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The First Year in Scotland
A Greek couple were teaching in Glasgow so we planned to stay with them and from there find accommodation in Edinburgh, they would build up a centre in Glasgow and we would do the same in Edinburgh, eventually we hoped a strong movement could be founded from there.
We put all of our possessions in the car, and headed up to Glasgow.
We arrived in winter to a unit in a cold, damp desolate area, much of which was about to be demolished. In fact, part of the building had already been demolished and there was no rendering on one of the outside walls, so the brickwork was exposed to the elements. The damp seeped through the walls and mould formed throughout the whole of one side of the flat. Two portable gas heaters were all there was to drive away the cold and damp, the damp was so bad that in the morning we had to dry our clothes in front of the gas fire, clouds of steam would come off them, we knew they were dry when the steam stopped.
The Greek couple looked pretty down, but we lightened things up by looking at old pictures of their time in Greece, just before they left for Glasgow.
Vasillios was a friendly chap, although I didn't quite get his method of dealing with lust - whenever attractive women would be walking in our direction on the street he would get us to cross over to the other side of the street so that we didn't feed lust, he had good intentions but I didn’t think that getting rid of lust meant zig zagging across the street, probably he didn't after a while either.
Edith and I couldn't see any suitable property in Edinburgh that was within our budget, so we put an ad in the newspaper. We got a response and rented a flat which was the bottom half of an old house, it turned out to be much better than we had expected, the house was in the pleasant Duddingston village, which dated from the twelfth century, there were only two quiet streets in the village, and it joined on to a large park, at the other end of the park was Holyrood castle, the Queens residence when she was in that part of Scotland. Some of the houses in the village were of historical interest and one was owned by Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a prominent British MP.
Being next to the park meant that we could go for walks almost any time we were free to. We started giving lectures in the city library and the numbers of people attending rapidly increased.
The students were having their fair share of OBE’s, Graham, a pleasant, smiling fellow conjured away a whole temple of the Black Lodge, he seemed such a happy chap, but gave up Gnosis to pursue what he called the path of the saints, he had many Obe’s including seeing a clock at a critical hour symbolising time running out, but he didn’t like to kill egos and he said he didn’t like all the fighting over there in the astral and wanted to pursue something more peaceful, I called him ‘spiral Graham’ from the beginning as I felt that was where is affinity lay. The spiral is a path for those who don't like opposition, where everything is rosy and fits into what most people think of as spiritual, but it doesn't lead to liberation. The direct path is a war which is why Jesus said that he brings a sword.
I offered a book by Samael Aun Weor called Revolutionary Psychology to a group of students so that they could study it, as they showed it to the class a woman jumped back in astonishment and said she saw that book last night in her dreams. It was not a book she could have seen here beforehand in the physical world.
Having the mountain so close meant that I could concentrate on my practices all weekend without interruption, and on any days or hours I had free during the week. I would go out for walks for hours and just concentrate on what I was doing, trying to be aware of all time, then I would go back to the centre and practice concentration or meditation or astral projection.
I built up a strong level of concentration like this and was able to lie down, concentrate on my heart, leave my body, as soon as I came back into it I would concentrate on my heart again to leave my body, and when I came back I would just repeat it.
I practiced travelling in the astral plane by concentrating on where I wanted to go, it proved pretty effective.
In a practice session alone in the meditation room one time I concentrated upon a candle, the concentration was so intense that I came out of my body and headed rapidly right into the candle, I was not aware of my physical body falling asleep.
When there were enough people in the groups that were ready, we met at weekends in the centre for practices from Saturday morning to Sunday.
Reynaldo asked us to take over the Glasgow centre as well and the Greeks went elsewhere. This meant we had a larger group to meet with at weekends from two cities. Fortunately better premises had been found in Glasgow and the centre began to thrive with lots of students, they took over the financing of the centre and we give the lectures and practices.
We used to practise meditation on an ego a lot; it was the main practice room exercise. We would spend as long as we needed to in the meditation room analysing and meditating upon psychological defects that we had seen during the day. I used to sit up and meditate, then lie down to continue my meditation, from there I would either drift in and out of sleep and dream or have an out of body experience, in either case I would often get information about the defect or ego that I had been trying to understand by meditating upon it. I could go up to eight hours at a time practising like this, then take a break for 10 minutes or so and then go back into the room to do another practice for a few hours more, not long after that I would start my practice of astral projection to go to sleep at night.
One time practising meditation during the day with a group of students I had a strange experience, I was lying down and saw that one student was not in his sleeping bag or in the room, so I got up to take a look, something felt strange, I checked my body it was solid, it was physical, nothing stretched, I tried to jump to float but it didn't work, I wasn't in the astral plane, I decided I would lie down to continue my meditation exercise and perhaps to have an out of body experience, as I lay down I saw that the person was sleeping in the room, he hadn't got up I think that was probably an experience of the fourth dimension rather than the fifth, something quite rare called Jinas in Gnosis.
Occasionally, when practising astral projection, right at the moment that sleep arrived I would hear voices in my head they were like screams, moans, groans, etc. I could hear them as though they were real voices in the physical world, but although they were not physical voices they were real nonetheless, they would egos that I had seen incorporating into me as a child, at the moment we fall asleep they detach themselves and we can hear them as they enter the fifth dimension.
I had an experience while out of my body, which made me feel what it was like to waste the precious time that we have as humans, I was locked in hell, with all opportunities gone, I could see my life as it was at the time and I longed for it, I more than longed for it, but I couldn’t get back to it, it was in the past. My cries were to no avail. This was a warning and at the same time a help for me to give me greater insight into a truth and into my own situation.
Retreats in France
In the summer and winter of 1992 we and other students from the UK travelled to the south of France to stay with the French students in retreat at the foothills of the Pyrenees, I was struck by the beauty and silence of the area both in the height of summer and in the snows of winter.
We stayed in country houses that were rented by the Movement. I practiced awareness and self-observation intensively, concentrating on being aware in that beautiful, peaceful environment. I worked hard to sustain it throughout the time and noticed that occasionally I could see into the state of others, stripped of many of the limitations of the human design, I could see people as they really were, as they spoke, one monstrous entity after another spoke, they were those entities, they merged from one into the next and out of the word, out of the voice came a vile, foul energy. So this was how we all really were. Interestingly, when Reynaldo asked one of the students called Rob how he was doing he said that people looked like monsters, evidently he had been seeing what I was seeing in some way or another, it seems likely that we were helped by forces from above and that was the teaching that we could take with us from the retreat. The teachings are there in any such gathering for those who can tap into them, empty their minds and glimpse reality.