The Quest For Eternal Happiness

Prologue

My name is Silas - Silas Fletcher. According to my parents, I was named after one of the early leaders of Christianity, who supposedly accompanied Paul the Apostle on his second missionary journey. According to my friend Skye, I'm also named after Silas, as in the hot immortal guy from Vampire Diaries. You're allowed to take your pick, my beloved imaginary reader, but I think it'd be helpful if I first made the statement that I have nothing to do with either of these colorful characters. That's because I believe (like any normal teenager does) in the importance of my own personal story.

Adults like to make fun of young peoples supposed "troubles." The trouble that the young so often like to rant about to their parents, therapists, or other individuals, who have been cursed with the fate of having to listen to a teenager's unhinged ramblings about school, their nauseating first romantic experiences, or some other misery in life. But I think there's a misunderstanding on both sides when it comes to an issue like this.

While adults laugh, shun, or push away the supposed troubles lying within the dark reaches of their teenage counterparts (because they've been around even longer and have seen even worse). Teenagers take these troubles and hold them close as the core of their life, because until now, that's the only thing they've ever experienced. If childhood is a colorful mandala of popsicles, water gun showdowns, and time spent with countless relatives dotting over your cuteness and innocence, then adolescence is the realization that all of that is gone, and that you now have to deal with problems. Problems which are very, very real to you in the moment, but will ebb and decay from the reaches of your memory as you grow older (and hopefully, more wise).

Everyone deals with the very real and up-in-your-face reality of suffering - one of the only emotions that manages to transcend individual human experience, manifesting itself in the collective unconscious as an ever-present and omniscient evil, the crux of everything we fight against. In Buddhism, suffering is seen as the result of desire, of want, and that breaking the cycle of suffering results in Nirvana, or eternal happiness. In Christianity, suffering is seen as the result of humanity's fall from grace, and our fight against it being a fight against sin. People recognize suffering differently. It takes on a unique personification within the mind of every individual, which may be why so many religions and ideologies have been formed - a thousand medicines which aim to do the exact same thing - to relieve the pain of suffering.

But what do you think happens when someone new, someone different comes along? A person who doesn't suffer from the once thought all-encompassing affliction of suffering? Someone who tells you that they can cure you (and keep you cured forever). Someone who, no matter if you suffer from the pains of adolescent neuroticism or adult zombification, knows exactly what you need to relieve yourself.

Many might call such a person God, Allah, or might make mention of a non-living structure, like the noble-eightfold path, or some system or ideology.

But to the three-hundred people or so people who call themselves the Children of Reconstructed Consciousness, and who inhabit only the most fantastically dystopian wonderland, hidden away from organized society, a person like this is known by one name, and one name only.

To some, he's a dangerously evil and fanatical religious leader, who organized the disappearance of one of the biggest cults of the 1990s. To others, he's their hero and savior.

But to me, and my poor group of friends who got entangled along with me in the uncovering of the greatest disappearing act the world has ever seen, we know him simply as Hans Mueller.