Mark was born and raised in the United States by a religious pair of loving parents. He maintained spiritual qualities and associated wisdom from his earlier religious lifestyle far into his present adult life. One of Mark's greatest passions that he's maintained since his early teenage years is the contemplation and exploration of our existence both in terms of our reality as well as the many things that seem to go far beyond it. Fascinated with attempting to understand reality from a combined spiritual and scientific perspective, Mark has a natural but somewhat unusual quality of maintaining a high degree of open-mindedness toward virtually any idea. This not only keeps his mind truly open to unusual ideas and theories, but it also acts as a balancing force to keep him from becoming too strongly aligned with any particular idea or belief that he may at times happen to prefer over others. Having also developed a love for science and scientific procedure within his life, Mark also hopes that a more open-minded type of science can eventually emerge in order to hopefully help in better allowing for an easier understanding to take place of the greatest mysteries within our existence. He feels that perhaps the universe is aligned much more closely with consciousness as a creative force than science is currently willing to grant as possible within its strict methodologies and understandings. He also feels that religion may be a highly simplified and distorted expression of various significant past and future events that could instead be caused by not-yet-understood natural cycles within the universe rather than by acts from a vengeful Creator-God carrying out willful punishments on mankind. Although Mark does indeed feel that a Creator-God exists as an active consciousness at some level, he prefers to believe that the Creator of all-that-is is instead a loving observer rather than a being who either exhibits anger and destroys things as a result or otherwise forces changes in things through some other means. He instead prefers the idea that the ultimate God of all existence loves all of creation and as such accepts it just as it is with full love, sympathy, and understanding at all times.