J Joseph Kazden was born in Brooklyn NY in 1952. Upon entering high school his education centered in the sciences and math. The pull of the nascent counterculture movement as well as the anti-war movement of the sixties and seventies would also play a crucial role in the development of his ideas and outlook. Upon entering City College his focus was on mathematics, but he found the culture and its society within the field unrelatable. This led him to take a year off from school to work on a Kibbutz in Northern Israel. This experience instilled in him a lasting impression of the creative power of community, working together, through their differences, to forge a future for the common good. A key part of that impression lay in what he saw as the animating power of attitude and perspective with their ability to instigate, focus, and maintain human action and energy in the achievement of difficult goals while overcoming obstacles on the pathway.

Returning home Joseph continued his studies, but now majoring in psychology. To support himself he drove a yellow cab. During this time, he also began his studies in the martial arts. In school his focus became depth psychology and phenomenology, especially the work of Jung and others, such as Adler and Freud. But he never lost his love of physics, which has continued as a lifelong interest. At the same time, on a parallel track, he began a significant and lifelong study and practice of ‘alternate’ philosophies and disciplines such as, yoga, Zen Buddhism, Taoism, indigenous and shamanic philosophies and practices, as well as others. He found this alternate method of self-education to be much more fulfilling than his experience in the University setting. And so, in 1974, Joseph left NYC and headed west, settling in Tucson AZ. For a short time he worked as a short order cook, and then for several year, in construction. It was in Tucson where he met his wife, Mary. They married in 1984 and together have a daughter, Nora.

In 1980 he discovered and became involved in the burgeoning Studio Glass movement. He spent the next 35 years making glass sculptures, on which he developed his signature reverse painting technique. He also applied himself to printmaking and drawing.

As an artist Joseph considered himself a mystic. He was a man in search of the numinous, that which cannot be defined or understood by the rational mind. Such a quest requires one to journey within to find the meaning without. He likened this journey to the one that King Arthur, as detailed in the Arthurian romances written by Chrétien de Troyes, in the 12^th Century, gave to his knights when they asked him where to begin their quest for the Holy Grail. “Let each of you enter the forest at that point which you choose, where it is darkest and there is no way or path”.

In 1987 Joseph and family moved to Seattle WA. The next year they moved to Bainbridge Island, which is a short ferry ride from downtown Seattle. Here he built his atelier and continued his art-making. While his art-making brought him in search of the numinous, his scientific passion brought him to examine the conception of human experience as an instrument in the search for objective reality, a conception that Relativity and Quantum Theory have shattered in many ways. For him, Einstein’s famous quote; “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a persistent one.”, combines both the numinous and the objective in one precise formulation. For Joseph it was the Rosetta Stone of Reality, with a capital R. But how to decipher it? In his search for Reality he realized that the source of the mechanism that creates and generates the persistence of the illusion of reality is key to revealing what lay beyond the illusion.

Then, one night in 2012 Joseph sat bolt upright in bed from a deep sleep. He had had an epiphany.  The outlines of the mechanism that generates this illusion of reality that Einstein was telling us about had been revealed in his dreaming state. Three years later he published his first book TotIs to reveal that mystery. It is not an easy conception to get your mind around. But once you do you will never see the world, or your place in it, in the same way again.