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Thursday 18 June 2009
Sunday 31 May 2009
THE SPIRIT THAT DREAMS WITHIN US
PREFACE BY SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN
So many dramas are taking place in individual lives, so many gallant fights of embattled souls experiencing difficult destinies. It is good when someone attempts to set down his or her life story. This book is such an attempt and it is well worth the reading.
We live in the time of drastic transition out of the Piscean Age into the Age of Aquarius, when the waters of the Spirit are being poured out, dissolving social and personal structures and often throwing us into circumstances of drastic change and challenge. It is, with all its anxieties, one of the most exciting ages to be alive!
This is a story of life experience through trials and great difficulties to deeper understanding and wider vision. The author has the courage to describe his earlier experiences of drugs and despair and his lifting through to vision of the spiritual nature of man and the universe. This includes the realization of the rising tide of Love now flooding into the consciousness of those who are open to it. Despite the violence of our time this phenomenon may prove to be of the profoundest significance in this transitional age of change.
Many people now find that they can accept the view that Planet Earth is essentially a training school for souls, that before descending we are given a preview of the destiny we’re taking on and that we come back again and again to fulfil our soul development. This concept of repeated earth lives adds an enthralling dimension to history and the part we have to play in it. Clearly in descending through the gateway of birth we forget the vision we have seen and are faced with soul battles and difficulties which we have to overcome. It so enriches the picture of our lives if we can feel we have somehow chosen the destiny and are watched over by angelic guides and our Higher Self.
I read this autobiography with real interest as an example of how a soul finds itself lost and wretched and, step by step, is led onward till it emerges into the experience of God active and working as the goal of all our lives.
Here in our age of turmoil is the supreme vision of hope and redemption.
Sir George
GEORGE TREVELYAN, 21 May 1990.
The Barn, Hawkesbury,
Badminton, Avon,
England.
PREFACE BY SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN
So many dramas are taking place in individual lives, so many gallant fights of embattled souls experiencing difficult destinies. It is good when someone attempts to set down his or her life story. This book is such an attempt and it is well worth the reading.
We live in the time of drastic transition out of the Piscean Age into the Age of Aquarius, when the waters of the Spirit are being poured out, dissolving social and personal structures and often throwing us into circumstances of drastic change and challenge. It is, with all its anxieties, one of the most exciting ages to be alive!
This is a story of life experience through trials and great difficulties to deeper understanding and wider vision. The author has the courage to describe his earlier experiences of drugs and despair and his lifting through to vision of the spiritual nature of man and the universe. This includes the realization of the rising tide of Love now flooding into the consciousness of those who are open to it. Despite the violence of our time this phenomenon may prove to be of the profoundest significance in this transitional age of change.
Many people now find that they can accept the view that Planet Earth is essentially a training school for souls, that before descending we are given a preview of the destiny we’re taking on and that we come back again and again to fulfil our soul development. This concept of repeated earth lives adds an enthralling dimension to history and the part we have to play in it. Clearly in descending through the gateway of birth we forget the vision we have seen and are faced with soul battles and difficulties which we have to overcome. It so enriches the picture of our lives if we can feel we have somehow chosen the destiny and are watched over by angelic guides and our Higher Self.
I read this autobiography with real interest as an example of how a soul finds itself lost and wretched and, step by step, is led onward till it emerges into the experience of God active and working as the goal of all our lives.
Here in our age of turmoil is the supreme vision of hope and redemption.
Sir George
GEORGE TREVELYAN, 21 May 1990.
The Barn, Hawkesbury,
Badminton, Avon,
England.
DEDICATION
I always knew I’d write a book but it took Baba to inspire me to do it! But this book is really not an autobiography. It is more a love story and a celebration.
As I sit before a window overlooking the deep blue waters of the Moray Firth I can sense the energies emanating from the great volcanic rift below it. Somewhere there are colonies of dolphins — the messengers of Vishnu — playing, arching and leaping exuberantly out of its waters ... weaving, with the whales and others, an intricate web of sound all around the vast oceans which comprise two-thirds of our Planet.
At a low frequency this sound, like that of our Planet, is OM, the primal vibration.
Sathya Sai Baba brought me to live here by the sea almost three years ago.
“Head for the hills!” I kept hearing a voice say inside me. I followed the voice and He led my son and me to Woodend with its grand views of the Highlands beyond the Moray Firth in the far north-east of Scotland.
When, finally, I got to Baba in December 1987 he blessed the writing of this book amongst many other things.
“Write! Write!” he instructed me, cutting the air with the edge of his right hand and with it the complacency that had been my greatest drawback.
Baba giving Darshan
This is a very different book to the kind normally written about Sai Baba. Whilst none of it is fictional some of the narrative might be considered by some to be far fetched or speculative. It is a book mothered by intuition. And none of it would have seen the light of day were it not, above all, for Sai Baba’s guiding inspiration. And then the encouragement of all my dear friends who, over the years, urged me to write down my extraordinary experiences.
So, remembering each and every one of them, I dedicate this book as a song of love to Sathya Sai — the Spirit that Dreams Within Us — and without whom none of this could have happened.
RW,
Woodend Farmhouse,
Inshoch Wood,
Lochloy, NAIRN,
Scotland.
7 July 1989.
I always knew I’d write a book but it took Baba to inspire me to do it! But this book is really not an autobiography. It is more a love story and a celebration.
As I sit before a window overlooking the deep blue waters of the Moray Firth I can sense the energies emanating from the great volcanic rift below it. Somewhere there are colonies of dolphins — the messengers of Vishnu — playing, arching and leaping exuberantly out of its waters ... weaving, with the whales and others, an intricate web of sound all around the vast oceans which comprise two-thirds of our Planet.
At a low frequency this sound, like that of our Planet, is OM, the primal vibration.
Sathya Sai Baba brought me to live here by the sea almost three years ago.
“Head for the hills!” I kept hearing a voice say inside me. I followed the voice and He led my son and me to Woodend with its grand views of the Highlands beyond the Moray Firth in the far north-east of Scotland.
When, finally, I got to Baba in December 1987 he blessed the writing of this book amongst many other things.
“Write! Write!” he instructed me, cutting the air with the edge of his right hand and with it the complacency that had been my greatest drawback.
Baba giving Darshan
This is a very different book to the kind normally written about Sai Baba. Whilst none of it is fictional some of the narrative might be considered by some to be far fetched or speculative. It is a book mothered by intuition. And none of it would have seen the light of day were it not, above all, for Sai Baba’s guiding inspiration. And then the encouragement of all my dear friends who, over the years, urged me to write down my extraordinary experiences.
So, remembering each and every one of them, I dedicate this book as a song of love to Sathya Sai — the Spirit that Dreams Within Us — and without whom none of this could have happened.
RW,
Woodend Farmhouse,
Inshoch Wood,
Lochloy, NAIRN,
Scotland.
7 July 1989.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I: GATEWAY OF INDIA
CHAPTER II: MOVING INTO AQUARIUS
CHAPTER III: ADRIFT ON MOUNT ARARAT
CHAPTER IV: THE YEARS OF AHRIMAN
CHAPTER V: “REMEMBER THE BRAVE ONES...”
CHAPTER VI: JERUSALEM
CHAPTER VII: SEARCHING FOR THE GRAIL
CHAPTER VIII: “THE MOST SURPRISING SONGS”
CHAPTER IX: TO BE HERE NOW
CHAPTER X: SWORD OF LIGHT
CHAPTER XI: STONES, GNOMES AND WINDMILLS
CHAPTER XII: TO THE END OF THE WOOD
CHAPTER XIII: THE YEAR OF RAINBOW DREAMS
CHAPTER XIV: “MY LOVE IS LIKE A RED, RED ROSE...”
CHAPTER XV: BANGALORE EXPRESS
CHAPTER XVI: BEYOND MAYA
CHAPTER XVII: SATELLITE CALLS FROM KURUKSHETRA
CHAPTER XVIII: THE LIGHT SUPERNAL.
CHAPTER XIX: KRISHNA
CHAPTER XX: EPIPHANY
CHAPTER XXI: THE FARTHEST SHORES
CHAPTER XXII: THE DREAM UNFOLDS
NOTES & INFORMATION
© RW1989
No part of this Manuscript may be reproduced in any form without permission from the author except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism.
CHAPTER I: GATEWAY OF INDIA
CHAPTER II: MOVING INTO AQUARIUS
CHAPTER III: ADRIFT ON MOUNT ARARAT
CHAPTER IV: THE YEARS OF AHRIMAN
CHAPTER V: “REMEMBER THE BRAVE ONES...”
CHAPTER VI: JERUSALEM
CHAPTER VII: SEARCHING FOR THE GRAIL
CHAPTER VIII: “THE MOST SURPRISING SONGS”
CHAPTER IX: TO BE HERE NOW
CHAPTER X: SWORD OF LIGHT
CHAPTER XI: STONES, GNOMES AND WINDMILLS
CHAPTER XII: TO THE END OF THE WOOD
CHAPTER XIII: THE YEAR OF RAINBOW DREAMS
CHAPTER XIV: “MY LOVE IS LIKE A RED, RED ROSE...”
CHAPTER XV: BANGALORE EXPRESS
CHAPTER XVI: BEYOND MAYA
CHAPTER XVII: SATELLITE CALLS FROM KURUKSHETRA
CHAPTER XVIII: THE LIGHT SUPERNAL.
CHAPTER XIX: KRISHNA
CHAPTER XX: EPIPHANY
CHAPTER XXI: THE FARTHEST SHORES
CHAPTER XXII: THE DREAM UNFOLDS
NOTES & INFORMATION
© RW1989
No part of this Manuscript may be reproduced in any form without permission from the author except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism.
Chapter I: GATEWAY OF INDIA
The orange glow of a distant sunrise began to creep over the horizon as I stood on the flight deck of an ageing Boeing 707 heading towards Bombay. The journey from Cairo was half over and the crew wore expressions of boredom as they sat monitoring the banks of instruments around them. Most of the passengers were asleep. Below, the Arabian desert stretched endlessly into the distance. Flying close to its maximum ceiling, the ‘plane must have appeared as no more than a slight vapour trail high up in the pale-blue dome of the approaching dawn.
Sunrise over India from Egyptair Boeing 707, 'Mubarrak', Flightdeck
The sun’s rays began to illuminate the fuselage and to wash over the leading edge of the huge, graceful wings bearing us to our destination. I thought of the very first poem I had written in my early ‘teens ... something about the desert’s burning sands. And of another I had never completed that had risen in my mind’s eye as the vision of a vast, fiery sun over some inner world within. With it had come the phrase, ‘Burning, burning comes the dawn.’
I had feared its apocalyptic portent and it was only much later that I understood the image of the sun signified the burning away of the dross of the old world, the dawn coming as harbinger of the new. As we flew into daylight I felt the colours of my vision rise out of the subconscious and weave themselves into the present in which I found myself. After the passing of twenty-eight years I was returning to the Indian sub-continent where I had been born, whence I had begun this life.
Once, I had stood as a child, with my parents, under the Gateway of India. Bombay (now Mumbai) had been the first port-of-call since our ship had steamed away from Colombo, Ceylon. I had forsaken my childhood years for a new life in the West. A new life in the old world of my fathers: Europe. Now, I returned to the more ancient world of my motherland, Asia.
During those years of exile I had suffered a deep sense of loss and alienation. For without roots there can be no happiness and living becomes fragmented. Over many years I had sought cultural and spiritual roots to heal my fragments. Much of that healing had taken place on inner planes and what lay ahead was something far greater than the sum of any one lifetime. Today, my ‘plane’ flew towards the burning fires of Bhagavan Surya, the Lord of the Sun.
The old passenger liner that had borne us over the oceans had long since ended its life in the breaker’s yard. Part of the departed Empire into which I, like my parents, had been born. They too were gone and the world itself prepared to enter a new millennium. How far had I really travelled — how many lives had I lived through — to get to this eventful time? How many years had I waited to witness this future? Several millennia and more maybe since it is said that it takes twenty million years for the life of a human to evolve from the mineral state! And then, how many more before it merges back into God?
As I sat in my passenger-seat I knew that I was close to that journey’s end. Somewhere in south India I would reach the Avathar1 of the Age, the Divine Mother-Father, infinite Alpha and Omega. Morning burst into the cabin and its inhabitants began to stir into awakening. Inside me I felt a tremendous lightness as if a great circle of time moved towards its completion.
The year had been a momentous one. 1987, the Hopi year of the Rainbow Light Dreams when a great psychic change had begun to take place within all life on our Planet.2 The Amerindian prophecies had struck a chord of recognition within me as in countless others. That August an event forecast by the Maya over 5000 years before had moved the Earth into evolutionary convergence with all the other heavenly bodies in its Solar System.
At noon on the seventeenth day of that month — when the stars we know as the Pleiades in the constellation of Taurus lay poised over the place called El Tule in southern Mexico — the Spirit of the Thunderbird ascended from the centre of the Earth to circle it twice along two great lines of primal energy, intertwining the dual forces of Shiva and Shakti in a cosmic embrace.3 Thus, the planetary chakras or power centres were re-energized in preparation for the great transformation to take place during the quarter-century to come.
The highly sophisticated Mayan calendrics had foreseen this over five millennia ago.4 Today, the fulfilling of earthly, solar and galactic events are presaged by the incarnation of the Lord of Time and Space whose number — in both Amerindian and Indian traditions — is Nine.5 The Kalki Avathar, Quetzalcoatl, Kukulcan, Pacal Votan, Wakan Tanka, Lud the Celtic God of Light, known also as King Arthur of the Kingdom of Avalon, Ahura Mazda, Maitreya, The Christ Messiah who has come to close an old age and to watch over the birth of another, more wondrous era.
“This Planet has a purpose in the great galaxy in which it is held,” Sai Baba tells us. “That purpose is now unfolding before our eyes ... The time is approaching when all humanity will live in harmony. That time will be here sooner than one expects. Before it arrives be prepared for whatever is needed to reveal to every living thing the true purpose of existence. It is not what anyone can imagine, it is not something that one can try to aspire to. It is beyond all comprehension. I can say that its beauty is magnificent beyond all dreams.” 6
In the spring an unexpected windfall from the taxman had provided me with the money to buy an air-ticket to India. I had discovered Sai Baba three years before and a series of powerful, synchronous events had persuaded me that he really was the Avathar — the Divine Principle, incarnate in human form, who has come to answer the countless prayers of the good. My intuition told me that the Rainbow Light dreams of the Hopi were an aspect of the Avathar’s mission ... for the rainbow is the sign of the Lord’s covenant with all earthly life. So, to travel to the Lord seemed the most perfect way to end the year.
As the ‘plane began its long descent towards the Indian coast I recalled an evening in my childhood when I had held my father’s hand as we stood by the railway line outside Colombo. The Sun was lowering itself into the Indian Ocean as we gazed at the horizon. I felt excited, watching the comings and goings of the ships as they made their way in and out of the harbour. Big freighters from Japan and liners from faraway places lay anchored out at sea waiting for the call from the harbour pilot. Soon we would be on one of those ships nosing out, majestically, towards the unknown. It would carry us away to another country, another life.
I recalled the dusk and the twinkling harbour lights as I stood alone on the deck of that ship, hearing a voice inside me say, “Look well and remember this scene. Then, turn your back and walk away from it all.” Obeying, I registered the time and place in my memory, turned around and went below decks, away from the first eleven years of my life.
Next morning the harbour was gone. Flying fish leapt silver in the sunlight over a green ocean churned into a great froth by the ship’s propellers. In the distance I could see the palm-lined Malabar Coast and to the west the islands of Lakshadweep. Ahead lay Bombay, the last Asian landfall. Then the Arabian Gulf, Aden, Suez, Port Said, the Mediterranean and Europe.
The Boeing skimmed alarmingly low over a ragged shanty-town near the final approach to Sahar International Airport. Bouncing untidily onto the runway, its jet engines screamed into reverse thrust to bring the ‘plane’s speed down rapidly. It taxied onto the tarmac apron shimmering in the midday heat. Soon we were out in the busy, modern airport building. At the Immigration Desk an officer perused my Entry Card on which I had stated my purpose for visiting as ‘Pilgrimage to Prashanti Nilayam — ashram of Sri Sathya Sai Baba.’
“So you have come all this way to see Sai Baba!” he exclaimed, his face lighting up with delight. Then, reaching into his shirt pocket he produced a picture of Baba. I wondered if this was the Lord’s way — his leela7 — of welcoming my partner, Jenny, and me to India.
Now I was back in Asia would I find what I had lost there long ago? Would the Lord heal me of all my wounds? Deep inside each of us we hold the memories of many other lives. Personal ‘myths’ about who we are and who we were before. These ‘myths’ flow beyond the farther shores of finite time, beyond our mortal limitations. In them we may discover a wealth of experience we might have never imagined — stories of other times. Through these stories we may begin to open doors into self-knowledge, into other dimensions of time and space. We may begin to understand ourselves differently — to know Atma8 — for these ‘myths’ are more than fairy tales.
As I have begun to heal myself of the anguish of self-doubt and loss of spirituality I have come to understand the importance of these inner stories residing within us. And I too have become a healer, a witness to the inner stories of those who have sought my help. I have watched as others relive experiences outside the consensus-reality of what we call normal life, seen the separation between the third and higher dimensions melt away as they have made their voyages to places beyond this lifetime. Eternal places that live outside our normality as perhaps part of the planetary memory of the Gaia-field.9 Once contacted, we come face-to-face with the One who awaits our awakening.
This book is about the story of inner and outer experiences which have helped me to see beyond the illusion of the everyday struggle of existence, how I began to open myself to a realm of reality beyond the third dimension. “Go beyond the illusion!” I have heard the inner voice so often urge me, “for there you will find Me!” With slow, painful efforts I have made the first infant steps into that reality.
It is the story of personal experience — how the inner myth revealed itself and brought me to the place where the spirit lives and dreams. When I have come close to that spirit — sometimes brushing the fleeting, sometimes the eternal — I have learnt that the very best expectations and hopes we may have of ourselves are worth cherishing and holding onto no matter how daunting may seem the road ahead. For they, above all, constitute the reality of who we are and why we are here in this life.
Tired and jet-lagged, Jenny and I found ourselves thrust, all-of-a-sudden, into the noise and merry-go-round of Bombay. At Santa Cruz, the domestic airport, we tried to buy tickets for the evening ‘plane to Bangalore. “Sorry, all seats are taken. Day-after-tomorrow is earliest you can book now,” the man at Indian Airlines told us. We decided to catch a bus into the city and try the train instead. The rush and crowds and colours and smells and noise threatened to overwhelm us. We collapsed into the bus and sat dazed as it drove us down Swami Vivekanand Road, the driver — using the split-second Zen of Indian road-sense — regularly blowing on a rubber bulb-horn to clear the path for his juggernaut.
The city sprawled in a conglomeration of badly-built high-rise blocks, treeless lots where young children played cricket and the ubiquitous shanty towns which rose wherever a space permitted. The bus stopped at traffic lights and up on a third-floor balcony I watched a domestic row taking place. The drama was heightened by the wild, accusatory gestures and facial expressions of the participants which reminded me of the stylized movements of Kathakali.10 Then the lights turned green again and we drove on to Chowpatty Beach and Churchgate where we alighted outside the Bombay Talkies.
Finally, at the busy Victoria Terminus we discovered that we would have to wait until the following day to get sleepers on the Bangalore Express. “But you can spend the night in the Station Hotel,” we were told. So, that night we slept in the old, colonial railway hotel, above the pavements and crowds around the terminus. I lay restively on the bed feeling too tired to sleep. The prospect of a train journey across India excited me. During the ‘fifties I had made just such a journey as a five-year-old, with my family, when we had travelled from Madras (now Chennai) to Bangalore and then onto the Nilgiri Hills.
On that occasion we had flown in an old Dakota from Ratmalana, Colombo. Somewhere below I recalled spotting a steam train making its long haul south, leaving behind a trail of smoke. The memory of that early visit to the vast Indian sub-continent — seeming even bigger to a small child — flooded back now. Only a year ago, a friend of mine had told me that she could see rails taking me straight to Sai.11 Now it was about to come true.
At some point I must have fallen asleep. Then, about five-thirty AM the temporary lull of the sleeping hours was broken: first, by the loud morning chorus of birds and then by a harsh voice making a repetitive announcement over the Station’s PA system. Railway announcers everywhere sound unintelligible I thought slipping out of bed to take a shower before the delivery of Sunday newspapers at seven o’clock and hot chai sweetened with condensed milk.
Later that morning we took an auto-rickshaw to the Gateway of India. Several hours remained before our train left Dadar for the south and we decided to indulge ourselves in a buffet meal at the Taj Mahal Hotel where we could eat and then sit in air-conditioned comfort, watching people and recovering from the ‘plane journey the day before.
There it was: The Gateway! The same imposing Victorian monument under which I had once stood before. I had returned, full-circle, to the symbolic point of entry and departure where the great mystery of India begins. Despite all the materialistic encroachments of the twentieth century its soul has remained constant and from it the torch of Sanathana Dharma has burned through the ages for all to see.12
Out on the glistening water an oil-platform proclaimed a modern India. The Soviet Fleet was visiting. I watched a turbaned commissionaire outside the sleek glass doors of the Taj salute several times as a Soviet admiral and his entourage climbed out of a white Mercedes. He was followed by a retinue of junior officers whose rank was denoted, I imagined, by the ever-humbler status of vehicle which had carried them to the marble opulence of the hotel. That afternoon we whiled away the hours, sitting in the lobby watching neatly-dressed businessmen from Malaysia and Hong Kong, sweating European tourists and large Middle Eastern families going about their day. How very different this society was from the one immediately outside those glass doors, I thought. Around the hotel swimming pool others lay about roasting their bodies under the fierce Bombay sun.
I was overcome by a sense of revulsion. This kind of wealthy, international society existed everywhere. What claim did it have to be part of the indigenous population of any nation? It was in the streets and villages where squalor and wisdom lived next to each other that India had touched my heart. Yet I too was part of this and had chosen to indulge myself in the ostentations of the affluent. I kept seeing the young child at the railway station, begging on all fours, his limbs deliberately broken to turn him into a grotesque, spidery caricature of humanity. Yet, in his face I had seen the innocence of God shining through. For my self-righteousness — and greedy appetite no doubt — I ended my lunch that day with an unpleasant stomach upset, the only one I was to have on the journey.
Confused and emotionally fraught by the paradox of India, my stomach churning, I sat next to Jenny in the hotel lobby and felt the tears well-up inside me. What was it I was trying to grasp? How long the road I had travelled amidst wealth and poverty, joy and sorrow, bliss and terror, goodness and badness, wisdom and ignorance ... just to get to this moment? How long had that eternity taken to get me here now, only a few hundred miles away along the railway track from the Lord?
© RW 1989
The orange glow of a distant sunrise began to creep over the horizon as I stood on the flight deck of an ageing Boeing 707 heading towards Bombay. The journey from Cairo was half over and the crew wore expressions of boredom as they sat monitoring the banks of instruments around them. Most of the passengers were asleep. Below, the Arabian desert stretched endlessly into the distance. Flying close to its maximum ceiling, the ‘plane must have appeared as no more than a slight vapour trail high up in the pale-blue dome of the approaching dawn.
Sunrise over India from Egyptair Boeing 707, 'Mubarrak', Flightdeck
The sun’s rays began to illuminate the fuselage and to wash over the leading edge of the huge, graceful wings bearing us to our destination. I thought of the very first poem I had written in my early ‘teens ... something about the desert’s burning sands. And of another I had never completed that had risen in my mind’s eye as the vision of a vast, fiery sun over some inner world within. With it had come the phrase, ‘Burning, burning comes the dawn.’
I had feared its apocalyptic portent and it was only much later that I understood the image of the sun signified the burning away of the dross of the old world, the dawn coming as harbinger of the new. As we flew into daylight I felt the colours of my vision rise out of the subconscious and weave themselves into the present in which I found myself. After the passing of twenty-eight years I was returning to the Indian sub-continent where I had been born, whence I had begun this life.
Once, I had stood as a child, with my parents, under the Gateway of India. Bombay (now Mumbai) had been the first port-of-call since our ship had steamed away from Colombo, Ceylon. I had forsaken my childhood years for a new life in the West. A new life in the old world of my fathers: Europe. Now, I returned to the more ancient world of my motherland, Asia.
During those years of exile I had suffered a deep sense of loss and alienation. For without roots there can be no happiness and living becomes fragmented. Over many years I had sought cultural and spiritual roots to heal my fragments. Much of that healing had taken place on inner planes and what lay ahead was something far greater than the sum of any one lifetime. Today, my ‘plane’ flew towards the burning fires of Bhagavan Surya, the Lord of the Sun.
The old passenger liner that had borne us over the oceans had long since ended its life in the breaker’s yard. Part of the departed Empire into which I, like my parents, had been born. They too were gone and the world itself prepared to enter a new millennium. How far had I really travelled — how many lives had I lived through — to get to this eventful time? How many years had I waited to witness this future? Several millennia and more maybe since it is said that it takes twenty million years for the life of a human to evolve from the mineral state! And then, how many more before it merges back into God?
As I sat in my passenger-seat I knew that I was close to that journey’s end. Somewhere in south India I would reach the Avathar1 of the Age, the Divine Mother-Father, infinite Alpha and Omega. Morning burst into the cabin and its inhabitants began to stir into awakening. Inside me I felt a tremendous lightness as if a great circle of time moved towards its completion.
The year had been a momentous one. 1987, the Hopi year of the Rainbow Light Dreams when a great psychic change had begun to take place within all life on our Planet.2 The Amerindian prophecies had struck a chord of recognition within me as in countless others. That August an event forecast by the Maya over 5000 years before had moved the Earth into evolutionary convergence with all the other heavenly bodies in its Solar System.
At noon on the seventeenth day of that month — when the stars we know as the Pleiades in the constellation of Taurus lay poised over the place called El Tule in southern Mexico — the Spirit of the Thunderbird ascended from the centre of the Earth to circle it twice along two great lines of primal energy, intertwining the dual forces of Shiva and Shakti in a cosmic embrace.3 Thus, the planetary chakras or power centres were re-energized in preparation for the great transformation to take place during the quarter-century to come.
The highly sophisticated Mayan calendrics had foreseen this over five millennia ago.4 Today, the fulfilling of earthly, solar and galactic events are presaged by the incarnation of the Lord of Time and Space whose number — in both Amerindian and Indian traditions — is Nine.5 The Kalki Avathar, Quetzalcoatl, Kukulcan, Pacal Votan, Wakan Tanka, Lud the Celtic God of Light, known also as King Arthur of the Kingdom of Avalon, Ahura Mazda, Maitreya, The Christ Messiah who has come to close an old age and to watch over the birth of another, more wondrous era.
“This Planet has a purpose in the great galaxy in which it is held,” Sai Baba tells us. “That purpose is now unfolding before our eyes ... The time is approaching when all humanity will live in harmony. That time will be here sooner than one expects. Before it arrives be prepared for whatever is needed to reveal to every living thing the true purpose of existence. It is not what anyone can imagine, it is not something that one can try to aspire to. It is beyond all comprehension. I can say that its beauty is magnificent beyond all dreams.” 6
In the spring an unexpected windfall from the taxman had provided me with the money to buy an air-ticket to India. I had discovered Sai Baba three years before and a series of powerful, synchronous events had persuaded me that he really was the Avathar — the Divine Principle, incarnate in human form, who has come to answer the countless prayers of the good. My intuition told me that the Rainbow Light dreams of the Hopi were an aspect of the Avathar’s mission ... for the rainbow is the sign of the Lord’s covenant with all earthly life. So, to travel to the Lord seemed the most perfect way to end the year.
As the ‘plane began its long descent towards the Indian coast I recalled an evening in my childhood when I had held my father’s hand as we stood by the railway line outside Colombo. The Sun was lowering itself into the Indian Ocean as we gazed at the horizon. I felt excited, watching the comings and goings of the ships as they made their way in and out of the harbour. Big freighters from Japan and liners from faraway places lay anchored out at sea waiting for the call from the harbour pilot. Soon we would be on one of those ships nosing out, majestically, towards the unknown. It would carry us away to another country, another life.
I recalled the dusk and the twinkling harbour lights as I stood alone on the deck of that ship, hearing a voice inside me say, “Look well and remember this scene. Then, turn your back and walk away from it all.” Obeying, I registered the time and place in my memory, turned around and went below decks, away from the first eleven years of my life.
Next morning the harbour was gone. Flying fish leapt silver in the sunlight over a green ocean churned into a great froth by the ship’s propellers. In the distance I could see the palm-lined Malabar Coast and to the west the islands of Lakshadweep. Ahead lay Bombay, the last Asian landfall. Then the Arabian Gulf, Aden, Suez, Port Said, the Mediterranean and Europe.
The Boeing skimmed alarmingly low over a ragged shanty-town near the final approach to Sahar International Airport. Bouncing untidily onto the runway, its jet engines screamed into reverse thrust to bring the ‘plane’s speed down rapidly. It taxied onto the tarmac apron shimmering in the midday heat. Soon we were out in the busy, modern airport building. At the Immigration Desk an officer perused my Entry Card on which I had stated my purpose for visiting as ‘Pilgrimage to Prashanti Nilayam — ashram of Sri Sathya Sai Baba.’
“So you have come all this way to see Sai Baba!” he exclaimed, his face lighting up with delight. Then, reaching into his shirt pocket he produced a picture of Baba. I wondered if this was the Lord’s way — his leela7 — of welcoming my partner, Jenny, and me to India.
Now I was back in Asia would I find what I had lost there long ago? Would the Lord heal me of all my wounds? Deep inside each of us we hold the memories of many other lives. Personal ‘myths’ about who we are and who we were before. These ‘myths’ flow beyond the farther shores of finite time, beyond our mortal limitations. In them we may discover a wealth of experience we might have never imagined — stories of other times. Through these stories we may begin to open doors into self-knowledge, into other dimensions of time and space. We may begin to understand ourselves differently — to know Atma8 — for these ‘myths’ are more than fairy tales.
As I have begun to heal myself of the anguish of self-doubt and loss of spirituality I have come to understand the importance of these inner stories residing within us. And I too have become a healer, a witness to the inner stories of those who have sought my help. I have watched as others relive experiences outside the consensus-reality of what we call normal life, seen the separation between the third and higher dimensions melt away as they have made their voyages to places beyond this lifetime. Eternal places that live outside our normality as perhaps part of the planetary memory of the Gaia-field.9 Once contacted, we come face-to-face with the One who awaits our awakening.
This book is about the story of inner and outer experiences which have helped me to see beyond the illusion of the everyday struggle of existence, how I began to open myself to a realm of reality beyond the third dimension. “Go beyond the illusion!” I have heard the inner voice so often urge me, “for there you will find Me!” With slow, painful efforts I have made the first infant steps into that reality.
It is the story of personal experience — how the inner myth revealed itself and brought me to the place where the spirit lives and dreams. When I have come close to that spirit — sometimes brushing the fleeting, sometimes the eternal — I have learnt that the very best expectations and hopes we may have of ourselves are worth cherishing and holding onto no matter how daunting may seem the road ahead. For they, above all, constitute the reality of who we are and why we are here in this life.
Tired and jet-lagged, Jenny and I found ourselves thrust, all-of-a-sudden, into the noise and merry-go-round of Bombay. At Santa Cruz, the domestic airport, we tried to buy tickets for the evening ‘plane to Bangalore. “Sorry, all seats are taken. Day-after-tomorrow is earliest you can book now,” the man at Indian Airlines told us. We decided to catch a bus into the city and try the train instead. The rush and crowds and colours and smells and noise threatened to overwhelm us. We collapsed into the bus and sat dazed as it drove us down Swami Vivekanand Road, the driver — using the split-second Zen of Indian road-sense — regularly blowing on a rubber bulb-horn to clear the path for his juggernaut.
The city sprawled in a conglomeration of badly-built high-rise blocks, treeless lots where young children played cricket and the ubiquitous shanty towns which rose wherever a space permitted. The bus stopped at traffic lights and up on a third-floor balcony I watched a domestic row taking place. The drama was heightened by the wild, accusatory gestures and facial expressions of the participants which reminded me of the stylized movements of Kathakali.10 Then the lights turned green again and we drove on to Chowpatty Beach and Churchgate where we alighted outside the Bombay Talkies.
Finally, at the busy Victoria Terminus we discovered that we would have to wait until the following day to get sleepers on the Bangalore Express. “But you can spend the night in the Station Hotel,” we were told. So, that night we slept in the old, colonial railway hotel, above the pavements and crowds around the terminus. I lay restively on the bed feeling too tired to sleep. The prospect of a train journey across India excited me. During the ‘fifties I had made just such a journey as a five-year-old, with my family, when we had travelled from Madras (now Chennai) to Bangalore and then onto the Nilgiri Hills.
On that occasion we had flown in an old Dakota from Ratmalana, Colombo. Somewhere below I recalled spotting a steam train making its long haul south, leaving behind a trail of smoke. The memory of that early visit to the vast Indian sub-continent — seeming even bigger to a small child — flooded back now. Only a year ago, a friend of mine had told me that she could see rails taking me straight to Sai.11 Now it was about to come true.
At some point I must have fallen asleep. Then, about five-thirty AM the temporary lull of the sleeping hours was broken: first, by the loud morning chorus of birds and then by a harsh voice making a repetitive announcement over the Station’s PA system. Railway announcers everywhere sound unintelligible I thought slipping out of bed to take a shower before the delivery of Sunday newspapers at seven o’clock and hot chai sweetened with condensed milk.
Later that morning we took an auto-rickshaw to the Gateway of India. Several hours remained before our train left Dadar for the south and we decided to indulge ourselves in a buffet meal at the Taj Mahal Hotel where we could eat and then sit in air-conditioned comfort, watching people and recovering from the ‘plane journey the day before.
There it was: The Gateway! The same imposing Victorian monument under which I had once stood before. I had returned, full-circle, to the symbolic point of entry and departure where the great mystery of India begins. Despite all the materialistic encroachments of the twentieth century its soul has remained constant and from it the torch of Sanathana Dharma has burned through the ages for all to see.12
Out on the glistening water an oil-platform proclaimed a modern India. The Soviet Fleet was visiting. I watched a turbaned commissionaire outside the sleek glass doors of the Taj salute several times as a Soviet admiral and his entourage climbed out of a white Mercedes. He was followed by a retinue of junior officers whose rank was denoted, I imagined, by the ever-humbler status of vehicle which had carried them to the marble opulence of the hotel. That afternoon we whiled away the hours, sitting in the lobby watching neatly-dressed businessmen from Malaysia and Hong Kong, sweating European tourists and large Middle Eastern families going about their day. How very different this society was from the one immediately outside those glass doors, I thought. Around the hotel swimming pool others lay about roasting their bodies under the fierce Bombay sun.
I was overcome by a sense of revulsion. This kind of wealthy, international society existed everywhere. What claim did it have to be part of the indigenous population of any nation? It was in the streets and villages where squalor and wisdom lived next to each other that India had touched my heart. Yet I too was part of this and had chosen to indulge myself in the ostentations of the affluent. I kept seeing the young child at the railway station, begging on all fours, his limbs deliberately broken to turn him into a grotesque, spidery caricature of humanity. Yet, in his face I had seen the innocence of God shining through. For my self-righteousness — and greedy appetite no doubt — I ended my lunch that day with an unpleasant stomach upset, the only one I was to have on the journey.
Confused and emotionally fraught by the paradox of India, my stomach churning, I sat next to Jenny in the hotel lobby and felt the tears well-up inside me. What was it I was trying to grasp? How long the road I had travelled amidst wealth and poverty, joy and sorrow, bliss and terror, goodness and badness, wisdom and ignorance ... just to get to this moment? How long had that eternity taken to get me here now, only a few hundred miles away along the railway track from the Lord?
© RW 1989
Chapter II: MOVING INTO AQUARIUS
I was born, in 1947, at the Alexandra Nursing Home, Maradana District, Colombo, Ceylon. My parents were Eurasians of mixed Sinhalese and European ancestry. The United States had dropped atomic bombs on Japan in 1945 and when at about the age of six I first heard of the event a great sense of fear entered into me. The world was a violent place and we all lived under the shadow of world war. My childhood had begun to break up. India had gained its independence the year I had been born and nationalism ran high through the entire sub-continent. Ceylon’s independence would follow in 1948.
Spiritually, my roots were Christian as well as Buddhist, ethnically Celtic and Norse as well as Dravidian — a heritage I did not begin to appreciate until I was in my ‘twenties. My first eleven years were spent on the island that had been known to the ancient Greeks — my father proudly told us — as Taprobane; to the Arabs, who came to trade there, as Serendib, and in our times Ceylon, the Pearl of the East. Lanka was to become my island in the sun and I an exile from a country of great beauty and sadness.
My father was a planter and managed the family estate. By the mid-‘fifties a series of ill-fated events forced him to retire. In 1956, the MEP (People’s United Front) rode into power on a ticket of fevered nationalism. Radio Ceylon had announced the victory and, on hearing it, I ran into an empty room to cry my heart out. Even though I was only nine years of age I knew somehow that it was the end of that life for my family and me.
“We will confiscate the land from the Eurasians and put them to work in the fields,” threatened their populist leader, Dias Bandaranaike.
For all they knew my parents believed it might happen. They decided to start again in New Zealand but, months before our departure, my father suffered from a nervous breakdown and a heart attack. Fearing that the Immigration authorities would turn us back on grounds of his ill health my mother exchanged our boat tickets to bring us, instead, to England. The estate could not be sold and finally it was nationalized without compensation during the ‘seventies and a chapter in family karma seemed to have come to a close.
We joined the steadily-growing exodus of Eurasians which had started to flow towards the Antipodes, Canada and England. My last years on the island were scarred with images of violence, racial strife, burnings and death. Ceylon had become both a paradise and a hell. Was the obsession with violence and fire something that this Buddhist culture had inherited from the demon kingdom of Ravanna and which had remained untamed ten thousand years since the events described in the Ramayana had taken place?1
One grey March day our ship dropped anchor at Gravesend in Kent — a name whose subjective meaning would be revealed to me many years later. I had to get used to those leaden skies. Not that they were unknown in equatorial lands. But these flat, depressing times left me with a feeling of asphyxiation as if I would never breathe free under the blue sky again. And though, during that first summer, we experienced a heat-wave it took me a long time to get used to the grey climate. Pangs of homesickness pierced me and I thought about the life that had come to an end so suddenly. I was an exile.
I remembered my friends, now so far away: the beaches, adventures, the illicit visits we would make, from our boarding school, along the railway line to the Mount Lavinia Hotel on Sunday evenings. The only way to get outside during term-time was to obtain an exeat pass. And we didn’t come by those precious little chits of paper so easily! I joined the Scouts and ostensibly on ‘chip-a-job’ would visit my aunt’s house during the weekend. Marmite sandwiches and sponge-cake for tea. What luxury! All very different to the spartan existence we knew as college inmates. A little bit of weeding would bring in five rupees to keep the scoutmaster happy. The rest of the time I would spend with my cousin gallivanting about town, going to the movies, swimming and visiting the houses of our mutual friends.
Then there were the caravan holidays at Koggala in the south where I had seen turtles swimming in over the reef at high tide; the jungles near Trincomalee in the north-east where we would camp near a water-hole. We swam in a deserted place we called Pirate’s Cove where the sand was powdery white and a sharp lookout for sharks had to be kept. They would cruise in from the Bay of Bengal, their sleek, predatory fins warning us of their presence.
I remembered the magnificent sunsets and the evening kite-fliers on Galle Face Green opposite the old Parliament buildings where my father took me for long walks and bought chili-hot kadallay (roasted gram) from the vendors. I thought of all these happy times. Now they was all gone and I had to learn to accept this new world whether I liked it or not. Yet, the question remained: Why had we been brought here? Why had our pleasant life-style ended so abruptly? And why had we come to cold, northern climes when we had planned to emigrate to New Zealand? I felt the hand of a malevolent God dealing out the cards.
Although I made friends in our new home-town I also spent a lot of time alone. Mostly making aircraft models. I loved aeroplanes and had read all the flying journals and every book I could lay my hand on: the Biggles books, Douglas Bader, Pierre Klostermann and Johnny Johnson were familiar companions. My bedroom became cluttered with models of Spitfires, Messerschmitts, Stukas, Wellingtons, Lancasters, Heinkels and every other WWII ‘plane I could get hold of. Sometimes I would become bored, take out a model into the back-garden, simulate an air-crash and set it on fire, photographing it as it burned. Years later the meaning of this incident was revealed to me when I underwent past life regression.2
I had decided that my family’s downfall could be attributed to the take-over of Ceylon by socialists and communists. I became rabidly anti-communist and at the same time was fascinated with Hitler and Nazism. The National Socialist swastika had an almost mesmeric quality about it. If ever there was another war it would be with Russia and I decided I wanted to be among the heroes who would fly over Moscow, drop their atomic bombs and enter Valhalla.
At the age of fourteen I applied to join the Air Force. But the medical officer found out that I had had two fits of petit mal as a child. It was enough to keep me out of the services. I didn’t have the qualifications to fly as a pilot so I tried for other jobs as air-crew in civil airlines. I had to fly somehow. But lack of schooling let me down and I failed the entry exams. I cursed my fate and all the teachers who hadn’t cared enough to teach me anything worthwhile.
By the age of fifteen I had read the entire thousand and more pages of William Shirer’s RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH. We had an old air-raid shelter in the back-garden and I would imagine the times it had been used. Sometimes I had nightmares where formations of bombers flew over our house. Bombs whistled down to blast open the doors and I would wake up, startled and in a cold sweat. The War felt almost like it had all been a nightmare. My nightmare. Yet, I had never lived through it so why did I feel this way? As a young child I used to spend hours, listening to old 78s on an ancient wind-up gramophone. One disc had Adolf Hitler’s voice on it as part of a war documentary Series. The voice scared me but sensing its magnetic pull I kept playing it. Eventually my mother sneaked the record away, broke it and buried the fragments in the ground!
Leaving school with no qualifications, I entered a west London polytechnic where I studied for four years. In modern European history I was able to investigate a deeply-held, subjective curiosity to learn everything I could about Europe’s recent past. I wanted to find out about the Second World War which had ended not long before my birth. Why had it happened and, anyway, why did nations have wars? The society I lived in seemed to accept wars as a necessary evil but part of me kept questioning the apparent need that humans have for changing the normal world from time to time and indulging in organized violence towards each other.
My attitudes began to change. As for the interest in fascism, I could never accept the anti-Semitic race-hate inherent in its philosophy. My own traumatic memories of racial strife during the last years we had lived in Ceylon had taught me the evils of nationalism. Now, I learnt about Lenin and Stalin as well and began to develop an interest in the doctrines I had loathed until then. I began to consider the possibility that it had not been the spread of socialist ideas in Asia that had led to our downfall. Its seeds had been sowed by those who had colonized those countries in the first place and we with so many others had become the victims of their misdeeds. The nationalism under which our kind had suffered was a kind of cultural and political emetic those once-subject people had taken to rid themselves of the yoke of their unwanted masters.
In the early ‘sixties the drama of the Cuban Missiles crisis had personally shocked me into awareness. I no longer thought of nuclear disarmament as part of a Communist plot by CND stooges.3 For the first time in my life I had known how it felt to be close to war. I began to see beyond the newspaper propaganda which blamed everything on the Russians. A still, small voice inside me began to ask whether anything was worth the destruction of all the Earth’s life. This inner process of change was to grow.
By the mid-‘sixties, the West was in a time of social and cultural change. Like so many other young students I found myself in the midst of those changing attitudes. The mass-bombings in Vietnam converted many of us to the liberation struggle of the Vietnamese people. Politically and morally the behaviour of the Americans in South-East Asia could not be justified. It represented an old political system which was living on borrowed time. All Europe was in a student revolt and the self-immolation of Jan Palach in Wenceslas Square, Prague — following similar acts of non-violent resistance by Buddhist monks in South Vietnam — symbolized the collective attitudes of many young Europeans who had had enough of the bad old ways and dreamed of a different kind of world.
“Don’t forget that you are part of this country’s intelligentsia,” our history teacher reminded us. “You are in a privileged minority so don’t waste your opportunities!”
Gradually, I became part of a protest movement which rejected the worn-out values of the past. The older generation simply had no understanding of our libertarian aspirations. Though we hardly understood them ourselves we could sense that we were within the grasp of a different kind of life where the world would be as one. It was so vast but we could feel it just beyond our reach and we wanted it. We didn’t want the drab future that was on offer. We wanted something better!
By then, my accent had changed from west London cockney to middle-class Surrey & home counties. Learning to change it, like a chameleon, to fit in with whomever I was I began to feel uncomfortable with an apparent lack of roots and genuine self-identity.
When I left the polytechnic I still had no idea of what I really wanted to do with my life. All I had ever cared about was flying but — given my change of political perspective — I began to think that I had really been quite fortunate to have avoided a life in the military. Having read Ernest Hemingway’s FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS I felt the need for adventure. The plan was to go to Israel and work on a kibbutz but the Arab-Israeli War had broken out and I volunteered. Everyone at the recruitment centre thought I was a Jew — even the Rabbi on the interviewing panel!
“But what can you offer us,” they asked. “Can you drive?” I couldn’t.
I decided I wanted to be a writer and, to make a living, I considered journalism. But that wasn’t the kind of writing I had in mind. I discovered that D.H. Lawrence had eked out a living as a school-teacher while writing his early books. Maybe I could emulate him I thought and applied to train as a teacher. I was accepted and embarked dishonestly upon an unhappy career.
College was a boring place and the values which our lecturers attempted to instil in us I found stuffy and bourgeois. I was a poet and a writer who felt surrounded by mediocrity. But a teacher’s certificate might secure my freedom and provide a ticket abroad. Perhaps New Zealand or Canada?
It had been a traumatic time. My parents had died within years of each other and soon after I had injured myself in a motor-cycle accident. I too had come close to death and on one occasion suicide. I began to drink a lot and to spend the money I had been left on other distractions. I bought a sports car and ended up smashing it regularly. I was very unhappy with my life and no amount of spending made any difference. Through the friend who had introduced me to radical-chic politics I discovered LSD.4 I knew Mike well and his recent behaviour-change intrigued me. One day he came in with a sprained wrist and I asked him how it had happened.
“We were taking Acid5 and I jumped off the balcony into the back-garden!” he replied.
I thought he was going crazy and questioned him more closely. What he told me about the effects of the hallucinogen interested me. Was it possible, after all, to reach Nirvana this way? One night we all went out to the controversial US Rock Musical, Hair, which was playing at the Drury Lane Theatre in London. Inspired by its message, I decided to try LSD and at his flat that night I entered into a psychedelic Pandora’s Box experience. Much to my disappointment, my own girl-friend had refused to share the trip with me. I had to take the journey by myself it seemed. Somewhere, there was another world which I had to discover.
Twenty minutes after ingesting the small, transparent microdot I began to feel its effect. It was like Alice in Wonderland. Standing in the middle of the living room I became a midget. Next, I grew as tall as an oak tree. Then I found myself in a kind of hall of mirrors where everything moved and changed in waves. I sat in an armchair and disappeared into it. A young woman knelt before me and I saw Eden in her eyes. I wanted to say the most beautiful thing I could say with words.
“I could paint you as a picture of the Dawn,” I blurted.
“But I don’t want you to paint me!” she replied.
Then things began to change again. Someone had replaced the Incredible String Band album with Jimi Hendrix and dissonance turned the room into a hellish place. A hoarse, shrieking voice on the hi-fi pierced into me as if the gentle love and peace of Aquarius was being crucified.
I was in an uncharted land going deeper and deeper into myself, leaving all the others behind, all the stars of the universe inside my brain cortex. Hours later, I awoke naked into a windswept day to find myself lying on an untidy bed in a strange house. I could hear the others giggling strangely as they put on their overcoats to take an early-morning walk. I watched them go down the drive and into the avenue. Someone appeared to float by on a bicycle and I pinched myself to see if I was really awake. The branches of the trees outside seemed to swoop towards the sky. Gradually, I began to feel myself returning to the world I had left behind the night before.
I dressed and returned to my college. Getting into a hot shower I decided never to touch the stuff again. My experience hadn’t been all beautiful by any means and I felt angry with Mike for having led me on and with myself for having followed so blindly. But a year later I began to take LSD again. In an empty, meaningless world the hallucinogen provided me with a sense of inner beauty and holiness nothing else had. I began to touch into a magical, immortal being and kept wanting to return to it. Now I could actually live out my inner poems without writing them down. Coming off a trip one morning I decided to burn most of what I had written until then. It was pretentious rubbish. But some I kept...
© RW 1989.
I was born, in 1947, at the Alexandra Nursing Home, Maradana District, Colombo, Ceylon. My parents were Eurasians of mixed Sinhalese and European ancestry. The United States had dropped atomic bombs on Japan in 1945 and when at about the age of six I first heard of the event a great sense of fear entered into me. The world was a violent place and we all lived under the shadow of world war. My childhood had begun to break up. India had gained its independence the year I had been born and nationalism ran high through the entire sub-continent. Ceylon’s independence would follow in 1948.
Spiritually, my roots were Christian as well as Buddhist, ethnically Celtic and Norse as well as Dravidian — a heritage I did not begin to appreciate until I was in my ‘twenties. My first eleven years were spent on the island that had been known to the ancient Greeks — my father proudly told us — as Taprobane; to the Arabs, who came to trade there, as Serendib, and in our times Ceylon, the Pearl of the East. Lanka was to become my island in the sun and I an exile from a country of great beauty and sadness.
My father was a planter and managed the family estate. By the mid-‘fifties a series of ill-fated events forced him to retire. In 1956, the MEP (People’s United Front) rode into power on a ticket of fevered nationalism. Radio Ceylon had announced the victory and, on hearing it, I ran into an empty room to cry my heart out. Even though I was only nine years of age I knew somehow that it was the end of that life for my family and me.
“We will confiscate the land from the Eurasians and put them to work in the fields,” threatened their populist leader, Dias Bandaranaike.
For all they knew my parents believed it might happen. They decided to start again in New Zealand but, months before our departure, my father suffered from a nervous breakdown and a heart attack. Fearing that the Immigration authorities would turn us back on grounds of his ill health my mother exchanged our boat tickets to bring us, instead, to England. The estate could not be sold and finally it was nationalized without compensation during the ‘seventies and a chapter in family karma seemed to have come to a close.
We joined the steadily-growing exodus of Eurasians which had started to flow towards the Antipodes, Canada and England. My last years on the island were scarred with images of violence, racial strife, burnings and death. Ceylon had become both a paradise and a hell. Was the obsession with violence and fire something that this Buddhist culture had inherited from the demon kingdom of Ravanna and which had remained untamed ten thousand years since the events described in the Ramayana had taken place?1
One grey March day our ship dropped anchor at Gravesend in Kent — a name whose subjective meaning would be revealed to me many years later. I had to get used to those leaden skies. Not that they were unknown in equatorial lands. But these flat, depressing times left me with a feeling of asphyxiation as if I would never breathe free under the blue sky again. And though, during that first summer, we experienced a heat-wave it took me a long time to get used to the grey climate. Pangs of homesickness pierced me and I thought about the life that had come to an end so suddenly. I was an exile.
I remembered my friends, now so far away: the beaches, adventures, the illicit visits we would make, from our boarding school, along the railway line to the Mount Lavinia Hotel on Sunday evenings. The only way to get outside during term-time was to obtain an exeat pass. And we didn’t come by those precious little chits of paper so easily! I joined the Scouts and ostensibly on ‘chip-a-job’ would visit my aunt’s house during the weekend. Marmite sandwiches and sponge-cake for tea. What luxury! All very different to the spartan existence we knew as college inmates. A little bit of weeding would bring in five rupees to keep the scoutmaster happy. The rest of the time I would spend with my cousin gallivanting about town, going to the movies, swimming and visiting the houses of our mutual friends.
Then there were the caravan holidays at Koggala in the south where I had seen turtles swimming in over the reef at high tide; the jungles near Trincomalee in the north-east where we would camp near a water-hole. We swam in a deserted place we called Pirate’s Cove where the sand was powdery white and a sharp lookout for sharks had to be kept. They would cruise in from the Bay of Bengal, their sleek, predatory fins warning us of their presence.
I remembered the magnificent sunsets and the evening kite-fliers on Galle Face Green opposite the old Parliament buildings where my father took me for long walks and bought chili-hot kadallay (roasted gram) from the vendors. I thought of all these happy times. Now they was all gone and I had to learn to accept this new world whether I liked it or not. Yet, the question remained: Why had we been brought here? Why had our pleasant life-style ended so abruptly? And why had we come to cold, northern climes when we had planned to emigrate to New Zealand? I felt the hand of a malevolent God dealing out the cards.
Although I made friends in our new home-town I also spent a lot of time alone. Mostly making aircraft models. I loved aeroplanes and had read all the flying journals and every book I could lay my hand on: the Biggles books, Douglas Bader, Pierre Klostermann and Johnny Johnson were familiar companions. My bedroom became cluttered with models of Spitfires, Messerschmitts, Stukas, Wellingtons, Lancasters, Heinkels and every other WWII ‘plane I could get hold of. Sometimes I would become bored, take out a model into the back-garden, simulate an air-crash and set it on fire, photographing it as it burned. Years later the meaning of this incident was revealed to me when I underwent past life regression.2
I had decided that my family’s downfall could be attributed to the take-over of Ceylon by socialists and communists. I became rabidly anti-communist and at the same time was fascinated with Hitler and Nazism. The National Socialist swastika had an almost mesmeric quality about it. If ever there was another war it would be with Russia and I decided I wanted to be among the heroes who would fly over Moscow, drop their atomic bombs and enter Valhalla.
At the age of fourteen I applied to join the Air Force. But the medical officer found out that I had had two fits of petit mal as a child. It was enough to keep me out of the services. I didn’t have the qualifications to fly as a pilot so I tried for other jobs as air-crew in civil airlines. I had to fly somehow. But lack of schooling let me down and I failed the entry exams. I cursed my fate and all the teachers who hadn’t cared enough to teach me anything worthwhile.
By the age of fifteen I had read the entire thousand and more pages of William Shirer’s RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH. We had an old air-raid shelter in the back-garden and I would imagine the times it had been used. Sometimes I had nightmares where formations of bombers flew over our house. Bombs whistled down to blast open the doors and I would wake up, startled and in a cold sweat. The War felt almost like it had all been a nightmare. My nightmare. Yet, I had never lived through it so why did I feel this way? As a young child I used to spend hours, listening to old 78s on an ancient wind-up gramophone. One disc had Adolf Hitler’s voice on it as part of a war documentary Series. The voice scared me but sensing its magnetic pull I kept playing it. Eventually my mother sneaked the record away, broke it and buried the fragments in the ground!
Leaving school with no qualifications, I entered a west London polytechnic where I studied for four years. In modern European history I was able to investigate a deeply-held, subjective curiosity to learn everything I could about Europe’s recent past. I wanted to find out about the Second World War which had ended not long before my birth. Why had it happened and, anyway, why did nations have wars? The society I lived in seemed to accept wars as a necessary evil but part of me kept questioning the apparent need that humans have for changing the normal world from time to time and indulging in organized violence towards each other.
My attitudes began to change. As for the interest in fascism, I could never accept the anti-Semitic race-hate inherent in its philosophy. My own traumatic memories of racial strife during the last years we had lived in Ceylon had taught me the evils of nationalism. Now, I learnt about Lenin and Stalin as well and began to develop an interest in the doctrines I had loathed until then. I began to consider the possibility that it had not been the spread of socialist ideas in Asia that had led to our downfall. Its seeds had been sowed by those who had colonized those countries in the first place and we with so many others had become the victims of their misdeeds. The nationalism under which our kind had suffered was a kind of cultural and political emetic those once-subject people had taken to rid themselves of the yoke of their unwanted masters.
In the early ‘sixties the drama of the Cuban Missiles crisis had personally shocked me into awareness. I no longer thought of nuclear disarmament as part of a Communist plot by CND stooges.3 For the first time in my life I had known how it felt to be close to war. I began to see beyond the newspaper propaganda which blamed everything on the Russians. A still, small voice inside me began to ask whether anything was worth the destruction of all the Earth’s life. This inner process of change was to grow.
By the mid-‘sixties, the West was in a time of social and cultural change. Like so many other young students I found myself in the midst of those changing attitudes. The mass-bombings in Vietnam converted many of us to the liberation struggle of the Vietnamese people. Politically and morally the behaviour of the Americans in South-East Asia could not be justified. It represented an old political system which was living on borrowed time. All Europe was in a student revolt and the self-immolation of Jan Palach in Wenceslas Square, Prague — following similar acts of non-violent resistance by Buddhist monks in South Vietnam — symbolized the collective attitudes of many young Europeans who had had enough of the bad old ways and dreamed of a different kind of world.
“Don’t forget that you are part of this country’s intelligentsia,” our history teacher reminded us. “You are in a privileged minority so don’t waste your opportunities!”
Gradually, I became part of a protest movement which rejected the worn-out values of the past. The older generation simply had no understanding of our libertarian aspirations. Though we hardly understood them ourselves we could sense that we were within the grasp of a different kind of life where the world would be as one. It was so vast but we could feel it just beyond our reach and we wanted it. We didn’t want the drab future that was on offer. We wanted something better!
By then, my accent had changed from west London cockney to middle-class Surrey & home counties. Learning to change it, like a chameleon, to fit in with whomever I was I began to feel uncomfortable with an apparent lack of roots and genuine self-identity.
When I left the polytechnic I still had no idea of what I really wanted to do with my life. All I had ever cared about was flying but — given my change of political perspective — I began to think that I had really been quite fortunate to have avoided a life in the military. Having read Ernest Hemingway’s FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS I felt the need for adventure. The plan was to go to Israel and work on a kibbutz but the Arab-Israeli War had broken out and I volunteered. Everyone at the recruitment centre thought I was a Jew — even the Rabbi on the interviewing panel!
“But what can you offer us,” they asked. “Can you drive?” I couldn’t.
I decided I wanted to be a writer and, to make a living, I considered journalism. But that wasn’t the kind of writing I had in mind. I discovered that D.H. Lawrence had eked out a living as a school-teacher while writing his early books. Maybe I could emulate him I thought and applied to train as a teacher. I was accepted and embarked dishonestly upon an unhappy career.
College was a boring place and the values which our lecturers attempted to instil in us I found stuffy and bourgeois. I was a poet and a writer who felt surrounded by mediocrity. But a teacher’s certificate might secure my freedom and provide a ticket abroad. Perhaps New Zealand or Canada?
It had been a traumatic time. My parents had died within years of each other and soon after I had injured myself in a motor-cycle accident. I too had come close to death and on one occasion suicide. I began to drink a lot and to spend the money I had been left on other distractions. I bought a sports car and ended up smashing it regularly. I was very unhappy with my life and no amount of spending made any difference. Through the friend who had introduced me to radical-chic politics I discovered LSD.4 I knew Mike well and his recent behaviour-change intrigued me. One day he came in with a sprained wrist and I asked him how it had happened.
“We were taking Acid5 and I jumped off the balcony into the back-garden!” he replied.
I thought he was going crazy and questioned him more closely. What he told me about the effects of the hallucinogen interested me. Was it possible, after all, to reach Nirvana this way? One night we all went out to the controversial US Rock Musical, Hair, which was playing at the Drury Lane Theatre in London. Inspired by its message, I decided to try LSD and at his flat that night I entered into a psychedelic Pandora’s Box experience. Much to my disappointment, my own girl-friend had refused to share the trip with me. I had to take the journey by myself it seemed. Somewhere, there was another world which I had to discover.
Twenty minutes after ingesting the small, transparent microdot I began to feel its effect. It was like Alice in Wonderland. Standing in the middle of the living room I became a midget. Next, I grew as tall as an oak tree. Then I found myself in a kind of hall of mirrors where everything moved and changed in waves. I sat in an armchair and disappeared into it. A young woman knelt before me and I saw Eden in her eyes. I wanted to say the most beautiful thing I could say with words.
“I could paint you as a picture of the Dawn,” I blurted.
“But I don’t want you to paint me!” she replied.
Then things began to change again. Someone had replaced the Incredible String Band album with Jimi Hendrix and dissonance turned the room into a hellish place. A hoarse, shrieking voice on the hi-fi pierced into me as if the gentle love and peace of Aquarius was being crucified.
I was in an uncharted land going deeper and deeper into myself, leaving all the others behind, all the stars of the universe inside my brain cortex. Hours later, I awoke naked into a windswept day to find myself lying on an untidy bed in a strange house. I could hear the others giggling strangely as they put on their overcoats to take an early-morning walk. I watched them go down the drive and into the avenue. Someone appeared to float by on a bicycle and I pinched myself to see if I was really awake. The branches of the trees outside seemed to swoop towards the sky. Gradually, I began to feel myself returning to the world I had left behind the night before.
I dressed and returned to my college. Getting into a hot shower I decided never to touch the stuff again. My experience hadn’t been all beautiful by any means and I felt angry with Mike for having led me on and with myself for having followed so blindly. But a year later I began to take LSD again. In an empty, meaningless world the hallucinogen provided me with a sense of inner beauty and holiness nothing else had. I began to touch into a magical, immortal being and kept wanting to return to it. Now I could actually live out my inner poems without writing them down. Coming off a trip one morning I decided to burn most of what I had written until then. It was pretentious rubbish. But some I kept...
© RW 1989.
Chapter III: ADRIFT ON MOUNT ARARAT
Three years later I left college with a teacher’s certificate and little chance of getting a job. With a few others I had fallen foul of the college administration which had provided me — I discovered in a roundabout way — with a report that would prevent my finding a permanent post. The system just didn’t need people like me. I had naively believed what my tutors had told me about exporting our ideals into the teaching profession. Now, I discovered that the reality was very different. Despite the great changes taking place in the world, what we discovered when sent out into the schools was a very conservative establishment hanging onto its outdated values. Everything told me that this was no place to be for anyone with the slightest degree of imagination and individuality.
After a short holiday in France I found work as a factory storeman. Four months later I was out of work and on social welfare. I sold my car to raise money. Lonely, depressed and withdrawn from the world I escaped by sleeping a lot. It became difficult at times just to get up to go to the welfare office to pick up my cheque. One evening I was at a party and someone sold me some LSD. Hiding it in the barrel of a pen, I walked the six miles back to my flat and swallowed the microdot. The subsequent experience was much more pleasant than the first time I had taken it and the inner worlds into which I travelled seemed to have far more meaning than the grey existence of normality.
My nocturnal escapade disturbed the students upstairs who complained to the landlady. “If Mr. Winter is unable to control his transports I shall have to ask you both to leave!” she wrote my flat-mate.
One cold March day, wheezing from a heavy bronchial attack, I packed my belongings and left. Richmond Hill, in south-west London, provided a night-time panorama which reminded me of the view from the Sacré Coeur in Paris. There I found a bedsitter on the first-floor of a decaying Victorian house at the top of Mount Ararat Road. Next to me lived a retired Scots Tea Planter who had worked in Ceylon. He drank heavily and mostly I kept out of his way. When we met occasionally in the communal kitchen we got on with each other. In the other room was a retired Major in his ‘seventies who was a vegetarian and a spiritualist. He didn’t say much but I was attracted by what I thought of then as his eccentricities. One day just before he moved out we got talking.
“D’you see that building across the road?” he asked, pointing out of the kitchen window. “Kaiser William stayed there when he visited Richmond. Now it’s a brothel. All these houses are neglected and they’re falling down. The land will fetch a fortune ... and watch the landlady’s agent. He’s a very violent man and won’t worry about using unpleasant tactics if you upset him.”
The Major found a companion to marry and went to live on the South Coast. I moved into his old room which had a peaceful atmosphere unlike the rest of the house. It became a haven from all my troubles. Into my old room moved Charley.
Charley came from a rich family where the only thing he lacked seemed to be love. He had dropped out of school and spent his days saving money to travel to Afghanistan where he could live cheaply and smoke all the marijuana he wanted.
“Man, it’s a beautiful place. People are free there. Not like the West where everyone behaves like robots in a machine!”1 Charley was just passing through.
Listening to SERGEANT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND we overloaded our nervous systems regularly with street Acid. What did it matter?2 Nobody cared about anything anymore. Our civilization hadn’t much longer to go and if Acid turned us on, why not? At least we could seek some kind of more meaningful reality in chemical substances with names like White Lightning and California Sunshine.
Standing by the large kitchen window tripping I gazed out onto the street below. A church-spire reflected the late spring moon. “How beautiful it is!” I exclaimed.
“Is it?” Charley seemed to reply in a voice that sounded angry and cynical.
Just then a car tore past, screeching its tyres. Someone opened a passenger-door, screamed and banged it close. In an instant the beauty I had perceived a moment ago changed into a harsh, monochrome, carbon-monoxide world of tortured reality. I ran my fingers through my hair. It snapped and crackled like coils of bare electric wire and my fingers felt like steel claws. I could feel myself falling into psychosis.
“There’s too much Speed in this Acid,” I replied in a hollow voice.3
Staring at the bare light-bulb in my room I felt myself melting into a vast continuum of time, going back several millennia. I saw Moses cross the Red Sea with the Israelites. The continuum zoomed back into my room at Mount Ararat Road. Then an Amerindian spoke from the pit of my stomach and announced himself to be God. I could feel the Indian trapped in a world where his spirit had become enslaved by materialism. I looked into the light-bulb and in its centre saw another Planet somewhere on the other side of the universe waiting to be populated by the human race. To get there we would have to travel faster than light itself. It lay beyond death.
“After we die and leave this place we shall fly there,” the Indian declared. “And that new Planet shall be called Peace!”
Taking a walk in Richmond Great Park, I would look at the trees, seeing their branches opening into the sky, spreading their nervous systems out into space and deep into the ground. I felt like a sannyasi travelling through the concrete jungles of the West.4 One day I sat in the middle of the parquet floor of the bandstand in the Park and sang to the deer. They gathered about to listen and lay down in the grass, their tails flicking away flies. Everything was holy. The sun set, lighting up the glass towers of central London far on the horizon. A red aircraft-navigation light, blinking above a distant telecommunications tower, reminded me of another city of silver domes and towers — perhaps on Mars or on another planet somewhere else in time and the universe...
Twenty-three years on this Earth, born under the Union Jack. My mother had brought me into the world and to this strange land. Now I was alone. All my past was gone. I was a holy man singing to the deer in the Park...
One night, I went deep into the karma of my adopted land ... saw it as a crown of barbed wire and thorns. I saw how everyday we crucified the Christ over and over. The world in which I found myself was full of the horror of a time without a soul. We had been conditioned, anaesthetized to accept it since childhood but some of us it seemed were destined to see through the anodyne.
I began to see its stark ugliness and its beauty. The world was both light and dark. Here was the wasteland that T.S. Eliot had described in a poem few cared to understand but which I had been fortunate to study. Eliot’s Waste Land was not in the past. It was still here with us in the material world where man lives by bread alone:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the Sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
and the dry stone no sound of water.5
Where was the meaning of being in a myopic civilization that lay trapped between heaven and hell, preoccupied with survival and opportunism? And who had made the rules in this deathly competition? What had I to do with any of it when deep inside me I felt so alien from it all? Then I began to see that it wasn’t possible to separate the outer from the inner. Everything on the third dimension seemed to be separated but looking beyond the duality of that which separated everything from everything else I began to get a very different picture of the universe.
One morning I emerged from a trip to find myself sitting in the corner of my room while the others who were there argued pointlessly amongst themselves. I sat and watched them as the thought arose that we found ourselves, right then and there, not by accident but as part of a much greater mystery. We were all players in a game of consciousness. And last night we had played the game on a dimension where the laws of reason and time made as much sense as a sub-nuclear quark to Newtonian physics ... I’m sitting here, I thought, and they’re here with me because I dreamed me and them as well as this room, this house, and country as well as this time called the twentieth century! It was all an illusion ... Maya6... and yet, it was very real ... an aspect of a much vaster holographic thought which existed beyond the limitations of time and space7...
I had glimpsed a sense of divinity as well as a state resembling hell — a sort of temporary unsanity — and through a transcendence of self reached a kind of mystic unity. All part of that other world experience to which I returned again and again to perceive life through both ends of a cosmic telescope. We were the players. It was a scary thought that ‘I‘ was responsible for the world in which I found myself — for its wickedness and horror as well as its beauty. The trips would often leave my body and mind feeling wasted like a battlefield. I wanted to sleep and forget the whole awesome experience. The discovery that everything was illusory and that the normal world was no longer a safe or comfortable haven had cast me into a no-man’s-land. Suddenly, to be a conscious human-being had become too painful a burden to bear. Not even death it seemed could provide more than a brief forgetfulness. There was really no escape-hatch. To awake into consciousness, to find the answers, was only possible when the I began to see Them as aspects of Itself... Out there as well as in here.
And we were waking up to find ourselves right inside the Age of Kali, the final destructive Age of the Mahayuga Cycle in which the Creator steered us — each players in that game — through the Biggest Trip of All.8
I was too afraid to grasp such a reality. I had begun to lift myself out of forgetfulness but was not prepared yet to deal with the information that the universe now fed me. Lying in a seedy old bedsitter, surrounded by people I hardly knew, having lost all the material security of my past, without a job or any obvious future, I awoke into a strange new world. Through some unconscious, unplanned rite of self-initiation it seemed as if I had travelled across several universes and times to get to this eternal moment of knowing. Yet, it was not the nirvana I had sought. The illusions had gone and I found myself right in the middle of the sangsara of this world.9
The wonder and awe of the LSD experience would wear off and leave me locked inside the deadness of consensus-normality. And every time I returned to that world it seemed to be more dead than ever before! I was alone. Neither religion nor education had prepared me for this. I was totally alone in a world of my making. No longer the unthinking, conventional, middle-class me. The mask of pretence had fallen to reveal … the face of God?
Sometimes, paranoia and psychosis threatened to take over. Fearful demons would dance in my brain and I gripped desperately onto the final vestige of sanity as it threatened to slip away for ever. I felt myself to be on the edge of some kind of nervous breakdown. What I had perceived as the madness of the world was now my own. The walls between in-here and out-there had collapsed.
I shaved my hair off in a symbolic act of renouncing the world. My head felt ready to explode and the fires of kundalini — prematurely roused — raged inside me.10 I mistook it to be insanity. Just occasionally glimpsing a great inner peace which seemed to reside at the very centre of my being, I entered the timeless bliss of the Pure Land.11 It dawned in me that nothing could redeem the aspects of death into which I peered now but love and compassion. For it is love that quickens and transforms us. Without it we fall back into an existence full of misery and pain. Through love alone could I redeem my life and grow beyond fear. Love was in everything and beyond all of it.
I knew that I had poisoned myself with too many toxic chemicals. When we bought and took street Acid we just didn’t know what might be in it. But we took that risk over and over. I knew I had to pull back before it was too late. I began to feel an invisible Christ Presence by my side, guiding and protecting me from the consequences of my careless actions. And the events that followed subsequently enabled me to begin detoxifying and healing myself.
But the question remained: How was I to understand an experience that had caused me to shift my perception of living so radically? It felt as if I had fallen off a surfboard into the barrel of a wave and on emerging had discovered that the beach had changed. Though it appeared the same as before its place in time had shifted and I seemed to come out of the wave into another planet somewhere else in the universe. Everything in the world remained as I had left it. But the lens through which I perceived it was different.
How could I understand it? I felt unable to turn to the Christian church whose conventional doctrines did not accommodate such leading questions as karma and reincarnation. I was nominally only part Christian. For the first time my other heritage broke its silence and moved into help. I could feel the compassion of the Buddha speak within me. The Eastern wisdoms were mine also and in them I might find the answers.
Having been brought up as a Christian in a life styled predominantly on occidental culture I knew very little about Buddhism. But now I could feel the need to return to that heritage to contact the ancestral spirit which would give me a spiritual healing-home in which to recover. I had sensed the Christ presence in a very personal way that had nothing to do with the established orthodoxy of the Christian church.
At that time I discovered the TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD (the Bardo Thôdol or Liberation by Hearing on the After-Death Plane) which has been used for centuries by Mahayana Buddhists as a spiritual text and guide.12 In Tibet, Egypt, the Druid civilizations of the West and elsewhere the science of dying had long been taught as an essential part of life. In Mahayana Buddhism I discovered that death, far from being a finite end, was seen as a real opportunity for liberation from the illusion of sangsara — i.e. where everything and every being appeared to be separate. If that sense of unity in all things could be understood and maintained, liberation from the eternal round of sangsara could be achieved. All that was experienced on the physical plane in life and the Astral plane (particularly during the period between death and rebirth) sprang from the subconscious mind. Immediately after death a Clear White Light was seen — the clear light of nirvana. If it was not recognized and reached the dead soul began a gradual descent into another state of illusion over a period of forty-nine days.
During the final stages of its descent the soul began to draw close to rebirth. Frightening apparitions awaited those who continued the downward path into the illusory world of sangsara. The soul — by then clothed in a desire-body — was constantly encouraged to face these apparitions, to see their unreality. For “The Lords of Death are thine own hallucinations.”13 In death, I learnt, the mind continued to be aware of events. Only the physical body was no longer present. Like old movies, the experiences that reside in the subconscious continued to play. By recognizing their source they might cease to cause the soul fear and the need to escape. Thus liberation might be achieved and rebirth avoided.
I began to see a relationship between the experiences described in the Bardo world during the time of death and the effects of psychedelics. In the Bardo Thôdol I found compassionate advice which could help me understand, better, my own life-death initiations with LSD. Though written many centuries ago to assist the dying and the dead it was clear to me that the meaning of the Thôdol held true for the living.
When the shapes of mine empty thought-forms dawn upon
me here,
May the Buddhas, exerting the power of their
divine compassion,
Cause it to come that there be neither awe nor terror
in the Bardo.
When the bright radiances of the Five Wisdoms shine
upon me now,
Let it come that I, neither awed nor terrified, may
recognize them to be of myself;
When the apparitions of the Peaceful and Wrathful forms
are dawning upon me here,
Let it come that I, obtaining the assurance of fearlessness,
may recognize the Bardo.14
Our daily lives are constantly affected by the play of subconscious thoughts and reactions. The LSD experience I discovered was influenced, too, by the emergence of subconscious thought-forms. One moment we might know heaven and, in the very next instant, find ourselves falling into hell. The more the ego resisted the unpleasant, the more frightening the experience would become. The only thing was to stop resisting and simply to watch from a distance as the old movies played themselves out.
The psychedelic experience is part of sangsara also, not nirvana. The Tantric symbols used in the Bardo Thôdol correspond to the various psychic nerves and centres called nadis and chakras which store subconscious impulses. And behind the symbolism of deities, mandalas and psychic centres lay “the rational explanation ... that each deity, as it dawns from its appropriate psychic-centre, represents the coming into after-death karmic activity of some corresponding impulse or passion of the complex consciousness. As though in an initiatory mystery-play, the actors for each day of the Bardo come on the mind-stage of the deceased who is their sole spectator; and their director is Karma.”15
LSD overloads and blasts open the psychic centres. The street Acid we bought might have had other toxins such as amphetamine which wreak havoc on the nervous system and cause paranoia. The more we took the black-market psychedelic the greater was the chance of damaging our minds permanently or temporarily. Much later I discovered how any strong drug, including alcohol and cigarettes, can affect the body’s physical and psychic equilibrium, leaving the aura open to outside influences. Seeking escape and short cuts to nirvana we had, in fact, played Russian Roulette with our lives.
For me the process of healing took years and caused much pain to my family and myself. But I was fortunate and with my healing I found the guru. Others were less fortunate. The last time I met Charley — about ten years after Richmond — he shook uncontrollably as if with Delirium Tremens. He had spent years going in and out of mental homes and was sedated with heavy tranquillizers. Though his thinking was quite normal and his reasoning as sharp as ever his nerves were shot to pieces. The paths to God are many and I pray that his is today a happier one.
We grow from our experiences. The more harrowing they are the more permanent the lesson! Whatever method or path we might choose we always return to God. No life ever need be wasted. Looking back at the ‘sixties I am struck by the clumsy and dangerous manner in which we as individuals and as a generation sought to discover ourselves. Was LSD and Flower Power a kind of mass initiation-ceremony or the repetition of a hedonistic past to be re-experienced before going on into the Aquarian Age? Each generation, after all, provides a bridge between the past and a future which it helps to create.
In other civilizations, various methods had been used to alter consciousness in order to provide religious initiations. These initiations were administered by priests who had the knowledge and training to administer such rites. Hallucinogens were revered for their holiness. Some civilizations, such as that of the Brahmans in India, concentrated on yoga and meditation as the process to enlightenment and liberation. During the permissive atmosphere of the ‘sixties we possessed little knowledge of the use of hallucinogens. They were abused in a careless and destructive manner and, in consequence, caused much psychic and physical damage.
Of the many who took LSD a fair number must have turned to seek God in less destructive and more lasting ways. I believe that the dead-end cul-de-sacs we encountered in seeking instant pathways to nirvana were part of the playing-out of our karmic evolution. But they provided us also with a powerful reminder — if we cared to listen — why we had chosen to incarnate in this time and place.
POST-SCRIPT: More recently, I have discovered that many of the ‘rites-of-passage’ I went through during my formative years had occurred within the area of a great Zodiac Circle or Star Temple in the suburbs of London. The Kingston Zodiac was discovered after geomantic research in the ‘seventies and in the zodiacal patterns that were unearthed I discovered a rich, personal meaning.16
During those crucial years, it turned out that I had lived, studied and undergone spiritual self-initiation in the areas of the Kingston Zodiac where the three main signs of my horoscope fell. And, finally I had drawn close to Lud, the ancient Celtic God of Light, on Mount Ararat! Today, I believe Baba to be the Christ presence who had protected me through those difficult times — through the scary, Bardo-like experiences of LSD — and who had stood invisibly by my side to deliver the Bardo Thôdol into my hands. Though I did not know it, then, I was on the road to the Avathar and even greater revelations.17
© RW 1989
Three years later I left college with a teacher’s certificate and little chance of getting a job. With a few others I had fallen foul of the college administration which had provided me — I discovered in a roundabout way — with a report that would prevent my finding a permanent post. The system just didn’t need people like me. I had naively believed what my tutors had told me about exporting our ideals into the teaching profession. Now, I discovered that the reality was very different. Despite the great changes taking place in the world, what we discovered when sent out into the schools was a very conservative establishment hanging onto its outdated values. Everything told me that this was no place to be for anyone with the slightest degree of imagination and individuality.
After a short holiday in France I found work as a factory storeman. Four months later I was out of work and on social welfare. I sold my car to raise money. Lonely, depressed and withdrawn from the world I escaped by sleeping a lot. It became difficult at times just to get up to go to the welfare office to pick up my cheque. One evening I was at a party and someone sold me some LSD. Hiding it in the barrel of a pen, I walked the six miles back to my flat and swallowed the microdot. The subsequent experience was much more pleasant than the first time I had taken it and the inner worlds into which I travelled seemed to have far more meaning than the grey existence of normality.
My nocturnal escapade disturbed the students upstairs who complained to the landlady. “If Mr. Winter is unable to control his transports I shall have to ask you both to leave!” she wrote my flat-mate.
One cold March day, wheezing from a heavy bronchial attack, I packed my belongings and left. Richmond Hill, in south-west London, provided a night-time panorama which reminded me of the view from the Sacré Coeur in Paris. There I found a bedsitter on the first-floor of a decaying Victorian house at the top of Mount Ararat Road. Next to me lived a retired Scots Tea Planter who had worked in Ceylon. He drank heavily and mostly I kept out of his way. When we met occasionally in the communal kitchen we got on with each other. In the other room was a retired Major in his ‘seventies who was a vegetarian and a spiritualist. He didn’t say much but I was attracted by what I thought of then as his eccentricities. One day just before he moved out we got talking.
“D’you see that building across the road?” he asked, pointing out of the kitchen window. “Kaiser William stayed there when he visited Richmond. Now it’s a brothel. All these houses are neglected and they’re falling down. The land will fetch a fortune ... and watch the landlady’s agent. He’s a very violent man and won’t worry about using unpleasant tactics if you upset him.”
The Major found a companion to marry and went to live on the South Coast. I moved into his old room which had a peaceful atmosphere unlike the rest of the house. It became a haven from all my troubles. Into my old room moved Charley.
Charley came from a rich family where the only thing he lacked seemed to be love. He had dropped out of school and spent his days saving money to travel to Afghanistan where he could live cheaply and smoke all the marijuana he wanted.
“Man, it’s a beautiful place. People are free there. Not like the West where everyone behaves like robots in a machine!”1 Charley was just passing through.
Listening to SERGEANT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND we overloaded our nervous systems regularly with street Acid. What did it matter?2 Nobody cared about anything anymore. Our civilization hadn’t much longer to go and if Acid turned us on, why not? At least we could seek some kind of more meaningful reality in chemical substances with names like White Lightning and California Sunshine.
Standing by the large kitchen window tripping I gazed out onto the street below. A church-spire reflected the late spring moon. “How beautiful it is!” I exclaimed.
“Is it?” Charley seemed to reply in a voice that sounded angry and cynical.
Just then a car tore past, screeching its tyres. Someone opened a passenger-door, screamed and banged it close. In an instant the beauty I had perceived a moment ago changed into a harsh, monochrome, carbon-monoxide world of tortured reality. I ran my fingers through my hair. It snapped and crackled like coils of bare electric wire and my fingers felt like steel claws. I could feel myself falling into psychosis.
“There’s too much Speed in this Acid,” I replied in a hollow voice.3
Staring at the bare light-bulb in my room I felt myself melting into a vast continuum of time, going back several millennia. I saw Moses cross the Red Sea with the Israelites. The continuum zoomed back into my room at Mount Ararat Road. Then an Amerindian spoke from the pit of my stomach and announced himself to be God. I could feel the Indian trapped in a world where his spirit had become enslaved by materialism. I looked into the light-bulb and in its centre saw another Planet somewhere on the other side of the universe waiting to be populated by the human race. To get there we would have to travel faster than light itself. It lay beyond death.
“After we die and leave this place we shall fly there,” the Indian declared. “And that new Planet shall be called Peace!”
Taking a walk in Richmond Great Park, I would look at the trees, seeing their branches opening into the sky, spreading their nervous systems out into space and deep into the ground. I felt like a sannyasi travelling through the concrete jungles of the West.4 One day I sat in the middle of the parquet floor of the bandstand in the Park and sang to the deer. They gathered about to listen and lay down in the grass, their tails flicking away flies. Everything was holy. The sun set, lighting up the glass towers of central London far on the horizon. A red aircraft-navigation light, blinking above a distant telecommunications tower, reminded me of another city of silver domes and towers — perhaps on Mars or on another planet somewhere else in time and the universe...
Twenty-three years on this Earth, born under the Union Jack. My mother had brought me into the world and to this strange land. Now I was alone. All my past was gone. I was a holy man singing to the deer in the Park...
One night, I went deep into the karma of my adopted land ... saw it as a crown of barbed wire and thorns. I saw how everyday we crucified the Christ over and over. The world in which I found myself was full of the horror of a time without a soul. We had been conditioned, anaesthetized to accept it since childhood but some of us it seemed were destined to see through the anodyne.
I began to see its stark ugliness and its beauty. The world was both light and dark. Here was the wasteland that T.S. Eliot had described in a poem few cared to understand but which I had been fortunate to study. Eliot’s Waste Land was not in the past. It was still here with us in the material world where man lives by bread alone:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the Sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
and the dry stone no sound of water.5
Where was the meaning of being in a myopic civilization that lay trapped between heaven and hell, preoccupied with survival and opportunism? And who had made the rules in this deathly competition? What had I to do with any of it when deep inside me I felt so alien from it all? Then I began to see that it wasn’t possible to separate the outer from the inner. Everything on the third dimension seemed to be separated but looking beyond the duality of that which separated everything from everything else I began to get a very different picture of the universe.
One morning I emerged from a trip to find myself sitting in the corner of my room while the others who were there argued pointlessly amongst themselves. I sat and watched them as the thought arose that we found ourselves, right then and there, not by accident but as part of a much greater mystery. We were all players in a game of consciousness. And last night we had played the game on a dimension where the laws of reason and time made as much sense as a sub-nuclear quark to Newtonian physics ... I’m sitting here, I thought, and they’re here with me because I dreamed me and them as well as this room, this house, and country as well as this time called the twentieth century! It was all an illusion ... Maya6... and yet, it was very real ... an aspect of a much vaster holographic thought which existed beyond the limitations of time and space7...
I had glimpsed a sense of divinity as well as a state resembling hell — a sort of temporary unsanity — and through a transcendence of self reached a kind of mystic unity. All part of that other world experience to which I returned again and again to perceive life through both ends of a cosmic telescope. We were the players. It was a scary thought that ‘I‘ was responsible for the world in which I found myself — for its wickedness and horror as well as its beauty. The trips would often leave my body and mind feeling wasted like a battlefield. I wanted to sleep and forget the whole awesome experience. The discovery that everything was illusory and that the normal world was no longer a safe or comfortable haven had cast me into a no-man’s-land. Suddenly, to be a conscious human-being had become too painful a burden to bear. Not even death it seemed could provide more than a brief forgetfulness. There was really no escape-hatch. To awake into consciousness, to find the answers, was only possible when the I began to see Them as aspects of Itself... Out there as well as in here.
And we were waking up to find ourselves right inside the Age of Kali, the final destructive Age of the Mahayuga Cycle in which the Creator steered us — each players in that game — through the Biggest Trip of All.8
I was too afraid to grasp such a reality. I had begun to lift myself out of forgetfulness but was not prepared yet to deal with the information that the universe now fed me. Lying in a seedy old bedsitter, surrounded by people I hardly knew, having lost all the material security of my past, without a job or any obvious future, I awoke into a strange new world. Through some unconscious, unplanned rite of self-initiation it seemed as if I had travelled across several universes and times to get to this eternal moment of knowing. Yet, it was not the nirvana I had sought. The illusions had gone and I found myself right in the middle of the sangsara of this world.9
The wonder and awe of the LSD experience would wear off and leave me locked inside the deadness of consensus-normality. And every time I returned to that world it seemed to be more dead than ever before! I was alone. Neither religion nor education had prepared me for this. I was totally alone in a world of my making. No longer the unthinking, conventional, middle-class me. The mask of pretence had fallen to reveal … the face of God?
Sometimes, paranoia and psychosis threatened to take over. Fearful demons would dance in my brain and I gripped desperately onto the final vestige of sanity as it threatened to slip away for ever. I felt myself to be on the edge of some kind of nervous breakdown. What I had perceived as the madness of the world was now my own. The walls between in-here and out-there had collapsed.
I shaved my hair off in a symbolic act of renouncing the world. My head felt ready to explode and the fires of kundalini — prematurely roused — raged inside me.10 I mistook it to be insanity. Just occasionally glimpsing a great inner peace which seemed to reside at the very centre of my being, I entered the timeless bliss of the Pure Land.11 It dawned in me that nothing could redeem the aspects of death into which I peered now but love and compassion. For it is love that quickens and transforms us. Without it we fall back into an existence full of misery and pain. Through love alone could I redeem my life and grow beyond fear. Love was in everything and beyond all of it.
I knew that I had poisoned myself with too many toxic chemicals. When we bought and took street Acid we just didn’t know what might be in it. But we took that risk over and over. I knew I had to pull back before it was too late. I began to feel an invisible Christ Presence by my side, guiding and protecting me from the consequences of my careless actions. And the events that followed subsequently enabled me to begin detoxifying and healing myself.
But the question remained: How was I to understand an experience that had caused me to shift my perception of living so radically? It felt as if I had fallen off a surfboard into the barrel of a wave and on emerging had discovered that the beach had changed. Though it appeared the same as before its place in time had shifted and I seemed to come out of the wave into another planet somewhere else in the universe. Everything in the world remained as I had left it. But the lens through which I perceived it was different.
How could I understand it? I felt unable to turn to the Christian church whose conventional doctrines did not accommodate such leading questions as karma and reincarnation. I was nominally only part Christian. For the first time my other heritage broke its silence and moved into help. I could feel the compassion of the Buddha speak within me. The Eastern wisdoms were mine also and in them I might find the answers.
Having been brought up as a Christian in a life styled predominantly on occidental culture I knew very little about Buddhism. But now I could feel the need to return to that heritage to contact the ancestral spirit which would give me a spiritual healing-home in which to recover. I had sensed the Christ presence in a very personal way that had nothing to do with the established orthodoxy of the Christian church.
At that time I discovered the TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD (the Bardo Thôdol or Liberation by Hearing on the After-Death Plane) which has been used for centuries by Mahayana Buddhists as a spiritual text and guide.12 In Tibet, Egypt, the Druid civilizations of the West and elsewhere the science of dying had long been taught as an essential part of life. In Mahayana Buddhism I discovered that death, far from being a finite end, was seen as a real opportunity for liberation from the illusion of sangsara — i.e. where everything and every being appeared to be separate. If that sense of unity in all things could be understood and maintained, liberation from the eternal round of sangsara could be achieved. All that was experienced on the physical plane in life and the Astral plane (particularly during the period between death and rebirth) sprang from the subconscious mind. Immediately after death a Clear White Light was seen — the clear light of nirvana. If it was not recognized and reached the dead soul began a gradual descent into another state of illusion over a period of forty-nine days.
During the final stages of its descent the soul began to draw close to rebirth. Frightening apparitions awaited those who continued the downward path into the illusory world of sangsara. The soul — by then clothed in a desire-body — was constantly encouraged to face these apparitions, to see their unreality. For “The Lords of Death are thine own hallucinations.”13 In death, I learnt, the mind continued to be aware of events. Only the physical body was no longer present. Like old movies, the experiences that reside in the subconscious continued to play. By recognizing their source they might cease to cause the soul fear and the need to escape. Thus liberation might be achieved and rebirth avoided.
I began to see a relationship between the experiences described in the Bardo world during the time of death and the effects of psychedelics. In the Bardo Thôdol I found compassionate advice which could help me understand, better, my own life-death initiations with LSD. Though written many centuries ago to assist the dying and the dead it was clear to me that the meaning of the Thôdol held true for the living.
When the shapes of mine empty thought-forms dawn upon
me here,
May the Buddhas, exerting the power of their
divine compassion,
Cause it to come that there be neither awe nor terror
in the Bardo.
When the bright radiances of the Five Wisdoms shine
upon me now,
Let it come that I, neither awed nor terrified, may
recognize them to be of myself;
When the apparitions of the Peaceful and Wrathful forms
are dawning upon me here,
Let it come that I, obtaining the assurance of fearlessness,
may recognize the Bardo.14
Our daily lives are constantly affected by the play of subconscious thoughts and reactions. The LSD experience I discovered was influenced, too, by the emergence of subconscious thought-forms. One moment we might know heaven and, in the very next instant, find ourselves falling into hell. The more the ego resisted the unpleasant, the more frightening the experience would become. The only thing was to stop resisting and simply to watch from a distance as the old movies played themselves out.
The psychedelic experience is part of sangsara also, not nirvana. The Tantric symbols used in the Bardo Thôdol correspond to the various psychic nerves and centres called nadis and chakras which store subconscious impulses. And behind the symbolism of deities, mandalas and psychic centres lay “the rational explanation ... that each deity, as it dawns from its appropriate psychic-centre, represents the coming into after-death karmic activity of some corresponding impulse or passion of the complex consciousness. As though in an initiatory mystery-play, the actors for each day of the Bardo come on the mind-stage of the deceased who is their sole spectator; and their director is Karma.”15
LSD overloads and blasts open the psychic centres. The street Acid we bought might have had other toxins such as amphetamine which wreak havoc on the nervous system and cause paranoia. The more we took the black-market psychedelic the greater was the chance of damaging our minds permanently or temporarily. Much later I discovered how any strong drug, including alcohol and cigarettes, can affect the body’s physical and psychic equilibrium, leaving the aura open to outside influences. Seeking escape and short cuts to nirvana we had, in fact, played Russian Roulette with our lives.
For me the process of healing took years and caused much pain to my family and myself. But I was fortunate and with my healing I found the guru. Others were less fortunate. The last time I met Charley — about ten years after Richmond — he shook uncontrollably as if with Delirium Tremens. He had spent years going in and out of mental homes and was sedated with heavy tranquillizers. Though his thinking was quite normal and his reasoning as sharp as ever his nerves were shot to pieces. The paths to God are many and I pray that his is today a happier one.
We grow from our experiences. The more harrowing they are the more permanent the lesson! Whatever method or path we might choose we always return to God. No life ever need be wasted. Looking back at the ‘sixties I am struck by the clumsy and dangerous manner in which we as individuals and as a generation sought to discover ourselves. Was LSD and Flower Power a kind of mass initiation-ceremony or the repetition of a hedonistic past to be re-experienced before going on into the Aquarian Age? Each generation, after all, provides a bridge between the past and a future which it helps to create.
In other civilizations, various methods had been used to alter consciousness in order to provide religious initiations. These initiations were administered by priests who had the knowledge and training to administer such rites. Hallucinogens were revered for their holiness. Some civilizations, such as that of the Brahmans in India, concentrated on yoga and meditation as the process to enlightenment and liberation. During the permissive atmosphere of the ‘sixties we possessed little knowledge of the use of hallucinogens. They were abused in a careless and destructive manner and, in consequence, caused much psychic and physical damage.
Of the many who took LSD a fair number must have turned to seek God in less destructive and more lasting ways. I believe that the dead-end cul-de-sacs we encountered in seeking instant pathways to nirvana were part of the playing-out of our karmic evolution. But they provided us also with a powerful reminder — if we cared to listen — why we had chosen to incarnate in this time and place.
POST-SCRIPT: More recently, I have discovered that many of the ‘rites-of-passage’ I went through during my formative years had occurred within the area of a great Zodiac Circle or Star Temple in the suburbs of London. The Kingston Zodiac was discovered after geomantic research in the ‘seventies and in the zodiacal patterns that were unearthed I discovered a rich, personal meaning.16
During those crucial years, it turned out that I had lived, studied and undergone spiritual self-initiation in the areas of the Kingston Zodiac where the three main signs of my horoscope fell. And, finally I had drawn close to Lud, the ancient Celtic God of Light, on Mount Ararat! Today, I believe Baba to be the Christ presence who had protected me through those difficult times — through the scary, Bardo-like experiences of LSD — and who had stood invisibly by my side to deliver the Bardo Thôdol into my hands. Though I did not know it, then, I was on the road to the Avathar and even greater revelations.17
© RW 1989
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