My Own Self Actualization 'Path' - Part 1

Introduction

Me in June 2005 (left) and May 2008.
Spot an important difference (apart from my age)?

This page was originally entitled My Self Healing Path, but I now consider it healthier to let go of the whole notion of 'healing' and think in the much more positive term of 'self actualization' or 'self realization' (two terms for the same thing) instead - a bit like regarding the glass of water as half full rather than half empty, except actually there's MUCH more to it than that, as becomes clear as this account unfolds particularly in Part 2. However, I'm leaving intact most of my earlier references to healing in order that search queries for healing and self healing will still find this page.

Important note (yes, another!)

I now understand that most of what self healing methods are mentioned below, from the time I got into spiritual healing, and the 'spiritual reality' associated with them, are highly problematical because they are involved in the agenda of the dark force to keep us in illusion (and indeed to varying extents controlled by the dark force) and lure us away from the simple means to true, full self actualization that would free us from all power / control agendas (always sourced from the 'dark force').

Thus the following account is very much of how the dark force sought repeatedly to sidetrack me (and indeed to destroy me!) and how, bit by bit, I pulled myself out of all that jungle, freeing myself from dark force interference and influence. It is important, therefore, that readers do not jump to quick conclusions from particular parts of the following about what my own outlook is now, nor indeed on what any 'higher reality' may really be.

Some of the information on this page has appeared in other writings on this site, but here my aim is to bring it all together into a coherent whole, so that people can get ideas most readily to assist them on their own self healing paths. Where possible I keep the length of this page to a minimum by referring the reader to accounts, descriptions and explanations that I've given on other pages - so the links I give are important ones that need following up to get the full picture.

I want to emphasize that, as explained below, for much of my life I followed a particularly tough self healing path, with only very belated recourse to painless fast track methods. I am not suggesting that anyone else should follow my own route - no matter whether all or even any of it - though I think many will find some helpful pointers for themselves.

Inevitably this page will give further ammunition to those who seek to dismiss or discredit me, pointing to this as yet another piece of rambling on about myself on a mega-ego trip. On the other hand others will see this page as another example of my being prepared to fearlessly use anything in my life process as 'demonstration model' for the benefit of others - which indeed is my intention. How many spiritual teachers or indeed teachers of healing or 'self realization' tell you openly and honestly about their own self healing / self actualization path in its fullness so that you could learn from that? I don't know of any, though there must be some. I hope that others will take some leaves from my book and do this themselves.

Up to my emotional crisis

My childhood tribulations were in a sense part of my lifelong healing process, because in the long term they were drawing my attention to issues that needed attention. Born in 1942, I had the most troublesome night hells (aka night terrors) up to the age of six. I felt immensely lonely and often deeply sad. I was bullied and ridiculed at school, and sought solace in my natural history interest, getting away frequently to local public woodlands to collect insects, which were central to my interest, and, later, lizards and snakes.

At puberty I discovered masturbation and then soon became frightened as I came to realize that my erotic feelings were all towards people of my own gender. The social environment at that time was pervasively homophobic, so I felt that I could not reveal my so-called homosexuality to anyone and was terrified of anyone finding out.

About that time I woke up to my deep music interest and connection, when I heard Stravinsky's Petrouchka for the first time - it hit me like a bombshell and had me electrified. Yet my response to this awakening was to keep it to myself and hide my musical interest from virtually everyone until after I'd left home in 1967. Even during my last years at school, increasingly I had music composing itself in my mind, but again I hid this fact from everyone, and in any case I'd not learnt to read or write music, so could not act on it at all.

All these experiences compounded my increasingly desperate feeling of loneliness. Once I'd moved from home for a job at the Animal Virus Research Institute at Pirbright in Surrey, I 'came out' about my musical interest and started collecting records, exploring pretty well exclusively 20th Century music, as I didn't feel much resonance with the earlier music that I heard played so much. So, although I was getting some more sharing of interest with my few friends, I was still out on a limb with my own particular musical interest and tastes, and longed to meet others with whom I could really share such music and the deep experiences I had.

A growing pressure to heal

In 1971 two crucial things happened for me. First, there was a local performance (in Guildford) of Bohuslav Martinu's powerful choral work, The Epic of Gilgamesh. This shook me up emotionally a good deal. I then bought the Penguin edition of the legend known as The Epic of Gilgamesh, and felt unprecedentedly strong emotion as I read it, being on the verge of crying, though valiantly not allowing that to happen because I'd grown up with the notion that adults don't cry except when a 'breakdown' occurs. However, that legend seemed to have loosened something up, for my longings were coming increasingly to the surface and the underlying emotional pain was also pressing at me increasingly.

Later in 1971 I took a bold step and recognised that I was feeling so lonely and devoid of real friends that I had nothing to lose in 'coming out' about my being 'gay'. Then I started meeting 'gay' men and was revolted at the superficial, unloving, manipulative attitudes and behaviour manifested by those 'gay' men who I encountered, and soon withdrew from that whole scene, resolving not to meet anyone on the basis of their sexual orientation or indeed their gender. That was all very well, but it left me isolated again. I intuitively knew from deep within myself the sort of relationships that were meaningful to me (apparently true soul mate relationships, though in much later hindsight I can say that 'apparently' is the operative word here, because the concept of the soul mate is a pernicious deception that has come to us from the 'dark side'), and I'd learnt from experience that my whole being was not going to settle for less, even if it meant my remaining on my own for quite some time to come.

During the summer of 1972 I was beginning to feel desperate, for increasingly I felt close to crying, but believed that I mustn't cry because that would mark a 'breakdown', and I was terrified of any such happening. My whole body ached with the weight of crying that seemed to be forcing its way to the surface. I felt pure horror at the way people around me were prepared to go to a doctor or hospital and be drugged or otherwise 'treated' to change their mental or emotional state, and I had no intention of following their misguided example. I became increasingly frightened as it seemed that I was indeed heading for a 'breakdown'.

I'd read about encounter groups and thought that getting into one of them could be the answer, and so I asked a recently acquired local friend with a lot of social contacts whether there were any encounter groups in Guildford where I was living then. It turned out that there wasn't an encounter group, but there was a group with some similarities that was going to start that October at Surrey University, in Guildford - the second British ongoing fundamentals class in Re-evaluation Counselling (RC).

The class was not due to start for a few weeks but at least I was able to buy a book about RC - The Human Side of Human Beings by Harvey Jackins (the founder of RC). Upon reading that I felt my first 'homecoming' feelings, for here was an explanation of how experiences mis-store in the memory when trauma occurs and isn't released at once, and how trauma (Jackins used the term 'distress') accumulates but could all be released (healed) retrospectively through crying, trembling, etc. Not only was it an explanation, but it was one that made total sense to me, and I suddenly had real hopes for RC and for myself. At last I understood that, if that book was correct, far from heading into a breakdown, I was about to start an intensive healing and recovery process, which would lead me into new and very positive areas of experience and functioning.

This discovery increased still further my internal pressure, and I fled from my research job at Pirbright, needing time and space to sort my issues out. With the first meeting of the class still a week away, I was desperate, wanting to get started with some crying but not knowing how to open the floodgates on my own. I managed to book an RC session with the secretary of the class teacher, who I shall call P.

Re-Evaluation Counselling

So, in that first session of mine, which P was giving to me on the basis that sometime later on I'd give her an exchange session, the two of us were sitting, facing each other, holding hands. I said I knew that I needed to cry and cry, and at this stage just wanted to find out how to use RC to enable that to happen. She invited me to choose something to start talking about - and it came to me to recount a dream (in the present tense) that I remembered from the age of about five or six, which involved an intense feeling of loss, separation and subsequent loneliness.

There was a point in my recounting the dream when my voice wavered upon saying a particular phrase. With a warm, appreciative smile, P at once interjected: "Say that again!". And the moment I started saying it again the floodgates opened and I cried. In fact on that occasion I didn't cry for very long, but I felt the most extraordinary sensations, as this release had changed the configuration of my whole energy system (not that I knew of such things as energy systems then). I felt a powerful tingling up my spine, over my scalp and in my arms and hands, and this lasted for perhaps half an hour, gradually tailing off.

That night my mind was in a tremendous tumult and I didn't sleep a wink. The mental tumult was a massive sifting and re-evaluation, as all manner of my life experiences and thoughts and feelings up to that time were reviewed in my mind and seen in the new light of my having found a way through - and indeed a way to eventually realize many if not all of my deepest longings rather than simply become 'cured' and 'normal'. My heart was thumping with the excitement throughout that night.

The basic practice of RC, then, is a particular type of peer co-counselling, in which, normally, the time of a session is divided into equal halves, with one person being client for the first half and then roles being switched at half time. The person who is in 'counsellor' role does not give advice or opinions, but gives warm loving support instead. RC counsellors learn to smile supportively and appreciatingly when the 'client' gets into difficult-feeling material and when emotional release occurs. The aim is NOT for the client to say things that the counsellor thinks are 'right', but for him to achieve emotional release.

The counsellor's role does involve an active element because very often the client needs to be directed to say something again, perhaps in a different way, in order to break the 'control pattern' that is preventing release from occurring at that point. Or it may be necessary for the counsellor to find a phrase for the client to say or a simple action to do, which contradicts a particular negative pattern that is operating at that point and preventing emotional release.  Otherwise the client could go rabbiting on talking and talking with little or no emotional release. The client's giving an interesting or entertaining talk in sessions is NOT what RC is about.

The ultimate aim in RC is not to become 'cured' in the conventional sense, and 'normal', but to enable one's whole self to manifest, for, apart from the effects of trauma, we are naturally positive, happy ('zestful' in RC jargon), loving, dynamic, alert, clear-thinking and flexible. Thus through RC we become far from normal, but in the very best sense - because at the present time normality actually implies a normal set of malfunctions and limited functioning. Even people who are widely regarded as being well adjusted and 'doing fine' are in most cases operating on only a small proportion of their true potential that can be manifested through ongoing practice of RC.

Increasing frustrations

In the group sessions I sometimes cried intensely (particularly when I focused on The Epic of Gilgamesh), but I became increasingly frustrated that people in the group would get upset or uptight at my crying so much or so intensely, so preventing me from continuing. An upset or uptight counsellor is no good to man nor beast. In the group we chose partners for one-to-one co-counselling sessions during the week, in between class meetings. Again I became frustrated because I found that my regular counselling partner was both resistant to his own emotional release and also could not support me through the intensive crying that I knew I needed to do. I was so determined that I still managed to do some crying, but often it felt no better than doing it myself with no assistance. I subsequently had other counselling partners, but I rarely felt I was getting the level of aware support that I needed in order to get really strong and sustained emotional release.

I quite soon gave up attempts to bring up the Gilgamesh legend in counselling sessions - even though that could elicit my deepest and most intense crying. The other RC-ers clearly did not really understand what RC was about and had learnt some rules and techniques without real understanding. So, if I started crying about the Gilgamesh legend (or Kafka's story Metamorphosis, which also made me cry with similar intensity) the counsellor would soon interrupt and say something like "Well, now I think it's about time you worked on some real material. Now, try saying "I'm living completely in present time!". I completely failed to get it through to these unaware people that the point of RC sessions was not for the client to do what the counsellor felt was 'right' for him to do, but was for the client to do what achieved maximum emotional release, and sustain it, even for a full hour - at least, when there was a considerable weight of material available to release.

As I know in hindsight, there was an overriding reason why I needed to cry my guts out over The Epic of Gilgamesh, for sustained periods time and time again, and indeed there was a very specific and unusual reason for the massiveness of the quantity of emotional trauma material pushing for release - and it was something I had no inkling about before 2006. More about that in Part 2 of this account.

Hint: how would you yourself tend to feel if you had a whole gaggle of traumatized (about half of them severely so) lost souls attached to you?

I should explain here that at that time the general understanding in RC was in the need for direct emotional release, and the promotion of bold pattern-challenging strategies to minimize the amount of necessary emotional release activity was still some years away. However, even when that came, it didn't really change anything for the better, because it was simply used by most RC-ers as a justification for their not really getting in touch with their material at all and putting still more pressure on the likes of me to avoid any significant amount or intensity of emotional release.

I certainly wasn't going to stick with one partially satisfactory group meeting and one usually unsatisfactory one-to-one session per week, so I had pretty well daily emotional release sessions on my own, where I was effectively my own counsellor. In these sessions (usually lasting a half- to one hour) I could often do the sort of sustained crying that I really needed to, though I was well aware that I was working within a strong isolation and loneliness pattern and therefore these sessions were not as healing and liberating as they'd have been if I'd been working with a really supportive counselling partner of a similar level of awareness to my own, and the intensity of the crying was usually less than I'd have experienced with truly aware support. Various other RC people warned me against 'doing it' on my own, but they were voicing their own ignorance and unawareness, and I disregarded them. It wasn't as though they were offering any positive assistance; they were just wanting to pull me down to their level of unawareness.

I attended occasional national and international RC workshops and at those, here and there I had really wonderful co-counselling sessions where I'd managed to get paired up with somebody who was, relatively speaking, really aware and supportive. On the other hand I had many troublesome encounters with tiresomely unaware people too, so overall it was all rather a fraught experience for me, even though I was also very excited at finding myself in a worldwide community that was dedicated to realization of full human potential - love, clear thinking, 'zestfulness' and all that. This appeared at the time to be my way forward, whatever the difficulties caused by the widespread lack of awareness or deep understanding within the RC community of what RC was really about.

One tremendous thing for me in the RC community - whether at workshops or with local RC-ers - was that it was the done thing to embrace warmly and awarely on meeting and parting (and at other times as one felt moved to do so). This was often marred, however, by the fact of everyone being made to feel obliged to hug, so that hugs were often something of a ritual, not having a healthy spontaneous and warm, 'meant' quality, and this problem was compounded by the ritual of being expected to say a nice, appreciative thing ('validation' in RC jargon) to the person you were hugging. Saying nice, positive things to each other was great in principle, but if it was being done out of a sense of duty its positive effect was at best reduced and all too often actually reversed to transmit a negative message.

This meant that many hugging experiences were degraded by unawareness in the hugs and the tiresome duty of having to find something positive to say to the other person, and of course all too often having unaware and unhelpful 'validations' said to oneself. Because that was usually not spontaneous and it was often evident that the person was having a struggle to find something really appropriate and positive to say, this was a detail that regularly made my heart sink. It would have been so much better if people had been urged to be much more flexible and spontaneous about such things and to say nice things to people only when they came naturally and could be really meant and felt. A warm, truly aware hug is a tremendous mutual appreciation without any words needing to be said - and in that particular context an obligational or/and unaware hug would have been better simply not done.

RC didn't recognise any broader aspect of life than the physical and mental /emotional, and, on the surface, neither did I at that time, and I had no connections with any appropriate people and so had no idea that RC, when applied fully and with deep awareness, was effectively a self actualization method (albeit, as I came eventually to recognise, by no means a very efficient one) that could theoretically take you to the point of enlightenment and indeed into further self actualization beyond that. I say 'theoretically' because in practice few people indeed would get very far along that path by use of RC.

It turned out that John Heron, our class teacher in Guildford, was actually teaching a serious distortion of RC, putting a big emphasis on set exercises in our class meetings. Set exercises are alien to RC because they have nothing to do with paying attention clearly and precisely to where the client is at and what that particular client needs to do in order to achieve emotional release and healing of their particular traumas. Ironically, set exercises would be more the thing to do in encounter groups, which I now understood would very likely have screwed me up rather than helped me. I therefore thank my lucky stars that RC came to Guildford at just the right time and 'rescued' me from the prospect of encounter groups - even though it was a distortion of RC that was being promoted initially.

Then another teacher took over the ongoing class, and she at least made the classes more authentic as RC classes, but she lacked the level of awareness that I longed for in order to be able to move faster myself - and she also had a quite problematical authoritarian pattern (as a result of which she worked as a schoolteacher). Another teacher eventually took over, but she was similarly very lacking in deep awareness and supportiveness for my level of working (albeit without overt authoritarianism), so my frustration continued.

Breaking of patterns

An important development in RC was a growing recognition of the importance of breaking rigid patterns of behaviour and outlook in our everyday lives, as by taking positive steps in our lives to contradict and dismantle these patterns we could free up old traumas for emotional release, and when things were done this way the release could be very intense but relatively brief, so making the whole process much more positive and efficient.

An early bit of pattern breaking for me, in early 1973, came when, as one of the set exercises in the group, we were paired up and then each directed to ask the other person to do some small appreciative thing for us, to bring or manifest at the following week's group session. The young woman who was paired up with me then asked me to write a poem for her.

That opened the floodgates of my creativity. I'd never before thought of poetry as something I could do, yet suddenly I found myself writing down the most amazing and original outpourings. Many of these were not well formed and clearly represented too much of a working-out of my old negative emotions to be worth keeping long-term as worthwhile literary writing, but even after severe purges later on I have kept a core of about a quarter of these works, a selection of which are presented on this site. In many of my poems I was intuitively practising symphonic music composition processes - in particular the fluid application of 'motivic metamorphosis' that characterizes the mature music of Vagn Holmboe.

As part of my more forward-looking, pattern-breaking approach to RC, having been to a performance of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem and been greatly moved by it, I set myself a long-term goal of actually singing in that very work. Superficially that seemed impossible because of my not being able to sight-read music notation, not to mention my strong embarrassment about being heard singing, and also the War Requiem was an intimidatingly large and challenging work to perform. But that apparent impossibility was part of the point of the exercise, because it was starting to focus me on breaking the patterns that were preventing me from getting involved musically. In other words the important thing was not whether I would ever get to sing in the War Requiem, but rather, the direction and positive processes that were set in motion by having that ultimate target, which in any case would be subject to review and amendment according to how my life developed.

So, following from that, one positive step that I took that was really dramatic for me was, in autumn 1975, to join the Surrey University Choir, which operated at the University in Guildford. To many people that would be nothing special, but for me, to go to my first rehearsal with that choir was the most courageous thing I'd done up to that time (and indeed probably remained so until my dark-force sourced ordeals of 2003/7).

As I set out from my flat for that first rehearsal (for Bach's Christmas Oratorio) I was shaking like a demented jelly, feeling as though a most horrifying death were just round the corner for me, and all manner of dark and scary feelings and thought voices were urging me to stop and go back to my flat. But I persisted, and came to sing regularly in amateur choirs ever since (apart from the 2003/4 and 2004/5 seasons, when I was preoccupied with my ordeals, of which more further below). It turned out that I didn't need to be able to sight-read the music because during rehearsals I was able to pick up my part from others around me and the choirmaster would help the different choir sections on the piano. So I was able to learn my notes very much well enough to get through.

My move to Exeter in October 1976 resulted from another 'positive direction' that I had set for myself to take me forward. In February 1976 I had my first attack of flu in my adult life, and it was a full-blown severe attack. I'd long dreaded getting flu again, for I remembered how in my teens I'd had such horrible depressive emotional feelings while ill with the flu. So this time I set myself a strategy of resting comfortably while really ill, allowing all depressive and negative thoughts to surface for observation, and I contradicted each one, as it arose, with its positive opposite. Many of the depressive thoughts were about my life situation then and its apparently not leading me anywhere, and so this led to my working out a major step that could open up all sorts of possibilities for the future. I decided that I'd apply to go to a university to study belatedly for a first degree. My feelings were all saying "No, no, NO! I can't!", but I was clear that my reasoned decision would rule. And so it came about that I moved to Exeter, to study there for my degree. So, for that big step I have to thank a severe bout of flu!

I made a rough estimate that from my commencement of RC in 1972 up to my move to Exeter at the beginning of October 1976 I had done about 500 hours of crying, and had spent a similar amount of time in other releases such as laughter and trembling.

And now in Exeter...

In Exeter I found a local RC ongoing class and joined it, only to suffer increased frustration, as these people were all colluding in avoiding working through their more deeply ingrained material - what Harvey Jackins called 'chronic patterns'. These people were on edge about me, for they felt threatened by my determination to work through my own deepest and most ingrained material. There was a definite air of defensiveness and resentment towards me, because I understood RC and was proficient with it to a level far beyond where they were at, and instead of welcoming that fact they were semi-covertly regarding me as an unwelcome alien intruder who might rock their comfortable, mutually colluding little 'boat', and saw me as something of an attention-seeking smart-arse within the group, for in their view I was supposed to be meekly and 'respectfully' letting the hopelessly ignorant and unaware 'teacher' and the various equally ignorant and unaware trainee teachers posture as 'teaching' me without a peep from me that they were just wasting my time and money (in class and workshop fees) and they'd do better to start learning RC - properly for once - from me. Unfortunately there was no means by which one could be in the RC community without being in a 'fundamentals' class and having to put up with whatever flaws the particular class teacher had.

To skip the details, in 1980 I was excluded from the group with the highly dishonest excuse that I myself had a pattern that made RC unsuitable for me. What they could not face doing was to be honest and admit that they were afraid of working at the sort of depth at which I wanted and needed to work, and they simply didn't want me in the group - indeed they were really an unsatisfactory group for me rather than the converse.

I did consider going to the top and contacting Harvey Jackins to fight the group's decision, but I realized that that would not work, for I would have been seen as an aggrieved person out on a limb and with a chip on my shoulder and therefore would have been seen to be unsuitable to be in such a group anyway.

So, I felt deeply hurt - indeed betrayed by the very people who supposedly represented a liberating direction for me. This situation remained then over the years. Occasionally I'd have solitary sessions of emotional release, but had nobody to give me any support - and I felt a sort of dark cloud hanging over me from the betrayal by the RC people - a crushing injustice that it seemed that I was powerless to do anything about. I still had no idea that there were any other healing avenues for me where the basic means of emotional release would be welcomed, or indeed could be almost entirely bypassed.

I still recognise RC as a sort-of effective method for clearing one's emotional issues - but now with a number of major reservations, so that I actually recommend against using it, at least if to be used to any really serious extent, even though its underlying theory (as expounded in Harvey Jackins' book The Human Side of Human Beings) is very useful as far as it goes - though unfortunately it doesn't recognise the major part that the dark force plays in human dysfunction and the formation of major and especially 'chronic' patterns.

• In practice most RC-ers are too wrapped up in their own ingrained trauma-based patterns of outlook to understand RC properly and use it awarely. According to my particular working model of how our problems operate, Soul programming is the underlying culprit for most of this.

• One big problem with the RC community globally was that Harvey Jackins had his own personal control agenda, and chose new teachers very much on the basis of their both looking likely to tow his 'Party line' and - sorry to have cause to say this! - having particular 'chronic patterns' that made the individuals concerned either weak and inarticulate as supposed teachers, or/and authoritarian (and therefore really not genuine teachers of RC at all). He weeded out prospective RC teachers with authoritarian patterns only if they looked like clashing with him, whereas he always claimed that he wasn't allowing anyone with significant authority patterns to teach. I don't suppose that he was consciously aware that he was operating in that way, for the dark force interference that was causing him to behave that way was giving him his own awareness blocks.

  I got so frustrated with this that eventually I applied to be approved as an RC teacher myself, not because I really wanted then to be teaching RC, but because all the local 'teachers' of RC (all accredited by Harvey Jackins) were so hopelessly damned awful and I wanted the opportunity to get some local people starting to understand what RC was really about and how to really go about using it. NONE of those so-called teachers really understood RC, and it was a matter of 'the blind leading the blind' in just about all respects.
  

  I wasn't altogether surprised - though I felt pretty betrayed and disgusted about it - when Harvey refused my accreditation. Indeed, because my application had to go through my group, and part of the process involved Harvey consulting with the extant teacher of that group, I've little doubt that the general message that Harvey got from the group was something like "We've passed his request for teacher accreditation to you only to keep him quiet, because he's a bit of a smart-arse and thinks he knows it all, and is a bit of a problem in our group. We don't see him making a good teacher, because he's not willing to learn [from us]; we'd be very happy if you refused him accreditation.".

  As I now clearly understand, ANY self healing / self actualization method whose dissemination is controlled by a single person* is bound to run aground and get distorted into all sorts of relatively ineffective variants despite any intent and attempts of the controlling person or founder to keep the teaching of the method 'pure'. The problem is always the same - personal power / control agendas. These always mitigate against 'pure' and effective operation of any self actualization method, for they are inherently incompatible with self actualization in the first place. And power / control agendas and 'authority' patterns will always seek to silence and suppress those more deeply aware individuals who have the fullest and deepest understanding of the method. - So, if you want really effective emotional clearance and self actualization, there's absolutely no point in relying on a 'teacher' or guru at all, except perhaps initially just to pick up some initial data on the method. Basically there's really no effective alternative to doing it yourself and being your own teacher. That happens to be fully compatible with, and indeed an intrinsic aspect of a genuine self actualization process.

  * That doesn't mean, however, that a self healing / self actualization method being controlled by a group or organization would be any better; in such cases the method, as disseminated, would be 'rotten in the bud', because of the inevitable control agenda(s) that would be there almost certainly right from the start.

• RC, especially when practised 'promiscuously' is potentially dangerous! It's not intrinsically so at all, but the problem is that a fair proportion of people who get involved in RC have 'entity' attachments that cause them to be very controlling (and so actually very unsuitable for anyone to open to in a RC session), and, furthermore, can have very serious consequences for particular individuals who are no-soul incarnations (such as myself). I had one experience in particular, where, in a workshop, I got paired up for a session with a man who I found very disturbing, for there was something visibly 'not right' about him, which was reflected in the menacing ways he moved his face when he spoke (and his overall 'vibes'), and he was very interfering and controlling in the session, which I found quite upsetting. In hindsight, by my use of inner inquiry supported by energy testing, I have pointers to his having had a powerful spirit attachment that was being controlled by the dark force into trying to frighten me enough to cause me to go out of body sufficiently for me to get landed with a partial walk-in or another sort of extremely troublesome entity that could possibly have completely wrecked my life. Fortunately I remained too grounded for that to happen.

  Basically the risk of picking up entities and other 'energy nasties' exists in all client-counsellor [/therapist] sessions, so this problem is not unique to RC. However, the fact of RC being a peer co-counselling procedure results in the client potentially being more vulnerable in sessions than in pretty well any other type of therapy or counselling sessions (the big exception, however, being any therapy involving hypnosis, which is the most harmful and dangerous of the whole lot).

• RC is actually not worth a second look for anyone who has attached parasitic lost souls - and pretty well everyone who goes for RC would have some. RC isn't all that efficient for clearing even one's own emotional issues, but the normal state of people doing RC is to be carrying a variety of traumas and emotional issues that are not their own and instead belong to parasitic lost souls attached to them. Such traumas and stresses can very gradually be released by use of RC, but they are released so slowly that you cannot reasonably expect RC to clear them fully over a lifetime's intensive use of the method.

• I now know that there are much speedier and more efficient and painless methods for emotional clearance or healing, which are also completely safe because they don't require you to work with anyone else. See Healing and Self Actualization - The Safest and Quickest Way.

• RC needs to let go of its tiresome little bits of jargon, which set up a barrier for many people. Words such as 'validation' (saying nice, positive things about someone), 'discharge' (emotional release or healing) and 'distress' (emotional trauma or stress) all in my experience set up barriers when I sought to explain about RC to people. The use of jargon is completely out of place in a method that is all about our reclaiming our intrinsic flexibility, and nowadays I do not use the RC jargon words, even though I use the insights of RC in my everyday life without putting a label on them - albeit combined with my more recent, broader based insights.

In this period (1980-92) I felt to be lost and drifting, and did my best to ignore the dark cloud of my having been excluded from the RC community. I put my attention more on other, positive things - my hiking, my annual spring visits to the Scottish Highlands for walking on the mountains, my giving adult education classes in natural history using my own nature photos, and indeed my doing intensive nature photography on my many hikes. I also wrote occasional short stories. Then in 1990 I discontinued doing the adult education courses and one-off slide talks (and indeed the intensive photography) and instead concentrated on writing highly unorthodox novels. All these developments I saw as part of a continuing opening up and breaking of restrictive patterns of outlook, so, even though I was not so often having emotional release sessions I had not 'lost the thread' and still very much felt committed to positive changes in my life. It just seemed that my whole life process was in enforced solitary mode, with no support to get things moving any faster with regard to my emotional healing.

I was regularly singing in Exeter University Choral Society right up to 2000, and imagine my amazement and joy when in 1985 they chose to perform Britten's War Requiem - the fulfilment of that impossible-seeming goal that I'd set for myself back in 1974! It was terrifyingly difficult to learn and perform, but WHAT an experience! And little did I know then that I'd sing in that work twice more, not many years after that, with Exeter College Choral Society.

Of course, it was interesting that I'd so soon achieved what had seemed to be an ultimate and probably unrealizable goal for my life. What exciting and even spectacular advances still lay ahead, then?

Alexander Technique

In 1990 I began to get ominous clicks in my neck, and then my neck started aching. I tried to counter these things by using the (actually harmful) McKenzie exercises for the back and neck, but any improvements were short lived and my neck got worse. By the end of 1992 it was getting very troublesome ('advanced cervical spondylosis' was diagnosed from an x-ray) and I was really frightened, for the medics and physiotherapists clearly had no clue and I felt abandoned with what was surely going to make me a cripple in next to no time. I was starting to tell friends and acquaintances that I'd have to give up hiking there and then because my neck hurt so much after each hike.

It was then that one of those acquaintances recommended to me the Alexander Technique (AT), mentioning a centre in Exeter where I could take lessons, and also pointing out that there were books on the AT, so I could read up about it before committing myself. I promptly looked out and bought a particular book which 'stood out from the crowd' of AT books. It was Your Guide to the Alexander Technique by John Gray, published by Gollancz.

As with The Human Side of Human Beings, reading this book was a homecoming experience for me, for it made so much sense of what had up to that point seemed so baffling and indeed tormenting for me.

What is the AT, then? -- The Alexander Technique is a mental discipline that allows you to progressively undo your lifelong accumulation of habits of body misuse. That misuse includes all chronic tensions, slumpings, distortions and the excess effort that we put into just about every movement and indeed position.

What is not officially stated about the AT is that at a more fundamental level it is a process of recognising and interrupting habitual tendencies, which can be purely mental ones with no obvious related body misuse. As I was to come to recognise later on, it is in fact a wonderful and grounding way of cultivating the aware and alert state that in Buddhist teachings is often called mindfulness, with no need ever to resort to formal or sitting meditation, which actually I came more recently to understand to be seriously harmful when regularly practised in an ongoing manner (for anyone - NOT just for people without a supposedly appropriate guru!).

Having read the book, at once I booked some AT lessons, being convinced that this would not only address the pressing physical issues but also had the potentiality to take me on a new path of sorting out my life, taking over where RC had left off. However, it was coming up to Christmas and I had to wait some three weeks before my first lesson. Was I going to wait for three weeks before even starting to sort out this urgent issue of my spine?

Hell, no! I well understood the AT from the book*, and at once started experimentally doing the lie-downs, which are the main thing that you overtly 'do' (the technique itself really being in the way you use yourself in everyday life rather than in any exercises). The point of the lie-downs is to retrain the body to let go of all the excess tensions and distortions and to experience good alignment without any of the habitual interference.

* Most people would not understand the AT - at least in any deep sort of way - just upon reading such a book, or even at all. There was a significant reason why I immediately got a deep understanding of the AT from that book: being what I nowadays describe as a no-soul incarnation, I had an exceptionally deep awareness and ability to understand anything that helps point towards genuine self actualization, in a way that is impossible for people who have soul programming (which is the vast majority of people, including the vast majority of AT teachers!).

For those three weeks up to my first lesson I was having 12 to 14 of these lie-downs per day. I got uncomfortable if I lay like that for long, so I reckoned that a large number of shortish lie-downs would fit the bill best for me. In retrospect I think that it was probably much more beneficial done this way than the normally recommended one or two lie-downs per day of about 20 minutes.

In the first week, each time I lay down (on my back, with head on a rest and legs somewhat drawn up so that the knees were raised) I was aware that there remained a space under my lower back, which latter remained arched. At the end of that first week, during one of the lie-downs that arching of my lower back released and my back flattened against the floor - a tremendously blissful feeling. Also, I felt muscles in my upper back releasing and allowing the shoulder blades to move apart - again a wonderful blissful feeling.

That marked the beginning of the physical release process, but also, with those first physical releases I was feeling in my everyday life a great feeling of emotional relief - as though I'd been released from a whole level of deep anxiety. This tallied with my understanding that emotional issues - even some deeply ingrained ones that are difficult to address in RC - are locked up in physical tensions or distortions, so if these physical issues are released, then the related emotional issues are released also. What I didn't know was whether that meant full release of those emotional issues or simply partial release or/and freeing them up so that the underlying emotional trauma could be more readily healed with ordinary emotional release. I think in practice it's most likely a bit of each.

I still needed the lessons really, for there were certain aspects of the RC that are best learnt directly from a teacher rather than just from a book, so I went ahead with my RC lessons. Initially I had a teacher who was teaching an abomination of the technique even though he was fully qualified by STAT as an RC teacher. He was making each lesson a process of trying to get things right, which was screwing me up, and I knew this was wrong and told him so. I then switched to another, excellent teacher at the same centre, who made each lesson feel to be a joyful journey of self discovery rather than trying to get anything right. This was important, because you let go of your habitual interferences in your body use not through trying to let go (a tense attitude that maintains the problems) but by observing (without judgement) how you are interfering with yourself and then allowing yourself to act differently.

The AT saved my hiking there and then, and I continued going on my hikes, indeed with a greater sense of ease than ever, for with the AT I'd learnt a much easier and less stressful way of walking. I also felt progressively lighter emotionally, and when I thought of the local RC group who'd excluded me, my immediate thought was: "Let them eat cake! They know not what I know!"

One of the wonderful things about the AT used instead of RC was that it was a method that you learn to use yourself, and once you've learnt it you continue to practise it, not as a named method or technique but simply as a better way of living. Thus after your initial lessons you were not dependent on any sort of partner or co-worker, and your progress depended simply on your own mastery of the AT and you own motivation for positive change in your life.

After my series of 15 lessons (10 weekly, then 5 monthly), that was it for me as far as lessons were concerned because I hadn't the money to keep spending on them. But in any case I'd fully integrated the AT into my life and had really no cause to keep having lessons. I settled on 4 lie-downs per day - one after each mealtime and one short one before going to bed. Doing it this way I wouldn't get neglectful about having the lie-downs as most people seemed to. The lie-downs were part of every day's schedule and linked to other scheduled activities so that they would not get forgotten.

I still allowed myself occasional sessions of emotional release, but these were mainly when some person or situation had restimulated some old trauma material of mine (or in other words I was feeling stressed or upset in some way), so I'd then use emotional release to enable myself to clear the stress or 'upset' as quickly as possible and use it as a healing opportunity for another little chunk of my buried emotional trauma material.

More pattern breaking

As part of my opening up and pattern breaking I joined a small local amateur drama group, which was a bit shambolic but did give me some enjoyable challenge, and it got me among some more people. I stayed in it for a few years until the following development engaged most of my attention...

In 1995, following a modest computer upgrade, I commenced my music composition work, starting with my First Symphony. It felt to be a great healing in itself, at last to be composing major and indeed powerful music works after all this time of feeling so isolated with my internal music, which I'd been unable to share with anyone. I was able to do all my composing on the computer without having to sight-read music notation; I could play back any note, phrase or whole passage at a click of the mouse, with all the correct instrument sounds, so I knew exactly what I was putting together.

I still didn't overtly recognise myself as being on a powerful self realization process (or 'path', as many people would unhelpfully describe it), but that was more a matter of not having the expression 'self realization' in my vocabulary. I think I did encounter the term 'self actualization', which I recognised as being relevent, except that that term was associated with certain psychology disciplines, and for that reason I didn't want to use it, because of the immense confusion and lack of genuine understanding of human consciousness and indeed emotions within all psychology disciplines of which I was aware.

I just thought of my 'process' as my progressive 'emergence' as my 'real' self, unobstructed and unobscured by emotional baggage and patterns (which of course really is the meaning of 'self realization' or 'self actualization'). 'Spirituality', however, wasn't really in my mind, even though I always felt a small openness of mind towards it - though actually not even really knowing what 'spirituality' was, apart from something apparently connected with religion, which I'd already had plenty enough of. I suspected, however, that my own lifestyle and outlook were getting close to Buddhism, even though I had yet to learn anything much of the latter.

I did notice, though, that certain parts of particular of my music compositions seemed to have a certain quality that I interpreted as 'spiritual' even though on the surface I didn't then really know what 'spiritual' meant - though at least assuming that 'spirituality' was something 'good'.

Also, especially during 1996, at times when I was walking about in town or having one of my lie-downs I would get a faint impression of the top of my head expanding into a whitish or light blue light, and this had about it a feeling of warmth and peacefulness. I assumed that this was something to do with spirituality, but my intuition was not to dwell on it and just to carry on my life as it was until I was somehow guided to do differently.

Enlightenment and 'Dzogchen'

Then, on the evening of New Year's Day 1997, when in the middle of composing the last movement of my 6th Symphony - which movement was intended to be a celebration of 'spiritual enlightenment' (which I didn't know anything much about except that it was supposed to be a very good and special thing to happen to one) - I myself became enlightened. This is recounted in detail in my article Crossing the Threshold of Enlightenment. I then immediately 'recognised'*, to my utter amazement, that I was not only on a 'spiritual path' but on a very high one indeed. I then understood that my thoroughgoing use of the AT had been cultivating everyday mindfulness - a way of being that is highly prized in Buddhism and is regarded as a normal prerequisite for enlightenment to occur. In fact I had been cultivating this mindfulness to quite an extent even when I was in the RC community - in particular when I was (so frequently) having my solo RC sessions, when I would observe so much of what was going on in my mind and interact with it as though I were a second person - a peaceful and loving observer and guide.

* - But actually that 'recognition' was actually mis-recognition - thanks to the dark force sourced confusions that permeate not only Buddhism but 'spiritual' and mystical traditions pretty generally. It's almost universally believed that enlightenment is something to do with spirituality, and so enlightenment is called 'spiritual enlightenment, even though it actually has nothing to do with spirituality but a great deal to do with self realization / self actualization.

Unfortunately I had picked up from the Buddhist teachings (which completely confuse the distinction between spirituality and 'self realization') the completely incorrect notion that if I was enlightened I was on a high level 'spiritual path'. Thus here began the real mischief for me, for spirituality in all its forms is one of the multitude of side-tracks that the dark force diverts people into in order to get them away from genuine self actualization - but I came to know this only after the event of my near-nemesis at the hands of the dark force. So, I was thus, from that point of my becoming enlightened, starting to get myself sidetracked by the 'spirituality' phenomenon and thus increasingly into the clutches of the dark force.

From that point on I was following a simple but powerful practice that could be regarded as being the essence of Dzogchen but without all the cultural and religious beliefs and esoteric practices with which Tibetan Buddhism had surrounded it.

In basic Dzogchen, all you do is keep your self-identification upon the deepest level of consciousness, which is naked awareness beyond all concepts. That is your enlightened essence. By continuously experiencing that as "I", you, as the 'meta-space' within which all experiences and phenomena arise, are then the peaceful observer of whatever you experience. This allows many minor emotional issues just to dissolve as they arise, and leads over time to a great quietening of the mind.

It seemed to me that Dzogchen fitted beautifully with the AT, making for a much fuller breaking of patterns through simply observing troublesome or negative thoughts or feelings and allowing them to dissolve as you watch. I also thought that at some time I probably should get into spiritual healing, but was concerned not to rush into it, lest my 'ego' get involved (the very distorted Buddhist teachings about the 'ego' had rubbed off on me a bit, though actually it was good that they had caused me to be somewhat circumspect about getting into spiritual healing). I thought that if I were meant to have that sort of involvement, then circumstances would guide me to it.

Although what I was doing could be seen to be effectively the essence of Dzogchen, the label 'Dzogchen' has so much Tibetan Buddhism baggage and tradition attached to it that nowadays I don't use that label at all, even though I continue in a flexible manner with that same mental discipline that is so simple that it is really not a 'practice' at all. By using the label 'Dzogchen' for such a simple and natural mental discipline, I'd simply been causing widespread misunderstanding, because then so many people had been thinking that I was claiming to be using a Tibetan Buddhist practice but was displaying supreme ignorance in disregarding all the Tibetan Buddhist traditional and esoteric baggage surrounding it. Also, I was unwittingly helping to perpetuate the esotericization of the simple mental discipline of cultivating one's enlightened awareness - because that's all it really is, and no prestigious name is required for that simple mental discipline.

So, let's be clear that I distance myself completely from all traditions and simply work with the essentials of my own experience. 

Spiritual healing - Reiki

Circumstances did indeed guide me into spiritual healing, as described on my FAQ page - and little did I know at the time what serious problems this was leading me into!

In late 1998 I joined a small local healers' group, which met every Thursday lunchtime in a room above the Evolution shop in Exeter's Fore Street, just two corners from where I was living. Group members gave healing to members of the public for a small donation, and when free to do so would exchange healing between themselves. I came into this very tentatively, having little idea of whether I'd be any good at it. Indeed I came into it as a sceptic (in the positive sense), wanting to have clear observations of experiences and happenings that couldn't be explained by Western science before I would fully accept that spiritual healing was more than mumbo-jumbo.

Although I witnessed no instant miracle cures of physical issues (I understood that these were not to be expected), increasingly I felt the healing energy (or so I thought!*), which behaved in ways that were beyond explanation in Western science and medicine. I also witnessed people who received hands-on healing become much more relaxed and peaceful and have old emotional issues start freeing up so that they could start releasing through crying and related processes. Longer-term, I was to see people becoming altogether more in charge of their situations and bringing about much needed positive change in their lives. Healing was thus, at least in some cases and to some extent, manifesting as a process of self empowerment for the recipients.

* Little did I know then that true healing 'energy' cannot significantly be felt by anyone, and that what supposed healing energy is felt to any significant extent is impressions relayed to the people by the dark force in order to confuse them and lead them away from working from one's core essence only, which latter is the only safe and healthy way to go about 'energy work' healing, free of dark force involvement. So, little did I or indeed anyone in that group know that we were all unawarely dealing with the dark force all along! It wasn't that no healing was occurring, but the dark force was keeping us diverted into a limited version of healing, which wouldn't in any way weaken or threaten the dark force's hold on us, and which indeed would tend to increase its hold.

Among my early observations inexplicable by Western science were the following:

• Often when giving healing my hands would be cold, because I have Raynaud's disease. Yet it was common for recipients to feel a lot of heat from my hands, whether on contact or a few inches away, and in some cases would indeed heat up quite a bit all over, even when they could also feel that my hands were cold. This was not a matter of the recipient's expectations, because it happened with the odd people who came, who'd never had hands-on healing before and didn't know what to expect.

• On one occasion when I was being given healing by the group leader (P) and another experienced healer, towards the end of the session I was feeling what seemed to be a steady and quite spectacular build up of what I interpreted as 'love energy' in my 'aura', which seemed to be resonating between the three of us. I was sitting on an upright chair, and P had had her hands on me through a descending sequence of positions and finally had her hands on my feet, so she was kneeling on the floor, and indeed was concentrating while facing the floor, so she could not see me at all apart from my feet. Experimentally, and without saying anything, with my intent I focused that 'powerful love energy' on P, who was kneeling there in front of me, looking down at the floor. At once she raised herself and exclaimed to me in amazement, "Philip, what was that? It was beautiful!". She had felt a tremendous wave of what she interpreted as loving energy pass through her, and indeed was aware that it had come from me.

  What I didn't realize then was that such happenings, although indeed not accountable-for by Western 'science', were not the wonderful and benign manifestations that I thought at the time. Such impressions that people get during healing work are almost always produced by the dark force in order to keep the people hooked on such experiences rather than true healing.
  

  So, as already noted, the only fully safe and effective healing 'energies' are from one's own core essence, which is based in fundamental consciousness ('the Ultimate'), and those 'energies' are hardly feelable at all. So anything that is significantly felt during a healing session is pretty well bound to be a distraction given to one by the dark force for some highly problematical purpose - never mind how wonderful it may feel.

Gradually I gained experience, also helped by having a weekly healing exchange with a member of the group. The group leader was a Reiki teacher* and eventually I went on a Reiki I workshop led by her. Later on I went on a Reiki II workshop of hers. However, I wasn't given a Reiki II certificate because of a stupid little technical detail which was to do with personal power politics and not Reiki at all, and so I didn't take Reiki III with her and went eventually to another teacher for that.

* The whole nonsense of calling Reiki teachers 'Masters' (with the capital 'M' too!) is one of the various dark force sourced aspects of Reiki and various other healing and self actualization oriented traditions. In real terms, nobody is a master (except of themselves, if indeed they allow themselves to be), let alone a Master! That description is a potent status symbol, which attracts countless extremely unsuitable people into those traditions to become supposed teachers of them for the underlying purpose of gaining personal status. That's all dark force stuff, about personal status, power and control. Real healing is very much about self empowerment and freeing oneself from all control agendas.

If you want to keep clear of the dark force, 
 you don't collect status symbols / 
 self deception aids like this one! 
 N.B. Packs of these ornamental certificates, 
 complete with cheap stick-on gilt (or do I 
 mean 'guilt'?) seal but blank within the main 
 rectangle, could be bought cheaply at 
 W.H.Smith's just a few minutes' walk 
 from where I live.

Even though I then had a Reiki III certificate which, laughably, said "Master" on it (see above), I was in no hurry to set up any sort of formal healing or teaching practice, because I still saw my priority as self healing, especially as it was clear that I still had a lot of isolation and loneliness material (including an invisible barrier that kept people distant from me and prevented my gaining ongoing significant friendships), and until this was cleared I simply wouldn't have many clients coming to me. Also I was aware of a little inner nagging about my early childhood torments, for these seemed so far to have hardly been addressed at all in all my self healing, and it felt as though there were something significant and menacing there, still awaiting my attention - whenever I really knew what to do about it. This was underlined by my continuing fear of being alone in the dark, and by my morbid dread of any hint of 'the occult'.

For a few years I carried out daily self healing, sitting on an upright chair, using notionally standard Reiki hand positions (there actually being no one 'right' set of hand positions). This was in addition to my AT lie-downs, which now incorporated healing visualizations. It seemed that such healing did not in itself fully heal emotional traumas, but it did loosen them up so that emotional release could occur much more readily. It thus seemed to go naturally alongside RC. It was a relief, too, to find that most spiritual healers more or less accepted some degree of emotional release, when it occurs, as a common part of the healing process. So I was able to cry more again, not only on my own but sometimes with somebody too - though now my emphasis was normally not on sustaining long periods of emotional release, but rather, allowing release to occur when something triggered it, and then to allow it in full but let it tail off naturally, so that the spell of release took its place as a part of a broader healing process rather than being a holy grail that was always sought for in itself.

I had the occasional people come to me for healing, and generally I taught them the basics of healing and had them exchange healing with me, so that I benefited and they also benefited by the personal empowerment that I was giving them. However, one of these people, who suddenly stopped coming and dropped all contact with me, turned out to have brought with him a very serious 'entity' issue, and had left a seriously problematical 'entity' or 'spirit' in my flat, of which I myself wasn't aware, but which a healer friend (MC, who gets further honourable mentions further below) noticed a month later and removed*. What was interesting was that that entity hadn't attached to me during that month while it was in my flat. I describe that situation in more detail in "Am I a Healer?"

* Er, well, no, it wasn't quite that simple! Yes, in effect he did remove it, but NOT by means of the supposed entity removal method ('smudging' of my flat with sage smoke) that he got me to use - for that method is utterly and completely useless for driving out anything more than possibly a few flies (and possibly actual people) - and NOT by any means that would gain him any sort of personal credit as a healer or 'lightworker'!

Indeed, it would give him far too much credit, for me to say at all that he removed the entity. He thought it had gone, because his pendulum dowsing indicated that it had gone - having no idea that it was the dark force that was giving him his dowsing answers, and thus that his dowsing answers were worse than worthless. What had apparently happened was that the entity had attached to him, because half an hour after leaving my flat he phoned me in a pretty stressed state and in a somewhat accusing tone, telling me that the entity was attached to him and a daughter of his, and was draining his energy like no-one's business. He did apparently manage to clear it later that day after having followed advice given by somebody experienced in supposed entity removals.

However, I write all the above on the assumption that there really was an entity hanging around in my flat as MC was claiming, but actually I had only MC's word for that on the basis of his dowsing and his subsequently having the problem that he interpreted as that entity having attached to him.

As his dowsing was actually being controlled by the dark force, just as any such dowsing would be, in much later retrospect I keep a very open mind as to whether there really had ever been such an entity in my flat then or whether MC had been mightily deceived by the dark force just as the latter had actually been deceiving him over many, many things, such as in all his channelling, in which he believed he was communing and getting guidance from ascended masters, angels, archangels, etc.

My own inner retrospective inquiry does actually support the hypothesis that there was a real 'entity' of some sort in my flat at that time, which did attach to MC, but nonetheless I regard that as pretty speculative, and I still keep a very open mind about it.

Despite that, I still occasionally had people for healing, who I taught something of how to be their own healers.

Accepting reincarnation as 'fact'

One thing that I'd taken on board as 'read' when I crossed the enlightenment threshold and temporarily came under the spell of Buddhism was the process of reincarnation, and I assumed I myself had had past lives. Once I was into healing work I found that the vast majority of healers accepted that we all reincarnated and had done so many times before, but they differed from the Buddhist view in regarding the reincarnation process as being a chronological sequence of incarnations as part of an evolutionary process. This made much more sense to me than the Buddhist view, which saw people trapped in a chaotic sequence of incarnations with no overall evolutionary process involved.

I soon came to assume that the apparent immensity of certain of my emotional issues - particularly relating to isolation and loneliness - must reflect an accumulation of  isolation and loneliness patterns from major and probably repeated separation traumas in previous lifetimes.

What I didn't know then was that there are actually two types of reincarnation that occur - basic reincarnation and soul reincarnation - something not known in any tradition of which I'm aware. The vast majority of people are soul incarnations / reincarnations, while a small minority, such as myself are no-soul incarnations. Actually, in an important sense everyone is a basic incarnation - that is, an incarnation of fundamental consciousness. However, most such basic incarnations have been hijacked by the dark force and programmed into entering into sequential, karmic soul incarnations. I explain more about this in The True Nature of 'The Dark Force' and its Interference and Attacks.

Actually, the Buddhist traditions appear to me to be inconsistent and very confused indeed over how they believe reincarnation to operate - tending to have an 'official' line that has aspects of the basic and soul types of reincarnation, but with individual 'masters' often effectively believing in sequential soul reincarnation, without understanding at all the significance of that belief, nor indeed the significance of the soul (something whose presence is denied in Buddhism, as far as I can tell, but then they effectively reclaim it under different names, such as 'the mental body' or 'the causal body').

As a no-soul incarnation (i.e., according to my own working model of how reincarnation works), I don't have past life memories of my own in the way that soul incarnations would, but I was carrying a lot of past life memories that were not mine, owing to the parasitic lost souls attached to me - about which more in Part 2 of this account.

Extending Reiki - Kwan Yin, Seven Archangels

A seemingly 'guided' hitch-hiking encounter led me to SS, a local healer who gave me the attunements to Kwan Yin and six other goddess figures, and also the Seven Archangels. The Kwan Yin / Seven Goddesses attunement used the OM symbol and the Seven Archangels attunement used the six-pointed star in a circle.

After those attunements I found that my intuition in healings was repeatedly to use either of these symbols in place of the standard Reiki ones. With these symbols I started being more intuitive about healing and less tied to the Reiki tradition that I'd been taught but had felt to be limiting. In any case the Usui Reiki tradition was hardly an old one with the apparent authenticity of any sort of antiquity to commend it, and indeed that tradition was actually passing on something very different from what Usui had been teaching - though it wasn't till very much more recently that I came to understand that every single version of Reiki was just another 'flavour' of dark force involvement, so Mikao Usui was no less dark force led and deceived than the individuals who are dishing up something different as 'Usui Reiki' or indeed any openly different version of Reiki such as Karuna, Golden Ray, Tera Mai or even Vortex Healing (which latter makes no claim to be related to Reiki and is supposed to be way 'above' it).

I felt a new level of warmth coming through me in healings*, and was sometimes moved to give impromptu attunements for Kwan Yin or the Seven Archangels, on hiking outings and even to the odd alcoholic homeless people in Exeter who asked me for healing. Yet still nobody was really connecting with me as a reciprocating friend, and I was sometimes having to be very diligent in keeping my loneliness feelings in the background and still attending to what was positive in my life.

* Actually I'd always felt that there was something a bit restricted about Reiki, with its use of symbols, not to mention all the 'healing politics' and the absurd calling of Reiki practitioners 'Masters' (yes, with a capital 'M') after just three workshops and a certificate, or indeed in some cases after just a single weekend workshop and a certificate. However, the truth here was that the 'new level of warmth' that I felt in the healings was nothing other than an impression being given to me by the dark force in order to encourage me in that direction - as I was quite soon to start finding out the hard way!

In the case of my using the supposed Goddess and Archangel energies and symbols, I was actually taking a lot on trust, for I never perceived those supposedly hi