Reviews
The Story Behind the Accelerating Life: And How We in the Year 22025 View Our Past and six other titles in a series
Youth the Writer
Xlibris, 54 pages, (paperback) $9.99 UK, 978-1-4568-5772-1
(Reviewed: March, 2012)
The author of this seven-book series is a former equity fund manager who, after being hospitalized for severe headaches, experienced a series of unforgettable dreams.
In his ultra-slim books (ranging in length of text from 58 pages to 30) written under the pseudonym “Youth the Writer,” he explores the information culled from these dreams, employing the classic form of philosophical dialogue, a la Plato, Socrates and Aristotle, between an omnipotent Professor, and Ace, his aptly-named eager student. Occasionally, the writer (“Youth”) makes comments, as well.
The basic set up is this: The Professor lives in the year 22025. This is apparently an advanced age in which humans rely on science and knowledge versus the religious dogma that has predominated in earlier years. His student, Ace, lives in the year 2010 (or 2011 or 2012; the date changes from book to book) of “the accelerating life.” The author explains this “life” in a baffling way: “It is like a dream for the real mind…the participant in the accelerating life can experience between sixty-eight and eighty-eight lives with an average age of sixty-five years if the success rate is high.” As the books progress, readers will glean that the “accelerating life” is a sort of time warp in which knowledge is quickly acquired, as if the past can be downloaded and fast-forwarded in a person’s mind. The ultimate plane of existence is the “real life,” which is defined at one point as “a paradise.”
As Ace asks questions, the Professor (who claims to be “the accumulation of billions of the brightest minds that lived before”) shares his knowledge. Among the simpler “truths” the Professor communicates is: “Let love be your guide and don’t let greed invade your life,” and “We are who we are now because of our previous actions regardless of their nature.”
But unfortunately, such moments of clarity are rare. Many of the Professor’s teachings are so esoteric as to be impossible to understand. Consider this: “The mind of the participants in the accelerating life is like a program ready to be written. We write the software program rules and instruction in very long detail that can function well against the many different inputs so the program can carry on by itself and decide on every needed action in the future.” Or when Ace asks, “What is life?,” the Professor answers:
“The life you know and experience right now is a state of dream generated by powerful computers that you have never experienced alike in life.”
As these examples indicate, the teachings are frustratingly obtuse, despite the author’s obvious earnestness in conveying them. In addition, they are generally disorganized, and plagued by grammatical errors. (Just to add to the confusion, at one point, the author notes that the grammar mistakes have been made on purpose: “They simply give more reason why these books should not be bought by the new participants in the accelerating life.”) Frequently, tenses go from past to present, making it difficult to know whether answers are offered from the year 22025 or in the here and now. Also, there’s a fine line between science fiction and philosophy; this line completely disappears in this narrative.
While each book’s title seems to indicate distinct themes, the baffling nature of the writing makes it difficult to summarize them. Below is a loose synopsis touching on some of the information in each book:
The Story Behind the Accelerating Life isbn: 978-1-4568-5772-1: In this book, Ace poses the question: “what is life?” The Professor talks about the nature of life, noting that early humans “were not so bright…The first lie was created, and it was God, an answer for any question that the elders don’t have.” He says that religion is now a thing of the past and discusses the kind of knowledge those who graduate from his teachings will eventually understand.
The Story Behind the Current Revolutions isbn: 978-1-4568-5682-3: At the outset, Ace tells the Professor that “many horrible things have happened” since the completion of the first book. This volume talks about earthquakes, tsunamis and other disasters, as well as Third World revolutions, both peaceful and bloody, which seem to have a relation to greed within religious organizations. The book ends with Ace pronouncing his own misery and Youth offering to bring in a priest who is an expert in exorcism to help him.
The Story Behind Our Behavior isbn: 978-1-4628-8512-1: This volume begins by declaring that God is a figment of “primitive peoples’ minds,” created to “intimidate their children, sometimes to intimidate the society at large, and sometimes to keep the wicked happy.” It announces that “we must shed light on peoples’ behaviour [sic] and what makes society the way it is now in the accelerating life…” Subjects touched upon include: why people commit suicide; the dangers of dogmatic religious ideology; the advantages of a healthy diet, exercise and relying on science and knowledge.
The Story Behind Life System isbn: 978-1-4653-9430-9: This book touches on gender differences between men and women, lesbians, bisexuals and so on; God and the devil; and the nature of the “accelerating life.” “The accelerating life is like a theatre drama,” the author writes, in one puzzling passage. “The heroes of the show are the three musketeers: the wise, the wicked, and the ignorant.” The book ends with the Professor promising to answer more questions in the books that follow and exhorts students to “Learn as much as you can before leaving the accelerating life.”
Inventions Deception: The Hidden Affair Behind Religious Miracles isbn: 978-1-4691-7788-5: This volume begins by discussing the way early inventions were used by the “temple masters” to enrich themselves. It touches on the idea that demons were invented to scare people into obedience to God and talks about the history of competing political parties and their manipulation of uneducated people.
Progress and Wars: The Bloody History That Made Us Who We Are in Year 22025 isbn: 978-1-4691-4027-8: Ostensibly focusing on “how we became who we are now in year 22025,” this volume has the Professor talking about how early wars led to the death of religious fundamentalists and to educated people rejecting “religion political parties.” It goes on to discuss the origins of WWIII, in which Third World countries were manipulated by Western powers looking to secure resources and from which a “bloody Dark Age” emerged; and the emergence of a peaceful society due to accumulated knowledge.
The Story Behind Life Unveiled isbn: 9781465397942: This book looks at life after death as a way that people transition from the “accelerating life” to the “real life”; it reveals new information about Ace and wraps up by noting that the series is “full of tricks and dual meanings,” but “Everything in those books is meant to be in them.”
Ultimately, trying to absorb the information in this series is a frustrating experience. Readers will find bits and pieces of intriguing ideas, but without a coherent narrative to glue these pieces together, they will be left wondering: “What’s real?” Ironically, that’s just the sort of question the series seems to set out to answer.
All books also available in hardcover and ebook.
Dreams and the Accelerating Life: How Dreams and Experiences Affect Your Daily Life
Youth the Writer
Xlibris, 51 pages, (paperback) $9.99 UK, 978-1-4771-1758-3
(Reviewed: July, 2012)
This is the eighth installment to a series of slim books written by a former equity fund manager who, after being hospitalized for severe headaches, experienced a series of dreams. Writing under the pseudonym “Youth the Writer,” the author explores the messages he received in his dreams through a dialogue between a “Professor” and his student “Ace.” (While previous books described “the Accelerating Life” as a process by which students experience a time warp in which knowledge is quickly acquired, this volume uses the term but offers little background about what it means.)
The book begins with the Professor eager to get started. “Hello, Ace,” he says, “are you ready for more information?” Their subsequent interchange takes readers on a baffling journey through ideas of all kinds.
The book explores seven, wide-ranging dreams. Dream 1, for example, touches on how “participants” in a virtual world receive information through dreams. Dream 5 tells the story of a “religious tax collector” who devises a scheme in which women found guilty of witchcraft “must be sentenced to death by burning naked on a stick.” Dream 7 talks about how poor people in primitive times needed olive oil to moisturize their skin, yet only a few could afford it.
It’s difficult to understand the significance of these dreams and how they relate to one another. The writing is often nearly impossible to follow. At one point, for example, the Professor tells Ace: “Imagine the following: you have an important experience of learning at that point in time of the real life you like the students to learn from, yet this point in time took thousands of years of information to build up. This time of build-up is irrelevant to the students’ main learning point.” When Ace replies, “You lost me,” readers will feel his pain.
In sum, as with the rest of this series, this book will leave readers puzzled from the first page to the last.
Also available in hardcover and ebook.
ForeWord Clarion Review
The Story Behind the Accelerating Life: and How We in the Year 22025 View Our Past
Youth the Writer
“How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?”
-Plato
Philosophers from Plato and Augustine to Heidegger and Wittgenstein have used a dialogue format as a means to explain their ideas. Youth the Writer chose to implement a dialogue format to explain the meaning of life and why human beings face so many hardships. According to Youth, we who exist currently in 2010-2011 are actually living an “Accelerated Life;” in reality, we are living in the year 22025. This revelation was shown to him though a series of dreams that consist of dialogues between two characters in 22025: Ace and the Professor. Youth includes himself in the dialogues only as an observer. He is unable to communicate directly with Ace and the Professor, but does provide commentary on their conversations. To comprehend, let alone understand the concepts the author wishes to share, he insists that readers must open their minds and use their imaginations. He writes, “Imagination is a key for understanding difficult, unknown subjects. It’s an important tool. We must all use it to full extent.”
The author’s dialogues have not been edited properly and are riddled with grammatical errors and awkward sentences. In certain dialogues, especially a dramatic piece, leeway is given in the usage of grammar to lend a realistic flavor to the conversation between characters. A philosophical treatise presented in a dialogue, however, must be written with proper language mechanics to make sure the author’s ideas are stated clearly. The use of correct grammar and syntax lends to its power and impact. Poorly written prose and haphazard grammar lead to ambiguity and misinterpretation. To allow the Professor, the wisest and most intelligent character in Youth’s dialogue, to speak with poor grammar will cause readers to wonder about the validity of his statements and the actual sum of his intellect. The Professor is supposed to be almost omnipotent.
The author illustrates this when Ace asks, “Who or what are you, Professor?” The Professor replies, “I am the accumulation of billions of the brightest minds that lived before and many are still living.” He continues, “...the advances in science helped us to understand the human mind and what we can achieve with it. With creative imagination, we started to experiment until we found the way to upload and download properties of the brain. With time and supercomputers, we started to be immortal, which have led us to accumulate the brightest minds.” An advanced artificial intelligence, an “accumulation of billions of the brightest minds that ever lived,” would not speak so awkwardly.
The author has rehashed and tried to revamp a few age-old maxims including, 1) we must love and treat each other with respect, and 2) we must read and learn from the books of the masters. A marriage of science fiction and philosophical dialogue is a clever concept but Youth’s conceptions are blemished by improper grammar and awkward sentences that make it is hard to take his discourse seriously.
— Lee Gooden
Kirkus
A message from the future in novella form.
In a very brief introduction, Youth the Writer (the story’s author as well as its protagonist) presents himself as a thoughtful man dismayed by the pain and cruelty in his world that leaves him wondering about the meaning of this life and how any god could accept the accompanying suffering, poverty and war. Youth’s worry leads to hospitalization and, upon release, he dreams. Each dream is a conversation between a teacher, Professor, and a student, Ace, with Youth as an invisible third participant; though neither the Professor nor Ace acknowledges his presence, Youth occasionally chimes in for the reader’s benefit. Through these dream-conversations, Youth promises that the world’s “best mysteries” will be explained in simple terms, and the reasons why religion and suffering can coexist will be revealed. While these promises aren’t realized, Professor and Ace reveal that Youth and others living in 2011 are participants in an educational program called the “accelerated life”; the true year is 22025, an age run by supercomputers and artificially intelligent teachers, and when those who believe they are in the year 2011 learn enough, they awaken into real life in their real time. As for how those in 22025 view their past, or our present, the lessons seem to be to love your brother, live peacefully and don’t follow organized religion as religion, myth and ritual from 2011 are equated with greed, ignorance and violence. Why one should trust super computers instead is never addressed. At one point, Youth remarks that imagination is necessary in education, and he certainly has plenty of imagination. However, his promises of meaning are so lofty that the reader is left hoping to take away more than is given. Adding to the frustration is the dialogue itself; characters speak in a strange dialect that is never explained. Even if this is a deliberate stylistic choice, it makes the book appear as though it is riddled with grammatical errors. But certain lines resonate, as when Youth remarks that, in confronting his dreams, he feels like a “child in front of a tiger.”
A strange tale that may be better understood in the future.