I was brought up as a Catholic; my mother was very devout and made sure I attended church regularly. Some weekdays before school, I would be an altar boy at mass, along with many of the other lads in my class. I took this task very seriously and was one of the main altar boys.

Running parallel with this however, was an interest in the occult. From about eight years of age I loved supernatural horror stories and movies, and would read something every night before sleeping. I would borrow books about the occult from the local library, and would occasionally play in the garden by drawing pentagrams and invoking spiritual beings, sometimes using the name Tetragrammaton. When I was twelve, my parents gave me a book Man's Search for Meaning, which they had bought at the Catholic Church’s own store. It explains how people had been looking for spirituality in different ways from the earliest times, and included many different religions.

I felt that I had to look further than what the church was giving me to find true spirituality, and I realized that I really wanted to find it.

The local library continued to be a useful source of information. When I was thirteen, I came across Madame Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, but I found it too unverifiable and incomprehensible. My favourite teachings at the time were from the four gospels. I wondered what Christianity would be like without any additions by anyone, so I wrote down just the words of Jesus in a note book. What emerged was something far deeper than was ever taught at church. It occurred to me that the real message of Jesus had been altered and that much of his message was personal and had a lot to do with inner change; it had many layers.

I wanted to find some way of going further into what that message referred to, so I looked at different religions and philosophies. I had to do this alone, because in the town where I lived, there was nothing to cater for any alternative spiritual or esoteric interests. It stayed that way until I was seventeen, when a friend in school took an interest in esoteric things. At eighteen, we went along to a talk and practice of Transcendental Meditation at a local council hall. It was like a glimpse of another world after the aridity of my small town. After the one session, they left and I never saw them again.

Later that year I finished school and went to Art College in the next town. We were sent a recommended reading list that didn’t have much art on it at all, but was a list of philosophical and esoteric books. Among them was one of my favourites at the time - the Tao Te Ching and several books by Krishnamurti. I found some of his books in the library and studied them intensively, far more so than the course in art which I was taking. 

In the summer of 1983, I and a friend from Art College, went to see Krishnamurti giving talks in Brockwood Park. It was a gathering that lasted about 10 days.

As we arrived, we were suddenly with people who shared the same interests. It felt surreal and when I saw Krishnamurti, he was so different from the people back in my home town, that he seemed like he was from another planet. I queued and sat at the front for each of the talks. It was very nice at the end of the day, to gather round the fire and sing songs with lots of people from the hippy days.

The more I tried to understand his teachings though, the more I began to realize that they were circular, that they didn’t actually lead anywhere and couldn’t bring about real change.

After this it was back to daily life and the start of university. Alan Watts was another author I read and he turned out to have been a bad influence, as through his work I got the idea of throwing myself into the opposite in order to overcome an inner state, so at University I pursued the positive side (pleasure) but it actually brought about its opposite (pain).

My upbringing had left me with deep rooted fear, which affected most of my interaction with people and was accompanied by depression. This pushed me to want to change. I needed to search more to find out how, but of course at university the intellect reigns supreme. I studied art and philosophy, which included logic and the philosophy of religion. I became an atheist and acquired that intellectual pride, which is not uncommon amongst intellectuals.

At the same time, I was trying to pursue pleasure in order to find happiness, but as I mentioned earlier I found that it fundamentally didn’t work. Before I was 21, I was struck down by a major illness. I saw a doctor - when he went out of the room, I read his notes. They said I had a possible terminal illness with no cure. I panicked and felt an awful fear, wondering how this could happen to me. The illness was debilitating, but over two years it gradually reduced. Eventually over the years it would disappear, but it was as though my youth had been taken away.

Despite taking few classes, I passed my exams at university and returned to my home town, where I worked to save money for travel.