Interests: "Quiet Horizon" is written for people who want to pursue self-knowledge, but who don’t want to do so ideologically - a task much harder than it may appear to be. Dogma, cultic thinking, ideology and fundamentalism all lay close at hand whenever anyone seriously attempts to live with greater awareness. "Quiet Horizon" demonstrates how this is so by detailing - and deconstructing - events that exploded into the author's life as a result of a totally unexpected mystical experience as a 10 year old. That experience immediately - and permanently - replaced the ordinary concerns of relationship, career, and family with the singular task of achieving spiritual awakening. This book details how that "single pointedness" led him not just to join an international spiritual organization as a 20 year old, but to assume a central role at the organization’s world headquarters two years later. That mercurial journey came to a climax when he was selected to participate in the organization’s guerrilla warfare training, an intensity-laden boot camp designed to prepare the next generation of “spiritual warriors”. If this scenario sounds familiar to contemporary readers, it should: it is a path being taken today by thousands of ideologues around the world. Recruitment into extremist organizations has shown itself to be as resilient and enduring as it was was at the time of Greg's experience 37 years ago. It appears whenever and wherever society’s problems overwhelm its capacity to address them constructively. Cultic thinking is at the core of these movements, and "Quiet Horizon" describes how easy it is for genuine spiritual aspiration to contort itself into ideological compliance, usually without a person knowing it has even done so. At its core, this book details four factors that pave the way for ideologies to secure a stranglehold on anyone's consciousness: 1) Society’s normalization of narcissistic behavior, 2) The damaged capacity of people to forge genuinely intimate relationships rather than just “networks”, 3) The adoption of limited but pervasive societal “meta-narratives” - stories people believe in without thinking, and which portray only a small slice of human nature, and 4) Society’s increasing conflation of emotion-based intensity with genuine transformation. Ideological strangleholds resulting from these 4 trends can only be released when a person addresses the age old question, “Who am I?” not through adhering to someone else's ideas but through direct, honest, and courageous engagement with the surrounding world.