Etienne de L'Amour: An interview with myself

Q: What prompted you to write the books in the Shadowlands series?

Etienne: The roots of the idea go back a long way ... indeed such things perhaps go back further than we might imagine?

One early influence, which prompted the idea of the mystics and their mountain retreat at babs chu, was the 1937 film, Lost Horizon, which I watched as a child, much of which was set at a mythical place called Shangri-la in the valley of the Blue Moon. Another was reading the explorer Alexandra David-Neel's With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet. Much later, as a young adult, I studied the original 1933 novel Lost Horizon by James Hilton, as part of a creative writing course. By that time I'd also found an interest in esoteric traditions and spiritual ways such as Buddhism and Zen; and I was intrigued by the possibility that there might be more to the world than met the untutored eye. Something far more subtle, hidden and largely forgotten.

Another major influence was a nervous breakdown I experienced in the mid-1980s, which I'd describe as “blowing my mind on God”. It was a rememberance or awakening of sorts that went awry, and one for which I was at that time utterly ill-prepared.

Excerpt from Escape From the Shadowlands: First chapter

0. The extraordinary general meeting

All weekend long the delegates of the Caretaker Council had been arriving, close relatives of the family being put up in the specially reopened west wing of the oak-timbered and limestone manor house whilst others found rooms at the village inn and at Mrs Murphy's guest house, much to the bemusement of the largely elderly residents of High Langton. Not since the outbreak of the First War had the sleepy hamlet seen such a level of organized activity, and given the secrecy surrounding the meeting, wild rumours were rife, further fuelled by the deliberate release of disinformation by Miss Crawford, the council's honorary secretary.

In her early to mid forties, Mary Crawford was a slight figure, standing no taller than five feet six inches in her sensible heels and tweed two piece suit. Her unfashionable, mousy, permed appearance and eagerness to please fooled many a stranger, but not those who'd come to know and ultimately admire her. The councillors and co-opted dignitaries might have been masters of waffle and debate and have the final say when it came to a vote, but it was the unassuming, organized and efficient Mary Crawford whose hard work brought them all together in the first place and made the event possible. The woman had the worthy gift of being able to attend to fine detail without falling into unnecessary pedantry.

The Insiders: The Teachers of Gurdjieff revisited, 2012

Before the second world war, there was an influential Greek-Armenian spiritual teacher by the name of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. He taught that most of humankind was in a hypnotic, robotic state of sleep, and that it was possible to awake from this sleep and achieve a higher state of consciousness through what he termed "the Work". His methods differed from that of the fakir, monk or yogi, and so he called his methodology "the Fourth Way". Many Fourth Way groups and organizations are still operating to this day, in such far flung places as the United Kingdom and the United States.

Little was known about the origins of Gurdjieff's teachings, until a partly fictionalized book, The Teachers of Gurdjieff by Rafael Lefort was published nearly fifty years ago in 1966, and at the time this caused a considerable stir, not least amongst those students still following or involved in the Fourth Way. At the time, in the swinging sixties, many people were setting off for places like India, Japan, Turkey and Tibet in search of spiritual and mystical masters, and the exotic; and Gurdjieff's own sources, such as the legendary and elusive Sarmoung Brotherhood, appeared to have been lost.

Rafael Lefort is a nom de plume, of course, and is said to be an approximate anagram of "Real Effort" (which is quite permissible in traditional circles). It is not known for certain who wrote the book, but it is likely that this came out of the camp of the Sufi mystical teachers Idries Shah and Omar Ali Shah who were at that time working together in the West, before they agreed to disagree and went their separate ways. The book may have been written by Omar Ali Shah, or perhaps by a number of students in the Paris group.

A helping hand: A Shadowlands excerpt

As [Jeanine] turned the next page, she found that Tenzing had quite abruptly and with little warning switched from a more didactic description of the study to illustrating what he wanted to say through the use of stories. One tale in particular found an inner resonance with her. It told of a young girl who'd been orphaned as a child and taken in by a poor family who scraped a life together fishing. She found work as a lowly servant at the king's palace, but due to the intrigues of another in the household, who had taken a dislike to her, the girl found herself accused of a crime and wrongly imprisoned in the cold dungeons of the castle by the king.

To cut a long story sort, word had soon reached her foster parents of her imprisonment and when every other means of obtaining her release had been tried, to no avail, and they were exhausted, they happened to mention their daughter's plight to an old wandering holy man, asking him to pray for the girl's release.

This master of the Way, being a holy man, was granted access to the girl to cater for her religious needs after presenting himself to the king and successfully arguing his case.

He visited her many times over the coming months until the guards became quite used to his comings and goings. At first they used to question the man, but as he always gave such an incoherent reply, the ramblings of a deranged holy man, and as he stank to high heaven, after a time the guards simply waved him through.

Then one day, the holy man failed to turn up as expected and come the evening when it was time to take the girl her bread and water, they found her lying in a corner of the cell covered by a thin blanket. When she did not respond, one of the guards pulled back the blanket. To his astonishment he discovered that it was the old holy man, naked as a jay bird, and that the girl had escaped.

And when they questioned the old man about the escape, he told them that the girl had dressed herself in his coarse woollen robes, with her hair tied back and her hood up to hide her features, and had simply walked out of the prison. The guards had become so used to his comings and goings, and his incoherent grunting, that they'd let her pass without question.

“Well,” declared the king when word of what had happened reached him. “The old man needn't think that any advantage has been gained from the escape. Lock him up in the girl's place and let him serve out her sentence. No, double the sentence.”

“In fact, throw away the ruddy key.”

But the very next day, when the guards came to check on the old man, they found that he had quietly passed away in his sleep, knowing beforehand that his time had almost come. So what had he really lost in order that the girl should gain her freedom?

Excerpted from Escape From the Shadowlands.
Painting: Porträt des Titus in Mönchkleider by Rembrandt.

• By Etienne de L'Amour ~ Google+

Every dystopian cloud has a silver lining

It's no coincidence that Sher Point, the metropolis of the Freelands, is an anagram of 'the prison', nor is the name 'the Freelands' itself free from a certain irony. The Sirians, who had originally helped instigate the Eden Project, had a hand in this and they were not without a sense of humour, albeit slightly twisted.

Nor is it coincidental that the words contain within them 'psion', which is associated with faculties such as telepathy. Such faculties did indeed play a part in the original project when people, though some stages removed from Unity or Reality, were nevertheless still able to benefit from it. However with the catastrophic loss of the Link to the Source, though vestiges of such abilities remained as a kind of by-product of spiritual development (incorrectly prized by some), they were largely lost to the masses.

Decay slowly but surely spread through the Eden Project, to the point that the experiment was largely abandoned and the realm ultimately came to be known more fittingly as the Shadowlands.

Sin and the Shadowlands have become, quite incorrectly, synonymous, and several globally organized religious institutions have emerged in the Shadowlands which hold amongst their basic premises the dogma that all people born in the Shadowlands are hapless sinners in need of their particular trademarked brand of grace and salvation. But the truth of the matter is rather more complex. What is seen as black and white by the religionists and the authoritarians might better be likened to a thousand and one shades of grey; or even glorious technicolour.

You see, the degeneration, bad as it was, was further exacerbated by what is now seen in retrospect as a foolhardy policy of biblical proportions: the decision to use the Shadowlands as a kind of pan-galactic therapy centre and later penitentiary, a dumping ground for the dross and lame ducks that other, extraterrestrial communities wished to off-load. It had been somewhat optimistically believed that the penitents would be favourably affected by contact with and immersion in the native community, and this was indeed the case before the Link began to falter. But the sheer number and escalating levels of depravity of the reprobates transported to the Shadowlands ensured that the very converse occurred and they helped to drag the culture down still further.

Alas, movements which once possessed a live dynamic so often succumb themselves and become sometimes grotesquely twisted, fossilised relics and institutions. But fortunately there have always been some who have been able to Remember and to keep the spark or eternal flame alive through the centuries. Tenzing Jangbu Rinchen, a representative of the perennial tradition, is one of those people, and fortunately he is not alone. Truth be told, and rest assured, we are never alone and help is always at hand.

Though preceded by two prequels, the best place to start reading the Shadowlands series is book 3, Escape From the Shadowlands.

Painting: Mountain Peak with Drifting Clouds, oil on canvas painting by Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1835, Kimbell Art Museum.

• By Etienne de L'Amour ~ Google+