Chapter One : Transformation.
I’d read a Tobias Woolf short story in the New Yorker magazine
about how he, while a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University, on a wet
Wednesday evening had gone with a friend to a cold drafty church to
watch Winter Light, the Ingmar Bergman movie, and how, in the
discussion that followed, while Woolf remained indifferent and
unmoved, that very same experience completely changed his friend’s
life. He immediately changed his course and went on to become a
priest and a missionary.
The article ended many years later with Woolf reading aloud to
one of his students the last stanzas of the poem Little Gidding by T.S.
Eliot and choking, tearing up, on the profound emotions the poem
evoked in him while the student was utterly unmoved, and clearly
embarrassed at Woolf’s reactions.
He had read:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea. Quick now, here, now, always-- A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flames are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.
One balmy Indian summer in September 1990, I was working in a
publisher’s office in London’s Soho Square. Framed by tall, stately
plane trees, the square witnessed an ever-changing array of humanity.
Early morning mist swirled around the legs of elderly Chinese men
and women as they practiced Tai Chi with strangely disjointed,
inelegant movements.
Lunchtime saw office workers relaxing on the grass and a
permanent feature was the unfortunate homeless at virtually any time
of day.
I would sometimes sit at my desk overlooking the square
pondering the relatively small change of fortune that would have seen
me out there on a park bench, a bottle wrapped in brown paper in
my hand.
One day as I left the office, my attention was drawn to a photo of
an Indian lady on a poster advertising a spiritual event that coming
Friday evening. My first response was cynical, dismissive; she was
probably one of those gurus who come to the West offering
enlightenment while accumulating riches for themselves. But there
was something compelling, and magnetic, something uniquely
attractive about her face, and over the days that followed, each time I
passed the poster, my attention was ineluctably drawn to her.
At some point I thought I’d quite like to see her and to hear what
she had to say. This was somewhat out of character for I had been
devoutly atheist since my early teenage years. Indeed, I had been
known to ridicule those who’d been induced to follow those offering
spiritual enlightenment in exchange for substantial amounts of cash or
some, who in doing so had been persuaded to do things common
sense would normally have encouraged them not to do. I knew too
that my wife at the time, repeatedly having heard my views on the
topic, would have understandably ridiculed me had I mentioned the
possibility of going to such an event.
When I was about three or four, a group of kids from our street
attended a Sunday school, and my parents sent me with them. The
Woodcote Gospel Hall was just around the corner and we, the pre-
school kids, met in a room at the back of the main room where we
sang songs, heard stories of the gentle Jesus meek and mild variety,
and drew pictures of the more pleasant aspects of his life such as
being born in a manger with the animals, riding on a donkey on Palm
Sunday etc. On one particular occasion, our usual teacher was absent,
and we sat with the older children in the main hall.
A fire and brimstone preacher let rip. He loudly and confidently
assured us that we would be taken from our mothers and fathers and
would roast in hell’s fires for all eternity unless we were washed in the
blood of the Lamb. Both alternatives seemed singularly unattractive.
As an only child, something rare in the part of East Belfast where I
grew up, losing my parents and being alone in the world was my
worst imaginable fear. I ran from the hall, tears streaming down my
face and was inconsolable when I reached the safety of my home.
Other children who attended the same Sunday school, suffered
nightmares as indeed I did too.
Eventually, terror and horror gave way to cynicism, disbelief and
eventually, hostility and ridicule towards those who proclaimed
Christianity. My anger towards those who would pronounce guilt to
infants in such terms, who would assault them with such horrifying,
blatant lies, knew no bounds. I knew too that their insistence that we
were all born in sin was based on nothing that Jesus had taught,
indeed he had said, “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to
come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”
I grew to despise religion as utter nonsense but, at the age of
thirteen or so, my father forced me, very much against my will, and
under the threat of physical violence, to be confirmed in the Church of
Ireland. The experience was ghastly, a form of spiritual rape. It was
made worse by the knowledge that my father wasn’t himself religious,
and indeed, apart from christenings, weddings and funerals, he never
went near a church, he was a perfect example of the ‘hatched,
matched and dispatched’ Anglican that Roman Catholics laughed
at. When I asked why he was forcing me to do something I was so
opposed to, he said it was to please my mother.
Thus, every Sunday morning for months afterwards, in preparation
for the great event, he dragged me out of bed and I would trudge
unwillingly along the drizzly, grey, empty, Beersbridge Road to
St.Donard’s church, envying as I went, the lucky ‘sinners’ still sound
asleep in their beds, including, my parents. Sinning, as a way of life,
seemed unambiguously preferable to the lives of tedium and
boredom led by those neighbors my mother described as
‘good living’.
When, at the age of fifteen, my friends and I would sneak into the
Morning Star pub in an alley way off Ann Street in Belfast’s center, we
would be occasionally harangued by an ex reprobate, who, puce-
faced and bible in hand, would point at us, and bellow, “Youse! Youse
over there, ye’d rather fill yer bellies with dirty big black pints than
listen to the word of the Lord.” This admirably and succinctly summed
up my position, although, in my case, one pint in would put me in
overflow mode.
The confirmation classes were led by a kindly, middle-aged man
who always wore a midnight blue serge suit with highly polished
black shoes. He had heavily brilliantined hair, swept back in
undulating waves. He was a gentle soul but his explanations of ‘our
faith’, the stuff we were supposed to believe, especially vis-à-vis what
Roman Catholics so erroneously believed, were pedestrian,
mechanical and dull. That so much misery had resulted from
what seemed to me trivial differences, the divinity or otherwise of
Mary and the doctrine of transubstantiation, whereby Catholics
believed that in the Mass, the wine transformed into the physical
blood of Jesus and the bread into his corporeal body. We, on the
other hand, believed that the wine and bread were symbols of the
blood and body of our Redeemer. He didn’t respond when asked if
that meant Catholics were therefore cannibals and struggled to
explain why these differences had caused such untold misery
and unhappiness over so many centuries. And what of Jesus
entreating us to love our neighbor as ourselves? He didn’t go there.
How could he or anyone else believe such doctrines when they didn’t
make any logical sense?
These things merely served to heighten the absurdity of
confirmation, that I was to confirm my belief in something I had no
belief in!
Indeed, the only aspects that held any interest for me – the
transcendent, mystical, and numinous, the Holy Spirit, and how could
there be a Father, Son and no Mother? These were matters of
apparently of no interest to the kindly man who instructed us, they
were either of no interest to him or understood by him, and were
therefore skimmed over.
The ceremony of confirmation itself, the laying on of hands by the
Bishop of Down and Connor, the affirmation of our desire to be
members of the Church Militant, was vacuous and meaningless. What
was so special about this man’s hands, as opposed to anyone else’s?
His hands were laid on two boys or girls at a time and I experienced
nothing spiritual when one hand was laid on me. Later I was roundly
scolded by my father because the Bishop’s hand could be seen
wobbling as I shook with laughter at the nonsense of it all.
Some time later, but not soon enough, one Sunday morning when
my father came to rouse me and get me up and out, I told him gently
that I wasn’t going and that he should go back to bed. To my
surprise, without so much as a murmur of protest, he did and that was
the end of organized religion for me. For many years I never entered a
church again.
My father was a joiner, a woodworker, with strong sympathies for
Russian communism. I could see that he might have forced me
through this as a way of killing two birds with one stone, getting my
Mum off his back while at the same time, confirming atheism as my
creed. Later, when I asked if he’d forced me to go through all
that guff to put me off religion for good, he gave a Machiavellian grin.
Back in 1990, by chance, on the Friday morning of the
Hammersmith program, my wife, who worked in publicity for another
book publisher, phoned to say that she had to accompany a well
known author to Glasgow for a television appearance that evening.
Thus, I found myself free to attend the event, which was
conveniently just off my normal route home. The hall was packed
when I arrived and I was happy to sit at the rear to facilitate the
possibility of an early exit. It was initially difficult to discern who were
disciples and who weren’t. Then I spotted them. They looked rather
smug as though they felt superior to the rest of us and some sported
large Ronald McDonald-type plastic badges which announced Behold
The Mother!
A music program was followed by a man of about forty who gave
an introductory talk. He said that he’d been practicing Sahaja yoga
for just over a year and he spoke well and eloquently. In my practiced
publisher mode of listening, ‘do I agree or disagree’, somewhat to my
surprise, I found myself mostly agreeing with what he said. A few
people walked out sporadically, presumably either at the injury they
were suffering by being made to wait for so long after the advertised
start time or maybe because they had decided that they were
uninterested, but I had come to see the Indian lady and hear her
speak and wasn’t going to be put off by mere unpunctuality.
Eventually, she appeared, wearing a white sari. She sat in a
comfortable armchair surrounded by flowers. I couldn’t see the details
of her face, but she spoke spontaneously, without notes, with the easy
confidence of a wise grandmother. I was impressed by her acuity,
erudition and wisdom, eager for the experience she promised.
I had never heard anyone speak about the topics that so easily
flowed from her and I was fascinated by what she said. Her talk lasted
about forty minutes and was followed by a question and answer
session. She handled the questions with patience and understanding,
amplifying points she’d made during her talk. She’d said that true
yoga was a connection between a residual energy in the sacrum
bone, known as Kundalini, and the external all-
pervading power and she then took the audience through a
series of questions and affirmations by which they might experience it.
Much to my surprise, I found myself in a state of gentle bliss. My
awareness was sharp, refined, my mind wasn’t doing its normal thing,
racing hither and thither at breakneck speed, drifting off into its usual
stream of thoughts and digressions, indeed, I mostly wasn’t thinking
at all. I was entirely in the present and could feel a cool breeze on the
palms of my hands that appeared to emanate from the top of my
head and cascade down my body.
I found myself with a focused attention I’d sometimes read about,
for example, in Wordsworth’s poem set above Tintern Abbey:
And I have felt
…… A motion, and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all object of all thoughts
And rolls through all things.
Or in John Keats Ode to a Grecian Urn:
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity.
I’d been particularly struck by this idea at the time when I’d first
read it, in school when I was fourteen or so, that the possibility of
something, some object, teasing me out of thought, and for sure
there had been fleeting moments over the years where inadvertently
and beyond anything I could control, I’d experienced this blissful
state of thoughtlessness.
And here it was. Something that I could bring about by the simple
practice she offered, free, with no strings attached. Dictionaries
mostly defined meditation as a form of thinking, yet here was a new
form, called Sahaja Yoga, the polar opposite, a form of not thinking.
I left the hall soon afterwards and as I drove home, the notion
came that my life would never be the same again. And it wasn’t.
I experienced a series of unexpected miracles from that evenin on
- Over many years I had tried a number of ways of trying to stop
smoking. None had worked, yet I never smoked cigarettes again, nor
did I ever again smoke marijuana. There was no question that I was
strongly addicted to both, indeed, for what seemed like years, I had
difficulty negotiating the staircase to access my bedroom at night. I
had been depressed too, on and off, from the time of my
‘confirmation’ to this extraordinary evening - thirty three years to
be precise. and in decades since that evening, I have never known
depression again.
When I worked at Penguin books I’d read a book for
teenagers, that listed one hundred questions by which one would
know if one were suffering addiction or not. Questions such as do you
find yourself mixing socially with people you would have otherwise
have no interest in because you know there will be drugs there? I
answered yes, to well over ninety of the hundred.
A woman once told me that I would only give up smoking pot
when the price paid was more than the pleasure it gave me. She was
wrong in my case.
Moreover sometime after the meeting with this lady, whose name
is Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, my atheism vanished and instead of belief,
I came to know God, not as knowledge in the usual sense of the word,
but at a profound level deep inside me. And that gnosis, has never
wavered in the intervening years.
I remember from when I was a teenager, seeing a television
program, John Freeman who later became the British ambassador to
the USA, interviewed Carl Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst. Freeman
asked him if he believed in God. Jung’s reply was that he did not need
to believe. He “knew.” How was that possible, I wondered?
And now, I knew too. And if I were to write down all the things I
know for certain, as opposed to those things I have an opinion about,
what I know would fit comfortably on the back of a postage stamp.
The first would be that I know God and am aware of God in every
aspect of my daily life.
After I had been practicing Sahaja Yoga for about three months, a
man I later discovered was the leader of Sahaja Yoga in the UK asked
if I knew how many of the one thousand or so new people who came
to Hammersmith Town Hall the same evening as me were still
attending meetings. I’d never thought about it but I guessed a few
hundred. The answer was - just you. Of course, I was surprised by this,
but it didn’t make me feel in any way special. I knew how I was feeling,
I knew the changes coming over me, I knew, having no information
about them, that I was incapable of judging, or making
pronouncements on those who’d come and then stopped.
And I came to know the meaning of Eliot’s last stanzas in Little
Gidding, the last of the Four Quartets. Research revealed that he’d
studied Vedic literature. These lines are about spiritual seeking, about
the movement of one’s inner divine energy, Kundalini, in her progress
along the channels of subtle energy in the spinal column. She’s the
fire, the fire that redeems, and she moves through the chakras until
she connects at the Sahasrara, the seventh chakra, which looks like a
rose from above, enlightenment follows, when the fire and the rose are one.
It is not my intention for this book to have a missionary effect on
the reader. Sahaja Yoga transformed my life, but it is not a panacea,
certainly it is not for everyone. Having shown many how to do it, it is
clearly works only for seekers of spiritual truth, many are not that and
of those who are, shopping in the spiritual supermarket has led many
down weird and strange paths, many of them away from the truth as I
have discovered it to be..
The author, Steve Turner, a committed Christian, wrote
Hungry For Heaven, in which he offers the hypothesis that rock ’n roll
was as much about spiritual seeking as it was about sex and drugs.
Not one of the many rock stars he wrote about, from the Beatles to
the Beach Boys and Pete Townshend, ever took to Sahaja Yoga.
I practiced this meditation diligently, twice a day, for maybe ten
minutes each time. I attended free meetings in Richmond,Hampstead,
Bayswater and Southall. I was astonished at the changes
coming over me.
The changes were utterly miraculous. The depression
that had hung like an enveloping cloud for thirty three years was
immediately a thing of the past. I immediately stopped using drugs
and cigarettes and experienced joy in the simple things of life. My
allergies, and there were many of them, disappeared.
But when I described these changes to friends, I could see that to
them, they were not all that dissimilar to the puce-faced evangelist in
Belfast with his bible in hand attempting to persuade strangers as to
the validity of his conversion.
There was a distinct difference, but what was it? And could I
describe it in a way that someone who had not had their Kundalini
awakened might understand?
Shri Mataji had awakened my Kundalini that night In
Hammersmith, and that energy brought about changes within me as
she, because it is a feminine energy, rose up along my spinal column
and through the chakras, the centers of subtle energy and she
pierced the thousand petal lotus, in the fontanelle
bone area at the top of my head and each of these petals became
enlightened. Hence I could feel it as a cool breeze and this is what
had brought about such a fundamental change in my consciousness.
Indian scriptures describe four states of human awareness.
Jagruti, the normal sate of consciousness, Swapna, the dreaming state
of consciousness, Sushupti, the state of deep sleep in which the mind,
the ego and superego are still. These first three states are commonly
experienced in homo sapiens, but there is a fourth state, known as
turya, which is known as thoughtless awareness of nirvichara samadhi,
In this state, the constant rising and falling of thoughts comes to an
end. At first, a gap, vilamba, begins to appear between the thoughts
and with regular practice of the meditation this gap increases and the
thoughts diminish so that the mind easily enters into thoughtless
awareness. In this heightened state, we neither think of past or
future.
For the first time in decades I began to know joy, to enjoy the pure
state of being and slowly began to feel the vibrations of my chakras
and as a result, began to spontaneously and naturally change from
within. I felt compassion for the man with the purple-veined face, for
sure this was not what his transformation included. There was no
mistaking the two states as the same.
And I found that I could awaken the Kundalini in others and did so
for many thousands in the years that followed.