Dear Zoe

Len Wiens spent his career in consulting and then building technology companies before selling his 75-person tech firm and turning his full attention to a question that had been following him most of his life: what is God, and why are we so stuck in the west without a good answer for suffering?

That search didn't come from a classroom, a seminary, or a pulpit. It came from reading spiritual traditions across the East and West, and included direct experience — years of contemplative practice, psychedelic exploration, and a deepening encounter with both Christian and eastern mystics who kept saying the same thing in different languages. He read across neuroscience, philosophy, and theology. He listened to Hindu and Buddhist contemplatives. He studied Jung's Aion and the Book of Job.

Along the way he noticed something else: the problem of suffering — western theology's oldest hard question — was now being picked up by philosophers and academics of consciousness — and they were leading us to the same dead ends, only with fancier justifications. The answer to suffering, he came to believe, had been sitting inside the Christian scriptures all along, hiding in plain sight.

When his daughter Zoe turned seven, he started writing it all down for her — because he wanted her to have everything he'd found if he wasn't around to give it to her later himself. What started as a father's letter became Dear Zoe: A Letter to My Daughter — On God and Suffering. Weaving a thread through the suffering of Job, the Hindu Ramayana, Carl Jung, Christ, the Bhagavad Gita, and the contemplative traditions of East and West, this letter assembles an answer — and argues that suffering is not the enemy of consciousness but the very mechanism by which consciousness comes to see Itself.

In the end, it offers a father's daughter something to stand on when the weight comes.

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