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4: How I came to be in an esoteric School: SES

When I was thirteen years old I formed in my mind and heart the very definite intention to find out the meaning of life. That was how I expressed it to myself then. I remember exactly where I was at the time, at the top of the school playing fields during a break.

The possibility that it has no meaning other than what we give it had not occurred to me, or if I had come across such an idea, I dismissed it. Some years later I remember a teacher at university pouring scorn on the idea of wanting to know the meaning of life, regarding it as simply a naïve phase of youth that people grow out of. For my part I regarded that attitude in turn as simply the ignorant fossilisation of old age.

Maybe it was because my life had been quite painful at times and I felt there must be something better, but it was at a time in my life when for me things were actually going quite well. The most miserable year of my life was when I was ten years old, and this was not noticed by my parents, however they had other things on their minds. But by thirteen I was settled and thriving in a school that I loved and had a friend from the age of twelve with whom I have kept in touch ever since. Despite the impending breakup of my parents’ marriage this was in some ways one of the happiest times of my life.

During the same year I had been reading Lao Tzu and I associate this in my mind with a moment of presence in the town centre. I remember exactly where I was and what I was looking at. It was merely the wall of a building near the Town Hall. The moment lasted only a few seconds. I remember trying to get it back but I didn’t know how. I now know that there is work that can be done to make such states possible, yet often nothing happens, and then some other time it is given to you, out of the blue. It is like the Christian idea of work and grace. You try, then learn not to try, then it comes.

The balance between what in the Christian tradition is called work and faith was important to me. I did not expect that simply believing something (and particularly something impossible to verify) would somehow lead to salvation. Somewhere Gurdjieff compares this to standing with your mouth open expecting a cooked chicken to fly into it. I was looking for a method, a way.

Another influence was that the head teacher used to read a passage from the New Testament every morning in assembly. There can’t have been more than half a dozen passages that he would read from. For this reason, without intending to I memorised some of them. Even though I had become an atheist from the age of ten (when I felt that there could not be a God, partly because of the misery I was then in) those passages have stuck with me.

At the age of about sixteen or seventeen I met a friend of my mother’s who was involved in the School of Economic Science (SES). By then I had already heard of Ouspensky and Gurdjieff and read Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum (which I asked for as a school prize —I still have it); I do not recall when I read In Search of the Miraculous, it may have been much later. In any event this lady informed me that there was indeed a School and so I attended the introductory lectures. I used to hitch-hike up to London to do so, and later on was enabled to stay over at a family’s house and hitch back the following morning. 

The SES advertises itself as a school of practical philosophy, but its history connects it with Ouspensky via Dr Francis Roles and his friendship with SES leader Leon MacLaren. At the time I joined it had located a teacher in India, the Shankaracharya of the North, and the philosophy taught was very much connected with the art of presence, combining a Sanskrit terminology with neo-Platonic ideas from the Italian Renaissance. 

The exercise is something that was taught in the SES in the first or one of the first introductory meetings. One sits and becomes aware of all one’s sensations, the weight of the body on the chair, the sensation of air on the face, the sounds in and outside the room, any visual impressions in the room.

The exercise, done in a conducive atmosphere, brings one into the present and lets worries drop away. One can with practice learn to be in something like this state in more-or-less any situation, although in my experience at first the automatic flow of worries and associations makes efforts of this kind very difficult. Mostly one just forgets. If one remembers it is for brief intervals, and the effort sometimes feels like wading through treacle. With repeated efforts one can reach this state more easily, and lot of unnecessary preoccupations either dissolve or are seen in context as less important.

I continued attending after going up to university and joined the youth group, which met and worked at Waterperry House in Oxfordshire alternate weekends. Waterperry House is a large country manor house, the front of which is 18th century in an austere style, and the back is older. In those days it had not yet been redecorated inside or adorned with the colourful philosophical murals it now has in the centre. It was also cold.

I used to cycle there through country lanes. I often got chased by dogs and was once bitten on the way. Most of the others came up in a coach from London. We would stay overnight in rudimentary conditions in the attic. By day the young men would usually work in the grounds, which had once been a horticultural college, and the young women would work in lighter garden duties or in the kitchen. We were assumed to be equal, but at that time the SES had an ethos that the sexes were each more suited to particular roles. After cleaning away the garden tools, which were washed, oiled and each hung in place, we would listen to music played on the piano by one of the youth group members who could play Mozart very well. Another student could sing Purcell’s Music for a While from the poem by John Dryden, which is the perfect thing to listen to when you have a mind tense with anxiety. 

Music for a while
Shall all your cares beguile.
Wond’ring how your pains were eas’d
And disdaining to be pleas’d
Till Alecto free the dead
From their eternal bands,
Till the snakes drop from her head,
And the whip from out her hands.
Music for a while
Shall all your cares beguile.
 
Then we would go in to dinner, which was simple but nourishing. Afterwards there would be washing up and the boiling of linen.

Sometimes senior students and Leon MacLaren himself would be there, but apart from helping prepare their food and wash up afterwards we did not mix with them. They had a special diet which consisted of fruit, honey, bread and cheese, and when Mr MacLaren was present there would be Nuits-St-Georges red wine also. I was once given a part-filled glass to taste and I was amazed, not merely by the fact that that small amount would have been very expensive but also by the fact that it tasted like a piece of heaven.

While working we would make efforts to put the attention on the point where the working surfaces met. This was exactly what I had been looking for: a method. There were also talks, most of which I have forgotten, but once we were given a brief talk by Leon MacLaren’s father Andrew MacLaren, then in his 90s, who lectured us about land value taxation (I seem to recall something about being asked to 'fight for your country’ in World War One and MacLaren senior, according to his own report, pointing out that he didn’t own as much of his country as was in a flower pot). We also had talks from Leon MacLaren occasionally and were once introduced to Dr Roles, although I don’t remember what if anything he said to us. I think it was Andrew MacLaren who told us we were all ‘stuffed shirts.’ The other youth group that met alternate weekends were considered to be more like hippies.

I was not good at mixing with people, and in particular I failed to attract a girlfriend, my other abiding passion at the time, but nevertheless I found a certain peace there. The youth group leader, Mr N. was a friendly avuncular man. He once quoted to me from Gilbert and Sullivan, ‘a most intense young man, conceive me if you can,’ as a gentle and no doubt accurate observation of how I was. Once he asked me, ‘how’s the tiny?’—meaning, the tiny mind. I did not in the least take offence at this—clearly he did not intend an insult. Rather it was a way of helping me out of the foggy and slightly tormented mental state that I was habitually in. ‘The tiny’ referred to the classification of mind in Vedanta (as taught in SES at that time) as manas, the monkey mind. Above that is buddhi—some kind of higher mind, a concept I did not fully understand. However, that the monkey mind is not us, that it is possible to be other than its continuous chatter, is a topic that I shall return to.

One time we were listening to a recording of a performance of Leon MacLaren’s oratorio, text based on Isaiah. This is actually a beautiful work, and I have never heard it performed since (other than a single performance at St Augustine’s church, Kensington) nor seen any trace of it at SES events. There were one or two wrong notes, after all, it was an amateur choir, and some of us winced a bit. Mr Nash told us to listen to the good. We were focusing on the wrong things. This does not mean there were not imperfections, rather that in paying too much attention to the imperfections and our own reactions to them we were missing the larger beauty. I am convinced that this is a powerful technique to deal with many things in life.

One weakness, I think, of the earlier introductory lectures in London, or perhaps it was a weakness in me, was the impression that full realisation as a human being (whatever that was) was just around the corner. I suppose if you can get a medical degree in five or six years it’s not totally unreasonable to suppose that you can get what the School offers in much the same time period. I did not then have the perspective I had subsequently, that to practise medicine really well you need not only post-graduate studies but also a lifetime of practising, and even then there is more to learn than any one person can ever know.

But then, what is realisation? Is there some kind of clarity of mind which leads to nirvana and the end of suffering? Some Zen koans relate stories of students achieving sudden realisation—at least for a moment—right now. Here is the paradox, or perhaps the central deception: pushing awakening into the future, when the only time available to us is now.

During my time in SES I was initiated into the meditation technique that was brought to the West by the Maharishi. One time during meditation I experienced something that has never entirely left me, although there have been many times when I have forgotten it. It was a state of no words and no thoughts—but nevertheless a conscious state—of perfect peace. I shall not attempt to describe it further now, as any such attempt tends to lose it in mere words. Some part of me still seeks this.

As an undergraduate I came under the influence of my college tutor, and I still don’t fully understand what happened. He was a strange and charismatic person, certainly he seemed to me a lot more serious and profound than many of the other people I met. This was a painful time in my life, when I had not really grown up. He said that the people at SES did not ‘see’ me—but I now think he did not ‘see’ me either. It would be an oversimplification to say that I was looking for a father-figure, because Mr N. who led the SES youth group answered that description much better. In any event, with the weak excuse that I needed more time for my studies I left SES after having been part of it for four years.

That decision was a wrench and provoked a storm of contradictory thoughts. I remember sitting in the college chapel on my own as the ‘reasons’ for staying or leaving went this way and that like a storm of flies. I now think the decision went the way it did because I had believed too many things. I think I had fallen in love with the teaching and the School, I was hungry for the knowledge that I had been seeking. Then when it was challenged by someone I respected I realised that many of the things I had accepted I could not justify. Some years later I drove to Waterperry just to look at the big house, somehow to assuage a sense of loss. I drove away again after a few minutes, knowing there was nothing there for me because I had left it.

I spent much of my life, then and since, looking for answers to the big questions, trying to construct philosophical theories of everything, which because I also discussed them with others were constantly being knocked down.

Had I read Ouspensky more thoroughly I might have understood that my problem with the SES was a mismatch between knowledge and being. I believed what I had been told, without having checked it against experience or any external standard. I swallowed the SES theory of the world wholesale, so that when one part of it was demolished the whole of it collapsed. I now think that the safest way to proceed is only to accept what you yourself have verified, and leave everything else an open question, but this is not easy. To look at it another way, knowledge that has not been verified is not really knowledge. It is dogma. There are good reasons for accepting dogma if you are learning a practical trade, but in the realm of science, and in any other search for truth, all dogma is provisional.

Before I leave the topic of the SES I have to point out that it is not hard to find stories of disaffected ex-students, and particularly stories of past abuse of children in schools associated with the SES. I have not commented on this because I have no first-hand knowledge of it. There is only one anecdote that I can supply and it may or may not be representative. As a youth I used to stay overnight in an SES family’s home to enable me to attend evening meetings in London. Their young daughter, who must have been about eight years old, maybe younger, was doing some homework consisting of calligraphy. One of the activities of the youth group was calligraphy, so I knew how we were supposed to sit, writing on paper on a raised easel, sitting straight, feet on the floor. The little girl was sitting slightly sideways with her feet swinging. I mentioned this to her parents, and one of them immediately struck the girl hard with a hand and made her cry. This shocked me and I wished I had said nothing.
 
Does dogmatism lead directly to cruelty? There is, in any case, a danger in any organisation or society that only accepts one way of interpreting the world and encourages no discussion outside the accepted view. This applies just as much to ordinary universities and schools and indeed ordinary families and individuals as it does to organisations that might be called cults. 

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