IN THE DARK AND STILL MOVING

I reviewed Anne Geraghty's more recent book about the death of her son, Tim – Death – the last God – last year, then she spoke at our November conference on conscious ageing and subsequently sent me a copy of her earlier autobiographical book. It is an extraordinary and eloquent account of a passionate life that takes readers of my generation right back to the 60s with the rise of radical spirituality and politics, feminism, drugs and sexual liberation. Anne lives all this with passionate intensity and to a degree that few would dare. She refers to this as an energy release from the prison of rigid bourgeois culture.

The story begins with her Catholic upbringing and the gradually escalating tension between her ambition for sainthood and her quest for freedom. The latter wins out, and provides her first initiation into dark turbulence as she seeks to reconcile these opposites. She even buys a wig as an alter ego, and relates that she would go to confession on Saturday afternoon and then a wild party on Saturday evening (she is also sexually approached by the priest, introducing another element of darkness). She relates a fascinating encounter with Donald Winnicott that gives her an insight into vulnerability and the potential healing of suffering through redemptive love, and this theme of vulnerability recurs several times in the narrative as Anne seeks to reconcile her roles as feminist, spiritual seeker, mother, lover and activist.

The second part relates her spiritual adventure in connection with the crazy Tantric wisdom of Osho Rajneesh and is entitled Playing Snakes and Buddhas. This is a story of both heaven and hell, freedom and repression, wild abandon and submission. Anne becomes Vismaya and takes on responsibility for the British centre after a trip to India. She has to face her own demons, realising that fear just gives them more power and that one must enter fully into life with its ecstasy and agony in order to distil wisdom from life experience. She writes that she 'saw the genuine love that breaks your own heart because its roots are in the real mud of our human struggle with hate. I saw the fierce honesty of a compassion that emerges from passionate anger, rather than the sugar on the shit of piety.' (p. 122) No holds barred here, or indeed anywhere else in this candid account.

Later, she writes that 'wherever there is life, there is everything - power in service and the abuse of power, sexual love and sexual abuse, the light of awareness and the darkness of ignorance.' (p. 132). This all becomes only too apparent in the psychodynamics of the Osho organisation. Many who occupied senior positions are later viciously stripped down to nothing, shamed and humiliated, their motivation questioned in the name of deconstructing the ego, which of course is meant to be good for them. I was quite taken aback by the unconscious projection of the shadow by those who had taken over – many of whom were later humiliated themselves (hence the implicit reference to snakes and ladders). Anne is told that she has the negativity of lifetimes to deal with, that she is deceitful, manipulative and cowardly; then, with supreme irony, she is informed that she is 'completely unconscious of the true motivations of your vicious and vindictive mind.' This leads to a punishment in a 'correction facility' in Germany involving 14 hours a day of manual work as a way of crushing the spirit.

On another level, Anne has to deal with loss in terms of intimate relationships and difficult issues in prioritising time as a mother for her son. Tim later writes a book about his experience, and as a family they undertake an intense process of exploration and healing. Her intimate relationship at the time when she was in the community is subjected to enormous strain, even though it later survives and thrives. One point, she literally loses everything as her house is burgled by people pretending to be furniture removers! Indeed, the third part is entitled 'falling in all directions' as she goes deeper into the realisation of the redemptive role of suffering and enters into further despair. It looks like her long-term relationship is doomed as her lover abandons her for another woman - she alternates between rage and grief as she processes the perverse results of her efforts to create a better world, but her vulnerable heart opens further and her lover returns. The mystery of the human heart is that 'its capacity for love and its capacity for suffering are the same.' (p. 277)

The final chapters bring things together, the brightness of the light corresponding to the darkness of the shadow. Osho dies, and appears to her the next night. She reflects that she did her best to make love not war, but found that all love leads to some kind of war until a different love arrives. She realises that she has to live with her own darkness, or else someone else will have to suffer it for her and she will project it out onto others. This leads to the profound realisation that 'darkness is intrinsic to our dualistic existence where life is divided into 'good' and 'evil' and 'you' are not 'me', 'we' are not 'them'. I learned by falling, repeatedly into my own darkness.' (p. 293) However, 'our human darkness, in all its anguish and despair, is the inextricable soul mate of the love, freedom, truth, friendship and beauty I have also found.' (p. 294). As readers of her other book will know, the loss of her son Tim gave her a further intense initiation even beyond all the joy and suffering expressed in this book. At a time when the shadow is cast worldwide for us all to see, this book can help us realise that light can come out of our own darkness if we embrace it rather than project it onto others.