1.  How the Search Started

 As a young man growing up in Newfoundland, an island Province in the easternmost part of Canada, my first awareness of the existence of different levels of consciousness came through reading various books which I had difficulty comprehending with the rational mind. There was one book in particular called Mount Analogue by Rene Daumal which is an allegorical adventure story about a group of people setting out on an expedition to discover a mountain said to exist somewhere in the South Pacific and which could only be reached at a certain time of the day because it existed on another dimension in time and space. When the adventurers finally reach the island after careful mathematical calculations which enabled them to break through normal time-space limitations, they learn that they need to find guides to take them to the base camp and that they cannot leave the base camp until they in turn bring others to that level. Only then can they move up.

I first read this book as an adventure story, but upon re-reading it, I discovered that it was written on many levels of understanding and that it contained many mysteries veiled in esotericism which awakened me to my own inner search for higher consciousness. It was a little like Jonathan Livingston Seagull discovering the vast potentials of flying. I began to believe, like Jonathan, that our process and that our own bodies are nothing but thought in form and by expanding the thought one could make the form anything one wanted to be. Then, Ouspensky's book The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution led me further from my hitherto accepted philosophy into the realms of self-discovery and a study of my form.