A Journey Towards the Light

Although I experienced my first brush with inner reality as a schoolboy at St Ronan's, lying under a great oak tree at the entrance to the playing fields, I first started to enquire deeply into these things at the prompting of my mother-in-law Timmie Watson in the (Australian) summer of 1972. At that time - and for about four or five years after my marriage to Prue and when we had just moved into Harvestgate - I devoured books beginning with William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy, Alan Brunton, anything by Alan Watts, the Theosophists, RH Nixon's Man, The Measure of All Things, PJ Sayer's Eastern Wisdom and Western Thought, Hubert Benoit's The Art of Detachment According to Zen, Raynor Johnson's The Watcher on the Hills and many other mainstream works.

Then, a kind of knowing opened up in me, through which I seemed to understand the world more fully. I could feel the spiritual nature of the world around me all the time; the present moment was a kind of hushed and immanent stillness. More strikingly, I could look at someone - particularly someone's eyes - and feel the depth to which they too understood that aspect of the world. I could also sense this when reading books. I remember being particularly struck by the understanding shown by Margery Allingham when reading one of her Albert Campion detective novels. I was soon interested in mystical experience (probably through having read William James early on) and searched the literature for examples of it, such as that of Proust, who was said to have carried around sewn into his jacket a fragment of paper on which he had written date and the one word 'Fire'. It was no doubt tiresome for others, as I remember being asked what I liked doing by Fay Scott-Eliot, I replied 'studying religious philosophy'. I toyed with the idea of taking LSD, which was currently fashionable through the writings of Timothy Leary, but never did (I never took any drugs or even smoked marijuana). I took up yoga and meditation and went at lunchtime to a man called Jack London who taught me both.

Gradually the pressure of work and the time spent with the children lessened my reading and the veil partially descended again; though I still preferred to read philosophical literature and built up a mass of it on the bookshelves at Harvestgate. On moving to London, almost the only things I took with me were those books, and I have most of them still, close beside me in my bookcase.

In the 80s, I was extremely busy at work, becoming a partner and then helping to create a new insurance club for Thomas Miller, and had little time for recreational reading. But towards the end of the decade when the new business was established I encountered 'I Am That' on the coffee table of a dear friend on the day we first met and devoured it. It was the purest expression of Advaita thought I had ever read and it immediately reawakened in me the 'seeing' and 'knowing' of those earlier years. It seemed to instill a more acute perception even in the business world and most strikingly I found that I knew what people were going to say before they said it.

A dear friend then introduced me to Sai Baba. I first went to Puttaparthy alone in December 1989 and was immediately overwhelmed with the love radiating from him. I knew without peradventure that he was a supreme being or avatar and that knowledge has never left me. And of course, I read much of the Advaita literature and still do and found it perfect. I also experienced some marvelous Baba 'lilas', which are only the most dramatic expression of the love he shows us every day.

And at the end of that decade in which I was, fortunately, able to visit Puttaparthy and Whitefield annually or more, we discovered that a great Advaita master was actually living and teaching at his home in Bombay as Nisagadartatta had done. So visits to Puttaparthy could be preceded or followed by visits to Ramesh Balsekar's daily Satsang in Worli. His core teaching was extremely simple and most of his books easy to read, but better, one could actually talk to him and question him. Ramesh is a realised Advaita master in the same line as his guru, Nisargadatta Maharaj and before him, Ramana Maharshi. His disciple Wayne Liquorman now carries on the teaching. It was to Ramesh that Leonard Cohen also found his way after his time spent at a Buddhist monastery, and he too soon realised the Master's teachings for himself. 

Update in 2015: I was very fortunate in being able to visit Ramesh until he died in 2009 and Puttaparthi until 2015 when I became ill and no longer traveled to India, but at the same time, (from the 1980s onwards) I had also found great comfort in attending the little church at Litchfield where I had been born, finding there another path towards the light, albeit in the Catholic rather than the Advaitan tradition.