The Fourth Awakening Chronicles I

Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Penelope Drayton Spence has been hired by two of the world’s richest men to track down and interview enlightened people who may have arrived at the Fourth Awakening. The problem, as fast she can locate a potential candidate, they have a nasty habit of mysteriously vanishing. These “Chronicles” are written in the "Serial Novel" format Charles Dickens famously used for the “Pickwick Papers” and many of his later books. It is also the format magazines such as “The Saturday Evening Post” made popular not that long ago.THIS FOUR PART SERIES OF NOVELLAS WILL BE COMPLETED IN 2014. The goal of each Chronicle is to present an Enlightened “Archetype,” and explore its characteristics. While each Chronicle is a stand-alone episode that can be read independently, it is a part of a much larger and continuing story which is easier to understand and follow if it is read in sequential order. In “Chronicles I” we meet a professional gambler in Las Vegas, Daniel Wooten. He is a middle-aged, confirmed bachelor with no religious moorings. Wooten has never meditated, hasn’t been in a church in decades and hadn’t shown the slightest interest in his spiritual side until the moment he found himself enlightened.WHAT IS AN AWAKENING?An awakening occurs when something so profoundly changes the world that all of the old rules no longer apply. A powerful new order arrives, completely unexpected and without warning, and things are never the same again. The First Awakening occurred approximately 200,000 years ago when Homo sapiens emerged in East Africa, but it took another 150,000 years for things to begin to get interesting. The Second Awakening saw the emergence of spoken language, early shamans, and great myths being told around the campfire. For the first time, early humans became self-aware and while still considering themselves a part of nature, they understood they were now different. We became aware of our own mortality. We started to fear death and began to seek a deeper understanding of the cycle of li