Latest

Like so many millions of others, I didn’t have the best of starts in life.  I suppose I was more fortunate than most because my abuse was never physical, it was always mental or emotional.  My tormentor was my father, who resented me being around.

My mother told me one incident when I was two years old.  My father screamed at me for being stupid because I had picked up a piece of litter (trash) and didn’t know to put it in what he called the “waste disposal receptacle” instead of just pointing at the trash can.

Also, he refused to acknowledge me by name until I was around eight years old.  Until then, he would only whistle for me as if I were the pet dog.  His interest in me was underwhelming; he never attended any school function, and when my English teacher wrote to my father that I should be tutored for Oxford University, the letter went straight into the bin, or waste disposal receptacle.

I write this not to garner sympathy – I feel none for my eight-year-old self because I have not known any different – but to raise two important questions: why do some of us behave the way we do, as my father did with me, and what are the longterm effects for the victim?

A New Year, a new beginning.  Were you one of the many who made a Resolution this year?  And will you be among the vast majority who will forget it by February at the latest?

Most of make a Resolution to improve some aspect of our behaviour, and we all fall back into our bad old ways pretty quickly, too.

But why?  It’s because we are all victims of a mental conjuring trick that’s so clever it fools us every time.  And not just at the beginning of each New Year, but every day, all year round – and very likely your whole life.

Last evening I started to read – or rather re-read – The Bhagavad Gita (The Song of God), and marvelled, as ever, at the profundity of the insights.  Some of the passages reminded me of the Psalms from the Bible, and in particular the verse: “Be still and know that I am God”.

But how could two disparate and different cultures have similar insights, and around the same epoch?  These thoughts they had are not obvious in any way; according to philosophy, they’re not even possible.

The past has its own life.  Its patterns continue to live through us, affecting our actions, the way we live and the world.  As a result, we live our life on constant repeat until we wake up to the process that, ultimately, deprives us of joy and happiness.

As we become more conscious, we can start seeing the patterns that are created from experiences we never understood at the time – we weren’t fully present – but these patterns run deeper still, and through the generations.

On a radio interview I did recently, the presenter praised me for my honesty in my book, Time-Light, and how I had openly talked about my childhood and how that had shaped me.

But I was holding out.  There was a darker secret that I never revealed but that demonstrates the enormous power of past hurts and misunderstandings.

The other day I was reading the e-book “Stripping the Gurus”.  Although some people believe that the author, Geoffrey D Falk, has a ‘skeptical agenda’, it nonetheless is a sobering catalogue of abuse, violence, predatory sexual behaviour, alcoholism and rampant egoism – involving supposedly enlightened spiritual beings, many of whom are well known.

Psychological, and sometimes physical, bullying and abuse is always possible in any relationship when someone has the power and someone else wants it.  There are also just as many fakers as fakirs out there – so be careful.

You can shortcut this whole troublesome process if you really ‘get’ the Time-Light super-charged koan: