Experience of a reality imperceptible to our senses is something I grew up with. That did not inhibit me, however, from seeking to understand it or explore how it might impact, if at all, on the everyday world in which I lived and felt fully at home. Already as a teenager I was reading Rudolf Steiner and Madame Blavatsky (and, it must be said, making little sense of either) as well as Aleister Crowley, the literature of Spiritualism and the musings of Carl Gustav Jung. In addition I was being taught about herbs and country lore by an elderly sheep farmer in the hills of North Wales, a man whose reputation as a magician – that's real magic not the smoke and mirrors kind – was never questioned by people in our neighbourhood. All of this I have described in my most recent book, Magic Without Mirrors, its subtitle “the making of a magician” intended to signal that I, too, was destined to follow in my teacher's footsteps. When still in my twenties and barely out of college I wrote my first book, Magic: an occult primer, published by Jonathan Cape and described, to my surprise, as as "one of the best books on magic written in the twentieth century, and one of the best introductions to magic (an altogether rarer phenomenon), written in any century" (Colin Wilson). There then followed, hard on its heels, The Magic of Herbs and, a few years later, Secret Wisdom: the occult universe explored (though “explored” was inadvertently changed to “revealed” in a recent paperback edition). Some newspaper reviewers predicted I would become a cult figure. I never aspired to that and, happily, it never happened. What never left me, however, is my curiosity about the wider reality mentioned above and our unique place within it. I have never pretended to know all the answers but by now, I hope, I have learned to ask the right questions. And it's in looking for answers that I invite my readers to join me - in each of my books. My hope is that by the final page of the latest one, Magic without Mirrors, those answers will be within the grasp of everyone.