“In each of our lives there are seemingly magical coincidences that, if not convincing us there is a higher force at work, at least cause us to wonder. In each of our lives there are also random, sometimes painful, events that, if not causing us to disbelieve in a higher force, at least cause us to doubt. At times we feel the master of our destinies and at others the victim of fate. Our lives and the world can seem good one day and filled with evil the next. In short, life often seems contradictory and confusing.
“The contradictions lead to age-old theological debates about the existence or non-existence of God or a god-like force. They lead to philosophical debates of free will versus destiny. They make us grapple with the ideas of good and evil and ask why they exist in our individual lives and the greater world beyond as well.
“This is a book about an old and simple idea that makes sense of the contradictions and confusion at all levels—personal, global and metaphysical. It is a beautiful idea that simply and elegantly explains the connections between us all and it all, but it is also a deeply troubling idea that can disturb the dark secrets we keep within.
It is an illogical idea, but it has an intuitive power that eats away at more rational views of life. It is not an idea that can be proved right or wrong in debate—it either feels right or it doesn’t. All any of us can do is try it on and see how it fits.
“When it feels right, all the pieces of your life, the lives of those around you, and the world around begin to click into place. It leads to understanding of theological and philosophical issues such as free will and determinism, whether or not God exists, and how there can be a benevolent God in a world with evil. It presents a framework for better understanding any system of religious belief. It leads to understanding of the interconnections between us all that are the world we live in. It helps us understand a global horror such as a war and a personal one such as the death of a loved one.”
— 1992 Reflection Introduction
This was how the book Reflection started when I first wrote it in 1992. I explained the idea as a way to better understand one’s life and also to understand the larger metaphysical sorts of questions we all have from time to time.
A number of people at the time, including total strangers, which was key, read draft copies of the book and told me how it had changed their lives, how it had made them understand. That’s why we, Mary Kroening my wife and business partner at the time, and I decided to self publish it.
Why self-publish? I actually had a literary agent in those days who had placed my two books on the logic programming language, Prolog, for me with Springer-Verlag. Those were challenging/fun books to write since Prolog requires a very different way of looking at programming. It’s not like other software languages, and I think those books, which still sell today, did a good job at explaining the underlying concepts that made it such a different and powerful software tool.
My agent shopped Reflection around to various publishers who might publish such a book. The feedback was always that it was a good book, but they couldn’t sell it. My agent had said if I was Dr. Dennis C Merritt, renowned expert in Jungian Psychology or the like, he could sell it. He said if the stories were not from my life, but say, from Marilyn Monroe’s, he could sell it.
But I’m not a renowned expert, nor am I famous. However, the book had touched people, so we decided to self-publish. I did most of the writing and then the reading and incorporating of the many reviewer’s comments. Mary worked the introduction and did the layout and got the copyrights and the ISBN numbers and the printer and—self-publishing then meant making your own large print run—we ordered 2000 copies.
We sold hardly any. I moved those heavy crates of books from one place to another, from Massachusetts to Ohio to maybe three houses in North Carolina. Finally I’d moved them enough. I kept some and threw out around 1,900 books.
In 2016 we, now Nancy and I, took our first steps towards living in Shelburne Falls, MA, and there I got some small interest in the book. The world of self-publishing had changed, and I had moved my two Prolog books to Amazon, so I decided to do the same with Reflection. I moved the text to Scrivener, an excellent tool for writers, added some stuff, removed some stuff, and then in 2017 created a PDF file and sent it up to Amazon. There it was self-published again. Wow, so much easier!
It still didn’t do well, but I had a bunch of author’s copies which I could sell or give away. Periodically I’d give a copy to someone, and then, never hear back. I don’t know if people just didn’t read it, or did and didn’t like it, or even got started. I don’t know if they were just being polite and thought I was nuts, or the book was nuts, or maybe it wasn’t well written, or maybe it was but they just weren’t interested in the topic… I didn’t know.
So I did what I do and moved to a new project and wrote another book that looked at something from a different point of view, explaining the underlying concepts. It was Jazz Chords for Baritone Ukulele. It presented a way for meshing the music theory of jazz with the geometry of a baritone uke’s four strings and fretboard. It sells pretty well for an un-marketed, self-published book.
My arguably different ways of looking at software development and jazz music attracted readers, but the same approach towards life itself, with Reflection, didn’t.
Then I got some positive feedback on Reflection, someone said it really did help them make sense of their life. OK. Then some more no responses. Then a few more people liked it and they started telling me their own stories of Reflection. It touched them.
I had gotten into the design of books and had done one for Eve Christoph, Eve’s Eden, a very mystical sort of book about channeling the energies of the goddesses, full of wonderful stories. Eve loved Reflection.
Eve is clearly someone who thrives in the world of ideas of mystical sorts of energies, except, I’m not like that! I’m a very logical person who tends to look at things from different points of view. It’s what my Prolog books are. It’s what my jazz book is. It’s what Reflection is, it’s me, very logically, looking at life from a different point of view. One that does, maybe, resonate with more mystical sorts.
Well then Eve’s mother, Rosemary, read the book. She’s a professional psychologist, and academic, and the owner of more books than anyone I’ve ever met. (And she’s read them all.) She read Reflection and said it was the best book she’d ever read. Well she backs down a little on that now, saying maybe it’s one of the best books she’s read. But still, she and Eve encouraged me to update it again. OK.
I was working on the book design and showed my work to Maureen Moore, a professional book designer. Aside from excellent commentary on the layout, she read it and noted that it was a book that would appeal to people like Eve, but not someone with an empirical mind such as hers.
I told her that she was exactly the sort of person I was trying to write it for, and asked her to explain why it didn’t work for her. So she went through the whole book and marked up all the bits that were jarring to her, and that could be explained by coincidence and psycho-somatic sorts of reasons and also where my words simply did not communicate what I claimed to be trying to say.
So now, with tremendous thanks to Eve, Rosemary, and Maureen I’m embarking on another telling of the story, maybe doing a better job of what I claim I’m good at, explaining a different way of looking at things.
(Note that the writing in this latest revision is a collaboration between me at 46, me at 71, and now, me at 80 and has sections from all of us, but mostly it’s still the work of my 46 year old self.)
The old title, Reflection, was kind of ambiguous and was trying to cover maybe too much of what I wanted to say. I knew what I wanted it to mean, but it wasn’t clear readers did. The book also had, and still does have, two very different parts. In the first edition they were called “Practical” and “Theoretical,” and in the second “Feelings” and “Thoughts.”
Part I is full of personal stories, the real experiences that shaped my thinking about the phenomenon I called “Reflection” that I believe connects the reality we observe to something deeper inside of us. I don’t suspect those stories will convince anyone else of the truth of my observations, but that is not their intent. More I hope that they inspire the reader to look at the reality of their own lives and see if they see the same sorts of connections I saw. Whether they do or not, I believe the very act of looking has value in better understanding one’s life.
That first part is now called Human Entanglement, which draws on the imagery of quantum entanglement, where atomic particle’s states are synchronously connected to each other. Since the first part uses the Rolling Stones lyric about how one doesn’t always get what one wants, but gets what one needs, the subtitle for the first section is, “Why do I need this?”
Part II ponders, in the abstract, what it might mean if the phenomenon is real and happening all the time, and how considering that puts various philosophical, psychological, and spiritual ideas in a different light.
That part is titled The Spiritual Core, because I do believe it explains a lot of what’s happening beneath the experiences of life. It’s subtitled, “What does it all mean?”
Note that it can be annoying or even dangerous to try to apply the ideas in this book to other people’s lives. No one can really understand how another’s reality connects to the needs of their inner self, or even if it does at all.
I often get asked if I mean to imply it’s at work for X, where X is some horrid example from a life well removed from my own. The answer is that I really have no idea how the idea applies to other individual’s lives, or even if it does.
That is kind of the point of this book, to inspire others to exam their own lives and to see how their observed reality might be related to their inner self. To see the two moving together, and to see how this phenomenon really can lead to a better understanding of the greater connection between us all.
Dennis C Merritt
Shelburne Falls, 2026