By mid-1997 the business was succeeding and the business had recruited my successor as MD.. It was March 1998 when I ceased being MD of NES no longer went into work every day. This pleased my wise man. For the previous few years almost every time that I visited him with a problem he would tell me that the root cause was exhaustion, doing too much and not meditating or being quiet enough.
The negotiation between Pilgrim and Hedonist that established the three monthly pattern of indulgence and clean out had an unforeseen consequence: our use of cannabis actually increased quite a lot. Prior to the negotiation the knowledge that Pilgrim was going to be moaning about any intoxication limited the times we smoked or drank alcohol. Now with a three month period of indulgence we enjoyed ourselves a lot more frequently. We also discovered that we could address problems whilst stoned. Indeed it was quite normal for us to gain some insight whenever we were stoned together. We also enjoyed food and sex a great deal more when stoned.
Interestingly when I returned to work at the University in 1998 I found the culture there very hard to accept. I had become accustomed to making tough decisions based upon clear performance criteria whilst managing the business. In contrast the University was vague, messy and unclear about everything. I had not realised how much being immersed in a commercial environment had shifted my own perceptions. Within a few months of being back I made an application for early retirement, which was granted. When I was making the application I remembered very clearly that throughout the years when I was working like an idiot, basically 1983 to 1998, I had promised myself that by the time I was 55 I would retire and thoroughly enjoy my retirement. Suddenly this promise to myself was coming true. All I now had to do was run a six week Intensive and hand running Intensives over to someone else.
My disillusion with the University was not only about how it managed its affairs. I also realised that I no longer subscribed to an academic way of thinking about the world. Many, but not all, of my colleagues at the University thought that by reading about something they had sufficient understanding of it. But this was clearly false when it came to stuff that involved experiencing something. I found myself repeatedly reminding my colleagues that reading the menu at a restaurant was quite different from actually eating the food! Anyway, I agreed that before I left I would present a series of seminars about my experience of managing a company with the aim of becoming a learning organisation, and on my experiences associated with Intensives.
When I was not being frustrated at the University I was preparing the house for the six-week. I enjoyed building a summer house in the garden in which Eva could stay. She was going to be a participant on the Intensive – indeed one of my main reasons for wanting to run it was to give her the experience of a well-run six week, unlike the one she had been to in Austria in 1987. With all the children gone from the house it was relatively straightforward to organise the bedrooms and bathrooms to suit 22 participants. I also planned the vegetable garden to produce most of its output in the period of the Intensive. Finally, I visited my wise man for his advice on how best to prepare myself. He said:
The work you are doing on the house was a good use of the ‘doer’ and would make the environment right. But you have to try to reduce doing so much. During the Intensive you should also refrain from trying to do so much – it is still one of your main failings as a Master.
The key to telling your stories is your motive, your intention. If you are aiming to inspire them and show how simple acts of love can help in the world then they will work. What you have to avoid is trying to appear good or holy. You especially have to give up trying to be the good guy.
Two days before the six week was due to start I went to the consumer unit in order to wire up an external socket that would be used by the caravans in which the cook and monitor would stay for the duration. I had wired up the entire Old Manor House back in 1987/88 – a decade earlier. The only two wires that I had not installed were those supplying electricity into the consumer unit. I now discovered that one of those wires had not been installed correctly and the unit was hot – indeed in danger of catching fire. I immediately hired an electrician to replace the consumer unit and was extremely grateful I had discovered the problem before the Intensive started!
I had already Mastered 7 two-week Intensives, the last five at the Old Manor House. This meant I had a well established routine for coping with everything. Running a six week was not, in my view, going to be much harder than running a two week. In both formats I was alone with the group all day and would need to face everyone down at least once. I had prepared myself better for the six week, most significantly by not working or being stressed for a few weeks ahead of the group.
Over the time I ran Intensives I had learned a great deal about myself and what was required to run the group. What I learned about myself was how to recognise when a participant had triggered me into some pattern or unconscious way of thinking. I estimate that I had been confronted by a thousand participants in the 40+ three days plus the 7 two week Intensives I had Mastered and between them they had found all my trigger points. I had also learned that once I had guided everyone into participating correctly, that is abiding by the rules, focussing and communicating appropriately and having a clear intention to experience their own truth, then the best I could do was to get out of the way. In particular I needed to drop my assumptions and analyses about participants. I had learned the hard way that although I was often right about the general area in which people were held up, in detail I was always wrong. I also needed to cease trying to make things happen by juggling the schedule or telling pointed stories in lecture. In short I needed to surrender more and let the process unfold as it would.
I knew that I was on the right track when, on the third day of the six week, I broke my normal routine and went for a walk in the garden. I still have no idea why I did so, but in the process I caught one of the participants taking heroin. I knew he had a problem of addiction, but I had no idea it was still current. During the rest of the Intensive I was able to hold this participant within tight boundaries with a great deal of love. Finding him that morning was the first of many examples in which I found myself doing or saying things that were highly appropriate but not in any way due to a conscious decision on my part. This was a major learning for me on the Intensive as reflected in the following summary I wrote three weeks after the end of the six week.
Three weeks ago I finished running a six week Enlightenment Intensive. It was an amazing experience and a wonderful group and I am still in the process of integrating what I learned from it all. One of the things that I was extremely pleased about was the degree to which I was able to surrender during and to the process. There is a very strong wilful component to mastering an Intensive – of which a very large part is the preparation of the venue, oneself and the participants. But once the Intensive is under way then there is a lot more surrender required.
There are two main ways I surrendered during the Intensive. The first was to the material I should include in lectures. During the morning period I would just put my attention on the group and see what occurred to me. Sometimes it would come as a series of thoughts, sometimes as an issue that needed to be dealt with, sometimes I would catch things that people were saying that seemed relevant. Sometimes I would be busy thinking about something, such as guilt or forgiveness and try to put it aside to find out what lecture should be about – and then realised that I already had what it should be about. Once I had the main topic or theme clear I would then do quite a lot of thinking about how to thread the ideas together, what stories to tell and anything that seemed particularly relevant to the group or any individuals in it. Often I would get more ideas for stories to tell as I thumbed through books at lunch time. By the end of lunch my preparatory work was finished and I would take into the group room all the books I might need to read from. I would also usually write out the first part in some detail so I could get started correctly.
Once I started delivering the lecture I would not normally look at my notes again. I would actually surrender again and things often occurred as I was talking. I would refer to the notes again right at the end to check I had not left out anything important before asking for questions. Sometimes I noticed that I had left out a chunk of material, and usually decided to just leave it alone – it had been dropped for some reason I knew nothing about. If it was a logistic issue then I would find a time to mention it. The net result of all this is that the lecture material was largely generated by surrender, then wilfully ordered and structured, then delivered in a surrendered state. It worked extremely well. Virtually everyone was inspired and bowled over by all the lectures.
The other time I consciously surrendered was when people came to me for interview. I would listen carefully to what they were saying and also mentally step back from the contact to notice how they were saying it and what was going on with me. Then I would go for as much contact as I could get with the person and just allow whatever to come out of my mouth. With a few people I knew that I would have to confront them about some particular trip (such as arrogance or unreality or lack of intention) and would think out a way to do that which they could hear – and I would do this before they came to see me. Then if what occurred in the contact and content of the interview indicated that this was the right thing to raise or say, I would allow myself to say it. But 90% of the time I had no idea of what I was going to say in the interview and listened to it as carefully as the participant did.
A key part of this method of interviewing is to be able to go for contact with the real person. I found I had that ability with all but one participant – and she had so many trips on me I could never keep her in one place long enough to challenge or contact her. Whenever I felt critical of a participant I would work on myself until I saw that they were doing their best. This did not usually take very long. Once I knew they were doing their best then I could help them to improve that without any loss of contact or love. One result was that I entered into a fantastic “dance” with each of the participants’ minds. In all cases, except one, the participant came to trust what I said to them completely and made real progress.
Overall, I found that my abilities to love others, to contact others, to remain in touch with reality and to surrender to whatever occurred were all extended, stretched and developed. This is what I gained from the Intensive. Since the Intensive I have also been aware of the desire of my ego to be fed and to have praise and adulation from others. I have resisted it pretty well, but it is like a very hungry child wanting to be fed most of the time – especially when people start talking about the Intensive. I am doing my best to tread along a tight-rope which acknowledges myself for what I have been able to do without feeding my ego. And a large part of the resolution of this is to continue to acknowledge that it was the Divine that made and delivered the lectures, it was the Divine who interviewed and guided the participants, and my real achievement was in allowing the Divine to act through me. This was exactly what I intended, it is what I set out to do and it is what I meditated and prayed for many times each day.
The people who stretched me the most were the most difficult. I knew who they were before the Intensive and thought about not allowing them to participate. Had I excluded the five difficult participants then the group would have been really easy but I would not have been stretched anywhere near as much.
For me the reason why people are difficult is because I was afraid that they would have psychotic episode, or lose their contact with reality or something equivalent. Three of the people involved did seriously lose touch with reality at certain times, and in two cases I had to work quite hard to bring them back. The key to bringing them back was my contact with them. I had to have a very high level of trust with them so that they would trust me even when they were being paranoid or deluded or out of touch – they knew that I had their best interests at heart.
I have learned that it is part of my role to allow participants to hate me. Indeed, if I do my job correctly then it is inevitable that their mind will hate me – if it’s all sweetness and light all the time then I have failed the person. Basically I was working within each individual’s abilities – their ability to bear facing stuff, their ability to contact me, their ability to distinguish reality from some very strong trip they are running and so on.
I was often profoundly moved by people, especially when someone was being very real about some huge pain or trauma in their life. I often cried whilst sitting in the chair. I was also moved to tears by many of the direct experiences that happened. I did not mind if people saw me crying. During the lectures I often allowed myself to be silly or angry or upset. I wanted to allow myself to cry during a lecture, but it never happened – either because it wasn’t right or because I was still hanging onto a level of control. Quite often in my breaks I would let myself fall apart completely. I would go under the duvet and just sob and howl with the pain I picked up from others. I often found myself in a very deep emotional place during these episodes – but nowhere I had not been many times before and felt quite OK about. I actually felt as open emotionally as anyone in the group – so I had no difficulty in keeping my heart open to them. The person who affected me the most was Eva; when she was howling with real despair I often felt like falling apart, or rushing over to hold her and comfort her. I had to be a bit more formal in all my dealings with her than with any of the other participants – I actually allowed deep contact with her for shorter periods of time than with the others.
An issue that is occupying quite a lot of my thoughts at the moment is how to really acknowledge and deal with what I have completed without inflating my ego. Part of the problem is that all the other people who know what I did have me up on a pedestal to some degree – so what I am getting from them is admiration and lots of other juicy ego boosting stuff. I can see that allowing this to feed my ego would lead me into a classic guru trip. However, my ability to get in touch with the inspiration and guidance depended upon my surrender – and setting myself up as a guru would undermine that. I clearly do not have the capacity or ability to stay surrendered for much longer than 6 weeks – that’s why I am exhausted and still recovering. But I was able to do it for 42 days continuously. And that was a great achievement.
October 3rd 1998
It is striking to me that neither in my journal nor in this summary of the Intensive did I mention the fact that late on in the Intensive I had to confront Eva. We had been participants on each other’s Intensives for many years, including several of the two weeks that I ran. But previously it had never required either of us to confront the other. On the six week this changed.
One of the difficulties of participating in a long Intensive is that one is sitting a lot of the time, in fact for most of the day between 6am and 10.30pm. When we started running Intensives most people sat on cushions on the floor. Now everyone was much older and needed to sit on chairs. During the 6-week Eva thought of new chairs that could be used to sit on. On one occasion she asked me to bring in some small orange armchairs. I did so because I thought they would be comfortable. However when participants were sitting in these orange chairs they were too far apart, so after one communication exercise I took the orange chairs out. It was this to which Eva objected and on which I had to face her down. This confrontation was to have a profound effect on our relationship for the next few years – I had put being a Master above being her husband. This was a requirement of the Intensive, but not something either of us expected.
I had introduced a simple physical therapy, known as Zero Balancing(ZB), into the six week to help the participant’s bodies cope with the discomfort and stress of such a long Intensive. This turned out to be a serious error. With the wisdom of hindsight I now know that the ZB sessions had the effect of damping down the build up of energy that was required for the kundalini release associated with direct experiences. People clearly had direct experiences, but the experience did not have its normal impact and was soon forgotten.
Despite this, the overall effect of the 6-week on the participants was clearly very positive. I received many thank you letters for the next few months explaining how people had changed their lives as a result. For me personally the most rewarding change to witness was that in Eva. Although she was always pushing herself into processes and participating in groups, in life Eva resisted looking deeply at what she was doing. After the six week that resistance disappeared. She commented that she had spent several days during the six week completely free from the normal chatter and trips going on in her head and had seen herself and everything else a lot more clearly – and liked what she saw. As a result, she was meditating more regularly and wanting to be a lot more tidy and organised.
One important outcome of my appraisal of the six week, including the effect of ZB, was that I came to appreciate more clearly what happened to me in California in 1982 when I participated in a six week. When I came home from that Intensive I presumed that the state I was in was typical of what happened to people after participating in a very long Intensive. There were no similar experiences to mine after the six week in Austria in which Eva participated. I put this down to an inappropriate venue and, later, to Satya’s state of relationship with Yogeshwar and her husband. Now I was explaining the lack of a similar transformation among participants on the six week I mastered to the presence of ZB! Slowly it was dawning on me that my experience in 1982 was not ‘normal’.
The debates I had with Yogeshwar made it very clear that what happened to me in California was exceptional and was more to do with a powerful kundalini release than any direct experience of the Divine. I saw that I had had a very powerful spiritual awakening – one that gave me the capacity to run a long Intensives. It was also significant enough to have generated a spiritual teacher!
In December I ran what was scheduled as my last Intensive, a 3-day, at Grimstone Manor. There were 34 participants and it went very well. It was obvious that quite a few people were there simply because it was billed as my last Intensive, nevertheless there were a good number of experiences. The main message I wanted to convey was “a direct experience of the Divine does not make you a better person than someone who has not had an experience – but it does show you how to become a better person, it shows you what is possible for you.” That also felt like an appropriate ending.
Eva and I had already agreed to hand over the mantle of running Intensives in the UK to Tom and Beryl. They had both participated in many three day and several two week Intensives, completed the Masters Training and had already run a number of Intensives of their own. I now handed over to them a pile of documentation that might prove helpful. I felt that I had succeeded in passing on what I had learned running Intensives to a committed couple.
Not long after the six week Eva and I went on our annual wedding anniversary trip looking for mushrooms. I noticed that Eva was being unkind to me a few times. When I challenged her about it the conversation returned to the orange chairs episode. Eva felt humiliated by me in that process; I apologised, but the issue remained raw between us.
We had elected to take our mushrooming trip around the edge of Exmoor and we decided that we would start looking for a new place to live in the area. We were strongly attracted to the wooded valleys, rivers and rolling countryside. So over the next few months we returned to look at houses that we thought we might like. In the process we drew up a list of the requirements we had, these included dark at night, no road noise, south facing, large garden, not much building work required and walks straight from the house (no driving required). We looked at more than 50 properties and failed to find anywhere that met our criteria.
When we were looking we recognised that we were also choosing a lifestyle. One place we considered involved building an eco-house and living miles away from anyone or anywhere: we dubbed this the eco-warrior lifestyle. Another option was in a very attractive house five minutes from Taunton station, making access to London extremely easy. This was a very sociable option, one that would have involved dinner parties and serious conversations. A third option we seriously considered had a small river running through the garden and stunning walks up the river; but it was in a valley that meant the sun would disappear early every day. Having these choices forced us to look at what we really wanted from a life away from the University, NES, Intensives and Milton Keynes.
At one point we considered exploring the option of living in Australia. We had an idea to hire a camper van and drive all around Australia seeing whether there was anywhere that we were attracted to living. Then, out of the blue, one of the people we knew through her participation on Intensives, said that some friends of hers were thinking of selling up and it might be the sort of place we might like. So we telephoned her friends and made arrangements to visit. As we drove along a single track lane on the edge of Exmoor we had a strong sense that this felt right. By the time we had driven up a rough track for half a mile to find the house we were smitten. It was a perfect location and as well as the house there were half a dozen barns with enormous potential for improvement. The house itself had two very large spaces that made it much easier for us to think of living there after being used to the grand scale of The Old Manor House. We had found Ashill Farm. We also realised it left us a lot of choices as to the lifestyle we could follow. We made an offer which was accepted and agreed a completion date of 9.9.99.
Early in 1999 Eva’s trip to the Ukraine as an energy consultant took place. She was gone for a month. There were two highlights for her. The first was meeting a Ukrainian energy expert, Lena, who spoke good English and immediately hit it off with Eva. As a result Eva spent a fabulous weekend with Lena and her family in their dacha – where they also grew all their own food. The second highlight was when she visited Poltava, the town closest to where her mother grew up. At a boring meeting Eva announced that she was honoured to be where her mother had lived and immediately burst into tears. All the staid communist officials around the table transformed and welcomed her and agreed to help her try to trace her long lost family. We had found an old photograph of Eva’s mother which the officials agreed to place in a local newspaper with an appeal for information. This was the beginning of Eva’s project to heal her family, a project on which I supported her whole heartedly in return for her supporting me at NES.
When I met Eva at the airport on her return I was struck by how much bigger she was: “Hello my Ukrainian dumpling” I said. She laughed and told me how amazing the food had been in the Ukraine and how everywhere she went people had laid on a feast for her. As a result she had put on 9lbs in weight! She was overwhelmed by their generosity and open heartedness. She also suggested that we organise and pay for a trip for Lena to come to the UK, which we did very quickly. Lena came in the summer and was bowled over by the house where we lived. I thoroughly enjoyed flirting with her and she claimed me as her second husband! I was no longer employed in the business I started in 1983. I had an early retirement deal organised at the University which was scheduled to be implemented in October. I had run my last Enlightenment Intensive. All our children had ‘flown the nest’. Now I was preparing to sell The Old Manor House, the place that had been our home for the last 12 years. It was the end of an era.
Next.
A Master's Path 