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Torchbearers for justice, for healing and for unconditional love, it is time to pass through the flames together: the garden of the future we have longed for now draws near.

Chapter Fifteen: A New Science of Consciousness, Connection and Compassionate Engagement

Preface

Activists and mystics are pioneers and adventurers. They leave the safer territory of comforting spirituality and charitable service and venture to the edges of personal and social transformation. They have a degree of longing and passion that makes some people uncomfortable. They have an unsettling degree of intensity. They ache for breakthroughs. They destabilize normality. They rock the boat of acceptability. They go off the radar screen of life’s prescribed trajectories only to return bursting with ecstatic insight, fiery conscience and new codes to rouse us from a sleepy moral conformity.

Both mystics and activists let their imagination catch fire. Rather than experiencing vision as an abstraction, they join with it as active participants. Vision enters into them and courses their veins until it is fully embodied. They are called relentlessly to step into the cauldron of real-life verification in order to bring airy concepts into flesh-and-blood reality. The path of enactment can be clumsy, painful and dangerous, but there is no other way for those who want to live the reality others conceptualize but hesitate to incarnate.

Have you been fed enough concepts lately? It is exciting to hear so many leading-edge concepts on everyone’s lips but, for my part, I get indigestion if I swallow too many great ideas at once. I need to savour them. I need to experience them in action.

One way important concepts move from a heady parade of ideas to full integration with my heart, my gut and the grip I have on reality is when I see them played out in lived experience. I like to see alluring concepts actualized in richly revealing personal narrative and tested out in the context of societal complexity. I am a little wary when intellectual brilliance feels disembodied.

It helps me to know how people live the scintillating ideas they present to others. I want to know how they got there; how they grew up and what were the pivotal intersections in their personal growth. This is why I decided to share with you those key pivot points in my own journey. There is more than a full spread of ideas about activism and mysticism in this book, but it is my hope that you will also enjoy the adventure of how they were explored and tested and finally integrated.

There is more biographical material in the early chapters on my childhood and adolescence – sharing our origins is an essential part of revealing our growth and development. In contrast, there is more conceptual material in the later chapters laying out the collective growth, integration and quickening of this era of unprecedented transition to a more conscious planetary civilization.

What is intended is that you experience the contrasting requirements of authentic growth for both activist and mystic before you can come to a full understanding of how they integrate in a visionary embodiment for a new humanity. The Conscious Activist describes the many rigorous initiations needed before the power of the activist can become one with the power of the mystic.

The very great idea of a unifying field of engaged spirituality and transformative action, emerging as an earthly reality of universal peace and justice, is not sold at the front door of this book. It is a vision that cannot be accessed without participation. The Conscious Activist will reveal the sacred conjunction of mystic and activist as you enter into its stories, as you meet its many wisdom-keepers and reflect on the threading of ideas whose time has come to ignite the integration of ecstatic spirituality and inspired action.

PART ONE

Initiation

Chapter One

Training Wheels for a Young Mystic

The author describes his formative mystical experiences as a child and a dramatic fall from grace which leads to a reflection on the nature of spiritual guidance, mystical communion and purification as one begins the mystic quest for direct experience of divine reality.

It was three in the morning. I was thirteen. My suitcase was scuffed from being hauled through woods and across rocks and bracken. I had made my escape partly across some wild Cheshire countryside to avoid being seen by even a stray car out for its own mysterious reasons on those remote roads in the dead of night.

I could never have explained myself. As inventive as I was, a young boy dragging a suitcase in a very lonely place at that time of the night would have a hard time explaining himself, when in reality he had committed a robbery and was on the run.

But now I dropped down onto the country road. I had no other option. I had an early train to catch from the nearest town of Macclesfield to the big city of Manchester. From there I would take a plane out of the country. It was a big plan; one that called for unflinching resolve. It would be sheer ignominy to be caught.

About half a mile down the road a red telephone booth presented itself whimsically out of nowhere. These famed English telephone kiosks can be found in the most unlikely of places. As I held the telephone in my hand, about to call the operator to check on the time, a wave of anxiety finally made its way into my otherwise focused and well-paced adventure. I stalled.

It had been only hours since I had stolen the money. Could somebody have woken up at the seminary and found that my bed was empty or the safe had been robbed? Or would I simply arouse suspicion as a young person calling from a remote rural telephone booth in the middle of the night to ask the time? With phone in hand I felt the shocks and jolts of adrenaline as I contemplated the powers of the world – parents, priests, policemen – who would soon be at my heels. But for the moment I was free. I dialled the number, got the time, and then picked up my pace as I headed for the railway station.

In my heart I knew that God was not entirely displeased with me. Somewhere in the cosmos I had a co-conspirator who was smiling down on this more than brash escapade and having fun with shuffling the deck of possible life trajectories to guarantee mine would be anything but a linear destiny path. It was of little concern to such a high cosmic being that I could suffer bitter consequences for my action, since bitterness can be a stern but effective teacher.

One thing was very clear: my priestly vocation had come to an abrupt end. Instead of living at a seminary, there was a distinct possibility I might find myself in an institution for young criminals.

What brought me to this moment cannot be reached by simple addition: who we are and why we act the way we do is a vast equation and one best not accounted for by a flippant psychology or without an understanding of the metaphysics of a universe finely calibrated to the laws of action and karmic consequence.

My bold raid on the Bursar’s office and dramatic departure from the Salesian seminary at Shrigley Hall have a natural connection to my seventh birthday. Age seven is the time of one’s first spiritual coming of age in the Catholic Church. It marks the year when one can receive Holy Communion. My brief, intense and formative experience with Catholicism begins there, as does my first mystical experience.

You might think of a seven-year-old child’s experience of Communion in the context of a religious ritual as peripheral to any core mystical experience. In my case it was acute and real. Confession, on the other hand, with its murky exploration of guilt and shame, held no resonance of deeper spiritual energy.

But waking up on First Communion day and putting on new clothes (white shirt and shiny shoes), arriving at the church and seeing all the girls in white dresses, flowers everywhere, a sea of candles, fragrances and incense – it all heightened a sense of expectation.

As I kneeled in my place after having received the Host, the priest’s words became my own as I gave back the phrase: ‘The Body of Christ’. The words were repeated effortlessly. As I swallowed the wafer my focus deepened. It was as if the sun was rising inside my body with golden sparks of sunlight. It was intimate, between me and the sun-God. I was experiencing a drop of essence, the home of my true self within the Self.

Another child tapped me on the shoulder to indicate that all the children were now seated and not kneeling. I smiled. I knew that in a few moments we would be outside the church receiving money and sweets from our relatives.

How seamlessly a child moves through different states without naming them or owning them as property. How fluidly spirit and emotion dance and flow together before our advancing egos claim them as real estate to be presented, bought and sold in the marketplace of others’ attention or admiration. We have a natural presence as children, when we are healthy and cared for, which we can commune with again and again as we age. For the presence of the inner child is nothing less than a portal to timeless unconditioned being.

Though now grey and bearded, I am here with this child as I recapture my early experience of heart-expanding inner radiance while putting sweets from beaming relatives into my mouth in one continuous moment of graceful flow.

And from here I can see the utter simplicity of consciousness deliciously immersed in the moment, like Krishna with his face in the cream. There is a fusion of both the senses and the spirit in mystical experience, and the conjunction of both shines through in the unrehearsed authenticity of the child.

My experience in the church was the first glimmer of what one might think of as conscious communing with spirit. At some point as an embryo we begin communing with our mother as an inseparable and undifferentiated aspect of our life source. By the age of seven, what was unconscious communication with the ground of our being in the form of mother begins to consciously differentiate as self-conscious identity. We grow out of our mothers both literally and figuratively. If we’re lucky we are allowed to swim freely in the mother’s essence until we are ready to hear the call of our own – until we are ready to emerge as ourselves. Our mothers herald our unique emergence and hold the lantern that guides us to be true to ourselves. A great mother provides both our original experience of ecstatic soulful communion and the highest invitation to manifest our own unique identity without severing the state of oneness.

In my case my mother discovered she was carrying me in the midst of her own first really bitter life crisis – the tragic and untimely death of her first daughter at the age of eleven. In her womb the cells of my body formed around her trauma and suffering. I grew inside her suffering and her heroic attempt to send me all the love I needed to emerge safe and healthy.

It is not surprising that I emerged sensitive to other people’s pain and suffering. Yet I was equally attuned to love and laughter. My birth marked the end of a period of mourning and a time to celebrate new life.

This encoded pattern of being attuned to the heart of pain, while at the same time celebrating new life and joyful possibilities, has repeated itself throughout my life. An alchemical mix of bitter and sweet is at the very core of my journey as a mystic and activist and has guided me to explore wholeness. One can only fully experience life’s wholeness when one learns not to avoid or fixate on either the bitter or the sweet. Our lives are poised between the bitter and the sweet.

While I was a sensitive seven-year-old I was also free-spirited and wild enough to rush at bulls in the field, hang over cliffs’ edges and swing from the branches of high trees. We lived at the seaside south of Dublin. Within the parameters of being home for meals I was given freedom to explore the world around me. Nature requires us to be in this state of freedom if we are to learn how to be carried into its own soul-lifting reality.

In summertime I would slip out of the house at dawn. In the early morning you could taste the salt in the sea breeze and feel the cleansing light of the new day.

When the tide was right I would get in the water near the surf’s edge and float on my back. It was like going into deep space. Time dissolved. There was no effort. I just floated. I would come back from this extended, undulant floating like an astronaut landing back on solid ground. For a while I could feel all that space within me as I walked home.

In the cold weather it was too frigid to go in the water, and the place where you could get pulled into vivid interior space was watching the turf and coals burning in the fireplace. There were kingdoms of red and gold, fiery palaces and spirit beings running through temples and melting in the raging heat of the sun. Later in life when I heard that native peoples stare into the fire during peyote ceremonies and during Mayan fire ceremonies I understood this form of spirituality, because in my own way I had practised it as a child.

Not long after my first Communion experience I told the parish priest that I wished to become an altar boy. I was inducted quickly. To the amusement of both the priest and the congregation at the end of serving my first early morning mass when the priest turned to offer final benediction, I also turned to the assembled parishioners and blessed them. When we were back in the sacristy he informed me that it was a little premature for me to be offering the blessing but that someday I could give blessings if I became a priest.

As the year progressed I became more familiar with the Catholic versions of heaven and hell and the concepts of guilt, shame and redemption. At the same time that the tiny shoots of a priestly vocation began to form in me, there was something about the concept of hell that seemed wrong. In fact I can remember kneeling at my bedside and telling God that I really didn’t believe He could punish anyone for all eternity. I prayed that Lucifer would one day be freed, since after all he had once been one of the brightest of angels. At some point the feeling and the prayer intensified into a more concrete declaration: ‘I can’t believe in You if some people are going to be tortured for all eternity.’

A quarter of a century later, still unable to bear the idea of torture, I became the Washington office director at Amnesty International.

I like to play with the thought that my prayer to save the Devil was so disturbing to my guardian angel that he sent a message to the higher authorities, ‘I have this young Irish boy who is praying for the Devil, what should I do about it?’; and that the answer that came back was, ‘Don’t worry we’re working on giving him a priestly vocation – that should sort it out.’

Over the next four years my desire to study for the priesthood reached such an intensity that my parents had to relent even though they thought the whole thing was terribly premature.

When I was ten my family migrated from Ireland to England. By age eleven I had identified the Salesian college at Shrigley in Cheshire as the perfect place to begin an early seminary experience. I was not daunted by the fact that it was far from home.

After we had said our goodbyes and my mother and aunt were boarding the bus to take the long journey back to London, I felt a wave of loss and grief. I couldn’t eat much at tea time. By bedtime I was disconsolate and once the lights went out I let the tears stream. I woke to the fearful sense that I had possibly made a great mistake.

Then one morning, during our early pre-breakfast prayers, it happened seamlessly and without effort. I took refuge:

Soul of my Saviour Sanctify my breast

Body of Jesus be my saving guest

Deep in Thy wound Lord

Hide and shelter me

So shall I never,

Never part from Thee¹

I understood intuitively that His wound was a place of sacred tenderness and vulnerability, not a morose place at all. Though young, I already knew something about the subtleties of wounding. As we left the chapel I could feel my strength returning. I was home and where I wanted and needed to be.

Thank God that those priests, brothers and novitiates understood that a young pre-adolescent person can truly have an authentic spiritual life. I am so grateful that the spiritual training at Shrigley was not adulterated by phony psychology or any patronizing attempt to dumb down the reality that we are capable of spiritual experience whatever our chronological age. Maturity can help with many things but we should never, ever deny a child’s ability to commune with spiritual reality.

I spent more than a year and a half at Shrigley Hall and most of my time there was profoundly joyful. I owe so much to my early seminary experience for helping me cultivate a deep spiritual life.

I was given ample space and time to experience reverence, to explore quiet and to taste silence. Special days of silent retreat became an elixir for me. In June, for example, we were given retreat days to contemplate the Sacred Heart. ‘Just remember your own heart is the only place where you can feel a connection with the Sacred Heart,’ the priest had advised us.

Out walking on those days, I felt warmth in my own heart. It never felt as if another presence came into it: it just expanded. But just as my earlier childhood experiences of floating in the sea had given me a sense of inner spaciousness, feeling my heart get warmer as I walked across the fields also gave me the sense that I was expanding from the inside out.

There are times in my life when I have ached to feel again that simplicity of flow that I entered into with such fluency as a twelve-year-old on a spiritual retreat. No mystic can get very far without learning how to kindle the heart.

But things were about to change and the hallowed grace of childhood would soon be over.

In my second year at Shrigley I began to notice a boy whose name was Lynch. He was an awkward and sad-looking boy. It was clear that his awkwardness had led to his being shunned. My conscience and my sense of justice pricked me to do something about Lynch’s situation. I decided to befriend him in every way possible. I sat with him at meals. I walked with him in the Quad. I encouraged him to join in communal games. I know he appreciated this, since I was popular and well-liked by my peers. But my other friends did not appreciate it. How could they be jealous of such a friendship? Whatever their reasons, they began to subtly ostracize me. I slowly built up a sense of moral indignation at this kind of treatment. Couldn’t they see that I was mirroring the values that should be at the core of a priestly vocation? Maybe I was overdoing it but I held on to the moral high ground and knew for certain that I should be with the outcast rather than trying to regain my standing in the popularity contest.

In some ways this was the beginning of the unravelling. What happened next was both ominous and enlightening.

I woke up one morning with a headache and a slight fever. I thought about telling the priest that I needed to go to the infirmary but on consideration I decided to push back any such thought as weak-minded. I dressed and went off for early morning mass. During mass I began to feel decidedly off-peak. Nonetheless, I received Holy Communion, half-expecting that its miraculous power would heal me. When we rose to leave the chapel I began to feel nauseous. With all my strength and with all the will I could muster I resisted the desire to retch. But as I got to the church door my body’s impulses took over and I threw up.

It did not take long for a group to form around me. I noticed that they had gathered not so much to support and help me but to gaze at the strange sight on the floor. What fixated their attention was the sight of discernible pieces of white wafer amidst other bilious matter that had come from my stomach. A few of the boys gasped and called out, ‘Father, Father come quickly!’ As the priest approached, still in his gold and green and white vestments, he too made a gasping sound and then uttered the terrible word: ‘Sacrilege!’

He called for a chair to be brought for me, asked someone to fetch some other priests including the Rector, and then he dismissed the other boys. All I could hear in my mind was sacrilege. I had committed a sacrilege. When the Rector and the others arrived they formed a circle and conferred with each other intently. Finally, they opened the circle and gave me their full attention. ‘You will need to go to the infirmary young man. You probably have the’ flu. There is no need for you to worry. This was an unpremeditated sacrilege. There is no blame. You did not intend any harm. Father will accompany you to the infirmary and we will do what is necessary here.’

All day long as I lay in the infirmary I tried to understand the concept of unpremeditated sacrilege. I had ingested the Body of Christ and then my body had rejected it. Somehow this reflected badly on me and yet I also knew that was absurd. What I threw up could not be the Body of Christ. This became a hugely complicated theological question. If the Spirit of Christ had entered the wafer and changed its atoms into His body and blood so that the communicant could become one with his Lord, could not the process be reversed so that, in the case of someone like myself throwing up, what came out of the mouth had no divine components to it? How could it be a sacrilege?

By the end of the day, feverish or not, I started to get clearer: Holy Communion was mystically true but not literally true. The wafer was a ritual doorway for people to experience mystical communion with God. I took a deep breath. I would no longer rely on the blessed wafer as the literal descent of divinity into matter. I knew now as a mystical beginner that for transubstantiation of matter by spirit to occur there must be a conjunction of spirit with spirit – a meeting – not just a oneway journey of spirit into matter. ‘Spirit to spirit through matter … instantaneous communion.’ My mind became exhausted, as if it had been struggling with a hard maths question.

The attending Brother came by to turn off the lights and I whispered to him, ‘There was no sacrilege.’ ‘That’s right,’ he replied. ‘You’ll feel better in the morning.’

Little did he know that the boy who would walk out of the infirmary was not the Catholic who had gone into it. I had discovered that mystical communion did not require the priest’s blessing of the Host, even though the consecration of the bread added to the spiritual drama and acted as preparatory for the most sacred meeting when the soul opens to a higher source or divine reality. In theory one could commune anywhere at any time. But how? To find that out would be my quest.

In one stroke the unpremeditated sacrilege had diminished the role of the priest. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew my priestly vocation was going to unravel. I just didn’t know yet how quickly or dramatically that would occur.

How strangely circuitous are the ways by which we receive guidance. But these are the ways the Mystery gets our full attention.

My delicate sense of justice was violated when I saw how Lynch and I were treated. Even at the seminary there was more harshness and insensitivity than I had dreamed would exist in such a place. Added to that, the Communion episode had really shaken my view of the role of the priesthood. As if all that were not enough, I quickly became aware of undercurrents of sexual tension.

As quickly as storm clouds can gather, I knew I would have to leave. For weeks I thought about how I would write my parents. How could I explain my sense of disenchantment? How could I explain the loss of my sweet and deep vocation? How could I share this visceral sense that I hadn’t lost God; that what I had lost was my passionate connection to the priesthood and to a fundamental aspect of Catholic dogma? I had used all my energy to persuade them to allow me to pursue the priesthood at such an early age; would they now think I was just careless and immature? It was all so complex to try to explain. I had lived in a kind of spiritual paradise and now I was being kicked out of that garden by something within me that I didn’t fully understand.

I kept telling myself that no one would understand. I had to face this on my own.

That is when the plan slowly began to form. I would simply have to leave on my own. I would have to find out what was really true for me. No one could help me. It was like looking at a blank canvas and knowing that I had to step into it before I could really see where I was headed.

One day as I passed the Bursar’s office the door was wide open and my attention quickly flashed on a safe that was in the wall with the key in it. With a rush of adrenaline I realized I was being shown the way out. In the days that followed, with a kind of poise and dedication I entered the lucid intentionality of the criminal mind. I monitored meticulously the activities of the Bursar’s office. I learned its procedures and timing, and most importantly where the key to the safe was kept. There was only one problem: the office was locked at night.

Once I reached the fateful day of my departure, that afternoon I slipped into the Bursar’s office after he had gone for tea and flicked the latch on the window so that I could break in when everyone was asleep.

I waited until the dormitory was really still and the patrolling priest had finished his final rounds. It took a long time just to get my suitcase from under the bed without making too much noise, to get dressed and to pass through the squeaky dorm doors without bumping my heavy case on the stairs that led to the outside door. Outside it was a starless night, blackish grey. I worked my way to the outside window of the Bursar’s office and climbed up. To my great relief the latch was still in the open position.

Inside the office everything went like clockwork. There was a lot more money than I had thought in the safe, but in my own imagination I wasn’t there to steal but to take what I needed to get me to Ireland. Since the greater portion was left behind, the missing sum might not be immediately noticed.

Every step I took was into that blank canvas. I knew what I was stepping away from but I couldn’t even begin to fathom what exactly I was stepping into. As young as I was, I had smashed the bridge to one clear path of destiny, and with a mixture of fear and courage I was walking onto a much more perilous bridge, over a chasm of impenetrable mystery.

I made the seven-and-a-half mile trek to Macclesfield to catch the early train to Manchester. Standing on the platform, sweaty and red-faced, I met with a few quizzical looks, and this rattled my nerves. Once on the train I breathed a sigh of relief. In Manchester everything became an unreal dreamscape. I booked myself into a hotel for one night and got a one-way flight to Dublin the next day. Yes, there were all kinds of questions from the hotel people and the airline people and to this day I don’t know why I didn’t arouse more suspicion. One thing that helped was that once the priests had realized I was missing, they asked for help in combing the countryside. It was beyond their powers of imagination that I was in a Manchester hotel and would soon be on a plane to Ireland. Of course, they contacted my parents, who fully expected I would call from a London train station within hours. It was only later that they realized I had disappeared into the night, a pretty expert thief – with enough money to make it out of the country.

In Ireland I lasted a few days before getting caught. The kinds of questions I had been able to dodge in Manchester were impossible to evade in the small town where I grew up. A young boy whose family was known to have emigrated to London, walking along the promenade by the ocean with a large suitcase at his side, was something of a giveaway. Friends of my parents called them and said they would take care of getting me sent back to London. Everyone was so kind and gentle with me – even the priests seemed more concerned about my wellbeing than eager to have me arrested. So I got off the red double-decker bus in Catford, south London, and walked up Newquay Road to number 22. My father came out of the house and walked towards me. He hugged me without a word of reproach. He was such a gentle and forgiving soul.

‘Prepare yourself,’ he said. ‘Your mother had serious heart palpitations and was taken to the hospital. She’s back now. Take it easy.’

She was sitting in an armchair with a blanket over her knees and a shawl over her shoulders. I dropped to my knees and put my head in her lap. I was no longer her champion. I was a fallen angel. We both wept. She whispered, ‘Why, why, why?’ I couldn’t answer. I truly couldn’t explain myself. But the thought that I had wounded her was unbearable.

Everything had crashed. I had stepped into the empty canvas and the only thing it really presented was a picture of me falling off a bridge into an abyss. It showed me that I needed to fall from a great height so that I could experience my own shallowness and pride.

What I couldn’t see was that I needed to fall far enough to prepare me for a future life organized around compassion and action.

Every day for the weeks and months ahead the one feeling that stayed with me from daybreak to dusk was a grey experience of loss. I longed to be back in the seminary. I longed for the state of grace it represented. Any flaws in that life now seemed minor. I walked the sterile streets of row houses in southeast London as if through a wasteland. I had hit a wall and it hurt.

As I approached my fourteenth birthday, my soul was spluttering and in its place all I could seem to find initially was a somewhat shattered ego that was not much help in guiding me through my own private purgatory. I began to feel that higher guidance had not entirely abandoned me. It was just that for the time being it had definitely relocated.

Communing, Purification and Guidance

You can appreciate by now that from childhood to adolescence I lived my early years with an unusual degree of intensity. I had reached a precious spiritual height, only to feel I had lost all that had been gained. My descent had been precipitous, at least that was the way it seemed. What I was unable to realize at that age was the degree to which all this might be viewed as something accelerating, rather than impeding, my spiritual development.

What I couldn’t see was the reality that even when you head out in the wrong direction, guidance is always at your side; when your life crashes, you have an opportunity to commune with a deeper reality; when you fall from grace, you are primed for a purification that can set you on a true path.

A mystic will tell you that hitting the wall is an invaluable experience, particularly when it gives you more insight into the nature of the wall. But if we spend too much time nursing our wounds when we hit the wall, we only serve to delay our progress. We can end up blaming the wall. But the thing is, we will meet the wall again and again: it is a combination of the unknown and the unpredictable mixed in with a medicine-brew the universe creatively concocts to wake us up. The wall is also compounded of every choice we make and every action we take.

Just to be very clear, the wall forms inside us even though it has huge consequences outside us. Evolutionary theorists tell us that humankind’s survival depended on how we dealt with wall after wall of obstacle and challenge until we flowered as a species. From a spiritual perspective, the same is true of the inescapable challenges we must face to make it to the deepest reaches of consciousness until we can truly commune with the reality we find there.

The root meaning of commune and communion is sharing. When we commune, an exchange takes place. We give our most intimate attention, which results in a meeting or conjunction of awareness where intimacy is also experienced. Communing creates flow. It heals the illusion of separateness. It expands us – sometimes right in the place where we were most contracted. Mysticism is based on achieving a reciprocal flow of exchange with the source of one’s being.

A mystic is one who yearns to experience an intimate connection with innermost reality and cannot be satisfied by substitutes or symbols for that reality. Anything that blocks the attainment of that reality or pulls the mystic away from it must be removed like a toxin. Mystics quest for exacting growth experiences that wash away all blockages to intimacy. The inner life becomes a universe which then gets purified as it grows. Without purification that inner universe will stay small and contained within the more rigid confines of ego. It will be unable to commune with the greater Self – the soul’s own essence.

There is nothing better than a fall from grace to lead you to the fires of purification.

As I discovered at an early age, purification does not necessarily mean getting holier. It is really about becoming more whole and more integrated. Sometimes we must experience the polarization of saint and sinner before we can move beyond the divided self. If we are to commit our lives to integration of the spiritual and the mundane we will need a lot of insight into what is truly saintly, sinful or sacrilegious. Similarly, the purification process may give us the training wheels of sweet and then bitter experiences before we are capable of experiencing the deeper mystical states of unity wherein the bitter and the sweet will finally merge into a great compassionate heart of oneness. Any notion of instant oneness without passing through the fires of purification should be treated with suspicion. The mystic Sufi poet Rumi reminded his followers that those who jump too quickly into the water will end up in the fire but those who go through the fire will end up in the water.

A central issue for anyone starting on the inner path is to understand the nature of spiritual guidance. The mystic path requires one to move from reliance on external guidance to learning to fathom the nature of internal guidance. A person of faith is directed by their faith’s rules and codes. A rationalist checks the world’s realities against a set of scientific and philosophical principles. An ideologue is governed by political models. The mystic, however, must be prepared to upset the applecart of rules and conformity in the quest to experience an inner knowing of what is true, in contrast to what has been declared true. A mystic has to taste the truth, even when it is very bitter. A mature mystic will travel through many dimensions of truth on the journey to wholeness.

It is obvious that a mystic who is taking off the training wheels of strictly conforming to given rules of propriety and impropriety must summon up the courage to diverge when inner knowing requires it. But here’s the rub: no soft landings, no simple confirmations and no perfect answers are guaranteed. Sometimes the impulse tells you to take the leap and you break a leg. Was the impulse wrong or did breaking a leg lead you to exactly the insight you needed? Guidance will ensure that you learn to recognize both shallow and impetuous impulses before you can attune to more profound and considered ones.

There is a prevalent notion that if you get the right guidance, magic carpets will appear out of nowhere and carry you far away from life’s foggier challenges.

The guidance I have come to know can accompany you through dark tunnels of hopelessness before you are ready to see the beauty of the light ahead. It can show you how to take trauma, abuse and betrayal to profound levels of healing, forgiveness and compassion. Guidance is not an on-off switch that is with us sometimes and then, as if to punish us, absent at other times. Guidance is actually continuous. But it is so great and so comprehensive that we have tremendous difficulty in appreciating its vast design.

When things go well we feel we have been guided. When things fall apart, we can feel as if we have lost the guidance and we cry out to it to show us the way. It is as if higher guidance is supposed to bring us merely good news and good luck.

The reality is that good people can do things that have terrible consequences and terrible things can also happen to good people. Our universe is not a clockwork mechanism of utter predictability. It is creative, dynamic and unpredictable, but it is not anarchic. It provides us with an unfolding journey through consciousness from its entry point in matter to its full realization in spiritual liberation. This is a journey of eons, not a quick drop-in for a game of punishment and rewards.

Our long journey through consciousness, both exhilarating and arduous, would not be possible without guidance. Nor would we attain anything close to spiritual freedom if guidance was like some meddling granny telling us to stop here or go there.

On the contrary, think of guidance as a knowledge process that we encounter only because we are given the freedom to learn in our own way.

With what magnificent design our universe is calibrated to provide us feedback throughout our life’s adventures and learning expeditions! Just how much energy and awareness we put into appreciating that feedback seems to be up to us and will determine how far we go on the journey.

In his or her spiritual DNA, the mystic knows that you start the journey like a tiny speck trying to communicate with a vast universe, but as you grow that universe begins to unfold and flower inside the tiny speck. And when that happens there is communion between the speck becoming a universe and the universe that always existed, unfathomably intimate and ever aware of all our needs for growth and maturation.

We have an inner voice that shuts down guidance that comes with all kinds of conceits, accusations and complaints. But when we fall from grace and ego knows not where to turn to salvage its interests, guidance crowds around us to offer itself. Guidance will unfold for us every subtle path to healing. It is our choice if we bar the door to its signals by imprisoning ourselves in guilt and self-accusation. It must be our decision to look for guidance when we cannot see our way. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi’s favourite Christian hymn: ‘Lead, Kindly Light, amidst th’encircling gloom. The night is dark, and I am far from home. Lead Thou me on!’²

In my own case, the next phase of the journey did not lead me away from a guided life so much as draw me into engaging in the field of action with its own distinct curriculum for growth and learning. And just as my early spiritual life had been accelerated, my activism in the world was to be equally fast-paced.

Chapter Two

Training Wheels for a Young Activist

His first initiations into activism as an adolescent in London gain the author recognition and a media platform. He affirms passion as a spur to action and reflects on moral conscience and the activist’s high horse.

To his credit my father realized that it was not going to be the best idea to send me to The Good Shepherd – the local Catholic school. This was not because I had strayed but because he saw that I would need to be challenged in a very different way. He arranged for an interview at one of the best schools in the area, Haberdashers’ Aske’s Hatcham Grammar School for Boys.

After I had been given an aggressive interview by Mr Hawkins, one of the House Masters, he called in my father and told him I did not qualify. He said, ‘Your son did not understand, for example, the meaning of the word caterwaul.’ All my father said in response was, ‘Thank you. We would just like to have a word with the headmaster before we leave.’

To this day I tear up a bit when I remember how my father begged the headmaster to offer me a place. ‘I promise you he won’t disappoint.’ The headmaster was moved and agreed to take me on a trial basis. I never looked back.

THE CONSCIOUS ACTIVIST

Where Activism Meets Mysticism

James O’Dea

Dedication

Contents