Books, minds, and umbrellas only work when they’re open. Also by the Author The Heresy Series By The Sword Friends Like These The Kettle Black After The Flesh The Camel’s Back The Icarus Trilogy In Shining Armor A Mind Diseased Thy Neighbor’s Wife Comedy Adventure Saga of the Beverage Men The Prince of Foxes Navarre Memoirs of a Swine St. Lucy’s Eyes Just Plain Trouble This Little Piggy A Bad Husband No Good Deed An Empty fist Nonfiction Variety Is the Spice A Thousand Words Alexander Ferrar NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and de- stroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.” Kind of like that free music you downloaded. Prick. This is a work of fiction. All of the characters portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coinci- dental. Should any resemblance seem apparent between the characters or events portrayed in this book and those of any persons living or dead, then you are a member of the guilty parties described, and steps have been taken to incriminate you in the event of the author’s murder. THE HERO MINDSET Copyright © 2019 by Alexander Ferrar All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or por- tions thereof, yadda yadda yadda, in any form. And we ain’t kidding, neither. ISBN: Published by Bunbury First edition: September 2019 Cover art by Alexander Ferrar A Note on the Text The text of this book was set in Hoosegow Linotype, a font created by the renegade typesetters known as the Black Hand, as a way of protest- ing the evil committed by the Church against Gutenberg. Note the sharp angularity and arrogant curlicues that characterize their style. Interesting bit of trivia: the Black Hand were the ones responsible for the practice of making S’s look a lot like F’s in early prints, such as “Ye Olde Black- fmith” and “Officef of the Magiftratef of the Ftate of Maffechuffettf,” as a way of knowing who in a crowd of strangers was sympathetic to their cause and weeding out the ignorant. A member of the clandestine cog- noscenti would, while reading, smile to himself and say nothing, whilst an enemy of the cause would say “By Jove, what nonfenfe is thif?!” www.alexferrar.com “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” ―George Bernard Shaw This book is dedicated to all the other unreasonable people out there. I Perhaps what I have to tell you will be hard to believe. It will fly in the face of many narratives we have been pro- grammed by society to accept without question. I died in 2002, and came back to life. Because I had heard so much about near-death experiences with a light at the end of a tunnel, I had the opportunity to be analytical while it was happening, and can describe it to you now. There was a pulsing darkness around me, with a dim light coming from below. I reached out and felt the walls of a tun- nel, smooth and yielding; and my body that should have been strong was weak and puny. I was not ready to go toward that light yet. I had not been fully developed. I had heard people tell me about the comforting darkness, and that when they were being pushed inexorably toward the light, it felt cold, and they didn’t want to go. I can relate. The warmth that enveloped me was very familiar and the light was repellent. There was a ropelike cord sticking out of my belly. I fol- lowed it with my eyes, back into the darkness. Without know- ing why, I grabbed it in my tiny hands, twisting myself around to face the other way. Hand over hand, I tried to climb it like a rope back out of the tunnel to my previous life, but there was nowhere to go, no room to move. While I knew the life I would go back to would not be the best possible one, I was determined to give it another shot. It was too much of a gamble to give it up and continue. First, all I knew was that my new life would be as a mammal, and what little I could see of my new body had not formed enough to give a clue what kind. With the rudimentary hands, I might’ve been a monkey or a tree sloth, or if I became a human, I might be unwanted. The thought of waiting there, with no idea for how long, only to be born and left somewhere to die, filled me 1 with terror. I was completely at the mercy of someone I didn’t know. Some of you will scoff and roll your eyes, but that is what I thought at the time. Like I said, this may be hard for you to believe. Looking back on my previous life, I remembered what I’d said as a child when they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had said, in all seriousness, a hero. That plan had gotten sidetracked after moving to the US when I was eight. I instead became a brat, then a troubled youth, then a schmuck, and finally, a villain. Realizing that, I had to go back and make amends. I prayed desperately, knowing that there was someone to pray to, not necessarily the God that we are taught to believe in, but I will call it God, because it’s easier. I appealed to that God, and it answered. Perhaps this will anger you because it contradicts the beliefs passed down by your religious leaders and parents, but in all fairness, how can they know for sure if they haven’t gone through what I did? How is a belief a good argument against what I saw with my own eyes? There was no loud, booming voice. It was rather the feel- ing of knowledge pouring into my tiny mind. I connected with God, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to describe it to you now. First of all, God is not He or She because It can and will never be limited by either. To suggest that It would have one gender or the other means there must be an equal and oppo- site gender somewhere, and if there is room enough for two beings, there must be something larger to contain them both, and what could be outside of that? The conceit in claiming God created us in His image must be done away with. We created “God” in our image. The jeal- ous Old Testament tyrant with a hit-or-miss system of divine retribution is far from the truth. The real god is everything and everywhere. God never came down to Earth because that very act suggests It wasn’t there already. That presupposes opposi- tion, and there can be none. 2 I’ll get into that later. Let me say, for the moment, that I am Catholic, because out of all of the religions on this planet, the best one in my opinion is that of Jesus, because no other motivates its followers to do good just for Goodness’s sake. Look up “Caritas” and you will find that the first responders to almost any disaster are Catholics devoted to helping victims all over the world. They exist everywhere, and do what they do not for any material gain. Then, there are the clergy who, with the obvious exception of predators I will cover later, devote their entire lives to the service of God, which means essential- ly, the service of their neighbors. Then there are the people on missions who travel to other countries to build homes, install running water for entire villages, and heal the sick, and do it all for no profit whatsoever. That is not found anywhere else, at least on this planet, to the degree that it’s done by the Church. That said, there is something inconvenient about my expe- rience. It turns out that, of all religions, Buddhism comes the closest to reality. Before I explain how, I’d like to first assure you that I’m not about to debunk your religion, or lack there- of. I knew in that moment that religion is, at its essence, a good thing, because it gives people direction in their lives and makes them feel better about death. Unless you have experi- enced it as I have, you cannot know what death is like, which is scary. If we choose to believe in Heaven we’ll be comforted. If there is an authority figure that will judge your actions and send you either to Heaven or Hell (neither of which exist) then you will be theoretically less likely to rape and steal and kill your neighbor. Of course, that does happen in the name of God in many instances, but that is because of truly evil people who wear the mask of religion. Evil existed long before good. The worship of devils is an ancient practice, and just because it is not out in the open does not mean that it has ended. Baudelaire said “The best of the devil’s tricks was persuading the world he didn’t exist.” While I maintain there is no Devil, there are definitely people who 3 believe in one, and worse, worship him.