As I started to understand myself better and become aware of my unconscious issues I was pleased that I had not continued to give public talks on energy policy. I was totally naive about power issues and understood nothing about how my psyche needed and used control. So during the period of intense self discovery I was relieved to not be adding more material to my already overloaded bin of traumas, embarrassments and stuff that needed to be worked out. To a large degree I also lost the confidence that I had previously, I no longer trusted myself or my motives. With hindsight I think this was a healthy step; until I engaged with my unconscious I had always taken a leadership role in all sorts of ways and just presumed that I knew best.
Assisting on Eva’s groups helped restore my self confidence in several ways. First, I witnessed other people having very similar issues and difficulties to me, so I ceased feeling that I was particularly bad. Second, I often found that other people found my observations or interventions helpful. This was a surprise to me – mostly because I had been emotionally blind for so long. Finally, in some of the encounter groups I allowed myself to give full vent to my emotions with surprising effects. For example, in one group there had been an interminable debate between group members about whether a particular person should stay in the group or leave. At a certain point I couldn’t stand it anymore and sat in front of the person in question and screamed “I don’t care whether you fucking stay or go, but I am sick to death of discussing it. If you want to go, just go. If you want to stay then stay and contribute something more fucking constructive than this whining doubt I’ve been hearing all day!” The person just loved it, no one else had been able to be so honest – that was what she wanted. Right there and then she decided to stay and there were no further doubts expressed by her or anyone else. Through experiences like these I learned to trust my emotional responses to difficult situations.
By the time I was assisting Eva on her first Intensives I had confidence that I understood the process well enough to be able to serve the participants appropriately. I was completely comfortable with ensuring that the environment and food were appropriate and also confident that I could help people to undertake the process. Enlightenment Intensives also became one of the central topics about which Eva and I spoke endlessly. We discussed the schedule, what to do if participants were not following the rules, what the best kind of food was for each meal and so on. We were equally passionate about helping other people experience their own truth – to have their moment of enlightenment.
By the time I participated in the Master’s training course I already knew that I was going to run a lot of Intensives and that my experience participating in long Intensives – as well as having enlightenment experiences – would serve me well. So it came as something of a shock that in the first Intensive I ran as a qualified Master, in 1984, there were no enlightenment experiences at all. There were 12 participants, so it would be normal for 3 or 4 participants to have valid experiences – but there were none.
This threw me into a bit of a crisis. I was expecting it to be easy and to be successful! I self inspected a lot and talked it over with Eva for hours. The conclusion I came to was that I had forgotten that no one, not any Master nor any participant, can ever ‘make an experience happen’. All that the Intensive format and process does is set up the circumstances so that experiences are more likely to occur. But if they do occur it is by grace, not because of efforts made by Masters, monitors or participants. Which means that when there are lots of experiences I, as the Master, cannot take credit for it. And when there are none I do need to self inspect to discover whether there was anything I failed to do, but I should not presume that it was my ‘fault’.
When I was self inspecting about this Intensive I noticed that I was really passionate about wanting other people to have enlightenment experiences. Indeed, I noticed that I became distraught if I thought that in any way I had been an obstacle to someone having an experience. I was shocked by the intensity of my feelings.
Although at this stage Eva had Mastered more Intensives than me, our plans for the next series of Intensives we were going to run had me taking the Master’s role most often. This was in large part due to Eva’s continuing role as a group leader. In particular she took on organising groups for the Institute for the Development of Human Potential, IDHP. These groups met monthly for two years and included experiences of a broad spectrum of therapeutic processes. So as well as dealing with the dynamics within the group itself, Eva also organised for the group to participate in an encounter group, a bio-energetic group a psycho-synthesis group and an Enlightenment Intensive.
In fact the next Intensive I ran, just three weeks later, was for the IDHP course that Eva was organising. I found it much easier – in part because everything I needed to do and say as a Master was fresh in my mind. This time there were more participants (16) and at least 4 experiences – including one for a friend of ours for whom it made a great deal of difference. The third Intensive I ran a couple of months later had 24 participants and there were four quite profound experiences as well as several minor ones. The four major experiences were significant for me because when each of the participants presented their experience to me I ‘got it’ – by which I mean I participated in the experience and was carried into contact with the Divine for myself. I wrote in my journal:
It is so precious, so wonderful, it simply pulls something beautiful from within me. It puts me in touch with exquisite, irresistible Love. It is an incredible ‘reward’ for Mastering. I notice that I am more interested in facilitating a few people to a deep experience than a lot of people to shallow experiences – not just for my own reward but because I know that it is the deep experiences that have the most transforming power. I think that’s why I want to run a two week intensive.
With hindsight I can see that this was the beginning of a journey I took to develop the capacity to meet other people as Divine beings. The significance of this will become obvious later in my story, but it became a powerful thread in my journey with Intensives
I also recognised that I just ‘knew’ when someone had had an experience. This was brought home to me because one woman came to me talking shyly about what she was doing. I knew she had had an experience and was able to take her back to the moment when it happened and as she told me about it she allowed herself to go into the experience again – and blossomed and beamed. The other side of this knowledge was that I also had to face down two people who were convinced that they had had an enlightenment experience when in fact they had not. I found it scary saying to someone ”No, that is not an enlightenment experience. It is an important insight, but it is not what we are going for here.” But I knew it was a key part of the role I was embracing. It was also a major reason why Eva shied away from interviewing people who thought they had had an experience.
At the time I did not regard my ‘knowing’ about direct experiences as anything special. Naively I assumed anyone who had had an experience themselves and had completed the Master’s Training course would have the same ability. This was not the case. Now, with the wisdom of hindsight, I know that my ‘knowing’ was a gift I obtained from the powerful kundalini release in California – the one that ruptured my colon. It was an amazing gift for a Master to have and contributed enormously to both my confidence and my ability to serve participants. It meant that I was in a position to truly be a vehicle for “The Transmission of Truth”.
In most groups in the humanistic tradition there is a general acceptance that the group leader/facilitator has some knowledge that enables them to help others. However, when it comes to what is going on in a participant’s consciousness there is a strong belief that only the participant themselves can judge what is happening. This is also a useful defence against the unconscious of the group leader that may be contributing to her/his diagnosis. However, in the case of an enlightenment experience all this is turned on its head. It is not a matter of opinion whether someone has had a moment of enlightenment; either their consciousness changed state or it did not A key role of the Master is to help participants distinguish whether what happened to them was an enlightenment moment or not – this is what the Transmission of Truth entails. The problem is that there is no external symptom, such as energy release, feelings of bliss or flushed face, that occurs only with a direct experience. The only way to be sure is to “get” the experience within oneself. This is why the gift I received from the kundalini release was so significant.
A short time later Maureen Yeomans, the editor and organiser of the Human Potential magazine, contacted me to ask whether I would be interested in running a three day and two week Intensive for her next year. The plan was for the 3-day and two-week Intensives to start together and for the groups to separate at the end of day 3. This was the format I had experienced with Satya two years earlier. Apparently, Maureen had initially set the Intensives up to be Mastered by Skanda but the price she felt comfortable charging for the group meant she could not cover his air fare from the USA. So would I be interested? Interested? I bit her arm off! It was exactly what I wanted. I had already scheduled three Intensives for the early part of next year, this would be a perfect addition.
We discussed possible venues and decided that none we knew were ideal and that I should explore the option of using Grimstone Manor, a new growth centre on Dartmoor. Eva and I visited Grimstone and spent the night there exploring the venue and negotiating with the owner, Tony Whieldon. Tony eventually agreed to a price that could be accommodated within Maureen’s budget. He also gained a free place on the Intensive – and my clinching argument was the amount of work that 20 participants could accomplish in two working periods each day! This was also the beginning of a long friendship with Tony and his partner Jean.
I ran three Intensives in quick succession at the beginning of the year, which was good preparation for the two week in the summer. However on the last of three there were no direct experiences and I sensed that there was something I was not doing correctly. I went on retreat to the caravan in Devon a few days later. After I had settled in I visited my wise man and asked:
What had gone wrong with the last Intensive? I feel desperate. This is something I felt was part of my destiny, something I love to do – but it wasn’t working. He replied “You are letting people off the hook – you are helping them avoid pain. You are giving reassurance too early, you were softening their sense of failure – all of which are bad errors. You welcome pain and use it as an opportunity to grow and you should be teaching this to other people. It is your unresolved issues around hurt that get you to encourage others to avoid it – so sort out what’s going on with you and you will be a better Master!”
As well as running three Intensives so far this year my life had been particularly busy and upsetting. I’ll describe more of this in the next chapter. For now it is sufficient to explain that I really needed the retreat from the world afforded by this time alone in the caravan. It took me a long time to get out of ‘doing mode’. This was helped a great deal by the confrontation with my ‘Doer’ sub-personality a few days later:
After a lot of resistance ‘Doer’ appeared – a grim faced, closed off version of myself. All he wanted from others was their submission – he wanted them to do things his way, love him how he defined it – otherwise they were rejected – totally. He is the one who gets things done. He is constantly striving to better himself so that others will like him – and do as he wants. It is he who acts in the world. I confronted him for what seemed like ages. It was only when I demonstrated my strength and determination that he relented and engaged in the negotiation. What he wanted from me was that I be a real man in the world – someone who wasn’t trying to get his childish needs met, someone who was not crushed by rejection, someone who didn’t take hurt from every misunderstanding. Since these were all things I was already working on I agreed to do more of them all. This was obviously a relief to him; he said he wouldn’t have to protect me with his will of iron and total rejection of others. He also said he would like a break from doing all the time. In return Doer said he would enable me to be more in touch with myself and be able to relax more easily.
When I returned home I found myself busier than ever, but able to maintain a level of calmness – for which I was really grateful. I was starting a new course at the University, one that involved having students use personal computers. The energy business involving energy software was progressing really well – I had orders for the software and contracts to customise it from the Building Research Establishment and Milton Keynes Development Corporation. I scheduled my work so that about a week before I was due to run the two-week at Grimstone I had time to reflect and prepare myself. As part of my preparation I used the Inner Guide Meditation and was surprised at what I encountered.
I followed my Guide to a stream and on the right there was an enclosed space bounded by trees – it was like a tree-cave. We sat on two moss covered rocks and I was told to be very quiet. After a short time a beautiful, delicate shining fairy figure appeared on a rock on the other side of the stream. She was about 12” tall and shone like a star – which is what she was called, Star. She flitted across to a rock closer to me. I asked her what she wanted from me in order to be my friend and ally.
She said she needed me to be quiet more of the time. She said that internally I was very noisy – like a fleet of helicopter gunships coming through the woods! She pointed out that I really valued the mental power, the decisiveness, the excitement and boisterous creativity. But she wanted me to be quiet internally. I asked if she meant quiet as when I start meditating and count my breath. She said no, even quieter than that. So quiet I was doing nothing mentally. I recognised how I actually liked that state but didn’t spend time in it because I had not consciously valued it. So I agreed to actually spend more time being that quiet.
Then I asked her what she had to give me in return. She said that when I was very quiet she could talk to me and tell me what was right for my soul. She said she was a bridge between me and the Divine, she could hear the Divine and convey messages to me. She said it was she who spoke to me on the bench in California before the 6-week and who spoke to me sometimes when I was on retreat. She gave me a halo and said that when I was quiet the halo would shine brighter and would tell those able to see that I was in touch with my soul – and then I would be given more wisdom and guidance. I cried a lot. I found it difficult to accept the gift. I also recognised again the beauty of my soul and how I have been projecting it onto women. I love the delicacy, softness and beauty of my soul.
About a month earlier I had used a sub-personality fantasy journey and found myself face to face with a Laura lookalike. She said “You are surprised to see me aren’t you. You are usually busy projecting me onto others instead of owning me as part of yourself.” The particular qualities involved in my projections were a soft lovingness, a trust in others and easy openness. The session with Star clarified what was involved. I was struck by how my inner journey had shifted from confronting the Tower (the black knight) and my destructiveness to now owning my soft, feminine side. Somehow it also felt appropriate as a prelude to running the Intensives at Grimstone.
My first task at Grimstone was sorting out the accommodation. Thanks to Maureen’s publicity there were 40 people booked onto the Intensive, almost half of them for the whole two weeks, including Eva. I had two very able monitors to help me for the first three days and they were busy familiarising themselves with the house and gardens.
From the moment I gave the opening talk on the first evening there was a lot of energy in the room. And everything worked. Walking contemplation in the grounds was delightful, the food was on time and delicious and the group room was spacious enough to hold everyone easily. During the afternoon of the second day one of the participants jumped up from his cushion on the floor, moved to the middle of the room and shouted “Don’t believe anything this idiot tells you. He is telling fuck stories, it’s all nonsense!” I went up to him and said “you should return to your seat and communicate what’s arising for you to your partner.” He was having none of it, he continued to shout what a fuckwit I was and what a load of fucking nonsense I spouted. I put my hands on his shoulders to try to guide him back to his seat, but he aggressively threw them off.
Everyone in the room was watching the drama unfold. It was as if everyone had caught their breath and was waiting for some resolution. “Come and talk to me about what’s happening” I said and turned away to return to my seat. To my surprise he followed and sat on the floor in front of me. I looked him in the eye and said very kindly “Tell me how you are doing the technique.” He burst into tears. As he did so the rest of the room came back to life and there was the hub-bub of twenty people telling their partner what had arisen in their contemplation. It turned out that the man responsible for the outburst had been stuck for most of the day and needed help to correct the way he was going about things. This incident gave me complete authority for the rest of the group. Everyone felt safe, I could clearly handle a very angry man with compassion and understanding. It stood me in good stead for the rest of the two weeks.
And I needed it. Of the eighteen people who signed up for the entire two weeks, six came from an encounter community where they resolved issues between them by screaming at each other. So for this group, whenever something arose in their contemplation that involved some negative emotion they just let rip. They pretty well screamed their way through the whole 14 days!
The third day of the Intensive was amazing for me. Participants were queuing up to present their experiences to me! There were twelve experiences during the first three days, one of which was very powerful. Once the three day group left the energy in the room shifted – from everyone partaking in a mad sprint to settling down for a long distance run. There was just one row of people sitting opposite each other, instead of the two during the 3-day, and the schedule became lighter; we finished at 10.30 instead of 11.15pm. I gave a lecture each day and made a point of including a story from my own experience of taking a long Intensive plus a story from another tradition. I also focussed quite a lot on ways in which one’s ego/mind can obstruct or subvert the process – and was often able to use my own experience to make the issue real. I did not have a monitor for the two week, it was just me and the participants. So it was also my role to track how everyone was doing, to provide them with corrections and encouragement. I kept a check list of whom I had spoken with and when to make sure that no one slipped out of my attention. I felt in my element.
Here is an example of one of the many stories I used to encourage the participants. As you will see it also contains important messages about the significance of following a spiritual path. It is a slightly edited version of one of many such stories in Philip Kapleau’s Zen Dawn in the West. I was able to use many of his stories because the Intensive process and schedule had been largely modelled on the intensive Zen retreat known as a sesshin.
Dear Roshi, it is now a week since the October sesshin and the daily routines of job and family have re-established themselves. Yet the sesshin changed the whole world! As you said in the closing talk, it was an unusually powerful sesshin.
For me the first half of the sesshin was extremely difficult. What a state I was in! It seems now that I must have spent half my time in utter despair, confronting as I had never done before the fact that in the deepest sense we own nothing, control nothing, not even our own bodies and minds. The other half was spent despising Zen: “I never used to fear death,” I told myself. I never used to feel such helplessness in the face of this impermanent world. I have Zen to thank for all this damn misery! Well when this is over I’ll return to home and family and live a normal life, like normal people who aren’t practicing Zen!”
Underneath all this indulgence the energy was building and through all the negative mind states I was able to keep asking, Who is afraid? Who is helpless? Who, who, WHO is going through all this? Then the last night came and suddenly, twenty minutes before the last dokusan, I knew! It was as though I had taken one small step and the whole universe turned inside out.
I must have literally squirmed in my seat waiting for dokusan. I wasn’t waiting to be tested but to express my utter astonishment, this state of joyful Surprise. It seems strange now that Surprise was the overwhelming feeling at the time. But I know now why it was, and it’s this point that needs focussing on. I realise now that throughout all the years of practice there always remained a residual kind of scepticism about the possibility of really freeing oneself. Deep down there was always the feeling that “life is gonna get you” and if life didn’t, well death would. There were times when I intellectually convinced myself there was a way out; but without the experience that there was, this was little more than a crutch that could, and did, fall out from under again and again. What joy to taste, to really experience this marvellous Freedom.
There was another kind of scepticism also present during these past years. I had started practicing Zen after a period of real disillusionment with political and social activity and had the hope that Zen would be able to alleviate, at least in a small way, the suffering I saw in the world. But through these years I was often troubled by thoughts that sitting and staring at a wall hardly seemed to be a reasonable way to do anything for anybody. In time, of course, the awareness grew that Zen made one more responsive, more able to help in small ways, less likely to cause pain. But this still seemed like so little in the face of such a dark, suffering world. So imagine my surprise when I glimpsed at last that there is no greater aid we can give than to awaken to our True-nature and dedicate ourselves to the awakening of all beings. “All beings without number, I vow to liberate.” What a vow!! Yet without Zen and you Roshi, you old lip flapper, how could we ever know this. Thank you for my very life!
As I came toward the end of reading this story to the group something remarkable happened to me. As I read the Bodhisattva vow, “All beings without number, I vow to liberate”, it was all I could do to hold myself together; I wanted to burst into tears, tears of gratitude. I knew that I had taken that vow before and that I was in the process of starting to live from it. Fortunately, I always pause after reading a story to let it sink in, so I was able to recover and return to my role. However, it remains one of my strongest memories from the whole two week. Much later I realised that my utter despair at the idea of being an obstacle to anyone’s enlightenment lay in this vow.
As the two week progressed participants started to confront deeper aspects of themselves. There were also comical moments. For example, a Yugoslavian whose English was pretty good did not understand swear words. One day he came to me and asked “What is this ‘shit’ that everyone talks about?” I thought for a moment and said “Brown sausages that go in the toilet”. The group erupted in laughter; I hadn’t realised they had been listening to our exchange.
On day 9 Eva had a lovely experience. It included a vision of a giant angel in the corner of the room dripping blood! On day 10 a woman had a beautiful experience of another person – well she experienced ‘God in everyone’. It brought tears to my eyes and visibly affected each partner to whom she communicated her experience. On day 11 there were three major experiences. One, to a young man called Brian, was probably the deepest experience of ‘who I am’ I have ever seen. He had a glimpse earlier and I said to him “You have dipped your toe in the water, why don’t you go for total immersion?” The next time he came to me his eyes were like giant black openings into the universe. He also profoundly affected his partners. At the end of the Intensive he told me that as a result of his experience he would like to join a monastery and spend the rest of his life pursuing Truth. I strongly recommended that he first experience more of life; I thought 21 was far too young an age to make such a decision.
Later on day 11 three of the women in the group let rip about their sexual frustration and anger at men. It was very clean anger. I remember them as the three furies. Somehow it was refreshing. At one point I looked at the group and saw three people communicating profound experiences, half a dozen more in tears of gratitude, someone else screaming, two people in tears of despair and the rest looking as if they were in love! It was amazing. I had the sense that Truth was in the room, doing its work. I cried with gratitude.
The last three days were something of an anti-climax. Day 11 had clearly been the peak in terms of experiences and everyone being most present. By the end I and all the participants were tired, some exhausted. I found it hard accepting the level of gratitude and elevation that the participants directed toward me. I felt shy and didn’t know how to let in their thanks and admiration without allowing it to (inappropriately) feed my ego. But within myself I felt really good. I knew I had run a good long Intensive and that I would be doing a lot more of this in the future. I was grateful to Maureen for having set me up to do it; it marked the beginning of my career as one of the foremost Masters of Enlightenment Intensives. It took me more than a week to recover from the mental , physical and emotional exhaustion. During that time I reflected often on how I could do things better next time. I decided that the most important step I needed to take was to dare to be more of a Master. My reluctance to take that step was based on ways I had screwed up in leadership roles in the past, particularly with ERG, when I did not know who I was or what I was doing. Now I did know my Self, I did know what I was doing – so I could dare to be an Enlightenment Master. I felt empowered and on the right path.
Next.
A Master's Path 