What does it actually take to turn a bad man into a good one?

Not the version where he hits bottom on page forty and walks into the light on page forty-one. The real one. The one that takes decades, doesn’t hold, has to be done again, and is never finished — where the man doing it is the least reliable witness to whether it’s working.

That question runs under all fifty-four chapters of this book, and the author is not neutral about it. He was the bad man. He is the one making the claim. You get to decide whether to believe him.

Three more questions the book won’t let alone

Can someone who has done real harm teach anyone how to do good? Every tradition has an answer ready, and most of them are self-serving in one direction or the other — either the sinner is disqualified forever, or he’s the most qualified of all because he’s been there. Neither is honest. This book sits in the gap.

How does a new spiritual philosophy actually come into being? Not how the brochure says it happened. What it’s really made of, who it borrows from, how much of it is invented in a bad week, and what it costs the person who ends up carrying it. There is a philosophy at the end of this book. It did not arrive. It accumulated, badly, over fifty years, and the book shows its working.

Does God (or do gods) exist? Are there things in this world we cannot explain that point at some larger picture — or is it coincidence all the way down, and we’re just pattern-making animals who can’t stop?

The author won’t answer that last one for you. He reports what happened, keeps his skepticism on the page beside it, and declines to resolve the tension. Some readers will close the book certain it was all chance. Others won’t. Both readings survive the text intact, and that’s deliberate.

Why it isn’t the usual thing

Most spiritual memoirs run on one rail: the seeker suffers, the seeker finds the teacher, and the teacher has a name, a lineage, and usually a foundation with a gift shop.

This one spends fifty years going the other way — and refuses every person who wants the job, including, in the end, the author himself. The title is the tell. Not the Bao Ji. A Bao Ji. One teacher among billions of potential ones, and not the important one in his own book.

It is also, unmistakably, a reply to Autobiography of a Yogi sixty years on, from someone who wanted the searching without anyone to kneel to.

Who wrote it

Marine. Stockbroker. Homeless, by van and by beach. Beach tarot reader in Waikiki. Small-town newspaper publisher. Convert, husband, father, divorcé. Fifty countries travelled, and a handful of them — Morocco, Turkey, Japan — actually lived in.

Whether any of it adds up to a man worth listening to is the book’s open question, and it does not settle it in his favour.

For editors, agents and press

The manuscript is complete at 157,760 words and is currently on submission. A full proposal package — synopsis, annotated table of contents, comparative titles, author platform — is available on request, as is the complete manuscript.

CD Damitio has written thirty-some books across novels, travel, satire and philosophy. He holds an honours degree in anthropology from the University of Hawai’i, hosts the Baoism: Truth Unveiled podcast, and is the founder of Baoism and of Xcrol, a social network with no ads, no algorithms and no data collection. He splits his time between Otaru, Japan and Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Enquiries: [email protected]

The philosophy the book arrives at: baoism.org — six words, nothing for sale.
The podcast: Baoism: Truth Unveiled
Everything else CD has written: indignified.com/books