AFTER THE EXPERIENCE of illumination, I was gradually withdrawn from spiritual things. Instead I had to cope with the process of growing into adult life. The soul, which seemed to have incarnated so imperfectly into the body, had now to make its proper entry and claim its own realm with authority. This was a painful time, and as the process of full incarnation continued, I grew further and further away from spiritual reality. Yet I could never forget what I had been shown, and no matter how much I tried to compromise with the materialistic values that surrounded me, I could never be false to what I knew was the truth. Any submission to values that were false to my inner judgment caused me intense distress and pain.
As I had embarked on a medical career, my attention was fixed emphatically on worldly things. My clumsiness with my hands, in no small measure an inheritance of the sheltered life I had led in which all the menial work had been done by servants, was to some extent ameliorated by dissection and later by examining patients. But I could make no real friends with my fellow students. My only point of contact was intellectual. I could discuss ideas with ease and thereby form a mental relationship with some people considerably older than myself. But my extreme diffidence about my body made any show of physical affection very difficult. I became increasingly inhibited socially, and spent most of my free time in solitude. My scholastic achievements were again in the first rank of excellence, for I could never fail in mental work or in examinations. Indeed, I lived for my work, in which I could, literally, lose myself - and a study of the human body in all its intricacies and excellence is a wonderful theme for perpetual meditation - but I did not know how to spend the holiday periods. Later I worked in hospitals during these times also. In all, I became adept in my work and developed a real passion for the patients I met and for their many problems. But I did not grow into the stature of a man. I was as isolated, as lonely, and as inhibited socially and physically when I qualified as a doctor as I was when I first went to school at the age of five. To enter a shop to buy a simple article was a major trial. An invitation to a party, a rare event in any case since I had so few acquaintances, produced a state of anxiety that half paralysed my faculties for days on end.
I was apt to blame this crippling psychological inhibition on my upbringing. My mother, a fine woman with a noble, upright heart, was neurotically possessive of her only child. Poor woman that she was, for one day the child had to leave her, and progressive mental depression was to be her lot, with death from cancer at too young an age! My father's view of life was shallow and materialistic. Though good and honest in his professional work, he had developed a cynical attitude to the world and saw the selfish part of life as the most real. He distrusted nobility and idealism - and who, surveying the world's progress over the last century, can entirely blame him for this nihilistic view of life? But I can see now that I bore the seeds of my inadequacy within me. I had too strong a character and too powerful a will to be entirely subjugated by any outside influence. While my parents' attitudes were unhelpful in my upbringing, I will always be grateful to them for the beautiful home they provided during the formative years of my childhood, when adverse outer circumstances, such as being incarcerated in a boarding-school, might have crushed me very badly. For the general ethos in those days was much less enlightened than it is today when eccentricity and individuality are much more acceptable in schools, and when the emphasis is less exclusively on physical exercise and more on mental and artistic performance. The whole point of my personal dilemma was that I would not compromise fully with the world around me. Only later was I to learn that I could not so compromise, for this was why I was born as I was.
As I grew older, I saw my contemporaries progressing in their own lives, courting, marrying, and setting up their own homes. Despite my excellent record at the medical school, I had great difficulty in getting the necessary house appointments at the associated hospitals, whereas those whose standard of performance was poor were well installed in these hospitals. It was evident that I was completely lacking in personal assertiveness and aggressiveness, which is a prerequisite for successful material existence. Gradually unpleasant tendencies began to emerge in my own character. The transparent simplicity and joyous wonder of childhood became clouded with feelings of jealousy, resentment, and vague fear. I began, quite involuntarily, to gloat over any disappointment in the life of a contemporary and to wish that any possible happiness, such as an impending marriage, might be thwarted. A tendency to make mischief showed itself, and I felt increasingly resentful of my own inhibited personality which was robbing me of the comforts and social achievements of others. And yet, in my deepest awareness, I had no real desire either for marriage or for material prosperity. When I was a small child I had already understood the futility of worldly riches: in my imagination I could be the richest, the most powerful, the most awe-inspiring man in the world. After about five minutes this model of earthly desire became nauseatingly boring, and I was happy to let it go. I knew, even at that age, love is alone worth having, and this knowledge never left me, even in my periods of greatest despair.
In 1951 I left South Africa and settled in Britain for postgraduate medical training. I knew intuitively that I would never return to live in my native land, for my horizons could not be enclosed in a community that practised racial discrimination. I also knew that the parting of the ways with my parents was close at hand. The time drew near when I had to bid farewell to the house where I had spent my prophetic childhood. That home alone knew my innermost secrets; it had been the place where Christ revealed Himself to me and instructed me how I should live. In it the supreme illumination of the Godhead had been given me through divine grace. I had confused my highest aspirations to its walls, and the depths of my fears were known in its rooms. In the garden I had paced out my meditations. It alone really knew me; every piece of furniture was a blessed friend. And now it was to fade from visible view forever. But in my dreams it is never far from me, and I have no doubt I will visit it once more in the form of mental reality when I have quitted the body of humiliation and put on the body of spiritual light.
My parents accompanied me to Europe, and after a short holiday together, they left me to return to South Africa. The final parting was mutely poignant. I knew how my mother was gradually breaking down inwardly as the day of departure drew nearer. At last the taxi arrived to carry them both to the air terminal, and I saw their well-remembered faces for the last time as they disappeared into the distance. I was to see them together on only one subsequent visit three years later, when the decline in my mother's health was already apparent. Soon afterwards her final illness struck. Against my father there was a feeling of mounting hostility that eventually culminated in a healing hatred. This strange description of hatred must shock the more conventional reader, but I was later to learn that a fully acknowledged hatred is the beginning of a future understanding that may, with God's help, flower into real compassion and love. It is the cold indifference of so many relationships, masked by superficial politeness and calculated urbanity, that is the true cancer of the personality. Schools of religious and metaphysical thought that refuse to face the fact of hostility, war, and evil are also unable to redeem these unpleasant ingredients of earthly life. They exist in us and around us whether we accept them intellectually or not. If we make them our own, they can be redeemed by the love of God; if we ignore them they will possess us and lead to enormous destruction. The God who created light also created darkness (Genesis 1:1-5). Both material light and darkness must be transfigured by the uncreated light of God that flows from His Spirit through receptive human beings.
My life in England was very different from that which I had known in South Africa. There were no servants and no parents. I was completely alone, and had now, for the first time in my life, to fend for myself I had indeed been thrown in at the deep end, but was able to adapt to the changed circumstances extremely well. There was only one thing that could not be changed, my own personality. The sense of strangeness and the inability to communicate with those around me, except in intellectual precepts, persisted. My social inhibitions increased in intensity. At first I was able to lose myself in medical study preliminary to taking postgraduate examinations, which I, as usual, passed successfully at the first attempt. But when I had achieved all I could professionally, I was bereft and alone. Once again the inability to assert myself prevented my acquiring the type of hospital appointment that would have been commensurate with my medical knowledge, added to which there was the handicap of being an outsider and so having no personal backing from influential colleagues. Nevertheless, considering the severe psychological difficulty under which I laboured, it is remarkable that I achieved what I did professionally. I was never out of work, and was highly esteemed by my colleagues on a professional level even if there was no effective social relationship between us.
During this dark period I sometimes lived alone in a bed-sitting room, and sometimes in a hospital mess. I preferred the latter, for I enjoyed the company of my fellows and never really chose solitude. This fact was of great inner reassurance, for it indicated to me that my social sense was basically normal and that there was no serious mental disturbance at the root of my difficulties. Indeed, ordinary social intercourse in a friendly, co-operative atmosphere was a great joy to me; it was only when some outside event, like Christmas festivities with their surfeit of over-drinking and excessive social fraternisation, loomed large that my inhibitions mounted and I disappeared into a quiet corner. During this period I had to undertake two years of compulsory military service. The threat of this overshadowed my life for many months beforehand, but when at last the time came, I found the experience far more agreeable than I could have imagined. I spent most of this period overseas in Nigeria and Cyprus where I learnt much both medically and sociologically, but once again there was no really deep communication with any of my colleagues. It was obvious that I could not release myself properly, while they, quite properly, were much more concerned with their private family attachments.
When I had completed my military service and had returned to civilian life, I was thrown firmly on my own resources. There was to be no more communal life, but only a private detached existence. No longer could I lose myself in group activities; I had to face my dereliction and ask myself what life was really about, and what I hoped to achieve. I had by this time become a university lecturer, and it became clear to me that I would never ascend far up the academic ladder: my social inhibitions would bar any significant promotion. The spiritual darkness, which had closed in on me progressively since the age of sixteen, was now almost impenetrable. I was filled with intense, though ill-defined, fear. My contact with spiritual reality was tenuous, and my prayer life, which had once been a spontaneous outflowing of joy to God the Creator, was now a mere gasp in the overwhelming ocean of dark meaninglessness. I was running desperately hard, but there was no clear destination. I longed to be safe at home, but there was no home, only a place of uneasy rest. The years were passing by, and having achieved all I could intellectually, I knew that I had achieved nothing at all. I was enclosed in a fog of incomprehension; those around me were pleasant and kindly, but they could not help for they did not understand. The only purpose in life was to keep on living. The fear of annihilation was the impetus that kept me in my professional work, and an obsessional drive to technical perfection made my life bearable. But I had no basis for living. In fact, I was experiencing the dark night of the soul.
To come to some social reality, I tried desperately hard to be sociable, to speak enthusiastically about nothing in particular. But all that came of this was a tendency to disparage others and to speak scandal, which often passes for wit in shallow society. When I saw what I was doing I became ashamed of myself, and crept further into my shell. Inhibition was preferable to false conviviality. Loneliness was more palatable than forced sociability. What I did not know then was that those around me who appeared socially at ease and full of self-confidence were also in hell, but were unaware of it. They concealed their own rootlessness, even with home and family, in a show of urbanity and good living.
The abyss of meaninglessness lay in front of us all, but I, with my heightened spiritual perception, could see it, whereas they were blinded by material delusion.