Chapter 3

At home in Dhaka Central

We were led through the general prison where the residents slept on the floor in 2 or 3 story dormitories, past various manufacturing facilities, like a carpet weaving operation, and the prison padlock maintenance workshop. All the locks were big, some huge, the size of a small plate. Key rings were 6” in diameter, keys were 6 inch long. We passed a chain gang crushing rocks with sledge hammers, an open laundry where a dozen guys swung soaped up clothes in an overhead arc to splat on the concrete slab, over and over, ultra clean was the goal, then through into an enclosed yard which isolated some special accommodation, which would be our world for the next 3 years.

Inside our wall within the walls we passed on the left a 2 story block of 4 small dormitories, where the 33 yet to be detained Nepalese guys would stay. On the right, opposite the 2 story dormitory was a 3m high wall, behind which was a big water tank, which on google earth today identifies where we were in this prison. At the end of this wall, if you turned right the path led through a gate to the hospital, but straight ahead was a 30m wide x 60m long grassed open yard. The path we were walking led down the right side of this open space past a row of 5 x 10m wide courtyards, each with 4 cells. Our home was to be in the first of the courtyards, our cell was the one on the left elevated above 4 or 5 brick/concrete steps. The cell doors were black painted 20mm diameter steel bars spaced on 120mm centres, so it was generally how you might imagine the layout of a traditional 18th century prison.

Looking straight across from our courtyard gate, which was always open as we were free to move around all day within our outer walls, to the left across the 30m of grass was the breakfast kitchen. Straight across to the right was the red walled courtyard of 5 cells, further down to the right was the yellow mud brick 7 cells. These 2 courtyards were detention cells, special prisoners, maybe violent, retribution cells for those seriously out of favour, or maybe they simply didn’t have families to pay enough to warrant their release.

Google Dhaka Central Jail, open up some street views around Dhaka to see how the other half live in Bangladesh. Locked safely inside the prison with guaranteed food was not the worst place to be.

So Steve and I were taken into our courtyard and directed to the cell on the left. Then up the 5 steps to the vertical steel bar door with a huge hasp and padlock which paired with its enormous key. The cell was about 3.5 x 2.5m, just a bare floor with a toilet can on the floor in the centre of the rear wall. The ceiling was very high, with teak like deck beams under the flat concrete slab roof, just far enough above so in summer it got hot, and stayed hot. The slab roof overhung the 5 steps like a veranda, just far enough so we could never see the stars in the night sky.

These cells were old being located inside the British Raj fort, with 2 foot thick mud brick walls, and we could imagine who would have been locked in here over the last 150 years. These were cells for British expats, soldiers, crooked administrators maybe, but we were the first foreigners anyone could remember. We were the first of 44 gold smugglers arrested over the next 4 months. It was mid afternoon when we arrived, we were free to move around but didn’t go far, and were locked in our cell about half a hour before nightfall. On the wall outside our cell was a tap, on the left side courtyard wall was a squat toilet and a small wash room. We didn’t have any possessions, so this was a fresh start from scratch.

Next morning one of the breakfast cooks came to our cell, stood in the door and pointed at me and said “come”, so I followed Charlie down to the last courtyard in our row, and was greeted by the guys in the left side cell, “sit” I was told, which I did. Charlie took his place at the end of the bed against the back wall and continued rolling up a canon of Ganga, while I was dealt a hand of cards.

The dope was low quality, a guard was inside playing cards another sat on the steps outside, but came in for his turn to draw on the canon. I’d lived in Asia a long time so knew how to handle this situation. It was low quality dope rolled up in newspaper like a long thin cone about 6” long, an 1” diameter at the top, you held it in the right hand poking out from your fingers, and cupped your left hand over the top to form a sealed cavity, you drew on it with your lips over the draw hole formed by your thumb and first finger.

This was the daily ritual for a couple of years, when Charlie finished cooking he’d come and get me, it was a signal to everyone that we Australians were friends of Wahid, who was a political activist and stand over man for the then opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the BNP. He would be released next time the government changed, even though he was in for what he said was a trumped up charge of murder. Well under normal circumstances he would be released at the next election, Inshallah, (god willing), but General Mohamed Ershad had just staged a coup and was about to form a political party and run for President, which he did, and won.

It’s Ershad as President who took advantage of the wave of arrests of gold smugglers, I was the first, about 50 followed, he made himself head of the gold smuggling sentencing tribunal, and blamed us for the dismal state of the Bangladesh economy. He had risen to a General in the Bangladesh military so well understood the laws of politics where if you tell the truth you will lose, you have to cause division and blame the minority to win. Ironically 3 months after we Australians left, nearly 4 years later, Ershad himself was overthrown and locked in the compound over the wall behind Charlie’s kitchen. So to me this Bangladesh episode is a case study of the rise and fall of a dictator, from army general to President to jail bird, to political kingmaker, the H. M. Ershad story which I will now try to weave into a different perspective.

It was also a study of the delusional states caused by what many think as innocuous marijuana. I’d seen it all with alcohol, now safely within the walls of Dakar Central I could experience first hand what to expect when you overindulge with Ganga. There’s something about my personality that goes for things full bore, or was I just on a mission collecting experiences to fill the pages of this story? It depends if you just think in terms of a timeline, or look at it in reverse, come back the other way from the end which you can do when you have absolute faith in the magnificence of the outcome.

We also had a pet red Burmese kitten who Steve had found dying in a vacant cell. Kuching was our close friend and ally through thick and thin. If Steve was feeling down Kuching knew who to cuddle at night to share the warmth, and love. Or he would stay with me when it was my turn. We got him registered as a prisoner somehow, his name was Tikus Kuching, which is Indonesian for Rat Cat, as when we washed him in a bucket of soapy water to get rid of the flees, he looked like a huge rat, he knew he looked ridiculous wet like that and was furious. We all suﬀer from the curse of vanity, particularly cats and humans. But seeing he was a regular prisoner he could get daily rations of fish, a special dietary requirement which he would share with us, luckily he never had to actually present himself at the hospital for the doctor to sign oﬀ on his diet.

Steve found him in an empty cell, he was with his sister who was much stronger so Steve brought her to our cell, but she was angry, hissed at us, saying take me back, I’m not staying here, so back she went and was exchanged for her little runt of a brother, skin and bone, eyes closed over and badly swollen, obviously soon to die, well let’s see, so Steve took charge and was Kuching’s nurse, bathed his eyes in salty water, fed him with a spoon, set up a sand filled toilet in the corner next to our pan, and then after about a week his eyes started to open and we watched as he dug a hole and squatted in the sand. Somehow he knew that’s what domesticated red Burmese cats do.

He turned into an amazing little cat, and when I eventually returned to Australia 4 years later there was his absolute double. Peg usually had a brown Burmese, but her latest was a golden perigee Burmese named of course Kuching, same colour as his Bangladesh double, same mannerisms, but where Peg’s version had been neutered to stop him turning into an angry Tom, we didn’t have those facilities in Bangladesh, but didn’t need to because he never did choose sides and become male, he stayed neutral with the best qualities of both genders.

The last we saw of his angry little sister was getting bashed to death after being caught stealing food in one of the neighbouring cells. There is probably a moral in Kuching’s survival story compared to his angry sister’s violent end. What was extraordinary about Kuching is he turned into a perfect domestic mischievous Burmese cat, identical to the carefully bred and pedigreed one Peg paid a bunch of money for. Well we were in Bangladesh just next door to Burma, but I thought Burmese and Siamese cats were carefully bred in yuppie western countries, not native to a Muslim country like Bangladesh were cats live on garbage piles and are never kept as pets.

Kuching would move gingerly around outside our compound during the day, and everyone tolerated him as they knew he lived with the Australians, but generally cats are treated as vermin so had to keep clear of the guards who felt compelled to belt them with their 1m long cane “lathi” batons. But Kuching had to be back in our cell before nightfall because that’s when the big wild cats would emerge from the drains to roam their domain.

The biggest brute was a thug of a Tom we named Uncle, who looked more like a bulldog than a cat. If Kuching got his timing wrong and crossed paths with Uncle he was in for a hiding if caught, and we would hear him coming, a little golden Burmese in full flight, claws scratching on the concrete and paving stones, sliding sideways like an F1 race car as he turned through the open gate, then up the stairs, like an arrow shot between the bars, followed closely by Uncle.

Kuching would nearly crash into the back wall as he spun around and back to the bars to stand his ground snarling at Uncle the thug who stood outside on the top step growling like a lion. Kuching was very brave once inside our cell, but looked pretty pathetic on the occasions Uncle cornered him outside.

He would lie there motionless on his back, pleading for mercy, Uncle standing over him, growling.

Unfortunately for Uncle he pushed his luck too far as he used to sneak into 7 cells and steal food, but one night was caught and they pierced his ears and wired on tin can lids as earrings. It was sad to see this once proud battler reduced to a desperate wimp, and he went into hiding and died.

There was another huge cat, a really sleek female like a miniature panther. She too got caught in the red cells one night and was tied up, and last seen next morning being swirled around by her tail till enough velocity was reached and she sailed up 20 ft and over the wall out into the street. Those chaps in the red cells weren’t in there because they were nice guys, but the cats lived by the laws of the jungle and weren’t to know about human revenge.

Kuching’s mother lived on the garbage pile at the back of our cells, and it was lovely to see him visiting her, he dressed in his shiny clean fur, talking to his less fortunate mum. Hopefully she took pride in his good fortune. And then there was the filthy blind cat that would make its way around the prison even in daylight, maybe it didn’t know what daylight was, but would quickly scamper along close to the wall, moving fast so when she reached a corner she would sense the open space, stop, reverse walking backwards to retrace her steps, then sensing the wall turn 90 degrees and take oﬀ at speed along the wall towards the hospital. So she knew where she was going.

As our trial date grew near the stories in the press about gold smuggling grew louder. We were now 3 Australians with the arrival of Darren, who was arrested 3 months after us. There were also 33 Nepalese, which was most interesting as in my travels around the region I had seen these characters, a group of about 10 young Asian males travelling together, they were obviously couriers smuggling something and now here they were and I could get their story.

We also had 2 gold smugglers from Great Britain, a Frenchman, a Filipino, a Singaporean, 44 in total. We were being blamed for the poor state of the nation’s accounts, a far fetched political long shot by the opportunistic President. There was even a radio serial drama called GOLD SMUGGLER introduced in a deep sinister rolling voice. The rest was in Bangla but my card playing mates would tell me some details and that it was a bad omen for our pending trial and sentencing.

We had a lawyer appointed by the embassy who would cost us US$5000 each. Darren paid, Steve paid, but for all Peg’s efforts the payment would not go through. It was actually stolen by a bank teller who forged the lawyer’s signature, and eventually the bank had to reimburse Peg, and by the trial this was still in progress, and was a scam anyway as the lawyer could do nothing as this trial was totally politicised by President Ershad, who had set himself up as the chair of the sentencing committee. So I felt a real personal relationship with the President and later prepared my own scam to attract his attention. Peg got her money back, which was fitting, as it wasn’t my idea to come here in the first place. I was sent here. The choices, there were no choices, I was to go, for what purpose is still playing out. It didn’t hurt me though it hurt other people, so if you like the story, or if it actually gives some people insights into who they might really be, then that’s its purpose, which is vindication in itself, so why should Peg be further out of pocket.

If it was meant to be a punishment for me being a naughty boy, that didn’t work as it was a fabulous experience, like a little boy let loose in Willy Wonka’s chocolate shop. So it was more likely the opposite: a gift for being a good boy for selflessly looking after Serayah’s children, a great learning experience like 4 years in a guru-less ashram, which is worth a chapter in this story.

In the end trial day came and I was sentenced to death, commuted to transportation for life, which then meant 20 years (later got jacked up to 30). It was an old law left over from the British where people were sentenced to transportation and sent to Australia, so perhaps by rights I should have been sent home. Actually I think one would be a lot better oﬀ doing a life sentence in Dhaka Central than in a sterile hate-filled dangerous jail in Australia.

***

I got the highest sentence of all the 44 gold smugglers as I was the most honest in not allowing my gold to be corruptly taken by whoever stood to gain from it not going into government coffers. Being sentenced to death also caused me to reflect on birth, death and the duration in between. It was obvious if you are alive before being born into a body, then death is not the end of life but simply exiting the body, which didn’t seem that scary when you took mind’s emotion and fear out of it.

So obviously we should be prepared to die for our convictions. I’d long given up trying to control what was happening to me and if this thing wanted me to walk smiling to my death then let’s go, but I knew that in the end the hangman’s trapdoor would jam, or he’d go to sleep like the passport inspector in Bombay, or something else, but in the end they wouldn’t be able to pull the trigger. Well, if the trapdoor worked as planned it would be over in a millisecond and I’d never know.

Just to ensure I gave the contemplation of death my all, not long after we arrived was the last hanging in Dhaka Central. The guys told us that on this night approaching 22.00 the whole jail would go into darkness, and silence, then on the hour the prisoner would be hanged. So there were a bunch of reasons why I had the maximum gold and was sentenced to death, and seriously contemplating death was one of them.

It was also maybe the final act of horror I caused Peg. Poor girl, she was dozing oﬀ to sleep with her radio on softly, when the news reader said that “An Australian, Chris Mitchell had been sentenced to death in Bangladesh for gold smuggling.” Peg lived in a permanent state of depression anyway so she always saw the worst in things. She wasn’t to know that a death sentence was only a bargaining chip, that there was no way a bankrupt nation like Bangladesh could possibly hang a citizen from one of its major donor nations for a petty commercial crime like gold smuggling. Carrying a load of heroin could be another story, but even then Bangladesh would be better oﬀ extracting a big ransom than pointlessly hanging a foreigner.

About a year after sentencing Ershad and the courts upgraded transportation for life from 20 to 30 years, a meaningless decision as we would only be there till it’s time to go, but it did up the bargaining power when negotiating our release, which is the way it works in some jurisdictions which believe in retribution and the concept of ransom.

It’s written in the scriptures that retribution can be paid to help compensate for the aggrieved party’s loss. As an extreme example, this doctrine gets used by angry fundamentalist terrorists to justify the highjacking of an aeroplane. An activist highjacks a plane with a load of foreigners on board because foreigners have caused a lot of harm so they must pay. So a ransom is paid to secure the release.

It’s a similar story for us gold smugglers in Bangladesh when eventually we get released, which coincided with the West Australian Government donating 50,000 tons of wheat to Bangladesh, and the Australian High Commissioner suggests to the Bangladesh Home Minister that the Australian Prime Minister would most appreciate the release of the 3 Australians. So even though the donors knew nothing about their gift being used to pay a ransom to secure our release, it worked and Bangladesh effectively swapped us for 50,000 tons of wheat. But that’s later in the story.

Behind the scenes Peg was very busy writing to Australian politicians and I’ve got all the letters in the files of supporting evidence to back up this story. Through friends Peg learnt that when writing to a minister you should start by saying something like; “following on from our phone conversation yesterday”, because then the minister’s minder who opens and vets the mail won’t know who the minister might have been talking to yesterday, so the letter might be important and not tossed in the bin. There are dozens of letters to and from ministers, the department of foreign aﬀairs and the Bangladesh high commission staff. You have to do all this, you have to apply pressure to keep the kettle warm or the fire can go out and you will be forgotten.

But you also have to serve your term. That’s if you’re lucky. Yes, I’m saying it was good luck that brought us there, then throwing a load of money at it isn’t going to work, and if you manage to bribe your way out of this type of thing it just circumvents the bigger picture. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but let’s not be too dogmatic as anything is possible, and in paying a bribe you are suffering a loss of money, which on the ground is power. It can be a form of balancing act, and hopefully it doesn’t burn a hole in the pockets of the recipient. Maybe he uses the ill-gotten gains to open an orphanage for deprived children or a refuge for their battered mothers, who knows, but in the real world people who have conspired their way to be the recipient of your bribe (like a politician who’s only real skill is to con his way to winning an election), is more consumed by self interest that the greater good.

So if you are lucky you will serve out your term, pay the karmic debts due, some from the past, maybe some scraps from way back, some from your current focus on self interest which brought you to here, and some to do with any damage smuggling gold might actually have caused. Keeping track of all that is no big deal as it’s only tracking positive and negative inputs in an etheric computer.

Man so called “invents” a computer and patents it to claim ownership to make a profit. He’s too focused on that profit to see that the design actually came from out in the ether, and in that sense he doesn’t own it, whereas if he let it go, gave it away he might be shown more about where it came from. So it’s a playoff between making life in a body more “comfortable”, versus gaining access and learning about what’s on the other side.

An alternative to buying a patent is to publish the discovery so no one can patent it. Give it away, and more will come. But sadly the commercial world doesn’t work like that. Employees need a salary as they also have kids to feed, rent and utilities have to be paid, and of course the shareholders need a return on their investment. So life’s tough, as choosing the non self- interested path isn’t meant to be easy, the key being to find the right balance.

But back to jail, the wheels are in motion setting the stage for release. The karmic debt is paid, people on the outside are greasing the wheels, the ransom is being organised, and when it’s all in line you get released. So it’s like the 3 streams meet and your little boat gets washed along into a bigger, stronger river. It’s all just mind’s etheric computer program applying positives and negatives in a ledger, which normally defaults to self interest if you let it, which makes it all so confusing, but the more you can bring it into balance the clearer becomes the view. So we shouldn’t believe someone, like a priest who tells us it’s all a mystery, that no one can ever know what it’s like on the other side.

But back in Dhaka Central and serving out our time, once we were sentenced it meant we were eligible for division, which raises your status and you get a bed, a mosquito net, more food, a lantern with kerosine, and a servant, our runner. Division would have been for white men and other upper class types, or anyone who’s family had the resources to pay the fee, or bribe, so we don’t know what happened with us, probably a request from our high commission, but again, we had to do our time on the floor first. The 2 English guys got division and we soon followed.

With division came our runner who we 3 Australians shared. Fadzli was a switched-on guy, respected around the jail as he was in for killing a villain and removing his head. We negotiated with the superintendent that we 3 being foreigners needed to prepare our food differently so we should receive raw ingredients instead of the over-cooked brew from the big kitchen cauldrons. This was Fadzli’s job, scurry around and collect our food, then help prepare and cook it. I sewed a little pocket in his underpants so he would be safe carrying other contraband around the prison for us as well.

I had been very active building things like mobiles out of bamboo, which would throw mystical-looking shadows on the cell back wall at night as all these geometric shapes, hanging under each other from the ceiling, once set in motion would rotate at different speeds and directions. And we made a stove to cook our food, which led to numerous stoves, with 3 burner, 5 burner, 7 burners with adjustable wicks. They were first class pieces of art made from tin cans, with wicks from strands of blanket rolled up inside aluminium foil sourced from sealed cans of milk powder. All our stoves were based on uneven numbers of burners, Joel from Manila became the chief stove maker. Once we had convinced the superintendent that all us foreigners needed kerosine lamps at night we had our fuel supply.

This creativity came from somewhere, it spread through most of the foreigners, and all sorts of things where being made. The Bengalis were amazed by the creativity, so was I. It was quite a display of what a change of attitude can cause and was an exercise in the power of this extraordinary thing. We wound up with so much food we were helping to sustain the 33 Nepalese guys, we had food everywhere, and it had turned what could have been hell into a heaven.

I should mention the huge bank of tandoori ovens, which produced around 5000 chapatis each day. Steve or I would occasionally accompany Fadzli to the store in the morning to collect our raw ingredients, and our chapati ration. In this kitchen there was an earth mound about 30m x 10m and 1m high. Sunk in that were the ovens, in 2 rows about 2 m apart, so 20 to 30 ovens. I think they were fired with gas so their must have been pipes running through the mound. The dough was mixed on a concrete slab with shovels and garden forks by a team of slaves, then other guys would tear oﬀ an armful of dough and carry it, pressed against their sweaty chests, over to the kneading tables to be rolled into chapati size balls.

There was always human hair and other foreign things in the chapatis, but a tender digestive system was long gone, if you were lucky. It’s a bit like Steve’s boils which are coming soon, and any sickness really. There is no point in suffering anything like that if it isn’t there as a balancing act for something. In a way, the more it hurt the better oﬀ you were going to be. The Bangladeshi guys were very proud of the chapatis ovens, the biggest in Bangladesh they said, maybe the world.

Through Fadzli I had access to the library, which had not been used for many years. It was a collection of old English language books which outside this place would be of historical value. I never saw it myself so got Fadzli to write down the titles and authors. Our place used to be the jail inside a British Raj fort, so here was a library with books going back 150 years which we could access. It was there for the expats including those who fell foul of the law. I was interested in history, religion, politics, philosophy and historical political religious novels. We also had access to books via the British High Commission and the British Council, which provided non-consular services for British citizens. So I was learning a lot about religion, its history, its leaders, and their so called reforms. It’s interesting to ponder how if something is supposed to be true, how can you reform it to make it more so. Actually I think it works the other way around. The ancient stuﬀ is closer to the truth, reforms chop bits oﬀ, so by the time you get to today there isn’t much left, and it’s time for a restart.

This is what I meant earlier when saying it’s all up to your perception. If you see it as hell, it will be, but life in a prison like this one was fantastic. It was an ashram. We were totally in control, and you could see clearly that here we were, a spark of consciousness locked in a body by levels of mind, each with its own lock and password, in a body, inside a jail, inside our cell, but with total freedom, with everything we needed provided in abundance, for free, no need to work, just play cards, smoke dope, read books, make things, draw boats. All you needed was the right perspective to see it, and the desire to make things happen.

The books came from those 3 sources, the British Council, the history-laden in-house library, and those books I had collected in Singapore which a friend would soon deliver. But books should be seen as only one source of answers because there are so many opinions, everyone has their own, and egos want to write them down in a book, like this one. So to me books oﬀer an opinion, which therefore asks a question, “Is this opinion correct or not?” Just because a group of people follow a path, it doesn’t mean it’s the truth. It’s better to see it as a relative truth as it’s all been passed down second hand, and politics will have changed it, so truth is not what everyone on the planet seems to think. Their idea of truth is actually a smokescreen, and this book is just another example of that, though a lot closer to the truth than most.

If a book is only asking a question, how do you find the answer? Well, the answer to that question is, “it’s going to come out of the ether”. And if it keeps telling you the same answer, or more likely a series of answers each adding to a make up a bigger picture, or refining the picture, then that’s your truth. It becomes something you know, as against something you think. It’s how consciousness works compared to mind’s thinking process.

The catch is, though, you go too far, particularly if you are using recreational drugs to artificially gain access to etheric or imagined information, which you then misinterpret. So oﬀ you go down the garden path, accepting more radical views which can lead to psychosis, dead end cults and even end in extreme acts like terrorism and disaster. But if it’s actually going on under the guidance of the highest power then the experience is used to teach you, particularly if your a personality like mine where you learn best the hard way through mistakes.

So so-called mistakes can be a positive contributor to the journey of spiritual evolution where you evolve in ascending waves like a small boat riding up and down as you go through good and bad fortune, but successive crests are higher, so the overall trend is up. The heights you ultimately reach and plateau out in your new home will depend on the source of your guidance.

You can glean its source by its symbols if you know how to read them, like if it’s a dope smoking guru beware. If it leads you to Kali, the wife of Shiva, it will be fun, whereas Brahm you might find a bit boring, or it could be the neutral Vishnu. The same goes for the different threads of Buddhism and the other world religions. In the end you will arrive at what suits the package which is you, but an independent way is to sit quietly and imagine the 222 universe and ask spirit to guide you in the direction that’s best for you.

Steve’s sister came to Bangladesh for a visit so I made her a mobile, Joel made a cup, a stove, and a pot of kerosine. We supplied matches to light the stove, tea, a poem, some texts, and she went back to her hotel that night and I imagine unpacked it all in amazement. But a lot of dope was smoked in assembling that package so maybe it all looked a bit too crazy.

Steve lived in Hong Kong and had done a few trips with gold around that northern Asia region, even through China to Tibet and Nepal. He lived with a Reuter’s journalist, who kept in touch after Steve’s departure. He made a point in visiting Brisbane for the Expo 88, commemorating 200 years of the white man’s invasion and occupation of Australia, though officially it’s termed the discovery and colonisation of Australia. Australia’s High Commissioner would be visiting the Expo so Steve’s Reuter’s friend sought her out, and prepped other journalists to do the same, and ask about the 3 Australians in jail for gold smuggling in Dhaka.

He also fired up interest with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and a month later we were told to quickly wash and dress in our whites, and summoned to the office as The 7.30 Report, the ABC’s flagship evening current aﬀairs program were in town covering the huge 88 floods, and would be at the prison shortly for an interview. We have no idea how this happened, it’s unprecedented, never before or I bet since has a TV news crew gained access to interview prisoners.

Not long after that it was a visit from the High Commissioner herself, Susan Boyd’s turn. Luckily we weren’t too stoned, and performed well on both occasions, though no one would have been surprised or shocked if we had been oﬀ with the pixies.

A friend of mine sent a letter saying he would be visiting, so we got him to go to Serayah’s apartment and bring my old briefcase full of books. He duly arrived and I despatched our 2 most trusted guards to take a note to his hotel and collect the briefcase and bring us the books. These guys were on evening shift and returned the next night, but were in tears. Each told me the same story: they had cheated my friend. He had asked them to score some hashish, he had given one 1000 and the other 800 US dollars. They had instead supplied adulterated boot polish and ripped him oﬀ. Now they were remorseful and wanted to give this ill-gotten funds to me. No worries I said, keep it, send your kids to school, buy your wife some gold jewellery, serves my mate right, he should not have used me as cover for this pathetic ill-considered dope scam.

From then on of course anything we needed from outside would be supplied. So we brought in pencils, rulers, erasers, and large sheets of art paper so I could properly draw the design concepts I had been sketching. I would draw the grid, plot the points to meet a curve and, while Steve held one of the bamboo splines I’d made so it traversed as many of the reference points or nodes as possible, I would draw the line. So it was high times in Dhaka Central.

A highlight of extraordinary synchronicity happened soon after the books had arrived. Here I’ve used synchronicity as the descriptor instead of meaningful coincidence, but I don’t like the word, it’s new age and trendy which is not what this story is about, so I hope you can see the difference. The word I do like though is the magical simplicity and rhythm of “serendipity”.

After finding those first books on my friend’s boat in the mangroves in Singapore, I was hungry for more and researched and found dozens of paths one could follow. Each would suit an individual’s state of consciousness, which is influenced by their traditional beliefs and the personal karmic baggage they carried. I studied several in detail, and being no longer a drinker, these and my new contentment and calm helped me through many tense situations and prepared me for this final gold smuggling trip and to jail.

So soon after John’s visit to Bangladesh, (and incidentally he did score some hashish, got on a plane to Sydney and was arrested and sentenced to 6 years in jail), I received a letter advising I was eligible for an initiation of a society I had joined, with instructions on how to prepare and what to do. The books had arrived and there were texts to read and contemplate, and while it’s easy to brand organisations a cult, a sect of a religion, technically they are a society of members who share information which helps grow their individual awareness. Consciousness can therefore be graded, like in any schooling system, but here it’s a spiritual evolution, where you can receive an initiation, you have received and absorbed otherwise hidden information, which suggests it’s a secret society, as is freemasonry, and probably how the mystical sides of all religious organisations work.

Normally an initiation is conducted under the guidance of a suitably qualified society member, but if you’re indisposed like I was, then you’d expect, if the society was actually what it claimed to be, then who needs an initiator to be there in person, as the whole thing should be able to be done by magic.

There were a couple of frangipani trees growing in the yard and we would often pick these to scent our cell, often selfishly taking them all. There were plenty on the trees during this day, and as my instructions included having a posy of flowers for my private ceremony, I wanted them fresh and if this was real then they would be there for me to pick in the late afternoon. But when I went to collect them they were all gone. Some bastard had taken the lot, not even one left for me, I was devastated, this whole thing was going bad, this was a very bad omen, and it was lockup time, so inside I went bewildered and the door was locked.

The second last courtyard, the one next to Wahid’s was the punishment cells for guys infringing prison rules. These guys were in chains or bars and generally considered untouchables and scorned. When they were taken away to the office for court appearance or other business, they often had to walk between a row of guards who would pretend to hit them with lathe sticks, though they are all a soul at their core, a spark of consciousness burdened with a mind and body that had got them into this mess, with all sorts of issues leading to their current plight, so who are we to judge. But judge we do, as that’s our easily swayed nature.

We were locked in our cells, the whole place was about to shut down when through the gate, followed by a guard, was one of the guys from the punishment cells, wearing only a singlet and sarong and hinged bars, that’s a pair of 500mm bars hinged at a ring in the centre, the other ends shackled to each ankle, the bars were held aloft by a rope tied to the ring which our visitor held in one hand. In the other he carried a huge posy of fresh frangipani flowers.

He came up to my cell door and with a smile handed me this beautiful gift. I was blown away, what a stunt this was, how many messages were contained in this one act of genius. This derelict from the punishment cells didn’t know anything about my self-centred needs, but had been promoted by something to pick all the flowers and bring them to me. He didn’t have to know because spirit did and used him to show how it can intervene and play tricks on anyone, it’s the master marionette as it demonstrated with this extraordinarily executed and timed stunt.

Fancy using one of the most decrepit and despised prisoners in the jail to do its work, to make a statement that it didn’t give a hoot about man’s pompous hierarchy, as that’s not who we are at our core. But people are all so busy with their mind in charge, telling them how clever or beautiful they are, they miss the real show going on in the background.

But what a perfect place to learn these lessons, to see the inevitable outcome of excess, this time not a drug like alcohol which caries you down a sensual path into the watery physical world, but drugs which bend your mind with smoke and fire, while locked away in safety behind the walls of Dhaka Central Jail.

***

Standing just outside the jail’s northern wall was what was said to be the world’s tallest minaret, with its equally world’s loudest speakers calling the daily prayer. In a desperate nation like Bangladesh we should not be surprised at the decibel of religious expression. When I was there Bangladesh had a population of 110 million, mainly Muslim, but just as it had over 100 busy political parties, all the worlds religions were there, some represented by a fanatical minority. I thought it pretty weird that outside the wall one day there was a Buddhist demonstration, a street procession going past, which our friends explained was not about the rights of a downtrodden minority, but in support of the Iranian Ayatollah’s fatwah against Salman Rushdie, kill Rushdie, kill Rushdie was the call. Fancy a Buddhist organisation endorsing a fringe Shiite position like that. It shows how politics and religion in a desperate third world nation can become so intertwined and complex and confusing for outsiders.

Bangladesh is truly a desperate nation as it was always going to be, right from the roots of its foundation. If you look at its shape you see the whole place is just a huge delta which should only have a population one tenth its number. It’s the delta of 3 huge rivers, the Ganges, whose catchment runs the southern length of the Himalayas, the Brahma Putra which snakes around from the north east, bringing water from the north of the Himalayas, and the Meghna River which drains from the east.

A delta is formed by a river dropping its silt and spoil as it slows and spreads as it nears the ocean, and so it is for Bangladesh, where the river beds are close to sea level, while the flood control levees which try to contain the river are built with fill from the surrounding dry land, so as more silt is dropped between the levees the higher the levees need to grow, till you wind up like Holland with some of its land mass below the North Sea.

But you can’t build dykes and pump out the flows of these three gigantic rivers, so when the snows melt in spring and summer, and the rivers flood, India’s dams and barrages overflow and Bangladesh goes under. The worst comes in summer as this delta is at the head of the Bay of Bengal which breeds tropical cyclones which attack from the sea bringing a tidal surge measured in metres.

I can’t imagine a more desperate position for a nation to be in, but the conservative media of the Christian west are not about promoting empathy for the Muslims who strive to survive in these impossible conditions.

In the huge 1988 flood which captured the world’s attention, over 90% of Bangladesh was under water, but we weren’t. It was sunny days and exciting times. Political leaders from around the world came to oﬀer their support or, more correctly, get good press for themselves as they offered investment to harness these waters, how was that pray tell. It was notable that we didn’t see the experts, the Dutch, making rash promises, as they know there is no solution to this problem, except decrease the population, but who wants to trade these desperate people.

Then some will say, “life is to be enjoyed and endured as is Allah’s will, why would we want to leave, this is our home, we grow stronger for the struggle, and besides, there is nowhere else to go.”

For us in the jail it was fine, as this was originally a British East India Company fort. Forts are always built on hills. Even a bump of only a few meters is a hill on this delta plain, so we were sitting just above river and sea level. You could see how close we were as when there was a major flood the sewers of Dhaka Central would back up, and the manhole covers in the jail would lift oﬀ, pushed up like an erupting volcano of faeces instead of magma. But our cells were safe as we were 5 steps up above the courtyard.

The prison hospital was certainly not a place to be sent if you got seriously ill as it had its sewage problems on a normal high tide. There was a toilet block on the side of the hospital dormitory with curious elevated stepping stones forming a path across to the door, curious until high tide as the squat toilets would back-flow and fluid would seep out over the hospital ground floor.

We saw all sorts of enlightening events from our unique inside perspective. At the time of the big 88 flood Bangladesh was the right flavour, “democracy” was being restored by General Ershad following his coup, Mitterrand and Madame were in town, as was George Bush in spirit, if not in person, hail the grand restorer of human rights, President Ershad, but as the election neared the prison population grew, we were bursting at the seams. The word was we had 1500 new political prisoners join us in the lead up to the election.

Thajhudeen was a long time resident who was locked up in our isolation compound as he was a Malaysian. His story was quite amazing as he’d been jailed for 20 years and no one knew why, his only crime he arrived as crew of a foreign owned ship working cargo through the port of Chittagong. He’d gone ashore, got drunk and involved in a fight, his passport or identity papers were stolen, he was thrown in a police lockup, the ship sailed and no one knew what to do with him and eventually he was moved to Dhaka Central.

He wasn’t violent, but wandered around the jail hallucinating and having conversations with imagined people. He spent a lot of time visiting us, and eventually Steve started enquires through our High Commission, which then involved the Malaysia High Commission, and eventually they found his mother living in Chennai in India. It’s incredible but Thajudeen was released and reunited with his mother who had remained in India when his father had taken him as a small boy to Malaysia. I hope it worked out for her and we didn’t open a can of worms through our intervention.

Another case I brought up didn’t end so well. There was a resident of the red-walled seven cells who had been there forever, again no one knew why. There was no record of the circumstances of his arrest 20 years earlier, other than when his house was searched they found a firearm under his bed. So I raised his situation with our human rights lawyer who was supposedly working on our case, the one who was never paid by Peg as the bank teller had stolen Peg’s cheque. Our lawyer followed it up, and this guy was eventually released, but a month later he was back in his cell, this time charged with murder. Yes he’d killed someone in a fight, so that was the last time we got involved in something that was none of our business.

There was an English businessman who was with us for a while. He was being held for ransom as he was backed by a major international tobacco company and was caught up in some corrupt extortion scheme by a Bengali tobacco distributor. It was interesting to have this law-abiding guy around, but for him it must have been an extraordinary experience and gave him quite a conversation piece if ever it got boring around the dinner table or swapping yarns in a bar.

Another crazy case comes to mind, where a young Chinese guy was arrested at immigration attempting to leave the country after overstaying his visa. His family back in Hong Kong were distributors for a European manufacturer of printing equipment. A Bangladeshi printing business purchased some machinery from them so their son was sent on a 3 month assignment to oversee the installation and commissioning.

On arrival the boss took his passport to ensure they complied with work visa requirements. When the 3 months was up, with his air ticket arranged and passport returned, he was dropped oﬀ at the airport. He passed through immigration and was arrested for being illegally in Bangladesh, working without a visa, and remanded to Dhaka Central. This whole episode would have been planned and orchestrated from the start, it was a scam coordinated with someone high up immigration official. Once you are inside an establishment like Dhaka Central it’s an expensive process to get out and it cost thousands of dollars in bribes to reverse the process. It will have to go all the way up to the home minister for his approval.

I’ll mention another “third world” scam which involved a heavy drinking American who worked oﬀshore in Indonesia, who had met an ageing Indonesian working girl so was spending his time oﬀ the oil rig with her in Jakarta. They were both alcoholics, she also a heroin junkie, when one morning he awoke to find his girlfriend and her daughter with them in the bed. There was a reason, her sister was staying over, and this threesome became a regular event, the significance of which escaped him at the time, but about 6 weeks later when he returned from a month oﬀshore, his lover was very agitated as her daughter had missed her period and the police had got involved as he was presumed to be the father, did he remember the night when he had sex with her sweet little virgin daughter.

He was arrested and I never saw the outcome, but it would have cost him everything he had. Foreigners out for a good time in Asia taking advantage of their new unexpected wealth can’t imagine the cunning scams they may be drawn into.

We were soon to be moved to a new compound, alongside the northern wall, where we were right under that huge minaret with its overwhelming aura of religion. Where we used to hear faint distant cries and screams in the night and wondered what they were, in our new home it was load and clear, just on the other side of the wall. Our Bengali friends told us it was a special police station, and what we could hear at night was the sound of torture.

But I wouldn’t say Bangladesh was violent, there are far more dangerous places on the planet, but Bangladesh is desperate, and if you live in the west and enjoy cheap clothes made in the sweatshops of Bangladesh, think about the mothers who sewed those clothes, their desperate battle to feed and raise their children.

It can be distressing thinking about the plight of these people, how did they ever arrive at this, and what’s the best way to respond, is empathy enough, which is a question for everyone to work out within themselves. We are guided by the usual rules of economics and self interest which restrict what we can do, but from out of the ether comes a conflicting suggestion: give, expecting nothing, and receive even more in return. How can both sides of this dichotomy be true, and if they are how do we get to use them both?

As it dawned on me as we first walked into this place, here it would be learning about cycles. Sparks which trigger a line of thought, or pure inspiration itself can come from anywhere, and so it was with the exploration of cycles, and with it a basic understanding of symbols. I had at my disposal an incredible library left over from the British Raj, with old books with notes and references on bookmarks written by borrowers a century before. I also had the books in my collection which compiled ancient concepts and presented them for today’s understanding. You hear howls of plagiarism about material like this, but where did the original scribe acquire it, probably plagiarised it himself. Besides, if it’s the truth then it’s always been available in the ether so it shouldn’t be commoditised in the first place. So there is this dichotomy of conflicting rules which we should try to honour, but don’t fret if you can’t as I’d come here for disobeying some of society’s rules, that didn’t seem to be a serious crime where it really counts, out there in the ether.

For several years I’d been fascinated with geometrical shapes and how they are used in design, from hexagons and pentagons to make soccer balls, Buckminster Fuller’s structures, to Sufi design of mosques. There seemed to be a natural harmony in these forms which is lost in contemporary architecture. A circle has 360 degrees which is divisible by numerous numbers, so if you stay with these and preference numbers divisible by 3 your creation takes on a naturally elegant form. While l found if you allowed number 7 in you lost the magic. Or did 7 lead to an alternate, maybe lower world magic?

When using 3 then, it meant using cycles of 12, ie the duodecimal system which would take you further at the design conception stage, but for detail and technical drawings it’s ok to use cycles of 10, which is the metric system. So in designing and drawing boats in our ashram the actual grid of sections through the hull would be metric as you wanted 10 stations which gave the 5 concentric circles representing the binary bubble, but the overall philosophy of the concept was imagined in duodecimals.

This process therefore recognised the dichotomy of the 2 dimensions and apportioned different opportunity to each, with the principle design influence coming from beyond the binary bubble. It was a rebuff of mind as it relegated to it the logic of technical detail, while the big picture purpose of the project, its philosophy, its elegance and harmony, came from the oneness.

So here was a statement of acknowledgement of the dichotomy which put mind in its place, and was an invitation to the Joker to please perform its miraculous interventions as it saw fit. Probably said this elsewhere, but that open invitation is taken up when mind is still, which is a purpose of meditation, not that it’s possible for most people to shut their mind down, so I was bypassing mind by not engaging in its logical process. Selecting dimensions for components which are divisible by 3 is a nonsensical way to go about designing a sailboat. But it allows you to view your creation from another perspective and incorporate concepts which seem to pp into your consciousness from nowhere. The question for me to always ponder was who or what’s the receiver here, was it mind or was it me, and how could I tell the difference. This then led to a deepening understanding of these inputs, until like today I don’t care from whence it comes, as when in the groove the solution, the fresh idea which solves the problem arrives as soon as I stop thinking about it, stop seeking it. From out of the ether, or from subconscious mind some will say. At least I’ve put forward the theory on how this actually works and how to switch it on. It’s the paradoxical magic at work.

***

We had only been at our new home in Dhaka Central a few weeks when I began making those mobiles which were hung from the ceiling at the centre of our little room’s rear wall. I can’t remember how I got up there the 3 or 4 metres to attach the pulley to the rafter and reeve that line, but must have borrowed a passing ladder, or told Wahid and he arranged it. The mobiles were made from finely whittled bamboo sticks, coaxed into circles, lashed together to make geometrical shapes like stars, a one at the top, a three, a five in the centre which walked and set the whole thing in motion. The 5 was chosen to drive the motion as a pentagon is used as a symbol for man, head, 2 arms and 2 legs fixing the points of the 5 pointed star. Below the 5 was a 7 then a 9. Each new mobile became more complex, up to 3 metres in height, and was hoisted on a halyard. Once set in rotating motion it cast mesmerising shadows, different elements turning in different directions at different speeds. A lot of grass got smoked, supplied by the guards who enjoyed the hypnotic distraction.

The more I smoked the wilder the concepts became. I could see how Magicians, Shamans, Witches and priests used numbers, how with incantations they could induce magic and influence outcomes. I imagined I was a powerful Mystic myself, a priest, the centre of my own New Age religion. I drew a trimaran, bounded by a circle, a square, a hexagon and an octagon, where the trimaran’s principal design features were determined by where geometrical shapes intersected. I sat at the centre of this tri under a dome and could sail through space, powered by the solar wind. One night in a dream-like trance I sailed out of the solar system, streaked past Pluto at the speed of light, out into the ether.

I predicted we would be released to great fanfare exactly 3 years after my arrest. 3 x 12 = 360 months would be the date, but it passed and I fell into a state of sadness. I had been led astray, duped by my own ego. It’s what happens when you artificially open yourself to psychic forces. So it taught me the only safe way to explore the supernatural is naturally, stimulant free.

Alcohol panders to the physical senses, grass takes you artificially into the worlds of mind where it masquerades as a pathway to the ether. Just as alcohol is a trap, so is dope. One plays with your body, the other your mind. Dhaka Central was a good place to finally learn that lesson and come out the other side alive and able to describe it.

To say the Joker is a genius is an understatement make no mistake about that, it had encouraged me to turn myself into a make believe magician, a drug crazed ascetic, a religious mystic, showed me how and why magic worked, how the lower worlds worked and the role of its religions, the dangers, and why we should not follow minds will. I was to learn that we can create a vision, but then tread lightly to allow the Joker to play the cards and prepare the pathway into our future, which will deliver the best outcome for all.

***

About 3 years into our incarceration we were moved to that compound right alongside the northern perimeter wall. Outside and towering above us was that huge minaret, nearby was that torturous police station. On moving day I packed Kuching in my briefcase and we hurried oﬀ to our new home, I had to hurry as he was in a state of panic. After about a week in our new residence he left us and we would get reports each day that he was back on the garbage pile with his mother. Ah well, he was a great companion while he was with us.

Then, after 2 weeks, he returned. He wandered around our rooms with loud meows greeting us all. Look at me he was saying, I’m now a grown up, no longer a timid insecure little guy. Now he strode around with confidence, no longer afraid of the guards, predicting their intent and easily outmanoeuvring their rattan poles. From now on he had a different routine. He’d spend the day with us then at night he’d wander oﬀ to patrol the jail, his jail as there had been a cull of cats, but Kuching must have been in the right place each time and had survived.

We had tried to make arrangements for him to leave with us when we were released and that he could stay at the Australian High Commission, but we dropped than plan now that he was in control. When we left the jail a few months later we felt he would be ok, but he’d lost our protection, and although he was adopted by a Bengali friend we heard he got sick and abandoned his body about 6 months after we left.

What was extraordinary though is just before we left Peg bought a pedigree red Burmese and when I eventually got back to her new house in Australia, there was Kuching, so identical to his namesake in Dhaka, in appearance, behaviour, mannerisms, even his preferences, that I just assumed it was him and this was a case of a soul occupying 2 bodies at the same time. Not sure if that’s actually possible, but it sure was a good way to start a conversation with Peg’s friends and visitors.

***

Back in jail things were dragging on. My 3 years deadline had come and gone, but no point dwelling on that, so I set about a design project to catch President Ershad’s attention, that we 3 Australian’s had been here long enough and it was time for us to go. I did 3 drawings for each of 3 boats, all 66ft long, but their waterline length was based on a waterline to overall length ratio of 22:20, 22:18, and 22:19.

That is 22:20 had a waterline length of 20 x 3 = 60ft, with an overall length of 22 x 3 = 66ft. This had nearly straight or vertical ends, and was a boat of burden, a cargo boat. It could be built in ferro cement by the prisoners and would be a sailing cargo carrier for the delta’s river system.

22:18 was a much sleeker craft with overall length of 22 x 3 = 66ft with a waterline length of 18 x 3 = 54ft. So this one had sharply angled and racy looking ends, so it was a sleek charter boat. What an opportunity for a charter business, let the well-heeled westerners who charter and holiday in the Caribbean and Greek islands, here was the adventure of a lifetime for travellers to cruise the Ganges river.

The third boat was 22:19, it was down the middle, would carry a good load of cargo, both sleek and fast, so was to be a ferry. It’s LOA was again 66ft, with a waterline length of 19 x 3 = 57ft. All these boats would be built in ferro cement by prisoners. This was a similar concept I’d explored in Geraldton jail in Western Australia all those years ago.

Each boat consisted of 3 drawings. A lines drawing, a sail plan, and a construction and accommodation plan. So 9 drawings in all, plus one more, a description of the project, drawn on a full-size sheet of paper, divided into 4 quarters. In the top right hand corner was a 3 in Bangla script, the bottom right corner was 5, bottom left is 7, top left is 9. In the centre is a one. The text describing the project flows around clockwise starting at 3, down to 5, across to 7, up to finish at 9.

This 10th sheet was envisioned as a mandala. Wikipedia says; “A mandala is a geometric configuration of symbols. In various spiritual traditions, mandalas may be employed for focussing attention of practitioners and adepts, as a spiritual guidance tool, for establishing a sacred space and as an aid to meditation and trance induction”.

The layout of this mandala may have looked like a flat sheet of paper, but a thing like this is actually a pyramid. It represented a powerful concept, which I believed to be a relative truth which would carry with it a powerful hidden message. But it never went to Ershad as word came to us that we were soon to be released, so I quickly pressed on to finish the text as I’d much rather take these drawings home complete. And much better than giving them to the home minister to prompt him to remind Ershad that our time was up.

A week later the Australian High Commission first secretary came to visit, and brought his camera to take photos for our new passports, he’d be back in a week to take us to the airport for deportation. He duly returned a week later and we were packed and ready to go. I had a lot of stuﬀ, we left all our books but I had a dozen diaries and a big roll of drawings.

I was however only interested in one thing, what was going to be the number of my new passport. I’d arrived on the 22nd and had seat 20 on the flight out of Singapore. My prison registration number was 2218, while Steve’s was 2220. I’d made 3 sets of drawings, one a boat of burden with a ratio of 22:20. Another the sleek racer at 22:18, my prison rego number, and the one in the middle at 22:19 which I liked most, as it was more in balance. So I presumed that the new passports would have to be something special to reflect the significance of this moment.

Well sir, please give us our passports so we can see the numbers. Thank you Sir, good job, it’s always a surprise but miracles are always accepted, in this case expected.

My actual passport number was J1102219, so the last 4 digits on my new passport was 2219 which I thought was fitting, Steve’s was 2220. But Darren’s was something entirely different, Hang on sir, what’s gone on here, why is Darren’s passport not in sync with ours, surely they should be in sequence. Oh, aren’t they, let me see?, “OK, yes that’s funny, why is that, OK, now I remember, the girl who was preparing these made an error on Darren’s which we noticed a few days later and she took a new one, so that’s why it’s out of sequence”.

This was a very interesting sequence of events, nearly as good as the posy of flowers for my initiation. Steve and I were arrested close together, we had spent this journey together, we were on the same page with everything, we had worked together on the lines drawing the boats. Darren on the other hand was arrested 3 months after us, he was on a different journey so it’s fitting that he should be out of sequence.

All these things are symbols. They are statements. They answer questions. What is extraordinary and very telling is how did this happen. So it asks the question, what caused the secretary to make an error with Darren’s passport? A skeptic can say nothing caused it, she just made a mistake, and if that suits the skeptic that’s OK. But any review of the odds of chance coming to this outcome, considering all the nuances in the back story is going to conclude it is beyond explanation.

So what happed here is the Secretary was triggered to make a mess of Darren’s passport and a new one taken to demonstrate just what the Joker can do if it wants to. We can either write this incident oﬀ as a coincidence, or face the facts, or glaze over and pretend it didn’t happen. Trouble is I’ve got the passport so the only question is how did it happen.

People think they are in control of their own actions, and generally they are but what happened here to arrive at this outcome demonstrates that things may not always be as they seem. But anything is possible when you funnel right back to the fundamental building blocks of matter, the make up of primal positive and negative charges kept apart and in motion, or alive, by the life force from the oneness. That means this life force is in everything, it’s the source of everything, it’s spit into the 2 opposite charges, and it’s there to keep them apart, so it IS everything, so why can’t it pull strings and be the Ventriloquist if it wants to.

So Spirit, this non thing that I’ve been calling the Joker can play extraordinary games with people, so be aware we can all be played like puppets, and won’t know anything about it. But at the end of the day the choice of explanation is up to each individual and the response we choose corresponds to the package which makes us who we are.

Everyone is their own bundle of truth, what they know and believe mirrors and reflects who they are. Everyone is evolving in awareness, they become more aware and in sync with their worldly circumstances. When they are caught up and controlled by a perverted mind they are going backwards in awareness. Everyone is in a state of near balance, seeking balance, they are always creating further imbalance, but are always going through balancing acts. If they are going backwards there will be inevitable balancing acts after which they have the chance to stabilise, and then progress on to greater awareness.

You can see me going through those cycles. Getting beaten up in Tahiti, the terror leading to going under a train, and going to jail are just balancing acts. It follows that if the purpose of life is to evolve in awareness, then balancing acts are good. Not many people will think getting sick, going bankrupt, crashing you car, bouncing oﬀ the front of a train, going to jail, or being hit by lightning could possibly be good.

For Steve it was an enlightening experience this time in Dhaka Central. He arrived a normally angry red-headed young man, he left on a mission. The early days were hard, there was some garbage that needed to be burnt, and he needed to be prepared for the arrival of the briefcase of books as conscious awareness needs to be generally in sync with the bodily condition. That is, the inner and outer bodies need to be a match, otherwise you get out of balance and unmanageable balancing acts can do unforeseen damage.

Steve’s unfoldment was being managed by the Marionettist under instruction of the Master Marionettist, but still it was painful. We can often be kept with just our nose above water, only our nose taking in air, you can get more buoyancy for a while and breath easy, get cocky then a balancing act will bring you back down, hold your breath, this isn’t going to kill you, and sure enough up again to take a deep breath. Spiritual awakening and growth can be a scary experience made more so by use of artificial stimulants that open you prematurely to the things you are not prepared for.

Not long after we arrived Steve developed boils on his neck, they would grow and fester, antibiotics in Dhaka Central were of poor quality, often past their use by date dumped there by profiteering pharmaceutical suppliers, so when nothing worked the hospital reverted to the age old fix for bullet wounds. Hang on because this hurts as the hospital orderly, a fellow prisoner, cleans out the hole, stuﬀs it with antiseptic soaked rags, which need to be pulled out and changed every few days. You can imagine the pain, there are a lot of nerves running through your neck, it’s hard to sleep, to wash, the thought of returning to that extraordinary hospital with its sewage problems, stuffing so called sterile rags an inch into your neck, then they are drawn out a few days later, not even a bottle of whisky to deaden the pain. This went on for months for Steve but he knew he was paying for the pot of gold waiting for him at the end of the rainbow.

I remember around this time a momentous day for me and Steve. He had been struggling to comprehend the simplicity of “the magic in three”, which I’d described Ad Nauseam, like I’m doing to you reading this story,. Then on this day he saw it, he was awake as pure consciousness, he’d bypassed his mind and in that moment had left his body and its pain behind. I quietly left our cell and went for a walk knowing that now I shared the cell with a kindred spirit who now knew what I’d been trying to explain, which of course you can’t as it’s beyond words and can only be experienced, by Soul.

We left Dhaka Central and Steve and Darren went on to Australia while I stayed in Singapore. I registered a business to develop the little sailing tender, my yacht had been sold while I was away and the proceeds went towards the family HDB or Housing Development Board apartment, but life for a retired middle age hippy trying to live in highly structured Singapore was becoming too restrictive and expensive. To stay you needed money and certification, and the old haunts had been broken up, new satellite towns were being built, and the transformation of Singapore to a modern metropolis was nearly complete.

By the way, the HDB apartment Serayah bought helped with proceeds from sale of my boat, it was on the 3rd floor and on the door was number 333. But after what I’ve been through with numbers this was nothing special, no need to look for meaning, just a hello, your never alone message from the oneness. Though if you Google 333 it throws up all sorts of meanings, like 222, there are pages and pages explaining its psychic meaning and relevance, but as said elsewhere, these things are irrelevant if your dealing direct with the Joker, they are distractions which cloud the simplicity of the truth. I suggest a good policy is if it’s mainstream, popular or trendy or “new age” stuff, treat it as a relative truth, a lower world discipline until proven otherwise.

It became obvious that I should move back to Australia to develop these little boats as it wasn’t going to work in Singapore. I packed the hull mould on a pallet, and filled it with all my possessions including the drawings from Dhaka Central and shipped it to Australia. But in organising the drawings I got an extraordinary surprise, as all the while in the past, completely unaware of the significance of numbers, I’d been involved in a strange game of déjà vu.

The first drawing I did of the little sailing tender I had numbered design 33, Dick’s big tugboat that I’d measured and drew, it’s drawings were titled 22 meter tug boat. The Norwegian rescue ship I worked on, the plans of which I modified were purchased in Norway, were those of RS 22. A design concept I spent a lot of time working on was inspired by a boat featured chapter 22 in a book by American designer Phillip Bolger. In relation to the rest of this story these were insignificant coincidences, but they do show that I was unknowingly caught up in this intrigue, playing out a role long before 222 entered the story.

I flew home to Melbourne and Peg got out all my possessions I’d left stored and forgotten at her place, among which were old bank books that she had organised, and there was a bank account from about 35 years before, from the ski lift building days so we took it up to the bank to see if it was still active. The girl asked what did we want her to do, see if it’s alive and update it ? yes I said, so she keyed in some numbers and it started updating the interest on the original balance of $3.50. It took a few minutes while we waited, she brought it over and wham, the new balance with 35 years of compound interest was $22.22 cents.

An irrelevant coincidence, could be, like them all just coincidence on coincidence, on coincidence. No it couldn’t be, the odds are just too great, like trillions on trillions to one. But what does that bank balance say? Well honestly I don’t know, except it’s a one-oﬀ joke played by spirit, the master comedian, the Joker of Jokers. How could anyone or anything possibly know what the interest rates were going to be over a 35 year period??

To a Muslim that’s easy, Allah knows everything, but I’m not into pre-determinism at that level. So actually I think the bank balance was just a stunt, showing off just what the Joker can do. But then if we can relate to the concept of Oneness, where everything exists, but without the timeline sequence of events, then maybe Muslims are right and Allah does know everything.

Maybe it’s time to sit back and take a few deep breaths. You cannot reconcile these questions through your mind as the normal laws of the physical world don’t apply. Neither should we insert these events in a timeline, particularly the $22.22 bank balance. It’s beyond time, it’s beyond binary logic, but we shouldn’t need a logical explanation just to keep our mind happy, as that’s what your doing if you require a logical answer.

There are the “normal” events, actions and reactions, the cause and effects which all can be explained by logic and science, it’s the mundane world of matter.

Then there are the supernatural events involving physical and mental phenomena, the world of mind, but these first 2 are to do with life and death in the binary bubble.

Then there are occurrences, the events or whatever they should be called like I’ve been describing which are beyond any explanation. They are however like beacons on the road in search of the meaning of 222 and evidence of the existence of another dimension, the Oneness, the home of your true inner self.

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