The Christos experiment also worked very dramatically for Eva. I was her guide through the process and when, after completing all the preliminary steps, I instructed her to look at her feet she started screaming. “I don’t want to be a chicken! I’m not a chicken. This is awful all I can see are chicken feet. I’m not a bloody chicken!” Once she calmed down I told her to look again at her feet. She then discovered that she was a village mad woman being kept in a shed with chickens. She had an awful life that involved loneliness, poverty and a lot of suffering in mental asylums. Eventually she was staked out on a moor and left to die of thirst. It was a grim life to guide her through, one that involved a lot of tears and several screaming episodes. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Eva was deeply impressed by how calmly I accepted her screaming fits and mental illness; she felt safe with me as her guide. Later I learned that Eva’s particular skill as a psychotherapist was her ability to help newcomers engage with a process. I had clearly benefited enormously from that skill; indeed it is unlikely that any other guide could have facilitated me into the Christos experiment process.
The next time I met Eva was when we were both taking a train from Milton Keynes to London, a journey that normally took less than an hour. The train we were on broke down with the result that we had an intense conversation for more than three hours. We talked about relationships and how the vogue of open, polyamorous relationships were not what we wanted. We found ourselves agreeing on many different levels, but there was no spark between us. It was interesting but nothing more. By now I had been made a Professor (of Energy Systems) and Eva was studying for a PhD in the Education department, so we also knew that we would continue to see each other at the University. I was intrigued by the fact that she was also a psychotherapist – indeed she was on her way to London to run an encounter group and then see private clients. I was on my way to spend the night with one of the women Laura was encouraging me to spend time with. Although I fancied the woman, I was not interested in a relationship with her – and I’m not sure she was interested in a relationship with me. She certainly fancied me enough to have sex with me. And in those days this was enough for many people. My relationship with Laura was tumultuous. One day we would be madly in love with each other, the next we would have a blazing row. We frequently separated – and then got back together again. At some point Laura decided that having an open relationship was what she wanted and that this might give us a sense of stability. So she invited one of her girl friends, who was living with us at the time, into our bed. although I found this exciting – and certainly didn’t object – I also knew it was not what I wanted longer term. After a party at our house Eva asked whether she could stay with us because she didn’t want to go home with anyone. Laura agreed and Eva slept with us, but with her clothes on. It wasn’t long before he was sleeping with us without her clothes. The three way suited Eva at the time because she had recently separated from her second husband and didn’t want a relationship that required commitment.
Eva became a regular visitor to my house where I lived with Laura and three other people, so it was natural to ask her to join us when we planned a summer holiday. It was a motley collection with seven adults, three of whom I was sleeping with, and seven children. The children were my two sons, Eva’s two children, my sister’s two children, and the nephew of one of my girlfriends also on the trip. We camped on a cliff-top site near Woolacombe in Devon. The first evening we all shared a joint together and laughed when someone came back from the administration centre and told us of a gale warning. That night I elected to sleep with Eva in her tent and we had a really good time together. In fact during sex it felt as if the earth moved – but it turned out to be a really strong wind rocking the tent. We quickly dressed and went outside – the wind was becoming stronger and stronger. It was so strong that at times it was hard to simply remain standing. At one point I watched in horror as the tent containing my sons and two other boys flew over the edge of the cliff – and only breathed again when I realised it was only the outer skin that had flown off. The inner tent, holding the four boys, was still firmly on the ground. This was the beginning of a strange night during which all our tents were destroyed and the children were bundled into the back of a large Ford Transit van. By morning there was not a tent standing anywhere in the camp site. Later we learned that the gale had wrecked the Fastnet yacht race and killed a number of sailors.
After breakfast in a local cafe we all set off back home with Eva and I driving in the big van with the seven children in the back. It was striking that we were the only parents in the group and it was natural for us to be taking care of the children. It became clear that Laura’s commitment to an open relationship was fine so long as she was in charge of who slept with whom. By electing to sleep with Eva I had transgressed her rules – polyamory was only OK if Laura chose who slept with whom. She sulked and despite displaying all the signs of being jealous, denied being upset or jealous.
Much later I learned that Eva fell in love with me on that trip – for three reasons. The first was that she loved my kindness and generosity – which she noticed when I bought lunch for everyone on the way to the camp site. The second was that the sex we had the night of the storm was the best she could remember. And the third was the way that I set about clearing up the mess created by the storm and quietly cleaned everything the next day (Laura and the others were still sulking ). For Eva a kind, generous, tidy and hard working man who could give her good sex was an answer to her prayers. When she read this she said “and being rich, handsome and extremely clever just made you into my dreamboat.” Although Eva had fallen in love with me, I remained committed to making my relationship with Laura work. In hindsight it seems insane. As far as I can remember I wanted to salvage the relationship for three core reasons. The first was that Laura was the first woman that I had ever fallen in love with, so there was a unique heart connection with her. Secondly every now and then I was able to make deep contact with Laura and we could talk honestly about what was happening to us. It was in the course of these conversations that we made mutual commitments to sort ourselves out so that we could have a less tempestuous relationship. And finally, and probably most importantly, despite our rows and upsets the sex between us was really good. I had sex with several other women during this time and none was as satisfying as that I had with Laura. I couldn’t explain it, but the experience was undeniable.
About a month after the aborted camping trip Eva returned from running a group in London and asked me to meet her at the station. When I met her she said “I want you to myself.” We went back to the my house and engaged in a discussion with the other two women with whom I regularly had sex, one of them being Laura. The ethos of the group living at my house was of open relationships – so Eva’s demand to have me ‘to herself’ raised ‘philosophical’ issues as well as jealousy. I was fascinated and later admitted I loved Eva saying she wanted me!
My relationship with Laura steadily deteriorated and a few months later I found myself walking along the canal with Eva, going back to her house late at night, and leaving Laura with one of her lovers. This turned out to be the end of my intimacy with Laura, but it took me much longer to drop my commitment to her and be free of the web that held me. However from this time onwards I was actually faithful to Eva, she is the only woman I have had sex with since that night.
The fact that Eva was a psychotherapist fascinated me; I regularly asked her questions based on books I was reading more avidly since the Christos experiment. I remember once Eva asked me to tell her three good things about myself. I thought for ages and could not come up with one! She was shocked, for me it was normal – but I could also sense something else stirring. I was curious about my childhood because I could remember nothing prior to age 11 and wondered why. One of the books that appealed to this curiosity was The Primal Scream by Janov. He claimed that if a person could regress back to the time when they gave up on themselves and released the pent up emotions then they would be psychologically and physically healthier. He had stories from his clients to support his thesis and Eva confirmed that there were primal therapists around. But she warned me that using any therapist was problematic since I would have to sort out what was my trip and what was theirs. So she encouraged me to explore this for myself. Although I was fascinated I had no idea what this meant; how did they set about screaming?
Shortly after I moved into Eva’s flat, leaving Laura and others to live in my house, we decided to take a trip for me to learn how to scream. I didn’t want to be overheard – so going away into a deserted area seemed a good idea. Since I was a Shropshire lad in the Christos experiment we decided to go to that county and ended up in Clun Forest miles away from anywhere. We collected wood for a camp fire and also picked some psilocybin ‘magic’ mushrooms. Before it became dark Eva had me lie down in the van and start to scream. It was a rerun of the start of the Christos experiment.
“How do I scream?”
“ Well you just open your mouth and let out a loud noise.”
My first attempts sounded more like a strangled duck, but after a few tries I was able to put some emotion into the sound and I sensed how it would work if I was experiencing something intensely. We talked about how people screamed in Eva’s encounter groups and how it enabled them to discover aspects of themselves concealed behind emotional doors. Eva shared her experience of participating in many different types of group. When I asked which was the best she answered immediately “The Enlightenment Intensive”. She explained how it worked and we even took turns asking each other “Tell me who you are”. After a meal cooked on the camp fire we ate some of the magic mushrooms we had picked. We had had them together before – but not in total darkness around a camp fire. It was an exhilarating experience. Eva became Hecate, queen of the witches, and revelled in feeling powerful and sexy. I was initially fascinated by the Elvin kingdoms I saw in the fire. Later I lay down and experienced myself as a crystal. Each sound I made reverberated around inside my body. Then I became aware of a different image, of an enormous dam holding back a flood of tears. If the dam broke I was sure to drown, so I resolved there and then to gently dismantle the dam so that I could let the tears go and survive. It was a prophetic image, one that served me well through the following years.
When we returned from our trip to Clun Forest I built a ‘primal scream den’ in Eva’s flat. This involved putting blankets and pillows around the bed, up the walls and over the door and windows in the bedroom. I didn’t want anyone hearing me scream and imagining I was in trouble. Eva also didn’t want to disturb her neighbours. She nervously listened outside the flat whilst I shouted and screamed as loud as I could inside the ‘den’. It worked; it was soundproof and I could make as much noise as necessary.
I had learned enough from reading about psychedelic experiences to know that it was possible to ‘programme’ a trip by setting a clear intention before it started. So one day, after Eva had left for work, I ingested 30 dried mushrooms, went into the den and set my intention to discover more about my childhood. I didn’t know what would happen or how it would work, but I was now more determined than ever to understand why I could remember nothing of my childhood, why I couldn’t think of anything good about myself and why I felt so worthless and miserable most of the time. As the mushrooms took effect I felt a wave of fear; I was stepping into the unknown – maybe I would have the mental breakdown my colleagues assumed I was in! I just surrendered and allowed the fear to slowly subside. As I let go all sorts of images and memories came to me, but nothing about my childhood. I decided to just let the process unfold however it would. At one point I remember feeling very sad and starting to cry and as I did so I had an image of myself aged about 4 or 5 cycling around the tiny back garden at the house in Chiswick where I lived from 3 to 14. I was captivated. I had forgotten that garden, with the rhubarb in one corner, hollyhocks growing against a fence and the concrete centre I was cycling around. Now I cannot remember more details from that first trip, but I know that I was beginning to remember both the physical details of the place and how I felt being that child. It wasn’t good. But the part of me that had set my intention was exalted. I knew I could use this process to explore my childhood – and find my ‘primal scream’. Which is what I did for the next four months.
The trip to Shropshire had yielded a large supply of psilocybin mushrooms. I had found more locally, so I knew I had enough for many trips. I thought it was a bad idea to have a trip every day, I wanted time to think about what I had experienced and prepare for the next trip. I settled into having a trip about every three days. Each trip would last between 6 and 7 hours and once I became deeply involved in my childhood memories I spent a lot of that time crying, screaming and shouting in rage. I was particularly struck by the way in which my voice changed when I was reliving something from my early years; I really sounded like a young child.
I remember quite early on I knew that something awful was happening in the room next to the kitchen, but could not gain access to it. So the next trip I intended be in that room to discover what was going on. When I gained access I found myself, aged 5 or 6, sitting on the table alongside my sister, who was 18 months younger than me. In front of us our step father was shouting at me “Did you put the toy down the toilet?”. I didn’t, and each time I said “No” he hit my sister. I don’t remember him asking my sister whether she did it or not; he may have. All I remember is the agony of telling him I didn’t do it and watching my sister being hit. After a while I couldn’t stand it anymore and said “Yes I did it”. I was told to go upstairs and take my trousers off and he would be up shortly to give me a beating. As I write this I am still in tears at the memory. That trip was one long howl of despair, helplessness and rage. I so wanted to protect my sister. I so didn’t want to be beaten again. It took me a few days of crying and raging without any psilocybin to integrate this particular memory. But I found dozens and dozens of awful times. I was hit every day of my life as a child, usually around the head. When my mother was in a really bad rage she would grab me by the shoulders and shake me. One day she grabbed me by my neck and shook me until I passed out. I thought I was going to die. As all this unfolded I understood why I had blocked it out. It was just awful. There were no memories of being loved or cared for, just being yelled at, being hit, being sent to bed without any supper. There was a bleakness to the whole time. Grey, cold, unloved, hit, miserable – remorseless day after day.
Throughout this time Eva was very supportive. She would return home tired, sometimes after having run a group in London, and be confronted by me wanting her attention and care. She often made really useful suggestions. I became caught in a cycle of feeling unloved and uncared for and trip after trip would end up crying my eyes out. I wanted to know how I could cope with this. Eva told me to use a cushion, or one of her children’s teddy bears, as my young self and for me, the adult, to take care of it myself. This was transformative. I broke out of that cycle and moved on to new horrors, but now had a process for integrating the uncared for boy into my life here and now.
Although my remembered childhood was awful I realised it was not that unusual. In one trip I remembered discussing with my classmates at junior school (aged 8-9) how our parents punished us. We were all hit. It was a violent working class culture. All our parents had been traumatised in some way by the war. We had been born into a broken world inhabited by broken people. The places where we liked to play most were the bomb sites – places where collapsed houses provided endless possibilities for games.
I also remembered a vivid fantasy I had when I took up a paper round, delivering papers before going to school. In the fantasy I imagined that I was the only human on the planet. Everyone else was a robot and I had to learn how to survive. With hindsight I can see the fantasy was not that far removed from the truth. My salvation was my teachers. They loved me. I was extraordinarily bright. By the time I was 7 the teacher put me in charge of teaching the class how to spell, how to do arithmetic and learn multiplication tables. I learned everything super quick. In my last year in junior school, aged 11, the teacher gave gold stars for outstanding work and full marks in tests. There was a chart on one wall where the gold stars were placed against each child’s name. I had three rows of gold stars, maybe 50 in total, no one else had more than 5. I was teacher’s favourite and lapped up the kindness and attention. I remembered all this in later psilocybin trips, once the horror movie had calmed down.
Even though school was a relief from the horror show at home, it was not without problems. Being so bright and the teacher’s pet did not make me friends with my classmates. In fact I was saved by being very good at football and cricket, so my peers wanted me on their team. Also after my 11+ exam I won a scholarship to a direct grant school, Latymer Upper, populated by middle class boys. When I first went to that school I felt alien and completely out of my depth. It took me most of my first year there to find my feet. Although I found myself in the top stream and the top of the class in all subjects except French I did not feel I belonged there. I remember my amazement when one of my classmates asked me to his birthday party. “What’s a birthday party?” I asked. In my working class home birthdays were not celebrated, and there were never parties for anything. As I integrated what I learned about my childhood I started to understand why I felt so worthless and miserable as an adult. I also realised why, up to then, I had always been attracted to, and fell in love with, rejecting women. Now it is obvious, but at the time it was like a light bulb going on inside my head. I was always trying to resolve rejection from my mother. The more I discovered about this aspect of my life the more I was resolved to not have anything to do with rejecting women ever again. It was a terrible blight, feeling rejected most of the time. I also decided that ‘falling in love’ was entirely neurotic and based upon trying to work out childhood stuff – so I was having nothing to do with that either. Romance was out, banished. If I was going to be with a woman she had to be ‘against type’ i.e. not rejecting. This also helped me understand why my relationship with Laura had been so awful because she, like my first wife, was a rejecting woman.
These attitudes caused Eva a lot of distress. Eva was not a rejecting woman – so I didn’t “fall in love” with her as I had with Laura. I saw this as positive, but Eva didn’t. Eva had fallen in love with me and wanted me to reciprocate the feeling. Indeed she argued strongly that falling in love was more than neurotic, she thought it was also about to seeing the real other person – the divine other. At the time I was having none of it; love was for neurotic idiots and I was busy becoming sane. It took me many years to see that in this argument Eva was right.
None of this was helped by the eruption of eczema in my crotch. It was extremely itchy and at times painful. It became so bad that for a few weeks I could not bear to have anything touching my skin around my crotch. The result was that when Eva came home from work she would often find me in tears wearing one of her skirts. This didn’t help our sex life. Even when it calmed down enough for me to dress normally it was uncomfortable having sex. At the time I suspected that the eczema was caused by something psychological, but I had no idea what it might be About a month later Eva and I attended a ‘primal integration’ workshop run by Frank Lake, one of the senior figures in the human potential movement. The workshop ran for 5 days and was attended by about 8 people, three of whom were nuns (Frank Lake was trained as a doctor and worked as a missionary, as well as being an excellent therapist). The core of the workshop was for each participant to re-experience their birth. This was simulated by having us lie of the floor with a person behind us putting their hands on our head. Frank Lake then talked us through a fantasy that evoked birth memories. It worked well for everyone. I remember that I felt stuck for a long time during this simulated birth. Frank Lake came and explained that I had my head stuck in the wrong place. He helped rotate my head and sure enough the birth then proceeded to completion. “Having my head stuck in the wrong place” seemed an apt summary of my life up to that point!
The next day I remember watching Frank Lake demonstrating something to the whole group – I cannot remember the detail. What I do remember is that he started to move his hips in a sexual fashion – as if having sex – and was talking about violence. A light went off in my head. I suddenly understood why sex had been so intense and releasing with Laura – I was channelling violence through sex. Bluntly I was trying to hurt her for all the times she rejected me. The orgasmic release literally relieved the violent tension that had built up in me. I saw and understood all this in a flash of illumination – and it left me amazed, ashamed and embarrassed. I had no idea that sex and violence could be so intertwined. I also felt a measure of relief – it explained why I had been so fixated on sex with Laura when there was so much wrong with our relationship.
To be clear, there was no physical violence involved between me and Laura. I did not inflict pain on her in any way during sex or at any other time. But energetically it was my suppressed violence that was being expressed sexually and making orgasms with her so intense. It is difficult to convey how shocking these realisations were to me. I had judged the ecstatic releases I experienced during sex with Laura as an indication of how good our sexual relationship was. Now I realised that the opposite was the case. Unconsciously I had been acting out repressed violence against her, which meant our sexual relationship was fundamentally sick. I had read about the ‘unconscious’ in a dozen or more books, but this was the first time I had really come up against it. And it made me wonder how many other things I valued were based on concealed motives. I also realised that ‘unconscious’ literally meant ‘not conscious’. How could I ever know what my real motives were? One thing was clear, my motivation for discovering more about my psyche was increased to 110%. Working out mother trips with rejecting women, being violent in sex – what other ghouls were lurking beneath the surface? How can I ever trust myself again?
There was one important positive result from the insight from the Frank Lake workshop: the eczema in my crotch cleared up completely and it did so within a week of taking the workshop. I found this amazing. How did a mental realisation have such a profound effect on my body? Since I was clearly not in control of what was going on in my body, I took it as a positive sign that a major ailment had completely cleared up; I was clearly on the right track. However, my ability to relate sanely to Eva was only marginally improved. Although I was disentangling myself from my relationship with Laura I still was not committing myself to a long-term relationship with Eva – which caused her a great deal of distress. This was because I had made a commitment to Laura that I had not yet abandoned , and because I was now so uncertain about what my true motives were. Despite all the difficulties, Eva and I were getting on better. Rather than arguing pretty well every day we were, on average, now having one or two days a week when we were getting on well together.
Next.
A Master's Path 