WHY AM I HERE? – ADAM IN TAOLAND

Book One of the Dreaming Dreams Trilogy

Twenty-year-old Adam has decided his life is not worth living.

Born in Novana, a bleak world dominated by artificial intelligence, Adam has been assigned to spend his existence alone at a remote sentry tower. Deprived of meaningful choice, human connection, and hope, he climbs to the tower’s top intending to end his life.

Instead, the impossible happens.

Adriella, a mysterious healer who has touched Adam’s life from childhood, reappears. The artificial veil surrounding Novana tears open, revealing stars Adam has never seen. Malaika, a heavenly visitor, descends aboard the Wanderer and offers Adam an astonishing alternative: leave everything he knows and begin again.

Adam enters the Fifth Dimension and awakens in Taoland, a wondrous world illuminated by three magical moons. Each moon will eventually represent a stage in the life he is about to live.

On the First Moon, Adam meets Roshi, an ancient farmer and spiritual mentor who teaches him lessons about patience, honesty, flexibility, responsibility, and the cultivation of a meaningful life. Adam also meets Tariana, and their attraction quickly becomes love. They marry, build a family, and have two children, Tojo and Kaleeva. 

For the first time, Adam possesses in Taoland everything Novana denied him: freedom, love, family, friendship, and possibility.

But possibility awakens ambition. Obsessive ambition.

Adam joins Tezhouse and discovers extraordinary talents for leadership, innovation, and winning. Under the mentorship of Komourin, a principled executive who recognizes Adam’s potential, he rises rapidly. Awards, patents, promotions, wealth, and influence follow. Each success seems to promise that the next accomplishment will finally reveal why he was given this extraordinary second life.

But achievement becomes its own hunger.

As Adam’s responsibilities expand across Taoland, Tariana increasingly bears the emotional cost of his ambition. She loves and supports him, but she also sees what Adam cannot: the career meant to give his life meaning is beginning to consume him..

Adam’s ascent also creates an adversary – Bogart, a ruthless rival determined to destroy him. Through manipulation, bribery, drugs, sexual entrapment, planted evidence, and corrupt authorities, Bogart engineers Adam’s arrest and brutal beating in Aboodin. Adam appears ruined.

But Komourin has quietly anticipated the attack. Through surveillance and careful preparation, he exposes the conspiracy, turns Bogart’s accomplices, and saves Adam’s career and reputation.

The experience should change Adam.

It does not change him enough.

Adam continues climbing.

His career carries him from the First Moon to the Second and eventually the Third. Along the way, extraordinary guides – including Malaika, Adriella, Abraham, Randahl, Lorelai, Ambrosia, and Roshi – offer fragments of the wisdom he needs. Yet Adam repeatedly mistakes the signposts for the destination.

Then even his body begins warning him.

Adam conceals worsening abdominal pain from Tariana and those around him. For years he appears to thrive while quietly deteriorating. Finally, with infections raging and his body failing, Adam collapses.

During a near-death experience, where his spirit departs his body, Abraham tells him that death is not his destination – because there is still much for him to do.

Tariana spends weeks beside him as he lingers in a coma. Her own understanding changes as profoundly as Adam’s. She no longer prays that her husband will become the greatest executive in Taoland. She asks only that he become the man he was created to be.

Adam survives.

Soon afterward, he reaches the summit he once believed would provide the answer: he is chosen to lead Tezhouse as CEO.

But standing at the top finally allows him to see beyond it. A final ethical test forces Adam to choose between winning a major business opportunity and compromising his integrity. For perhaps the first time in his career, he willingly walks away.

Losing becomes winning.

Eventually Adam leaves Tezhouse altogether. The identity he spent decades constructing – executive, innovator, leader, winner–gives way to something simpler.And profoundly more meaningful.

Servant Leader.

With Tariana beside him, Adam devotes himself to young people, shelters, hospitals, kitchens, families, and individuals who need help. He comes to understand that purpose cannot simply be taught or handed from one person to another. It is discovered through the lifelong process of becoming the person one was created to be.

As Adam grows older, the people who guided him begin to depart this life.

Roshi, now 250 years old, gives Adam one final lesson beneath the tree planted for him decades earlier. He advises his charge to let his heart crumble into countless seeds of love and plant them in everyone he meets. When Roshi asks him who he has become, Adam can finally answer without mentioning a title, achievement, or possession:

He is Adam.

He is here to serve others.

Roshi dies peacefully. Adam later encounters the broken Bogart, now destroyed by addiction and regret. Rather than take satisfaction in his enemy’s fall, Adam forgives him.

Next the Ruler of Aboodin where Adam becomes invested in helping other passes as well.

The circle is nearly complete.

Adam and Tariana renew their vows as their family expands into another generation. Their children have grown; grandchildren have arrived. Adam has traveled from a near suicidal youth through love, parenthood, ambition, triumph, betrayal, illness, mortality, forgiveness, service, and wisdom. 

But Taoland was never Adam’s final destination.

Having discovered why he was given his life, Adam learns that his next calling is to return to the place where that life almost ended.

He and Tariana gather their children for the hardest conversation of their lives. They must say goodbye.

With Adriella joining them, Adam and Tariana prepare to cross the universe back to Novana – a world Adam left believing himself powerless and to which he now returns with purpose.

His first journey as an adult has ended.

He has discovered and accepted true purpose.

A greater mission is about to begin.

WHY AM I HERE? – ADAM IN TAOLAND is ultimately not about a young man conquering a fantasy world. It is about a man traveling through the seasons of a human life until he understands that achievement and purpose are not the same thing–and that the measure of a life may be found not in how high we rise, but in whom we lift along the way.