The Book

I was born in Manchester, England, in January 1966. My mother is Irish, and my father is Jamaican. When I was six, my mother left my father and then moved to more addresses than Bin Laden. She also flitted back and forth between England and Ireland, the land of her birth. When I was twelve, she decided to move back to Ireland for good.

We began our ‘exile’, as I began to think of it, in a tower block in Ballymun. Although I’d previously encountered racism, the level of hostility and ridicule that met us traumatised me to such a degree that it became what seemed to be an indelible wound. I carried the trauma of that rejection for many decades. My past was a prison from which I could not escape. I tried to run away from the pain of ‘me’ in various ways.

Nothing worked other than to distract or alleviate the pain. My core was damaged beyond repair, or so I thought.

Then, one night, I underwent what many would regard as a spiritual transformation in the presence of Swami Premananda (1951 – 2012). Without speaking to him, I asked one question of him. It was the one thing I needed to know above all else.

Who am I?

I could not run away from myself, but who was this ‘self’ I was running from? Was there something other than this ‘me’ who was caught in the story of my past?

I asked this question in my heart, and Swami Premananda answered in Silence. Everything I thought I was, Everything I felt I was, Everything I knew for sure that I was —

Shattered into a thousand pieces.

Paul Donaldson disappeared, and yet I did not. I died and yet still lived. It was a form of liberation, of being born again, but it was more than that for me. It showed me there was nobody to be liberated from the past. The past was just a story I dragged along behind me like the corpse of an old friend. I held onto it out of some misguided belief that it meant something, and I had to honour it by holding it tight. It defined me. It was who I was.

But it disappeared. Not only did the past disappear, but so did, figuratively speaking, the hands that were holding it. The definition of me broke apart, and the light poured in. By ‘light’, I mean to convey the act of seeing, of understanding what I was and was not. Paul Donaldson was an experience which comes and goes, but it only exists in the light of something outside of time and space. Call it the soul or consciousness or anything you want. It makes no difference.

Whatever name you give it, that pristine, perfect state is you. and not your suffering.

Through this book, I hope to show the key to liberation was not in struggling with the past but in finding out, through grace, who or what it is that does all the struggling. When the emphasis on healing is placed on revealing the sufferer's nature rather than healing the pain, something beautiful happens. You discover yourself to be what you’ve been looking for all this time. The looking is what obscures seeing. I’d like this book to entertain you at the very least, but my sincerest wish is that it encourages you to look into the nature of this ‘I’ who we think is living this life. 

The story moves between events in India and Ireland, blending the past and present into a tale of emancipation from the shackles of the past. My story in Ireland reached a peak, or rather I should say, a low point, when my psychological and emotional state had deteriorated to such a degree I set out to take a life through an act of violence. It was a futile attempt to end the pain of my existence and, in retrospect, a way to make the world atone for what it had done to me and my family. Ironically, my experience with Swami Premananda gave me a lasting peace, but this required not the death of another but the end of my particular sense of ‘I’. 

As I said earlier, I was born again.

Just like in the old days when the midwife slapped the baby to ensure the newborn was breathing, life commenced slapping the shit out of me for many years after that night in the Ashram. Even today, life still comes a’slappin. It’s okay. I always return to knowing I am that which witnesses all the sound and fury but remains untouched by it. Everything comes and goes except that which has no beginning and no end. That which is true does not change, and that moment in the Ashram is still with me. Still and silent and empty. Out of that emptiness, each day rises.

And each day, I am blessed to know each day also falls, but there is nowhere for it to go but into the emptiness, which is the source of Everything. As Nissargadatta says, I Am That By Which I Know That I Am.

Swami Premanada gave me ‘Nothing’, which was Everything. Admittedly, when I look at the pictures, ‘nothing’ looks like half a coconut and some other odds and ends.

But therein is the beauty of enlightenment.

Am I enlightened?

The short answer is no.

But the real answer, which exists before the question is even asked, is who is there to be enlightened?