BECOMING WHO I AM PART THREE

The most fascinating thing about self-acceptance is that, when we know who we truly are, acceptance happens automatically. It is only when we don’t know who we are that we give ourselves such a hard time. Knowing who we are solves every problem or, rather, dissolves every problem. Everything that was previously seen as a problem is now simply what it is – no problem.
Aligning what we want with what we get is happiness. When I changed my name from Patrick to Patrick I thought of it as a joke but the effect of the change was quite astonishing: I planted the seed of becoming who I am. It took a while to become myself. It took time for the seed to germinate and grow.
I used to earn money as a professional gardener. Granted, it wasn’t a lot of money but I learned the value of waiting for things to grow. I used to get clients who wanted an instant garden. There is nothing instant about a garden, I would tell them, gardens become themselves over time.
So do people.
While the seed of my Self was slowly growing I learned to grow my own personal supply of cannabis. I developed a liking for it as a teenager. In my twenties I gave it up and replaced the habit with meditation. In my forties I resumed the cannabis consumption and decided to grow my own. By 2011 cannabis was my only vice if we can define it as such. In my own mind there was a conflict as I wasn’t sure that it was conducive to spirituality. In fact, my consumption of the herb was consuming me. Nevertheless, this plant always felt sacred to me. I used to just stand there with these beautiful plants around me and feel their presence and it is a decidedly feminine presence. As any grower will tell you, male plants have only one purpose – to provide pollen so that the females will produce seed. It is the females who produce the sticky resin in the flower heads and it those buds that growers wait five months for. I would stand there with them being blessed by their feminine presence and blessing them with my own presence. In those days that was an aspect of my social life and my spiritual life. Cannabis was my sacrament and my communion with the divine presence.
My relationship with this herb was very ambiguous. I had more than enough for my own use so I tended to overuse it. I particularly liked to cook with it. Smoking it acts quickly and tends to affect the head while eating it seems to make the effects emerge from within the body. On St. Patrick’s Day 2011 I decided I would have some fun. What happened next was a lot more than just fun!
After months of being with them, of watching, tending, feeding, watering and keeping them well hidden from public view while they grow stems and leaves the cannabis plants develop their distinctive sexual characteristics. The males produce these little dangly balls full of pollen which is carried to the female flowers by insects and wind. The idea is to get rid of the males as soon as they reach puberty otherwise the females will produce too many seeds at the expense of resin, and lots of resin is what you want.
Harvest for outdoor crops is early autumn and the predator that needs to be watched out for at this time is mildew. Mildew will wipe out the entire harvest very quickly once it gets established in the heart of the resinous buds. Through carelessness I lost my entire first crop to mildew but, by 2010 I was getting good at spotting the warning signs. So, the following March I had plenty of quality herb to consume.
I don’t drink and I don’t really enjoy being in the midst of crowds of people. I usually find them to be draining unless I am especially focussed or with close friends. That St. Patrick’s Day I was alone and I decided to enjoy my own company to the fullest. I ate perhaps four specially prepared fairy cakes and I was smoking as well so I was in a good mood doing the washing up at the sink, gazing out at the garden while I listened to Iain McNay of Conscious TV interviewing the radical Non Duality teacher, Tony Parsons. That, in itself is an odd thing to be doing while celebrating St. Patrick’s Day but I have never allowed being a little different to bother me.
Allow me to slip back in time to when I first began to consciously and intentionally live a spiritual life. It was the late 1970s and I was in my early twenties. I had travelled overland to India and caught a glimpse of an entirely different worldview in which holy men and women were openly revered by ordinary people. This was a world in which really unusual things could happen and no one would be surprised. It was a world in which miracles were expected and welcomed. Seeds of yearning were planted in my soul and they began to germinate.
I became dissatisfied with my life. None of my friends had much interest in spirituality. Some were gradually becoming alcoholics so I became estranged from them. Yoga arrived in my life and it led me towards meditation and Theosophy which is a compromise between Western occult traditions and Oriental esoteric traditions embracing the Hermetic tradition, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism as well as esoteric Buddhist and Hindu traditions. In fact it was the Theosophists who introduced much of India’s spiritual traditions into a Western world immersed in materialism.
One of the factors that Theosophy emphasized was the idea that there are hidden spiritual masters who somehow guide the direction of world events and spiritual evolution from their headquarters in a mystical location somewhere in Tibet or nearby. These hidden masters are said to have had the ability to communicate with their disciples all around the world by way of occult skills such as telepathy and travelling in an ethereal or astral body in order to instruct their followers. After a couple of years of yoga I found myself in a meditation group. It was a strange form of meditation where we would sit in a room on cushions with our backs against the wall and a candle in the centre. The leader of the group, Saul, would say the word “Om” in his resounding voice which would be followed by a period of silence. Then he would speak, as it were, on behalf of his own master. The assumption was that this was one of those spiritual masters identified by the Theosophists. Each member of this group was assigned a master but it was usually only Saul who spoke on their behalf. This technique is known as channelling in which the energy and consciousness of a spiritual presence is communicated.
I wasn’t that impressed with a lot of the content of these messages. I began to doubt the source of these communications, the spoken words became less and less valuable to me, but the quality of the energy was undeniable. Something of immense spiritual value was occurring in these group meditations. In hindsight, I feel that this was the presence of Shakti.
Shakti is the empowerment which becomes available to us when the original energy which gave form to the cosmos becomes present in our lives. One of the many signs of the presence of Shakti is a yearning for spiritual fulfilment. This yearning motivates us to some kind of spiritual practice like meditation. In turn, meditating increases the presence of the Shakti. In Hinduism this presence is also called Amma or Mother.
After about three years this Mother energy partially unveiled itself to us as the Holy Grail. Soon afterwards the group dissolved and each member took a separate path. In my own case I felt that I was seeking this Holy Grail. I don’t know how the other members felt. I lost contact with most of them. But it is interesting that our experience should mirror the myth of the Holy Grail which is seen in a vision by the Knights of the Round Table in King Arthur’s Court only to vanish and inspire the knights to set off on a quest, each knight taking a separate and individual path.
My own path passed through a spiritual wasteland for twenty five years or more. Finally, the yearning within me caused a crisis precipitated by the death of my mother. The emptiness I felt at her passing was intense as I had been her fulltime carer since the death of my father almost four years earlier. I felt that my whole life had become utterly pointless and that I was a complete failure. I was ashamed of myself. I had come to the end of something and I had no sense of a beginning which might follow it.
So, there I was on St. Patrick’s Day, 17th of March 2011 high on cannabis when I heard Tony Parsons say “I don’t give meetings. There is no one sitting here. This is what’s happening.”
“That is something that is very hard to grasp” said Iain, “especially for someone who hasn’t done a lot of seeking in themselves. They see you, they know you have a name, Tony, and you have a red sweater and a blue shirt and there’s a guy saying there’s no one there. It’s a tough one.”
“Yeah, okay, okay. It’s not tough. It’s not difficult.” Said Tony, “It’s impossible…”
POP!
The person I thought I was simply vanished when I heard the word “impossible”. In that moment something I never expected and something I would have considered impossible happened: I no longer existed. In fact, I never had existed; I only imagined my existence. It was such a relief! The bubble of who I always thought I was burst. All that was left was everything else, everything which I had always thought of as not being me. For the next ten days I was everything. I was everything apart from myself and I was myself as well.
In Part Four I shall tell you what happened next. It was very strange.