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Bodhangkur Bhikku Bodhangkur was born Victor Langheld on
April 29th, 1940, in Berlin, Germany. At the age of six he arrived in Ireland
as a refugee. He was naturalised an Irish citizen in 1947. Victor’s lifelong journey to enlightenment began in
1952. One Sunday during a sermon in his parish church 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 remained so all his life. From
that day forward he resolved to uncover the (later understood as his)
truth. He began his quest by immersing himself deeply in the
early philosophy of a previous sceptic, namely Shakyamuni Siddartha, no doubt
inspired by the charvakas of Vedic times, and later
given the epithet ‘Buddha.’ He also
delved equally deeply into the sciences — physics, biology, anthropology,
evolution theory, and astronomy — questioning the source, purpose, realness
and logic coherence of everything, indeed of thingness as such. But, as time
went by and insight became more subtle, he realized that the Shakyamuni had
not told the whole story and that his ‘freedom from dukkha’ did not stand up
to scrutiny and that he had failed to apply his scepticism to his own
beliefs. At twenty-three Bodhangkur
reached India with a single dollar a day to spend and complete freedom of
movement and thought. Like so 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, and that’s all they were, of the Upanishads and early Buddhist
(i.e. now presented as Theravada) thought experiments into a coherent,
contemporary, linguistically updated understanding of existential emergence. For years Bodhangkur
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 and disrupting — an ecstatic disorientation that
verged on madness that resulted in a high level of both mental and physical
vulnerability. When mental and physical stasis returned with a complete
reconfiguration of understanding that provided a new perspective, having as
it were ‘crossed the river’, Bodhangkur disrobed,
as the Buddhist sutta prescribes. Over the following decade he commuted between India and
Ireland, free of the Buddhist dispensation, but still a sceptic as the
Shakyamuni his early mentor had been, elaborating his new view in some
fifteen books — each an intense and complex thought experiment, each almost
unreadable, and none commercially successful. Yet the process of exploration,
of thinking the unthinkable 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 prevented from the ultimate step by a vision in a dream. In it 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 ancient Charvaka scepticism algorithm kicked in. 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 —Bodhanglur’s, alias Victor’s final sculptural and
philosophical persona. When Finn “arrived” in Roundwood in January 2025, his
discomforting silence compelled Bodhangkur to give
him voice — to tell this druid’s story: a new, natural philosophy of the
emergence of identifiable reality known as Procedure Monism grounded
upon the fundamental insight of Original Goodness. There was, Bodhangkur, now
morphed as Finn the druid, insisted, nothing super-natural, or even
supra-natural in his method of uncovering the truth. The procedure —
adaptation through sustained, subliminal input processing— is built into
every human system. Once he had discovered how to access the creative “zone”
that would nudge him via random walk towards his goal, he simply stayed
alert, waiting for the unexpected and ready to respond without thought. Each
time a new prompt arrived in consciousness 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. Bodhankur’s, now Finn’s final act was to out himself as a
druid, end Victor’s Way and close the contemplative garden.
After a remarkable life — a life of philosophical adventure— Finn 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 algorithms 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
that. Refining
the Charvaka mind-set |
