This was a process, over time, but here’s an example. It was my first puja, Diwali 1991, in Cabella, Liguria, Italy. I was staying in a bar/pension in the town square. At some point, I’d mentioned to my friend and brother Ian Paradine that I could get a book published about Sahaja Yoga. In those days, newspapers would pay a lot of money for serial rights, for example, they paid Bloomsbury something like £400,000 to serialize a book Walking Tall, by Simon Weston. He suffered 46% body burns was while sitting in a middle deck of the Sir Galahad, a crowded troopship while waiting to disembark, when it was hit by an Argentinian Exocet missile. On living through sheer hell, despite having been a failure up to that point, with his face unrecognizable and after 96 reconstructive operations he transformed himself into an admirable, extraordinary human being. When I worked at Penguin, they had published a diet book, that was re-named by Penguin’s CEO, The F Plan Diet. It was similarly serialized and went on to sell millions of copies. In both cases, the newspapers advertised the serializations on television. After just over a year practicing Sahaja Yoga, I was convinced that Shri Mataji’s teachings would transform the world in very short order. Despite the fact that I was assiduously meditating twice a day, and thunderstruck at the changes manifesting in me, I had little understanding of Sahaja Yoga and no idea as to who Shri Mataji was. I had recently met Michael Wilkins, a Cambridge educated engineer, and it was he who told me about Cabella in northern Italy where Shri Mataji had a house. He said he had just attended a puja there. This was a term I’d never encountered before. I was intrigued when he explained that the weekend was life changing for him. I just didn’t begin to understand what he was telling me. “You do know who She is?” he asked. “She’s God!” I was profoundly shocked for I had been a devout atheist for some thirty three years and this statement rocked me to my core. I was thus confronted with the contradiction between my beliefs and the utterly incredible changes I had experienced by following Shri Mataji’s guidance on meditation. I decided there and then that I would go to Cabella for the very next puja which was to be a week or so’s time. Cabella, in the Borbera valley, in the foothills north east of Genoa, was a cold place in early November. I wore a Schott black leather A2 bomber jacket, black jeans and boots. I wasn’t initially impressed by the yogis I saw there. I asked myself what I would have felt had I chanced upon this village, seeing Western men and women dressed in colorful Indian clothing? And men dancing with other men, women with women? I’d never danced with a man in my life and wasn’t about to start now. My wife at the time was convinced, based on her experience of book publishing that bad behavior would be a natural ingredient in such a gathering. She was wrong. I was in full reactive mode. My ego and superego were in overdrive, all the things I didn’t like flashed before me but while what I saw was off-putting what I was experiencing deep inside, a depth of bliss I’d never known before was for me, a life-changing experience. When Shri Mataji appeared, on the Friday and Saturday evenings, the ecstasy I experience in Her presence was beyond anything I’d known before. I have little memory of what She said in the spontaneous talk She gave just before the puja itself on the Sunday but sitting in a big blue circus tent in the proximity of hundreds of men from all over Europe, mostly in meditative silence for what seemed like hours that passed in minutes was something I’ll never forget. I had originated several million selling books up this point in my publishing career, for example, when I was on the verge of being fired at Penguin books - they’d had thirty five sales directors in their fifty year history, thus the average life expectancy was around eighteen months. By the time I’d been there a year, it wasn’t only my paranoia that told me I was being measured up for the chop. But, I asked a thirteen year old boy, a neighbor’s son to write a book on how to solve the Rubik’s Cube and showed him how to graphically illustrate a solution from any random start point. The book sold several million copies, was translated into forty seven languages, topped both the UK and USA bestseller lists, and by some magic, some catalytic process, suddenly all the changes I’d made in Penguin’s sales structures that should have worked and hadn’t, as if someone had suddenly flipped a series of switches, clicked into operation and I was fireproof. I was certain I could do the same for a book on Sahaja Yoga. In my head I planned how I would go about it. I’d convince the deputy managing director and head of non-fiction, David Reynolds, to experience the magic of Sahaja Yoga for himself, so he would have complete confidence in putting a book together, and similarly for Ruth Logan, our rights director, who would sell newspaper serialization rights. At 3am on the Monday morning following the puja, I was awakened by Ian Paradine’s voice in the street outside my room. I had to be up and on a bus to Milan airport at 6am, so I wasn’t pleased to be awakened at that hour. He said, “Shri Mataji wants to see you.” I was astonished and thrilled. I hurriedly dressed and we walked up the steep hill in the chill morning air to Shri Mataji’s house. We were shown into Her room, there was something like a dozen or more people there as well as Shri Mataji. One was Patrick Hughes, an American, Paul Wynter, (I noted subsequently that the check used to buy the house in Cabella was proudly framed in Paul’s mansion in Wales.) I sat and listened as the people, in turn, spoke to Shri Mataji and listened to what they said and Her replies. We were all sitting on the floor, Shri Mataji in a chair. I had badly, irreparably damaged the cruciate ligaments in my right knee, playing rugby when I was fifteen in Belfast. I was unable to sit for any length of time without extreme pain and discomfort, and at one point, I moved my legs from the left side of my body to the right. In doing so, there was a point when both my feet were pointing directly at Shri Mataji, and a couple of the yogis yogis present dived at me, as this was apparently a very disrespectful thing to do, something I didn’t know at the time. Shri Mataji smiled and said to the divers, “It’s OK, he doesn’t understand.” That was certainly true, and indeed it was only during the weekend that I came to truly recognize Shri Mataji’s divinity. That being so, as I listened to the to and fro of the conversations, I knew for certain that I would never in my life speak in the manner and tone of some of the people speaking to Her. How could you be in a room with an incarnation and speak to Her in the tones in which they addressed Shri Mataji? At some point, Shri Mataji turned to me and said something along the lines of “I understand you could get a book published on Sahaja Yoga? How might that work?” I explained my plan and She told me to go ahead. Paul Wynter, who flew back on the same plane as me to Heathrow airport, drove me into central London in his Land Rover and dropped me off in Shaftesbury Avenue, the southern side of the square that demarcated the area called Soho, in which I’d worked for four years. I knew it to be the Mooladhara chakra of London, and as such, it was a small space of enormous creativity, Mozart had lived and composed there, Karl Marx too, while researching and writing in the nearby British Museum what became Das Kapital, Paul McCartney’s offices were next to ours in Soho Square. Ronnie Scott’s Jazz club was a few doors down from where I worked. The downside of this was that it was also the red light district of London - I’d noticed that negativity always attacks the innocence. To my astonishment, as I walked up through the streets to Soho Square, now, in the light of what I’d just experienced in Cabella, the atmosphere was eerily satanic, it felt as though as I was walking through the Gates of Hell. As soon as I could, I implemented my plan. My colleagues knew that I’d been doing Sahaja Yoga for more than a year, and although I hadn’t proselytized it to them, some had noticed the changes in me. Liz Calder, a cofounder of Bloomsbury and one of the great fiction editors of her time, who’d discovered authors such as John Irving, Anita Brookner, Salman Rushdie and Julian Barnes, published Booker Prize winners such as Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje as well as Nadine Gordimer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature after Liz published her. Liz approached me and said that she was very stressed and had seen the changes in me. She asked me if I would show her what I was doing. I drove up to her flat in North London, showed her Sahaja Yoga. Liz arrived at work about 7am every morning and a couple of days later, on my desk was the photo of Shri Mataji I’d given her and note saying, “Thanks, but this isn’t for me.” I wasn’t confident at giving Self-realization and so I took David Reynolds, who would be the commissioning editor for the book to a yogi’s offices near the Thames in Battersea and he gave David Self-realization and showed him how to meditate at home. I took Ruth Logan, our Rights Director, to the Spiro family home in Flask Walk, Hampstead, since she lived not far away from there in North London, and they gave her Self-realization and also showed her how to meditate. The whole thing blew up in my face in a way that although disappointing, was amusing too. I asked David how he was getting on with the meditation. He was by nature a cynical fellow and said, as an obvious put down, that he’d tried it with a photo of John Lennon and It hadn’t worked. Ruth’s response was the polar opposite. She was an intelligent woman, had a good degree from Oxford, and brilliant at her job, but she was living in a ghastly trap, with a man she didn’t love and although I didn’t know the details, for some reason she couldn’t get out of it. Suddenly, after a couple of days meditating, her prison door was sprung wide open, as if by magic, and she was suddenly free to leave. She stopped meditating immediately because she found it to be too powerful! As Shri Adi Shakti and Shri Mahamaya, I knew that had She wanted to, Shri Mataji could have overcome all potential obstacles and caused the book to be a huge bestseller. But was the English Sahaja collective, less than a thousand souls, capable of dealing with hundreds of thousands of people wanting to learn Sahaja Yoga? I could see however that Shri Mataji had chosen to give me a lesson, one that was to be repeated numerous times - She wanted to show me that my ego, my conditionings too, needed to be very much reduced. It was surely something extraordinary and exceptional, beyond human understanding that She would make this a priority over the potential success of a book and the ensuing explosion of interest in Sahaja Yoga? Fortunately, it was easy for me to understood that the lesson was a necessity, a prerequisite to for my spiritual progress. And my recognition of Shri Mataji, as Shri Adi Shakti and Shri Mahamaya has never wavered nor have I experience doubt in the the thirty years that have passed since. Jai Shri Mataji!

“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.

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.

ENDURING I am a child I am told And I am surprised I have grown old. Looking through the lens Of returning pain Was there any sense? Was it all in vain? Becoming something else Can make you crazy But becoming oneself Is not very easy. But then I realize And it is for sure To get the true prize We just must endure. Losing or winning Is the game of the fool This is about learning Just jump into the pool. Sakshi pokhari The pond of the witness Keeps you cheerful and merry You can’t succeed with less. TRADE OFFS If you are motionless you can carry movement If you don’t steal the show you get inspiration If you are silent you overcome torment If you forget the goal you receive the vision If you want a role you lose the location If you want control you lose the connection And it was this place at the Lotus Feet Where you and your God were meant to meet.

He was one of us but different He met her in Moscow, she was like him, different too. Her first thought was, “this is my husband“. It took him somewhat longer to reach the same conclusion, at least five minutes. It was how he felt. He knew he’d never known this before They barely spoke, for words would have been unnecessary, A superfluous excess An intrusion on the depths of their communication. He experienced satisfaction, completion, Parts of the puzzle that were him, that had made no sense before, now fell into place And parts that he never knew were missing, were present, suddenly, out of nowhere. It had all been arranged of course, She had traveled seventeen hours by train and it was on the train that she’d been told he’s already been matched with someone else. She wasn’t unconcerned, surrendered, Such was the depth of her trust in the living God Who’d made the arrangement. The goddess had told him some time before that she would find him a wife, a Russian wife. He’d waited, year by year and he knew That when the time came, He would never bring himself to say no to Her. And he didn’t She’d vaguely thought in vacant mood That she didn’t want to marry an Englishman, She thought they smelt of mothballs. She didn’t understand the difference between English and Irish any more than he understood the difference between Russian, Tatar, or Azerbaijani These were the blessings that came their way, joy, satisfaction and bliss. Who would want more? Not them, not ever.

Webster’s says it’s close or continued thought. What if it’s the opposite? - thoughtless awareness. Either/or never had or has appeal. Both/and did and does Ananya bhakti - when there is not the other You’re American, I’m Irish and American You’re Zoroastrian, Jew, Jain, Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Sufi, Sikh I’m a Sahaj yogi We’re both these and children of the same Mother. Mother Earth, this big ball hurtling through space. Sat chit ananda. Truth, consciousness, bliss. In thoughtless awareness, a dynamic living force, We become the oneness of Spirit.

He was one of us but different He met her in Moscow, she was like him, different too. Her first thought was, “this is my husband“. It took him somewhat longer to reach the same conclusion, at least five minutes. It was how he felt. He knew he’d never known this before They barely spoke, for words would have been unnecessary, A superfluous excess An intrusion on the depths of their communication. He experienced satisfaction, completion, Parts of the puzzle that were him, that had made no sense before, now fell into place And parts that he never knew were missing, were present, suddenly, out of nowhere. It had all been arranged of course, She had traveled seventeen hours by train and it was on the train that she’d been told he’s already been matched with somebody else. She wasn’t unconcerned, surrendered, Such was the depth of her trust in the living God Who’d made the arrangement. The goddess had told him some time before that she would find him a wife, a Russian wife. He’d waited, year by year and he knew That when the time came, He would never bring himself to say no to Her. And he didn’t She’d vaguely thought in vacant mood That she didn’t want to marry an Englishman, She thought they smelt of mothballs. She didn’t understand the difference between English and Irish any more than he understood the difference between Russian, Tatar, Kazak or Azerbaijani These were the blessings that came their way, joy, satisfaction and bliss. Who would want more? Not them, not ever.

Will you love me forever Will you love me forever Lioudmila Chibirikova?* Will you love me forever Lioudmila Chibirikova? I just met you today but I’ve loved you for lifetimes Will you love me forever my Siberian queen? I care not a whit if your father’s a rich man That the blood of a Countess flows in your veins For the Goddess Herself, matched us together I’ll honor and love you all of my days. And love you I will without stain or dishonor Surrendered to Her and to paramchaitanya I’ll marry you again, a thousand times over At Her Lotus Feet, I pledge my troth. *Old name for Siberia Will You Love Me Forever? Will you love me forever? A rhetorical question For we’re both surrendered To the power that made us. Surrender's a catalyst It remains untouched, unaffected By the changes it evokes Having recognized the truth There’s no viable alternative To Sat Chit Ananda And the blessings of the Goddess To have been in Her direct attention For the time taken to match us And for Her to watch and enjoy our response.

No Surrender, that bellowed mantra of an Orange Ulster childhood, But thankfully not in my case, It was heard not embraced. London, still September dawning, Golden Square Venerable, aged Chinese doing Tai Chi Elegance and grace, magic in the swirling mist A silent witness - me . Suddenly I saw Her A photo on a poster on a gable wall Each time I passed I was captivated, entranced Inexorably drawn to Her face, attention in enthrall. She is Vishwarupa, She contains the universe Thus, it was easy for Her To help us take the next evolutionary step, To become the spirit. I didn’t know it at the time, how could I? Nor did the hundreds or so who saw the poster too. She called, I came, a minority of one. Non duality connected to the One. What did I have, worth holding on to? Touching Her Lotus Feet Surrender was sweet, revealing Just as the morning mist conceals, and gives way to light.

The fish who first crawled on to terra firma must’ve felt confused The first sound they heard was rhythm The rhythm of the waves The gentle sshh of ebb and flow, perhaps a stormy cataclysm And the fetus in a mother’s womb It was rhythm too that it first heard Heartbeat, ba boom, ba boom, ba boom Both a rhythm and a tune. We’re surrounded by rhythm, heard and not heard Felt and not felt. Day night, season The movement of Mother Earth around the sun Hurtling through space with no apparent rhyme nor reason Each center of spiritual power Flowers within, each with their own rotational speed And sounds, rhythmic sounds that indicate wellbeing From seed to flower, flower to seed. If you’re a jazz musician, you need to know two hundred songs, and to be able to play each in all twelve musical keys! You’re on a bandstand at a gig, The bandleader calls the name of the next number. You don’t know it, you look at him with a questioning look. “Rhythm changes”, he says, meaning that it uses the chord changes of George Gershwin’s  I Got Rhythm. These changes have resulted in hundred of songs, mostly hits, from the Flintstone’s theme song. Many songs use its chord progression, such as Duke Ellington's "Cotton Tail". Charlie Parker alone based many songs on its chord progression, e.g. "Moose the Mooche". Gary Larson referenced the song in the Far Side.

It’s about 40°C, about as hot as it gets here in summertime. A visit to the Khadhi Bhavan revealed it to be incredibly dirty. The staff were sitting around talking to each other, it was difficult to attract someone’s eye to get attention or service. Gandhi, who’d been instrumental in founding these shops all over India would be very disappointed. They now look rather like that once admirable institution, the English Cooperative shops when they had, as all things do when they’d lost sight of the dynamism and vision of the founders and run out of steam. Begun to sell the produce of the Indian villages, they even sell now polycotton. In one dusty picture frame but there’s a sign that says something like “Khadhi is the integrity of the country.” The newspapers here are full of scandal - who has been caught doing what and since everyone’s doing it the ones that get caught are just the unlucky ones. The hotel porter told me that the taxi return trip to the Khadhi shop would be Rs 30. On arrival there, the driver demanded Rs250. There’s no shame even when their bluff is called. If the big guys do it why not me? Somewhat to my surprise Mr. K told me that there were to be marriages here in Kolkata and he asked me why I don’t get married? Shock! He also suggested that learning Hindi would be the thing for me to do to. He was not short on advice, Mr. K and in the manner of Indian SY leaders I am told, not shy in dispensing it. He said that his driver would pick me up after 12. It is now 1.15PM. Again, more practice in detachment, well needed in my case. Tuesday, April 11, 1995 Shri Mataji’s plane from Kathmandu was two hours late. Some two to three hundred yogis sat quietly in the airport lounge. The Austrian leader was there, a lady from Geneva, a lady from Ukraine who’d married an Indian. I also met a very nice Austrian woman, Gisela Matzer, who’s children had grown up and under Shri Mataji’s guidance was starting a home in India destitute Muslim women. I felt really well since I arrived here. There was some anxiety at first, the long wait at the airport, the uncertainty of where to stay, my apparently suspect return ticket. All these matters were resolved during the day and I felt at complete ease for the first time since my arrival at the home of the Roy family last night. It’s an unfamiliar feeling not knowing where I’m going next, or even where I’ll be spending the night, it’s pleasant once one surrenders to it, childlike even. I’ve exchanged the private, isolated familiarity of an international air-conditioned splendor of my hotel room for the heart, sticky, humid and human warmth of the real India courtesy of the Roy family. Even after only two days it’s been revealing for me to see a lot of my own conditioning, the problems of my attitude towards my own mother, there’s a huge sense of release and the acknowledgment of this in witnessing my anxiety at the prospect of insecurity in travel, of things that go wrong, the necessity to live a more surrender life. If some of these can be absorbed the trip is already worthwhile. As for Mrs. Roy, well she lives here, an Indian middle class life with the almost total absence of material comfort, at least by today’s European standards. Angelica Roy is a lovely German lady who married an Indian in Germany in 1965 and has been living here since 1972. She offered to put Gisele and I up for the night. She told us that she met her future husband while traveling on a bus in Germany. She’s now a Sahaja yogi, he is tolerant of it but uninterested. When we arrived at their house we had an excellent meal and a really good meditation. Angelica travels one hour on various buses to get to work, over by the Salt Lake. To think she exchange her life in Germany for this . But she exudes peace, satisfaction and tranquility. When Shri Mataji arrived at the airport She looked really lovely. At one point She saw me and smiled and said, “How lovely to see you, I didn’t expect to see you here.” I felt like $1 million, actually much, much better than that and to be in the attention of the Adi Shakti is beyond price or expectation. Angelica explained that whereas in Europe bring bread goes hard when it gets stale, in the humidity of Kolkata it goes soft and moist. At certain times of year when the humidity is 100% it’s impossible to dry clothes after washing them. I sleep without covering just wearing a lungi, or dhoti as they call it in southern India, and a khadhi shirt I should explain that Gandhi told the Indians that the way they should peacefully protest and support themselves in trying to force the British out, was that they should return to wearing handmade, homespun cotton, that they should give up their jobs and sell Khadhi as a means of making a living. At one time Shri Mataji’s father cut up and burned his British woolen suits. Thus the Khadhi Bavan was begun across India, shops that sold handicrafts from the villages of India because Gandhi saw that encouraging the expansion of village life and culture was the way forward for India. It can now be seen as an idea that has run its course, even at the time, people like Nehru laughed at it, he saw Gandhi, an educated barrister, wearing Indian peasant clothes as a bit of a joke. A taxi arrived and took us to another place, Loic a French Sahaja Yogi was in it and the lovely Mr. Brahman Banerjee who told me his job was translating from Bengali into English. At the recent birthday Puja in New Delhi he said that Shri Mataji categorically stated that any Sahaja Yogi who lives a pure life is guaranteed no more reincarnations! I find myself initially disappointed at first by this thought, after all having lived so many previous lives in an unrealized state, why wouldn’t one want to come back and enjoy one or two more in this newly evolved condition? Then, on second thought, I was utterly inspired by the fact that the endless cycle of Maya, the great game of winners and losers, could be over in this lifetime. What a goal to strive for. 10 PM. This new place, called Banini Dharmsala is a huge building, with large rooms with marble floors, each with their own basic cooking facilities attached which are open for rent to the public. Hindu religious ceremonies go on constantly, lasting virtually all day with individuals coming and going at random. The priests spoke and sang into microphones and the overall sound echoed and resonated through the building reached deafening levels at time. The operator of the one elevator in the building curiously enjoys a lunch break between 1 PM and 3 PM, the very time which when it appeared to be most needed. Loic came back with me to the Kenilworth Hotel where the laundry awaiting me was from room 406 whereas my room was 604. Driving through the crowded and corroded city streets was something to be remembered. Even though I’ve experienced it before in Delhi and Bombay, the sheer turmoil of an Indian street is always a shock to the system. The streets are awash with activity, from top to bottom of society including the flotsam and jetsam, and every conceivable type of vehicle contributes to the chaos. There are rickshaws seating two people, although I’ve seen six in one, pulled along by one man. There are carts made from long strips of bamboo supported on cross members atop car wheels, laden high with jute sacks. Up to six men will be pushing and drawing these through the streets There are cyclists and motorcyclists, scooterists – the record number I’ve seen on a motor scooter is six, and drivers of curious three wheeled contraptions, a cross between a lorry, a three wheeler and a car. There are motorized rickshaws, cars, vans and trucks, the latter extravagantly decorated with Hindu symbols and painted in the brightest colors. The drivers of this cornucopia of transport do their best to contribute to the cacophony of sound, with shouts, bells and horns that range from the flat, two-dimensional squawk of the motor scooter, to the deep resonance of the old-fashioned bulb squeezed airhorns. Our taxi driver had two, a tinny excuse of a horn mounted on an inner ring of the steering wheel and affected when any part of the ring was depressed and the bulbous air horn as previously described. As with users of city streets everywhere, all, despite the evidence to the contrary, are apparently convinced that the noise they generate will magically open a way through the congestion. Or perhaps, more plausibly, that the exercising their rights to bellow, shout or squawk will in some way ease their frustrations at being stuck in such hell. No evidence to be found here of the detached witness state.

Sunday, April 9, 1995 New Delhi airport Mr. Bhandari was a large, corpulent Sikh, and from what he said, a secular one. He wore a beautiful red turban and his beard was dyed jet black. Little bits, around the edges and notably under his skin were as white as the driven snow. He is in the ladies garment business and while he’s in England he also pops over to Sweden where he buys paper which he then imports into India. He told me some quite wonderful things. He was traveling with his brother ( who wore a beautiful powder blue turban), both were vegetarian. He asked me if I was and then went on to say that he had only been one for five months. His son, who is 18, studies very hard. One night, Mr. Bhandari went to the bathroom at 3 AM and noticed that his son’s bedroom light was still on. To his surprise he discovered hat his son was still studying To show his son how solidly the whole family was behind him, and the son already being a vegetarian, they all gave up meat as an act of solidarity and support. Mr. Bhandari, who studied business administration in London in 1973/4 and at Ann Arbor Michigan was telling me that the academic competition in India is so fierce that if a student doesn’t get more than 90%, they’re nowhere. He recently went to a parent’s evening and was standing in the queue to see a teacher. His son had scored 93% in a geography exam and Mr. B was looking forward to basking in praise heaped down on his son from the teacher. He overheard a lady ahead of him arguing with the teacher, her child scored had 98% and she wanted to know why he hadn’t received full marks and for what specific reasons why two points had been deducted. Finally, the teacher who had the exam papers to hand and obviously couldn’t fault her son's paper said that he never gave more than 98% to anyone. The lady went away satisfied. Mr. B says he experiences a great deal of racial abuse in England, particularly in Hackney. He told me a joke. Some time ago an Indian prince was playing cricket for England against Australia. An Englishman watched the Prince hit a six, turned to an Australian and said, “See, we have princes on our team!” The Indian prince was bowled out the very next ball. “Bloody nigger,” said the Englishman. Mr. Bhandari spoke with phenomenal love of his own mother. He said he was so grateful to her, he talked of how she had educated her children, even after her husband died. He sees her as a living saint. He said that the whole family feel the same way about her and if one morning she has even the slightest melancholy on her face they will all attend to her to make sure she’s well and happy. He says he touches her feet every morning and asks for her blessing. What I find shocking in this was to contrast my treatment of my own mother with his. I thought at the time that my mother was stupid, prudish and old-fashioned. She died of breast cancer something I believe women are susceptible to when their wifely/motherly qualities are challenged. I know she felt rejected by me and I ask for forgiveness for this and I can see now in Self-realized retrospect that in most of her views she was right. All of the things I did which she disapproved of or would have disapproved of had she known about them were wrong, harmful to me as well as to others. How amazing it is that it’s taken until now, 20 years after her death, for me to see this. And is it not strange that in recognizing Shri Mataji as my divine mother, I came to see and appreciate my own mother so much more than I did when she was alive? Why is it that I always have these great self revelations when I travel? I suspect that the answer is this, there are two types of travel, the first when one is travels through physical space, from A to B. The second also involves traveling through physical space but it’s also traveling through metaphysical space, there is a clear and obvious spiritual dimension to the travel, it used to be known as pilgrimage in times more enlightened than the one I grew up in. I recall sitting next to a French yacht broker on my way to New Zealand a few years ago and how cathartic and insightful his conversation has been. Everything he'd said was of direct relevance and benefit to me. Mr. Bhandari said that when a man says he knows God, God gives him riches, to test him. Many men forget God or get distracted by the problems that come with money. If a man passes this test God then gives them lots of other problems e.g. family problems and that any man who passes these is truly close to God. Having heard something of my own story, Mr. B said straightaway that my wife wanted out of the marriage when it became clear to her that I was no longer under her control. He pointed out how, in her new situation. she’s has put herself again in a position of control, she’s now the breadwinner, she’s in a totally dominant position over her new man, irrespective of whether she exercises that dominance or not. Well observed, Mr. B, she clearly from what my sons say, does exercise that dominance. In common with others I’ve met from the Indian subcontinent, notably my dear friend Shams Qureshi, Bloomsbury's agent in Pakistan, Mr. Bhandari has a fine line in paranoia and conspiracy theory. Saddam Hussein, he was told by a man who’d been an officer in the Iraqi Army for 20 years, was a CIA agent. Why did all assassination attempts against him fail? Because Saddam was always warned in advance by the CIA. Saddam was told by the American ambassador that if he invaded Kuwait the USA wouldn’t intervene. United States policy was to let Saddam destroy Kuwait then have Uncle Sam come to the rescue reminding all and sundry that they have to do what the USA tells them. He also believes that Gorbachev is a CIA agent, hence the way he destroyed the Soviet Union. Mr. B, though nominally a Sikh, made it clear that he has no time for religion, he opts for the view that is the cause of all our problems and that we would all be better off without it. He saw no contradiction between this and the views he expressed about God but I guess there’s nothing unusual in this, plenty, William Blake included, were against organized religion although deeply spiritual and connected to God. Mr. B is well-versed in scandal and had lots to say about Mark Thatcher’s USA tax problems, Rajiv Gandhi's shortcomings plus those of his mother. Shastri, the former Indian prime minister was murdered by air injected into a vein, because he was too honest. Like the stopped clock which is accurate twice a day, Mr B was close to the truth in the latter case. CP, who was Shastri's principle private secretary at the time of the Tashkent conference where Shastri died, did not think he had been murdered. Shri Mataji said that he was, poisoned by his cook, who disappeared immediately afterwards. Listening to all of this brought home to me just how far I’ve come myself. To have lost my deep cynicism is truly a miracle for which I’m daily thankful and to know God, to live in the present, is a divine blessing, one beyond any hopes, aspirations or expectations I ever had before encountering Shri Mataji.

My wife hated me meditating from the outset but when I went to India, she insisted I take a pair of her favorite Capri pants that had been made in India with me and to buy some more. It seemed a mission doomed to failure. I explained that many clothes were made in India for export and not available there because Indian women, at that time, had a different sense of fashion to their Western counterparts. I looked around New Delhi, not a Capri pant in sight. Saris yes, Punjabis in profusion, Capris conspicuous by their absence on what India women were wearing and absent from what was available for purchase in street markets and stores. When it came time to leave, the people I was staying with offered to get some made for me and to mail them. I left them $200, an inordinately high amount, but I wanted to do my best that sure nothing could go wrong and as a token of my thanks for their hospitality. Months passed. No package. My wife decided that this was all the evidence she needed that my newfound meditation was a scam, my new found friends in India were scammers. How could I be so stupid? Nine months or so later, a bulky package arrived from India. It contained her old Capri pants and two more pairs, made from what appeared to be rough sisal, the material of burlap bags, material that was so rough to the touch that it would have had the effect of sandpaper and if worn next to skin. A casual inspection revealed that their only resemblance to my wife’s Capri pants were that they had two leg openings. In the days that followed, my wife went through an impressive range of emotional indignance. It would have been better had my friends simply pocketed the $200 than to do what they’d done. Every cliché in the book was thrown at me, beginning with insult to injury, that she’d known from the outset that something like this would happen. Friends? Indeed! Moreover, this was proof positive that the form of meditation I was practicing was a con. Weeks later, at my meditation class, which was forty minutes drive from my home, I turned around, and there she was, sitting near the back. The expression on her face was evidence confirmed that she’d come not to like it, to prove, for once or for all, what she already knew, that this was a cult, and nothing happened to change her mind. What’s there not to like?

I never paid any attention to a critic ever - about anything. How could you? What do they know? I've been doing this my whole life and most of them have never touched an instrument. How could they be critical of anything? Jack Wilkins, Jazz Guitarist and Teacher.

So says Blake Snyder in his wonderful book, Save The Cat - The Last Book On Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need. What he says would apply to books too. He says every great movie has a logline, one sentence that tells you what it is! He gives examples and says that the best has four key characteristics. Examples: A newly married couple must spend Christmas Day at each of their four divorced parents homes - 4 Christmases A just hired employee goes on a company weekend and soon discovers someone is trying to kill him - The Retreat A risk-averse teacher plans on marrying his dream girl but must first accompany his overprotective future brother-in-law - a cop - on a ride coming from hell! - Ride Along. A cop comes to LA to visit his estranged wife and her office building is taken over by terrorists. - Die Hard. This is broadly true of book publishing too, especially non-fiction, if you watch sales rep selling a list of forthcoming titles to a buyer in a bookstore, they probably get only a minute, maximum, to show a book cover and describe it. Hence the cliché in the business that if you can't describe it in a minute it's a dead duck. He says the four basic elements of a logline are: 1. Irony. It must be in some way ironic and emotionally involving - a dramatic situation that is like an itch you have to scratch. 2. A compelling mental picture. It must bloom in your mind when you hear it. A whole movie must be implied, often including a time frame. 3. Audience and cost. It must demarcate the tone, the target audience, and the sense of cost, so buyers will know if it can make a profit. 4 A killer title. The one-two punch of a good logline must include a great title, one that “says what it is” and does so in a clever way. This is quite a tough discipline, I have always been lousy at titles and point 4 blows my present one out of the water - And The Fire And The Rose Are One.  What about: A man thinks he met the living God in New York City, but She chose Him and takes him. - God Alive in New York City.

There’s an old guy who hangs around the boxing gyms in the Bronx. The owners do their best to discourage him from coming even though it’s against their business interest to do so. Attracting customers is their stock in trade and much as it is against the grain to repel those who want to pay them money to train, they feel sorry for old Saul, as well as concerned, because he’s sixty seven and still harbors the ambition and desire to fight professionally again. He’s already in the record books as being one of the oldest men ever to fight professionally in a licensed boxing ring and despite the obvious brain damage he suffers, he still thinks he can do it one more time. He was no soup can (easy to knock over). And back in the day when a world title meant something more than a marketing opportunity for somebody other than the champion, he’d won a world title in South Korea by knocking out their man, their World champion in the fourteenth round. Professional Boxing is as much, if not more of a business as it is a sport and people like Saul were not invited to travel from the Bronx to Seoul on the basis that they stood a chance of relieving their champion of his title. It was the kind of place where you’d have to knock their man unconscious to have an even money chance of being awarded a draw. I was getting dressed, having trained and showered, as Saul was changing to train. We were the only people in the changing room and we chatted a little as we had a couple of times before. He repeated that he wanted to fight again. “Doing the same thing endlessly over and over is really boring. Have you considered maybe that it's time you packed it in, and learn to do something new and challenging, like be a boxing trainer?” He said he’d once tried to train his son, but that he wouldn’t listen. “What did you expect? Sons rarely listen to their fathers. I have four brothers, none of them, me included, ever listened much to our old man, not unless we wanted something off him.” "But”, I said, “in your case, you’d make a great trainer.” In New York City there are eight million people, how many do you think ever held a world title in boxing?” He looked at me, wondering where this was going. I said, “I’d guess, maybe ten.” “It’s probably less than that,” he offered. “So of all these trainers, for example, in this club, in this city, few if any has been where you’ve been, faced what you’ve faced, know what you know. They might think they know, but that’s not the same as knowing what you know. All you have to do is learn how to put it across.” “But what if they won’t listen to me?” “Would you agree that in the history of mankind, the wisdom of the old was always respected by the young, at least that element of the young who were going to achieve anything?” He agreed. “So if you meet someone who doesn’t listen to you, doesn’t offer you the respect you deserve, ignore them, find someone who does.” A smile crossed his face. “I’ve never thought of it like that.” He shook my hand and I left the gym as he prepared to train.

I call it the "Save The Cat" scene. They don't put it into movies anymore. And it's basic. It's the scene where we meet the hero and the hero does something - like saving a cat - that defines who he is - and makes us, the audience, like him. In the thriller, Sea of Love, Al Pacino is a cop. Scene One finds him in the middle of a sting operation. Parole violators have been lured by the promise of meeting the NY Yankees, but when they arrive, it's Al and his buddies waiting to bust them. So Al's "cool." (He's got a cool idea for a sting anyway.) But on his way out he also does something nice. Al spots another lawbreaker, who's brought his son, coming late to the sting. Seeing the Dad with his kid, Al flashes his badge at the man who nods in understanding and exits quick. Al lets this guy off the hook because he has his young son with him. And just to let you know Al hasn't really gone totally soft, he also gets to say a cool line to the crook: "Catch you later.... " Well, I don't know about you, but I like Al. I'll go anywhere he'll take me now and you know what else? I'll be rooting to see him win. All based on a two second interaction between Al and a Dad with his baseball fan kid. Can you imagine if the makers of Lara Croft 2 spent $4 on a good Save the Cat scene instead of the $2.5 million they spent developing that new latex body suit for Angelina Jolie? They might have done a whole lot better. From the Introduction to Save the Cat - The Last Book On Screenwriting You'll Ever Need by Blake Snyder. An absolute must for anyone who wants to learn to write so that others will want to read what you've written, and to pay money for the privilege.

November 12, 2018 Verse Caustic, duplicitous, coercive Been around the block too many times To feel the stones in their hearts Chorus Where is their attention And Oh, I hate to mention That the Last Judgement Is coming their way, any day now Verse Who’ll be in the Last Judgement seat? What dread hand, and what dread feet? Unaware that they’ll judge themselves Their own harshest critic Verse Dread? They used to say Better red than dead Or was it better dead than red? What’s the difference if you can’t see That it’s all a leela for Sada Shiva?