Ramblings on the Path: Beyond the Tyranny of the Mind

By Anand Shraddhan

This fascinating and wide-ranging book is the true story of a coolly rational and deeply unhappy person who sought release from the tyranny of the mind. Having entered the stream of awakening, he set out to find what might lie beyond.

This is not yet another version of I found my salvation in Jesus. No religio-moral sentimentality will be found here. The authors message is, as Socrates pointed out, that an unexamined life is not worth living. This book is addressed to all those people who are genuinely interested in the question of what it means to be a human being, in the hope that it will encourage them to widen their horizons and not be limited by them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Feb 16, 2006
• ISBN: 9781467014779

Anand Shraddhan

The author, having been scientifically-oriented from a very young age, started his working life as an Electronic Engineer. Having had a deeply unhappy childhood, he soon abandoned a career and lifestyle that had now lost its value to him and went in search of some real meaning to life. Through therapy, he soon came to find great happiness, but enjoyed the path of personal growth so much that he continued along it. Then by chance one day he discovered the way to gain release from the tyranny of the mind. The revelation transformed him. Yet, having glimpsed something far beyond, the author was still not content. He set out to find what might lie beyond, and was not unsuccessful

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Contents

Dedications

Introduction

Early Days

Earliest Memory — All Alone

Toddler

Getting Dressed In Warm Sunshine

First Day At School

Breathing

Walking to school

The stepladder

A beautiful, alive, loving being

You must eat your rice pudding.

Paper aeroplane

Sweet shop

Loneliness

Art lessons

The joy of being alone

Friends

I won’t fight any more of your fights for you.

Sports day money

Last essay in Primary School

Grammar School

Suffering is caused by the mind

Sunday School

The misery of my situation

Depression

The Grey Glass Wall

Violin

My father

Betrayed by my father — lost key

Drug sniffing

Woodwork and History

Near-death experience

Aberfan

The Ending of Childhood

Sport

Motoring

I can’t love you because I don’t trust you.

Family Life

My Love of the Great Outdoors

Electronics

University and Work

Death of my father

Finishing with Formal Education

The World of Work

Timeon

Therapy

Groupwork

The experience of group work

Quitting work

Travels

Anger

Glimpse of ultimate peace

At the end of the group

And afterwards

Therapists

Christmas

Persecution

Life In Oxford

Back to Work

Why I left Oxford

Taking sannyas

India

Meeting Rajneesh

The Function of the Mind

Meditation

Life’s rich pageantry

Leave in fear

I know I have to return to Pune

T’ai Chi

Return to Pune

Welcomed Back

T’ai Chi Intensive

The Tape Department

The Cow

The Goat

The Cat

Shaktipat — Energy Darshan

Seeing the Dhamma

Return to the West

Cornwall

Smoking

Maggie

Depression Comes Down

Past Life

Depression Lifts

King’s Cross

Six-Week Retreat

Ghosts

Probation Service

Amaravati

Walking meditation

Noble silence

Life at Amaravati

The Jhanas

Becoming an Anagarika

Switzerland

Chithurst

When all I have worked for seems about to be lost

Return to Amaravati

Self-pity

Fear

India 1997/8

Unfinished business — Pune

Udaipur, Rajasthan — The City of the Dawn

Purging

Equanimity, and the collapse of meditation practice

Return to Amaravati

Motivation and the desire to achieve

Ordination as Samanera

Last winter retreat

Leaving — why?

Back to the World

Subud

Work

Institute of Counselling Summer School

Paul Lowe — June 2002

Asperger’s Syndrome

And Now?

Epilogue

Endnotes:

"Sitting silently, doing nothing,

Spring comes and the grass grows by itself."

(Zenrin — Zen master, 15th century.)

Dedications 

There are many, many people who have given me a tremendous amount in this life, so many that it would be impossible to name them all. I dedicate this book to them, and also:

to my family, especially my mother, for giving me so much motivation;

to Mike Wibberley and Nick, Helen Davis, Chris Fraser, Roger Dalton, Becky Coble, and many others for their kindness, compassion, sensitivity and no-nonsense attitude;

to Paul Lowe, who made so much possible without my knowing it, and who has popped up from time to time to keep me moving; and to Claire too, for whom I could say the same;

to Veeresh, for opening up brand new possibilities for me, and to Rajneesh who provided me with a beautiful situation in which to grow;

to Judy, Jo and Chris, for their magic hideaway in Lamorna;

to Luang Por Sumedho, Ajahn Viradhammo, Ajahn Thiradhammo and Ajahn Sucitto for bringing Ajahn Chah’s teachings to the West and for providing me with a space in which I could pursue my dreams, and to all those people who support the Western Sangha in Amaravati, Kandersteg and Chithurst — especially including the person who very generously bought me decent sandals to wear;

to the many hundreds of people whose names I mostly never knew, who did me the honour of showing how beautiful all human beings are when they are being true to themselves, no matter how they might be feeling;

and most of all to Maggie, for her love, her wisdom, her common sense, her support, and for sometimes just putting up with me.

Introduction 

I love you, and because I love you, I would sooner have you hate me for telling you the truth than adore me for telling you lies.

Pietro Aretino (1492-1556) — Italian poet, writer, dramatist

What follows is a collection of memories, reflections, and ramblings, recorded at various times over the last few years. The topics in the text are in vaguely chronological order, for by now I have difficulty remembering the order of early events in my life; others tend to overlap in time. There are probably many things which need explaining. For example, the names ‘Bhagwan’ and ‘Rajneesh’ refer to the same person, an Indian guru. A ‘sangha’ is a community of four or more Theravādan Buddhist monks. In the West, ‘anagarikas’ and ‘samaneras’ are non-ordained members of this community. An ‘anagarikā’ is a female anagarika, where the sex discrimination is appropriate. In order to avoid the sexist use of the pronoun ‘he’ to refer to people of either sex, I have instead used, often ungrammatically, the pronoun ‘they’ in preference to the even uglier forms ‘s/he’ or ‘(s)he’ or the inconvenient (for me) and potentially confusing use of the device of alternating ‘he’ and ‘she’. Finally, to avoid any confusion, whenever I write of problems, or difficulties, these never refer to practical or scientific, or other such intellectual problems. These are entirely outside the scope of this book; I only write of the person, of the individual, of the human being.

I was rather surprised by the reactions to the initial draft of this book. I see the book as a description of a journey through life, through personal growth, to a state of being which, although I do not yet fully understand it, is actually quite blissful. One person, a psychologist specialising in family work, described this book as poignant and blaming. Others see the book as negative, sad, and miserable, and they wonder why I did not focus on the positive aspects, and indeed have seemingly ignored them. Nobody has told me that my descriptions of events are inaccurate (apart from one minor detail, now amended, where I did not express myself clearly enough, and was misunderstood); rather, I was told, quite forcefully, that I should not have written about these events.

Listening to this feedback ‘between the lines’, as it were, I came to realise that these people were choosing to live in denial, and were upset because I had come along and rocked the boat. They seemed to think that I was attacking them, being deliberately cruel to them. They had no idea whatsoever of the great joys and ecstatic moments of my life, and certainly no comprehension of my current quiet bliss; instead, they claimed that I am miserable and depressed, and that rather than blame others for my problems, I should seek help. This leaves me feeling mystified. I am certainly not miserable or depressed, and I am most certainly not blaming anybody for anything whatsoever — on the contrary, I have several times stated very clearly my gratitude to them for what they did for me. Yet, the quiet joy that I was trying to express seems to have evaporated from the pages as they were being read.

This book is not just a whinge; when I write about my unhappy past, it is to provide a backdrop, a background from which the highlights stand out. To say that I should not include this backcloth because it seems too dark is to say that I should paint my pictures with highlights only. I don’t see how this is possible. It is like saying that people who climb Mount Everest should be airlifted in so that they start at 29,000 feet, as they then only have about 30 feet of climbing to do, and don’t need to bother with the hard part of the climb. But then, what would be the point of going there? Why bother?

Is there, then, no communication possible? I wonder whether anybody is even interested in what I have to share; the first draft had several titles, yet nobody ever asked me what the titles might have meant. And I hoped to challenge the reader to respond; I ask many questions, not that I seek the answers to them, but in the hope of provoking some sort of dialogue, even if only to tell me that I am mistaken. Yet the only response along these lines was Too much philosophy!. I am tempted to retort with a saying by Socrates: An unexamined life is not worth living. Or perhaps I should heed the advice: Let sleeping dogs lie — in case they should bite you if you wake them up.

I once read a story based on the proverb: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The story turned this idea on its head: A man, while climbing in the mountains, has an accident and falls down a steep slope, ending up in a valley populated by people who are all blind, people who have not even rudimentary eyes. A girl happens to find him, and she and the others nurse him back to health. However, they gradually become concerned by his strange behaviour, the strange things he says, and his claim that he can perceive things that nobody else can. They consider that, because his behaviour is not normal, he must be deeply unhappy, and decide that his unhappiness must be due to the two strange bumps on his face. Out of their compassion for him, they decide that the best thing to do would be to remove these bumps; he would then be just like everybody else, and would fit in happily. The girl goes to tell the man of the good news, that he would soon be just like all the others, and that then they could marry. That night, the man flees.

My story is not a story of sadness, as others have claimed. At least, it is not a sad story about me, though it contains a great deal of sadness for other people. It also contains quite a few humorous anecdotes; if you don’t see the humour, you can be sure that you have fallen into the trap of identifying with the sadness. This book relates amazing experiences and mysterious events, events that truly happened as I described them (in as far as this giving an accurate description is ever possible), yet for which not only have I no explanation, but they even fly in the face of my intellectual understanding of the world, against the laws of physics. I don’t ask anybody to accept what I say at face value, but surely it is not reasonable to deny what I say without proper investigation. Yet not a single person seemed to have even noticed these mysteries, for they certainly never commented on them.

My story is about how I managed to gain freedom from the sadness, how I gained freedom from the tyranny of the tortured mind. I find it sad that so very few others have done so, and remain trapped, wasting their lives. I certainly do not blame these people — their lives are already unhappy enough. Instead, I offer this book to them as an inspiration to help them find the courage to find their way out of the mess they probably do not even realise that they are in.

In fact, this is not a story at all, in the sense of a novel being a story, and it is certainly not fiction. Nor is it in any sense a philosophical treatise; it is rather a tone poem, a symphony, a song to the world, a song from the heart which I share with you in good faith. And if you, in like spirit, would like to share with me, I would love to hear from you.

Anand Shraddhan, August 2005.

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Early Days 

Earliest Memory — All Alone 

My earliest memory is of course vague, and necessarily pre-verbal. It is something like: lying on the back, moving arms around, darkness, no contact with the external world, space all around, aloneness — perhaps abandoned?

Toddler 

As a young child grows, its brain develops the ability to perceive other people’s inner mental states — whether they be happy or sad, friendly or hostile, honest or deceitful.

At about the time I was learning to walk, when I had gained enough confidence to be able to walk a few feet without having to hold on to the furniture for reassurance, I was also learning to pick up the ‘vibes’ of my surroundings. And they were very uncomfortable. I saw that my parents were deeply unhappy, yet pretending not to be. I could not understand why they should hold on so desperately to their unhappiness, with so much denial that they were doing so, as if being unhappy was of great importance to them. Yet it was not so much the unhappiness that struck me as strange — it was their decision to be dishonest about it that really struck me. Why would any human being choose to be unhappy? Happiness comes and goes, unhappiness comes and goes — no big deal. But what kind of person chooses to live in unhappiness, when they can so easily let go of it? And, more importantly, why pretend that this is not the case?

Getting Dressed In Warm Sunshine 

I remember an occasion when I was getting dressed — with some difficulty, as I was young and not skilled at the task — in a bedroom which I seem to recall was my parents’ bedroom, though I might be mistaken in this. The salient feature was my enjoyment of the warm sunshine in the room, and my reluctance to go downstairs after I had got dressed. So I got dressed as slowly as I dared. And why was I reluctant to go downstairs? Because this meant meeting the rest of the family, which was something I dreaded even at this young age. Like the sunshine, I felt inside bright and radiant. I had no desire to have this cloud over. So I was enjoying the sunshine, taking my time getting dressed, enjoying the present moment and dreading the future.

First Day At School 

When I was taken to school for the first time, I have no recollection of being told why I was going there, the fact that I would be left there all day, and that someone would be collecting me later. I didn’t know where I was, or how to get back home — I had not even any idea of which direction home might be in. I felt that I had been dumped, forgotten, abandoned.

Breathing 

An early memory I have of primary school is of noticing several posters on a wall. The one that really caught my interest was a poster which showed the path taken by air when the body breathes. The reason for my interest was that I had become confused about how I was ‘supposed’ to breathe. Somebody, perhaps several adults, had convinced me that when a body breathes in, the chest rises and the abdomen moves inwards; on breathing out, the chest relaxes and the abdomen moves downwards and outwards. I have no idea who was responsible for making me believe this, or why they wanted me to believe it. I was confused, because this way of breathing just did not feel right.

I assume that it was one or more of the teachers at primary school who had forced this idea on me. In Britain, when somebody says breathe in, what they want people to do is to pull in their abdomens, usually in order to take up less room in a confined space. Because of my discomfort at trying to breathe in this unnatural way, holding the abdomen rigid while breathing only into the top of the lungs by expanding the rib cage, I was trying to find out for myself how the body would breathe most naturally. The chart I saw held my attention, for it clearly showed the air moving in as the diaphragm lowered and the abdomen moved forwards; when it showed the air moving out of the body, the diaphragm rose and the abdomen contracted inwards. This flatly contradicted what I had been told. Later, at home, I noticed that the cat was sound asleep, its abdomen rising and falling rhythmically according to its breathing. Its chest hardly moved at all; and seemed to be moving only in response to the movements of the abdomen. I decided to do an experiment. I gently held the cat’s nostrils closed in order to check the direction of air flow as the cat’s abdomen rose and fell. I found that air was pushed out of the cat’s nostrils as its abdomen fell, and that when the cat’s nostrils were held closed as its abdomen started to rise, the cat would momentarily wake up, take an obvious deep in-breath, and fall asleep again.

This was my first ever scientific experiment — an objective investigation of observed phenomena, with a view to proving or disproving a theory. I was not intent on proving my theory to be correct; I only wanted to know the truth, of whether the theory was correct or not. I repeated the experiment several times, on various occasions, and found on every occasion that the natural process of breathing causes the abdomen to expand, not to contract. Clearly, what I had been told was incorrect. Yet the use of the phrase breathe in, when used to tell someone to pull in their abdomen, is very common, and I have never noticed any clue that it is being said tongue in cheek. Everybody seems to mean it literally. Never any slight smile, a slight wink, a change of intonation, some slight cue that the speaker is aware of using a stock phrase which is physiologically nonsense, a phrase that is purely conventional, with no basis in reality.

Now I understood the mechanism of normal, gentle breathing — the abdomen moves up and down, the chest does not (unless one is breathing very deeply and powerfully, as during vigorous physical exertion considerably beyond one’s aerobic capacity). Yet I found that I was not breathing this way, at least not at any time when I was awake. I seemed to have chronic abdominal spasm; breathing into the abdomen was not possible because the muscles were unable to relax. Years later, when the abdominal muscles had at last begun to relax, it seemed that the muscles of the diaphragm had atrophied, for there would be a dull ache in this region after any sustained deep breathing. I was into my early thirties, and had been in therapy for quite some time, when these muscles were fully able to relax and the diaphragm regained its strength and proper functioning. Now, abdominal breathing is normal for me, as it is for cats. In several of the early therapy groups, I often heard the phrase, If you don’t breathe, you’re dead. A locked abdomen means that breathing is always shallow, and has to be faster than normal in order to compensate. Due to reduced flow, more stale air is trapped and respiration is less efficient.

Is there any connection here with the increasing incidence of asthma? Little intake of oxygen implies little energy. Today on the television I heard a woman talking about a breathing technique to help sufferers of asthma. Apparently many asthma sufferers only breathe with the top parts of their lungs. As an experiment, I put a hand on my abdomen to check that it did not move, and tried breathing only into the upper chest. Within seconds I felt uncomfortable, ‘wheezy’ and out of breath. The body began to breather faster in order to cope with the reduced flow of air into the lungs. The technique that the woman mentioned involves breathing properly from the belly. She ended by commenting that this is not a technique you can learn overnight. But surely it is not a process of learning how to do it, but a process of relaxing the chronic conditioning of the body. And neither is it a ‘technique’ — it is the natural way to breathe!

The Chinese claim that the abdomen contains the hara, the body’s energy centre; for me, as I began to learn about myself, a lack of energy was a cause for concern, and so I was very pleased that one day, while talking with some woman in a restaurant, she suddenly commented, as if in surprise, that I was breathing into the abdomen. I had not noticed that I was breathing in such a relaxed manner.

Walking to school 

There is a path that still leads from the primary school, climbing steeply upwards near the end to reach the road where I lived. Near the top of the path, it is steep, narrow, cool and humid; the ground is damp, and ferns and mosses grow there. Further down, the path widens out onto open ground; it is almost level. I remember this lower part as being sunny, with a small pool where tadpoles and wild strawberries grew. I remember hearing grasshoppers chirruping, and I remember hunting them in the long grass. They are difficult to find, and catching them needs patience.

I also remember finding a dead rat at the edge of the clearing, near the trees or bushes. I tentatively poked at it with a stick. Back home, I reported my find, probably wishing to express my concern that the rat was stiff and did not move. But rather than let me share this, the reaction was one of ‘Ugh! Horrible! How could you touch it!’

The stepladder 

It was shortly before the occasion of my father’s birthday. My mother pretended to me that we would give him a present of a stepladder. We wrapped it up prettily, and hid it behind a sofa. For me, this was exciting, and I looked forward in anticipation. When the time came, we presented the stepladder to my father. But I don’t remember any word of thanks, no word even of recognition. This memory was so painful that I repressed it for almost fifty years. It reappeared one sunny afternoon when I was sweeping up some rubbish left by building work. All of a sudden, I noticed that I felt sad/angry/hurt, and I paused in my work to consider the source and reasons for this feeling. I realised that this feeling had appeared at the very moment that I had moved a stepladder so that I could sweep the floor underneath. The memory came back in a vivid flash.

A beautiful, alive, loving being 

When I was very young, I was a beautiful, alive, loving, open, caring human being. Yet my parents seemed to believe the opposite. I believe that the shortest verse in the Bible is God is good. When I spoke to my mother, referring to this and saying I am good, she behaved as if I were blaspheming, or at least lying; my parents kept telling me that I ought to be a good person, and yet they could not see that I already was a good person, indeed better than merely good. Why was it so important for them to foist this lie on me, that I was no good? It was a dysfunctional, blaming family. I am not clear on why some families are blaming families. It is something to do with the ‘need’ to have a scapegoat, someone towards whom they can direct their repressed anger.

On another occasions, my mother told me that if only I were more friendly to others, cared more for them, then they would love me in return. I pointed our to her that I saw no evidence of anybody loving anybody else, and that it seemed that there was no love to be had. I had hoped that, by challenging her in this way, she would prove to me that I was wrong; instead, she made no reply, and thereby confirmed my perceptions.

It would be incorrect to infer that my parents were psychopaths, people who are absolutely out of touch with their feelings; psychopaths are, in a way, very sensitive to their situation, but they relate to it from their intellects, not from their hearts. Psychopaths act according to their analysis of the situation (something which they can become quite skilful at), rather than act according to their feelings (which they are not at all in touch with). On the other hand, my parents just did not relate.

I also remember some incidents which seem to cast doubt on my father’s grip on reality — not that I am saying he was in any way crazy, certainly not, but nevertheless they are a bit strange. One is when I was about seven. It was a hot summer’s day and I had been running around on the lawn, near where we kept chickens. (I remember being fascinated with the arrangement for providing their drinking water, an upturned bottle whose neck was immersed in a dish of water. As the chickens drank the water, it would be replaced from the bottle.) My father came out of the house. I went up to him. He pointed out that I was sweating and told me that I needed to learn not to sweat. This baffled me. How was I to learn not to sweat? Surely it is a natural response of the body to high temperatures, and was therefore presumably a good thing. Such was my understanding at the time. Perhaps what he meant to say was that it is not done to sweat, not proper, too working class? But he never used such language, as far as I recall.

One of my chores as a child was to burn waste paper from time to time. (I think the idea of recycling paper had not occurred to anybody back then.) Well, one day the wind was blowing smoke from the bonfire towards the neighbour’s washing line. She asked me to not have a bonfire while the clothes were drying on the line. I went to check with my father, who had insisted that I burn the paper that day. He merely suggested that I try to keep the smoke down. He was certainly not lacking in intelligence — he had two degrees, one in Geography, the other in Geology, and later taught Economics. Perhaps it is fair to say that practical matters, or relating to the world, were not his forte.

You must eat your rice pudding. 

While having lunch at primary school, we used to sit on long benches at the dinner table. One day, I felt that I had had enough to eat, and that I didn’t want to eat my rice pudding. I was never particularly keen on rice pudding, finding it too bland and sweet. (I last ate rice pudding in August 2001, and found it bland and sweet — edible, but not a food of choice. The only time I made a form of rice pudding was in about 1996 — sweet and rich, to my own recipe created as I went along, with coconut milk and crushed cardamom seeds, and enough of it for thirty people. Delicious!) So I got up and left the table to go out to play.

A teacher noticed that I had not eaten my pudding and told me to eat it. I told her that I wasn’t hungry and that I didn’t want it. She refused to accept this, and followed me out to the playground, carrying the bowl. I repeated that I did not want to eat it, but she was adamant that I had to, and I was by now even more adamant that I absolutely would not eat it. I felt hurt and offended that she refused to listen to me, refused to accept that my reasons were genuine. There are some lines in Pink Floyd’s album The Wall, which go something like this: If you don’t eat your meat you won’t get your pudding. How can you get your pudding if you don’t eat your meat? The implication of these words is that the pudding is some kind of reward for eating less pleasant food. In my situation, it was the reverse — I liked savoury food. Perhaps the teacher’s attitude had something to do with the fact that sugar was still being rationed after the Second World War.

I once heard Rajneesh say that people become teachers because they hate children. At the time, I thought that perhaps he was joking. Looking back, with the benefit of hindsight, I find that this was no joke.

Paper aeroplane 

The school playground had some gardens adjoining it. One day, a neighbour called me over and, while I watched, he folded a complicated paper aeroplane and gave it to me to play with. Some other children saw me with the aeroplane, and wanted me to make one for them. I told them I didn’t know how to. A teacher became involved, and she told me that I shouldn’t be so mean, that I should show the other children how I had made my aeroplane. Nobody seemed to listen when I told them that I had been given it, and that I hadn’t made it myself, and that I didn’t know how to make one. So rather than being encouraged to play with the others, the result of this confrontation was that I felt even less inclined to have anything to do with them. And being called mean and a liar didn’t help one bit. I even ended up resenting the man who had so kindly made the aeroplane and given it to me — the few minutes of pleasure that I had gained from it were greatly overshadowed by the suffering that it brought me.

Sweet shop 

Down the road from where I lived there was a sweet shop. I went in there one afternoon to buy some sweets, and there was nobody in the shop. I considered calling out, but felt very uncomfortable with the idea of doing this, so I decided that I would take just the one item I wanted, and pay for it the next time I went in. Unknown to me, the shop owner had been upstairs. She had heard me leave, and she later told my parents what she thought had happened — she did not know I was guilty. I was accused of theft, yet this had not been my intention: out of fear of raising my voice, I had taken the risky course of postponing payment until a more convenient time, and had certainly not intended to steal a few pennies from the shopkeeper.

Of course, nobody asked me what I had done, what my intentions were, and certainly did not ask me how I had felt. Instead, they projected their own dishonesty on to me and blamed me for it. The shopkeeper had not called out to me, and must surely have seen that I was not running away, that I was walking away quite slowly, and she could easily have come after me. Rather than deal with the matter there and then, it seems that perhaps the shopkeeper preferred to cause me trouble; her repressed violence came out.

Loneliness 

Loneliness hurts. It hurts to the very bones. I lived with it for many, many years, from the first day I went to primary school to the day I left grammar school. And afterwards, too.

When I had not been very long in primary school, I felt that I had no friends there. I knew nobody, and nobody wanted to know me. I tried to be friendly with one person, as he seemed willing to relate to me, but was soon told that he was a no good person and that I shouldn’t have anything to do with him; if I chose to be friends with him, then nobody else would be my friend. One day in school, I was standing in a queue of children in a corridor, waiting to go into some room. I was feeling utterly lonely and miserable, and wanted to reach out and make contact with someone. There was a girl standing in front of me, with long blonde hair down to the middle of her back. I happened to be standing very close behind, and I gave her hair a gentle, friendly tug. She spun round, snarled in my direction, and shrieked in complaint to a teacher.

The teacher asked who had pulled her hair, and I did not reply. I was taken to the headmaster. I could see that he was not interested in me as a person — all he seemed to want to do was to apprehend and punish the guilty party. I did not consider myself guilty, for I had not intended any harm, nor had I caused any physical hurt — it had been a very gentle pull. Apparently surprised by my refusal to admit my guilt, the headmaster asked me if I would swear to my innocence on the Bible. I considered I had not done anything wrong; I had felt desperately lonely and had tried to reach out to someone, only to be rejected — attacked by the girl, and blamed by the teacher. I had hoped that perhaps I might be able to talk with the headmaster, but he wasn’t at all interested in the truth of my situation, so I decided that I would swear the actual truth on the Bible, thus ‘lying’, for if I said the truth, that I had indeed pulled her hair, I could only expect to be punished, and I had already been punished for the non-offence. To lie on the Bible would mean that I would not incur the punishment that I did not deserve and which would have been immoral. So I lied.

According to Carl Rogers, there are two reasons for one’s feelings of isolation and loneliness. One is that we have become estranged from our experiencing organisms: the experiencing organism senses one meaning in experience, but the conscious self clings rigidly to another, since that is the way it has found love and acceptance from others. It is clear to me that this lack of internal communication has been forced upon us by our upbringing: we have been forced to live according to other people’s ideas. We reluctantly tolerate this violence because of our desperate, biological, need for love, yet what we receive can be love in name only, for anybody who truly loves somebody will never for one moment destroy them in this way. The other reason, according to Rogers, is the lack of any relationship in which we communicate our real experiencing — and hence our real self — to another. Without a relationship in which we are able to communicate these two aspects of our divided self — our conscious façade and our deeper level of experiencing — we feel the loneliness of not being in real touch with any other human being.

Art lessons 

Many, many years after leaving primary school, I happened to comment to a group of people that a patch of light and shade that I had been looking at was too powerful to look at for long. One of the people who heard me say this was amazed, and asked me if I was an artist. I was surprised that he had asked, said No, and asked him why he had asked this. He told me that he was an artist, and that only an artist could have said what I had said.

Yet my experience of art in primary school had put me off art for many years. For example, one day we were told to draw a large circle. Then inside this