Chapter 9: Max’s health
He and Isabel were running the classes regularly
for most of the year, in the house in nearby Chesterford Gardens; and Max always
had new papers to write for the courses. Journalists and television programme
makers sometimes took an interest in his work and friends and visitors, most
of them involved in the health and healing movement, dropped in.
Occasionally, Max and Isabel held a dinner party
to celebrate a birthday, inviting close friends for an evening of good food
by candlelight and irreverent laughter. At
weekends they would take a walk. A favourite route was through Golders Hill
Park, a mile or so away, where they usually sat with a coffee on the terrace
at the Italian cafe.
I introduced them to France and their enjoyment
of good food often drew them back there for holidays. We went together to
Brittany, Provence and other regions, staying in country hotels or bed-and-breakfast
establishments. One year we toured to Carnac, in Brittany, and visited many
of the prehistoric sites with their granite megaliths standing in carefully
designed patterns, marvelling at the sight of four-kilometre lines of stones
by the light of a full moon. With no distraction from other visitors, we
fell easily into the timelessness of these ancient sites.
Another favourite place was in the north of Provence,
in the Luberon, which I had discovered a few years before. The
hotel in which we stayed was in the heart of the country and consisted of
what had been a whole village: a few houses and a church which had been joined
together. A swimming pool had been added, which Max enjoyed using most
days.
The woman who owned the hotel was very friendly
- she herself believed that she had been cured of cancer a few years before
by a healer. These holidays
were great opportunities to exchange ideas and explore possible anomalies
in the work. On one occasion,
I wondered out loud whether we were psychically making our subjects produce
the State 5 EEG pattern to fulfil our own theories. We eventually decided
that it was very unlikely that we were causing lamas and swamis to show us
this pattern and therefore State 5 did indeed have a genuine value when our
subjects achieved it.
Though their life was busy and contented, it
was not carefree. Max’s health began to deteriorate because of a combination
of factors. After he broke his neck for the second time, in the hit-and-run
accident while working for Smiths Industries, his sight deteriorated badly
- to the extent that for a while he became almost blind. But the accident was probably not the cause. His
research for the Royal Navy had exposed him to high-power radar beams and
at the time it was not known that this could lead to eye cataracts. Max
believed that he prevented the cataracts developing during the next 25 years
by meditation. Whatever one
may think of this, his eyes were functioning before the accident and after
it he could no longer see. Fortunately, by this time an operation had been
developed to remove the outer layer of the pupil together with the cataracts. After
the operation was carried out, he had to wear contact lenses to replace the
missing lens of the eye rather than simply correct the normal visual defects.
Max had been diagnosed as diabetic at the age
of 38, bringing all the complications of diet and other inconveniences the
condition can create in everyday life. By his late fifties his health was
causing increasing concern. Max said “function is everything” and
kept going despite the cumulative effects, sometimes observably drawing on
remarkable inner resources. The classes for the most part continued as normal,
but he was in increasing pain and his deep understanding of the workings
of mind and body was by now being sorely tested.
In the early 1970s, he suffered a stroke at home. Here
he demonstrated extraordinary fortitude. It
happened one Friday. Isabel
wanted to call the doctor immediately but Max, unable to speak, looked so
red and angry that she did not dare do so. Though
incapacitated, he would not accept that very much was wrong and was determined
at the weekend to take his Monday evening class as usual.
Monday came and he began the first session, but
after an hour Max could see that the group was not following him and had
to accept he was incoherent. On
the Tuesday morning, the healer Addie Raeburn was due to visit to discuss
healing research. It was very
fortunate that she arrived at that point for she was able to offer her remarkable
healing ability. She laid hands
on him and afterwards Max said later the experience was “like being
in an express lift going down very fast”. He
woke up the next day, 18 hours later, and Isabel cautiously asked how he
was. To her surprise he answered
lucidly: “I am very well indeed; thank you very much for asking.” You
can imagine her relief.
Max immediately set to work and spent the whole
of the Wednesday typing. The stroke was still having its effects: he had
to correct almost every letter on one sheet of paper but succeeded in regaining
his typing skills. The
next day, his “Thursday evening group” were delighted to see him
back. He gave a public talk
three weeks later at the Festival of Mind, Body and Spirit at Olympia. His only worry was that he might forget who he was in the
middle of the talk. Max
told me, it seemed at the time
as though a zip fastener between the two halves of his brain had come undone
- he knew perfectly well what he wanted to say but could not communicate
across the gap to his voice to convey the words. He
said that when the stroke happened, the only way he had been able to tell
Isabel not to call the doctor was to demonstrate that he was angry at the
idea.
In 1980 we were invited to Italy to give a seminar
on biofeedback and healing in Florence, by Bruce MacManaway and his group
based there. Max, Isabel and I decided to take a holiday first in Provence
and then continue on by car to Florence. On previous journeys there had been no problems but this
time Max was already suffering with his circulation soon after we arrived
in the South of France. The
soft car seat, pressing on the back of his legs, intensified the circulation
problems in his legs. The pain
in his feet was intense and we could see when he took off his shoes and socks
one toe had started to turn black. On
one scenic route, he was in agony just walking a few steps from the car to
look at a magnificent view along a gorge.
We did not know what to do but the car journey
to Italy looked as though it would not be too difficult, with a good motorway
for most of the way, and we decided to give the seminar in Florence if at
all possible. In the event,
we had underestimated the distance and the journey was a nightmare; the roads
were crowded with heavy lorries along the coast road through Monaco and into
north Italy. Max was in a bad
way when we arrived and the local hospital was adamant: one of his big toes
would need to amputated immediately.
Max needed to get back to London fast, to be
on his home territory and seek proper advice. He
and Isabel left as soon as possible and flew home. I
stayed behind and with the help of an excellent translator held the seminar
in Max’s place using our usual techniques of relaxation and guided imagery.
Arriving home, Max concentrated on his circulation.
Students in the Thursday class rallied to help. Sidney Crawford remembers: “Our
group of 12 to 15 people would sit in a circle holding hands. Max’s
foot would be on a chair, and we hoped we were sending powerful waves of
healing to the dark toe now visible. Over the months the dark wine colour
of the toe began to fade and became a normal pink.” At
one biofeedback weekend, the whole group offered their healing ability to
Max as they concentrated on his toe. The specialist could not believe it as, day by day, the colour
came back and finally an operation was not necessary. As Isabel said much
later: “He died with his
big toe on.”
In the classes, too, people saw Max grimace in
pain at times and realised that he was fighting a long battle. Isabel was
now heavily supporting Max in his work, helping him to choose the papers
and meditations for the evening and developing as a teacher herself. Sydney
Crawford was gripped by the slow deterioration of Max’s body, month
by month, while the man maintained a shining brilliance of mind and spirit.
Each Thursday evening, Sydney would arrive at
Chesterford Gardens a few minutes before the class and watch Isabel help
Max out of the car. Max would
slowly walk to the room with the aid of a stick and then to his chair. Often
his voice would be faint at the beginning but then grow in power. By
the time the group reached the 8.30pm break Max would be in full flood, inspirational
and compelling as in earlier days. Body highly energised, he appeared to
have risen above his earthly woes; to Sydney, it was a supreme example of
how mind could arise above matter.
In early March 1985, Max was taken ill after
the first week of his latest series of five-week courses. He
had to go into hospital for a fairly routine prostate operation and I volunteered
to lead the courses in his absence, expecting that he would be back in time
to take them for the last couple of weeks. Max
was very pleased that I was filling in because, for him, such an undertaking
was a commitment he would not break if it could be helped. I
found it not too difficult to give the two beginners’ courses - Psychocybernetics
and Hypnopsychdelics - nor was it too demanding to find something for his
long-term followers, the Thursday evening group.
After waiting for a couple of weeks in hospital,
Max went into the operating theatre one afternoon for the prostate operation. There
was no reason to expect that it would be any more complicated than that. The
operation was performed successfully but he died of shock a few hours afterwards,
on March 28, despite the efforts to save him. This
was during the fourth week of the courses.
I do not think I was expecting his death but
I had been aware by Isabel’s tensions and reactions for the preceding
year or so that she was unconsciously expecting it sooner rather than later.
Maybe I am saying this with hindsight because we could not imagine him not
being present and continuing to surmount his health obstacles as always,
even though we knew it had become increasingly difficult for him to do so.
I want to give you my experience of Max’s
death. In the early part of
his final evening he had convinced Isabel that he was all right after the
operation and she went home. But she was almost immediately called back to
the hospital, where she and I found that Max had died in the emergency ward. The
nurses were very supportive and allowed us stay with him where we chanted
Aum and Hum by his side.
I believe the nurses were very moved by his presence
and they allowed Isabel and Helen, my wife, to return again to the ward,
where they stayed until dawn. Looking
at Max’s face before going home that night I had a strange experience:
it seemed to me that, as I watched, his nose and chin reached towards each
other in an expression of terrible anguish. I could shake my head and the
effect would vanish, but again as I watched the effect would be repeated. Seeing
him in death two days later, the effect was quite different. As
I looked an ecstatic smile appeared. If
my psychic impressions are true, then it seems that a high-tech death in
hospital is not very easy even for someone like Max.
The reaction from some of those who had attended
the last courses and who had met him only once on the first evening, was
poignant. “I thought that I had at last met my true teacher,” said
one student. Max's charisma
was with him until the end.
Then came the final Thursday evening, a few days
after Max had gone. Students
who wished to do so offered some guided imagery, a meditation or a poem. Isabel
remembers: “When the moment came to have a meditation, we played one
of Max’s meditations on tape. I
almost jumped out of my seat, for it was like hearing his voice for the first
time. In that moment I had a realisation of the power of Max - and why people
came week after week and year after year to our groups.”
For me, he seemed to be sitting between the tables
at the centre of the room. Max
was certainly present with us as we made our offerings to him: present, alive
and vivid without all the handicaps of his last few years of illness. Barbara
Siddall, who was there that evening, recalls: “What we all experienced
together was profound, intense and deeply moving. We
all felt his presence; for me, it was a huge loving heart of which we were
all part.”
“This may sound macabre,” she says, “but
Max looked so relaxed and well at the undertakers. Some
of us called in to spread a few crystals or snowdrops about him. The
undertaker’s two Siamese cats loved to be with him and insisted on using
him as a bed. The woman undertaker
said she felt such a presence and wanted to know: “Who is this man,
is he a Master?”
The funeral was held a few days later and Max
was buried in Fortune Green cemetery, West Hampstead. About 30 people arrived
at the church, many of them from the biofeedback classes. Barbara read his
Meditation poem from The Awakened Mind. Afterwards, we all walked the short
distance to our house for a glass of wine, to talk and mark his passing.
More people arrived. The atmosphere was cheerful – “a great send-off”,
as Barbara put it. But we did not quite believe that he had gone.