Treasure: A Hero's Journey

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Paperback ISBN: 979-8-88692-210-3

eBook ISBN: 979-8-88692-211-0

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TO THE MEMORY

OF ALL THE CHILDREN OF GAZA

killed, maimed, mutilated, burned, injured,

and starved since October 7th 2023.

Absolutely nothing in life is achieved in isolation. For this reason not a single part of my odyssey could have been lived out, and then written about, without the love and support of my parents.

With incalculable love and gratitude to my late beloved father

TOM WILLIAMS

(1925 – 2015)

and my beloved mother

ZOYA MENSHIKOVA WILLIAMS

Also, the presence of some more than incredibly special people was indispensable. They allowed this odyssey to happen when Fate brought them into my life. Each has shown me his/her greatness.

FOR PAULO COELHO

who dared to dream.

MY SOUL MATE AND TREASURE J.

my brave and irreplaceable soul sister Angela W.

my magnificent, life-loving soul sister Sila Escribano.

my late beloved friend Will.

Never forgotten, dear dreamer brother.

and my ‘Espana Magica’.

IN LOVING MEMORY

of the late

Sir Laurens van der Post

who inspired me to believe in my inner light, and so dare

to go it alone within the inner depths of my being.

Because what follows is a true story, I have changed many of the names of people and places to protect their privacy.

However, the following places and individuals

retain their original identities:

London, The Royal Dorchester Hotel London, Madrid, Paris,

the glass pyramids of the Louvre Museum,

Place de la République,

Hotel de Nemours, Musee d’Orsay, and the Tuileries gardens in Paris,

Granada, La Iglesia Santo Tomás de Villanueva,

Cafeteria Siglo 21, Malaga, Calle Puerta del Mar, Avenida de la Aurora,

Santiago de Compostela, and The Hague.

Karen, Mayka, Susana, Marika, Harriet, Salvador, J, Sophie, Cecilia,

Marta, Penny, Sila, Connie, Rosa, Marisela, Chris Peter, Fatima, Brian Weiss M.D,

Bernie Siegel M.D, Paulo Coelho and Alejandro Jodorowsky

PAULO COELHO AND KAREN WILLIAMS IN

SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA, JUNE 2008

"But Oprah, you want to know, (pause)

Did I write The Alchemist? (Pause)

I’m not sure,

I’m sure that I was good instrument"

***

A segment of Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Paulo Coelho

on her Supersoul Sunday Series, as seen on Youtube.

Uploaded in 2014.

Author’s Note

The universe is not trying to break you, my dear, it’s trying to find a way to wake you up, so that you will see what is real and worth fighting for.

SOURCE UNKNOWN.

TREASURE: A Hero’s Journey is a new version of my 2019 book TREASURE: A Soul Journey with The Invisible (New Edition III), and like the previous book tells the TRUE STORY of how Paulo Coelho‘s iconic fable THE ALCHEMIST happened to me in real life, and how because of that I discovered:

THE TRUE MEANING

of Paulo’s famous tale.

My motive for bringing out this new version of TREASURE is because in 2020, a year after my odyssey had ended, I experienced several unexpected ‘aha’ moments, or epiphanies, which gave me a much deeper and clearer understanding of what I had gone through. Eventually I realized that these new insights would have to be incorporated into a revised version of the book if my story were to make complete sense. And so, dear friend, here you have those vital additions in this final edition of TREASURE.

For more than three decades the world has only known ONE HALF OF THE STORY OF THE ALCHEMIST; the tale of ONE HERO – a young, Andalusian shepherd boy called Santiago – who goes in search of an enigmatic treasure. However, the truth is that Paulo Coelho’s fable is in actual fact the story of:

TWO HEROES.

It is the tale of two dreamers, two dreams and two treasures.

Santiago would never have been able to find his treasure in The Alchemist without having met his ‘OTHER HALF’:

‘THE OTHER HERO’

hidden inside this much-loved allegory.

Over the years The Alchemist has acquired a truly iconic status since its original publication in 1988, and yet no one really knows the TRUE MEANING of the story. Study guides on the internet profess to help students in their analysis of the fable, and yet they never touch on its CORE MEANING.

However, unlike the millions who have read and loved Paulo’s allegory, I started with a distinct advantage in that, after embarking on a spiritual odyssey whilst living in southern Spain, I discovered that one of the fable’s emblematic sites – an old abandoned ruin – stood on a hill just a few minutes walk away from my parents’ villa in the Andalusian countryside. That discovery opened up a hitherto invisible reality for me which eventually allowed me to decipher the hidden subtext of the story, and thus identify the fable’s true meaning.

This revelation may be something new to you, dear friend, or perhaps even something you may find hard to believe. However, within these pages I will be able to offer you that true meaning, and also evidence that there really are TWO HEROES, and TWO TREASURES in Paulo’s book. I will also be able to show you how, when the true meaning of The Alchemist is known, it then allows us to understand the real path taken by the shepherd boy Santiago, and how that path was, in part, one in which he went in search of his own wholeness. As the well-known saying goes:

TWO HALVES MAKE A WHOLE

Your willingness to believe what I have just said may depend on whether you operate as a rationalist or an intuitive; or as a cynic or a dreamer? Do you allow for the improbable, or even downright mysterious to be an integral part of your life – even if you have no way of explaining how it happens? To examine this question, just for a brief moment let us look at some statistical facts.

As of this year 2024 there are more than eight billion people on our planet, and the chances of winning a Euro Million jackpot are currently 1:140 million. Nevertheless, despite all of these huge, and almost unimaginable numbers, day-in-and-day-out people’s lives seem to DEFY THE ODDS. They find true love, hit the jackpot, get struck by lighting, recover from incurable diseases, become one more statistic in the numbers of people killed in air traffic accidents, die in bringing a new life into the world, fulfill a life-long ambition, become victims of terrorist attacks, or perhaps are saved to live another day by the seemingly ‘angelic intervention’ of a complete stranger.

To these facts we can try to apply logic, or alternatively a questioning perspective of wonder, and wonder is definitely my preferred option! It is that wonder, and sometimes just plain astonishment I feel when I look back on what unfolded for me as The Alchemist started to happen to me in real life.

***

In 1987 Paulo Coelho sat down and wrote his famous fable in the space of two weeks, and then went on to publish it in 1988. In 2014, in an interview with Oprah Winfrey for her Supersoul Sunday Series, Paulo unexpectedly took the interview in a surprising direction when he asked Oprah the following question:

"But, you want to know Oprah,..........

Did I write The Alchemist?"

After a momentary pause, Paulo then answered his own question:

"I’m not sure……..

I’m sure that I was a good instrument."

Serendipitously, two years after the appearance of this interview on Youtube, I sat in front of my computer screen in 2016 and suddenly came across this segment and quite literally found myself jumping for joy! Paulo’s words were the most WONDERFUL vindication of what I had always known, but had never heard him confess.

I had been contacting Paulo for years via emails and letters, and had even seen him twice face-to-face, to tell him that he had in fact CHANNELED his fable from an invisible realm, and that what he had written had been a psychic prediction of what had happened to me in real life! However, even though Paulo champions the mysterious and miraculous in his books, when I turned up in his life my message met with total rejection.

By 2004, when I first saw Paulo in person, he had already become so dizzyingly famous around the world that he had found himself trapped by that fame. Unable to risk stepping out of it in order to acknowledge what I had to share with him, he had resorted instead to ignoring me for many years, and then took refuge in a ‘quasi-confession’ of the truth in his interview with Oprah in 2014. He never used the word CHANNELED in front of her – something with which he is more than familiar – but rather decided to opt for an extremely disingenuous explanation of how The Alchemist came into being.

So, dear friend, here in these pages, you will find what a famous and good man could not bring himself to say or share, but before I begin my testimony I wish to give you concrete evidence of what I mean by the illogically mysterious and miraculous nature of life.

***

My spiritual odyssey was only made possible because one day I decided to take A LEAP OF FAITH and believe that what I call the ‘language’ of coincidences, serendipity, manifestations and synchronicity is REAL, and not the product of the wild imaginings of our sometimes gullible and impressionable minds. As an example of this, I want to recount to you something quite extraordinary which happened to me in the spring of 2019.

A few days before making a trip up to London, a close friend asked me to be with him on that journey because he wanted to visit his parents’ grave, and he needed my emotional support. He hadn’t been there for nearly twenty years, and felt he needed to pay his respects to his mother and father, and also find closure on this part of his life.

After a two hour bus ride to London we eventually arrived at the cemetery and walked towards the crematorium. We entered the building by a side door, and once inside found ourselves in a chapel-like area where the walls were covered in plaques bearing the names of people who had been cremated there.

My friend and I began to search for a plaque with his cousin’s name on it as this young man had been cremated in the cemetery many decades earlier at the age of 21. We searched long and hard, but couldn’t find any plaque with Tony’s name on it, and so concluded that it had probably been removed if it hadn’t been maintained with regular payments by the family.

Before we left the chapel, I approached a sand tray in which there were some burning candles; the type known as tea lights, and which are encased in aluminium holders. As I did so, I noticed a sign telling me that it was only permitted to light two candles per person. I picked up a candle from a tray below the sand tray, and decided to light it in honor and remembrance of my father Tom who had passed over in 2015. For the second candle I briefly thought of my mother, but then remembered that the candles were for the dead and not the living.

Suddenly, my aunt Betty, my father’s youngest sister, popped into my head. She had died about 9 years earlier, and I recalled that I hadn’t truly honored her passing in any way. Feeling guilty about this, I now saw that I had an opportunity to make amends, and so I lit the second candle for her. I placed Betty’s candle right next to my father Tom’s candle in the sand tray, and then made sure that the aluminum sides of both candle holders were touching each other.

Childish, or simply downright illogical as my behavior might have seemed to an outside observer, I decided to ignore my rational mind, and instead told myself that this act would be symbolic of my aunt and father being together again in Heaven, and being able to talk and interact with each other. I even remember silently saying the words TOGETHER AGAIN inside my head as I checked to see if the aluminum holders encasing the candles were actually touching each other.

***

Fast forward half an hour, and my friend and I returned to the chapel after having visited his mother and father’s grave because he too wanted to light two candles for his parents. After placing his candles in the sand tray, I told my friend that we needed to break the rule about only lighting two candles per person because we couldn’t possibly leave without lighting a candle for his cousin Tony.

My friend did this, and then we decided to make one last vain attempt to see if we could find Tony’s plaque on any of the walls of the chapel. Whilst my friend scanned a wall, I told him that I had already checked the adjacent wall half an hour earlier, and would be moving around the corner to scan another wall which we had missed.

I did just that, turning the corner and finding myself looking at a wall with only about 5 plaques on it, rather than the usual 20 or 30 which were on each of the other walls. In a way, the lack of plaques on the wall made it stand out and difficult to ignore. And as I stared at the large empty spaces between the plaques, that was when I saw something utterly astonishing, and found myself instantly rendered completely and utterly speechless! Right in front of me at eye level I saw a plaque which defied belief. It said the following:

TOGETHER AGAIN TOM AND BETTY.

Welcome, dear friend, to the magical

and mysterious world of

SPIRIT AND THE INVISIBLE!

***

The miracles we seek, as you can now vouch for by looking at the photo above this paragraph, are right before our very eyes in our ordinary and everyday lives. But the question is who amongst us is willing TO BELIEVE and also OPEN THOSE EYES?

At the moment it seems that not many people want to do so, and there is a very simple reason for this. It is that instinctively all of us know, far beyond our logical minds, that there is always a price to be paid for Truth, Love and Freedom. We may not be able to consciously articulate this knowing, but it is something we sense and feel in the deepest part of our souls.

The price I am talking about, and which engenders so much fear in all of us involves:

DEATH

sometimes real physical death, but more often than not the death of the ego self – our little selves –clinging to the wreckage of a ship rapidly sinking into the mud of present and past falsehoods.

Unknowingly I decided to pay that price when I embarked on my incredible spiritual odyssey, and to this day I still do. Pain is usually part of that process, however I can honestly say that in the end the reward of SPIRIT always makes up for that pain – Love always shows up.

The challenge of this book is whether or not you might be willing to entertain the possibility of paying the price of confronting your own ego-self by venturing into my testimony. To fully participate in my story and believe it, you will need to engage with your own strong inner feelings, and at times be prepared to ‘let go’ of the wreck of the old, trusting that somewhere inside the very depths of your soul the invisible is telling you that there is ANOTHER, FAR GREATER REALITY waiting to be discovered.

In the pages of TREASURE you will take what is known as THE HERO’S JOURNEY, perhaps suffering with me as you confront your own fears, but certainly going to places you have never been to before. And, in the process, if you manage to stay the course, you will discover, just as I did, THE TRUE MEANING of The Alchemist, and also the true nature of the treasure Paulo Coelho wrote about.

Not only that, but you will also come to know, without a shadow of doubt in your heart, that there is a deep connection between each and everyone of us – a sacred connection – which constantly manifests in our daily lives, pointing to a magical and immutable Reality and Truth. That Truth, put quite simply is that:

WE ARE ALL ONE.

ONE HEART, ONE SOUL, AND ONE SPIRIT BECAUSE

WE ARE ALL EACH OTHER’S HALVES.

Paulo Coelho’s ‘hero’ Santiago jumped headlong into the challenge of finding ‘his other half’, without any conscious awareness that this was what he was actually doing. Seven years after the publication of The Alchemist, but with no knowledge of the existence of the book, I did the very same thing in real life. And just like Paulo’s ‘hero’ I also began my ‘adventure’ with no conscious awareness of what I had embarked on. Each of us risked everything because our hunger and need for authenticity and something we could recognise as REAL was overwhelming. Would you be willing to do the same, my friend? I really hope so, otherwise I wouldn’t have written this book.

The great advantage of taking that LEAP OF FAITH into this journey by continuing to read my testimony is that I have already ‘cleared the path’ in front of you. I will guide you towards that search for ‘your other half’, and I can guarantee that you will find it. Your final reward will be your birthright, and the certainty of knowing that you have found THE REAL YOU. And that, my friend, has to be a TREASURE worth risking everything for.

PREFACE

Born to Dream

The future belongs to those

who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

ONE winter’s day in 2017 I sat with a friend on a wall looking out onto a beach of pale, golden sand and a windswept, glistening Atlantic Ocean. Just beside us sat a mother with her youngest child. Her eldest boy was running towards her across the beach with a small bucket in his hand. He looked to be about five years old. As he reached his mother, he blurted out the most incredible message: Let’s go and dig for treasure Mummy!

I stopped breathing for an instant and then, glancing at my friend, whispered to her:

"A SIGN ANGELA, A SIGN:

TREASURE!"

Angela nodded at me in silent complicity; we were on the same page. Both of us were familiar with the appearance of ‘signs’ from what we knew instinctively was an invisible spiritual realm. Angela was fully aware that at that very moment I was just in the process of proof-reading the final chapters of my book TREASURE, and so for the two of us none of what was happening on the beach was in any way an ‘accident’.

As I watched the mother and her two boys trudge across the sand to the hole her eldest boy had been excavating, barely a meter or so from the tumbling waves, I marveled at this universal hunger we human beings all express. Whether we are young or old, each of us dreams of finding some kind of mysterious and compelling reality we call ‘treasure’. Here I was, sitting with my friend, witnessing a real-life miracle.

A young boy was unconsciously ‘dreaming’ one of Mankind’s eternal dreams, filled with the hope of unearthing an undiscovered ‘treasure’ inside a hole on a sandy beach. And twenty-two years earlier, living by the shores of yet another sea – the Mediterranean – the adult me had also burned with exactly the same passionate dream; only MINE had been that of being able to find an inner ‘treasure’:

THE INNER LIGHT OF MY SOUL.

Back then in the 1990s I had absolutely no idea where my soul was located inside me, but I felt sure that it would be the sacred part of me which could rescue me from my life-long fear of death. Not only that, but it would be the repository of everything which would give my life its true meaning, and thus ultimately lead me to the Holy Grail of authentic human happiness.

And so, dear reader, this is exactly what my book is all about. Contained within these pages is the true story of my personal odyssey in search of my own inner ’treasure’, but it is also the story of a treasure which shines for all of us, because as I have just said, that treasure is:

THE ETERNAL LIGHT WITHIN THE HUMAN SOUL. WHAT WE CALL SPIRIT OR THE INVISIBLE SPARK OF THE DIVINE.

***

LIFE IS A JOURNEY:

A CLICHE OF COURSE, BUT TRUE.

Life is a journey, and we are its ‘pilgrims’ carrying our souls, with all their longings, frustrations, desires and pain, in search of that universal treasure I have just mentioned.

Miraculously, truly mysterious forces of fate entered my life, and seemed to know exactly what form that journey would take because those forces decided to ‘arrange’ for something utterly supernatural to take hold of my life. I discovered that this supernatural reality meant that the famous fable The Alchemist, which has sold more than 80 million copies around the world, had been an unconscious psychic prediction of my future by its author Paulo Coelho.

IN OTHER WORDS,

THE ALCHEMIST ACTUALLY

HAPPENED TO ME IN REAL LIFE

long before I had ever heard of the book or its author.*

*(For a summary of the plot of THE ALCHEMIST, please go to the Appendix of this book.)

This channeling from an invisible realm which predicts the future usually comes either through a book or a movie. It is what is called:

LIFE IMITATING ART.

Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist is one of these examples, but is by no means the first in the history of world literature. And, to convince many of you who may be still skeptical about what I am saying, I wish to illustrate my point by directing you to the example of a novel written in 1898 called FUTILITY.

The author Morgan Robertson created a ‘fictional’ story about a huge ship named TITAN which was the largest of its kind afloat at the time. In the novel TITAN sinks one fateful night in April on a voyage in the North Atlantic when it tragically hits an iceberg. Fourteen years after Robertson penned his fictional story, the world received the shocking news in April 1912 that the newly-built ship THE TITANIC, the largest of its kind at that time, had just met the same fate as the imaginary ship in his book.

Now, the question is how could the writer possibly have known with such accuracy and precision what lay ahead in the future? Of course, the only credible answer is that he experienced information flowing into him as a result of contact with a ‘space’ or ‘realm’ FAR BEYOND his normal intuition.

What Morgan Robertson had opened himself to, dear reader, was a SPIRITUAL REAM shared by the whole of the human race. The famous, twentieth century psychiatrist C.J. Jung called this space the collective unconscious, and I have decided to call it the invisible realm, or what Paulo Coelho named in The Alchemist The Soul of the World.

Here there is no past, present or future; instead all of these coexist with each other simultaneously.

There are many more examples such as the book FUTILITY where writers have unwittingly ‘foreseen’ future events, and all of them point to one inevitable conclusion: there are absolutely no ‘accidents’ in life.

Just as the Universal Intelligence or Higher Power which is at the heart of our collective human soul, had been present when I had visited the crematorium in 2019 with my friend, illogically prompting me to say to myself that my father Tom and my aunt Betty were TOGETHER AGAIN, and then seemingly ‘by accident’, had subsequently led me to find a plaque with their names on it and with these exact same words, then all the amazing coincidences we experience unequivocally tell me that our lives are not governed by logic. Instead we live by an Energy or Force we cannot see, but most certainly can SENSE.

Life, with a capital L, wants to show us that there is a supremely metaphysical plan for all of our lives.

Back in 1987, through this mysterious process of ‘channeling’, the plan had been to use Paulo Coelho as a MESSENGER, or INSTRUMENT as he told Oprah Winfrey in 2014. However, because that message was destined to be so quintessentially spiritual and transcendental, it needed more than just a fable which would sell millions of copies for its unraveling. And so, seven years after the publication of The Alchemist, I too found myself ‘channeling’ from the very same source as Paulo Coelho.

Unconscious forces of fate would mean that I began to experience connections to the very same Soul of the World he had described in The Alchemist and the key elements of Paulo’s fable would then unknowingly become THE CENTRAL EVENTS OF MY LIFE. In a sense my dreaming spirit was being ‘handed’ the baton in a cosmic relay as I found myself chosen to be the NEXT MESSENGER in a truly extraordinary real-life ‘miracle’.

***

As I have already mentioned, this book is an account of my search for the Light of my soul, and at the very beginning of that search I couldn’t foresee that, even though this journey was a quest for Light, paradoxically it wouldn’t take me there via a direct route. Rather, my quest forced me to come face-to-face with my individual darkness before I would be able to access any kind of Light inside me.

In so doing, I ‘accidentally’ made a huge discovery, and that was that both my inner light and darkness weren’t as INDIVIDUAL and personal as I had thought. And, as well as this, I also uncovered the fact that there is something which we all share as a Human Race, and that is what we call THE HUMAN CONDITION: our conscious self-awareness, and also the awareness of our own mortality, together with the terrible darkness inside each and everyone of us.

Another discovery I made, and which was also of great importance on this journey, was that there is a ‘metaphysical connection’ between The Alchemist and the ancient system of divination known as the Tarot.

THE FIRST MAJOR ARCANA OF THE TAROT: THE FOOL.

Yes, those enigmatic and mysterious cards which we sometimes persuade someone to ‘read’ for us in order to gain access to a picture of our future.

The major Arcanas of the Tarot ‘popped up’ serendipitously for me at the beginning of my odyssey, and then followed me throughout it – sometimes visibly and at other times invisibly –but I was only able to decipher their connection to The Alchemist in the very last months of my odyssey. However, when I did finally uncover this unexpected relationship, it prompted me to place many of the major Arcanas of The Tarot in strategic positions throughout this text, testifying to the truly mysterious nature of the path I had chosen.

This was a path I followed year in and year out, very often in a state of great fear and utter confusion, such was my level of ignorance regarding what I had embarked on. I had thrown myself into a complete unknown, and on so many occasions I could barely understand what I was actually doing.

***

Dear friend, what you will find in the pages of TREASURE is a quite extraordinary and miraculous adventure. Not only is it the story of how Paulo Coelho unconsciously predicted my personal future, but it is also the passionate, and yes obsessive search of one woman for spiritual meaning and truth.

In our modern world, where truth has been under the severest of attacks from some of the most powerful people on our planet – and I know that you will have guessed that I am referring to the recent presidency of Donald Trump and its aftermath, plus the Chinese coverup of the source of Covid-19, together with the war in Ukraine, and now the apocalyptic war in Gaza – that truth and this book’s passion for it are more important than ever.

For anyone who has staked his/her life on what is True, he/she will know that this path is not for the faint-hearted, and never has been. For me it meant that I needed to be a complete and utter ‘fool’ to embark on and finally complete this odyssey. But, then again, dear friend, my foolishness was not of the so-called ‘normal’ kind. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard encapsulates ‘normal’ foolishness in this quotation:

‘There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe

WHAT ISN’T TRUE; the other is to refuse to believe WHAT IS TRUE.’

These are the two traps of our ordinary, thinking ego-minds. However, I have hinted at another type of foolishness in this preface when mentioning The Tarot, and its major arcanas – the first of which is The FOOL ARCANA. This odyssey has been my personal act of foolishness, or madness as I embraced:

THE FOOLISHNESS OF THE SPIRIT.

That mysterious and utterly illogical part of ourselves, unseen but deeply felt, which synchronizes itself with the magic and meaning of life.

The challenge of my account, dear friend, is a sort of metaphorical gauntlet I throw down before you, and in that challenge I ask you to embrace that Mystery, leaving behind the apparent ‘certainties’ of the logical EGO MIND, so that you can come to believe what IT would normally REFUSE TO BELIEVE.

The truth is that a supremely Divine Timing is in charge of our lives, and it has led you to this book because this force which created us all wants to pull us away from the lies and ‘stories’ we tell ourselves, and instead lead us to discover:

exactly who we really are!

Yes, here in the pages of TREASURE you will learn, just as Santiago in The Alchemist did, that in the end we are not our minds, but spirits on a cosmic pilgrimage. And, with our pilgrim souls, each and every one of us is in search of something far greater than ourselves. That ‘something’ shows up day-in- and-day-out when we begin to notice the signs, the ‘coincidences’ and the serendipity all around us, and how our lives DEFY THE ODDS.

Where logic ends, we begin because whether we know it or not, subconsciously inside the very depths of our souls we are all FOOLS:

Fools in search of Light, Fools in search of Spirit,

and Fools in search of Love.

Welcome, dear friend, to this

Hero’s Journey like no other.

BOOK ONE

THE AWAKENING

When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.

THE ALCHEMIST, PAULO COELHO

Table of Contents

Author’s Note i

PREFACE xiii

The Ruin: Andalusia, Spain 1

Tarifa and Tangiers: The Journey Begins 18

Entering the Desert:The South Coast of England 38

The Desert and the Englishman 51

The Pyramids of Paris 62

The Beating and the Treasure 80

Why The Alchemist? 100

Me and My Shadow 117

BOOK TWO 137

SHADOWLANDS 137

Part I 139

Destiny Calls 139

Let There Be Light 141

The Invisible Realm Speaks 163

Dreaming Again 183

The Pyramid of Love 196

PART II 213

No Going Back 213

The Mystery Uncovered 215

Deeper and Deeper 227

Getting Ready to Dive 237

Jung and The Alchemist 252

Signs, Amazing Signs! 262

The Two Roads to Redemption 273

PART III 285

Coming Home 285

Love and You Will Find 287

Divine Alchemy 310

Being a Pilgrim: Fear or Faith 334

The Kabbalistic Tree of Life 359

Another Tree 382

My Matroyshka 395

BOOK THREE 403

THE SUMMIT 403

PART I 405

The Unholy Trinity of the Ego 405

Losing Control 407

Me, You and Our Shadow 423

The Darkness before the Dawn 438

PART II 451

Apotheosis 451

The Judgement Arcana 453

Reaching The Peak 493

There are No Accidents 527

The Road of Return 533

EPILOGUE 552

Appendix 564

Acknowledgements 567

About the Author 570

1

The Ruin: Andalusia, Spain

The process of life should be the birth of a soul. This is the highest alchemy, and this justifies our presence on Earth.

This is our calling and our virtue.

HENRI FREDERIC AMIEL

WHERE does a treasure hunt begin? Well, mine started in my parents’ house on a hill in Andalusia, southern Spain, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. That house was called EL CAZADOR, which in English means THE HUNTER.

A sign you may be asking? Yes, it most certainly was because ‘coincidentally’ seven years earlier a so-called ‘fictional’ TREASURE HUNT described in the fable The Alchemist had also started amongst these very same hills of Andalusia:

ONLY I DIDN’T KNOW IT.

These are the first of countless amazing coincidences you will discover in my story, dear friend, and if you ask me on the deepest of levels how they actually happen, I honestly can’t say. Bernie Siegel MD in his book LOVE, MEDICINE AND MIRACLES tells of how he was once handed a card after one of his talks, and on it was written:

‘Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous’.

After nearly twenty five years of journeying, I don’t believe this to be true, I KNOW IT IS TRUE, and I know it because my journey only became possible when I started to believe that these kinds of coincidences contained real messages from an invisible spiritual realm.

***

I HAD COME TO LIVE IN THIS

PART OF SPAIN IN 1984

In the spring of that year I had been fired from my low-grade clerical job in London and was looking for adventure. I was only twenty-six years old, and felt that I was far too young to commit myself to a career and what I saw as the monotony and meaninglessness of ordinary life. Frustrated, unsettled and lonely, I quickly booked myself a cheap flight to the city of Malaga situated on the Mediterranean coastal region of Andalusia known as The Costa del Sol.

However, I had no intention of doing things in a conventional way and so, just before leaving England, I had bought myself a small two-man ridge tent, and on my arrival in Andalusia headed off to a camp site in a nearby resort town. I was more than ready to begin my ‘adventure’!

Destiny kept its beady eye on me, and within a few days I met a young man and we began a romance. Weeks later this culminated in the young man inviting me to live with him in his small apartment in this Spanish coastal resort. I had wanted adventure, that was for sure, but never suspected that it would take this particular form. Five years later, after visiting me many times in my new Spanish life, my parents decided to sell their house in London and retire to Andalusia. And so it was that they came to buy their villa in the hills:

EL CAZADOR.

The time with my young man sadly ended after two incredibly enriching years, and although I found myself living alone for several years, working in different jobs, and then even returned to London for a while, here I now was at the beginning of 1995, eight-and-a-half years later at the age thirty-six, living with my parents amongst the idyllically picturesque olive groves of Andalusia.

Just over a decade had passed since I had taken my naive and unconscious leap of faith into the unknown by moving to Andalusia, and those years had been filled with the UNEXPECTED. This took the form of experiencing a number of inexplicable ‘coincidences’ for at least six of those ten years, and which I had begun to refer to as SIGNS.

The first time a really remarkable coincidence happened to me was in some ways an extraordinary awakening. The year was 1989 and I had been with my then boyfriend inside the Houses of Parliament in the center of London. We had stood in front of a life-size statue of the Victorian Prime Minister William Gladstone and had been reading the inscription giving Gladstone’s dates of birth and death. In an instant each of us had become transfixed by what we saw. The statesman had been born on my boyfriend’s birthday and had died on mine!

At that moment both of us felt as if we had just been handed some kind of cryptic message from an invisible realm we had always suspected existed somewhere ‘out there’ beyond our normal lives. In a sense this experience in front of the statue marked a huge turning point for me; something which I felt was impossible to ignore. Peculiarly, and yes UNEXPECTEDLY I had been introduced to something WAY BEYOND the physical world in which I lived; and my intuition seemed to know that this was the place where TRUE REALITY LAY.

As well as noticing ‘signs’, once in a while I would experience a very deep dream, and one such dream in April 1993 changed the direction of my life completely. I never wrote it down, but I do remember that in it I had clearly experienced my soul. On waking I realized that there were two Karens in the world. There was my personality, which seemed to dominate my waking hours, and then there was my soul – for me the real Karen – which had appeared so clearly in the dream.

I was shocked to be shown that during most of my daily life I was operating from my superficial personality, and not from this deepest part of me. And so, that morning when I woke up, I vowed to myself that my mission in life was to go in search of my soul, and live from this truest part of me and nothing else. The idea of not being able to live from the most authentic part of myself quite literally terrified me, and made all other problems in my life pail into total insignificance.

***

So it was that at the beginning of 1995 I had already been on some kind of search for nearly two years, and in that time I had been surprised to discover a lot of confusion and pain inside me. All of this had shocked me. I had never thought that my inner, emotional self could be in such a mess, and this had made my daily life decidedly difficult and stressful. I was constantly angst ridden, insecure, and frightened.

Nevertheless, despite my inner pain and turmoil, the overwhelming feeling I had was that none of this was an accident, and perhaps represented the price I needed to pay in order to be engaged in the most important task of my life:

THE FINDING OF MY SOUL!

The invisible realm I have just alluded to decided to give me a huge helping hand in my spiritual endeavor, and only a month earlier in December 1994 it had ‘gifted’ me the deepest dream of my entire life.

In the first week of December I innocently went to sleep and experienced the most horrific nightmare imaginable. The word horrific doesn’t in any way come close to describing what happened.

In that dream state I found myself descending into Hell.

When I awoke I had the taste of Hell in my mouth and the smell of it in my nostrils, and I instantly felt suicidal. The taste and smell persisted for some minutes and I found myself in a terrifying state of overwhelming panic. I knew that this dream hadn’t been some kind of psychotic aberration, or just an invention of my overactive imagination. At that moment I sensed that a very real, deep and horrible truth had been communicated to me about my own soul, and Hell was far from being a mere religious ‘invention’.

In December 1994 I had absolutely no idea that this dream was to mark the very beginning of an incredibly long and dangerous spiritual odyssey for me. I cannot reveal the content of the dream because that is for me only, but what I can say is that at the heart of that dream was DEATH, and this would be the signature reality of what I would face over and over again for more than two decades as I went in search of my soul.

Over the following weeks after this nightmare my emotional state was even worse than before. There were times when I completely forgot about it and felt able to be quite normal, but then there were other moments when it returned to me with full force and I experienced myself plunging into those suicidal feelings all over again. I had thought that the last two years had been painful and confusing, but now everything had become several degrees more so.

And so it was that in this jittery and angst-filled state I left my parents’ house one morning in early February 1995 and took the bus down the mountain road into the seaside town of Salveira. I was aiming for the local bookshop because I was in desperate need of explanations for my emotional turmoil, and it seemed that only a book would provide me with those answers.

On my arrival at the shop I went down the stairs into the basement area, and to the esoteric section which was my usual haunt. I scanned the shelves in front of me at lightning speed, looking for a title that would speak to me in some way. Suddenly, I saw