Introduction from Seekers & Speakers by Arthur Telling; Chirag Patel

“Your life truly becomes your own when you have learned to experience the world as you, not as what you were taught to be.” (p.248).
I was asked to introduce Seekers and Speakers because so much of what is covered in the book relates to my work as a full-time Psychologist. Sitting focused and present, I am granted the incredible privilege of being able to hear first-hand my client’s most intimate experiences, relationships, fantasies, traumas, fears, anxieties, and so much more.
Whether from an adolescent, student, or mature adult, I am asked the not uncommon questions of “Why me?”, “Why this, now?” or “What now?”. Sadly, these are often requests I must in full authenticity admit I do not have an answer for. There is no reason why. There is no sufficient explanation. It is just awful. Raw. Painful.
In these moments, I have learned with that sometimes all that you can do when counselling a suicidal student or hearing someone speak for the first time about sexual violence, is just ‘be’; hold witness and reverence to the release of pain, fear of the unknown, and the braveness to choose a path towards healing.
“I have come to accept endings. This is how we move forwards. We accept that things end, and that we change. For all the apparent similarities, the person you are tomorrow does not have to be the person you are today. Often, we leave it to circumstance to trigger these things, but there are other ways, ways to take control of the process of ending and closure to your own ends.” (p.238).
Reading Seekers and Speakers has shone an invaluable light for me into an area that resembles so many of the conversations with my clients and my own fallible human search for meaning in suffering, direction in darkness, and worthiness in fear; that sometimes, only something bigger, stronger, and more lasting than us, can carry us towards growth, acceptance, and love
Then, the incredible thing to witness is how confronting the most awful and painful experiences, making bold decisions, and speaking from the heart carries the most dejected and damaged into wholeness and authenticity.
From Sunday School to Festivals, Mosques, and Temples, we are presented with, typically, a thin slice of the reality pie just because of who we are, where we are, and who came before us. However, the contemporary conundrum in the collision of science, religion, Psychology, metaphysics, philosophy, and God has left many people expressing malcontent at the ‘traditional’ modes of explaining reality and the lived experience.
In reply, Seekers and Speakers is an experiential, metaphysical and intellectual tour de force that cuts to the heart of phenomenology, meaning, esoterica, and everything in between. It is precisely the text that is needed to navigate the previously siloed and divided spaces between religion, reality, logic, and the rollercoaster of the human lived experience.
Chirag Patel and Arthur Telling demand the reader to pay their dues in mental labour and to suspend dogmatic disbeliefs; their honest, a priori, and conversational style allows for a huge range of topics and tangents to be covered while still pulling towards the explicit aim of providing an overarching and inclusive text yearning to make sense of it all just like the rest of us.
I have been left with the deep appreciation that there is something ‘more’ out there; something that we intuitively know and feel from glimpses past the veil but so often deny for fear of what it asks us to sacrifice. Our challenges with love, purpose, meaning, relationships, and the quotidian are not new. We as a human race have been here before; rising and falling, starting then stuttering but always seeking out what’s over the next hill. The answer is out there somewhere.
In Seekers and Speakers, Patel and Telling have positioned the reader as a listener-participant as they easily exchange opinions, knowledge, and deeply personal experiences that have fundamentally shaped their own life courses. While at times I was uncertain of who was speaking, the voice was nonetheless speaking to me; the relatable life stories, hard-earned insights, and wisdom gained from the effort to just ‘be’.
Ranging from SciFi Fantasy, Gnosticism, Christianity, Fiction, Daoism, and even gardening, the merit of the questions and conclusions drawn by Patel and Telling lies in their individual sorties in writing. Using a bold but unpretentious style, Seekers and Speakers offers the reader the ideal bridge across previously taboo terrain that might just prove to be a greener pasture for the person searching for their true fate.
“Take heart. The things that have happened to you are preparing for an unknown fate, and that fate can be seeeized if you have the will. Everything else can be ignored; it’s just stations of the cross.” (p.232.).

--Greg Wilmot, Counselling Psychologist, August 2020

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