Introduction

For quite some time now I’ve felt that my life was a journey of many different experiences, some without and some within.  That in reality I feel I have a visionary mystic mind that wants to take and share with other people this strange world and life that we all participate in.  Breaking on through to the other side might be something that one person does, but to my mind I think its something that we can all do.  To experience life in full measure, and to all look at ourselves and say “how amazing”, what an amazing race we are and start on that journey, which really is quite a fascinating journey, to see ourselves and the planet as one.  We each have a separate universe and star planet that belongs to us but, all brought together, it is one.  The Atomist theory that myself and my friends see very clearly: that it’s quite an experience to behold when different worlds meet and the same wavelength is there. Perhaps that’s why I feel I have strong telepathic experiences, because my mind reaches out to all worlds, past, present and future, that really when you look at the different worlds, universes etc, one feels of just how little we know, but that the excitement is that we are all continually learning about everything, that it is the tip of the iceberg, that the journey of mystic soul and spirit has aeons and aeons to go.

So, one step at a time, building day by day, taking a day for a day.  Small steps working with what you’ve got from where you are.  That time is the key for unfoldment to take place, that everything has a beginning and an end; a cycle of life birth to death.  That it is never too late to start.  Really these small little bits of wisdom are what I’ve learned to base my life on.  Ok, so compared to a lot of other people’s worlds I’m still at the beginning, but that’s where I am.  I can learn a lot from people who, like myself, are at the bottom of the ladder and in many ways I hope my life is a message to others who are finding it impossible, because I’ve been there too.  I’ve been in hell.  I’ve had suffering in the form of mental illness and, to date, a lot of my new friends have illnesses but I’m there for them to put my hand out, even in just a small way, like today talking and giving a roll up to Sandra.

Someone once told me I was a “fly boy”, someone who goes here and there and I think I am.  That could be because when I was a male model I found it all such a stifling bubble world of ego mania and “look how pretty I am”.  Thankfully, I’ve come a long way from those days and I’ve put in a lot of time and distance from that world.  Although I do often think of people I used to know then and wish them the very best, I’m now doing something different, and that world of expensive restaurants and nightclubs doesn’t appeal to me any more.  It was something I once did and have grown out of now.

Perspective

One thing I am always doing is looking back into the past to

put the jigsaw of my life together, to look with my inner eye into the various worlds I’ve been to, the various people I knew, and I can put it all together as one big photo, a little like the school photo, and I see everyone right now in my minds eye, of all being the treasure tower, of everyone being a Buddha and participating in true Buddha nature.  That I love everyone of them and know that it is the tip of the iceberg.  That they represent a small portion of humanity.  That if I can take a picture it would be of everyone of us with a great big smile on our faces, and we would call that picture the universal smile.

In my experience of life I’ve found that as one door shuts another one opens.

I know in all aspects of life that I am just an absolute beginner, that I have a lot to learn. This could be why I often see myself back at the convent, sitting with my school friends in kindergarten. I’m a great believer of mystic connections and often look at them as reference points in my life. Where I grew up as a little boy is just up the road in Westbere. Now I live in Canterbury in a council flat and that’s fine for now. Its going to be a diving board to somewhere else one day, and I have to win a battle here as I did in the shared accommodation at Broad oak Road, and before that living with Jack in Chislet. Life is something to win at no matter what. I believe that we can all win whatever our situation and that true winning and success comes from within. I’ve experienced both success and failure in my life.  FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FAME as a male model and a marriage and daughter and then wham! A door shut and I was in the mental hospital. But for me, life is the experience itself and because I have looked within.  It’s strange to say it, but it wasn’t the fame or the winning that really worked in putting my life together from manic depression and schizophrenia.  It has been the success of my relationships with my friends and family.

The relationships I have now are more important, and life itself feels precious. I think that’s a combination of Buddhism playing its part and my maturity and inner growth. Right now I feel I’m in the prime of my life. Now, I’m so many more things than when l was married to Vanessa, working as a male model and living in London. Now I find success in every day, winning with that day bit by bit. I seem to find more positive things to focus on, even if it’s just in a conversation with friends. Somehow, with each breath, a new world unfolds that very second different from the last, and I can tell you, that’s quite an achievement from some one that only a few years ago was running around with just his underpants on in his parents garden, banging his head on trees and thinking he had to eat all the bad apples!  Time is the healer, something we don’t often see when our mental states are chaotic.

Perspective is very important to me. The writing experience itself, to my mind, isn’t to achieve a work of art. To begin with, it’s really a means of healing within, of inviting others to know your soul and, of course, that applies to self too. To me, even if I only reach out to one person who says “yes I’m there with you mate” or to someone who says “no, I didn’t know that, you’ve taught me something new”, then that will be success even if nothing is published. I think that anything one tries to do takes time to master and that one has to learn from the mistakes. That all artists, all songwriters, anyone who starts something, has to start from the beginning and that only with practice is he ever able to become a master. And yes! I admit I would like to be good at something, that I would like to find a golden arrow. That it would be something I would like to teach myself well, to shoot and hit the target every time! I think Zen and The Art of Archery could apply to writing too. That to hit the target one has to know about the missing of the target, that there are all sorts of angles to encompass and time and practice is the key to success. So my dear friend, wish me all the best with this adventure, and if in two years from now its something that I’m still working and building on, then I will have found success, knowing that its in the doing rather than the achieving.

life story, a tip of the iceberg, a no one going nowhere, a somebody going somewhere, from a nobody going nowhere, something from nothing, a small existence, a flashing in the universe. That in the black hole of time we are literally here participating in existence and creation for a split second. That we are all equal.  That no one family is more important than any other. That ok, we might not all be film stars or rock stars or something pulled out backwards from the metal machine but to my mind we are all soul stars. That what I see in me I see in you and vice versa.

Perhaps we are all strangers on a very strange planet and though there does seem to be chaos at times, the order of the universe is flowing on with or without man, and if we are going to create the dream world for our children’s’ children’s little ones, then yes, as Stephen Hawkins says, we need to KEEP TALKING, so that like pebbles rippling out, we can make changes.  First in our lives and then gradually to others’ lives and worlds. That each and every one of us has to start from where he and she is and work with what we’ve got. What we’ve got, we have to give, and if nothing else, then love and compassion is enough in itself.

Some of what I see feels like an inner truth, some of which I have taken from various teachings, but I like to mix it all up. All aspects of knowledge that come to my mind particularly focus on the science of the soul. So that from having once been a cocktail bartender, I have a cocktail vision that I want to share but not to dictate. Perhaps to work from the background position of pushing the universal mantras out to all our lives. That at times I really do feel “yes, I can feel that we are all one!” That we are on the same WAVELENGTH, that the universal mind is connecting to people in power, (in the commons and to people all over), the plan that we have one WORLD VISION. I’m not trying to put myself on the same level as John Lennon, or Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, but in my diddily squat tiny existence, I do have something to say. Something that, if it only sparks clarity of vision in one persons mind, I have succeeded, as it will continue to ripple out to each and every life that the power of one, if its going to work, isn’t trying to hold onto to power to manipulate to your own ends. If you are able to tap into your universal power source, as I’m sure you can, then you can go anywhere, to any time, to any dimension. That your world can really be as big as all the universes put together. That when you’ve seen those universes on an atomic structure, them all being the size of an atom drop in my cocktail shaker, we’ll see if we can split the atom into a universal bliss structure and really make Buddha smile a UNIVERSAL SMILE.

Ever since I was a little boy going to the convent I imagined my soul as being two silver discs where my shoulder blades were and that to have a pure soul I had to make sure I polished them clean. Now at 38 I’ve come back to that nature of my soul and the two discs are now Siva and Saki soul and each day whilst I sit meditating I polish consciousness of soul almost to the extent that I can go back to the little boy in me and see him looking out of the picture with his chubby face and beautiful curls and that the person I am now is still him, beautiful and loving.

Another image I had as a little boy was of a cactus tree and under that cactus was treasure. I now realise that the treasure is what is within my being, that it isn’t in what I have in tangible materialism, that I like to lead a very simple free life, free from attachment. That happiness real joy and bliss for me is to look into my television mind and just say to myself “let it go, let it all go to emptiness, to nothing”. And often when that happens I see in my minds eye Buddha, just sitting there with a smile on his face that says “well done Hugh, here’s a lotus flower”, and the lotus flower is the flower of my life. Everyday it unfolds gradually a little at a time, and the water I feed to the lotus flower is meditation Zen mind, Hugh mind, no mind, empty. That form is form and emptiness is emptiness and yes, suffering, inner conflict, desire, everything just melts into the flowing water music that I’m listening to.

The fact is that today, 8 years on from my crisis in life, I am well.

This is because I have found what I was always looking for, in meditation and Buddhism. Today, from starting from nothing, my practice encompasses Buddhism Zen Tibetan mysticism, Hinduism in the form of Krsna chanting, chanting Nam myho Renge Ky. To focusing on Taoism and Chinese philosophy, to Siva Consciouness,

to shamanism, to the Kundalini Chakras. I am never bored when I’m following my Eastern mystic path.

I can almost mark it to the day when I was on my cross, and make no mistake, it was a real cross though few would ever believe me. The Independent newspaper had just come out, and I recall thinking I must look to find out how many days it was that I had laid on my bed sobbing my eyes out for days, for humanity and myself. At the time I was so angry with what had happened and for being in hell, that when I did drop my cross I believed in God and everything but fortunately Eastern faith started to play a part in my life. Through all that suffering, I gained benefit in the form of love and compassion so that all I want to do now is send out healing to the universe from my flat to each and every person, because we all suffer, and we all have to learn to turn suffering into joy. That yes, I do have a universal vision for world peace and unification, that I know I’m not alone with that dream, that there are many Tibetan Buddhists, many Zen Buddhists people all round the world wanting the same thing. The War Lords -those who cause suffering in others lives- will, like a ship of fools, run aground. Many of us are beyond government control, and whilst political parties focus their minds on power and greed, I focus my mind on pictures of Africans with nothing, to the Vietnam children scarred from napalm, to many of the photographs that photographers like Don Mcullin and Eugene Smith took. To pictures of Jews in concentration camps, and you might think that’s so depressing and morbid but to me its reality, and its not too late to save them all when you find universal soul within and without. So don’t think, just join me.

The main aim for me in writing is to try and find from within, that mystic touch that some writers have of being able to see a scene or a situation. It might be something very simple, it might just be someone walking down the street, but they seem to be able to put it into words, as though they had a paint brush in their hands. Really, what I hope to do is mix in from within what I know of what I have experienced to what from here I can build into the written from within. I’m sure good, sound advice from an established writer would be to start from within and just let it unfold naturally, that Zen comes into its own when words and thoughts come together and are just allowed to be as they present themselves in form.

Friendship and working at relationships is so important to me that there is nothing quite like a good friendship. I find most conversation so healing and full of harmony that it really is the essence of communication, and its something you learn to relish when you’re on your own a lot of the time. True friendship comes from knowing how to give space, that often the one friendship a lot of us forget about is the one with self. People say love yourself, but it’s not easy and it takes time. I feel that to know yourself is to love your self and others and vice versa.

Thoughts are coming to me of the beginning of a story almost verging on a possible film script. It’s part of the iceberg of experiences in my life, and as I think of it now it seems so fresh in my life. It’s taking a trip to five years ago to living in Chislet with Jack. The beginnings of a mystical relationship that has involved us both, following the middle way of Buddhism and meditation. The starting point would be when I lived in Brixton with Vanessa and things not looking quite right from

my mental point of view.

The story is about a man having a successful job, a wife and child and, ok, living in a council flat in Brixton but nonetheless having a good life but because of stress from the world of his work he has a breakdown and ends up on a journey in conflict with his soul thinking that he was Satan a religious crisis starting from perhaps having once been a catholic.  Anyway, he ends up following a path to Calgary and almost ends up crucifying himself more on a mental level that anything else. The journey ends up with him leaving his family and going out to the wilderness set in his home village after a lot of crisis and confusion. It ends up after a period in a mental hospital meeting a someone from a completely different background but someone

who too has her problems and the story unfolds as to how they deal with their lives and how Eastern religion plays an important part in their lives that even today the story is still unfolding though they’ve gone their separate ways.

I feel that telling yourself to just write, to start with an idea, it doesn’t matter what, gives you so much freedom to put things together.

I know progress is slow at this time and I’m probably often going to bring myself back to talking about writing a lot because in its own way it is very much a mystery to me and perhaps its a bit like learning to play the guitar.  At first before you learn to play the instrument one is fascinated with the instrument itself.

I still think I have to find a correct starting point and up to now its just waffle.

I know that but I think this body of work has a title, which is Mystic Dispatch. Because it really is about a journey within, through the doors of perception and as each day becomes another, to go further along into the mystic journey writing it into words has to be taken stage by stage.  Seeing as it is an autobiography I think I should put into perspective my background. I was born in Solihull Birmingham and moved down with my family when I was 5. I grew up in a pretty small villa in Westbere and have a whole host of childhood memories of playing on the lakes, guns in the ratfield, building go-karts, sledges and canoeing and shooting and really having a lot of freedom at a time where there were a lot of children of my own age group living in the village.  I shall come to naming them at a later date but the amazing thing is 30 years later we are all still good friends and that we called ourselves the Westbere Village Trucking Society (WVTS) and even though we are all in different places today doing different things I still think of there still being a WVTS.

Mind you I’m the only one really who still goes back to Westbere every weekend to see my parents but that’s ok because although its the same place it is nonetheless a different experience now.

Anyway, I grew up in Westbere, went to a nearby convent and then travelled to Ramsgate to a Benedictine monastery and from there went to Canterbury Technical college to take A levels and at 18 started work in Aprcoma

in London. That didn’t really work out and from Fleet Street

I found myself washing up knives and forks in a trendy hamburger restaurant in Knightsbridge. From there I worked up to being a bartender and then got a job as a cocktail bartender at a place called Peppermint Park. From there I went to America for a year before coming back to become a fashion model with Lorraine

Ashtons agency.

I’ve lived in various places in London: Shepherd’s Bush Gloucester Road, Waterloo and Brixton. The modelling was going well until I made the mistake of going to Milan and too much stress brought on a nervous breakdown. By this time I had got married and a baby on the way. But because of the mental situation I wasn’t able to cope with a marriage and was forced to move back to Canterbury where I started going to St Augustine’s mental hospital.  All of which I shall go into detail at a later date. 

Gradually, from being a patient I started to become a Buddhist, meditating and for 8 years have been working every day on my practice.  THOSE LAST YEARS OF MY LIFE HAVE BEEN THE MOST PROFOUND years of my life with many experiences and changes happening to the extent that I am now 38 and find myself living on my own here in Canterbury. So really it’s probably a good time to put it all into words and to gain a perspective in order to see where I go from here, YES.

There in your hallway hopefully you wont have to learn what it’s like to be held down by nurses and their professional arm-holds that they boast to each other and injecting you with a needle and syringe of hathidol. I love it give me the lot and I’ll mix it with it with a tequila sunrise! Then tell me I’m not Einstein.

A little fantasy.

Now that we have begun our relationship and that if you find it interesting will get to know my mind and universe, that really at the end of the day it’s probably no different to yours and the whole of the universe. That I dispute that man can’t be the centre of the universe, however infinite it may appear to be it is just the tip of the iceberg and the journey is lifetimes ahead of us that I don’t think it would even take a quantum leap to go through the mystic ancient door of time and the black hole and go now into the 21st century or any century we wanted to, that I frankly have to a admit to Simon Fleminger (yes you guessed it another psychiatrist! There’s quite a few of them!)that in actual fact I haven’t got a Tardis or that I’m not Dr Who when I said that I could time travel. I think Simon watches too much television but then I think you all do.

Some of us really have gone to the other side of reality. In fact I am now sitting here typing and listening to Echoes by Pink Floyd. The music has just come to where it is building up to a point that visually I connect to an ancient Egytian picture Of Ra in his solar boat and at his side he has red and yellow controls that I relate to a four-wheel Landrover.  Pushing down on those controls he goes into overdrive and connects into the Rover factory at Solihull and that is a Viking emblem and that before you know it I’m sitting in my Rover with Jacquline and we’ve taken our clothes off and are about to ram the car through a pair of white gates at Bottoms Up in Broad St. Canterbury and the police signal has gone, so where do I begin with this mystic journey of life? Solihull Birmingham where I was born? The son of a racing driver and excellent PR man? That if I do believe in gods then its the two Egyptian gods Osisi Gethin Bradley and Isis Jennifer BABBAGE AND THAT Hugh has Horus’s third eye to give to his parents when they go through the world that comes after death.

What does fascinate me is the missing link between say 2000 BC to 2000 AD, that I think to myself if one can find that missing link surely I could tap into Mystic Meg and win the lottery but so far no such luck. 

28.04.95. So it’s another new day, a little late in getting up as usual. It  seems that I come into my own at night, as the Persian proverb says, “The night conceals a world and reveals a universe.”  At night my mind is often still wide awake and at that time is able to go where it likes.  In time I hope to be able to change that pattern along with many other things that I want to change about myself.

All in good time though I still have a lot of patience and acceptance to work on.  Still, the main thing is it’s my second writing day and I still feel keen about writing but what to write?  I am still in a bit of a blurred state of mind. I always like to start the day with a little Zen meditation just to gain a correct perspective of the situation. When I wake up it always seems that I have a lot of sexual thoughts particularly about former girlfriends that I’ve been out with.  However, if I allow these thoughts to go where they want to go to, hey go in a short time.

My flat is a very quiet flat and is a home that I love very much. There are still things that need doing to it but it will all come together in time.  Every day I tell myself that I’m lucky to have my own roof over my head and to have independence too.

Something from nothing

We the planet and everything started from nothing, that it is possible in mind consciousness to feel within the beginnings of everything, that God created us and the world is as John Lennon said, just a concept, it can never be proved or unproved, that the mystery of creation and where we came from is something Buddha said is an everlasting mystery. But I suppose that won’t stop people and particularly scientists from wanting to find the ultimate answer.

Personally I feel the secret lies within, knowing self. The great school of philosophy in Greece, the oracle of Delphi, had on its door “Know thy self” And its a teaching past down from many years that all that is known is within, that the key to universal mind and knowledge is in self realisation and discovering the universe within, that knowing the universe within is to know the universe without. That at the end of the day you are the teacher and that the teaching itself is life and your participation within it.

We all have a world and universe within each of us that our life can often seem as though living in a bubble of one and that bubble is a bubble within a bubble.

I quite enjoy starting from self as being the size of an atom within a room within a flat city country world and universe, and I sometimes think to myself “aaaah” the atom of the mind is split and that you split the atom of universal mind and conscioucess to the universe itself, that it doesn’t take long to think that perhaps I can do what Einstein did and before you know it I’m heading straight up to St Martins hospital in a total panic that I’ve actually blown up the universe when all I have done is created a big bang within and started a chain of endless visions where one minute I’m focusing on Egyptian mysticism to Roman to Greek from the start to the end of time and whilst I’m frantic in this state of mind little old ladies are offering me cups of tea to try and calm me down, to the extent where I find myself bouncing about in unreal realities back to sitting there with my hands in my head and looking up to find a cup of tea in front of me. Unreal, but then so is my mind especially as Hugh means mind. In fact popping off through the insanity ring is something I often do that though Jung or Freud might have a field day with my mind and where it is or isn’t coming from, my psychiatrist Dr Bamber wants to inject me with the complete cocktail of British medicine. 

Now I’m learning to master my visions and mind surfing trips that really where I go in my head no longer frightens or alarms me at all but don’t tell Bamber.  I would say that I am a mystic and visionary, be it a self proclaimed title. That I can see into worlds just from mind, that many people don’t see and this relates to meditative mind and the psychiatric experiences THAT I’ve had over the past decade.  That to the well tailored society we live in it is lunacy to see yourself as an ancient Roman walking down Canterbury high St. and if I am to divulge my world to you, the known and unknown, it is because I know I’m not the only one. That mystics abound in ancient Briton today. In fact you can see them for yourself under Charing Cross bridge if you could only let go of your tiny world of what and how much you can put into your Sainsbury’s shopping trolley.

Am I being cruel? Am I attempting to poke the bubble of your world? Not really, I just want to show you something that perhaps you’ve never seen or experienced before. Don’t worry, you won’t go mad even if you do succeed in splitting the atom of the mind. Andrew splits atoms right in front of nurses eyes but they don’t normally cotton on as there too busy studying for there exams and eyeing up Bottomly’s position. Where would we be if we didn’t.

I say every time I sit down to meditate that I’m just a starter that I have a long way to go, many changes to make, that there are still a lot of things I want to do, that it will come in time, that the best thing to do is take a day for a day and build up with small steps, working with what I’ve got, starting from where I am, that I’ve got a battle to win from my monastic shell here and that no matter what, I’m going to win.

I think of the day centre that I sometimes go to, Mustard Seed, to see friends there and I think of how much distance I’m putting in from that world today, that I don’t need to go through to the film gate, I can go it alone to the soul gate, to be a soul star.  That fame materialism is within and for following the middle way of working with my practice everyday is the success that I want, that I have a different dream now, that my dream connects to the Eastern mystic path, that each second of the day is going to be filled with potential and that from where I am now I will keep winning and going forward. Well done.

Hugh, says my second mother Jill Carlisle, you certainly are building a cathedral and I am every day.

I have this strange feeling that my true roots go back to the ancient Egyptians and often I find myself tumbling through past lives back to that time of being on the Nile and seeing the pyramids being built and I have a vision of a coffin entering into a tomb and a jet plane flying high above, something I remember hearing when we were at Grandmas funeral.

From where I am now I can go furthest west across the globe to east North and South that I can see stormy weather and sunny weather that I can nip into Athens out to the pyramids across to Australia back to America along the Aztec path down to STANNESA CONVENT TO ASSUMPTION House up to the lunatic asylum at St. Martins, a quick visit to the equator line in fact.  If you care to jump into my mind I’ll take you anywhere, but my favourite place is back in time to the ancients so let us go and join the ancient skywatchers and angle ourselves on the Orion star belt and take a trip into the Milky Way and look down from there onto Broadway, New York and see my mate Jonhn Hedigan coming back from a hard days work and we’ll find an amazon feather and tickle his poor old feet.

So it would seem from where I am still in my home town that many but not all have got onto their horses and ridden off into the sunset but some will find that they have saddled up properly or that their horse is a little too wild me.

I stand in the pit watching my horse go round and round on a lead and gently it will get to know me and when we are ready the horse and myself will be one and whilst everyone else is coming round to the finishing post me and Trigger will be flying up into the stars and sky and my horse will be Pegasus.

I see a picture of a child in Africa whose life was saved by a sixpence, that the biggest disease in that part of the world and many third world countries is poverty and that then I REFLECT ON the wealth I see outside my window and what is in the western world and I ask Rod the barman how much in percentage terms the West gives to these countries and he says probably fuck all and probably a loan at that and I think to myself what can I do about it? How can I change someone who isn’t all that well off financially and I turn to my masterguard as I am now and its a question I shall put to Jack tomorrow. Do you think we can

effect change from within from sending out healing to these mothers and children because I feel their suffering I feel their  PAIN.

Three minutes to work it out

Thanks for all the fish

Thankyou I love you

Rumpy St Bailey

Me