VERLIN DARROW
Praise for COATTAIL KARMA
“COATTAIL KARMA isn’t just a book. True, it’s an exciting, fine piece of writing with plot twists galore, peopled with characters that behave like villains and metaphysical superheroes. And it’s certainly fun to read. But it’s so much more than that.
“In other words, Verlin Darrow’s outrageous fantasy masquerades as something that readers can easily grasp and be wildly entertained by, but along the way he also shares wisdom and his own quirky take on the meaning of life in mind-blowing fashion.
“Well, if it isn’t a book in the ordinary sense of the word, what is it? An experience? Yes, that’s closer.
“Who can write such stuff and get away with it? Verlin Darrow can...and did. I can’t recommend this book more highly. I love it.”
~Richard House, MD, author of Between Now and When
Some Cool Passages
--When the Maori heard me agree to go, he hugged me so tightly, I dropped my duffel bag and wondered if he could completely compress someone if he tried. I pictured police detectives puzzling over a two dimensional corpse.
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--In seconds, I was in samadhi again, and this time there was absolutely no experience to have and no one there to experience anything, anyway. Everything just went blank.
I wasn’t asleep or unconscious, and the blankness wasn’t onerous or boring. There wasn’t an I, in fact, and the blankness wasn’t the absence of something. It was more like being in contact with something realer than anything I’d ever known—something so real, there was nothing to know about it. It had no attributes or qualities, nor did it have an absence of these. It was transcendent of the realm in which anything existed. It just was.
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--The experience continued for some time—I had no idea for how long. Eventually, I realized Faroud wasn’t sending me the light as some sort of transmission. Faroud was the light. He was revealing himself to me in his own way. The blessing he’d offered was the opportunity to be with his essence—to commune with it, to know it firsthand. The light lived in a Faroud suit.
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--Could I accommodate the temporary nature of everything I thought I knew? One minute, any given fact was there in front of me and I was grasping onto it for dear life. Then it morphed into something else. Or it oscillated back and forth. Or somebody else knew the score but wouldn’t tell me what it was. It was as if none of what happened to me was ever real—just an aspect of a process that was always en route to the next thing it seemed to be. I was forced to immerse myself in a quagmire of meaning and identity. I didn’t like it.
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--Finally, Marco announced it was time for bed. I was still ensconced in my brown comforter with Lucy on my lap. The red ski cap was perched on my head. In a lowbrow comedy movie, I’d have been the wacky ethnic neighbor who dropped by and told everyone in horrendous English about an upcoming party where the babes dug happening dudes wearing comforters, ski caps, and beagles.