I worked for three years writing of A Spiritual Evolution. Why? The answer came down to this: It’s a book intended to help people – particularly those with addictions – move ahead in their own spiritual evolution.
The strongest point of the book is its unflinching honesty. I describe my alcoholic thoughts as they appeared to me to make sense, but with the insight since gained through sobriety and the spiritual growth the 12 steps can bring about.
Right from the bat my story discloses an obsessive compulsive disorder that acted out the bondage of self in a literal and bizarre way. Unable to understand the contradictions of the alcoholic home where I grew up, I tried to navigate the world by counterbalancing my self-loathing with achievement and, later, acting out the role of a glamorous woman as best I could piece it together.
Early in this chaotic tug of war, I died. That is to say, in a Manhattan nightclub, at 21, I snorted nearly a full gram of lidocaine that had been sold to me as cocaine. Lidocaine is an anesthetic that can shut down the body’s respiratory and cardiac functions if ingested systemically. As my heart slowed and slowed, my breathing became increasingly ineffectual until the lack of oxygen set off a full grand mal seizure followed by cardiac arrest, right there on the floor of the Peppermint Lounge.
A bartender worked to revive me with CPR, but I knew nothing of that: I’d left my body and traveled in a state of elation through an otherworldly landscape into the house of my ancestors, where I saw a brilliant sun dazzling a path across the ocean that – to my surprise – pulled me toward it and sucked me inside, into the most brilliant light you can imagine.
For years afterward I refused to believe I’d crossed over, because I’d been raised in a family that rejected god and all things spiritual. I’d never heard of Near Death Experiences, and I had no clue of NDE paranormal after-effects. As I went on trying to make my life work using the self-centered, manipulative, confused mindset of an alcoholic and rejecting all possibility of spiritual help as nonsense, paranormal things – undeniable ones – kept happening to me. I had no idea why, except in the deepest part of myself, where I knew they were related to my experience in the light.
I went on drinking until, when the will to live had all but left me, god found a way to rope me into AA through a codependent relationship. (Whatever works, right?) The second half of the book relates my learning to live life all over again, learning from pain and the wisdom passed on to me, as the paranormal effects became more blaring and left me no choice but to acknowledge not only god but a complex spiritual world that can influence our human experience.
Book Links
AMAZON E-BOOK: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0093NPHYO
A Spiritual Evolution 