The Soul’s Red Thread: Memoirs of a Guide

$19.95

This book’s story spans a half-century. It begins when the author, Scott Eberle, leaves his home at age seventeen, full of hopes and hormones. It ends with him about to turn sixty-seven, standing on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean as a fogbank is billowing in. Scott is healthy, and yet age alone has him aware that the White Shroud of Death is also on the horizon, soon to roll in.

This fifty-year story—a passage from adolescence to elderhood—is both conventional and unconventional. Scott is, at once, a pragmatic physician serving others in the ordinary world and a seeker of mystical states that are only found in the High Country of the Mind and Heart.

On this long passage, Scott follows his own life thread, The Soul’s Red Thread. This leads him to the bedsides of people who are dying, where he begins to learn some of life’s deepest lessons. It guides him out onto a desert mountain, first to do his own four-day vision fast and then to become a desert guide for others. It takes him deep inside on extended meditation retreats, where he travels to the darkest recesses of his psyche, ultimately meeting his greatest monster. And late in life, it takes him on a guided medicine journey where Mother Psilocybin serves as truth serum for the soul, revealing more lessons to be learned as he continues walking toward death’s horizon.

This book’s story spans a half-century. It begins when the author, Scott Eberle, leaves his home at age seventeen, full of hopes and hormones. It ends with him about to turn sixty-seven, standing on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean as a fogbank is billowing in. Scott is healthy, and yet age alone has him aware that the White Shroud of Death is also on the horizon, soon to roll in.

This fifty-year story—a passage from adolescence to elderhood—is both conventional and unconventional. Scott is, at once, a pragmatic physician serving others in the ordinary world and a seeker of mystical states that are only found in the High Country of the Mind and Heart.

On this long passage, Scott follows his own life thread, The Soul’s Red Thread. This leads him to the bedsides of people who are dying, where he begins to learn some of life’s deepest lessons. It guides him out onto a desert mountain, first to do his own four-day vision fast and then to become a desert guide for others. It takes him deep inside on extended meditation retreats, where he travels to the darkest recesses of his psyche, ultimately meeting his greatest monster. And late in life, it takes him on a guided medicine journey where Mother Psilocybin serves as truth serum for the soul, revealing more lessons to be learned as he continues walking toward death’s horizon.

Praise for The Soul’s Red Thread

Scott has been a respected wilderness guide at The School of Lost Borders for more than twenty years, and with this book he tells the story of his own voyage into the wilderness of a human soul. One of the main gifts that a guide brings to rites-of-passage work is to listen, and here Scott listens deeply to his own heart. Listen along with him. His story offers wisdom that can support any of us to listen more deeply to ourselves. 

— Meredith Little, co-founder of The School of Lost Borders

Scott’s book arrives at just the right time. In a global world where so many feel powerless, our stories are all we have. Our stories must be told. There is an art to telling a life story and this book helps us to learn that art. Scott has taken the warp of his life and interwoven the weft of a red thread by drawing upon his life as a doctor, his work as a rites-of-passage guide, and his calling as a spiritual seeker. Scott’s gift as a storyteller makes this book both personal and universal, for in the telling of his stories he invites readers to discover more deeply their own.

— Sue Sully, Senior Lecturer, University of Brighton, rites-of-passage guide and psychotherapist