HERETIC • Reflections on Unorthodox Pilgrimage

In October 1991, Tom Joyce was one of three partners in a successful San Francisco advertising agency. He had been blessed with a precocious nine-year-old son, a beautiful pregnant wife and what looked like a bright future. Life had other plans. The firestorm in the Oakland Hills spared his family but took everything else, precipitating a decade of spiritual disruption, tearing him away from a comfortable suburban life and compelling him to the far corners of the Earth.

Heretic is a memoir chronicling this ten years of personal upheaval and reorientation, a journey from the fragrant gardens and gritty streets of Kathmandu to the polished marble and prayer rugs of Mecca's Masjid al-Haram, a grueling trek across the Himalaya to the mythic Mount Kailash in Western Tibet, culminating with a near-death-rebirth in the murderous human crush of the Sa'udi Jamarat. Before this unorthodox pilgrimage concludes, Joyce will stand naked beneath Tibet's "Stairway to Heaven," witness his father's last breath, taste his own blood mixed with ouzo on the summit of Olympus, discover "the Contraries" in a Greek Orthodox monastery on Mount Athos, face self-delusion in the arms of a sensual oracle at Delphi and stare into the cold eyes of a virulent mutation of Islam that will soon challenge the values and moral fabric of Western civilization.

Throughout this five-part narrative, Joyce examines the heretical origins, gradual evolution into religious orthodoxies and inevitable corruption of the world's great spiritual traditions-in the process discovering an underlying path-common to all faiths-wherein spirit and flesh merge and transcend cultural differences. Heretic asks universal questions and posits some unorthodox answers, in the process exposing the long-accepted lies propagated by entrenched dogmas that blind human beings to their true nature.