“Those who live in illusion have the illusion to live.”

Grégoire de Kalbermatten

I used to sing, accompanying myself on guitar in Open Mic nights in

New York bars. The MC in Irvington New York, before allowing me to

perform, asked,

“What’s your genre?”

“Songs I wrote.”

“You gotta have a genre,” he said.

When I came offstage having had the audience applaud as much

as they tend to do at these things, most of them anyway were other

musicians awaiting their turn, I asked the MC what he thought my

genre was.

“British Punk,” he said without hesitation and without a sense of the

unwitting slight he’d just offered, for calling the wrong kind of

Beflastman British could well have the same kind of effect as stepping

on a land mine.

I’m Irish, born in Belfast, But that is a kind of genre too, in the

original 19th Century French meaning of the word - a kind.

Identity, genre, is a strange thing for ,we’re all born human

beings, but at some point afterwards, labels are stuck on us without

anyone asking us. Then we willingly or not, chose an identity for

ourselves. Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, for example,

was born in Dublin into the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland when

told that he was Irish, replied, “Because a man is born in

a stable doesn’t make him a horse.”

Thus we come to accept labels that we weren’t born with,

Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim etc.No one sought our

permission, these labels just were affixed.

A Belfast poet, Derek Mahon, quipped, “At home in exile.” Did I

understand this? I think not. Exile is banishment, being ostracized,

who did it to me? No one. I wasn’t in exile, I just didn’t fit in, not into

the family into which I was born, nor the society, I thought for most of

my life I was born in the wrong place, but it took a lot of introspection

and time to conclude that I was born in the right place. My favorite

aunt said of me, “he was one of us, but different”.

Like many Ulstermen, identity is constantly challenged. In

the Bronx where I lived for the first sixteen years in the USA, it’s

automatically assumed that I’m a Catholic, ergo a supporter of Sinn

and the Provisional IRA. In the Broader USA, I am deemed to be Scots

Irish. Amongst the Ulster Protestants in my hometown I’m inalienably,

unarguably British, and unlikely as it may seem, there are Irish

nationalists, north and south of the border who would completely

agree with them, probably the only common ground they’d share.

Viz a viz Ireland, the English are historically unaware, the Irish

know too much and some Protestant Northern Irish are adept at living

simultaneously in the 17th century as well as in the present one.

As a young salesman, in England, my boss in Procter and

Gamble, an American company, told me that if I wanted to get on I

would have to lose my regional accent! The manageress in a

small self service store in St. Helens, Lancashire, asked me if I was Irish

and when I said I was, said, straight out:

“I don’t like the Irish.”

I said, “I couldn’t care less what you like. I get twelve pounds a week

doing this lousy job, and that’s bad enough but then I have to listen to

nonsense from people like you! Being Irish wasn’t a choice I made,

blame it on my mum and dad!” Much to my surprise, the sales call

continued as though this unpleasant interlude hadn’t occurred.

There’s a Machiavellian aspect to being from Ulster and I wasn’t

being entirely open with the shop manageress. Plenty of Irish people

come to England and lose their accents in a matter of months. Oscar

Wilde, for example, born in Dublin, who attended a boarding school

in Eniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, had a broad Irish accent until he came

to Oxford university. In three months he jettisoned his accent. Some

don’t, neither Joyce, Beckett nor Heaney lost theirs.

I kept my accent too, although mine in the sixty years since I left

Ireland was like a stone eroded by the impact of running water.

Even my name changed wherever I went. In East Belfast it was

Aahln, in London it was Ehlin, and in New York it, bizarrely to my ears,

became Ellen. What to do?

I want to be upfront about my life. Truth is important. Truth is a

quality of the spirit and in the ancient Vedic culture, these qualities

were deemed to be Sat, Chit, Ananda, truth, awareness and bliss.

Truth came first.

If you’re lucky, and I mostly was, it was my good fortune to come

into contact with the people I most needed to meet at the very time I

needed them, at each and every stage throughout my life.

Thus, over the years, my parents, grandmothers, schoolteachers,

my Russian wife, some bosses at work, certainly John Solomon at

Procter and Gamble and Peter Mayer, the American publishing

genius who turned around the great loss making ship of Penguin and

eventually an incarnation, the latter being the most important.

Her name, Mrs. Nirmala Srivastava, more commonly known as

Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi. She lived in London for sixteen years with

her husband, C.P. Srivastava, KMCG, who had been knighted by the

Queen of England for his services as Secretary General of the

International Maritime Organisation, the only United Nations body

based there and where he was uniquely re- elected for four

consecutive four year terms.

How many books have you read where the author claimed to

have met God in human form. Such a person must surely be

misinformed or mad to believe such a thing. How many of the

thousands who met Lord Jesus Christ in his lifetime recognized his

divinity? His mother, certainly, Mary Magdalene too but it was only

after his reappearance after death when he showed his disciples the

stigmata that they came to know.

There is therefore no requirement on you, the reader, to deal with

that in any manner different to anything else you come across in this

book. I will relate incidents about her in my life with no desire or

interest to encourage anyone to pursue the path I did.

I was a good salesman in my day, and were it possible, I would

unhesitatingly sell you, the reader to help you know what I know if I

could, but I can’t, it’s not possible as you will see.

For sure, if it wasn’t for Shri Mataji, I’d be long dead, nearly

twenty years now at the time of writing and that’s a statement made

separately by a US doctor and a US surgeon.

An incarnation? I was asked to head up a group who went into

public high schools across the USA showing students how to

meditate. This was through HealthCorps, a 501c3, a not for profit

foundation and the president, Michelle Bouchard, by way of

introduction, took me out for lunch and at one point asked, “Do you

believe that Shri Mataji is the Adi Shakti?” (the Adi Shakti being the

divine feminine.)

I’m thinking, “This is where we get thrown out of HealthCorps”.

“If I were to write on page everything I know as opposed to the

millions of things I believe or have an opinion about, there’d be very

little on the paper. But the first thing I’d write would be that I know she

is the Adi Shakti.”

She leaned over, touched my forearm and with a huge smile on her

face, said, “I’m so happy.”

But mere words, as in this case, are as nothing in the matter as to

whether someone gets it or not.

Shri Mataji herself said, “In the judgement of the divine love we

have two types of people: one who are seekers of truth and the

another who are not. They may be good people, they may be nice

people, they been doing a lot of good work, social work, this work,

missionary work, every sort of work they might be doing. But if they

are not seeking the truth, then they do not come to that category

where God has to incarnate. So try to understand the

preciousness, the importance of seekers. And that’s what you have

been seeking. Very few persons. If you take the percentage of

seekers, is very, very wee bit. But it’s very important because, say a

one little part of gold is much more valuable than mounds of steel. In

the same way a seeker is much more valuable in the growth of

spirituality. The whole universe was created, whole

atmosphere was built, all the evolution took place for what?”

Why would anyone wish to read my story? One reason might be

that I’ll explain how someone like me, without a college degree, who

left school at sixteen, became, with ease, a director of three book

publishing companies, Corgi, Penguin and Bloomsbury respectively.

And in doing so, consistently came up with ideas for books that sold

many millions of copies.

And, for example, when six months after starting to publish

books, when Bloomsbury’s business plan, which had us be hardcover

publishers, profitably selling on paperback rights to the major

paperback publishers, was in ruins, I was able to come up

with an alternative that worked.

When I asked two of my grandsons what qualities did they think I

have that brought this about, and some of my sons before them, they

hadn’t a clue as to why. Nor, I would have to say, were they

particularly interested which was fine by me. Thank God we’re not all

the same.

Certainly there were those I worked with who had higher IQ’s

than me, who had a number of qualities I significantly lacked. But

there were some things I brought to my work that singled me out as

beyond the merely good, some of those things I learned as a child,

some from my parents, my grandmothers, some from my teachers.

Why, when exposed to the same influences as I was, did others not

learn these things too? It is a question I have often puzzled and

pondered over. Throughout the book, I explain the things I learned

and figured out, that allowed the career success I experienced.

Penguin privately published a book in celebration for their first

fifty years. Guess how many finance directors are mentioned? None.

Or human resource directors, logistics directors, company secretaries,

distribution directors or marketing directors? Those who compiled

the book wrote mainly about editors and art directors.

Sales directors? Just one, me. And why? For doing something that

had nothing to do with what I was being paid to do.

Something I’ve never understood is this. Many will say they want

to be the best in their field, but if that’s so, why do they do exactly the

same things that everyone else does? Because it’s safe is the

probable answer, doing something different to the herd brings its

own incumbent, inherent risks.

Another constant of my life, in addition to the impact of teachers

and gurus, is the extent to which I have always been an outsider, but

that’s deceptive too. Superficially, I always thought of myself as that,

but then, in my early twenties I came to see that I was merely part of a

vast Western archetype. American movies showed the outsider, his

life stacked against the odds, against the orthodoxy all around him.

Beatniks, hippies, mods, rockers and punks were all evidence of this

outsiderness as mass movements. Commonly,students of my age

would be asked to contrast and compare Colin Wilson’s The Outsider

with Albert Camus’ work of the same name, now more commonly

known as “L’etranger.

But I came to see that there was more to this superficiality to me

as an outsider, for I could only appear to fit in, in Belfast, London or

New York, by acting a part.

Despite the conflicts of the personae and identities imposed on

me from outside, there’s more to it than that. Persona by the way, in

ancient Greek means mask. It’s something to hide behind.

My Russian wife, Lioudmila, of twenty-five years, formerly a

chemical engineer in the Soviet rocket industry, who specialized in

navigation systems for space rockets, is convinced that she and I were

married in at least one past life, specifically that we were Muslims,

married in India four hundred years or so ago. Certainly, I’ve never

met anyone who I completely understand and feel more comfortable

with than her, Even when she only had a few hundred words

of university English, we both understood each other perfectly.

There’s an amusing irony in our backgrounds. When I

married her, she had a small apartment in a hamlet called Yablonyavy

Ovrag, Apple Blossom Gully, across the Volga from the industrial city

of Togliatti, I had an apartment on the King’s Road in fashionable

Chelsea, a Mercedes and was a director of Bloomsbury Publishing

PLC. But whereas I was the son of a joiner who left school at

twelve, she had a great grandmother who was a Jewish Countess and

her father had been an apparatchik, head of food distribution in

the Soviet Republic of Kyrgisthan.

Appearances, we know, are deceptive but we’re still taken in by

them, see who we vote into power.

Inevitably there’s a strong Irish component in my artistic, spiritual

DNA and hence, as in the great epic of pre-Christian culture, the Táin

Bó Cúailnge, commonly known in English as The Cattle Raid of

Cooley, is essentially non-linear. This is also true of a number of

ancient texts from around the world.

I have no choice in the matter, obviously, like everyone else,

there’s a chronological aspect to the life I’ve led, but non linearity will

strongly feature in the story I hope to tell.

I am neither this body nor this mind. Who am I? I am eternal bliss and awareness!

When it comes to notions of identity I am spirit.

"Tad Niskala" by Adi Shankaracharya

Om. I am neither the mind,

Intelligence, ego nor chitta.

Neither the ears, the tongue,

Nor the senses of smell and sight.

Neither ether nor air.

I am eternal bliss and awareness -

I am Shiva! I am Shiva!

I am neither the prana,

Nor the five vital breaths.

Neither the seven elements of the body,

Nor its five sheaths,

Nor hands, nor feet, nor tongue,

Nor other organ of action.

I am eternal bliss and awareness -

I am Shiva! I am Shiva!

Neither fear, greed, delusion,

Loathing, nor liking have I.

Nothing of pride, or ego,

Or dharma or liberation.

Neither desire of the mind,

Nor object of its desiring.

I am eternal bliss and awareness -

I am Shiva! I am Shiva!

Nothing of pleasure or pain,

Or virtue or vice, do I know.

Of manta, of sacred place,

Of Vedas or sacrifice.

Neither I am the eater,

The food or the act of eating.

I am eternal bliss and awareness -

I am Shiva! I am Shiva!

Fear or death, I have none,

Nor any distinction of caste.

Neither father nor mother,

Not even a birth, have I.

Neither friend, nor comrade.

Neither disciple, nor Guru.

I am eternal bliss and awareness -

I am Shiva! I am Shiva!

I have no form or fancy.

The All-pervading am I.

Everywhere I exist,

Yet I am beyond the senses.

Neither salvation am I,

Nor anything to be known.

I am eternal bliss and awareness -

I am Shiva! I am Shiva!

My father’s in this photo, on his hunkers, at the front with his left

hand on his knee. His friend, Bob Barr, also from Belfast is on the left,

a quiet, lugubrious man as I recall. Click on the photo for more detail.

The faces of the men though smiling, are gaunt, hardened by the

working conditions they endured, brutalized by the weather, and

exploited by the bosses. My father was a union man, and I was proud

of him. Through economic circumstances, he left school at twelve, at

sixteen, he was apprenticed at Harland and Wolff in Belfast and apart

from the seven years of exile, he wrought there all his life on

Queens Island. Here’s a photo of him with other joiners on the deck of

a boat in Barrow in Furness (tradesmen of his vintage, for reasons

inexplicable to me, never called them ships, nor did they use the term

‘worked,’wrought was their expressed preference ). He was fired when

his apprenticeship was over because Harland and Wolff preferred to

hire another apprentice rather than pay him and the likes of him, a

journeyman’s wage. The years that followed, living

in cheap lodging houses while working in the great shipyards of

England and Scotland. Whilst I couldn’t identify with the experience, I

liked the rhythms in saying the names of the shipyards where he wrought:

Cammel Laird on the Mersey, John Brown on the Clyde

Vickers of Barrow in Furness, Thorneycroft of Southampton

Swan Hunter on the Tyne.

My father could hold his own in any company. He was asked to

build a kitchen in the home of Dr. Denis Rebbeck, the managing

director of Harland and Wolff. That out of a thousand joiners who

worked there at the time, the fact that he was the one asked to build a

kitchen for the top boss, tells more than I can about his skills. I

watched them engage in conversation and it was obvious the respect t

the latter had for him. My dad could recite Shakespeare at length and

Ulster doggerel too.

Dr. Rebbeck, at one stage, when I wasn't there, asked my dad

about me. I was about to take what was known in Northern Ireland as

the Qualifying Exam, the equivalent of the Eleven Plus in England. Dr.

Rebbeck told my dad he was also Chairman of the Board of Governors

of Campbell College, the poshest, most prestigious school in the north.

He said if I passed the Qualifying, he would get me a free place at

Campbell. My dad told me and asked what I thought. Without much

hesitation, I said I didn't want to go there. That was the end of it, my

dad didn't ask why but the reason was that I knew that I'd

stand out as the poor boy, and I knew I wasn't.

Later, when I was playing rugby (at a very low level) against

Campbell College and tackled my opposite number, as he raised

himself off the ground, he said, "You working class bastard".

Who am I? I knew I was none of these things, things imposed on

me by others and circumstances, for I have come to know that I am

spirit.