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‘The very next day I threw out all the meat from the freezer and became a vegetarian’

Martin on his dramatic change of lifestyle

Martin Shaw thought it was just a happy piece of good fortune when he met up with an old friend from drama school on the set of Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, but it was a reunion that was to completely change his life. The friend in question was Luke Hardy. Like Martin he was a gifted young actor, but one who had become disillusioned by the profession and thought he had given up acting for good. A devoted follower of the Indian guru Charan Singh, until he met Martin Shaw, Luke had absolutely no idea why he had taken a small part in the film. ‘And when he saw me at the studio he knew why he had accepted one more role,’ says Martin. Luke realised that although Martin did not know it yet himself, deep down he was not happy with his wild and heavy-drinking lifestyle, inside he was crying out for a direction in his life.

They had originally become close as young men at drama school. ‘We used to drink and womanise a lot together,’ said Martin frankly. The two men talked and talked, and Martin saw that Luke had found the sort of calm inner peace that he himself had been unconsciously searching for. Much later, Martin explained the significance of the meeting to writer Garth Pearce: ‘Intellectually I don’t know what made me get involved in the first place, but spiritually it was my time. Back then I was drinking heavily, sometimes up to a bottle of whisky a day, and I was also a stone overweight and eating all sorts of meat. When the time was right… that was it.’ Charan Singh was a living yogi whose teachings had given Luke Hardy a sense of purpose and a real meaning to his life. ‘In a nutshell his belief is to go back to God while you are still alive rather than have to wait until you die,’ said Martin.

The friends talked long into the night, and Luke told Martin everything he had learned about clean living and vegetarianism. Straight away, these ideas began to have an effect on him. Cutting out the meat from his diet was the first decision. ‘The very next day I threw out all the meat from the freezer and the Oxo and the Bovril and became a vegetarian.’ And it was largely on moral grounds – with the passion of the converted, Martin was quickly asking questions like: ‘How can you justify hacking off a little lamb’s leg or ripping out a pig’s belly just because you like the taste?’ Also, to his relief he soon felt noticeably fitter: ‘All this talk about needing the protein meat provides just did not seem true in my case.’

Giving up alcohol took rather longer. ‘Over the next 12 months I read everything I could get my hands on about what Luke and I had talked about,’ said Martin. ‘Gradually, very slowly, I became a convert. Doubts kept coming my way – “A man can’t be a God,” “What about the other bad things that happen in the world?” But every single question I threw at Luke got answered.’

Inside a year he also went from being a heavy drinker to a teetotaller. From the first time he started to sneak halves of bitter as a 14-year-old schoolboy, Martin had always enjoyed alcohol. ‘I liked the taste of booze,’ he said. ‘That was part of it, and as your resistance builds up so does the amount you need to make you feel relaxed.’ At drama school, he was at the centre of a hard-living group and he admitted that at one point his daily diet included a bottle of whisky, two bottles of wine and several pints of Guinness. He knew he had gone way past simple social drinking; he was hitting the bottle and hitting it hard. Living in a flat in London he was really putting the pints away and he put on a couple of extra stones in weight. ‘Young actors have a lot of time to drink,’ said Martin. ‘You might be on in the evening in a stage play but that leaves you all day to drink. It got so I was starting in the morning with whisky when sensible people were having a cup of tea.

‘What started as a game became serious drinking. People wanted to be like Peter O’Toole, Richard Burton and Oliver Reed. It was terribly glamorous to demonstrate that you were gritty and real by being unshaven, to smell of alcohol and be unpredictable. Of course,’ he said years later, ‘nothing is more predictable than going around unshaven, smelling of alcohol and shouting at everyone.

‘When I did the revival of Look Back In Anger at the Royal Court there was a quiz in the Guardian saying, “If you answer ‘Yes’ to any of the following ten questions you are probably an alcoholic”. I had to answer ‘Yes’ to three of them. I would drink anything – Scotch and wine during the show and the same afterwards. I was not moderate in any way; the only purpose of alcohol was to get drunk.’

Meeting friends at lunchtime involved more alcohol, and in terms of units he was way into the danger area. In fact Martin was warned by his doctor to give up drink because it was endangering his health, but he took no real action until his inspirational meeting with Luke Hardy. ‘Part of the realisation that the teachings of Charan Singh made a difference for me was stopping drinking,’ he said. ‘Once I had come to the conclusion that his way was the right way for me, I came to totally reassess my life. I began to realise that drink was poisoning my mind as well as my body.’ Not drinking meant no longer going into pubs, which he described with a smile as ‘another welcome side effect of Charan Singh’s guidance.’

But Martin possesses a fierce determination and when he makes a decision he sticks by it with a passion. When he finally decided to stop drinking, he did it instantly. ‘I was in a pub having a pint of Guinness,’ he recalled. ‘And I thought, “This will be the last one.”’

The meeting with Luke Hardy was in 1971 and it made a profound enough impact on him for Martin to name his first son after his friend. ‘It changed everything for me,’ he said. ‘Nothing was ever quite the same again. Luke started a small clothing business in 1972. A bale of clothing arrived at London Airport and Luke’s sister suggested he sell it. I used my car to go and collect it. We took it around a few boutiques. And from that small beginning grew a successful business, with shops all over the place. Luke stayed outside acting; he thought it did not match with his beliefs.’

In addition, meditation became an important part of his life. ‘I meditate for two hours in the morning and half an hour at night,’ he said. ‘There is a meditation which has a purely physical benefit to take your mind away from the strains and stresses of the day, then there is the kind which is a discipline to give you spiritual advancement. But that is the sort of spiritual advancement that comes from within, to gain power and to go further up.

‘The path that I follow says that you do not have to wait until you are dead to go beyond. You can do it while you are alive. I have to make it very clear that what I tell you now about meditation is what I have learned, but not experienced. One of the vows that we take is that you should never, ever reveal what has happened to you during meditation, otherwise it would be impossible to separate what you are saying from ego. All the people who follow the path that I do never ever talk about meditation. What happens is that as you develop over the years, your concentration grows for you to vacate your body, which is when you step into, literally, other planes of existence. Yogis have done this for thousands of years. The problem with that is, as soon as you get out of your physical body, the very first step – horizontally – you are in a creation and existence that is a million times more attractive than this one.

‘A lot of the great yogis get stuck on the first or second plane. As I said, I follow a living yogi, Charan Singh. The purpose of having a living master is that you can see him and know what his vibe is like. When he initiates you he implants his radial form, his astral body, at your eye centre. I know how this must sound but, believe me, I have studied it for a long time. He has already made the journey from the body to another plane and when you start to have success in meditation there are so many negative things going on inside. The great benefit of having a master – who you love like the disciples of Christ did – is that you see him on the outside and the inside; you keep on following him upwards and upwards.

‘I go to group meetings and there are old ladies, skinheads, hippies, bank clerks, actors, musicians… It is a total cross-section of people. Master is very understanding. The way you were born is how you are. Luke thought acting was a distraction. What happened was that his business became huge. I did not have the remotest idea that I would go in for all this. Nothing could have been further from my mind at the time.’

And there were more practical benefits from his new life as well. ‘Through meditation I heard about the wild-flower remedies,’ said Martin. ‘Did you know there are 38 different kinds of herbs for treating states of mind like jealousy, anger and irritation?’

He is well aware that his wide-eyed enthusiasm can sometimes provoke ridicule but he knew he was in for a sympathetic hearing when he told his father all about his beliefs. After all, he already knew that his relentless quest for truth and discovery was inherited. ‘He really listened,’ said Martin. ‘Most people when they first hear about it either go glassy-eyed or cynically go, “Ah Ha!”, which I might well have done myself a few years before. But my dad listened and I spouted for about an hour and a half, and he said, “You know I believe I have been looking for that for 40 years.” It was a wonderful moment between us.’

Visitors to Martin Shaw’s dressing room have remarked on the gold-framed colour photograph of Charan Singh on his table. The beaming face of the guru is topped by a white turban and he proudly wears a long grey beard and a benevolent smile. Martin refers to Charan Singh simply as ‘the man who changed my life’ or ‘my spiritual healer’. He sincerely believes he was well down the road to self-destruction when he met Luke Hardy. His belief in the teachings of Charan Singh completely refocused his life. ‘It is a path I have followed ever since,’ he says.

He sees no reason to be embarrassed or awkward about his devotion. In fact, he has many times tried to explain his motivations to a wider public despite knowing perfectly well that he could easily be misinterpreted and come out sounding like a complete crackpot.

In many ways, Martin Shaw is a very private person yet he went to great pains in an interview with journalist Ian Woodward to try to spell out exactly why he draws such strength from his beliefs. He said: ‘There is a place or a person or a thing or an entity, which everyone knows by different names, like God or the Lord or whatever, and at one time there was just that and nothing else. And then, for reasons best known to itself/himself/whatever – if you imagine that thing as an ocean then drops separated from it, and that was the first action, and every action has an opposite reaction, so that produced more and more reactions. These drops went through various stages, various altered states, and got further and further away from their source until they became Mind, and from Mind they became astral plane, until they finally crystallised into steam, water and ice; this is in turn crystallised into a physical form and became very dense and very coarse. The essence of the ocean of the Lord is still within every human being, is still here. It’s what makes people restless, what makes people lonely, what makes people fall in love. It’s just a reflection of the love for the Lord that they once had.

‘What keeps people bound in the body is the cycle. Now in the West all this sounds like nonsense, yet 85 per cent of the world’s population believe in karma and in reincarnation; it’s only in the West that we don’t have very much knowledge of it. The purpose of this path is not to make life easier, although one of the side effects is that it does make life easier. The real purpose is to enable me to get out of this life altogether and not have to return in a human body. I’ve never acknowledged that before and maybe it’s time I told the absolute truth about what I’m doing so that the public can learn what kind of nutcase I really am! The purpose of this path for me is to finish off all my karma residual attachment to a physical plane, make a hasty retreat and never come back to it again. Now the only way you can do that is to be guided and taken through the journey inside you by somebody who knows that “inside” way – Charan Singh. He has taught me the calming effect of meditation. His presence alone is inspirational and I have met him several times. His whole philosophy of life is to do with love and integrity. This is why I am a vegetarian.’

Though the changes in Martin were remarkable, not quite all his predictions at that time came true. He said in 1982 that in 10 years, or hopefully 5, he wanted to be out of show business altogether, he planned at the time to switch track and run some kind of pioneering healing institute where he could use all the knowledge of alternative medicine and herbalism that he had built up. ‘Although I love my job as an actor,’ he said, ‘and although I am artistically dedicated to it, I don’t feel as attached to it as I once did. To be honest, and I have not said this publicly before, I can see that my spiritual and emotional attachment is being directed much more towards healing. That’s where my heart lies.’

Martin’s encounter with his old friend Luke in the 1970s changed his life completely. He became much more self-aware and determined to behave as well as possible in all circumstances. Martin admitted he had a temper and he realised in future he would always do his utmost to control it. ‘The change in my personality has been gradual,’ he said. ‘But I believe my beliefs have made me more tolerant, a lot more loving and generally more understanding.’