The Dawn of my Spiritual Life
The end of the beginning
Towards the end of 2004, I realised in the core of my heart that, although I still felt extremely unsatisfied, there was simply nothing left for me to do in the world. Twenty-five years old, and my life seemed over, because the world had nothing left to offer, and, tragically, I still felt totally unfulfilled. This was not the result of a restless mind that could not find any place in the world because it had not searched or persevered. I had already done so much and gone so deep into myself thereby that there appeared to be nothing else that I could gain anything meaningful from, and I had been weary of the world for a considerable time. Every time my mind was quiet, and even when it was not quiet, that inner voice would the same questions repeat; is there something higher that can be attained in life, and if so, how?
My first brushes with wisdom
My mind would wander back a year and a half to when I was sitting under a tree in Patagonia, poring over a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, a scripture about our true nature as the omnipresent and omniscient Self, and the mystic methods of realising this knowledge. It was chilly, my health was precarious, and I had been sleeping rough for some weeks, hitch-hiking over the pampa from place to place. I was oblivious to everything except the words of Krishna. Flashes of wisdom would, now and again, suddenly leap out of the words, but tantalised, I felt that I was not grasping all their essence, and neither was I capable of grasping them properly alone. The words of mysticism were the only thing that really held any mystery to me any more. Eventually, the heart-calling to go to India became too strong to ignore.
The beginning of transcendence
Several months and a one-way overland pilgrimage to Benares, the fabled City of Shiva, later, I was in a small ashram hidden up a narrow alley somewhere in the old city. The guru of the ashram was there. They said he was God. It was the third day of his visit. They were worshipping him as Shiva, the representation of Self-Knowledge or the destruction of ignorance that results in that. They all bowed down to him. I followed. When my head touched his foot, I felt extremely clearly a stream of energy entering my head for several seconds. It is this which is the start of the spiritual life, the journey to the pinnacle of existence. Spirituality is not books, yoga or meditation; it is power, and only the presence of that results in transcendence and the ultimate Self-Knowledge.