I met God in the basement of my rental house in Secaucus, New Jersey, which was a weird thing to happen to an atheist.

I was fired before Christmas and the man I still loved went away, never to return. Worry about not being good enough, not being important to anyone, lay on my torso like a slab of cold, black granite.

Six feet underground, below the living room of my house, I sat in a dingy basement more alone than I had ever been. In the crook of a blue corduroy couch, under the yellow glow of a table lamp I experienced the worst psycho-emotional storm of my then thirty-nine-year life.

But something else unfolded between those wood-paneled walls in the winter of 2004. Something extraordinary began to sprout beneath a snow-white blanket of solitude.

Smoking, Writing, Lamenting, Smoking, Writing, Lamenting... and then everything changed!

My writing habit increased with my smoking. In with the bad air, out with toxic residue, I wrote and wrote in unceasing verse; my uninterrupted lament filled page after page of a spiral notebook. When I finished the last page, I opened a new one to begin again. But this time something sprung forth before I noticed the pen moving. I didn’t know I was writing until the pen stopped. The words...

Unemployed? It is my assertion you are employed by me.

...had already spilled out onto the first line.

I was a skeptic, and it would have been easy for me to conclude that this emerging “hello” from another world was just a figment of my imagination, or worse, the onset of mental illness. But something deep within me said otherwise; the room had changed. Energy all around me was electric and enormous.

Within an instant I knew these words were the first crumbs, nuggets placed on a path where atheists fear to tread.

One Year of Dialogues With What I Came to Call God

That moment sparked a year of solitude and isolation. I filled ten spiral notebooks in dialogue with what I came to call God. This journey you’re about to take opens, if you don’t mind, with the subject of me.

When you were born, your mother's epiphany was very traumatizing to the family. It resulted in her search for answers and she was taken by a new religion in town... This religion wanted members in order to facilitate the mission of its founder, and the effects of that on your family were, in a sense, catastrophic. Ultimately you were forced to become a motherless child in the world of mankind.

This has extremely important significance in the world of Love, because mother is a symbol of “unconditional Love from that which begat you.” Mother Earth, for instance, symbolizes the essence of life on earth as having been derived from the womb of nature, and you were abandoned by that very nature of God at the tender age of two.

Age two is also significant because that is the age when a child first begins independence from mommy. So when you were exploring the world, your mother was gone, leaving you to explore with God's Love only. You were very close to God at that age; you were in love with Love instead of in love with mommy. If you had a mother you would have grounded your needs into a mother's heart and not God's heart.

Is losing a mother at a young age important to awakening in God? 

No. You were given this opportunity because you possess a strong need of God's Love and that just made it the easiest way to get to you that which we were supplying. You were in the world without your mother in order to facilitate the mission you had set out to fulfill...

You grew up not believing in anything except Love. But the problem was that no one could convince you what Love was except your father. When you were a child he was distraught by the loss of his family-world, when your mother was gone. He stopped believing in love and stopped believing in his own life when his world disintegrated. He was forced to make a living and feed his children, when what he really wanted to do was feed his soul.

As he turned away from what his soul wanted, he turned his back on your needs for emotional support, and therefore gave you the idea that love and longing was the same thing. He was a man broken by love and he made a daughter who was broken as well. You were so young when he turned his back on love that you don't remember it happening, but it became a written word on your heart. The word was longing.

What we want you to know is that the woman you are today is so far from that little girl inside a woman's body, that you may not believe us when we tell you that you were incredibly broken by every person you were loving and needing... You were so cruel and painfully mean to others with your wit and quips...

You had made everyone who cared about you feel as if they had made a big mistake for loving you... They felt you had lost your mind and never had a heart, when in fact you had squashed your heart to silence so that it could not be broken again.

The reason you must know these things and the reason they are part of this book is not for your edification, but for your very dear mother and father. They can trust the work they are to read in the coming chapters to be honest to goodness renewed hope, and they will know that they are not responsible for the tormented spirit that emerged in you at the end of your former life.

Are we done with this chapter now? 

Yes we are. And I promise, we will not talk much more about you. The rest of this book is going to be about the realm of the ways of God.

This article was adapted with permission from Chapter One of the book:

What To Do When You're Dead
by Sondra Sneed.

This is not a touchy-feel-good spiritual guide as much as it is an awakening with a warning about man's self destruction. The warning comes with a unique responsibility however, and that is to learn why death is not real, and that our experience of crossing over to the other side is directly linked to our state of mind while on earth before passing. Darkness must be overcome, or the soul will remain trapped in the past and attached to things of the world, rather than following spirit to the light of God.

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About the Author

Sondra Sneed is a science and technology industry writer and former atheist with a secret. All the years she’s spent interviewing scientists and engineers, translating their high-minded knowledge for lay persons, she has also been interviewing the highest mind, the Creator of the Universe.