About the Book

How Many Roads?

About the Book

How Many Roads? is an autobiography that provides an inside look at Howard Sodja’s participation in beatnik, leftist, and hippie countercultures. The book presents pivotal events in his life, such as the author’s near-expulsion from a Catholic high school for reading banned books by Thomas Huxley and Darwin. This and other high school experiences prime him for college philosophy and social-science studies that profoundly alter his worldview. While attending a Southern university, his encounters with social injustices prompt him to become a civil rights and antiwar activist. The author analyzes the historical and humanitarian grounds for opposing US military and economic intervention in Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, and Central America. He also documents illegal FBI and CIA activities and extreme bias in media reporting.

In the late 1960s, the author attempts to live his philosophy and create an alternative society in several hippie communes in Northern California. A series of unforeseen social and economic communal problems temper his idealism and teach him many lessons. Realizing that living his ideals and having a professional career are not mutually exclusive, he serves humanity by working as a social worker for the next 30 years. After the author sees a graphic film of a 1980 massacre in El Salvador, his activist drive is rekindled and he founds community groups that help restrain US intervention in El Salvador. Five years later, exploring new scientific discoveries, the author uncovers secret US experiments in mind control, which he verifies with a series of brain-wave control experiments. His well-referenced ELF (extreme low frequency) and brain-wave research validates environmentalists’ protests over the dangers of electromagnetic radiation and, in particular, a high-powered US Navy ELF transmitter in Wisconsin.

The final chapter weaves the many threads of the author’s life into a philosophical and scientific overview of all life, known as the Gaia theory. In this paradigm-shifting view, the author explains how Gaia, a superorganism that encompasses the gestalt of all life on Earth, is the culmination of evolution; and Homo sapiens are merely the distillation of Gaian consciousness. This theory is a synthesis of the world’s greatest Eastern and Western thinkers, from 6th-century B.C. Taoists to modern quantum physics and life-science philosophers. Ancient wisdom, modern science, and religious philosophy are intertwined to support this unique view of reality. Provocative but not dogmatic, the author urges readers to examine the facts for themselves and arrive at their own conclusions.

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