Spirit

I was born in Bombay in the state of Maharashtra in India and lived there till I was nineteen years old.

My family's religious background was divided between Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism and Lutheranism. From these I inherited a love of drama and ritual from the first, a healthy respect for middle-of-the-road tolerance from the second and a deeply-held feeling for free thought and religious independence from the third.

In time I rejected all three of these forms of Christianity to search for some understanding of the psychic/spiritual faculties which had been taking shape within me quite naturally from six years of age. These included precognitive dreams, the 'knowing' of events before their actual occurances in the exterior world and experiences of what I call spirit forms and sounds.

As the main responses from the christian world surrounding me at that time varied from disbelief to mild forms of exorcism and ostracism, I rejected that world at 16 years of age in order to look outside it for some understanding of thee processes that I had already learned to suppress and this led me to Christian Science, Buddhism and Hinduism.

I found myself to be a 'natural' Hindu in the sense that a strict monotheism had never really appealed to me and I felt at home with the idea of the eternal Unity in Diversity and the beautiful epic and religious literature of Hinduism and the philosophy of Vedanta. I also owed a lot to my drama teacher Shrimati Hima Devi who taught me more about the Perennial Philosophy than she ever did about drama (though what she taught me about drama has never, frankly, been surpassed by anyone else).

Now I call myself a Spiritualist am committed to serving all Spiritualist churches as it was at Kingston Spiritualist Church in 1969 that I first received reasonable answers to my childhood questions about my early clairvoyance, clairaudience and sentience.

I do not hold that all the answers given are sufficient in themselves or that all the questions have been sufficiently answered. When the time comes for a new physics to be developed that can give us scientifically veriable frameworks within which these faculties and phenomena can be better or more accurately explained to my own satisfaction then I will welcome them. In the meantime I will continue to talk about the Spirit World as a tangible reality for that is how it has felt like and been evidenced to me.

Since 1983 I have served churches and spiritual centres whether they are affiliated to any of the various Spiritualist organizations or not. I do not and have never believed that the Universal Spirit(in which I have a literal rather than a poetic/metaphorical belief) has ever been limited by religious denomination, cultural form or organizational instituition. I am, therefore, a very bad 'joiner' of things and I am not a registered member of any national spiritualist organization though I am a member of Bennerley Hall Church, Battersea in South London.

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