Climbing the Holy Mountain of Recovery: One Man's Escape from the Hell of Heroin Addiction with the Help of the Sacred Medicine, Ibogaine

By Adrian Auler

This story is about the development of my heroin addiction and my recovery from it. I struggled to escape from addiction for 17 years, but only succeeded after an ibogaine treatment. It is autobiographical, but I only describe traumatic episodes that contributed to addiction and sketch the highlights and milestones in my recovery. It is a memoir, as it offers a thematic view of my life and is moderate in scope; and a personal essay in which I offer insights about societys role in addiction. My intent is that addicts and their loved ones may better understand the nature of addiction so their approaches to treatment are better informed and more compassionate.
At 66, I am a gentleman/hipster/Seeker and scholar, but Im not an armchair academic who wrote this book from a library: I was an addict for 22 years! Now I am blessed to be alive and have 18 years clean. My mission is to help addicts by educating the public and the professional community about addictions complexity and the efficacy of ibogaine for its treatment. I hope my story supports a change in social and medical attitudes so that the unheard voices of addicts will be honored, instead of just seeing them as social problems.
Addiction put my life into suspended animation when I had a third of the credits I needed for a bachelors degree. 27 years later I returned to school; now I have bachelors degrees in Anthropology and Psychology and a Masters degree in East-West Psychology (EWP). I am currently a PhD. candidate in EWP at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, California.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Dec 2, 2015
• ISBN: 9781490765310

Adrian Auler

Addiction put my life into suspended animation when I had a third of the credits needed for a bachelor’s degree. Twenty-seven years later, I resumed my education, and now I have two bachelor’s degrees (in anthropology and psychology), a master’s degree in East-West psychology, and am currently a PhD candidate in that department at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. At sixty-six, I am a gentleman/hipster/seeker and scholar, but I’m not an armchair academic who wrote this book from a library: I was an addict for twenty-two years! Now I am blessed to be alive and have eighteen years clean. My mission is to help addicts by educating the public and the professional community about addiction's complexity and the efficacy of ibogaine for its treatment. I hope my story supports a change of paradigm to an ensouled one that honors subjective as well as objective viewpoints.

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Copyright 2015 Adrian Auler.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

A Story about Heroin Addiction and Its Treatment with Ibogaine

Autoethnography, My Storytelling Style

A Word about My Choice of Containing Myth

A Note about the Story's Spiritual Aspect

PART I: Climbing the Holy Mountain of Recovery

BOOK I: BIRTH

First Steps on the Path

Reintroduction

A Brief Biographic Sketch

Back to the Tree-Lined Lane

Losing My Way in the Twilight

I Wander Deeper Into the Forest and Get Lost

Still Wandering in the Dark Forest of the Material World

Brief Respite in a Clearing

I Resume the Downward Path and Enter the Gate of Hell

BOOK II: DEATH

I Qualify to Enter the Gate of Hell

Part 1

Part 2

Descending Below the First Circle of Hell

Doctor Shopping

A Resident of the City of Dis

Addiction Enters As a Friend

Junk Induces Psychophysical Changes That Make It the Central Reality of Your Life

Waiting

Getting Busted (1)

Overdosing

The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strained; It Falleth As the Gentle Rain from Heaven---Tales of Legendary Dope

The Other Side of Overdosing: I Save a Life

Moving Into the Terminal Stage: Terms of the Contract

The Inevitable End of the Disease

A Visit from the Angel of Death

BOOK III: REBIRTH

The Hand of Isis Assembles My Parts

The Final Hurdle

Voyage to Destiny

The Magic Begins

A Spell Is Woven

The Hero's Journey

A Note of Sobriety: A Respectful Approach to Grandfather Iboga

The Hand of Isis Raises Me to Life: After Trials, I Emerge From the Underworld

Landing on a Strange, New Shore

BOOK IV: RECLAIMING MY LIFE

Climbing the Holy Mountain of Recovery

Mapping the Mountain

The Mountain of Recovery I: Beginning the Ascent

A Hiccup in My Ascent and a New Warning

I Return to the Fold and Resume My Ascent

Struggles and Rewards on the Mountain of Recovery

Endings: A Final Break with My Past Casts Me Adrift in My New World

New Challenges and New Levels of Growth in Recovery

The Last Links to My Family of Origin Are Cut

Another Step along the Path of Early Recovery

Real Personal Freedom

The Mountain of Recovery II: A Big Test and I Climb to another Level

New Vistas and New Choices

Stepping Up to the Plate

Another Miracle Helps Me on My Way

BOOK V: TRANSFORMATION

A Goddess Guides Me to the Earthly Paradise

The Magic of Isis

Personal Chemistry in the Magical Alembic

Meeting Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise

Nurtured in the Arms of the Goddess

Reflections

PART II: Notes from the Field

BOOK VI: EPILOGUE

A Word from Your Guide

Why Drug Addiction?

Characteristics of Addiction

The Disease of Addiction (Depth & Integral Psychology)

The Fear (Existential Psychology)

Shame versus Guilt (from my therapy and 12 Step meetings)

Psycho-Physical Dynamics That May Have Encouraged My Addiction

Why Do Some Become Addicts, While Others Don't?

Getting Busted (2)

A Psycho-Social Addiction Manifesto

Considering the Addict-Hero's Journey Within

Ruminations on the Spiritual Wellsprings of Addiction

Spirituality, Entheogens, and Recovery

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have undoubtedly lost sight of some people who have mentored or befriended me over the course of my life. This might have happened because I couldn't see their support in the swirling chaos that represents a large portion of my life; or because of the almost constant erasure of my past. This in turn occurred in part because I couldn't make full contact with life and society since I didn't feel that I belonged anywhere. That may also be why I have trouble remembering people's names if I don't see them regularly.

However, I wish to acknowledge a few people whose outstanding contributions and support have been crucial to my continued survival and further development after getting into recovery:

Dr. Mash, whose research work provided me the opportunity to partake in the transformative ibogaine detoxification process, whose team inaugurated my engagement in and with that process, and who graciously volunteered to be the outside reader on my dissertation committee;

John Giordano, whose pioneering vision of a holistic approach to recovery helped me find a path which enabled me to apply what I learned from Iboga Plant Teacher to my personal process of healing and growth, who prompted and provoked me to engage with life and the world, and who encouraged me to believe in myself and others; and

Dr. Santo Tarantino, who exemplified the Mentor archetype and who graciously extended his personal resources to sponsor a student under his tutelage. He was single-handedly responsible for sending me to San Francisco to enter the California Institute of Integral Studies as a grad school, where I discovered integral philosophy and yoga---and, by extension, integral psychology.

I owe all of these people a debt I cannot repay in this life. I love you all.

PREFACE

This is a story about how I became a heroin addict and then recovered from it using the sacred, shamanic, entheogenic plant medicine, ibogaine. The following introduction gives a brief synopsis of the story and describes my format and approach to its writing. In it I describe my beliefs, assumptions, and intent in order to provide the context within which the story becomes meaningful. Thus oriented, you'll find yourself looking out at a surreal world from behind the eyes of a soul lost in addiction, and then at the miraculous salvation, joy, and hope that resulted from taking ibogaine. My hope is that non-addicts will better understand addictive behavior once they begin to grasp the alienation, fear, and pain that permeates an addict's life, and the overwhelming power that addiction has over them.

Why another story about addiction? I had to write it for the therapeutic value the act held for me: after a decade and a half in recovery, the story simply burst out of me, crying to be heard. Writing it was an act of recovery similar to journaling, so sometimes the story meanders and I pause to muse on what just transpired.

But my story is meant to serve a wider purpose than my own needs. Addicts harm others by their actions, including those they love---or loved when they still could, since losing one's finer sentiments is a collateral damage of the condition. The close friends, family, and loved ones of each addict are hurt and confused, wondering how and why their child, parent, friend, lover, or spouse could abuse them so. As a result, addicts often come to be judged as bad people.

So I offer the details of my story as suggestive examples of the kinds of events, thoughts, feelings, and decisions that can lead any decent person into addiction. If those who are distressed by addicts' behavior could see how an addict views the world and themselves, they might better grasp how addictive behavior is an often irrational and always desperate response to an invisible torment which causes them so much suffering. This story is my effort to reveal an addict's perceptions and actions from the inside, looking out.

My intent is to engender greater sympathy for addicts possessed, as it were, by a demon of overpowering strength, with the hope that this may lead to public support for humane and compassionate modes of treatment. I also promote a down-grading of ibogaine from Schedule I to Schedule II so that it can be administered on an inpatient basis in locked-ward clinics. After all, while heroin is Schedule I, morphine and most other opiates are Schedule II; this enables them to be administered on the same controlled basis in clinics and hospitals.

I am reaching out to addicts who are at a loss to explain why they feel and act as they do and, especially, why they can't stop. Their uncontrollable behavior often hurts them as much as it hurts others and makes them judge themselves more harshly than the sternest magistrate, the most unforgiving prosecutor ever could. I hope to help them understand, then forgive themselves, which are necessary first steps to being able to love themselves. After 18 years in recovery, I'm still working on that. I'm also sharing my experience, strength, and hope with recovering addicts who may find insight into their own process by reading about mine. Maybe my perception of addiction will resonate with addicts who haven't been able to relate to other stories. So I hope that my story can help addicts and their loved ones make sense of this perplexing affliction.

Finally and especially, I offer my extraordinary experience with a sacred medicine that helped me escape my bondage when all else had failed and I had lost hope. Those in the terminal stages of addiction, and especially those who have been on methadone for many years, may find a ray of hope in this.

INTRODUCTION

A Story about Heroin Addiction and Its Treatment with Ibogaine

I am a Baby Boomer military brat: my dad was a career Air Force officer. My folks were unhappy people who became alcoholics with other addictions too: dad became a gambler while mom used pills for depression and anxiety, and they both smoked like fiends. Their lives were unfulfilled and they were maladjusted so they unconsciously passed their angst and defeat on to me. They tried to turn me into a vehicle for the realization of their own frustrated desires; so I became more of a trophy than a child for them.

I suffered serious damage in early childhood, but I didn't write this to chronicle painful events in my life as a tale of woe. The story is about my inner world and how my warped impression of life resulted in unbearable feelings, because that's the origin of addiction. I grew more and more alienated, depressed, and anxious until, by age 23, I was diagnosed with PTSD, severe depression, severe anxiety, and severe migraine headaches. Therapy was uncommon in those days, so I just received several prescriptions for my symptoms. I was given Percodan, a narcotic pain pill, for my agonizing, incapacitating migraines. I used them as prescribed for over a year until one day I discovered that Percodan worked much better for anxiety and depression than the drugs I'd been given for them (this was long before SSRIs were developed). Also, the quality of my life had gradually become dismal, but suddenly improved dramatically when I took the narcotics. I began to self-medicate with my pain pills every day and, of course, eventually became physiologically addicted. But there is much more to addiction than just this surface presenting condition, and I intend to reveal some of those dimensions through my story.

This story of addiction and recovery is meant to exemplify just one possible addiction scenario. However I hope and intend that the interested reader can see the underlying dynamics that are common to all forms of addiction, and can draw their own connections between the details of my story and the details of addiction as it appears in their own life, in order to begin to see a bigger picture than just the bizarre behavior of addicts. That picture will include the addict's family history and social environment.

By presenting a personal story of how an intelligent, educated, nice, middle-class white male slowly spiraled down into the hell of addiction, I hope to show that addicts are not demons or hopelessly subhuman, but can be decent people who react to their invisible pain and damage by avoiding it any way they can. I intend to help addicts by providing a clearer picture of addiction as an emergency triage response to unbearable conditions that they can't break free of once the original threat is removed; and to help the larger number of people who are close to an addict and who also suffer pain and confusion as they see their addict deteriorate, seemingly bent on self-destruction.

So I began a downward journey into Hell that characterized 22 years of my life. I was a hippie before becoming an addict, so I was used to a drug-taking lifestyle; thus I was able to romance the first five years of my addiction and pretend it was fun. But when it started getting too hard to continue, I tried to stop---then found that I could not! Over the next 17 years I tried to escape my enslavement by entering 14 different treatment programs; but I relapsed every time. Thus I continued down and down until, by early 1997, I was very nearly dead of morphine toxicity. This is like lead or arsenic poisoning: gradually, toxins accumulate in your body faster than it can expel them until your vital energy falls below functional levels and death ensues.

In the last stage of my addiction a transpersonal experience heralded a series of miracles---synchronicities, if you prefer---that helped me to escape from the prison of addiction. Just before my 48th birthday, I took an experimental drug as part of the Ibogaine Research Project directed by Deborah Mash, PhD. In 1997 when I entered the program, she was an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurology at the University of Miami, School of Medicine. The FDA had given her approval to conduct ibogaine Phase I clinical trials at the University, but she couldn't obtain funding to support the work---rather strange, as she already received extensive grant money to study addictive disorders. Frustrated by her inability to gain Federal support for the research, she formed Healing Visions, LLC and managed to attract sufficient funds to begin her work. She was granted permission to conduct her research by the government of St. Kitts and Nevis in the West Indies, which is where I went in June, 1997.

Although I was a volunteer in a study, this was effectively the 15th and last detox program for me. There, the sacred, entheogenic plant medicine ibogaine gave me both a window of opportunity to escape my addiction, and the will, hope, and means to use it. It is only because I used that opportunity that I am here talking to you today.

Dr. Mash was concerned that ibogaine not be seen as a magic bullet, an attitude that is often promoted by Big Pharma: just take this pill and you'll be fine. No: it is important to note that ibogaine is not a magic wand that permanently frees you without any further effort on your part. Ibogaine is a highly effective addiction interrupter and its initial, revitalizing boost can last for many weeks after dosing. This gives an addict enough time to begin constructing a new lifestyle and way of looking at the world before it wears off. But they must do their inner work, so that when ibogaine's psycho-emotional support finally fades away they have developed a new way of living which leads to a meaningful life, with opportunities to express the potentials with which we are born.

Only when one becomes aware of how many-layered and multidimensional addiction is, and how very difficult its treatment is, can one appreciate the fabulous accomplishment of ibogaine! It performed an unparalleled healing that got me off to a great start. I still had to work hard on my issues for years; but before ibogaine, I couldn't. No mainstream treatment had given me hope that I could get better, or the desire to do so because I felt I was worth it. I hadn't felt hope in years, and I had never felt that I deserved to have a rich, full life and walk in the sun like an actual human being. I don't believe that I could have achieved total freedom without the help of Spirit, and ibogaine reawakened in me a sense of the divine; then Grace afforded me a chance. But it was my responsibility to take that chance and use it in order to honor the gift I had received and to honor myself---truly a novel idea for an addict.

I have almost died six times in my life, three of them when no one else was around. I am convinced that I was preserved by higher power (the divine by whatever name you call it) to act in service to opiate addicts who suffer the torments of the damned every day and, by extension, to all other addicts as well. I undertake this duty through my project to clarify the nature and scope of the addictive process underlying all addictive behavior, whether or not it is expressed as substance abuse.

I am also trying to further the cause of making ibogaine legally available for inpatient treatment in the U.S. It is now legal or unregulated in a growing number of countries like Mexico and Canada; and New Zealand has made it a nationally authorized treatment for opiate addiction. I don't claim it is the best treatment for every opiate addict, because they are individuals, too; but it is an excellent one. For terminal opiate addicts, especially those who have been on methadone for a long time, it may be the only way to escape this degrading enslavement that eventually leads to death.

Autoethnography, My Storytelling Style

I present my story as an autoethnography. This means that I frame my experiences in the context of the culture and times in which I became an addict to examine the relationship, if any, between the social environment and the process of addiction.

Is my story true? To the best of my knowledge. Sometimes there are facts that can be checked against public registers, but often I recount my impressions, sense, or memory. Whether these correspond to physical events is almost irrelevant, as my behavior, like everyone else's, is based on what I think or feel is going on. Revealing how different the impressions of addicts are from societal norms and how they tend to react in real world circumstances, often bizarre from straight perspectives, is a major goal of this story. Certainly addicts' behavior often responds to forces or impressions that no one else can perceive. Of course, my memory of events may have shifted over time as I learned more and as my hindsight improved. I make no excuse for this as it happens to all of us; I just assert that I have honestly recorded what I recall without deliberately adding imagined details for effect.

Critics of autobiographies often accuse authors of self-indulgence. If I unconsciously invented elements in my history that excuse my turn to addiction, I suggest that these are outweighed by my continuous, sincere effort to reveal every twisted thought or paranoid fantasy I had, in the cause of familiarizing non-addicts with the warped thinking, feeling, and willing that lead to the typical plot twists so common in addict's lives, exemplified through my own escapades.

My story is in three voices. The majority of it is autobiographical narrative, although I relate only the parts of my life that bear on the development of my addiction. Sprinkled throughout the story are memoirs, episodes of using or recovery that were so intense for me that when I recalled them, I relived those experiences, complete with their sensations and perceptions. These were very challenging to write down; I was usually shaking and exhausted afterwards, and had to stop writing and rest for a while. Finally, because I am a scholar who has been intensively engaged in a recovery process over the past 18 years, occasionally I step outside the narrative to share a contemplative analysis of the whys and wherefores of addiction. I included them because I didn't write the story just to entertain, but to illuminate the complex nature of addiction and the process by which it developed in me. This is not to say that all addicts share the same process in detail, but principles of mine are common to most. Also, only by realizing how layered and multidimensional addiction is can one begin to appreciate the fabulous job ibogaine does to free one from their chains---often in a single treatment!

So my story is told in the forms of autobiography, memoir, and didactic discourse, with a separate voice for each. My academic voice is infused in the autobiographical container, but expressed in colloquial expressions uttered by the person I was at the time. Within that container are memoirs, episodes that give you a taste of what it was like to be there. These passages drop into hip street voice because when I re-lived them I was back there again. I edited this lingo a little so it would be comprehensible to those who have not been addicts or otherwise experienced in street culture; thus my scholarly voice may have crept in to color those passages, too. But the memoirs represent a full re-experiencing of events in what passed as my life. It is all first-hand experience, enriched and confirmed by uncounted conversations I had with other addicts during active use and in recovery.

My tale includes a snapshot of the Hip Revolution. I was a Woodstock Nation hippie for about eight years before becoming an addict. This is not an aside; I point out precursors of my fall into darkness that I have been able to retrospectively discern amongst the fun.

I present my story in six books. Book 1: Birth relates the incidents in my early life that created the context for my addiction. Book 2: Death recounts the stages of my addiction, illustrating them with first-hand episodes taken from my experience. These vignettes from the netherworld are memoirs that describe, first-hand, the frantic life of desperation and fear swirling within addicts. Those episodes were deeply burned into my psyche and when they erupted from my memory, their clarity and presence was so overwhelming that I virtually relived and felt the entire experience. It was very challenging for me to return to the House of Pain in order to tell my story. Because I want to clarify the features of addiction for non-addicts, this section is the longest and features most of my experiential memoirs. Book 3: Rebirth is the story of my life-saving ibogaine experience. Although this episode was only two weeks in my life, it is so vitally important that it constitutes a separate book. Book 4: Reclaiming My Life describes my early and middle stages of recovery, including my early process of healing, return to school, and several miraculous events that contributed to my rescue and preservation. Book 5: Transformation relates the most recent part of my story when I was guided to the California Institute for Integral Studies, an extraordinary graduate school where I am now in a PhD. program. I consider that I began advanced recovery here. It is an intentional community, different from but in some ways similar to the 12 Step fellowship. Book VI: Epilogue is my reflection on and discussion of addiction, its nature and consequences. Here I deploy my scholarship and 18 years of recovery to review and evaluate my story, attempting to elucidate principles of addiction and requirements for recovery from it that anyone can use.

Since I first wrote this, I became a member of ERIE (Entheogenic Research, Integration, and Education), a nonprofit dedicated to informing the public about the value and dangers of entheogens (psychedelics). It is also the launch pad for my life mission to advance the comprehension of addiction, to educate society about the potential worth of ibogaine for its treatment, and to champion a revolution in paradigm so needed in our world (a process described in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions), since I believe that the old one of scientific materialism is strongly implicated as one cause of addiction.

A Word about My Choice of Containing Myth

Now let me introduce the mythic container of my story. Since addiction is a progressive affliction, I found The Divine Comedy---the allegorical, epic poem of Dante Alighieri (a 14th century Italian poet and philosopher) about his journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise---to be a useful map to describe my own descent into darkness, down and down through the hell of heroin addiction, and my liberation back into the light as I struggled to climb the mountain of Purgatory, which I equate with recovery.

After being lost in the woods (as Dante was at the beginning of his poem) for most of my young life, I spent many years in the Limbo (anteroom to Hell) of severe depression before I began my true descent into the hellish darkness of addiction. I spiraled steadily down through Dante's circles of hell over the course of two decades, till I finally reached the frozen Ninth Circle of total hopelessness and black despair by around 1995. Dante's construal of hell has the last three circles lying within the City of Dis, in whose streets I spent a lot of time copping junk while trying to avoid the demons (police and desperate addicts who might take my money or dope). I don't pretend to have reached Paradise, the last part of Dante's story, which takes place in the heavenly realm; but I do feel that I've reached The Earthly Paradise, an Eden-like plateau on top of the mountain of Purgatory. This wonderful state is represented externally in the form of my intentional academic and spiritually-supportive school community, and internally by my discovery of integral yoga and philosophy, which gives form, light, and substance to my life and to my view of the universe. These perspectives are my unique, personal path of recovery and expression of freedom from the addictive state. The path of recovery will look different for others.

Virgil was Dante's guide through Hell and Purgatory in the Divine Comedy. Virgil was a Roman poet who lived in the time of Christ (70 BC-19 AD). His poem, the Aneneid, was well-known to Dante and there are storyline parallels between the Aeneid and his Divine Comedy. This is one reason why The Aeneid, the Divina Commedia, and the Odyssey as well all have important episodes where the hero enters Hell while still alive (via divine intervention) and then leaves, bearing vital information. They are versions of the Hero's Journey as described in detail by Joseph Campbell. This passage through the Underworld is also a frequent element of shamanic initiation.

My qualification to describe the nature of addiction comes from my status as a wounded healer, a shamanic term. Mircea Eliade said pathological sicknesses...in themselves constitute an initiation; that is, they transform the profane, pre-'choice' individual into a technician of the sacred. In The Sacred and the Profane he says (I paraphrase)

by performing initiation rites, entailing ordeals and symbolic death and resurrection, the novice imitates a divine action....The initiate is not only one newborn or resuscitated; they are one who knows, who has had revelations that are metaphysical in nature....Initiation is equivalent to a spiritual maturing.... Here...there is a symbol of death; darkness symbolizes the beyond, the infernal regions.

This description explains why I came to see my life path as a specific type of the mythic Hero's Journey, as expressed in Dante's Divine Comedy: the descent to Hell, followed by the struggle to ascend the divine mountain of Purgatory, and finally (ideally), the translation into Paradise.

In the Divine Comedy, Dante is able to enter the underworld (Hell, in 14th c. Christian terms), while alive and without suffering the tortures of the damned, through the agency of the divine Beatrice. Historically, Beatrice was a woman that Dante fell in love with and hoped to marry, but who died young from disease while still a virgin. So his love for her was the pure Romantic love of which the troubadours sang and which led knights to fight for their lady fair, though they only saw her from a distance and from whom they might have a scarf as a token. Beatrice looked down on Dante from heaven and wished to spare him the many dangers of falling into sin, so she arranged his extraordinary trip through Hell so he could see first-hand the consequences of sinning. Thus he would cleave to the straight and narrow path of righteousness and so might one day join her in heaven. She also arranged for the shade (ghost) of Virgil the poet---who, though not a sinner, had to wait in Limbo for salvation because he had been a pagan---to guide Dante through the labyrinth of Hell and then up the torturous mountain of Purgatory, where Christians could expiate their sins.

This is an analog of the journey of Odysseus to the Underworld (as it was known to the ancient Greeks), where he had to travel in order to obtain vital information that would enable him to finally complete his ten-year journey home from the Trojan Wars. He, too, had a divine benefactress in the person of the goddess Athena. It is because of Odysseus' long trip home from the war that the term odyssey represents a long, arduous journey. As with Dante, Ulysses' divine benefactress provided a special agent---in his case, the sorceress Circe---who helped him to converse with the dead in the underworld without falling prey himself to the dark forces there. The knowledge Ulysses gathered was not just pragmatic information, but noetic wisdom---extraordinary, incontrovertibly certain knowledge---just like Dante.

Dante's version of the Hero's Journey more closely parallels mine than Ulysses' does by virtue of its stages. I felt drawn to it because I saw a close parallel between Hell and my experience of addiction, as well as between Purgatory and the struggle of recovery. This choice has nothing to do with my religious orientation; I chose it for the convenient story-telling characteristics of this mythic container. I do not mean to imply that one must be a good Christian in order to recover.

A hellish passage through the underworld that confers special knowledge is a commonly encountered feature of shamanic cultures. Shamans are more often made than born. No one wants to be a shaman because they have to survive a shamanic illness, usually a near-death experience, to become one. It may be a potentially fatal illness, but it can also include being hit by lightning, for instance. Not everyone who suffers such catastrophes becomes a shaman; personal characteristics and circumstances play a part, too. But it seems that powers or forces other than human select the candidate, so that attempts to ignore or run away from the calling are fruitless and often entail more suffering until the candidate accedes to the choice of Fate and undertakes their shamanic training.

This is why I feel I have been chosen to advance the understanding of addiction. I did not chose this path; it chose me. Who would deliberately elect to embark on a long sojourn in Hell? Junkie is not a career choice offered by most guidance counselors.

A Note about the Story's Spiritual Aspect

I cast my story in a spiritual framework because I live in an ensouled universe. Part of the damage of addiction is what shamans call soul loss: the dissociation or suppression of major components of one's psyche. For addicts whose damage began in childhood---which seems to be most of them---some of the deepest, most grievous wounds are the loss of innocence and of one's connection to, and sense of, the sacred in their life.

I refer to the divine feminine a lot here because the material universe is generated by that aspect of the divine; and probably also because feminine influence has been conspicuous by its absence in my life. My psychological study of archetypes led to a study of myth as well; as a result, I introduce several faces of the divine feminine: Isis; Sophia; Saraswati. They each have features unique to them but share fundamental feminine characteristics. Each has played a role in my life.

The divine is Absolute, so it is dual and non-dual, One and Many. This may represent a paradox for us but not for God. The divine feminine represents dynamic, creative aspects of the Absolute, so it is primarily responsible for creating the universe. The masculine aspect balances the feminine and together They represent the archetype of relationship. Relationship types are prefigured in the divine realm or they couldn't be enacted here; this is a Platonic perspective.

I have come to these conclusions after a lifetime of Seeking, so of course I have more to say about God and reality; but this isn't a philosophy text. Perhaps the comments I have made will inform your own search.

Finally, and importantly, my deliberate use of the word holy in the title does not refer to any religion, including the medieval Catholicism of Dante Alighieri. I included it because one of the more devastating consequences of addiction is a loss of all sense of the sacred, the holy, or the divine in one's life. These terms refer not only to the worship of a transcendent God, but also to a sense of the magical, the mysterious, the miraculous about the cosmos and our nurturing Earth. It is the loss of this sense that enables human beings to ravage and destroy the very environment that sustains us. It results from the shutting down of our heart center, an inevitable consequence of addiction. Thus it is very important for recovering addicts to include some path towards regaining this subtle, yet