Chapter 13: From Darkness to Divine: A Journey Through Addiction to Spiritual Awakening
After reading earlier chapters in this book, it would be easy to assume that I had led a fairly well-organized life and had sufficient native spiritual and emotional intelligence to find my greatest good without too many problems.
Nothing could be further from the truth!
Conventional wisdom often suggests that a life imbued with uncommon knowledge that spiritual transformation brings follows a predictable path: religious study, gradual enlightenment, and methodical progress toward divine understanding. My journey shattered this assumption entirely. Instead of ascending through traditional spiritual practices, I descended into the deepest caverns of human despair, where addiction, loss, and the desire for self-annihilation became unlikely teachers on the road to transcendence.
This chapter is not just another typical story of redemption in the classical sense, but rather an exploration of how the universe sometimes uses our greatest failures as doorways to our most profound awakenings. It’s a testament to the idea that spiritual truth often emerges not from comfort and certainty, but from the ashes of everything we thought we knew about ourselves and reality.
This is the account of how I discovered that the kingdom of heaven—that eternal presence Jesus spoke of, or the mind that the Buddha cultivated—can be accessed not only through the innocence of a child’s mind, but also through the complete destruction and rebuilding of adult consciousness. It was an epic journey that took me through Portland’s underworld, through the precipice of suicide, and ultimately into realms of awareness that few in humanity would ever want to experience.
My path began with a deliberate rejection of everything our religious culture had been taught to revere. Religious dogma, which provided structure and meaning to many others, became objects of total scorn by me. The sacred texts, the rituals, the promises of salvation—all of it felt hollow, disconnected from any authentic experience of the divine. This wasn’t mere rebellion; it was a complete spiritual revulsion at organized religion, a revulsion that began in grade school, that eventually left me adrift in a world that became devoid of meaning.
What followed was a fifteen-year odyssey through the often-turbulent landscape of despair, loss of hope, and self-destruction. Drug and alcohol abuse became my primary spiritual practice, offering temporary escapes from the overwhelming emptiness that had consumed my existence. Each substance promised transcendence but delivered only temporary relief from the burden of self, and only deeper entanglement in cycles of craving and disappointment. The highs became lower, the lows more devastating, and the space between them increasingly unbearable.
The casualties accumulated relentlessly. Friends eventually failed to provide comfort and companionship through the slow erosion of trust and connection that addiction inevitably brings. Family relationships, once sources of support and identity, crumbled under the weight of broken promises and repeated failures. Employment opportunities vanished as my reliability dissolved along with my sense of responsibility to anything beyond the next high, the next forgetfulness of the misery of the moment.
Challenger Explosion January 28, 1986-The day I attempted suicide, and began my search for Truth
The descent reached its nadir in a moment of absolute clarity about the futility of my existence. After years of gradual deterioration, I arrived at the logical conclusion of my trajectory: suicide. The explosion of the Challenger spacecraft on January 28, 1986 was the exclamation point on my life of failure. I once was to be an Air Force pilot, with hopes of becoming an astronaut. But my relationship with a mentally ill wife and my own insouciance in the face of overwhelming odds against my success goaded me into taking extreme measures. The Challenger explosion became a symbol of my life’s destruction, and there could be no resurrection from this. This wasn’t an impulsive decision born from temporary despair, but a calculated assessment that life, as I was experiencing it, held no value worth preserving.
The attempt failed, but the failure itself became a catalyst for transformation. Lying in the aftermath of my unsuccessful bid for self-annihilation, I experienced something unexpected: not relief, but conditional acceptance. I was confused at a universe that kept me trapped in an existence that felt meaningless, while amazed at some coincidences that prevented the successful ending of my own life.
In that moment of faux empowerment, I made a demand that would alter the entire trajectory of my journey. I reloaded my pill bottle—my insurance policy against continued suffering—and issued an ultimatum to existence itself. Unless I could find a truth worth living for, I would complete the work of self-destruction that I had been unconsciously pursuing for fifteen years.
This wasn’t a plea or a prayer in any conventional sense. It was an ultimatum to myself, a demand that I would stay alive only if I could unearth authentic meaning. I had moved beyond hope into something more primal: a raw insistence that truth, if it existed, either reveal itself or I would face the consequence of my permanent departure from this most troubling game of existence.
I consciously stated to myself that I now will begin my search for Truth.
The months that followed my ultimatum were characterized by gradual movement into the deepest levels of Portland’s underworld. This wasn’t a dramatic descension, but rather a slow, learning-rich journey through various strata of human experience that I had previously ignored or dismissed. Over the next year, until March 17, 1987, I was sucked into Portland, Oregon’s underworld community—a shadow realm populated by those who, like me, had fallen through the cracks of conventional society.
I had made several connections on the periphery of this black hole in consciousness while securing drugs for myself beginning late in 1985 when I walked away from a fiancé and my lifetime guaranteed job with the US Postal Service. Here, among the addicted, the lost, and the forgotten, I was to encounter a different kind of wisdom. It wasn’t the polished philosophy of academia or the comforting platitudes of mainstream spirituality, but the raw, unfiltered insights that emerge when all pretense, and often all hope, has been stripped away.
During this period, I encountered a competent confidant, an undercover DEA agent who happened to befriend me and who possessed the clarity to diagnose the foundational issues underlying my self-destructive patterns. His assessment was both simple and daunting: I needed to achieve sobriety and confront the unresolved father issues that had been driving much of my destructive behavior.
The prescription seemed almost insultingly basic after the complexity of philosophical and spiritual concepts I had explored during my descent. Yet there was something compelling about its directness. Perhaps the truth I sought was only unearthed through the work of addressing psychological wounds and chemical dependencies.
Getting clean required a complete restructuring of my relationship with consciousness itself. For fifteen years, I had relied on substances to mediate my experience of reality. Sobriety meant facing that reality directly, without chemical buffers or altered states to soften its edges. The withdrawal was not merely physical, but existential—a confrontation with the unadorned experience of being human without pharmaceutical assistance.
Dog Mountain hike in 1998 with my father, his dog Peaches, and me
Addressing my father issues proved equally challenging. These weren’t simply matters of personal psychology, but fundamental questions about authority, masculinity, and my place in the larger patterns of existence. The work required examining not just my relationship with my biological father, but with the entire concept of paternal authority, divine and human.
Two months into sobriety, I discovered Jack Boland’s tape series “12 Steps To A Spiritual Experience.” These three hours of recordings contained the most powerful information about recovery and spirituality that I had ever encountered. Unlike the religious dogma I had scorned or the new-age platitudes that had left me cold, Boland’s teachings possessed an authenticity that spoke directly to my experience of spiritual bankruptcy and renewal.
Boland’s approach wasn’t about conforming to external religious structures, but about discovering the spiritual dimensions inherent in the recovery process itself. He presented the twelve steps not as mere psychological tools, but as a genuine spiritual path capable of producing profound transformation. His teachings suggested that the very experiences I had dismissed as purely destructive—addiction, loss, despair—could serve as doorways to spiritual understanding when approached with the right perspective.
What made Boland’s work particularly compelling was its integration of practical recovery wisdom with mystical insight. He didn’t ask me to abandon my hard-won skepticism or embrace beliefs that contradicted my direct experience. Instead, he provided a framework for understanding my journey through addiction and recovery as itself a spiritual path, complete with its own forms of death, resurrection, and transcendence.
Without working the twelve steps with particular thoroughness, I found myself opening to possibilities I had dismissed for years. The combination of sobriety, psychological healing, and exposure to Boland’s teachings created conditions for experiences that would fundamentally alter my understanding of reality itself.
The First Spiritual Experience: Divine Maternal Presence
It was not LDS’s gold bars in the wild western regions of America, but it was a vision that reverberated within me the promise of perfect love.
The first breakthrough came unexpectedly, not through disciplined spiritual practice but as a spontaneous eruption of grace into ordinary consciousness. I suddenly felt the unmistakable presence of what I can only describe as the divine mother—a loving, nurturing force that seemed to embrace my entire being with unconditional acceptance.
This wasn’t a theological concept or a psychological projection, but a direct, felt experience of love unlike anything I had ever encountered. It possessed a quality of unconditional acceptance that made every human love I had experienced seem conditional and limited by comparison. This love didn’t require me to be different, better, or more deserving. It simply was, and I was held within it completely.
The experience lasted nearly two weeks in time, but its impact was permanent. For the first time in my adult life, I had direct evidence that love—real, transformative, divine love—was not merely a human construction or wishful thinking, but a fundamental force accessible to direct experience. The cynicism and spiritual despair that had driven my fifteen-year descent was a direct contrast to this overwhelming encounter with grace.
This first spiritual experience served as proof of concept for the entire enterprise of seeking truth. The universe had responded to my ultimatum by providing exactly what I had demanded: evidence of something worth living for. The divine mother’s love wasn’t simply comforting; it was revelatory, suggesting that the reality I thought I knew was merely the surface layer of a much more profound and loving existence.
I will further enlighten the reader about this experience in a following chapter.
The Second Experience: Healing and Restoration
Larch Mountain, near observation deck
The following month brought another spiritual experience, this one focused on healing rather than love. In a single transformative moment, after a hike up to Larch Mountain’s observatory, years of physiological and psychological damage from drug abuse and neglect were simply erased. This wasn’t gradual recovery or slow healing, but instantaneous restoration that defied every assumption I held about the irreversible nature of the damage I had inflicted on my body and mind.
The healing was comprehensive, addressing not only the obvious physical deterioration from substance abuse, but also deeper psychological wounds that I had carried for decades. Patterns of thought and perception that had seemed permanently etched into my consciousness were suddenly absent, replaced by a clarity and vitality I had never experienced, even in childhood.
Most remarkably, this healing experience included a shift in perception that allowed me to see without words for the first time in my life. The constant mental commentary that had always mediated my experience of reality fell silent, leaving me in direct contact with what I can only call the underlying reality or foundational awareness that supports all experience.
This wordless perception revealed the extent to which ordinary consciousness is filtered through conceptual overlay. Without the constant stream of mental labeling and interpretation, I encountered the world as pure presence, unmediated by the categories and judgments that typically shape human experience. Colors became more vivid, sounds more immediate, and the sense of separation between observer and observed began to dissolve.
All that I once saw, could now see, or would ever see, unto eternity, was myself. Was I to be burdened with just knowledge and memories, or eternal moments of awe?
How was I to see myself in this eternal moment?
I will further enlighten the reader about this experience in a following chapter.
The Third Experience: Beyond Body Consciousness
Another month later, the most profound spiritual experience came in the form of what I can only describe as spiritual or psychological transportation beyond body awareness entirely. In this state, I found myself at what seemed to be the foundation of all perception and creativity, able to observe the mechanisms by which consciousness constructs the apparent reality based upon duality that most of humanity accepts as fundamentally real.
From this vantage point, I could see the utter unreality of what we typically consider real. The solid world of objects, the linear progression of time, the separation between self and other—all of these revealed themselves as constructions of consciousness rather than fundamental features of existence. They weren’t illusions in the sense of being false, but rather temporary formations arising within a more fundamental awareness.
This experience provided access to what I can only call the creative principle itself—the force by which consciousness manifests the apparent multiplicity of forms and experiences from its own unified nature. This experience also revealed several perceptual keys that would fundamentally alter my relationship to ordinary consciousness. I was shown that the elimination of all time-based thoughts—those mental activities that reference past or future rather than the eternal present—leads directly to the doorstep of what Jesus called the kingdom of heaven, or followers of the Buddha called the Buddha mind.
The most practical and transformative insight from my spiritual journey was the recognition that time-based thinking is the primary obstacle to experiencing eternal presence. Every thought that references the past or projects into the future pulls consciousness away from the only moment in which divine reality can be directly experienced: the eternal now. By learning to identify and release thoughts that carried temporal reference points, I could consistently return to the timeless awareness that had been revealed during my third spiritual experience.
Eliminating time-based thoughts doesn’t mean avoiding forgiveness work, practical planning, or ignoring the lessons of experience. Instead, it means recognizing that the ultimate truth of existence is always available in the present moment, and that any mental activity that pulls attention away from that presence diminishes our access to the divine. In this state, the loving universe reveals itself not as a distant concept or future possibility, but as the immediate ground of all experience.
I was shown that no teacher could bring to another person their salvation, or connection to the infinite. We are all blessed with infinite capacities of insight and perception, and to avoid living a second-hand life experience, we must each directly make conscious contact with the infinite source within our heart and soul. Education can only take us a short distance on the spiritual path, and then it is up to us to travel upon new paths of consciousness, consciousness that unfolds in each new moment, and not as a replication of someone else’s experience or reality.
I will further enlighten the reader about this experience in a following chapter.
Ultimately, how does anybody distinguish between genuine spiritual experience and hallucination, especially given historical accounts of religious delusional activity like Joseph Smith in the early LDS movement, the recent emergence of many religious cults promoting false prophesy, or even with my history with substance abuse? The distinction lies in the transformative effects and lasting insights that persist long after the experience itself. Hallucinations, whether drug-induced or psychological, typically leave consciousness unchanged once they pass. Genuine spiritual experiences produce permanent shifts in perception, lasting healing, and practical wisdom that continues to function years later. The three experiences I describe weren’t temporary altered states but doorways to ongoing access to transcendent dimensions of consciousness. You can come to your own conclusions about the early LDS church and its founders.
Can someone achieve similar spiritual awakening without going through addiction and near-suicide?
Absolutely.
My path through the underworld was neither necessary nor recommended. The chapters addressing early conditioning, overcoming the unconscious and common knowledge games, and our ability to rebuild our understanding of ourselves is of greatest importance. Many achieve profound spiritual realization through meditation, mindfulness, practicing the Presence, service, study, or other traditional means. However, some individuals seem to require complete ego destruction before breakthrough becomes possible. The key isn’t the specific path but the willingness to release everything that isn’t ultimately real, whether that release comes through discipline or devastation.
Jack Boland’s teachings provided a framework for understanding the spiritual dimensions inherent in recovery itself. His insights helped me recognize that my journey through addiction and despair wasn’t separate from spiritual development but was itself a form of spiritual path. His teachings bridged the gap between practical recovery work and mystical realization, showing how the twelve steps could serve as legitimate spiritual practice.
The trio of profound spiritual attunements happened over a fifty-eight-day period during the summer of 1987. This transformation still impacts my daily life thirty-eight years later. The fundamental shift in perception has been an on-going evolution, while integrating transcendent awareness with ordinary life. The ability to access the uncommon knowledge of wordless perception, divine love, and eternal presence hasn’t diminished, though I’ve had to learn how to function practically while maintaining awareness of these deeper dimensions. Daily life becomes a constant opportunity to choose between time-based thinking and eternal presence.
Looking back across the landscape of this journey, I can see that every element—the religious disillusionment, the addiction, the losses, even the suicide attempt—served a function in dismantling false foundations to make space for authentic spiritual realization. What I had sought through destruction was actually construction: the building of a consciousness capable of directly experiencing divine reality.
The meaning I had demanded from the universe in my moment of ultimate despair wasn’t provided as a philosophical concept or belief system, but as direct access to the source of all meaning itself. The eternal presence that underlies all temporal experience, the divine love that embraces all beings regardless of their worthiness, the creative principle that manifests infinite possibility—these became not objects of faith but dimensions of immediate awareness.
Perhaps most significantly, I discovered that the kingdom of heaven that the ancient prophet Jesus spoke of isn’t a reward for good behavior or a destination reached after death, but a dimension of consciousness available in any moment when temporal thinking ceases. The elimination of time-based thoughts serves as a perceptual key, unlocking access to the eternal presence that is always here, always now, always loving.
The journey from darkness to divine wasn’t an escape from human experience but a descent into its ultimate depths followed by recognition of its transcendent foundation. Every moment of suffering, every encounter with loss, every brush with annihilation contributed to the destruction of illusions that prevented direct contact with ultimate reality.
The universe had indeed provided truth worth living for, but not through comfortable revelation or gradual enlightenment. Instead, it offered complete transformation through complete destruction, death and resurrection played out in the theater of consciousness itself. The pearl of great price was discovered not in spiritual treasure hunting but in the ashes of everything I thought I was.
This is the paradox of authentic spiritual awakening: sometimes we must lose everything, including the desire to live, before we can discover what life actually is. The kingdom of heaven remains closer than our own breath, available not through achievement but through the simple recognition of what has always been present, waiting patiently for us to stop looking elsewhere and return home to the eternal now.
If your path is one of continuous conscious evolution without extraordinary pain and suffering, more power to you.
Mine took me through the fires of hell to reach the promised land.
Looking back, it could not happen any other way.
We each have a unique path to take to finally enter into the universe’s unlimited bandwidth of life, love, and death.
