Soul Journey of a Yogi Bus Driver

“Being Soul Conscious” Observations of a Bus Driver Love is a great power in human life, and this remarkable memoir can be seen as Simon Ralph’s lifelong search to feel and share it – first in ways that lead to degradation and loss, and then through the soul-consciousness of the title, through which he finds renewed strength and freedom. From a kindly but rather awkward boy who kept finding himself in minor forms of trouble, he graduates to a young man repeatedly embracing altered states of consciousness through sex, drugs, music and any other experience that would help him to “slip outside time”. Even a stomach massage takes him out of the body and gives him a glimpse of the unlimited. But he becomes more and more at the mercy of his desires, “raving and misbehaving”, until jobs, houses, relationships and money fall away and he ends up “left in the gutter of my own self-pity”. “You can’t win with those things,” he reflects on the drug-induced rushes of love. “It’s just another ball and chain around your leg.” Even the “gentle, peaceful detachment from the world” brought by marijuana, which feels in keeping with his own inner nature, makes him lazy and forgetful and trapped in antisocial behaviour. It is Raja Yoga meditation, which teaches a distinction between soul and body, and the experience of an inner connection with the divine, that puts him back in the driver’s seat of his life. It offers him a better road map, gradually liberating him from his desires, dependencies and negative thought patterns, so that self-respect is restored. “I felt I was making ground at last in understanding the self and taking control of my physical organs, like a good driver steering the bus on the straight and narrow, through storms of negativity,” he writes. “By separating the being from its actions, I am able to remain as a detached observer…and can become free from the influence of situations or people.” Ralph has a chatty, friendly writing style and he tells the story of his decline and fall – “I felt sex was very much part of me, if not all of me…lust governed my life for decades” – with humour, and without self-pity. He intersperses his moving tales of loss with nuggets of spiritual wisdom, until eventually we arrive at a life filled with new meaning. – Neville Hodgkinson