US-IS? Does the Most Un-Islamic State Have a Future?

Tags

ISIS, Islam, Middle East, religion

 

Many blog-readers have asked me this. How to respond? The easiest and most honest answer would be to say, Who knows? Because no one can tell. The question does, however, raise some interesting issues. For example, how curious is it to find yourself thinking of Al-Quaeda as ‘moderate’? For, in the face of Desh, Taliban, and other enormities, such is evidently the case. It leads one to think of who controls these organizations. And, on the anniversary of the US attack on the Medecins Sans Frontiers hospital at Kundun, Afghanistan, a year go today – in which many innocent patients and staff were slaughtered – it reminds you of the valid grievances shared by some members of some anti-western groups. Al-Quaeda, since the assassination of Osama bin-Laden, has been headed up by Dr. Aiwan Zawahiri, a spectacularly uncharismatic leader, also very adept at hiding himself from US assaults. A surgeon by profession, he presumably has, or so one would imagine, the kind of educated mind able to look through ideological blather and perceive the political realities of his organization’s current and future situation. This may well account for Al-Quaeda’s recent low profile.

The current situation vis a vis West Asia, from Iran and the Gulf to Syria, is about as uncertain and turbulent as that troubled stretch of the world has ever been. The catastrophe in Iraq, and now the chronic vacillation regarding Syria, have made it clear to those two-thirds of the planet never enthusiastic about western hegemony that the United States is a waning power. Where once a phone calls from any Secretary-of-State would have made rebels and dictators alike jump, now there is only a scornful silence, as everyone proceeds with their  bloody work of imposing someone’s brutal will upon others. Within this fiasco are, somewhere or other, the many voices supposedly representing an ‘Islamic State’. But who exactly do they claim to represent? It certainly isn’t most of the planet’s billion-odd Muslims.

The African factions, like al-Shebab – and which proliferate faster than one can recall their grandiose names – scarcely represent any form of Islam at all. They comprise mostly recent Muslim converts whose allegiances are principally tribal. Conflicts in Africa are invariably hostilities between tribes dating back into the mists of time, and only nominally religious wars. Groups sympathetic to an ‘Islamic State’ south of Syria are extremist Palestinian factions financed by the Wahhabite clergy of Saudi Arabia – just as Bashar Assad’s Shiite regime is backed by hardline Iranian clerics. The Syrian rebels seek a Sunni government at Damascus – some indeed probably a secular one. The forces of Desh – in a three-way civil war (something the US is prone to get involved in, despite military advice to the contrary) – are in reality led by officers of the old Iraqi Republican Guard. They may have grown beards and become adept at spouting nonsense bowdlerized from the Koran, but their sole interests are carving out a territory for themselves from parts of Syria and Iraq. One can hardly blame them. A vast majority of the Sunni and Christian Iraqis with whom I am still in sporadic contact say the same thing: no matter how bad things were under Saddam, there was peace, stability and prosperity. Now there is just conflict, chaos and poverty. It ought to have been very clear to the brain-trust in Washington that overturning Saddam’s Ba’athist rule would leave the oppressed Shia majority in power, and everyone else running for their lives. It is another measure of America’s waning power than no one appears to have advised against the war. Long-used to being in power, Iraqi Sunnis, and some of their Christian subordinates, would have not only felt mistreated, but would also have also possessed the know-how, and some of the means, to fight back – to carve out part of Arabia for themselves. At the end of the day, it is the post-1919 dividing-up of West Asia by western powers which decided on the artificial frontiers seen on any map today. The inhabitants of these vast areas – much of them desert – have never viewed the boundary-lines as legitimate. As a glance at the atlas will show, they are all straight lines – a sure sign of the mapmaker’s work. A sign too of the viability a theorised ‘Islamic State’ presents to many living in the proposed area for such a state.

Israel sits unhappily at the centre of this maelstrom, unable or unwilling to voice her many valid complaints and suggestions. To Jerusalem, the only feasible solution to Syria’s dilemma is the continuation of Assad’s regime. It may not be just or likeable, but it will still be easier to deal with than any kind of Sunni democracy, let alone – God forbid! – any kind of Islamic state. A situation in which no one is happy certainly seems like no solution at all.

But should such a bastion of pseudo-Islamist ideals manage to cut itself a portion of West Asia, what prospects would it have for a thriving future? Precious few, I would say. Israel’s potent military would be ever-watchful. Iran would arm and finance Shia rebels. The Saudis would meddle. And the African factions would demand help with their endless inter-tribal belligerence. On top of all this, the Internet and social media would force the Future into these time-trapped regions and, just perhaps, their denizens would then ask themselves and their leaders what all the horror, hostility and bloodshed were about, Perhaps?

 

P.S. Whoops! I have just learned that the US have blmed Russian interference for all the problems in Syria. Now doesn’t that just go to show you that an old unresolved squabble is better than

 

Paul William Roberts

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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

Recommendations

Tags

afro-americans, cbc, civil rights, Islam, James Baldwin, radio, religion, United States of America, Wahhabism

On today’s Sunday Edition (CBC Radio One) – a rare example of intelligent programming – the exceptional Michael Enright interviewed Karen Armstrong, an ex-nun who has become the most important popular voice on religion, and is now almost the only non-Muslim to write knowledgeably and equitably about Islam’s relationship with terrorist factions. The podcast is a free download available on CBC.ca/thesundayedition. On it you will hear one of the very few mentions broadcast by media of the Saudi Arabian Wahhabi sect, or heresy, being responsible for the spread of terror. She likens it to a radical U.S. fundamentalist church controlling all the petro-dollars, backed by massive armed forces, attempting to take over Christianity. She also points out that, of the 41 mentions of ‘Jihad’ in the Koran, only 10 are related to actual warfare; and she also cites a Hadith where the Prophet, Mohammed, returning from battle says, “Now we have finished with the Lesser Jihad, we can return to the Greater one,” this latter meaning the inner struggle between our upper and lower natures. Ms. Armstrong quotes from a poll conducted with millions of Muslims over many continents after the 9/11 attacks. Answering the question, ‘Were the attacks justified?’, 93% said No, all citing religious reasons. Of the 7% who answered Yes, all cited political reasons. My old friend, the late Christopher Hitchens, never understood the difference between religion used as a political tool and religion as an inner communion with the Divine, calling Ms. Armstrong ‘an apologist for Islam’. His misguided and ill-researched atheist manifesto, God is Not Great, promotes a tautological argument, based on a pitiful ignorance of spiritual texts, especially the Koran. Listen to Mr. Enright’s superb interview and you will be far better-informed about the nature of true Islam, the contents of the Koran, and the pseudo-Muslims – most of them Wahhabi converts – who commit atrocities for solely political goals. You will also hear an irreducibly concise account of the Crusades and their effect upon the development of Islam over the past millennium.

The interview might incline you to lobby an MP or government Minister over Saudi Arabia’s support for Wahhabi terror, as outlined in my own previous blogs.

James Baldwin would have been 90 this year, had he lived. The most articulate and brilliant of Afro-American artists and activists from the 1960s, all of his books and essays are still relevant to endemic U.S. racism, which seems no different in Ferguson today that in was in Watts in the late sixties. The Sunday Edition also presented  a moving tribute to Baldwin this morning, including audio clips of his potent, eloquent, and supremely intelligent voice addressing concerns that, sadly, remain 40 years later. I have long-awaited his equal in vain, yet still with the hope that young Afro-Americans will read his works and draw their own fresh inspiration from them. By wiping the floor with right-wing pompous TV pundit, William F. Buckley, during an interview, Baldwin proved to the world that there were far better ways of combatting racist ideology than by violence. Happy Birthday, Jimmy!

Love from,

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.

An Eye For An Eye

Tags

Islam, Judaism, Middle East, Palestine, politics, religion, violence

 

I keep waiting for the Imam or Mullah of substance to say, “Every time a Muslim carries out an act of violence, he or she is desecrating Islam and the Holy Quran.” I keep waiting, too, for the Islamic scholar daring to suggest that the Quran needs a thorough editing, existing, as it does – we know for certain after the discovery of a Quranic graveyard in the Yemen of multiple variant texts – in numerous forms, mostly transcribed from oral sources. Like every other scripture, it is most definitely not the Word of God. It is also written in a form of Arabic so basic and obscure that a full third of it is incomprehensible. Thus, every translation of it is, of necessity, an interpretation. Muslims are not expected, or allowed, to discuss the text and its meaning, merely to recite it. The very word ‘Quran’ means ‘verses’ and its first injunction is to ‘recite’. The questioning of Allah, or God, is as forbidden in orthodox Islam as it is encouraged in Judaism and Christianity, where doubt is a valued aspect of faith. Muslims are told that doubt reveals the presence of Satan. Like the pre-Reformation Roman Church, Islam prefers its congregations to remain ignorant of the sacred text, its clergy preaching sections from it, or telling apocryphal stories related to it. Anyone who can read the New Testament in its original Greek can easily understand why the Church acted as if its own Latin translation was the authentic version – the Greek writing, with the exception of St. John’s gospel, is poor stuff, a vernacular form of the language barely recognizable to early scholars. Much of the Quran is similarly primitive, though can sound quite beautiful when chanted. Many Muslims learn it by heart, yet few can understand the meaning of what they recite. This leaves the religion open to chronic abuse by sects like the Saudi Wahhabites, as well as pseudo-religious organizations like Islamic Jihad, whose erstwhile leader I once had the dubious pleasure of interviewing.

With the current escalation of violence between Israel and the Palestinians, I once again wait for that Imam or Mullah, and now the Rabbi willing to state that the appropriate response to violence is not more violence. If someone killed my children I would indubitably want to kill them with my bare hands – this kind of vengeance is human nature – yet I would not want to kill their neighbours, relatives, or anyone in the vicinity where they lived. The Palestinians have a legitimate grievance, no question, but every time they fire rockets at random into Israel they undermine the legitimacy of that grievance. And what do they expect in return? Well, they get it: air attacks from Israel, whose weapons are at least somewhat more accurate than the Palestinian rockets. In both cases, the result is innocents, women, children, the old and infirm, dead. Allied with Islamic Jihad, the Hamas militants, like ISIS or ISOS, with its spiteful, ridiculous ‘Emir’ al-Baghdadi, and the disparate al-Quaeda factions, are no more Muslims than a herd of swine. They are destroyers of the faith they profess, which is why they so despise the Sufis, and other Islamic factions, who teach love, not hate.

As I tried to tell factions in Iraq, during the U.S. invasion, Ghandi won his revolution through non-violence. If they sat peacefully in front of American tanks, the whole world would be watching, and on their side. If they adopted a policy of reconciliation, putting sectarian differences into the past, they would have a prosperous thriving country with a magnificent future. Instead, of course, the path of violence and revenge was taken, the road most often travelled – and the results speak for themselves.

Many in Israel realise that retaliation and increased violence are no solution at all. Many Arabs also recognize the same irrefutable truth. Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan is, I believe, the only person in West Asia who understands that the necessary dialogue for peace is between religious leaders, not politicians. He has, quietly, pursued the organization of such dialogues for years now. At least a dialogue exists; it is a start.

Just as I await the righteous Muslim cleric to condemn all forms of violence, I also wait for the righteous Rabbi willing to explain that “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” is not the sanction for revenge, but rather an illustration of the impossibility of its rectitude – what human can judge the exactitude of his or her revenge? An eye for an eye would blind the whole world, without the remotest claim to true justice. Are we not also told, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord”? The silence of religious leaders on these issues is deafening, or else prevaricates with empty rhetoric. Let Pope Francis go and stand in Gaza, or under the Hamas rockets, and I will believe his sincerity. As always, though, I wait for someone with the courage of their convictions to speak and act, if they wish their various creeds and faiths to be taken seriously by the rest of us – and if they themselves wish to take them seriously.

 

Paul William Roberts