Allan Vincent Wood
A personal recollection
I first came across Allan Vincent Wood, or AV as he was known, in 1979, through Neil Harrison, a mutual acquaintance who lived in Cheltenham. Neil had a bookshop, Number One Supplies, which sold mainly second-hand books, but with a particular focus on Eastern mysticism, Western esotericism and the occult. Neil was involved in a group which had gathered around AV, who had already established himself as a teacher by that time.
Apart from being a teacher in his own right, he pointed to the importance of P. D. Ouspensky and the teaching associated with him, known as the System. AV did not teach the System directly, but instead he taught all that was supplemental to it. Among other things he pointed to the recognition of Ouspensky as the Bodhisattva incarnate in the twentieth century. He taught that, in order to value the System rightly, it was necessary to recognise Ouspensky’s stature.
He pointed out that the recognition of Ouspensky as the Bodhisattva would depend on consensus. Buddhist history tells us that, a thousand years after the death of Gautama, he was succeeded by the Bodhisattva known as Bodhidharma, who was the founder of Zen. AV explained that a Bodhisattva must incarnate again and again until eventually they become the Buddha, and then never have to incarnate again. He pointed out that D. T. Suzuki, who had written extensively about Zen, stated that Meister Eckhart, who taught monks to meditate in the Middle Ages, was an incarnation of the Bodhisattva, and that Suzuki had hinted at the possibility of an incarnation in the twentieth century.
AV also drew our attention to an interview with Ouspensky, in the book God is my Adventure, by Rom Landau. Landau had attended Ouspensky’s groups in London. In the record of his attendance, he wrote that Ouspensky entered the room and sat before the assembled group:
‘One of the speaker’s first sentences was: ‘None of you here is awake. What you all do is sleep.’ After he had made this remark he stopped abruptly, as though withdrawing from the world of words into his own more comfortable world. His appearance suddenly suggested to me some modern version of Buddha.’
AV was quite clear about the importance of the recognition of Ouspensky as the Bodhisattva. It was claimed that, in his later years, Ouspensky had abandoned the System. AV explained that this is because, when asked whether he had done so, he answered ‘There is no System’. AV pointed out that this was because they did not understand Ouspensky, and more particularly the Psychological Method.
Ouspensky had introduced the term, the ‘Psychological Method’, to distinguish between ordinary logical thinking and psychological thinking. The Logical Method expresses everything in terms of clear definitions, but the Psychological Method, through which Ouspensky conveyed his teaching, is intended to provoke insight. He first used the term in Tertium Organum (1912):
‘In order to obtain at least some kind of an answer to the questions which torment us we must turn in quite another direction – to the psychological method of study of man and humanity.’
He employed the term again in his second book, A New Model of the Universe:
‘We can see different levels of thought in ordinary life. The most ordinary mind, let us call it the logical mind, is sufficient for all the simple problems of life.
‘But a logical mind which knows its limitedness and is strong enough to withstand the temptation to venture into problems beyond its powers and capacities becomes a psychological mind. The method used by this mind, that is, the psychological method, is first of all a method of distinguishing between different levels of thinking and of realising the fact that perceptions change according to the powers and properties of the perceiving apparatus.’
The type of perceptual change Ouspensky was referring to is more than simply a change of outlook, but something more akin to the change of perception known as ‘satori’ in Zen Buddhism, which is a sudden insight into the nature of reality. In Buddhist teachings it is made clear that satori cannot be manufactured, nor logically arrived at, and that the whole of its teaching is merely the preparation for it. It could be said that the purpose of the psychological method is to provoke insight.
AV had once irreverently remarked that he had been Huike in a previous lifetime. The legend of Huike’s meeting with Bodhidharma was that the Master had refused to teach him, and so Huike stood in the snow outside Bodhidharma’s cave. Huike is recorded to have cut off his left arm and presented it to Bodhidharma in order to demonstrate his sincerity. Bodhidharma then accepted him as a student, and Huike then remained with him until the death of his Master, at which point he became the second Patriarch of Zen.
It is recorded that Bodhidharma called his four closest disciples to his deathbed and asked, ‘What is the dharma?’ Each answered in turn, until at last Huike stepped forward, bowed silently, and answered ‘There is no dharma’. To which Bodhidharma responded ‘You are the marrow in my bones’. For those who do not understand the Psychological Method, Huike’s answer might seem to be a negation of the teaching.
It is no exaggeration to say that AV was charismatic. He was born in 1921, near Manchester, and was 58 years old when I met him. I recall he said that, like me, he was born a Catholic, and was left-handed. At school they tied his left hand behind his back to make him use his right hand. He said he had been an Anarchist when he was younger, and had sent his son to A. S. Neill’s Summerhill school.
AV was just over 5’6″ in height, and on condition of his height he had served as a sergeant in the Home Guard during the war. He had been married and divorced, and had two sons by his previous wife.
The issue of freewill was important to him. Indeed, it could be said that it shaped his whole outlook on life. The theme of freewill and determinism came up quite regularly in his talks and letters. For him, freewill was no mere theory, but something that had to be attained through deliberate effort. And even that was conditional. He would add, whenever I made a careless remark about my intention to do this or that, that I should add ‘God willing’.
He taught that, in Zen, there are the concepts Jiriki and Tariki; Jiriki meaning ‘self power’, and Tariki meaning ‘other power’. He said that the Western equivalent is ‘Man proposes, God disposes’. This was so inherent in his outlook that it was clearly the product of experience. Indeed it could be said that AV didn’t do theory. He was very practical about everything — mundane and spiritual — and never pretended to be a ‘saint’ in the conventional meaning of the term. He pointed to the line in the Gospels, ‘Them that are whole need not a physician but them that are sick.’ He was quite clear that we are all sinners.
AV was, as it is said, not the type to suffer fools gladly. He was a more serious person than anyone I had ever met before (or since). At the same time, he often did things that showed his disdain for pretension. He stated once (and without any emotionalism) that he’d had a nervous breakdown, and that, at times, he’d felt his own worthlessness. A part of his teaching was the means to deal with depression and suicide, and it is clear that this was born of direct experience. He was not by any means conventionally religious. For all that, he once recounted an instance when, in desperation, he had gone to a local Church with the intention of throwing himself on the altar. He arrived at the Church to find the gate locked.
I remember he said that, on principle, if a person doesn’t become interested in spiritual matters by midlife, they would be unlikely to come to it after that. He was 37 when he came to it, which was quite late, and perhaps a testament to his personality. In 1958 he became interested in the work of Ouspensky and Steiner, and very clearly took up his interest with the same single-minded determination that he applied to everything he did.
He had been a keen poet was younger, and had submitted his poetry to Faber and Faber when T. S. Eliot was editor. He received the standard rejection slip with Eliot’s signature on it, and ‘write more poetry’ jotted underneath. He said it had kept him going for years, but now, looking back, he realised that what Eliot meant was ‘You need to write more poetry’.
In 1966 he established a group to study the System. It was then that he came across a series of lectures by Steiner about the importance of recognising the incarnation of the Bodhisattva — as distinct from a full incarnation of the Buddha — in the twentieth century. It was this that led him to recognise Ouspensky as the Bodhisattva.
In 1967 he had his first experience of mystical union. A second experience occurred in 1973, after a period of intense effort at concentration exercises that he first began in 1959.
It was in 1969, that he came across Edward de Bono, reading The Mechanism of Mind and being very taken by it. This led to a number of meetings with De Bono, where AV discussed his work. AV recorded that he had been very supportive. AV had also been in contact with both the Anthroposophical Society and the School of Economic Science at the time, and had tried to communicate his insights to them, but both had been dismissive.
I had read The Mechanism of Mind in 1979, and like AV, I had been very taken by it. It was after an insight into the thinking of De Bono that I decided to move to Cheltenham to work with AV and the group gathered around him. I had been travelling at the time, and was in Iceland, working to sustain my journey and intending to travel on to Canada where I had grown up as a youth. The insight resulted in a complete turnaround in my life. By the time I moved to Cheltenham, AV had moved to Powys, near Llandrindod in Wales with the group gathered around him, and so I followed them there.
Llandrindod proved to be too small, and by 1981 we had relocated back to Cheltenham. AV moved continually — to Reading, Chester, Llandrindod, Buxton, and Hereford — before finally settling in Cheltenham. Each move and each location was chosen because he sought to teach others in different parts of the country. His activities included Awareness Workshops, musical performances, and lectures. He once put on a series of lectures in Oxford outlining the nature of etheric forces and how they can be studied scientifically.
Regarding music, he was a composer, and in addition to his songs, he wrote a musical score for Ouspensky’s novel Strange Life of Ivan Osokin. His songs were what might be called the ‘devotional’ type, but this does not convey their emotional element, which was extraordinary. Two songs particularly, The Benediction and Over Silent Sea, produced a very notable feeling of bliss in those who heard them. In addition, he wrote what he called ‘Will Songs’ which were up-tempo and almost military in nature.
He had a relationship with Susan, who was his partner from the time I met him until his death. They had a young son, Tommy, who bore much of AV’s vivacity and musicality. Many of the group activities then became musical or theatrical in order to accommodate his personality. It was through this what AV introduced us to music hall songs, Rodgers and Hart, Wagner, and Sibelius.
It is likely that AV knew more than he said. He would occasionally ‘lift the veil’ and say something insightful. I suspect he was clairvoyant.
He died in 1993. When they took him into hospital, the doctor told Susan he had cancer and it was very advanced. He asked her what painkillers he was on and she said ‘aspirins’. He was a being of will, of that there is no doubt.