fhuy
flo
aA dark winter's afternoon'emi Gt was some
time before she answered the doorbell because she had
tocome down four or five flights of narrow stairs. In
# as the part of London here you don't expect answer-
phones at the door and autematig press-button release.
She was dressed
a long gown,rvery dark with
steady black eyes, a
mother-type you would call
L00YE:
her, something of a gypsy, you could see the wild side
behind the stillness. She-wes-eteying muthetep floor
and I made a joke that must have been madenseveral times lym I
toher when-we got * thope-frter all those stairs
I need to be reborn!"
Because that was what I'd come to her for, to be
reborn.
First we had a chat in the tiny sitting room.
She half lay on a mattress on the floor with cushions
round her. I wasn*t-exaetly nervous but I had a sense
of foreboding. I've noticed this a lot since---in
others who want to get reborn. They know they're going
to say goodbye to the old life. Something tells them
that. So they get fearful and apprehensive or they
may fall sick. That ogten happens. Or they may
suddenly cancel the appointment. Samexkingxisxmperatingx
XRTEXEAX*#1IX*elixtxexwkattexemmingxxpx It seems people get
a forewarnin of what's going to happen and even if they
feel their lives are a mess they may still not want to
get out of the mess in case there's a worse one ahead.
Morel than that, a mess creates its own pleasures and
comfortsroud veleeses. K
She told me women weré more open than men in her
experience. They cry more easily, she aid. Og I cry
wi thout difficulty I said. Great was her reply. We
went down the corridor to the bedroom and she told me to
lie down towards the edge of the bed. Then she covered
me wih a light quilt, and put a thin pillow under me
head. She asked me if I wanted to pee and I said no.
She said well I'd like to lie as still as possible,
if you've got something to say you can say it and of
course wask any questions wyou want to but otherwise
keep as quiet and still as you can. All you re going,
she added, is breathe in a certain way. She then turned
the standing lamp in such a way that the room became
shadowy. The curtains were drawn. It was very quiet
considering it was such a busy part of London. She put
my arms at my side and brought a chair over to the bed.
She sat down and said close your eyes and keep them
closed.


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ttre curp
It was right to tell her I cried wit thout difficulty.
But I didn't exapect the silent tears that poured from
my eyes, and continued to well up agai and
And
it wasn't ordinary crying. It had nothing maar to
with
any distress of mine. I was crying ta the awful kindmess
and tenderness being poured down on my me in such an
unstinted flow I've never experience before or since.
And that tender ess fwas coming from a definite entity.
Simultaneously I felt en enormous gratitude to this
woman who was sitting in a chair close to my head---
*ha*XEXEXexwasxtXXMEXYEXXENIX saying and apperently doing
nothing---t that she was the vehicle of this thing
thing that came out of the blue and over which I had
no control.axxxwhigkxinxfaaREXSEEXROXHBxm*x*axxmxxtaxxx
My hands had started tingling. I told her this
in a whisper ad she said simply OK, that's nom normal.
And the tingling spread gently to my stomachand legs,
and then suffused the whole of my body. And as this
happened **XIX****XEXXmexxidxitiyXawaYEXmfxaxprESENEE
kaxeringxiwxfrwx*xEXEEXDEXXXX
Iif I start I became aware of a presence in front of me
or above me I'm going to run into difficulties not only
with the reader but myself. It would be much more true
that I became possessed by something over which I had
no control. Better than hat, I was under possession,
I was sort of gripped by the greatest force I; d ever
encountered---gripped everywhere, physically as well
as mentally. I was entirely the property of this
shadowy force. I call it shadowy be cause it seemed
to be a living and dynamic part of the shadows of the
room, though my eyes were closed. And I was being
addressed. A definite message was being given to me
but not a t all a verbal one. And the presence was
much more than shadowy. It was visible---and much
more visible, much more present than we remember
dreams to be. It was a face. And---again I risk
alientating not only the reader's but my own power
of belief (much that we experience we fail to believe
even while experiencing it) ---that face belonged to
a person I recognised. Yet I'd never met that person.
Some people said he'd never existed anyway. I'd read
quite a lot about him. I think that I gathered from
my reading a vivid sense of his personaliy. Itxwasx
I'd never really been part of the cults and institutions
organised in his name. I found the doctrines attributed
to hkm absrud. As for cults, my taste for hem had
bee satisfied well enough by orietal teachings---yoga
and various types of meditation, fasting. For over
sixteen years my attention had been given to other
teachers than this one---and ones proved to have
existed, and ones alive today. For this was the
face of Christ. How I knew this I couldn't understand
at the time, nor do I understand it now. But th
presence was SO overpowering that the tears began pouring
from my eyes---there was such a shower of love and
tenderness from him that I could only break down
utterly. But I never for a moment lost my awareness
of him. Of course my mind was saying all the time
this


this isn't true, you're lying in a room with your
eyes closed and a silent woman at your side. But
the presece persisted. It had a definite form, and
a definite reltionship with me. I was aware O his
long hair, and I was also surprised to see==or rather
feel---that the hair wa S auburn rather than black.
He was dark, less thin than I had supposed in childhood
bible classes. His skin was smooth, his features
extremely soft.
And he hovered over me, part of the
shadows, a shadow himself but quite distinct, indeed
more distinct than a physical presence could be because
he had possession of my whole person, body and soul.
And he began doing something to me. He drew closer
ad closer to me---I felt an overwhelming sense of
being favoured, priileged, I felt awed, moe than at
any other time of my life---and seemed to take my arms.
And I raised myself slightly to in order to get the
message he seemed to be conveying to me. I say seemed
because we get used to talking this way about shadows.
The word just meas that our mind is insisting that only
th physical is real (despite this having been consclusively
disproved even by those who believe in it most, the
physical scietists). But what with the tears and
that sense of a tenderness I had never witnessed or
eve n thought possible before it was difficult for
my mind to retain its control or even vigilance.
Yes, my arms were being moved. They were being
moved from he side of my body upwards. Slowly he
was lifting thm into the position of the cross.
Here again I have that sinking feeling that this will
be taken as just another piece of se lf-induced
religious illuminaion. ***xixeanxpieaxisxthatixxx
HEXEXT***IEx*imexfurxreligian*X***xaxpIEnkyxfarx
xalkdxmy**iX**XXXXX**Ria*xx But at the asame time
I have to set down truthfully what my experience was.
Though my arms remained physically at myside I could
have raised them.
That is, there was a strong nervous
tendency in them to raise themselevs, which my mind---
alive to the fact that I might make myself ridiculous
to the st anger at my side---resisted.
(Sin e then
I've seen many others raised their arms during a
session). He was pressing on me but without the
smallest touch. It was all being done by the power
of his eyes, that extraordinary gaze from which I
flinched and yet towards which I was more and more
drawn, and the utter softness of his expression which
at the same time was firm, strong as I hadnever
witnsessed before in a face. It was like me being
show n that tenderness is the greatest strength there
is, the only real key to understanding matter. And
as my arms wen back I realised that he was with infinite
gentleness, using the shadowy power that emanated from
him in an irresistible way, he was making me take up
the Christ position on the cross, and the tears were
pourinf down my face also for this, the thought of such
tenderness being nailed up and killed by people. And
there was no blame in him. In fact there was the very
opposite emotion in what h was trying to get me to do.


And this brought the tears in evn greater flood---
the thought he was inducing in methat what had happened
on the cross hadn't in the least been bad. He was
trying to lift my head too, becase that had dropp
ed : under his shadowy directions, to one side, so
that my chin restd on my shoulder-blade in the character-
istic crucifixion position. And he was lifting it.
He wanted to look into my eyes. He was urging me to
feel joy. He was urging me to laugh. He was melt-
ing the pain of the crucifixion into aother thing.
And I was following him as closely as I could, strain-
ing forward, my breathing quiet stopped now. And this
increased my emotion yet more---the message that in
pain there is joy, in suffering there is joy, but when
I put it into words it sounds trite. But he conveyd
th feeling to me, urging me to see life his way, to
change my life in fact, to base it on that feeling,
or rather awareness, that the pain and the suffering
are an etire illusion and only the joy real and permanent.
It is something I'm still learning (the hard way) well
over a year later. But it feels as if that mssage
entered my cells in some way---not my mind. My mind
can't make much of it. My mind insists that what
looks negative is negative, and tha what hursts is
really hurtful.
But I know he possessed me that
day---whatever name you like to give him. And what
he possessed me with was this basically inexpressible
awareness that the suffering and pain are only a mistake
about the nature of experience. Hexxadexthatxmistake
HINSEXEXXEEXXEXKRENXXXXXEXEXIEAXENE@xEX**x@sdxmhxemdx
xyxkaxtxtHaxthaxxfursakenxme?* Somewhre along the pain
you will find the opposite, like something you have
to pull aside curtains for. And of course---I nearly
forgot this---I was feeling more and more joy as he
conveyed this to me, more and more peace and utter
satisfaction. And I floated in this, physically and
in every other way. Yet I was on a sort of cross.
I was spposedly in pain, I'd supposedly been spurned
and persecuted by people, butthis ext aordinary liquid
joy was sperading O ver me all the time, and thre
were cast spaces round me, and everything lay still
and content in this joy, ad this was the basic relaity
of everything. And the sense of joy too increasd
the emotion-- -the tears poured now because of the
sheer relief. I knew while all this was going on
that I was being told the most important hing of
my life, and that if I disregarded it in the fuure,
if I didn't in some way base my life on it, thin
everything would go wrong. And even then, if
'everything went wrong' it wouldn ;t be too late to
realise that unerneath this too was this amazing
stillness and joy, and perfect order. It was like
hovering in a vast sky tobether with this presence,
an here too was a sense of greater privilege and
wonderment than I'dd ever had.
At the same time, almost throughout the experience,
I was aware of a deep gratitude towards the woman who
sat by the bed ana who had be en


madsat by the bed and who had been the means the to
this experience. In som way I felt it coming from
her or through her, ENdxHErXEIIENEE*MEShe guided me
only minimally, with a soft word here and there, to
help the pattern of the breathing, and sometimes she
laid a light hand on my forehead, when the tears were
very strong, or on my shoulder, as if to steady and
suport me. It was as if she saw and felt everything
I saw and felt. Not that I ever told her about what
I'd gone through. This is in fact the first ti e
I"ve ever recounted it. Somehow I felt that telling
it to be, even to the one closes to me, would reduce
the importance and intensity, and evn make me begin
to doubt it, whereas if I waited and recounted it in
an ordered and considered way, as I'm trying to do
now, it would so to speak receive its proper due and,
above all perhaps, remain safely beyond the reach of
perammaixinfAIXINIKKEXEE human interefernce: I man by this
that if Idd told it freely to people some of them migh
have reacted sceptically, and this might well have
joined up with the scepicism in my own mind, and thus
bit by bit undermined the experience for me and, more
important, diluted the message behind it, and finally
destroyed it. I didn't want that to happen. So I
kept it as my scecret until now. Because now I can
build on it, amplify it, justify it" it has relevance
to practicaily every exprience I've had since then.
On ething I forgot to mention. This face of
Christ subtly changed from time to time, especially
towards the end of the experince. It wasn't really
a physical chage, more one of identity. He seemed
to become Indian, and in that the softness yag XaX
RiffErEnEXf=Exfezixarentx*xtx**x**XEXXIxEantixpxtx**
asx
of his face became subtly plumper, though agiag again
I say there was no actualy physical transformation.
I realised at the time---but I remembere wih some
difficulty now---that while changing into someone
else he was remaining himself, or put in another way
he and the other presence were the same one, the same
person. Later I saw a picture of an Indian guru
which fitted this 'second' presence perfctly. And
I shall tell that remarkable story when I came to
it later in this narrative. All I want to convey
now is that Christ and this guru were the same
presence, they were addressing me in the same way,
and basically it was only my mind perceiving that
they were two, because no observale change took
place in the shadowy form above me, and the cross
remained th theme of the experience.
Well my tears dried. The experience was over and
I realised that I'd been given the most powerful guarantee
possible for this 'tgerapy' as some people called it.
For me it was a miracle. And a miracle arrivd at with
amazing simplici ty---a matter of breathing in a certain
way. Why had no one told me about this in over fifteen
years of practicing eastern techniques? The lady in
the chair


the chair asked me if I wanted to pee and I said yes.
I was still tingling in my extremities and feeling
rather dizzy i n head but she said it was OK for e
to get up as long as I didn't dash about. I wen to
the loo and sat there in something of a maze (I was
too unsteady to pee standing up). Life had changed
for me. Not that I felt a different person. I
simply knew that this experience was the most important
one I'd ever had, and that it would in some way direct
the rest of my life, determine my relatinships and even
change my work. All this in fact happened, but much
more graphically ad dramatically than I could have
predicted.
All the time there kept ringing in my head th
words "Well done Janabai' (this was the name of th
slent lady). I CO uldn't rid my head of the notion
that she had in some way been responsible for what I'd
been through, and, m re han that, had been chosen for
the role. She was actually in London only a few weeks,
and came from Honolulu, so that it was quite a fluke that
I should have got her services and not those of a less
all-seeing person.
Janabai has that air about her---
of total abitlity to cope, and awareness of the most
subtle inner states. Whether this is tre of her private
life I don't know and don't care. It is certainly
true of her as a rebirther, sitting mostly in silence
close to her subject's head. We went to the sitting
roo and chatted brief y. There wasn't much to say
except that I'd had the bigggest experience of my life,
and all she said was that this was a rar occurence, it
happned to no more than one in seven people, if that.
We made an appointment for the second session (sh told
me one needed btween six and ten) and I left. I wanted
to breathe some more in my room, but she'd warned ,e to
not to try on my own---no more than twenty or so breaths
at a time. I disboeyed her---and paid for it. But
that first week was good. I fel light and healthy,
and my face showed it, if the remarks of other people
were anything to go by. Of course, as with all such
techniques, it's a question of whther that state continues
and for how long. *XXXXEENHIOMEXXAXHWs**XIXXXXEEEXXaXX
I remember that at one point during that first
session, when I was straining forward to gett th
message that was being given to me by that presence,
afraid it might disappear at any moment, Janabai
whispered to me 'Don't hold on', meaning not to strain
or hold my breath.
This was at the very end of the
experience,when in fact most of the message had been
conveyed. Yxxsayingxt In menioning this now I'm
trying to convey the reality ff what was appearing to
me. I describe it as being composed of ashadows,
yet these shadows were less shadowy in their effect on
me than anything more physical would have been. That
degree of love I have never received before, so that
those shadows were vry much more BNXTMEXREREXKEkandxthandxthan
imaginaki@nxamdxaxxXXXX*XEXE*KErxkanddreawxx than imagination
or daydream or real dream could have evoked. I can
only


only compare it to one other experience, in which the
same kind of presence came to me, composed of hadows
yet vsiible and of much greater potency in its effects
than AXXANAK an actualy human being would have been.
I was a child of about ten and sleeping by myself in
a small room close to where my parents slept. My
door was open, and so was the door to my parents'
bedroom. In the middle of the night I was aware that
my grandmother, a small woman usually dressed in black,
had entered the ro om and was standing by the bed.
She remained there for a few moments and then bent down
untilher face was very close to mie mine. And she
peered darkly into my eyes. I woke up---and of course
only then began to realise that it waEntexmyxgranduatk
couldn't have been my grandmother. Yet it was. And
the moment I woke up, quite unalarmed by her presence,
she slipped out of the open door again. It was only
now, gradually, that I began to fe el afraid. For my
grandmother was dead. But she had actually been there.
Waking up, in the dim light, I could still see her---
it wasn't that she was gone the moment I opened my
eyes. Her prseence there at the side of my bed had
woken me, but th waking din't diminish her vividness,
so that my impression of her when asleep (or perhaps
half asleep) was exactly the same as when I was awake,
unlike either a dream figure or a real human would
have been. Later in life I read (in the works of
Frued) that this was a frequent 'visitation' in
childhood the whole world over.
Was the Christ I was awre of familiar to me in a
similar way--namely someone I ahad been constantly
aware of in childhood because of bible classes and the
fact that as a choirboy I was in church three or four
times a week? Or did he apear to me from the past,
intact, without refrence to any of my memories or
assocaitions. I was struck, thinking about it during
the week hat folowed, by the fact that during the
session wi th Janabai he gad appeard to me wih auburn
hair, which I hadn't expected and which I din't for
a moment associate with Christ. I was also struck,
now, by the fact that his face merged into tha of an
In dian I didn't know but who was certainly a saint or
mystic of some kind. I began to think back on a book
I'd thought of wriing some years before. It was
called the Indian Crucifixion. That Its theme had
been the connection between Christ ad India, not
simply spiritually but historically, through Greek
and Persian influence. I had also conjectured that
the monastic order he is said to have joined owed
its origins (since the Jewish religion had no monastic
ism) to Indian roots which found their way to the
Mesopatamian world through missionaries and traders
and the Persian army, where Indiands were sometimes
enlisted. More than that, I had wanted to show hat
Christ had actually brought Indian or oriental droctrine
into Israel, ad that it had bee for this that he had
been crucified. It seemed to explai that peculiar
Indian


KIndia connection in the Christ appearance I had had.
And I came to the conclusion that is yo are going to
get a powerful appearance from the world of shadows
ofthsi kind it will always in the terms that you have
already made clear to yourself, inyour day to day
experience. Thus Buddha would be more likely to appear
to an Indian or Chinese. And not at all likely to
appear to someone like me. But in my experience was
both Christ and the Indian guru, as the spiritual
guides of my past. To that extent, I thought, I'd
created that presence. But I certainly hadn't created
the shdows. I began to see that the shadows will
form any shape or suggestion you are familiar, but
that the message they wish to convey isxpreissiy is
the sole matter of importance. The shadows will convey
it to you in whichever manner will possess you and
make you understand most completely. The fact that
Christ (during the experience I never for a moment had
any doubt that it was Christ, though how I could have
bee so utterly certain is beyond me) came to me as
vividly as my dead grandmother had gone mny years br
before, with as vidvid EKCX an impact, and wi h
extreme emotional effect, SHEWENXHExmexthat made me feel
that a force had got to work on me that would alter
my life, in the sense that the message it had conveyed
to me in silence and shadow was to become in a strange
way the goal of my life. At the time, during that
week after the first sessio wi th Janabai, this was
clear to me only a bare formula. I just felt it was
going to be so. It took quite a few months for it
to become a sbsubs substantial reality.
There was one other time when I was aware of
shadowy presences, but much more recently. It gad
happened after I'd been reading about hypnotic regressions
into past livs conducted by Helen Wambach with hundreds
of human subjects. While reading her book I became
aware (rightly or wrongly) that I knew abou my OW n
birth, though I'd never consciously known about it
before. I could actually remember hovering over
my mother in the company of other shadowy people
(called I believe by the regression experts and by
clairvoyants as one's spiri itual "peers") who were in
the same state of expecteant joy as I was, and who were
egging me on to enter life as a great adventure. In
most of the accounts of birth from memory, by the way,
the shadowy self enters the ueterus only seconds
before birth, and isn't resident in the foetus while
in the womb.
But I was aware of these "peers" in the uterine
memory while fully awake. They were so to speak at
the back of my mind, W ile the Christ apearance and
theappearance of my grandmother were totally "possessive",
that is not a cell of my body was unaware of them,
they were closer to me than anything physical, and much


more potetnt than anything physical.
This mention of the uterine memory isntixaltngmiker
IXTEIEYanEXamtxtuxtKE is strictly to the rest of the story
here because the 'therapy' I had started was called
rebirthing. That is, it induced in the subject the
first real birth, on the gr unds that the first birth
had been so conditiond, and usally such a shock,
as to prevent the true desires (and even the true body)
of the person born from developing. I had been promised
that I would feel all the snesations of waking up to the
world if not the for the first time at least in a way that
demonstrated to me tha I hadn't been proper;y alive
before.
Rebirthing, I learned, had started in San
Franciscco a few years before as a resul of an acciden
that had happened to Leonard Orr in a sauna. Or rather,
it was an indced accident, an ecperimental one. As I
(and a good many othr people now see it) it was a very
organised accident---organised as much by those shadowy
forces that play at the edge of our lives as my Christ
appearance was,. .aRdxHsingxtHEXsaWEXXXX He saw a notice
on the wall warning everybody that noe more than fifteen
minutes should be septn in the steamroom. So he spent
an hour---and he had to crawl out. To srvive he found
himself breathing heavily. And as a result of the
breathing he went through some extraordinary sensations.
Afte rwards he remembered the breathing pattern and began
to pracyice it on himself wih impressive results. Much
latr he took the technique to India and was told by a
famous guru that he had hit on a very ancient breathing
technige which yogis had always ben forbidden to teach
to the lay public. It had been kept a monastic secret,
and many Indians believed hat Christ had used this tech-
nique as par of his training for his mission, while he
was with the Essenes. All this was exciting material,
and of course when I actually received the Chris appear-
ance it all seemd to fit together in a strange way,
though that was nothing to the events that began to fit
together much later as a resul of this first experience.
(and led me to San Francisco where it had all started).
There were two forms of rebirthing. One was the
breathing technique I was practicing and the other was
the 'wet' rebirth in which the subject floated in water
wi th a snooker on, sometimes for an hour or more, breathing
in the rhythmical fashion of the 'dry' rebirth. I never
tried this, though there were quite a few "rebirth tubs'
about in Britain. In fact like many people I never got
the birth recall during any of my rebirth sessions. There
are those people who und ergo vivid and often painful
recollections of their birth, and thre is the majority
who go through certain physical symptoms (coldness,
hunger, fear, suffocation) which they may or may not
associate with birth.
Simultaneously wit th my Christ appearance I went
through the classical physical symptoms---first the
tingling, which usually starts as Isaid before in the
hands---the a feeling of extreme cold, followed by
fear and alarm and a sense of not being able to get
enough air


enough air, followed after about two hours by S ense
of heat and well-being and an enormous appetite (my
first three sessions were dominated by hunger). Now
the rebirth chiefs round Leonard Orr say that these
are the feelings you had at birth, and they are passing
out of your system to make way for thenew creature. In
my case the fear passed fairly soon but I had suffocation
problems for a quite a number of sessions, and my feeling
of not getting enough air tended to return from time to
time over at least the following year. The Orr school
says that nearl y all people born more than ten years
ago will have had the normal birth where the umbilical
chord is cut too soon, tha is before the child has
begun to breathe, so that the first experience of deatk
life is fearxmexteathpanic fear of death and a horrified
sense of suffocation which makes the first breath of
air when it does happen traumatic. The breath nver
recovers from this first shock. One of the reults is
that most people "subventilate", which is why, when they
are rebirthed, hey go through hyperventilateion problems
which require the presence who of someone who knows wha
is happeneing and how to control. Conventional medicine
would indeed describe all the symtoms show during a rebirth
as normal hyperventilation symtoms which have to be
removed as qickly as possible (usually by an inhibition
of the breath). Th rebirth school says that only continued
rlaxed breathing will remove the sym t ms, and tha the
tingling or violent vibration atendant on hyperventilation
are in fact th entrance of energy. This energy has a
marked therapeutic quality, and will go to distress points
in the body, whether these are caused by a common cold
an operation or some deepseatd ill which the subject and
his doctors know nothing about.
In my case I had immediate numb and then throbbing
sensations in the area where I'd had a hernia operation
about seven months before. I was worried by this, in
case I was opening the wound, or some such fantastic idea.
It took two or three months of continual rebirthing
sessions before the nmbeness and throbbing disappeared,
an then it never came back and the last traces of th
wound healed entirely. During subsequent rbirths I
had aches and throbs in othr vulnerable areas of mine---
the liver,the intestines and so on, and Orr's promise
that all one has to do is breathe ithroug' these
symtpoms, and that the pain or numbness or throbbing is
simply a rapid therapeutic action, has been borne our in
my experience over and over again.
I realised also that I'd never really breathed in
my life, and had yeared all my life for more air without
knowing how to get it. My teacher Janabai told me in
the first session tha I would soon get my 'breath release',
though she din't exactly specify wha this was.
And there


is a lot of contradictory and vague talk about this in
rebirth circles, perhaps because not all people seem to
have this release, and when they do its symptoms differ.
In my case it hapened in the second session. I suddenly
found myself drawing about twice the quantity of air,
quite as if my rib cage had come unstuck from the grixzx
grissle round it which had formed through under-use over
the years despite daily yoga. The spasmodic digestion
problems I was used to disappeared very early in the
sessions and never returnd, whow ever I abused the
digestive organs. I fond that drink affected much less
than before and hat after leaving a club or pub one or
two breaths of the kind Janabai had pateiently taught
me were enough to clear my head and give me the sensation
that I hadn't been drinking at all.
So it seemed to me that rbirthing was the fullest
package I'd ever tried. It healed, it illumianted and,
perhaps above all, as I was to discovr, it changed your
life radically withou you doing anything about it. I
didn't have an easier time after I re irthed, in fact
I think I had it much harder than before, but I was
aware very much aware of leading my own life, with my
own resources, and of fighting through to that place in
life where only I could b (and thre is such a place for
evryone). The hard part of those months that followed
my initiation ino rebirthing were due to the fact that
I overhauled my slife from top to bottom. I went through
more changes more quickly than I'd ever evn specualaed
on before. In the process I lost all my money (despite
or perhaps because of the mini 'prosperity seminar' I
went through, spending my last pounds) and all my professional
projects collapsed one by one in a way I couldn't believe
was possible, going by previous experience. Having all
my life kax suffered severe security worries, derived from
having been brought p in great poverty, and having like
many people brought up in such fear-dominated conditiins
squandred my money whenever I got it (and I had had quite
a lot in my life), I now had just about one thing to keep
going on, my own person and the clothes I'd bought myself
in the 'old' life. I often thought to myself, if this
is a rebirthall I can say is it feels like death. And
I read over and over agin a remark made by Leoard Orr
in one of his seminars---after your rebirth you go through
quite a lot of ups and downs, for qui te a time. At the
same time I was awre of clearing out of mysystem not only
a lot of unwanted toxic substances which my yoga and evn
my fasts seemed to have overlooked, but---and this was
the factor changing my life---a lot of dead things in
my mental makeup which I'd been carrying around with
me as normal luggage. I learned fthrough rebirthing
what I knew intellectually before---that I was responsible
for my own life, and that any trouble I went through,
EXE though i t seemd to start from the outside world
and to invade my world unexpectedely and unjustifiably,
was actually programmed byme, sometimes at birth, some-
times later, and most of the time withot meknowing a
thing abou it.
a yiddin a 2y ftu i0 e -
ike
Aurs
ueat
ob Th
ays
Caule
len
H a


Naturally I approached the second and third sessios
with fll expectations of the first ecstasies being repeated
and the message that came with them becoming clearer.
BNothing of the sort happned. I used up about three
boxes of paper tissue. The mucous poured outof me.
In those days I always seemed to be hawking and spitting,
and my nose was. continually getting clogged, as if with
an incipient cold, despite a good diet and regular yoga.
I've been free of all that now for at least a year. I
did have a series of colds during and immediately afer
the rebirth sessions, but ExtakexTHESEXXaxkaxeXXEEN
praxekedxkyxtkexkreahingyxanXMIXEXEORxeantinnationxwwixtxx
*kexapyxstarkmaxkyxiznakaixhyxianzraixx all that's finished an
gone now. It went th same way as the numbness round my
hernia wound. And spagny similar feelings of distress
in my aanal and porostate areas. They held for a certain
number of sessions, then disappeared entirely. My third
session was uneventful, in he sense that there was neither
a sense of ecstasy nor much physical therapy going on.
I lost consciousness tha time. That is, I just didn;t
know what had happened to me. I' ve observed this in
people quite a lot since then. The body goes etirely
still and to all intents and purposes the breathing
ceases. Then the suvject comes back with a jolt.
Well I did that. And Janabai explained that it hapened
when the organism couldn't deal with some pain or block
or problem in the mind,
I've never been quite satisfied
wit th that explanation, perhaps because it isn't provable.
Mt tendency to go unconscious grew stronger in the follow-
ing months as I began rebirthing myself. In fact, as I
shall describe later, I got myself into considerable
difficulties through that tendency. I believe now that
the unconsciousness is ***XXERE*XAXXBEX*KEXtkexkwayxtkexkwdxx*wx an
effort O the part of the organism to make up for a hell of
a lot of tension and SEXX so hidden sorrow (so hidden that
it so to speak lurks in the cells like a toxic substance).
***X*EEXEXpianatinaxmf Janabai also told me hat it could
be due to a great amount of pentathol and such sedatives
substances in the blood due to past operations, if only
those in the dentist's chair. This makes sense for me
but the fact remains that my tendency to go right out
(though not at all an unpleasant senation). increased in
my case even though I had neither operations nor dental
attention in that period. Certai ly these bouts of
unconsciousness were followed by a deep sens of rest and
ease. I also slept a bit in the third and subsequent
sessions. If I arrived at a session very tiredI sslept
most of the time (to Jaabai's annoyance). In other words
that energy coming into me as a result of the rhtyhmic
breathing always went to the points of greatest weakness---
and if the body needed sleep that was what the energy
provided. I've seen a man with a lifelong insomniac
problem, afraid since childhood both of falling asleep
and going unconscious, do both in his first rebirth
session. NaturalkyxxexfsIXaXEERSEXBINgImfxgrxxixgrwakxkriumpkx
These physicat-resuate-were impressive but-idoubt
1f I wouzd have continued the rebirthing with outthe
Christ epearence-in-the first. Iwent to a smaliseminer


Bwxxifxre
XI madxyustxEXKEEHXXI IEXAREN M.
XE A exisxifxixhadn**x* H CC EXEXDEYIEREEXEK
SESSIXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
If it had just been a matter of getting rid of
physical distressesi don't think I would have done
more thanfinish one cycle of six or eight sessions
with Janabai.axt But I had a sense of this strage new
manner of breathing---which was in some undefinable way
much more than breathing---being a great adventure.
Let me give an example of that right away. I wrote
most of the above yesterday. It was a Sunday, sunny
and quite warm, and I was full of ideas. The fact that
I was starting this book after thinking about it for
quite a few months was a matterof excitement for me,
and I couldn't stop returing to my room to write another
page or so throughout the day. Today was different.
I expected someone to come for a rebirth at half past
eight in the morning (for by now I have rebirthel many
people in various parts of the world) but she called p
up around eight to say she had stomach cramps from
menstruationand didn't feel up to it. Somehow that
screwed my day's programme. I meant to phone up a
number of people---theatres, a newspaper, all profess-
ional stuff. ixtkangh*xixmighkxaiswXpARREXMYXAgENXX
I completed the phonecalls and be gan working on this
book but *HEXWEENEXEITKEX the zest of the day before
was absent. One becomes used to this as a writer.
You simply have to go through periods of gestation
short or long and they aren't always enjoyable, in fact
they are frequent;y harrowing. You don'y quite feel
like settling to any other job, in case (as can happen)
you suddenly get the urge to go on writing. The day
isxgrex morning was grey, very still, witha low cloudy
sky. The ewather's been playing up in recent days,
with floods, tornadoes and valanches . This morning's
papr said that the Squaw Valley (I'm in California)
would have to be avacuated because of avalanche dangr.
In the afternoon it began to rain. Now depression is
almost unknown to me. I need only the simplest supports
in life---a roof, a minimum or food, the possibility of
music. I can stand as much solitude as I have to take,
and enjoy mos t of it. But today there was definitely
a Ehilixintxx stillness inside, a darkening of the
light as I Ching calls it (and at times like these I
Ching becomes my most important lifeline). I decided
to phone the re irthing headquarters to sedif Leonard
Orr was about as I wanted to ask him a few questions,
They gave me a number but he wasn't there. Then---
whether it came across from Orr or not is anyone's guess-
I suddenly got a sense of rebirthing as a great adventure.
I suddenly felt the miracle agin, the world importance
of this utterly simple technique. I remembered how
that feeling had gripped me in the first days. And
how ufte once Janabai had said I You know we have a
miracle in our hands but its difficult to realise it
all the time, it just pops up and strikes you every now
and then'. Certainyly I would never have done more
tha a cycle or two of rebirth sessions had it been a
matt


RENE
lai Propl C 1 fhe
2 claedidar
tirese
Leoi aal
Toned lo DE
C eRP.
Tholelto fm
tally
le Teir
afg
Pue Wa Loc Lold
Su A H box
fide,
hie L e
loue Cree
twes culei Cecan Le
Cue uieele Lee ( p Cicd Atie :
(p uure dee l nt
ure hou nmy. Le ten, Khisd limp) Hi c
howe un nil 2eay - A to),
Actpele the emld taed
hof bekcu ful
U) clotaddoon, Al Ripti tho - fece Aic I


matter of getting rid of my physical distresses.
The mucal problem wen, and all kinds of intimate
symptoms which most of us acarry around with us and
accept as part of what it is to be human (mild hemarroids,
eurethal discomfort, prostate aches, aching joints,
backache, headache). **XX*****X***xingsximftxme All
these things ca n be breathed away, if the breathing is
right and the teacher too. But there was much more
than this to it. And, XEMENNETINEX thinking this, I
suddenly thought as I've often done over the last year,
But rebirthing can rid of everything---the darkness in
the mind, irreolution in work, lack of zest, lack of
love, lack of connection. So why wasn't I rebirthing
myself? Why wasn't I breathing? I hurried to the
bedroom and drew the covers, took off my underpants
(there must be nothing tight) and my wristwatch, and
the rhythmic breathing began. I 'breathed out' my
nervousness for a few minuts (realiseing for the first
time that I was nervous and in a weaker state than
usual), thena sense of inner depression came and I
realised that I had that too, just before it disappeared.
I felt close to the woman I love. And the form of
what I'm writing now came into my mind. I saw that
the nervous state, the weakness was a barrier to spontaneous
thought, and spontaneity is the first ting you get from
revbirth breathing. Everyhing falls i to place.
There are no closed doors any more. **XX***XYXXXYMXXf=RXXXXXX
HAXEXWEEAXARBYEXEEWXEHESXX K supose I breathed for
twenty minutes. It wasn't enough to start any vibration,
and nothing therapeutic happened, but it was enough to
get rid of the dark edges round the mind, and to set me
working again.
Now Sandra Ray, one of the rebirth chiefs h re in
California, says that when you get into athe rebirth
rhythm the. 'inner breath' joins with the 'outer breath',
you gradually fall into a rhythm tHakxgEENEWEX*BXKEXxbexdigtatedx
fremxentsidexx*XexaxEXAXEHXEXEIXEEHREEMREEYERINEdingxrkytkuxXxxX not
your own because it is the rhythm of matter all round
you, and yet more intimately your own than any other.
The sensation is that of reentering the universe, after
having been anspegta otbeserver. Time disappears---
and with it the though of growing age, and with that th
thought of death. So you are released from the suffoc
tation of three score years ad ten, youget to a source
in you which is imperishable, though it may quickly disappear
in the bustle of the world, when the rebirh is over.
But how is it that even whenpracticed frequently
it doesn't immunise the mind to any form of darkening?
Why am I still, a ye over a year after my first rebirth
experience, and after many dozens of sessions, at least
three or four a week: in that time, leading what must look
from the outside a disordered life? Why is my woman not
with me---and maybe not my woman? Where is that ecatstic
love we: had last summer in Italy when we were in each
other's arms night and day, wakefully, for te n or more
days without pause? Why, if a miracle has entered my
life, isn't my pocket full of bucks? How is it possible
for me (connected as I so lften am t that harmonious
'outer


'outer breath') to have rows wit th someone I love more
perhaps than I've ever love anybody? How, after having
been bathed in Christ's tenderness as I was on that first
rebirth session, can I wihhold tenderness from my own
beloeved? Really the wnswer to this is why I'm
writ ting this book only a year or so after my first
rebirthing experiences, instead of waiting my life
is once more in order and I can see everything in per-
spective.
The fact tkat is that disorder is no contradiction
of the order inheresnt in the rebirth experience. In
fact the innder order induced by rebirth breathing may
provoke its very opssoiste, and in such a way that the
outer disorder is in ratio to the order. It struck me
in my first rebirthing days that my teacher, despite
her utter calm and compsure during a rebirth session,
was in constant distress over money, lovers and living
quarters. But a moment of her company and other people
fewlt reassured, hopeful. She ran prosperity seminars
and her listeners did really get propserous ofttimes.
She made everything work, and without the smallest
outley of effort, or so it seemed. She was a hopeless
organiser but on the lower levels, the unconscious levels
th ngs worked for her rebirthees in such a way that she
seemed to have had a hand in them. This was after all
how the woman Im not allowed to be with at this momnt
came into my life. Janabai said 'I'd like to run a
seminar a t your Italian house' (I part-own a small
farm near Siean with my ex-wife). She didn't turn up,
ARAX*KEXSENINaTXwaXXeniixparkxurgaxxx but two young women
did, and one of them became the woman I'm only allowed
to talk to on the phone. Now I'm in California at this
moment because she'd planned to spend six months here
on a therapy training course. And we agreed I should
follow her out. I did---wad within a manthxixwaswek
week I was out of her bed, within another two I was out
of the house in an ashram.EkaringxyHET*EXS There was
nothing about it, for me, which was unconnected with
rebirthing. My whole life had sort of taken a spin out
of my control but the real I WASXEWKE seemed more in
control than ever bef re. The ashram led to this house
in the Walnut Creek hills where I'm writing this book
and rbirthing people. The idea of me being here all
alone with a young woman seems to drive I my woman'
crazy, even though there's no sex going on. Not that
my woman admits it. Only whenever I talk about the
hills outside the window when I'm phoning her she
snaps 1 I don't want to hear it'. So here I am more
or less without a buck, rejected but not released by my
woman whom I have no right to call my woman (especially
as we haven't slept togetgher since Ixtaxekenxsax
KrangisgexairpertREEX*MYEEXMERTKS I left Stockholm airport
exactly seven months. And we haven't slept wi th anyone
else. Having been nine months celibate before I met
her fixaiaxthatxte (that was deliberate on my part---
I decided I was going to give u all sex until the
W oman came along, and she did) that makes quite a monkish
total, the very opposite, you might think, of the kind
Of res


of resurrection I'm trying to sell in these pages. But
that's why I'm writing these pages. It's a real resurrect-
ion, not the kind promised by ashrams and most yogis,
namely a state of detachment and bliss which might be
possible for a monk but not for those who have claims
on their hearts from dawn to dusk. The heart works in
a: very different way. Storms are its language. And
the most ancient and precious breathing technique known
to mankind (for this, I believe, is what Leonard sdiscovered)
demonstrates it again and again. If Christ did use it,
it might explain why his mission was in terms of the heart,
always and everywhre the heart. And I began to discover,
with this technique in y hands, that many if not most of
the self-devlop,ent workshops discourage the heart, and
promise an order which is not only quite impossible but
wrong. Of all the famous gurus in the world talking
doday only Rajneesh perhaps is alive to this.
Awaiting my third session, ten days from my first
one,
While I was waiting for my third session, ab ut ten
days after my first one. the rebirth people in London (who
could be counted on the fingers of one hand) organised
a tiny seminar.
That is, they din't mean it to be tiny.
In fact they hired quite a large hall near the Britishj
Museum with at least a hundred seats. There were eight
people at most, quite half of them rebirthers. Most of
the talk was the psychological get-the-shit-out-of-your-
system level, and that didn't interest me, and I said so,
constantly. The feeling of that meeting was
rather disgruntled and resentful in atmosphere, 10pByt and
had the strong impression that most of these people
were ;ocked in a depression.which They called themselves,
of all things, the "rebirth E society', and that was the
tone, joi n our little group, you'll have fun. In fact
those were the opening words of the meeting, from the
organiser: 'Rebirthing is such fun.' Of course I was
in a very sensitive state, having only had two rebirths,
and feeling that I'd hit the greatest inner adventure of
my life, and I was certainly in no mood to have that
whittled down to some bloodless bible-class formula.
And there was so much teaching. You were being told how
t ings were, not only outside you but inside you.
And
I felt thoroughly miserable, even in S state of mild
shock. For I'd bee reading Lenard Orr and Sandra Orr
and feeling strongly in tune with eve ything they were
saying. And here were virtual children (so my mind
said) playing with dynamic forces they had clearly not
yet grasped, and which they would almost certainly
abandon for anothr enlightenment package quite soon.
Today I would have taken that meeting in a very
diffceren spirit (assuming that I would go to it,
which most probably I wouldn't). I know now that the
whole rebirthing process takes place on the level
desired by the rebirthee, and to the tintensity he can
oler


tolerate, ad that thisxprHEEzEXEaXXXEXEFSEXXNXAXexixxaxmament
ax*xthex a dynamic change may take place at any time,
making it impossible to say that rebirthing hasn't
taken effect, or that a person hasn't just hasn't got
the benefits. For me, now, it is impossible for the
rebirth breath not to have its effects, een (and sometimes
especially) when the rebirthee denies that there S been
any change. In other words the first thing you lose in
the rebirthing process is the willingness to judge the
inner state of others. That is a mysterious and always
unique land which frewuently, if only for a time, shows
the outside world an opposte opposite face.
A lot of slogans came out that eveing. And it
seemed to me that these people (apart from my own teacher)
had learned the slogans and were repeating them out of
servitude. The slogans carried no weight with me because
I knew they had grown out of Leonard Orr's experience
and Sandra Ray's and not these people's. The very
thing that Leonard Ord seemed to have avoided, qite
deliberatly, namely the gurugame, was being undermined,
which meant that rebirthing (again it was my mind speaking)
could not be done successfully by these people. Taday
IXMenidxsayx*ha*xrekirtkingx Today I see a very different
picture. Rebirthing is so much in the hands of what I
now call 'the third force'---which entres all re irth
session like another presence. taking charg of bother
rebirther and rebirthee---that neither of the two havs
,uch control over the situation as persons. My feeling
now is that your rebirther is chosen for you---on your
level, and according to your requirements---however far
you or he may have to travel to get to each other. This
morning I spoke to one of America's greatest writers,
whom I am rbirthing, and he said 'What astonishes me most
of all is hat my rebirther should be you, another writer
who has lived in many of the same places, who is So close
to me inexperience and taste and all that, an who knows
many of the same people, and here we meet each other after
all these years just when I'm ready, just when I'm finally
ready to commit suicide, just when I'm ready to overhaul
my whole life!' And that's how it works. SUHHHEXETXX
maxhasxhiHISXWWXXFEXIX
When I look back on my first session under Jaabai I
realise that any other rebirther might have interrupted
my experience at a crucial point and wreckd everything,
even supposing I had entered that same experi ience at all.
When I phoned a revirthing contact for my first appointment
I was told that she wasn't available but there was this
other lady from Hololulu/.....
After that meeting three or four of us, including
Janabai, went a crepe place for supper. pain started
roundmyheart, nodoubt indigestion, but-Iknew-it had
been_brought onby the-meeting and thataeertaininner
flow had boon-interrupted. Lik e m ny people who are
being rebirthed for the first time, and finding it the
greatest adventure of their lives, I din ;t want to talk
about it, much 1sss have other people telling me what
they couldn't know, namely waht I was experiencing.
Hvetearnedsinee thattime that everyone-1ea universe,


I had actually talked during the meeting---grudgingly
said that my first two rebirths had been nothing less
than a miracle, and now I felt I shouldn't have expressed
myself so soon, it was tempting the gods at that early stage
of the experience. Witkx*kisxxegre*xeamXEamExaxxmizExinsidex
mexatisayingxthatxtkexpainxixxiuxmxxkeartwareawasWBEXdHEXtUX
*kexkreathing. Meawhile one of th rebirthers was going
TUHNOXTMEhextakiEs from table to table interrupting lovers
at their meals to persuade them they needed tp put down
fifty bucks a session for a new life. I told myself
that I would never go to another seminar or workshop
connected with the rebirth movement, and I kept to that.
And later on I found out why I kept to that---why it was
right to keep to that.
When I got back I felt a pain round my heart, no
doubt indigestion. Once al was in bed a voice inside
started telling me that the pain was due to excessive
breathing, and that rebirth was a kwax health hazard.
I knew that nearly every orthodox doctor in the world
would agree with this voice, even withot the slightest
shred of evidence behind him. So I suddenly pulled the
pillow out from tunder my head and started breathing as
my eeacher had taught me. In just about half a minute
the pain was gone axaxixfsixixkatntixeakenxfmRXEHEXKENYEXX so
I continued breathing for another hour despite Janabai's
warning not to do more than twenty or so breaths from
time to time. At the end of that hour I felt as light
as if I hadn't eaten all day.
Over that crepe supper I happened to mention laughingly
that waking up that morning I'd become conscious of my
mind asking itself involuntarily not whether I should
commit suicide but what kind of suicide I ought to choose.
PHEXMRNEN*XIxspakexixgaxxaxxX**XRIx*eaggingxkadyxandxxxxXxX
XXfEMXGTTXSXErxsiwgansx***t**xxMXXMEXEXX**X**EXE**xxaxxamaxakrapikyxxx
RIMSEOXIKTHEXENkjREEXtxagainxandxaddedxthatxitaxtakenxaxxxx
hathxinstgad I was at once told that in such a case I
should have written out 'affirmations' (this is sometimes
used as part of the rebirthing process, and is a matter
of writing out what you wish to happen as if it already
had). As like most people I respond badly to 'ought'
and 'should' and ('those who can't teach') I closed the
subject abruptly ad said that I'd taken a bath instead
and that had driven the idea away.
Not that I really did consider suicide. But Iwas
still surprised that the idea, eve idle and flashing
though it was, should enter my mind. My life was going,
on the surface (where unfortunately I was judging it),
badly, WIXXXMHXIHXEY I had gone to the wrong agent,
which was wrecking my work. I was inlove wi th a woman,
or so I told myself, who was not only living awith another
man but too far away for me to visit more than once or
twice a year, and, worse than that, I seemed to prefer
turning her into a dream than actually trying to get her.
An this had been going on for five years. I think I
must have filled two or three thousand sheets of paer
with I Ching answers about her feelings towards, and
my propspects with her, over those years. We had
had a short affair in Paris, continued it disastrously


in Munich---and then I disappaeared to Venice for at
least six months, still dreaming about her, while--
naturally---she not only forgot about me but started
to live with somebody else. And at the beginning of
those five years she had announced to me as clear as
a bell in the streets of a small town called Olten
near Basel 'When you're away from me you don't exist!'
Wowxalxxi*a*xdreaming Clearly that degree of deliberate
dreaming wrecked the rest of my love life. When I met
S omone attra tive I made a quick retreat---or EXteredx
axreiatiRnXwhiEhXSEMEXkHEXKEEANExaurtinxx**x*EX***XX else
made love and then made the quick retreat, which was
inconsiderate. On the whole, though. my love life
was sparse, partly because I preferred abstinence to
getting involved. Because my heart wasn't free, or
so I told my self.
And meanwhile this poor young
woman, mostly unaware of the dream I was building up
of her, got an occational letter or visit from me which
she put down to feelings of friedship. Well, I think
I BYEFESXIX exaggerate her naivete there. But at least
she didn't know the extent of the dream Above all,
she didn't know how little my dream of her had to do
with her. TKEXEXEXMBXMuXhingxwBxxEx*XEX*MaNXITnxkreatingxaxwamax
addressingxaMBIMEXMErXHHMANXHEXNexngxasxiX**x**EYXWETEXXWETEXYENY
dreamxmfxtKEMXXXXXXXXXMEn*xthisxisxwhakxixdiayxandximekixy
FMEXXEXXSKExwasxixxaxhappyxardxfiwurishingxsEXxralakisHXX
She was to find this out later---and so was I.
Also I had an agent at that time who was quite
unsuitable for me, so my work life was something of a
rweckage too. My savings were dwindling at a freighten-
ing rate, and this awoke lifelong fears of destitution
in me. I began having nightmares---mostly about insecur-
ity of some sort. And these MEXE continued REYEXBIXXEX*X
MMEXXXHEWYXXINEEXMYXXifex*xxiifex*axx W i;e the lifelong fears
existed. Until I tackled those (by ac ually making
desititute) my life was a constant worry, internalised
and kep from my friends through because the insecurity
fear says 'Don' t lose your repuatation as well because
this is the last asset.' I was in urope at that time,
and the elitism, which is as str ng today as it ever was,
means that failure bears a heavy social stigma, making
renewed effort twice as hard as ncecessary. Not that I
was in fact failing. I was writing a great deal. I
had at least seven prohjects going, and a current contract.
But nothing would work. It wouldn't work like my love
for that lady would work. And I couldn't find out why.
I couldn't finy ot why, for instance, I'd abandoned one
of the best literary agents in New York, who had a
lucragive contract going for me, for one in London who
was temperamnetally unsuitable for me and disliked
b essentially disliked my work. But that was what I
did, and it was what I did in every quarter of my
life: I promptly undid whatever good came into it.
Clearly, then, I was dissatisfied with eve ery aspect of
it. And I think that when this hapens to someone,
if he is lucky, he hears about rebirthing.


The following Sunday I woke at about seven and Feeling
cold I put the gas fire on (I was staying in a rented room)
than went back to bed where I dozed off again. I often
that second sleeps in the morning produce horrific night-
mares. I was in a strange barren landscape and involved
with a very old cadaverous man whom I recognised to be the
father of one of the labourers working on a farm ixpart*x
ExXxinxi*ax belonging to my ex-wife and myself. Bringx
INXRIKEOXWEZSX I apparently had the job of looking after
him and when he walked I had to support him physically.
There were nurses prezent. I think I realised even in
the dream that this was about my own death and that I was
being identified by the nurses with this cadaverous old
man with his yellow wrinkled skin and shrunken head, and
I seemed to share some of his physical weaknesses too,
for my eyesight was failing so fast that moment by moment
the objects round me were darkning, so thatI felt desperately
helpless. I woke up with this sense of death in me As
aways, iyt wasn't long before the little pleasures of daily
life (the smallest ple asures have a disproportionately
encouraging effect on me) made the dream seem far away.
But, I knew that it had something to do with rebirthing-- -
atxjxs*xakeHEXEXEexrythingxixwasxpassingxtaxtaraughxatxx
thatx*imexwEXWASXEURREEXEOmdxwitx***xxX
Later that morning I picked up one of Orr's lectures
on propserity and read the words 'The morenlightened you
are the more active your death urge becomes.' I was
suddenly aware that this remark concerned me urgently---
especially as self-enlightenment had been my chief
KNSINEXX priority for the past fifteen years at least.
'The more enlightened you become, the less negatives you
have in your consciousness because you've worked them ot
out.' I'd certainly worked the common fear of death out
of my self in those fifteen years. IXXEXXEHEETXWEKEXHp
*xx**exmxdd1Exmix*Kexmigh*xw**x*XXXEXPHESSIENXIN Not for
avery long time had I experienced that panic realisation
of the fact of death which I believe mEEXXPERPIEX is the
lotof mos t people young and old. I never woke in the
dead hours as I remember once doing with the awful
proposition in my mind 'I'm going to die! Why? What
does it mean? Why am I here if I'm going to die? Why
did I come?' And then I would see myself dead---which
really means conscious but entirely helpless, for ever.
Since, of course, you would never see yourseif dead unless
you were in some manner alive. Yes, that terrible
negative (which I believe domintes most of th people on
the earth) was gone.
'The more light you shed on your
mind the more darkness you have in your mind'---what
a revelation that was to me when I read it, and hot it
explained the otherwise unreasonably distressing experiences
I'd had in recent years---no more distressing than what
everyone goes through, but surely growing enlightenment
should have brought me enough serenity ad detachment (two
of the promised fruits of nearly all self-enlightnement
packages) to see whywhere the distress came rfrom and how
to way lay it? Then I remembered how te great Ramakrishma
had died in agony of cancer. How RamanaxMahirshixtas
kxx
Vivekenanda his greatest devoteee had suffered
daily tortures of the mind, nightmares by night---and
died in his early thirties. Ramana Mahirshi too died


of cancer. One hears all the time of well-known gurus
in a state of sickness which one would think they could,
with their powers, control. And here was Leonard Orr,
*KEXXEWANTERXkmaxehilaxmixaxmmtkerxwitkxmighkxmtkersxtaximk
wafter* after experimenting on himself in a sauna, alighting
aon a problem which no one had really faced except with
trite explanations like 'These diseases are a result of
the yogi taking on other people's karma! (but surely he's
beyond that prim itive stage which any psychic healer can
'If you have thrown out all your negative ideas
except that death is inevi table, guess what? You'll use
all your spiritual power to kill yourself'. I suddenly
woke up---my God, surely I'd been doing that as hard as
I could, and was still doing it!
Why else would I choose an attractive and intelligent
young woma n to fall in love with and then, instead of
devoting myself to her welfare and listening to what she
said, proceeded to live far from her, disapear for months
on end, and steadily bild a dream of her which was fine
*i*xwaxx*KEXXRX*sexgiftedxpersXPEYEERX for a book but which had
nothing to do with her. XHOXIEXEXisxakwutx What was
that but a clever and enchanting suicide---and an attempt
to involve someone else in suicide? What was it but a
veiled assertion that I didn't want the real love I had
for her (if it really existed) bcause I didn't want the
real woman? that maybe I didn't feel W rthy to have
the real woman? that I didn't feel worthy to be fully
alive? Because, in those moments after reasing Leonard
Orr on that Sunday morning, I began to realise that even
I---considered by nearly all my frieds unimpeachably self-
confident---secretly (unknown even to myself) didn't
believe in having a real life and tha t in recent years
I had been using all my spiritual power to kill myself,
in Orr's own words.
I had all these years wrecked my sexual life, turned
myself into a sexual daydreamer after a long and sexually
most active marriage, but above all I ha d PrYENTRAX*KEX
arrixaxxefx put a protective wall round myself which no
new woman could penetrate and which, above all, the
woman I belonged to (for I believe that there are a few
people but only a few, and perhaps only one, to who, we
belong) from drawing near. It was a serious situation.
I remembred thinking so often whe working on a book
or play 'What's the use, of doing this if I'm going to
What's the use of loving and being loved if I'm
going to die? Because if I'm going to die I'm dead as
good as dead already. I havel death hanging round my
person and how can death radiate or receive love? And
it can't.
In fact I was killing off every project in my life,
amatory or porfessional or financial, as fast it happened.
And been heavily engaged i n doing that for as long as I
could remember. I wanted to make love but killed every
chance of doing so, I wanted to make money but killed
every possibility of doing as fast as it arose, so that
I ended with a lot of love activity but little love and
a lot of money activity but little money. A friend


of mine said to me about that time, 'You must have pased
huge fortunes by, let them go out of the window, fremxwhatx
IXseexwix*kexwayxWaXXYENXWWTXXX and that was about right. If
I think now of any one project out of dozens I've been
involved in, the general story is one of unexploited
possibilities, unexplored fortune. I picked up money,
sometimes quiute a lot of it, but it never hung about
my person. And so I passed a great part of my life in
money anxiety, especially when I hada lot.
ixfrx*xiINSERMngegure
akmx*txxxxI
There's a Yidd sh saying that ten enemies ca n do less
harm to a man than he can do to himself. And it now began
t,0 seem to me that I had spent at least two decades
slamming closed all the doors that opened in front ofme.
,y ex=wife saw it much more clearly han I did. She said
to friends 'He has huge possibilities and somehow lets them
all go.'
HEYEXwaXXkmEnardxerr 'So people in enlightenment
groups notice that they get themselves into suicide irges.
Their suicide urge starts getting active and they are
constantly thinking about commiting suicide. The only
way you can get out of that bind is to question that death
is inevitable, which is to get yourself into a nunorthodox
position.'
And here I started to think of that first rebirth
experience. Wasn't this what Christ had been trying to
demonstrate to me? Wasb't that why he pushed back my
arms with such gentle force, and showed me that despi ite
my resistance and unwillingness it didn't hurt, even with
my hands being nailed to the cross?
And was his visit to me the second coming, the true
second coming? How coujld we expect the second coming
to be the reapearance of a man? He had done that once,
he'd been through that. Hetd presumably done it toshow
that in fact it's impossible to kill a man, that no
crucifixion can work, that he din't die and we don't
die, and that what he was the when he was cricfieid
he is now, so that his second coming is coninual and
accumulative, and happening all the time inside us,
and this is the so-called new consciousness, the joy
of looking right through the crucifixion, right through
the agony and distress, into where it melts into joy,
so that death is uncovered as a total uillusion...
BukxixirEEXXXXSXTEXEXamxixgwingxeaXXiAXXXKEX
And you can call him Christ or Buddha ot whatever
you like. Was this Had this to O been cleverly
conveyed to me in that rebirth experience by the shadowy
apearance of the Indian as the same man as Christ?


My hthird rebirth was on Good Friday (1981) and this
time I received a second 'appearance' though much the lesser
of the two in intensity and duration. It was a kind of
appendage to the first one, ad my mind was much more in
control. I was telling a friend of mine, a working woman
in London, about the dying soldiers I had witnessed.
The message I was giving her was that, in Wilfred Owen's
words, 'the poetry is in the pity'. Thoughts of battle
are frequently in my mind at Easter time. And then he
reappeared, much dimmer than before but no less there---
as if once he'd made contact with me further contacts need
only be messages---and he was telling me to take example
from this very woman to whom I was talking in the rebirtg,
because she was an example of one who was rich in KEREYSBI**X
andxfgeX heart but actually poor, and full of joy when others
like myself wwre always worrying about money and survival.
The threat to her life was greater than that to mine but
she still had more to give than me---to her dautghter,
to anyone who called in. Here was someone who made you
feel a king, and who hardly had a penny to bless herself
with.
Christ impressed me deeply with the idea that this
was one of the most important people in my life, yet she
saw herself and was seen perhaps by most others as a kind
side product while her daughter was the real prodct.
the theme was the same as in the first rebirth: joy is
a state, not the fruit of outer circumstance. Christ
took the poorest person I knew and said "There isthe
greatest joy.'
These appearances showed me what I thought I already
knew but didn't---that Christ wasn't connected with the
churches in his name. I'd known this intellectually but
now it was quite a revelation for me that Christ had no
more to do with Rome or ay other churcg than Lenin, in
the sense that they weren't issuing statements from him
or being in any way his mouthpiece. K I was suddenly
liberated from the idea that these churches, parf icularly
Rome, in some way encapsulated or contained him in them-
selves, or that he had authnoriesed them in some way, or
that he was authentically and exclkusively interpreter
by them. It didn't mean that I would use churches
less than I did,for meditation---and for thinking abou
Christ when I wanted to. But the connection was broken
in me, as a certainty. It was no longer a thought---
that severance. It was knowledge. And of course whn
we come to think it is fatuous to think tha a group of
men or organisation can have exckusive right of this
nature.
I knew that these churches had to advertise
themselves haas having an exc usive trading licence from
Christ in order to keep their power. Having lived in
Italy most of my adult life I know the degree to which
this fraud has been perpetuated. It accou ts for the
horror most Italians have of the church and anything
priestly, and for the prevalenceof marxism am ong the
intellectual classes despite marxis beingexactly contrary
to the Italian temperament.
Ryxi Rx6X9AXX9XXXXX k*x
axMe PRRXXEX*R9R*X*X**
PKEDER9XRXXW
Axx


The meanign of that Good Friday apnearance WS also
that rrosperity is an inner thirg and may actually go with
extre e noverty. If that isn't true there have never
been mystics. voris and edepte. il
ThaxfaxkxixaxXxxXxwxaDtextuXXXUXXBXXXRXRXXEXXEREAET
EEBNEXIRESEsEXappEarangesX
It was clear to me from these appearances that some
one else was in charge of my rebirth, and this I have come
to call' te third force' which dominates both rebirther
and rebirthee sextkatxixxisxanxiXIXINSIRNXX during a session
and takes charge of both, giving one the power to give and
the oher the power to receive. Or rather, to one the
illusion of giving and to the other the illusion of
receiving. For this third force is already, in some
mysterious way, inside us watiting to be resuscitated
or taped into. This was proved to me not once in my
first and third rebirthing sessions but in the whole
series, namely in those too which contained no appearances.
These joiened with the first and third to form a kind
of unfolding tale which I did nothing to provoke (for
the first thing you learn about revbirthing is that unlike
the verbal and intellectual therapies, whether they are
normal psychotherapy or Est or
: .) you have no
control whasoever over what happens. On the crudest
level, you have simply no control over what parts of the
body the incoming energy chos chooses to work on. In
fact the rebirthee nay get qite a surprise when anxurganx
WENITESTEdXdIEETEEEXWMENXX suposedly healthy organ manifests
distress for the first time during breathing.
Not until I had absorbed the impact of that third
force was I able to talk about it to other people. This
took a month or so. Even then I never talked about th
apearances, fearing, as I said before, that I would be
ridiculed---not to my face but inwardly, which is as bad.
if you're still uncertain abot twhat's going on. I
would have been thought to have had a 'Vision' (or worse,
"hallucination'), which would have meant devalkuation
for me. I knew that only by telling the whole story,
its background and side-effects and aftermaths, as I'm
doing now, would convey the fact tha far from being eithr
an hallucination or a vision these were direct apearances---
that is, the 'messanger"'taking on a particular form---and
and that these direct appearances had a particular end
which caused the wriing of this book and which this book
is designed to fulfil.
Wh What was this mysterious third force which had en ered
my life---conveyed to me by my rebirther but not belonging
to her, received by me but not belonging to me? Within
days of the first session my life began to alter---I began
meeting 'new' people, I had a strong sense that my life
had changed, though it would take som time for the material
things to change too. After yor first rebirth (and you
never again have that joyous and liberating experience--
just because you are being let out of prison for the
first time in your life. You realise you have never
breathed and that probably most people on the earth
don'y breath eithr. So you've never really lived
becaus


because the breath is one's only bridge to the outside
world, our one connection that cannot cease for a few
moments whether we are XXSREP active, asleep or unconscious.
And this is the most intimate thing we have, it is the
closest to us, the sustainer which enters us and steals
into the organism doing irs work of fuelling the body,
without which no other type of fuel would have any use.
And when it stops the cells cannot survive in that form,
they must decompose into other forms and combinations,
to make other brathing life.
Ageuxdn**xkeipxthEXdREIIngxtkatxthisxeixikisakionxtha*x
MadxeamexEXak@NEnkxinxthEXEWIREXRIXAHEHEIRREXRONEXWaSXaxdeathxx
So in the rebirth you connect up for the first time,
with the result that two processes essentially the same
take place: you feel you're more truly yourself, or
rather have become yourself for the first time, and you
are no longer diivided from the r world. You begin
to realise that the universe round you is there to
support rather than to thwart you. Of course you can't
make a dogma out of this. Someone can come along ad
say hthe world's against you because it has wars and
inflation and disease and terrorism and unemployment
and endless cruelty. But what you claim isn't an
intellectual thing. It derives from the fact that you
know, in your cells, for the first time, that you are
being supported moment by moment, and so to speak cradled
in the universe, becaus e of that breath.
You become
awre that your breath can be beautfiul , it can take on
form. Early in the seessions it may appear to you to
be in the shape and texture of, say, an almond just
freshly peeled from its frail brown skin, or a: bud.
After your 'breath release when the ribcase does a
sudden jump and you'retaking in more air than ever before
in your life, that uppercurve where the inbreath joins
to the outbreath and the lower curve where the outbreath
melts into the inbreath becaome ever more smooth and
;ight, and you begin to recongise that cutting the
inbreath from the outreath and vice versa is a sign
of inner unrest or some blockage (it might be a lot of
wind) in the system.
THEYEXEYEXHARXXPEuDIE And it's something you can't
control. Just as you can'y control your state during a
rebirth, especially in the first sessions, so you can ;
influence or control that ;third force' in the way it
starts reorga nising your life and getting you into all
kinds of ups and downs you've never been in before.
It may not be pleasant but you kxww soon see that the
downs lead straight into the ups and that the ups
couldn't have happened without them. You feel pinched
by that third force to move in a certain direction,
and sometimes it is neceassary to pinch hard. Only by
depiriving me of every professional outlet and every penny
I had in the world, even eery prospect, did that thirf
force get me moving into my new life. I wouldn't have
become a rebirther without it. I wouldn't have travelled
to California and formed some of the most importan
friendships iof my life, and thos e friendships strictly
connected with the whole revirthing process. I would
have


have gone on living what I now consider a death life,
though the death life was considerably more comfortable
than the one I had *xxxxxx
later. The life after
re irth, in fact, scared ANRXtErTIfIRN me out of my wits.
I*XEXEXENXXRxinxkatiie*XIXexxxx I'm still having insecurity
night tmares, and I still wake up with that nauseous "How
am I going to survive?' feeling somewhere in my diaphragm.
My cells got used to this, and the programme is lingering
on for a bit until(so I now think) that I've finally
learned for sure that lesson of the first appearance--
when I let my arms be pushed tenderly back onto that
cross and don' t resist any more, and find out that after
all it isn't a cross. I believe that Christ found this
out in the silence after he had cried "Oh God, why have
you forsaken me?' x For Christ resisted too. That's
why the story of his mission travelled drom the simplest
origins through space and time ad is as fresh today as
it ever was" because he didn t set himself up as a damned
teacher or, more important, the Son of God in the church's
sense. He was son of God precisely as every himan being
is, and this is what the chrches don't on the whole let
you know. He allowed himself to be ridiculed and
humiliated, and he wasn' t, as we all know, thought
importan enough by the Romans to be mentioned in any
of the records.
AnxtkisxisxaxgwuaxthingxtmxRXTEMERKEX
WAEKX I mysle f have ben humiliated since I was rebirthed
to a point that would have been utterly un erable to me
before. I've had actually had people ridiculing me
for having sunk so low as to be entirely dependent on
their mercies for their survival. And I went through
that without the smallest resistance. In fact it made
me feel good. And they weren't bad people who were
doing it to MEXE me. One is a close friend of mine
in fact I'm writing this in her house in California,
and the other I love more than I've ever loved anyone
in my life.
This experience took me right down to
myself. I grew up very poor, I got usd to poverty,
but all that ceased in my Oxford days, and I began to
live a more and more artificial selfx XXSEXXENXEXPEEtatisNSX
(most people would have called me a natural and easygoing
person) based on what I thought other people required of
me, and on the way I thought thy saw me, and the way I
thought I ought to be. And that; wha t the third force
throws right out of the window. The subtle accumulations
of so-called personality which are simply effort to be
what you are not. Nobody asks you to bethat way, but
you tell yourself that you're doing it for the world
just the same. An I believe that mos of the people
in the world now are putting huge effort to be what
they are. not, and this is screwing up. the nervous stsytm,
not junk food or too much sex or raditio n or over
population or industrialisatin.
All that would fade
away as an obstacle the moment we built our lives on
oursevles, that is to say on our breath. That is to
say, oif that thir d force ran our lives and not our
weak brains.


present time, that is why. What the psychotherapists
so often do, is to send a patient homel with a constructed
per onlity which is more 'on the rails' than the old:
one but which requires just as much effort to keep up.as'
But relaxing the effort would mean trouble, because that
third force would not be there to dor the thinking and
the planning in the cells, whetehe- thinking and planning
are mean to go on, namely with the whole of the organism.
Psychotherapy in other words promotes, must promote,
more control rather than loss of control. Loss of
control can only mean in therapeutic terms a lapse
into irrational behaviour. Most psychotherapy is,
in this way, a branch of conventional medicine in its
treatment of the symtom rather than the cause, and
cure rather than healing. The demand to have control,
that is to construct ewih effort Exetuxgersexality
furxx the situation round one, so that it emanates
satisfactori;y from one's personality or sum'total of
desires and ambitions, is precisely what screw S people
up and drives them to the psychotherapist. But his
success with them must be limited while he confines
his treatment to verbalisation and mental probing.
There are many who don't, notably the Reichians. But
for the Reichians, most of whom are well aware of
rebirthing and practice something similar, the way
of getting rid of that 'armoury' which human beings
put round themselves is stilla matter of analysis and
altered control, with the breath helping. But rebirthing
is entirely different not because the breathing it
involves may be different from that of the Reichians,
but because the breath is the be-all and end-all of
it, and it is allowed to take its course, therapeutic
or life-changing or spirtualising, in its own way,
and without the miniminal attempt thot control the
process mentally. In fact it can't be controlled
mentally. All ca be observed in terms of the breath,
and all can be corrected in terms of the breath. I
for instance can tell just what a person is doing
wi th his body, that is his life, themoment he lies down
and breathes normally for me. I told a young woman
recently just before I taught her the 'rebirth breath'
for the first time, 'You have no connectio wi th your
body', just from watching her breatj. She murmured
'I can't agree with that', but after the session was
over she agreed. And what persuaded her was the fact
that she had been out of control of herself, and two
years of psychotherapy, so sh told m, hadn't done
anything to alter that.
Not only did this woman,
a brilliat writer, not know whose body she had before
she rebirthed, she was the most chronic case of sub-
ventilation I have ever come across: in fact I don't
see how. she sruvived her thirt-five years looking
so healthy.
What I am saying tha is that she believed
herself to be in perfect connection with er body, and
in control of it, precisley because she wasn ;t getting
enough air in to live, so that her body had really and
truly becaome a thought for her.


present time, as it seems to have
ASXIXXEEEXEXXAXMAXEXKEER
present time, asxi*xgERWSX**X**XXEXXEEXXSIHEEXTXEXXXXXXEXX
desiinexmixtxexXTXEXRMTANXETamanxempireyox that is the reason. And what
**ax the psychotherapists SOI often do finxtkexdaysXWHEK
HungxamdxKreMEXWEXEXexexaxentxX*X*KEXEXXX fandxatwaysx
is to
send a: patient home with a carefully constructed personality
which requires constant effort of thought: to maintain it.
Which is why psycho-analysed, people psycho-analkysed by
the old pre=celleular


But once the cellular connection has been with made
with the oiutsde world, you can fell what it's like to
be any cell, not just your own. You are part of the
cellular system for the first time. And some of the
results of this ae that you find yourself looking at
animals in a different, even as equal beings. Or you
look at children, strangrs, criples, drunks in a differnt
way. Hnkikexmanyxwaxkskepxtkerapiesyxandxmugkxtkaxxgmes
mxxixxIndtanxaskaranxxinx**XEXHAMEXB*X**EXXXEXXIXINEXXREXEEIfEXXWX
*HISXYEERRHEETiNExupxwithX*HEXENSIdExwarxdx You may find
it difficult to make love to someone who hasn't been
rebirthed.
You may find talkng to rebirthed people so
natural and open an without far that talking to un-
rebirthed people begins to struck you as difficult.
Or you may discover such an extraordinary sense of
liberation that you can only share this properly with
fellow rebirthers. These are momentary, non-ladting
effects. But they are the cells clebrating thir
first freedom nonetheless.
Such effects often follow enlightenment workshops
or meditiatio groups. It is the same activity---the
cells registering their relief at no longer being closed
from the world by inner fears and (the kasis result of
the fears) efforts and the tension involved by the
efforts.
The effect of the workshops or metiation
groups dies down, and finally away. So does the effect
of the rebirthing.
The cells get used to their new
state. Or they lose their new state and relapse into
the old. But in the case of rebirthing, once a person
takes charge of his breath, and maintains his breath,
he can always be assured that his life is under the
contr 1 of the third force, and that he will received
constant 'messages' which wull convey to him consciously
what he has to do.
This is where effort is required. All life requires
effort. But it is where the effort in life should be.
Othrwise, in the lack of effort, in this qauarters, and
however much effort there is put in. other uuarters, the
individual must go through the conventional stages
of life whicvh have bee mapped out by and for the good
Christian, namely, birth, childhoo, yuth, middle age,
old age (or sickness) and death.
That cycle is entirely avoided by the process of
rebirth as it is aparently not by other riental methods
that have come to the West, if the sickness of the great-
est gurus in these methods is anything to go by. Rebirth
is an ancient technique which until now has been kept a
secret. We know of the existence OS such techniques
from yoga hatha yoga, and we know of the contempt of
most of the greatest Indian gurus towards the practice
of techniques which will simply secure long and healthy
life. What is theuse of a long and healthy life if
it's the worng life? But the fact is that you probably
can't have a long or healthy life (that is one without
old age) un if it's a wrong one. So what has gone wrong
wih the Indian pro ramme?


One of the basic tenets of the Indian enlightenment
programme as purveyed by the principal gurus and asharams
and one that not only has been argely disregarded by the
West but which fits very ill that western optimism which
has produced massive industrial and colonial and aggressive
activity for the ast four or five centuries, is that birth
is a calamity. fyunte)x 'Once you have grasped the truth
that the world is full of suffering, that to be born is a
calamity, you will find the urge and the enrgy to go beyond
it.' These are the words of Sri EX Nisargadatta Maharaj,
and variants of the same remarks have been made a thousand
times over by Indian yogis and saints. The soul is en-
deavouring to reach God. It enters incarnation after
incarnation to achieve this end, ad it enters God, becomes
God totally when the cycle of incarnations has been completed
and there is no further karma to be rsolved. Which outs
us quite near the idea that we are born in order, ultimately,
never to be born again; that we come to life in order,
ultimately, to reject life; that we cannot tdo better,
ultimately, than renounce all desire for life, beginning
with the more ego-bound desires such as that for sex and
money (Ramakrishna's 'women and gold'. 'Distasion' is
the most used word on this subject. That state is desire-
lessness. Only in that state do we experience real peace,
and only in that state can we complete the cycle of births
and mmerge oursevles once more in God.
Ont the other hand our EBNISXEFEXdIXIREXX selves are
divine. Divinity is our true inner nature, only we usually
hiude this from ourselvesunder 'sheaths' of igorance and
worldly attachment. The famous mantra Om Namah Shivaya
means 'I honour the diviinty in myself' and it is the core
of meditation. Essentially, meditating means concentrating
on the divinity i n oneself, becoming so aware of it that
the whole organism hopefully shines with it, utterly still,
utterly satisfied.
So essentially we are already God. The great Ramana
Mahirshi asked his devotees again and again 'Who are you?'
You are not that which is incarnated. You are not that
which dies. You are not that which is born. You are
that which cannot go away because you never came. Ramana
Tkexeaxkradtsiiwxexxexxxxalxx**isxaXEXaITERdyXXgryx**ik*x
told people that meditating was for the beginner, the merest
initiate. There was no need to do anything, think aything,
be anything----you already were all you could evr be.
You already were the divine self, you already were God.
It was only a matter of taking away those 'sheaths' of
ignorance and identifying your true self. Then you lived,
ate, laughed and cried in perpetual meditation. You lived
in a divine glow.
The contradictions in all th S are already very thick.
If we are essentially divine, and already God, in our real
as opposed to illusory selves, why was it necessary to
pass through cycles of incarnaions in order to 'rejoin'
God? If we had never separated from him, why was it
necessary to find Him ahain?
Again: everything is spirit. InxthexXe**X*HETEXIS
*XXWY***RXRXXRXt8RpXXXaxax*xgixtkisxi XaXXXX
Ther is no such thing as matter unmoved, totally and utterly


inert.
The particles which are the inner substance of
life move, exist---some physicists say with a life of their
own. The atom may be compared with a stupendous glowing
arena teaming with activity and life.
In the West I
thinkiEXXWEXEYEX*WXX there has been no exponent of this
more convincing than Mary Baker Eddy mixtkexekrix founder
of the Christiant Scientists. Quote.
Since eerything is spirit, since everything is God,
since every physical object, every cell, every desire
and thought and motion of the created will manifests God
hot T C
and God alone, why renounceyit all? Waswas Why was being
dois
born into this splendid harmonious galaxy a misfortune, to
be quickly undoene? Why If meditation or obedinece of
the guru, or the act of realising our divinity brings us
to a state of bliss, what : is there to renounce? And if
we XETEXHEXETYHHIX cannot die because we were never born,
if the true 'T'belongs to none of the bodies it chooses
from-time to time to incarnate itself in, if the true 'I'
remains utterly outside its/material manifestations, why
our
is it necessary to avoid incarnations and menifestations
if poss ble? ter hmeseef wesit coanater,
Of course the Indian scriptures are't naif or in-
complete, howevr much contemporary geras In dian gurus
may be. The scriptures clearly show that once you have
renouned the world inwardly, once you have identified your
real self and recognised that reality is non-solid and
illusioty (a statemen adequately. suppored by modern physics,
as many people have pointed out) you can return to this
world of 'veils' and appreciate it, live in it blissfully,
even yprolong your life in it. as much as possible in order
to enjoy the divine creation.
Ramakrishna used to say
that it was like entering a house full of dark rooms,
you entered each one, and mounted the staircase to th
next floor, until you reached the roof, where you found
blinding light. Once you knew that light you could retgurn
to those dark rooms, and you would no longer find tgem
dark.
There would only be light for you.
gWYNEXSXE****XXXX*XXXXXXXM
xx*axgixexupXdESIXEEXXHXXXXXRNXWIXX
ERXEIRNRXX*XXXX*Xex**m*xWMEEYEYXXXXXaXXXXXXRamakriskwaxhadxxx
**em*x*xdiaxYixekanandayxawxdidxkOXRAMANAXXXXXXXXETXETXXXXXXWXEXX
XRXXXXXEXGEXdESITEesxxifxenkyxfurx
Now if birth is a calamity for you, if incarnating is
ENXINIErIerxagkixity done only in order that it may no
longer be done, surely the logical outcome (for your cells)
is-that death is a boon for you, bodilessness a reward?
Does this explain sickness in so many of the greatest K
yogis? Does this explain why they eshew hatha yoga,
longevity asanas, as being on a level with the so'called
'left'handed' Tantric practice of God through sex.
Hatha yoga, consisting of bodily asanas, was always
thought to be the lowest of the yogic disciplines. But
is that because what we take to be ha tha yoga is the
discipline with its mostt important secret missed out,
namely the secret of the breath? Are the gurs as far
from this secret as anyone else in the last centuries?
Certai ly Ramakrishna made no such practice.
Nor did
Vivekananda. To judge by the pathetic sniffing that


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the followers of Mukdenanda today go through as a
preliminary of meditation, times have hardly changed.
Mukdenanda himself has a 'heart condition', according to
his followers. Tkatxisxkmxsaypxkexisnttxhrsatkingxprapsrwx
kypaxfautxwrtzhx Is that because he isn't breathing
properly and nver has done?
For once the cells are told by their masters that
they are an inferior and temporary mechanism to reach
a state in which they will not exist, they will rapidly
degenerate, precisely as a man who believes in old age
will become old at the prescribed time. Ixxetker Occe
yo say to God 'I have no use for this life excapt as a
kind of waiting room' he will shortent the stay for
you, and isthis the advice that is being given to the
West---that while you can copulate and make a family
and feel attached to certain people (notably your lover,
wife/husband or children), it would be better if you
didn't. There S no avoiduing this conclusion in the
Indian programme as it is purveyed today. There are
few Indian gurus around who will say boldly like
Vivekananda that a man may have a hundred wives and be
a man of God: indeed Mohammed did. So devotees are
left in a half-way house, with the result that hours of
meditation and asanas may leave the devout in a highly
charged sexual stae. I shall never forget how, a few
weeks ago, during my stay in an ashram, I did my one-
hour morning meditation from 4.45 to 5.45, followed by
breakfast and an hour's chanting, to spend the rest of
the day nrusing an enormous erection. Vivekananda,
during his American lecture tour in the last years of
the previous century, was freugently asked by his
ingenuous audiences why they felt so 'lustful' after
meditation, and he didn't really have a satisfactory
answer.
A friend told me yesterday that she spent Easter
at an ashram in Santa Cruz and on the day of her departure
they were meditating, that is sitting in the lotus position
without support, for five hours together. She got up in
an angry state and driving home to Berkeley didn't say
a word to the ot er passengers. Buty She also noticed
sexuality in the satmosphere---on this occasion men and
women were gtogether, not separatd as is usual in ashrams
for the meditational devotion. K Now the anger and sexuality
may be different elements of the same thing, namely an
attempt---a rather agressive atempt--on the part of the
cells to asesert themselves. Vivekananda's answer was
that something must be wrong with the emditation, and
this does seem clear.
But is this because *HEXIndiaNX
prugrammexakasxaxmmditasigEXEXXXEea**xasXappesedxkuxiifeyx
WI***X**KEXTEXHIEESXRIXEXEXX*HEXEHYEXRBTIEINEingxi**xxxXXX
Masx*IxkaNRNEX***thexdixinityxixXX*XmYSEXA*XKEEEWEX*IXXXEHIX**EXXXXXXXXX
deatkxinxmyXMYEEX****TNEXIexdeatkxmIxsexuEXMAXXIWXIwXEyXRIXmfxmyxakaEXMEN*X
*WX*KEEEXEIWEEXXWXMEXRRixmyxpXPXEEIBNEXIRXREaYNa*makintxx
MeRwaringxtaxdixinityxinxXENYSEXf*XKEERmIngx honouring
the divinity in yourself actually increases th energy
to live in your incarnation---and if you haven't in fact
renounced sex, if you in fact love th sex act *X**XX**XX
kekwxed more than any other act of your life, youwill find
the cells forcing you to face the fact, xfxx as mine did


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The meditation is unsuccessfyl, ad probably less good
than not meditating at all. But is this because the
Indian programme has failed to proride more than an
unnatural mental self-alienation which will simply not
work for most people? Isxixxinxfagkx Has the Îndian
programme in fact produced a sort of suicide blue-
sheet not so different from that of the People's Church
in San Francisco which resulted some years back in mass
suicide? What is the objection to getting rid of the
present body, if that body is ready to enter God?
This is where rebirthing comes in. I am going
to claim that meditation isximpessikiExaNoxindEed
harmfnxx*ex*uxpERpIExwhwxkaxen**EXTEREMAEERXEAXEEXYXEaYEE 5
dESITESXfwrXYENMOXWEAXEAX*XIX**EskeadxwixmIxiRadENNEXEXERESXEXWRESXEXEY
is not a mental activity or lack of activity at all.
It is an act of the cells. And when this act is success-
ful and properly managed it cannot lead to sexuality or
anger. *nxX*exx**xXXXXXXXXXXENxam*xmixtMAXTHEXEEIISEElisxi*ximpxx
EANNEEXkEXaxwatkErxmfxsi**ingxwithx*XX*MEXXEZEXEIHESEXX
AWIXRHEXKANEXBEXTIXEXERdxtemptyingxHEXmIX**Xxxxxxx
BEXIEYEXX*a*X*****XXX****XXXEEXXHXXESXXXHEXXEEXXREXERIXREXX
IxdianxpragraNKEXEREEXPrexidedx It is isimply impossible
to feel these things when you reach the state of non-
breathing or stillness in a rebirth session. The mind
is here truly inactive, in the sense that it is not in
control. The cells are undeniably in a divine state---
they feel that way, it isn't a matter of a mental attitude.
And you simply can't get the cells to behave like that,
to become transformd, just by sitting with your egs
crossed for an hour or five and doing it all by mental
effort. You will maybe feel calm, or experience some
well-being, and from time to time you may have the
impression of a light SNETHuNdindingxywHXXX am emanatig from
you. But you won't stop the mind working. You will still
be in perfect control. You will still be in the 'real'
world, or in per ect consciousness.
Swxwkatxixanxsuggeskingxisxthatx Now no doubt certain
Indians do teach a definite physical method for arriving
at meditation, whether it is breathing or certain repeated
asanas or extreme fasting. Only in this way will the
suicide factor be resisted.
It seems to me now that I am writing this because of
that first rebirth experience, the appearance. I was told
there not to accept the pain and suffering story, the vale
of tears stroy, I was told, I think, that birth was indeed
no calamity. I was told, I think, the opposire of what
the Indian programme today is putting round the world,
for the reason that it has lost touch with its own secrets.
The first thing to drain out of you in rebirth
breathing is sex desire. With it goes all trace of
irritation ad anger. These things may come up. in
order to disperse almost at once. XOX*KEXINGIANX
axigexixxtaxtxxtaxaxtwxx Now frequently an Indian guru will
advise people to let the most terrible thoughts flow
through their minds without rsistance, in the first
stages of a mediattion. I suggest that this advice
is u


is unknowingly derived from an earlier, now forgotten
meditakimnaixstatexxhizxxwzXWEXXINAKEndxewaxkyxx rebirth
state. I believe that even th W rd meditation istelf
is a watery dilution of the real experience, throwing
the emphasis on the brain, which in any genuine meditatio
is the least active of the orgas.
The rebirthree passes into stillness in his own time,
and yet this time is determined by the breathing, its
duration, rhythm and volume. HWWXEAEKXkxmeditakiENXEEXXX
SESSIERXMAShasxi*sxxxxX Now this duration, rhythm and volume
is never constant. Three minutes may be enough to induce
stillness or non-breathing (I am deliberately avoiding
the over-used word' bliss' because this is only one of
the many experiences possible in this state), and on another
occasion (with the same rebirthee) two hours may not
be enough. On other occasions still not even two hours
will get there: the organism is just not in a rebirth
state.
The sniffing that many people practiceas a premliminary
or aid to mental medi tation is, it seems to me, a last
almost imperceptible trace of that early breathing through
which the original masters of he Indian programme many
thousands of years ago attained longevity, serenity and
the power to survive withou eating or drinking. Of C As
a matter of fact sniffing may simply irritate the organism.
Short sharp intakes of ait without adequately long out-
breath release have the effec 9 like all breath intake,
of raising momentarily the blood pressure, heart bat,
metabolistic rate, temperature and nervous enrgy. So it
may have the opposite effect to the one devoutly wished
for.
To. me it makes sense that Christ practised a form of
re irthingbecase his mission was really the Indian programme,
as I've called it, brought to the west. And that programme
comes by mean of what I've called the messenger, in the
rebirth. It is why there is no Indian religion as there
are other religions. The Upnaishads say that 'all paths
lead to God'. The Upanishads aren't aout a particular
path. E**x****X***XXXXEXXPHXXRY So what I am saying here
is that they were actually given during rebirth sessions
many thousands of years ago, in the form of the Vedas
or early scriptures which were passed on from mouth to
mouth. The whole doctrine of the divine self (which
Christ repeated---'Is it not written that ye are Gods?'--
and the sense of reality as an illusion, that is that
objectivity lies in the perceiver ad not in the perceived,
all the basic tenets of the Idnian mystciism, are giva
in rebirth as a actual lviing experience. Surfaces are
pierced, the self seems to illuminate the entire univers
and become its centre, ad guidance is given on how to
behave (the messenger), not in the form of moral command-
ments but the only natural and harmonious behaviour open
to the breathr.
Now all this is clearly opposite to suicide.


And it is suicide that the Indian programme, like hald
of the workshops and the mind-grabbing sects, invites and
(praises) without the smallest intention of doing so or,
apparently, the samllest awareness of what it is doing.
The greatest teacher among the Indians, perhaps the greatest
the world has at this moment, Bagwan Rajneesh is about the
only epokesman of the Indian programme who is clear and
categorical about it. He says relisiongs make a difference
between God and the world, they piut God against the world,
but you can have both, there is no need to think of them
as separate. This is because he 's aware of the suicide
built into the I dian programme, with which the mass suicide
of the Indian people, their passivity in crisis and their
inability (amounting to refusal) to deal with the simplest
probelms of racial survival, is partly the result: the
Indian programme, eschewing thr world not only as unreal
but undesirable, especially its essential creative spark---
the living heart of every cell which we may call sex or
conception or XWXE*** love---has entered deep i to the
papukarxindianxmindx mind of the Indian people whether
they acknowledge the Upanishads or not. Ramakrishna and
Vivekananda and a good many other yogis worked against
this process, extolling the West for its optimism and self-
help, but they were monks just the same, and I doubt
whether either had experience of an act of sex.
The workshops in their turn, taking directly franxthe
or indirectly from the Indian programme, perpetuate the
same psychological reaction, without (naturally) intending
to either. ixvaxishkyxtxxyxtxwyxfwliuxxpapntaxxfrentianxprinsipkssy
*h**x Not that they're against sex. In fact most of them
follow, unconsciously or otherwise, a popular freudian
pricniples, that withholding sex is unhealthy, that self-
expression is essential, that the bad things inside, the
hangups (in current Californian, the shit) has to 'come
out'. It continues to come out edlessly. And it is rather
as if someone with a chronic tendency to colds told hims lf
each time 'It's my mucous coming out', It is indeed, and
the release of the mucous does relieve the sysyetm, but
nothing is being done to get at the cause. And if you
You may be bilding up the mucus emotionally. Xwuxmayx
XEXXESIS*INE And the very principle that you do your
yoga and your Brima and your massages and your rolfing and
your Est training and your actualisation and your dream
anaylsis and your past-life regression and your psycho-
therapy in order to 'get rid of your shit' is already an
encapsulated suicide. And it isn't W wonder that people
tending to deep depression can go through these disciplibes
spending their life savings over a period of six months
or more, and end p with the deepest depression of all
time. The mucous has certainly come out. But no one
has stopped it being manufactured inside. No one has
pointed out that the 'shit' is nothing but inbiuilt
suicide, moment by moment suicide, and that expressing


it, whether you do it at a Kubler Ross workshop, bteaing
a pillow with a piece of rubber tubing to 'get the anger
out' or under the caressing massages of a fellow Brimah
student, unless the will to csuicide is tackled head-on
nothing whatsoever has been done.
The above ahpened to my woman ('my'l---but we've
seen each oher again, we slept in the same bed together
for two niths, though we didn't touch each other) She
sent through the whole lot---and ended with the deepest
depression of all time. Now for me that depresion was
directly associated with the nager- and hate-display
urged on her by the Kulber Ross. It was connected wi th
the fact that, as part of the training, she enacted
the suicide of her own mother when she was eight years
old.
Clearly the West has a vast suicide programme too--
otherwise we wouldn't have found the secre of destroying
the vry heart of matter, the inner sexof every cell, the
atom. That has been weighed and researched and thought
towards for centuries, at least since ancient Greek
times, when the at m became the subjectof philosophical
farxsmientifie*mimrxfmrxtkatxwaxxxx discgussion. And finally
we got there. All our Western vigous and optimism and
slef-help created the means to destroy all animate life
on the planet in less than a second. In our case we got
there by listening to ministers of the church telling us
that essentially we were bad creatures and that even the
most ecstatic act known to huma expeierience, that of
sex, was wrong and, more, filthy. And finally it sunk
in. In the rebirth process you hit that suicide sooner
or later whoever you are. I'm about the most unsuidcidal
person you coul have, as far as intentions and conscious
tendencies go. But I hit it just the same.
And when
you hit it you are astonished that it has been resident
in your cells all these years, really since birth, withot
you knowing it.
We in the West run from this suicide and depression
to disciplines which promise bliss and a reprieve from
all the dark accusation that have been hurled against
us by the churches and perpetuated by psychologists who
still cling to the idea of there being a 'good' part of
you and a 'bad' part of yoj, a 'super'ego' and a 'lower
ego'. We fall straight into the arms of the Indian
programme only to find that the suicide-principle is
a basic inbuilt part of the discipline, only this time
it WOOS us fwrxreax and delights us. It can make us
say, after a time, with Keats, 'I have been half in
love wi th easeful Death'...


You can experience bliisss or a state of desire-
lessness without belieiving in God.
Nearly all the
enlightenment techniques and workshops are concerned
with calming the nervous system and inducing it to
feel a state of sevurity. They may advertise bliss
as the Indians do, or they may not. But they musy
all promise a certain stae of inner joy *HXTEXEaXIX
ExtightERHES because this is what enlightenment implies.
It means living in a world of light instead of one of
darkness. Any psychotherapist, too, must have a similar
objective in the erea of the mind: clear and optimistic
thinking is clearly better from his point of view than
dark and doomed thinking. But with this growing of
light, with ecstasy and optimism, there may not be belief
in God. EspegiaikyaXIRXXXXXINXENY X EXW*r****EXwwX*x@waxisx
wnikexrig****X*XXXxkxmfxfaskimnyxamaxtkelisfxinx@matxisxxx
MasxaxrathErxadawnedxx I'm deliberate;y using an old'
fashioned expression which sounds to most of us not only
empty of meaning but damned silly. How can you believe
in the rigijnal dynamic force of creation i n the universe,
how you can believe in the everywhre, how can you believe=
in spirit? You either know it or you don't. And what
I'm suggesting is that you can have the bliss and the
ecstasy and, now and then, the feeling of uter security
even in danger, WhIgKXpERPIupiexwhwxdwxxx**axxguesxwitXWX**XXXX
>wixxingxixxmt without knowing it. And if you don't
know it, if you only get glimpses, youare thrown back
into the 'real' world ixxxxbewiiteretxstaterXXXXXXExgX8ixg
saysyxx (that is, the world you lived in before)wikhxalix
*texdarkxss)X with most perplexing contradictory results.
You may thin find yourself thinking about su cide more
openly than ever before, even though you know yo will
never do it, or evn plan it. It is just there in the
mind playing about. You may find that the darkness
becomes more difficult to bear. You may find little
unexpected misfortunes in your life. You may find
doors closing on you which were always open before.
You may find even your career folding up. But these
things the ashrams and the workshops neither advertise
nor acknowledge the possibility of this connection.
And the result is a great deal of unhappiness of the
kind I saw at the Mukdananda ashram, where constant inner
crisis is blandly called a 'kria", and left where it is,
to pass away (which it doesn't do). At that ashram I
saw people in frantic tearful states, terror and so on,
but there was no one in the direc orate who could do more
than smile sympathetically an refer the evoteee. back to
his early morning chants.
People rise from their meditations
fregently feeling anger or hatred, and shame because
they're feeling it, and frequently they believe they're
alone in this and don't want to expose themselves t the
Englightened Ones by mentioning it. Bu all this trouble
is caused by the inability to believe in God in its real
sense, that is knowing with perfect security that you
are being looked after. The path to that is endless,
and every human being is on it whether he likes it or
knows it or not. Every gesture to bring order into
his life by reaning more or having the right lover or


making children or retreating to a holiday house or
cultivating warm friendships or joining clubs (or
workshops or gyms) is a gesture towards that seurity.
But unless yo u know what you're really looking for you
experience less seurity as time goes on, the more order
you create around you. You can srtive for the seurity
of a being famous or rich but once there you will feel
less se cure than in your darkest days of failure and
self recrimination. IXxXX*XWaN*x**x*xxxx*yxpapXtars
gaxtuXgNrNExtka*xisx*KXXMEXTEEENNY And that security,
that believing in God in the real sense where you no
longer talk about God or about believing anything but
just live wih the knowledge, is what rebirthing (for me
at any rate) is essentially about.
It means an end to
our need for churches. Churches are monuments to our
disbelief. And paradoxically they create more misbelief,
partly by living on it and profiting by it. This SO-
called Christian civilsation of the West has been founded
on and organised by the richest and most far-flung church
in the history of man, but who goes to church nowadays?
The Italians, in the country where that church was first
organised on an imperial basis? Going to church in
ITaly has, in the last thirty years, become almost an act
of shame. And it's a reflection on your intelligence
too. I have never met one man or woman in a lifetime
spent in Ialy who had a good word to say about preiests.
But the God that expresses itself in leaves and
winds and HEE dark inner moods and mysterious sounds at
night, the God that intimates its existence to us in
sometimes vivid and overwhelming ways---that is som thing
you live with, a security you rest in, not concept in the
head.
If yo u fight the darkness to reach the light in
hours of meditation, if you fight the sexualiy to reach
non-attachment, the darkness and the exauality will
well up and suffoacte you. As I Ching says, when one
keeps still one gains conrtol over on's bndy, but
where rigidity occurs in I the hips', that is the zone
wher the dark and light forces face each other, 'the
heart moves aimlessly, the nerve paths will thereby be
interrupted, and a suffocation of the heart is to be
feared.' Such a thing is impossible with re irthing.
becase rigicdity is impossible. Rigidty comes from
effort of mind, and if there is effort of mind the
re irthing process that process will simply cease.
What I call believing in God is simply the ack-
nowledge of the Third Force. Until that force is
geuinely acknowledged *aRXIXaXER**xTwaRKedxthatxskage
XXXXXXXXXXX*XXX**X**NXXngxhagkxixXXXX***XXXX***X*XXxg* Kigkt
nightmares and unexpected suicidal atitudes will continue.
The msyterious process of rebirthing seems to put
the cells into a state in which things can begin to
hapen as if total securiy was there. The Third Force
takes over as best it can---but while the mind doesn't


doesn't believe or assent, it can only work gradually
and or fragmentarily. Now the rebirthing won't produce
the mental assent. It will merely set the Third Force
in motion. ThisxmayxxpsrXX*XEXXKEXIRREEXSENSEXHIXSENETItY
Now the Indian programme, despiteits emphasis on
doing away with he mind (for that programme is mor e aware
than any other of the blocking power of the mind) , does
not do this. Or raher, it can do it in only one way---
th rough the actual touch or presence of the guru. My
belief is tha there rebirthing there is no technique
avaiable like rebirthing which sets the Third Force in
motion, and minimsises the damaging effect of the mind.
All the available techniques, including those of the
Indian programme, are intellectual and verbal, and there-
fore howevr much thy may discourage menatl activity they
are dependent on it and therefore canno get rid of it.
Mental control remains. And with rebirthing mental
contr 1 is th first thing to disapear.
This at once separates it from psychotherapy,
which may ba celled a journey through the mind. The
rebirther isn't, and shouldn't strive to be, a 'clean
vessel' as some psychotherapists call it, through which
the subject's pain and distress may flow without causing
discomfort or even reacion in the rebirther. The attempt
to becom a clean vessel (which only a monk who devotes
his whole life to just this can be) kradsx may lead to
great affectation in a psychotherapist and make him
adopt an attitude in which the heart ceases to act
naturally. Thus an enlightenment endeavour may end
by recreating the vry cause of darkness, namely a shrivell=
ing of the heart and its protection by all kinds of
prestense ad defense devices (which the Reichians call
the 'armour'). I frequently cry when my subjects cry,
during, a sesion, (unknown to them, since their eyes are
closed). This is when my heart works sympahetically.
But the subject mus also b e preared for the rebirther's
heart fo work unsympathetically. It happened to me
when my teacher got angry because I had over-breathed
myself into hyperventilation after my first session with
her, xespite her warnings that I must not try breathing
alone. Her anger aroused pain and resenment in me: I
thought I deserved her concern. But the important fact
was that the heart was in active dialogue.
In California I fond that people abandoned the
re irthing process 9 if only for a time, much more
frequently than in Europe.
And in theend I put it down
mental control being such an important factor in American
life. In the lack of traditions binding eve eryone together
blindly and automatically, Amrican life has had depend
on the mind as the one unifying factor among many religions
and attitudes, and over vast spaces. Therefore it has
played an essential role in builing the country with the
result today that the American tends to f el threatened
and unsafe if he isn't in control of the situation round
him. If he finds unexpected things hapening to him as
a eresult of two or three rebirths he will in ariably
feel he is being led into the unknown---and the unknown,
he has SO often been taught, means the presece of irrational


irrational forces (that is, to come full circle), mental
control is absent. X*xX*KEXpH**areligkaigKWNEXEEEXE*y We
still live according to eighteenth century enlightenment
pricniples: enlightenment meant at that time Human
Reason. And the loss of this reason meant, for the
thinkers of that time, chaos and madness. So qite
often someone being rebirthed, and falling into a state
where his mind is not oin control ad may not even be
conscious, begins to fear thatmadness may result. For
he has been taught that rational control is the one thing
that prevents him from going mad: and the more madness
there is in him, the more deep layers of unconfrtonted
resentments and ahterds and terrors, the more he will
feel the need for this control. Thus it may be said
that those mostbin need of rebirth are those who fly
from it. AMoxthesxwhe onc e the process has started.
I found this in two writers I sraterd to re irth
in San Francisco. One had been afraid all his life to
fall asleep or unconscious (he did both in the first
rebirth, although he denied the unconsciousness later),
and the other was the mos sub'ventialted human being
I have ever come across. Both were living (and dying)
from mental control, and the loss of control which they
felt and marvelled at, though they nboth knew it was
probably changing their lives as nothing else had done,
was the very thing that frightened them and made them
edge away. I say 'edge away' because these flights
are always surreptitious, for the obvious reason that
if they staed stated their fear clearly the re irther
might successfully discourage i and have them on their
backs again.