James Alan Conlan

Born into rural Ireland, poetry was my first expression of love while living in the simplicity of nature. Reaching adolescence in the 1960s, I enjoyed the speed of dancing and exploring the mysteries abounding. During those times the burning question 'What is the purpose of life' sporadically played on my mind.

In my late teens, I spent two years studying economics in Gaelic at University College Galway. For the boy left home, it was new and exciting. But it wasn't for me. A metaphysical message in a Gaelic poem sparked my early departure, energizing me to move on from a mindset at that time unwilling to evolve in the dawning of unprecedented change.

Facing raw adolescence, I worked in London as a laborer digging tunnels on the Victoria line and steel fixing on high rise buildings. This was an important interlude for working off my excess energies. When the time was right, I took up a banking position in the City of London. There, I gained many insights into the subtle play of a British Empire still alive and manipulatively well on the international stage of financial control. The training was rewarding, but it wasn't my purpose. One particular morning on the steps of The Royal Exchange, the moment arrived when it all seemed clear. Their world was not my journey and I left.

I returned to Ireland, partook in the building of the National Institute for Higher Education (now Limerick University) after which I enrolled as a mature student in the fields of sociology, political science and economics. Career changes followed, from previous building, banking and logistics to the newly directed financial sector based on the petrodollar. Believing what I was told and sold, I still had a lot to learn.

The initial question remained. I found myself clashing with fundamentalists, practical philosophers and a spiritual master claiming to know the unknown. Then, on a late afternoon after attending one of his seminars in Australia, I walked alone into a rainforest where something, I can only describe as coming from deep inner space, imploded within me. Had I found the answer? I don't know, but it had a profound impact that changed my direction completely.

All I'd understood and believed as one of the many, I now saw to be illusion. It was a sudden and shattering awakening. I realized the surrender of self means letting everything go, even one's belief in making things better. This was my entry to the long dark night of the soul.

In the 1990s I completed a postgraduate course in Conflict Resolution and obtained a teaching diploma that opened the way for travel. Since then, I've published books on the evolution of consciousness, as discovered from my own journey, and worked as a teacher in Europe, England, Middle East and Africa.

The central message of all my works/teachings echoes the one divine temple of God in existence is love, served rightly, all else follows.