As a small boy, when I attempted to share my deeper thoughts with my father, he said,”Why do you think this way? Nobody else around here thinks like that. You’ll only make yourself miserable asking yourself these sorts of questions.” And he was right. But I couldn’t stop the thoughts, didn’t want to and I found myself constantly pondering, is the way I see the world, my reality, the same or different to how other people see reality? If the realities are different, are they subjective, and is there an absolute that none of us are seeing? Or, If for example, when a good man or woman says something good, is that the same as when a bad man or woman says exactly the same thing? My intuition told me that it wasn’t the same, but when I asked my friends, the few friends I had, they insisted it was indeed the same. And, if I’d been alive at the time of Jesus and he’d come walking down the street, would I have recognized His divinity? And if so, by what means? It was clear to me on reading the Bible, which I mostly did when forced to, that even those who knew Him, mostly didn’t recognize that he was a divine being, not even his own disciples. And a favorite, if my attention was strong enough, could I move a pebble or a pea, using the power of my attention? I couldn’t, but I kept on trying. But it was obvious that some people had powers that others didn’t. Mostly they were quite understandable, like when my father carried me on his back to old Billy Ritchie’s house, and upstairs to a small box room, because I’d busted my right knee playing football and it had swollen to twice the size of the other one and painful to the point where I couldn’t put any weight on it. Within an hour of Billy working on it, massaging it vigorously, rubbing it, moving it, touching it with a finesse and a range of movements unknown to me, the swelling was gone and I could walk on it, albeit gingerly. The sweat poured off Billy’s bald pate, rolled down his cheeks, stained the armpits of the collarless, striped shirt he wore with the cuffs rolled up to his elbows. The small room was filled with the smell of his persipration and it, in turn, was overwhelmed, by the pungent, strong smelling liniment he said was normally used on thoroughbred race horses, Billy was a retired joiner from the nearby shipyard. We knew he never took money off anyone, so my father dropped a packet of John Player’s cigarettes under the massage bench when Billy wasn’t looking, as his way of saying thank you. Maybe it was my misunderstanding of it, but the way I was taught history in school, it seemed to be as a series of fixed points. In 1066 this happened, in 1492 this happened, but it obviously wasn’t like that, it was a series of ever changing moments. Change was the constant, the fixed moments were snapshots of change at a fixed moment of time. And the one person Billy taught his skills and knowledge to, charged money for it, and within a relatively short time had a Rolls Royce car and a fancy house. He brought marketing to Billy’s gifts. And of course, could no longer afford to treat the poor who were Billy’s sole customer base. What I didn’t and couldn’t understand was this. My grandfather and my father were charmers. They could sense certain things, they could see auras around people’s heads and they could charm away certain illnesses and conditions, mostly bland, common or garden and non life threatening things like warts and rashes. They could also predict the sex of an unborn child. On the face of it, that’s not particularly impressive for in each case the odds of a boy or a girl are 50:50 but when, somewhat shamefacedly, because just as I had learned not to share my deepest thoughts or much of anything else with my father, he, for his part, seeing my increasing disillusionment, cynicism and hostility towards him, had learned to be nervous of sharing his own inner thoughts and experiences with me, he had learned to be wary of my sharp tongue and anger. The seeds of mistrust and miscommunication between us had been well sown and had blossomed into poisoned fruits. We loved each other but that sense was as overwhelmed by other issues just as Billy’s sweat was by the horse liniment. But, he correctly predicted the sex of my first three sons as well as those of at least half a dozen pregnant women who lived nearby, even someone as cynical and skeptical as the me I’d become, had to take notice. When I asked him how he did it, he said he didn’t know, he just could. So I tried, and to my surprise, I could too. In perhaps 10% of the cases I tried, I failed, but to be 90% correct was beyond mere mathematical chance. Once I was alone in an elevator with a woman editor in the publishing firm where I worked. I didn’t know her very well and was rather hesitant, but my curiosity got the better of me and I ventured, “Forgive me if I’m stepping out of line, but are you having a baby? She was visibly shocked and said, “My god, how can you possibly think that?” “I think you’re having twins, a boy and a girl.” She came to my office, closed the door and took a seat. “The doctor confirmed last week that I am pregnant. I don’t want anyone here to know, at least for a few months , can you please keep it to yourself?” “Of course, it’s none of my business.” She did, in fact, have a boy and a girl. She never asked me how I knew but she did offer when she returned from maternity leave, “I now know for sure you know how to keep your mouth shut.” This was a skill and an attribute that was to prove useful in the years I spent in this business, a business rife with politics and endless, incessant, internal gossip. In one firm I worked for, after I’d been there a couple of years, one of the directors took me aside and said, “You’re different to everyone else here. We all love Penguin, you don’t.” I told him that my job was by far the best job I had ever had, and I loved working with the people there, but Penguin doesn’t exist, it’s a piece of paper in a bank vault somewhere - do I love that? Further, I said that the time will come when I no longer work for Penguin, and that will be good for me and also good for Penguin. In time I found that I could see auras too. I was traveling a lot, so sitting in an airplane seat, looking over the tops of the heads in the rows in front of me, or in an airport lounge waiting to be called for a flight, I amused myself with this newfound skill. By looking at the top of a particular head in a sort of unfocussed way, I could see a slight, delicate, grayish, shimmering cloud of energy. I never saw colors and it was a skill that had no practical application or purpose. I never tried to cure warts, mostly through of lack of opportunity. In the elevated social circles I now moved in, disfigurements such as warts had long since been removed by a professional. Still, I found myself returning to the questions, but without resolution, if a good person says something good, is it the same as if a bad person says the same good thing, and, had I met Jesus, would I have recognized him and if so, how? There were no clear cut answers, but I found, through trial and error, that I could stop the rain.

A versus B

The apparently superior and sophisticated classes of London and New York book publishing proved to be a much less interesting world to inhabit than that of the seemingly, simple urban poor of Belfast. It was a seductive world in many respects, you got to fill your belly with delicious, overpriced food, my father was intrigued, astonished when I learned that what I’d spend on a business lunch was more than he earned in a month. But he was happy for me too, unlike a friend, who’s father, a plumber from Leicester, was mad jealous when he found out how much his son earned. I mention this here, because I also learned a lot from my father and was able to put it to good use. The people I worked with were mostly educated beyond their intelligence, certainly beyond their ability to use creatively what they’d learned, they wore their knowledge as a burden, as a yoke around their necks and they’d lost the ability, so abundant in young children, to think for themselves, to be creative and to enjoy life. The Belfast that I grew up in was in many respects a hard, harsh, difficult, unfair place, but it was also a numinous world where magic, or what seemed to be that, was ever present and there was a great sense fun and enjoyment, an integral part of daily life. Hard. I had an English teacher when I was about fourteen. He was much loved, I had a visceral mistrust of him. His father had been Moderator of the General Assembly in Ireland, he was a devout Christian. He’d been a captain the British army in World War II, captured by the Germans, and he’d read to us in Assembly, his prison camp diaries at Christmas, Easter etc. He’s given us a sonnet to learn as homework, I hadn’t bothered, and next day, he chose me to recite it aloud. I’d propped the text book open at the relevant page, glanced down and began reading, as if from memory. He quickly saw what I was up to, rushed down to where I was sitting, saw the open book, lost his cool and decided to teach me the sonnet there and then, while banging my head hard with his knuckle to drive the sonnet home into my brain. I had two thoughts while this was happening, one, I’m really sorry the Germans weren’t even harder on you, and two, you will not make me cry, I utterly refuse to cry. As a matter of fact, I never cried again in my life, completely lost the ability to, even when I wanted to, but I didn’t and I couldn’t, and I can’t. That night when I showed my father the lumps that had swollen up all over my head, his only comment was, “I hope you deserved it.” So much for Christianity, gentle Jesus meek and mild, and all that.

Education. Why don’t schools teach children how to use their attention? For children become the person where they mostly put their attention. When I taught meditation to crack dealers on remand in Riker’s Island prison, the main difference between them and me was the difference in were we’d put our respective attention. That of course, and the fact that I have white, probably more pink that white, Irish skin and they don’t, and that they come from one of the five zip codes that provide 70% and more of the New York prison population. Life’s not fair, and attention and where you put it, is a passport to liberation. Why don’t they teach children to think? My last job was in a small, publishing house in Manhattan. There were five major publishing houses at the time, most were barely breaking even, two were up for sale, couldn’t find a buyer. The people I hired, who’d worked in the other competing publishing houses seemed to think that if we became as good as the big five, that would be success. No matter how I tried, I could not persuade them that if we became as good as that, our owners would close us down. Moreover, the big five could outgun us in every single area, they could pay more money for publishing rights on books we would like to publish, they could and would outspend us at any turn. For us to compete and win, we would have to do what we did differently to them, not the same, and there was only one way for us to do that. The people worked hard, did their best, they worked hard to the point where they were stressed. When people are stressed, they can’t think straight, lose the ability to prioritize. The only way for us to outgun our conglomerate competitors was for us to outthink them, and we can’t do that if we’re stressed. So I asked them to consciously do 90% of the work they were currently doing so that in their 10% free time, they could think playfully, come up with ideas that we would publish, we would turn into books, books on which we controlled the publishing rights, not the literary agents, who preferred to sell to the companies dripping with conglomerate money. It worked, by a combination of luck, always the best strategy but hard to harness, impossible to organize, but you have have to be in the game in order to win it, and a combination of circumstances no one could have envisaged. But it failed in that most of the people were not able to give up they way they were conditioned to work in, the taking of literary agents for lunch, depending on their goodwill and largesse, instead of taking the power into their own hands.

What matters, what makes the difference is the subtle, not the gross. What matters is being able to see behind the personna, the superficial. Personna is well named, it’s the ancient Greek work for mask. It’s being able to see that the stroppy, uncooperative thirty year old Sarah Lawrence graduate giving you a hard time, is still, in no small measure, the girl who was violated by nuns, caned on her bare bottom aged eight, at her expensive Catholic boarding school by sadists who had no compassion, no milk of human kindness in their dried up breasts. And to see too, that my own father was dealing with an only child who was presenting him with problems beyond anything he knew how to cope with. I saw my father having fun with teenage boys my age, laughing and joking with them, he could and was a very funny man. How come he was Adolph Hitler with me? Long after my parents were dead, my favorite aunt told me that she and her siblings had told my parents that they were being too hard on me, that I was not the kind to take it and that if they kept it up, I’d leave home as soon as I could. My parents, just like those being told to work less, couldn’t hear it, and I left Ireland for good, two weeks short of my eighteenth birthday. It goes without saying, that I in turn, in high pressure jobs, mortgaged up to the eyeballs, in a failing marriage was a lost soul in dealing with my own sons.

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