I have almost no memories of my childhood, just a few still pictures, snapshots flashed into my brain. A broken window in my bedroom where the curtain caught between the frame and the hinge, torquing the glass until it fractured in a pattern like a spider's web. Two children playing in the garage, their teeth painted blue and wearing black macintoshes, accidentally hurting themselves, though I do not know how. Other memories seem to belong to my sister, stories she told me, or I think she told me, about things that happened. I was there, but I do not remember. Not until I was fourteen years old.

At fourteen we moved, my mother and me, from the house I had lived in all my life. I cannot tell you what that house looked like, except I sort of remember the hallway and the stairs where I played endlessly with toy soldiers, inventing weapons of mass destruction and enacting heroic last stands in the face of overwhelming odds. And playing with Tuppence, our cat, using a sheet of scrunched up newspaper tied to a long piece of string for her to chase. I cannot remember colors but the texture of the carpet that I would lie down and play on is imprinted on my mind.

After we moved I would walk through the woods, past the swimming pool and along the narrow paved path that led to my old street, a cul-de sac, where my friends lived. It was a lonely walk. I felt lost, out of touch when I walked it because I was not used to making such a trip, about a mile and a half, to see my friends. I felt like a stranger, a visitor to the place that once was my home. I knew every inch of those woods, yet I was no longer at ease there. Not unwelcome, but an outsider all the same.

Then the explosion.

I walked, fourteen years old and lost in the full blast of adolescence. The first part of the journey was beside the main road, past a pub and alongside the route where every day I waited for the Number 96 bus that took me to school in the opposite direction. Then into the park, a wide-open rolling expanse of green with one tall horse-chestnut tree on the left in the park's lowest area, where all the water drained. Walking up the slope, into the sun, the sky a radiant blue too bright to look into, I was hit between the shoulder blades, knocked to my knees and held in place by a grip so strong it held even my mind still. I was seeing and I was seen. Each blade of grass, each leaf on the chestnut tree, the sky, the sun and my self were one, no longer separate and unrelated but dynamic, organic, full of thunderous being and is-ness. I woke up.

Whatever grabbed me that day stopped my mind and my world in their tracks. I did not complete that walk. I returned home and in awe I knelt in front of a full length mirror with tears streaming down my face and looked at my reflection. Light, vast unbounded light, fountained everywhere. I wrote my first poem that day, the first of many, kept in a bright orange foolscap binder that filled up very quickly, and on the front cover I wrote its title, The Scriptures of Love.

My awareness of the world began to change. I realized I existed, that I could see and feel. I found that I responded to love and respect and had no patience with arrogance. That caused problems at school since the majority of my teachers were either angry or contemptuous. I learned to trust my intuition. Every morning we had an Assembly, a meeting of the whole school, for prayers, peptalks and punishment. I sat, along with the rest of the upper and lower sixth, the most senior students, in the balcony overlooking the rest of the school, all boys. The Headmaster gave the morning address, and on this day his intent was to demonstrate that the Bible was the most popular, hence the most truthful, book in the world. His proof was that if you went into any bookshop you would see the shelves were full of Bibles. Complete bullshit. I stood up and in a loud clear voice interrupted his sermon. "The reason," I said, "why the shelves are always full of Bibles is that nobody ever buys them."

Nine years later, at college, a new world opened up for me. A group of ten of us lived together for two years, studying psychology and philosophy, dropping a lot of acid and smoking a lot of dope, avoiding the year's end exams for as long as we could. On cold and wet winter nights we sat around the fire and read to each other passages out of books we had discovered. One day Bill brought home Bhagwan's "I Am The Gate" and read aloud from it all night, in between games of cards and rolling and smoking joints. Within a month he was in Poona. He wrote us letters about Bhagwan, His discourses and whatever else he saw. And what he saw blew him away. In response to these letters Colin went to India as well and came back dressed in bright orange with a new name, Akasha.

This wasn't for me. I had no judgements, no objections and no interest. My best friend Simon and I were playing at being Carlos Castenada. Acid, mescaline, dope and speed. Laughter, beauty, absurdity and fear. We were adventurers. The drugs were not the focus, rather the new experiences, the changes they induced in our consciousness.

My mother had given me a thousand pounds to be used as the downpayment on a house if and when I got married. It sat in a Building Society account for a little while before Simon and I put our money together and bought a small mountain of cocaine. We intended to experiment with it, sell some of it and have some money to pay our rent since by now we had dropped out of college and were no longer being supported by Local Education Authority grants.

The pile of coke rapidly dwindled and with it my enthusiasm for the experiences drugs could bring. With a mixture of guilt at having wasted the money my Mum had given me and the feeling of emptiness that comes when you tire of something that was once really enjoyable, I sold what was left of the cocaine and moved out of London to Canterbury and wondered what on earth I was doing.

Walking through the streets of Canterbury, down narrow thoroughfares where young boys in straw boaters, pupils of King's School, milled haplessly around. Wandering through the city wearing Indian leather sandals, long hair and bright yellow cotton trousers, called loons, with 16" bell bottoms, living in a daze. And then one day in one moment, the sudden change of colors from red to green of the traffic lights in the town-center stopped me dead in my tracks and something clicked and a switch was thrown inside me. I was going to Poona. There was a travel agency right there on the street. I turned, went in, and bought return tickets for myself and my girlfriend and a single ticket for my friend John, because that was all the money I had.

I traveled alone to India with £20 in my pocket and walked, bag in hand, into the Ashram. I sat on a low wall looking into Radha Hall watching the first stage of Kundalini. For two minutes, afraid, I watched these strange people, clad in orange lunghis and robes, shake to bizarre rhythms and sounds. A voice inside my head spoke. "It's simple. Either you join in now or you walk out of the gates and go back to England." I entered the hall and began to shake.

A week later I sat in front of Bhagwan and he gave me sannyas. "This will be your new name, Prem Veda. It means the Scriptures of Love."

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