Edward N. Haas
The author was born April 13, 1936. From early on, perhaps the chief driving force in his life has been a fierce hunger to stuff his head with as much knowledge as possible. Necessarily, that was a longing which entailed a desperate struggle to find—without injuring his physical health—as much leisure time as possible to devote to reading and writing. It was a struggle so desperate, it has always ruled out every possibility of either marrying or in any other way sharing his daily life with another human being.
The author graduated from Jesuit high school, in New Orleans, in 1953. A single fruitless semester studying music at Loyola University of the South in New Orleans was followed by almost two years of floundering in a sea of confusion, and the author then joined the U. S. Air Force on Dec. 7, 1955. In less than a year’s time, that precipitated an intense urge to commit suicide. It was an urge he managed to control only by devoting every spare moment to reading books in the many fields of Science and the Humanities.
Honorably discharged in April of 1960, the author underwent another two and a half years of floundering so severe, he came extremely close to a mental breakdown. In desperation, he gave away everything he owned and, for thirteen years, took mainly to the life of a wandering hermit. In search of as much time and energy as possible for reading and inner reflection upon self, God, and the nature and purpose of reality, he criss-crossed the United States on foot four times. At first, he lived off of whatever food and clothing he could beg; but, after learning how to live on a dollar a day or less, he turned mainly to working at various monasteries in the winter in exchange for the two to three hundred dollars required to feed and to clothe himself during the next spring, summer, and fall of walking. The monasteries also provided access to libraries in which he could read, and extract notes from, the great writings of the Catholic Church. In the course of that thirteen-year odyssey, there was a four year period during which he refused to speak to anyone (except on very rare occasions) and communicated only by means of written notes.
In August of 1975, the author’s father lost his mind, and the author’s siblings insisted he was the only one in the family with the time and ability to tend to their father in his hour of need and to manage the rather large number of assets their father had amassed. Thus, after thirteen years, the author’s preferred lifestyle came to an end. Dire poverty then gave way to economic independence, and total seclusion gave way to what little privacy can be enjoyed by bachelors who prefer to avoid partying and to stay home and—as much as possible—to bury themselves in as much reading and writing as the world around them will allow. His 19 books in print as of April, 2012, are evidence of how much reading and writing he managed to do despite the many demands placed on him by his family.
After his father’s death in 1981, the author took care of his mother until her death in 1996. The author now continues managing his family’s assets until such time as he can sell all of them off at a price acceptable and fair to his 5 siblings.
In his 19 self-published books, this self-educated author seeks to share with others the avenues of thought down which his mind was led by thirteen years of heroically intense inner concentration followed by (to date August 2012) twenty-seven years of moderately intense inner concentration. Those avenues pertain to a wide range of philosophical, theological, and psychological topics and, last but not least, to a unique theory regarding the fundamental nature of time, space, spatial objects, and apparently continuous locomotion. The author calls that cosmological theory: lp=165529 Esoptrics: The Logic Of The Mirror].