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ASCENT
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SPIRITUAL ANTHOLOGY
Dedicated to Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba
Who continues to be my Guiding Light
“You are a child of God, and it is your God-given role to help others to remember that they are also children of God”
[Divine decree received 2010]
‘Energy cannot be created or destroyed;
It can only be changed from one form to another.
Everything is energy and that is all there is to it.
Match the frequency of the reality you want,
And you cannot help but get that reality.
It can be no other way.
This is not philosophy;
This is physics’
[Albert Einstein]
Why these Writings?
On completion of the Labyrinth here at Jacaranda Haven in 2010, I walked it on my own for the first time and then stood – silent and empty- in the centre. A loud voice spoke telepathically to me:
“You are a child of God, and it is your God-given role to help others to remember that they are also children of God”
Sai Baba had gifted me a pen and vibhuti (sacred ash) whilst leaving Puttaparthi in 1999, renowned psychic Joan Moylan had told me in 1998 to write, and psychic Jennifer Starlight conveyed to me from Spirit in early 2022 that I was meant to write…but what ?
And then I realised that all I could write about to assist others on their paths was my own experiences, teachings and learnings in order to “…help others to remember that they are also children of God”. Hence these autobiographical writings…
Modules
This is but one ‘module’ in this collection of autobiographical writings that I choose to call ‘modules’. Each one stands alone, but some cross-reference others. A completed book is a static thing once finished: however, these modules are flexible in that I can add to them at any time should new experiences/information comes to hand, and the reader can pick & choose which particular modules attract them. The collection of modules thereby constitutes an’ anthology’.
The intent of writing these is to share experiences and teachings that I have been blessed with along the way of a human incarnation – the ascent of consciousness – such that the reader may also benefit to illumine their own path/ascent to the ultimate inevitable goal for all humans: that of ‘self-realisation’.
Belief vs Truth
As a precursor to reading any of these Modules, there is a need to clarify the difference between ‘Belief’ and ‘Truth’: one may ‘believe’ eg it is raining outside by the sound on the roof, but when you actually see the rain falling/walk out and get wet, you actually then ‘know’ it is so – ie it is ‘true’, and so ‘belief’ about that instantly ceases.
Many go through life accumulating fixed ‘beliefs’ about people/things, and, as Krishnamurti taught:”… the moment you arrive at a conclusion/form an opinion/a belief, you block the possibility of further enquiry and discovery”.
So, a hot air balloon called ‘Ascent’ awaits: I invite you to climb into its basket with me, throw overboard the ballast of all those accumulated ‘beliefs/opinions’ you have acquired to feel safe, and therefore allow this balloon to rise free and drift to destinations unknown.
Because, otherwise, some of what you read herein may sorely challenge your accumulated beliefs…
Everything recounted within the Anthology is absolutely true, unless I have qualified otherwise.
John Stephen Butterworth
1945 – 1990s
THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS
A PRECIS
INTENT OF THIS WRITING
In the late 1990’s, the renowned Australian psychic Joan Moylan was staying with my wife Rosemary and myself in Sydney doing back-to-back readings each day. Suddenly, one morning at breakfast, she told me I should write a book about my life! Taken aback, I nevertheless trusted and started this writing of an evening after dinner. When Joan came back to stay once again later, she asked to read what I had written to date.
I’ll never forget her looking up across the room from the first pages with her eyes shining and saying: “Don’t let them change a word of it!”
I then got swept up in other matters (day job for next 20+ years, our running The Southern Cross Academy of Light, purchasing and running our property Jacaranda Haven etc etc) and have only eventually in 2022 (also recently spurred on by another eminent psychic Jennifer Starlight that Spirit/Sai Baba told me telepathically to call whilst I was on the ride-on mower one day !!), finally found the space during a prolonged wet spell to return to this writing.
Sai Baba also gifted me a pen on my ‘pilgrimage’ commanded by Him to Him in India in 1999 …which I have only just realised (feeling somewhat foolish) now, 23 years later, was His way of wanting me to write!
My intent in such writing is not to merely entertain but to share what I have learned by experiences and teachings from the passage of my life to date in this incarnation so that others may take away understandings to guide their own paths – remembering that they are also children of God, and hence helping yet others to remember…and so the ripples in the pond move outwards…hopefully to inspire others to lead sacred lives.
A HUMAN INCARNATION
Sathya Sai Baba has said that every human being is a starseed from elsewhere in this Galaxy ( ref ‘ There is One Universal Consciousness: I am that One’ Irene Margaret Watson 2018). He stresses that all humans should ‘Love All, Serve All’ (one of His most famous sayings). Each should live unwaveringly adhering to 5 Human Values: Love, Peace, Truth, Right Action and Non-violence and to what He calls His 5 WATCH principles: being constantly aware of our Words, Actions, Thoughts, Conduct and Heart. He speaks about the power of sincere, heartfelt prayer and asks that we pray that ’All Beings in All Worlds be Happy’ (in Sanskrit: Samasta Lokah Sukhino Bhavantu) ie in all time/space dimensions, not just on Planet Earth.
It is said that only in a human incarnation, can one finally attain moksha (liberation from the cycle of birth and death) ie full Self Realisation, and that to have a human life is an immense privilege…
TO START AT THE BEGINNING OF THIS INCARNATION
I came into this present life around 10.15pm on the 8th March 1945 in the small ‘Braidwood ’private hospital in Lytton Street North Sydney – the first and only son of Tom and Bertha Butterworth. My only sister had arrived 4 years earlier. My mother and father had grown up in the north of England where Dad came to work in the cotton textile business.
They emigrated to Australia right at the outbreak of the second World War on (probably) the last passenger ship ‘SS Orontes’ to get out of England – a 6 week trip during which all on board had to do submarine/UBoat watch all the way. The ship had just escaped being bombed by the Germans the night before it left (barrage balloons reportedly deflected the bombs), and had to slip away under total secrecy. Part of this meant that my parents were not allowed to tell anyone in advance of their movements: my mother at 84 years of age (in 1998/99) still carried the anguish in her heart of seeing her father in the distance walking home to lunch from work across the dales and having to get into the taxi without waiting to say their goodbyes. She never saw him again.
My parents apparently could have emigrated to Egypt, India or Australia as Dad was specifically in the cotton side of textiles.
The way my mother tells it, the British Government basically told Dad where his options were as part of the war effort: Britain had lost so many of its highly-specialised technical men in WW1 that they were not going to allow it to happen again. Many times over the years I have (and continue to) thanked my parents for coming to this beautiful country which I love so passionately. It’s also quite fascinating to consider that it might have been India or Egypt where I am told by others that I have had previous lives. But I have not felt a pull to either country yet: if I have been in either in the past, my sense is that I have completed whatever needed to be done there, and hence I haven’t felt any particular need to go there physically in this life –well not yet!! [Sai Baba shortly after writing this in 1999 came to me in sleep and commanded me “Call me in Puttaparthi” – but more of that later]. Nevertheless, there are powerful connections: I carry an –almost hypnotic attraction for the colours blue and yellow in association – specifically, the rich deep blue of lapis-lazuli and gold ( I wore these as a couple of pendants around my neck for many years now), and, deep down, I know this connection is from ancient Egypt. With India, I have a powerful attraction to its spiritual and cultural traditions, and likewise to neighbouring Tibet/Nepal – but more of that later.
My mother recorded that the first word I ever uttered was (No – not “Dad” nor” Mum”! but) “pretty”. I have always admired true beauty, grace and elegance – not as much that artificially fabricated by humans, but more that created by nature. This is not to say that I do not appreciate fine architecture, music, paintings etc (I am a musician, landscape architect and horticulturist by training and by practice); rather, I carry a deep and abiding admiration first and foremost for all that comes directly from nature.
[Just an aside:-
I recall my parents telling me how, in May/June 1942, when Japanese warships off the coast started shelling the Sydney metropolitan area (and midget submarines got into Sydney Harbour), they (on at least one night), pulled our kitchen table into our home’s hallway, and spent the night there squeezed together with my baby sister …when WW2 came to Sydney].
My earliest memories are of playing around the house and garden at that home at Northbridge on Middle Harbour just north of Sydney. There were little frogs that occasionally I came across in the garden that fascinated me, and, when I was a little older, I recall running around the yard trying to be horizontal above the ground either on my back or on my front: all these years later, I now realise that I was simply trying to recreate the sensation of flying as I must have been doing at night in sleep on what they call call the’ astral plane’. I have only a couple of memories of such ‘flying dream ‘experiences – and they are from adult life, and what wonderful experiences! My love of surfing on a body/boogie-board gives me that delight in the physical awareness as well – which brings me to the ocean.
I love the ocean/land interface of beach and surf, but really only on blue sky/sunny /blue ocean days (there’s the blue and gold connection again!) – and just cannot get enough of looking at it, just craving to be catching waves. My parents have told me that the first time they ever took me to a beach (it was Dee Why, one of Sydney’ northern beaches), they set me down on the sand, and started spreading out a rug and lunch-momentarily letting me out of their sight. Now, many/most children have a fear of the ocean, but not this being. Apparently, I (who could barely walk/toddle) just walked straight due east into the surf and kept going… I must have been feeling/thinking “ Hey, hey, hey ! This is one of the things that I’ve come to this planet in this life for! Let me in there! I‘ve been waiting for this for a long time!” They then saw me and dashed into the water to pluck me out, and had to go back up to the shops to buy me a new set of clothes for the day because I naturally was saturated!
I have a deep need to live where I can look out over a panorama with mid-long distance views of the ocean/harbour and/or lagoon/lake/water – and have done so for most of this life. (Here, at Jacaranda Haven, I built 2 ornamental ponds encircling the northern side of our octagonal house).
It truly nourishes me, all the more so on sunny, blue sky days – particularly if there is also natural vegetation and birds and other wildlife around as well. I had a profound revelation out of the blue one day some years ago about a totally- unexpected connection between the ocean and my health.
As a child, and into teens and my 20’s at least, I had a predisposition to hayfever and asthma under certain specific conditions. Once we eventually figured out was from dust mites, and the other was that, if eg there was a hot day in Autumn followed by a sudden cold change – say at nightfall, my nose would start running uncontrollably, the mucus would settle on my chest and, hey presto, asthma. Then, in November 1993, I was in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney one Sunday having facilitated a Sacred Sound Workshop on the previous 2 days (at which a miracle occurred – but more of that later!), and from being a quite warm day, a cold change suddenly arrived with that amazing speed of temperature change that happens in mountainous areas. We quickly got into the car, and started driving.
As I was doing a ‘U’turn in a side street, the revelation was given to me even though I was fully focussed on driving and thinking about nothing else: I suddenly knew/realised/visualised –whatever – that I had been plunged into icy seas when Atlantis finally went down at the moment of that final mighty and terrifying cataclysm – and may well /probably perished. What therefore happened every time there was a sudden/abrupt cold change in the weather in this present life was the triggering of that deep dreadful memory. Hence the physical reaction as described. I was then to hear (quite unsolicited ) from /via others(trance mediums, clairvoyants etc) in coming years of what they understood, had been some of my roles and activities in probably more than one life in that Atlantean civilisation (said by the American visionary Gordon Michael Scallion to have lasted some 250,000 years).– some of which was not very pleasant, nor easy to accept.
In my pre-school years, I have memories of being at home with my mother and playing around the house and garden on my own. I don’t recollect ever playing with my sister who is 4 years older than me: she has always seemed to lead a life quite separate from mine. I had no friends of my own age – apart from occasional contact with family friends on weekends, or neighbouring children of similar age-group. So I remember now as I write inventing an imaginary friend called ‘Bill’ – since I frequently heard my father talking of his factory foreman Bill Daniels. I have no memories of seeing little folk from other dimensions (as nature spirits, fairies, etc) that so many young children do so particularly in this day and age. Hence, I really had to be very self-sufficient in terms of peer companionship in those early years. I recall sitting playing while singing over and over popular songs from the radio such as ‘Lavender Blue’, ‘I Like Aeroplane Jelly’, and ‘ If I Knew you Were Coming I’d Have Baked A Cake’! –not knowing the significance that sound and music were to play in the life ahead (and apparently in past lives also).I fondly recall that home life in these early years and beyond was gentle, loving and nurturing, and, understandably, British-influenced.
Meanwhile, my father as General Manager had supervised the adaptation of a former General Motors Holden factory in Carrington Road Marrickville (Sydney) for a textile company called ‘Davies Coop’.
Dad (on the right) (and another)standing outside the adapted building in the 1940’s.(Formerly General Motors Holden factory).
This was the reason why he and my mother had come to Australia. Initially, they were told they had to live near that area – but my mother recounts that she did not feel comfortable – and so they explored further afield. She says that, the moment they started to cross the Suspension Bridge (as it used to be called) into Northbridge, she said to my father “ I could really live here”. And live there they did for the rest of Dad’s life (he crossed over 5th March 1973), and most of Mum’s – from 1940 until the house was sold in 1998 when my mother (by choice) moved into a retirement village. Many times over later years, I thanked my mother for them choosing to live where we did: I just loved looking out over Middle Harbour, and being able to stroll down through the bush of Clive Park to the water’s edge and paddle at the small sandy beach – maybe communing with the baby stingrays that slowly swam around my ankles when I stood still in the shallow water late afternoon. I had a remarkable experience there in 1995 when, on 3 successive days around lunchtime, in clear blue sky sunny weather, a solitary sleek fish with brilliant emerald green along its back and silver beneath, maybe 50cm long, just appeared out of nowhere and dashed around me as I stood in the shallow water up to my knees. Its appearance of that colour, form, and speed against the gently rippling dappled golden sunlight on the sand was breathtaking. On the third day, a lady nearby also witnessed this phenomenon and commented on it.
Having grown up in that area and learnt in detail about all the fish of the area, I knew that such a fish species probably did not usually occur there. At that time, this colour emerald green was featuring strongly in my life (just turning up in different ways) following my touching a magnificent emerald green-coloured and gold ring that Sai Baba had reportedly manifested for ( the now late) very dear friend of ours, Valerie Barrow.
Even though I was only just getting to know about Sai Baba and his miraculous and sometimes playful ways, I innately knew that this wonderful experience with the fish was very likely a delightful gift (or leela) from him. [Incidentally, following first touching that ring, the business card of the wearer of the ring miraculously appeared in my briefcase the next morning! When I incredulously rang her to tell her what had happened, she just chuckled and said that she felt that SB just wanted me to be more aware of him and his teachings and work – plus she since became a most precious friend of ours, but now has passed].[Refer separate module:’Sai Baba’]. But back to my childhood!
Dad had a taste for the very best of things, a wonderful innate sense of quality – and this included cars. The first car I remember us having was a Studebaker (quite exceptional in Sydney then), and then a Rover Coupe sedan. The Studebaker was rather unusual in that its windscreen and back window looked almost identical : they both wrapped around mirror-image fashion – and we used to say for fun that you never knew which way it should go.
One day some 40-odd years, later I had done a ’Sonic Entrainment’ sound therapy session late afternoon with a client upstairs in that same house in my sound room and was ‘told’ by Spirit during the session while working around him with various exotic instruments (such as Tibetan singing bowls and bells, Native American drum etc) that he was Venusian/ had extra-terrestrial origins. I didn’t say this to him, for he may not have been receptive to such suggestions – as fascinating as they might be. Rosemary and I then after dinner did something we had never done before (nor since) which was to relax in the sound room on the same couch that the client had sat – with me sitting right where he had been. We had the heater on, and both dozed off. I suddenly became aware in semi-consciousness of a voice speaking through me referring to my father’s Studebaker and recalling that it was very similar to small spacecraft that were instantly so familiar to me. I jerked awake and shared with Rosemary what had just occurred and knew deep down that this memory had been triggered by the sound session just before.
At the age of 4, before I had started school (kindergarten), my parents started me attending a gymnasium (Cunningham’s Gymnasium) at North Sydney once a week for exercises for my respiratory system since I was very prone then to both hayfever and asthma. This I went to continuously for 7 years, and was yet another close link with the North Sydney area, for which you’ll see, I obviously have a very deep and strong connection. It wasn’t until 2003 that I came to know exactly just what that is – and know that I had a karmic commitment in one or more past lives to be of service to and/or spend time in this area in the future ie this life – but more of that later…(See separate module :’North Sydney’).
Those early years were characterised by mainly playing in the bushland and Middle Harbour foreshores of Northbridge. I became friendly with a boy who lived nearby in early and subsequent primary school years, and we spent much of our time catching (and releasing) cicadas in the summer ( which had wonderfully poetic common names such as ‘Black Prince’, ‘Yellow Monday’, ‘Greengrocer’, ’Dusty Miller’, ‘Cherry Eye’ ) as well as frogs and tadpoles in watercourses, and exploring all the bushland around us – play-acting many of our heroes such as Tarzan and Robin Hood, or dreaming of building a raft out of oil drums and planks to be our version of the ‘Kon-Tiki’ expedition that had crossed the Pacific from east to west only just a few years before – the book of which I read over and over (I discovered later when touring eastern NSW in the late 1990’s with Peruvian spiritual teacher Willaru Huyata) that (he and) I may well have been on the original Kon Tiki expedition from hundreds/thousands of years before).
Just prior to these primary school years, I attended kindergarten for a year or so, and remember well both the building and teacher. Around the walls, there were various pictures/ paintings and one especially captivated me. It showed a small boy sitting under a tree at night on a hillside gazing at the star-studded sky: it was somehow hugely nostalgic for me and I identified very much with the boy as though I was he – and feeling a deep longing…
Otherwise, those primary school years were relatively uneventful and really warrant no other comment in this present context. My hair was unbelievably naturally-blond (in that ‘surfer’ era, most others were peroxiding theirs blond!); my surname attracted predictable nick-names relating to the price of butter at that time! Makes me wonder just how the name ‘Butterworth’ ever came into being – but it’s a fairly common name in the north of England. And my sister and I know very little about our ancestors: my parents had apparently never been told much about their forebears – not that it has ever concerned me. I’m really only interested in the here and now: the past has gone (though I still honour my birth parents at morning prayers) and I’m not generally interested in what might happen ahead – unless it’s important for my highest good…
In 1957 at age 11, I moved on to high school: guess where ? Sure enough ‘North Sydney ‘!
North Sydney Boys High School (NSBHS) was ‘an opportunity school’ (just like Fort Street Girls’ High where Rosemary went). Those attending having been assessed as being of higher-than-average academic ability (or so I believe). My parents had me from a young age enrolled to go to SHORE – a private school (also in North Sydney) – but I somewhat rebelliously told my parents that I didn’t want the apparently stricter uniform, rules and regulations (and snobbery) of a private school that I had just witnessed my sister going through for the previous 4 years at PLC Pymble Ladies College. I also remember figuring that it would have meant a greater financial burden on my parents – not that Dad at that time was having a tough time financially that I remember (he’d branched out into his own textile business in 1952). Interestingly, this proved very relevant around the early 60’s when he was humiliatingly forced out of business by accumulated debt – which ultimately destroyed him personally.
My parents respected my choice and would have still been comfortable that they were providing me with a good education since NSBHS was (and probably still is) considered one of the best schools in the State.
High school was a very different cultural experience. My best friend from primary school was also there, but we suddenly found that we had different friends, and didn’t really see much of each other any more. It was a strange sensation in a way, but just part of growing up, I guess. My sister had finished high school and, in 1957, started at art school which coincidentally was directly across the road from my school. I would occasionally see them going back and forth to the park for life-drawing lessons. My Dad around that time had the foresight to introduce ‘Lurex’ metal thread into Australia (via his work with what were termed ‘fancy yarns’) – much to the embarrassed horror of my sister and I (we were at THAT age of being embarrassed about anything that was not already fashionable). Little were my sister and I to realise what an impact ‘Lurex’ would have on world fashions in coming years!
In 1958, my sister moved on to East Sydney Art School along with such (future) luminaries as Peter Travis, Luciana Arrighi and Peter Rushforth The school was (and probably still is ) situated within the re-cycled former Darlinghurst Gaol. She used to have to stay up late at night doing art assignments, and I fondly remember magical times helping her and the others set up their end-of-year exhibitions in the Cell Block.
[My sister went on to become firstly an art teacher, then subsequently art mistress, at a Sydney private school ).
In about 1968, she married: her husband, then in advertising, switched to studying law, eventually becoming a partner in one of Sydney’s leading law firms. They have 2 children: a son and a daughter and a grand-daughter.
She continued with her art – specialising in watercolour and becoming extremely proficient. For many years, she taught groups privately at home. Most years, she paints a wonderful watercolour on card and posts it to me as my birthday card- hence we have a small collection of these splendid works .
She also used to bring home from the library copies of the very best Scandinavian design magazines which I used to avidly go through – not really knowing at that stage what all this was a prelude to for me in later years. At that point, I had not exhibited any artistic abilities- nor had I been helped at all along such lines in my schooling. For in those not-so-enlightened years, boys were simply not allowed to study eg art, music, biology as high school subjects. Oh no, those subjects were only for girls! The ‘educational ‘system was ( by modern standards) unbelievably and grossly imbalanced towards academia and was highly discrimatory. For some years after high school, I may have carried a lot of anger and bitterness towards this restrictive system – but it was just the way it was. I had to leave high school to personally discover the wonders and delight of music, art, and botany- after 6 years (I repeated my final Leaving Certificate year) of purely-academic subjects including English, French and Latin (which I did very well in up to a point).I passionately longed to play music. I got into trouble one day for daring to touch the grand piano in the school hall! All NSBHS could offer was the cadet band – and I didn’t agree with anyone playing at being soldiers and armies. Nor did any of those instruments appeal to me. As well as being a natural percussionist, I wanted to play piano – and jazz piano at that!
The first time I ever heard ‘jazz’ or jazz-influenced music, I was hooked! As I type, I remember hearing a trumpeter playing part of Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ from a distance when I was in primary school – and that really spoke to me. Around the age of 11, I heard Nina Simone (and her trio) singing‘ I Loves You Porgy’ and loved it so much that my mother bought me the 45rpm disk of it the next time she was in the city. It was my first record. Other kids of my age weren’t listening to any music at all, and in their teens were then into Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, Johnny O’Keefe etc.
My sister and her friends were listening and dancing to Stan Kenton, Les Elgart, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller (the movies of the latter 2 had just come out?) – and I couldn’t get enough of it all. My parents also subscribed to ‘Readers’ Digest’ (RD) (which in those days had some wonderful material) ( …and like me, did you also look forward to occasional visits to the doctor so that you could read all those marvellous ‘National Geographics’!?). This allowed us to get all the boxed collections RD put out in those years of classical, light classical, opera, Gilbert & Sullivan etc – and I would sometimes sit for long periods next to the radiogram playing album after album. And so I became steeped in a wealth of musical tradition – some of which didn’t do much for me, but much of which did.
Now, ironically, I was in a household which did not have a piano (while kids I was going to school with were being forced to take piano lessons), so I took to looking in the newspapers every Saturday for musical instruments for sale -–trying to sense just what I wanted to learn and play. Well, as my long-suffering family and neighbours could never forget, I chose the (yep, you guessed right) drums, or did they choose me ? For I have decades later been told by others that I’ve had at least 9 lives as a Native American – mostly as a medicine man/woman, and, if that’s so, I probably did heaps of drumming ! My parents bought me an old kit and I started bashing away – with no lessons at all. I ‘played’ in a high school end-of –year revue, and was embarrassingly bad whilst highly enthusiastic. In the following year’s revue, there was a real drummer available, but they needed a bass player – so we made a ‘tea chest’ bass, and I played that – sort of, if you could call it ‘playing’ – more like caveman ‘thunk, thunk, thunk’! But it was still me playing rhythm of sorts. What all this led on to, I’ll cover shortly – but let’s just stay with those high school years for the moment.
Our parents sent my sister and I to tennis school on Saturday mornings – for me, it must have been straight after I stopped going to remedial gymnasium around age 11 or 12. I was also passionate about golf !! That most wonderful of games – which I lived, ate and breathed in my early teen years until playing music became a greater consuming passion. As well as going fishing when on holidays, this was an activity that I shared with my father on Saturday afternoons for a period – and that was a good way to be together as father and son. Tennis opened up mixing with the opposite gender for the first time for me when I shifted from classes to joining a Saturday morning tennis club at Roseville. We would all occasionally go to a party, movie, or concert together – and it was comfortable and pleasant. I quite enjoyed the company of some of the girls in the club, and have fond memories of those (even if sometimes awkward) times.
However, at some point I started to get teased about girls and girlfriends by my sister, and began to get more and more shy. Prior to this, I had entered puberty in a state of complete innocence and ignorance of what was about to happen to me – including my voice breaking. My parents hadn’t talked to me at all about these things at that stage – and, in hindsight, it really was a combination of both their very British upbringing and embarrassment about such matters, and, being conditioned by that home atmosphere, mine also. To their credit, NSBHS staged ‘Father and Son’ evenings to provide sex education from a more comfortable third party source ie lecturers with diagrams (from what I heard), but I think I kept the event from my parents, fearing both my father’s and my own embarrassment. Dad tried to talk to me about the ‘birds and bees’ one day while playing golf but again, I felt his extreme discomfort and lied to him that “… we’d been told all about those things at school”[Sorry, Dad: you really did try to do your best]. I was finding out bit by bit on my own on the run – as it were. With my voice, I didn’t know it was breaking/had broken until, suddenly one day, a friend’s uncle made a jovial comment to all those assembled about the fact and connecting it with puberty. At around the same time, I first heard my own voice on a tape recorder, and said innocently “ Who’s that?” only to be obviously told that it was me. For some reason, both events made me very self-conscious about my voice, and, like many of us for some reason, I didn’t like the sound of my own voice!
The reason for sharing some of this is that it profoundly affected the style and quality of my life for many, many years to come. I developed a major hang-up about the opposite sex: I so badly wanted to have normal boyfriend/girlfriend relationships, but was I nervous when in a potentially-intimate situation with a girl. As you can appreciate, I was scared to do anything other than just talk to girls. And I had an irrational complex about my voice for many years to come, until the age of 26 when someone meeting me for the first time asked casually if I was a radio announcer. So, suddenly I figured that maybe my voice was maybe OK after all.
So, it seems to me that the lesson in all of this for all of us is to be acutely aware of the sensitivity of children in their formative years – especially in regards to what we say to them and the way we act at every single moment. It is crucial to their development that we never tease nor make fun of them, that we honour and respect them, and that we constantly create an environment of free and open communication – irrespective of whether they are our own children or not.
Having shared a brief sketch of what was happening for me emotionally, culturally, physically, and mentally during those high school years 1957-62, what was happening spiritually? Well, nothing much – earlier on at least.my sister and I had been sent to Sunday School at the local Presbyterian Church on a regular basis even though our parents didn’t go to church themselves. After that, I didn’t feel very attracted to Christianity’s general approach to spiritual matters – at least, via the limited exposure I had then. I observed varying degrees of bigotry and people around me trying to coerce me to join their ‘club’ – as it were. I found it quite off-putting, and learned very quickly to steer clear of anyone trying to force their particular beliefs down my throat: it is really is quite a violent act – despite the best intentions of those concerned. When you actually see the truth of anything, you are instantly drawn to it: it’s a totally personal phenomenon. So, during that period, I connected with the essential truths, the eternal principles of Christianity (I knew them in my heart!) but then started to discover that all/most of the world’s religions/faiths/teachings share all those essential, eternal truths or principles. [My sister, now in her 80’s, from a very early age became, and remains, a devout Christian].
Around 1960 (I was 15years old), I went with a group of friends of like age one day to a wonderful large house up on Sydney’s North Shore to welcome back home to Australia Tony, a friend of theirs whose family had been living in USA for a few years. I still remember us all going into his expansive bedroom, the floor of which was covered with books and LP records scattered everywhere that he’d brought back with him. There was poetry and prose by ee cummings, Dylan Thomas, and Ginsberg, Snyder, Kerouac, Orlovski et al( ie all the so-called ‘Beat ‘ generation writers), jazz records, novels, books on Zen Buddhism etc, etc – there was an extraordinary range of stimulating material. Quite apart from enjoying the jazz, I thereafter for a period started to want to write poetry and prose – stimulated by some of the material I saw for the first time that day: not the off-your head, violent stuff, but the delicate simple material eg of Gary Snyder, whose poems were so influenced by his involvement with Zen Buddhism.
Totally-unaware then of some of the past lives that some say I have had, I was entranced by Zen and all the culture associated with it – the art of the tea ceremony, of ikebana (flower arrangement), of archery, of garden design, of the koan (poetic form) etc. I bought every book (virtually ) on the subject( D.T. Suzuki, Christmas Humphreys, Alan Watts, Herrigel etc), and studied its practice, writings and teachings to the point that, by age 16 or 17, I was extremely knowledgeable about it. Not long after leaving high school at the end of 1962, I was strongly asserting to friends that I wanted to go to Japan to become a Zen monk. And then suddenly, I came to realise that, whilst connecting with those essential, eternal truths, my involvement was all so intellectual. I just walked away from the books, and, likewise, from the desire to write poetry. I also came, in the fullness of time, to give away all my collection (albeit small) of jazz records – because I had heard each one so much that I knew every phrase off by heart- and they hence had lost their magic. I had just listened to them too much. To keep listening to them was simply trying to repeat the delight of the first experience, which of course can never happen.
Each time is a brand-new experience, but how often we contaminate it with the desire to repeat an earlier enjoyment … and miss the fullness of the freshness of that new event.
At the end of 1961, I sat for my final high school exams (called, in those days, the Leaving Certificate). I had also studied for the Honours courses in both French and Latin, but, despite my ability for those languages, found it all rather difficult. As with most final school exams, there was a lot of pressure placed on all students – as though this exam was the end-all and be –all of life. It really is most stupid and destructive. I recall that, about 3 months before the event, I just found that I couldn’t study very effectively: there was the pressure from teachers and society generally (I don’t think my parents ever pressured me),I found the subjects I was doing really not stimulating ( there was very little choice in those days!), and I was much more focussed on music, poetry and Zen Buddhism. I grew a small Van Dyke-style beard during ‘stuvac’ (the period off from classes for intensive study just before the exams), and went into the exam hall feeling fairly hopeless about it all. The beard triggered predictable reaction from the school staff when I appeared for the first exam; there was much glaring and muttering. In the 2 Honours papers, I couldn’t write a thing ! Not a word! (The same thing had happened to me with the History paper in 1959 in the Intermediate Certificate: I honestly could not recall a thing!). I walked out of the school after the last exam lighting up a cigarette whilst still in the school grounds (even though I mainly smoked a pipe at that time – with my parents blessing; they felt that the pipe filter might protect my lungs more than cigarettes!). A teacher called out to me to put it out, and I ignored him . Surprise, surprise! My school reference was witheld when I went to get it a few weeks later: the rebel was getting his ‘just dues’! When the exam results came out, I had 2 ‘A’s and 2 ‘B’s, and had failed the 2 other subjects. Since I was only 16 and 10 months or so, and honestly didn’t quite know what career I wanted, I agreed to go back and repeat my final year …( without the beard!).
Well, doing that really didn’t achieve anything at all – that I was/am aware of. I was socialising already with people a year or two older than me, and now found myself with boys a year younger who were noticeably much less mature – a lot of them very childish in fact. I seem to remember it as a relatively lonely year, and probably found solace in Zen, jazz and poetry. The final exam results were essentially the same as the year before – 2’A’s and 2 ‘B’s again, but this time, in different subjects! I still did not have much of a clue what to go ahead and do with my ‘career’ – apart from music, and jazz in particular. As with the previous year, my peers were allowing themselves to be slotted into the various career pigeonholes that their parents and teachers thought suitable… Do I sound somewhat cynical ? Well, allow me to share the following with you.
Thirty years later, I attended a reunion in the City of that same group of fellow students (‘The Class of 1962’) (ie we were all by then around our mid-late 40’s). I arrived at the selected city venue rather nervous (my partner at that time had knowingly persuaded me to go – feeling that something useful would come out of the evening). Entering the function room, I found myself face-to face with other men with name labels on their lapels. To greet each other, we’d move forward and look from the face down to the label and then back to the face – suddenly realising just who we were meeting again after all those years. Face-on, there was little or no recognition – but I suddenly encountered a remarkable phenomenon: when someone turned side-on to speak to another, there was ( for me anyway) the discovery, that despite the weathering of the years, the facial profiles hadn’t changed that much, The same unique configurations were still there ! And this was 30 years later! Anyway, that’s just bye-the-bye, and not the main reason for recounting the experience of the evening…We were naturally a very mixed crowd: we had moved into many different walks of life [Just prior to the re-union, we had all provided brief CV information which had been condensed into a handout on the night- and made for fascinating reading; some of it was quite hilarious eg “…got married and commenced hair loss, fathered 3 children which completed hair loss”]
Some had achieved varying degrees of ‘fame’ in their endeavours, others had led quiet, simple lives, and everything in between. The drinks were flowing, and it was all very jovial.
We eventually sat down for a formal dinner and speeches, by which time many in the room were fairly ‘under the weather’. I found myself at the table with a theatre/opera director who had not long returned from London with his family to work in Melbourne and who I had known since we were both quite young.[Incidentally, he told me that he had left London because, each night walking to and from work at Drury Lane, he found himself stepping over more and more homeless people and ‘derelicts’ sleeping on the footpath: he and his wife then made the decision that it was no place to be bringing up children]. Neither of us were drinking alcohol, and so we were simply sober observers, as it were, of the scene being played out before our eyes.
Most there just got more and more drunk: one of our former classmates fell asleep at our table from drinking: the pathos and tragedy of it all was quite powerful – for one could observe that, whilst some had probably taken up a fulfilling career, many of them had not followed their heart in life, but were either quite’ lost on earth’ and/or had fatalistically accepted the career paths that their parents and teachers had thought best for them 30 years before. And the only way that some could temporarily escape from the pain/boredom/desperation/ feeling of failure –and to have a good time together, was to get drunk. There is no judgement in this: it’s just a factual description of the way I saw it all through these eyes. And I’m quite sure that all/most present would say in hindsight what a wonderful evening they all had. And, yes we all know that to get drunk together at a social gathering is an acceptable ( sometimes expected) form of behaviour in this and many other cultures.[I was told in the mid-1980’s, and have briefly observed first-hand, that in Italy, for example, it was considered generally unacceptable social behaviour to get drunk: most Italians grow up with wine always on the dinner table( along with water ) that is consumed as an integral part of the meal – and hence, as a nation, apparently had a more mature approach to alcohol].
If you observe a group of young children together, they can just have spontaneous fun together-just natural joy, with no need for artificial stimulants. As adults, I feel that all that is still there ( the so-called ’inner child’)( I, at eg 54 years of age just loved playing!) but we adopt ‘adult’ attitudes to protect ourselves – borne from our inability to handle the vicissitudes of life philosophically and with wisdom, at least in the West. I observe adults sitting on buses travelling to and from work sheltered within protective shells of thought, buried in listening to music via headphones, reading – and generally only conversing/communing with others if they already ‘know’ them. “So” (you are probably thinking) ”what’s so unusual/wrong with that?”. Nothing at all – except, check out a group of young children on a bus, even a whole busload : they freely talk with each other, laugh, play, marvel at what they see out of the windows – don’t they. But, how many adults freely do so? Or, sadly, in this day & age, all ages are all-consumed by their mobile phones…
Well, back to stepping out of high school at the end of 1962. What to do with my life? I just wanted to write prose and poetry, and play jazz. I felt to be a writer I needed to experience life, and so chose to head out of the city into the bush for a while. I heard of people going down to pick grapes in the Riverina area of south-western NSW/north-western Victoria, so, in early 1963 I signed up and, with sleeping bag and rucksack, went overnight by train with many others down to Melbourne, only to get off and straight onto another train up to Mildura. Just after sunrise, we got off at Redcliffs immediately south of Mildura and were signed up by grape farmers into teams. Meanwhile (I was told) the local police were herding back onto the train known prostitutes who had also come up from Melbourne in order to solicit business from this seasonal influx of single men. We were then driven out to the property we were to work on and shown our’ quarters’: it was an old sheet metal shed with a dirt floor, a wood stove and some basic camp stretchers – located in the middle of a citrus plantation on the side of a concrete irrigation canal.
The next day, we were picked up quite early and taken to the vineyard to start picking. All through the day we laboured –head down/sometimes kneeling in the rich red dusty soil of the flat plain with the ’inverted basin ‘of a clear blue sky overhead- harvesting bunches of grapes into rectangular baskets which the boss would periodically collect on the back of his tractor trailer, keeping tally of each person’s yield – as we were to be paid on how much we picked. We all quickly discovered that it was a ‘mug’s game’: unless you were a very experienced and fast picker, you weren’t going to earn very much at all! And it was extremely hot, dry and back-breaking – reaching over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the middle of the day. The boss’ wife would bring us hot, sweet black tea in a billy mid-morning and afternoon, which was wonderfully thirst-quenching; in between, we’d drink the cool sweet water from the hessian water bag hanging on the front of the tractor. (From that day to this, I never again drank the British customary milky tea that I’d been raised on!).
We were a motley crew of pickers- from all walks of life and backgrounds. Most of us really didn’t know clearly just where we should be heading in life (remember, I was only 17, about to turn 18 in March!) – but others were in their 20’s and perhaps 30’s . We sang any songs that we knew as we worked, just to help get us through the long hot strenuous days. In the evening, we tried to cook something on the wood stove –but no-one knew how to cook, so it generally something of a disaster! I was the only one to have brought mosquito repellent, and probably got the best sleep the first night –although I’m sure that I would have shared it around after that. By the end of the first week, I’d had enough: the boss had seen it all before, and was used to some dropping out early in the piece (picking was to go for several weeks). He paid me for what I’d picked and I headed for Mildura enroute for Sydney. I hitch-hiked through to Hay in New South Wales the first day, stayed in a stationary caravan and then hitched another ride the next day with a semi-trailer driver all the way back to Sydney.
I feel that he picked me up for the company to help him through this long trip, He was quiet and pleasant, and didn’t say much as we thundered along the Hume Highway all day and all night with very few stops for food and to relieve ourselves. The trip was an educational glimpse into the world of inter-state truck driving in those years, and the pressures the drivers were under to get to their destination as quickly as possible. I vividly recall us rocketing down a hill towards a narrow timber bridge during the night (probably reaching up to 80-90mph) with another semi-trailer heading just as fast down the other side towards us. Neither driver eased up, and we passed at about the middle of the bridge – clipping rear-vision mirrors! My otherwise silent companion commented quietly what a close shave it had been. Approaching a truck weighing and inspection station SW of Sydney during the night, he pulled over and filled in his log-book in pencil – adjusting the calculations to say that he’d had more rest time than he’d actually had. He was open and honest about manipulating the information, sharing with me that it was the only way to make it all work. Also, he told me or I’d heard elsewhere since about the taking of stimulant tablets to help stay awake on long trips. for any truckdriver to both satisfy the authorities and his employers. As I left him at his destination in the western suburbs of Sydney, and caught a train back home, I soberly reflected on this brief exposure into how there are interstate truck and bus accidents.
Throughout 1963, I did a variety of jobs as just money earners whilst I focussed on playing the drums, listening to jazz, and doing a lot of reading. I’d go into the Theosophical Society Adyar Bookshop and Library in the City, and both buy and borrow books on a range of subjects. I remember trying (undoubtedly like many others ) to get into Madame Blavatsky’s ‘The Secret Doctrine’ – and found it just too difficult. My mother, knowing my interest in things spiritual and philosophical, saw an advertisement in the Press for a series of lectures at an organisation called ‘The School of Philosophy’ and asked me if I would like to go. It just didn’t appeal: interestingly, years later, I am surrounded by people (including Rosemary) who devoted (and some still do) a large part of their lives to that very organisation. Her son Peter has been with the School for over 5 decades and does weekly philosophy teaching sessions via ZOOM.
It was probably around this time that my closest friend at that time, Stuart, connected me with the published verbatim talks and writings of Jiddu Krishnamurti, a gentleman of Indian birth who, I learnt, travelled the world speaking to large gatherings about going beyond the barriers of mind, and fear, and discovering true freedom – and the real meaning of existence. I instantly connected with the essential, eternal truth of what it was reported that this man was passionately urging others to enquire deeply into and discover for themselves. I knew virtually nothing about him or his background and didn’t feel the need to.
In the mid-1960’s, Stuart and I started to go to regular audiotape playings of some of Krishnamurti’s (or ‘K’ as he apparently sometimes referred to himself) overseas talks at The Wayside Chapel theatrette in Kings Cross. These were put on by Donald Ingram-Smith who also was the originator and producer of a remarkably-innovative weekly radio program on ABC radio called ‘Scope’. This ground-breaking show explored various aspects of human existence such as fear, true education, humour, and so forth by means of brief spoken segments from leading philosophers, writers, teachers woven together with a thematic connecting text and music – sometimes quite humorously so. Don would make regular trips to eg India and record K’s public talks on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. His life was very powerfully influenced by K’s teachings and he dedicated much of it to K’s work and the dissemination of those teachings.(In the mid-1990’s,Donald released a book on the subject entitled ’Truth is a Pathless Land’ which is well worth reading).
For myself, I actually didn’t read any background on K’s extraordinary life and work until more than 20 years later in the mid-late 1980’s when I read the first 2 of the 3 biographical volumes on K. by Mary Lutyens (the first of which is ‘ The Years of Awakening’; I strongly recommend anyone to read at least this first book): as strange as this sounds, I really had felt no need for anything other than what he had travelled the world for 60 years teaching up to his death in (I think) early 1986. By this time, Don and others had for many years by now been showing colour videos of K’s talks from the latter period of his life at The Wayside Chapel theatrette on Saturday mornings once a month/fortnight? (and probably still do!).
1970 was the last time that K. came and spoke in Sydney (he had spent considerable time visiting here in his younger years). I was able to attend only one of the series of talks which were held before a packed audience in Sydney Town Hall. K. walked out onto the otherwise empty stage dressed neatly in a lounge suit, tie and carefully-polished shoes (as he always did for Western audiences) and sat as a small figure on a simple straight-backed chair before a microphone. He spoke clearly and deliberately, picking up from where he had left off exploring with the audience the day before. As always, he passionately urged those
present to discover right there in the moment the truth of what was being investigated – and not merely believe him nor anyone else. I remember that, part way through the talk, a man (maybe a little drunk?) suddenly climbed up onto the front of the stage just near K. Donald Ingram-Smith, who was right there rushed forward to intervene if necessary, but K. calmly welcomed the man and invited him to stay sitting quietly on the edge of the stage for the rest of the talk. K. probably then took questions from the audience, and then finished in silence.
Donald (who knew me by sight from attending the tape sessions at The Wayside) had bumped into me in the corridor just before the talk that day, and invited me to a small private gathering a few days later at Manly (of which I was not to tell anyone else) – but without telling me specifically what it was all about. I turned up late morning at the appointed time to find a number of us taking the lift up to a penthouse that commanded magnificent panoramic views of clear blue skies and a sunlit Sydney Harbour. It was only around then that I realised that this gathering was all about K. We settled down around the spacious lounge room – and then K. walked in from an adjacent room and sat in a chair facing us. I then realised that this was where he was staying while in Sydney.
We sat in silence for some time, and then he started to speak. I don’t recall exactly what he spoke on, except for him referring to a passing ship and the matter of how we perceive things (“The observer and the observed being actually one”). It was mesmerising to be there, and, after the talk, everyone mingled – quietly sharing. I felt somewhat awed and shy; also. I didn’t really know anyone there by prior acquaintance, except for a former highschool mate – who, for some inexplicable reason, I felt too embarrassed to speak to. I remember that at one point, K. sat next to a man I’d walked along the street with to the apartment block – and they simply sat in silent communion with each other: not a word was spoken. It was quite powerful and memorable. What I also will never forget is when, standing there amongst everyone feeling somewhat alone and uncomfortable, I found K. standing some distance away looking directly at me. He looked deeply at me/through me for what seemed like an eternity with those wonderful eyes – obviously knowing exactly where I was at. I was just too shy to approach and speak to him – and, frankly, would not have known (I felt) what to say.
I have heard of all the various difficulties and controversy that surrounded K. at different times, and know nothing first hand of these. What I do know is that I salute this beautiful being and the immense legacy that he left to all of us who have the ears to hear and eyes to see. Thank you, thank you, thank you Krishnaji wherever you may be in Spirit ! You immeasurably enriched my life. (A medium once told me that I had been with K in a former life somehow).
Then in the late 1980’s, I re-connected with Donald and was invited to join a weekly discussion group at a small weatherboard house overlooking Warriewood Beach (Sydney –Northern Beaches). This group used to explore topics such as life, fear, suffering. joy etc etc in the tradition of Krishnamurti. We would discuss, then always naturally go into a deep meditative state. [Please see the short piece at the end of this module about me ‘channelling’ etc].
Harking now back to 1963, I took on a variety of jobs just for the sake of earning an income while I focussed mainly on the drums, jazz, poetry – from what I now recall. Jobs included helping at my Dad’s textile factory ( one afternoon, his foreman walked in and said that JF Kennedy had just been assassinated: we thought he was just kidding, it seemed inconceivable – until we saw the evening papers and TV), being a relieving postman around my home area of Northbridge ( a job which I really enjoyed – meeting people and their dogs: though there was a couple of tricky encounters with unfriendly canines!), being a chauffeur briefly for someone who had lost their licence ( who owned slot machines all over Sydney), and, briefly, a furniture salesman/assembler.
Since the Australian Government had committed troops to the Vietnam War and re-introduced conscription, there were regular ballots for the call-up of 18 year-olds, and my date of birth came out of the barrel. It was a dreadful feeling to go down to the letterbox one morning and discover ‘that’ letter waiting for me. I had not come to this planet in this life and be involved in going out and trying to kill or maim others, nor to be the recipient of such. I immediately lodged a letter as a ‘conscientious objector’ – declaring my dedication to peace and unity, my study of various philosophies particularly those from the East, and my desire to lead a spiritual life. Well, you can imagine the reaction that must have evoked: there was still much hatred towards the Japanese after WW2 (that after all, had only come to an end less than 20 years before), and here Australia and the US were fighting Vietnam. Multi- culturalism had definitely not yet come of age in Australia ! One particular conscientious objector, Simon Townsend (who incidentally went on in later years to host a long-running children’s/family TV show ‘Simon Townsend’s Wonder World’) was deliberately made an example of by the Government and hence the Press – and was jailed for a period.
I was told, regardless of my objection, to report for a medical check-up one evening in the City. This revealed that I had both a history of asthma and hayfever (which in those years I was still quite prone to under specific conditions), and also a damaged ligament in my left knee from a motor scooter accident that Stuart and I had not long before. For one/both reasons, the doctor apparently declared me unfit to go into the Army – for which I and undoubtedly my parents were hugely relieved. Something very interesting then immediately started to happen – which both my parents and I intuitively knew was not coincidental. I instantly started to be called up for jury duty on a regular basis, and this went on for several years until they must have lost track of me due to changes of address. The 3 of us sensed that it was the Government’s way of saying that they could at least force me to be of service to society in this way (probably at my inconvenience) if not as a conscript in Vietnam. As it happened, I never did get sworn in on any jury; I’d just get paid for the day by the Courts, be discharged by lunchtime, and then go and use the small amount to buy some new socks and underwear! But, then in my early 50’s, I came back on the jury lists again under a far more considerate system whereby one nominates the most convenient/preferred times of year to be considered for jury duty.
Around the end of 1963/early 64, Stuart encouraged me to try a job like he was by then doing – which was working on a golf course as a greenkeeper. He said that it was a generally easy outdoor life, and I just loved golf. One day my father came home and said that they were looking for an assistant greenkeeper at his bowling club (which I knew overlooked a golf course) and was in a pleasant part of Sydney not too far from where we lived. I applied and they hired me – little realising the next phase of my life that I was unknowingly getting into.
I ended up working there for about 2 years during’64 and ’65 .The first greenkeeper I worked with was a rather difficult man who liked a drink, and he didn’t last long. His replacement was quite refreshing – a man from a country town who had to give up driving coal-powered trains because he kept getting cinders in the eyes, and so he became the local bowling club’s greenkeeper. He then brought his family to Sydney to give his son better educational opportunities. I generally enjoyed working with him because of his friendliness, conscientiousness and direct, sincere, honest approach so typical of those from country areas – in such contrast to contrary qualities that tend to so often characterise those living in cities.
During that period, I switched from playing the drums to the double-bass: I could see very little opportunity for playing jazz as a drummer around Sydney and had heard a wonderful bassist Lyn Christie a lot at The El Rocco jazz cellar prior to this time showing the broad potential of the bass. Now I am a player of rhythm, and so the double bass was my next
choice. I started taking lessons, and bought my first (plywood) bass. The teacher I went to made a practice of sending all his students to play with The National Youth Orchestra which rehearsed every Friday night in the (former) Smith Family Building in Crown Street near Kings Cross. The orchestra was sponsored by the British Motor Corporation (who made, Morris, Mini-Minors etc) and was conducted by a charismatic musician Gorden Day. There were some very talented musicians in the orchestra – but unfortunately ( during my time there) not many good classical double bass players: we were mainly wanting to be jazz players, and really not classical. I simply didn’t and don’t have the technique to be an even remotely competent player – as much as I would have dearly loved to, because it was very thrilling to be in the middle of an orchestra in full flight, see all those notes on the score on your music stand, know how they are meant to sound – and not have the dexterity to play them! I was of no help to the orchestra, and found it all very frustrating.
I started to get jobs on Saturday nights playing functions (mainly weddings) and so started on a part-time career that was to span about the next 25 years in that role as a bass-player in a band. I had bought my first car (a Mini-Van) which had to a van/station-wagon to carry the bass (and eventually, amplifier). I also went to technical college (Ryde School of Horticulture) and did a 1 year certificate greenkeeping part-time course. I found the botany aspect of it fascinating – little realising what that also would lead to in the future. The orchestra gave Sunday afternoon concerts several times a year at Sydney Town Hall and we’d all sit up there on the stage under the lights in our white shirts, black pants and red bow ties – with the double bass section playing the easier parts and faking the faster, more technically-demanding parts! We also used to do country tours, and I went on ones to both Bathurst and Tamworth. The latter was by train, and I found myself sitting next to a girl who I courted for the next few years before we married in June 1967.
Yvonne was a fine musician who played both violin and viola, having learned under the discipline of local nuns (she wasn’t Catholic: her family just felt this was the best way to learn to play). She gained her AMus A on both instruments on successive days – which was an extraordinary achievement!
We married in June 1967 and had 2 wonderful daughters: the eldest born 1970, and her sister born 1972.
[Author’s Note: Out of respect for my children, I do not mention them by name to protect their privacy].
We had bought a bushland block at Sackville Reach/Ebenezer (next door to the Tizzana Winery) in the late 1960’s with the intent of building and market gardening there, but sold it in 1971 as we just couldn’t cope with all the travel etc. The proceeds from this went to being the deposit on our own house shortly after.
We lived in a series of rented accommodations until we got approved for a mortgage and moved into our own house at Dee Why with ocean and lagoon views in about 1970.
I continued to go to work as a greenkeeper 7 mornings a week – doing 3 full days (Mon Wed Friday) and 4 half days, and as a casual musician working clubs, weddings, restaurants etc. Because of my love of the bush, I worked one Easter period in the early 1970’s as a Seasonal Ranger at Ku-ring-gai National Park to see whether this might be a career path for me. Yvonne continued to be fulltime mother.
I undertook to study Horticulture part-time at Ryde School of Horticulture 1972-74, then the Post Certificate in Landscape Design 1974-75, but didn’t quite complete all subjects as I was accepted into the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in 1977 for 4 years as a mature-age student; when I finally completed my undergraduate thesis on the fountains of the Sydney Region, I graduated Bachelor of Landscape Architecture, 1st Class Honours in 1982.
The years at UNSW were extraordinarily challenging as there I was (with some design ability and experience gained from working in various design offices) in my 30’s, married with 2 children, 2 cars, a mortgage, own home etc etc alongside those who had just left high school aged 18. At times, they gave me hell because I just didn’t know always how to handle myself when they felt insecure/threatened due to immaturity/relative lack of ability. Not happy years at all, and a relief once complete.
To cap it all off, Yvonne and I separated when I only had 3 weeks of coursework at the end of Year 4 to complete: she understandably could no longer stand me working in my home office until the early hours very often, and I moved in temporarily with my mother.
I saw the children of a weekend and would take them on outings to the best of my ability…
Then an aunt & uncle came out to visit from England and my mother told me I’d have to get my own accommodation elsewhere.
I’d gained immediate employment on leaving UNSW in a design & planning practice in North Sydney (which later relocated to the City) and so was able to pay the rent on a small, ground floor apartment (at the head of Cremorne Bay) in Neutral Bay.
Those early days were challenging in that I was coming ’home’ to a space empty of others which I had never experienced before. But I knew that I needed to tough it out – as the marriage had been increasingly stressful to both Yvonne and I, as she could only get fulltime employment whilst I was at UNSW for those 4 years (the original plan was that she would work just part-time) and I was so busy with coursework/homework/family/casual music work etc etc – hence it was really inevitable that something had to give way eventually…
I also was trying to finish writing my undergraduate thesis – which virtually noone in the course had time to do during those 4 years at UNSW. So I’d have something to eat after work, then sit down as soon as I got ‘home’ to start writing again…only to jerk awake hours later to find my head had been hard asleep on the table…it was a seemingly hopeless situation…but was relieved (by Spirit) in several quite interesting ways…
Firstly, I met a lovely Lebanese-born lady who I spent time with that 1st Christmas period: she took me in hand, seeing that I was emotionally rundown. She made me buy some new clothes which she helped choose, took me to her hairdresser to style my hair better, would tap me on the shoulders when walking down the street telling me to walk erect and dignified, introduced me to the marvels of Lebanese food, and made love to me as I had yearned for … and then, after a few weeks, she moved on – having done what needed doing and helping me on my way: I thought of her as ‘my Lebanese fairy godmother’ because that’s just what she was: she had “…pulled me up by my bootstraps”…I wish her well on her journey wherever she may be, eternally grateful for all that she did for me!
The second event was that Australia went into economic recession later the following year and I was made redundant. This gave me the chance to complete the thesis at long last! Hallelujah!!
But I was still unemployed so I decided to start promoting myself rather than just looking for job vacancies which were almost non-existent.
And then Spirit arranged a radical event for late 1982 which you can read about under the separate modules in this series: ‘Karma’ and ‘Forgiveness’. Fully explanatory.
The result of that event was that I was unable to stay where I was (had violent nightmares after what I had been subject to) and my mother invited me to move into the upstairs of her home at Northbridge whilst using a vacant living room attached to the rear of her house for any landscape design work I got (my sister and family had lived in all this accommodation whilst her husband was completing his studies to become a lawyer prior to obtaining their own home).
And get work I did: within weeks, I had a fee proposal accepted to design & document all the ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ landscape for a large new retirement village ‘Peninsula Gardens’ at South Bayview which was a major project and needed staff. (I designed a 7 hole pitch and putt golf course for the valley floor as the focal point for all the residential on the side slopes: I was passionate about golf, so really enjoyed this! But it is the only ‘golf course’ I ever designed).
So I quickly engaged 2 or 3 to do so, and other project commissions came along including an entirely new shopping centre at Bateau Bay (‘Bay Village) and so forth. It was now early 1983.
At Easter 1983, a friend invited me to spend the break with his family at their holiday home on the Far NSW North Coast on the Clarence River. Whilst driving there, I suddenly lost mid-ground vision – which was very scary. I didn’t know what was happening, but Easter Tuesday morning found me at Sydney Eye Hospital where they diagnosed (as well as some other short term trauma conditions) the onset of pigmentary glaucoma – a condition where pigment granules rub off the back of the eye and potentially block the drainage tubules. Now, in 2023, 40 years later, I still have to take eyedrops daily plus be regularly monitored for this condition.
I realize now in hindsight that this may well have been triggered by the trauma of what I and my family went through in late 1982 (see ‘Karma’ and Forgiveness’ modules).
It was very challenging at the time but one quickly gets used to the situation. And I am so grateful to the skilled eye doctors and staff who have cared for my vision all these years!!
My landscape practice got busier necessitating a secretary Louise who blessedly was also a graphic designer (likewise her husband Graham). She brought these skills into use several times and was a wonderful quality controller in the office – constantly reminding us all: ”You don’t get a second chance to make a good first impression”. At our peak, there up to 6 of us working together. As well as design projects, I acted as an Expert Witness on numerous occasions in the Land & Environment Court of NSW.
I slept/dressed in the upstairs bedroom, right next door to the upstairs office space. And it worked really well for many years as it meant that my mother also had ‘company’ so that she wasn’t lonely and could be cared for if necessary. During much of these years, I was a single man – not by choice, just was, plus still doing casual music jobs plus seeing my children on weekends with occasional golf with another bass player friend.
A milestone in my life occurred in September 1985 when ‘Spirit’ decided it was high time I became vegetarian (see module: ’Food’).
And then in 1987, Sai Baba brought Beverley and I together for the first time in this life: see module :’Sai Baba’. She and her daughter were running a café where I used to drop in for a snack after evening music jobs and we were immediately attracted to each other. She had just come out of a marriage under awful circumstances, and Swami knew she needed some brotherly TLC – not that He told me about our spiritual sibling relationship until about 35 years later!
Our relationship only lasted a while as she needed to move on: I couldn’t offer her anything material as I was living & working out of my mother’s house! What was significant for me was that she was very much on her spiritual path and acted as a trigger for me to awaken once again to mine which had been in abeyance for so long due to other circumstances. When Swami re-connected us some 35 years later, He obviously did so for her to inform Rosemary and I as to what was happening with Swami’s mission after His physical death 24.4.2011 as we knew nothing at all. Once she had done all that, she has once again now in 2023 moved on with her own path. I remain eternally grateful to her for all her loving support and spiritual mentoring!!
And what of my two wonderful daughters?
In 1988, when they were 18 and 16 respectively, my ex-wife and I heard ( ?probably via the girls) about exchange student schemes. The eldest was keen to give it a go and wanted to go to USA.
We researched available programs and decided that ‘Youth For Understanding’ (YFU) offered the best scheme for us with a 12 month period of the eldest living with an American family but not requiring us to take any children in exchange. As we got well into the program arrangements with her being accepted, her younger sister suddenly said that she would also like to go overseas…and at the same time (August 1988-89 US school year). Whilst the eldest had been approved for a USA family, the younger was approved to go to Mexico!! As parents, we agreed and so it was full steam ahead!
The younger daughter understandably immediately started teaching herself Spanish as she would be going into their final high school year where it was all in Spanish as the national language.
So off they went, with the eldest to Omaha Nebraska in central USA where she found herself in very straight-laced conventional US society! Not what she had hoped for!
Throughout the year, I rang each of them regularly for a catch-up chat and quickly found that my younger daughter had really landed on her feet: her host family in Mazatlan, Sinaloa, Mexico were well-to-do, owning mango farms, shrimp boats, a cinema etc and lived where there were aunts and uncles living nearby. If come nightfall, she found herself at one of these extended family homes, they would simply let her host family know and put her up for the night. She had a wonderful time with loving people around her, and became so proficient in Spanish that she graduated from high school at the end of the academic year! Extraordinary achievement !
But I must share what these 2 got up to before they came back home…
The youngest rang her mother and I one day unexpectedly with a remarkable request: the eldest was graduating High School shortly so could she please, at just age 16, fly unaccompanied up from Mexico to Omaha USA for her sister’s graduation and celebrations? Gasp! Her mother and I quickly conferred with her host parents plus estimated cost sharing – and agreed. So it happened and she apparently had a great time!!
And so one would think that was the end of that… but noooooo….need I say?
The eldest then rang her mother and I: “…since you allowed my sister to come to Omaha for my graduation, pleeeeeease can I fly down for her graduation?!?!?” Her mother, I and her host parents felt we collectively had no option but to agree, and so she, unaccompanied, flew to (I think) Detroit, where she taxied to the embassy to get a Mexican visa, taxied back, boarded another flight down to Mexico to party with her sister and high school friends, then flew back to Omaha. As you do…
Back in Australia, the youngest finished high school here, then went to university – first going into law, then banking, where she springboarded up the corporate ladder to a very senior role in the Ausrtalian banking industry. In 1998, she married her highschool best friend, and they have 2 wonderful sons.
The eldest meanwhile in Omaha had a high school romance with a gifted silversmith and magician who followed her back to Australia and proposed to her. She accepted and emigrated back to USA where they married in September 1996 with me there as father of the bride (please go to separate module:’1996 – A Seminal Year’). She had always been artistically talented and had studied art in Sydney. She also became a florist, but these days is flourishing as an emerging innovative artist working from her home in the USA mid-west. She also engages in charitable activities for both people and animals – for both of which she has a passion.
And then in the late 1980’s, karma stepped in once again when I connected with a lady of Turkish birth who I now sense was a reincarnation of Kdjinimatu – an Aboriginal woman who I had co-habited with in a former life on the shores of Sydney Harbour and had children with. I was initiated as a white man into the local Wallumedagal clan – an apparently rare situation in the 1800’s (see module:’North Sydney’).
In this life, both she and I had 2 children each, and we lived as a couple in rented accommodations in Sydney and country for about 4 ½ years until she ended the relationship. The karma was complete.
Towards the end of the relationship, she and I went several times to the Artarmon Spiritualist Church where on one occasion, the reader to lead the gathering didn’t arrive so my partner stepped up and did ‘overhead’ readings in total trust opening up to her clairvoyant gifts – and did very well. It was a very brave thing to do, and important for her own spiritual development.
On another Sunday, we went to a UFO Symposium in Kings Cross at a large hotel, and as we were leaving, met a lady Esther Crowley who had been drawing spirit guide portraits in a side room. Discovering she lived at Mosman near us, we gave her a lift home whereupon she invited us to come to their Thursday evening group studying JJ Hurtak’s ‘The Keys of Enoch’.
We did, and that is where I first met Rosemary (refer separate module:’Rosemary’).
England 1995
Following the wonderful travels that Rosemary and I had in 1994 in Britain,Scotland and France, I had flown back to Australia via Hong Kong in order to meet up with Sally Anderson who ran The New Age Shop there as recommended by Valerie Barrow. More about that shortly.
Then I returned to England in 1995 on my own (enroute to Hong Kong again)- attending sound workshops including one with Jill Purce (wife of the renowned biologist Rupert Sheldrake NB morphologic resonance discussed in the module :’Entrainment‘) and touring: I would drive all morning sight-seeing, lunch, then play golf in the afternoon. I also spent a week at Findhorn experiencing a further variety of its activities and running an evening sound workshop – which was packed as there was no charge!
At the end of the week that I stayed at Findhorn, they facilitated a well-advertised event featuring the renowned Dr Hunter ‘Patch’ Adams – famous for the establishment of a hospital in USA at which comedy was used as a powerful ancillary healing tool. ‘Patch’ enamoured the capacity audience by his compassion, humanity and sense of humour. I had the delight one day of lunching with he and others (his neck tie was a silver cardboard ‘flash of lightning’!)! It was at that event that he announced that Hollywood had just bought the film rights of his life story to star the (now-late ) Robyn Williams which brought thunderous applause,cheering and a standing ovation from the hundreds present.
Importantly, I requested an interview with Eileen Caddy (one of the Findhorn founders) which she granted. At the appointed time, I knocked on the front door of her new house ‘Cornerstone’, and was warmly greeted. She took me by the hand,and,like an excited child, took me on a tour of inspection of her lovely new house – so excited and grateful after years of privation living in caravans! We then sat so that I could tell her how Rosemary and I wished to found an intentional spiritual community back home in Australia and asked what advice she might provide. The main advice was commonality of focus and purpose (the proof of which had been evidenced by the ‘manifestation’ of their meditation sanctuary: see separate module:’Manifestation’).Her loving care was wonderful: I was staying across the path from her in the last caravan she had lived in, and one day, she came in to fix/show me how to operate the gas heating system. When I thanked and complimented her ,she replied:”Well I lived here for long enough!”.
I’d like to share two particular events that occurred whilst travelling through Britain:
The first was when I travelled south from Bath to a small village where I had been given the address of a small-scale but well-known publisher whose office premises were below his house on sloping land. My friend and mentor Valerie Barrow had asked me (if convenient) to drop in to pick up a typewritten hardcopy of a book manuscript (? ‘Alcheringa‘, perhaps?) she had mailed him from Australia asking whether he would be interested in publishing it.
He greeted me affably and invited me to a Ploughman’s lunch with him – sitting outside a pub several miles away. Then he shared a remarkable story with me. Years before, he recounted that he was cycling in the countryside when he found himself travelling down a hill – picking up speed all the way – then saw that the road curved to the left at the bottom but was largely obscured by overhanging trees. Going extremely fast, he suddenly saw to his horror a large pile of gravel that a truck had just dumped on the road and realised he had no way of stopping !
As he desperately applied the brakes and just before he hit the pile, he said that an invisible force lifted him from the bike and suspended him in mid-air as the bike crashed into the pile and cartwheeled several times into a paddock...and then he was gently lowered to the road surface, where he said that he instantly knelt – bowed on bended knees thanking God /the angels for saving him…
This miracle,he said, was understandably the turning point in his life – being fully focussed from then on spirituality and dedicating his life to such. And I knew that I was hearing the truth being so humbly recounted…
The second story concerns a lady in London that Valerie B. had given me contact details for. I had rung her and was invited to lunch with her husband and she one Saturday. To do this meant driving into and through London which I had vowed I would never attempt – but I did it.
[As an essential prelude to the following, I need to share that,early in the 1990’s, we in Sydney got to hear of a man with AIDS in California who,in desperation at his condition and not at all on a spiritual path, reportedly one day called out to the Universe:
“Please help me!!! ” to which he immediately heard telepathically :
“Become a healer and you will be healed !!”
He wondered what on earth he could do about this when he saw a poster in the local shops advertising an upcoming Reiki (I think?) course and undertook it. He then started having opportunities to utilise this new training and, the more he did so, the more his health improved ! This story made a deep impression on me…so now back to London 1995…]
Lunch over, I sat with just the wife and she explained that she was in a dilemma as she was a therapist (consulting psychologist,I think) who had started to connect very strongly with colour and its therapeutic use to assist unwell people (as her spiritual abilities started to open up) and who desperately wanted to start practicing her new-found skills and understandings. But she was conflicted as she was worried that, to do so, might get her ‘struck off’ as a registered psychologist, was increasingly unwell due to the stress this conflict was causing…and could I offer any suggestions what she should do?
I left her saying I was unable to help at all – being a sound therapist & landscape architect- and drove off. Now, to do this trip successfully, I memorised a road map from Temple Fortune to Muswell Hill (where I had been staying in a B & B) – and, triumphantly did so without getting lost!
But a remarkable thing happened in transit: fully focussed and totally pre-occupied with my memorised street directions to get me across London, a loud voice suddenly spoke telepathically to me:“
Become a healer and you will be healed !!” Astounded, I nevertheless knew instantly who the message was for.
On arrival at my accommodation, I rushed inside and rang back the lady from lunch and relayed the message to her: ie she was being told by Spirit to do in full faith what her heart desires, and all would be well…unfortunately, I lost contact with her/her husband, hence do not know how it all panned out.
Message
The message is clear not just for these 2 people, but for all of us:
Care for others first and foremost in total trust and you will also incidentally be cared for – whatever your circumstances. Vasudhaiva kutukbakam – One World One Family.
Hong Kong
On my way back from the UK in 1994, I had gone to The New Age Shop in Hong Kong on the introduction of Valerie Barrow (always mentoring me!!) where I met the lady proprietor who immediately hired me to mount a weekend ‘Sacred Sound‘ workshop 12 months hence in June 1995.
And so, as more fully recounted elsewhere, this I did and was greeted at the airport by friends who were living & working in HK at that time. Now, whilst I had been touring England & Scotland just prior to this time, Rosemary had clairvoyantly seen that I would be ‘attacked’ and warned me of such. Indeed, dark forces did so in Scotland and left me extremely ill as they obviously did not want me to bring more light to HK, and then did so at the airport on arrival when my wallet was stolen from my back pocket as I was hugging greeting friends. This created obvious upset and practical difficulties but they were dealt with by the great support of those friends and credit card companies (I was issued a new AMEX card the very next day! plus I had travellers cheques stowed elsewhere).
The weekend went very well – with a couple of interesting happenings. The first was that an extremely well-dressed lady approached me as I reported in to The New Age Shop saying that she was a medium, had seen me there 12 months earlier and knew that she was do a private reading on me. She and her husband picked me up from my hotel following the workshop conclusion and drove me up the hill to their beautifully decorated house within a gated estate where she did the reading about what she saw for me in the future. She was a delightful,cultured Englishwoman with whom I remained in written contact with for some years later: I wish her well.
The other interesting thing that happened was that I discovered that a Chinese lady attending the workshop was a ‘breatharian’ ie did not eat physical food (this topic is discussed more fully under the separate module:’Food‘).
Hawaii Probable karma in action…
Around Christmas 1983, I suddenly decided to go somewhere overseas on holidays on my own – not ever having been out of the country before then. A friend suggested Hawaii, so I then booked an itinerary for Hawaii including the US mainland West Coast. I travelled briefly from Kauai to Maui and back to Honolulu .One night, I went to an Italian styled restaurant and, dining on my own, watched the very attractive manageress as she went about her hostessing duties. She had olive skin, black hair, a beautiful face and was probably of Italian origin. As I went to leave at the end of the evening, she invited me to sit with her and we started to talk. To quote the flower-selling lady later who saw us first together:” There was electricity flying between you two !!”
She then took me in her car on a night-time tour of Waikiki and surrounds including coffee at one of the large hotels. As she dropped me off in the early hours at my hotel, she lent over and kissed me. We both knew that there was a very strong attraction between us and agreed to spend the next day together (as she just worked nights). When I flew out to San Francisco the following day, we knew we had to keep in touch. And so we did: having seen San Francisco, thence Disneyland, thence Tijuana via San Diego Zoo (just over the Mexican border), my pre-booked itinerary took me back to Honolulu where I went that evening to her restaurant. After work, she was able to drive me to the airport and we agreed I had to return ASAP for us to spend time together to see where the relationship was meant to go.
A few months later, such an opportunity presented itself for both of us (she was due leave) and I went back to Honolulu. Whilst we stayed in her apartment in Honolulu, she had booked us accommodations on the Big Island, Maui, and Kauai at ‘kameyana’ rates (discount for Hawaiian residents). And so ‘island hopping’ we went for a couple of weeks on our collectively-limited budget.
At first, it was very romantic, but then the energy started to change between us, and by the time we returned to Honolulu, it was just OK but only just…so what had happened?
Her background was that, born & raised in Long Island New York in an Italian family, she had had ‘very unhelpful ‘Catholic schooling from nuns (to put it mildly). She then got married young to a car salesman, only to separate, and flee to Hawaii where her sister was in a relationship/married to a well-to-do businessman (mainly property development/land subdivision). She started a business in cosmetics servicing department stores/speciality shops but had to let that go and manage her de facto brother-in-law’s restaurant instead…which is where I met her…
In the 2 weeks or so that we were together, she found in me, apparently for the first time in her life, someone who would listen compassionately to her challenges and the dramas she’d been through. Some of this was very emotional, with tears & crying: I well remember one evening occasion in a shop doorway in Lahaina (Maui), another screaming out loud with expletives on a crowded beach at Kona on The Big Island about her experiences with the nuns at school…in review, it was all very cathartic and healing for her.
But were we meant to be together beyond that period? By the time we returned to Honolulu, she knew ‘no’ whilst I was infatuated with her beauty and persona. Then, when she finally took me to the airport to fly back to Australia, she ran away from behind me whilst I was checking flight information boards rather than face a difficult ‘good bye’: discovering her suddenly gone, I was devastated as I’d become so emotionally and physically involved.
So, in hindsight, now that I understand about karma as a fact of creation, I realise that this period was almost certainly linked to a past life wherein eg she may have been very helpful/loving to me, and that now in 1983, in return, I came back into her life to care for her in this life and help her clear old emotional baggage so that she could then get on with her life/spiritual path…
Wherever she may now be, I wish her well on her journey …
Experience of ‘channelling’
Harking back to around 1987, I reconnected with a small group who met regularly of an evening at a small weatherboard cottage overlooking Warriewood Beach (just north of Sydney) to explore in the Krishnamurti (K) tradition topics such as the purpose of human life, love, true education, and such like. K. had once visited this house whilst on an Australian speaking tour and had named it ‘Surya’ (‘sun’ in Sanskrit) as its eastern aspect embraced the sun and ocean.
The house was owned by a petite elderly, but very fit lady who had done yoga for decades, and our ‘leader’ at such gatherings was Donald Ingram-Smith who had spent a large part of his life dedicated to K’s teaching around the world including recording talks and re-playing them eg at the Wayside Chapel theatrette in Kings Cross on Saturday mornings (where I had first gone when I was about 20 years old).
Typically, the lights would be dimmed, we would sit in a circle (maybe 5 or 6 of us), go quiet and a topic for investigation would be suggested. There would then ensue contemplative exploration of it, leading ultimately to a profound meditative silence…in which one night, I felt my arms and hands progressively feeling expanded like balloons and, as I went deeper and deeper, a voice (that I was distantly aware of as being my own), spoke in answer to (a) question(s) raised by another attendee about colour and sound. I have no other memory except eventually gradually coming back to room conscientiousness.
Reflecting back now, I realise that I must have been ‘channelling’ another being/source of wisdom (which I had never done before)…and it may well have been due to energies left there by K’s visit…and likewise that was why the group chose to meet there…very special.
I wish to share a remarkable experience:
Probably around the mid-1990’s, I was invited to be a presenter of the therapeutic potential of vocal & instrumental sound at a weekend retreat at The Theosophical Society Retreat Centre at Springbrook in South East Queensland. I accepted and flew up there from Sydney with a selection of my sacred bowls, bells, gongs etc.
I mounted an afternoon segment, and then was asked to facilitate a Sacred Sound Healing Meditation for all dining after Saturday night joint meal.
Now it just so happened that the same lady who owned ‘Surya’ back at Warriewood Beach was also at this retreat (with a lady friend from that same group). The petite lady sat opposite me at dinner as we were good friends. The vegetarian meal was excellent, and then they offered dessert a wine trifle (comprising cream, ice cream, jelly, cake, etc). I accepted a serving, and seeing mine, she just could not resist…keeping in mind that she was tiny and had already had a substantial main meal…
Once tea & coffee had been served, everyone brought their chairs into a large circle, closed their eyes, and I was asked to commence…
After briefly telling them to simply surrender to the sounds and not try to analyse/think,I started with soft, gentle instrumental sounds whilst walking around the circle, gradually increasing in energy and then culminating/climaxing with my ‘tam tam’gong (which is a flattish circular gong with a splash acoustic effect) [as I did not acquire my larger lipped Paiste gong until 2000].
Suddenly, my petite friend vomited profusely all over her lap and floor…and collapsed.
She was immediately carried into an adjacent room and laid on a bed where others carried out reflexology on both her hands and feet.
However, the centre manager (who turned out to be a medical doctor) pronounced her dead. No pulse. No breathing.
Whilst others were verging on hysteria/anger, I recall being relatively calm and centred. One man abused me for using the ‘tam tam’ gong due to its effect in his opinion.
I sat by her body looking at her face and (I think) held her hand whilst the reflexology on feet and other hand continued…and then she opened her eyes, saw it was me, and smiled( saying something like):
“You told us not to try to think or analyse whilst you were playing…I started to see beautiful coloured mandalas/sacred geometric patterns and shapes/exquisite colours, and kept reminding myself that you said not to think/analyse: just surrender, but (as you well know) my busy analytic brain wouldn’t and I had this mental battle going on… plus I obviously should NOT have tried to eat that trifle!!!”
“I can’t ever thank you enough for this wonderful sacred experience I’ve just had” obviously oblivious to having just had a ‘near-death experience’ (which I assume others then told her of later, and the beauty of which was that she would never be fearful of dying).
I have lost contact with her since that time and believe that, by now, she may well have passed – as I’m now 78 and she was probably, say, 25(?) years or so older than me. So I send my love and best wishes to her on her sacred journey – being all the richer for having known her and the others of our Krishnamurti group.