The marble table in the centre of the kitchen is gleaming. You make a note to compliment Mrs. Caterpillar – the housekeeper – how well she keeps the servants busy cleaning and polishing.

For you have been the butler in this fine and noble house for as long as you can remember. You sit now, at the kitchen table with a copy of yesterday’s Time’s (that your master discarded) a warm coffee and rather tasteless cigarette. It is seven o’clock in the morning and the kitchen staff will be down soon to prepare breakfast. But for the moment all is quiet.

Above you are seven brass bells are linked to thin wires that travel across the ceiling and up. Each bell is labelled in gold script with the name of a room.

Before we going any further, bemused yet interested reader, know that the house in which you sit is yourself; your physical body and all the aspects of self that you experience as ‘being alive’.

The first three bells relate to the three rooms commanding your instinctual behaviour. Your body mind unity has many instinctual needs and of all the bells, this one summons you the most – or at least it seems that way. They are characterised as demanding immediate gratification whether it be the alleviation of pain, sleep or hunger. Sometimes they are craving pleasure associated with sex or relaxation. The bells are labelled in accordance with the three base chakras (which the master learnt about during his service in the Army for the West India Company). They are named Root chakra, Sacral chakra and Solar Plexus chakra

And as if these were not demanding enough, there are four more.

The next in line is the one labelled Heart chakra. In a way, this one is the most important and yet most difficult to satisfy. When you enter this room and enquire politely after the reason for your attendance, the master or mistress is likely to be experiencing either pleasing or difficult emotions. The pleasing are generally rewarding and include happiness and contentment. The less positive will present as states of anxiety or extreme disquiet as a result of some injustice, frustration, jealousy, annoyance and many others.

Each one has to be dealt with head on and care taken for the matter in hand to be explored thoroughly and in the presence of other parties involved, if possible. Failure to work through these emotions to an acceptable conclusion to all, can lead to problems. The master has been known to order you to lock a troublesome feeling in one of the large cupboards – to be ignored. When in there, experience tells you that it will grow and emerge even more strongly and therefore more troublesome. Emotions tempt your master and mistress into behaviour which is clearly ‘risky’ whether it involves amorousness and romance, gambling, cocained addiction and much, much worse.

The next bell is labelled Throat chakra. This is the room where all communication goes on. There are comfortable chairs for sitting and smoking after dinner for the gentlemen. The ladies occupy another room in which to withdraw, where considerable conversation takes place on topics which the men are generally totally unaware.

The conversations in these rooms are contained within the room as silent speech or as we say, ‘thoughts’. They can take over your time with alarming ease and rapidity often in the middle of the night. Little or no benefit is likely to occur from this obsession with thinking and chattering, but still it goes on.

The last two bells are the rooms which interest you most; although being called there is regrettably all too uncommon.

They are labelled the Third Eye chakra and Crown chakra. You might expect these rooms to be occupied mostly on religious festivals and Sundays, but this is not the case at all. When the master and mistress enter these rooms they do so generally in complete silence. In this condition and in a slightly melancholy atmosphere tinged by the musty smell coming from the peeling wallpaper where it meets the ceiling and the roof above, here great self discoveries are made. It is as if not only the combined knowledge and experience of those in the room come into conscious understanding and therefore ‘guidance’; but the whole knowledge and experience of the community at large – indeed the whole world – is here.

All of the above illustrates in metaphor the position that we occupy in our early lives in relation to our body mind complex. It is hard to get to grips with and involves a lot of running around. Fortunately the energy of youth makes these huge tasks just about manageable – although you are aware that there are some of your peers for whom the tasks become too difficult. They withdraw into a sort of mechanical relationship with the world and their fellow occupants of the world – whom they blame for most of their own shortcomings.

Now as in all tales told by the masterful story tellers of the past, there is a twist – an unexpected turn – as in life, the road very occasionally takes a sideways impromptu step or about turn.

Here in your house, where you thought you were the butler, something extraordinary happens. As you peer over the top of your Times newspaper one morning, you observe yourself unexpectedly sitting in the master’s high backed leather chair. The pipe resting on the ivory holder next to you, curls a wisp of luxurious perfume and tempts you to take another draught of it’s smoky elixir.

With both shock and satisfaction in equal measure, you realise that you have either become the master of the house or have in fact, been the master all along and failed to realise it.

And there is Mdme. Butterfly, your wife now, sat opposite, threading a needle into a circle of cream canvass stretched on a mahogany frame. Several of her colourful depictions of your favourite flowers, adorn the wall behind her.

Sun enters the room, as if to sweep the colour from the exquisite Persian rugs into the air. You feel exalted, ecstatic even – and only the ardour of your parallel experience ‘downstairs’ prevents you from rising at will to the ceiling.

You have experienced what psychologist’s term ‘individuation’ – become a collection of part’s united – a whole being.

Slowly, tentatively, tortuously you reach across the rich velvet arm of your chair for the tasselled bell chord. You wonder;

‘Is there anybody there?’