Change or Die: A Novel of Spiritual Evolution

By Carol Costello

Cat has everything—a condo on the ocean in San Francisco, a booming career, a great backhand—but she is losing her sanity and her soul. The one thing she has wanted all her life is slipping away, an intimate connection with Spirit, the Divine Mind from which the universe is shaped.

A man from her past, maverick quantum physicist Josh Siegel, promises her that and more if she will join him and three other carefully selected women in a scheme to harness Spirit’s power for a free, clean, unlimited fuel source. Doing so, and teaching others to do so, will trigger an evolutionary leap in consciousness that saves humans from extinction.

Cat jumps at the chance. But at Shamballa, Josh’s retreat in Sonoma’s Valley of the Moon, she discovers that he has dangerous hidden motives and even more dangerous enemies. As Cat’s uncanny gifts with Spirit emerge, so do deadly, long-concealed fears and anger, unleashing a fiery battle between good and evil in herself, with Josh, and with the malicious Consortium that runs the world and wants to stop them.

Some change, some die, and Spirit reveals to Cat its deepest, most surprising secret.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carol Costello
• Release date: Jan 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9780983683766

Carol Costello

Carol Costello has made her living as a freelance writer for forty years. She has worked as an investigative reporter in Chicago, a freelance acquisitions and developmental editor, a ghostwriter or book doctor of some 30 books (including two national best sellers), and has published under her own name The Soul of Selling and Chasing Grace: A Novel of Odd Redemption.CHASING GRACE follows ten year old runaway Cathy Callahan's quest for healing and the divine over thirty years of her life. It is a raw, humorous look at spiritual coming of age, at unconventional ways to heal deep emotional wounds, and at finding grace and greater purpose in surprising places despite desperate odds.Carol developed the Soul of Selling sales method to bring more ease, meaning, and enjoyment to the extraordinary results she produced as Sales Director for three vital start-up companies over her 30-year career.Her message is that you can get exactly the results you want, and at the same time honor, respect, and appreciate everyone with whom you speak. You can sell with a higher purpose, based on your own personal values—and still get the numbers you need to succeed. She focuses on the honor and joy of selling, and on how to have fun and make money while becoming the person you've always wanted to be. www.soulofselling.com.Carol is a student of meditation and the Vedanta, and a hiker. She lives across the street from the Pacific Ocean in San Francisco and speaks around the country on selling as service, creativity, and self publishing. M.A. University of Michigan.

Book preview

PRAISE FOR CHANGE OR DIE

A spiritual thriller with heart, soul, and humor. Fresh writing, irresistible characters, and a riveting story. A terrific read.

Adair Lara, author of Naked, Drunk, and Writing



High drama in the beautiful wine country of northern California as Cat finally goes after the one thing she’s ever really wanted in life—an intimate connection with Spirit, the Divine Mind that shapes the universe. This gripping story takes us deep inside the California Consciousness Circuit—a world that is treacherous, uplifting, and at times darkly humorous. Cat’s quest winds through triumphs, nightmares and inspiration as she faces the evil of a twisted guru and the secret Consortium, a group with unlimited power that covertly rules the world. Her tale ends in surprising revelations about herself, the friends she meets along the way, and Spirit itself.

Marsh Rose, author of Lies and Love in Alaska



Masterful writing and strong, quirky characters create a compelling reality that kept me turning pages. Narrator Cat is both inspiring and reckless—a combination that ignites exquisite tension as she goes where few of us dare to go. I lived Cat’s adventure with her, and was the better for it!

Ruth Coe Chambers, author of

The Chinaberry Album, Heat Lightning, and other novels

CHANGE OR DIE

A Novel of Spiritual Evolution

Carol Costello

NEW HORIZONS LIBRARY

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

Change or Die: A Novel of Spiritual Evolution

Carol Costello

Copyright © 2016 by Carol Costello

Published by New Horizons Library at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

New Horizons Library

825 LaPlaya 426

San Francisco, CA 94121

www.carolcostello.net

Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

Change or Die: A Novel of Spiritual Evolution/Carol Costello. -- 1st ed.

ISBN 978-0-9836837-6-6

Book Layout © 2014 BookDesignTemplates.com

Cover design by Cathi Stevenson

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016955646

Thanks to all who have supported me in writing this book, especially Nancy Elkington and Tom LeNoble. Special thanks to my writing partner, Marsh Rose, for her unflagging support, wise humor, and keen editorial eye.

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

―GOSPEL OF THOMAS

CONTENTS

LETTER TO THE NEW SPECIES

THE ROAD TO SHAMBALLA

THE QUASI-COVEN

FIRE IN THE NIGHT

LIFTOFF

SHAPING SPIRIT

BOILING POINT

FLYING SOLO

PRESSURE POINTS

MAGIC TRICKS

PANDORA’S BOX

THE LITTLE SILVER CUBE

SORCERER’S APPRENTICES

RUN TO RENO

ELDORADO HIDEOUT

ADAPTATIONS

BIG SKY

About the Author

CHAPTER ONE

LETTER TO THE

NEW SPECIES

The envelope was all soft and lush as I pulled it from my mailbox. Velvety ivory paper, with blood red ink from a real fountain pen, and old fashioned script. Thick, too, like a little pillow. Meant to be irresistible, something you just wanted to rub against your cheek and love.

A Sonoma postmark. It could only be from Josh, and that was not good.

Over the next few hours the envelope migrated from the kitchen counter to my desk, then to the oak table beside my sand-colored sofa. My condo perched on the edge of the continent at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, a safe little nest awash in beachfront colors—tawny tans, sage greens, and soft sunset salmons. I sat watching high winds churn the ocean into a white-flecked grey-green chop, with bright sunlight dancing in the spray.

Finally, I reached for the envelope, broke the crimson wax seal, and pulled out a sheet of thick ivory vellum. In the same dark red script:

Come to Shamballa July 10-12 for a private weekend retreat. You will walk into the fire and burn alive, then rise out of your own ashes to become something more than human.

You will learn to control the field of energy from which all life and matter are created, and spearhead the evolution that will save humans from extinction at this change or die moment.

"If you lead forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not lead forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you." – The Gospel of Thomas

Arrive by 4:00 PM Friday.

Josh Siegel

cc: Paige Munroe, Lee Smith, Jesse Engel

My cheeks burned, as if I’d been caught doing something shameful. I had a history with this field of energy, and Josh knew it.

In his workshops, we called the field Spirit because that seemed simple, clean, and made us all feel vaguely holy. There were other names for it: Divine Mind, Source, the I AM, Universal Energy, the Infinite Mystery without form or limits, beyond all thought and words. It was the absolute, undifferentiated Consciousness from which everything that existed was imagined and shaped.

I had craved Spirit ever since I could remember. As a small child, I would stare at a leaf and try desperately to grasp what made it go. I yearned to get way back behind the cells of a tree, a dog, a person, and feel whatever made them alive. And not just understand that essence, but chase it down and capture it. Control it, breathe it in, and be it.

That craving had gotten me into no end of trouble. When you look for something that powerful in all the wrong places, as I did, things can go sideways very quickly. Running away from home at ten, and never going back or getting caught. Getting pregnant by a phony guru and having an abortion I thought was murder, just to keep him. Shooting the cowboy I married after fleeing to Montana, running again, and drinking, drinking, drinking until at twenty I got beaten up and left for dead in an alley behind the Eldorado in Reno.

Nothing stopped me in that frantic hunt for Spirit, certainly not good sense. But despite my recklessness and bad behavior, I often felt Spirit reaching out and brushing itself across me, tantalizing. I lived for those fleeting and unexpected moments, knew instinctively that the only thing that really mattered to me, the only thing that would ever make me happy, was getting a solid, intimate, at-will connection with Spirit and immersing myself in it as deeply as I could, for as long as I could.

That was my mission in life, and I was failing.

Over the twenty years since Reno, I had lived sober but bruised, in a semi-trance that focused largely on staying out of trouble. I made a small fortune selling real estate, went through the motions in a number of relationships, and did the personal growth work that was de rigueur in the Bay Area. I talked about Spirit, but skirted actually engaging it, afraid that if I took up that fierce search again, I would wind up in another Reno alley, or worse. So I hung back, treaded water, floated above it. I was no longer a spiritual kamikaze; I was a hobbyist. A dilettante who flirted with Spirit in her spare time. I saw clearly how insane and cowardly that was, but I kept on doing it.

Josh knew all of this. He’d been watching me, skillfully eliciting a lot of information over the five years since I’d met him at one of his workshops on the California Consciousness Circuit. The Circuit was that smorgasbord of personal growth and quasi-spiritual offerings that sprouted up on every San Francisco street corner back in the 1970s and 1980s. It started with people beating on pillows with rubber bats to release anger from their dreadful, dysfunctional families, getting rebirthed in less than immaculate hot tubs, and hanging on the words of discarnate entities channeled by people with long, tangled hair, dressed in flowing robes and dripping with rose quartz crystals.

Later, the Circuit evolved into something more sedate, organic, and meditative—and drifted more toward intimacy and prosperity, the code words for sex and money. Or toward the more mysterious, rarefied forms of Deeper Knowledge favored by Circuit veterans who’d either affirmed their way to, or stumbled upon, sex and money and discovered that those things didn’t make you nearly as peaceful or happy as you’d imagined they would.

Josh’s seminars fell into the latter group. With his dark skin, deep brown eyes, salt and pepper hair, and gleaming white teeth, he looked like an unsupervised genetic cross between Rasputin and the Marlboro Man. He had been a high profile quantum physicist at Stanford, teaching graduate seminars on esoteric subjects like Cold Fusion as Contemporary Alchemy and promoting his two physics/metaphysics bestsellers, The Cosmic Hologram and Scripture of the Cell, about the souls of protons. He was everywhere in those days, crisscrossing the country, using his personal magnetism to save the world, or so he claimed.

Since his retirement from Stanford, Josh had cultivated the image of a mad hermit in the forest. He gave weekend workshops up at Shamballa, his hundred-acre retreat center an hour north of San Francisco in the Valley of the Moon near Sonoma—and became all the rage among dropouts from the Circuit who were ready to discard their peacock feathers, crystals, tie dye, and soft-shell gurus for something more intellectually challenging and, in their words, Beyond. They would huddle in little groups out on Josh’s deck during workshop breaks, exchanging significant looks, nodding sagely that they felt on the brink of a personal breakthrough in understanding the arcane secrets of the universe, noting how tasty the guac and hummus were, and wondering if the crackers were gluten-free.

All that gave me pause, but not enough to stop me from going up to Josh’s seminars at Shamballa a couple times a year. Beneath all the masterful marketing and posturing, I knew he had something. I’d have bet money that he had deeper and more consistent access to Spirit than I did. When I was around him, I felt those random touchings of Spirit sweep through me more often. Even so, a lingering sense of something disquieting, almost unsavory, about Josh made me hang back—both from him and from what he might be able to teach me.

When I was actually in his presence up at Shamballa, it was easy to get drawn into his talk about humans evolving into a new species that knew its essence as Spirit and understood that we were all One—understood that, in fact, there was really only One of us here. He spoke of a new consciousness, a new world in which evolved humans learned to manifest free, clean, inexhaustible supplies of energy from Spirit and created a civilization based on harmony, learning, and exploration.

A lot of it made sense when he said it—but the glow would fade as I drove back to San Francisco late Sunday night after a weekend workshop. I would wind through the darkened vineyards and eucalyptus groves of Sonoma County with an uneasy feeling, both sad and relieved to be leaving his world and getting back to mine, unsatisfying as it had become and depressing as it was to feel those last tendrils of Spirit slipping through my fingers.

Spirit always slipped away like that, and usually I just let it go rather than risk it blowing up in my face as it had years ago in Reno. I had a nice life, a subscription to the opera, a good backhand, and more money than I needed. But an inch beneath the surface, I was nervous. Anxious, even angry. I knew I was wasting my life.

Still, walking into fire and burning alive? Controlling creation? Becoming more than human? My first impulse was to curl up under my bed in the fetal position, clutching a ten-pound bar of chocolate. My second was to jump in the car and race up to Sonoma. My third was to sit frozen, staring at the ocean, wondering whether to jump off the high dive without knowing if there was any water in the pool, or to admit defeat and skulk back down the ladder.

July 10 was only two days away.

I stood up with Josh’s letter still in my hand, uncertain whether I was heading for the bedroom to pack for Shamballa, or the kitchen to toss it into Recycling. Every pro for going contained an embedded con, and every con contained an embedded pro. But most of the cons had to do with Josh himself, and I figured that in the end, I could handle him.

The phone rang, and I knew right away who it was. I'd met Paige about the same time I met Josh, at one of his meditation intensives. He’d taken a shine to both of us. Josh liked being around other people with a scientific bent, and Paige was an M.D. It probably didn’t hurt that she was also slim, blonde, a leggy 5’10, a former second runner-up to Miss Georgia, and a lesbian. All of that was right up Josh’s alley. I had neither Paige’s looks nor her style. Lanky rather than statuesque, with hair that was short but not necessarily chic, more interesting-looking than pretty. Maybe Josh just liked me because he knew he had something I wanted so badly.

Until ten years ago, Paige had lived a storybook life as the doctor, wife, and mother she’d been brought up to be. Then one night at a candlelit dinner in Pacific Heights, she had fallen in love with Alice. Not kinda in love, but head-over-heels, die-without-it in love. She asked David for a divorce, and her family in Atlanta took his side in an effort to bring her around. As a result, David got sole custody of their boys, then ages three and four. Paige got her family’s ongoing disapproval and resentment. Alice was long gone now, but Paige's feelings of the ground falling out from under her, of forced transformation from socialite to outrider, were not. Inside, she was still rebuilding—as I was.

We’d hit it off immediately. Sugar, she said to me the day we met at Shamballa, we’re like two little biscuits in a too-hot oven. Golden brown on the outside, but not quite cooked all the way through.

Paige had been out of town, taking her sons back to their father in Atlanta, and was due back in San Francisco yesterday. She’d probably just opened her mail. I knew that picking up her call would bring me out of limbo and make Josh’s letter real, so I stood perfectly still. Her voice filled my living room. You pick up, Miss Cat. I know you’re there! I know you got that letter and…

Hey, Paige. How was the trip?

Not so bad, now that I’m home. Her voice was deep and syrupy, as if she’d been crying, and still held traces of a drawl. Is that man crazy, or what?