A Curious Year in the Great Vivarium Experiment
“An honest, vulnerable, transformational travel odyssey into the heart and soul of a man using the power of gratitude and intention. No matter where the reader is in their life, A Curious Year in the Great Vivarium Experiment is a story about the magic that occurs in awakening to the unlimited potential of your life’s journey.”
Dr. Joe Dispenza, NY Times bestselling author
vi·var·i·um [vahy-vair-ee-uhm, vi-]
a place, such as a laboratory, where live animals or plants are kept under conditions simulating their natural environment, as for research.
Spirit brought me into the world.
The body carried me through the world.
And the mind sent me in search of the world.
From the opening quote above, so begins A Curious Year in the Great Vivarium Experiment.
On the surface, it's a story about a man in his mid-30’s coming to terms with the death of his parents. Beneath the facade, however, it’s a multi-layered literary novel in three parts (Spirit, Body, Mind) about an artist searching for his voice, a writer searching for his story, and the power of gratitude and intention to create our reality. Drawing on the themes of childhood, the search for self, and the quest for self-realization, A Curious Year in the Great Vivarium Experiment takes the reader on a journey into Thomas Furey’s inner life as he travels throughout India and Southeast Asia for exactly one year.
Using a gratitude/intention journal as a structural element, the catalyst for the story is the morning of Thomas’ 36th birthday, which finds him jobless, without a relationship, or any of the other successes his friends seemed to have. Having just returned from his mother’s funeral, he decides to buy a one-way ticket to India. Possessed by fear, armed with hope, protected by naivety, and guided by intention, from the moment Thomas begins to act in alignment with his true self, serendipity intervenes.
Throughout the course of exactly one year, Thomas finds himself volunteering for a Nobel Prize winner in India, working as the assistant to a delinquent school photographer in Vietnam and China, drinking his way through Laos and Cambodia, wallowing in the depths of loneliness in Thailand, experiencing a moral hangover in the Philippines, and after having just rekindled a love affair in Sri Lanka, believes he may meet his end.
The course above charts a roadmap for Thomas’s spiritual, mental, and emotional growth as he wrestles with the death of his parents, heals the wounds of his past to create a new future, and attempts to surrender his fears for a greater vision of himself.
But threatening his security, safety, and success is the veil. Something he can feel more than name, the veil is a shadowy force that has haunted his life and dreams for as long as he can remember. Terrified by whatever is behind it, the veil threatens to lead him down a trail of self-destruction, all the while obfuscating a truth central to his life.
Throughout his year of travel, like the breath of life that animates his body, Thomas moves through a series of joyful expansions and painful contractions as he drifts through women and excess, paralyzing fear and self-doubt, fathomless loneliness and unbounded gratitude, and the terrifying and ultimate realization that he is infinitely more powerful than he ever could have imagined.
At its most human level, A Curious Year in the Great Vivarium Experiment is about the journey of overcoming the self. At the archetypal level, it’s the hero’s journey towards self-realization/actualization. Ultimately, it’s about the fact that each of us are the heroes we’ve been waiting for.
No matter where the reader is in their life’s journey, A Curious Year in the Great Vivarium Experiment is a story about the transformation and awareness that occurs in awakening.
13 Keys: A Memoir from the Future (Coming Late 2024)
13 Keys: A Memoir from the Future, is a memoir from the future about the mechanism behind achieving your dreams: the power of directed consciousness.
Now the catch, not to mention what makes it accessible to readers, is that Shields is teaching all of this to his 17-year-old self—a dreamer, a virgin, and an aspiring writer full of hope, hunger, longing, and curiosity, while at the same time paralyzed by anger, sadness, fear, and loneliness.
At the heart of the narrative is the idea that because time is an illusory human construct, if he can teach his younger self these lessons now, he can affect not only their present reality from where Shields writes to his younger self, but the trajectory of future self-actualized versions of themselves.
Beyond musings on the illusory nature of time, the effects of programming and conditioning from our environments, alchemy, consciousness, the importance of having a spiritual practice, the demands of being an artist, the power of the dream, and an update to Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey as the evolution of consciousness—culminating in a teaching about love, forgiveness, and healing—the ultimate teaching resides in Shields’ model of self-actualization called “The Circlétron.”
The Circlétron represents the infinite possibilities of one’s life, but more specifically, it’s a framework—a simple, easy-to-understand roadmap of possibilities for our soul’s journey.
Through it all, Shields gives the innocent, naïve, and trusting version of his adolescent self hard-earned knowledge and wisdom, which if embodied, will help his younger self manifest his dreams with less resistance and at a faster rate, which means having the freedom to dream the next dream, which means living a more fulfilling and enriching life.
The Young Timothy in this book is the “Young You”—as well as everyone who reads it—making it an ideal gift for sons and daughters, graduates, dreamers, initiates, artists, creators, philosophers, spiritual seekers, and anyone else seeking to manifest and live the life of their dreams.
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