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Victor Langheld The Life of a Creative Sceptic Victor Langheld was born on April 29th, 1940, in
Berlin, Germany. At the time, his father, Heinz, was interned as an “enemy
alien” in the Curragh Army Camp in Kildare, Ireland. On Ash Wednesday eve,
1945, at the age of five, Victor was baptised by fire amid the inferno
of Dresden — an actual near-death experience. In 1946 he arrived in Ireland
to join his father and was naturalised an Irish citizen in 1947. Victor’s lifelong journey of de-mystification
began in earnest in 1952 during a sermon in Christ Church, Bray. At the age
of twelve, he suddenly entered an altered state of consciousness — the first
of many over the next sixty years — and realised that the world presented to
him by parents, priests, and society was false, an enchanting fabrication.
Shocked into hyper-awareness, he transmuted overnight into a sceptic and
remain so all his life. From that day forward he resolved to uncover the
truth. Disenchantment became his passion. He began his quest by reading voraciously across the
mystical and philosophical traditions of medieval Christianity, ancient
Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, while delving equally deeply into the
sciences — physics, biology, anthropology, evolution theory, and astronomy —
questioning everything. At twenty-three, with a single dollar a day to spend
and complete freedom of movement and thought, Victor reached India — “the
land of limitless religious fantasy.” Like many seekers, he was first dazzled
by the exuberant theatrics of modern Hindu devotionalism and the melodious
promises of its many godmen turned multinational CEOs. Yet the enchantment
did not last. He was dismayed by what he perceived as a lack of genuine
insight into Nature’s emergent systemic functions — the algorithms of being —
and by the inability of modern India’s holy entrepreneurs to translate the
profound intuitions of the Upanishads and early Buddhist and Jain thought
experiments into a coherent, contemporary, linguistically updated
understanding of existential emergence. For years Victor travelled between India and Europe —
to earn money or to study, to deepen his inquiry, to ‘train’ his small
language model. By forty, it seemed he had little to show for it. Then,
like many seekers before The after-effects of that experience, lasting seven
days, were as rapturous as they were destabilising — an ecstatic
disorientation that verged on madness. When equilibrium returned with a complete
reconfiguration of understanding, having as it were ‘crossed the river’, he
disrobed, as the Buddhist sutta prescribes, and promptly returned to Ireland
to recover from his ordeal with a hot bath and a full Irish breakfast. Over the following decade he commuted between India and
Ireland, producing some fifteen books — each an intense and complex thought
experiment, each almost unreadable, and none commercially successful. Yet the
process of exploration was exhilarating: new insights, disillusionments, and
ecstatic recognitions continued to emerge, the creative state sometimes
lasting for months. By fifty, he thought the game was over — the goal
reached, the journey done. Contemplating self-termination, he was distracted
by yet another visionary episode. In a dream, he saw a garden — complete,
luminous, and alive with sculptures, each representing a facet of human
systemic functioning. Within ten minutes he had sketched it; over the next
twenty years he built it. The dream became Victor’s Way — a spiritual
sculpture park near Roundwood, Ireland — and the embodiment of the results of
his lifelong inquiry. Those years were glorious: filled with rapture and
despair, joy and exhaustion. At last, the boyhood vow to “uncover the Truth”
took cognizable form. But, as he later wrote, “the Truth itself was anything
but a pretty sight.” Then when the garden was finally complete the
unexpected happened again. ‘Out of the blue,’ as it must, popped the prompt: Bury
it. The sculptures had done their work; the Way had fulfilled its
purpose. The task of burying fell to a new sculpture — Tiffany the dung
beetle — who, with humorous gravity, eliminated the philosophic past and
cleared the ground for something new. That something morphed as Finn,
the modern druid — Victor’s final sculptural and philosophical persona. When Finn “arrived” in Roundwood in January 2025, his
discomforting silence compelled Victor to give him voice — to tell this
druid’s story: a new, natural philosophy of emergence known as Procedure
Monism grounded upon the fundamental insight of Original Goodness. There was, Victor insists, nothing super-natural, or
even supra-natural in his method of uncovering the truth. The procedure —
adaptation through sustained, subliminal focus — is built into every human
system. Once he discovered how to access the creative “zone,” he simply
stayed alert, waiting for the unexpected and ready to respond without
thought. Each time a prompt arrived and was accepted, the response appeared —
as if from nowhere — perfectly timed and at first unbelievable. Five months after Finn’s appearance, his story was
complete. Victor’s final act was to out himself as a druid, end Victor’s
Way and close the garden. After a remarkable life — a life of
philosophical adventure— he retired with no regrets to live quietly as a
druid anchorite, grateful that he had so far escaped the fate of so many of
his monist predecessors who had been burnt at the stake for revealing their
troubling view of ground of becoming. Like them, he knew that his knowledge, true or false,
would vanish when he did. But unlike most, he had already made his peace with
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