I am a native of St. Catharines, Ontario. I studied humanities at Brock University for two years, and then transferred to the University of Toronto, where my reading included Sufism and Classical Persian (the latter under the late G.M. Wickens, translator of Persian Classics for UNESCO), and from which I graduated. My exposure to the Gurdjieff teachings dates from my sixteenth year, and it led to an interest in Sufism.

I have dual Canadian and UK citizenship, and I lived for some 13 years in London, working in a series of jobs: eventually in the editing departments of various publishers or doing freelance editing and proofreading and, finally, as Editor of the Services Resettlement Bulletin for the Ministry of Defence. I studied Arabic in evening classes at what was then the Polytechnic of Central London School of Languages.

A short novel I wrote in the 1980s about a Britain of the not-too-distant future under nuclear attack had fallout shelters and the wisdom of having them as prominent themes. It was eventually published by a small press in northern Ontario. Unfortunately they did little to promote it, few copies were sold, and it is now out of print.

In Canada again I pursued my interest in alternative medicine, especially Traditional Chinese Medicine. Like so many others I had to deal with the circumstances produced by the so-called "Common Sense Revolution" of the Ontario Conservatives. In due course I resumed freelance publishing work.

Articles I researched and wrote on international local government appeared on websites run out of London by someone I worked for briefly when I lived there. A graduate student at Cambridge University told me that my explanations of certain issues were the clearest he had ever read. Some of those articles have been reproduced elsewhere.

I score extraordinarily high on clerical perception tests. A way to knowingly benefit from this continues to elude me.

The contents of Mirror of the Free are the product of my own independent and privately pursued research over a number of years.