Ecstasy

and spirituality

In the late 1990s I was living a rather difficult life. Well, at least by comparison to the one I live today.

I was in a a smallish coal city, Newcastle, just a few hours north of Sydney. It was difficult for an Arts graduate majoring in Linguistics to get a full time job, so I was pulling things together as best I could with a range of odd jobs - lawn mowing for a friend’s business, casual work in a CBD petrol station, and part-time outreach work for the local Baptist Church.

All of these jobs involved odd hours. Mowing lawns started at 7am, graveyard shifts at the petrol station start at 10pm, and my outreach work the Church started at midnight because the people I was trying to help were the local street people - sex workers, heroin addicts and mobsters.

It’s fair to say that my consciousness, my waking experience of life, was filled with tension, stress, and various deprivations of diet, sleep and exercise.

In the midst of all of this, I had one of the most elevated experiences of my …