Later in life, living in Germany just after World War II, I faced the question of good and evil in my own life - the betrayal of faith and love, the jeering face of a competitor. It was around this time that Freud's ideas and psychoanalytic jargon began to permeate the thought and talk of most of the educated non-religious people I knew.

Freud's concepts have always seemed to me to be valuable, in that he described aspects of human life and emotions (better understood by the ancient Greeks perhaps) in a more or less scientific way, and brought the consciousness of the subconscious to a place of prominence.

But in my agony, at that time, I found the Freudian concepts facile and fundamentally unrooted. I wanted some explanation of life and people that included flesh and blood and bone and sinew. Feeling bruised and beaten beyond redemption, and far beyond any Freudian help, and knowing the betrayer was not truly evil, I began the long journey of mind and soul that has brought me to this writing. That journey took me through eons of time and thought, reading and writing, going off on tangents, circling and settling for all the world, like a dog settling to sleep.

It was the patterns that drew me.

Convinced, as I had been for a long time, that human concepts of good and evil were simply the shorthand for any individual culture's accumulated experience with life (what worked for it and what didn't), I sought endlessly for a link between those concepts of the mind and our physical being.

What drove me crazy all along was that I could see the similarity, duplication, if you will, of a single pattern of behavior, or activity, or motion: in the pattern of specie development, in patterns of individual organism development, and in the patterns of development of human thought and behavior. The pattern is best described as it occurs in the amoeba, a lowly beast whom you may have met in zoology classes or through Robert Benchley's classic short movie "Love Life of the Amoeba." However you met him or remember him, you must recognize him as a very early organic form of utterly marvelous simplicity. He has a food vacuole through which he absorbs and distributes nutrients. He has an evacuation vacuole through which he expels any absorbed nutrients that don't suit, and the unusable remains of nutrients already metabolized. He moves gracefully about his watery world, putting forth bulges of himself in directions which seem to lead to food sources or comfort of some kind, and pulls in bulges that seem to be heading into danger. As he does so, he is adapting to his environment, and at all times, presents a lumpy, bumpy persona, sometimes turning into a veritable comet shape, when something in his environment looks especially enticing, sometimes curling into a tight ball, when the whole environment seems threatening.

Occasionally, he pauses and seems to review his lumps and bumps, deciding which one is most promising. When he wants to reproduce himself, he simply lines up his chromosomes, produces a matching set, and divides. And no one knows who is mother or father, sibling or stranger.

This irregular pattern of movement is like a template of the movement of species, and life itself, as it pursues its never-ending quest to use the elements of the environment to maintain and extend itself. First comes the exploring spur, or projection, then the organization of the whole, or a large part of it, into the projection, trying one, then another, and always withdrawing the spur, projection, or whole body from sensed danger or discomfort. The pattern is traced in the evolution of species and by the whole mass of life in the three dimensions of space and the fourth of time, spreading, finger by finger, bulge by bulge, to the most arid, the coldest, even the hottest areas of earth. The pattern is repeated in the journeys of Man; from Africa along the coast of the Mediterranean and India to the Pacific Islands and Australia, then branching up and back from India to the Arctic and the Orient, middle, northern and western Europe. (Spencer Wells, A Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002) The pattern is repeated in the evolution of the thinking and imagination of Man, which adds a fifth dimension, since thinking and imagination are invisible and have no physical presence until they are voiced or affect behavior. Still, the patterns of Man's thinking and imagination spread according to the old patterns: the early spread of ways of hunting, tool-making, painting and sculpture, existing only in a specified area of time and space or co-evolving in different areas, but spreading - always spreading - in an amoeba shape, a bulge here, a withdrawal there.