I am attending the Cambridge University LGBT+ Alumni Association Annual Dinner at Girton College this weekend – and staying overnight at Churchill College, the first night I will have spent there since I graduated in 1986!
The LGBT+ Alumni Association “aims to provide a personal and professional network for LGBT+ alumni, to promote awareness around LGBT+ issues, to champion LGBT+ inclusive policies, and to forge links with other LGBT+ networks to share best practice and further any common objectives.” Cambridge LGBT+ Alumni | Alumni . I am looking forward to telling people there about the amazing healing work underway at Queer Spirit Festival.
I graduated with an Upper Second Honours Degree in History and raced off to London seeking to shake off academia and have some fun – having very recently ‘come out’ during my final year at Churchill, unlike most of my fellow graduates career was not big on my mind – finding myself was. Reflecting back 4 decades later I see that embracing my sexual and romantic attraction to men was just the first step on a very tranformative path of questioning and searching within myself. Within a few years that path was taking me towards death – I was diagnosed HIV+ in 1990 and told I had maybe seven years to live. I reasoned with myself that everyone dies so why get upset about it – I firmly believed at the time that we are merely biological creatures, living a lifetime then entering oblivion – and I decided that I had one goal to aim for before I died – to be deeply, fully in love. The tastes of love that I had experienced so far convinced me there was nothing greater in life.
I found that love and it saved my life. I met Pierre in Comptons of Soho in 1993 and we were soon living together in south London. Both HIV+, we nursed and supported each other through major sickness in the following years – but more than that, the powerful love between us became for me a catalyst for spiritual awakening. I felt drawn to seek for deeper understanding of love, and, for the first time in my life, to question why do we actually exist in the first place?
At this point my Cambridge degree became my greatest tool – I applied my historian’s training to the question of humanity’s search for understanding of life, and quickly realised this search has been our obsession for millennia – yet there I was, a product of the 20th century education system, simply accepting that existence is a material phenomenon, dismissing religion and not interested in any inner, spiritual, search, not really even aware of such an idea!
As I was preparing myself to die, I wasn’t only interested in the theory, and I had nothing to lose – I dived into the practice of spiritual transformation, taking on board the notion, singing loudly to me from the mystical voices of all the world’s holy paths, that we are each a manifestation of the One Spirit/Consciousness/Love that gives rise to and pervades all Creation. Meditation practices, Witchcraft and Hindu teachings came into my life – and quickly the veils fell away. I saw that western society was literally blinded by science – the rejection of the religious paradigm had produced an equally dogmatic system, one that sucked all meaning out of life. At the root of all religious, magical and spiritual paths I found the concept of Oneness – and learned from the mystical schools of thought that it is within our own consciousness that we can come into relationship with that Oneness, know it within our own hearts, minds and bodies.
I saw that the western mind is utterly hooked on left brain, rational thinking, and I had been brought up to dismiss the intuitive, emotional side of human nature as secondary – but as I prepared myself to drop all attachments to life the magical side of my mind opened up and took me on a journey of realisation – opening up in me the part of the mind that sees the world as a unity, that senses the subtle and causal energies underlying life’s drama. I now view humanity as being on a path to a glorious awakening, through the union of the individual with the collective field of unified consciousness: this is actually the knowledge, the place, that Hindu teachings, plus pagan wisdom cultures and magical paths all start from. They tell us we are That, and offer tools to become more aware of, identified with and embodied as the collective, eternal Self, alongside our individuality.
As I prepare for a night with Cantabrigans I’ve been reflecting on who I consider to be my Cambridge forerunners, who are the ancestors of this centre of academia in whose steps I humbly follow? Here are the four that stand out brightly:
FRANCIS BACON 1561-1626 (Trinity College) 1st Viscount of St Alban, Lord Chancellor and Attorney General for King James I. Bacon is known as the Father of Empiricism, a philosophy that emphasises sensory experience as well as empirical, scientific evidence. Bacon applied this idea as much to the internal landscapes of his own mind and spirit as to external scientific research, producing the Pyramid of Philosophy, a vision of the completion of the descension of the divine consciousness into human existence – the fulfilment of humanity’s journey of separation and a reunion with the invisible realms of spirit – a completion process he believed that would take another 400 years – ie until the 2020s.
EDWARD CARPENTER 1844-1929 (Trinity Hall) Philosopher, socialist, poet and early advocate for gay rights, Carpenter was appalled by the hypocrisy rife in Victorian society – he left the worlds of university and church to live on a small holding near Sheffield. He was greatly influenced by the Yogic philosophies from India, and also by the poetry of Walt Whitman, whom he visited in the United States in 1870. He lived openly with male lovers, meeting George Merrill in 1891, with whom he was partnered for the rest of his life. Carpenter’s work includes studies of the roles played by same-sex attracted and gender-fluid people, whom he called Uranians (a popular term among educated gay men at the time, unlike homosexual which they despised – Uranian invokes the assocation made in Plato’s Symposium between same sex lovers and the Godddss Aphrodite Urania), in the world’s cultures and history.
In The Intermediate Sex (1908) Carpenter set out spectrum of sexuality with Uranian being ‘an intermediate sex’ that unites masculine and feminine qualities in one person, who then becomes an natural intermediary between the classes and a natural counsellor between men and women. “I believe it is true that Uranian men are superior to normal men in this respect through their feminine element.”
In Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folks (1913): “This interaction in fact between the masculine and the feminine, this mutual illumination of logic and meditation, may not only raise and increase the power of each of these faculties, but it may give the mind a new quality, and a new power of perception corresponding to the blending of subject and object in consciousness. It may possibly lead to the development of that third order of perception which has been called the cosmic consciousness and which may also be termed divination.” (Note Jesus said much the same thing in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas).
“There is in every man a local consciousness connected with his quite external body; that we know. Are there not also in every man the making of a universal consciousness?”
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN 1889-1951 (taught at Cambridge 1929-1947). Critical of and resistant to formal religion, Wittgenstein was equally critical of scientism. His spirituality was his personal relationship and service to the divine. He wrote “Is what I am doing [my work in philosophy] really worth the effort? Yes, but only if a light shines on it from above” (published postumously in Culture and Value).
“Death is not an event in life: We do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.” from Tractatus
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD 1904-1986 (Corpus Christi) novelist and playwright. Isherwood studied history but wrote jokes and limericks on his second year Tripos and was asked to leave without a degree in 1925. A few years later he moved to Berlin where he could live an openly gay life and connect to the growing queer community there – then fleeing Germany in 1932 with a young male lover. Settling in the USA in the late 1930s Isherwood studied Vedanta teachings with his friend Gerald Heard.
From Mark Thompson’s book Gay Spirit:
In My Guru and His Disciple, Isherwood explains his initial reticence: “My interpretation of the word God had been taken quite simplemindedly from left-wing antireligious propaganda. God had no existence except as a symbol of the capitalist superboss. He has been deified by the capitalist so that he can rule from on high in the sky over the working-class masses, doping them with the opium of the people, which is religion, and thus making them content with their long hours and starvation wages. “I soon had to admit, however, that Gerald’s ‘this thing’—leaving aside the question of its existence or nonexistence—was the very opposite of my ‘God.’ True, it was by definition everywhere, and therefore also up in the sky, but it was to be looked for first inside yourself. It wasn’t to be thought of as a boss to be obeyed but as a nature to be known—an extension of your own nature, with which you could become consciously united. The Sanskrit word yoga, ancestor of the English word yoke, means “union,” and hence the process of achieving union with the eternal omnipresent nature, of which everybody and everything is a part.”
Isherwood on Heard: “He felt that the homosexual temperament was potentially very, very, very important; way beyond the question of choosing a boy rather than a girl, rather than a camel. I don’t just mean the mere difference in sexual choice, but there was a real kind of potential in homosexuals—or at least in some homosexuals. In other words, a kind of homosexual genius, in the sense that there’s an Irish genius or a black genius. There is a kind of indwelling potentiality which might play a great role,”
“If gays were to live up to their deeper intuitions and their … flair for dealing with other people, they could perhaps really make a tremendous social contribution to life—a sort of sanity that came out of refusing to play the heterosexual role in this society; that they had something else to offer.”
And on Spirituality, Isherwood explained: “It’s maintaining a sense of clarity and purpose about your life.”
That I concur with, a fact of life I discovered at 30. My rational, materialist, academic upbringing had left me spiritually asleep. I believe that is why Life brought me to the journey with HIV/AIDS – I was dying, not because of gay sex, but because I was not living my potential. Spirituality is about becoming whole in ourselves and about coming into union with the world and cosmos, dropping all fear of death and living in the eternal presence of the One Sweet Self, experiencing our individuality and our unity with others, with nature, with LOVE.
For Consciousness is Fundamental – that is what I discovered, and as such I figured that it could only be a matter of time until some scientists discovered that for themselves! And I see that it is happening – in the field of Conscious Realism, as opened up by Daniel Hoffman. At last I see scientists saying the same thing as the gurus and mystics – that everything, including the physical plane, emerges from consciousness. And so as I return to Cambridge I wonder if a spiritual awakening in academia might be on the horizon, as scientists and artists alike choose to turn within to discover the miracle of their own Being. Academia keeps students and teachers focussed in the head, but I’d like to walk in the footsteps of Bacon, Carpenter, Wittgenstein and Isherwood and say LIVE IT, EMBODY IT, FEEL IT – don’t just think it.
“We are arriving at one of the most fruitful and important turning points in the history of the race. the Self is entering into relation with the Body. for, that the individual should conceive and know himself, not a toy and a chance-product of his own bodily heredity, but as identified and continuous with the Eternal Self of which his body is a manifestation, is indeed to begin a new life and to enter a hitherto undreamed world of possibilities….this transformation, whilst the greatest and most wonderful, is also of course the most difficult in Man’s evolution, for him to effect. It may roughly be said that the whole of the civilisation-period in Man’s history is the preparation for it.” Edward Carpenter
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