I was not in a position to pay for classes but was let in to their 'club' essentially because I befriended everyone. I hung out with them four to five days a week for three to four hours a day taking all sorts of classes as well as impromptu training. I would clean up the place occasionally and after a while I would help teach certain classes, thus 'paying' my way. I rather quickly became competent at the very showy style of martial art dance that they had created (that resembles little save the Wu-Shu circus from China). After a while I even had the opportunity to participate in some of their shows.
A lot of the people in the 'Shango' were very strange people, into alternative anything and deliberately mystical. Thirteen is a very impressionable age when surrounded by adult mystics who's approval one desperately craves. I learned meditation and breathing exercises. I learned a focus of concentration that can be so intense as to stop pain. I learned 'tricks' that aren't really. I learned the one inch punch where a board is placed touching your outstretched hand, then without the hand loosing contact the board is broken. I learned to be fascinated by things bizarre.
Then one day when I was fifteen I attended a lecture that was given to a huge audience by a spiritualist medium (a woman with impeccable academic credentials, thus the audience). I was fascinated by what I heard and when the lecture was over waited patiently outside of the gaggle of groupies that clamored for her attention until the last of them had left. Finally in an empty auditorium she turned to me and smiled, seeing something I did not (or so she said). Within a couple of weeks I was her student, reading books she lent me and taking a class a week with her where we practiced listening to our intuition. Over a couple of years I became her protégé, and finally one of her pet psychics, doing readings in her spiritualist church and other events.
With the confluence of the Shango and this woman I naturally developed both a fascination for and a certain understanding of things esoteric. I started to amass a huge library of books on the occult and studied and thought much. I have always had a gift for public speaking and communicating ideas, this combined with the large number of impressionable people I was surrounded by, due to the woman's church and all, led to my finding myself more and more cast into the role of guru. After a while it was quite normal to find me talking in a room with a large number of people who would all sit quietly listening. All I wanted to do was to share my understanding of the universe, to help people in the only way I could, by sharing things that I (thought I) knew and insights that I possessed.
It is a terrible thing to be put on a high pedestal, especially when you have been put on a moral one by people of questionable balance. I was far from perfect in ways which were not easily apparent to the majority of the people around me. It was drugs that were my downfall. Not so much due to the drugs themselves (though they were not good for me) as due to the reaction of the people around me when they discovered that I used them. Their perfect little angel whom they had almost worshiped, was not perfect, I had deceived them. I was a dark angel, I had taken the left hand path, I was to be shunned.
When this happened at the age of twenty I was far from sure of myself. There was a great deal that I did not know and many questions the answers to which I still sought. When virtually everyone I knew was telling me that I had strayed from the path, that I practiced black magic, that my soul was forfeit, it was impossible for me not to believe that this might be true. I had to consider the possibility that everything I knew might be false, I had to face my demons, I had to confront myself raw, without illusion. I entered my abyss.
I fell. Into the depths of despair I sank questioning everything, forcing an answer. Try as I might each question fed on itself to create an even greater doubt, until nothing made sense, nothing was real. I touched insanity and for a moment, I was not sane. I almost didn't make it.
Finally I prayed. Not as a christian would or the way any other human being might save myself. I did not pray with words, for I do not always think with words, they restrain ideas. I looked into the blue sky and it resolved; I cannot know the truth, even if I did it would not change who I am or the way I live my life, I can do nothing better than live my life to the best dictates of my conscience, if this is not enough, tough. At that moment the questions ceased to have meaning and my despair turned to serenity, which largely persists to this day. My intellect is a tool of the physical world. It may answer questions of the physical world, other questions are irrelevant to me.
I have never looked back to those days when I sought answers to unanswerable questions. From that moment forth I used no more drugs, I went back to school. I no longer speak of those things that I used to. As far as anyone knows (myself included), I know nothing. I keep silent.