The Road to Sathya Sai Baba

Tags

lsd, spirituality

         Anyone fortunate enough to have experienced LSD — when it was still legal, pure, and came as a liquid in small bottles sealed and labelled by the Swiss Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company — would have probably noticed experiences closely resembling those recounted by mystics of all stripes over the past five thousand years. A love for, and unity with, all living beings best sums this up; and the Beatles’ All You Need is Love was its anthem. In my case, having taken an exceptionally large dose, I felt I was dying. But, having read the available literature on that drug, I knew this was the ideal effect and ought not to be resisted. So I let myself embrace death, falling towards it with a roller-coaster-like sensation, and not a little apprehension, although I knew that LSD was not toxic in any dose. At the moment when I was certain unconscious and death were about to occur, I felt instead as if a great burden had been lifted, and I was finally freed from something that had prevented me from being my true self. This self initially floated through my own bloodstream, and I saw my inner organs, with the heart pumping, and so forth. Then it was carried as if by a stream of light through the top of my head, pouring out all over the cosmos, where I saw many universes exploding into life, or fading away, in a process that seemed endless. At one point I was near a colossal star which changed colour constantly. I went to touch this star, only then realizing I had no arms or body, but instead actually was everything I saw, except there no longer existed an ‘I’, only the awareness of being conscious that all existence was pure consciousness alone, and all one [as the word used to mean]. As a former atheist and Marxist, I was somewhat slow in grasping the fact that what I saw was a glimpse of God’s mind, which was also my own consciousness, now in a state of indescribably supreme bliss and limitless love. I could have remained in this state literarily forever, desiring nothing else. Time itself no longer existed, but eventually the consciousness of a body, a room, and other people returned, except everything and everyone was self-illuminated, and all was Divine. In the eyes of my friends I saw the same sense of wonder and a love that flowed from all into all with waves of bluish-gold light. No one spoke, for there was nothing to say not said by this infinite love, and the sense of a unity which was God. Indeed, there was only God anywhere at all. The music we had planned to play sat in its covers. The food we had planned to eat remained untouched. We desired nothing except the bliss we already possessed. After what was probably six or seven hours, a thought occurred, and the bliss immediately dissolved into euphoria. Talk began, and the desire to explore this new world soon had us heading out into an incipient dawn, past glowing flowers and living trees, swathed in a pinkish mist. It took a day for the effects to recede completely, and the intensity of our experiences, or their undeniable truth and reality, never really left at all. There was no urge to take more of the drug, since its effects had to be digested and understood. Everyone read Aldous Huxley, R.D. Laing, and, of course, Timothy Leary. But these early experimenters with LSD invariably pointed the way to, mainly, Oriental sacred texts, where our experiences were very accurately described as the nature of enlightenment or self-realization, except this did not wear off. With the Vietnam war raging, and protests against it increasing, dealt with violently in the US, many felt that if everyone took LSD love and peace would rule the world.

          Huxley and others had warned Leary to cease promoting LSD publically because it would result in the drug’s ban. They were right. I took it several more times in England before it was made illegal there too, but during the last few sessions I had a distinct feeling that I had learned all it had to teach me, and now ought to cease, and seek a more permanent enlightenment. Yet the lure of an easy fix, a swift route to Nirvana, was hard to resist. Lama Govinda, and other revered spiritual leaders, had taken the drug and concluded that it did indeed produce a reasonable facsimile of the Nirvana state, adding that it wore off, so was only useful in showing someone that such elevated states of consciousness did indeed exist, thus encouraging people to seek for the real thing through meditation and other disciplines. I did once take a street version of what was by now called ‘acid’, finding it barely resembled the real thing.

          At this point someone I knew had access to a thousand gallons of pure Sandoz LSD, which he wanted to pour into the water reservoirs of various cities, convinced this would bring peace and love to reign, at least over England. All he lacked was the million pounds to pay for the stuff. Knowing I had, through a friend, access to George Harrison, he persuaded me to ask the Beatle for funding. I agreed, believing, to some extent, in the virtues of such a project. George then still lived in his psychedelically painted house at Esher. Without an invitation, I called at the house, only to find no one home. Weary, I fell asleep on the doorstep, to wake finding George standing over me. Invited in for tea, I explained my mission, which he understood but, like me, had realized acid only took you so far. I asked how one got further, and he explained his attachment to chanting and the Hare Krishna movement, which followed the advice of Chaitanya, a 17^th century holy man, who announced that chanting was the only method for enlightenment in Kali Yuga, the worst and darkest of the four Hindu ages – each 25,000 years long. He then gave me a copy of Paramahamsa Yogananda’s wonderful Autobiography of a Yogi, and the soon-to-be-released vinyl single of the Hare Krishna Mantra, this one having the full apple image on both sides [Beatles’ records when released had a cut half apple on one side]. I was to see much more of George in the years ahead, but that day I left feeling I had failed in my mission. I did not read the book or listen to the mantra for some time, but when I did read the book a whole new stage of my life began. I still read it, or rather listen to an audio version now, because it still enthralls and inspires me. In Toronto I would often go to the Hare Krishna temple to chant, because the experience is always uplifting, even now when I chant alone. Like meditation, chanting forces the mind to do what it most dislikes: concentrate on one single thing for an extended period of time. The ego and its thoughts are often fearful, since it knows its end is nigh, yet imagination cannot imagine its own death. When you start off thinking about something particular, and then, 15 minutes later, wonder what chain of associations brought you to an utterly irrelevant thought – often a worry – it is surely not hard to conclude that there is no thinker behind your thoughts – they generate themselves. Who is it observing this process, though? This is the real question: Who am I? It is the same in a dream: who is the observer? I have many lucid dreams in which I am conscious of dreaming, so who is the dreamer? Or who is the ‘I’ conscious of dreaming? The proverbial ‘I think therefore I am’ is entirely wrong, and ought to be ‘I am aware therefore I am’. Thought is the object for a subjective ‘I’, therefore the two are distinctly different. Ask Hegel – he worked it out too, even if his phraseology makes it hard to work out most of what he worked out.

          At Oxford I was, initially, miserable and lonely, consoling myself with Yogananda’s book: I could always flee to a Himalayan cave and meditate – such was the consolation. But I became President of the Buddhist Society, and was, for some time, also its only member – so meetings were straightforward: I sat in my 17^th century rooms and read books. Eventually, though, I received a stiff note from some authority informing me that the President of any university club or society was obligated under section blah-blah, sub-section blah, of the Oxford Extra-Curricular Act of 1464, or some such, to hold an event of nearly any nature that was open to non-members, its purpose being to demonstrate your club or society’s nature, and to attract new members. The temptation to conclude my letter with Wildean sarcasm must have been massive. Without Internet or Google – or a computer smaller than my college – finding information was a virtual career. I needed a Buddhist monk to give a talk – that was all; that would count as an event. Under ‘Buddhist’ the Oxford yellow pages contained no entries whatsoever. I had heard there was a Buddhist monastery in Scotland, yet, telephoning information operators in every major city and many large towns, asking, ““Buddhist Monastery, please,” I received  many amusing or cheeky responses, yet no information, beyond the tacit understanding that no one north of Hadrian’s Wall even knew what a Buddhist was. As a last resort I telephoned a producer I had met on the set of Roman Polanski’s Macbeth – where my first job was ferrying coffee all night long, then accompanying Roman to Tramps night-club, making sure the waiters watered-down the 50 cognacs he drank, no one ever mentioned Sharon Tate (his pregnant wife recently murdered by the Charles Manson cult), I didn’t mention my suspicion that making Macbeth as a sexy love story seemed doomed to fail, and finally bribing a cab driver to make certain he actually entered his home and closed the door behind him. This producer, who had no connection at all with the film, frequently engaged me in talk about the Occult, giving me preposterous books by Madame Blavatsky, and attempting to lure me to what sounded more like orgies than magical rites. My call was thus well received, although its purpose was probably disappointing. He did, however, have a good suggestion: Swami Rama, an Indian yogi he was currently sponsoring – whatever this meant – and would mail me some literature I might find interesting.

          I did, as it happened. Swami Rama had agreed to demonstrate some of his yogic powers under rigorous scientific conditions at the Menninger Foundation in America. Amongst a sheaf of publicity releases and propaganda, I found the actual 120-page report produced by the Foundation on its work with the yogi, who had indeed provided conclusive proof of abilities far beyond anything scientists believed possible until then. Wired up to ECGs and other monitoring devices, for example, Swami Rama had first slowed, then stopped his heartbeat entirely for longer than brain-damage and death would result in an average body. A small bird was killed in a vacuum jar, certified dead, and then given to the yogi, who held it in his palms, breathed upon it, soon restoring it to life. He lowered the temperature of his body by some 20 degrees. He made one hand very hot and the other, simultaneously, very cold. In meditation, he dramatically altered his brain waves, and slowed his breathing to one breath a minute. I had read of such feats, and infinitely more spectacular ones, in Yogananda’s book, so they did not amaze me per se; yet to find scientific proof of yogic powers was precisely what I needed at Oxford, where atheism was the norm, and philosophy had become logic, or rather Logical Positivism – which wrestled with issues such as how one could tell a chair existed merely because one could see a chair. Or there was Wittgenstein, whose second magnum opus refuted his first one, and he decided that all problems of philosophy were now purely semantic (which is curiously true, though not in the way he intended: ‘Whereof one does not know, thereof one ought not to speak’). Via the producer, Swami Rama agreed to give a talk for my Society. I made copies of the Menninger report, acquiring much hyperbolic ink in the local media; and then posting up or handing out leaflets announcing the event.

     The producer arrived with yogi and a woman in an opulently-restored Rolls-Royce from the thirties. Swami Rama wore Christ-like robes of white raw silk; but although his face shone, there was something unpleasant in his eyes. Greed, as it turned out. The hall was packed, and the Buddhist Society suddenly acquired many members. But the yogi’s talk struck me as lack-lustre, uninformative, repetitive, and mostly concerned with a need for all to visit his ashrams and learn meditation – which anyone can learn in five minutes. Practising it twice daily for at least 30 minutes is the hard part – and no one can teach you that. But people expect the magic bullet, the trick that brings enlightenment in a pill, like LSD, but permanent. In his masterpiece, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche describes how westerners who turn to spirituality treat it in the same manner they applied to material pursuits. If they do this or that, they expect rewards, benefits, praise. They confuse material things, such as clothing, diet, yoga, and so forth, with spirituality, viewing those who act differently as inherently not spiritual. The highest spiritual leader to leave Tibet – the Dalai Lama being more of a temporal authority – Trungpa decided to rid his first western students of their misconceptions. He held one of his first gatherings in a bar, where he arrived wearing a western business suit, not his traditional robes, and drank scotch while talking. The students were in their Indian clothes and beads, many with sadhu dreadlocks. They were shocked, of course; but such was the power of his teaching, his mind razor-sharp, that his point was soon driven home, and everyone abandoned the trappings of another culture for ones of their own, learning that what one ate or drank had no bearing on spirituality, which solely concerned constant awareness of one’s actions, thoughts, character, and the compassionate love for all emanating from the heart. Thus, meditation was not something one did for a set time each day, like exercise; it was a state of awareness to be maintained all the time, not requiring special postures, nor precluded by work or any other activity. Reading something like Yoga Journal, I used to get the impression that there were spiritual shoes, chairs, décor, etc, much as New Yorker ads imply that serious readers or intellectuals must own special book props for bed-reading, with special lights, considerate of the sleeping partner. Both magazines have ads for vacations suited to like-minded people, places unknown to the hoi polloi. It is true that retreats featuring daily 14-hour meditations, and meetings with a genuine master, can be helpful in deepening one’s technique, understanding, and dealing with specific problems. But you still have to return to your world; and only the teachings of a fully self-realized master or guru – someone who knows rather than repeats scriptures – is of any genuine value. The obsession with a vegetarian diet displayed by many spiritual organizations is a misunderstanding of ancient Vedic dietary rules, in which only Brahmins are required to be vegetarian, because their lives were sedentary, involved in lengthy meditations, as were sadhus or reclusive yogis. It has nothing to do with killing animals. The Ayur Veda, the world’s oldest medical text, like ancient Chinese culinary books, regards food or diet as medicine – an idea currently enjoying resurgence, regards food or diet as medicine – an idea currently enjoying resurgence. Ayurvedic medicine defines various physical types, with qualities applying to all things, and known in Sanskrit as gunas.To simplify, there is rajas (active, fiery, aggressive), tamas (slow, lethargic, lazy), and sattvas (pure, untainted, sensitive). The average person needs these gunas to be brought into balance, for he or she will require something of each quality during everyday life, therefore someone with an excess of, say, tamas, ought to avoid certain foods and eat more of others, to restore balance. Only the sattvic person, providing they are solely engaged in meditation, etc, will be required to eat a pure vegetarian diet, without peppers, or any other rajasic or tamasic foods or spices. The specifics are outlined in extraordinary detail, along with the healing properties of countless plants, flowers, and herbs. Only the khshatriya, or warrior caste, is mandated to eat meat, which is highly rajasic and necessary for anyone engaged in much physical activity. As the caste system evolved from being a description of differing human abilities, compared with parts of the human body, into a rigid class system, where birth determined destiny, the Brahmins established themselves as the highest caste (when the original system was equal rule by priest and prince), thus making vegetarianism an elite diet. They also made the cow sacred, since it provided their main source of protein, as milk or curds. To this day, beef is not eaten in India by anyone. Veganism is a modern fad, existing only in the west, and based upon the fallacy that any food derived from a living creature is abuse of that creature. Even honey is stealing from bees, and  watching films is abusing cows, since celluloid is made from hooves. People can, of course, eat whatever they wish, but diets tried and tested over millennia strike me as more sensible than ones probably not providing proper nutrition. Ancient cultures all agreed that domesticated animals ought to be treated humanely, and all animals killed in a painless manner. Only the corporate farm introduced abuse and cruelty, treating animals like manufactures. An awareness of nature shows that it devours itself, and everything ends up as food – including us. Is an owl wicked for killing a mouse? Homo sapiens was probably always a predatory omnivore, wisely avoiding certain creatures for reasons of hygiene that must have been instinctive long before religions made them laws.

          I digress thus because these issues began to plague me in the Buddhist Society once it had members, and I first discovered that what most people wanted was someone to tell them exactly what to do in every aspect of life. My other task was talking people down from bad acid trips. They would show up at any hour the college was open, or any hour at all if they lived in the college. No one ever said they had taken a drug and now felt awful or terrified. They presented the dilemma as a spiritual crisis, bit I had seen enough people on bad trips to know what was going on, and became quite adept at the art of returning them to a benign universe. The result of this was similar to the situation with new Buddhists: I acquired followers, even devotees, when all I really knew was that I knew nothing worth teaching. By then I had joined Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship and was receiving monthly newsletters with step-by-step exercises leading towards meditation. Concentration was the first stage, and I soon conceded that my university work-load of two 30-page essays a week for each of my two tutors, not to mention learning Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Icelandic sagas, and so on, required all my concentration and more. I nominated a new Buddhist president, stopped answering my door, and began to find that I really liked poetry, as well as the English novel. I came to like my tutors too, Jonathan Wordsworth – direct descendent with access to unpublished manuscripts – and Stephan Gill, authority on Dickens. I also made some friends who have lasted a lifetime, like Martin Amis and Richard Sparks. Christopher Hitchens didn’t make it to a lifetime, alas. But, despite some very good times, I still yearned for the company of someone with whom to discuss spiritual interests in a non-academic way, as seekers not pundits.

          I was saddened to find, as my second year began, that Stephen Gill had moved down Turl Street to a senior position at Lincoln College. He had been replaced by someone called William Byrom, with an M. So my tutors were now Wordsworth and Byrom. Bill Byrom was English, but, I heard, had been finishing a Ph.D. at Harvard. I hoped I would like him, since a one-on-one tutorial system is very intimate, and can be hell with the wrong person. I was already being tutored by John Bailey – Iris Murdoch’s husband, and a beautiful soul – over at New College, since neither of my own tutors knew anything about American Lit, one of the few elected courses. Now I found that this Byrom knew American Lit, so would take over from Bailey. I disliked him already, before we’d even met.

     Stepping into his rooms for our first tutorial I noticed the smell of incense, and then I saw a framed photograph of Yogananda on the wall. I knew this was, instead, the start of a wonderful friendship. We spent the hour talking about meditation, Rumi, the Upanishads, and a teacher he had in New York named Hilda Charlton, who had been a devotee of Neem Karoli Baba, the guru Tim Leary’s old partner, Richard Alpert, had sought to find out what LSD really was. The story is famous, but can be summed up by the guru swallowing enough acid for two hundred people, with Alpert hoping he hadn’t killed the old man. His answer arrived after a couple of hours, by which time Neem Karoli revealed no effects from the drug at all. He was permanently in the state it produced, so it was like taking aspirin when you do not have a headache. Alpert stayed to learn meditation, returning as Ram Dass, American guru. He often attended Hilda’s sessions, where she taught mainly through silence. Bill Byrom had that inner light in the eyes common in people who have progressed far in spiritual work, and his presence was gentle, his voice often caught with emotion as he spoke of something deep. I loved the man. We probably should have done some Lit work, but, apart from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickenson, we only discussed God.

          During that first Michaelmas term, he went to New York, hanging out with Hilda’s circle, and sharing an apartment with Ram Dass. Evidently, the two did not get along that well – perhaps because their Harvard backgrounds tended to prompt intellectual chatter, which neither of them wanted. When he finally returned, I noticed on his wall a framed colour photograph of someone I thought at first to be Angela Davis, the black activist, with her trademark Afro. I soon learned that this was actually Sathya Sai Baba, proclaimed by Hilda Charlton as Avatar of the Age, a full incarnation of the Divine in human form. Bill had seen film footage of Swami, admitting that he did not like the pomp and ceremony surrounding him, and felt the display of miraculous powers to be contrary to traditional Hindu beliefs that yogic powers were never to be publically revealed. Hilda had told him these rules did not apply to an avatar because miracles were his nature, never diminished by use as normal yogic powers were. Bill intended to visit India and see for himself during the Hilary term vacation.

     When he came back everything changed. He too had changed, more serene and filled with light now; also reluctant to say much more than that I must go there myself, for the inner experience was everything, and the rest, the things he had found off-putting, were nothing at all. Swami was everything, and he had no doubt at all that here was the purest incarnation of divinity the world had seen  so openly since the advent of Krishna, but was also the first avatar of Siva-Shakti – the combination of the god and his consort, his active aspect – ever recorded by any scripture or myth.

          As a boy, Swami had declared himself to be the reincarnation of Shirdi Sai Baba, a mysteriously reclusive holy man revered in a small part of northern India, yet unknown in the tiny village of Puttaparthi, nestled in a remote area of southern India, all but cut off from the world. Shirdi Sai had lived in an abandoned mosque, so devotees were never sure if he was Muslim or Hindu. They recognized his sanctity though, by his mere presence, although he too did occasionally materialize the sacred ash, vibhuti – ash regarded as the purest substance, that which has been through the fire. All Bill would say about the ashram was of its intensity, likening it to the smelting of metals, where the dross materials rise to the surface and are scraped off. Instead of the Aum symbol, typical for ashrams, Swami’s gateway had over its arch the symbols of all the world’s major religions, and was named Prashanti Nilayam, ‘Abode of the Highest Peace’ – which is also the meaning in Hebrew of ‘Jerusalem’.

          In Sanskrit legend, the appearance of Siva and the start of his sacred dance, signals the end of creation. Bill said not to worry, since Swami had already informed devotees he would come again in a third and final incarnation, to be named Prema Sai Baba. Sathya means ‘truth’; Prema means ‘love’. To some he gave the place and date of this final incarnation, even showing an image of the new body. That date has just passed, showing he knew he would shed the old body long before the time some devotees say he stated as his passing, and still some ten years hence.

          Naturally, I could hardly wait for the long summer vacation when I would be able to witness the incomprehensible for myself, witness phenomena I had only read of in Yogananda’s book. Nothing prepared me for what awaited in Puttaparthi, though, or the permanent change it would bring my entire life.

 

[To be continued]

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.