We discovered that Charles Berner, Yogeshwar, had moved his ashram from California to the hills outside Adelaide in Australia – where Eva had grown up as a child. In January 1986 Eva arranged to go to Australia to participate in a mind clearing program run by Skanda. She left in early January and I agreed to travel out to Australia later with her two children a month later so we could have a holiday there together. I would also participate in a mind clearing exercise, though for a much shorter time than Eva. We would also be able to spend time with Satya and Skanda and probably see Yogeshwar as well.
Very early in January, before Eva left for Australia, I caught a very bad head cold. I spent days huddled up around the fire feeling more and more frustrated at not being able to do anything. Eventually I decided that it was time I started to write a book on Enlightenment Intensives. So I lay on the floor with the portable Osborne computer set up and started typing. The first chapters just poured out of me and within 10 days I had completed the first half of the book. This was a fictional account, written in the first person, of what it was like to participate in an Intensive. The second half, which took longer to write, was about why the process was set up in a particular way and how it worked. I really enjoyed the whole experience of thinking it out and writing it as clearly as I could. The book was finished and printed out as a manuscript before I left for Australia; I was keen to have Satya, Skanda and maybe Charles Berner’s comments on it. There was not yet any book written solely about Enlightenment Intensives (in Geoff Love’s book Intensives were described in a single chapter).
Whilst Eva was in Australia I arranged to have dinner with Laura, in part as a way to find closure. It would be the first time we had spent together in seven years. I was intrigued to discover how things had unfolded for her. Here is an extract from a letter I wrote to Eva about the meeting:
Without any effort on my part we started to talk about important things. She is very miserable. She decided to go for a full-time monogamous relationship with Dave – but he turned her down flat. And her other lover has moved to Cornwall with a new woman. She cried quite a bit and the pain and sadness were clearly still overpowering. Later we talked about misunderstandings between us, times we felt hurt by each other and so on. She talked quite a lot about the episode early on when her ex-boyfriend threatened suicide. Apparently she felt so bad she went to a psychiatrist at the time – who apparently said “grow up little girl, come into the world, marry the physicist!”
I feel sad for Laura. I wish she were happy. Saying goodbye, I gave her a hug and she was really tight and shaky. I realised that I have been affected by her. I want all the people with whom I have shared part of my life to be happy. It doesn’t feel right for me to have so much and for them to be suffering. Sometimes I find life unbearable, I just want to make everyone in the world happy – then, and only then, could I be really happy. I keep thinking of that vow; “I vow to liberate all sentient beings without number”.
The journey to Australia with Eva’s children was very stressful. Joe was by now 8 and Sophi 14. Eva had found a place for us to stay in the Adelaide hills. I found myself suffering from jet lag and feeling miserable a lot of the time. Before leaving England I had been pondering what it was that drove me to work so hard. I clearly had a lot of energy, but there seemed to be something else wrapped up in my activities. The something else was avoiding my feelings! For at least the first week I was miserable and difficult to live with most of the time – I blamed Eva – or the children – for everything. When I consulted my wise man he gently pointed out to me that I had a very firm belief that Eva didn’t love me and that she experienced this as a total obstacle to loving me. He advised me to work on dropping the belief and finding out what the truth might be! This turned out to be a recurrent theme of the entire trip. I would find a way out of the belief, we would have a nice time, and then I would find myself doubting her love all over again. By going in and out of the trip quite frequently – and by not distracting myself with piles of work – I could see that it had absolutely nothing to do with Eva and everything to do with me. Me and what I was choosing! Over and over again I saw that I had deep feelings of misery, rooted in my childhood, that I normally avoided by working hard and when I stopped working I blamed on Eva.
We had Satya and Skanda around one evening for dinner. We were appalled at how the related to each other. They constantly interrupted each other and paid very little attention to what the other person was saying or feeling. I had read quite a lot of Charles Berner’s (who now called himself Yogeshwar) teaching on relationships and decided that I disagreed with some of his basic ideas. Seeing Satya and Skanda’s relationship reinforced my belief that Yogeshwar did not have much insight into relationships. (A similar conclusion could be drawn from the fact that he had been married four times and failed to make any relationship last more than a few years.)
Eva described to me the work she had undertaken as part of the ‘mind-clearing intensive’ she had undertaken with Skanda over a two week period. For her the most profound aspect was discovering what she felt guilt about in her own estimation. She had been accused of all sorts of wrong doings as a child and young woman, but did not accept much of it. When confronted to find out what she thought she had done wrongly in her own estimation she was often horrified at what she discovered. It helped her accept responsibility for the failure of her first marriage (to Sophi’s father), which also created an opening for our relationship to grow.
I had a week’s mind clearing scheduled with Skanda. The guilt clearing part did not last more than a few hours in my case. Instead I was confronted by various attitudes that held me apart from other people – feeling shy, feeling lonely, rehearsing what to say before saying anything. I found the process interesting, but did not experience any significant development.
We were able to meet with Yogeshwar several times. I checked with him whether it was OK to record our conversations, and he agreed it was. The first time we sat with him I asked a lot of questions that he answered. Having a tape recorder running meant I didn’t have to stop to take notes. On that occasion he also challenged Eva to cease resisting the Truth.
The second time we met with him I gave him the manuscript of the book I had written on Intensives. He was cautious about accepting it and said he would read it when he had the time. We had a meeting with him scheduled for the next day and as soon as we sat down he said that he had read the book all the way through. He couldn’t put it down and had been up late into the night finishing it. He said “it had been written with authority, clarity and compassion. That it authentically describes an Enlightenment Intensive and succeeds in conveying the essence of some enlightenment experiences. It is an important contribution that will inspire people as well as providing them with accurate information on Intensives.” He also said “you are an exceptionally clear thinker, talented in writing, compassionate and in touch with kundalini energy. Generally, you use that energy in your creative work, but sometimes you also hit your wife with it. And the way that you lead Intensives is fine.” The last acknowledgement was probably the most important for me; after all he was the authority on how to Master an Intensive.
Back home life resumed being very busy. I Mastered a three-day Intensive in May and another towards the end of June. I continued developing software for the energy business and teaching materials for the University. I continued to struggle with blaming Eva for my bouts of misery – but fortunately they were happening less frequently. And our relationship was steadily improving – mostly because we were becoming more adept at spotting the trap we had walked into – again!
Early in June I used one of my sub-personality fantasy journeys to explore what was requiring attention within me. After a time I saw this delightful five year old boy with lovely loving eyes. It was me as a child. I realised that he was in touch with the love and joy that have been so present in me recently. And I knew that he had brought the love and joy with him – and he was in me. I cried a lot – with joy! Talking to him he said he was pleased to be able to come out again now it was safe. It wasn’t safe for him for a long time – and he still feels unsafe when I get angry or just caught in rows with other people. He wanted me to work so as to make it safe for other people to let their child show – then he would feel totally safe. He was just lovely.
A week after running the June Intensive, which was tough but rewarding, Eva and I spent an evening doing the communication exercise together. We found the formality of taking it in turns to speak for five minutes, to give each other an instruction and to neither interrupt or comment on what we heard really useful. That evening was particularly productive. Eva made headway on her relationship with Sophi, particularly her guilt at not being as good a mother to her as she wanted to be. I spent quite a lot of time remembering experiences that I had on Intensives – sometimes my own, sometimes as a result of sharing other participant’s experiences. Toward the end I kept returning to a memory of sitting under a tree on the last three day in which I had been a participant. It was the one where I ‘missed’ my experience of life.
I had had maybe a dozen intense flashbacks to that moment sitting under the tree without ever understanding why. Last night it clicked. Under that old willow tree, I underwent a fundamental shift in orientation. I knew I had been blessed by the Divine once again and I felt totally indebted. I knew that I had a surfeit of things for me and that I now had to act from these blessings for others. Up to that point I had really been working on myself for myself, to be happier, to get more goodies for me. Since then I have been working on myself in order to be able to serve others better, to be a better Master and teacher – so I do not fail in any way that I can avoid. When we talked after the exercise Eva recognised what I was saying as the truth about me and suggested that this was the real basis for the joy and bliss I had been experiencing so much of the time.
But it was not the only source of my joy and bliss. My relationship with Eva had been transformed, and a key part of that was my recognition of my role in holding Eva out. My character is based upon being a forcer; Eva’s is on resisting. So we both have a default assumption that it is she who is reducing the level of intimacy and contact between us. But during the trip to Australia I saw that it was my belief that Eva did not love me that was holding things up. And that belief was based on years and years of being with rejecting women who really did not love me. I was shocked at how I had transferred that belief to Eva even though she was clearly not a rejecting woman. As I slowly let go the belief I was delighted to find Eva’s love, contact and intimacy more available to me. There is a noticeable change in the tone of the entries in my journal around this time. Instead of describing my misery or frustration or other negative emotion, I am now writing in the journal less frequently and when I do write it is usually positively about our relationship. Here is a fairly typical entry:
I have been thinking about how great it is to be out of the relationship jungle – out of the hell of that misery I was in for so long. I now know who I’ll be with for the rest of my/her days. I love her and she loves me. We know each other better than we’ve ever known anyone. How did we make it through? At one level it was because of all that we learned from the previous nightmares. At another level is was because we each accepted that “it is all me!” And we have very good tools. But mostly it was owning our stuff that really saw us through to the other side. And Intensives have been fantastic for that – for self inspecting deeply, for communicating clearly and learning how to really listen to another person.
Next.
A Master's Path 