For years--when I was young--I had Paul Gauguin's print with this title hanging in my bedroom. At that time it was only an allusion to the exotic South Pacific that had caught my imagination as a boy.

In time, that print and my adolescent desire for the sensual allure of a far-off Polynesian neverland disappeared. For some thirty years afterwards, the day-to-day world all but took over my existence and most of my dreams faded...then seemed to disappear altogether.

In the meantime, the insanity of the society around me came into clearer focus as I watched people blindly pursue immediate gratification in the most non-thinking and self-absorbed ways. Culture, especially in America, was synonymous with "pop culture" and rarely meant using your head for little more than hanging a set if earphones onto.

But more worrisome--and totally incomprehensible--to me was the institutionalized hatred and disrespect being established by people of the so-called "right wing", which began its assault on human compassion and tolerance in the Reagan Administration, but has come to full force in the last five and a half years under George W Bush and his kindred types.

It is only because of massive incompetence by these same people--mostly involving the lack of success in the Iraq War--that we will perhaps break the bonds that have nearly strangled our democracy this November. At the same time, I simply don't understand the lack of outrage at the proliferation of professional hatemongers and anti-Americans like Tom Delay, Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Dick Cheney and too-many others.

The reality that included such irrationalities set me on a personal quest into the mind of man...and ultimately to the seminal questions that comprise the title of this chapter.

I wanted desperately to try to understand the mystery of “us” more; us as humans. As I had evolved over the years into a philosophical materialist and atheist, I didn’t hold that the evil I observed in life can be attributed to some spectral creature called Satan or "the devil". The evil, I reckoned, must be a part of us; i.e., a consequence of our development or something in our genetic makeup. Yet compassion and “goodness” are also a part of everyday life, are they not?

This dichotomy increasingly intrigued me. What different realities we must all perceive. For instance, I could no more think of sending people off to die in a war that has no real justification than I could of murdering a family member.

And what of murder? How does one actually do that? That is, how does one commit a murder and continue to live with themselves without somehow going insane?

These questions all seem to be based on that something we call conscience? But conscience is only a by-product of another non-material manifestation of life called consciousness. So I guess the greater mystery is how consciousness in each human creates such different views of our waking reality.

My first step, then, was to begin studying the latest scientific research involved in human consciousness. This led to a fascinating idea put forth by some scientists that the cytoskeleton of cells could function as organic quantum computers and that the computations from these quantum calculations give rise to consciousness.

This isn’t a mainstream idea, but it did give me the first hints about the mysterious--even "magical"--concepts contained in quantum mechanics. But the most magical ideas of all were yet to come. String Theory with its ten or eleven dimensional universe offered glimpses of a theoretical reality that previously had been only dreamed of by madmen and science fiction writers.

It’s funny—or perhaps intentional—how one area of interest has led me towards another in a seemingly logical sequence. My interest in consciousness led me to studying some of the latest research on memory; perhaps the most important component of human consciousness. Then last year, the whole idea of Creationism (in the new disguise of Intelligent Design) came to the forefront of public debate. More religious bullshit, I thought. How can so many people be so ignorant of the indisputable scientific facts that are within easy access for anyone today?

Science has created (for good and ill) most of what we call civilization, yet a great number of people choose their science as they would items from a buffet. If this particular feature of science doesn't seem appetizing to them, they simply ignore it.

Obviously when it comes to watching television, or flying in an jet aircraft or having an x-ray is concerned, science comes in quite handy for such people.

More recently, I read a book called Genesis, The Scientific Quest for Life’s Origins, which discusses abiogenesis (or evolutionary biology), the branch of science that searches for the answer to how life itself began on earth. The book spends 339 pages going through the various ideas put forth by scientists who try to simulate the early earth environment. The object is to see if inorganic compounds could, through evolution and natural selection, eventually become the incredible bio-diverse world we see around us now, with the added knowledge that many times more species have come and gone than even exist on the earth today.

But this book created many more questions than answers for me.

I then read a book that started me on an entirely new path, and it did so by starting to merge in my mind the diverse worlds of DNA, quantum physics, consciousness, certain “New Age” ideas and even the notion of Intelligent Design (although I will spell it intelligent design since so-called Christians have co-opted that term also for their own agenda).

The Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby coalesced some of these ideas by adding the world of Shamanism and it's most visionary plant agent, ayuahasca, or “Sacred Vine”, which is used to induce hallucinations and ultimately intra-species communication, and through which was revealed to primitive man much of the folk wisdom that has nurtured and sustained our species for 100 millennia.

What Narby came to realize in something of a "eureka" moment for him was that the similarities in so much mythological symbolism the primordial creative force involves single or entwined snakes or serpents (including that of our own Edenic tradition), perhaps arises from the ability of "shamans" from many historic and prehistoric peoples to communicate with DNA itself!

So in a sense, the Truth or Knowledge that I was seeking about the mysterious us seems to be very much wrapped up inside the fabulously entangled molecule that resides in every living cell on earth...and perhaps elsewhere: DeoxyriboNucleic Acid.

With this journal, then, I will chronicle my own journey towards this ultimate Knowledge or Epignosis. Initially, it has been just an intellectual journey. But it will surely be interesting to see where it eventually leads.