Eugene Samolin wrote a beautiful article for my spiritual blog, Rainbows, Potholes and Nuggets of Gold and today, he is sharing his book, Rising Karma with us. Thanks for joining us, Eugene. Please tell us a little something about, Rising Karma, and why you wrote it...
Rising Karma is visionary novel that reimagines ancient spiritual truths for a new generation.
Rodney Real just wants to be a writer, until a vision of the Tree of Life shatters everything he thought he knew. The revelation of his hidden ancestry awakens a specter born of history's darkest lies.
As protests ignite across a university campus seething with unrest, Rodney is drawn into a struggle between love and fear. His search for identity becomes a battle for the redemption of history itself.
Rising Karma is a visionary novel about ancestry, awakening, and the unseen war between light and shadow. It's the story of one man's calling to bridge the divide between religions, and to discover that the act of writing can change the world.
Why I Wrote Rising Karma
At the beginning of my writing career, I wrote a mission statement: to write fiction that inspires people to build a better world for all humankind.
Shortly afterwards, I had a profound vision of the Tree of Life. In the vision, I saw all humanity connected together on one great tree, stretching through the generations and overseen by God. As I reflected on what I had seen, I noticed that many of the world's religious traditions seemed to point toward the same underlying truth. Needless to say, it was a deeply inspiring experience.
What made the experience even more significant was what followed. My sense of identity suddenly came into sharp focus, and the events of my life seemed to gather momentum around that revelation. I was at university at the time and navigating relationships, spirituality, and questions about my place in the world. From the outside, it probably looked as though I went a little wild for a while. I found myself engaging with people from churches, synagogues, and mosques, trying to understand and apply what I had seen.
Yet it still felt as though the experience remained unfinished, as though I had not fully grounded it in the world. Eventually it dawned on me that I needed to write a book about it: to make sense of it, to explain it, and to place my experience on the record as clearly and honestly as I could. My hope was that the story would inspire others, and that the truth and meaning I found in the experience might encourage readers on their own journeys, in keeping with the mission that first led me to become a writer.
What Makes Rising Karma Special
At the heart of Rising Karma is a firsthand mystical experience that changed the course of my life: a vision of the Tree of Life.
While the novel itself is a work of visionary fiction, the experience that inspired it was real. The Tree of Life has appeared throughout history in the teachings of mystics, sages, and spiritual traditions around the world, and this book is my attempt to explore that mystery through story.
For that reason, I believe Rising Karma offers readers something unusual: a modern novel rooted in an ancient spiritual truth.
What also makes the book special is its vision of a future beyond division. Beneath the differences that separate religions, cultures, and ideologies, there may exist a deeper truth that unites us.
My hope is that readers will not only look beyond the divisions that exist between themselves and others, but also the divisions that exist within themselves. Often it is those inner conflicts that give rise to the outer ones.
The Tree of Life points toward a greater unity, reminding us that we are connected to one another, and that the good of the other is ultimately bound up with our own.
Oh My Goodness, what a beautiful reason behind the book. Would you mind sharing an excerpt with us?
My pleasure, Pam. Here you go...
The Tree of Life
It was a cool, overcast afternoon. Clouds rolled low and heavy across the sky. Inside the bungalow, I paced between shelves, stacking books, folding clothes, trying to bring order to the room.
The quiet rhythm of my movements slowed my thoughts until they slipped into something like meditation. Why had I always lived at the edge of every circle, one foot in, one foot out?
And then it happened.
The sound of a trumpet blast filled my ears. The veil of the ordinary world was torn apart by an enormous, all-encompassing ball of light. The light drew back above my head, revealing the most awe-inspiring thing I had ever seen: a gigantic tree made up of uncountable human bodies, all connected together in branches of flesh that wound their way down through time from the ancient past to the present.
I was one body among the multitude. I looked up towards the past, and saw that my line of ancestors went through the middle of the tree all the way to the top.
Sparks of light flowed up and down the branches. The tree was alive, an organism of its own, with every person who’d ever lived being just one part of the greater whole.
At the top the brilliant ball of light that had torn the veil. From inside the light, I saw through the eyes of the first man in my line. Adam. The world was the garden. And when Adam took a bite of fruit, the ball of light began to fall through the generations.
It descended down my line of fathers, with me inside it, toward my body in the present. With each ancestor, I saw flashes of their lives, moments of agony and awe, struggle and triumph. Each soul bore its burden. Each passed something on to the next generation.
And then, halfway down the tree, I passed through the body of one of my forefathers. But this body wasn’t like the others. It had sunk down so deeply into the garden bed that it had become a well. Through it, the sparks of light that animated the rest of the tree flowed forth.
An image emerged of a man in a hooded cloak, with a single word written across it: Messiah.
There was only one person whose body this could be: Jesus.
The vision moved on. The men who came next were also my fathers. The patriarchal line remained unbroken.
The light went out.
With a splash, I was back in my own body again, looking out through my own eyes. Only, it wasn’t me looking anymore: it was Christ. And my consciousness wasn’t mine, either. It was Christ’s.
My blood sang with recognition.
The door banged.
I turned.
A shadow fled the room.
All I can say is... W-O-W, Eugene, Rising Karma sounds like a wonderful read! Now tell us about yourself and where we can get a copy of the book...
Here is my official bio and links...
Get your copy of Rising Karma at Amazon in eBook (FREE in KU) and Paperback.
Perfect, Eugene. Thank YOU, again, so much for sharing your book with us today. We wish you the best of luck and God's blessings with it.
Well, Friends, that's a wrap on Saturday Spotlight for today. I hope you'll check back next week for another edition.
Until then, take care, God Bless and Make Reading a Priority - I promise you won't regret it. 😍
PamT