My Sufi Teacher was able to spiritually transform objects simply by touching or waving his hand over something, which was usually alcohol or food. Part of my spiritual training involved drinking prodigious amounts of alcohol (not recommended unless you have someone like Punditt around…). During this process, I had to behave as soberly as possible, but that didn’t stop me feeling ill. When I was on the point of being sick, I would signal. At this point he would either get me to sip some of his alcoholic drink, or he would stare at my glass for a few seconds, then urge me to drink it. As most of us know, more alcohol at this point is the last thing needed, but within seconds I would start sobering up! When I first met him, he would smoke cigarettes, and the difference in colour and quality of the exhaled smoke was very noticeable in comparison to other smokers.

Drink more to sober up

Sobering up someone with an extra sip of beer or vodka is far more than a party trick. If someone brought a talisman for blessing, he would do what Gurus do all around India – he lightly touched it, or waved his hand over it, while all the time he looked entirely insouciant. So, there was my benchmark: a glance or light touch to transform an object. He could do amazing things, and it did not matter how wonderful or weird my visions were, I had to act as though nothing special was happening.

For some years, I became somewhat dependent on him, expecting him to do all the work. The method was entirely silent – he worked on high levels of consciousness where no words are required. I never saw him do rituals, or declamations to the Spirits. There was nothing. Things were happening in me at all levels, while he was talking about the weather, or football or other mundane subject. Discussion of spiritual topics almost never occurred, and if they did, they lasted about two sentences (mostly my sentences).

I realised that it was up to me to do the spiritual work and not rely on him. I experimented, doing a spiritual or magical act (I can’t remember what it was, but I was in my office between tarot readings). I got the results immediately, and after a week or two, I had enough courage to tell him. Before I had got halfway through my first sentence, he was nodding impatiently, and said only this: “If you make a mistake I will help you, I will fix it.” What a liberating statement! My real spiritual and magical training started at that point. I never discussed what I was doing before, during or afterwards, but if ever I made a mistake (and there were many, some of monumental proportions), he fixed it. I never even had to express what the problem was, or what I had done wrong, the latter because I rarely knew what the mistake was.

Thrown in at the Deep End

When it got really hairy, and I was not just out of my depth, but falling down a limitless chasm, he was nowhere. Calls remained unanswered; he had disappeared. There was nothing for it but for me to try to sort out the problem myself. Once done, he would appear again, not surprisingly.

Modern magicians obsess with knowing the name of a spirit, but I never had that luxury, or the need. Whenever there was a problem or strange event, he would say “Spirit”. That was it. If I had a problem, I would say “Spirit”; he either knew about it, or would quickly fix it, simply by looking. I learned early on, that questions of what kind of spirit were met with “Spirit”. Sometimes it would be “Spirits”, but that was it. Desperate problems were solved by sending me on a walk for 10 minutes while he fixed it.

This did not mean that he was not familiar with western spiritual techniques. I had discovered Tikkun or Rectification a few days before, and we were sitting in the pub having a quiet pint, talking about nothing in particular. I thought, “what the hell”, and secretly did Tikkun, not just for me, but for him. He immediately looked at me and said “Thank you”. That was when I discovered I could and should help him spiritually. This was a revelation! Up to that point, I thought he got help from elsewhere.

A long apprenticeship

My apprenticeship lasted over 20 years, and it is still going on even though he has retired. When he passes away, I expect I will see even more of him. That is not the start of the story. For this, we have to go to my first memories. I was 2 years old and I had a spiritual revelation. I was sitting on the carpet alone in the living room. I remember analysing the semantic differences between God, dog and guard. I was obsessed with ghosts and spirits from an early age. By the time I was ten I knew I was different to other children. When I was 14, I learnt transcendental meditation, and at sixteen I was living at a TM academy, and was soon meditating 3 hours twice a day. I moved to Brighton, and continued meditating long hours while holding down a job. My life was turned upside down – I was homeless and out of a job. People talk about having to renounce possessions to move forward spiritually. This is not true. True spiritual progress will strip you of your possessions. I found somewhere to live, and some work, but in such a way that I was able to spend many hours with him, usually . This was an extraordinary time of spiritual exultation, fear and terror.

The magician’s comparison of me to my teacher marked a turning point where I could believe that I knew, and that I had to move on. One day, I was ‘told’ by Spirits I could program crystals, and in half an hour I had about twenty programmed quartz crystals in front of me.