In 2006 I began work as Site Editor for a large online gambling company in the UK. It was a great company to join at the age of 22 for my first serious job. The number of free parties and streams of booze from countless open bars were a great kick in the arse to make new friends and move from my parent’s house in High Barnet to Central London. I also gained a wealth of work experience.
For a year I lived with close friends I met on the job. We slept very little, instead raving around the clock in London’s clubs, parks, house parties and pubs. It was a wonderful exercise in liberation from my very quiet, rarely social life at the end of the Northern Line. Then the fish bowl set up of working, partying and living with the same small set of friends gradually became tiring and claustrophobic. My attendance at parties became infrequent and simultaneously, my closer friend of the bunch and I took to reading about meditation, attending lectures and classes rooted in spirituality. We’d later pretentiously refer to these activities as part of a path.
The superficiality and insincerity of forced smiles and laughs at managerial bar banter to win favour come bonus time felt empty. Our investigations were fulfilling and snowballed rapidly after a traumatic Halloween themed night at Farringdon’s Turnmills night club. Both worse for wear, we spent hours in the staff cloakroom whilst a medic tried pulling my friend out of a Ketamine and Ecstasy induced hole. Defibrillators were on hand incase his heart beat got any faster than the double speed it was working at and came to a stop. We were eventually able to catch a black cab home after he’d woken out of his unresponsive state of inaudible chants. We sat sobbing on my bed, still in our white boiler suit costumes, listening to All You Need Is Love by The Beatles on repeat. The face paint of a David Bowie zig zag was smudged down my face. It was like something straight out of a Hollyoaks special.
Withdrawing further from partying, I took a course in Tibetan buddhism at Kennington’s Jamyang Centre, attended talks at London’s Buddhism Society, practiced lots of yoga and did several detoxes. Meanwhile, my friend had heard on the holistic scene about a lady who used an electric drill like device to vibrate your upper spine behind the neck. This was done so fiercely that it changed the angle of a particular vertebrae, apparently sloped inwards due to alien contact with Earth… Once corrected, the lady claimed patients would have a straighter, more direct route for energy to burst past the third eye chakra to the crown chakra. These were two points said to be prominent locations for spiritual energy in ones body. It sounded farfetched and over the top to me but he got it done. He wasn’t boasting about how much he’d drunk the night before anymore, but still had claims of extremity, just at a different end of the scale.
In early 2007, I got a bonus and travelled India for three weeks, visiting various landmarks of Buddhism. I guess I played mates with the bosses just enough. I did lots of Yoga, read books on Buddhist scripture and attended a week of classes led by the Dalai Lama at the foot of the Himalayas. Whilst in Rishikesh, I often jumped the wall of an abandoned Maharashi Mahesh ashram made famous by The Beatles, to wander around all day writing poetry. The site was full of monkeys, completely silent, colourful with wild bushes of flowers and contained many dozens of crumbled lecture halls and homes. It was incredible, providing me with more genuine peacefulness than, as just one example, a two day intensive course on practicing Reiki that culminated in panting on my knees in a dark mountain hut whilst the teacher dropped loose grapes he’d blessed onto my head, countering my every outward breath with a musical groan. It was half a day into the course, not years of hindsight, when I began doubting the teacher’s authenticity.
Returning to the UK, copywriting to encourage single mums to gamble online didn’t sit well with my newly found, calm and relaxed outlook. I handed in my notice before having a new job to start but luckily moved quickly into a role for an international charity, leading their digital fundraising. At separate times, my friend and I attended a course of 10 weeks in East Dulwich by a South African lady who called herself an energy worker. She’d spend the first half of a session talking with you as if a traditional therapist. The second half of a session involved you laying on a glorified ironing board in a corpse position whilst she made deep breathing noises and whizzed her fingers around in circles above your crutch which she said released energy blockages from your childhood. It was like a frantic form of Reiki.
Those sessions, though somewhat absurd, were pretty useful for me, providing somewhere I could privately discuss my homosexuality and work on telling others about it publicly, something I’d put off for years. They kept me busy for some time. Around the same time, my friend had started reading about Kundalini energy and speaking with a lady in America who called herself a guru to a wide following she communicated with via a Yahoo Group and Youtube channel. I guess the casual nature of the sessions in a quiet suburban house in South London was a bit too pedestrian for his liking.
Before long my friend quit the gambling company job too, took a flight to Seatle and returned with his head shaven and a desire to be called after a character in Indian mythology. Our lease ended, I moved into a new house share and he travelled back to the US to spend more time with the lady. Mutual friends would ring me up, alarmed and confused by the upload of many online videos showing him being unable to speak or focus his eyes; apparently two reactions to Kundalini awakenings. At the time I loyally stuck by my friend who I didn’t want to think of as in trouble or under the influence of someone, so believed the every word of.
Eager to remain close friends with the guy who helped me catch up on the fun that not leaving home to complete my degree robbed me of, I joined the online group. I followed its leader’s online lessons, downloaded her chanting to fall asleep to, maintained the energy diary she required me to keep and kept speaking with my friend via Skype. I also began a relationship. That brought with it more drinking than I’d been doing in a while and lots more social interaction. Gradually my focus on spirituality started fading as I got to know a new group of fun, friendly and balanced people.
After a short time, that relationship came to an end, coinciding with a three week holiday in Kenya I funded with more bonus money from the gambling world. The trip was just after political upheaval in the country and so there were very few people at backpacker hostels to speak to. Besides some amazing sights, the trip is filed in my memory under ‘solitude’ and ‘loneliness’. On my return, my old friend was sleeping on the sofa of my flat which I shared with a mutual friend. I was incredibly happy. I’d got through the dull trip and the person that knew me best was around to help me deal with the heart ache. Only, it wasn’t my best friend. It was an unrecognisable person. On top of breaking up with a fling that seemed a lot more at the time than it was, I also had to deal with the drastic change in my closest friend. He took a matter of fact approach to my moping, dismissing my situation as trivial and not worthy of the attention I gave it. My sense of solitude amplified.
Eventually he moved from my sofa back to his parents which acted as a base for him to become a deputy leader at the online group. He got in touch with friends less and less, travelled various parts of the world to talk to people about his apparent awakening and eventually disappeared. He expressed happiness throughout rare correspondence though as I got over the departure of someone I was very impressionable of, I wondered if it was his trademark stubbornness talking, trying to save him face as he began realising he’d gone too far down his chosen ‘path’ for his own good. He was always incredibly energetic, sociable and adventurous. Surely a life in the lotus position with eyes closed couldn’t contain that for long.
It wasn’t long before I got blocked out of the online group for not maintaining my energy diary, or perhaps not paying its leader a percentage of my wage. My friend had provided her with a widescreen monitor for her computer so was more than in favour. My resentment towards the group had been building with each message board post by people from all corners of the world, hanging on to the leader’s every word. A series of clips were added to her Youtube channel in which new group members of a similar age to my friend, were shaving their heads, deleting their Facebook and e-mail accounts, quitting their jobs and moving away from their families and friends. It was sad to think of those individuals’ best friends and families perhaps experiencing the abandonment I felt of someone they were very fond of or admired.
A group that’s meant to be based in positivity and truth, I thought, couldn’t be a group that transforms a very charismatic, friendly and entertaining young man into an unrecognisable person who’s hard to spend time with and who’s ‘everything is merely energy’ perspective doesn’t allow for friendly small talk, be it about a favourite band’s new release or an attractive new acquaintance, as would routinely be discussed each evening over a beer or in front of the television. Being able to sit in silence with your close friends and families is a healthy practice. Not saying a word at all and sitting sedately staring, much less so.
Another gripe I had with the group was that for a set of people claiming to be distancing themselves from ego and a sense of self, they talked about their selves an awful lot. On his brief return to the UK, my friend spoke of nothing more than his journey and the change he’d undergone. He superiorly contrasted his actions with those of acquaintances still enjoying a harmless pint, smoke, dance or lover. The group leader regularly referred to her past, how hard her struggle was, what a challenge she had overcome and how incredible her life now was. With every ‘I don’t do that because that’s attachment and I am not attached’ and ‘I think that’s not the way. I choose this route’ I heard, the more hypocrisy I felt. I heard ‘I’ more than an optician. Life’s detail and drama didn’t seem abandoned so much as reconfigured into a viewpoint of self importance, elitism and worth. The more their outlook was discussed with conviction, the more group members seemed to be trying to convince themselves, dismissing any counterargument like a child in a back and forth playground fight who covers their ears and starts shouting nonsense because they’re at a loss and can’t respond to a challenge intelligently.
During one of my last exchanges of emails with my friend before his responses altogether stopped, he alluded to his falling out with the group’s leader. For a while he had been spending long lengths of time at homes of her followers around the world. He would offer what he called energy work and guidance in following the practices she promoted as steps towards enlightenment, which he had apparently followed and reached. When I pressed him on why he had left her group, he wouldn’t provide detail but mentioned that there had been a conflict with authority. They had disagreed on how to go about teaching their audience. I couldn’t help but speculate that she felt there was only room for one leader of influence in her group and felt threatened. Power hungry and dictatorially, she probably wanted the head seat and all the adulation and blessings (cash or electronic gifts) solely for herself.
My dismissal of the group and the extreme nature in which it endorsed detachment from day to day details such as fondness towards objects, activities and place, arguments with loved ones or issues at work wasn’t instant. I often questioned if my discomfort with the group was my mind desperately trying to cling on to attachment and forever put obstacles to enlightenment in my course. I wondered if the situation of losing a friend and not having their support was the very manifested mind drama the group said it promoted the avoidance of. To a degree it was, but whilst prolonging mental turmoil seems unhealthy, so too does denying that life is life and with it comes circumstance. I eventually settled on the middle path between two routes that the early introductory books on Buddhism explained way before my stock cupboard of incense and cannon of pub anecdotes got built.
Whilst strange recollections like that of two hour sessions in church halls, on my knees in a queue to look into the eyes of an old Indian lady called Mother Meera for a zap of what her followers claimed to be divine energy amuse me, my short time sitting in circles holding hands, eating Eckhart Tolle books for breakfast, giving away my possessions to charity shops and fasting provides many positive reflections all this time on. I bumped into some lovely people at meditation classes, got more honest about myself to family members, reigned in a very fiery temper and built up much needed self-confidence. When something goes wrong, I’m usually able to put it calmly into perspective in a healthy manner and strike a day to day balance between the recklessness of a nihilistic attitude and indulgence or the debauchery of those early dances of the night.
Whilst it’s great my friend didn’t carry down the route he was going, coughing up blood every morning, skipping nights of sleep and overdosing on drugs, it’s a shame and a waste that he’s isolated from friends and family and only has real company in an ego he’s apparently shed. It’s a blessing that I’m of a fulfilling career and social life. And it’s a fine line between taking incredibly valuable, beneficial lessons or advice from spirituality and taking what you come to understand so literally you entirely self destruct, and that’s not in the enlightened sense.