Belzebuub

Taking some time out of the study/work regime a friend and I traveled to the Middle East for three months by bicycle, this is a story in itself. The journey was interesting but cycling was very tiring and quite dangerous. 

 After that adventure I returned to a more mundane lifestyle working for a year in my home town. It became tedious and so I went on another cycling trip to Europe, I traveled through seemingly endless forests before staying for several month in a city.

I stayed with a group of Irish lads there and came across a pseudo-esoteric group who had taken over a large cinema, I wasn’t particularly interested in what they taught but liked discussing spiritual things with different people, I spent around five evenings a week there, after a break of four years I was beginning to take an interest in spirituality again.

I couldn’t see myself staying in that situation for the long term so I went back to Wales and another job. This time though I looked for spiritual groups where I could learn something worthwhile, there was nothing in the area apart from a psychic group and I wouldn’t find anything until I changed job and moved to a larger city.


The visit to the psychic group is worth a mention though – it was a two day workshop that was meant to explore psychic phenomena. Amongst the activities we had to sit next to a person and each describe each others life. The first person and I each had nothing to describe about each other, so I tried again with another person and accurately described her life, finally there was a hint of psychic abilities after a drought of so many years.

The final event was a channeling done by two people, it was lights out, the two ladies closed their eyes and began to contort and twitch in an identical way, I could ‘see’ this sinister presence go into them and they began to talk to the audience. I put a question to the person/entity which I suspected they wouldn’t be able to answer, she replied “you are an old soul close to the awakening” I wasn’t impressed, I had a bad feeling about that kind of psychic activity and never went back.

Despite an interest in spirituality I became drawn into a business with a partner designing and manufacturing hi-fi products, this preoccupied most available time. The product was well received at an audio show of the worlds best hi-fi and was featured as a highlighted product of the show in two of the UK’s leading audio magazines, we received an innovation award, and had a top business advisor who took an interest in us and decided to help us to get established, this of course would involve a lot of debt, but he was confident it would succeed.

Through his influential contacts he brought together a group of top accountants, marketers, designers and advisers who sat together around a table and agreed to help us. It seemed that we were about to step into the heady world of business and the next morning we went to his office to get everything going, only to find he’d died in the night of a heart attack.

We paused and looked again at the mountain of debt we would have to get into to launch the venture and decided not to do it.

Around that time I thought carefully about what I really wanted to do with my life, I realized that I really wanted a spiritual life above everything else. To do it I knew I had to devote myself to the search for spiritual truth 100%. I decided to do it, but didn’t know how.

It was back to the library and attendances to spiritual style groups. I regularly attended the Buddhists but found them lacking something I couldn’t really define. I tried the Raja yoga group, I just couldn’t buy into their belief system, I needed verification, something more objective that I could experience and with more depth than they offered. They looked particularly off-putting when they showed me a picture of their leader, a woman who looked neither like a man nor a woman. They said she used to look more feminine but with Raja yoga you become a divine androgyny, they showed me other pictures of men who looked like their leader. There was no point in going back to that place.

I felt that at the root of life was sex, that everything was ultimately sexual, but I had no way of finding out more about it.

Until one day in 1990 I saw a poster advertising a lecture and a course in a local library, it was on Gnosis and the woman giving the lecture was called Edith.

Next: Starting Gnosis