There is no truth to be found in a subscription system that charges initiates a fee for the next level of enlightenment. If you are asked for money to join a cult, you are not supporting your own enlightenment, you are supporting somebody's business model.

If you perceive the Jack Barrett books to be a subscription-based business model, please don't buy them. They are just books about an unremarkable boy who grew up in postwar England and performed some quests in search of self-realisation. If you're still curious, then borrow them from a library or a friend, and subvert the system.

If you have a feeling that, by reading this preface, you recognise a traveller who struck out into unknown lands, a Marco Polo figure who made sense of a pre-fabricated world of symbolism, then you are already some way down the road yourself and may find some of this useful on your own trip to the Land of the Living.

If you're already there, you are laughing with me and calling on, with one voice, those who have reached the slope up to the summit and require neither map nor directions, because they can see it clearly for themselves.