How many times over the years had he been seduced by the promise of yet another cure, he wondered. Would Mesmerism prove any more effective than any of the other thus far useless approaches which promised salvation.

Psychedelics they had cried. The miracle cure for all ailments of the soul.

Not so for his soul, it seemed. Perhaps the wounds were too deep, too old.

Many joined the great and ultimately useless dance to Widdicombe Fair, in search of the sacred mushroom and the great and the good trampled over Uncle Tom Cobley and All to get there.

Endless glowing articles in publications which ought to have known better. Hyperbole from the best research facilities in the land. And of course the capitalists hard on their tail. Billions raised. Psychedelic treatment centers everywhere, some charging enormous sums of money for this pipe dream. A course in ketamine therapy for the bargain price of £6,000.

Those who dared or could afford it, mostly ended up disappointed. Tipped back into blackness when the clinical trials were over and the overly-optimistic papers published.

Heal thyself said Jesus, cura te ipsum. Know thyself, said the ancient Greeks and perhaps, he thought, it was time to heed such messages. Perhaps he was on his own, the magic potion he sought a mere conjurer’s illusion, an alchemist’s failed experiment.

And so he turned to meditation. A retreat into silence. After all, the wise men from the East claimed they knew of a way out from suffering for those who would listen. And he sat. And he sat. Sometimes he would wake a couple of hours later and found he had nodded off. Occasionally he would have lucid waking dreams.

But dawn was never seen. Cracks of light occasionally appeared in the jet blackness of his moods; but it remained night and very, very dark. During such endless absence of joy, the overwhelming desire is to exit. To take that final, irreversible step can seem tempting indeed when one has lived a long life, mostly in deep darkness.

Abstaining for a while from thoughts of what he macabrely termed the “final solution”, he took up again, after a long absence, with a latter day disciple of Franz Messmer.

A kindly, intelligent and earnest practitioner, he thought of himself as a priest in secular clothing. For 40 years he had sought to cure souls by means of self persuasion no less. Brought up a Catholic in a rough urban area, he had fought his way to the top against considerable odds and became a healer.

It is called hypnosis these days and it is said that all hypnosis is self hypnosis. And so this priest would teach, to all who would listen, the art of self hypnosis. A self imposed consent state, where the giving of repeated suggestion is said to be capable of over-writing the destructive scripts which become entrenched in the minds of the wretched.

Much to his surprise, he found rapid descent into trance a relatively easy achievement. And the deepening of that trance equally feasible. He found himself in a state similar to that which would usually have taken a least an hour of unguided meditation.

The uninitiated would doubtless scoff at such an endeavor, but those who persevere and allow themselves to believe and want such states, will find them readily obtainable.

And then comes the use of imagery and suggestion, the imagining (if you like) of the way you would like your life to be. A symbolic word and a meaningful image brings into the mind, during these highly suggestable states, aims and wishes carefully considered and drafted in states of normal waking consciousness.

Ever a seeker at the doors of perception, long a petitioner begging entrance to other worlds, he found the process altogether satisfactory. While in such states at least, the sun rose and the darkness receded. Sometimes he would find himself in his own past, in a long forgotten room of his childhood. At other times a more fanciful scene would appear – dreams perhaps of strange lands of the past or the future. Occasionally, existence itself seemed to disappear until, sometime later, consciousness would be regained and he would feel puzzled at his apparent absence.

And so where did he find himself weeks later? In darkness still, or some better lit land. He had ever sought and was still seeking. God perhaps. Some realm where the cruel banalities of human existence had no place. Where original sin had never happened and where fear and want were unheard of.

With profound gratitude he was aware of the pink glow of rosy fingered dawn. But night follows day in the never ending cycles of the physical world. Need the mind also be ruled by such eternal, destructive cycles he wondered. He hoped that such need not be the case.