A dramatic crisis in Neville Jayaweera’s life

 Extracted from his full autobiography, “The Fork in the Road”, which is accessible on this website under the "About Neville Jayaweera" menu tab.

Written in the 3rd person, so as to avoid using the word “I”

The background

In 1970, in his 40th year, Jayaweera’s view of the world changed dramatically and permanently when he had a life-transforming experience of the Spirit of Jesus Christ. This experience exercised an extraordinary grip on him, turning his priorities and values upside down, and providing him with an indestructible foundation for life and a permanent centre for emotional and intellectual integration.

Coming from a devout Buddhist family, and a strongly Buddhist cultural background, Jayaweera found that the “Christ experience” presented him with challenges for meeting which he had no precedents. Understandably, therefore, his decision to go with his experience of the Christ put him on a collision course within his own culture and he became an object of derision and ridicule within it. When thousands of one-time "Christians" who, during times of colonial ascendancy, had found it advantageous to call themselves Christian, were now quietly divesting themselves of their "Christian" encumbrances and calling themselves Buddhists, so as to catch the prevailing wind, Jayaweera was singular in doing exactly the opposite. He abandoned what was obviously a highly advantageous Buddhist platform which he had inherited, and climbed on to the "sinking ship" of Christianity. His commitment to Jesus Christ made him seem a traitor to his culture and shut him off from all possibility of a public life.

However, not all of these many disadvantages which cramped his “progress” in the world could turn Jayaweera aside from his commitment to the Christ, who became for him a continuously flaming inner experience.

Jayaweera says that from the perspective of that experience, his career in the secular world has been a lot of “tinsel and fluff”, and of value only as a benchmark from which to measure his defection from it.

Indeed, he says that this seminal spiritual encounter evicted from his mind permanently the universally held belief that “reality” is what human beings apprehend with their five senses, and convinced him, beyond a shadow of doubt, that beyond the empirical there is another Reality (with a capital R) which human beings' sensorial apparatus knows nothing of.

Following this dramatic spiritual encounter, echoing the example set by the beggar who had been healed of his blindness by Jesus of Nazareth, Jayaweera could honestly and literally exclaim, “I was once blind but now I see!”

How Jayaweera experienced a dramatic defection from the secular world and a total turn-around in beliefs and values should interest those who explore religious or mystical experiences such as those described by William James (Varieties of Religious Experience – 1902), Evelyn Underhill (Mysticism –1911), Aldous Huxley (The Perennial Philosophy – 1946), Joel Goldsmith (Practising the Presence – 1947), Fritjof Capra (The Tao of Physics – 1975) and Ken Wilbur (The Spectrum of Consciousness – 1989).

The wilderness experience

In May 1970, when he was only 40, Jayaweera became a victim of a major political upheaval in Sri Lanka which pushed his life and career into crisis. Between his 29th and 40th years, Jayaweera had held several high-profile managerial posts with successive governments, which were far above the level of his seniority in the service, and which served to produce in him a seemingly indestructible self-confidence and a towering arrogance. He had not only been head-hunted by successive governments, but had also acquired a reputation as a no-nonsense administrator and as a stern disciplinarian, and this had incurred the implacable enmity of leading politicians and trade union leaders.

In 1970, when the government which he was then serving was ousted from office after a general election, Jayaweera found himself out of favour with the new government, which not merely exiled him to a relatively junior job in the provinces but also subjected him to great humiliation and public calumny. He also became an object of continuous detraction by former employees and trade unionists whom he had disciplined when he held high office. Even significant sections of the mass media, which had begun to swing round towards a partisan support of the new government, did not spare him. Worst of all, even his family became grist for the venom churned out from his detractors' hate mill.

However, throughout this unremitting assault upon his reputation and career, Jayaweera did not even once retaliate, or speak up in his defence, either through official grievance procedures, or through the media. Even though colleagues and friends urged him to speak up in his defence, he absorbed it all upon his mind and emotions. He was utterly dismayed why, when he was only trying to do the right thing, as he perceived it, he should be subjected to such harassment and calumny. As a consequence, for several agonising months, he found himself traversing a wilderness of despair, anguish and confusion.

Rather than defend himself, Jayaweera sought remedies through diverse philosophical and spiritual disciplines that were available to him from within his own rich cultural heritage, and kept seeking light, wisdom and reintegration through them.

Coming from a devout Buddhist family, his first option was naturally to seek answers to his conundrum through disciplines that were observed with great reverence within his own Buddhist culture. He took to Maitri Bhavana and Vipassana Bhavana, two profound and rigorous meditative disciplines at the heart of Buddhist teaching, far exceeding Transcendental Meditation in profundity and depth. Failing to make headway along either of these routes (which is not intended as a criticism of the said disciplines, but simply to say that they did not supply the answers that Jayaweera was seeking) he resorted to the Advaita meditative discipline, or Neti-Neti meditation, as taught by two of India's greatest Hindu philosophers and saints, Sankara (700 AD) and Ramana Maharishi of Arunachala (1900 AD). Those disciplines also, profound though they were, failed to provide Jayaweera with the answers he was seeking.

The all-sufficient answer

However, in September 1970, while still engaged in his relentless quest for the Truth through meditation, unsought and completely contrary to what he expected, he had an awesome and luminous experience of the Spirit of Jesus Christ. It was as if Jesus Christ had manifested in Jayaweera's experience as the all-sufficient answer to all of his questions.

That was quite ironic because Jesus Christ's emergence was not only totally contrary to his expectations, but, given his cultural conditioning, seemed even an unwelcome intrusion. Jayaweera's immediate reaction was therefore to be hostile towards his experience, and decided to examine it critically.

Jayaweera says that the appearance of Jesus Christ in his life was all the more ironic because at that time, as part of his search for spiritual answers to his worldly conundrum, he was seeking answers only from within his own cultural tradition. One can understand Jayaweera’s absolute consternation when, as if by some divine reprimand, unbidden and totally contrary to his expectations, Jesus Christ should intrude upon his experience instead!!

However, after looking at his experience objectively and over a period of time, through the critical spectacles of philosophy and psychology in which he had been trained, he concluded that there was more to his experience than a hallucination or a delusion, and that it had in fact been for him a conduit into another reality, or into what modern cosmologists describe as a “parallel universe”. Drawing on a metaphor provided by Stephen Hawking, one of Britain’s greatest intellects of recent times, Jayaweera says that the trauma he went through in 1970 was a spiritual “black hole” from which he exited to another universe – a "parallel universe".

Looking back on that experience, several decades later, he is convinced more than ever that the experience of the Christ he had in September 1970 marked a seismic shift in his consciousness – a major paradigm shift.

In support of his conviction that his life-changing experience was neither a hallucination nor a delusion, he points out to his critics that a hallucination is essentially an optic distortion, like seeing water on a desert road, or like mistaking a tree stump at dusk for a ghost, or a rope on the ground for a snake. What is common to all these experiences is their ephemeral nature. They lack durability and are easily corrected, and can never exercise a hold on a person's consciousness over a length of time, let alone over a period of over four decades; and much less, be instruments for permanently transforming the subject's consciousness, character or personality.

Likewise, Jayaweera says that a delusion is essentially a manifestation of a sick or psychotic mind, often accompanied by, or producing, a chaotic and fragmented personality, rather than the highly integrated and cohesive personality it eventually produced in him.

Jayaweera also rejects the notion that his experience of Jesus Christ might have been a projection of his subconscious mind. He agrees that the subconscious mind can play all sorts of tricks on one's conscious mind by projecting images and apparitions on to one's experience in the same way that a film projector throws images on to a screen.

However, he also points out that if that was the case in this instance, one would have expected his subconscious mind to project into his experience images and pictures that were an integral part of his own cultural background, and which would have helped him to harmonise the conflict in which he was snared.

In the event, the appearance of Jesus Christ in his experience proved entirely counterproductive in terms of the world, alienated him from his culture and his tradition and opened up new areas of conflict for him, which proved permanent and irreconcilable. Hardly a wish-fulfilling projection of his subconscious mind! At that time, Jayaweera was trying to work his way back into the world, which had evicted him from its midst. That being so, it does not stand to reason why his subconscious mind should come up with an experience which, far from helping him to achieve that goal, actually distanced him from it as never before, and ensured that he would never return to it!

He has never ceased to ask himself why, when being cocooned within the comfort zone of his inherited culture was clearly to his material advantage, he should deliberately have opted for an alien allegiance, for that was what his commitment to Jesus Christ meant in terms of the world, when by all worldly criteria it was absolutely inexpedient for him to do so.

The only possible answer is that the seminal experience he had of the Christ while he was in meditation and prayer in 1970 had been so self-authenticating and so overpoweringly compelling, that all considerations of added proof became irrelevant.

What actually happened?

Jayaweera believes that what actually happened at that point in his life was that, when his Ego had been utterly pulverised and felled to the ground, he finally submitted to his brokenness and began fervently to seek the Truth. It was at that point of brokenness and of intense seeking that he became open to the activity of the Spirit.

The Spirit touched him and imparted to him a new perspective on everything that concerned his life – a new set of values, a new consciousness, a faith he never had before, and above all, a centre for reintegrating his new life. That centre was the Spirit of the Risen Christ.

That is what it means for Jesus Christ to come into one's life – a fundamental reintegration of life around Him, an irreversible change in core beliefs and values, and most importantly, a 180-degree turnaround in the choice of life’s goals. In a most extraordinary way, all ambitions that Jayaweera had had up to that time for his progress through life simply dropped away. He no longer wanted to “achieve” anything in the world except, through the Holy Spirit, to be transformed into the image and likeness of his Master, Jesus Christ, and to be a demonstration model for him on earth.

Neither did Jayaweera consider gaining access to “heaven” as his spiritual goal. Heaven was for him an “added thing”, whereas now his primary objective in life was to seek God’s Kingdom, here on earth, and manifest the Kingdom in his personal life as well as in the world around him. However, neither through military might, nor through politics, nor through technology, nor through development, nor through any human strategy, but through Spirit alone. He says that that is strictly in accordance with Jesus’ command, “Seek first the Kingdom of God … on earth as in heaven … and all these other things shall be added to you” (Matthew 6:10 and 6:33 combined and summarised).

This did not mean that Jayaweera was about to retreat into a cave, or take holy orders, or enter a monastery. Not at all! He simply continued to live out his life in the world, as circumstances ordained it, except that he no longer determined those circumstances but allowed the Holy Spirit to rearrange them for him.

Consequently, shortly after he had gone through that seismic experience, in his forty-second year, literally from out of the blue, he received an invitation from the World Association for Christian Communication in London (the WACC) – an organisation he had never heard of before – to serve as their Director of Research and Planning on an open-ended contract. Accepting that invitation, he took early retirement from the Public Service, relocated with his family to Britain, and served in the WACC for 17 years.

It turned out that the chief value of that job to Jayaweera was that it gave him opportunities to deepen his spiritual life through several more mystical experiences of the Spirit of Christ. However, during those 17 years, he did write copiously on Communications Technology and on the Communication Revolution. However, his off-the-desk life, deeply embedded in Spirit, was his Real life. His spiritual encounters during those 17 years provided him with the meat and substance for much of his later writings which now appear on his website https://www.nevillejayaweera.com

Jayaweera wants to emphasise that the only reason he is writing about this experience now, in 2014, is that he feels under a compulsion to talk about it to the world, as his testimony to the power of the Spirit of Christ to radically transform a life, and not at all out of the desire to advertise himself.

However, he wants to confess with deep contrition, that very early in his new spiritual life he was lured by crusading evangelicals from various countries of the world to talk publicly about his experience of Christ. He was too immature in his faith to discern the difference between wise testimony and the "parading" of one's faith. Consequently, he lost the incandescence and power of the Spirit’s presence and went into a deep depression, from which it took almost 18 months to emerge. He traversed a classic “tunnel experience”, which St John of the Cross, a great mystic of the Middle Ages, referred to as the “Dark night of the soul”.

Now in his 84th year (in 2014), Jayaweera feels compelled and under a spiritual obligation to write about his life-changing experience of 1970 when he was 40 years of age, but only as a lasting testimony to the enduring power of the Christ to transform lives.