Tony Butcher

I was in my final tern at teacher training college, preparing for the final exams. After bashing the books for a couple of hours, I decided to have a break and go for a short walk in Regents Park. I had no idea that I would learn more about life there, than can ever gained from books.

I hadn’t gone far when I became immersed in tranquility. In addition I had the sensation of expanding and could feel everything around me as part of myself. There was a tree about 50 yards away that seemed to be part of my right arm and I could feel the coolness of the grass under my feet even though I was wearing shoes. Much later I learned that this was an experience of Unity experience.

I had never experienced such inner happiness and freedom in my life before and I was naturally keen to repeat it The problem was that I had never heard any reference of such a wonderful phenomenon in my life before and there was certainly no trace of it in the Psychology books we were studying.

What I had chanced upon was the true goal of life - in fact what we are all here to achieve - but what seems to have been forgotten. This kind of inner joy cannot be bought. It can only be earned by purifying our central nervous system by regular experiences of a fourth state of consciousness that underlies the waking, dreaming and deep sleep states’, called the Turiya state or transcendental consciousness.

Eventually, I chanced to come across Transcendental Meditation. I took to it immediately. Whilst it did not repeat the experience in the park it certainly added a dimension that had been missing. Life with my wife and three children became happier and settled and I certainly benefited from the novel ideas for teaching and poetic inspirations that seemed to come from out of the air.

One afternoon in the summer term of 1973, I was helping a fourteen year old boy overcome his reading difficulties, when I suddenly had a vision which revealed the true meaning of Fairy Stories. Originally they were composed for initiates at a much earlier period of time, when the human intellect was more developed. Time, like the seasons of the year comes in cycles. There is a golden period when knowledge is full and without problems, followed by a silver age when it goes down to 75%; a copper age when the intellect is reduced to 50% and finally an iron age when it is reduced to only 25%.

We came out of the latter Iron age and into the copper age in about 1700AD. This accounts for the rapid expansion of trade and technology. but also continued our tendency to look outside of ourselves - rather than going within - for the answer to the big questions in life.

For over a century great teachers have been coming from India to the West to help us raise our game and find the true purpose for our existence. It seems that if a sufficient minority take to this path it is possible to over-ride the long period of time and bring in a new golden age.

Maharishi is part of this tradition. He always maintained that it was possible to live a normal family life, follow a career and also achieve the true goal of life by ascending the stepping stones of higher states of consciousness. Cinderella’s three visits to the ball symbolised these.

In the mid 70s, news was coming out that Maharishi had successfully incorporated the Yoga sutras of Patanjali to produce the TM Sidhi programme, which speeded up the process of purification. I was keen to go for that and found it was well worth getting up early for.

I really enjoyed my long teaching career, which included twelve years working with pupils with Behaviour Difficulties - seven of which were as a headmaster. This type of work was a massive challenge. It didn’t take long to find out that the methods they were employing at such schools don’t work. One morning I managed to talk the head of round to allow me to introduce the pupils to TM.

My friend Richard, he deputy head liaised with the Nuffield Foundation for Educational Research to advise him which tests the employ before the pupils learnt TM. We aimed to repeat them after six months and then a year later. They were very interested in the scheme and said if it was successful, they would like to use ours as a pilot study and run a much larger one.

Ours was amazingly successful. It changed the school from being a rough-house, characterised by fights, bullying and widespread vandalism, to a pleasant orderly school in a very short time. However, the LEA took fright and didn’t fancy being out-on-a limb and closed down the experiment once they found out, even though it had the backing of the NFER.

When I was appointed as a headmaster, the LEA made it clear that no pupils were allowed to meditate. Maharishi always said that it takes only 1% of the molecules of water to bring about a phase transition that would turn it all the ice. The same ratio held to transform water to steam.

It was about that time when research upholding Maharishi’s prediction, that it took no more than 1% to bring about a whole range of positive trends in an environment or a society. Heartened by this, I had a meeting with my young staff, and told them how learning TM would benefit them and also transform the atmosphere of the school, and make it far more pleasant to work in.

Fortunately, most of them learned. This changed the entire feel of the school from a battleground to a quiet, orderly and relaxed environment, producing remarkable results - 70% of the pupils were successfully returned to mainstream education after a period of using the remedial programmes we devised.

Once again the local authority failed to see the positive side of these results. I didn’t want to waste my time sitting back and waiting for retirement to come so I left teaching for five years to market one of the schemes I had devised. I called it Flying Start to Basis Literacy. It had some good results judging by the letters I received from quite a few teachers, who had introduced it to their schools. One notable was an article in a local newspaper with the headline: ‘Word Blind Grant Goes Top of the Class. His teacher sent me the press cutting with a personal letter saying that Grant’s success was all down to my cassette scheme.

By that time my friend Richard had become the headmaster of a boarding school. He had also written a popular set of remedial readers about a young footballer. He produced another set of four books using the same character for me to sell. One day he phoned to ask if I could do him a favour by helping him out with a bit of Supply Teaching, as some of his staff were off ill and another was on a course. Once I was back in the classroom, it didn’t take long for me to see how much I missed teaching. Soon after I phoned up the LEA and got more work with them. It wasn’t long before I went back into the classroom full time.

My last nine years in teaching were very happy because the school had an international feel about it because the majority of the pupils came from other countries.

Soon after retiring I received an inner prompt to go to India. On my first day in Allahabad two incidents occurred which later confirmed that I had achieved the state of Cosmic Consciousness and had broken free of the cycle of births and deaths.

The next day I had my first experience of the goddess Durga, who has been my inner guide ever since. I have done a long but joyful puja to her every morning since 2001 and have acted as both her servant and healing instrument ever since.

I finally put together the knowledge I had gained in a vision in 1973 and had ‘Yoga Consciousness in the Ancient Mystery Religions’ published in 2007. This was followed by ‘A Walk in the Park’ and ‘A Trip Beyond Imagination in November 2014. There is also a fourth on the way called ‘The Life of a London Yogi’.