Founder

    About ten years ago John Pearson was just starting to develop his concept of NexStep collateral coaching groups designed to aid its members in recovery from emotional addiction. Upon starting these groups John came to the realization that they were growing faster than he was able to teach his NexStep Process. Consequently John made the difficult decision to put his concept on hold so he could put together the framework necessary to support the number of people that were attracted to this process.

    It became clear to John that he would have to create a system where he wasn’t the only one with the knowledge to teach this process. He would have to put to paper everything that was simply intuitive to him. This task was difficult and took longer than he had anticipated. Eventually John made the decision to take everything that he was compiling and turn it into a book, which would break down the NexStep process and its benefits. His book, to be named “Kissing the Dragon’s Lips”, was almost finished, but there was one last chapter. This chapter, intended to chronicle the history of emotional addiction in society, ultimately forced John to put the finishing of the book on hold.

    As experienced in other recovery programs, it is important for members to understand the origins, causes and consequences of their disease. In this case, it was John’s belief that emotional addiction was the direct result of civilization itself. In other words, it was civilization and thus its inherent hierarchy system that had lead us away from egalitarian nomadic groups where all members were equally valuable. This transition sent humans down the path of emotional addiction in order to cope with the emotional consequences found in the better-than/less-than system found within all hierarchies.

    Thus the descent into finding when, where, why, and how civilization started had begun. At first John believed this would be an easy task. He started looking into all of your typical ancient civilizations. Most scholars generally believe Mesopotamia is the oldest “modern” civilization and John was almost certain he would find his answer within the history of Mesopotamia. Much to his surprise there were no apparent incremental steps found in Mesopotamian history that pointed to how they had come to be. It was almost as if they had spontaneously emerged as a society built on hierarchy. This puzzled John.

    He next decided to investigate one of the world’s most documented ancient civilizations. Ancient Egypt. Once again, he could find no incremental steps leading to their great civilization. John decided to broaden his search and what he found was quite surprising. It seems that 13 separate civilizations simultaneously launched around Eurasia between 5,000 and 6,000 BCE. Not only did they all begin around the same time, but they also seemed to be sharing plants and animals of the same genetic origin. How could this be possible unless there was a civilization that preceded the 13 and ultimately seeded them with their materials and culture?

    Armed with this hypothesis John looked into the histories and mythologies of ancient civilizations for clues as to where they came from. It was at this time he came across some research compiled by Sir William Mathew Flinders Petrie, an independent scholar and renowned Egyptologist in his time, in which he had translated the Book of the Dead.

    Ancient Egypt’s Book of the Dead was a document used by the priests of the time when they would mummify and bury their nobles. It was essentially a map to guide them through the trials of the afterlife and back to the lands of their forefathers. Professor Petrie decided to go down a road less traveled and asked the question “What if the places talked about in the book of the dead really existed?” To answer this question he constructed a map based on the geographic points contained in the ancient text. Interestingly, the map showed the path led not to any familiar place in Egypt, but a land far beyond to the north. This was surprising to John, but not enough evidence to conclude that this was where civilization had begun.

    Based on this new information John believed there had to be something important being passed on in these civilization’s ancient texts and mythologies; certainly something more important than just a telling of moralistic tales to help guide their people. He started looking through the mythologies with a different filter. He began examining the names within the mythologies by tracing their etymologies. When he took the meanings of the names and put them in the context from the story, a much clearer telling of history came into view. It seems our ancestors had compressed the events of their times into single words to make them easier to pass on. In that way they could pass on the information without needing to tell the whole story. John called these names holistic phrases. He defined a holistic phrase as a single word used to compress the information of a single event including its circumstances, descriptions and solutions.

    Now, equipped with this key to decoding the myths, he went after almost every recorded mythology in the world. What he discovered was truly amazing. He found that essentially every mythology in the world told the same story of the origin of civilization. They all started in the valley below a volcano and ended with a war and catastrophic event (most commonly a flood) that destroyed almost all of their people.

    Some of the mythologies are more detailed than others, and decoded, are the source material for not only substantial hours of multimedia content, but led us to unprecedented extraordinary archaeological discoveries.