​from the upcoming book:

​'LIBERATION IN THIS LIFE
​- The unlikely story of a Western yogi rediscovering the power of the true Enlightenment teachings at the heart of Yoga and Tantra'
by ​Peter Littlejohn Cook

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"Divine grace' is available... the Divine is everywhere... is everything.

We are the proverbial fish seeking the mysterious 'sacred water'  we are already swimming in.

No wonder the Indian spiritual traditions speak of  the power of 'Maya'  (illusion) and the resulting human ignorance.

It is exactly that: habitual ignore-ance.

We have been trained by our culture and our chronic anxiety to ignore - to filter out the sacred and to see only the 'mundane'... to focus on what is directly associated with our physical needs and pleasures and what brings immediate, but temporary, relief from our sufferings.

The desires and longings  and the futile attempt to escape from suffering, without understanding the root cause - is all endless.

This is why the Buddha spoke of life itself as being suffering.

No wonder many of the sages have summarized 'the path' with enigmatic statements like:

"Just stop seeking! Abide as the Self."

But there is a way to uproot all our seeking - of all this endless running around in circles, which is destroying our habitat - our Earth.

The true power of the spiritual awakening is not 'personal'. This is also the core of the Mahayana Buddhist wisdom.
The true power of Enlightenment is accessing our power of divine service, to transform our world.

This has been the path of the Siddhas - the mysterious tantric yogi-saints."
"It is one thing to understand this, it is an entirely different thing to have the tools to physically achieve this."
"Authentic Tantra and Yoga provide something miraculous...
​
They give a key to the realm of the impossible: a way of succeeding in the first task of 'un-doing', because all great spiritual power comes from true stillness.

And then the next miracle...
​discovering the stillness and peace that are also there in the heart of all movement."'
​

Extract from a chapter of the booK:

THE DIVINE - WHATEVER NAME WE ATTRIBUTE TO IT - IS ALWAYS PRESENT.
DO WE RECOGNIZE IT AND FEEL IT? IT DEPENDS ON THE STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS WE ARE IN.
EXPANDING OUR STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS, TO ENCOMPASS THE EXPERIENCE OF THE DIVINE IS WHAT TRUE YOGA AND TANTRA ARE ABOUT.

All children who have enough stability in their lives - a sense of emotional and physical security - will go through a phase of asking the question "Why?" - "Why" this, and "Why" that?

Our culture doesn't support this process very well. We're too busy, too sure that we know the answers, too sure that we know which are the important questions.
We've forgotten how to honour that precious curiosity.
But I was lucky. My curiosity was valued and nurtured.

I was a seeker of 'truth', and I wasn't satisfied with what school was presenting me with about the nature of life, and 'reality'.

I remember as a teenager the moment that Christianity, as it had been taught to me, suddenly became a total impossibility to accept. I became sure that something must have been distorted in the teaching.
​
I somehow already believed, or sensed, independently of any formal religious dogma, that God - the Intelligence of the Universe - was Love.

For this very reason, I could not take seriously the idea that some people are excluded from the 'Kingdom of Heaven' - from Peace and from experiencing Divine Presence due to not having accepted or to not having even received the teachings of the Bible.

I remember thinking about the missionaries who sought to bring the 'Word of God' to peoples all around the world...
I realized there was something fundamentally wrong in this mentality... not just because they were trying to 'convert' others, sometimes even through intimidation and force., but because of the fact that they hadn't understood a simple, really basic truth:
God is everywhere. The Divine is accessible, everywhere, at all times.

I realized that there was something fundamentally wrong with the story of the 'Fall from Grace', or with our understanding of it.

I knew that God was still present, accessible. No 'original sin' could keep us from being in God's Presence.

I sensed that the 'sin' was in our minds - that something in the way that our minds work was keeping us from seeing the truth of our Divine Connection - and of our own divinity.

So when I read the life-story of the Buddha I was absolutely mind-blown.
I was reading the story of what I had already figured out, or intuited, was 'the way'.

I recognized in this story - a story of profound self-discovery through meditation, going beyond the realm of the mind, into the realm of pure awareness, to the realm of unconditioned mind - a universal truth... a truth and experience that is available to all of us. 

This is what I felt had been missing in the way that Christianity was being taught.

​It's not that I doubted Jesus' teachings of love, in fact it was precisely because I felt so inspired by Jesus' teachings of love, and because I felt they were universal, that I recognised that something was wrong with the way that the churches had been presenting these teachings.

This was back in around 1991 or 1992 when I was 16 or 17.
​I vowed back then to seek and attain Enlightenment in this life. 

It can seem naive and even arrogant to have assumed that I had the capacity to achieve what dozens of generations of Buddhists had apparently failed to achieved, so I've sometimes felt embarrassed to share this.

But the fact is that nothing else was calling me with such urgency and passion.

And maybe it was significant that I had already started my journey and intuited the way to 'Truth' - to 'Awakening'. So I was finding confirmation and an injection of enthusiasm through reading the Buddha's story.

I was already on a mission to know the 'Truth'. I simply acquired a new name for it: 'Enlightenment'.

If I hadn't read Aldous Huxley's 'The Perennial Philosophy' soon after that, I would probably have become a Buddhist. 
But I realized that even though I identified so much with the Buddha's story and recognized the fundamental truth behind it, even this was not the whole picture. The Buddha was a special human being, a beacon for humanity but, in many ways, his message and his experience were not unique.

What I suspected and found confirmed in Huxley's writings on the 'Perennial Philosophy' was that all over the world people had been experiencing divine connection - spiritual awakenings, divine grace, 'Enlightenment' - no matter what culture or epoch they lived in, as far back as recorded history.

I sensed in a vague way already then that the 'name' of God, the form or no-form of God - all these questions and contradictions could be an endlessly distracting mental puzzle.

No exclusivist 'religion' and no specific culture could contain all of what constitutes 'God', or 'Divine Reality'.
God is too freely available. - Divine Grace is just too available - to be able to confine God to any one methodology or 'religion'.

Even the word 'God' is not able to encompass all of 'Reality'. Most of us have a limited idea of what 'God' is, associating the word with some conventional dogma.

So my focus became a combination of the Socratic method of constant questioning of our assumptions, and our definitions, together with the practice of meditation - the practical method to go beyond these mental frameworks.

Perhaps it was after reading a couple of books by Osho that I recognized the opportunity and value of finding a living master - a guru, or perfected teacher - and almost immediately it seems, I was gifted with a meeting with my first teacher of Kriya Yoga, Paramahamsa Hariharananda. This, I believe was towards the end of 1994, or maybe 1995.

Although very significant for me looking back at all this, it was just one thread of my life-story. Another, very different, thread - almost a parallel life - was also being lived.
 
During much of this period. from the age of 16 to 19, I was a drummer, playing in several rock and grunge bands - first at school, then in London after leaving University.

My experience in this other world, with sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll was also having a major impact on my life and I was sometimes struggling to bridge the two realities.

I was inspired by the Buddha and Socrates on the one hand and by Jim Morrison and his philosophy of excess and fearless psychedelic exploration on the other.
This too seemed a very direct and immediate way to explore the nature of 'Reality' - going beyond the familiar and the safe, exploring the subconscious head-on.

This was a risky approach of course, as it's easy to lose oneself on this path.
It felt exhilarating, testing the boundaries of reality. I was even quite open with my family about my psychedelic 'research'.
But where's the line between indulgence and genuine exploration?
I certainly had a hard time staying on 'the path', specially when few of my companions had the same commitment to consistently 'exploring reality'.

There's a quote from Jim Morrison that was particularly significant to me at the time.

"I believe in a prolonged profound derangement of the senses."
​- Jim Morrison

For many of my friends the lifestyle was basically just 'for a laugh' - rebels without a cause. Occasionally I would wake up in a pool of my own vomit, not remembering where I had been or what I had done the night before.
But even this did not reduce my enthusiasm. 
It was messy, but it felt real, more real than anything that 'polite society' was offering. And of course there was a strong dose of young macho 'bravado' involved in this testing of the limits and going beyond where others would dare to go.

Seen from the outside it would have been difficult to determine whether this was a path of self-exploration or a path of self-destruction. And really, there was a big mix of inner processes going on. I liked to see myself as a young 'philosopher' on the one hand, but it would be fair to say that I was also an irresponsible drunk much of the time. 

During the period of two or three years while immersed in the London Rock scene, I experienced friends going through drug addiction, suicide, overdose and fatal accidents caused by alcohol.

We were all walking on a razor's-edge - on a path whose evident dangers included madness, and premature death. But we were mostly 'rich kids' playing around. No one seemed to be struggling with any big inner demons. That was all well hidden beneath the surface. We just lived like tomorrow didn't matter, and many of us simply loved it. We loved it to death.

Soon after leaving University I remember living for several months at a friend's one-bedroom apartment in London. We often shared the double bed. Sometimes it was even three of us - all members of the same rock band - sharing the bed. It was a great comedy.
I remember we woke up to the same Cat Stevens song on the stereo every day until it drove us a little crazy. 
​Even something beautiful can drive us crazy when it becomes too repetitive. That's what most of our minds are like, and often without the beauty, focussing on stories of fear and self-criticism instead.

For me psychedelics - mind-altering substances - were not just about 'altering reality'.
They were actually a way to better understand the nature of reality, by altering our habitual perception of reality. 
I'd figured this out at a lecture we had all received at school when we reached an age in which we were more likely to come into contact with drugs. I was around 16 and became fascinated with the potential to see the outer and inner world differently, through altered states of consciousness.
In fact, 'Psychedelic' actually means originally: 'that which reveals the psyche'.
I was aware of Aldous Huxley's book 'The Doors of Perception', as well as his follow-up 'Heaven and Hell'. I had already read these at school, probably soon after the drugs lecture that was intended to scare us away from such things.

I had also become aware of the ancient widespread use of naturally-occurring psychedelic substances, not just in indigenous shamanic cultures, but even in the elaborate spiritual cultures of India and Egypt.

So during this period I read more about the shamanic and mystical use of mind-altering plants, including Castaneda's adventures with his teachers Don Juan and Don Genaro.
When we use the word 'psychedelic' we may be drawn to think of hippies in the '60s, and LSD trips. But these substances are also known as 'entheogenic' ("inducing 'Divine' states").

Around 1995 I also started studying with a shaman from Peru. who I had briefly met a few years before at a 'Mind, Body and Spirit Festival'. He became my first spiritual guide.
Curiously, as well as the training in the indigenous spiritual culture, he had spent several years practising Yoga in India under direct guidance of a traditional Guru.
This too was serving to strengthen in me the latent desire to understand and bridge all spiritual cultures.

Towards the end of my own 'psychedelic period', I used the guidelines in the book 'The Psychedelic Experience - A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead', and combined meditation with the use of LSD.
I wrote poems and journalled about my adventures. I had been doing this since my school days - since around 1991.
I even had what could be termed a 'premature Enlightenment' during all this'. Which left me in a 'complicated' relationship with my ego for a few years, and with a kind of 'Messiah complex'.
Here's something I wrote back then while reflecting on all this:

"I used to think I was not Enlightened. 
Then I stopped thinking - and was.
Then I thought I was Enlightened.
... Then I stopped thinking... and was."

As powerful and direct as the psychedelics were, eventually I became tired of depending on external stimulants - on any substance at all - to investigate and to alter or expand my state of consciousness.
It clearly wasn't a sustainable way to relate to a 'bigger Reality'.
It also didn't provide a very credible framework for me to share my spiritual understanding or 'philosophical insights'. Back then hardly anyone had heard of Ayahuasca, and people didn't speak of 'plant medicine'. I felt I had to share what I had understood, but feared that no one would take me seriously if 'drugs' were part of the story-line. For years as a teacher I avoided talking about this period of my 'awakening'. Eventually I discovered that a very large number of teachers had gone through this same process of exploration.

But back then I was no longer satisfied, and I became hungry for a different approach. I knew that meditation itself had the power to take me beyond the limitations of ordinary states of consciousness, so I entered this new phase of Kriya Yoga practice with the same enthusiasm that I had dedicated to the sex, drugs and rock'n'roll.
Actually, the sex and the rock'n'roll were still a dominant feature in my life. But I had enough enthusiasm - enough passion - to enable me to be disciplined in my spiritual practice, despite the general lack of focus or discipline in other areas of my life.

I was disciplined enough to practice, but also fascinated by all the spiritual traditions, so I found myself studying with teachers in practically every tradition I could find.
Between 1995 and 1998 I participated in numerous courses, workshops, and retreats. I studied intensively with an Egyptian teacher who was sharing the ancient traditions of Egypt. I went to Egypt with him, the students, and managed to take my parents along on a truly life-changing trip for all of us. I also studied Zen Buddhism, Taoism and started practising Qigong, I started experimenting different approaches to meditation. But I kept coming back to Kriya Yoga

The discipline with the Kriya Yoga, with its powerful meditation and breathwork techniques - designed to lead to Liberation - combined with the Taoist practices, and other energy-work practices started to bring about some curious effects in my intimate relationships and specifically in my experience of love-making.

But before going into that, I can truly say that during this short but very intense period that I was leaving behind, I had many insights about the nature of the mind and the mind's relationship to our experience of reality.
I have many heart-warming memories of friends who shared the journey with me, some of whom I am still in contact with.

So. in spite of having dived in at the deep end, playing with the extremes, I survived, and it served as a preparation for understanding and navigating the very different worlds of 'Right-hand' and 'Left-hand' Tantra, which became an important theme in my life, specially a few years later when I met some of my next teachers, and when I eventually realized the profound connection between Kriya Yoga and Tantra.

Later I realized in a very practical sense, the connection between Tantra and the central practices and teachings of all the world's spiritual traditions... but that comes a little later in the story.