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Mysterious Journey - James Burgess

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autobiography of a western dervish

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EARLY DAYS

magick and accountancy

Humble Origins
I was born in a poor council house in Lawrence Weston, Bristol, UK at 01.11 on May 7th 1951. My parents did nothing to draw attention to themselves during their whole time on Earth, and provided me with a bed and adequate food until, at the earliest opportunity and to the relief of all concerned, I left home to read Mathematics at Southampton University. Two extraordinary moments are worth recording, one of which occurred not to me but to my grandfather, yet the telling of the tale impacted very strongly upon my imagination.
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Scorpio Intuition
Henry Melville Morrison, my beloved Cornish grandfather 'Pop', was a '50-year-man'. He started work at Falmouth Docks as a carpenter on his 15th birthday and retired on his 65th, never once having been promoted or reprimanded and, so the story goes, had never once lost a complete day's work through illness or accident. However, one morning in 1941 he failed to get out of bed at the normal time and informed Gran that his legs were completely paralysed. A few hours later, this disability had cleared up of its own accord and he walked to work for the afternoon shift. There he discovered that his work station had been destroyed by a Luftwaffe bomb and had killed his two workmates. His mystical Scorpio intuition had saved his life.

Wow! I can fly
The second noteworthy thing was when I was 16 and I was kneeling on the sofa looking out the window at the heavy rain trying to decide whether to hitchhike down to visit Pop. Suddenly, for no obvious reason, I found myself looking down at my own body, tingling with static electricity and feeling completely able to fly about the room. I had no other further such events since, soon after, I began concentrating on my schoolwork for the first time ever because I wanted to get the grades to go to a good university, and lost my open-mindedness to the disciplines of numbers.

On Being a Drop-Out
I didn't like university so I left and trained as an accountant, which required great focus and endurance, and caused me to become rather obsessive about work. For some 10 years or so I took no holidays at all; all my energies were single-pointedly directed towards passing my exams and then making money and building a management consultancy practice. Though successful, very soon I became very disenchanted with the accountancy game. I had always thought of professionals as truth-telling, trustworthy and capable and when I discovered how corrupt is the world of business and money, I disavowed my accountancy qualification and left the profession entirely, wanting nothing to do with the perpetuation of lies. Shocked and disgusted at how casually I had ditched my society-approved training, when I took off my suit and let my hair grow my parents effectively disowned me, and never again showed any interest in my life track. 

Seeing how dispirited I had become, my rugby mate Simon repeatedly pressed me to take a break, and so I took myself off to do a road trip across America. I drove from Denver to San Francisco and then back east to Boston, a month on the road. For the first time I met hippies, whose ideas were truly extraordinary to me, smoked a lot of weed and camped under the stars feeling freer than I ever had in my whole life. I was so changed by the experience that on my return, Simon failed to recognise me at the airport. Soon after he took me to a local hippie camp, nearby where I lived in Bristol, and once again I found myself playing a guitar by a campfire under the stars. It became so clear that this was closer to my soul's yearning than being a success in business. Some of them lived like this all the time, and I asked one man, “How did you manage to create this wonderful, peaceful life you yourself? I wouldn't know how to even begin making this possible!” He smiled. His response was so simple and yet it spanned the chasm between our lives and our mindsets – “You just don't go home again”.
 
Nonetheless, I went home and tried to pick up my old life - but I didn't find that especially fulfilling and gave it up to set up a business, to do with electrical appliances. That did quite well for a while and I had 40 employees, but the stress was unbearable and the freedom and simplicity of another way called me. One day I just couldn't bring myself to go to work and spent the morning simply sitting on the grass and staring at a honeysuckle bush for hours. Later that afternoon, I went in to the office and announced my decision to let go of it all. Within 48 hours I had disposed of the company and had set about selling my apartment and closing down all my commitments.

​As soon as it sold I put on a backpack and took off to India and, more especially, Nepal. I thought I might wander around for a little while - but little did I know that I would be 'on the road' for over 30 years. Of course, here and there I had a few settled places for a time but never a home.

Spooky Stuff
In the few weeks before I departed the UK for good, something rather strange occurred - well, two separate things that were linked in some way. Since the time of my childhood out-of-body experience I had had nothing spooky happen at all, just lots of stress and struggle really, but all that changed, pretty much from the moment of my decision to give it all up to live On The Road. From that day forth my life has been littered with bizarre feelings, realisations and events - and by bizarre, I don't mean strangely coincidental, I mean downright weird, defying normal rational explanation. Now, I am not fanciful or given to emotional drama; I'm a serious-minded type, an accountant and son to the two most boring parents on the planet - so please remember that as you read my account of these events.

epiphany and escape

Maisie
One morning one of the office girls came into my room and asked if she could speak to me about something that was troubling her. I didn’t really know her, except that her name was Maisie and she was often away on sick leave. She was maybe 18 but looked years younger and had a rather childlike appearance of innocence. I overcame my reluctance and attempted to be gracious and let her talk freely, although she could sense that I’d rather be getting on with my work.

Her story was truly distressing. The reason that she’d been so often away was to attend hospital appointments. She had been violently abused some years before and was undergoing treatment, unsuccessfully, to heal a terrible knife wound she had suffered at the hand of her rapist. Of all the indignity and intrusiveness she had subsequently been subjected to, by far the worst, she reported, was that she had had to endure white-coated male psychologists taking thinly-disguised pleasure in making her go over her trauma repeatedly. In the pretence of offering counselling they were getting off on her suffering, even sexually.

Even though I lacked any experience or aptitude for counselling, I agreed to see her from time to time but, if I am quite honest, approached her situation with a slightly impatient attitude, in a rather business-like way. Our interaction had more to do with getting on and fixing this problem than expressing any empathy, sympathy, pity or kindness. Strangely she spent more time laughing than crying and, in response to my ardent discouragement of self-pity, she got on with it and pulled herself out of the mire she had let herself get into. Her previously intractable vaginal infection cleared up in a few weeks and she was able to get on with her life normally.

Indifference as a Healing Tool
When asked, she explained that it was my very posture of indifference to her problem that allowed her to talk it out; the quality of attention I gave her was sincere and I had no agenda other than to help her sort it out quickly and permanently (partly so that she would cease her excessive absenteeism - I was trying to deal with a business problem by getting my staff back to work). Apparently, in this case, such a quality of attention had the capacity to heal. It is worth remarking that in later years I repeatedly brought this same approach to clients and yet I was often criticised, even though I frequently sorted out their issues, simply because I would not indulge their self-pity.

God Stuff
Until that event I had not accepted the existence of Spirit, and found ‘God stuff’ rather silly and a little irritating. But I saw this process of Maisie's healing as a miracle, and opened myself up to further enquiry. To repay my kindness, (as she saw it), Maisie introduced me to a new, previously hidden aspect of my good colleague Eric. I’d known Eric for quite a while but had no idea what he got up to after work, and now I was being informed that each evening he and his beloved Trish sat together in meditation and invited ‘spirit guides’ to join them. 

Seances
Both Trish and Eric were mediums, and I was invited to join them and attend one of their seances. A month earlier I would have scoffed and ridiculed them both, but something big and deep had changed inside me; now I was open to whatever was to come. I confess that I was still extremely sceptical. Until recently I had denied anything ‘spooky’, notwithstanding my childhood experience and Pop’s story, and now I was sitting in a 1920s style living room with two ‘mediums’ hoping to converse with beings from the spirit world. Hmmm…

That's Not Eric!
It took but a few moments to turn my whole worldview upside down. I knew Eric well; I knew every gesture, his tone of voice, his lack of self-assurance, his body-stiffness born of chronic arthritis and age. The atmosphere around him shifted palpably, there was clearly a presence in the room that called upon our expectant attention. This was not him; his whole demeanour had transformed, his face took on a remarkably different expression that was outside of his normal range and which was completely unknown to me; it was filled with gravitas and awesome authority, his jaw became strong and his eyes somehow were now black and piercing.

Spirit Guides
A voice boomed out a single word, ‘Greetings!’ and like a tiger, he sprang up out of the armchair across to Trish, to whom he delivered some kind of healing attention with the movement of his hands. Throughout the next couple of hours, various characters came through either Trish or Eric. Some were Chinese, some Native American, there was a Zulu and several Europeans. Their messages were not particular, but more general wisdom and inspirational teachings.

How I Used To Be
To understand the significance of what followed it is necessary to hold a picture of the kind of man I had become. With the exception of my recent time with Maisie, I had been almost completely selfish, short-tempered, ambitious and arrogant, holding an angry grudge against the world and entirely dismissive and cynical about all things religious, perhaps with the exception of astrology, in which I saw very little that could be called sacred. I hadn’t even realised that this was the case, since all of my friends and family were rather similar. I had assumed that the world was like that and I found enough shallow pleasures to compensate for the nastiness and stress everywhere I looked in the world.

Easter Monday 1985
Eric suggested I should meet a special guest who was to visit soon, on Easter Monday as it happened; it was said the man, Richard, was an exceptionally open channel. When the day came, I arrived early at their house and spent a little time with a cup of tea, noticing this person. He seemed shy and awkward, having nothing to say and looking like he would rather not be there at all. Yet, when he was channelling, his personality was entirely changed, and indeed changeable, as he took on any number of faces, voices and characteristics of these spirit guides.

Brought To My Knees
I was in for a shock. Rather than a gentle, inspiring and empathetic approach, one after another of these spirit entities laid into me aggressively, they challenged each and every belief and attitude I held; I was grilled, examined, emotionally and intellectually battered, stripped of all defence and pretence and, over a 7-hour period of constant catechising, they brought me to my knees and in tears.

A visitation by one of his characters was clearly the central purpose of my experience, and brought about my deepest emotion ever; I have no recollection of ever having had such a feeling in my whole life – he told me a story that awakened within me a feeling of dread.

Priest from Asterion
He claimed this: that I was a low-level priest in a monastic order located on a distant planet, light-years away and, despite my vow to serve ‘for ever and ever’, I had escaped and fled. For an unimaginably long period of time, I had been wandering the universe trying to avoid recapture. He explained that he was my supervisor, whose fault it was that I had escaped, and that his task was to bring me back to exist for an eternity as a monk in servitude. He was by no means friendly towards me and I could detect an ounce of satisfaction in his voice when he told me that my ability to avoid detection had recently been compromised when I had offered Maisie the healing attention. That meditative activity had activated the light within me, which light acted like a beacon and drew him to me. I was bound to complete this current incarnation, but would be taken back to ‘Asterion’ the home planet, upon its completion.

ESOTERICA

mystical cows and primal screams

Unfamiliar Dangers
My travels took me into realms of experience that forced me urgently to let go of my comfortable self-image and worldview and deal with what was at hand. In India there was a perilous situation immediately on arrival as I came from the airport to my hotel. Having left the bus, I was climbing up to retrieve my luggage from its roof rack when the vehicle pulled away, with me perched on its flimsy ladder. I had to decide in the moment whether to take the safe option and lose all my possessions or, as I did, grab my heavy bag from the roof rack and jump off the bus as it raced into the dangerously packed streets of Delhi. Then later, in Bali, a 2-metre snake was in my bedroom when I woke up; in Thailand a coconut crashed within inches of my head, thrown with clear intent by a monkey high up in a tall tree. I felt I was certainly in harm's way!

Cleopatra, Merlin and Monks
Along the way, I met a woman traveller who explained that she was the reincarnation of both Merlin (I thought he was fictional?) and Cleopatra; I met a man who performed sex acts on stage to raise money for his sick grandmother, and children (plural) whose prospects as beggars had been intentionally improved by parents who had cut off one of their arms. I met hardcore drug dealers, more than one murderer, Hells Angels galore, prostitutes, gamblers, fishermen, soldiers and Tibetan monks. None of them was without personal issues, none without opinions and attitudes, and none actually threatened me at all, each was willing and happy to 'live and let live' as long as I was also so willing.

Insatiable Appetite for Learning
En route and back home in England, I took every opportunity to learn whatever I could of meditation and esoteric practices. I spent every spare moment reading and practising such techniques as tarot, crystals, healing, astrology, magick ritual, shamanic journeying and more. Also I received whatever healing I could from whomever I met, sometimes with dramatic cathartic release, up to and including primal screams. I received training in NLP, in mantric chanting, in astrodrama and sacred dance, also drumming and guitar. In the wild 1980s that was the thing to do – we were all at it – and sometimes it was really funny. Here’s an example:

​I was out one morning doing my normal 2-hour constitutional along the tracks and fields of Somerset where I lived in a hippie community called Ferngrove. Jumping over a style between two fields, my glasses leapt out of my jacket pocket and landed unseen somewhere in a massive bed of stinging nettles. It occurred to me that this was the perfect moment for me to learn how to do dowsing, so I took from my neck the unicorn pendant I wore, and concentrated my mind. I had seen someone do this once or twice before: ‘show me yes…show me no…’ and so on, trying to calibrate the responses to my central question, ‘where are my glasses?’.

Within just a few seconds I had to raise my eyes to look for the cause of a very loud rumbling that had arisen quite close by. Very strangely, from three different directions, in three adjacent fields, three separate herds of cows had all started pounding the earth and racing towards me! Luckily, I was guarded by fences. For several days after, every time I walked along the roads, any cows would follow me along the bordering fields. I came back the next day, with a long stick, and beat the nettles down until I found the glasses.

Oak Dragon Camps
In Ferngrove, we hippies had come together to bring about Oak Dragon Camps, which were the mother camp of a whole set of UK events that began in seed form as Glastonbury Camps in 1983, and eventually flourished as a vibrant Campscene, which comprised any number of camps focusing on such themes as dance, voice, healing, astrology, drama, shamanism, paganism and wiccan practices. These spread into other countries such as Germany, Russia, Ireland, France and the Baltic States and have settled into a normal annual holiday activity on the margins of mainstream society.

A little bit too real!
Occasionally these camps would attract a celebrity, and I remember that a very interesting event occurred once when we were having an event called a ‘talking stick circle’. This process requires a very respectful attitude, especially when listening to what other people have to say, and it must be done in a spirit of sacredness. In this circle of maybe 100 people, I was sitting next to a particular man – I won't tell you his name out of courtesy for his privacy – but he was a professor at a leading university in Britain, and his speciality included having a profound knowledge of British folklore and pre-Christian spirituality.

Unfortunately I made a rather shallow and foolish joke at his expense; it was very immature of me. When he asked me about it afterwards, I realised immediately that I had done something which required rectification, so I gave him a small rose quartz as a token of apology. The situation was well handled, he accepted that my remorse was genuine and we moved on with no chagrin or animosity between us.

We go forward in time a couple of years when he was on another camp and participating in an ancient French mystery ritual to invoke Venus, which he had researched himself and for which, as was clearly stated in the original magical works, one had to deposit a certain amount of blood to seal the spell. In the heat of the moment, he became rather excited at this process, even passionate, and when he came to give some blood, he did it a little bit too enthusiastically and cut open the back of his hand; rather more blood than required was sacrificed!

When he was away on this camp doing the ritual, his partner was a long way away at his home – where he had kept that same rose quartz upon his living room mantelpiece – and in great perplexity she noticed quite a remarkable thing. At exactly the same time that the ritual was going on, this quartz crystal lost all of its colour. The blood colour drained out of the crystal at the same time as the blood ran out of his hand.

CAMPSCENE

 fogues, unicorns and shamanic death

Harmonic Convergence
However, the most momentous event of that period was, for my set, 16th August 1987. It was called the Harmonic Convergence, an event long predicted by the Mayans as a watershed point in humanity’s awakening. An Oak Dragon Camp was held at Nanteos, in a field near Aberystwyth, Wales. It attracted a large number of assorted people from across a range of different strands of the Alternative World and esoteric spectrum. We met to create a very large group meditation; we sat on the grass and formed the shape of a solar cross – an equal sided cross within a circle. For many of us it was a very powerful experience, creating a vortex of light that frightened the nearby horses and stuck in our memories for a lifetime. Of all these 9-day closed camps, of which I attended some 200 over many years, this was certainly the wildest, most colourful, most violently troubled, sexually explicit and life-changing.

Jezrudin
Immediately afterwards, I retreated to camp alone and spent some weeks without human contact, cooking on an open fire, having neither electricity nor gas, and no vehicle. I needed to regroup, and so spent a lot of time walking and thinking and, by night, staring into the flickering campfire. One time, in the flames, I saw a face, and judging from his powerful manner, he was a man of some importance. He looked very impressive and a little intimidating, his eyes seemed as black as his beard and long hair; he was tall and strongly built, and wore a sword at his side. He spoke to me quite clearly, ‘I am Jezrudin. I would have words’.

Opening Channels
Jezrudin was in the company of around a dozen men who sat at a table, with him at its head. They were all dressed in the style of Arabs and I gained the sense that their lives were lived in the region somewhere around today’s Yemen, a good few hundred years ago. His men, (for he was undoubtedly their leader and, I surmised, their Sufi murshid), were decidedly nervous. Their agitation derived from his having opened up a channel to communicate with me. They seemed angry at me. To them I was in some way a serious threat because I had not sufficient self-discipline or spiritual power to resist intrusive energies and, now Jezrudin had opened the channel, they felt that my leaky boundaries would allow dark energies to come through, energies that could harm them.

A Rude Awakening
Brushing aside their fearfulness, Jezrudin looked at me with such intensity that my third eye began to ache. Much passed between us; without verbalising anything. I felt certain that I had understood what was being communicated, whereas, in fact almost nothing was actually said. In my habitual manner of avoiding responsibility for my own decisions, I asked him to help me understand my life purpose and to guide me in achieving it. Far from offering the kind, gentle wisdom and compassion that I was expecting, he too seemed to become impatient and even irritated. A shaft of light was directed towards the centre of my head, quite painfully, as he spoke two simple words: ‘It’s you!’. The old image of an iconic recruitment poster flashed into my mind, ‘Your Country Needs You!’. Then he disappeared from the flames and the campfire lost its ethereal glow.

Unicorn Vision
Very surprisingly, the hiatus lasted for only a moment. Another vision presented itself. I saw a unicorn. It climbed up a hill and, at the top, burst into radiant light. I climbed upon its back and it took me down the hill onto a plane where people lived in small villages. I explained to the villagers that they could bring their sick so that the unicorn beside me could offer healing. They thought I was a little crazy because, so it turned out, no-one else could see it. One or two came forward and felt some benefit from the presence of the magical creature but most people turned away from me in amusement or disdain.

These campfire images passed, and once again I was left quietly with my thoughts.

The Magick of Storytelling
Over the next few days I wrote a story. It was intended as a children’s book about unicorns and mysterious Eastern men with sallow complexions and swords, but it turned into something else entirely. It became a metaphor for all that my life was just about to become. I took the essential parts of the two aspects of my visionary experience and wove them into a magick spell using symbolism from Sufism and traditional mythology. I will mention that the story’s characters included Lucy, a 9-year-old whose birthday fell on the Capricorn Moon on the Summer Solstice, and Zaruman, a troll. I had no idea at the time what I was doing; I was so far out of my depth it was startling but I felt compelled to move forward with it as though I knew that it served some greater design. Then once I released the story into the wider circle, it took on a life of its own, eventually touching the lives of thousands of people.
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Sancreed
Later, back at the hippie community at Ferngrove, someone got all excited that I had written about unicorns, and pulled a bunch of people together so that I could read it out to them. The general consensus, having heard the tale, was that we should create a small camp entirely for the purpose of acting it out as a kind of mystery play. A few months later, in June 1988, I was driving through Penzance just a few miles away from the venue for this, the very first Unicorn Camp at Sancreed, in West Penwith, Cornwall. This region is awash with Stone Age constructions that have been used for religious and magical purposes since before recorded history – the Merry Maidens, 9 Maidens, Boscawen-un and other stone circles, plus dolmens, fogues, and lines.

Story​ becomes Reality
I shivered with a mixture of excitement and nervousness when I noticed a red catamaran in the harbour, whose rather unusual name was the same as one of my characters – Zaruman. Also rather disturbing was that there was a little 9-year-old girl called Lucy, whose birthday was the Summer Solstice, like my fictional Lucy. The play was coming to life in real terms.
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By any standards, this camp was a very extraordinary event, peopled by an assortment of characters who had no tolerance for normal life, the normal wage-slavery jobs, normal religiosity – or anything which they thought strangulated their spontaneity and freedom to express their life-force immediately and innocently. They saw the world as tyrannically run by a shadowy elite of wealthy power-possessors who sought to convert living, vibrant souls into half-dead automatons in servitude to their dark and selfish purposes.

The Dangers of Amateur Magicians
There was anger in the air during that era, violent anger. It was soon after the Battle of the Beanfield in which the ‘Iron Lady’ Thatcher convincingly played the part of the evil witch-bitch. Yet her attempts to crush the spiritual rebellion which was under way actually brought about the release of pent up expression of the potential for non-ordinary, even magical experiences. To be frank, the typical ‘New-Ager’ was rather more confident in their ability to practise magick than their training or competence warranted. This gave rise to a lot of strange conversations and assertions, and occasional abnormal events. In fact, some scenarios were quite bizarre – and this one springs to mind.

Doing a camp in the Spring of 1987, I was walking along a very quiet country road to a nearby holy well at Sancreed in the far west of Cornwall, when I came upon three of the other campers; they were clearly involved in something dramatic. It seems that one man, Jack, a solid and strong fellow, had attempted (twice!) to rescue a viper he had noticed coiled up in the middle of the road, in danger of being squashed. The first warning hiss having failed, the snake struck out and deposited its load of venom into Jack’s arm. The other two were supporting his decision to attempt to ‘assimilate’ the poison. He was stubbornly insisting that he was capable of getting himself into ‘Shiva Consciousness’ wherein he could absorb the venom without harm. He failed, and fell to the ground. This whole process took time, and the delay in getting him to hospital was a hair’s breadth from causing him a very painful death. On that camp, four of the participants suffered nervous breakdowns; one of them spent his future years going in and out of mental hospital. One learned that magick is not a game for fools to play.

Carn Euny Fogue
Amongst the many strange and disturbing interactions and moments, the one that stands out is when we celebrated the night of the Summer Solstice in Carn Euny Fogue.

At first there was a fairly large group packed into the circular underground chamber that was at the centre of the field of an old settlement. Although the tourist information would have us believe that it had been used for storage of grain, those with sensitivity to subtle energies knew it to be a construction for inter-dimensional contact, employed in ancient times. We carried out our own, modern-day, worshipful ritual to mark and celebrate the full expression of solar energies during the longest day, and the impending return of the dark on the shortest night. That done, one by one people drifted away until only two of us remained.

The woman, Brock, who was with me in the chamber was a very capable witch. I had seen her cure  burns on a child’s hand using prayer and a dowsing pendant; I had watched her make her own flower-essences, and I had noticed that she conducted herself with unimpeachable integrity during the camp, where for example other witchy-women had been playing ‘altar chess’ – a manipulative technique to influence the behaviour of others, for example stimulating two people to get involved sexually by secretly bringing their totems close together on the shrine we had made. Brock used theatrical methods to boost her influence, not unlike her predecessors in the olden days. She wore a black robe, walked a little bent using a gnarled stick, and chose her words to sound very strange and medieval. Irrationally, I felt an intense dislike for her at first sight, unlike anything I had previously felt towards any person ever before.

Romans and Atlantis
It was not yet dawn, perhaps around 3 am, when we opened up a connection between the worlds. Our first journey took us to the time when Roman soldiers were in Cornwall to collect tin for military purposes. In that story, Brock had been my grandmother. To save the children of our tribe from enslavement, she had secreted us all away underground and given us a supply of poisoned food. Knowing it poisoned, I refused the food, and consigned myself to a slow death by starvation in the dark as I watched all my friends die. That explained my initial feelings of strong antipathy for this woman. 

After re-centring, we journeyed unexpectedly back to the time when other peoples were in this region. You can still today see evidence of their legacy in the eyes especially of certain ordinary Cornish people. Walking in Wales, Ireland, Galicia, or indeed along the streets of Penzance, one will see the Celtic type, often of stocky build, with blue eyes and curly black hair. Yet occasionally in Cornwall one can observe another type whose eyes are very light blue, almost translucent, and with an attractive magnetism that draws the attention into a dreamy state of reverie. The people of Atlantis are reputed to have had a very advanced knowledge of technology, much like today’s only further developed and more in practical rather than theoretical use. And yet, also much like today, they had not the spiritual maturity to use this technology wisely.

Genetic engineering gone very wrong
Our magical journeying took us back to a laboratory being employed in the conducting of genetic engineering experiments. I was a white-coated scientist, the laboratory manager. Along one side of the lab, in cages, was a number of very ugly beasts resembling modern-day animals but terribly misbegotten. One had two heads, another had many arms, a third had both tail and wings and the very ugliest has a single eye centrally located in its forehead. I was horrified when, as we watched, the cages were burst asunder and the beasts escaped their bondage; they went absolutely wild and ran off. The shock was so strong for us that the connection was broken. We were rudely awakened from our journeying, looked at each other briefly and then quickly returned to the camp, both of us very shaken.

Next day I joined a friend, Mike Blackwood, at the campfire, saying nothing of my experience the previous night; but he asked anyway. ‘What were you two doing up at the fogue last night when everyone else had come back?’. I gave nothing away, but enquired, ‘Why are you asking Mike?’ And his reply has given me much food for thought in the many years since that day. ‘I was sitting here, alone by the fire in the early hours and I saw a string of wild and horrible creatures crossing over the bottom of the field. It blew by mind!’

One truly bizarre upshot of this experience occurred afterwards that went on for a few weeks. Whenever anyone mentioned the word Atlantis, I would start a fit of belching, which I couldn't control. I remember one bloke got very angry with me because this offended his sense of decency. One day even, in a group, I belched spontaneously, and I asked 'Is anyone thinking of Atlantis right at this moment?'. One woman admitted that she was, and was totally taken aback that I could read her mind!

It Gets Even Weirder​
I had several other encounters with this woman over the years mainly because she turned up spasmodically on camps, although it cannot be said that we ever became friends. Each encounter was rather unsettling for us both.
​
There is a Stone Age burial chamber quite close to Avebury and Stonehenge, called West Kennet Long Barrow. It actually has three chambers, two on each side and one circular one at the end of its tunnel. One day, I entered the end chamber and, for about 20 or 30 minutes, was doing the dervish turning practice. By the strangest of coincidences, and quite unknown to me, Brock happened to be lying down in one of the side chambers, lost in mediation. Later that day I overheard her in the camp café describing her experience to a friend; she was beside herself with rage, ready to kill, and I was pleased at that moment not to reveal that I had been “that fucking stranger in the Barrow who spun me out into a billion pieces into the infinite cold vacuum of the black cosmos”.

The Danger of Hospitals
It had been a very unpleasant time for her; she had completely disintegrated. Because of her rather shady past, and her addictions, she had had destroyed her natural defences, at least temporarily, and was highly susceptible to certain types of energy, including magick for example, and indeed, as is relevant to the story, not excluding hospitals. Later in life she managed to reclaim her complete strength, but before she did there was yet another bizarre event when we came across each other again, and I was challenged with the most difficult decision I have ever faced in my whole life.

My Difficult Decision
​Again present on a camp, Brock had collapsed to the ground, and a doctor was called from the nearest town, Glastonbury. The woman doctor pronounced that were she not taken immediately to hospital she would probably die. Brock struggled to open her eyes and was almost unable to speak, yet her thin voice could be heard clearly enough – ‘If I am taken to hospital I will not survive; don’t let them take me’. Even though the doctor heard this, she nevertheless insisted that she must go. Brock looked at me with such a penetrating glance that I can easily recall it to this day; she said but one word, ‘James!’, and in that moment a stream of awareness passed between us. She was a powerful and respected witch who was, fairly and squarely, demanding that I save her life, save her from the controlling powers of a society that her damaged body could not tolerate.
​
If Brock died, I would certainly be held accountable, yet it was for me, and only for me, to honour her decision and enact her will. I had to face down the doctor and a good number of onlookers. But I stood for a principle – the individual must have the right to decide their own destiny.

​She quickly recovered and a few hours later and the whole incident seemed like it had been nothing but a storm in a teacup.

DANCES OF UNIVERSAL PEACE

towards the one

The Magical 80s
​For me, the few years of the late ‘80s were very strange and magical. My vocabulary had expanded to include such words as fogue, wicca, guided journeys, shamanic burial and flower essences instead of cash flow projections, balance sheets, cost-benefit analysis and feasibility studies. The next chapter followed my training in a sacred dance form, and was linguistically marked by other phrases: Om Mani Pemme Hung, Anat Amenta, Bismillah ir Rahman ir Rahim, and Ahura Mazda. I kept company with those who ate hummus and drank chamomile tea, who had ‘low energy-levels’ sometimes, and spent a lot of time on yoga mats.

As a leader of Dances of Universal Peace, one might think that I spent a lot of time travelling to exotic places doing weekend workshops in lovely retreat centres. Yet the less salubrious truth was quite grey and arduous. My opening came with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Ex-Soviet countries had a long-repressed appetite for any and all knowledge and teachings from the West, and on any flight to Moscow, Tallinn or Riga there was to be seen a collection of persuaders off to make their claims. There were oil executives, bible-bashers and car salesmen, all ready and prepared to attempt to win over their various target clientele. I was the ‘Sufi’. I speak ironically. I learned rather more from them than the other way around, and I was by no means deserving of the title Sufi.

Peace Through the Arts
My experience as a dance leader was at that time limited to the one and only dance that I had been allowed to lead as a favour – because I was one of the organisers of an event, Peace Through the Arts, that was established in order to bring Americans and Russians together on English soil, in the spirit of love, harmony and beauty. I was the accountant. At the end of the camp, by way of thanks, the Russian organiser, Vasudeva, invited everyone and anyone to visit Russia, so I said ‘Yes!’ in a flash.

On arrival in Moscow, I had a bit of a surprise, because Vasudeva had fixed up a series of dance workshops for me to lead in several cities. Because he had seen me lead the one dance at the ‘world-famous PTA camp’ he had assumed that I could handle a full-on weekend with over 100 participants, none of whom having done DUP before. Their appetite for new experiences, and willingness to make the best of things meant that even I could not fail to please, and the first workshop went well enough despite that it was held in a freezing-cold gymnasium in Moscow, with all the dancers wearing overcoats and gloves. Yet the word got out, and by the time I had reached Petersburg a few weeks later, according to the legend that only Chinese Whispers can create, I had become a ‘great Sufi Master’.

Student Gurdjieff
This misunderstanding went to absurd lengths. At one Petersburg apartment in which I stayed, on the mantelpiece there were two gloriously framed photographs. The one was of the very famous, highly respected, long dead Sufi master, G.I. Gurdjieff. Standing proudly next to that, in equally impressive frame, was a picture of myself! Now, notwithstanding my completely serious commitment to this type of work, it has to be said that I have a mischievous side to my humour, which, as an Englishman, can become very dry and subtle. I kept a straight face and said, ‘Ah, Yes! One of my better students.’ But this Russian took me at face value and actually believed that somehow, in realms non-physical, I could, and did, instruct the great masters!

The Power of Music
As a special courtesy their local ‘master of dance’, an impressive old lady who, as a child, had survived the Siege of Leningrad, got her girls to show me their own style of dance magic. I had to stand in place as they moved very slowly towards me chanting their strangely disturbing 'Spring Song', which was once used to scare away evil spirits before planting. My insides churned up in fear and I began sweating and shaking a little, very pleased not to be an evil spirit. 

​Interestingly, I met a bloke in Moscow, Serge, who was my ‘time twin’; we were born within 12 hours of each other, and shared every planet in our horoscopes, although we had different ascendants. To validate astrological ideas, we looked for similarities in our lives, and found a good few of them. I’ve never met anyone whose style of driving was so much like mine – a distinct blend of patient, natural and easy skill with dangerously fast and furious! Also, he had the same absolute obsession with punctuality, and a total commitment to do exactly what he said he would do, whatever the cost; it made me feel delighted and a little spooked. Like me, he had been a businessman and had largely given it up in favour of the pursuit of esoteric studies, and like me he had a knee injury from an aggressive sport, and was frequently getting into trouble with authorities for challenging their lack of integrity. We had the same short and stocky body appearance and, according to my companion, an extraordinarily similar atmosphere and manner of being. Most bizarre was that his wife and my ex-wife both had September 19th birthdays!

Burn Out
Within a year or so the 80s ended and the era of mystery and magick gave way to the more mundane and ordinary. I spent the 90s in airport lounges and strange beds, and by 2003 I had become completely exhausted. In that year alone I was three times in the Baltic States, twice in the USA, and also in Russia, New Zealand and Australia. I burned out and spent the following 7 years recuperating. Still, I am jumping ahead. I want to tell you about my adventures in Turkey.

SUFISM

nasrudin's stories

My First Encounter with Zikr
At one of the camps, I had discovered that I could dance – which had been what led me to train with Amida Harvey as a dance leader. Also later at Dance Camp Wales, Amida introduced me to zikr, the key spiritual practice of Sufism. The group lasted no more than an hour yet, in that blink of an eye, my life took on another dimension. I had been looking ardently all my adult life for what, it seemed now, Sufism had to offer, which I had surmised from books was a spiritual /magical philosophy untainted by dogma and hierarchy and presented through a range of teaching methods including mantra, visualisation, teaching stories, breathing exercises and sacred dance. The single hour of zikr had made me buzz with electric shivers and popped open doorways of new perceptions in both heart and mind. Clearly it worked, and I wanted more.

​On The Road Again
It took me but a few weeks to wrap up my life and put it into a backpack, and soon enough, as the English countryside’s red and gold colours of Autumn passed by the window of the train, I was riding to Heathrow on the first leg of my biggest journey, destination Istanbul. I had vowed to remain in Turkey until I met the Sufis. This might well prove problematic because Sufism was by no means encouraged in Turkey, even thought to be outlawed, especially for foreigners. Yes, of course there was the tourist version to be found in Konya and around, but I wanted the real deal.

I had formulated a plan. I would travel overland to a city in the East, close to the borders of Armenia and Georgia, which in that period were under Soviet control. In the cathedral of Kars, Gurdjieff had studied with a Christian priest before he moved towards Sufism later in life, and it seemed to me a little like a pilgrimage. I believed that my clear intention and faith together were enough to draw me somehow to meet a dervish somewhere along the way.

Nasrudin
In the 80s it was no picnic to travel in the poorer, rural areas of Turkey; it was both uncomfortable and not without some danger. I could limit some of the risk by presenting myself as an eccentric. My hair was long and untidy, like my red beard; I wore brightly coloured clothes more like a clown’s outfit than a tourist would ever wear, and I introduced myself as ‘Nasrudin’, a spiritual name from the Sufi tradition and associated widely in the Middle East with the humorous teaching stories of the fool, Hoja Nasrettin, the ‘mad mullah’. If anyone asked of my purpose I would happily declare ‘to meet the Sufis’ despite frequently being warned not to speak openly of Sufism. They really didn’t know what to make of me – especially as to them a red beard indicates that a man has completed the haj, and been to Mecca!

Cold and Alone
​I took a circuitous route through the vast lands of Anatolia, enjoying its unique beauty with its frequently implausible landscapes, and visiting certain spiritual places, not the least of which was Konya, an ancient centre of historical Sufism associated with Shams of Tabriz and Jalaluddin Rumi, whose tombs are there. I was learning how lonely it gets not being able to talk to anyone for weeks on end, but at least I had the pick of hotels in the whole city, empty and affordable since no other tourists were to be found. It was February by then and, from a thousand miles away, the Siberian wind blew bitter cold across the high plane.

Learning the Fateha
Each morning the young house boy would stand close at hand to make sure I had no further requirement for my kahvalti, the Turkish breakfast feast of eggs, honey, feta cheese, bread and olives. Although we were not able to speak to each other, my having no Turkish whatever, I managed to get him to teach me the Fateha. This is a long prayer in Arabic and rather difficult to pronounce and remember. He himself had learned it in its entirety but not as individual lines, and was following the code that, once begun, the Fateha must be completed.

So each morning I would get him to recite the prayer many, many times and I tried to write down what I’d heard. This was only possible by placing my hand quickly to cover his mouth when he reached the place in the long prayer that I needed to study next, so I could write down each of the strange sounds as words. It became very farcical. The assimilation of knowledge had been a much more complex affair before the Internet!

Kars Cathedral
Eventually I found myself perched on a small and hard wooden seat on a public bus to Kars, which rattled noisily along a poorly maintained road pocked with snow-lined deep holes where the frost would eat away at the surface every winter. The journey was truly arduous, and I felt a real sense of achievement pulling into Kars and was excited to visit its celebrated cathedral, of particular interest because it had changed its designation several times from cathedral to mosque to museum and back to cathedral. Yet bizarrely, no sooner had I got off the bus than I jumped onto another! It made no sense whatever. I had no idea where this other bus was going or why I had simply excluded Kars Cathedral from my thoughts to endure another marathon of discomfort. Hour upon hour passed, morning became afternoon, evening turned into black night and at last the bus stopped at its terminus.

I never learned the name of the town. All I ever saw of it was the bus station, filled beyond capacity by a thousand passengers, all denied the right to journey onwards because of a curfew in place due to the state of martial law that governed the country at that time. I felt at a very low ebb. I was exhausted, perplexed and feeling very lonely and vulnerable. In this poor, rural region I may well have been the first westerner that some of them had set eyes on, and I looked like a clown, an excessively ragged clown.

I am Dervish!
To break the tedium of the hours until dawn, a young man spoke to me; his English was poor but passable. When, to his typical enquiry, I gave him the normal response – ‘I’m looking for the Sufis’ – I notice that he reacted in an unexpected way, although I couldn’t put my finger on what it was to make me think so. However it all became clear; he took me aside so that we would not be overheard and, with a careful glance to right and to left, rather dramatically and conspiratorially, he whispered in my ear, ‘I am dervish!’ I fell in with him, we got on another bus and we arrived at his village a few hours later.

His story was that he had once been a devoted dervish studying with his Sufi sheikh but, because his shameful thoughts about women could not be controlled, he had removed himself from his beloved master’s loving presence. He interpreted our meeting as a sign that he should make peace with his sheikh immediately and introduce me to him. This was very timely for him because he was on the point of leaving his home to take up a permanent teaching position elsewhere.

First Contact
He brought me to the Sufi group and, surrounded by a circle of young dervishes, a rotund old master sat on a chair opposite me; we beamed goodwill towards one another, and yet struggled to exchange anything meaningful. It was lucky that my new friend had some English so that we could make an appointment for me to meet the sheikh again a few days after by which time they might find someone who spoke a little more of my language. ​​​

The Prophet's Celebration
A few days later I returned and was delighted, and rather startled, to discover that it was a very special occasion that day, the birthday of the Prophet. In a small room, equipped with shelf seating from floor to ceiling, were packed a hundred dervishes or so it seemed. As guest of honour, as the ‘sema’ commenced, I was allowed to sit with the fat sheikh at the centre. Covering a full range of low sweet murmur to raucous shouted passion, many of the names of God were intoned by all present. Well, all but one. I sat drinking it all in.

The Power of Sacred Sounds
At first I tried to make sense of what was happening to me, yet within but a few moments I was transported to a condition of a rabbit in headlights, transfixed and bemused. I trembled and broke into a cold sweat; my face was on fire and my whole body shivered with almost painful static electricity. I lost any sense of who I was, where I was or what was happening, and felt simultaneously both lost and buoyant as if I were a cork on a vast ocean. Indeed, wave after wave of energies and feelings washed over me and through me, awakening a palette of emotions I had never previously felt. No more than half an hour had passed, and yet I barely registered the fact, when I was lifted bodily from the carpet up to the top shelf, away from the furnace of sound. Various pains and aches subsided and so I could last out the night without disturbing the others. At dawn, some 15 hours later, the gathering disbursed and I was given a place to lie down to sleep.

Draper's Shop
In the morning I was taken to a draper’s shop where a small number of dervishes were gathered, all in rapt attention. Another sheikh had arrived in the night who was being afforded their highest level of deference. Clearly he was considered a dignitary, and he held himself in a posture of commanding importance. No on spoke unless in response to his words. His voice differed from theirs in some way; he had Arabic and Turkish, but even to my unaccustomed ear it sounded a bit off. Later I learned that he was German, yet he certainly looked more the part of a Middle Eastern dervish than a western gentleman. He was very big indeed, tall and heavily built, with a full beard and dark bushy eyebrows that somehow kept hidden the look in his eyes.

Discomfort and Difficulty
Mostly ignored, I sat for several hours and unwillingly accepted one after another of their glasses of tea, which was so horribly sweet that my teeth began to hurt. My mood was foul. I’d got almost no sleep, my teeth ached, I was suffering from sitting too long on a hard chair and, having understood not one word of the stilted conversation, I felt rudely treated. Then the big man deigned to speak to me. He raised himself to an even higher position and look down at me rather contemptuously and enquired, ‘do you have any questions?’ I stuttered something, wanting to know the meanings of some of the mantras that were spoken and sung the previous night. I found his answer deeply offensive both in content and tone; he was talking down to me, ‘These are the holy names of God and cannot be translated!’

James Loses It
Nowadays, it's quite hard for anyone to get a rise out of me, but in my earlier years I had a quick temper and was not considered the most courteous or self-controlled of men. So, notwithstanding his great eminence and profound self-importance, nor even the room full of sycophants, I let rip. I ranted on and on about how difficult my journey had been, how difficult it was to actually find real Sufis, how I was determined to learn what I needed to learn, that I had been treated very rudely as I was a guest in their country…almost to the level of having been misunderstood by my parents and still upset that my football team had failed to win a recent match! My behaviour was truly pathetic.

He sat quietly, absorbing all my anger and self-pity, his eyes almost smiling a little even if his mouth did not; he was by no means disturbed at my outburst. He let the silence hang in the air for several unending minutes, while the tension in the room subsided a little bit. The young dervishes were embarrassed beyond measure, most of them looking at their feet; what I had done was unthinkable. They waited for the sky to fall, or at least for me to be turned to ashes by a lightning bolt. ‘Come with me’, he said, ‘bring your bag’. And he walked out of the shop with a quick Goodbye to the others, and I followed like a dog. ​

Riding on a Turkish Bus
He walked in silence to the bus station and we got on to the next bus to Istanbul, where he had been only a day or so ago, having made the 15-hour journey by bus for no reason other than his intuition told him he had someone to meet elsewhere – me!

At that time a Turkish bus was neither safe nor friendly to strangers, and there was always an atmosphere of tension until the bus had been travelling for a while. Men were very often carrying knives, which occasionally they would wave at each other to demonstrate their machismo. Yet today my new companion, Abdullah, gently settled the whole congregation of passengers with his courtesy, helpfulness and humour. People were actually laughing.

I don't like Istanbul very much
Istanbul happens to be the exact location for me where Pluto would be on my Descendant doing a relocation chart. The Sabian Symbol for that point is 'A Teacher of Chemistry', which speaks to the potential for a person to have a greater ability than is immediately obvious to act as a catalyst in changing the lives of people. My experiences in Istanbul were very extreme indeed, and yet led eventually to my role, and life purpose, as a teacher.

​Abdullah and I didn’t really like each other, but we were both locked in to a commitment to pursue our spiritual objectives come what may. While I had to accept his rather comfortless approach to my training, he had to accept my rather coarse and unlearned attitude to this sacred work.

Elbows in the Ribs!
There was precious little instruction; I had to observe and contemplate. He sometimes answered my questions, but mostly not…if I asked, he was as likely to speak harshly towards me as he was to completely ignore me. My poor ego! However, he did take me to all the places I could ever wish to see, including the very room that my hero Gurdjieff had used when he studied Sufism some eight decades before me. And he took me into the heart of it all – the tekke where a certain tariqa of Sufis meets on Thursdays and Mondays, as they had been doing uninterruptedly for 600 years. Mostly, when we arrived at the tekke, he would leave me to my own devices and let me work it out for myself. Instructions from the other dervishes were quite likely to take the form of an elbow in the ribs to get me to move out of the way. Few spoke English and fewer wanted me to be there with them.

Examinations
He would give me little examinations to test me, but he wouldn’t tell me I was being examined. One day he spent at least an hour explaining to me a very complicated exercise that involved breathing, sound and inner visualisations so that subtle energies could be moved inside the body, and thus certain exceptional states of being could be achieved. It was so rare for him to explain something so profound that I was very excited and thrilled to be initiated into the ‘real thing’. However, as soon as we had finished the work, he looked at me very sternly and pronounced imperially ‘This practice is forbidden! You may not do it!’ Very surprising and a little upsetting!

​That night I was very close to walking away without a word. His strange attitude and almost constant rudeness were hard to take and I couldn’t see how I was getting anything useful from it all. However, the next day when we met, he was friendly and charming, made jokes and radiated love towards me. Also, when we talked about the practice he had shown and forbidden, he said to me, ‘Now you may do this practice!’ In response to my quizzical look he explained, ‘It is because you were obedient and followed my instructions that you have earned the right to do it.’ Somehow he could see, presumably from ‘reading my aura’ that I had not broken his command. That was also a little surprising but far from upsetting, it validated so much of what I had only been able to believe in before rather than know. Now I knew for a fact that Sufis can see what others cannot.

​Blinded by the Light
My training had begun and then the work got a dimension heavier. As a direct result of the exercises he gave me, very strange things happened to my body and my feelings. For days I was blinded by an infection in one eye and almost completely unable to see at all. As that eye cleared up, the other did exactly the same thing. So in a state of great vulnerability, I had to stumble around the city of Istanbul trying to navigate buses and throngs of people, insanely busy roads and somewhat unkind street vendors. Many of the practices triggered emotional clearing and, in my hotel, I became a figure of some ridicule and bemusement since I was so often seen either in tears or staring vacuously into space. I did all I could to keep up, but eventually I had had all I could take and needed to get away.

On the evening before my departure, he did something odd by pressing his fingers against my temples and crown and intoning certain words. He told me to come back and see him when I had managed to establish myself as a teacher. We parted as friends and I set off to hitchhike towards somewhere warmer and easier.

Midnight Express
​I was very fragile and actually not completely safe from harm, having moved away from Abdullah’s protective attention. When I got a lift from a couple of Dutch guys in a van I was happy to be on the move, but things were still not finished with me. I spent hours and hours in the back of the vehicle unable to stop crying. We spent a few days on the road together – until I learned that they were transporting a very large amount of heroin hidden in the wheels. I had been one intuitive policeman away from being locked up for 25 years in a Turkish prison. 

TEACHING
From a Welsh mountain to the forests of Lithuania

Coming Down the Mountain
One thing about going away on a real trip is that, at some point, we have to come home again and try to pick up the pieces of our broken lives. Any serious travelling creates a rupture of sorts; we find ourselves changed and our family and friends substantively unchanged and unable to accommodate our own differences of attitude and expectation. I was completely unable to reconcile my experiences with the Sufis with anything or anyone I knew, and what's more I had no money, no job and no home. 

Self-discovery
I found an old caravan on a Welsh mountain, scraped a thick layer of bacon grease and filth from its walls and ceiling, put in a wood-burner, and hid from the world. I spent hours each day practising zikr and went through a period of painful emotional clearing. I came eventually to see how my life had been dominated by two undeniable forces, which together pulled my strings as though I were a puppet. They were claustrophobia and sexual lust.

Shamanic Burial​
Realising that I must face down these two fearful conditions I made the decision to practise celibacy in preparation for a ritual I intended to do to mark my 40th birthday, a ritual burial called ‘shamanic death’. There was nearby a man I knew, Brian Monger, who said he would guide me through the process. The winter was hard. I had food money but little more than that, there was no electricity or running water and I often had to break a layer of ice to have my morning wash out of a bucket. It rained most days and the walls never quite cleared of mildew. During the few hours of daylight I would walk in the rain over the mountains, otherwise I spent the day in prayer. For weeks on end no-one visited – and that was what I needed.

Pagan Ritual
Spring came and with it the Unicorn Beltane Camp. Although there were several dozen participants, very few knew of my plan to carry out the ritual – just Brian and two close friends. I dug the grave and lined it with a waterproof tarpaulin. Looking like a Michelin Man, dressed in layer upon layer of clothes against the cold, I lay down for Brian to cover me with soil. I had constructed a breathing tube out of an old Kellogg’s Cornflakes box. At the foot of the grave was Tristan and at the head was Debbie, two pillars to ‘stand watch’.
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Rather naively I had assumed I would be able to meditate and cruise through the whole experience, whereas in fact my mind could not let go of its irrational, obsessive fear of my being confined; I could not move at all. So, to contain my fear, I focused very slowly on each of my memories sequentially from birth. In the distance, a church clock chimed the quarters and I used this anchor to section my life memories into 5-year periods.

Facing the Truth of Who I Was
There was no difficulty reliving the early years, but when it came to my early twenties the memories were so horrible that I could hardly contain myself. School years had been mostly decorated by my two loves – playing football and studying mathematics – but as an adult I became aware of the depth and breadth of nastiness in this world of lies, and had hardened myself to cope. Now I played rugby, described as ‘a game for animals played by gentlemen’, which was played in the spirit of aggression and domination. And instead of the elegance and beauty of mathematics my number skills were employed to cheat the taxman and make the rich richer.

These dark memories sent uncomfortable shivers through me and my body twitched and sweated in unparalleled distress. I yearned passionately for the chimes to allow my mind freedom to move to the next period of years. When at last the chimes rang out, my mind jumped forward and quickly reviewed my late twenties – which had been filled with shallow pleasure, money-hunger, sex-lust, ambition for position and complete disregard for anyone’s feelings but my own. It was truly horrible. There was a palpable sensation of a life without love or much goodness of any kind; it was heavy, and so lacking in spirit that I could not even feel sadness or despair, yet from deep within me a feeling of profound self-disgust bubbled up. I had hated myself, I had hated life and I had wanted not to exist.
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Although it was impossible for me to move an inch, covered as I was in a very heavy layer of soil, nonetheless I found superhuman strength and somehow burst out of that pit, screaming. Unbeknownst to me, Tristan had decided to sit out the vigil wearing on his head a full-blown mask of a king stag – so the first and only thing I saw as I burst forth was an enormous face of a wild animal! Dread and horror triggered me into screaming convulsions that I could not control for quite some time. The whole camp froze into silence, their having no idea what was happening. I was not a popular man in the days that followed!

Unicorn Camps
From that time, the Unicorn Camps began to take off in a major way, at first with intimate gatherings centred around themes of Dances of Universal Peace, Astrology and Magick. Later when we expanded the management group and added singing, a wider public was attracted, numbers grew and versions of Unicorn Camps popped in various countries, as they still continue to do to this day.

The raw magick of the early days tapered off and in time I became less excited by the camps, which lacked the kind of punch I had become used to. The participants were now more on the edges of mainstream rather than part of the wild and wonderful, rebellious tribe of malcontents I had come to expect. Nevertheless, I continued to enjoy them all even if they had become a bit tame.

My Decision not to Die
Death itself is perhaps the greatest mystery of life, and I have two sources of wisdom to thank for my unusually positive approach to this normally taboo subject. My Sufi teacher spent a large amount of time presenting ideas and teachings about the process that follows our final passage, and I find Walsh’s ‘Home with God’ to be the most inspiring written work on the subject. In fact, one of the explanations Walsh offers about death is all but fantastical – and yet stupendously exciting. But first, I will relate an account of an extraordinary moment that came and went with almost no drama, and yet was perhaps the oddest of all my life episodes, which I only came to understand much later on reading his book.

I had that day completed a Sufi retreat led by Nigel Hamilton, and was driving home a distance of a few hour’s travel, enjoying the stimulating conversation of a friend who had also attended the retreat. We were very absorbed in each other’s recollections of our retreat experiences. It so happened that the A303 had road works and we were diverted along a narrow country road in Hampshire.

​Following the retreat, I was hardly in a worldly condition and the August afternoon was warm, even a little sultry. My attention was distracted by the conversation and I took little notice of the fact that, from the opposite direction, a National Express coach was approaching a small hump-backed bridge at an inappropriate speed. I failed to react. Fleetingly the thought crossed my mind that I was in a very good spiritual state to be taken across The Great Divide; I was completely sure we were about to die and was pleased that I had just gone through a Sufi heart-purification. Yet, momentarily, we found ourselves on the other side of the bridge without incident. It was unquestionably unworkable for both vehicles simultaneously to pass the very narrow bridge, and I checked this fact with my friend, looking at her and asking, ‘That wasn’t possible was it?’, which she confirmed.
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Many years later, I found the book and read the most surprising idea – that we can ‘un-die’. When we have passed over, and gone through various processes, the final stage of our journey is for us to make the big decision, the biggest we ever have to make: do we want to stay dead. If we choose not to die then we are returned a ‘microsecond’ later into a version of life that did not include our death. Free Will is an absolute; no-one ever dies unless, at some level, they choose to do so.

7 WORDS

no, hello, thanks, goodbye, please, sorry, yes

​Khanqah Salaam
There is a version of Sufism widely taught outside Islam, which, in the West, includes several strands that grew out of the teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan. This great man, a true Being of Light, came from India in 1910 to present his message and founded, among other schools in USA, Russia, France and Netherlands for example, the London Sufi Centre. When I attended, this was run by Nigel Hamilton and I count myself very privileged to have studied with Nigel, who was able to pull me up into a state where I could open my third eye.
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In order to assimilate the teachings, it took me another ten years or so of presenting the material to my own students, whom I found in the Baltic States together with a very inspired woman, Jurgita Pabrinkyte. We co-created a Sufi retreat centre called Khanqah Salaam.

Mystical Healing
Two rather extraordinary occurrences are worth relating, although there were scores of other non-ordinary moments that current science cannot easily explain. In the first example I was asked to offer healing to a youthful mother who was about to undergo a hysterectomy operation, and who felt very despondent about facing such an early menopause; she needed some gentle attention. Without any physical touch, I held my hands above her womb area for about 15 minutes and intoned the appropriate healing wazifas. I was contacted the next evening by her husband, a rather zealous businessman, who reported that the doctors could no longer find cause for the procedure; she was well again.

The Paradox of Desire
The second was a special moment in my life. We were close to the end of a retreat, all of us in a very high state of grace, and I sat alone after lunch just enjoying the way the gentle breeze caused the sunlight to become a shimmering presence on the flowing river. Suddenly I was raised into a state of clarity; my mind became entirely free of thought. This wasn’t meditation; it was to meditation as Himalaya is to foothill. I saw IT ALL in total clarity – all the Light, all the fuss and confusion, all the unnecessary grief and its false reasons, all impotent desire and the foolishness of all ambition.

Although there was no voice to be heard, I had a direct message delivered into my pure mind – “James! Whatever you choose to have will be given to you – now in this moment you can have anything at all”. In a real sense this was the exact goal I had been pursuing for a very long time indeed, enduring hardship and various other indignities in order to follow the track that led to this moment.
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Yet, I had no desire. The state of being wherein one can have it all is that exact state of being where the bubbling of desire is overcome by stillness. I tried to think of something I could ask on behalf of another person – but even that felt somehow wrong, an intrusion upon that person and a denial of their right to win it for themselves. I smiled in silence; the voiceless presence chuckled and the sparkling light journeyed on.

7 Planes of Consciousness
Somehow from then there was no more juice in this activity for me, and anyway there was another ready to take my place as the teacher, so I moved away from leading Sufi retreats to develop another aspect of Sufism. The main philosophy I had studied with Nigel was the 7 Planes of Consciousness, and I wanted to find a way to make this beautiful wisdom more widely accessible – not just to spiritual retreatants. Thus began my work with the 7 Words System. 

Simple Mind
Sometimes, when I came upon a new idea, I would have a eureka moment and that was that, I got it straight away. For example, there was a part of my brain just waiting for differential calculus to be shown, and suddenly I knew it. But on the other hand, another part of my brain feels like sludge and needs to be battered with information and explanation to understand the simplest idea – which sadly applied to accountancy, at which I had laboured for years and years to gain a measure of competency. The 7 Planes of Consciousness was very much more the latter and, despite repeatedly being shown its elegance and profundity, it took me an enormous amount of time, study and effort to comprehend. I really needed to see it in its most simple expression first, before attempting its subtleties, yet when eventually my ease with the topic had been established, I set out to explain it in terms that anyone would find commonplace and accessible, something like this:

7 Words Overview
Life is complex. We can identify 7 different strands of life intertwined, and focus our attention on any one of them. The most obvious is physical existence – we have bodies that need food or we die. This is called the Earth Plane. Yet the realm of our thoughts and feelings is not subject to cause and effect, requires no bread but thrives on attention; these describe a world called the Astral Plane. There are 5 other planes, which we can tune in to through meditation. However, an easier way to get a sense of what they are is to consider seriously and deeply these 7 words: no, hello, thanks, goodbye, please, sorry and yes, and to notice that they create within us quite different states of being. If we practise using these 7 Words with awareness and supreme clarity, then we begin to perfect each associated state, which can be defined as an attitude of being.
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No shows strength, Hello is about exploration, Thanks indicates caring, and Goodbye speaks to how we deal with conflict, Please is our quest, Sorry is about conscience and Yes is to do with our ability to flow along with what turns up in life. If we become reasonably competent at all 7 then life gets to be smooth and fulfilling.

​I began to offer trainings in the 7 Words System, sharing this work in partnership with Richard Grey, mostly presenting courses here and there, and yet I also had some success delivering it into the commercial world for a time.

Let's Jump out of a Plane Attached to a Complete Stranger!
At some point in our perambulations, Richard and I came up with the rather questionable idea that to grasp fully the meaning and body state of the word Yes we needed to do a skydive. Up in the plane, strapped to my instructor, all was going well for me until my turn came. However I was tucked into the back of the craft, therefore last to jump, and a red light came on because we had overflown the landing area; the plane needed to turn back around. It banked, and, for rather a long time, I was suspended over the exit door with nothing to do but contemplate the 15000 feet between me and the hard ground far, far below. I lost my nerve.
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I turned to indicate to the instructor that I had changed my mind and decided not to do the jump. He just smiled in a kindly way as he slowly shook his head and gently eased me out of the door. The next 60 seconds was the longest minute of my life. I had no choice but completely to surrender, and I found myself very happily, if nostalgically, relishing all the richness I had enjoyed in my life, and how lovely it was to be going out this way. Yet the parachute opened and life once again became just a little bit boring.​

The Special 5%
After a few years offering these trainings, I learned a very surprising thing. I had assumed, perhaps foolishly, that people generally would take steps to improve their lives if they knew how to do so, and yet I came to realise that those who were genuinely willing to work upon themselves in order to evolve and advance their situations were very few in number. Anyone who took a small amount of time to understand the 7 Words System got it quickly, some immediately, yet afterwards rather few did anything with it. Let’s say around 1 in 20.

The Sleeping Masses
The large majority of folks are stuck in place, generally rather disillusioned with life, despondent, unfulfilled – and yet not to the level of intolerability. It seems to me that most people are putting up with a second-rate life, lacking the will to evolve because it’s not quite bad enough to bother to change anything very much. This realisation saddened me. For many years, most of my involvements had been with dynamic seekers – at first ambitious professional types and later, in the Alternative World, with students of Sufism and other spiritual paths and practices. I had lost touch with the general working population and had not been able to see quite how grey and lifeless people actually are under the surface, at least from my viewpoint. Surely the animal kingdom is where feeding, breeding and nesting are the dominant activities? Should not humans do more than put food on the table and find someone to raise their kids with?

Did I Break a Mirror?
This sad realisation may well have been the first sign of my fall from grace. Up to that point I had had a lifetime of colourful progression – lots of successes to bring validation and encouragement, lots of failures and setbacks to teach me lessons and challenge my determination – all good, dynamic stuff. But then, as though a switch was thrown, my supply of life-juice dried up, and I began to slide. Over a period of some 7 years, the Lord of Loss and Misfortune gave me his full attention.
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Both my parents died, my marriage failed, my home and friends disappeared, I lost my various positions as a teacher, for the first time in my life I was heavily in debt and, on top of it all, I ended up on the street. I had been on the road for 30 years but never on the street before. One night, kipping outside Tesco’s in Pembroke, I was noticed by three lads with drink in them, who had an inkling to have some fun at my expense. I managed to evade the danger but it suddenly brought it home to me that I was living in harm’s way. It was time to pull myself together!

SABIAN MYSTERIES

emerald cottage

Settling in Ireland
​I managed to work off my debts, and also received an advance on a modest inheritance, so on arrival in Ireland I had a bit of cash to get an Air B&B. Bit by bit, I pulled myself up by the bootstraps and settled into a simple apartment overlooking Galway Bay. I couldn’t live in England anymore; the rot was all but universal there – it seemed that everyone was too rushed to notice anything that really counts. Ireland was an English-speaking country where I had permission to reside and, at least in the country's western regions, the style of life was slow and very much more casual. Undisturbed by social involvements, I concentrated my attention on the work of Marc Edmund Jones and wrote Sabian Mysteries. That done, I moved to Kerry and bought a simple little cottage with the balance of my Dad’s legacy, and eased myself into my pension years, ready to surrender to the processes of decline while I pottered in my garden.

I had never known life without restlessness; I actually tried to leave home when I was 4 years old - packed a bag and got on a bus with 6 pence, 'Falmouth Please!' I told the bus conductor. Since then, I had been wandering around trying to find my place to be. I discovered that Kerry, and particularity Emerald Cottage, was my home, and power-point. For all of 6 months, I just sat in my living room, luxuriating in the cosiness of a real fire while the never-ending rain teamed down greening the land. Then I went walking into the beautiful mountains, and found the magic of the Land. Everything delighted me, the music, the gentleness, the crazy way that everything flowed along in its own time and in its own way, as long as I was willing to flow with it.

A constant feeling of awe and gratitude filled my heart and squeezed out of me my best song ever, or at least my favourite, Kerry Song. I also learned that one of my songs, Jamil Allah, had been recorded by the City Soul Choir in Vancouver - a proud feeling!

More Visions
I set to work transforming my half-acre of wild land into a sacred Zodiac Garden, identifying 12 aspects that I could develop according to astrological principles. I planted a tree circle of 11 tress, in accordance with Sufi cosmology, and built a temple space for the pagan deities Puck and Bridey so I could celebrate the quarters and cross-quarters. I included an area for the Buddha, and had emblems of Christianity here and there too. If anyone wants to offer me a menorah, calligraphic art of Allah or indeed a Shinto shrine, I would certainly find them a place too. I thought I would retire quietly and enjoy the colours change in every season. T'was not to be! My work, it seems, was not yet finished.

I started having 'visions' again. I don’t really speak much about them, partly because nobody expressed much interest, and partly to avoid ridicule or worse forms of persecution. But they have frequently arisen over the course of time, whether in visual form or other types of direct knowing, and have been a reliable and profound source of guidance and inspiration. To some small extent I have learned how to trigger them – insofar as I would, through meditation, focus stubbornly on a particular question, day in day out for weeks if necessary, until I found my answer. Sometimes it takes the form of a eureka ‘pop!’, sometimes an unusual event has metaphorical significance, sometimes I begin writing and some other agency takes charge of my pen – and, from time to time I see things or feel things, or just know things.

​Asterion Revisited
Many years ago, in a séance with Eric, I had had a dramatic and dreadful interaction with a spirit presence who had informed me that following my death I would be recaptured and returned to Asterion, a distant planet where I was bound eternally to serve their tyrannical priesthood. I do realise how absurd this must sound, and yet most of my life has shimmered between the absurd and the ‘just about acceptable’. Indeed, I count as one of my major achievements the fact that I have evaded imprisonment and psychiatric incarceration. Not because I’m a criminal or a nut-job – but because, apparently, I do sound like one to the people who wear, or work for, those who wear expensive suits.

The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum
Anyway, I took the Asterion threat seriously and, simply put, my deep-felt intuitive response to the idea of an eternity of monkishness was ‘fuck that!’ The coarse, stubborn, offensive and aggressive rebel within me is easily as powerful as the kind and gentle meditator, teacher and healer. I was as proud of having been a rugby player and ruthless businessman as I was thankful to have found faith in God. I decided to re-enter the fray with the bastards of Asterion, take them on, and win back my eternal freedom.

​It did not escape my attention that my inner world and outer world clearly reflected one another. Somehow my initial escape from Asterion had led me for a time to this dark pit of nastiness where the most celebrated persons are Trump, Putin, Kim and Xi. I had only won a temporary victory and there was more to do. One particular memory underpinned my confidence that I could achieve my goal.

​11 September 2001
​There was an incident, after which conspiratorial forces of evil in the world were uncovered and stepped up their despicable practices through which they cleverly robbed the world at large of much of their remaining liberty and goodness. 911 pulled the attention of the whole world into debilitating shock and horror, but it had completely passed me by. I knew nothing of it for 6 weeks because I had been travelling from Lithuania to Russia when the news broke, and no-one thought to tell me anything. The widespread fear that engulfed the western world has had a permanent effect to threaten and bully the general population even further into obedient acceptance of the dictates of the ruling class. There is substantively less freedom in the West than once there was.

Yet, I was excused this terrible offence to my emotions and threat to my confidence in life. Subsequently, my thinking changed; it went thus: I am somehow protected by greater forces than the dark power that brought about such terrible emotion to most others; if I can escape 911 then I can escape Asterion.

​We Make It All Up
​I digress now to discuss with you the developments in modern physics. From Plato and Archimedes, through Copernicus and Galileo, to Newton, Einstein, Heisenberg and Schrodinger, various clever people have formed ideas and created models to explain the workings of the universe. Science and mysticism have ever been entwined, and over millennia in turn been either supportive or antithetical to each other. Today there is a lot more concordance between ancient mystical teachings and laboratory experiments (not just theoretical postulation), which demonstrates quite clearly that ‘we make it all up’.

​It’s a little tricky to understand intellectually, and even more so emotionally, but really the best way to explain life is that – we get whatever we expect. However it is unlikely that we can see this, because much of what we are is unconscious, and unconsciousness governs our expectations easily as much as does consciousness. Yet through meditation and other practices, we can tip the balance and attain full, or at least fuller, awareness and so claim sovereignty over our life experiences.

The Magick of Stories​
From this I came to realise that I needed to rewrite my story of Asterion in my mind, and in fact on paper too. I knew that my story-writing could have magical effect, since it had already done so with the unicorn tale I had written in my 30s – which had directly and indirectly led to thousands of people having degrees of spiritual awakenings on Unicorn Camps in UK, Germany, Latvia and (as Earthsong) in Ireland. So I wrote my own story of how I escaped from Asterion and how the tyrants there were deposed. The hero of the story is a wise old man called Sofyus, who used his loving heart, laser-sharp intelligence and chuckling humour to win over the majority and stir them to bold action that usurped the bad guys. His picture is included frequently with my Sabian work as a mark of respect and gratitude.

The Last Chapter?
My outer work now is to explain how I see Sabian Symbols and to establish a more widespread appreciation of how to use these Symbols, and indeed also the 7 Words System, in order to free ourselves from the grinding tyranny of this world. Yet my primary purpose is on the inner planes – to prepare myself for my onward journey, by studying the ultimate spiritual practice: To Die before you Die - in other words to let go of attachments to things of the outer world.

I live simply now. Typically I get up around 5.30, light a fire, do yoga and meditation and start work by 7. I walk for 2 hours most days, usually more, and I keep my large garden half way between cultivated and natural, delighting in all the small changes that come as the seasons change. I see few people, and always enjoy the peaceful feeling when I am alone again. 

Perhaps the single most precious treasure I have won as a result of all my shenanigans is that I have faith. The greatest articles of my faith are that I have absolute free will, and that the future is better than the past, even beyond the grave, so that I will continue to express my own truth as clearly, freely and richly as I can in this world and the next. 

​Thanks for reading!
James