Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Four Births

Prologue

BOOK I: THE FIRST BIRTH

Chapter 1: An Unsuspecting Mystic

Chapter 2: Changing Times

Chapter 3: Preparation

Chapter 4: Learning

Chapter 5: Getting Started

Chapter 6: Madness And Managing

Chapter 7: Teaching

Chapter 8: Land of The Free And Not So Easy

Chapter 9: Unexpected Tests

Chapter 10: Special Learning

Chapter 11: Expanded Awareness

Chapter 12: Final Year In America

BOOK II: THE SECOND BIRTH

Chapter 13: home “Sweet” home

Chapter 14: Linked Apprenticeships

Chapter 15: My Valley In The Shadows of Life

Chapter 16: Up Against The Ceiling

Chapter 17: Meditation, Meeting Elizabeth

Chapter 18: Adam Came First

Chapter 19: Swami Krishna, hare, hare

Chapter 20: hurry Krishna, hurry, hurry

Chapter 21: Visiting A Saint

Chapter 22: Holy Man, Holy Cow—Holy…What!?

BOOK III: THE THIRD BIRTH

Chapter 23: Thakur's Directive

Chapter 24: Love, rage, and outrage

Chapter 25: Enlightened At Last!

Chapter 26: Deliverance, New Awareness

Chapter 27: Inside The Nitty Gritty

Chapter 28: Walking The Talk

Chapter 29: The Business of Enlightenment

Chapter 30: Community Life

Chapter 31: My Dreams Become A Dream

Chapter 32: Death, Grief, And Madness

Chapter 33: Another Goodbye

BOOK IV: THE FOURTH BIRTH

Chapter 34: Cut Loose

Chapter 35: The ravens’ Nest

Chapter 36: Touches of Life

Chapter 37: ripening Fruit

Chapter 38: Trial By Fire

Chapter 39: Tripping over The Next Step

Chapter 40: Stopped In My Tracks

Chapter 41: hard Labor

Chapter 42: rebirth

Chapter 43: A New Life

Chapter 44: Awakening

Postscript

Endnotes

Biame Network

I dedicate this book to Elizabeth, who has shared my path for almost three decades, and to all who seek spiritual unfolding, awakening, or completion in the Infinite.

Acknowledgements

This book, which I began to write in 2000, was a joint effort. I wish to thank and to pay tribute to the many people who contributed in countless ways.

Elizabeth, my wife, was the most important contributor. We have lived and worked together for over twenty-seven years, developing and refining our spiritual practices throughout that time. Our lives have continually led us directly into a heightened awareness of the wondrous dance of life in which we can all participate. As a result, it's not easy to pick a place where I stop and where she starts in what I've written about our joint activities. I thank her for sharing her life, love, and wisdom with me. More important, I thank her for making available to us all her profound level of realization.

Many spiritual teachers, masters, and mentors have also contributed to this book. Some of them taught me specific approaches, others taught me by example. All of them have saturated me with their aliveness and realization. They include Swami Muktananda, Adam Davis, Elizabeth Mellor, Swami Krishna Gautam, Thakur Balak Brahmachari, Jack Lim, Mother Meera, Jane Greenbank, William rand, Dr. Rutcha, and his holiness the Dalai Lama. Words cannot express the gratitude I feel, nor describe the extent of the contribution each of them has made.

Another source of inspiration and guidance has come from many friends and acquaintances who have given me key suggestions during different stages of my life. Each one stimulated me to turn my life around significantly or to start new and fruitful projects. I give my thanks to Suzanne Mellor, Ralph Henger, Norman Lowe, Len Tierney, Robin and Val Maslen, Eric Berne, Elizabeth Brophy, Paola Gautam, Jacqui Schiff, Bob and Mary Goulding, the Hebephrenic group at Cathexis Institute, Krystyna Andreoni, Glenda Spivak, Peter Vines, Mireille de Meuron, Raymond McDermott, and Tony and Nada Smark.

Others have contributed by encouraging me to write or by reading and commenting on all or some of the manuscript during different stages. In particular, I thank Rex Finch, who, when Elizabeth and I were writing our first coauthored book, Parent Craft, years ago, taught us the basic craft of writing for publication. Stephen Karcher was also my mentor and friend from the beginning of this book. His many suggestions were invaluable, and, more importantly, he was almost entirely responsible for enlivening my writing style. I also thank David Carman, Mark Davis, Mireille de Meuron, Anil Madhok, Martin Wells, Jan Clark, Maryna Mews, and Vaughn Malcolm all of whom read the manuscript during different stages and made significant suggestions. My thanks to Elizabeth, Zoe Edmonds, and the Wednesday Training Group as well: they all listened as I read large segments of the book. Their general and specific suggestions and comments were always useful and helped me to believe that others might find the book interesting, entertaining, and useful.

Finally, I would like to thank the whole crew at Strategic Book Publishing for their help, good will, and expertise during the process of transforming the manuscript of this book into the form you now hold in your hands. Their creativity, competence, efficiency, and good will throughout were reviving tonics whenever they were needed. It has been a pleasure dealing with them all.

Four Births

During spiritual awakening, our consciousness goes through four births. Each birth makes possible another dimension to that awakening, and each follows a general pattern:

Gestation

Labor

Delivery

Bonding

There seems to be a natural order in which these four births take place, although, through no fault of their own, many people don't follow this order. Those who don't will need to spend time catching up on what is incomplete from earlier births before they can complete the later ones. This was the state in which Ken discovered himself when he became self-conscious enough to notice.

Prologue

Suddenly, I was flying across the room, stunned by a blow to my head. I landed hard against the junction of the floor and the wall six feet away. Seeing stars and with ringing ears, I wanted to stay where I was to settle myself. But I knew I needed to get back into the struggle since I was still conscious, so I launched myself into the fray again, looking for what I could do to help.

Siegfried, a tall, gangly young man, was still trying to fight off the staff. Three of them were struggling to take him down, a task made more difficult because of their need both to stay clear of his flailing limbs and to get close enough to subdue him without hurting him. He was out of control and a danger to both himself and everyone within range. Fortunately, as I started back, I saw an opening and lunged forward. Because I'm small, I found my way through Siegfried's flailing and got a good hold. Then I hung on like a limpet.

Out of balance from the momentum of my impact and from my extra weight dragging him down, Siegfried folded to the floor where he continued to struggle for about half a minute. It seemed to occur to him then that he wasn't going to get free from us, so he stopped fighting.

I was a trainee in a private institute in the United States that worked with schizophrenic and other people with severe psychological disturbances. While there, I learned to use “the talking cure” instead of medication. This approach required that staff and patients alike directly face and deal with their personal reactions and issues. Given the life and death intensity of many of these issues, facing what was there understandably often took courage. Complete resolution—or cure, as we called it in those days—was our goal, which made the work much more demanding than if we had been willing to settle for less. My experience there helped to prepare me to meet the profound wonders and the uncompromising challenges of the spiritual processes I would encounter in the future.

More than ten years later, I was in an ashram in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India. My wife, Elizabeth, was asleep beside me. A thin cushion of air inside our blow-up mattresses separated us from the concrete floor on which we lay. We were visiting and staying with a highly realized spiritual master. Although he lived on another floor above us, we were lying within twelve yards of him and so we were strongly saturated with his awakened consciousness.

It was pitch black to my physical eyes. However, after having meditated in the master's field for a long time that night, my inner eye was in control. And, what I saw was beautiful. Our room was filled with a translucent, dark blue light that made everything seem transparent and enabled me to see light shining both inside and outside all that was there. My body had that same translucent transparency, and I knew I was seeing the master's life energy and grace. Feeling very peaceful and fulfilled by all of this, I was nevertheless unexpectedly distracted by the high-pitched whine of a mosquito getting louder as it approached, a whine that ended with that distinctive crescendo as it landed.

The instant I felt it on my cheekbone, I swatted it hard with my hand. It was a total reflex—no thought, no feeling—just whack. And the mosquito died. But, that was not its only end. As it died, I saw an explosion of energy; a rapidly expanding sphere of light that quickly spread throughout the room. Somewhat lighter in color than the blue in which we were all suspended, and easy to see because of the contrast, I knew I was witnessing the life force leaving the physical form of the little creature I had just killed. I immediately felt the shock of its death as if it were my own, and an organismic regret at what I had just done that had me recoiling from my act.

For the first time in my life, I realized the preciousness of every living thing. I also realized how ignorant I'd been and how casual I was about the carnage I'd caused in my ignorance. When I grew up, insects were insects, nothing more. They didn't need protection; they were carriers of disease and ought to be eradicated so we were not put at risk. However, the instant my hand terminated this tiny creature, I realized how vulnerable we all are and the precious profundity of the life that animates the bodies we all wear. With this shift, I also learned how wonderfully obvious the aliveness in everything is, particularly when it is intensified in the awakened fields that surround true masters.

These lessons and many more would increasingly inform my life from then onward. At the time, the incidents involved would appear to have occurred by accident, as if unbidden by me. Yet when looking at the tapestry of my life as its different parts approached completion, I have often seen how clearly each stitch was called for by an unfolding design that was hidden from me as I was sewing it. I also knew I was helping to create the design. And, I don't think I'm unusual in knowing this. Many people sense that they contribute to creating the events through which they live.

At the same time, most of my life has been taken up with the mundane and coping with day-to-day living. I'm an ordinary bloke (as we say in Australia), and as a child, like everyone else, I also needed to learn the basics about living life. Not doing this as well as many of my peers as I grew up, prompted me to learn all that I needed to know later on. As will become obvious, there's no doubt that this need to learn strongly influenced what I did in my early adulthood. The reason why I became interested in the extraordinary realities and exchanges that underlie everyday appearances from very early in my life is still unclear to me, however. What is clear is that I did.

Exploring these interests transformed my life. And some of the consequences of what I've done as an ordinary bloke are far from ordinary. Like the mosquito, all of us in our very ordinariness are extraordinary beings with capacities and potential that far exceed our understanding, to begin with, at least. The primary point of this book is to share with you how this transformation in me took place.

While many of us don't know yet how to realize our potential, we can all learn. Most important, we can learn this while we live our everyday lives. The key is to act in ways that shape what happens to us day to day, instead of passively allowing events to shape us. For example, by learning how to embrace all our experiences, we become strengthened, expanded, and spiritualized by them, and our extraordinariness then emerges.

I now know that we participate in creating everything we experience: the people we meet, the feelings and other experiences we have, the events through which we live, the crises we need to face, and the wonders of life itself. I find this very exciting, because we can learn to claim our creativity and learn to apply it consciously and deliberately.

This book is also the story of how I laid claim to life—at least to some extent. It is about new beginnings, hopes and dreams, mistakes, mundane events, mastery, false starts, unknowing, extraordinary awakenings, excruciating challenges, and completion. It includes passion, boredom, excitement, and the beauty of love expressed and shared. It's also about enduring commitments and successes, and about unrealized hopes. In other words, it's about everyday life.

In sharing my story with you, I hope you will find encouragement to keep going when you face challenges; that you will realize how everyday people have the talent to fulfill extraordinary potential, and, whatever your current state of personal and spiritual development, that you'll go on to realize completely your inherent nature. I also hope that, just as I've often found encouragement, insight, and support from other people's experiences, mine may be useful to you.

At the same time, I offer this story to you as a fellow traveler. I'm still a work in progress and learning more every day. Everyone I meet is another source for learning, a reality that remains true even after having met thousands of people both in my professional practice and while teaching meditation. The vast majority of them have been interested in making the most of themselves and each has had a different starting point. They've been clients, students, workshop attendees, trainees, friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers. Some have been psychologically well balanced, some emotionally disturbed, and some physically ill; while others have hungered for spiritual fulfillment, felt blocked in their spiritual practice, or, although already spiritually advanced, have valued the companionship that comes from shared experience.

From my exposure to this rich diversity of people on their life journeys, it is clear to me that while there are similarities in the paths many of us tread, the path to spiritual awakening for each of us is unique. Our courses through life are the products of the places and times of our births, the unique talents and quirks we have when we arrive, and the people and opportunities available to us as we live. Your life had a different start and a different course from mine, so your path to your awakening will need to be different, too. As you read my story, therefore, instead of imagining that you'll need to go through similar experiences to mine, I hope that you find support and inspiration to live in the way your spiritual unfolding will require, that you celebrate and persevere until your journey's end whatever you face, and that you discover some practical suggestions to assist you along the way.

Because this story is about full awakening, it is also about the truth in each moment. Accordingly, I have written openly about my experiences. To the best of my recollection, what's written here is what actually occurred. I haven't tried to hide inconvenient or unflattering aspects of my responses. The truth has far more impact than contrived stories. Nevertheless, I have camouflaged the identities of some people while preserving the essence of the events that related to them. For others, I've used first names with few exceptions. Since most of what I've written is complimentary, I hope that all who read the book will appreciate what wonderful contributions all of them made to me and to many others.

In addition, my overall hope is that everyone will understand why I'm sharing so directly. I imagine my intention will be clear and easy to accept when what you read is to do with beauty, transcendence, and things about which you feel comfortable. When I openly share my questioning of some people's reliability or their difficult qualities, however; my intention may seem less clear and less acceptable. What is important then is to remember that the perceptions I am sharing with you about the past were purely mine. They were not necessarily the truth. This is something I have striven to make clear throughout the book.

I've included these perceptions because they played an important part in the awakening process through which I went. They also involved challenges and impasses that many people experience and need to learn to manage during long-term and intense awakening. So I want to be clear: I've included these responses to illustrate conflicts I encountered from which I learned important lessons; but they're not criticisms of those involved. The people may not have been doing, thinking or feeling what I thought they were. In fact, the person who I had the most difficulties with is the one who was undoubtedly the most involved in my spiritual progress and the one who gave most generously of his time and energy. I remain filled with gratitude to him and to all the others who contributed in any way to me.

Finally, I take responsibility for what I've written. I've done my best to remain accurate. Nevertheless, I recognize that the passage of time distorts what we think may have occurred. I hope, therefore, that you, all other readers, and anyone involved in this story understand that this book is meant as an honoring of life and living, and a thank you to all who have contributed. I also hope that what's here helps others along the way.

BOOK I: THE FIRST BIRTH

The first birth occurs at the time of physical birth, with a labor that can last from a few hours to several days. The labor involves the physical contractions of the womb. This birth delivers the fetus from the mother's womb onto the mother's bosom. The newborn baby then bonds with the mother, and the mother-baby relationship becomes the primary field of learning for the next two years. This relationship is the womb of the second birth.

The first birth is a physical birth that enables us to learn about our bodies, the physical world around us, and engaging physically with others. Because of this birth, physical body-consciousness is available for awakened activation in the evolving being.

Chapter 1: An Unsuspecting Mystic

Emily and I had talked animatedly for a long time. It was the mid 1970s and I was on a visit to the United States. We sat together on a hotel balcony overlooking a verdant garden, greatly soothed by the balmy afternoon. The soft, deep greens, indicative of plentiful rainfall and filtered sunlight, were very different from the lighter, almost yellow greens of my native Australia with its scorching sun and scarce water.

“But I don't see it that way, Emily,” I said much more strongly than necessary. “What do you mean,” she asked with the soothing tone of an experienced psychotherapist.

“Saying I'm a husband, a father, or a taxi driver has little to do with who people actually are. Doing so limits them enormously, because they often end up leveling themselves down to fit what they imagine those jobs or roles require.” As I spoke, a familiar tension had risen from my belly to the center of my chest, causing my voice to rise along with it.

Desperately wanting to hide all signs of feeling, I silently berated myself, “Settle down Ken! Talk calmly!” While to Emily, I said, “We're all much more than this,” which I managed more calmly, but still so intensely that I instantly regretted it. I could see Emily's experienced eyes watching me intently and I thought I'd given away my secret: a long-standing inner battle as my hidden passion struggled to throw off the weight of the cool, calm, and collected image I perpetually tried to portray.

Nevertheless, her obvious warmth towards me encouraged me to go on, so I said, “I've often debated this issue internally: Am I really a psychotherapist and only that? Is what I do all of who I am as a person? And my answer is always the same: I am neither just a psychotherapist, nor am I a person limited to and by what I do. I am much, much more.”

I paused, then added, “I only do psychotherapy; it's part of my repertoire. But what I do is not who I am. I'm Ken all the time.” I knew this with certainty, for I still had lingering memories of a transformative experience in my early teenage years that I'd kept secret from everyone, a moment when something otherworldly had touched me, and deeply changed me.

Emily gave me a long searching look, then she said, “You know, Ken, you're a bit of a mystic, and I think we're going to be hearing from you in the future.”

Mysticism

I didn't know what to say. Completely taken aback, I could see no connection between myself and what she'd just said. I felt ordinary, uncertain in many ways, and definitely not special in the ways I thought mystics were supposed to be. I was neither highly evolved, nor linked to other realms beyond the physical world, another association I had with mystics. Very mundane—that was me.

Also, the word mystic had exotic associations. I thought mystics were members of secret schools that excluded the uninitiated and taught mysterious rites that ordinary people could neither understand nor successfully carry out. Many mystics had lived in extreme isolation, too, like hermits in caves, or “destitutes” who wandered naked through deserts. Added to this, severe austerities were touted by many as necessary for harvesting the real fruits of any spiritual endeavors. Allegedly, because of all this, some mystics had the capacity to experience divine ecstasy, while many were a little crazy, or even very crazy indeed.

Complicating matters further for me, none of the spiritual practices I'd read about held any appeal, and I thought the requirements were way beyond me. Self-flagellation and going into the wilderness for forty days and forty nights to fast and pray were good examples. I was, I thought, far too squeamish and soft for anything like this.

Yet Emily's comment started a conscious process within me that continues to this day. This process teased me into looking for answers to questions like: What is a mystic? What is mysticism? And how could I possibly be whatever that is? More important, it also teased me to answer the bigger question: “Who am I?” As a result, and with the benefit of hindsight, I now realize that Emily was very intuitive.

Even as a young child, I knew life was far richer than it appeared. I used to play with other children, for example, and found it impossible to get lost in our games as if they were anything other than pretend. When playing together, my brothers and friends seemed fully absorbed, while I remained detached because the game was just that—a game. It was not real. I didn't know what was real, but I knew it was far more substantial than our playacting. Is there something wrong with me? I would wonder at times like this.

At other times, I was also aware that there was a lot more to things than the adults around me ever conveyed. It was as if everyone lived a kind of make-believe life. This seemed particularly true with the religious talk and practices to which I was exposed at school and church. My teachers seemed to have adopted postures of commitment and faith that lacked grounded authenticity, though I could not have put it into words like this back then. I just knew something was missing.

Now, I don't want to imply that I was preoccupied like this for most of my childhood, nor that I had any divine revelations. The experiences I have just reported were more like transparent hints, or exquisitely soft cadences at the edges of my awareness, not anything that I could directly put my finger on. For all I knew, everyone experienced the same things, too, so I never mentioned them. Also, while the experiences were distinctive enough for me still to remember them, I had plenty to distract me. My day-to-day activities at school and home combined to keep me very occupied.

Nevertheless, throughout everything, I kept puzzling over something that never altogether went away. It was like wanting to scratch a subtle itch without knowing where it was, an itch that always kept returning to prompt me, yet again, to look for more than I'd already understood. However, this itch was not my only inkling that there was more.

Another Beginning

I was thirteen. My parents were travelling overseas for a year, my twin brother was living interstate while they were away, and I was feeling lost without them. Also, saturated with the dependency, doubts, and needs of a typical thirteen year old, I yearned for something to fill my emptiness and cried out in distress, “Jesus, if you're there, let me know in some way.” Even as I did this, however, because it was not the first time I had sought help without getting any, I expected nothing to happen.

This time, though, I was in for a surprise. The moment I finished, my consciousness expanded into a vast inner awareness. I felt completely free and awash with a sense of the profound beauty in everything. Most importantly, I felt the touch of an absolutely accepting love that soothed and filled me instantly with an abiding sense of completion. I felt fully nourished and succored—healed, too—for the first time in my life. My hollow yearning had just evaporated, transformed by complete fulfillment.

Though they were gone as quickly as they arrived, I knew those few moments had changed me forever. I'd glimpsed and been touched by something from beyond the world of my everyday experience, something completely new.

And those few magical moments were so profound that they set me on a conscious and deliberate quest to repeat what I had just experienced again and again. I wanted to make this experience a permanent part of my life, for I knew that I needed whatever it was for my very life's sake.

The only trouble was that I hadn't the slightest idea of what I'd done to produce the experience, nor what to do to repeat it. I quickly tried replicating the anguish I'd felt before the incident, and especially repeated the tormented pleading—but this didn't work. Then, I tried everything else I could think of, but to no avail. Far from giving up, though, my lack of success strengthened my resolve to learn how to repeat that wondrous experience, no matter what it took.

Christian Experiments

At first, I tried using what I knew from my Baptist upbringing: praying a lot and beating up on myself when I made mistakes. However, by the time I was about eighteen, because I'd had no more experiences of heightened awareness, it was obvious that I'd failed. Moreover, my memory of the only experience I'd had was dimming.

Looking back, my failure was hardly surprising. We were taught at school and in church that we couldn't be truly touched by God. We were sinners, after all, and that left us little, if any, hope of salvation. “Rely on the love of God and put your faith in Jesus Christ to save you from your sins,” we were exhorted. How to do this was never explained. We were also repeatedly told that we were fundamentally flawed, inherently sinful, and inept in anything that mattered in life: “It is only by the love of God that you will ever succeed. Only through God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit does anything good come to you.” Since we were also taught that we were so sinful that we didn't deserve to be saved there was, in fact, little hope from God, Jesus or the Holy Spirit, either. So it was not surprising that I'd failed.

Not everything was so bleak throughout this period, however; for other parts of my life were rewarding. My family had acquired a holiday home near the beach where we spent all of our school holidays and many weekends. Racing sailboats quickly became my passion. I loved sailing, and my pleasure and the release I felt when doing well at this sport swept aside much of my craving for the divine. Winning races taught me to persist, too, no matter what I faced, because winning wasn't for the fainthearted, nor was it for those who lacked determination.

Sailing also exposed me directly to the miracle of life and the power of the natural environment whenever I was on the water. During tranquil, windless days there was the peacefulness of sitting as still as possible as the sailboat imperceptibly moved through the water. The vivid blue sky, usually without a cloud in sight, the intense heat of the sun, the lapping of the water against the boat's bottom, and the sound of loosely flopping sails were all magical. The water's surface, mirror smooth for lack of wind to stir it, reflected the sky back up to the sky. In this state, the water was impenetrable any distance away from the boat and miraculously transparent to the sea floor when I looked directly below. I would merge with it all—with the land, the sea, the boat, the sky, and the almost imperceptible eddies of air—entering a state of tranquil oneness that opened my awareness to how profoundly connected everything is, and to something subtle that everything shared.

During more strenuous times, I thrilled as the boat planed across the water. There was a unique delight in feeling the weight of the wind on the mainsail through the rope I held in one hand, and the lightness of the boat's passage across the water through the tiller in my other hand. I loved the taste of the salt in my mouth, the wind on my face, and the loud thrumming coming from the combined effects on the boat of wind, and sea, and speed. My heart would swell with joy at the time, and again later when I recounted these experiences to others.

I eventually mastered a special kind of intense, focused concentration that was casual and relaxed, the unique blend I needed for using wind and sea and boat to garner every bit of speed. I learned how to caress and coax and sooth in light breezes, or in different weather, to wrestle with the wind and the waves by meeting strength with strength. I learned how to keep to a purpose, even when the elements seemed completely at odds with it. You see, to succeed, I had to learn to harness these sometimes delicate and sometimes immense forces, if I were to win the races I had entered—and I certainly wanted to win.

Looking back, I clearly see how these and other experiences were signs of my openness to and a natural talent for meditation and other practices that I would develop more in my future. Yet, despite these signs, and a retrospective sense that I was always in training for what was to come, I was not aware of this at the time, nor could I see the overall pattern in the events through which I was living.

I was not sailing all of the time, of course, and when I wasn't, I would usually feel lost and alone. As far as I could tell, most people were unaware of how I felt and thought everything was fine. In reality, though, sailing itself, and the many activities that went into keeping a racing yacht in top condition, were only distractions. My deep, gnawing emptiness, the inner vacancy that I yearned to fill, was always lurking. I wanted relief, and I still didn't know where to turn to find it.

It was welcome, therefore, when David, a young curate in the Anglican Church, befriended me. He introduced me to liturgical church observances, and more. The rituals of sacramental worship, the softer approach to spiritual life, the set prayers, and our talks about mystical possibilities, all intrigued and prompted me to investigate further. Within a couple of years, I was a regular attendee and I was seriously considering becoming an Anglican priest, or, better still, a monk.

I was highly sensitized spiritually and enamored with fantasies about the cloistered life as a way of discovering the secret of again meeting the divine. Living by the letter of the law, my approach was, “If this works, then doing what the experts tell me will prove it; if not, then I'll know something else that doesn't work.” In about 1967, as a measure of my commitment, my wife, Suzanne, and I joined the vestry of a small Anglican church near where we lived. Suzanne and I had met in 1964. We were undergraduates at Monash University then, and we had married later, while I was doing a postgraduate course at the University of Melbourne.

Several years afterwards, my interest in the church had waned, however; and by my mid-twenties, I was no longer involved. My efforts to complete my quest using liturgical worship had failed just as obviously as did my first attempts using the Baptist tradition.

A Flaw In The Process

It took me years to realize what was not working. As a Christian, I was expected to commit myself to belief, faith, and hope. I was encouraged to believe in God and Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, and to accept that their value to us was unproven—and unprovable. I was encouraged to have faith, for “those with faith can move mountains”— whatever that was supposed to mean. And, I was enjoined to hope that all of this was true. For my part, I also hoped that living as if these beliefs were true would be enough to solve my mystery and to reveal what I sought. In the end, though, the practices I used were not effective.

None of my Christian teachers and mentors could deliver any answers. The Anglicans were certainly more hopeful and more forgiving than my Baptist trainers, and this was refreshing. But none of them had had the direct experience that I continually longed to repeat; or, if they had, they were as ignorant as I was about how to repeat it. What had become clear to me was that they were living in and relying on hope, because they hadn't had direct experience. As a result, my teachers were as unable to teach me what to do to know the divine directly as I was to repeat my experience.

A Crucial Decision

Soon after I understood their incapacities, another insight woke me one morning, flooding me with new awareness: I would only succeed if I discovered what actually worked and then did it. The solution was then immediately obvious; I needed to find people who knew what to do. Though this understanding is now no longer out of the ordinary, it was an astounding insight back then, and I immediately made a life changing decision.

My decision was to shelve belief and faith, and to practice guiding my life with what I knew from direct experience. I decided that from then on I wouldn't assume I knew anything that I hadn't yet experienced. I somehow realized that I only truly knew and understood what I'd lived through myself. Everything that came from other people's experiences was theirs, not mine. This was a profound revelation.

The key that unlocked my understanding was this: Believing that something was true, and acting as if it were before I'd directly experienced its truth was an act of faith. It was not real knowing, nor real understanding.

I also realized that many of my previous teachers had already demonstrated how unrewarding living by faith could be. To act as if something were true because others believed that it was true for them, because others who taught them had previously believed that it was true for them, and so on, was increasingly unreliable the longer the chain of belief and faith became.

A Mystic After All

So instead of living by belief and faith, I committed myself to acting as I thought true scientists acted. I was convinced that they were keen observers and based what they knew and did on the results of their observations. As an approach to life, this made great sense to me.

I was, and still am, fascinated by our human condition, and by how we can realize the vast potential available in us all that I'd once glimpsed. What I didn't know at that time was that in making my decision, I had committed myself to following an age-old mystical and spiritual tradition.

Without consciously knowing it, I had become a mystic. I wasn't the sort of exotic mystic of my early reading, but I was a mystic nonetheless. Emily was right.

Little did I know the wonderful journey my spiritual conception at thirteen had set in motion; how long it would take, how challenging I'd find many of the steps along my path, or how easy, in principle, the final answer would be.