How This Book Came About This book is, in some sense, the soul, underlying an earlier book that I had written, a book about modern science, which had the title The Search for the Meaning of Space, Time and Matter. The book was written for people with interest in modern science. It had the subtitle Images from Many Travels. The subtitle of that earlier book and the final decision to write it had its origin in a restless wanderlust, which, in the last twenty years, has driven me irresistibly to travel to the most remote places on earth. I traveled into the Arctic, the waters between North Norway and Svalbard, to Tibet over the plateau to the foot of Mount Everest, to North India to the remote monasteries in the Ladakh, along the Silk Road around the Taklimakan Desert into Inner Asia, to Timbuktu at the edge of the Sahara, to the Antarctic, and to the Skeleton Coast in Namibia. These journeys were driven by the urge to somehow grasp the whole world and make it my own. It was the Brahma in me who is creating a world in himself, in his mind. It is Odysseus in me, Faustus, the restless, forever searching until his life dissolves. I had to wander the many roads that all led to the same place, that vastly complex unfolding essence of Being, in all its colors and textures and shapes. I had to go and see this wonderful tapestry of life that is of deep inner beauty, even in its squalor, its suffering and pain and the dirty ugliness that I saw on some of these travels. I had to wander to fully accept all that life is, into myself, to feel at home on the earth. That same kind of yearning had driven me in my youth to discover the mysteries of space, of time, and of matter. After WWII, at age sixteen, I had acquired rudimentary knowledge of Heisenberg's and Einstein's attempts to create that all-encompassing unified theory that captures the observed phenomena of space and the world of the elementary building blocks of matter. A sort of obsession to learn all that is known about t