While I was becoming more deeply involved in the Sydney ashram — attending programs several times a week and finding my place through drumming — I was still living the life of an ordinary Australian kid.

Around the age of ten I changed schools, moving to Barker College, the same Anglican boys’ school my older brothers had attended. To gain admission I had to be baptised. I went through the ceremony with my parents, but to me it felt like little more than a necessary formality.

Starting at a new school in Grade 6 brought its challenges. I was polite and got along with most people, but I never really felt like I fitted in. I struggled badly with Maths and would often play up in those classes. What I loved were History, English, and Geography — anything that involved stories, ideas, and the bigger picture.

Once a week our grade attended chapel. While the chaplain gave his sermon, I would quietly pull out the Bibles stored in the pew in front of me and read. During those services I made my way through much of the New Testament and parts of the Old.

With the teachings from Siddha Yoga informing my understanding of Christianity, I saw Jesus as most Hindus do, as an enlightened spiritual master trying to awaken others to their own divine potential. Christians say that Jesus is the son of God, which fits in nicely with the Hindu idea of avatars of God, incarnations of the Divine into this world to provide a spiritual rescue of humanity from evil forces. There have been many such avatars, such as Rama and Krishna, and adding Jesus and Buddha to the list is something many Hindus can do without feeling any conflict.

My father’s distrust of the church influenced my thoughts on the matter as well. He had the combination of personal dislike or organised Christianity, and academic study of the subject. He had various books on the subject of the early church. One of these was called The Pasover Plot, which argued that the resurrection of Jesus was staged by Jesus and his disciples. Around this time I also read one of my father’s books about Emperor Constantine and how he had used Christianity as a political tool to unify the Roman Empire, while he personally worshipped Sol Invictus, the Sun God. The story of the Council of Nicaea and the suppression of alternative voices left a sour taste in my mouth.

At home, my mother was going through a powerful spiritual awakening. After her profound experiences in Siddha Yoga, she began having intense kundalini movements and constantly heard the sounds of conch shells and Hindu ritual music — sometimes to the point of physical pain. When she asked the swamis for guidance, they offered little real help, simply telling her it was a good sign and that she was hearing the nadis. Their lack of understanding left her searching for deeper answers.

This search led my parents to join the Adyar Theosophical Library in Sydney. Located behind one of the central stgreets in Sydney, it had a glass door entrance where you had to be let in. Then catch the elevator up to the third floor. The doors of the elevator opened to a huge spiritual library. Shelves from floor to ceiling housed probably the biggest collection of spiritual, occult and esoteric books in Australia. We began going there quite frequently as a family.

This library opened up an entire new world. I familiarised myself with all the different subject areas and borrowed books from many of these. I discovered the Nag Hammadi Library and Gnostic texts that emphasised gnosis — direct inner knowing. I also read Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism and Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy. These books showed me that beneath the surface of all religions lay a common core of direct inner spiritual experience. This was the beginning of a clear and lasting pattern in my life: deep scepticism toward institutional religion paired with a powerful drive to seek out hidden knowledge and direct mystical experience.

I borrowed books on many weird and wonderful esoteric topics ranging from Lucid Dreaming to colour theory. A book my parents and I found fascinating was called The Boy Who Saw True, which was the innocent diary entries of a boy who had second sight, and wrote about the different things he saw, often in the energy bodies of people he interacted with. For a long time he thought it was normal, before finding out it was something rare.

It was there that my mother found books that spoke to her experiences, especially The Interior Castle by St. Teresa of Ávila and The Chasm of Fire by Irina Tweedie. She got a lot of solace from such books which outlined the spiritual challenges faced by these women on their spiritual journeys. She felt such a close connection to St. Theresa that she thought she may have been a member of her Carmelite order of nuns in a past life.