The Old Dark Man

The time in my life that is most relevant to my novel is without doubt the years spanning 1996 to 2010, but in particular the first three years of this period to which The Old Dark Man is somewhat of an allegory. 

During this time I trained as, and then became, an exorcist, and was subsequently called out to many London addresses, somewhat as a last resort by the occupants, to deal with ghosts and other non-corporeal energies that were making their lives more than difficult.  Someday I hope to write a full account of this time, especially the first three years, which culminated in clearing 23 Cranley Gardens, the former residence of serial Killer Dennis Nilsen.

Myself and the lady I worked with understandably brought a small amount of notoriety upon ourselves for this, but a few television appearances was enough to give us the feeling that we never wished to go public ever again, having no desire to sensationalise what for us was a thousand times more sensational without the traditional media spin given these sorts of things.

1999 was the time when I really began to question what I had gotten myself involved in - my relationship to death, fear and madness foremost in my mind - but there seemed to be very little distance I could gain from what I was doing, enough to integrate it all and feel grounded.  And that, and finding myself living in a very haunted apartment in Finsbury Park made me flee to Thailand, where I thought I would get the distance I needed as well as much needed rest after the events at Cranley Gardens.

Let me just add here that normally a clearing will take around two to three hours to accomplish.  Cranley Gardens took two and a half days.

Rather than bringing me integration and rest, Thailand brought me further drama.  I fell in with an Englishman who was a regular opium runner from Laos to the southern islands, and after two weeks spent attempting to recruit me, plying me with much of the drug to which I was completely open and curious, things inevitably turned sour.  Thai men packing shiny silver pistols had started to appear toward the end of those two weeks, but it wasn’t until this Englishman appeared one morning having fallen out with members of one of the families that controlled the islands, looking the worse for a drunken brawl, that things got dangerous.  After a terrifying day spent trying to prevent him from hiding a large amount of opium in my hut, the following morning I fled back to Bangkok, where I hid out for three days until I could get a flight back to England.

Although my Indian Gayanese girlfriend at the time took great care of me after my return, my mind was still greatly troubled.  I seemed to be experiencing an enormous internal separation from the lives of those around me.  Add to this my father’s death, after a five year sentence of cancer, and it seemed reality was something almost liquid and indefinable to me at the time.

But I could not leave the ghosts alone.  It was just too fascinating experiencing both the hauntings I was subsequently called out to, and the fact that it was me clearing them.  It was and still is a mystery to me how I have this ability.

The Old Dark Man was written as a way of exploring what had happened to me, and ultimately was a way of exorcising myself.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-old-dark-man/id445522042?mt=11

Bizarre Tension

It is as though I were being pulled in two directions at once, with either option seemingly denied by money and a mind that refuses to help.

I don't know what to do.

We must all face this, many times over in our lives, I'm sure.  Which is all very well to extrapolate out to the rest of mankind, but that doesn't help me now.

Here I sit, in my sister's kitchen in Bubwith, pissy rain falling outside, no money, in debt, waiting to hear from various publishers about my book, but expecting nothing, so no prospects to get myself moving and onward......an email in my inbox from Agathe in Krakow looking forward to later in the year when we might be together again, with me back there.........finding that I want that too....knowing there is no money to make it happen......opportunities to expand and create further with my music from encouraging emails from friends with studios.....but no money to travel down to the south of England to make that happen..........

Stuck..........and I don't know what to do.

Do nothing.

I've given this wisdom to others when the pressure has been the other way around.  And I suppose, with no other options but frustration, anxiety and fatigue, that is what I will have to do, hoping that wheel of fortune will finally stop spinning and give me a way through.

The Puritan

It feels, and has felt for a very long time now that Life is isolating me away from not only what I want, but also that which I need.  It is as though I hang suspended just a little outside of time, or that I fell through the looking glass and cannot get back.

I can't work out when it definitively happened, or what in essence caused it to happen, but life moves past my eyes as though I am a ghost.  It feels like a prison sentence.

I'm sure it was a combination of a handful of deeply impacting events that caused it, including first my near death in Israel back in 1995, my induction into trancework and then the first three years as a transpersonal medium, clearing peoples' homes of unwanted ghosts, which continued for another thirteen years but those first three years being the most dramatic.  Also my use of hallucinogens at around that time, '96-'99, and then my experiments with opium toward the end of '99.  Kundalini yoga for sixteen years, punctuated in 2003 by the death of my Father, from a long drawn out cancer that took five years to kill him, with many 'near misses' in the final two years...never knowing 'is it today?'

I have confronted much about myself during this time, all the big taboos of death, dying, fear, madness, and of course relationships and sex.  Much has been revealed to me about the true state of being in the world around me, and there was a strange time, perhaps six or seven years ago where the greatest contributor to my plight started to loom in my consciousness.

To summarise it in a sentence, black became white and white became black.

It was as though I really had passed through a mirror, where the way I had assumed life was had been revealed as a play we all enact every day with mask and script.  But worse than this, that the actual reality of life was perfectly opposite; that what is taken as good is a manifestation of evil, and vice versa.

This took a while, a long while, to digest and integrate and, before I go on, must be understood on a much more subtle level than perhaps your mind is at present trying to grapple with, eager to cast me away as simply crazy.

What I am trying to describe has its roots in the mask and script I was just alluding to, and can be loosely understood as a person who's words sound good, pure and holy, but who's spirit only uses these words for selfish ends.

Now this will not sound new to anyone I am sure.  Hypocrisy is an old word.

But what if I was to suggest to you that I am not just referring to the occasional bad apple, but most of the tree?  What if I was suggest to you that it is not the odd priest that we should be on our guard against, but God himself?  And I don't even mean what you perhaps think I mean here.  This isn't just another pseudo intellectual attack on the world's religions, but is an attempt to point out the impostor.......within you.

What if your very notion of 'Good' is not what it seems or appears to be?  What if your notion of Good, your Good......is actually Evil?  That an intent always to aim for Good and away from Evil, will in actual fact bring about the very opposite situations than those you were intending?

My life is ridiculous

When I look inside my mind at the moment, all is vague and baffling.  I've been back from Krakow now about three or four weeks and have felt completely lost the whole time.  I had been living there since October last year, and trying my damnedest to make it work.  I taught english, I dj'ed, I even managed to secure a lecturing job at one of the universities this coming october.  But my money just evaporated, and now I find myself in York of all places, living with my sister and wondering what the hell to do.

For the first few weeks, on returning, I think I was in denial; daydreaming possibilities about various creative projects in York.  Then I hit depression and frustration, and an overwhelming sense of failure, feeling that everything I turn my hand to ends in disaster.  I've sunk lower than this in my life, but it certainly touches insanity to feel you are not where you should be, and are being forced to plan for a change of life you don't really want.

I love living in Krakow.  I've had negative experiences there, but on the whole, looking back, I was happy there.  I really feel that life has well and truly pulled the rug from under me.

I sold everything to go live there.  I had been living in London before that, and had been for many years, and life had just become impossible there, so I knew it was the right decision.  I just don't understand why life, or more importantly, luck wasn't wholly on my side, enabling me to create an ongoing existence there.

I am so confused.  At times it feels as though some hidden power is trying to thwart my freedom, or the pursuit of it.