Conversations with a Spiritual Guide: Questions Answered and Answers Questioned

 

Dr. Drew Leder never expected to publish such a book. Trained as a physician at Yale, an internationally-known philosophy professor for over two decades, and author of seven books, he is by his own admission not "the kind of person who is supposed to be talking with a spirit-guide." But after surviving devastating loss as a teenager (his mother's death from cancer, and the suicides of both his father and brother), years of Twelve Step work and inner practice cracked something open. A voice began speaking. Wise, patient, sometimes funny, always direct, answering life’s deepest questions.

Its 70 brief chapters move from the practical to the cosmic—open to the ones that most interest you. In “Part One, Living Well,” the Guide addresses the key issues of ordinary life: how to quiet an anxious mind, work with anger and fear, hold on to joy, love others without losing yourself, and face pain, illness, and aging without being consumed by them. In “Part Two, Realms of Reality,” the conversation opens outward onto death and what may lie beyond it, reincarnation, karma, the spiritual heart, ESP, and the nature of an evolving universe that science can describe, but is saturated with the Mind of God.

The book is written with a survivor's honestly, and a professional philosopher's rigor (for anyone interested, there are 238 explanatory endnotes and four scholarly appendices), At the same time, its answers are humorous, loving, and often surprising. It's an invitation, one conversation at a time, to trust that the wisest voice you'll ever hear might already be within you.

For readers drawn to spiritual philosophy, inspired self-help, channeled wisdom, near-death and afterlife literature, and anyone wondering whether they, too, could learn to listen within.