Info Point

Allow me if you will, to lay before you a witness account of a learning process and its result. Learning about Man and the life of Man. My reason to embark upon this quest at first was personal, even selfish. I did so in search of a cure for my ills. Not for any physical ailments that tormented me but for my psychological state, for which, even when it became unbearable, modern medicine could offer no explanation or solution. Being a junior doctor, this was a huge disappointment and it forced me upon a different route in search of answers.

Searching for the Lost Smile

About the book…

The book you have in front of you is not arranged chronologically, it is not a travelogue of my journeys. The chapters are instead organised primarily in line with my inner development, they follow the markers of my inner journey.

The chronological order of my travels is this: in 1996 I went to Nepal, where I stayed a month before travelling around India for ten months. After that a year travelling around West Africa, starting in Morocco and passing through Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Togo, Benin and finally Nigeria. From 2000 to 2004, I spent several months in both Ethiopia and Peru, paid a number of visits to Nepal and journeyed into Tibet. In 2001 I came across a hospital for lepers in Varanasi and over the next seven years I spent between one and four months at that hospital each year.

With the exception of a couple of details, in this book I do not write about the trip to West Africa or my subsequent travels to Nepal, Tibet and the Himalayas. I believe what happened on those journeys outstrips the scope of this book, and more importantly, I wouldn’t know how to begin to describe it.

The book has five chapters, with the first four reflecting the evolving stages of a spiritual path according to the teaching of Dr Roberto Assagioli, the founder of psychosynthesis.

The four stages – the crisis preceding spiritual awakening, the reaction to spiritual awakening, the crisis caused by spiritual awakening and the transmutation phase – are experienced by all who set out on this path.

The fifth chapter, which I decided to name Psychosynthesis, is the result of my own experience of them. Over the past twenty years I was able to recognise each of these phases in my own development, so the book is structured in the order in which I experienced them.

It begins with Packing for the Journey, which introduces the reader to what is essential to all those contemplating a spiritual quest.