Wisdom Notes on Psychology

A Life on the Edge

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My grandparents lived in the East End of London. Although in my early years there were still horse-drawn carts in London, what I especially remember when our family visited it were the bomb craters. These were a residue from World War II and were a great playground for kids!

As a child I was not a social person. I was social at school, but when school ended for the day I became immersed in daydreams. I probably spent most of my childhood daydreaming. Television had only recently become available and was still a novelty. In my teens I listened to classical music in the evenings and spent my late nights listening to Voice of America and AFN (American Forces Network) on the radio, as they were the only venues for jazz and swing music (the BBC radio only allocated half-hour per week for jazz at that time). As an alternative, I watched the night sky and studied astronomy.

When I was about 19 (just before I went to college), a gradual sense of confusion and rebellion started rising in me; all I knew was that something was wrong but I didn’t know what. This confusion eventually propelled me in my 30s into a standard spiritual search for a truer identity. 

My main academic qualification is a degree in physics, obtained in 1967 at Reading University. When I left college I found employment in electronics. However, these were hippie times. I soon became a hippie and dropped out of the pursuit of a professional career. My 20s were the period of my political activism in local issues, based on anarchism, communalism and existentialism. I was an anarchist in politics and an existentialist in everything else. After my 20s, life became rather an anticlimax.

In my 30s I studied counselling theory and psychology at evening classes. I also began the traditional soul search, exploring various groups who believed that they had the answers to life’s confusions. I developed faith in an English theosophical teacher, who himself was a disciple of an Indian yoga teacher, swami Dev Murti. The English teacher introduced me to the idea of reincarnation, an idea which I accepted immediately through a blinding flash of intuition. The intuition was so intense that I have never ever doubted that idea since. In my 40s my faith ended and I began my journey into psycho-analysis and self-discovery. I went through a second adolescence as I started exploring sexuality – I had fun and felt plenty of confusion.

A Troubled Life

Since I am a private person I did the psycho-analysis on my own, without using any therapist to help me. During the analysis I analysed my limitations and failures and difficulties in relationships, all of which mixed together in my mind to create states of psychological confusion. During the analysis my higher self threw all the dark sides of my mind at me, non-stop for many years. As a result of this I became very familiar with many transient states of madness. My sense of identity was damaged several times and each time I had to re-build it into a better form.

I learned that madness is not inexplicable but results from causes whose origins can be explained, either in psychological-sociological terms or in symbolic terms together with karmic influences. I kept my confusion at bay and analysed it by means of my powerful sense of spiritual idealism. My dominant ideal became the pursuit of truth, and I followed it wherever it led me. It became my quest in life.

Nearly all the articles in my books are based on my own experiences. The only reason that I ended up writing about my experiences was because I discovered some new facts about emotions and abreaction.

I did most of my analysis in the 1990s. During this period I worked in a hospital as a porter in therapy departments and later as a care assistant and support worker in care homes for the elderly (usually EMI homes, or homes for the elderly and mentally infirm). I also worked in nursing homes, homes for people with learning difficulties, and finally on hospital psychiatric wards. I did this after I had completed most of my psychological theorising. Nothing that I saw on the wards invalidates any of my ideas. 

The Bleakness of Nihilism

After the main phase of my psycho-analysis was over I spent many years exploring the nature of good and evil, using my ideas about the subconscious mind. The exploration plunged me into the bleakness of nihilism and in that time I hit depths of desolation and spiritual abandonment worse than any form of madness. The intensity of my experiences meant that my life was a life on the edge.

What kept me going?  Well, behind me lay disasters that were known, and ahead lay disasters that were unknown. The unknown is always more interesting than the known, so there was no looking back. In fact, the phrase don’t look back was regularly in my mind during the years of my investigations into the mind.

One of the reasons for the depth in my work is the wide variety of experiences that I have been through. And many of these experiences ended in some form of disaster. So perhaps my main character asset is the ability to extricate myself from all the pits that I fall into. But without all these disasters, I would not be able to explain many of the obstacles to the pursuit of a spiritual path. I have had a number of inspiring experiences, but these were mainly one-off transient ones.

My path has been one of meeting and resolving severe psychological problems. I have had to think my way out of all my problems. My nature is that of a mystic who has a fascination with science. Hence I have an unusual balance of scientific rationality and mystical intuition, and this is rare in original thinkers. Overall, I am a pattern thinker, meaning that I try and discover the patterns that any one issue makes with other issues. I took early retirement in 2005, when I was 60. Afterwards I began working on gender identity issues, as I allowed my feminine side to find expression. My aim is to find a harmonious balance between my masculine and feminine sides, without repressing either.

This was my life until I began jhana riding in the 2020s (see the section on spirituality, in Landmarks of Spirituality). 

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