In the summer of 1986 I ran another two week combined with a three day Intensive. My memory of it was that the two week Intensive was a bit of a disaster. I remember being very critical of a number of the participants and I have no memory of any enlightenment experiences. Reading my journal gives a totally different picture. There were 41 people for the first three days and in that period 12 of the participants shared 18 experiences between them. The 17 who carried on for the whole two weeks were making steady progress, including a number of experiences, up to about day 10 or 11. Then the group went flat. And it is clear from my journal that the reason was that I ran out of energy. It seems that although the Master cannot make experiences happen, he or she can certainly get in the way of them happening.
I didn’t appreciate how totally exhausted I was until I arrived back home. As I walked in through the front door I literally fell over from exhaustion. I held it together up to that point and then collapsed. It took two weeks before I had much energy for doing anything at all. And even then, I was plagued by allergic reactions – which outside the hay-fever season was unusual. It took a further month for me to work out that I now had an allergy to dairy products.
I sent a report on the Intensives to Satya, Skanda and Yogeshwar. Yogeshwar responded with some detailed suggestions, including one that I glossed over at the time. He said that I had experienced another kundalini release and that this was the source of much of my criticalness of some of the participants. With hindsight I can also see that it was probably the cause of my dairy allergy; the kundalini had now risen as far as the stomach chakra where it ran into another block and caused me grief.
In fact, nothing really became clear about what had happened on the two week Intensive until I decided to get stoned one evening about six weeks later.
It is totally and obviously stunningly simple – I profoundly love other people. I need never doubt my rightness in serving others on Intensives. Several times today I have recognised that I just cannot stand what I see when I am really open to other people. I may have closed down at some point in the two week – because I couldn’t stand my sense of helplessness in the face of other people’s pain. I couldn’t stand the pain it stirred up and reminded in me. I couldn’t stand my feelings of love and empathy – a state in which I would do absolutely anything to help the other person. This feels right. I couldn’t handle the two week group – they were too much for me. I couldn’t stand the feelings they stirred up in me – no wonder I was so critical of them! At some level I knew I had done this, which is why I have felt so low since the Intensive. A major direct experience late in the Intensive would have carried me through, but it didn’t happen. This is what I needed to understand and why I got stoned this evening. Now I know I do not feel bad about it, I just have to increase my capacity so that I do not have to close off during an Intensive ever again. I can also remind myself, yet again, that whenever I am feeling critical then there is something that I need to look at in myself.
Things did not remain ‘obviously stunningly simple’. I continued to work harder than I could easily cope with and as a result periodically ran into crises. Toward the end of the year I visited my wise man to ask for help. He said
The reason why you are in a crisis is that until recently you were pursuing spiritual growth for ego gratification and that ultimately the Divine will stop feeding your ego. You have gained enough rewards and highs to keep you going – but now that has stopped and your ego is freaking out. What you need to do is approach things differently – to choose to do things because it is right, not because of the results or some high you might gain. In short quit doing things for ego rewards. Remember it does not matter what you do; it matters a great deal how you do everything.
I received different versions of this basic message over and over again for the next period of my life – which was an extremely busy and productive period. By the end of 1986 Eva and I were fed up with teenagers monopolising the only bathroom in our house. We also had a significant amount of money in the bank and my business had effectively doubled my income – so we started to look for a bigger house to live in. This was a fraught process. We had our offer on one house accepted, a survey completed and a mortgage arranged only for the owner to pull out at the last minute.
A short while later we found an enormous Old Manor House that we could afford, but it required major renovation to make it habitable – for example it had no heating system in the house. Eva was not enthusiastic – partly because of the amount of work required but also because the house was gloomy and felt neglected. I was quite keen because I could see it had great potential for running Intensives. In particular it had fabulous walks straight out of the garden, enough parking space for a dozen cars and probably enough sleeping spaces for 20 people. I didn’t talk about its suitability for Intensives to Eva and it was only much later that we discovered that we had both been sizing up all the houses we looked at in this way.
In the meantime, Eva had signed up for Satya’s second six-week Intensive that would be held in Austria in the summer. Before she left she gave me power of attorney to buy the Old Manor House if I could negotiate a suitable price. This I did and I moved into the house whilst Eva was away on her six-week Intensive.
The renovation of the Old Manor House was a yearlong project, complicated by the fact that it was a listed building. For most of the next year there were three plumbers, a carpenter, a plasterer a general builder and his assistants to supervise. I undertook the rewiring of the house, mostly so it could be done in step with the other work, but also because I enjoyed being practical. I installed more than 100 double power points, more than 100 lights and in the process used more than a mile of electric cable! We uncovered old stone fireplaces and had to repair large stone arches. We found that the stone mullion windows were not the original windows – so the core of the house predated 1600. We caused one of the enormous beams in the house to crack and had to employ specialist church repair people to make it safe. The beam in question was 9 meters long, more than a meter deep and over half a meter wide. The beam would have come from an oak tree several hundred years old, and since it was installed before 1600, this meant the original tree probably dated from before 1200!
Once the renovation work was underway Eva became fully involved and, to her surprise, loved it. By the time the work was finished we had a house with eight bedrooms, two kitchens, four bathrooms and three large rooms on the ground floor which became our living room, the office for my business and a TV/library room. Our children loved it as well – they now each had a large room to themselves – and the second kitchen on the top floor was for their use. They were also able to contribute to the project, particularly helping with the decoration and clearing the half acre garden that was around the house. The renovation project cost £100,000 in 1987/88, equivalent to more than £250,000 in 2016/17.
I moved into the Old Manor House in July 1987 and decided quite quickly to schedule the summer 1988 Intensives to be held there. In fact Eva and I decided that we would run a two week Intensive followed by a Master’s Training course – the same format that Satya and Skanda had used in 1982 and 1983 when we had trained. It turned out to be quite tight to have the house fully prepared for the Intensive in July 1988. We were literally painting the main group room (also our lounge) two days prior to the participants arriving. As we were putting the finishing touches to the room I suddenly remembered what had happened on my Master’s Training in 1983. Then someone had asked me why I was starting a business, to which I had said “Because in five years time I want to have a house large enough to run Intensives in”. Here I was, almost exactly five years later, finishing a house in which we were going to run Intensives! Once more I felt that I was fulfilling my destiny by running Intensives.
Although writing the book about Intensives had been relatively easy, finding a publisher for it proved to be anything but easy. The problem was that the book was effectively promoting a niche process in a small market. I finally gave up finding a publisher and self-published it. I was able to use illustrations by a famous American artist (Peter Max) who had made the drawings shortly after participating in an Intensive himself. The book title Tell me who you are was simply the first instruction people hear on an Intensive. It was finally printed and finished a few weeks before the two week and Master’s course in the new house.
At the University I was asked to take on being the Head of the Systems Department. I only agreed to do this when I had gained the co-operation of the senior staff in the department to take a share of the administration work required. Nevertheless taking on the HoD role was significant. This all came about whilst I was supervising the renovation project at home, running five Intensives that year and also building up an energy software business. I was asked by the National Energy Foundation to develop the software I had created for the energy World exhibition into a general Energy Index for all dwellings. This was a major opportunity that I took – in part in order to pay for the increasing mortgage on the Old Manor House caused by rising interest rates.
The six week on which Eva participated was poorly organised. There were too many people on the Intensive for the facilities available and, in Eva’s estimation, Satya made a number of errors whilst Mastering. Nevertheless Eva had a powerful experience and gained a deeper sense of her self worth and ability. This meant that by the time we were running the Master’s Training in our new home we were both very confident of our understanding of how Intensives worked, what was required to Master them and how to teach others to do so. We also loved working together at this level. There was a natural harmony between us, rooted in our experiences of the Divine. We also respected each other’s work with people, even though we would approach issues quite differently.
Without any appreciation of the significance of doing so, we had always run an Intensive in early December. After reading more Zen literature I discovered that this was the time when Zen monasteries around the world celebrated Buddha’s enlightenment. The Zen sesshins at this time were known as the Rohatsu sesshins, so we called our December Intensive the same. I took the opportunity to explore ways of changing the schedule and having participants prepare for the Intensive by completing a Holistic Yoga exercise. I wanted to find out whether there were ways of increasing the number of participants having experiences. This was also a way of making the whole process my own; I was no longer simply following what Yogeshwar did – although I believed I was maintaining the sense of facilitating people to find out who they actually are. It was another step in claiming my Mastership.
Another step occurred after I ran an Intensive an Intensive at Grimstone, this was a few weeks before our new house was ready. There were two of Tony’s daughters on the Intensive, Tony being the owner of Grimstone. The Intensive went quite well and immediately afterwards I went to my caravan on Dartmoor – a five minute car trip from Grimstone – for my annual retreat. A few days later I received a message to return to Grimstone, one of Tony’s daughters, Clair, had not been able to sleep since participating on the Intensive and was behaving strangely. I took Clair back to the caravan with me and spent time talking to her, taking her on long walks and providing her with food. I had an idea that she might have had a kundalini release, but did not know for sure and even if the diagnosis was correct, had no real idea how to help. Clair stayed with me for the next few days. It became clear that she was dealing with a jumble of a lot of early memories, some happy but many fraught or terrifying. I helped her to express her feelings about them, but that just seemed to make the jumble worse and the flood of memories increase. And she still was not sleeping. So I took her to a doctor in the nearest town to request some sleeping pills. The doctor listened to what had happened to her and basically thought that sleeping pills were a bad idea; he suggested that she should talk about what was going on with her. Despite all my explanations that she had basically been talking too much for the last 9 days he would not budge. So I returned to Grimstone and after a brief discussion it was agreed that the only course of action was for Clair to be admitted to a mental hospital. The idea horrified me; but I had no better idea.
A week later I was relieved to hear that Clair had fully recovered. Apparently the hospital had tried all sorts of tranquilizers and sleeping pills to get her to sleep – and nothing had any effect on her. Eventually, ten days after the Intensive, she slept. When she woke up she was completely normal. She had to convince a panel of psychiatrists that she was OK – but she was able to do so, and was back home the next day. To the best of my knowledge she has never had a repeat of the episode, nor anything like it, for which I am extremely grateful. The whole experience showed me that I knew virtually nothing about how to handle this sort of event – so I spent quite a lot of the next year educating myself about ways of handling kundalini episodes, mild psychoses and the like. I wanted to be as competent and aware as I could.
Whilst completing my retreat I listened to tapes of Yogeshwar giving lectures about Sahaj Yoga, also known as Surrender Yoga. He had learned about this yoga from his guru who had been practising it for more than 25 years. The instructions for undertaking the yoga are deceptively simple. “Go into a room where you can lock the door and not be disturbed or overlooked. Then surrender to the Divine and allow whatever happens to happen.” What then unfolds is a natural process in which the person purifies themselves. The person will spontaneously start to adopt postures, undertake breathing exercises and chanting until finally kundalini is released and the individual becomes ‘enlightened’. According to Yogeshwar’s guru it was when people saw enlightened yogis doing postures and breathing exercises that they started to copy both – giving rise to the now popularised versions of ‘yoga’. I was fascinated and wrote to Satya and Skanda asking what I needed to do in order to start this practice! I actually started it just over a year later in 1989.
My life was settling into a routine. I awoke early, spent up to an hour in the garden – I was developing a productive vegetable garden – then I went for a run and meditated for 45 – 60 minutes. Then I would have a shower, breakfast and go to work. I often divided my day between working at the University and working on the energy business. My wise man continued to advise me that I was working too hard and neglecting my spiritual development, however my activities were being very productive, both in terms of earning money and in terms of developing and implementing new ideas.
One very positive development was that Eva and I started to take two week summer holidays together without any of the children. This was significant because it was an extended period of quality time together during which we were able to develop our relationship. We usually spent the first two or three days arguing – basically clearing the backlog of unresolved stuff between us. We then started to be more in love with each other and spend one day taking a long walk and the next day relaxing on a beach. We always went in the middle of the hay-fever season to give me a break from sneezing – we also made sure to travel far enough south that there was no pollen around. This meant going to places like Turkey, Cyprus, Crete and so on.
Quite often on our walks we would use the Intensive communication exercise. I have a very vivid memory of doing this once in the Troodos mountains in Cyprus. When Eva said “Tell me what life is” I contemplated for a while and then said “Life is an opportunity to experience love whilst in a body. It’s an amazing opportunity to feel and know love!” This episode has stayed with me ever since and I have come to regard what I discovered that day as my purpose in life.
Indeed with the wisdom of hindsight it is easy to see that these holidays saved our relationship from serious neglect during these years of working so hard. This is made clear in the following conversations with my wise man:
As I was explaining myself to my wise man it became clear that I was very desperate because I felt I either had to leave Eva or give up on what I wanted.
My wise man said: “You have not given time or attention to your relationship for the last two years. Things have reached this state because neither of you have given the relationship the time needed. You are also stuck in a particular way of seeing Eva. Your story has a lot in it that is valid for you and you have used your logic and clarity to make it completely convincing to yourself. You can probably convince Eva of it as well – but it is a story you have chosen – and it’s unhelpful. In all your options you always leave out changing yourself – you don’t have to give up wanting love or anything else – but you do have to give up this view of Eva. She may be loving you the best that she can – but you are so fixed in your view you are unable to see it. From where you are now, making any change seems threatening and impossibly difficult – but once the change is made you’ll wonder why you resisted! And it is exactly as difficult for Eva to get out of her fixed state of mind as it is for you to get out of yours. The very best you can do to help her is to get your own act together – get out of your fixed mind set. And any time you find these convincing blame stories running you can be sure you are stuck in your stuff!”
When reviewing my journals for this period I was able to see something that had escaped me at the time – namely that my wise man was regularly telling me to give up my belief that Eva did not love me. I referred to this at the end of the trip to Australia (which was in 1986) and this last confrontation was in 1990. Indeed, he continued to confront me one this issue after the time period covered by this chapter. At the time I had not realised how entrenched the belief had been. It was obviously related to the fact that I had a rejecting mother and had been attracted to rejecting women – all of whom gave no indication of loving me. I felt embarrassed at seeing how long I resisted recognising Eva’s love for me. When I saw all this whilst reading the journals, I immediately apologised to her for not recognising her love sooner; she was grateful for the apology – even though delivered nearly thirty years late!
A few months later I struggled with a sense I was in some way being insincere, so I had another conversation with my wise man:
As I explained my problem to him I untangled it all, I must have spent a full 30 minutes telling him what I thought. I started by saying that I couldn’t bear the thought of living with someone as messy and unloving as Eva for the rest of my life. I knew I couldn’t change her. But then I realised that one of my main reasons for being into growth and the Truth was because I thought that in the process Eva would change. I really didn’t want to give up having things my way – because that was why I was into this growth work – to have things more my way. Suddenly I could see why I was questioning my sincerity, why I was so critical of Eva’s lack of progress, why I didn’t want to go on – because to go on from here means giving up on her ever being any different. I could vaguely see that if I gave up and ceased being critical of her then she might feel safer and find the room to change. But I was really caught. I didn’t want to go on. At which point I asked my wise man for help.
He said “Jake your integrity is amazing to witness. It is always the case that at some point everyone has to give up the very thing that got them going for the Truth in the first place. And you have come to that point, fair and square. You have put it together and seen the source of your criticalness of Eva. And it is natural for you to question your own sincerity. How do you know that you are not being insincere at a new level? Well the thing that stood out for me so clearly in all that you have said is your love for the Truth. You went on confronting yourself, using your powerful intellect to pull yourself apart, because you would not settle for anything less. Your love for the Truth is magnificent and will take you onwards. Bless you for that Jake!”
These confrontations really helped and meant that a lot of the time Eva and I were OK with each other. However early in 1990 things came to a head when I was once again exhausted from working too hard and she and Joe were making the house messy. I spent most of a day crying with despair and not knowing what to do. My back was aching and, as my osteopath had told me repeatedly, this was due to me “holding back” sexually and emotionally. That evening Eva and I talked about what was going on between us. I explained that I feared that I did not love her any more – that our relationship was at an end. There was no antagonism, just a defeated sadness.
When we reach an impasse like this where rational talking does not hold out much hope of progress or resolution, we often get stoned together. We have found that this can open up new perspectives that can be helpful. So that’s what we did; we got stoned.
When we were stoned we explored what it meant to stop loving someone. For me it meant giving upon a certain level of contact and intimacy. I had given up on having sexual closeness and intimacy with Eva. I explained how I saw her going ‘off’ into her head. She explained that was safer for her – more sure than a chance hormonal thing. I said it was infinitely worse and a clear NO would be much better. Then, slowly, I realised what it was that I wanted. I said “Look it’s not sex that I want, it’s you. I do not want sex without you being present and in contact.” Eva couldn’t believe it. She had a deep belief that no one could love her and that she had to perform sexually to be loved. So I had to say it to her over and over again. And she had to face down the aspects of her who didn’t believe it. It was really the right message and I know that she heard it – and found it irresistible. All my withdrawal and sorrow was a poor, indirect way of trying to get it across. It became clear that for Eva to say “No I’m not interested in sex right now” carries the implicit message “Yes I want real intimacy”. The pretence of wanting sex carries the implicit message “No you can’t have me, have this instead”. There is still a lot to sort out, but we reconnected in this stoned conversation.
Very shortly after this I was totally immersed in work once more. I was finishing the software that was going to become the National Home Energy Rating (NHER) scheme, figuring out the training required to use the software consistently and then devising and running a course to train trainers to teach it all. We now had a fairly regular schedule for Intensives that included four or five three day events each year, a two week Intensive every two years and a Master’s Training every four years. We had a mailing list of several thousand people and a well worn system for keeping them updated of all the courses. My work at the University was also going very well. Our house was finally finished and the garden was producing a regular supply of fruit and vegetables – as well as looking beautiful. In 1990 Eva and I went to Crete for our June holiday and we had a wonderful time. Quite early on Eva apologised to me for a range of stuff, like being untidy and not helping enough with the kids, which really helped. We just loved being together, even when it involved becoming completely lost in a totally dark night in the mountains! The only downside on the holiday was that I had to come back to the UK a few days before the end of our holiday for the official launch of the NHER scheme. I was to demonstrate the software to Margaret Thatcher who had agreed to help launch the first domestic energy rating scheme. It was a fitting climax to a period of very intense work. As a couple we were back on track, my business was making more money than I knew how to use, my work at the University was very successful and I was established as the leading Enlightenment Master in the UK; success on all fronts!
Next.
A Master's Path 