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Victor Langheld — A Life
of Disenchantment 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 —
a literal 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 mystical
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, a
fabrication. Shocked into hyper-awareness, he transmuted overnight into a
sceptic, a condition he would maintain for 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 sutras into
a contemporary understanding of existence. For years Victor travelled between India and Europe —
to earn, to study, to deepen his inquiry. By forty, it seemed he had little
to show for it. Then, like many seekers before The experience, lasting seven days, was as rapturous as
it was destabilising — an ecstatic disenchantment that verged on madness.
When equilibrium returned, he disrobed, as the sutta prescribes, and promptly
returned to Ireland to recover from his ordeal with a full Irish breakfast. Over the following decade he commuted between India and
Ireland, producing some fifteen books — each an intense thought experiment,
each almost unreadable, and none commercially successful. Yet the process was
exhilarating: new insights, disillusionments, and
ecstatic recognitions continued to erupt, sometimes lasting for months. By fifty, he thought the game was over — the goal
reached, the journey done. Contemplating self-termination, he was interrupted
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 sculpture park near Roundwood, Ireland — and the embodiment 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
visible form. But, as he later wrote, “the Truth itself was anything but a
pretty sight.” When the garden was finally complete, another altered
state arrived. Its message was simple: bury it. The sculptures had
done their work; the Way had fulfilled its purpose. The task fell to a new
sculpture — Tiffany the dung beetle — who, with humorous gravity,
buried the philosophic past and cleared the ground for something new. That
something was Finn, the modern druid — Victor’s final sculptural and
philosophical persona. When Finn “arrived” in Roundwood in January 2025, his
silence compelled Victor to give him voice — to tell the druid’s story: a
new, natural philosophy of emergence known as Procedure Monism,
grounded in the insight of Original Goodness. There was, Victor insists, nothing supernatural in his
method. 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. Each time, the
prompt arrived unbidden, and the response appeared — as if from nowhere —
perfectly timed. Five months after Finn’s appearance, the story was
complete. Victor’s final act was to out himself as a druid, thereby
completing and closing Victor’s Way. After a remarkable life — a life
of philosophical adventure without regret — he retired to live quietly as a
druid anchorite, grateful that he escaped the fates of his heretical
predecessors who were burned or stoned for their troubles. Like them, he knew that his knowledge, true or false,
would vanish when he did. But unlike most, he had already made peace with
that. |
