Panel Discussion: My Living Story of Alchemy Transformation

Peter Graham is a Mystic Publican and Alchemist.

“My commitment to alchemy began at an early age. A Canadian (Protestant) upbringing allowed me “to seek first the Kingdom of Heaven:” the Universal Truth in Christ’s teachings. A teenage introduction to the Transcendentalism of Thoreau’s Walden Pond, and Blake’s “world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower”, combined with Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World, and Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm socialism, led me to separate spirituality and religion. 

My first epiphany was post-drop out emergence from a mescalin-induced institutional stay. I read the proverb of Sufi mystic Nazrudin where he directed the woman looking in her garden for a lost key (dropped in her house) to, “Look within for the lost key.” ‘But it is dark in there!”. Aha, I realised!  At age 20, then, this paradoxical insight resonated so deeply it fuelled my journey through life. 

From early studies of Raja Yoga and Anthroposophy, the Findhorn community in 1979, three years in the Ramala centre in Glastonbury, the path of the karma yogi householder since marrying in Glastonbury in 1983, ten years of overseas development work, and over 20 years as a monk in a Christian mystical order, I’ve been labelled a “misfit, missionary, mercenary and mystic”. For the last two decades I’ve been disguised as a publican (“…and sinner”). Only last year I had the privilege to meet alchemist Colm Holland. And the philosopher’s child has been reborn.” – Peter.