My "path" has been checkered. I don't want to waste people's time putting them through reading the backdrop to all this, just to say my pre-adolescent upbringing was not nice.

It wasn't that in itself that started me off but an early teenage fascination about things unlikely to be explained by science or reasoning: dreams, inspiration and the existence of wildly different religions of which only one could be right (so it seemed).

Keeping it short, this interest was picked up by an elderly family friend who suggested I look at Hermeticism. He gave up time to assist me. THAT really started it. Nothing was as it seemed to be. I was victim of both delusion and illusion and both were best shot of...that was the path. How to get rid of it.

Needing to know what was at my core and plain curiosity about what animated people generally, I encountered various Neo African and Japanese ideas through friends at college. I never took to the Hindu ideas because they seemed too inward and less about living life to the full but admit I barely studied them. The populist stuff going about was a bit dodgy.

I also spent some time with sorcery, a practical application of Hermeticism - have left that behind now but it did set my attitude that there's little point in a spiritual drive without it benefiting someone in practice.

More recently I realised that I'd probably set out at a much younger age, maybe 7 or 8, diverging from my parents' expectations, sometimes censure. At times it was in defiance but the only suffering was the frustration and upset that censure caused me, constricting my feelings and ideas. When the Children's Department got involved over physical cruelty it was like the doors of a prison opening!