that somehow, for me, are still embedded within the constitution of the new
housing estate, shopping centre and parking lot that replaced them. Where now is
the unrestored house at 26 Tudor Street and also the place of the uneven muddy
earth and the horse pads, the creek with the tadpoles? Will my eventual death not
only be the extinction of my physical self but the extinction also of those very real
places in my life, as I knew them, as they existed?
1.2 Personal Context
My research work for the Master of Letters and Master of Arts degrees was
based on my interest in the theories of Carl Jung, Western mystical and religious
thought (Meister Eckhart, Teilhard de Chardin, Martin Buber, Bede Griffiths),
Eastern mystical thought (Sufism, Taoism), Buddhism (especially Tibetan Tantra and
Bardo states) and Hebrew mysticism (Kabbalah) among other things.
I have always been intrigued by mystical and spiritual philosophies and my
quest to understand them began at an early age with an intense awareness of the
God of the Abrahamic tradition. Under the influence of my highly intuitive Jewish
mother, my interest focused on the paranormal and alternative spiritual traditions.
The journey along that path became more focused when one day in the City of
Sydney Public Library, then located in what is now the renovated and upmarket, but
then dilapidated, Queen Victoria Building, I found a copy of Carl Jung’s Aion: The
Phenomenology of the Self. The stimulating, sometimes difficult, contemplation of
Jung’s ideas, studied both formally and informally, together with a love of poetry
and literature and a strong inclination to the religious and the spiritual, has
influenced me and shaped my perspective on life in a decidedly particular way. It
has certainly rent several of the many veils that had obscured my awareness of, for
want of a better word, God. I n the early 1990’s I joined the Australian
Transpersonal Association where I met serious metaphysical thinkers, often as
visiting lecturers, such as Charles Birch, the late John Mack, then Professor of
Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, Stanlislaus Grof, and Stephen and Robin
Larsen of the Joseph Campbell Foundation.
The most significant aspects of my life are those that have always been
related to, or in some way comprehensible in terms of literature, the spiritual or
transcendent, and place. I ndeed, sometimes I tremble when I consider the
complex effect these elements have exerted on my life; when I remember the