Sathya Sai Baba: the Teachings

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India, Sai Baba, sathya sai baba, spirituality

The book for which this blog is a rough draft will have more narrative to engage an average reader with an interest in, but no experience of Baba. Yet I have been made aware that my own ego-journey has no place here; thus I shall fast-forward through much of that, only slowing to recount what is relevant to the purpose of this writing: why Swami was on earth in a physical body.

First, however, a word about the virulence and hatred which always seems to emerge whenever I write about Baba – and my former accounts were mild, omitting much I thought too baffling or unbelievable for most of my readers. This account will not do that, and the book perhaps ought to have a warning banner for those passionate believers in a random and purposeless universe whhere our lives have no meaning or value. You have to admire the tenacity of their faith in the futility of whatever they become or accomplish. I have less admiration for their need to demolish all spirituality. I was saddened by my friend, the late Christopher Hitchens’ book attacking religion, partly because he was really gunning for Islam via the two other monotheisms, partly because he ignored eastern experiential doctrines, and partly because too many syllogisms were tautological. We were both trained at Oxford – a Gold’s Gym for the mind – and it has taken me 40 years to get that mental muscle under a semblance of control. I understand and feel sorrow for those unable to deduce that the mind creates what it sees – for it can be arrived at objectively, which is a step on the path to an ineffable subjective experience. I can only forgive those who threaten me to stop perpetuating a lie or U ‘will pay dearly for it…’ I say to them, Find me first. If I am ‘delusional’, ‘mad’, or have been hypnotized for 40 years, thank God, because, as I watched Shock and Awe hit Baghdad in 2003, I thought, This is madness! What we call a civilization amounts to a few exquisite paintings, architectural masterpieces, and some beautiful music, too much of it formulaic and rigidified. That’s it; that’s our great western civilization. That’s what we regard as an achievement so immense the world should suck it up…or die, like the 90 million who have died in 313 wars since 1945. Democracy, justice, education – all shams and deceptions; and we know it. But the generation coming up, in their teens and twenties – they will not be so easy to fool, I suspect. The First Nations, near whose lands I live, have always known it; and, finally shedding the shackles of colonial oppression – even attempted genocide – are determined to protect their Mother Earth from greed and depredation. I learn much from their traditional stories and the wisdom of their elders, for whom the wilderness is both pharmacy and supermarket – and deeply respected for that, for gifts of the Great Spirit. They ought to have converted the Jesuits, not vice versa.

You who dismiss spiritual practice as an atavistic aberration ought to have seen the planet 50 years ago. No yoga, no ashrams, no health food, no meditation, no women’s rights…. We have come a long way, because, as John Lennon put it so succinctly, Love is the answer, and you know that for sure… God is love.

Puttaparthi in the early seventies was a newish small ashram, housing possibly 100 or so, on the edge of a thatched-hut village, by a river that dried up every summer, and far from even a small town. During darshan once, Baba told the few devotees around him: “One day this will be a great city and millions will come to visit Swami.” Almost everyone laughed; the thought was ridiculous. Where I live now is actually smaller than Puttaparthi was, yet if I announced it would become a great city no one would even listen. Yet Puttaparthi is now a city, and there were an estimated two million devotees at the last festival I attended.

He ignored me completely for several months. It was not the guru-chela welcome I had read of and expected. He began to irritate me – though whenever he was close my heart opened and ached for him. I had presumed there would be teaching, yet all we had was the chanting of bhajans. I also expected peace and tranquility, such as I now have, but the ashram was frenetically far from peaceful. I also noticed I was forming close friendships that would suddenly evaporate, always leaving a sense of something learned. An ancient Indian woman, Sudha Mazumdar, adopted me like a son, and I still miss her, miss her instructive advice, and her stories of first meeting Swami – for, in youth, she had been a devotee of Shirdi Sai Baba, and was thus very dubious about this man claiming to be a reincarnation; she needed to be convinced, and she was. I will tell you her story later.

One day, sitting waiting for darshan, I noticed a young western man who had just arrived. I watched him walk to find a seat and had the vividly irrational feeling that I hated him. Just his strutting walk infuriated me; his smug class-nerd’s face needed punching; even his hair was annoying. How could one hate a complete stranger? For weeks thereafter I was always thrown into his company one way or another, until I grasped the fact that I had to learn to love him. I soon found qualities I liked, but during the process Swami always paid him special attention in my presence. He was a lawyer, for example, but Baba said, “Not lawyer…lover…” As soon as I began to see his soul was one with mine, our paths rarely crossed again. This process of drawing out personal faults until they were identified was intense, and the ashram was unlike any other place I have been. The energy seemed fiercely tangible, almost visible. It was still a while before I realized that this was in fact the potency of Swami’s teaching: a complete environment where souls were smelted, with the crap rising up to be scraped away. A 100 years of life’s lessons passed in months. I became painfully aware of the karmic flaws in my character that were so deeply embedded they were more like animal instincts: a cat does not choose to chase the rustling leaf or bird. There is no space between sense perception and action. Lust seemed like that to me. Certain western girls there evoked an instant response: I want, I want, I want… They seemed to know it as well, one always pulling her sari up until only her eyes were visible – and eyes don’t lie. I was always able to discern a woman’s sexual interest from her eyes, but in India the secret of concealing in order to reveal is still understood, and ought to be studied by western ladies who think a man is attracted by virtual nudity. After a while in India ankles would light my fire – and the women know this too, wearing jewelry and bells above the heel. It went without saying that Indian women were unattainable, virgins until the wedding bed; thus the westerners were more troublesome, a tempest rocking the frail raft of my inner work. I also found myself becoming friends with men even more lust-afflicted than myself. One, a tailor named Khan, even assured me that sex in the astral planes was even better than down here. “You get a hundred wirgins,” he said, “and no matter how much you do this-thing they are still remaining wirgin. You tire of these, you get one hundred more, all too much beautiful – for the God is too much good, isn’t it?”

As a  philosophy it posed more questions than it answered – yet not if lust was your Holy Grail. It was for Khan, and – although it was not my ideal eternity – it was for much of my time down here. My slavish obedience to the King of Lust only became shamefully apparent when I was drinking chai outside the ashram one day. Propped against a wall and sitting in filth and dust was a young beggar girl dressed in rags so dirty no western mechanic would have used them to mop oil spills. No more than eighteen, she was, I now saw, so beautiful – huge almond eyes, full lips, flawless bone-structure, teeth like pearls – that in the west photographers would fight to shoot her Vogue covers. She also had a baby, either a very big baby, or a three-year-old pushing the easy life for as long as he could get away with it. Two things then occurred: she pulled aside her wretched sari, revealing no choli and the kind of full perfect breasts shown by Indian erotic art, but rarely found in reality without a surgeon’s help. The huge grimy infant immediately went hungrily at a nipple as roughly as a man eating mangoes. Then the girl did something I had never seen before nor ever saw again: she hoisted the bloated child, took his penis in her mouth briefly, and then extracted it urinating – urinating into her mouth, and swallowing the contents, of which there had to be half a pint, since the pissing poseur’s stream lasted over a minute. Thoughts collided in my head like a pile-up on the LA Freeway. Men in India pissed wherever they felt the urge, so primitive sanitation was not an explanation. Auto-urine therapy is a feature of Ayurvedic medicine, even practiced by Prime Minister Moraji Desai, as he happily informed the media. ‘Auto’ is the operative word, however: you drink your own piss. The therapy is not without virtue, either, since urine does contain natural antibiotics (going into a war zone, I was told to piss on a bad wound if nothing else was available, wondering how this could be explained to a wounded Arab). A severe infection, though, only responds to the fiery purge of modern synthetic drugs. I also recalled that Mandarins in old China used to wash the face with baby’s urine to prevent signs of age [free business idea for someone in an anti-aging scam, with compliments]. Was the girl simply thirsty? Or was some rustic superstition involved? Halting this pile-up to remind me I was his slave, his creature, his toy, King Lust pulled out all the stops. She’s hoping to make a rupee after sitting there for 12 hours, I thought, leering over at her as I schemed. For 20 rupees she’d follow me to a mountain cave and do anything. But she ought to wash. And what about the infant imposter? Before long, the shag gland now sultan of my mind had her installed in a nearby cabin, with new saris, and a general makeover – perhaps during a trip to Madras (now officially Chennai). Had I known she could probably be bought, a sex chattel, for around 300 dollars, I would almost certainly have added this perquisite to my plans for benign sex slavery, the Thomas Jefferson of Andhra Pradesh. Why stop at one? The Kama Sutra often required a few women, and some complicated equipment. The domain had everything, and rivalled Khan’s astral whorehouse, obviating death as a prerequisite for admittance. Yes, it had everything – except any consideration for that girl’s dignity or free will. I froze in horror, recalling a parable by the Marquis de Sade, where an aristocrat, who enjoys sex whilst torturing and murdering, confesses he is depressed to think that, after death, his victims find peace and joy. He seeks a way to pursue them with agonies through all eternity. Sade’s point, as so often it is, shows lust, like every desire, can never be satisfied, always promising satisfaction through some greater excess, its grip ever firmer, never leaving hold until your death. Desires can only be transcended, never fulfilled. Of all the things I have ever desired and attained, the only one to deliver a permanent fulfillment is the quiet mind, equanimity, and the certainty that divinity is in all existence, for nothing but God exists. Separation is a mental illusion, for we bring imprints from possibly millions of previous lifetimes into this one, and need the maya or illusion to expel whatever prevents us recognizing our divine oneness. I consulted the teachings on transcending lust, because I now saw it as a monstrous obstacle in my path. The usual Indian advice is to regard all women as your sisters. Since I have no sister, I found this hard. Nothing worked until I tried thinking of them as my children. This got me around the ashram safely, at least. The next skeleton in my fault closet was impatience – closely related to an intolerance of stupidity. No doubt the reader can imagine how these twin faults were identified – yes, I found myself assigned to teach five of the stupidest 14-year-olds that ever learned to feed themselves. Concomitantly, someone nominated me as assistant to the assistant postmaster [if there was an actual postmaster I never saw him]. Nothing could ever be found in this office, since there was no filing system. Raju, my boss, had some mental block about any system not involving piling documents etc wherever there was room for them. He refused to accept that work would be 50 times easier if we just created areas for subject matter – an alphabetic approach was problematic when half our papers were in languages that either had 30 more letters than my 26, or else possibly did not operate at all upon a principle of interlinked letters or glyphs. My epiphany came when I jumped up onto our unstable table and, possibly frothing at the mouth, screamed at the assistant postmaster, my boss, Raju, every insulting expletive that came to mind. For a moment it even looked like a torrent of green slime poisoning the room, the village, the world. Instead of violent outrage, or instant firing [which was technically impossible since I wasn’t hired or paid], Raju began weeping, looking up like Oliver Twist, and I suddenly saw vividly the toxicity of these uncontrolled and unhelpful emotional reactions or mind-states. It was like riding a horse for ages without noticing the reins were broken and it charged wherever it liked, oblivious to heel or voice. Worst of all was the revelation that unloving thoughts and deeds permeate the whole universe with their poison.

I do not pretend that I was ‘cured’ or purged of these flaws, but, thanks to Swami, I was ever after mindful of them as potential snares, weak links, portals leading to darkness. Lust and impatience did not vanish, of course, but I strove to make the former part of love, and to ensure the latter was both justifiable and helpful in a situation. Every emotion has a valid use, but to be used oneself by these emotions creates a universal imbalance. Those who have children will know that there are times when you’re obliged to be angry with them – but you must never lose your temper. Never: uncontrolled anger crackles through a home like electric storms, and then adds more anger to a world already mad with fury.

I am writing with the knowledge that humanity is entering a period unlike any other in history. Baba mentioned this to a small group 40 years ago, even giving a date 60-odd years in the future when human consciousness will either transform, or all that is solid will melt into air, by whatever means we have so industriously invented for our own destruction, or by a mighty judgment from Mother Gaia. The planet will not miss us. The greed of a few has ignored the warnings of scientists about climate change since the eighties [see Paul Kennedy, Preparing for the 21^st Century], when it was pointed out that the planet is designed to be a closed, self-sustaining system, producing or dispensing with whatever she needs. By releasing millions of tons of gases like methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere we have disrupted this perfect system, stripping our atmospheric shield from ultra-violet and other harmful spectra of light. Skin cancers soar; species become extinct daily – tiny things you have never even heard of, but which perform a vital role in keeping the eco-system balanced – and balance is something the whole universe craves. Bad must be balanced by good, etc etc. Scientific lackeys were even unearthed by corrupt corporate politicians to refute the science, when its data were irrefragable and even visible. When water warms its volume increases. Antarctica, the world’s largest ice mass, has already lost enough melted ice to cover Mexico. In the fifties, Albert Einstein and the philosopher Bertrand Russell – generally considered the two most intelligent men alive when I was a child – personally paid for a full-page ad in the Times where they stated unequivocally that if we did not immediately dismantle and ban all nuclear weapons humankind would destroy the planet and itself within 100 years. President Eisenhower’s farewell speech similarly warned of a dangerous collusion between big industry and the military that would make war too profitable to resist. People listened to three of their most respected men, but they did not hear. Believe Sathya Sai Baba or Einstein Russell, it matters little which, but we have a couple of decades left to unite as one in order to save our home.

It took all of human history for the global population to reach one billion, around 1900. Since then, in a mere 100-odd years, we have added over six billion more. If the planet warms another 1.5 degrees Celsius, rice will not grow, and two billion people in China and India will starve. As sea-levels rise tens of millions will become refugees. The problems are immense, and many climatic effects are imponderables. Is this where evolution has been heading? No, because Darwin’s theory is nonsense, most of it actually disproved. Species adapt, but this does not demonstrate progress. Life in Old Kingdom Egypt or Vedic India was infinitely better than this armed madhouse. Their communities recognized the evils that destroy peace: wealth had to be spread around; each worked according to his ability, with all regarded as equals – much as we don’t view our hands or feet as lesser parts because of the work they perform. Rulers were once wise men, enlightened sages, whose decisions were based upon divine principles. Recorded history is simply the account of a steady decline into ignorance. We now approach the consequences of lives lived for acquisition of things that are worthless, since the King of Death himself has nothing beyond this world, and we shall certainly leave it bereft, unless we face our only certainty and use it to work out why we are really here. Death defines life; and also contains its meaning.

Baba said: “The mind is fed by five senses. Take away those senses and only you are left. No world, no things, no sound, no taste, no thought – yet consciousness is there. The God of Moses says, I am that I am, yes? This is the truth of your soul. It is never born and never dies; it dwells in eternal bliss, at one with all. You are all divine and eternal, yet you do not realize it. This is why I am here – not for anything else. Love is God, and you feel this in your heart. You feel goodness and compassion there too. They are not thoughts. Make the mind a tool, but control it to be silent when not required. Like a monkey it leaps about to little purpose. Make the mind do one thing – mantra, counting breath, it does not matter – and you will control it, having also peace. Practice this each day, and you will then know that Swami, you, and God are one and the same. The soul can never be harmed, so why fear? I am here and will always be with you. Be happy, love all as one, and the whole world will reflect happiness and love. It is so simple that your busy mind overlooks it. One moment of giving love and peace to all is worth ten million dollars, even more. But all karmas must be settled, for people and countries. I shall have to leave this body when that time comes, because this big hair and red robe distract you from the divine in your heart. I want no worship; I need nothing; but I come because you are all free to do whatever you wish. Too many are now wishing to be bad. I come to protect you from them, and to repeat eternal truths, laws that never change. When this body is no longer seen, you will understand more, and see this world of maya for what it is. Never fear; always I shall be here, for where else can I go? Where can you go? Be good, do good, see good. Yes? Oh, it is still too simple for you!”

[To be continued]

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Puttaparti

Tags

India, religion, Sai Baba, spirituality

            Not the easiest place to reach in those days, with your choice of transport limited to eight or nine hours in a bus with wooden seats and unpaned windows, regularly stopping for chai or roadside passengers, often accompanied by  livestock – usually goats and disgruntled chickens – until the vehicle was packed to standing-room only, and your two-seater bench accommodated four or five. You arrived covered in dust, exhausted and aching. But for a journey  equal to travelling from Toronto to Quebec City, the price of about 50 cents was not unreasonable. Your other choice was a taxi in which its driver also lived, though plainly could not wash. This ride took four or five hours, but cost about $ 40. Thus the trick for more well-heeled pilgrims was to share a taxi between four or even five people. Bill Byrom had told me that westerners stayed in Bangalore at a small hotel called, incongruously, the Bombay Ananda Bhavan, on Grant Road. Since Bangalore was a few hours’ flight south from Bombay (now Mumbai), one wondered why the place was named thus. But at three dollars a night it could have been called the Cairo Hilton for all I cared. Now an excessively overcrowded and ostentatiously wealthy Indian version of Silicon Valley, Bangalore, 40-odd years ago, was just a sleepy ex-Raj cantonment, famous for the British era bungalows and mansions, with their broad monsoon porches and Moghul-Rococo style. Confusion still reigned over street names, changed after Independence to more Indian titles – except no taxi driver knew the revised names, and to find Grant Road you had to ask for St. Mark’s road, and make a right half way along it. The signs still bore only their English names, apart from Mahatma Ghandi Road, Main Street, which was now known as ‘MG Road’ by cab drivers, who could never locate a Mahatma Ghandi Road if asked for it.

            The city was then also a tropical garden of Bougainvillea, flame trees, and parks full of countless exotic blooms. City transport was by auto-rickshaw, a kind of motor scooter pulling a two-wheeled covered carriage, and at a hazardous speed. I took one from an airport, like the one in Casablanca, where you walked from the airplane steps to the terminal building, on whose walls were framed pictures of Swami garlanded with wilted flowers. He was clearly the only reason westerners came to Bangalore, since he had already built a college at Whitefield, an Anglo-Indian village ghetto some 20 minutes’ drive beyond the city, and where he often spent long periods of time away from the Puttaparthi ashram. Bill had advised me to check where he currently was before deciding on my destination. The hotel was where one did this easily: if it was full, Swami was clearly at Whitefield. If almost empty, he must be at Puttaparthi. The place was an old mansion converted, to some extent, into a guest-house. My room, for instance, had four beds draped with mosquito netting, and three doors, two of which led into other rooms. The bathroom had a squatter toilet yet no bath or shower. Two taps at knee height perched over a red plastic bucket with a jug hanging by its handle from the rim. Instead of toilet paper there was, near the squatter’s porcelain footprints, a long-spouted plastic watering can, such as one might use for house-plants. I got the concepts quickly, and within weeks was accustomed to washing from a bucket, and also knew why food should only be taken in company by the right hand.

            Heading out in search of a meal, I ran into a blonde American from Montana now named Vijaya. She had three friends looking for a fifth passenger to share taxi-fare to Puttaparthi. They planned to leave at 3. a.m. the next morning – a time I usually went to bed. But the deal was agreed upon, and I ate some kind of curry with chapatis prepared by the hotel’s owner and sole employee, imagining I would sleep in the taxi.

   Wrong. Vijaya and her three friends, one named India, were part of Hilda Charlton’s satsang (spiritual gathering), and knew Bill Byrom well. This discussion over, they all sang bhajans for the entire trip, excitement building as we turned left by a sign reading Puttaparthi, stopping briefly to give a blind beggar about 2 cents, possibly because he carried a picture of Swami on the tray from which he also vended beedies. Had the road sign indicated distance, I might have relaxed for a bit longer, since it was around 40 miles further. While the temperature in Bangalore was hot but pleasant enough, this proved to be because it stood on a 7,000 foot plateau. But now we were down in the burning plains of Andhra Pradesh, a desert wasteland of rocks and scrub, lined by ochre, black-capped mountains, these peaks, as India told me cheerfully, burned by the tail of Hanuman, the monkey god, servant of Rama, as he flew to do battle with the demon Ravana in Lanka (then Ceylon, now once more Sri Lanka). This charming yarn did not make me appreciate the landscape more than I had before hearing it. Barren, deserted, hostile, the area seemed to have never attracted inhabitants of any species. It made the moon look like fertile savannah; and the heat, by 8 am, was staggering, one vast kiln – and this was where a divinity chose as his birth-place? The image now always comes to mind when I think of a world whose climate proved impervious to control.

            Yet, as we approached Puttaparthi, this blasted wilderness gave way to lush green rice paddies, and verdant palm groves. Sweet-faced, rubbery-black water buffaloes plodded slowly home along a dusty umber road, driven by small boys or smiling women, all escaping the building inferno of a summer day. A few cube-shaped concrete huts appeared, and thatched stalls selling Campa-Cola, rose-milk, Limca, baddam-milk, and other unfamiliar drinks. Then there was a high-walled compound, surrounded by flimsy shacks vending solely Swami memorabilia – posters, lockets, stickers, key rings, books, etc.

    Nodding at the high wall, Vijaya said, “That’s Swami’s ashram. First we go to the office, though, and then see if we have missed morning darshan.”

    We skirted the wall, passing an arched gateway bearing the symbols of most major religions fashioned from painted steel. Through it I briefly saw a gigantic statue in black stone of the elephant-headed god, Ganesh, son of Siva (and doubtless a big surprise), ‘Remover of Obstacles’, always prayed or chanted to first in any ritual ceremony. The wall curved somewhat, bringing us to a large pair of open metal gates. The ‘office’ was another concrete cube, whitewashed by a slovenly hand, and containing one table, with one chair behind it, upon which sat a small round man, his shiny orbed face emanating an expression of immense self-satisfaction. Very deferentially, India asked him if any rooms were available.

            “No,” he said, pretending to examine some  papers, then elaborating, “All full.”

  I wondered how these Americans in saris would take such news. They seemed very docile, whispering among themselves about alternatives. I disliked this official a lot, finding it hard to imagine that anyone liked him, and even that he did not wish to be liked. I was also scorching hot, caked in dust, and extremely underslept.

            Therefore I said, “Listen, you, whoever you are, I came half way round the world to be here, and I want a room, any room. I will have your room if nothing else is available – which I don’t believe. I think you just enjoy what miniscule power you have, and that is mostly refusing rooms to foreigners, because you hate foreigners. You’re a pocket Mussolini, and I shall tell Swami of your rudeness the moment I see him. So give me a room and act politely or I will throw you and your crappy table out and live here. Am I making myself clear?”

     By now I was leaning over a few inches from his glossy face, which had begun to express fear. I doubted if anyone had spoken to him in such a manner ever – although I came to learn that most Indians were frightened by overt expressions of anger or indignation.

     “Some rooms are being painted,” he said, quite humbly, “so room is available, but painter must work.”

     “These ladies will take one of them,” I told him, “and I will take one. Give us the keys. Now! And bear in mind that not all western devotees will tolerate your ill-mannered crap…”

   “Jeez,” said India, as we carried our bags over fine sandy ground, “I’ve always wanted to put that asshole in his place, but I figured it would have me thrown out of the ashram. Swami’s officials are often obnoxious, and no one knows why he gives them such jobs.”

     “Let’s ask him,” I suggested.

     “Yeah, right!” was all she said.

     The rooms were in a new three-storey concrete block opposite the ‘temple’, which was enclosed by a low wall, and had  clearly been yet another, if larger, concrete rectangle. Now parts had rickety bamboo scaffolding tied together on the exterior. The roof already possessed a new white dome, and a narrow semi-circular balcony had been added, with a pair of solid silver doors behind it. The current work seemed to consist of numerous mythical creatures sculpted from concrete and then painted. None were particularly identifiable, except for one resembling a flying armadillo. The colour scheme was ill-advisedly garish: pastel blues, greens, and pink. Most of the building was white, blindingly white in the torrid sunlight, so the colours were unusually brilliant. All over the grounds were hand-painted signs bearing, presumably, Swami’s wise sayings, which then struck me as banal, simplistic, and often more like advertising slogans than wisdom: Be good do good see good; Love all serve all; Love is God, etc. His public talks proved to be equally simplistic, essentially urging his audience to lead good lives and treat others well. The Oxford-educated brain does not take simplistic philosophy with much enthusiasm. It likes paradox, conundrums, syllogisms, dialectic, teleology, epistemology, ontological arguments, and indeed anything but simple truths.

            I usually like simple rooms, though, but the one whose padlock I opened  was far too simple. It was not even minimalist, as I understand the term. It contained nothing at all, except four concrete walls, whitewashed by a familiarly inept hand, with white splotches decorating the bare floor like remnants of a decomposed carpet. The windows had shutters, but no glass or screening. There  was no washroom. Since Vijaya and friends were a few rooms down, I went to make inquiries, finding their door open and mattresses being inflated. Bill had not mentioned a dearth of bedding. To my query, Vijaya said that toilets and washing facilities were some distance away and clearly marked Ladies and Gents. Gender separation was, I soon found, of obsessive importance in the ashram – but one adapts to anything in life (I can assure you, as can Julian Schnabel’s masterly film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly).

            Before I could improve my living quarters, people were gathering to sit on the sand surrounding Swami’s temple, ladies in an arc on one side, gents on the other – a sign that darshan would be soon. Thus, I hurried down, leaving my sandals by the low wall, as others were doing, and sitting behind the first row of gents. There were only 70-odd people there in total, three or four of them westerners, hippies wearing an assortment of Indian clothes, dreadlocks, beads, and one fellow in Bermuda shorts. I wore khaki shorts and a T-shirt. Within a few years, however, a strict dress-code would be enforced, with all men in long white trousers and white shirts with the tails untucked, which meant many wore traditional Indian outfits, although the Indians tended to favour western shirts with collars. Women were all in saris, their heads covered. I learned that this dress-code was in fact the brain-child of some official in one of the many Sai organizations that were to spring up, forming bureaucracies, as any collection of people will do – for want of anything useful to engage them. Politicians are the same, forming committees when any problem arises (these committees, at preposterous expense, eventually produce reports no one reads, because other problems have eclipsed the former one, which the public has long forgotten). After some fifteen minutes, the sun had heated my head so ferociously that I moved to the shade of a palm tree, where I stretched out and nearly fell asleep when a buzz of excitement fizzed through everyone, and people edged into the front lines, all eyes trained on…what? Even the men sculpting winged concrete tigers, or whatever they were, had stopped in their work to stare, as the bamboo scaffolding lurched dangerously beneath them.

            Then I saw him, a tiny man with a prodigious Afro, wearing a long orange robe covering his bare feet, and, about to think something banal, I felt my heart suddenly explode with a love so intense that I simply burst into tears. Ignoring the crowd of devotees, Swami chatted cheerfully with the workmen, pointing to things, and obviously asking questions about their work. I quickly returned to my old spot, aglow with pure love, as he suddenly turned towards the ladies, now standing almost immobile, a forefinger seeming to write on the air, as his other hand revolved slowly, cupped, as if to test for rain, then turning his middle finger in a manner suggesting it spun a small disc. His gaze looked above the expectant, adoring faces; and then he began to walk with a slow uncanny grace along the arc of women, occasionally stepping back if someone tried to touch his feet, taking notes from some, which he handed to a humble attendant – who proved to be Dr. Bhagavantam, one of India’s preeminent nuclear physicists – and then stopping by an elderly woman, moving his right palm in a polishing motion, releasing from it a small stream of grey powder, which the woman caught, and he marked her forehead with the remainder, flicking his fingers. He next approached the gents’ section, and my overwhelming love grew, teardrops almost blinding me. Again he stood still, his hands writing and revolving; his eyes seemingly looking into other worlds, deep, yet blank, with no sense of a person behind them. Though tiny – five feet tall at the most – he had the aura of a mighty king, his bearing majestic, noble. His body was slender, delicate, a young boy’s, yet his neck was unusually thick, almost muscular. His skin was a very pale brown – unlike the dark Dravidians typical in the south, where no one had Afro hair, or even knew it existed. Yet, as photographs of him as a youth show, he wore the Afro long before Jimi Hendrix or Angela Davis were even born. His features too were strange, sharp in profile, yet broad when seen full-faced. As he approached along the line where I sat, love erased all thought, and I had no idea what to say or ask him. For a man next to me he produced vibhuti with the same polishing motion, but now I was so close that I saw the ash actually pour from the centre of his palm, as if through a hole in space; as it fell he turned his hand to catch it, handing some to the man and the rest to another man, whose forehead he also marked. Now he stood right in front of me, and I felt certain he would say something; yet his eyes looked all round at faces behind and before me, but I seemed to be invisible to him. Not a glance; nothing. Then suddenly he was gone, ambling now with a rolling, bear-like gait back to the temple, where a side door led into his rooms. I thought I was about to feel let down, perhaps angry, yet something assured me I had got Swami’s message, which was love, divine love, the love that is the self, the love that created and sustains this universe. As dear John Lennon puts it: Love is the answer, and you know that for sure.

            I also knew for sure then that I had better find a mattress to buy, along with other essentials.

            The Puttaparthi ashram was not actually in Puttaparthi, as I soon discovered. The village where Swami had been born was about a hundred yards down a dusty track past a memorial built for the avatar’s parents. The few inhabitants awake, in what resembled an impoverished settlement from the Iron Age, assumed I was here to see the house where Swami was born. Not wanting to seem ungrateful, I allowed myself to be led to what looked like a collapsed cow-shed, boasting a sign which, translated from the Telegu, read: Birthplace of Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba. ‘Humble’ hardly described it. ‘A step away from homeless’ was more accurate. I was even introduced to Swami’s brother, who looked like everyone else, and worked a rice paddy. Sometime later, I met him on a bus ride, learning that he was his brother’s devotee, yet had no more access to him than anyone else did. He was proud of the ashram, though, terming it ‘very big’. In the village I asked where I might purchase a mattress, but no one knew what a mattress was, so I called it a bed instead, learning that the village had no shops as such, but there was a carpenter who made beds. All the shops were back up outside the ashram walls, but they only sold Swami trinkets and posters. I asked how long this carpenter would take to make a bed, and was taken to the craftsman himself, who, after a 20-minute chat in Telegu with my guide, replied that a bed took an hour to make and cost a dollar. I paid, asking if the bed could be delivered to my room. It could, arriving four hours later, and comprising a wooden frame with stumpy legs, and a web of rough string criss-crossing the frame. It may be better than sleeping on concrete, I thought, but not much better. Outside the ashram I found a tailor who wanted to make me shirts, but very reluctantly sold me his whole bale of white cotton heavily laced with rayon, or some such plastic thread. Unrolled on the bed’s string, back and forth until, after five layers, it ran out, there was a serviceable enough covering for the bristly rope. I lay down, feeling the bed wobble in a disturbing manner, and then soon fell asleep. I had a strange dream in which I saw only Swami’s feet, touching my forehead to them, and then gripping his ankles, as if trying to save myself from drowning. In Hinduism a holy man’s feet are sacred, the only part of him in contact with the earth, thus the only part to which humanity can connect. Devotees often tried to touch Swami’s feet during darshan, yet he usually skipped back beyond their reach. The trinket stalls outside sold pictures of his feet; and elsewhere I would see depictions of other gods’ or gurus’ feet. Yet, normally, I had no interest in feet, no desire at all to touch those of Swami, no grasp of the concept behind this foot worship. In the dream, however, I felt my very salvation lay in holding onto those ankles so my forehead remained pressed against the toes, sustaining me from harm, providing access to a heavenly realm. It reminded me of Jacob’s ladder, where the angelic consciousness is in constant flow up and down from higher spheres in a metaphor showing earth’s ineffable contact with the divine light. When I awoke it was time for the afternoon darshan.

 

[To be continued.]

Love, Paul William Roberts

What is Wisdom? Part II

Tags

India, ramana maharishi, spirituality

In reading the first section of this essay, I felt digressions into my biography and early experiences defeated the topic itself, which is not time-dependent, nor susceptible to language, yet is always here and now. Therefore I will simply state that a direct experience of Reality, Truth, Wisdom, God – whatever you wish to call it – is possible, largely through meditation, but is beyond any descriptive language whatsoever, so why bother?. Try a year of meditation, whatever kind appeals to you, and then decide if a change emerges in your deepest self. The only book I would recommend reading on this subject is Talks with Ramana Maharshi. If this does not convince you that a truly wise and holy man is speaking as directly as possible on the issue that is life’s very foundation, then nothing will. I had intended to discuss ancient scriptures, but why? Their beauty and wisdom is unassailable, but they too often relate to another age. When we have a text, or texts in fact, by a person who died in 1950, Ramana Maharshi, why bother with sages who lived before him? Maharshi’s life, unlike those of gurus since, shows the simplicity, poverty, and direct knowledge of the divine within which we rightly expect from such men. It is my Bible; he is my link with inner reality minus the attractive yet superfluous yarns and deities. Many ask him questions – almost everything one would wish to ask oneself – and his answers are relentlessly consistent and ring deafeningly true. This is my best advice for the day, and the year ahead: read Maharshi.

With love, as always, Paul William Roberts.

What is Wisdom?

Tags

India, lsd, religion, spirituality, truth, wisdom, yogananda

The Buddha tells us that the object of meditation is to achieve wisdom and compassion. The latter we can all understand as the ability to feel what others are feeling, and, if possible, to assist in alleviating their suffering, as well as to share in their joy. But what of the former? What do we understand as wisdom? It seems to be analogous with Truth. Yet what is Truth? When Pontius Pilate asks that question of Jesus, the Christ is silent. Does this mean that Truth or Wisdom exists only in silence?

Possibly.

I have spent much of my life seeking wisdom and truth, spending much time with alleged gurus and holy men, as well as reading nearly every scripture and sacred text in existence, not to mention the lives of saints, and the discourses of sages from every faith. In all of this searching I have found much inspiration, many truths that seem to be universal, and others that strike me as reasonable working hypotheses, explaining problems that plague people limited to one dogmatic faith or philosophy. Common issues do not bother me. For instance, if God is all-powerful and all-merciful – as most require their god to be – then why does he allow evil to exist? If he can abolish it yet chooses not to, he cannot be all-merciful. If he cannot abolish evil then he is not all-powerful. He can only be one or the other, not both. Why do babies die? Why do bad things happen to good people (and vice versa)? Such sophisms and conundra do not trouble me in the least, because they are succinctly answered by the concepts of karma and reincarnation – which were even part of Christian dogma until the 4^th century, and are still accepted by certain Jewish sects as the only conceivable manner in which a just universe could be run. George Harrison puts it with characteristic simplicity: And the Lord says whatever you do is gonna come right back at you.

Like many of my generation, the drug LSD turned me away from a material grasping world, revealing a universe in which everything was alive and tangibly created of, by, and for a divine energy-intelligence which some term God. In one long night I was transformed by direct experience from an atheist into, not a believer, but a knower of God. Taken under the right and controlled conditions, I still believe LSD is the most powerful tool humanity has ever possessed for the expansion of consciousness towards a state where the divine is not mere faith but irrefutable fact. It is capable of inducing states which transcend the powers of language and are thus impervious to description. It is a state of Unity in which no ‘other’ exists, where subject and object are one, where the self is indistinguishable from all that exists; thus description, language – which is really a labelling process – can be of no use, since it would create a division, thus ending the state of Unity. The state is, to use a term from Vedanta which translates as ‘God’, sat-chit-ananda, ‘existence-conscious-bliss’. The bliss is often so ecstatic and overpowering that it manifests as an awesome love for all – the animate and the inanimate – a love that is also returned by all in an endless flowing of bliss and the visual evidence that everything is self-illuminated, or, as William Blake puts it, “All that lives is Holy.” I remember one session where the state reached was one of such utter serenity and joy that I felt I could sit where I was forever without desiring any more than the deep peace and limitless bliss I then possessed. There was no thought as such at all; simply consciousness of an existence that was pure joy – and that this was my true self in its own eternal world. The experience was more real than any experience I had ever, and have never since, known. Unlike most street drugs, for which I have little use, LSD was not something one became addicted to, or wanted more of immediately. Indeed its effects were so potent, when it was pure Sandoz liquid, at least, that you had no desire to take it more than once a month, if that. With me, there even came a time when it seemed as if the drug itself was saying, You have learned all you can from me, and now you should seek to attain bliss by yourself.

LSD was still legal in England when I last took it, and came in a medical bottle from Sandoz laboratories. It provided, and provides, an experience to which every human being has a right. Not everyone should take it, and it must only be taken under safe, controlled conditions, ideally in the countryside. It is definitely not a party drug, or one that should ever be taken outside a safe setting. A group experience can be interesting, but the deep LSD state is largely inner. Only during the final phase – the last 3 or 10 hours, say – does the outer world, people, music, nature, begin to exist in classic luminous forms. A proper session should involve one person who has not taken the drug, but is familiar with it, and who can handle anyone experiencing something frightening, as well as random chaos, from burst water pipes, to aged relatives showing up unannounced. Someone in deep-state LSD experiences cannot be disturbed – and, even if they could be, would not be very helpful in such situations. Contrary to common misperception, Timothy Leary, who I met several times, never encouraged people to take LSD at rock concerts or in public situations. His books emphasise the vital importance of set and setting. Albert Hoffman, discoverer of LSD – who died recently at the age of 102 – told me he had pleaded with Leary to cease promoting the drug so prominently, since it would inevitably lead to its prohibition. Hoffman took LSD for most of his life, and understood its importance as a tool to expand human consciousness in ways unprecedented even by shamanic herbs, mushrooms and peyote. Through Hoffman, many prominent people enjoyed LSD sessions in the 1950s and early 60s, including Cary Grant, the actor, Aldous Huxley, one of England’s greatest writers, and Steven Jobs, who ascribed his invention of the personal computer to experiences on LSD. Interestingly enough, Leary was also one of the first to see the potential world-shattering effect of an interlinked humanity, and indeed first introduced me to the personal computer, with its webbed universal mind. Sadly, Hoffman was right about the consequences of excessive promotion, depriving science of the opportunity to study why LSD causes such potent effects on the brain and mind. Yet, I hear, research with LSD, and its uses in psychiatry-psychology, has once more been resumed in England. This will mean that a pure form of the chemical exists somewhere out there, and may soon come here, there and everywhere. When I talk to younger people who say they have taken LSD, their experiences in no way correspond in profundity to mine, or those of anyone who took Hoffman’s discovery in pure form. I hear of euphoria, hallucinations, increased luminosity, but in club or party settings. I do not hear much about the inner voyage, and nothing about the often-terrifying ego-death preceding it, where you can feel that you are literally dying, perhaps poisoned. I had read enough of the literature before my first experience to expect this, and thus to let go, to allow this death to occur. Only when the ego, or little self (whose characteristics are insecurity and fear of death) has been ‘killed’ can the experience of Unity, the real Self, commence.

My LSD experiences lead me to read material that had previously bored or annoyed me, if I had even read much of it at all. I now read the mystics, like William Blake, Thomas Traherne, St. John of the Cross, George Herbert, and the incomparable Jacob Boehme. In all of them I found poetic accounts of the same experiences I’d had under LSD. I suddenly knew what Blake meant by, To see a world in a grain of sand/ And heaven in a wild flower,/ Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,/ And eternity in an hour. I knew what Jesus meant by, My father and I are one. I knew that Moses had correctly heard and understood God’s name in the words, I am that I am (note: the Hebrew can also be translated as, I am that I will be, the lack of vowels and dots in some early Torah manuscripts making certainty impossible). I knew heaven and hell were states of mind, and that Satan is merely a metaphor, since the Divine is a unity and can have no opposing force (note: it is interesting to study the biblical evolution of Satan or the Devil, since he does not appear in the Torah; and his later debut is as an employee of God, a kind of Chief Prosecutor, dispatched to perform tasks God finds distasteful. Then, in the Book of Job, his status is slightly elevated, yet he is on sufficiently good terms with God to make a bet with him that sufficient misery inflicted on Job, the most upright man alive by all accounts, will make him denounce God. God accepts the challenge, and the pair set about tormenting Job in unconscionable ways. God only wins the bet by pulling rank on Satan – Where were you when I created the Universe?­ It is an odd tale, to be sure, and cannot be taken as anything besides myth and metaphor. But Satan still only comes into his own with the New Testament, where he remains true to the meaning of his name, ‘the Tempter’. Jesus performs many exorcisms, but it is never clear if these cast-out devils have a chief or not. The Revelation ought to be Satan’s finest hour, yet he does not even get a role, unless he’s now renamed himself as ‘the Beast’ or shacked up with the ‘Whore of Babylon’. I shall write on the Bible at length, for this is not the place; but one more observation is relevant: there is no Hebrew word for ‘God’; the words translated into English as ‘God’ are curious; Adonai is more a quality than a name; Elohim is a plural, more properly rendered as ‘sons of god’ or even ‘gods’; and Jehovah is not a name at all, but merely the arbitrary adding of vowels to ‘YHVH’, called the Tetragrammaton, and only susceptible to interpretation as a complex mystical symbolism.)

In Jacob Boehme I found someone who had clearly experienced a mystical vision of the utmost purity and profundity. He lived around Shakespeare’s time in Holland, and was an illiterate cobbler (“A mender of bad soles,” as the Bard might have put it), who, in his own words, said that one day, without any warning, “The Kingdom of Heaven poured down upon me like a shower of rain.” All who knew him were not in the slightest doubt that his experience was both real and powerful. They urged him to find a way to express his obvious wisdom and enlightenment to others. First he had to teach himself how to read and write; then he had to teach himself how to read and write in Latin, since this was still the lingua franca among scholars and clergy all across Europe. He was urged to use existing mystical systems to express his own knowledge, in works like Mysterium Magnum and Signatura Rerum. Such books pleased the mystical schools, of which there were many at the time – Alchemists, Gnostics, Kabbalists, etc. – based in Prague, though found everywhere beyond the reach of Rome’s long, intolerant arm. But these books did not satisfy Boehme (sometimes spelled Behmen or Behman), who went on to write a simple little book called Confessions, which I regard as the most deeply moving and succinctly profound work in all of Western mystical literature. It corroborated my own mystic states under LSD, yet it did not explain how one could attain such states on one’s own and permanently. For this was now my quest.

By a stroke of fortune, I was introduced to George Harrison, with whom I spent many hours alone discussing this very issue. He too had found that LSD opened consciousness to a transcendent reality, yet only as a way of prompting the individual to seek for ways of attaining the state alone. He had also felt that the drug did not wish him to take it any more after a deep-state consciousness had been achieved. Its purpose was to show you that enlightenment was real, and not mere speculation or hope, but then the task of attaining it permanently was up to you. But, he added, there were time-honoured methods in the East for achieving the state of self-realization. “Read this,” he said, “and tell me what you think.” He handed me a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahamsa Yogananda, adding, “And here’s me latest record.” It was a vinyl single on the Apple label – but with the exterior fruit on both sides – of the Hare Krishna Mantra.

The book by Yogananda is still precious to me forty years later, although I now have it on audio disk. It opened up a whole new world of miracles and marvels I had never dreamed existed, chronicling the life of a holy man, whose only desire since childhood had been enlightenment. His patent honesty and simplicity make even the most improbably remarkable accounts of spiritual marvels resonate with truth. Sent by his own guru, Yogananda was among the first Indian sages to arrive in America, whence he came in the 1920s, with barely a few dollars in his pocket, going on to establish the Self-Realization Fellowship, designed to teach a form of meditation, which he termed a ‘spiritual science’, to westerners. Most received these teachings as monthly newsletters at a cost barely more than the postage. In 1952, at a gathering to welcome the Indian Ambassador, Swami Yogananda led a meditation, sitting in the traditional lotus posture, eyes closed. Such public meditations usually lasted no more than a half-hour, in consideration of those present who might be uncomfortable or unused to lengthy silence. This one, however, went on for over ninety minutes, at which time one of Yogananda’s devotees went to whisper in his ear that the Ambassador had other commitments for which he was already late. The devotee, receiving no answer, tapped the guru’s arm. No response. It was some time before they realized that, still seated serenely in the lotus posture, a faint smile on his lips, had entered Mahasamahdi, a conscious and permanent exit from the body, as opposed to the self-realized state of Samahdi, from which one returns after some time – hours, days or even years – of remaining merged in the Unity of Divinity. During such deep meditations the heart-rate can slow down to a mere few beats a minute; breathing is similarly reduced. It is much like an animal in hibernation. Because no one was certain if Yogananda had actually died, the Los Angeles Country Morgue was asked to delay any burial. As Morgue records show, Yogananda’s body displayed none of the usual signs of decay even after three weeks, by which time putrefaction would normally be advanced and nauseatingly odorous. The Swami’s body merely smelled strongly of roses, his favourite flower, and did so right up to the moment his coffin was closed forever. I have a photograph of him, taken a few hours before his final exit, in which his eyes seem to gaze into eternity, and his expression is one of pure compassion. Only one other photograph of a human face has ever moved me so much by capturing something of the pure Divinity within it.

I signed up for the SRF lessons, practising techniques of breath-control and meditation as assiduously as possible. But I was studying at Oxford by now, and the world was too much with me. Unlike my experience at North American universities, the course at Oxford was gruellingly hard work, with little time for leisure and silence. My mind was wholly preoccupied with books and words, very difficult to rein into the stillness of meditation. Yet, by another stroke of luck, one of my second and third-year tutors was a lovely soul named Bill Byrom, who had done his doctoral studies at Harvard, where he came across a mystic named Hilda Charlton, who’d spent many years at the feet of Neem Karoli Baba, the same guru Richard Alpert – Leary’s partner in the Harvard LSD experiments which ended with them both fired from their teaching posts – had sought out when trying himself to understand the nature of LSD experiences. Alpert’s answer came when the guru swallowed enough LSD for a battalion, then sat back, entirely unaffected by the chemical. Alpert concluded that Neem Karoli was already in a higher state of consciousness than his acid could provide, thus it was much like taking an aspirin when you have no headache. He remained with the guru for a year or so, changing his name to Ram Dass. Hilda Charlton, whose name only changed to Hilda, had a meditation group in New York, which Bill Byrom began to attend. By the time he had obtained his post at Oxford, he was barely interested at all in the English Literature which he had been hired to teach. I remember the smell of incense when I first entered his rooms for our weekly one-on-one tutorials, and the look of luminous serenity in his eyes. On one wall was a photograph of Yogananda, and we instantly hit it off, talking more about the inner quest than the writers neither of us cared for unless they revealed some experience of Soul. We hung out together a lot too, and he introduced me to such mystical poets as the Persians, Rumi and Hafez, and all the wealth of Indian and Buddhist spiritual wisdom. We took tea with Evans-Wentz, translator of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and numerous other Tibetan texts. The old man taught at Jesus College, which was opposite ours, and had personally known Yogananda, writing the introduction to his Autobiography of a Yogi. “He was Christ-like,” said Evans-Wentz. “One never doubted his wisdom, or that he spoke from knowledge, not theory or faith. He knew, and he exuded love the way a flower emits its fragrance.”

Byrom asked him the question this blog asks, “What exactly is wisdom, do you think?”

“In Jesus College,” said the old scholar, chuckling, “I ought to reply with silence. But you are not Pilate, so I shall give you my experience. Wisdom is a state of pure equanimity, where one desires nothing more than the moment in which one exists, seeing all its beauty and wonder as an embarrassment of riches. Wisdom is realizing that nothing is wrong in this universe, nothing needs correcting. It is perfect and precisely what it is supposed to be. Wisdom is realizing that people are exactly where they need to be at any moment, and must be treated with compassion, yet cannot be changed. All are subservient to their own karma, and they can only change from within. A wise man may point you towards the means for change, but he cannot change you. I believe it is only love in actions that brings about positive change.”

“What about meditation and the company of spiritually-minded people?” I asked.

“Swami Yogananda himself told me,” said Evans-Wentz, “that he could lead devotees to the waters of life, yet he could not make them drink. No books – and I have read so many – and no teachers, of whom I have met a few, can give you wisdom. It comes only from within; and we already possess it without knowing where it is to be found.”

He then recited the old Sufi parable about a man who spends his life digging everywhere for treasure without success. When he dies, his house is demolished, and beneath it, buried, a vast treasure is discovered.

“Somewhat disheartening, all that talk about wisdom, didn’t you find?” Byrom asked me, as we had tea back in his rooms.

“I think he knew whereof he spoke,” I replied. “After eighty years, or whatever he is, of delving into this stuff, he must have learned far more than we have.”

We both wanted the experience of a real holy man, one who knew. On Hilda’s advice, Byrom went to see Sathya Sai Baba in India. I could not wait for his return and hear what he had found. His experience, he told me a month later, was profound. Baba had seen him privately several times – a very rare occurrence – materialising a ring, a locket, and much sacred vibhuti ash from thin air as gifts. I asked if these were merely magic tricks. Bill said, no, he had seen the action from a foot away and the objects formed slowly enough to see they were drawn from the air itself, and were also, initially, very hot. The ash simply poured from his palm like rain. “Try hiding ash up your sleeve,” said Byrom. He spoke of an overwhelming sense of love felt anywhere near the holy man. Yet there was also much he disliked around Baba: the gaudiness of the main temple, the rudeness of ashram officials, and his confusion over whether Baba was a guru at all. He claimed to be an avatar of the god Shiva, who, traditionally does not appear as avatars, the way Vishnu does, in forms like Rama or Krishna. In the literature, Hinduism’s major deities form a trinity of Brahma, the Creator, Vishnu, the Preserver (whose avatars read like ancient Darwinian theory, the earliest being animals), and Shiva, the Destroyer, who occasionally appears to devotees as himself, the archetypal yogi, yet only emerges to anatomize the universe at the end of a vast cycle of yugas or ages, each lasting 26,000 years, and correspond to west Asian and European notions of a golden age, followed by silver, bronze, and iron; or an age of gods, one of heroes, then one of men. For all of recorded history we have been in the darkest yuga, that of Kali, but it still has many thousands of years to run before Shiva begins his dance that will end all creation in order that it can be recreated. This is the mythology; but it does not explain why Sathya Sai Baba would claim to be an avatar of Shiva. He also claimed to be the reincarnation of Shirdi Sai Baba, an obscure holy man from Maharastra, who would have been unknown in the tiny South Indian village where Sathya Sai Baba was born. The ring Baba made for Byrom bore the image of Shirdi Sai Baba too, a holy man of whom Bill knew almost nothing, yet who, he learned, was enigmatic, revered, although it was never clear if he were Muslim or Hindu, lived in a ruined mosque, accepted no gifts, and was reputed to have performed miracles, including the materialization of vibhuti ash. A silver statue of Shirdi Baba stood prominently on the altar of Sathya Sai’s temple, and on the night of Sivarathri, the big Shiva festival, was bathed in vibhuti materialized from a jar by Sathya Sai, which was not large enough to contain a fraction of the ash poured from it. On this same night, Baba produced from his mouth an egg-shaped lingam – the phallic symbol of Shiva – so large it often tore the corners of Baba’s mouth as it emerged. Byrom witnessed this phenomenon – as did I a year later – and it was an eerily moving spectacle, similar to watching a woman give birth. The lingam was crystalline and appeared to glow from within. Byrom found the ritual disconcerting, and disliked the manner in which Baba was treated like a temple idol during the night. He also found that, although Baba seemed to know everything about him, no teaching was offered, and the only practice at the ashram was singing bhajans, repetitive chants involving the names of gods that increase in tempo before ending. The Hare Krishna Mantra is an example. A number of Indian holy men, over the past few hundred years, have suggested that chanting bhajans is the most effective spiritual practice during Kali Yuga. It is indeed pleasant and uplifting to chant, but both Byrom and I wanted a more direct route to enlightenment.

Then we discovered Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche’s book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. Trungpa was a Tibetan sage – in fact of a more elevated status than the Dalai Lama – forced to flee Tibet during the Chinese invasion. He settled in America and began teaching Americans, who liked his robes and rigmarole, some even adopting it themselves, or dressing like Indian sadhus. Trungpa came to see that his students had abandoned the material world for the spiritual, but without leaving their materialistic nature behind. They treated spiritual practices as if they were corporate activities, entailing promotions and tangible gains. They expected rewards for hard work, good report cards, gold stars, devotee-of-the-month stuff. To snuff these misconceptions out, he told his students to meet him in a Manhattan bar, where he showed up dressed in a suit and tie, and then proceeded to get them all drunk on Martinis. Some got the point; others quit in disgust. In his book, where one can glimpse a mind like a razor at work, he sets out his whole and very wise perceptions in meticulous detail and with the flawless diamond-cutter logic of a truly wise being. It is essential reading for any westerner delving into eastern mystical practices, and it gave both Byrom and I much pause for thought. When I left for India, we lost touch – which I regret deeply now, since I owe him so much – and he died in 1988. He had a form of cancer when I knew him. He never mentioned the fact, but it does much to explain his intense search for self-realization. I hope he attained it, and will never have to return again to this world.

My experiences in India are mostly recounted in my book Empire of the Soul, but I shall add some new things, and continue with this subject in my next blog. If a detailed look at the Bible is of urgent interest to anyone, they should write to say so – which might hasten the promised essay.

With love, as always, Paul William Roberts.

Quebec: Into the Void

Tags

India, literature, meditation, publishing, redcommended reading, spirituality, writing

              This entry often deals with things that are beyond the reach of words, even beyond the realm of thought, and thus the mind itself. They are states which can only be experienced; there is no subject-object relationship, thus no observation or examination, in the usual manner. I shall endeavour to be as precise as possible, yet the use of metaphor, analogy, allegory, and other poetic devices will be inevitable; as will the deployment of Sanskrit terms. As many have observed, Sanskrit, with its compound words and personification of inner states, seems to be a language specifically devised to deal with issues of the soul and consciousness, of life’s quintessential reality. I shall explain the Sanskrit to the best of my ability, but the reader must be aware that all translations are imprecise, often unable to convey the root forms of words, and thus losing deeper resonances carried within them.

              Here we go:

              In my last entry we arrived at a point where I had begun to study and practice Buddhist forms of meditation and philosophy, setting aside the Yogic method into which I had been initiated nearly 40 years earlier. What is the difference?

              Perhaps I can best summarize it like this: the Yogic idea runs, you are aware of your body, therefore you are not your body; you are aware of your thoughts, therefore you are not your thoughts; you are aware of your mind, though not in sleep, therefore you are not your mind. What you call a ‘self’ is merely a collection of disjointed memories, shifting emotions and ever-changing ideas; this does not amount to a self. The real self is unchanging, does not act, but is merely a witness of actions, feelings, and the rest. True reality, the Self, or God, the Yogi would say, is Sat Chit Ananda, which can be rendered as ‘Existence, Consciousness and Bliss’. When the Witness witnesses this state, he or she has achieved moksha, or ‘Liberation.’

              Now, the Buddhist teaching closely follows this same form of self-inquiry, but the Buddha adds, You are not the Witness either. So where does this leave you? The disconcerting conclusion can easily be that there is no ‘you’. One translation of the term Nirvana, a stated goal of Buddhist practice, is ‘blown out’, or, in other words, snuffed, ceasing to exist. Nothingness and non-being are terms that frequently seem used where others might use ‘God’. Most people know that the Buddha’s first Noble Truth is that All life is suffering; but few are aware that ‘suffering’ is more accurately translated as ‘unsatisfactory’. This makes the teaching far more comprehensible, since we have all experienced the fulfillment of desires and ambitions, no matter how great or small, as anti-climatic, nothing like they promised to be. Watching a child after all the Christmas presents have been unwrapped sums this up succinctly. We come to learn that desire is like an itch: scratching appears to relieve it, yet in fact only makes it worse. No one ever has enough of anything until he or she learns the truth that enough is in fact enough. In our culture, all too often, enough is defined as ‘too much’. The fact that we will all die cannot be termed suffering, although it may entail some, so much as an unsatisfactory ending to all our endeavours. Besides, no one believes they will die – a globally ubiquitous notion, pointing, surely, to something fundamental in the human psyche? In the Bhagavad Gita (Song of God), the god Krishna tells his friend and devotee, Arjuna, on the eve of a great battle, that the soul is never born, thus it cannot die, simply moving from body to body in a ceaseless round of reincarnations, whose purpose is that the jiva (analogous to our ‘ego’) will come to realise that its sense of separation from God is an illusion, thus it is itself an illusion; at which point it merges into the divinity, its existence and consciousness acquiring the bliss which is its true nature. A common image is that of the water droplet falling into an ocean: although it is now no different from the ocean, does it still not continue to exist? [Don’t apply molecular biology to metaphors]. In Sanskrit, another word for the individual soul is Atman, whose relationship to another word for God, Paramatman’, is irreducibly precise.

              Hinduism, in its subtlety, complexity, generosity of spirit, and sheer breadth of scope makes all other religions pale by comparison. Yet it is not really a religion itself, so much as a portal into ways of experiencing the divine. These ways range from selfless work (karma yoga), through worship of a symbol or divinity (bhakti), to intensive meditation on the nature of the Self (advaita, or ‘non-dualism’, which is not monotheism at all, acknowledging that everything in the universe is one, and this One is God). This latter form most closely resembles Buddhism, yet it can also employ in its doctrines the Hindu myths and metaphors in order to illustrate points impervious to language. Non-dualism, which is purely experiential, without dogma, theology or ideology, is a hard path to follow for most, yet its freedom from religious trappings gives it a wider appeal to those who find their inherited religions lacking in essential substance. I will explain, in a later entry, and with extensive quotations, why I find the Indian philosophy, or spiritual science, by far the most profoundly wise yet pragmatic guide to self-realization the world has ever known, and the probable source of all human civilization.

              Now to my own experiences with Buddhist teachings as revamped by contemporary Western ‘gurus’, and even by transplanted Eastern ones.

              What is the purpose of meditation? It is, essentially, a way of stilling the mind by attempting to hold its activities to one single thought alone. This thought can range, depending on the practitioners’ preferences, from a sacred word or phrase, through sacred images, of divine beings, or symbolic objects and art works, all the way to focusing exclusively on one’s breath, or even on a blank white wall. No technique is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, though some may be better suited to one person than another. But why reduce the mind’s activities to one thought? The scoffers deride this process, saying that the mind is designed to think its thoughts. This is perfectly true, yet it rarely performs this function at our instigation. Everyone has the experience of having one idea embark on an associative chain of memories, fears, worries, and so on, ending up in some irrelevancy and then wondering how one arrived there, sometimes able to retrace the chain, sometimes not. What this ought to make apparent is that there has been thought, yet no thinker. The random chain of thought has generated itself. This is not the same as directing the mind to perform a function, like write, or solve an equation in algebra. Holding the mind to one thought, contrary to the skeptic view, sharpens its ability to be a tool of the will, rather than stultifying it. Yet this one-pointedness is only an initial stage of real meditation, and is usually termed ‘concentration’. True meditation itself only proceeds once the rippling thoughts have been entirely stilled, and, in William Blake’s words, the doors of perception have been cleansed. Then, he says, everything will appear as it really is: infinite. Let us try to understand what mystics mean when they declare that the world is an illusion. In dreams, we can create whole cities, landscapes and people, often in great detail. Yet upon awakening we no longer think that these dream creations are real. The world we do regard as real, however, is perceived as so purely from the sense perceptions processed by our brain. Someone born with no sensory organs – no sight, smell, touch, taste or hearing – would still exist. But where would they exist? Their universe would lack every quality by which we define our own: no shape or dimension, no solidity, no up or down, no time or space, and no good or evil. Thus, a reality exists independent of brain and mind, of subject and object. Consciousness is that reality, and deep meditation takes one into this consciousness, which is seen to permeate everything that exists, binding stars to atoms, and the individual self to a single Self. This Self, within all yet beyond all, is what we call God. “I and my Father are one,” says Jesus. “Everything that lives is holy,” declares Blake. One could quote from all faiths the same message, which is the sole Truth: that the universe is a unity, the consciousness of its Creator within every particle of it. Asked to summarize the Torah while standing on one foot, the sage Hillel said, “Love thy neighbour as thyself.” Because there are no ‘others’ when all is one. Is there a form or character of this divinity? Asked his name by Moses, God says simply, “I am that I am” [which can be translated also as “I am that I will be”, the Hebrew tense in some manuscripts being uncertain]. Questions such as why suffering exists, or why babies die, cease to be asked when the doors of perception are cleansed. Since deep-state reality shows that death is an illusion, causes create effects, and, to quote Shakespeare, there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. When the mind is controlled it makes a wonderful servant, but, as Plato observed, is usually like a ship on which the crew has mutinied, killing the captain and pilot, and unable to navigate any course, blown hither and thither at the mercy of capricious winds. It is thus essential to keep our captain and pilot in control. For the world and nature are not what we want them to be, and nor is life. We are not apart from nature, we are of nature, and must see its processes as they really are, not as we would wish them to be. Nature devours itself, life feeds upon life – and this is the reality in which we must learn to place ourselves in order to be fully alive. Only an awareness of pure consciousness can enable us to do this. And the various forms of Yoga are the only tools for achieving that goal. This is why I meditate, but the practice is not without its dangers.

              In changing from my old practice of concentrating on an image and the repetition of mantra, I began various Zen Buddhist methods, mainly breath-control and a focus on emptying the mind of any image or concept. The goal was a state of no-mind, or emptiness, a journey towards something called Nothing.

              One day, deep into a state where my only consciousness was of breath going in and coming out, I began to forget about the ‘I’ witnessing this activity altogether. I started to feel as if falling through endless space, a space in which there was nothing at all, and where my fall would continue for all time. The bottom dropped out of my plexus, just as it does when a rollercoaster begins its descent; yet this rollercoaster had no ascending phase. It only plunged on down into nowhere. It was an indescribably terrifying feeling; not like the ego-death of an LSD experience – which you have been taught to expect, and is followed by a simulacrum of bliss – but like an utter eradication, a dissolution into the Nothingness of which everything seemed composed. No light, no love, no union with an ineffable, no meaning, no purpose, no wisdom, no compassion: just Nothing. Surely this was not the state of emptiness to which people aspired and devoted thousands of hours in rigorous practices? It was when this thought arrived that I realized a witness had returned; there was still an ‘I’. Forcing my mind to resist its own emptiness, I repeated my old mantra, and prayed to all I held sacred to restore me to this world of illusion. Quite suddenly, the nightmare descent ended, and I was back in my familiar room, seeing it with new eyes, no matter how blurred and faulty they were, and with love. The clock told me four hours had passed since my sitting had begun. But time had meant nothing in that void. I wished dearly that I had a teacher or guru from whom to seek guidance on this experience, but I had no one any more, at least not on a physical plane. I had only my audio books, which I now reviewed carefully, finding that many warned readers of practicing deep meditation without a teacher. There were snares and traps unknown to normal consciousness, and only someone aware of such menaces could advise the student about dealing with them. Were these states, I wondered, the Dark Night of the Soul, or the Valley of the Shadow of Death? But little is written about them, largely because meditation techniques are taught under conditions of secrecy that no written text can provide; not because there is much to be secret about – apart from arcane practices that would be misunderstood by the casual reader, or, like certain arduous breath-control exercises, hazardous in the extreme without proper preparations and guidance – but because no student requires the same instructions as any other.

              When next I sat in meditation, the fear of entering that void once more made the practice impossible. I felt the message being delivered was that I needed to wait, to purify myself, to create more order in the chaos that had, for so many years, comprised my life. I would listen to books, walk in the beauty of nature, restore my health, and pray. But I yearned also for work.

              All I can really do is write, however, and, since writing is in fact actually rewriting, which entails reading, I feared that I would never be able to write again. I could scribble a first draft, but I could not read my handwriting, so the work could not progress beyond a stage too basic even to show anyone. Nabokov characterized showing first drafts as “dangling your sputum in the public’s face”. God forbid. My method of writing was always to go over and over a text until I could find no more to add or change. Sometimes 50 drafts, with more discarded than used. Even then, on reading a publisher’s galleys, I usually found my books unreadable. But I never had the luxury of being able to set aside a work for several months, then revise it again, refreshed by the space away from it. I wrote to deadlines and for money. It was prostitution in the name of mortgages, children, clothing, and all those things that flesh is heir to. I will never do that again, especially since big publishers are little better than criminals, exploiting writers shamelessly, their sales figures and accounting practices impossible to fathom, their costs far less than they pretend, the author’s share of profits a joke – since there never seem to be any profits. I now even find my books pirated in digital form, without my authorization or notification, by publishers whose contracts may have included ‘electronic rights’, yet were drafted long before the so-called E-Book existed, thus can hardly argue they own that right. Never have I received a statement from any publisher, except to say my advance is not yet earned out. Only once did the publisher of one of the world’s three major houses, who was also a close friend, tell me my book sales showed I had been heinously underpaid, by as much as six figures. He clearly had access to such inside information, as all publishers do, yet he was leaving the business in disgust, so placed little value on its secrets. He did not, however, tell me how to access the source.

              Thus, bereft of God, unable to write, I faced a new life with trepidation, yet with hope, and faith. My next entry will be on this and the riches of Indian wisdom. And so I remain, as always, sincerely, Paul William Roberts.

Recommended Reading

Gods, Demons and Others by R.K. Narayan. A retelling of Hindu myths and legends by one of India’s greatest writers in English. Graham Greene hailed Narayan’s novels as masterpieces revealing the Indian soul more acutely than any other work in the language. Here, in the persona of an old village storyteller, he brings to vivid life the beauty, wisdom and subtlety of tales that have fueled and fired the Indian imagination for millennia. An education disguised thoroughly as superb entertainment. Indispensable.

 

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