The Fourth Awakening Chronicles I

By: Rod Pennington, Jeffery A. Martin

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Penelope Drayton Spence has been hired by two of the world’s richest men to track down and interview enlightened people who may have arrived at the Fourth Awakening. The problem, as fast she can locate a potential candidate, they have a nasty habit of mysteriously vanishing. These “Chronicles” are written in the "Serial Novel" format Charles Dickens famously used for the “Pickwick Papers” and many of his later books. It is also the format magazines such as “The Saturday Evening Post” made popular not that long ago. THIS FOUR PART SERIES OF NOVELLAS WILL BE COMPLETED IN 2014. The goal of each Chronicle is to present an Enlightened “Archetype,” and explore its characteristics. While each Chronicle is a stand-alone episode that can be read independently, it is a part of a much larger and continuing story which is easier to understand and follow if it is read in sequential order. In “Chronicles I” we meet a professional gambler in Las Vegas, Daniel Wooten. He is a middle-aged, confirmed bachelor with no religious moorings. Wooten has never meditated, hasn’t been in a church in decades and hadn’t shown the slightest interest in his spiritual side until the moment he found himself enlightened. WHAT IS AN AWAKENING? An awakening occurs when something so profoundly changes the world that all of the old rules no longer apply. A powerful new order arrives, completely unexpected and without warning, and things are never the same again. The First Awakening occurred approximately 200,000 years ago when Homo sapiens emerged in East Africa, but it took another 150,000 years for things to begin to get interesting. The Second Awakening saw the emergence of spoken language, early shamans, and great myths being told around the campfire. For the first time, early humans became self-aware and while still considering themselves a part of nature, they understood they were now different. We became aware of our own mortality. We started to fear death and began to seek a deeper understanding of the cycle of life and how it applied to us. We started to develop increasingly complex rituals of burying our dead to prepare them for the afterlife we hoped existed. We began a desperate search for immortality in any form. The Third Awakening began around 3,000 years ago. It saw the rise of all modern religions, as well as science. Between 800 BC and 400 BC, there was a religious explosion. The key events in the Old Testament occurred, from which emerged Judeo/Christian beliefs. At the same time Taoism was being followed by Confucianism in China. The same was happening with Shintoism in Japan, and Hinduism and Buddhism in India, and later Islam. For the past 500 or so years, the political power of religion has waned while the power of science has flourished. With videos of Space Shuttles exploding on cable news, both sides politicizing environmental science to serve their personal agenda and “safe” nuclear power plants melting down, science is now in retreat. When the big ideas from the previous Awakening start to collapse, a new Awakening is on the horizon. The Fourth Awakening is just beginning. Exactly how it will manifest itself is still unclear. Are you ready? The original book in the series, "The Fourth Awakening", has been the #1 bestseller in its Kindle category for over 3 years in both the US & UK.