It is hard to express the profound experience to be found in meditation without sounding oily and unctuous.

I continue to write very largely so as to keep a diary, rather to attract an audience with all the vanity that that entails. I find it useful to look back over the five years odd I have been keeping this personal record, to see what progress if any I may have made on my road to nowhere. Or somewhere.

Let me be clear – I do not wear a beatific smile. I do not seek to preach, to the unwashed or otherwise. I simply seek my own course, pursue it. To escape from a lifetime of impenetrable blackness. To discover meaning in an apparently aimless universe.

If there is a god, Christian or otherwise, then as creator he must bear sole responsibility for clearing up the ghastly mess he has made. I don’t intend to help him.

If on the other hand, reality is something of an entirely different and uncreated nature, as seems likely, it is still every man for himself anyway. Or woman, child, creature.

And yet if what I write, if the tales of my endless journey be of help to some, then I am glad of that. I do not wish ill, nor am I insensitive to the stupefying suffering on this earthly dystopia or elsewhere. My writing is the only contribution I can usefully make, read or otherwise.

Great works have in any case never led to universal peace and happiness. Simply to further inequality and injustice.

If there is a way out, it is to be found not through conversion to some man made dogma or foolish cult. But through personal “enlightenment”.

And lest that word sounds fawning and oleaginous, may I hasten to add I merely intend to convey the process of becoming “unblinkered”. In a psychological sense. In a rational sense. To become able to exercise reason, wisdom and levelheadedness. To see reality as it is.

Enough of the apologies then, although I do believe they are important to my purpose. To my self exploration. To my journey. To convey what it is I seek and that that I do not.

I wish for peace. It is that simple. And if there can be peace for all, so much the better. My belief is that inner peace will not of itself be found through science or religious dogma.

Peace, at least in my own quest, has only begun to emerge through letting go. By looking within. By abandoning pretence. By looking at the futility of what most strive for, and turning in the opposite direction.

Perhaps for others, the meaning of reality, if only some personal rather than universal reality, will be made clear in other ways.

In obeisance to a deity perhaps. In a life of ascetic abstinence.

But peace is certainly unlikely to be discovered in hedonism or the wielding of power. In excess or greed or violence. But who knows, perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps the violent Halls of Valhalla give comfort and certainty to some. Maybe there are those who find truth in pure violence and unspeakable cruelty. In which case, evil may be said to exist after all and the universe is not an inert and blank canvas.

That is not my belief however. Peace is to be found elsewhere entirely and I have found no more practical route than quiet meditation.

For many years my meditation was “unguided” and haphazard. Sitting in quiet contemplation on a mountain top or a remote beach. Listening to the sound of the wind or the murmuration of the waves on a remote beach.

It was a dead end. A pleasant and thoughtful pursuit and yet not one which led me to peace. The abyss remained close by, the darkness ever ready to consume and convert an already tortured soul into something ever more terrified, desperate and unhinged. To stand at the edge of the crevasse, at the very gates of Hades, is not an experience to be savoured. Nor is it by any means simple to stand back, to retreat from that dread precipice and search for kinder climes.

We may have advanced from the days of Galen, but we are still so very far from understanding the human mind and body. While some may be blessed with quietude and concord at birth, others are forced to travel a harsh and uncertain road beset by uncertainty and doubt. Perhaps none are granted peace from birth – certainly none are spared the vicissitudes of this often grim existence.

Medicine can not grant peace, although some benefit to an extent from the numbing effect of strong and poorly researched chemicals, produced by big pharma, largely for their own benefit. The Sackler family and Purdue Pharma come to mind.

Many seek relief and a false peace in alcohol or opium, cocaine or ecstasy. A sure road to damnation as I for one can testify.

True peace comes from a different direction entirely. A change of lifestyle, the renunciation of harmful pursuits and substances, the gradual accumulation of wisdom. And yet in my own case, none of this ever tipped the balance.

My daily meditation began to take a very different form. Guided and directed with the express purpose of becoming who or perhaps what I wanted to become. By choosing goals and making them into a mantra. By guiding myself towards a different landscape, a different reality.

And that different reality has appeared and continues to change and morph day by day. Not every throw wins a coconut, but most certainly do. Most sessions build upon the last and the process is cumulative, becoming stronger every day. It has reached the stage where often a mood can be produced by simply willing it. Imagine it, declare its reality and so it becomes.

And there is strangeness, of that there is no doubt. An increasing awareness that a different world is there to be had; and I take it. Nothing dramatic, just echoes and glimpses of better things. And pleasure. And peace. Strong images in the mind, feelings, and not voices exactly but a feeling of being in contact with something other.

I concede that I am given to things “arty”, to beauty and music and feelings. But this is something different, visceral and real.

There will be those that say it is “mere” chemicals and indeed it may be that meditation produces dopamine or serotonin. As well as slower brain waves. But exactly the same may be said of “normal” day to day existence. Anger, greed indeed any emotion has a chemical signature and yet they are none the less real for all of that.

Meditation seems to be giving me the ability to experience life in a dramatically different way, to the extent that it feels very much like walking through William Blake’s Doors of Perception.

There may be an alternate reality – one in which we are living anyway but can not see. One which takes practice and a certain mindset to access.

That, in any event, is my conclusion so far.

A conclusion with which I am most satisfied and for which I am most grateful.

As I continue on my idiosyncratic and unconventional path, as I progress along the road less travelled, I am finding at last a quiet pleasure in my uneventful existence.

Illustration: William Blake – from the Song of Los