My Double Life. 1 This Dark Wood A Journey Into Light : Episodes and Patterns in a Writer's Life

Lost in a dark wood like Dante, Nicholas Hagger tells the story of his search for meaning, purpose and truth that took him to Iraq and Japan, and encounters with Zen and China’s Cultural Revolution, which he was the first to discover. In Libya, then a Cold-War battleground, he began four years’ service and a double life as an undercover British intelligence agent (here revealed for the first time). He witnessed Gaddafi’s Egyptian/Soviet-backed coup, and its terrifying aftermath tore into his personal life, plunged him into a Dark Night of the Soul and faced him with execution. He went on to serve in London as Prime Minister Edward Heath’s “unofficial Ambassador” to the African liberation movements at the height of Soviet and Chinese expansion in Africa during the Cold War. Despite being routinely followed by surveillance squads he found Reality on a ‘Mystic Way’ of loss, purgation and illumination. He now perceived the universe as a unity, and had 16 experiences of the metaphysical Light.