Early Life

I was born, and given the name Paul (a mixed blessing), the second son to Max and Mary Keetley, in Melbourne about 7 pm, on 21^st March 1951. It was a difficult birth. The date however was auspicious, the equinox, last and first day of the astrological calender, and a 22 date, in numerology. It’s also the birth date of my Guru the divine Mother Shri Mataji, and also JS Bach.

In Perth, 26 years later, in 1977, I went through a re-birthing process at a five-day self encounter course, and re-experienced this difficulty, which felt very vivid, intense and real.  Sounds funny perhaps now but at that time, when I re-experienced my birth in that re-birthing, it felt like I’d been trying to be born at a particular time. I had felt very constrained as I struggled to be born at ‘just the right time’. I felt desperate to get born at the right time. I confess to this feeling again in later life, this desire to be ‘in synch with the auspicious time’.

I subsequently asked my mum about the recently recalled difficulty during birthing. I had been completely unaware of it previously, but she confirmed, yes, all true, a lot of problems, umbilical cord, inundation with fluid, then slow to get going. A tricky start.

In my second year I caught something highly contagious, German measles. I was suddenly in full hospital isolation for about eight days. When mum came to get me the nurse remarked “my he’s got a terrible temper!” Mum replied “No he hasn’t.” But on the way home in the train mum says I would not even look at her, no matter how closely held. Obviously my time alone in hospital was a deeply traumatic separation from mum. Separation from your mother is an archetypal trauma, I understood, like with Dante. And a sin not readily forgiven. Also a feeling rekindled a few times in my life, I have consequently realised. I really love my Earthly Mum. I love my divine Mother and Guru, Shri Mataji. And I love my Eternal personal sacred Mother, my Kundalini, who has journeyed with me in this evolutionary quest through lifetimes. Re the anger, I confess I have been frustrated and got very angry with some people, and some yogis, who behaved poorly towards Shri Mataji or who I felt betrayed eternal principles like integrity, truth, respect, understanding, loyalty and trust. I cannot answer for them and so perhaps I should not have spoken to them in anger. But that’s just another story, and ultimately we all will understand that our story is only Maya, a sleep, a dream, fantasy, and not who or what we truly are.

At about three or four, I nearly tumbled off a lofty look-out, on a viewing platform at the Mt Buffalo National Park in Victoria. Dad grabbed me at the last possible moment, as the vista and the high drop seemed to call me out and over. A memorable moment for sure, and a real reprieve! Seems I have escaped several such perilous moments in this life. Thank God. God Is.

Home was a musical place. Mum had been well trained at Catholic boarding school, on piano, and she played professionally at times in bands and for family and friends. Dad was musical too, singing well. They were a talented and beautiful couple who obviously enjoyed each other. I know that Dad was troubled perhaps as a result from his own early life where he lost both parents in his first two years and was adopted. I only remember them both with great love and gratitude.

I’ve always loved and been inspired and moved by music. At home in Melbourne, a piano and LP records playing. Opera, classical, modern. I remember going to see a live musical. The Pajama Game. The theatre, stage, performers, action, dancing, colours, lights and yes, that live and very loud orchestra and chorus of singers, all leaving deep impressions.

I remember holiday trips out of Melbourne. Little low caravanette on the back for mum and dad. We two boys then sleeping on the car seats. Lift-up kitchen-lid at the very back. Pump-up primus stove. Meals at tank stands. Staying by lakes. Giant skies. Long hauls. High adventure for us kids in the Nature and wildlife, on country.

At about six in 1957 we moved over to Western Australia, to live up in the warm coastal country town of Geraldton. Our apparently hasty exit from VIC had something to do with dad’s colourful career within the police force. At one stage Dad sued the Commissioner for police, apparently for being passed over for promotion. The Victorian police force has a very colourful history. Don’t quite know the whole story but apparently we were well advised to make the trip out West. (Possible memoirs later were foregone, following a warning.)

Mum worked in the record and music store. Nicholson’s. Dad started working with a local car dealer. Cars of all types had been his interest and were to become his career, pardon the pun. We would drive out from town North-East through the Chapman valley out to grandad’s and grandma’s remote farm and house out past the township of Yuna.

Mum’s parents were Ray and Eileen Farrell. Yuna was a tiny pub, tiny school, fuel stop and shop (pic), big long grain silos, sheep yards, a grassless footy oval, and not much else, perhaps no houses at all, that I can recall. Mum’s sisters families and other relatives were all also mainly settled out along that Valley way, all of them on the land.

Our grandparent’s place was a typical far-North wheat-and-sheep-belt, large remote farm with homestead. Arid semi-desert dwellings demand a classic oblong design, thick cool mud walls, rendered white, with tin roof and wide verandas, right around. Doorways on all four sides. The precious rainwater tanks at every corner, contending against the very real ‘droughts and flooding rains’. Washing and bathing by the bucket at times. Life in the red dirt. Yes, lots of sheep and wheat, but only when the seasonal Gods allowed, and lots of chooks. Out back, rustic drop-box dry loos. Vehicles, machinery, storage and shearing sheds, stock ramps, herding yards, fences, dams and paddocks. Hot and dry, and stark. And beautiful, like the people who lived there.

Grandad, (Ray) came back silent from that first Great War. He carried shrapnel in his leg all the rest of his days. I fear his internal, unseen wounds and losses were worse, but these stayed seared and sealed into his mind and memory. He never spoke about it. I’m told many others from that the first Great War would not speak either. Australia has carved a sense of national identity based on this supremely courageous, and resolute, yet crazy, sacrifice of the wars.

Kent my brother was especially loved by our grandfather. We were reminiscing recently and were both moved to tears. Mum’s father fixed and drove everything; ute, car, truck, tractor and plough, seeder and harvester. He did everything required to sustain everything, with one eye on the weather and rain gauge. When bumper crops did come in, once or twice every few years, it was time to maybe take a short holiday away from the farm at the coast or even the city far south. Also a time to renew or replace every crucial thing on the farm and maybe some small luxuries for the family. Kids as they grew older went off to boarding schools.

Grandad butchered his own sheep, and we watched. As did the red cloud kelpie sheep dogs who got to gorge themselves on the still warm, draining blood, as it fell red into vivid pools on the dry red earth. I wondered if this could turn the dogs into killers but they knew their place and revelled in their role. This was Life, and Death, and Life. Grandad did all that was required of a solo man on the land in a remote farm. He never seemed without things to do, but his pace was patient, easy, and one you felt comforted by. He was a living icon to me. We noticed how he ritually, carefully, peeled and sliced his one proverbial ‘apple a day’ when he could get them. He was the most intriguing master of the game of drafts. Would set you up to think you were winning and then take all of your 4 to 6 or more remaining men in an astonishing round the board final move – that you never saw coming. Baffling, mysterious, awesome and poker-faced, and playful. We revered him. Grandad was to pass suddenly from shock, upon the hearing of my father’s death in Dec 1969. So our mum lost both her husband and father at that same time. Our Dad was just 44. Both men loved my mum, my mother Mary. The experience of real danger and much death in war was common to both men and I think they genuinely loved and respected each other.

We swam in the main dam, or in the rain tanks when it was really dry, with Uncle Kevin. Grandad’s only Son, Kevin, our blue-eyed sunburnt uncle, had arrived quite late after the five girls. All those aunties were unique. Now they all are passed over. Mum too. God Bless. I asked our Grandma (Eileen) years later how she ‘got through it all back then?’… Six kids, farming, droughts, isolation, the heat and dry, pesky flies and that great tyranny of distance?

“I prayed every day” she said simply, with that ever present twinkling light in her eyes.

When ‘Granny’ laughed her tummy heaved gently I recall. She seemed like a little bellows of Joy. A beautiful, kind and gentle person. She made the best scones ever, in an ancient ever burning wood stove, for the shearers and for us. She was wonderful, and so was her eldest, ‘Mollie’ – Mary Ellen, our Mum. I must confess I took our mum entirely for granted, as many children will. Not only that, I imbibed the great myth of male superiority and the secondary roles of women generally. Fortunately I was to learn, and reframe, and in some small ways right, some of this attitude later. She like Dad was a Seeker too. There were no daughters in my father’s family. Funny that I should only ever have had daughters in mine.

My brother Kent and I first attended the tiny Bluff Point Catholic primary school near Geraldton WA. Both sides of our family were Catholic. I remember getting dressed up for my first ‘holy communion’. New clothes, shoes and shiny little prayer book, a solemn ceremony, but no more than that. Any expectations or hopes of religious experience were not fulfilled.

I had some sense of the potential of getting closer to Christ, but the emptiness of the ritualism and enforced demeanour by priest and paraphernalia only heightened a sense of disappointment. Mass and other church rituals were for me never quite a ‘moving experience’. I did have some respectful times in that tiny church when empty, and the hymns always felt the most real to me. God was nowhere visibly in sight therein, and so was a mystery to me, and to most others I suspected. Jesus was crucified on the cross, and all of us were born into original sin, supposedly. Mind you there was Mary and the baby Jesus. And there were some truly great Saints in Catholicism I later discovered. One can find great saints in all the great religions, if one should care to look past the exoteric displays and regalia. We can and should understand that ALL great religions have a very deep and real source of Mystic or esoteric experience, in the founders and saints, that all true saints have personally realised the One Truth and Reality that is “GOD IS”.

We lived firstly on the West Coast narrow two-lane ‘Highway’ in a pale blue painted asbestos clad house not far out of town. Cross the road, and railway track, and you were on the beach, and into and under the Indian Ocean. Duck diving, snorkelling, spear fishing and perhaps the great prize, rock lobster or ‘cray’: caught with a homemade barbed ‘gidgee’ on the reefs opposite. You can hear them cacking underwater. Also plentiful fish, small crabs, some squids and octopus, that seemed much scarier after seeing the movie ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.’

Oh. And the very occasional baby reef shark. One of these tiny predators tenaciously grabbed Kent by the forearm, and being in the shallows he dragged it from the water. No really serious harm done, only minor lacerations, and the tiny poor shark paid with its life for its impudence. But yes I remember quite a commotion about that at the time.

Imagine a time before TV, when the family radio, the drive-in, and kids Saturday movie theatre matinees, ruled our entertainment headspace. Big screen colour movies were awesome, and musicals a priority. Popular musicals came home on LP records. Rodgers and Hammerstein were the favourites. The art of the kids serial was to leave you on a cliff-hanger moment each week, ensuring your resolve to return.

TV, in snowy black and white test patterns, was first only glimpsed at night through the front window of the electrical store. In 1960 you needed a very tall antennae and favourable wind direction to gather that TV signal up from Perth, 300 miles to the South. Before TV in our country town it was the ABC national radio, and 6GE our local Geraldton radio station, that were our communication mainstays.

To listen in we had conventional radios, and tiny radio crystal sets, and of course the big family radiogram and record player to go with the large record collection, and mum’s piano. Some of the records were from kids cartoon soundtracks, with pics on the record covers. We knew every second of those by heart. Printed books, a wide variety, magazines, newspapers and comic book favourites like the Phantom, which were read until absolutely tattered.

Social family life almost always featured both laughter and lager in close proximity. Beer drinking I don’t think was a problem for our family, hard liquor or even wine was rarely seen, but I was too young to know I suppose. Plenty of cousins and relatives, and some friends made through school. Close friends to our family were few but they were strong and consistent over years, there through thick and thin. I remember when our youngest brother Shane was born in 59, mum’s good friend Elvie appeared in our house without notice, busily at work in the laundry and kitchen. Life was good and untroubled for us kids particularly.

Mum ‘s household policy was “clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy”. Like most mum’s she worked and cooked and cleaned tirelessly. To our shame we males at home took her entirely for granted. I never heard a bad word said of her, or a swear word from her, and my own friends enjoyed and were drawn closer by her easy, caring personality.

I remember Dad would sometimes pick us up from school at lunchtimes in the heatwaves, and in moments we are ferried back home, into bathers, over the road and into and under the water… and then quickest lunch, and back to school, before the end of the lunch break. True! Dad had Pisces in his chart too.

Living ‘down under’ in Australia was, and remains, a huge blessing. I am so grateful for those natural, innocent, and peaceful times. The Ocean. Bike adventures. Golf caddying and tennis courts. Big local bonfire nights on vacant blocks nearby, with many crackers and skyrockets. One huge ‘penny bunger’ went off right alongside my sandled foot. That was a memorable moment.

I remember us all out lying on the front lawn as we watched the night sky for the earliest of satellites, which could be seen with the naked eye. Anything in space in the 60’s was a great novelty. The Russians were up first with Sputnik, and later a dog, and then Yuri Gagarin.

I also remember long drives. Sometimes up and leaving very early in the still dark. One long trip South to Perth was suddenly scary when Dad and I rolled a big Ford Mercury at speed in a densely wooded area closer to Perth after a tyre blowout. Very lucky. Missed every tree. Car was totalled and yet we were both AOK, but had to fly back up home to Geraldton 300 miles North. I should have enjoyed that picturesque flight, but I was just a boy and still in shock from the rollover. A strange feeling, dulled, yet intense, like being frightened of something after its already happened.

My father, Max, entered the retail car business in Geraldton. He had always loved cars and so did I. Having been a detective sergeant in Melbourne in the Police first response ‘flying squad’, he could really drive, and he was also an expert shot. His first Army training was at just 16. He had lied about his age to get into the Army, as many did at that first call up. He was a natural marksman, an uncanny shot. When his age was revealed he was not able to continue. But it wasn’t very long before he was able to re-enlist and this time he joined the Air Force.

In the Army first, under-aged, my father trained as an anti-aircraft gunner, he was posted to Darwin. He was actually there when the Japanese first bombed Darwin and they fired back. A few years ago now we found a group picture there in Darwin with him in it, in the restored bomb-proof tunnels that you can still go inside and visit. He was in a posed publicity shot of a group of hard-hatted shirtless soldiers, second from right, playing a game of two-up.

Dad in the Airforce trained in Canada as a RAAF Sunderland flying-boat tail-gunner. He may have been pilot material perhaps, but I suspect as he was such a great shot that on big slow planes the tail gunner was a potent and important defence position requiring a variety of skills and uncanny anticipation. These flying-boats were called porcupines because of their heavy gun turrets but in spite of their fire power many were destroyed. In the second half of the War, they were 461 Squadron, flying out of England over the seas, under the UK Coastal Command, chasing down German U-boats. This was usually at night trying to catch these ‘wolf packs’ visibly in the moonlight, whilst on the surface. Dads pictures and stories from the UK posting were captivating and he saw live action there. Their squadron motto was “They shall not pass unseen.” (Sounds like Lord of the Rings J)

Many Australians in that 461 squadron of Sunderlands, 64 of 86 in all, lost their lives in action. One amazing sychronicity was that Squadron plane U-461 was responsible for sinking the German U-Boat U-461. In that engagement, against RAF regulations, they jettisoned their own on-board life-raft to those submariners left swimming in a freezing sea. Some of those saved and remaining members of both crews met after the war and became long term friends.

https://www.historicwartours.com.au/blog/2021/3/22/raaf-461-squadron-courage-amp-coincidence

An RAAF 461 Squadron Sunderland, registration “U” or “U-461”, under the command of Flight Lieutenant Dudley Marrows, joined the attack. “U-461” made one attempt flying in low and then dropping seven depth charges. A direct hit was made on one of the submarines. The force of the explosions broke up the submarine and it began to sink. Those of its crew who could, had no alternative but to abandon ship into the cold waters where survival unless rescued quickly, was unlikely. But, against RAF regulations, the 12 Australian crew of “U-461”, agreed to drop their plane’s life raft to the men in the water below. Only 15 of the 68 German crew survived the sinking. Coincidentally, the German submarine was the “U-461”, the same registration as the RAAF Sunderland.

Dad and mum met in Melbourne after the war. Both of them had been in the RAAF and were both Western Australians. They were married, in Bairnsdale VIC. There was a later family photo of dad with a Bugatti sports car after the war out front of the family’s first home, at Box Hill near Melbourne. I know he owned that car then, and I still wonder at its history. It had straps over a long bonnet and low-line doors. Those old Bugatti sports cars when preserved or restored nowadays literally sell for millions. The Bugatti business and brand was revived a few times over decades, and in the current era they still make superb Italian supercars, with very high performance, and prices.

From country Geraldton, down to city Perth, we moved for Dad to set up his own first used car yard in the early sixties. Max Keetley Motors. Mum did the office and books. Mechanical and cleaning bays down back. We lived in the small house situated in part of the car yard block, just behind where the offices looked out over the front yard and three lines of cars. Out the back there was a very big mulberry tree that we climbed, with huge amounts of berries in season. The rear workshop was a place of playful experimentation, some of it dangerous, playing naughtily with pieces of pipe and crackers! One projectile pipe flew out of the garage, over the caryard and out into the busy street out front. Luckily it made no impact with anything important. Stern warnings followed.

As a child I showed an innate ability for writing lyric poetry. Words came easily and I found inspiration everywhere. My family nickname was “Inky”. An early poem I scribed was called ‘A natural prism.’ that was about a chance encounter, seeing a radiant rainbow, beside a sunlit water-fall. This early lyric poem garnered some interest from family and teachers and it was highly ‘recommended’ that I should recite it out aloud at my first junior high school Speech Night. This was indeed a scary prospect, exposing myself as poet, author and speaker to a crowd. The prospect of speaking in particular quite horrified me. I flatly refused to do it.

However, as my fate and my father then dictated, I found myself alone on stage, in front of a big school quadrangle filled with many people, and my family. So what transpired was that, being too smart to read my own poetry, and too dumb to remember and recite it by heart, I crumbled to a most painful moment, unfinished, half way through the recitation… I recall what I imagined was ridicule and laughter. I left the stage shamefaced to a smattering of polite but awkward applause. My failure was transparent. I determined there and then, never, ever, to publicly speak again. And this was a promise that held sway for several years after.

Our father, Max, was immediately innovative and successful as a car dealer. He pioneered full warranties on ‘pre-owned’ cars, as well as personally presented TV ads, and also pioneered weekend and after-hours trading. The yard often had unusual and some high priced vehicles. He explored unrepresented brands like Studebaker, and imported lots of cars especially from Canada and the US. It seems I was always destined for the car business.

A heavy smoker since young, Dad developed chronic emphysema and was destined to die young a few years later at just 44, in 1969. I was 18. One of my first duties was to sell his Mercedes. Mum decided we should sell the hilltop sand-dune City Beach house which was acquired when we had to relocate finally to Perth for dads palliative medical care. So Mum and we boys designed and built another. We were still to live close to the beach, but less exposed. We designed into it a big purpose built rumpus room, to accommodate a large 10 foot snooker / pool table, and also to contain her three boisterous boys. This was a damaged 12 foot snooker table, rescued from a burnt out Kalgoorlie hotel and rebuilt for us anew by a real artisan and snooker table specialist.

It was quite a feat to get it manufactured and installed, but we were really putting down roots for an unknown but stable future without my father being with us. Originally built with 8 legs and 6 big 2 inch thick slates, just 6 legs and 5 slates survived, These were rescued, reshaped, plus new sides and cushions constructed, and the whole thing professionally installed. Around this table we gathered with friends for many hours, with mum’s caring, but not too intrusive, vigilance and support, over the next few years.

Dad had an ongoing interest in psychology. He was an orphan of well-off parents, who both died in his first two years. He was adopted and raised by relatives, who did not tell him for years he’d been adopted, and then he struggled to unravel this difficult and shrouded history. He sought professional psychotherapy, and read extensively, and even sampled LSD as a therapy in a hospital setting. He found that experience helpful and tried to tell me something about it. My response innocently and sincerely was “So what then? After that?” I could not quite fathom his responses. Could this type of intervention bring revelation, insight, and positive change? Since 2000, serious research into medical marihuana use and other hallucinogenics, including micro-dosing, for mental health is ongoing. Many people have been ‘self-medicating’ on these, prescription and other types of drugs. Prescription opioid use and abuse is widespread. Nowadays in Australia drug use policy and laws for personal possession are becoming less draconian. In my own experience with marihuana use in my twenties, after an initial period of relaxed enjoyment, I found it was demotivating, and that it then prompted paranoia over time. I saw it also lead others into other much more dangerous drug use.

My LSD experiences were part of my Seeking. These few trips were intense and profound but I recognised early this was a brief window of heightened perception, and then a period of burnout, but certainly not an authentic doorway into sustained enlightenment, knowledge or spiritual empowerment. In the 70’s we tried a few things. I wasn’t into alcohol, it made me either sick or tired. As I shared, marihuana was more attractive, but not of any productive value except as a relaxing and socialising agent. It became even less attractive over time and together with tobacco they had both became quite redundant by the time I was able to get spiritually awakened in 1983.

Dad learnt hypnosis, believed in the power of the mind (psyche) over the body (soma) and practised positive thinking. “Its not what happens, but how you take it.” Dad’s Catholic schooling, paid for from his parent’s estate, did little to endear him to conventional religious practices, but he developed his own sense of authenticity and integrity, and also a sense of the spiritual, as distinct from spiritualism, séances etc. Yet he sent us boys on to be taught by the Christian Brothers, one of whom, ‘Spud Murphy’ had traumatised him as a child. Still that ‘private school education’ option for us was as good as any scholastically, way back then. To some brothers and priests teaching was a real vocation. The best of them sought to help guide and foster potential when they encountered it. At least a few did so with me. I guess I was born curious and as they describe nowadays ‘an active learner’.

In Perth, my first Catholic junior high school, St Philips, (‘the grasshoppers’) where we wore green uniforms and berets, I left under a group expulsion, for some after-hours supermarket ‘shopping’. Childrens Court decided there would be no record for any of us but we all had to leave that school. And so I played out my new ‘naughty boy role’ at my next school, Christian Brothers College in Leederville. But as soon as I won a Commonwealth secondary scholarship, there was concerned and caring attention, and positive feedback, that got me again focussed on the positive path. Teachers reengaged with me and supervised my intrinsic interest and desire for progress in learning, at what may have been a potentially deviant time. They were focussed on scholastic achievement. What I realise now is that our projections and expectations, and our mindset or framing, really affect the responses we get.

I have learnt the value of ‘good finding’ as a growth facilitator. RECENT ARTICLE But I could say I have not mastered this art however because at times I could be quite liverish, picky or harsh, and sometimes really very angry at some people that I deemed off-centre. My Mum’s philosophy, she was a Libran, was essentially that what provoked or pained you in others was at some level your own stuff or ‘projection’. I realise now what a high level of psychological maturity she had. She was prompted by dad to also see a ‘shrink’ who after a few visits concluded she was remarkably well adjusted.

Many kids disappoint a parent. As my choice would have it, in 1968 I did not go to university after senior high school, much to mum’s chagrin. My grades were good. She imagined me as a safe professional pharmacist I recall. I had done very well at tech drawing at school. I had always been interested in architecture both classic and modern and had a flare for designs and drawing and so that became one possible career option. But I had also begun hanging out and helping at our newly built car yard in Geraldton. We had moved back up again and built another house at Bluff Point on the beach, and dad and mum named this one ‘Dunroamin’.

But for that moment, still at high school, I became a casual, but persistent after-school and even weekend worker, at times. So to his credit my father thought to put me to work manually at first in overalls, in the cleaning bay, and also down in the under-car pit in our garage and service areas, learning mechanical. Perhaps to test my interest and resolve, and also probably to expand my understanding of what’s really required in all parts of an auto dealership.

In the 60s my first ever paid job as a youngster had been casual picking work in a local market garden. Peas and tomatoes. Cars however were much more interesting and of immediate interest to a teenager soon to get their driving license. Kids bikes were fun but cars were freedom at an adult level. Both can be dangerous! One of my grandsons has just gotten a great birthday bike at 8. I recall as a youngster racing down a long footpath in Geraldton at near terminal velocity, only to see a car backing out of their driveway across the pathway. I froze. I pranged. It was destructive. I lived. Had a few such moments in life like that. You know when your in something inherently dangerous and out of control and everything starts to move into slow motion….

I hung out quite a bit with our car mechanic, Gordon, who had a great sense of humour. One day he took me for a supposed post-mechanical test drive in a car and when we were on a straight piece of road, without warning, he took the steering wheel off, and handed it to me in the passengers seat saying… “OK you drive then!”

I was a quick learner about cars and did a lot of cleaning or ‘detailing’ as we called it. I enjoyed it all, and was not deterred. Dad said things like “If you polish that car hard enough, someone’s name will appear on it.”

Later on at 17, (1968) now fully employed in the business, we would do wholesale buying trips together down to Perth where I learned more truisms from his car business wisdom like “Don’t worry, you can always get anything for a ‘plum’. And other great and universal standards that have stood long in commerce and life like…’Quality only hurts once.’

The first car I ever sold, a white HR Holden sedan, was to the local Sergeant of Police, on a Sunday, wearing my white cleaning overalls with ‘Keetley Motors Geraldton’ embroidered on the back in dark green. It was 1967. I was still sixteen. I really liked that car and recognised back even then that professional selling was little more than a suitably paced consultation and transference of belief. The goal was ‘helping the person to buy’ using a no-pressure interview and a paced presentation and/or demonstration aimed at the needs and wants of that particular buyer. “People love to buy but hate to be sold.” The Sergeant helped me get the car out from behind the display gates on the front line to go for a demonstration. A quick drive for him was all it took. I had to get my father to come down to the yard and sign him up. Dad had been a detective sergeant in Melbourne so they got on famously. Actually it was technically illegal after-hours trading but it wasn’t a crime, yet. Dad became famous for publicly championing such after hours and weekend trading for the car business. Another first of his.

I have always been captivated by the psychology of buying and people’s motivations. Why, do people do things? And buy things. So it seems pretty obvious now I was going into the car business, before I even had a license to drive one.

As it turned out, I got my drivers license on my 17^th birthday. The examiner was a local policeman and asked whether he had seen me driving before that day. I may have told him that was my brother. Qualifying for the drivers licence did not involve very much back then, 55 years ago.

We don’t really have a spiritual ceremony or ‘right of passage’ for young men transitioning to adulthood in the West. But getting your drivers license was something like that. Out on your own. Power and autonomy. You feel it when you put your foot down. Free at last!

My first motor-cycle ride was on the pillion of a little scooter. It was wildly exhilarating I still recall. Coupled with that new freedom to drive cars, I soon after had access to a motorcycle, an ancient and noisy BSA 650 we had traded in the caryard. Now that is another even more intense and more adrenaline charged way of flying down the road and putting yourself on the edge of danger. That bike had bits that would continue to fall off without notice. A great read at that time for me was ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’.

Regards motor cycles, next up was my first Honda ‘K1’ 750, a really powerful big 4 cylinder bike. One day in summertime Perth, with very young brother Shane on the back, and wearing only a Swiss cotton shirt, we were in an accident at a roundabout nearby the house in City Beach. I got up, ran over to berate and possibly assault the driver of the car involved. After a long moment I realised I had put the handlebar through into my abdominal cavity on the left hand side. I thought better of bashing the driver, though I felt he deserved one, and in a semi-feint of shock I sat down on the curb, as someone decided to call an ambulance. Shane was unhurt. He’d ridden my back as we flew forwards from the suddenly stationary bike. Over the years I’ve been heard to say that motorbike riders usually have the scars to prove it. Few years later I dropped another Honda 750, in Geraldton. A good leather jacket and boots bought in London meant only minor body damage. Not so the bike.

Just remembering Shane, eight years younger than I, and how much he was fun to be with. One night we snuck into the drive-in behind our temporary house and sat in the long grass to one side to watch the movie. I told him we were aok as long as we kept down and were not discovered, and he in perfect seriousness said “But what about when they play God Save The Queen?.” We still laugh about that one.

Shane had a small sturdy horse called Dapples that he went to pony club with. Dad rode horses too and bought several race horses over the years. Dapples preferred girls and boys to teenagers but would be coached into taking you round the old training race track nearby. Dapples knew the way home to his previous owners and so one day I had him up to a gallop ‘hard held on the rails’ as the race callers might say, when without notice he took a sharp right turn off the track and I flew, like off the Hondas, straight ahead. Not only was it super painful but I had to try and catch him up after my fall. Very unhelpfully he proceeded to meander home to his old place whilst I kept hobbling painfully after him, where he would then evade me for the next grassy patch. From then on all my steeds had motors.

By 1969 we had had to move again, finally, to Perth again for dad’s treatment, which now was little more than palliative care. He had a large oxygen bottle, a facemask and nebulizer on tap constantly by his bed. His condition worsened. He’d stopped playing golf and even going out. At the end he took himself off to a motel and resolved the interminable incapacity and suffering. My elder brother Kent and I went to the motel. He had not intended to be discovered in time, and I could not fully enter that room. A glimpse of his feet was sufficient.

My father was himself a bit of a legend in the auto industry and he was still interested and helpful in my blossoming career in the industry, up to his last. Some of us are lucky enough to have had a really good life mentor. Worldly wise, inspirational, principled and street smart. He was mine.

At 17 I was already a good new car salesman and reported to him at home on different things. Sadly he was to pass in 1969 when I was 18. I took it very hard. So did both my brothers, and mum of course who lost her father a few days later upon hearing about my dad. She and we organised to build another new house in Perth near the beach at Scarborough for us all, for her, and we three young men, to face the future. I went ahead into the car industry for the next 5 years.

By the time I was 22 in 1973 I had started a new car business and become a Honda and Volvo dealer, trading as Motor Car Sales Pty Ltd, the ‘Home of the Straight Deal.’ Also started an innovative new business in partnership, Roadside Auto Services, like the callout RAC, only as a pay-for-use-service. Then I had what I’ve jokingly referred to as my first mid-life crisis, at 22 years of age.

In truth it was almost my second life crisis. Upon my fathers death in 1969 I was profoundly saddened with grief. Also I was loath to say this out loud but my reactions included a sincere but very ego-centric question. “How could he do this to me?”

I went ahead for a few years, did very well in the car industry, married a girl Jamesie who looked a lot like my mum, and bought a country property up in the hills behind Perth. I called it ‘Shalom’. I should have been able to say ‘I’ve arrived’. But I could not. I awoke one morning. I said to myself, “You are not happy. Why is that?”

I have found that this is a common experience in Life, amongst some ‘Seekers of Truth’. Often their worldly life and goal successes have been achieved, sometimes early, and sometimes easily, and yet these have NOT been found to be satisfying. Somehow for true Seekers, life goals and external achievements become increasingly meaningless and unimportant.

One gets to a point of reflection, of pausing and questioning. Who am I? What am I doing? Why am I pursuing these things? Sometimes relationship endings are a coincidental key to beginning what you might like to call ‘the Seekers Journey.’

Somewhere along their life journey it dawns upon such Seekers that the important answers, like the Kingdom Of Heaven itself, all lie within. That of themselves, there are no extrinsic people, places, things, titles or roles that can give you, or assure you, of real and lasting personal fulfilment. One may call this Seeking a desire and need for goodness, or worth, or wholeness, or God.

When one becomes a student, or a teacher, or mentor, or a sales or service person, or a manager, or parent, one comes around to an interest or study of psychology. Understanding people. What are their motives, their personality types and style structures? How do people grow up? How do we acquire wisdom and maturity? What are our innate drives, needs and satisfactions? What are the keys to Life, and to self-realisation, to creating sustainable health and true fulfilment? Psychology then leads us to Philosophy, the love of Wisdom.

Soon after my return to Perth from my concurrent ‘time outs’ in Qld and UK, I acquired a self-development self-study program from a Texas based company called SMI. The Success Motivation Institute programs facilitated life goal introspection, prioritisation, self-determination and offered some great lessons, insights and models in manuals and cassettes.

The focus was on one’s own personal development. The approach was individual and holistic, that is, in its pie of life depiction, there was a spiritual slice. The foundational SMI program was called the ‘Dynamics of Personal Motivation’. It was timely. I got a lot out of this modularised course and so I was an obvious person to subsequently become an advocate and agent for this SMI company courseware. It helped people to get their lives together.

As Life and ‘Kismet’ would have it my now wife and partner, Colleen, in New Zealand, about 1987 discovered the same program and company and became an agent herself for SMI. She had also become a spiritual Seeker, and like myself had found Sahaja Yoga meditation and Shri Mataji. We were married in 1995, having met just a couple of years before.

The first SMI lesson began with “We are conditioned people.” This is such a basic idea, but really opens us to the reality that much of our thinking is conditioning and may have been unexamined and also so limiting that we may never get beyond it. Conditionings of course can be either good or not good. Supportive or restrictive. Typically Evolution and Growth happen in progressive stages. The idea that we are mostly sleep-walking and content to just be ‘fitting in’ to paltry personal or collective comfort zones, or chasing meagre goals that you may have never actually chosen, is disconcerting. To realise how accepting we are of stultifying and lasting straight jackets of conformity, and how much we may choose to live lives ‘of quiet desperation’ as the song says, is to invite ill health and unhappiness. I say we are meant for infinitely more than this but we must awaken to our true Nature.

One early understanding on the path to ‘knowing one self‘ and others is simply to notice that importantly…

“We trust and like people like ourselves.” Great persuaders are aware of this. They tend to really listen to and ‘pace’ their customers to get in step with them. This builds Rapport with others. Rapport is a French word meaning literally to ‘also carry’. We can recognise that good communication is often about having things in common. My first fully fledged consulting and training company was called Rapport Consulting, formed in 1979. I was 28 and it was to be a career move lasting 22 years until 2001. A second separate company The Automotive Agency was also created to specialise in that industry. Here’s a short summary as of Rapport’s consulting career:

I specialised in Sales, Marketing and Human Resource development courses and interventions, usually tailored in-house and delivered live to suit requirements of that organisation. My 8 sliced Whole Person holistic model worked well for self-assessment and personal life planning, often used as a prelude and part of collectively co-created organisation strategic planning. A specialty of mine. Building personal balance and building collectively agreed purpose and principles was the key.

Big ongoing clients were Zurich Insurance and auto manufacturers including Mercedes, Honda, GM, Ford, Toyota, and Volvo Cars and Trucks. My first family trip to Uluhru was paid for by GMH for a dealer conference presentation. Mercedes supplied a new model quarterly as part of my training and consulting for them. All programs were based on real world experience and learnings. In the period 1979 to 2001 I wrote and delivered tailored training workshops and designed HR and strategic “Big Picture” holistic development and planning programs for several corporations and non-profit organistions.

These Big Picture holistic strategy programs included Whole Person individual planning and Type-Style Profiling, and three’What If?’ questions first, before an organisational Quadrants Matrix for analysis and planning via more conventional SWOT and SOS strategy co-design. My approach was to involve everyone bottom up in the reframing, design and realisation of collectively devised and held Purposes, Principles and Vision.

Importantly I would use an inverted triangle, and my flat Circular Quadrants, corporate structure, thinking it through from the Customers view as central. Essentially re-framing the group around those it was serving. Who were its customers and major stake-holders, and how to empower the people who were serving. Plus How to work with the Elephants in the room, the heavy hitters and egotists.

This approach was born out of experience as a trainer where I realised the need to first interview training group participants and discover their motives and priority and also their problems and experiences in doing their jobs so that they really wanted to learn, contribute and become better at their jobs.

I also experimented with secular style and holistic Corporate Meditation, including Being Aware and Stress-Less programs and delivered these for some government depts, some schools, a uni, a NFP, several companies and an indigenous mens rehab org. I am still to find a corporate that routinely uses a meditation to start a group session or a working day. Went close with an architectural group but they did not sustain a regular group practice by themselves. Also in the 90’s worked in Hong Kong and Tokyo, where I lived for a few years. By that era I was a dedicated proponent of Sahaja Yoga.

PLEASE NOTE – Sahaja Yoga programs, paradigms, and resources appear on the website www.GODIS.au

But we digress:

My first mid-life crisis was way back in 1972. An awakening to deep disatisfaction that required serious introspection, questions and answers. Personally I had been over-responsible. I had been carrying on resolutely to fulfil not my own personal intrinsic desires, but rather my father’s. This was a real wake-up and a watershed moment. So at 22 I sold out of all business.

My first marriage of just two years ended, and so I absconded and went surfing with my dog Duchess in a VW decked-out combie and lived for half a year of time-out near Noosa in Qld. After that, still unsettled, I returned to WA and went straight on to the UK for more time-out where I lived in London in a shared house at Hendon. I also left Duchess, with her sister Paysak, who was with good family friends in Geraldton and where she stayed thereafter.

Life in London was great in the early 70s. The big house in Hendon was stacked with a large group of up to 16 itinerant Aussies, some of whom I knew as youthful friends from early days in Geraldton. I loved London and many times had ‘Déjà vu’ (‘already seen’) sensations there. Felt particularly drawn to Hampstead Heath and surrounds. Young Australians are prized in the UK for their openness, work ethic and historic love of Mother England. We lived. Some working, and partying, and toured the Continent and sucked in the music and culture of the very early 70s. One of the girls at the house worked for a radio station. She brought home pre-release albums like Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield and Moondance by Van Morrison. It was gratifying just to be there (again?), fancy free and enjoying life.

Eventually I decided to return home to Australia to seriously contemplate my own future. I decided on a career essentially in Marketing, the part of business I was good at. I first got a job in media sales for Channel Nine in Perth. Then a sales manager appointment in Outdoor Advertising for Australian Posters. This was a great opportunity to develop what I called “the 4^th Primary Advertising Medium.” At the time there was only the ‘Big 3’ media of TV, Radio and Press, No Internet! I repackaged and relaunched the company’s offerings there and upped its advertising commissions.

Then I sold an unprecedented ‘all available sites’ campaign for a rebranded Perth radio station 6ky, and printed locally there for the first time large full colour outdoor billboards and major super-sites, plus street and shopping centre posters that went up absolutely everywhere. It worked well. And so Perth ad agency demand for posters in their campaign media mixes took off. Also advertising agency creative staff really took to the artistic opportunity of designing memorable posters. ‘An essence in as few words as possible’.

While working in Perth in 1979 as the sales manager for Australian Posters in WA, I sold a beautiful national supersite billboard poster campaign to Air India called “India Is Waiting” which worked so well for me so as to include a very favourably priced return trip to the UK for two. This first trip to India then included a ‘bump-up’ to first class and a personal level of VIP service from the flight crew. The plane was decorated inside and out with Mughal style décor. Their motif at the time was “The airline that treats you like a Maharajah”

As part of my Seeking, I had read very closely the ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ a book by Paramahansa Yogananda and started attending the local Self Realisation Fellowship, SRF, meetings with my girlfriend Rachel. I had lots of questions and read everything they had.

Yoganada was the first popular Indian guru that had come to the West, at the suggestion of his guru, Shri Yukteswar. Yogananda got established on the coast in California and a nearby surf spot where he swam was called “Swamies”. Yoganada’s book was popular with some surfers, who applied themselves to yogic practices of different types, and still today surfers are compelled to find timeless, silent moments in the flow-states of getting ‘tubed’.

I recalled he said “Man has come on this Earth to know about God. He is here for no other reason.”

The SRF followers in Perth were sensitive, beautiful, and devoted to their practice of Kriya yoga and meditation. I thought possibly to get in touch with SRF in India. However India, if you are lucky enough to get to put your feet on Her, gets in touch with you.

“India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend and the great grand mother of tradition” – Mark Twain.

No matter where you might have been in the World, if you haven’t been to India, I would say that your travels are incomplete. Particularly if you have an interest in the Religions, and their common heritage, the direct apprehension of God. – Mystic Spirituality.

Hinduism as a name may be called a religion in the West but rather Hinduism is actually a collective compendium of sustained spiritual endeavour, experience and understanding. It permeates all the cultures of India. Some of the most holy, heavenly and auspicious places in India are in the highest places. In the high Himalayan mountains of India there is a heavenly place, the vale of Kashmir. The Himalayan mountain range, the ‘roof of the World’ rises in a giant stretch from Pakistan, through Kashmir, North India, Tibet, Nepal and into Western China. Kashmir sits in the junction of Pakistan, North India and Nepal. It has catered to tourists and trade since long.

A centrepiece on the great Silk Road, Kashmir’s cool high lakes and wetland gardens have beckoned weary travellers and intrepid souls for millennia. Snow fields and chalets provide some of the best and least expensive skiing in the World. Holiday makers and honeymooners from India travel North from the hot dry plains up into one of the most beautiful and restful places in the World. Religious and territorial disputes can erupt nearby but the heavenly vale peacefully persists as it has always done. Many who tour or traverse India head for Kashmir.

There in India all religions are accepted and practised. This Maha Bharat or ‘great land’ has accommodated, understood and integrated all manner of religious practices and people.

A well researched book from around my first visit to India time was by a young German, Holger Kersten, and was titled ‘Jesus Lived In India’. Jesus is said to be buried in a tomb in Shrinigar, Kashmir. His appearance there as “Issa” is well recorded. The book also closely researched the Turin Shroud which was deemed to be authentic, but showed that blood ran from wounds after the body was interred. This idea has proved vexing for the Catholic Church in that it may confound doctrinal perspectives on the Resurrection, and so as Google reports: * Currently the Catholic Church neither formally endorses nor rejects the shroud, and in 2013 Pope Francis referred to it as an “icon of a man scourged and crucified”. The shroud has been kept in the royal chapel of the Cathedral of Turin, in northern Italy, since 1578.

At the start of this personal story and recollections section I referred to a re-birthing experience I had had in a personal development course. I also identified at that course the deeply held contractual obligation I had been holding unconsciously with my father, which read “I had to be strong, to be loved by dad.” It was a cathartic procedure to free myself from this conditioning by reversing it, namely to say persistently to my unconscious “I don’t need to be strong, to be loved by Dad.”

I capitalise the word Dad because like my earthly father I had to recondition later on the same sort of unconsciously held beliefs and conditionings, that I had to be strong to be loved by our Divine Father, as well. I also had to discover that I and my father, my brothers and many men globally have held seriously negative conditionings, beliefs and attitudes about the earthly feminine, the Women of Earth. We were truly ignorant about the reality or even possibility of a Divine Feminine. A Deity of Unlimited Power. The Great Mother.

Yes when I was a Catholic boy it was only Father, and Son, and perhaps a Dove, or worse, a male only ‘Holy Spirit’. But Truly? A Father, Son, and no Mother? All of us are born of an Earthly mother. And all of us can be ‘born again’ of our Holy Spiritual Mother.

It has been a vain attempt by males, and an in vain attempt, to reduce Deity to male only representations. All the values and colours and varities of this Infinite Creativity are the manifestations of God’s Creative Desire and Powers. She is the Creatrix, that works, and does all the Living work, and He is the Consciousness, the Universal One, that watches.

Humanity’s Divine Mother is the Holy Spirit, who is ever present and powerful, and ever ready to Comfort, Counsel and Redeem us from our fearfully immersed, dreadfully ignorant and spiritually alienated states. I absolutely cringe at the way the males of the world generally disrespect and are ignorant of the true feminine. The cost of this oversight is a global catastrophe in the making. The Mother Earth. The Mother Nature. The Mother in society. All are denigrated, and all these are currently in danger of complete disintegration.

At Easter, the World symbolizes and celebrates the over coming of our fear, inhumanity, and even death, in the symbolic form of the Easter Egg. A universal symbol of rebirth and freedom, the egg symbolises resurrection. At this time Jesus becomes ready to demonstrate he has become the Christ, that he has achieved and manifested Union with His Spiritual Father, and is willing to undergo and fulfil His Destiny. Whilst praying in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus surrenders His will to the Will of His Father and agrees to passively be subjected to the trials of the crucifixion.

Then after this personal ego death experience He rises again and in due course rises ultimately into God’s Heaven. In India the process of being spiritually reborn is called ‘Dwijaha’ meaning ‘twice born’. Firstly a person is born, with an enclosed personality like an egg, and secondly when the Kundalini rises from the Sacrum bone, up through the Fontanel bone area and breaks through to give spiritual rebirth, as a free bird, a spiritually realised and liberated person.

Jesus confronts His unique destiny, and in highest super-conscious Yogic Communion, He accepts the Will of God, as he is destined to do. He understands it is by surrendering His own free will, that He is to achieve His final Liberation, and fulfil His Divine Destiny. He must surrender to the Will of God and submit to the cruel ordeal and deathly drama of crucifixion.

This sacrifice we can understand both shows, and opens, the Way, for us to evolve and spiritually ascend and achieve our freedom too. The Easter Egg is the symbol of rebirth.

We are like a bird or Dwijaha (twice born). We are born first as an egg, a basic human, and then we are born again by breaking the egg of our entrapments, and then we are free to fly.

The Easter Egg is about the breaking of the shell of our ignorance and conditioning, and becoming Awake to our Destiny of Ascent, and flying free.

Being ‘born again’ is not a self-certifying, or clerical, empowerment. It is a person who is Seeking God humbly, at a time when they are ready to surrender Body, Mind and Ego to God, and something happens inside. They get their second-birth when the Yogic Power of pure desire, the Kundalini, rises to break through at the fontanel bone area at your crown.

The White Dove of Peace is the symbol of the Holy Spirit. She is the Divine Feminine.

This great essential Truth has been shrouded by male clerics since the days of Paul of Tarsus.

My namesake, Paul or Saul, never met Jesus, was Roman, and was responsible for the reformatting that undermined and replaced the original Gnosticism (Gnosis means Knowing) of personal spiritualisation, and so helped create the Roman state hierarchy religion of Roman Catholicism which has been a binding and a blinding, and not a liberation on Humanity.

Incidentally the Catholic accounts of Christ say it was the Jews who asked for the crucifixion. In the Buddhist accounts, Issa or Jesus was crucified by the Romans, and were not encouraged by the Jews. Saul or Paul was of course a senior Roman and a senior Jew, and did actively persecute and kill the early Christians, before his conversion experience.

Like most modern religions the culprits are virtually all male. These guys turn a living religion of personal revelation and self-realisation, of Truth, Beauty and Awareness, into a political, money and power mechanism that soon represses the followers by means of dogma, ceremonial ritualism and control. The placement of un-enlightened clerics, usually with false morality, who reign over the followers using fear of God and damnation, is an abomination of the greatest magnitude. And as if the hypocrisy is not enough, the amount of corruption and/or physical abuse that often goes with this is truly mind-boggling. Mind you, we should not be surprised because we do know in reality, that political power and money when sought, almost always corrupts. And that religious intolerance is never true religion.

The pure Divine Power of the Holy Spirit lies coiled in the Sacrum Bone of Human beings.

She is there ready to rise and to give us individually, Second Birth. But can She? and when will She, rise Collectively? Individual Liberty comes before Collective Liberty it seems. Can we Rise to the challenge of becoming Christ Consciousness, and surrender our Will?

Leonard Cohen sings mournfully ‘The Holy Dove, of Peace. Bought and sold and bought again. The Dove is never Free’. Truly? Is it true that Humanity can never transcend its Earthly ignorance? Become emancipated? Let us sincerely hope and pray that Humanity can be liberated.

The emancipation of Humanity has begun in earnest. It should happen. It must happen. And soon. From what I have seen it can happen enmasse, initially as a movement of initiation programs. But can these initiates, these Yuvas or young Yogis, ‘Become’? This third stage of Becoming I would say is more ‘one by one’ at the moment. So far at least. However the few can become the many. The few can and do help subtle create pathways for the many.

Some birds in any batch are early achievers. They struggle to get free, to stand and to fly. Its not easy to be the first in any family. Its not easy to be first Lemming off a proverbial cliff. Its not easy to Touch the Transcendent God-Self and to Become the Spirit. But increasingly it has become easier individually, and so I suspect it will become more accessible, collectively.

Jung was an extraordinary Seeker who worked out so much. He saw a better age coming and predicted two shifts he saw us approaching. One was the dawn of ‘Equality between the sexes’. The other was of a ‘Collective Consciousness’ where we would become much more concerned with Whole World and Whole Humanity issues.

We are waking up Collectively.

Some of these shifts are driven by circumstance. Our excesses and transgressions in ignorance and arrogance are tipping balances that are becoming difficult, or even impossible for now, to correct. Some shifts are being drawn and driven by Evolution – which is the Power and Purpose of the Divine Desire. Either way, its high time for us to Awaken to our Divine Destiny. It is our Choice.

Serious students of spirituality cannot overlook the land of yogis, Yoga Bhoomi – India

On my first trip to India I landed in Delhi. It was early morning still and quiet outside the Airport. As we taxied into the city, a large grey elephant and rider materialised dreamlike from the grey early mist and haze. It paced easily, slowly, majestically, as only an elephant can, along the side of the road. This was India.

Like no other part of the World, India is an almost timeless place that has witnessed many invaders who eventually are pacified and incorporated into a multifaceted yet almost seamless culture. At the heart of India the women carry this culture which celebrates the Divine Feminine proclivity for infinite variety, humour and goodwill towards people. A million colourful and intricate saris. A billion ready smiles. A steadiness and rhythm that is implacable and assured.

India is gracious. Bharata Mata. Mother India, for She is certainly a Mother, does what all good mothers do. She loves, and feeds and raises all Her children in impossible numbers and passes on Her eternal wisdom and kindness in the dharma or ways of daily life. ‘Dharmas’ are the necessary rules for sustainable human life. Dharmas are eternal, but are rediscovered by all the sustainable cultures, and so are inherent in all the great religions of the World. Dharmas protect us from sin. And so help us keep the Balance in our evolutionary ascent.

My first friends in India as it turned out were Kashmiri carpet traders in Delhi. I had bought hand made traditional carpets in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul years before and just loved them. I had gleaned some understanding of knotting, thread counts, dyes, designs and regions, and I just loved carpets. Like humans, each one beautiful, unique and with a story.

Arguably amongst the best salespeople in the world I suspect are oriental carpet dealers, where the object was never to persuade, “just see”, which of itself sounds like a pure meditation instruction.

I felt comfortable just being with these people and tasted their food and culture and the Great Religion of Islam, of Surrender, to the religion of the One God. Planning to go to Kashmir I naturally networked with them and by the time I ascended off the dry and dusty plains of India up into the vale and water gardens of this ‘heavenly valley’ I was booked to stay on a beautiful old luxury houseboat on Dal Lake, auspiciously named “Mother India”

A modern book in 1944 that relates to Kashmir and spirituality was “The Razors Edge” by Somerset Maughn. This book has twice been turned into a Hollywood movie. The first was in black and white in 1946 with Tyrone Power. The story is about a young man who goes off to find himself after returning from war. The movie was retold in 1984 with Bill Murray as the star, who also co-wrote the remake of the screenplay. It was shot in part in Kashmir and Murray made a deal with Columbia that if he agreed to make Ghost Busters they would make The Razors Edge.

Murray was trying to transcend his merely comic type roles and thereafter actually ran away from Hollywood to live in Paris, just like in the movie, only to be lured back by his friend Harold Ramis from Ghost Busters (1984) to make Groundhog Day (1993), another comedy, not about dead spirits, but one deeply grounded in symbolic Eastern spirituality.

Somerset Maughn was a writer who like Herman Hesse was concerned with the individual’s journey into maturity and Spirituality. A favourite Hesse short story from his Nobel prize winning book (The Glass Bead Game) was ‘An Indian Life’. Essentially this short story was about the Play of Maya, illusion, and how we get lost in the World of dreams, entanglements and transitions that ultimately burn out and leave us with the pure desire to integrate and transcend and begin the Great Work, of finding and realising God-Self or Spirit, personally.

I did not find my spiritual practice in India but I soaked up wonderful experiences travelling there. From Delhi I took a bus across North India and up into Nepal. It was an English bus, a Bedford, that had travelled overland through the Middle-East on the traditional hippy trail from Amsterdam to Katmandu. That well travelled ‘Journey To The East’ (another novel by Herman Hesse), through Iran and Afghanistan was becoming increasingly dangerous, both politically and geographically. The bus, driven by a Welshman and owned by an Englishman, was equipped with a good sound system and my fellow travellers were all adventurers of one sort or another.

Its an epic journey to travel into Nepal. The mountains become true tests for men and machines. These roads are perilously narrow and twisty. Some turns are unbelievably tight. Good for one vehicle at a time in some places. The bus would have to seesaw in three-point turns around some corners to make it. Magic moments included a full moonlit night, listening to Supertramp, staring into the apparently bottomless abyss on one side, and virtually scraping sheer rock walls on the other. These are real mountains of great heights standing as immortal sentinels in dark silhouette. Truly memorable.

I’m an experienced driver I thought, but great bus drivers are a special breed apart. In India and Nepal they have a most alarming habit of charging head long at each other only to swerve at the very last second. Horns blaring. Truck drivers also. There is occasional evidence of failed efforts to avoid each other. In Nepal there are wrecks destroyed and in unrecoverable situations, having failed to stay on the mountain roads, or to keep out of each other’s way.

We travelled on up to Pokhara, in close view of Mount Annapurna, the tenth highest mountain in the World. And the most deadly for climbers. We parked by the lake and I found accommodation in a small garden cottage owned by a Nepalese retired Gurkha major, and his English wife, Rose. She towered over him in height yet he was a short man of great stature.

The Gurkha’s rightly earned a fearsome reputation as warriors, wielding their famous khukuri knives. At first being found almost unconquerable by the English, who were always in need of effective soldiers for the Empire, they then recruited them enmasse into Gurkha regiments in the British army. Against the Japanese, fighting alongside Australians at times, they were a formidable and stealthy force. They also enlisted in the Indian Army regiments.

Our bus as it turned out got bogged next to the lake in Pokhara. It took us a few glorious extra days to get a big Army truck to pull the Bedford out. That was no problem for me. I happily extended my cottage stay. I would have liked to stay on in this heavenly garden for very much longer. Those mountains make you thoughtless.

The people of Nepal I found very special. Things may have changed in 45 years but all the Nepalese I have met are extremely friendly, humorous, sweet and generous. At some impromptu stops, when I was there, they would take you off the bus into their simple homes and their hospitality and kindness were most sincere.

Our spiritual teacher and Guru and God-Mother, Shri Mataji, was often close to Gandhiji as a child together with Her father, Prasad Salve who was a great scholar and spiritually awake person. He was a founding political leader at the time of India’s independence and first government. Ghandhi called the young Nirmala Salve ‘Nepali’ as Her face was round, serene and cheerful, like many Nepalese appear. Much more about Shri Mataji later.

After just a brief stay in Katmandu we flew back to Delhi along the majestic grand vista of the high Himalayas. Delhi is a wonderful compilation of two cities. The old and the new.

Not far away is another Jewel of India, the Taj Mahal, near Agra. We were there luckily around the full moon. We had been befriended by Jesus during the day, a wellspoken and connected guide, astride an immaculate tricyle rickshaw. This had been gifted to him by a German tourist he explained.

To see the Taj during the day was impressive, but at night even more so. The architecture is archetypal and the workmanship is sublime. Inlays of semiprecious stanes and beautiful motifs of animals and birds. Via his connections, Jesus was able to take us into the Taj gardens after hours. At night in the full moon the Taj becomes really luminescent and seems ready to rise up. That night, after our late night visit inside the grounds, we rode back to our hotel along the well manicured terraces. It was a very beautiful and quiet night. At one point I jumped out to soak it up and stretched into a run alongside the trike. It was a balmy moonlit night and it had all seemed rather magical, and other worldly.

In the few days we were in Delhi I had become very keen on Tandoor chicken and nan with fresh lime sodas. Perhaps I thought I might have been part of the Raj in an earlier time. A few years later I herded a few yogis into Connaught Place to experience these delights again.

Whilst back in Delhi again I arranged one of the great transcontinental train journeys of the World, from Delhi to Madras, traversing over two and a half days and fabulous nights the great plain states including the mystical Maharastra, great land of saints.

We finally arrived at the very far shore of my much loved Indian Ocean, where the magic continued at Mahabalipuram, on the coast nearby to Madras.

The beaches at Mahabalipuram are near to a Shiva stone carved temple and there is history that there was a total of 7 temples nearby but the rest have been covered by the Ocean. I spoke to one of the fishermen who was temporarily beached there and explained that I swam in and surfed waves in this very Ocean. I pointed to the South East towards our very distant Western Australia. I’m not sure if he got my meaning. He smiled. The innocence and beauty of the Indians and Nepalese speaks to a spiritual culture that transcends the measures of Time.

Whilst sitting quietly by myself on the beach there, from quite a way away, a young boy of maybe 8 or 9 approached. He respected my meditation and when I was ready he spoke to me of these seaside and submerged temples and their history. He explained there was a new school of sculpture now to revive the stone arts, which he was attending. He handed me a heavy hand sized grey quartz stone statue of Shri Ganesha, seated in full posture and regalia.

The stone itself had tiny flecks of light reflecting from granules. He tried to just give the statue to me but I was insistent I should pay him. I had thought to buy a Shiva statue but knew less of Ganesh. It is seen as auspicious if someone gives you your first Ganesha. The colour of Shri Ganesha in carved stone is usually grey, just like an elephant.

On this my first trip to India it was a further sign or augury of my Seeking that would come to full fruition on the 22^ndApril 1983 in Perth, on the other side of that Indian Ocean. But well before that could happen there needed to be an escalation in my experimentation, research and spiritual Seeking.

To be a Seeker is to be a soul that has a thirst for Spiritual knowledge and experience.