The Boy and the Stones — A Word From the Author

The author of the Bionian Book on the childhood behind Chapter One — memory, spirit, writing as restoration, and a plea to parents.

The boy in Chapter One is not an invention. I went through that for years. Nearly asleep, and the stones would come in — bigger than houses, rolling and grinding, nowhere to go. I had no words for it and nobody to give them to. So I carried it alone, the way children do, and I got tired the way the boy gets tired. Looking back, I count myself lucky. If I were six years old today, I doubt I would have made it out unlabelled. There would have been a diagnosis — ADHD, or something with more syllables — and a prescription soon after. The stones would not have gone anywhere. They would just have had company. Here is what I have come to understand, and what the Bionian Book is built on. You do not have a soul or a spirit. You are one. You are a spiritual being of unknown and apparently infinite potential, and you own a mind — which is not the brain. The brain is part of the body, a mechanism. The mind is yours, and you carry it with you, life to life, form to form. What came in at night when I was six was not a malfunction of a child's brain. It was something carried in, from a long way back. If my parents had known that, I could have spoken about it. Someone could have sat on the edge of the bed and asked what I saw, and listened without deciding I was broken. A scared six-year-old would have had somewhere to put the weight. Perhaps I would have discovered Bionian decades earlier. Instead it waited, the way carried things do, until I was ready to look at it. The looking is the thing. Writing the book has been the restoration. Not silencing the memory, not managing it — letting it come in and setting it down in plain words. There was so much anxiety and confusion growing up, and it turns out the way through was never to shut it up. It was to hear it out. Every chapter I write puts a piece of it where it belongs, and the character it restores is my own. And the pain in it? Pain can be a phenomenal teacher. It teaches you two things: to be clever enough to avoid it, and to be tough enough to bear it. My old boxing trainer used to say it every session — "Come on. It's only pain!" He was more right than wrong. There has been so much wonder in the long journey too. Love and adventure beyond one lifetime's worth. That is in the book as well, because it is the truth of us: each person a miracle of creation, with a capacity for infinite creation and imagination. Recognising your own immortality is not a comfort. It is a responsibility. An endless future is the reason to start creating a good one now. So here is my final word, and my plea. Do not drug your children.