A Personal Introduction

On Mt. Baldy in Southern California

An introduction given to the Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace - June 4th, 2010

Good morning.

It is a great pleasure to again meet with you only, this time, to let you know a little more about myself.

The essential nature of myself is at ease in your company which is a major part of why I have stayed at ICUJP since I first came nine months ago after meeting Veda, Stephen and Pat, in that order, at a gathering in the Valley in September last year.

Indeed, I learned early on that not only was I surrounded by what I would call truly Christian people, despite various other affiliations or even none at all, and I felt that here were the kind of people with whom I could, should it ever be necessary, share a prison cell, little knowing that several of you, so it seems, have already done precisely that. Moreover, I have been drawn by your fundamental goodness and commitment to seeking justice and peace for all, and in this you have opened my own eyes and heart.

For myself, it probably comes as no surprise to tell you that I was born in England, in the market town and university city of Cambridge just before dawn on the 3rd of October, 1958; and from the start I feel that my life has been blessed, perhaps attributable to my mother having found a four-leafed clover on her way to the hospital to give me birth, although her wish for a girl, rather than a second son, was unfulfilled.

My life, by global standards, was greatly favored, at least in material terms, with my mother’s teat being replaced in my mouth by a silver spoon. It was an old spoon, well worn by over 30 generations of Nugents dating back to Normandy in France a century before the 1066 invasion of England – a battle in which three ancestors fought, with one of whom commanding a division of the Conqueror’s army.

For better, or perhaps more often for worse, it is difficult to wrestle power and influence from those who have attained it in the first place. My ancestors, having in part led the Norman invasion of England, then turned their attention together with their Norman cousins and army to that other sceptered isle of Ireland, where, upon victory, my family remained for the next 500 years, establishing themselves in the process as the Earls of County Westmeath. Here, amid the pastoral beauty of medieval Ireland, the family spoon was softened and made more palatable through more noble causes, ironically including leading a revolt against English oppression and the founding of abbeys and the patronizing of the arts and artists. By no means the least of these was William Nugent who in more recent history is reputed to have been the true writer of the works of William Shakespeare, as detailed in the book The Green Cockatrice, a title taken from the family coat of arms. Meanwhile William’s older brother Christopher, who had been imprisoned in the Tower of London for his part in what was called “the Nugent revolt”, taught Queen Elizabeth I to speak Gaelic so that she might address her Irish subjects in their native tongue.

However, in 1690 the Karmic Bell tolled – or as some would say “what goes around comes around” – and at the Battle of the Boyne, being Catholics on the losing side, my family was dispossessed of their lands by a stronger Protestant army from England.

Haugh End, the Rawson family home of my grandmother

Fleeing to the West Indies for safety, too far away to hear of King William offering their lands back should they join the Protestant faith, they established a sugar cane plantation in Antigua, toiled over, to their detriment, by African slaves. By the late 1800’s they had moved lock, stock and barrel back to England for the first time in 700 years, where they married into old, landed gentry families in the northern county of Yorkshire. All of which brings me to myself, but it is perhaps necessary to understand the bed into which I had been born, growing up as I did in a large country estate amid some of the most picturesque countryside in England, all of which framed the way in which I came to view the world.

Field House, the Stansfeld family home of my great aunt, and where I spent several years of my childhood

Moreover, such domestic ease, combined with a genealogy inclined towards idleness, gave me a certain nonchalance that spilled over into my academic schooling which was passed from the age of seven at boarding schools at the opposite end of the country. The consequence was that I failed almost all of my exams, and certainly those that would have granted me university access; the only accolades I could claim on leaving school were president of the illicit house drinking club and captain of water pistol shooting. It was not much to show for the labors of my parents, my mother having become a schoolteacher in order to help pay the school fees.

You could say I was a drop-out and a failure, but deep inside myself I felt I had never been taught the only thing I really wanted to know and the only thing I felt that mattered, which was the meaning of it all. 

With such academic paucity my options were severely limited. However, with a little effort and chastisement, I managed to secure the lowest passing grade needed for further education which led me three years later by way of France into the London wine trade where, after 23 largely squandered years, I was now loosed on the world and needing to find my own way.

But still my life was blessed and favored, reminding me in hindsight of the wonderful truism from Hamlet, that “there’s a Divinity which shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will.”

As I began to find my feet in this adult world something deep within me began to stir, and it was evident, at least to myself, that something was greatly missing from my life. Not knowing what it was or where else to turn, I read the four Gospels for the first time in my life with any seriousness and everything began to change for I knew that here was someone - namely Jesus Christ - who knew and understood more than any of us, how to live our lives.

It was not hard for me to digest; it was everything I had been seeking, and more. What was hard was for others to reconcile this change within myself.

My biblical study led me to attend a church, initially Westminster Abbey for want of knowing of anywhere else to go, and though I loved its Norman architecture and the history within its walls, being filled with the tombs of poets and kings, it remained austere and so I transferred my allegiance to St. Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square, known as “the Parish Church of England”, where I felt much more at home and joined the Scrub Club, a motley crew of mainly pensioners who cleaned the church each Saturday evening – no small task given that the church was a refuge for many of London’s homeless, and instead of dusting a few pews as one might expect, it was more like “cleaning up after a football match” as one friend so described it. Ironically, the elderly spinster who ran the club had known my late uncle killed as a young man over 40 years before in World War II, and I think, from the way she spoke, that she had loved him.

All of this discovery sparked a whole new lease on life and I drank deeply of the sweetness of being alive and what it is, and means, to be granted the gift of life. Meanwhile, through my boss, a deeply spiritual man and wonderful mentor, I embarked on a four-year study of Eastern mysticism at a school in London where I was awakened to such concepts – though I would call them Spiritual truths – as  Karma and Reincarnation, that equally had a profound effect upon me causing my questioning of life to go even deeper; and through his secretary, Patricia, I attended a New Age community of wonderfully caring people in the north of Scotland called Findhorn that had established its reputation through communion with the Nature Spirits; and I also learned from her of The Aetherius Society, a metaphysical organization that had been founded in London in 1955 and which I intuitively knew would shape the remainder of my life.

For what drove me more than anything, aside from my deep spiritual awakening, was my grave concern for the world as a whole, epitomized in an article I remember reading in The London Times in May, 1984, in which the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn stated that the West, though he might have said the world, “had lost its consciousness of God” – a consciousness that had made itself overwhelmingly apparent in my own life, spilling over unexpectedly into verse that allowed me to express both my spiritual joy and worldly despair.

A despair I knew that could not be fixed by politics, for even though I applauded and marveled at the ease with which I, a commoner, could freely enter the public gallery of the House of Commons and hear for myself members of Parliament debating the issues of the day, and for all the great democracy of this, they were, to my mind, merely attempting to perfect second best, and as we know, second best cannot ever be perfected. To me the problem then, as it is to me today, is a spiritual problem, and only a greater spiritual awakening and understanding can bring about the kind of change our world so desperately needs.

Which is why, increasingly, I turned my attention to The Aetherius Society, even though by this time my life and career were going well – the small company I had joined five years before was honored as Britain’s Wine Merchant of the Year in the first comparative study ever to be made of Britain’s vintners, while I was on my own way towards becoming a Master of Wine.

Here and now is perhaps not the best time to go into why I have so dedicated my life to the spiritual teachings and cosmic philosophy of The Aetherius Society, for I know that Stephen is a man with an agenda and we have other more pressing business this morning to cover, but save to say, its vision is truly a cosmic vision, uniting all of humanity in a greater understanding of our place within this vast, unintelligible Universe, embracing life upon other worlds, even within our own Solar System albeit on a different level of vibration, for “in my Father’s House there are many Mansions.” But if we only knew and glimpsed it more thoroughly, more directly, more simply, and more deeply, we would come to know – as I had sought to know – the great miracle of life, the awe of what it is to be human, to be alive; and how – when truth be told, that there is nothing that any of us can ever possess, nor ever wish to, no matter what station or type of spoon in our mouth we should be born into.

In conclusion, to explain why I am here in America, it is because in 1990 I gave up my life in London choosing instead to devote myself more fully to the spiritual work of The Aetherius Society. The previous year, following a brief visit to the American Headquarters in Hollywood, I was invited to become a full-time employee of the organization – an offer I accepted, turning down the subsequent offer of a directorship in the London wine company I had helped to establish during the previous eight years. For it was clearly evident to myself that my life’s work lay with The Aetherius Society, and in 1992 I was further privileged to become a personal assistant to the spiritual teacher and Yoga Master who, nearly 40 years before, had founded this organization, and whose hand, in the early hours of July 12th, 1997 I held as he left his body for the final time.

In 2001 I became a Director of The Aetherius Society, a year after meeting and six months before marrying my Japanese wife, Yuriko, whose birthday it is today. In 2000 she had attended a five-part course I had devised and teach called “Why The Aetherius Society?” Her limited English did not grasp all that I tried to convey, but for her part, she asked “Why not Paul Nugent?” Today we live with our cat Gracie in a rented apartment in Hollywood, far removed from the faded grandeur into which I was fortunate to have grown up, though my elder brother James, in England, has more than amply provided the 34th generation of Nugent heirs to suck upon the family spoon.

Thank you.

Paul Nugent

June 4th, 2010