ACB

This page is about Andrew Cameron Bailey – my life, vision, writings, published works, forthcoming books, music, photography, films, my remarkable kids and so on.

Andrew Cameron Bailey and his grand-daughter Juniper Bess

Andrew Cameron Bailey & Connie Baxter Marlow

ANDREW’S STORY
[From the book THE TRUST FREQUENCY: Ten Assumptions For A New Paradigm by Andrew Cameron Bailey and Connie Baxter Marlow. Published by Cameron/Baxter Books, LLC.]

Who am I? What is “real”, and what is man-made illusion? Why is it vital to know the answers to these questions? For me it began in South Africa at the age of fourteen, when I discovered the writings of Lobsang Rampa and Jack Kerouac. I was as fascinated by the tales of flying Tibetan Buddhist monks as I was by the beatnik American “Dharma Bums.”  At the same time I was doing my best to be a good Anglican, and pondering the nature of the mysterious all-knowing, omnipresent entity called “God.” Some years later, in a university anthropology course on comparative religion, I found part of the answer I was looking for, in the cosmology of the Australian aborigines. By that time I was a college lecturer in organic chemistry, and, thanks to my science training, had a vestigial idea of what quantum physics was about. Up until that moment, nothing in the mainstream religions had made much rational sense to me. They were obviously man-made constructs, all of them. The aborigines, however, were different. They spoke pure, poetic quantum science. Their take on the nature of the Universe resonated in me in ways that neither Western science nor world religion had done.
Arriving in California in late 1969, after delivering a  90ft.sailboat across the Atlantic and arriving in the New World during a meteor shower on my 26th birthday, I was befriended by an American I had serendipitously met on my last night in London, a bearded Jerry Garcia look-alike named Ralph Abraham. Other than that brief encounter, I knew not a single person anywhere in the Americas. I was truly a stranger in a strange land. Ralph was one of the world’s great mathematicians, soon-to-be father of Chaos Theory, and a frequent presenter at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. He lived in Santa Cruz, at the very heart of the northern California consciousness-expansion movement. I knew nothing about any of this at the time, but my inspiration for traveling to California included two words I had encountered in a 1968 Life magazine article: “cosmic consciousness.”
Hitchhiking north on Highway 101 from Los Angeles for the very first time, I had a powerful experience of synchronicity. I was picked up in Santa Barbara by a man who introduced himself as Jeffrey Love. He was heading for Santa Cruz, but needed to make a stop along the way, if I didn’t mind. I had all the time in the world, I told him. The stop turned out to be the Esalen Institute on the cliffs of Big Sur. It was a glorious January day. On the winding curves of Highway One, high above the blue Pacific, Jeff asked me what I was planning to do in Santa Cruz. I mentioned my London encounter with Ralph Abraham. “Aha!” he exclaimed. Ralph and Jeff, it turned out, were partners with an Indian master musician in an educational venture called the Pataal Foundation. Pataal means “navel” in Sanskrit, Jeff explained. Planet Earth has two spiritual navels, or poles, one near Rishikesh in the foothills of the Himalayas, and the other in Santa Cruz, California, our destination later that same day. I had definitely entered another dimension.
A lot was going on in Santa Cruz at the time. For example, a certain Richard Alpert, PhD, the controversial Harvard psychologist and LSD proponent, had parked his ‘67 Volvo in Ralph’s California Street driveway and gone off to India in search of a guru, as many spiritual seekers were doing at the time. Dr. Alpert returned with a new name: Baba Ram Dass. The nascent guru settled in Santa Cruz, the surfing capital of the world, and the rest is history. In another instance of synchronicity, Ram Dass set up shop in the rented house in the little village of Soquel that was my first home in America, shortly after I moved out and up into the Santa Cruz Mountains. Ram Dass’s Harvard psychedelic research colleague, Ralph Metzner, initiated me into the mysteries of an ancient meditation practice called agni yoga.
I may have arrived in Northern California a few years too late for the Summer of Love, but my timing could not have been better. Looking back, I can see that I had landed right in the center of things at the perfect moment. I was a competent athlete and an intellectual graduate student at that time, but my spiritual ignorance was almost complete when I arrived in Santa Cruz. Ralph Abraham, [unbeknownst to him] helped launch me on a path which led to decades of inner work with the likes of Ralph Metzner, Stanislav Grof, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, and Persian mystic and sufi poet Javad Nurbhaksh.
Further information and inspiration came from the wise ones: Paramahansa Yogananda, Aldous Huxley, Hazrat Inayat Khan, Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo, Jalaluddin Rumi, Ervin Laszlo, Bruce Lipton, Rupert Sheldrake, Jean Houston, Brian Swimme, Barbara Marx Hubbard, the Kalahari Bushmen, the Toltec elder Tlakaelel, Victor Vernon Woolf, and others too numerous to mention. One and all, I bow to the divine in you, and humbly thank you for all you have given the world. Finally, I honor my beloved partner, Connie Baxter Marlow, whose extraordinary vision provided the inspiration and the backbone of the Trust Frequency book.