Alan Macmillan Orr

Let me tell you a short story....

My name is Alan Macmillan Orr. I am 40 years old, and was born in Scotland, although I have lived all over the world. About 6 years ago, I started becoming aware of the world around me a little bit more - from the litter we drop in the street, the madness of consumerism, to the way we treat each others, the animals, and the planet we all have to share but for a short time. I started to question who I was, what my place was in this world, and if perhaps I was missing out on something important. So started the journey that led to the writing of the Natural mind - waking up; a 2000 page, 250 topic, A-Z personal deconstruction of what it meant for me to be human.

Not having had any previous knowledge of philosophy, nor any religious affiliations, I started from where I found myself. A 30 something man, living in a western society, never having had to want for anything, but with a sudden inquisitiveness to find out answers, I had previously never thought to seek. Each topic, from supermarkets, god, banking, and greed to pornography, addiction, weapons, and hate, is my personal journey where I question myself and the reader to open their minds to the possibility that we humans may be living a life of illusion.

So many books have been written, talks given, on what it means to be human, that I never thought I would be able to contribute anything more. But what I realised, was that although religious books, governments, scientists, ecologists, evolutionary theorists etc all had a view (sometimes very valid), none of them had made a lasting difference to the world. There were still wars, greed, desire, competition, violence, anger, and power struggles. Only now we were destroying the whole planet at an alarming rate. I set to find out why no one had ever managed to change the direction we were heading.

It came to me that the reason we were failing was that we were not looking at the whole. Sure, we were trying to fix bits of the world, but as we always saw each problem in isolation, and never in relationship, when we fixed something, we broke something else. I realised that unless I investigated every aspect of the world with my mind, I could never hope to understand it.

After finishing the book this year I still felt like a beginner at all of this, so, instead of leaving the book to rot on a bookshelf somewhere, I decided that the book had to come alive. The evolving book was born. A book where we could all begin to discover more about ourselves, and change the way we think about our place in the world. There is no end for this book, it is, like you and me, in a state of constant evolution, never static, always changing.