More about the book

“Maybe I’m enlightened after all and I don’t know it.”

Diary of a Mystic Apprentice tells the story of the Lightweight Warrior – outwardly a successful entrepreneur (a millionaire on paper, broke in reality) who sets off in search of enlightenment armed with nothing more than a DIY mantra and an overdraft. Along the way he wrestles with the everyday temptations of money, love, and coffee.

A chance find in a charity book sale by unknown author John Butler: ‘Wonders of Spiritual Unfoldment’ for £3 changes everything. He decides to move from the city where he spent forty years to a small English market town where, for three years, he rises at dawn to sit in silence with an old man with a white beard in a cold church.

What unfolds is part comedy of errors, part confession, part field report on the path to ‘realisation’. Irreverent yet deeply sincere, it charts the paradoxical path of a modern seeker – hapless, dedicated, laughing, longing – all the while distracted by emails, close encounters and overdraft notices.

Wry, tender, and surprisingly relatable, Diary of a Mystic Apprentice offers a fresh take on the spiritual memoir: one that insists enlightenment, if it exists at all, is found not in distant ashrams but in the grit and grace of everyday life.

“A spiritual memoir of the search for enlightenment – as if Christian from Pilgrim’s Progress got waylaid by Richard E Grant from Withnail and I. Soulful, shambolic, and yet strangely inspiring. You could call it a field report from the edges of sanity and stillness … a unique voice.”

Robert Twigger, best selling author and winner of the Somerset Maugham Award for literature.