Brian Joel Jolley is a computer engineer, systems thinker, and lifelong science enthusiast who spent his early adult life fully committed to a religious tradition he later left at 33. He describes himself as a secular humanist and nontheist, which makes him an unlikely person to find the most clarifying framework of his life inside the Book of Genesis.
That’s the origin of this book. Reading the Genesis creation story not as literal history but as a fable (the way you read "The Boy Who Cried Wolf"), Jolley found something that surprised him: a coherent, scientifically resonant, and morally sophisticated description of how awareness expands in nature. The six days of creation map onto stages of biological and cognitive development. The story of Adam and Eve describes what happens when self-awareness emerges and the ego takes hold. The serpent, he argues, represents ego itself.
He’s not a theologian or an academic. He came to these ideas through a computer engineer’s habit of looking for the pattern underneath the pattern, and through living through the harder parts of ego awareness himself. The book is, in part, his own map back.
He lives in Salt Lake City. Evolving Awareness: Why Kindness Matters is his first book, dedicated to his son Joel.