About Maxine "Max" Felicity

An Ordinary Childhood

I had a very ordinary childhood. When I was eight, my parents separated and divorced, after years of fighting in front of me.

They left me struggling with issues I wasn't wise enough to cope with and, like everyone else on the planet, I made some choices which brought lasting happiness, and others which brought lasting suffering.

As well as the broken family, I also had to deal with a facial blemish. Others, both children and adults, considered this blemish very important, and I made the mistake of assuming they must be right. I became unusually shy and, like many shy people I retreated into a world of books.

I read books as if my life depended on it, picture books intended for children and novels intended for adults, in every genre imaginable. I started to write stories, beginning with nasty little revenge tales starring the children who bullied me at school, and then fantasies and attempts at novels, which I never managed to complete.

Then I stumbled upon a book which affected me in a way nobody expected.

An Extraordinary Experience

When I was 13, an aunt bought me a middle grade history book about famous women through history. I remember there were sections on Hatshepsut, Cleopatra, Amelia Earhart and Rosa Parks, among many others, but three of the women in the book puzzled me and had an especially profound and lasting effect on me.

Deborah was a prophetess who became the leader of ancient Israel in the time before they had kings. Lady Julian Of Norwich wrote the earliest surviving book in English written by a woman, Revelations of Divine Love, which is still in print today and describes a series of visions she experienced. Joan of Arc was a French peasant girl who claimed visions from God which helped the French defeat the English.

This book wasn't a novel, it was non-fiction, and the idea that God could be experienced directly amazed me. It was uniquely powerful for someone as lonely as me when I read Lady Julian's visions of a loving God. It was almost as if I could touch God, right there and then.

My family wasn't religious, and the answers I got from them about God didn't satisfy me. A brief stint at church went nowhere, both because my mother wasn't interested in attending regularly, and because I couldn't connect what I heard there with the book I kept reading and re-reading.

I was naive enough to decide to talk to God directly, just as Deborah, Julian and Joan had done. I was also too naive to be surprised when I got just what I was seeking, very soon after I started.

Anyone who has had a full-blown spiritual experience will tell you that it's the most wonderful thing which can happen. The euphoria and sense of insight is even better than ending up with a large pile of money, achieving something big, or finding a close human relationship (though when someone genuinely "falls in love", those relationships can have a very similar effect, at least for a while).

The experience is much more common than most people realize, and goes by many names, depending on the religious tradition of the person experiencing it: awakening, enlightenment, seeing the light, entering the Kingdom of Heaven, nirvana, Cosmic Consciousness, satori. People who use psychedelic drugs to achieve this experience talk about it being "mind-blowing", "mind expanding" or "consciousness expanding".

It's a common experience, but it's also common for the experience to last only a brief time, and never to be experienced again. This happened to me despite my efforts (or perhaps because of them) to recapture something so marvellous.

The Naked Philosopher

Some years later I had another profound encounter, this time with a living person called Richard "Dick" Seaman. Yes, that really is his name.

We met through a forum for people interested in spirituality, and we bonded because of our shared interest in one particular spiritual teacher called Eckhard Tolle, who wrote the best-selling book The Power Of Now.

At first, I thought this website you're reading now should be called Max Felicity And The Naked Philosopher. I like the ring of that, perhaps because it sounds similar to the Harry Potter books, which I admire greatly. However, he's also setting up a completely separate website called TheNakedPhilosopher.org which contains non-fiction materials he's writing, to parallel the fiction works on this website. So Max Felicity is devoted to fiction, and The Naked Philosopher to non-fiction.

Richard fascinates me. In so many ways, we're complete opposites and yet somehow we work together extremely well - I keep thinking of the analogy of a hand and a glove. He does all the things I can't do or can't stand doing, like this website and marketing. He's also going to take care of finding an agent and a publisher, or self-publishing on the internet. If there are ever any public events to attend, he'll be there for those, too!

All of this makes it much easier for me to concentrate on what I do enjoy - creating stories. But he also helps with that. He jokes that we are Yin and Yang, that I have the Gift Of Creation and he has the Gift of Destruction. I see now that my strengths are in the area of creating stories and characters, as well as portraying emotions and dialog, but he's much better at overall structure and seeing logical inconsistencies. So we bounce my novels between us, with me writing and him acting as editor and critic, and often also coming up with solutions to the problems he finds.

More than that, though, he has added depth to my stories by telling me about whole new areas which I knew very little about. He has college degrees in science and theology, and has thought deeply about religion, psychology, science and politics. His struggles with personal growth have opened my eyes to the ways in which men are both oppressors and victims, pressured by society to deny their feelings of weakness and vulnerability, which often results in anger expressed through external violence, or in life-destroying internal stress.