It was less than a year since I experienced the Christos Experiment and my world had been turned upside down. It really seemed that a door to my psyche had been opened and that I was now experiencing aspects of myself previously completely unknown to me. I had ‘remembered’ being in my mother’s womb, I had decided to change my name to Jake after a telephone call to my osteopath, I had remembered an awful childhood courtesy of psilocybin and Primal therapy and I had discovered that my sexual hook with Laura was actually an unconscious acting out of violence.
I could dismiss some of this as delusion or fantasy, but not the links to my physical well being. I had emerged from the Christos experiment with a bad arm, even though I had simply been lying on the floor. The same pain reappeared in my arm months later and disappeared when a woman on the other end of the phone said Jacob and I resolved to change my name. Rediscovering my childhood lead to recognising my rage towards my mother and rejecting women which lead directly to an excruciating bout of eczema that cleared up when I recognised I was acting out sexually. Clearly my body was responding to whatever was happening to me psychologically, so I could not dismiss what was occurring. In fact quite the opposite, I was now more determined than ever to discover more about my inner world.
I moved back to my house and the people I had been living with moved out. Eva moved in, but she retained her flat since I had not yet committed to our relationship. I converted a small bedroom into a sound-proof den with all the walls padded with mattresses. After about 30 trips over a [period of three months I ceased to use psilocybin to initiate primal sessions. Now I used the den to explore my emotions in more depth whenever I felt triggered or upset. As a result I would visit the padded den once or twice a day for the next few months. In the process I learned a lot about how echoes of my awful childhood were still conditioning how I reacted and behaved.
Many times when I felt really upset by Eva I went into the den and allowed myself to really cry with the hurt I felt. Quite quickly the crying shifted and I was aware of being a young boy crying for my mother to come and take care of me. As I emerged from the crying and despair I was able to recognise what it was that Eva had said or done that triggered a memory of my mother not caring for me. Each time I would report back to Eva so that she knew what was happening to me, but this sequence played itself out many, many times. The difficulty was that there were so many times in my childhood that I had felt neglected, ignored and uncared for by my mother that almost anything Eva did could trigger an episode. Over a period of months things did improve because I was consistently separating what was occurring in the present from the historical baggage I was carrying. It was a slow process and just as hard for Eva as it was for me; I felt very supported and encouraged by her. The Christos Experiment is one of many ‘fantasy journeys’ used in many different psychological traditions. I explored several other fantasy journeys using those described in John Stevens book about Gestalt practices (Awareness; exploring, experimenting, experiencing). The fantasy journey that had the biggest impact on me was the Wise Man fantasy. This involves going through a process in order to enter a state of deep relaxation Then you imagine you are walking along a mountain trail at night and visiting a wise man near the cave where he lives. The wise man can answer any question. So after arriving at the cave you sit by the wise man’s fire and explain the background to the question you want answered. When you have finished you become the wise man – and give an answer to the question.
The very first time I tried this fantasy I had been stuck in a miserable state for several days without understanding what it was about. My normal practice of allowing myself to cry and freak out showed me that my feelings ran deep, but did not reveal any content. I explained all this to my wise man and asked him what the source of my misery was. When I became the wise man I felt a significant shift within myself, and, to my amazement, told myself that I was grieving for my father and how he had been absent from my life. In the fantasy I became myself once more and recognised the truth of what had just been said – and cried a great deal more. Knowing what the tears and misery were about enabled me to resolve the feelings quite quickly.
Two things convinced me that there was something real about the process. First when I followed the instruction “now become the wise man” I felt a shift in my awareness. It’s hard to describe, but was a definite shift. The second things was that I had no idea what I had been crying about, but when given the answer by the wise man, I knew it was right. Following this success I started to use the wise man fantasy whenever I became stuck, either in my own process or in an argument with Eva. Every time I came away understanding more about myself and what had been happening. Eva learned to appreciate my wise man a lot because he always helped me to see what I was doing to make the situation worse and what I could do to help improve it. I will give more examples of the help I have received from ‘my wise man’ as I go through this account. I am not giving anything away by saying that he became my therapist, my spiritual teacher and guide in all aspects of my life. I attended a Psychosynthesis weekend and was fascinated by their concept of ‘subpersonalities’. A subpersonality is a set of attitudes, beliefs, behaviours and traits that coalesce to provide a functional response to certain situations. The idea is that these subpersonalities often arose as a result to historical trauma of some sort, they have a life of their own and usually mask some aspect of the real individual. By becoming aware of a subpersonality an individual may be able to negotiate a way to integrate the subpersonality into the larger sense of self.
The Inner Guide Meditation Subpersonalities also figure quite strongly in Jungian therapy; the concept is similar to the archetypes of Jungian psychology. I found a book, The Inner Guide Meditation, that used a fantasy journey to access archetypal subpersonalities and was fascinated by the negotiation involved. I decided to explore this meditation using the archetypes represented in the major cards of the Tarot. Here is an account of one of my early explorations that helped me uncover another aspect of my violence.
I started by imagining going into a dark cave and finding an exit somewhere at the back. Once out of the cave I went across a river and had to wait for an animal to come along. For me it was always a horse and it lead me to a glade in a wood where I would always find my inner guide, a friendly chubby man called Ben.
On this occasion I was setting out to gain some insight into the difficulties I was experiencing dealing with the people in the Energy Research Group. I asked Ben for help with the problem. He reminded me of the symbols of strength that I had gained from previous encounters with him and recommended that I visit the Tower. As we walked out of the glade I asked him what the Tower was like. He just laughed and said “Wait and see”. The image of the Tower on Tarot cards is a stone tower being struck by lightning with people being thrown off. I couldn’t imagine talking to a stone tower!We emerged from the wood and looked out across a plain. There was a castle in the far distance, with a few stone towers. Ben called out for the Tower to come. As he called I saw the drawbridge of the castle lower and a black knight, armed with a long black lance, rode out. He was a very menacing figure and even though he was long way away I could see that his lance was aimed directly at my heart. He steadily rode across the plain and only came to a stop when his lance was a few inches away from my body, right on my heart.
I now started the negotiation with him by asking, “what do you want from me and my life in order to be my friend and ally?”
“Submit” he said in a threatening voice, “just submit.”
I didn’t understand, this wasn’t how negotiations were normally conducted. “I am afraid”, I said, “and you are very destructive.”
“That’s right”, he said, “and you have to submit to me!”
By now I was genuinely afraid that I might become caught up in some negative energy. So I asked Ben what I should do.
“You should submit to the negative energy”, said Ben, “in the sense of owning that you feel destructive and are therefore the same as the Black Knight.”
“OK”, I said to the knight,” Yes there is a destructive side of myself. I want to get revenge and to punish. So I submit to you, and I am very afraid. I know the destructive forces are in me and I really don’t want them to be and I’m afraid of being taken over by you.”
“I will take you over if you carry on fighting me – submit!”“Yes, yes I submit. I want to kill those fuckers in the Energy Research Group. I nearly killed myself trying to help them and the bastards rejected me. I want to annihilate Tom and Simon and put Hugh down and …. Argh! I really want to kill them all..” At this point I started to scream and sob. I recognised that these were the feelings that were holding be back in dealing with the people in the research group – and admitting it was scary but an enormous relief. As the crying died down I knew that I had complied with his demand, so could enter the next phase of the negotiation.
“What do you have to give me in return?” I asked.
“Love and creativity”, he said immediately. “If you can own and express your destructive side then I can give you your loving and creative side. Your ability to build up is hidden behind your desire to destroy and punish – you cannot find ways to help the group because you have secretly been wanting to destroy the group and all the people in it. Now you can let that go and really find ways to help.”
“And do you have a gift for me?” I asked
“Yes” he said. He got off his horse and laid down his lance. I wondered whether he was going to give me armour or his shield. Then from behind his shield he brings out a beautiful, delicate pink flower. It’s a rose, just opening. He placed it in my heart. “The rose will radiate your love and enable you to be powerfully creative – but only if you have a pure heart” he said. I knew he meant that I had to own my destructiveness to do this. I sobbed again, this time with gratitude and feeling the love in my heart. As this wave of tears subsided I turned to Ben and asked “Have I finished?”
“No”, said Ben, “Ask him what nurtures the rose, what makes it grow.”I face the Black Knight once more. “What nurtures the rose?” I ask.
“Loving yourself. You also need to own the fact that you want to punish and kill yourself for what you have done. If you can forgive yourself, and so love yourself, then the rose will be nourished – you’ll feed the rose and increase your capacity for love and creativity.”
I sobbed once more knowing the truth of what he had said and relieved that at last it was recognised and I could start to address it. As the tears subsided once more I said “Thank you” and the ‘Tower’ left. Ben and I walked back towards the glade.
“Every step I take in my inner journey seems to take me so far”, I said, “yet when the next step comes along it seemed still larger – it just goes on and on.”
“You are doing fine”, said Ben, “just remember to keep working on yourself and everything will be fine.”
“I don’t even know who you really are”, I said – and as I said it I felt my contact with him fade and found myself back in the room. When I reflected on this session I realised that once again I was facing deep feelings of violence towards other people. It was shocking, and at the same time thrilling. The shock was to my self image; I thought I was fundamentally a nice person, not one who wanted to be violent to his girlfriend during sex or who wanted to kill all his research associates! At the same time I was thrilled to at last start to understand why so much of my apparently successful life was so awful. I felt as if I had entered a new world and was busy rushing around exploring new places as fast as I could. I was also experiencing more intense emotions than ever before in my life – and I found that energising. However I also recognised that knowing the depth of my violent feelings would not, of itself, make them disappear. Now the issue was how to handle them without causing injury to other people. I clearly had work to do!
Eva and I were still having fierce arguments. One of us would feel hurt about something, but rather than being vulnerable and saying we were hurt we would be angry – and hurt the other. Then the other person would also feel hurt and hide it with anger. So we often screamed at each other and both frequently felt very hurt and alone. However we made a commitment to sorting things out and we stuck to it. We were determined to continue sorting out what had gone wrong until we both agreed and neither felt our reality had been denied. This was the only way we knew to avoid ‘stack up’: a process where unresolved arguments stack up and become the battle ground for every misunderstanding. One useful insight from some of my reading was that rows often started before either person was aware anything was wrong and we frequently found this to be true. It was around this time that we made an agreement that in all rows between us we accepted exactly 50% of the blame each, the origin of our 50:50 rule that has since proven very helpful to us and many other couples.
Slowly we both recognised unhelpful patterns and projections. My worst pattern was going cold; completely cutting off from Eva and going off to do some task or other, apparently unscathed. Eva’s worst pattern was to become hysterical and demand that her emotions took precedence over mine. Looking back at the journal I kept during this period I am amazed that we stayed together. It is worth mentioning that at this stage we were not receiving any support from our friends and colleagues. My colleagues at the University still believed that I was having some sort of mental breakdown. For some it was a time for my ‘come uppance’ because I had been too successful too quickly, but for most of them it was just a case of not understanding what an inner journey entailed or why it was worth pursuing. Eva’s colleagues, many of whom were also therapists, regarded our ‘working on ourselves together’ as potentially dangerous. They were sure that we would end up colluding in avoiding basic issues.
Around this time Eva suggested that we both see a therapist to help with our relationship. She wrote to David Boadella, a respected Reichian therapist. He accepted us both, largely, I suspect, because Eva was a well known therapist in her own right. David Boadella saw us at his home in Abbotsbury, near Weymouth. Initially the two hour train journey followed by a taxi ride seemed a problem. In practice it was a blessing since on the journey there we could consider what we wanted to work on, and on the way home we could begin the process of integrating what had emerged. Although we sometimes travelled there together, David always elected to see us separately because he did not regard himself qualified to act as a relationship therapist. In practice it was helpful that he dealt with our different perspectives. The early sessions with him certainly helped both Eva and me to start to resolve some of the issues in our relationship – which was very slowly improving. I was starting to own my projection that she did not care for me and she was recognising that some of her fears about me were paranoid projections.
We also started to notice that when either of us became real in an argument – which often involved expressing strong negative feelings about the other person – things improved significantly. At some level it was obvious that in the row Eva hated me, but when she just screamed at me “I hate you” I felt relief that at last we were facing what was going on – and that was much easier than dealing with accusations and analyses that were being used as a cover up. I was learning that having a strong negative feeling wasn’t of itself a problem. What made it a big problem was if I denied having the feeling – then it would manifest itself in some underhand fashion. If I could own that I was hurt, angry, hateful or feeling violent I could then be in command of how I acted. I wasn’t proud of having strong negative feelings, but if they were there I was far better off accepting them and dealing with them consciously rather than discover sometime later that I had been acting out unconsciously. David Boadella was a very intuitive Reichian therapist whose main focus was always on the body. He quite quickly noticed that whenever I was in a physically stressed position, I started to shake. He quizzed me about this and quickly established the link to being shaken by my mother. He explained that whenever I was shaken as a child I would have been striving to hold myself still and this set up a pattern of tension in my body. One result was that my buttocks were always tight, no matter how relaxed I was. He recommended that each evening, before going to bed, I allow myself to shake for 10 to 15 minutes. This sounded weird – but not much weirder than other things I was trying. To my surprise it was very easy to comply with his instruction – my body really did want to shake. Sometimes the shaking would become quite violent. In the beginning almost every time I did the exercise I had to force myself to stop. Over a period of a few months the shaking started to subside – and I noticed that I was standing differently. My buttocks were now relaxed. I was grateful to David for providing such a simple solution to an unpleasant hangover from my childhood.
Although the different therapeutic traditions I explored in books and groups had different explanations of how the psyche worked, and each used its own particular collection of techniques, they all illuminated the same issue for me. I felt worthless. At one level uncovering my violence and negative feelings exacerbated this. I felt unloved and unlovable and was constantly seeking to have other people resolve the issue for me – but would not allow them to do so. I could also see how this made it impossible to be in a sane relationship; I was continually wanting Eva to bolster my self-esteem and immediately reject her if she attempted to do so. All this was made abundantly clear in all the processes that I explored, but none provided any relief – I just became more acutely aware of how the inner sense of worthlessness was driving my behaviour.
About this time Eva recommended I read a book, The Quantum Gods by Jeff Love. Jeff was someone who had participated in, and now lead, Enlightenment Intensives – the group Eva considered the best she had ever taken. Much of the book is devoted to an exposition of Jeff’s understanding of ‘the origin and nature of matter and consciousness’. I was not a fan of metaphysics and did not find much of the book interesting. However there were two sections that did grab my attention. One was a detailed description of the process that was used in an Enlightenment Intensive. The other was a section titled “The Creative Law”. According to Jeff Love if a person used the seven step process he called the Creative Law then he or she could have whatever they intended. My physicist brain thought this was a load of bullshit. However I had recently experienced the power of intending to have something when using psilocybin to recover memories of my childhood. So I was curious. I quizzed Eva about it. She said she had once participated in a group run by Jeff Love and he had taught them the Creative Law. The people in the group were instructed to use it to find something small within the next 24 hours. Eva had chosen to find a 2p piece and indeed had done so – which surprised her. What surprised her even more was that most members of that group reported finding the object that they intended to find. Now my curiosity was piqued.
Eva and I were both keen amateur mycologists; we loved going on walks in old woodland in order to find edible mushrooms. It was early autumn so we decided to try using the creative law to find some really good mushrooms. The process involves checking your motives, making sure you are not being greedy and being very specific about what it is that you want. We decided that we wanted to find six mushrooms known as The Prince (agaricus augustus). This is one of the most delicious mushrooms and we figured that six specimens would give us both a nice meal. The next day we cycled into the University together and just as we entered the university grounds we spotted some mushrooms under a cedar tree. We walked over and there were six beautiful Prince mushrooms. We were shocked. It was really spooky. There were not four or five mushrooms, nor seven or eight; there were exactly six. This fungus is renowned for growing in the same place year after year, and we had never seen any fungi growing under this tree before. Once we were over the shock we collected the mushrooms and later that day enjoyed eating them – they really were superb. And my mind was reeling. Was this just a strange coincidence? Did we really create something by our intention? We did look under the same tree for mushrooms for the next few years, but never found any. That evening I decided that I would really like to participate in an Enlightenment Intensive, and I would really like to meet this man Jeff Love. So I went through the steps of the creative law intending to take an Enlightenment Intensive with Jeff Love as soon as possible. A few weeks later the new edition of Human Potential Resources landed on the doormat. This was the magazine where therapists and group leaders advertised their courses, groups and services. The star attraction in this edition of the magazine was Jeff Love coming to London to run a three day Enlightenment Intensive! What’s more the group was to be held on the top floor of the building in Old Street where Eva ran her groups. We both signed up for the group immediately.
Next.
A Master's Path 