I have described what happened to me on the six week in some detail because it was the most profound growth experience of my life – by a clear margin. Each day I faced material about myself that would have kept me and a therapist busy for several sessions – and it was relentless. For 16 hours a day for 42 days I was facing myself and steadily uncovering more and more depths to my psyche – some good, some bad and some divine. The six week completed a radical transformation of my inner world. I remembered how in 1978-79 I was desperate to change but had no idea where to start. Now, only 4 years later, I had an enormous list of things about how I acted and lived that I wanted to change because they were no longer consistent with who I was. I was reminded of Gurdjieff’s observation that it was always difficult when one started to change because “you have given up the seat you used to sit upon and not yet found a new place to sit.”
At the time I did not know, in fact had no idea, that I had also suffered a major kundalini release. About three weeks after arriving home I received a strange questionnaire from Charles Berner. He asked all six-week participants to complete it in order to establish whether anyone had had a kundalini release. The aim of the yogic system that Berner advocated was to purify the body and to then deliberately release kundalini energy and allow it to transform oneself emotionally, physically and spiritually. Apparently with each enlightenment experience, no matter how small, there was an associated (and often small) release of kundalini energy. I dismissed Berner’s questionnaire as nonsense – yet when I looked at the questions I would have answered them all very positively – including an odd one that asked “Are you making odd, loud noises for no apparent reason?” I regularly found myself braying like a donkey – for no obvious reason. The main reason why I dismissed the questionnaire process was because I was disillusioned with Charles Berner and his ashram. Although I thought Intensives were amazing, I thought he and most of his students were weird. I wanted nothing to do with any of them so I binned the questionnaire.
With the wisdom of hindsight, I now know that I did experience a significant kundalini release during the six week. Indeed, it was the release of kundalini energy that lead to the intense pain in my arse – which turned out to be an anal fissure. Apparently when kundalini is released – at the base of the spine – it then proceeds up the chakras and anywhere it runs into resistance or impurity it causes damage. It didn’t get very far in my case! But at the time I did not understand any of this – I just thought I was in a strange space with a lot of love and a lot of energy. But in reality I was in a remarkable state, one that did not leave me until a year later when I had a general anaesthetic as part of an operation to put right the anal fissure.
The state in which I found myself had two strong characteristics. The first was that I was often in a state of profound love. This was quite similar to experiencing myself as Love during Jeff Love’s Intensive two years earlier. Eva actually found me being so loving a problem. Although Eva said she wanted me to be romantic and loving toward her, she was actually attracted to aloof, rejecting men – much as I was attracted to rejecting women. So my loving state was a challenge. She characterised my lovingness as being ‘soppy’ – but that didn’t stop me feeling intense love toward her most of the time. And over time she grew to appreciate being loved.
The second characteristic was that I had a great deal of clarity and energy – both of which meant that I was very effective in what I set out to do. In fact in the year following the six week I started four activities that fashioned my life for the next 30 years. What strikes me now, looking back on all this, is that at the time I did not think anything exceptional had happened. I naively thought that anyone who had been on a six week Intensive and had some profound direct experiences would feel and act the way that I did. It was much later that I understood this was not correct.
Initially my attention went to integrating what I had learned on the six week and finding ways to make the changes that I wanted. I distilled what I had learned during the six week into seven key lessons that I wanted to take forward. I decided to allocate one lesson to each day of the week. The idea was to remind myself of the day’s lesson in my daily meditation.
Monday: To not go with my criticalness, instead to always find out what it was about me that made me critical of others
Tuesday: To resist trying to always figure out what was going on. Instead I would just relax and have faith that things would either work out or become clear.
Wednesday: To resist being greedy and be more aware of my pleasure seeking traits.
Thursday: To tell the truth, to neither exaggerate nor leave things out nor denigrate myself.
Friday: To remember that I am at the beginning of a spiritual path and to be humble.
Saturday: To remember that it is my choice how I perceive events and the world around me. I cannot change what happens, but I can and should, consciously choose how to interpret or receive what I see.
Sunday: To accept myself and others just as they are and to let my love out by considering and serving other people.
These might sound like reasonable topics for meditation – but they were a good deal more than that. You need to appreciate that I was the Olympic champion when it came to being critical. I saw things that were wrong light years before I could ever see what was right. So to embark on a process of withdrawing my criticalness and find out what it was about within me was not a small undertaking. I had already had success with the process on the long Intensives, now I wanted to do the same in everyday life. Similarly, relaxing figuring things out for someone whose intellect had frequently been described by colleagues as in the genius category was not going to be easy. I had a lot invested in people thinking highly of me and my intellect. In fact, all the above topics challenged a core aspect of my personality and how I had been living until now. I was not expecting change to be rapid, but I was now, more than ever, totally committed to making the changes. At the time I certainly didn’t know it would take many years to make headway on most of these issues.
With hindsight I can see that this was a profound and very important decision. A significant number of people who have powerful enlightenment experiences on Intensives do not put them to use. They regard the experience as some sort of trophy – something they achieved. For me they were a clear indication of the work I had to do in order to be able to live as my true Self – as Love, as the one who chose everything.
In this I was influenced by my study of the Gurdjieff system. His system, which is based in Sufism, was focussed on developing techniques for thwarting the ego/mind that kept everyone away from higher states of awareness. The two techniques that I used the most over the next few years were ‘self-remembering’ and ‘external considering’. Self remembering is exactly what it says – aiming to remember that I am the one who is doing and saying everything. It sounds simple until one tries to do it – then it becomes obvious that in normal life one acts with no self awareness at all. In order to combat this, I left notes saying “Remember yourself” in places that I infrequently accessed – like recipe books, in a random page in my diary, behind the bags of coffee in the cupboard and so on. Each time I found one of the notes it reminded me to remember myself and, over time, I was able to do so more frequently. ‘External considering’ is simply the process of considering what other people are thinking and feeling instead of focussing on my own thoughts and feelings all the time. I found this exercise easier – but still requiring effort – especially when I was caught in a trip of my own, or thought I was right or judged them to be foolish. In other words, I also found this exercise difficult when it actually mattered.
In various different ways I recognised that whilst I was feeling very loving I did not have a channel through which to direct the love. One evening Eva and I were having dinner with two people who had taken Intensives and trained to be Masters. They were clearly struck with the state I was in. They were encouraging me to run Intensives as a way of expressing my love and what I had learned on the six week. I resisted, pointing out that Eva was the one who had been trained and I would take the Master’s training course next summer. Our friends persisted and were only satisfied when I said “Look, if there were sixteen people in a room and no Master I would run the Intensive before being trained, but not under any other circumstances.”
Three weeks later, just after Christmas, Roger, who had completed the same Master’s training course as Eva, telephoned and said “My wife has just left me. I am falling apart. I have an Intensive planned in a week’s time. There are sixteen participants. Will you or Eva Master it?” Eva was away for three days on a University course, so – given that there were sixteen people without a Master – I agreed to run the Intensive. I was stunned that my condition for Mastering an Intensive had been met so precisely and so quickly. I spent the week rereading the Master’s training Manuals – but found that my participation in the two week and six week Intensives had actually given me an extraordinary understanding of the process and how it worked. I was actually ready to Master an intensive and so focussed my attention on practical issues – such as where the venue was, assembling a tape-recorder and gong timer tapes, materials for lectures and so on.
There were numerous difficulties stemming from the fact that we had not set up the Intensive. This added to the challenge of Mastering the Intensive. However I felt in my element and found that it was the perfect channel for my skills and Love. For all the participants it was their first Intensive, they had little idea of what to expect because participating in this group was part of a three year long programme of self development. Despite all this the Intensive was a success. The participants engaged with the process and people gained personal insights and there were a few direct experiences. By the time it ended we both knew that this was something we were going to be doing a lot more in the future. In fact, I felt it was my destiny to lead a lot more Intensives. This was the first of the activities I started that would define my life over the next 30 years.
The next activity I started was that I moved from the Physics Department to the Systems Department in the University. This reflected transitions in my understanding of both the external world and my inner world. When I embarked on commenting on energy policy in 1972/73 I did so from a physics perspective and rapidly realised I had to understand more of the technology involved. For example, criticising nuclear power required me to understand how different power stations were employed and controlled as part of the National Grid. Later it became clear that it was not technology that drove decisions but economics. So I studied economics for a year so that I could engage with economists involved in energy policy. I felt I was making headway after winning a public debate on the safety and economics of nuclear power until a member of the Central Electricity Generating Board came up to me afterwards. He took me aside and said “Everything you say is correct, but you should realise that we are building nuclear power stations in order to get out from under the thumb of the National Union of Miners (coal miners).” It became obvious that it was a complex mix of technical possibilities, economics and politics that determined energy policy. This holistic view lead me to appreciate ‘systems thinking’; which is one reason why I became a member of the Systems Department. The other reason was that the holistic approach implicit in a systems approach was the closest any academic discipline came to my new understanding of the ways in which a person’s psyche influenced how they acted and the choices they made.
One member of the Systems Department, John Naughton, urged me to join him in learning how to use a personal computer and a short while later I was busy learning how to program on of the early Apple ][ computers. An ex-student of mine had been working on a computer program to work out the energy use in houses. I agreed to take on developing the software; in return he would help repair my roof. We also decided that if I could get the software running on a portable computer we would start an energy business together that offered people advice on how best to insulate their home. I was excited about putting my physics and energy knowledge to use in a new way as well as finding out what was involved in creating a business. This was the third activity that I started that would shape my life for the next 30 years.
The fourth activity that shaped my life was one of the first that Eva and I talked about when I returned home from the six week, namely getting married. I had already committed fully to my relationship with Eva after the two week last year; now I wanted to crystallize that commitment by getting married. Now it was Eva’s turn to face up to commitment. We saw clearly that our journey together was one of awakening and that this was the basis on which we wanted to marry. We also saw that we complemented each other really well; I had a great deal of intellectual intelligence and Eva had a surfeit of emotional intelligence. Together we were an awesome team. We decided to schedule getting married in September.
I went on my retreat in May. Initially my time on retreat was spent feeling lost – until I visited my wise man for advice. He pointed out that I had been working like an idiot right up to the time I left and I needed to rest – and also figure out why I was working like a maniac. This turned out to be the theme of the retreat – my attitudes to work, why I worked so hard and how it all related to my desire to become more conscious. My determination to change had started because the way I was working was literally killing me. Now that I had a lot of energy once more I was starting to fall into the same pattern – over working, becoming stressed and losing consciousness. Over the next two weeks I recognised how I often overworked to prove how amazing I can be – which of course went right back to wanting to have my mother’s attention and approval. I also saw how working for attention or admiration meant I was requiring specific responses from other people – and if they did not materialise then I was either furious or hurt – or both. Learning to work consciously was not going to be easy!
All the time I was away I had difficulties with pain in my backside. This was exacerbated by the fact that my only transport was my bicycle. The pain was steadily becoming worse and I was beginning to fear that it was never going to heal. After almost two weeks of suffering I was exhausted with pain and felt that all the inner work I had done was ridiculous and pointless. Sometimes I felt like a child who wanted someone to come and make everything better. I noticed I was afraid a lot of the time – afraid that anything I did might make things worse. I felt like giving up. In desperation I visited my wise man for help.
He said “Don’t you see that what you are feeling right now is what you felt as a child when you gave up. What did you give up on Jake? Look now and find out” I looked and realised that I had given up on my mother – and on myself. “Yes”, said my wise man, “but there is something else. You don’t have to do anything, just be open to what comes up. What else did you give up on?” So I just lay there and was open. And I saw that I gave up on my dad … and on my sister … and on everybody. I gave up on the whole human race. No one noticed my pain. No one answered my cries, no one ever came, no one cared for me – so I gave up on everybody. From that time on I have justified treating others as robots, as objects … It was agony to recognise the depth of it. I literally cut myself off from everyone. I howled with despair. “Yes”, he said, “that’s the key. Things will start moving now. There are lots of ramifications which you will uncover, but you have found what you needed to find. Until you found that you couldn’t truly serve others. Although you have been letting other people into your life it will be different now. I salute you for your courage and persistence in pursuing the Truth. God bless you Jake.”
As I reflected on that session I realised that I had always held other people out, without ever asking why I did so. Now I was feeling that I wanted to let others in, even if it meant showing them how afraid I was some of the time. It was a timely session because Eva arrived the next day and we spent the next few days reconnecting and having a lovely time together.
Two weeks after returning home I had what turned out to be my last session with David Boadella. He said that I did not need any more therapy and that my self-driven process was proceeding really well. He also said that I had found my real self and a life purpose, something that other people spend a lifetime searching for. He said my body shape had changed since I first saw him, and that a lot of trouble and heaviness had gone from my forehead and eyes. I felt profoundly acknowledged and very grateful.
The pain in my backside was steadily becoming worse so my naturopath arranged an appointment for me with a specialist in Harley Street. I was nervous about seeing him. But it was he who quickly diagnosed that I was not suffering from haemorrhoids but from an anal fissure. In turn he organised for me to see a specialist at a St. Mark’s hospital in London. The specialist was so concerned with the state I was in that he wanted to book me in for an operation as soon as possible. I had a Master’s Training course organised for later in August and a wedding and honeymoon in September. We agreed a date which was a week after the scheduled wedding date.
The Master’s Training course was being run by a Skanda, Satya’s husband, and together they were Charles Berner’s principle students and emissaries. By now the pain in my backside after a bowel movement was so bad that I was confined to bed for an hour or two – which meant that I could not easily participate in the Training course each morning. Because I had studied the manuals a year ago and assisted Eva running two Intensives and run one myself much of the training was easy for me. I was honing my skills rather than learning them from scratch.
At one point during the training Skanda talked to us about the process of interviewing a participant who thought that they had had an enlightenment experience. To illustrate the points he was making he called up one of the participants who thought that she had had an experience in one of the practice Intensives. As he interviewed her I saw quite clearly the woman shift from this state of consciousness to directly experiencing herself. It was as clear to me as someone taking off their coat and putting it back on again. When he had finished interviewing the woman Skanda asked all the other students on the course to decide whether she had had an experience or not. I was surprised that most people said that they did not know, a few even decided that she probably had not. When it came to my turn to offer an opinion I spoke directly to the woman and said, “I know you had a direct experience, it was very clear and beautiful, thank you for sharing it with us all.” Skanda asked me how I knew, I just said it was obvious. I was actually the last to give an opinion and Skanda agreed with me, the woman had clearly had an experience.
Over the next hour I was supposed to be preparing for my own mini-Intensive – but I was on fire. I realised that I had actually directly experienced the woman presenting her experience – which is not uncommon – it often happens that one person shifting their consciousness will trigger others into an experience. But it made my preparation very difficult – I had to force myself to concentrate, my awareness just wanted to rest in what I had experienced.. It also made giving my lecture very difficult – my voice was croaky and I was more interested in looking at the participants than giving them a talk! Once I had my mini-Intensive underway I noticed that one of my participants was glowing – she was clearly in an altered state of consciousness as well. In the break between exercises I quizzed her and established – to my satisfaction – that she had directly experienced what life was. The trouble was that she had not ever had an experience of herself, so she did not know who had experienced anything (this is one reason why everyone starts with “who am I?”). I changed her instruction from “Tell me who you are” to “Tell me what you are conscious of”. Over the course of the next few exercises she finally connected to the experience – much to her, and my, delight. I was overwhelmed. Suddenly I had been thrown into the very serious issue of “transmission of Truth” – determining what was and what was not an enlightenment experience and helping people to connect to and communicate it. At the time I thought that my ability to ‘get’ when someone had had an enlightenment experience was a result of having taken long Intensives, much later I discovered that this was not the case.
During one of the periods when we were all helping prepare food for the Training Course one of the other participants asked my why on earth I was starting a business. Without thinking about it at all I said “so that in five years time I can own a house large enough to run Intensives in.” I was surprised by the words coming out of my mouth, but thought it would be nice to have such a house. The rest of the conversation in that period was about what was needed in a venue to make running Intensives easy; it was clearly something most of us had thought about.
At the end of the training course the two women I spoke to the day of my mini Intensive, the woman being interviewed by Skanda and the woman struggling to communicate her experience, made a point of coming and thanking me for being so available to them. I had passed the course, but their acknowledgement of my role in assisting them meant more to me than the certificate – I felt I was finally ready to really take on running Enlightenment Intensives.
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Dear companion to my soul
Friend and enemy of lifetimes past
With you I have glimpsed
What it is I truly am
And the glory of your divinity
Through the veils of my ignorance
Your beauty shines a guiding light
And helps dissolve the fogs of fear
That hold me back from love
And the fulfilment of our destiny
Your presence, grace and love
Have fed and nurtured
The seeds of love within me
Giving me the strength to discard
The doubts and burdens of the past
And the strength to love you
As a man
Dear woman, companion, wife
My heart rejoices in this union
And in the love you bring to my life
This was the poem that I read out to Eva at the ceremony we held at home after we had been married at the Registry Office three weeks after returning home from the Master’s training. She sang me a song echoing similar sentiments. Then I stood up and gave a short speech. I started by saying that we had both taken wedding vows before, and broken them. I wanted to address how this time was going to be different. As I looked around the room, with about 20 friends and family present, I realised that almost everyone else there had also broken their first wedding vows. (For the first time I could ever remember my mother and father were in the same room – but with their new partners.) I talked about how we had agreed to help each other on our journey to God and that if things went badly wrong we were committed to finding each of our parts in that and then, later, deciding whether we wanted to remain together. Later I discovered that this had freaked out a good few of the assembled family and friends – it was not OK to talk about God, nor about finding one’s part in any disagreement!
The operation on my backside passed easily enough. I had to stay in hospital for eight days to make sure that the recovery was complete. I remember Eva brought in the Osborne computer I was using to write the energy programs on so I could do something useful whilst lying in bed. It was quite a feat for her because although this was sold as a portable computer it weighed 25lbs! But it was indicative of my state that I could not just lie in bed and read – I wanted to be doing something and writing software that enabled the user to predict the energy used in a house excited me. Within a few weeks of returning home from hospital I created a registered Limited Company to develop and sell the energy software and survey system. It was called Energy Advisory Services Ltd; EAS for short. The relief I experienced having the intense pain in my arse resolved is hard to describe. No more screaming each time I had a shit! No more hours of agony waiting for the pain to subside enough that I could stand up and walk around. Life was starting to feel normal. I did also notice that the fairly constant sense of loving everyone had also disappeared, but that was also a bit of a relief. With hindsight I now know that the general anaesthetic finally stopped the kundalini release that had started on the six-week Intensive – almost exactly a year ago.
Next.
A Master's Path 