CONCLUSION

 

Your parents, God bless ’em, will take you as far as they can; your teachers will usher you as far as the institutions that employ them permit. But a mentor, well chosen, can guide you to the frontiers of your Self. Mentorship has been most successful in my life when I was simultaneously awakened to my need to change, willing to learn and there was an explicit and consensual method to pursue. Obvious examples from this book are as follows.

Chip Somers: I needed to get off drugs, he knew how to get off drugs using the 12 Step method. Or Chris Cleere, I wanted to learn Jiu Jitsu, he is a black belt in Jiu Jitsu from the Roger Gracie Academy. When you have the method and the master, your own willingness and surrender is all that is required for progress. More informal types of mentorship coalesce around friendship. Perhaps these less distinct examples are where there is no stated objective and there has been no overt request for help.

I would advise that in utilising this system and finding your own mentors, you look at your life and investigate where you would like to improve. Examine your existing friendships to see where there is the potential for greater learning. Who could you ask for further guidance in the areas where you feel you are deficient? Are you happy with your mental health? Your fitness? Your diet? Your marriage? 12 Step fellowships are an excellent entry point into a mentorship system and they are great for addressing most areas of emotional and spiritual deficiency, if you agree that most addictive behaviours are in some way compensatory.

In reviewing the mentors I have written about in this book, I demonstrate how you can replicate a wheel of guides, teachers and role models in your own life. Chip Somers, as I have said, mentored me out of chemical dependency, without which I would not have been able to even embark on a spiritual journey. I would’ve been trapped on an unconscious plain of circuitous self-harming.

As for Meredith, I never asked her to be a mentor but she is a person who so clearly operates on a spiritual frequency that even our earliest communications bore that timbre. She literally uses the I-Ching, an ancient fortune-telling system, not as part of her role as an acupuncturist but in her less formal but equally obvious guise as a wise woman.

Perhaps when we naturally migrate from the island of family, we unconsciously look out for tunes and codes that will nourish us. Perhaps somewhere in the infinity of our universe, in the limitlessness of our essential awakenedness, we have been each other’s children, sisters, mothers, a thousand times. Maybe we hear in their voices the echoes of these endlessly resonating connections. There are more types of family than we can read in blood.

Jimmy was a very conscious, deliberate choice as a mentor and functions in my life as a symbol for my own aspirant manhood: ‘I must be a father, a husband, a worker. I will have to face conflict. I will have to peel off the past and feel the rawness but move onward.’ Ours is an unsentimental connection and highly functional in my life. I would never ignore Jimmy’s counsel, never favour my own instinct above his. He offers experience rather than advice, and through conversation I deduce how his experience is applicable to my own circumstances. Because I asked Jimmy for help outright, our connection is as explicit and boundaried an example of mentorship as I can think of – like an apprenticeship.

Chris, on the other hand, is a teacher in a specific discipline and my relationship with him demonstrates how inner intention can elevate outer progress. Chris is not a ‘romantic’ or whimsical man, not one given to thinking about abstract ideas like mentorship, certainly not in grandiose or verbose terms. But through my attitude of total surrender and my openness to the potential life lessons learned in Jiu Jitsu, I have gained more from our relationship than I otherwise might have. Not that BJJ isn’t steeped in ritual and tradition that for a soul like me are easy to poeticise; we line up before classes and bow; we clap to signal the start of new exercises; we run in a circle, ostensibly to warm up but it’s basically a tribal dance; we all wear the same outfit. There’s even a colour-coded belt system that is important across all interactions – not just sparring. The more I think about it, the more I see how these customs create a bonded community ambience.

Then there is Bruce. He is nominally a therapist, but he came to me through Jimmy. We share a philosophy and a camaraderie that has meant the relationship, while still boundaried, has exceeded the expected therapeutic limitations.

Like Bruce, Manya was a deliberate appointment to help with mental health too, and is now especially valuable in my marriage, in that she counsels my wife and gives both of us invaluable insight into how we are affecting one another.

On the more spiritual plane, there is Amma, who is considered a realization of divinity on Earth, which sounds like the very epitome of grand religiosity unless I consider it practically: what would it be to let go of all selfishness? To relinquish, to actually relinquish, my lust and greed? Who would I be if I lived by the Maharishi’s blunt edict, ‘Don’t do what you know to be wrong, do what you know to be right’? Who would I be if every impulse to be kind, to say a kind word, to be loving was followed up? If I practised restraint when I knew that my words or thoughts or actions would hurt another? Would I become Christ? Or Amma or whatever prophet or avatar you admire? Is it possible? Is it less possible than what Gandhi achieved? Or what every grieving parent that chooses to go on with life achieves?

Why do we wait for extreme circumstances before reaching for extreme greatness? I heard ‘The world does not require everyone to believe in God for its salvation, just for the people who do believe to start acting like it.’ Can I become the man that God would have me be? What if I opened my heart to everyone, if I opened our home to the homeless, had the courage to outgrow my old program and reach into the unknown held only by the certainty of love. Well, for a start my wife would fucking kill me. She’s pretty keen not to move strangers in with our babies, so I’m safe from that spiritual experiment for now. But a mentor like Amma provides a light for what may lie beyond the, let’s face it, murky limitations of the modern, secular western life model.

During the heights of the garlanded Nuremberg, that rally of devotion on New Year’s Eve, I noted Amma’s admonishment of a keyboard player who was out of tune during the kirtan (a devotional song). She spoke to him assertively, not rudely, but it certainly wasn’t wishy-washy. There are standards I thought, particularly when it comes to devotion. There is form. There is room to communicate with others sternly. I suppose you can’t get hospitals and schools built on love alone, you need order, you need a plan, you need direction and we cannot flinch from discipline. After all, that is literally what is required of a disciple.

Whilst Amma seems to almost entirely inhabit an otherworldly realm, Radhanath Swami for me is a bridge to sainthood that I can conceive of crossing. Perhaps because I’ve now known him a long while, and I know he is from Chicago, and he speaks in the language of popular culture as well as the language of ancient India. He once said to my mother ‘I love you very much and I see you as family, would you rather I was your son or your brother?’ My mum, with her customary kindness said ‘I cannot imagine being a mother to anyone other than Russell, so you can be my brother.’

Swamiji as he is known visited us when we were staying in Ireland. He ambled around film sets and comedy clubs with the same bemused luminescence he displays whenever I drag him somewhere odd. I distinctly remember his holy horror when we were (for some mad reason) at a lesbian rollerball event in LA. ‘With your permission I would like to leave now’ he said gently. Along with some of his devotees he came to my caravan on set in County Wicklow. My dad was there too with his girlfriend, Sandra. We sat crammed into the space, maybe eleven of us – me in the outrageous costume of a baddie in a kids’ film. It went better than I expected in that it wasn’t totally mental. Radhanath Swami elegantly told stories from the Bhagavad Gita, about Krsna and Gujundra and all were absorbed. In part, I wondered how my volatile Dagenham dad with his no bullshit Del Boy intensity would take to this spiritual teacher. How would they find a common frequency? ‘They’re hardly gonna chat about West Ham,’ I thought. But inner inquiry of this type was a disservice to them both. Ron Brand, of course, is a hugely inquisitive and intelligent man and was fascinated by the mystic. As the meeting resolved, Swamiji approached my dad and said with pure sincerity ‘It is a great honour to meet you, you are a very beautiful man,’ and I saw in real time how love can reach through any veneer and touch the truth within. I saw how my dad’s rough carapace of sharp-elbowed hustle is what he uses to protect the child that lives in him, how love and kindness are the only vehicles that can cross the eerie silence between us and make real connections occur.

After a life of rejecting who I am and where I am from in order to survive and grow, I now see that I was born with everything I need. My mum with her cancer and car-crash vanquishing spirit and limitless love, and my dad – an intelligent, funny, tough and gentle working-class man – have been revealed to be the perfect parents for the man I have become. Like anyone on a quest – and we are all on a quest whether we accept it or not – I had to reject where I came from to become who I am, but with the neat efficiency that makes the genius of Campbell, Jung and Nietzsche bite, it is to home that I must return.

My mentors have helped to show me who I am, to accept who I am. A mentor baptises the child and invites the adult. A mentor teaches and demonstrates. If you feel that we live in a time that is defined by mean ugliness and ugly meaninglessness, then invite beauty and power into your life. Become willing to be taught, to connect to the invisible thread that runs between us all and that runs throughout all time, binding the empty space and filling it with love.