What Keeps Me Going

Work means all sorts of things to me. I work at different things on different days of the week. I’m a builder, electrician, plumber, writer and therapist —  but I’ve learnt all this variety because what I love doing doesn’t earn money, or at least it didn’t to start with. My work has to do with two things. One might be called healing. The other is exploration and understanding of myself and other human beings.

As a teenager I was very interested in spiritual healing and I had this wonderful dream of being a healer in the traditional sense and this didn’t come about. But the dream stayed with me. I explored relaxation and hypno­tism, I trained as a nurse — I did all sorts of things — but the real beginnings of my work were in relaxation. I started teaching people basic muscular relaxa­tion and I couldn’t get satisfied with it. There was something I didn’t under-stand driving me on, so I constantly tried out different things. Gradually I pieced together a personal understand-lug of a process that goes on in human beings. Some of the pieces were tradi­tional spiritual approaches from India, Indonesia and Japan. Some were nearer at hand, such as Mesmer and his work. The basis of it all was relaxation, and out of real letting-go arose spontaneous movement. From this, the process of healing occurred and it happened by itself. I saw this phenomenon all over the place, described in various ways, with different approaches all over the world in different periods of history. But I couldn’t find out how to get this experience myself. I knew that what I was looking for wasn’t a cult thing. Other groups had this process, but they said they owned it and I wondered how it could be unique when Pentacostalism had it and Mesmer was doing it. Then there was another approach that was owned by the medical profession which I didn’t want either. I was trying to find something that was for the lay person.

At the age of thirty-four I had a spiritual breakthrough and directly experienced this action of the uncon­scious through spontaneous movement. I remember getting up in the middle of the night and I was just about to get back into bed when this voice spoke from everywhere and said: ‘You’ve asked how God touches the human soul. Now watch closely.’ From then on I was in love with this experience and wanted to tell everyone about it. And so that’s my work. How to find and help other people find and perhaps simplify their understanding of the process of self-realization.

I have worked with individuals and groups. It’s a way of earning a living but I have a lot of conflict with it. There’s no way I can sell the spiritual experience to people. They might have what it takes to find it, just as some people have what it takes to climb a mountain. But it’s their personal motivation that does it and that’s something I can’t give to people for money. I write as well. Human dreaming seems to link with this process, so I write about that. The royalties from my best-selling book this year probably amount to about £15 a week, so it doesn’t earn a living. What has kept me going is my sense of personal need. When I was in my early thirties I felt so awful that I didn’t think I could go on, year after year, feeling the way I did. I needed healing. After finding healing what then drove me on was curiosity. What was this healing process and what were its possibilities? Internally we are shape-shifters. We consider ourselves to be merely our outer personalities but we’re so much more than that! I was motivated by a desire to learn how our unconscious can change our lives. That still keeps me going today.

At the moment I am exploring several things. One has to do with perception. The unconscious has faculties of perception which some people use in traditional ways. I love to to put the workings of the unconscious in terms anyone can understand. I’m also exploring what’s going on inside us and whether people can make radical life changes using their inner resources.

I hope we make advances in our understanding of the human mind. I still see people locked in old patterns of behaviour that go with believing themselves to be of a certain religion, or a certain nationality, and out of that comes bloody conflict. We all have the possibility of transformation inside us. It’s very important for people to be able to say ‘I don’t depend on a therapist. I have this process inside me.’

One of the major diseases in the world today is the old social pattern of traditional religion and politics. They helped people gain identity in the past, but now they set them at odds against one another. We need to clear up our own personal unconscious.