Journal
If you spend enough time exploring spirituality, sooner or later you encounter an uncomfortable idea - that there is much darkness in this world as well as light.
Some people relate to this idea as simply a metaphor. For others, it is a fundamental part of their understanding of existence. And for a few, myself included, there are moments when the distinction between metaphor and experience becomes much harder to define.
I’ve had a couple of experiences in my life that I’ve interpreted as encounters with what I would describe as the dark side. And let me be very clear about what I am about to describe here - I cannot prove what they were, nor can I tell you that they were supernatural experiences.
I can only describe what happened, how they felt, and why they’ve stayed with me.
The first experience happened in Milan, probably around 2011.
I had been visiting a friend and, after going out for the evening and having a few drinks, we returned to her apartment to watch the Grand Prix. I’ll be honest and say I was a little bit merry during that evening.
But as I sat in the sitting room watching the race devouring a delicious Italian pizza, I noticed something strange propped up on the floor. It was a carved wooden mask – the type you regularly see in movies depicting anything to do with voodoo! It wasn’t hung on the wall as a treasured possession – just this small wooden mask sat on the floor leaning against the wall.
There was something about it’s presence that immediately disturbed me. It wasn't simply ugly. It felt wrong. I can't give you a rational explanation for how I felt towards it. There was just something about the mask that caused every instinct in me to say that I didn't want to be near it.
I remember saying a quiet prayer and asking for protection from it because it just felt so out of place, and frankly, demonic.
Eventually, I went to bed and passed out. A few hours later, I woke up startled from an experience that I can still vividly remember. I felt as though I was being pinned down. At the same time, something seemed to be slapping my left thigh hard.
And then came the strangest sensation of all. I felt as though something was elevating my soul upwards and out of my body, into an intensely cold environment.
The sensation was terrifying and deeply disturbing. I remember my heart pounding whilst I looked around the room for sight of my attacker. There was nothing but empty darkness.
But I was suddenly wide awake and completely unable to settle back down for the rest of the night. Fortunately, the experience didn't appear to progress any further but I had a new appreciation for the stories I’ve heard about people being attacked during the night.
Eventually, morning came and I asked my friend if she’d felt anything strange unfold in the night. She looked at me somewhat confused as I explained what I’d experienced and shortly afterwards, we parted company.
As often happens with experiences that don't fit neatly into our understanding of the world, I was left somewhat shook up, wondering what on earth had actually happened.
When I returned home, I spoke to someone who knew considerably more about the spiritual side of life than I did. She immediately told me that the mask was a voodoo mask that carried an intensely dark energy and she recommended my friend burn it immediately to get rid of the negative effects of having it in her home.
I called my friend to ask where she’d got it from. She told me she’d found it in a skip outside a local house that was being renovated and thought it was nice, so she took it home. I then told her what my spiritual friend had said about it and the attack I suffered. That didn’t go down well. When I suggested burning it, to get rid of the dark energy, she quickly ended the call. We haven’t spoken since.
Since that experience, I’ve reflected on it quite a lot. Firstly, I couldn't understand why anybody would want such a disturbing-looking object in their home, especially when it had absolutely no sentimental value to her whatsoever. But my spiritual aide suggested it gave her some sense of power.
Maybe it did. Maybe it didn't. Perhaps the mask was nothing more than an old piece of carved wood onto which I projected my own fears and then ended up creating my own vivid experience as a result. I can’t say for certain.
But maybe there genuinely was something deeply dark going on.
The second experience was very different. It didn't happen in a bedroom in Milan. It happened over a period of years, and this time, there were very real consequences.
By the time I had my ayahuasca experience (see my other Journal entries for more details), I’ spent most of my adult life building businesses and a reasonably successful property portfolio.
I’d worked incredibly hard and taken a lot of risks. I’d missed numerous social and family events over years in sacrifice of what I was building. The internal belief I have - which is significantly different from many within the spiritual community - is that building a business is one of the most “spiritual” things you can do. It brings you into direct contact with many of our hidden beliefs, especially around self-worth. I personally think its one of the best things anyone can do who genuinely seeks greater understanding of self.
Anyway, I had built something that gave me a significant degree of financial freedom and, perhaps most importantly, some freedom over my time. One of the development projects I’d recently completed gave me a feeling of immense pride. It was a redundant office building that had stood empty for several years before we converted it into seven bedsits, together with commercial office space on the ground floor. It was a substantial project which promised sizeable monthly income and sound capital growth as a result of the renovation work.
Yet, seemingly out of nowhere, the foundations upon which I had built so much began to move beneath me.
The one mistake I’d made was trusting a major bank I’d been a customer of for over 35 years. They’d been practically the only bank to finance my projects during the 2008-2010 financial crisis and as a consequence, I’d put a lot of business their way. They held charges across most of my property business when they decided to pull the plug on a deal at 4pm on the day of completion – one which had been agreed for weeks beforehand.
At the time, it was a case of losing a smaller amount of money, or a large amount and I chose the former because the consequences of the latter were unimaginable. I wrongly thought, because of the longstanding relationship, they’d be understanding and we could resolve things amicably. It was an extremely naive view.
What followed was years of conflict. There were armies of lawyers (on their side). There were intense legal proceedings spread out over years with the bank choosing not to hand over documentation they were legally supposed to do (called disclosure). What I witnessed throughout that period was certainly not a “justice” system. I finally understood we live in a “legal” system and when you start asking uncomfortable or highly inconvenient questions, the lawyers and the judges definitely don’t like it.
In fact, I feel very strongly that the legal system conspired to work against me and cover up what I felt was outright criminality. I’d like to say at this point that I appreciate the reader may view this as a particularly strong view, however I am not on my own with this. There has been a Panorama investigation into this particular bank, and I know of hundreds of other people who have gone through exactly the same unfortunate process and lost their life’s work.
There were many times when I found myself looking at what was happening and simply asking:
How on earth can this be happening?
I had always believed, perhaps naively, that if you had evidence, there was a process through which the truth would ultimately prevail, especially in court. My direct experience during multiple court hearings in both the county and High Court’s challenged that belief profoundly. My experience taught me that having a legal system and experiencing justice are not the same thing.
And when you’re involved in litigation against organisations with vastly greater financial resources, the experience feels exactly like mental torture – which is a crime against humanity. The emotional toll is enormous. Imagine every week, at least one multi-page letter drops through your door threatening to take away everything you have and make you bankrupt. Imagine your life’s work being pulled apart without question by people who ought to be protecting your interests. It’s a deeply disturbing feeling.
The financial toll was devastating, and I don’t mind sharing that after a while, the whole thing begins to consume you, mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually.
During this period, I also came across information about the property and financial system that I found deeply troubling. I began to understand things about how the system operated that I had never previously appreciated. I mean, you hear about the obvious conspiracy theories about the financial system, but no one seems able to prove too much.
Some of what I discovered was documented in the sort of complex diagrams and prospectuses that put people to sleep. That’s probably by design because asleep people don’t ask too many questions! Other elements of it became part of my own research. Unfortunately all of it is difficult to talk about without going into matters that are beyond the scope of this journal.
But, one thing I came away with was a profound sense that there were several weaknesses in the system that ordinary people simply didn't understand. And that is what kept them trapped, working jobs they hate to spend a lifetime paying for something that was paid off the moment they signed the “loan document”.
The knowledge I gained came at a huge price. All told, it cost me several million pounds to acquire. But there was another cost that I’ve never talked about, until now. For a period of perhaps two or three years, because of what I was exposing, I genuinely worried that somebody might just turn up at my home and shoot me because of what I knew.
Looking back, I cannot tell you whether that fear was justified, but when you’re living under that kind of pressure, your world becomes a very different place.
There was another coincidence within all of this that I found difficult to ignore. All of this was happening around the same time that I’d returned from my ayahuasca experience and started writing Love Is The New Religion.
I came out of that experience with an overwhelming sense that I’d been given something to share. So even though I didn’t know where the whole experience would lead, I began writing. And almost simultaneously, it felt as though the structures I had spent twenty years building were being dismantled around me.
I lost a significant part of the business and property portfolio that had taken me decades to create. The financial loss to me was enormous. But the psychological loss was arguably greater still. I had to face the loss of a belief that if you worked hard, behaved honestly and played by the rules, the system would ultimately protect you from wrongdoing. I could not have been further from the truth.
There were moments when I couldn't help wondering whether there was a connection between what I was trying to put on paper and what was unfolding in my life. It seems that anyone who wants to share a message of love in this world is ultimately targeted by the dark side.
There is a word that’s kept coming back to me during the intervening years. That word is Crucifixion. Not literally, of course, but metaphorically.
Jesus was persecuted for challenging the established order, whilst spreading a message of love. Ultimately, he was crucified.
And here I was, in my own much smaller and vastly less consequential way, feeling as though I, and my life’s work, was being dismantled by systems I’d previously trusted. Perhaps the comparison is completely inappropriate, but it became extremely difficult for me not to think about it.
Even the story of Jesus overturning the tables of the money changers in the Temple took on a very different meaning for me as I understood firsthand why he did it. When you understand the way the financial system works, you’ll know exactly why Jesus stood against it.
Beyond the immediate consequences however, there were many questions:
What happens when the systems we create undermine humanity?
What happens when “money” becomes more important than people, or basic morality?
And perhaps most importantly:
What happens when we stop questioning our most basic assumptions about life?
Perhaps one of the biggest lessons I’ve taken from all of this is that darkness doesn't necessarily arrive wearing a black cloak with a deep, booming voice. It can look perfectly respectable. It can sit behind a desk. It can wear a suit and work for a big name firm. It can arrive in a legal document or present itself as bureaucracy. It can hide behind procedure, processes or the seemingly innocuous behaviours of the individual.
It can even convince itself that what it is doing is perfectly reasonable, which, to me, is far more frightening than the idea of some supernatural monster lurking in the shadows. Because human beings are capable of extraordinary evil things when they disconnect their actions from their conscience.
Perhaps that is where the spiritual battle really takes place - not somewhere in another dimension. But deep inside us, each and every day. In the simple choices we make. In the way we treat others. And whether we choose to act from a place of fear or love.
There is another idea that has emerged from my journey, although it is one I still wrestle with every day. It’s this question: what if darkness actually serves a purpose? Not because cruelty is good and not because suffering doesn't matter. And certainly not because terrible things that happen in life should somehow be accepted as inevitable.
But because we cannot fully understand light without experiencing darkness. Think about it for a second - how would we understand courage without fear? Compassion without suffering? Forgiveness without being wronged? Love without experiencing loss?
Perhaps the people and circumstances that challenge us most profoundly become important teachers in our lives, whether they intend to be or not.
That doesn't excuse evil behaviour and nor does it absolve anybody of personal responsibility. But it does give us another way of looking at our life experiences – perhaps in a more favourable light.
Instead of asking only: “Why is this happening to me?”
Perhaps we can ask ourselves: “What is this trying to teach me?”
I don't know whether either of the experiences I’ve shared here were literal attacks from the spiritual dark side. No doubt some will claim the first was a sleep-related phenomenon, which under the combination of alcohol, exhaustion, expectation and an unsettling object, produced some spectacular mind games.
And maybe the second was simply the brutal reality of business, finance and litigation colliding with the life I’d previously built. Or perhaps there’s another explanation.
Perhaps there are dimensions to our very existence that we still don't understand and which often leave us with more questions than answers. What I do know is that both experiences changed me in some way.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned through all of this, however, it is that we cannot control everything that happens to us. We can, however, choose what we do with it.
We can allow fear to consume us, or we can find our way back to love.
We can become bitter, or we can become wiser.
We can spend our lives fighting the darkness, or we can become sufficiently committed to the light that the darkness no longer controls us.
The irony is that my life fell apart at almost exactly the moment I began writing a book about love. Perhaps that was a great coincidence. Maybe it was simply life unfolding in a way that its meant to. Or perhaps it was the greatest lesson of all.
Because maybe spirituality isn't about escaping the darkness. Maybe it’s about learning how to walk through it without becoming part of it. And perhaps the real victory isn't defeating the dark side. Perhaps it’s refusing to let it change who you are.
