Guest Writer: The Long and Winding Road to Here, by Robbin Hayman

Hello, everybody! This is the second article in the new series where my clients/students/friends get an opportunity to share some of their stories with you. Robbin is an expat Englishman living in Denmark. He went through an Awakening Session with me this past winter, and then his charming partner, a yoga teacher, did the same. Both of them came to awakening quite easily–I was picking ripe fruit both times.

Robbin has since spent a good bit of time with me clearing. He’s made tremendous progress in a very short time. Long-term readers will remember me talking about my friend in Denmark who’s been doing so well. This is the guy.

One quick note. Richard Miller (Never Not Here) and I had our second talk last night. I got the camera working right this time! Betsy and I will be on holiday part of next week, so Richard and I will skip next Tuesday night and then talk again on August 12. YouTube automatically makes it available on my channel as soon as we’re done, which is terrific. Google Hangouts has made this technology available, and it’s pretty cool stuff. IT in service to IT through the body of Google. I like it.

According to his website, Richard says we’re talking about the language of awakening and awakened living, and I’m pretty sure that’s what he’s doing. I am actually talking about whatever comes out of my mouth. I have no agenda, no plan, but a great, open willingness. The spontaneity of it all makes for some interesting viewing, I think. We don’t agree on everything, which is fun, because it’s clear that we don’t need to, nor do we need to win the other over to our side. Each of us is a catalyst for the other.

We’ll see what happens with this out-of-IT, into-IT video series. Stay tuned! And now let’s hear from my friend Robbin…

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The Long and Winding Road to Here

by

Robbin Hayman

The long and winding road leading to the awakening session with Fred has its roots in a harsh childhood in a poor, northern British, working class environment with little or no stability. Physical violence and alcoholism were common and we were constantly moving around the country, so I had visited seven schools by the time I had turned sixteen. From about the age of nine I was seeking for some kind of meaning to this madness. Of course, that is not how I articulated it then but in hindsight, that is what I was doing.

I immersed myself in science fiction after being blown away by Kubrick’s metaphysical sci-fi film 2001 A Space Odyssey aged only nine. (I was sent along as a kind of “chaperone” for an older brother on a date with some girl. They paid no attention to the film or me.) It was an escape and also a schooling in different perspectives and ways of perceiving the universe.

By the time I turned eighteen I had established a solid victim mentality paired with an inferiority complex the size of the U.K., which gave rise to the questions; Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? What’s all this about? I had tried reading Kant (without success!), Erich Fromm and even Tuesday Lobsang Rampa. Yes. The guy with the hole in his head and trips in his astral body! It was all very exotic and did not get me anywhere. I was still young and did not have the context.

I ended up doing what many of my generation did and went on a hitchhiking odyssey around Europe driven by the assumption that somewhere out there, I would find myself and the answers to these questions (and maybe a girl to boot!). It all had a sense of searching for the holy grail about it, and I took it very, very seriously. So after reading Kerouac’s “On the Road” I set off.

I reached Mumbai by plane but had almost no money for the trip home, which turned out to be a kind of survival against all odds, where I had to make it or break it by land through Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey with many close shaves and fortunately great kindness from complete strangers. We are talking 1979 when the Taliban were on our side! After 5 months, I arrived back in Europe, smelly, penniless, homeless and with barely enough clothes on my back.

All my gear had been sold én route so I lived more or less as a vagabond the last month. However, I had added a major new chapter to my life story and created a new identity as a hippie/man of the world and not least as a survivor. I had made a dent in the inferiority complex and proved to myself that someone, or something, was watching out for me, no matter how bad things looked. (And yes, I did find a girl.) Things were looking up.

I settled down in a major German town for the next four years or so smoking grass and reading Carlos Castaneda, Tolkien and generally enjoying a hippie lifestyle. But I was still seeking for spiritual truth in my own foggy way. Just when I had almost forgotten all about this search for meaning, I had a ground-shaking spiritual experience.

In 1982 I was visiting a collective when out of the blue, this guy turned up. I knew him vaguely but he had changed. Without making a fuss about himself, he casually began to talk about our true nature as human beings, that we all are one and that the world was an illusion and eventually we would realize this. We were not separate entities at all. He went on for about 45 minutes lucidly and without theatricals. I cannot remember all the details.

While he was talking something happened in the room or more precisely with me. The walls began to shine and everything became transparent. We were all light. Suddenly it was over and he had left. I was almost paralyzed by the experience.

It was so real and moving. My heart rang like the bell of Big Ben. I was in no doubt that this was authentic. So far from anything drug induced. Strangely, my companion had not experienced anything out of the ordinary.

I managed to meet with him a couple of times after that before he disappeared again under the radar. I learned he was involved with some Christian mystics who talked of reincarnation, energy-healing and etheric bodies (in German Heimholungswerk Jesu Christi). But what he emanated was not in the book he gave me to read and I couldn’t take it in. Never the less it was a turning point.

Although it was a profound and beautiful experience at the time, it did more than anything else to ignite the fire of the spiritual seeker identity within me. From then on, I was obsessed with where or when I could experience it again. It took another two years before I stumbled on to something. I tentatively mentioned some of the things I had learned from this guy to someone at a party. She was entertaining us by reading Zen koans aloud.

We talked and she told me about the Austrian-born mystic, psychic and philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who died in 1925. I felt this was where the path continued, even without the shining lights, and the following five years I was more or less obsessed with Steiner’s cosmology and worldview, what he christened anthroposophy. He had created nothing short of an alternative western spiritual cosmology that aimed at reconnecting the spiritual, scientific and artistic aspects of life to a new updated unity. This was just as advanced and highbrow as any philosophy or scientific theory, something that you can spend your whole life trying to understand on its own terms and still feel inadequate. The more you learn, the further you feel you are from enlightenment.

Maybe in a hundred incarnations you will get there, if you are lucky. In the meantime Joe, just toe the line. There were meditations and practices that could lead you to your own independent realization of the spiritual world Steiner saw and was inspired by. I gobbled it up. I meditated and I practiced.

Progress was either excruciatingly slow or non-existent. At that time there was nobody I knew of who had “got it” through his system that I could approach for help or guidance. If they had, they were definitely keeping it to themselves. Everybody else seemed to be groping around in the dark too. I felt less and less worthy, and despite the obvious advantages and insights of his esoteric schooling and cosmology, it began to lose its sheen.

I began to see it all as yet another “tower of Babylon” mental construction in an altruistic attempt to make the spiritual aspect accessible and the basis of everyday life. That deserves due respect. But you can only get so close to God before your concepts crumble. I was looking at the world, and myself for that matter, through another man’s eyes, wearing his shoes and with my sense of judgment securely deposited in his lap. And he had been dead for sixty-odd years. It is an old story.

But what now? I spent years studying Sai Baba, the Ascended Masters and even became a clairvoyant and Reiki healer and had my own practice. This all had limited value. There were many jewels in there to be found, but in the end, they were still just labyrinths to get lost in. They made me feel special, one of the chosen few, stroking the hairs on the back of my ego, and kept me busy searching.

How could I possibly heal someone else when I was so cloudy? Was this not just one ego confirming another ego’s existence in the guise of spirituality? Was I not just helping others to be more successful in the dream? It began to feel more and more wrong. Frankly, it felt awful.

I closed my practice. A year later, I had a mental breakdown with PTSD that I had been carrying around for most of my life. And I had been trying to heal others! Time for a reboot! This OS was not making it.

I was sobered by this experience, and in the process of rebuilding myself, for want of a better word, I discovered Eckhart Tolle. I had tried to read his book The Power of Now earlier, but it just did not click at the time. Then luckily, I saw him on TV and then bought a DVD. This was fresh air. This was warm sunlight on a spring day. This was something else.

Eckhart’s teachings have been close to me ever since. I have seen him twice in recent years and the audiobook of The Power of Now is a regular companion on my ipod and smartphone and of course all the videos on YouTube. It is through Eckhart that I met non-duality. He mentions in an interview on YouTube some books he has read, that helped him after his awakening; Nissargadatta, Krishnamurti and Ramana Maharshi among others.

I began reading them and watching their videos and was especially attracted to Nisargadatta. That led me to Sailor Bob Adamson, Jeff Foster and many others. Eckhart’s teachings brought me some of the way back home, but something more personal was required for the final distance. I stumbled upon some videos by Fred Davis and a chord was struck. It took me a couple of weeks to get the courage together to book an awakening session and I spoke with him on Skype in the middle of April 2014.

No angels and trumpets, no flashing lights or transparent walls. Just ME. Big ME. No centre. The space in which all arises. No resistance. Peace. What I had been searching for all the time was not out there somewhere in a future time and space.

I am it. I cannot get any closer. There is nothing else. The experience of ego, all other egos and every single arising in creation is held within it. It is life without end. It is the famous NOW. It is what everything is.

With dexterity and elegance, the Oneness in the guise of Fred led me to the abyss, held my hand and lifted me over to itself. There was never any fear or confusion. You are sitting on the back of an angel in flight. Five airbags, ABS brakes and a parachute.

That is all well and good but like the Wright Brother’s first flight, the realization waned pretty fast and during the following days I began to doubt if anything had really happened. I was definitely moved by something, even shaken at the core, but whatever had happened was not what I had expected. My ego was in a fever of activity trying to categorize and analyse. It almost wore itself out. I booked a clarity session.

How meaningful that title suddenly became! I have already had a few clarity sessions and will need them regularly in the years to come. It is oh so easy to fall back into ego-identification and the constant conflict duality brings. Hell, I have been practising that the most of my life! Everybody has to have an opinion about reality.

What a joke! It is an old habit the relative world seems to confirm all the time. But then again the opposite is true too. Once you have experienced Who You Really Are the carousel ride of spiritual seeking comes to a grinding halt. The mechanics of searching for an answer in the relative world outside of yourself become obsolete.

This in my experience is the most apparent change in perspective since my awakening session. I mean huge! The faster that carousel turned, the further I was from experiencing my true nature. Another very apparent change in my experience is how stuff I have “known” for years is suddenly imbued with meaning.

One example could be Christ’s farewell to the disciples at the Ascension (I think it was) where he says something to the effect of, “Fear not. I am always with you”. Seen from the perspective, and more importantly from the experience of oneness, this becomes much more than a consoling sentiment. The German poet Goethe said; “A poem is like a stained glass window. Its true beauty can only be seen from within.” The same can be said of any truth.

According to my partner, I am quicker to spot egoic thought and emotional patterns, and let them dissolve or lose their influence, than before my session with Fred, and she should know. Some patterns are small, some are huge meta-patterns like family relationships, lifelong beliefs of who you are and so on, that often take more time to be seen through and have a wider “root system”. This is where clarity work comes in either with Fred or any other source of the Oneness.

Somehow, I got through this without mentioning my profession in any way. It makes me think of the great author, William Saroyan (The Human Comedy) who once said, “My work is writing, but my real work is being”. I am a teacher.

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Robbin Hayman,
Denmark, July 2014

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