Purchase Lucifer’s Game Available at your local bookstore and on Amazon Will Schneider is a full-time writer living in the wine country of Sonoma County, north of San Francisco. Formerly working in business development, Schneider spent years as the Licensing Director for the world-renown artist, Laurel Burch, as well as a National Sales Manager in the wine industry and high-tech arena. An adventurer at heart, and naturally drawn to the ‘edge’ of things, his current passion is kayaking along the wild Pacific coast. Will has equally experienced a calling to explore and push the boundaries of his inner world, and has spent decades deeply immersed in the study of various metaphysical traditions. Thirty-five years of deep training from a variety of exceptional spiritual teachings has allowed him to develop a wide-ranging platform of knowledge and understanding regarding the human inner landscape and our potential range of consciousness. Lucifer’s Game is his first novel. Will is currently writing a sequel to this novel focused on the Shadow world of relationships. He is also preparing workshops and events focused on understanding the Shadow and ‘waking up’ to our Presence. Author Statement My decades of exploration into mindfulness clarified for me a powerful realization. Unlike all other creatures on Earth whose consciousness is locked into a specific band of experience, our human awareness has the potential to move vertically, up or down. In any given moment, I can be more ‘awake’, more ‘present’, or, conversely, more in a kind of ‘waking sleep.’ That realization rocked my world. If nature left us off in a foggy kind of ‘waking sleep’, how can I snap out of it? So the proverbial ‘moth’ in me began fluttering its wings towards the flame of learning to be more awake. Over time, this quest brought me into various metaphysical ‘schools’ of consciousness development, which revealed greater knowledge of myself and provided powerful trainings for me in how I could get in touch with, and open to, my true Essential Nature that’s buried under layers of egoic structures. Having spent so much time and energy on my quest towards Spirit, I began to recognize a pattern in myself and in so many others along the spiritual journey. I had been irresistibly drawn towards the ‘Light of awakening’…but I began to wonder about my darkness—the Shadow side buried within my unconscious. The Shadow; all the unsavory aspects of my nature that I have unknowingly rejected in favor of shoring up my overall positive ‘self-image.’ Like everyone, I had systemically pushed away these unwanted characteristics, pretending that they were not a part of me. They were ‘out of sight and out of mind’. Gradually, I came to understand that this is a pretty weak strategy that we all employ. Our Shadow side may be buried out of sight but it’s not out of our psyche. It may be ‘off the radar’ of my conscious mind, but it remains alive and well, albeit hidden, until one day, out of the blue, it can emerge from below. The Shadow is filled with our noxious characteristics like Pride, Greed, Anger, Gluttony, Dishonesty, Envy, Lying, Hatred, Manipulation … and the list goes on. I began to see that we ignore our Shadow side at our peril. Those very character aspects that have been renounced and banished can, and will, rear up and sabotage one’s life. Just take a look at the various spiritual paths that abound. How many teachers, gurus and so-called ‘masters’ have been co-opted and subverted by having ignored their Shadow? Quite a few. An honest appraisal of society, in general, reveals how riddled our culture is with these ‘Shadowlings’ infiltrating people’s reality and wrecking havoc. Just read a newspaper on any given day… It was this realization about the Shadow world that was the genesis, my motivation behind writing Lucifer’s Game. I realized it could be intriguing, insightful and fun to imagine a character who actually agrees to spend a day with Lucifer, who in my tale, is simply the Master of the Shadowland. What would they discuss? What would Lucifer’s role be when it comes to the dark side? Just what’s his game with us? Just what’s he up to that would behoove us to get a handle on? I envisioned Lucifer ‘holding the torch for all those rejected Selves’ who live at the bottom of the spiral staircase of our psyche, shown on the cover of Lucifer’s Game. The ensuing tale is a witty and provocative exchange between the two characters. It’s designed to stimulate thought, and ideally, generate self-inquiry in the reader. Ultimately, my intention with Lucifer’s Game is to offer a new perspective of ‘waking up’ to a deeper, more balanced realization of oneself and the possibility of evolving into an elevated level of spiritual wholeness.