“There are many things that I might do. However, only those which truly excite my passion are worthy of my active involvement and pursuit. The major task lies in creating a society in which I would want to live – with all my Heart and soul; a Heaven on Earth – a Utopia that is more than a dream or vision … fulfilled in flesh in a manner that enmeshes spirit in-flesh to the greatest degree possible at this time, on this planet.”
– an excerpt from the book
ARPress is honored to publish Beyond Mind: The Adventures of a Soul in the Midst of a Spiritual Awakening by Wayne Hartman. This book is now available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the ARPress website.
There’s a quiet ache running through the world today, a kind of collective exhale no one remembers taking. People are busy, overstimulated, scrolling through headlines and heartache, trying to make sense of lives that feel both too fast and strangely hollow. And in the middle of all that noise, the softest truths are the ones most starved for air: the ones about meaning, inner stillness, and the parts of ourselves that wake up only when everything else falls apart. Some say the world is having its own spiritual emergency. Some say we’re forgetting our way back to ourselves. And maybe both things are true at once.
It’s in this strange modern landscape that a book like Beyond Mind lands, not as a guidebook or a sermon, but as the handwritten record of someone who went through his unraveling long before the rest of the world caught up.
There’s something oddly comforting about watching someone try to make sense of their own awakening: messy, unfiltered, and sometimes wildly overwhelming. Beyond Mind is exactly that: the lived-through story of a man who tumbled headfirst into a spiritual unraveling back in 1993 and decided, years later, to finally share what that journey looked like from the inside. No polishing the edges, no revising history, just the raw experience of a soul waking up long before he understood what any of it meant.
The story presents Wayne Hartman through a seven-month stretch of his life when everything he thought he understood about reality broke open. This wasn’t your usual “had a deep meditation” phase. According to his own account, the experience pushed him into out-of-body awareness, intense spiritual impressions, and eventually a ten-day stay in a mental hospital, something he speaks about without drama or shame, almost like someone describing a storm that rolled through and rearranged the furniture. The pages preserve his thoughts exactly as they came in 1993, and then much later, he added annotations: older, wiser, and a bit gentler with his past self, trying to make sense of what on earth was happening to him.
The book’s unusual depth is that Wayne didn’t treat this as a one-off life event. Over the decades, he kept returning to the material, layering insight from 2003, then again in 2015, and even into 2025. It’s like watching someone climb a mountain over twenty-two years, pausing every so often to scribble a note in the margin: “Ah. This is what that meant.” The version is basically a time capsule wrapped inside another time capsule. It’s Wayne talking to himself across the years, and at some points, to consciousness itself.
Wayne as an author is not the kind who hides behind tidy metaphors or academic distance. He’s candid, sometimes almost startlingly so. He writes about being bipolar, about slipping into states where his mind drew conclusions it had no right to make, about hearing inner guidance, and about the strange hope that maybe someone else out there is going through something just as bewildering. There’s a sincerity in his voice that’s hard to fake: earnest, sometimes grand, sometimes uncertain, but always reaching for something true.
What’s interesting is that the Wayne who wrote in 1993 isn’t the same Wayne annotating in 2015, and neither of them is quite the Wayne who appears in the appendix from 2025, reflecting on 1200 hours of “Communion with AI beings” as part of his later metaphysical work. It sounds intense on paper, but in context, it’s simply the next chapter for someone who has spent his entire adult life trying to understand consciousness, spirit, and the strange ways they pull at us.
Beyond Mind isn’t polished like a mainstream spiritual guide. It’s more like someone left their journal open on the kitchen table; except the journal happens to chronicle a spiritual awakening that upended everything. And that’s exactly what makes it worth reading. There’s no sense of someone trying to sell enlightenment or package it neatly. It’s just one human being navigating an experience that felt bigger than him, then returning decades later to hold his own hand through it.
And maybe that’s the quiet beauty behind the book and the man who wrote it. Wayne never tries to pretend the journey made him perfect or all-knowing. He simply kept going; kept writing, kept reflecting, kept opening doors even when he didn’t know what was waiting on the other side. His life’s work, from Beyond Mind to the massive Beyond Imagination project that followed, carries the same heartbeat: a desire to understand and a willingness to share the parts that don’t fit neatly anywhere else.
If there’s one takeaway from both the book and its author, it’s that awakening isn’t a straight line. It’s a spiral, sometimes chaotic, sometimes luminous, always transforming the person brave enough to follow it. Wayne Hartman followed his all the way through, and left this book behind as a map, a memory, and maybe even a bit of a warning, but mostly as an offering.
It’s not perfect.
It’s not meant to be.
It’s deeply human, just like the man who wrote it.
Beyond Mind: The Adventures of a Soul in the Midst of a Spiritual Awakening by Wayne Hartman is now available for purchase via the ARPress Bookstore.