Living With a Wild God: A Non-Believer’s Search for the Truth about Everything

As a teenager Barbara Ehrenreich was an atheist and a rationalist, determined to understand the meaning of life. During this time she would regularly have minor experiences of dissociation, of seeing the world in a strange light. Then when she was 17, while on a skiing trip, she had an overwhelming, cataclysmic 'mystical' experience, far more rapturous and ecstatic than anything she had had before. The rapture would return later in life, but never with the same intensity.These episodes, and the rational Ehrenreich's ongoing argument with them, are at the core of this unique book. To try to understand the experience of some sort of force, 'out there', trying to communicate with her, Ehrenreich, a renowned investigative writer and self-described myth-buster, reads neurology, theology, philosophy, and accounts of other people's mystical experiences. Interwoven with her research is the story of the precocious adolescent that she once was, and a moving memoir of the life that shaped her.