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1. Five things to do if you’re bored

1. Go to town, find a Subway, and lick it. You now have one hour to spot as many people as you can who are as drippy-looking as David Schwimmer. The world record is three. It’s not as easy as it sounds!
2. Read old text messages and emails, just in case there’s any vital information you missed first (or second) time around.
3. Smile at a potted plant. Tell it that you love it and that you would kiss it French-style if there weren’t so many people watching. Kiss it anyway.
4. Hold hands with your neighbours’ cat. If the cat says, “fishsticks,” award yourself ten points. If the cat turns into a swan, lose a life.
5. Download a new set of ears from <a href=http://www.geocities.com/therubsley/sega.zip>myearshaveshrunk.com</a> and wear them to a party hosted by an obscure North Indian statesman’s butler in a toupee. When the clock strikes eleventy-two, swim like a shelf.

2. Love Lies Bleeding

It’s the same old story, really: boy meets girl, boy digs girl, girl gives in to boy’s charm, boy and girl make beautiful love, girl says, “that’s all it is”, boy says, “fine”, girl changes her mind, boy gets confused, everything goes to shit, and they start again but with different people.

3. Commitment

I’m resolved to get this sorted – I see too many aspects of my life that are affected by this, and I can’t wait to get cracking. I’m off to hypnosis on Tuesday; I was even thinking of buying a pet (I’ve wanted one for years, but always stopped myself, the idea of it still being there in one or two months just too much to handle). If I just commit to everything will that sort it out? I’ve always thought I’ve lived this free-spirited, open-ended, possession-free life because I was, well, <i>a free spirit</i> – but was I wrong? I’m beginning to think so. And where does it come from? A bad habit gotten into from travelling, where possessions and plans and thoughts of the future do have to go out the window? Something from childhood or past relationships? Or something else? (Being raped at twenty-one, for example.) I don’t know. Shall we dissect, or shall we wait till Tuesday, and hypnosis, and see what comes then?

4. Dissect

Parents divorced at six; not great parents before or after that in any case. First relationships – no problems there. Two of two years apiece, commitment not an issue – but, then, other things were, and I wasn’t exactly operating at a very deep or emotionally-aware level. First problems, at 21, with Leah; unsure, unable – becoming more aware of the things going on inside me (and before that, with the Australian girl Erica, a brief fling that made me feel insecure and shit – so a sign that perhaps things had never been right, just that I wasn’t aware of them). After that, not much in the way of commitment – ie, nothing – until X, in 2003 (with E, the adulterous French woman in between; that affected me), in which I never really had any problems committing – because I loved her so much, thinking, as I did, that she and I were ‘soulmates’, and destined to be together from the very beginning – but then again, it seems like I always had a backup plan in Y. And she and I? Perfect for me, really, in so many ways – but whenever I felt myself getting close – thoughts of spending a long time together, feelings of love – I seemed to want to sabotage it, to run away, to reclaim myself. And that makes me think of X and Y, and why it didn’t work, and if maybe it should have if I’d only expressed a little more and feared a little less. But I didn’t know what I was doing at the time, acting out of this unconscious devil parasite that dwells within me like a greasy John Cusack, and there’s not much more I can say about that. These analyses of commitmentphobes like to say that these guys are manipulating, and know they are – but I swear, if I am, I haven’t got a clue I’m doing it – and yet all of them have accused me of “mind games”, and so maybe I need to look at that. This is a slightly dispiriting and humbling experience. I’m having to admit I’m wrong in so, so many ways.

5. L

Gone, I assume, with another/others, thoughts of me banished and repulsed, leaving me saddened and raw, broken-hearted, and angry. She’s away in France, whooping it up; I haven’t heard a thing. I poured my heart out, wanting to give it another chance – and now I’m here, alone, working on the things that made it not work. And she? I don’t know. Texts and emails go unanswered; it’s role reversal from my time in India, and other times as well. Well I guess I’ll be fixed, one way or another – and for that I can only be grateful. But how sad and frustrating that I have to miss these chances for happiness – and babies, and future family life – because of my silly, silly mistakes with these wonderful women! And how sad that I have to cause them tears, and lose them. Still…resolved; to be better, and to get myself sorted, and to make it work the next time. Because there will be a next time, won’t there? There will be another chance for happiness?

6. Coal

When I was in India I went to see this Jyotish astrologer while I was staying at Amma’s ashram; I can’t remember his name; he was a middle-aged Indian bloke sat in a room with some computer printouts and charts, and that was about it. He gave me a big long list of things that he saw in my chart – a bewilderingly long list, I felt, and it took me about two days before I could bring myself to look at everything I’d written down. It seemed so mad, the things he’d said – like feed dogs and monkeys, and give money to the deaf, and various ceremonies – but then lots of the things he said he saw in my chart seemed true too: an inability to commit to women; respect issues (respecting others, which was good, but ‘demanding’ it back, which was bad); having a gift to write; being sort of spiritually wishy-washy; having car accidents (“you should drive slowly,” he said). There was something in it – but more than I could handle at the time.

Anyway, the two days were up and I was sitting on the steps in front of the temple, and this Spanish girl I’d befriended came up to me and we got chatting, as we did quite often during my stay there. She asked me about my astrology reading and I pulled out the papers on which I’d made my notes, from the pocket where they’d rested since I’d left his room.

“It was mad,” I said, “all this crazy stuff about getting a rooster, and giving money to the deaf, and feeding monkeys – I mean, where am I gonna feed monkeys in England? There aren’t even any monkeys here, in India.” It was true, as far as I knew there weren’t any monkeys in Kerala; I’d been there over a week and never seen one.

Just that second, directly in front of us, a monkey strolled into view.

“Oh,” I said, and we laughed.

Another thing he’d told me to do was these three ceremonies – “pujas” – to Mars, Saturn and Rahu, which would apparently help me out. I felt pretty sceptical about it, but was willing to give it a try, only I didn’t have a clue how to go about it. I put it to the back of my mind and thought maybe I’d see about it when I got back to England – there’s a Hindu temple not far from my house that I’d recently discovered, and they do pujas there – and a few days later, on the train station on the way to see Amma in Trivandrum, I overheard these ladies talking about how there would be some pujas at the programme.

“Do you know which ones?” I said.

“Mars, Saturn and Rahu,” they replied. Of course.

I got back to England; the first morning I was up early and ran to the supermarket about a mile down  the road to pick up some breakfast treats for L and I – and to begin my new healthy regime I’d resolved myself to, but which hasn’t really lasted, bien sur – and as I entered I saw there a place for people to leave dog food, to be sent to a dogs’ home (which reminds me of a funny sign I saw this week, on the way to the North Yorkshire Moors: “DOGS TRUST”) and, sort of automatically, I bought some doggy biscuits and put them in there, and I’ve done that a few times now.

Finally – although there was more stuff I was supposed to doing, to be helping myself in whatever way this odd Indian astrology is supposed to do – he’d told me to get some coal, and to throw four pieces into fresh running water every day for fours days; apparently this would help me with my relationship issues, and I got it into my head that my doing so would actually help bring ‘my woman’ to me. I was keen on this one, for some reason; probably the thought of coal, happy boyhood memories of playing in it, of watching it burn for hours and hours; I’ve got coal in my veins. But where to find coal in this day and age? And where to find only sixteen pieces, even if I could find a place that sells it? I’ve wondered about that for weeks, resolved to do it, but not really seeking it out, half-thinking I’d make a pilgrimage to my hometown and maybe find some there on the disused pit-tops that surround it.

Tuesday just gone, me and my housemate Diego headed on up to the North Yorkshire Moors, for a day’s hiking up the hills and valleys, near a place called Levisham. It was his idea; he’d hired a car to take his girlfriend to the airport and wanted to make the most of it, and I was only too grateful for an opportunity to get out into the great outdoors that is the <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_York_Moors>North Yorkshire Moors</a>. We had a whale of a time, proper boys’ own stuff, bashing sticks, rolling down hillsides, chasing sheep, farting lots, eating bread and butter, and tromping up and down hills, with just a spot of rain. We also saw four choo-choo trains – which always brings me great delight (that steam, that smoke – those mighty wheels!) – bustling along the tracks below us.

Now, on the way to our destination, the <a href=http://www.nymcam.co.uk/011301a.jpg>Hole of Horcum</a>, we’d dallied briefly with the tracks while crossing from one side of the valley to the other, and that’s where I’d made a singularly delightful discovery: a piece of coal! Oh, the thrill of that black stuff; the memories of it from my youth; the feel of it gripped within my fingers and held! And, also, the thought that it was just what I needed. We walked further and I kept my eyes on the tracks; one piece, two, three and four were found; no more, no less. I told Diego what I had to do – he thought me mad – and then, with the river just a few strides away, I stood there and prepared to throw it in. I felt a little prayer was in order; I felt uncommonly emotional too, I don’t know why. I threw it in, one by one, and so began my four day ceremony. I wondered immediately where the rest of the coal would come from.

On our way back, though, after several miles of ups and downs, we decided to follow the railway, giving us a direct route back to the car, seeing as it was getting dark. We had balancing competitions along the rails – first to the nearest post, two sleepers back if you fall off – and strange races along the sleepers themselves, not allowed to miss any, harder than it sounds. I also started to find coal, and lots of it – so much so that I filled the empty plastic bag that the bread had come in, and then had to construct another shoulder bag out of my zip-up top (which I was mighty proud of). I was a man obsessed; I couldn’t let a piece of that gorgeous black stuff pass me by. Of course, I had more than enough for my purpose now – but I wanted to burn it also, in our little garden fireplace. Diego thought I was mad; probably I was, heaving that heavy, heavy coal three or four miles down the line. ‘Coal-picker’, he calls me now, in his strange, Spanish way.

And so, for the next three days I took the short hike or bike down to the river that runs just down the hill from our house in Kirkstall, and there, in the dark, I said my prayers and threw my coal with a plop into the water. It never failed to feel somewhat emotional, as though something was going on, and by the end of it there was a definite sense of something having lifted, of completion. Is it a coinky-dink that all these things are happening now? I don’t think so. I stand on the verge of something, impossible to come before – even though I may wish it had – perfect in its timing. I will be a different man after all of this – I hope. Who knows? I might even be able to commit to something.

7. Doing the thing I said I wouldn’t

Spiritual Rory is dead; this is something I have got to realise. Indeed, I thought I <i>had</i> realised it in India, back there in Amma’s ashram, surrounded by a plethora of it, when nothing of it appealed to me, but blasted mind/ego got me tricked once again, with promises of ‘taking it seriously’ once we were back in England, getting back into the swing of it with regard to meditation and practice, making my little shrine in my new room, etc. But has it happened? Well, like the fat man that resolves to join the January gym, or the smoker who is going to quit on their fortieth birthday – in the future, always in the future – no, it hasn’t. And so to see the truth of me, all I have to do is look in the mirror, and to look at the life around me, right? Right. It should be as simple as that – but, for some reason, it isn’t. And why? Because I lived it so very, very deeply, for some considerable amount of time, and got all carried away with it, and just can’t shake it out of my head. Except this is what I’m going to do now.

It began, I guess, long before I realised it had begun, back in childhood, back in my bedroom, alone, where my ten year-old mind pondered life’s bigger questions, and wondered what happened when I died, and contemplated my dreams, and thought of past lives ‘sort of’ remembered – “when I was a man,” I used to tell my mum – and listened to stories of astral projection and getting higher than drugs naturally from strange old hippies, and then, in my teenage years, taking five hits of acid and running around London in my boxer shorts in the early hours thinking I was God, that I had created all of this, and experiencing something indescribable and terrifying, and beyond anything in this world. And, more so, it began with a sense of dissatisfaction, with my village, and with my family, and with my relationships and my life, and the feeling that burned within me, that there had to be more to it than “this” – whatever the “this” was at the time, there had to be more to it than that.

I tried a lot of things; I tried drink and money and sex and love, family life, work, materialism, tv; I was miserable. I reached a low point aged twenty and took myself off to America, and there I started to discover something of joy, in nature, in people, in experience. I tried everything there – the cross-country drive, the mad city nights, the drink and drugs and wildness of youth – and, again, at twenty-two, I reached a new low-point. I was on bail and shunned; I was broke. I went hitch-hiking, and in the kindness of strangers, and in the randomness of that existence, where things seemed to just fall into place, a perfection that surrounded me, a force that took care of me, I guess things started to change. I tried to give up drink; I sort of succeeded, for a while. I plunged myself into nature; and found an ecstasy there. In the wide open spaces of the American west; in the generosity and humanity of the people I met, I began to change. I had been bad and I wanted to be good. I had stolen, and I was shamed into stopping. I saw beauty in myself and in the world. I was still twenty-two – and there was still more to discover.

In December 1998, I hitched down the Pacific Coast, from Seattle to San Diego, having come down from my plateau of the joys of the previous summer, those ecstasies having faded back into the sense that there was still more out there for me to discover; still something more to this life than cars and boxes and houses and relationship and jobs and television and death. I remember leaving The Truman Show and watching all the people driving by and thinking there was no more reality in the world than in the world in which he had lived. I didn’t know what else to do; I’d tried everything, and still I wanted more. I decided to go back to England, to try the settling down thing, to get a girlfriend and a job and just be normal. That was when I bumped into a guy on the beach that I’d met four months previously, thirteen hundred miles away, a coinky-dink that seemed to shake me to my core. He was heading down to Mexico and he wanted me to go with him; all I wanted was to go home – I was so tired of travelling – and, anyway, the thought of Mexico didn’t appeal at all; in fact, it terrified me. But I couldn’t get over that meeting, couldn’t shake it from my head – and on the day he was leaving I tossed three coins to decide. Heads came from behind to triumph, and Mexico it was – much to my despair.

I thought, initially, that it was just gonna be two weeks of cheep beers and tequila – hell, what’s two weeks out of my life – and me shepherding him on his fearful way (for, sure, he was scared) and then back across the whole gaping continent for my plane back to England. I was resolved to that – but life had other plans. We met these two girls from San Francisco one day – oh, this was after I’d sort of ‘drowned’ on Christmas day, and had a sort of mild epiphany experience (and then later told an annoying bartender I was “the new Messiah” for a joke) – and with them they took us to this Hot Springs about fifty miles north of San Jose del Cabo – and that was where we met Lindsay. It was heaven, this place, and me and Dave – my American chum – bounded up the boulders in the river there like excited children, always super-eager to see what was around the next corner, blown away by the beauty and the magic of the place. Well, ten minutes up the river, just before the big waterfall, this little golden-eyed goblin came bounding down the other way, moving far more sure-footed and joyously than I could ever hope to, and he blew me away. “How long you been here?” I said. “Five days,” he answered. “Five days! What the hell did you do here for five days?” “Oh, laughing and singing and dancing,” he said – and off he went, laughing and singing and dancing, and leaving me dumbfounded in his wake. There was something about that golden-eyed goblin – something that struck me more than probably anyone has ever done before or since. He bemused me. He puzzled me. He brought up feelings of anger and resentment, and I hated him at times. And yet, I couldn’t leave him alone.

The California girls left the next day, and as we waved them goodbye I already felt like I was at home, like I was waving them from my backdoor step. We were in paradise, this out-of-the-way canyon that lead up to the mountains, a crystal clear river with swimming holes and waterfalls and magnificent volcanic boulders and rocks ending in a dam at the end of a sandy road, and nestled in there in the canyon side, among the trees and rocks and palms, some natural hot springs, one tub big enough for four (at a squeeze) and one for one. We soaked in there for hours and it was joy unequalled; I could stay eight hours at a time; I could sleep in there all night. Every night and every morning we took our baths, and Dave and Lindsay and this Italian, David, became the lovely boys of el cañonito, running around naked, cooking together incredible feasts in sawn-off milk jugs, rolling chapattis on cardboard with honey jars, eating avocados scooped straight outta their skins – and always talking and swimming and diving in the water, laughing and singing, and great big Italian David gesticulating wildly with his huge grin and balls and dick swinging so close to Lindsay’s head, but Lindsay not caring, and Lindsay talking of love and meditation and going deeper and happiness, and stuff about him living in a monastery these last three years in Nepal, and how he’d cried so many tears, and me still bemused by it all, sort of sitting on the edge there listening, and not really understanding, and sort of out of comfort zone, and questioning, but wanting to know more.

The thing about Lindsay was, he was sort of like me: he’d come from a small and struggling mining village in some buttfuck part of Britian – him Wales, me Yorkshire – and he’d set off into the world to find something more. I mean, I’d met other people in the world who seemed happy enough, but they were always American, and wealthy, and hadn’t started where I had, in the bins. Plus, compared to him, they weren’t really happy anyway; it was like he had the thing – <i>the it</i> – that I’d been searching for all this time; it shone from his eyes; it reverberated in his words and his wisdom. And everybody – and I mean <i>everybody</i>, from the hikers to the locals, to the Mexican senoritas – loved him; were drawn to him; thought he was amazing. Him there with his pot belly and hairy back and silly Indian clothes, and annoying ways. And he was older, too – about thirty-five – so not some idealistic and ignorant youth – but he had the joy of a child about him, and the energy too. He was always laughing; always singing. He was incorrigible and amazing. And he rocked my world. But I didn’t always like him.

Some things I remember him saying: stuff about love; stuff about the need to go deeper [inside oneself] (I said what about Bob Dylan? He seems pretty deep but he don’t seem happy. He hasn’t gone deep enough, Lindsay replied); stuff about meditation, about crying, about forgiveness and being better. I questioned it all, and probably mocked it too – but that he had something, I was not able to deny.

Just before New Year’s we befriended a Mexican family who had come to camp at the mouth of the canyon and we spent a few days eating and singing and laughing with them. They were lovely – I dubbed them “la familia bonita” – and they thought we were pretty great too – although Lindsay (who they called ‘Lucio’) was obviously their favourite. Anyway, we laughed and drank and ate and sang, and it was all pretty fine and dandy, just a bunch of people sitting in the desert having a good time with food and guitars and jollities – and then, at midnight, on New Year’s Eve, they all got up and made a circle and something changed. They held hands. They started to pray. I didn’t know what they were saying but it was like some force had descended on us; there was a power there, something tangible in the air. From the smallest child to the great-great-grandma they took their turns, and prayed for God knows what, and there was tears, and some words I could make out – “for the children in Africa” (in Spanish, obviously) – and even Lindsay said something (in Spanish) and broke down in tears. I stood shocked by the whole thing, unable to comprehend what was going on – but, more than that, unable to deny that something incredible was happening. I was hit with these words: “Holy shit! There is a God!” – and it was as undeniable as if I’d been smacked in the face with a brick (I was an absolute devout atheist at the time). So there was that, and there was this moment where I asked myself, “what would I say, were I able to say anything?” – and the answer I got: “nothing”. It was as though there was nothing there inside me, that when I looked into my heart – to see who I’d pray for, to see what I felt – all I saw was a big fat zero; an emptiness; a nothing. I was devoid. I saw this, and I felt this overwhelming shame – that here were these people, filled with so much feeling, and that I had nothing – and when it came to the end, and they were returned their smilings and happinesses, and went round hugging each other, I didn’t want them to touch me. I felt dirty, unworthy; I felt like I who had – and was – nothing didn’t deserve their affection or their time or their love. I was distraught. Lindsay came over to me and gave me this hug, and in my ear he whispered, “we’re all brothers”, and in that moment I felt this electrical current surge through my body, binding me to him, making me want to never let him go. It was as though something had passed from him to me. It did something to me. Something changed. Writing this now, it’s apparent: that this was big, and that something changed.

The next day, I was shell-shocked. Try as I might, my mind could not deny the reality of the previous night’s experience, and I’m amused to say that I was slightly traumatised by the whole thing. “What the hell was I going to do?” I thought, “become a Catholic? Get down on my knees and pray to Mary? I don’t know how to do any of that stuff – that’s mad!” I struggled to reconcile my experience and what I knew of God – but, luckily, before they left Lindsay and Dave gave me two books – ‘Another Roadside Attraction’, and something by Osho – that seemed to clear up my befuddlement and show me that just because I’d experienced God in the presence of Catholics didn’t mean that I had to become one (a point many Christians would be wise to take note of) and I sort of slid into this Eastern understanding of God, the old “one mountain, many paths” kind of thing. We were ten days in to sharing our experience there when the others decided it was time to go – but I was at home, in my canyon paradise, and I couldn’t leave. The place was mine. I was there another five weeks.

Often times I’d have to myself, go two or three or even more days without seeing anyone. Occasionally hikers would pass through my camp and we’d stop and chat for a bit, and then they’d be on their way. I think they liked seeing me living like that; I was always being left bits of food and making friends. Then there were others, who would stay longer, camping by the dam (I was on a little beach, about ten minutes upstream) and I’d go visit them and we’d share food and times, before I wondered off into the darkness alone, after my bath, hopping skilfully from rock to rock in my barefeet, able now to do the boulder-leaping hike in the pitch darkness, naked, unafraid – or in the daytime to sprint it, my feet at one with the rocks, the nature of that place having infused with a love and understanding of it; truly, it was a magical environment to live in, me alone, on the beach, balancing rocks or juggling devil sticks – that’s where those two things started for me – and just living on what I was given, or the oranges and grapefruit I picked on my weekly visits to town, and the chapattis I continued to make, as Lindsay had showed me. Plus, the people that I met there – that the place attracted – were amazing too.

After some time had passed, and I’d gotten over my New Year’s Eve shock, and rebuilt my ego, this young, bright-eyed American called Shane came through, and we sought of struck up a conversation. He was impressed with how I was living; I dug that and thought I was better than him. He was a spiritual guy too, and said stuff like what Lindsay had said, and, like Lindsay, I was at the same time attracted and annoyed by him. One night, as he was leaving my camp, he said to me, “you know, sometimes me and my friends get together, and sit in a circle, and we just tell each other everything we think of one another, in unedited truth – for instance,” he said, “I feel the way you’re living here is really inspiring” – and I smiled – “but I wouldn’t want to be around you when you’re drunk.” That was fair enough, I thought, I can be an arse when pissed. “Would you like to give it a try some time?” And, “sure,” I said, “why not?” And that was the start of my mind being blown all over again.

The next night Shane and myself and this Dutch guy who had decided to stay in the canyon for a while sat around a long-burning fire on my little beach and did what Shane called ‘truth sharing’. Basically, we sat around and told each other how we felt, from moment to moment, as honestly and from-the-heart as we could. It took me a little while to get into it – Shane had to teach me how, had to show me how to get in touch with my body and emotions, how to be present and speak not from the head but from the heart – but once I got into the swing of it, it was an incredible ride. I remember thinking the next day how it seemed like a night like that should have been impossible without drugs – for it was like we had entered some alternate reality. One person would talk, and perhaps be sharing something incredibly sad, and there would be tears – and then, after a few moments of silence, it would die down and Shane would come back with his eternal (and sometimes infernal) questions, “how do you feel?” It was like, “oh” – because instead of being lost in those feelings of sadness, and dwelling on it, as one might normally do, by checking in with what was actually happening, in that moment, I would usually find something different; there would be another feeling; another thought; another memory – and, more often than not, it would be something joyful, or hilarious, and all of a sudden we’d be cracking up, and laughing our heads off – and then back again to, “how do you feel?” and seeing what was there then, a rollercoaster ride of intense highs and lows, and laughter and tears, and none of it sticking or being attached to, just emotions to explore, layers to peel away – Lindsay’s words: “go deeper” – and in the end of it, once the layers had gone, once the essence had been reached, many hours and much fire later, nothing remained but love and joy and connection. I was staggered by the process; I had probably learned more in one night than I had in my entire life. Again, it was a truly mindblowing experience. I had been taught how to feel, and to get to the heart of myself, and it was amazing.

A little while after that, I met a guy called Shawn who was also on the spiritual path. Around the fire one night, in a different part of the canyon, we were all talking – and they were talking about things that I didn’t understand, and therefore ridiculed, like mantras – when Shane and Shawn shared these various experiences they’d had that just seemed out of this world (and slightly crazy) about feeling these incredible levels of ecstasy (naturally) that they could barely contain themselves, being reduced to focusing everything they had on one single object in nature (a blade of grass and a stone, I think it was, respectively) and just crying into it and loving it and feeling a bliss indescribable; it all sounded a bit mad to me. They’d been talking a lot about “following your heart”, about how that was all you really had to do, and I just thought, “right, if that’s all you have to do, I’m following my heart back to my beach, and back to my bed, because these two blokes are obviously complete and freaking weirdoes” – and that’s what I did. Except, some big part of me knew that they weren’t weird, but just that I didn’t understand; that they had experienced something true and real that I hadn’t, and that was beyond me, and that was why I resented them. It sounded mental but something in me knew that it was real, and it made me sad to know that I hadn’t felt it too.

Shane had a teacher – a spiritual teacher, that is – and he talked loads about him, as though he was the best guy who ever lived; that made me angry as well, and I hated him from the moment I heard about him; he just seemed too good to be true. But, anyway, Shane left, and went back to his home on the other side of the mountains, and I was once again in the canyon on my home, pondering all that had gone on, and feeling sort of higher and higher, and happier and happier all the time. One day a lovely Mexican couple came along and we talked for a few hours and, before they left, the guy made this shape around me and said something about how he could see “la luz de Dios” – I certainly felt it, and wondered if I had got what I had seen in Lindsay. I probably never felt better in my life; more happy, more contented, more peaceful, more free. The canyon was a magical place; I was there for forty-five days, and provided for in every way, and rained down on with perfection ceaselessly. “Everything this way comes,” I thought to myself, “including, probably, the woman of my dreams; all I have to do is wait.” I didn’t, though – I got a splinter in my foot one day, and had to go to hospital in San Jose, and had to leave too to get my visa renewed. Plus England was starting to call me again. I said goodbye to my paradise home and hitched out of there, and around the coast back to Todos Santos, where I planned to see whales before hightailing it back up the Baja to California, and England, and home. I thought, though, that I might as well pop in and say hi to Shane, seeing as I was passing that way...I popped in; I said “hi”; I didn’t leave for another two months.

Shane and his family lived in this B&B – although really, what it was, was a sort of ‘spiritual retreat’. They did yoga, and tai-chi, and lots of these truth circles, and there were young and exploring people such as myself around who just did a bit of work for their tent space and food and got to benefit from the amazing palm tree surroundings of this other beautiful place just within earshot of the crashing waves. They were all lovely; they asked me to stay. I did, and that first night I experienced sufi dancing, and got high and mindblown again, and shared a platonic tent with a lovely girl, and that was the beginning of even more adventures, for Shane’s spiritual teacher John was coming in a few days, and I supposed I might as well hang around to meet him.

That first night he came, he sat there at the head of the table, and told these incredible stories, and I hated him. Everybody loved him, though, and fawned over him, and I was ignored. His stories just seemed stupid – unbelievable – too fantastical to be true – and I couldn’t understand why everybody thought he was so great. He was obviously some kind of charlatan. After dinner, though, he got up and gave us a few little demonstrations of tai-chi, and of what chi could do – for instance, he explained the ‘root’ – that is, that by doing tai-chi, one could develop a ‘root connection’ with the earth, that would help with this and that, and make your life better, etcetera – and he demonstrated with a ‘root test’. He stood there on the ground relaxing and asked the biggest to try and push him over. He shoved and shoved, but couldn’t budge him, John all the while smiling and relaxed, not using any effort whatsoever to resist. Then he said, “you, you and you,” and me and two other guys joined the first one in pushing and shoving – and all to no avail. The guy was stuck there, rooted to the spot, like a tree. I guess that was the point. Then he showed how you could knock someone off their feet without touching them, just by using chi. It was all pretty mindblowing – and, let’s put it mildly, I was starting to warm to the guy. The next day, while I was watching him do tai-chi, I saw him disappear – that is, I was looking right at him, and then he wasn’t there anymore. Freaky things were afoot! But more than that…

One day I’d been ‘truth sharing’ with this awesome and beautiful girl, Rani – I think this was the day that John turned up – and then that night Shane and I were in the kitchen with her and her boyfriend saying goodbye, because they were leaving the next morning. We were all hugging and saying nice things to each other – but when I came to say goodbye to her boyfriend, I felt sort of weird. We were hugging, and I said, “I feel disconnected.” I had my eyes closed and I suddenly seemed to float off into myself, into this enormous space somewhere where my forehead should have been; I felt twenty feet high – and actually seriously worried that I was gonna bang my head on the palapa roof. It was like I was in this huge black space – and then I saw this dancing blue flame, sort of swaying side to side. It was immensely peaceful; I could feel myself falling into it. Then I heard this voice say, “he’s leaving his body” – I thought it was Shane, but maybe it wasn’t – and I snapped open my eyes, feeling too weird for that. Suddenly, everything was beautiful – I mean, the cups and plates and knives and forks were all glistening and gleaming and seemed just to be these amazing and beautiful colours, so vivid, so much larger than life, almost overwhelming in their splendour, almost more than my mind could take. Everything was like that; my eyes were darting all over the place, unable to comprehend the magnificence of what I was seeing; when I say it was almost overwhelming, almost more than my mind could take – well, it was; basically, I exploded, and had to leave my friends and the kitchen, and went racing outside to scream and hug and run, in a joy unparalleled and unfelt before or since; it’s pretty much impossible to describe. I could say that my heart was full of stars, that my mind was blitzed by the light of a thousand suns – but that would just be poetry, not truth; the truth is I went racing around the gardens, hugging the trees, bringing their leaves to my lips and skin, every touch of everything – the trees, the earth on the soles of my feet, the air – sending me higher and higher into this indescribable ecstasy. I raced and raced, eager to touch and feel everything, unable to stay in one spot, unable to contain what I was experiencing – and then I would remember my friends, and run back to them in the palapa, and try to tell them – tell them, “oh my God, this is fucking MAGIC!” – but be unable to stay, and go running off once again into the outdoors and the nature, and after several rounds of this, of God knows how much time, I fell into a pile of gravel and just clutched it my face, sobbing into it, beside myself with ecstatic delirium, a happiness unique, and experience to die for – and knowing know just what it was that Shane and Shawn – and who knows how many others – had felt on their own nights of blissful awakening and insight.

8. To be continued (after I go and play football)

9. Back now (nine hours later)

So I settle in then to The Way of Nature, learning Tai-Chi – building up my own root to the point where Shane couldn’t budge me – and getting all spiritually high from various meditations and the truth-sharing thing. I started seeing people’s faces change – ostensibly seeing their past lives – and also discovered that I had healing hands, after feeling this ‘electricity’ in my palms and feet for about three days, which only cleared up after it was ‘discharged’ into my friend’s head while I was giving her a massage, simultaneously removing her headache. I also spent lots of time with John, learning techniques and spiritual principles, and doing my first ‘vision quest’, which entailed six days alone on a beach sitting in a small imaginary circle sans distraction – ie, all I had was food, water, and sleeping bag; no cooking, no fire, no reading, no writing, etc – that again took me to new heights. Three days I spent in emotional and mental turmoil as everything long-buried from my past seemed to bubble up to the surface within me, and I felt it all again – it was hell – and then three days of peaceful ecstasy, and I didn’t want to leave. I never drank again after that – after six or seven years of hardcore drinking; the need left me, I guess – the things that had caused me to seek solace/respite/escape gone. I was higher and happier than ever after that, and suddenly the word seemed full of magical possibilities, and bliss, and I dedicated myself to the task of enlightenment. I travelled Mexico and America, then, without money, wanting to see if there was truth in Lindsay’s (and others’) assertion that “the universe will provide” (and Jesus’ “lilies in the field”) and found there was. I crossed the US several times absolutely penniless, never begging, never really telling anyone what I was doing, and found I never wanted for a thing. I was fed everyday, I went everywhere I wanted to go, I needed nothing. At one stage, in LA – where I met someone in the street who put me up in their apartment (actually, that happened twice there) – some woman gave me twenty dollars for no apparent reason, and I just gave it straight away, unable to comprehend what I would do with it anyway. Blessings and provisions were showered down on me constantly, day after day, week after week, and miracles abounded.

Like the time I left John’s place in Bisbee, Arizona, and sixty miles up the road, at an interstate truck stop outside Tucson I realised that I’d left my toothbrush behind, and became mildly distraught – thinking only two things mattered to me, as far as possessions went (everything else would come), and one of them was my toothbrush – the other being my passport – because who on Earth was going to give me a secondhand toothbrush, say, in the way that they would give me clothes or food or socks? And just as I was thinking that, standing there in the middle of this concrete expanse miles from anywhere hospitable, a man on a bicycle came riding right up to me, stopped, placed a plastic bag in my hand and rode off. And what was in it? A toothbrush, of course. I was flabbergasted. Two years I’d travelled and never been given a toothbrush – and yet the moment I needed one, there it was – handed to me by a man on a bicycle, in the middle of automobile-dominated, concrete America. Impossible.

Or the time where I was sitting in LA waiting for a bus – having made a dollar juggling devil sticks – and just thinking to myself, “hm, I’m a little bit hungry” – and then sort of noticing this woman come by. Anyway, five minutes later she returns, and mysteriously hands me this plastic takeaway food container, and in it is the most wonderful Thai noodle dish. “This is for you,” she says. Again, I’m flabbergasted; I’m just sitting there on a bench with other passengers, looking smart, not looking hungry, or poor; not looking any different to anyone else. The only difference is my thought, and the power which seems to be guiding and guarding me around this continent, and providing for my every need.

And there were many more too – but that’s enough of that for now…

I saw John again up in Crestone, Colorado, and did my second vision quest, this time for twenty-eight days, high up in the Sangre de Christo mountains. Unlike my first, though, there was none of the pain that I’d felt on that beach in Mexico, it was pure and simple bliss, an ecstasy of oneness with nature, peace and love for all things, within and without. I heard singing, too – a sort of chant – and when I joined in with it, it made me feel good. It was just one word, over and over, sounding like it was being sung by a group of Africans or Native Americans. When I was done I told John about it and he said, “what was the word?” “Yah-way,” I said. He raised an eyebrow. “Does it mean anything?” I said. “It’s an old Hebrew word for God,” he answered. And so many more things during my time there with him, those two months in those magical mountains.

And I went to visit Shawn, and met his teacher, a 72 year-old African-American woman named Momma Lucas, who had been healing since birth, and Shawn and I assisted her as she healed people every day in Shawn’s house, and saw many incredible things – and slowly, without her really saying anything, the healing gift grew in me too, and came to resemble her way of doing it. She was an amazing woman; a fog of energy surrounded her; I felt giddy and good just being in the room with her. And Shawn, too, who was developing his own gift of healing and angel channelling, with I was to experience many, many times, and which was always incredible and wonderful, and the two of us became such close and grand ‘spirit buddies’, always encouraging one another on our paths, our quests for this mystical thing called ‘enlightenment’, called ‘God-realisation’. And off to Mount Shasta we went, called separately, travelling there together, to reach new heights of sacrifice and joy, dying and being reborn up there in the snow, another altogether unfathomable and practically indescribable experience and time; another pinnacle and ‘peek’.

I lived in a Buddhist meditation centre; I returned to Mexico and got stuck into being a healer, and people came to me with their ailments and troubles, and got themselves cured, always to my wonder and satisfaction and gratitude, of things like dodgy knees and IBS, shingles and bad backs and migraines and emotions. I thought that maybe I should do it full-time; I thought that some sort of ministry would begin. I started to think that I could be a Buddha, or a Christ, and I threw myself into it deeper, ever deeper, seeking to overcome every fear, every attachment, every aversion, dispensing with all my possessions and all my money once I returned to England (in <a href=http://youtube.com/watch?v=-7pESRAmf5Y>magical circumstances</a>) and setting for sail for India – inspired by <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobiography_of_a_Yogi>Autobiography of a Yogi</a> – no longer able to cope with the material world and burning up with a desire to find my guru, the one who would take me further still, feeling that I had gone as far as I could under my own steam. I visited many yogis and gurus, including Sai Baba (feeling nothing) and Ammachi, who I had met the year before, in New Mexico, and who had touched me deeply, but none of them seemed to satisfy the intense yearning for a teacher that had built up in me. I implored and pleaded internally for the answer to come – and then, feeling that I didn’t deserve it because I was travelling with money, and therefore not living on faith, I gave away everything I had and surrendered myself to what India wanted to give me. Later that day I found a book on an Indian ‘avatar’ who was living in Germany, Mother Meera laid on my bed, and devoured it hungrily, overcome with a feeling that I had to see her. I made a bee-line for the airport, and landed back in India shoeless and dirty, and booked the first ticket to Germany I could find (this was at the beginning of 2000, just over a year after my time in the canyon in Mexico; in the meantime I had also spent time with some Sikhs in New Mexico, at a yoga festival, learning kundalini yoga and meeting Yogi Bhajan; been gifted two ‘manifested’ plane tickets, straight out of the blue; revisited old family and friends, who could not believe the change in me, who said I looked like I’d really found something, who said I looked like I’d found the thing I always seemed to be looking for). I found her in an old castle on top of a hill – but because I didn’t have an appointment, they wouldn’t let me in; for the first time in ages, I cried – and was stunned, because of how hard I’d worked to develop acceptance of whatever came my way, believing it was all for the best. But the feeling that I needed to see her was overwhelming, and it was so, so hard not to. The next day I made some phone calls, and got to see her, and out of nowhere, when she put her hands on me, my heart began to beat at about three times its normal speed, and swamping every other thought in my head, louder than all else, I was filled with the words “oh God, thank You” resounding within me automatically, like a spontaneous mantra. I was filled with peace; I couldn’t get enough of her – and in that moment, the yearning had gone, and whether she was my guru or not I couldn’t say, but all I know is that the yearning had gone, and the thing that had driven me across America and Mexico and India and to Germany was fulfilled and sated and done. And in so many ways that is the end of this road.

That is nearly eight years ago – and when I type that I shake my head in wonder and wonder where it’s all gone, and what have I done? For it seems that so much of the last eight years have been spent running around like a headless chicken, going nowhere, chasing my own tail, and blowing all the good things that I’d built up and stored inside during those magical sixteen months between my New Year’s Eve awakening and my meeting with her. It seems like so many wrong turnings and missed opportunities and fruitless distractions/desires when, thinking about it, it all could have been so simple; even during that first visit, strangely and conspicuously now, but not clicking then, one of her helpers said to me, “Mother likes people to have jobs” – but I was so keen on the so-called ‘spiritual life’ I ignored that – and spent the best part of the next two years trying to continue and recreate the highs and experiences of my time in Mexico and America, running here and there, meditating myself into ecstasy, trying to become this Christ-like figure, shunning everything of the world – and ignoring the signs – the signs which had guided me so well – and which were now saying, “stop, be normal, go home” – but which I was unable to follow. Until, that is, Life grew tired of hinting, and instead slapped me around the face and dragged me back to Earth, using the lure and the bait of a beautiful yet ultimately poisoned French woman I met at the Amma programme in Toulon. And that was the start of me getting my feet back on the ground – for, undeniably, I had lost myself to delusion, and gotten too high, and forgotten and neglected everything about me that was human, and that I wasn’t just spirit. So I gave up meditation and took up football; so I went to university – probably a year later than I should have done – and looked at spirituality from an intellectual standpoint, and realised that that had its uses too; so I got back into women, and human desires, and watched TV, and learned how to work, and dealt with money and bills and the thought of a career and maybe family and home – but it all took time. I struggled with staying in one place; I wrestled with it for a long time, and eventually I won. So many negatives had come from my travelling and spiritual days – I was out of balance, seriously ungrounded and living in a dream world – and it’s taken me years to correct them – and correcting them I still do. I’m trying to shake off the unreality of who I am – the me who I think I am, but the me who doesn’t really exist – and this is all part of that. I’m trying to say my spiritual life is over – dead – but it’s hard because writing all that stuff about America and Mexico, all these years ago, still seems so fresh and magical and good, and I can’t help but yearn for it, the way reading a book about the deserts of Arizona makes me yearn for a backpack and a thumb and a wide-open empty stretch of road – except it’s not a yearning that makes me actually want to do it – not seriously, not in the way that I did back then – it’s a yearning that merely takes me off into dreamworld, distracts me from where I am, makes me dissatisfied with it – and that’s what I’ve got to stop. I’ve seen how ‘unspiritual’ I am these days; how I’ve basically given up practice and prayer in favour of materialism and sex; how I’ve shunned so many of the good things in life in favour of youtube and sport – and yet I just don’t seem able to get it into my thick head that I’m not like that anymore. Except, in writing this, I’m doing it; I’m resolved. These things are behind me; my glorious past needs to spoken of no more – not here, and not in the world – because, oh, it’s just so long ago! And, oh, it’s just so irrelevant to how I live my life now. I mean, it’s all about the now – and the truth of this now has nothing to do with the truth of the now back then – but I so much wanted to do it. My world is different; that is where I have to be: this boy, laying in his X-bought pyjamas in bed, a laptop on his lap, a guitar there in the corner, two much-maligned pictures of unprayed-to saints upon his dresser, mess, and things undone, and thoughts of a blonde-haired woman several hundred miles away and the tattered remnants of their possibly non-existent relationship, and the need he has to just feel okay, and to do whatever it takes, and saying, “I’m not spiritual; that life is dead to me” seems like one way to do it. Of course, some things remain – the way that people still say occasionally, “there’s something about you; you give off this peace” (though it doesn’t happen nearly as much) – but mostly it’s gone. God made me a good bloke – He took a shit, and he fashioned something reasonable – and it’d be hard to ask for more than that. I did, however, and that was the problem; I thought I could be great. I got the Western-disease, of thinking enlightenment was as easy as buying a computer; I’m not alone in that. But it’s not; it’s for a rare soul, and it’s a rare soul still that even gets on the path. As for me, I had my taste, and found my faith – a very real faith, a faith based on experience, unshakable now, if not my everything and all – and that will stay with me forever. Many other people have that, and many other people don’t – but there’s nothing unique or unusual in it; I was just a little sick, that’s all. I need to get over it; I need to just accept that what I am is normal, and to be normal, and to live my life, do my job, marry my woman and love her as best as I can, and raise my kids, and what’s so wrong with that? But I need to forget that I once wanted to be a Buddha, a yogi, and put it behind me once and for all. I just hope that by reading this you will have some understanding of why this has been so hard for me – this forgetting, this letting go – and why I harp on about it so much in this blog. But now: case closed. Job’s done. And dusted. Done.

10. I need to pee right now

I love <a href=http://youtube.com/watch?v=L61W6XnTGeo>Snuff Box</a>; I love Shooting Stars; I love kicking and hitting and chasing a ball, and running about, and getting all sweaty and muddy and bruised. I love a nice good shag, and choo-choo trains, and making a racket on my guitar. I love to type, and write nonsense (Scooby little left shoe bronze), and drink tea and eat lots, and find bargains and get away with not paying when I take the train to work. I love magic onions, and my cuddly monkey, and going for walks and seeing the blue, blue sky. I love my bike – even if I treat it like shit – and I love my shoes and wish I could buy some more that are exactly the same but I can’t find them anywhere. I love keeping a nice clean computer, and peeing in random places, and farting lots, and breaking wood. I love go-karts, and super glue, and a yummy fried egg on toast. I love myself, in the mirror, in my head, in my hands. I love kissing, and skin, of another, and holding them tight, and the thought of her right now if almost too delicious for words (if it’s really such a shame then why don’t we do something about it? we have that power). I love the feeling, of sadness, of joy, and tears down my cheek, of laughter. Of feeling. I love being me, and investigating myself, and curing, and fixing, and realising, and solving. I love it all. And sometimes I don’t. And I like crisps too – though not too many. They can sort of leave a yucky taste in my mouth when I eat too many – which is pretty much any time I eat them at all.

11. All the other things I did this week

1. I played my first game of squash in the league I’ve joined. I lost, full of overconfidence and a certain feeling of sorrow for the imminent loss of my opponent. I hated myself for it afterwards. I vowed to kill the next guy I played – and did. 9-0, 9-3, 9-1. I hope I can be equally merciless and devastating every time I play.
2. I went to a rugby match, for the first time ever; it was actually pretty boring. The people there stunk, too, inside and out, and beer fumes and shouting and swearing just gave me a headache. When I watch football sometimes on TV, and see the fans, I feel so happy/sad for them (depending on their emotions) – but times like these remind me that, happy for them or not, and fond of the game they love or not, you wouldn’t actually wanna spend any time with them. I mean, great though it was to see those Barnsley youths hugging each other and their idols when they knocked Chelsea out the cup the other week, you gotta remember too that they’ll probably be mugging old ladies and scamming the dole and being generally shitty to all around them as soon as they get home. And, my, isn’t that terribly snobby and bleak! But, whatever, I’d say there’s some truth in that…
3. I played a game of football in goal and got man of the match, kept a clean sheet in a 7-0 win; even I was surprised by my performance, by some of my saves. I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging – ‘cos it could all go the opposite way in the next game – but I was pretty happy and proud of myself. I just hope for more of the same next week.
4. Had an Oxfam area meeting; man, it was so tedious and painful, I swear I was <i>this close</i> to chewing my own throat out. Our area manager just hasn’t got a clue. What is it about boss types and people that can’t get enough of the sound of their own voice?
5. I helped my dad sell some stuff one eBay; I quite liked doing that for him. He says he’s going to pay me; it’s how he’s gonna earn his money soon, once he jettisons his shop – but he hasn’t got a clue how to use a computer. He’s such a joker, that man.
6. Bright eyes was a rabbit with a sorry end – he talked too much and waffled on to no one in particular; it’s hard to imagine that no one even bore with him. Scantily clad and disastrous, he died. Well that’s the way the doughnut crumbles, sometimes. Martin Forthwith told it like it is: a duck. “Skin him!” he cried, “these words are just tumbling like drainpipes, falling from that sky boat’s chimney stack, crippling the doctor’s wages and forcing him into labour far earlier than he should! Take ye and eat, she whittled, I’ll bring up the rear and show them why I’m lord of the dance, settee!” And then he went, and Martin was no more. “Resurrect! It’s the time for it! All will be revealed, if only you’ll resurrect!”
7. I wonder what the coal’ll bring
8. I really need to pee again
9. I’m done

12. I’m done

I’m done, I said. I’m done.