Recently I came upon Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2015 book Living with a Wild God: A Non-believer’s Search for the Truth about Everything.
Although she was born a few years before me, Ehrenreich was a prominent anti-Vietnam activist and a key figure of the ’60s enlightenment. She and I have been living in parallel for decades, each of us trying to figure out the nature of reality.
Originally a scientist, with a Ph.D in biology, she retains a disciplined scientific approach throughout the book while remaining open to anything.
She tells how she returned to her home in the Florida Keys after Hurricane Wilma to find everything destroyed, her computers, books, notes covered with mold – all except a journal that she started when she was a teenager that survived unharmed.
She began reading and came upon a page on which her 16 year-old self, already struggling with deep problems, sent a message to herself in the future, asking – “So what did you find out?”
Stunned by this question from her young self of the past, Ehrenreich set out to answer her. Living with a Wild God is the reply.
What did she find? You will have to read her book if you want to know that. All I will say is that she is on a similar path to me now, both of us having learned that the world, or the universe if you prefer, is vastly larger and more complicated than we thought it was. Like me she has come to understand that it does not simply contain paranormal phenomena, but is paranormal in its very nature.
If you ever think about these things, don’t miss this book.
Alan Conrad 