A man’s spiritual quest yields psychic powers and fraught contacts with superhuman guides both demonic and divine in Araki’s intense autobiography.

The author, a retired control systems engineer, recaps a years-long spiritual journey through his native Japan, the United States, and Canada that was by turns strange, frightening, and exalted. The episodes he describes include an inexplicable “pleasant phenomenon” (likened to a three-day long “feeling of pleasure far exceeding sexual climax”) and his development of psychic powers, including the ability to heal by laying on hands and to change the weather and cause traffic jams with his mind. Araki studied a wide variety of New-Age therapies, started a massage and hypnosis practice in Canada, joined a Theosophical group, and began telepathically receiving thoughts from an Indian guru called Sai Baba, who claimed to be “the Almighty God who created everything.” (Sai Baba proved this by introducing the author to a lumberjack named Ben, who turned out to be Jesus Christ.) Unfortunately, Araki’s paranormal accomplishments swelled his ego and attracted women who tempted him to cheat on his disabled wife, thus causing tensions that led to a “collapse of sanity” in 2004. The author began hearing voices of “evil spirits of the mountains and rivers”—sometimes embodied in insects—that threatened to “take away all [his] powers.” Meanwhile, Sai Baba’s voice was ordering him to perform purification rituals (including burning incense and disconnecting all the batteries in his apartment) that made his wife question his sanity. The (perhaps ironic) point of all this, Sai Baba finally revealed, was to teach Araki to treat his wife better. Later chapters cover the author’s landing of a great engineering job in Japan with Sai Baba’s guidance, health problems stemming from his failure to follow Sai Baba’s dietary guidelines, and his post-retirement activities helping disabled children at an Indian orphanage.

Araki’s narrative is a jumble of Eastern philosophy, New-Age nostrums, and mystical experiences that chart a struggle to move from hubris to humility and enlightenment. It’s sometimes hard to follow, especially in the author’s interactions with the cacophony of voices in his head; it’s often not clear whether the entity speaking is an evil spirit, or Sai Baba, or a different Master from a higher plane, or Sai Baba masquerading as some other entity, or just an auditory delusion. The meanings behind the dialogues and ruminations are also hard to pin down, aside from the instances in which the exasperated Sai Baba simply megaphones blunt lessons into Araki’s consciousness. The author conveys the numinous, oceanic feeling of religious rapture in glowing, lyrical prose: “As soon as I finished praying [to Sai Baba], something clear, soft and energetic enveloped me from the heavens and I felt as if I was on stage in the spotlight. My body felt warm and my heart overflowed with happiness.” (Araki writes in a darker, feverish register when chronicling his psychological crackup.) At his best, the author captures both his anxious turmoil and his bliss at overcoming it.

A muddled but sometimes-gripping story of a soul’s trek into darkness and back again.