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Paul William Roberts

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Tag Archives: spirituality

Sathya Sai Baba: the Teachings

24 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by paulwilliamroberts in india, spirituality

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India, Sai Baba, sathya sai baba, spirituality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[To be continued]

Puttaparti

06 Sunday Dec 2015

Posted by paulwilliamroberts in india, religion, spirituality

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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

The Road to Sathya Sai Baba

04 Friday Dec 2015

Posted by paulwilliamroberts in india, religion, spirituality

≈ 2 Comments

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 17th 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 17th 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]

The Meaning of Life

28 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by paulwilliamroberts in religion, spirituality

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Tags

grace, sathya sai baba, spirituality

In the Bhagavad Gita, the warrior prince Arjuna is with his charioteer, the divine incarnation, Krishna, on the eve of a great battle against an enemy comprising many of his relatives, friends, and revered teachers. Although fearless and renowned for his skills as an archer, Arjuna says he has no will to fight, since even if he wins the battle he loses it, slaying so many dear to him. This is when Krishna ceases to be a mere charioteer, delivering what amounts to a sermon as his answer to Arjuna’s plight of conscience. The Gita is a small section in what is still the world’s longest poem, the Mahabharata, which recounts a great war in much the same way as Homer’s Iliad does – except that the Gita, one of Hinduism’s most sacred scriptures, is obviously a later addition, barely connected to the main story – which may well be the account of a real conflict from Indian pre-history. Bhagavad Gita was the first Sanskrit text translated into English, by Charles Wilkins in 1785 – which is why I have included a discussion of it in my forthcoming book, Queen Victoria’s Secret, set in the late eighteenth century, when battles were scarcely different from the one Arjuna will fight, and my central character is also a warrior prince ambivalent to the nature of victory, yet cognizant of his obligations to duty.

I am well aware in this blog that I have devoted too much space to politics, particularly strife in the Middle East, when my true concerns are those related to the purpose of life and the realization of one’s immortal identity. I have no doubt that this is why we are born, and will indeed be ceaselessly reborn until the truth becomes clear. Yet the world has many distractions – though fewer since I lost my eyesight – and even the best of intentions can lead us far astray from the straight path we trod after many lifetimes searching for it, and with the guidance of a master whose grace also had to be earned over many incarnations of yearning. I liken the situation to that of Arjuna, since, after personally experiencing the 1991 and 2003 attacks on Iraq, along with numerous other war zones, I became convinced that war was the greatest of all crimes and ought to be eliminated from future human history. But wars invariably lead one into politics, which form a maze there is no escape from, a labyrinth housing the Minotaur of a vested interest that will destroy its critic. I faced that beast after my books A War Against Truth, and Homeland, both of them works of anger and indignation, and both inciting anger and indignation from powers I had no chance of defeating, having now lost all equanimity. Anger causes war, it does not end it, just as war cannot bring peace. Only peace, compassion, and a love for all can bring lasting peace.

Krishna tells Arjuna that he must fight the following day, since fate has already determined the result, and those destined to die will die whether or not he fights. Initially, this seems harsh; but Krishna then reveals truth and wisdom: the soul, or self, is immortal, never born, thus never dying. A body is born, its mind formed by sense-perceptions, and then also memories. Actions performed within time bring identical consequences – good for good, bad for bad – some consequences extending into new lives. But the soul, the real self, exists in a timeless eternity, without beginning, without end, unimaginably small, yet also infinitely large, containing only a consciousness, a unity within which exists all that was, is, or ever can be. One. Poets labour over it; scriptures variously call it by qualities, which are names for the Nameless; or describe it simply as Light, Silence, Peace, Emptiness, God. Oddly enough, and burdened by a monotheism – with the dualistic absurdity of a humankind and a God – it is Moses who asks his Nameless for a name, receiving the immeasurably profound ‘I am that I am’ (which can also be translated as ‘I am that I will be’). In this one phrase is the whole truth, the goal of self-inquiry. Someone born with no senses would know only this one reality: I exist, and I am conscious I exist. There would be no where or why. A baby has never been born without some senses – except possibly the stillborn – yet if one  were born thus science would term it brain-dead, just as many reclusive yogis or holy men, sitting for years in meditational trance, would be diagnosed as catatonic or insane (using of course the latest label preventing physicians from concealing ignorance). The great Sufi Master and sublime poet, Rumi, was widely called mejnun, or ‘mad’. The summation of this is that time is illusory, and life a kind of dream, from which the self awakes at death into Eternity, an unchanging reality of which it is a part, just as a raindrop is itself yet also one with the ocean into which it falls. Such a truth cannot be understood by the mind, which requires a subject-object relationship in order to function; yet this One, this Unity, can be experienced , described sometimes in Sanskrit as sat-chit-ananda, or ‘existence-consciousness-bliss’. Most of us have glimpses of it when the heart aches with compassion for suffering strangers, or is aglow with love, both supreme and temporal. These states are experiences not thoughts, always felt in the heart area, believed by many to be the seat of self or soul. One cannot think about such experiences while experiencing them, although they can be recollected in tranquility, where language will struggle to describe them. Hence metaphor and allegory pervade poetry and scripture, which may inspire a reader to seek for the personal experience, yet cannot provide it. Even austere disciplines, diets, self-denial, chanting and meditation cannot provide it – although they will probably be uplifting, as will the company of spiritually-inclined people.

Another major lesson Arjuna is taught concerns actions detached from their results – a particularly difficult concept for goal-oriented westerners to grasp. The prince in my novel wrestles with it, asking why anyone would do something if they didn’t care about the result. Finally, he sees a comparison between Krishna’s teaching and a soldier’s duty, which is to obey orders and fight as he was trained to fight, dealing only with the moment he is in, and thus necessarily detached from whatever conclusion his actions achieve. Attachment to results breeds inattention to the present moment in that process leading to a result. If one’s task is cleaning toilets well, a moment of inattention will mean some part of the job is less well performed, and the defined goal not achieved. A house ought to be cleaned, not to look clean. The Buddha defined boredom as a lack of attention – so much goes on, yet we fail to notice this, and are now often surprised by a video recording of ourselves containing birdsong, an electric hum, pitter-pattering rain, and many things we failed to notice at the time when we were in the now-digital moment. Awareness is a key to spiritual growth; we must be ever watchful of our actions, speech, thoughts, and the feelings projected by our deep heart. Just as every hair is numbered (an easier task daily in my case), every thought and deed profoundly affects the entire world, which is but a reflection of our collective mind. Five minutes spent in willing peace, compassion, and love to all is worth more than millions given to charity by someone hoping the act will bring rewards in heaven and a community plaque. It is all awareness, and so necessary because negativity is ever waiting for an opportunity to pour out its toxins, as what passes for ‘news’ shows us daily if me make the error of listening to it.

What brings enlightenment? The answer is an ancient one: divine grace, which is attracted, as St. Teresa of Lisieux said, only by love. A yearning for the divine through love is the only answer given by any sage or holy man who has truly attained his, or her, own complete enlightenment.

I have refrained from writing or talking about my own spiritual master, Sathya Sai Baba, until now, besides the superficial mention of him in my book Empire of the Soul, because the 40-year relationship and its qualities are essentially private, personal, and, often, either misunderstood or incomprehensible. But he left his physical body in 2011, and I am now 65, so  I shall do what many have asked me to do over the years, and he has now given me permission to do: write about my time with him, and the many experiences and teachings whereof I was told not to speak, thereof not speaking, even to those closest to me. This blog will henceforth be a rough first draft of that as yet untitled book.

To dispense with my preliminary qualms, I shall state unequivocally those things which most seem to fascinate, repel, outrage, and in general bother people about the person I know as ‘Swami’, and shall refer to as such from hereon. Yes, he was an avatar, born as a divine incarnation, rather than someone who attained enlightenment during their lifetime. This is not a belief, since he proved to me it was true – and I shall describe the manner of this proof in good time. No, I did not worship him, since he told me this was unnecessary, because, “Guru, God, and Self are one, indivisible. For some it is necessary to make their devotion to an external form, an idol, a man, a cow, a tree – the form does not matter if the heart is pure.” Did he possess all the qualities accorded to God in every, or any, scripture? Yes, and I witnessed most, if not all, of them.

Was he different in private than he was in public? Yes, very. Free will is a cosmic law, and knowledge of the Divine must be arrived at, or earned, not forced upon people by witnessing acts which permit no doubt. What I experienced alone with him was even different from things witnessed in small gatherings in his house. Did he sexually molest children? Not to my knowledge. I am aware, however, that he occasionally cast out devotees to whom he had once been close, causing some of these people to turn against him, spreading malign rumours stemming from a single unreliable source. Tal Brooke is a good example:  close to Swami, loaded with privileges, and then one day ignored, treated like anyone else. He decided Swami was Satan, writing a spitefully silly little book called Lord of the Air. This was back in the early seventies, but its circumlocutions, innuendo, and embellished rumours were seized upon by the group perpetuating slander and unsubstantiated allegations thirty years later. Professional skeptics were also, I believe, provided by Swami with deliberate acts of stage-magic – which were what they sought. He seemed to give everyone what they wanted, saying, “Few come for what I am really here to give them.” This was grace, the actual experience of divine love, which emanated from him like a perfume of the heart. Did he acquire vast wealth? Not personally, but his trust did, opening countless schools, hospitals, and providing various forms of help for the poor. He lived very simply, ate little, and his daily routines were unvarying. The Trust was run by a committee, some of whom I found obnoxious, as I did other officials at the ashram, once asking Swami why he kept so many awful people around him. He replied, “If they were not here they would be doing far more harm out in the world.” Why did he seem to favour wealthy or powerful devotees? If one believes in the laws of karma, people are born into lives they have merited by past actions; therefore it is logical to assume such people are more deserving of attention than others. There were also many such people he ignored or refused to see, including Indira Ghandi. He would rarely accept gifts, either, and many wealthy people I knew there were distraught to find their offers refused. Although he appeared to have an organization around him its chief officials were no closer to him than anyone else. He had no one approaching a ‘friend’ in any sense, and all behaved like children in his presence – even those who were otherwise haughty, bullying officials. He was unlike any person I have met, tiny, yet able to seem plump at times, with eyes revealing no one behind them. Not one photograph of the thousands existing conveys him remotely. Even his skin changed colour, from as pale as mine, to blue-black, and everything between. At times he would stand stock-still, writing in the air with a forefinger, his other hand revolving as if spinning a small disc, and his gaze seeming to be in other dimensions. He once told me, “All worlds come for my darshan (public presence), so I cannot ignore them just for you, can I?”

 

[To be continued]

 

Paul William Roberts

Poem 5 and the Thing With Feathers

04 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by paulwilliamroberts in spirituality

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

blindness, poetry, spirituality

In the mirror this old man sees

Nothing.

Where once his face would be

Looking back at its own changes

Is now a blurred grey emptiness,

Framed by distorted familiarities:

Frosted hair; glimpses of a Monet world.

That which sees can now never see itself;

The eye of ‘I’ has closed its windows,

The blinds permanently drawn,

Perpetually blind.

Those screens upon which ten-thousand things

Were once reflected, before transmission

Along the optic cable into that coiled chamber

Where I translated a sense into forms, the forms wherein I dwelt –

Those screens now hide behind a tattered curtain,

Behind shattered slats.

Yet each sense must go before this vehicle is ready to be devoured, just as it has spent its brief decades devouring nature in numberless forms.

Yes, they must all go.

Only in the stillness

Can I know where I will be

When there is no thing, no one

To feel; only silence to hear;

No means or object of tasting;

But perhaps an unearthly fragrance, a perfume which pervades and envelopes, nurtures, and supports rather than being smelt?

Perhaps.

Perhaps – because Mysterium  Magnum has not eluded ten thousand tongues and scrolls

And years

For nothing any man or beast can label under the

Illusion that objects names explain.

Names are flash-cards glued to stuff for the child or adult learning the trick of language.

As the mind dodders towards decay,

More and more is labelled ‘the thing that…’

It always was.

The labels taught us little about what they named.

There is a Hadron Collider in Cerne which has recently confirmed the existence of Higgs’ Boson, an energy particle so irreducible that some are equating it with God.

I state this series of labels to demonstrate that not one reader will really know what these words mean.

The Vatican owns two major astronomical observatories.

Cardinals and popes are very much more interested in the universe than they are in the poor and wretched.

Why not?

The poor are always with us, yet the universe may not be.

What does the Vatican seek out there in that glittering eternal vastness?

God? Alien life forms ripe for conversion to their archaic version of totalitarian tyranny?

There are no gods,

Because all existence is Divine.

Galaxies we view as they were a trillion trillion years ago:

Divine, holy.

The cicada singing its whirring chant in the dust – and the dust itself:

Divine, sacred. All.

Creator and Creation are one and indivisible, as every saint and sage has been telling us for countless millennia.

Only our senses persuade us otherwise,

And Death, of course, will be the final proof.

Why die without knowing, though?

Stillness and silence alone offer the experience of this blissfully eternal Unity.

I know my name.

Yet who is this knowing ‘I’?

Thoughts and memories, hopes and fears?

Are the thoughts me?

Watch them, but do not follow.

I discover they have no connection to the ‘I’ which adopts them.

They are generated by the unstill mind, through association, memory, desire, yet I do not generate them.

In the quiet mind only consciousness exists.

We exist, and are conscious of this fact. It is indeed all we truly know.

Pass the terror of an utter loneliness, and what awaits is pure bliss, the raindrop realizing it is the infinite ocean into which it fell.

When ripples cease, the little pond becomes a mirror reflecting, and no different from, the starry night up at which it now gazes, or which gazes down.

Stillness, silence: these are the answers that so many seek, and why ‘the Kingdom of Heaven lies spread out upon the earth, yet men see it not’.

What is Wisdom? Part II

05 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by paulwilliamroberts in india, religion, spirituality

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

India, ramana maharishi, spirituality

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

With love, as always, Paul William Roberts.

What is Wisdom?

12 Friday Sep 2014

Posted by paulwilliamroberts in india, religion, spirituality

≈ 7 Comments

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 4th century, and are still accepted by certain Jewish sects as the only conceivable manner in which a just universe could be run. George Harrison puts it with characteristic simplicity: And the Lord says whatever you do is gonna come right back at you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With love, as always, Paul William Roberts.

Quebec: Into the Void

27 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by paulwilliamroberts in Uncategorized

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

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

              Here we go:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommended Reading

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

 

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New Feature: Recommended reading based largely on what I have been listening to.

26 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by paulwilliamroberts in Uncategorized

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books, literature, mythology, spirituality

New Feature: Recommended reading based largely on what I have been listening to.

 

  1. The Enderby novels: by Anthony Burgess. Hilarious yet poignant account, over four books, of a minor English poet, who drinks too much, despises his publishers, loathes foreigners and their cities, marries into money, yet decides he prefers solitude in poverty…It goes on, the flawless skill, fine Joycean observations of character, and often sheer beauty of the language, making this a perfect introduction to one of the most prolific, daring, and masterful giants of 20th century literature.
  2. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: essays by David Foster Wallace. Where Harper’s magazine invariably sent me to report on apocalyptic warzones, its editors, in their infinite wisdom, seem to have sent Foster Wallace – whom I regret never meeting – off to cover events for which they were certain he would be unsuited. Like the Indiana State Fair, or a luxury Caribbean cruise, to name but two. The results, however, are far from predictable. Wallace becomes obsessively intrigued with prize hogs, for example, or willingly joins in the highly-structured on-deck activities in shark-infested waters, although he refuses to go ashore at the various island ports-of-call, citing agoraphobia. Few accounts ever penned are funnier than his describing a defeat at chess by a nine-year-old girl. The collection makes a useful introduction to his novel, Infinite Jest, which I am coming to regard as the 21st century’s first American masterpiece, as staggeringly original, outrageously funny, and painfully human as the Joyce of Ulysses, or the Burroughs of Wild Boys. I will return to it in detail later, since no audio version exists and I have to rely on Kara for the reading. It is not short. David Foster Wallace took his own life a few years back, a loss his novel makes all the more hard to contemplate. Had Harper’s, or indeed anyone, suspected the actual severity of his psychological problems – the addictions, the electro-shock therapy, the bottomless depressions – I doubt if he would have been placed in such untenable positions.
  3. The Financier by Theodore Dreiser. The classic American business novel, curiously contemporary with its account of overweening greed, corrupt politicians, and the cartels that in reality run our world for their own benefit. Over a 100 years old, the novel is a startling reminder that if elections changed anything they’d be made illegal.
  4. Selected Stories by Mavis Gallant. She died, aged 90-odd, earlier this year, in Paris, where she was widely revered as one of greatest exponents of the short story in its history, every bit the equal of Chekov, Kipling, Joyce, and Turgenev. Her childhood and youth, however, were spent in Montreal, which, of course, means she is virtually unknown in Canada. Faultless, exquisite sentences, finely etched characters, quotidian situations, but often highly unexpected twists of narrative are her hallmark. No one who enjoys writing at its most precise and revelatory level can fail to fall deeply in love with Gallant.
  5. Myths to Live By, edited talks by Joseph Campbell. This is a great introduction to the work of a man who, in any other society, would be hailed as a Socrates, or Nietzsche, a teacher of genuine and self-realized wisdom. His subject is the coherent interrelationship of all world mythology, and its vital, ongoing relevance in our own lives. His insistence on seeing every religion as essentially mythical, a product of the collective unconscious, has, predictably, made him reviled by those who still cling to their own scriptures as factual truths, indeed the only real truth; yet his learned, compassionate comparisons of global mythologies, if followed with unbiased attention, make it impossible to reject the argument that every race regards itself as ‘chosen’, has a messianic figure, born of a virgin, and sacrificed for the good of humanity, whether to save it from sin, usher in the Golden Age, or simply assure fertility and abundant harvests. Cruel death, followed by resurrection, are ubiquitous concepts across the Middle Eastern religions, from Osiris and Tammuz, through the Hebrew Messiach, to Jesus and the Sufi martyrs, like al-Halaj, who was also crucified for claiming, “I and my Father are one.” Campbell has little time for the exclusivist monotheisms, however, preferring the rich subtleties of Hinduism and the Eastern systems, which have always known that their stories of gods and demons are merely metaphors for inner states, eternal verities, rather than irrelevant pseudo-historical yarns. Jesus has no more historical reality than the Exodus of Israelites from Egypt, or the conquest of Jerusalem by Mohammed. Even the texts themselves are provably unreliable, conflicting, existing in many versions, thus very far from being ‘the word of God’. To fundamentalists, Campbell is anathema, since he knows the actual scholarship, the original languages, the variant manuscripts, and thus can point out that there is no word in Hebrew capable of being translated as ‘God’; that the Decalogue brought down from Sinai by Moses are not ‘commandments’ but simply ‘utterances’; that, to American Indians, the earth is not ‘dust’, as the Book of Genesis scornfully terms it, but rather a nurturing mother, the source of all life; that serpents are generally revered as wise and sacred by most mythologies; and that the divine is viewed by all mystical systems as within every living being, not remote from them, not a wrathful puppet-master, cruel and unpredictable, but a life-enhancing point of love and light to be sought in solitude and contemplation. “Follow your bliss,” was Campbell’s exhortation to his students, urging them all to take the hero’s journey, and conquer life’s monsters and obstacles along the way, in order to return to their place of origin, knowing it and themselves for the first time. Anyone searching for a spiritual element in their lives, yet unable to accept the stilted orthodoxies, with their deadening dogma and preposterous theologies, could do worse than adopt Joseph Campbell as a guide and guru, who will, at the very least, lead the seeker to still-richer troves of soul-treasure.
  6. Talks with Ramana Maharshi. If I could only take one book with me to the desert island, this would be the one. Spiritual insight and wisdom distilled to its quintessence. I can say no more, since words do not reach these realms.

Towards the Grim Twilight of the Soul.

03 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by paulwilliamroberts in Uncategorized

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alcoholism, blindness, books, god, spirituality, writing

Those aware of my lifelong interest in mystical spirituality – the years in ashrams, the meditation, etc – may well wonder where all this philosophy went during the above-mentioned time of tribulation, of which I have only mentioned the blindness aspect. I will get to such other tribulations as the arrest of my son on gun and drug charges, and the death of my erstwhile wife later, perhaps. But ubi sunt, those consoling virtues of Hindu or Buddhist scriptures just when they were most needed? The only consolation I found during those bad years was purchased at the state-owned drug monopoly we have in Canada, called in Ontario the Liquor Control Board of Ontario. In Quebec, amusingly, its name translates as the Alcohol Society of Quebec, which sounds like an enterprise started by lapsed A.A. members wishing to keep the companionship while losing the coffee and confessionals. I won’t get into the shameless greed and extravagant hypocrisy of a state presuming to legalize a drug more damaging than heroin, then granting itself exclusive rights to sling the stuff and own all the corners; yet suffice it to say, judging from recent tax revenue reports from Colorado and Washington State, it will not be too long before the drug cartel in Ottawa decides to branch out into the pot trade, after settling knotty issues like will it cut into the booze racket, and should the tax on a joint reflect current street prices, or will the addict tolerate a customary 900 percent revenue added, as they do with alcohol and nicotine? But I digress, which is, after all, the joy and privilege of the blog scribe; yet, since I don’t want to change my current title, I will try to continue with its apparent theme.

So where were Krishna and Gautama Buddha when I literally prayed for their help? They were not around, that I do know; or maybe I don’t, since I was so zonked on other consolations that I wouldn’t have noticed Armageddon most of the time. All I then did in Toronto was lie beached on the sofa drinking, smoking, and listening to whatever audio books my wife (the new one, Kara, not the dead one) managed to find in the local library. ‘Eclectic’ is not the right term for these literary ventures, implying, as it does to me, a broad but intellectually discerning range of reading. I read, or rather heard, such stuff as the autobiography of Ted Rogers (more boring than Mein Kampf), a memoir by Eric Clapton (hasn’t had a drink in 28 years – I should have benefited from his wisdom), an awful lot of, believe it or not, Agatha Christie (she wantonly misleads you about the villain), a version of The Brothers Karamazov which had been edited to fit on one CD, reducing it to a short story that made no sense whatsoever. Then I embarked on the unedited War and Peace, which came as around 100 tape cassettes (remember those?) in a dilapidated box, all out of order, and constantly interrupted at the most inappropriate moments by a stern voice ordering you to “Turn the cassette to side 56 B,”, or “Proceed now to cassette 78 and play side A first.” Since it must be mainly the blind that use audio books, I wondered how the creators of Tolstoy on cassette imagined their clientele would be able to locate their multitudinous installments, none of them positioned in an ordered sequence. These were the days before the transcendentally wondrous mp3 (Harlot’s Ghost on one disc! If you suspect this book concerns a spectral hooker, look up ‘Mailer, Norman’, once, a decade or two ago, in the United States of Amnesia, frequently cited as ‘greatest living writer’, an accolade vehemently contested mostly by Gore Vidal, who wanted it for himself. Neither can claim the ‘living’ part now, alas. But they are both still very great writers. The book I mentioned, by the way, is some 1300 pages long), thus most audio books came as sets of anything from five to thirty CDs – again, items hard to handle by the visually challenged, even harder to find in most libraries, and so outrageously overpriced that I was not surprised to discover the only store specialising in them was situated on Bay Street (our version of Wall Street, a thieves’ row of designer suits, gaily flamboyant suspenders, naked greed, and ceaseless yack about market forces, etc.). One must assume the store’s location indicated that many a commuting Porsche or BMW supplied the corporate scam artist with his sole allotment of book time. On an income by then reduced to precisely nothing, I was not about to fork out $100 for Pride and Prejudice, a title aptly summarizing my reaction to its price. Thus I was stuck with whatever my dear Kara could find in the kiosk of Davenport’s library. One problem the sighted alcoholic reader does not have to face is losing his place in the book when he lapses into unconsciousness. The blind drunk, however, is sorely afflicted by the fact that a CD does not stop reading when you fall asleep. These booze-sodden sleeps are erratic too, nothing like the healthy four-hour cycles, and really nothing at all like sleep. I was rarely aware of having slept, thus not aware that I had awoken, with the reader still reading, even if the plot was now somewhat baffling and many books appeared to be preposterously short. But I didn’t particularly care about most of them anyway. All I cared about was the thoroughfare of woe into which I had stumbled, or perhaps been flung as a punishment for my many sins. One of these, by the way, was an (unfair and ill-founded) accusation of plagiarism leveled at my book A War Against Truth, a first-hand account of the so-called war in Iraq. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a newspaper of which I had never even heard, let alone seen on or off-line, and whose cumbersome name I would certainly have remembered, claimed I had used parts of three sentences and a quotation from their pages without crediting their author. They had a point, although it hardly amounted to plagiarism, but my explanation seemed to satisfy their lawyers (I had been in Iraq at the time, and my notes were somewhat adversely affected by the daily bombing of my neighbourhood, although I must have copied down the errant words from some source, possibly a borrowed satellite computer’s internet site, and in illegible scrawl. In any case, it was an absurdly trifling gripe, and one that every hack has committed at least once). Yet our national newspaper felt the incident merited a half-page article, with photograph (while never mentioning anywhere one of its own hacks’ more serious act plagiarising a chunk of Israeli propaganda from a stridently right-wing source, not only failing to credit it, but also failing to verify the facts, which happened to be entirely false, a hate-mongering anti-Palestinian fabrication. I thought bias might be at work, especially since their hack hated me, openly, even using an editorial to express this loathing, though declining to debate our differences on live internet, as some of his own colleagues had even urged him to do. For his sin he was exiled to the China desk for a year, by which time the calamity, copiously reported in the local Arab press, would have faded from memory. My punishment had more severe consequences). I had not bothered to return the paper’s phone calls requesting a comment, however, being too drunk or tormented by demons, so my explanation was not featured in the page two article. I will pursue this topic later, but the newspaper’s malice caused the book to be withdrawn from circulation, and killed foreign sales. This was interesting because there was clearly something else in that book other than uncredited quotations that someone wanted suppressed, because U.S. sales that were at the contract stage were mysteriously cancelled without explanation – and this was before the so-called plagiarism issue even arose. There was unusual hostility from among the Neo-Con media stooges too (not to forget that the impetus for attacking Iraq originated out of what was then the Neo-Cons’ Bat Cave, grandiosely called something like the American Enterprise Institute, whose website, when last I looked at it, had not posted a single entry since its Iraq mission had been universally branded as the worst mismanaged, ill-conceived, and epically bungled catastrophe since the last one). Anyone opposing the idea or fact of invading Iraq was subjected to the usual repertoire of what passes for refutative debate among the noisy right-wing media courtiers: you’re a communist, a conspiracy nut, anti-American, unpatriotic, a drug fiend, and all your facts are lies etc. These accusations are generally shouted rather than spoken, and if you attempt a response some talk shows will even cut your mike. Only Andrew Coyne, of the National Post, agreed to a television debate with me on the subject, and his major argument consisted of telling me I was clearly a huge fan of the murderous tyrant, Saddam Hussein, from whose clutches the war was expressly designed to liberate the poor oppressed Iraqis. His point was pitifully easy to refute by mentioning my previous book on Iraq, The Demonic Comedy, which he had not read and thus was unaware that it damned Saddam’s regime and particularly its ruling family. I felt rather sorry for Coyne after this, since he knew little about the realities in Baghdad and still less about the Arab world in general. I liked him, in fact, but had eagerly expected a feisty exchange of views. I resent being identified as a knee-jerk liberal, since I am in fact more of a libertarian or anarcho-syndicalist, but such is the price you pay for opposing these new pseudo-conservatives on any big issue. And these issues invariably concern the desires of multinational corporations – entities whose power and wealth exceeds that of many entire nations, making them de facto, nations of their own, lacking only borders and democratic institutions – their desires, however, often seem at odds with the public good and general will. The government is therefore viewed by these mighty invisible empires merely as an instrument for distracting public attention, altering by various methods the general will, or legalizing an activity previously outlawed. But of all the real powers that be the military-industrial complex is king of kings, richer and more ruthless than the ancient empires of Greece, Rome, and Persia combined, especially since the privatization of war initiated by George Bush the First, and honed to perfection by his crony Dick Cheney, whose own wealth during his stint as Grey Eminence increased mysteriously by some 1000 percent. These are the kind of people who can kill a book as easily as they can kill a person, or a million people. You don’t fuck with these people, but I suspect that, unwittingly, I did fuck with them.  One suggestion I have is that the book contains irrefutable and easily verifiable information showing that the Americans were dropping cluster bombs on Iraq whose bomblets, scattered over a wide area by the initial explosion, were disguised as children’s toys. I shall not bother to explain the reasoning behind this, since your imagination works just like mine. But I imagine the Pentagon hack assigned to put a good spin on this barbaric travesty. There is much more about the atrocities and violations of international law during the unwarranted and illegal attack on Iraq, but I will save it for later. You can still buy the book on Amazon, of course, but that doesn’t necessitate an American reviewer demanding answerability from the Pentagon, does it? The chaos that erupted because of the war goes on, and is intentional, created to distract a divided population from the fact that their one major asset, the largest deposits of high grade oil on earth, are now controlled by foreign corporations.

Back to God, I think, no? But all is supposed to be one, so all digressions must really be illusory. I was somewhat heartened not long ago to learn that in her diaries Mother Theresa expressed frequent doubts about the existence of God, whose work she imagined she was doing. Given the situation, these doubts are quite understandable. They amount to the old logical saw that one’s requirements of a god are that he be all-powerful and all-merciful; yet if he is all-powerful, why does evil exist? If he cannot defeat this evil he cannot be all-powerful, and if he can defeat it but chooses not to, he cannot be all-merciful. He can be one or the other, yet not both, which strips his qualifications to be your god, unless you don’t mind a divinity of reduced expectations. Such pseudo-philosophical claptrap, on the same lines as wondering about the quantity of angels able to dance on a pin’s head, not to mention the Inquisition, explain why organized Christianity has never appealed to me. It is worth noting that Mother Theresa, when I met her at least, was a big fan of St Francis Xavier (most of whose body is still in Goa), the man who summoned the Inquisition to India, with its many charming features, like slaughtering children in front of their parents as an incentive to conversion, or just burning the infidels to send a wider message out to any fence-sitters. With this kind of history beneath her sandals, it is a wonder Mother T. didn’t defect over to the nearby Kali temple. But her doubts were not analogous to mine, I decided, eventually. She expected some heavenly reward for her sinless life, and evidently did not get one, or not the one she wanted. I expected no divine reward, just an explanation and some guidance – such as what a blind writer is supposed to do with the rest of his life, other than curtail it prematurely by force. A future of self-pity, drinking to oblivion, and random audio books struck me as a reasonable facsimile of hell. I knew I had to deal with it somehow, but the actual how eluded me. I didn’t believe in God the way Mother T. did anyway, although I often wished for a more personal relationship, a saviour even.

A word, or another word, on blindness. It is clearly a different experience for those born blind than it is for those who lose their sight much later in life. I was astounded by the range of activities that suddenly became impossibly arduous or just plain impossible. When I contemplated alternative careers, for example, it dawned on me that even the most menial job – bag-boy, Big Mac vendor, garbage man etc – would be beyond my abilities. When you cannot read, virtually every form of work is ruled out. Being probably the most disorganized and untidy person I have ever encountered (possible exceptions: John Bailey and Iris Murdoch, whose house resembled a library bombed during the Second World War and left that way), I found myself forced into a form of order, unless I wanted to spend half my time looking for stuff. Notice that most disabilities develop powerful and effective lobby groups – there are, for instance, wheelchair ramps everywhere now – but not the blind, because organization requires sight. We could do with a number of things that would improve the quality of our lives – talking traffic lights, the right to touch sculpture, waiters obliged to read out menus, a Blue-Tooth GPS that reads out street names and identifies shops, a mobile phone entirely voice operated, a simpler computer interface also voice operated, with a version of Microsoft Word which just allows you to write on a theoretical sheet of paper without offering fifty fucking options for every button and all the thousand capabilities you don’t want or need. But we blind folk can’t even organize a lunch for the Laurentian Blind Society. People either forget the date or the location, because they can’t find the reminder or can’t read a note about it. Efforts are made on our behalf, it is true, but the well-meaning sighted who make them have no idea what being blind really requires. Even our white sticks are more symbolic than functional; they merely explain to people you have barged into that violence was not intended; and they get you free bus and subway rides. There is also the ‘explained’ movie, during which, and only in lulls in dialogue, a voice says things like, “Now Boris enters the room, his expression puzzled by the sight of his closed shutters. He sees the body of a circus clown lying in a pool of blood under his bean-bag chair. Now Laura enters the room, a gun in her hand and a hat of huge peacock feathers on her head…” Then you have to deduce what’s happening from the dialogue alone, for there will be no more explanations until the actors are either gone or alone. It completely trashes the film, and clearly has severe limitations. Where would you find space for explanation in, say, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf, or even Wolf of Wall Street for that matter; whereas a masterpiece by Ingmar Bergman would be 90 percent explanation. It was a nice thought, but no thanks. What we need are valets, free chauffeurs and cars, personal assistants, professional organizers, and packaging that does not require an axe to open it. We need money too, lots of it. But what we get are devices to clip on a coffee mug and bleat when the water you pour reaches the brim. We also get a half price train fare, for your companion, not for yourself (the companion, as you no doubt realise, spares them staff and aggravation). This is cost-benefit analysis at work, not philanthropy. Even if the blind manage to meet in a group, there is, I find, very little interaction; for blindness isolates you; the world beyond your own head and fingers becomes ‘other’; when you cannot see someone’s face their voice loses all the instruments that accompany it, from expressions and tics to the extraordinary array of human thought and emotion the eyes are capable of conveying. It is as Proust observes when he first talks on the telephone to his grandmother: without her face and mouth operating in synch with it, her voice even sounds different, stripped down, made less somehow, as if it is not really his grandmother to whom he speaks. I have not seen my own face in five years, and this makes me not care much about hair or appearance. Clothes are a pain to find, so I wear pyjamas for days on end, or sweat pants that I continue on in until Kara tells me they need to be washed or incinerated. I rely entirely upon her for almost my whole existence, and I am not used to relying on people, not accustomed to feeling helpless, afraid of fire, of water leaks, of power failures, and even of unexpected visitors who will require my signature on a form I cannot see.  Yet by far the worst torment, for someone whose idea of a good time was to curl up with a book, constituted adjusting to a voice reading me words I would have read differently myself, in pronunciation, or emphasis, and always in conjunction with my own imagination. It took a long time before I began to become accustomed to acoustic reading. There were, though, eventually, readers I came to regard as marvelously gifted, able to produce utterly different voices for dozens of different characters; there were ones capable of expressing the most delicate nuance and catching by instinct the subtle poetry at quiet play in a work of prose (Laurie Anderson springs to mind). But there were also readers I found unendurable. A woman whose shrill, reproving tone reminded me of the kind of teacher responsible for killing any potential love of literature forever in thirty or forty young minds – and, from out of hundreds of fine speakers presumably available, she had been assigned, by some semi-literate sadist, or possibly malicious ironist, the task of reading Dante’s Inferno, of which I managed to tolerate barely ten minutes before flinging the disc back to hell. Then there was a version of Tristram Shandy in which, for unfathomable reasons, each chapter was read by a different person, one of whom had a near-impenetrable Scottish accent, and another was a woman afflicted with a pretty devastating speech impediment. One appreciated her wanting to try, to do her bit, but not the person who let her actually do it. No one would let me fly a plane, I hope. Sterne’s novel is, beyond all doubt, the most eccentric text ever published before 1967 – 200 years before too – yet nothing about it suggests the montage-like cacophony summoned up for its audio version. Only someone who never listens to audio books would think this a tenable approach to any book (okay, maybe it would work for The Canterbury Tales). This kind of travesty did not, unsurprisingly, do much to help my convalescence. I wanted to write savage letters of complaint, but I could no longer write so much as my name at this stage. I could not even use a telephone without hitting a dozen wrong numbers before getting the one intended, or, often, giving up the whole idea of communication with the outside world altogether. What did we now have in common? This was also my first experience of pity from the receiving end, and I did not like it. But I sensed a kind of emotional paralysis in friends; they had no idea how to respond to my situation, besides imagining how appalling they would themselves find it. One even said that if it happened to him he’d top himself, leap from the Bloor Viaduct – if, I thought, he could find it. I still wonder if he considered that this information might be helpful for me. Another old acquaintance suggested I should work in radio. I said to her that just because the blind listen to radio it does not mean that radio production is run by blind people, that it has no need of anyone who can read since scripts are only required for visual media. Radio hosts ad-lib every show, and producers do not rely for their program topics any help from newspapers or magazines; they just overhear them on the bus, or simply pluck them out of the ethers. I asked her if this was the way she imagined radio’s world ran itself, and could see she understood what a dumb suggestion she had made, and was now embarrassed by her own lack of logical thought. When I asked what other bright ideas she had for the working blind, it was obvious that reality had finally dawned. She could think of nothing at all that paid blind people for work, because she could think of no work they could do. I couldn’t either, because there isn’t any. You can’t even stand on the corner selling pencils and holding out your tin cup these days without people assuming it’s a tasteless con. Basket-weaving does not strike me as a boom business either. What on earth do the blind do for money? Then it occurred to me that music was the one area where blind people often toiled and frequently prospered. Stevie Wonder. Ray Charles. Apart from a great guitarist whose name eluded me, my list ended here, however. An hour later I came up with Blind Lemon Jefferson (who was not the great guitarist whose name eluded me, and his blindness was only my assumption not my knowledge), seriously wondering if I could reinvent myself as an old Delta blues man, perhaps Blind Drunk Roberts. I even worked up some songs for my act, finding that I had suddenly acquired a deeper appreciation for the blues after accumulating so much experiential content for these songs. I will spare you an example, but a typical opening line was something like, In a mirror the blind man ain’t black or white,/ To him every bitch is outta sight, /He’d like to makes moves but he don’t have the right,\ All he’s got is the blues from mornin’ to night,\ Oh yeah, blind man’s blues…etc. I figured that, with enough bourbon and cigarettes, my voice would easily evolve into swamp shack growling redolent with memories of slave ships and cotton bales. I’d wear wrap-around shades, a chewed up straw hat, with denim coveralls; and I’d hunch over the mike on a stool. The fantasy lasted several days, until I discovered that I couldn’t play my guitar without seeing the frets, and couldn’t tune it either. I also recorded one song with my Sony mini-corder and a conga drum, finding that I sounded more like an old English asshole than an old Delta blues man. I also toyed briefly with the idea of a stand-up comedy act, complete with white stick and shades, but, besides the inability to think up a routine that was remotely funny, the thought of an audience laughing awkwardly out of sheer pity ended my comedic ambitions in a stroke. I began to wonder if I was going mad, or possibly had already achieved madness but, being mad, was unaware of it. Then I listened to an audio memoir by a guy with Asperger’s Syndrome who, after years of tragic struggle and poor interpersonal skills, ended up creating light shows for the Pink Floyd. It gave me hope and the fortitude to try actually dealing with my own woes, rather than using them as a mud bath.

But before this exciting adventure is related, a word about doctors. I don’t like them much, but I actually hate surgeons with a venomous passion. I will get to the saga of the stages involved in my blindness later, possibly, but now I just want to mention a few facts that will put you off acquiring eye problems for the rest of your life. I had been passed from hospital to hospital, from doctor to doctor too, for some time before ending up at St Michael’s Health Centre, where the eye clinic is located. Do not confuse this place with St Michael’s Hospital, which is found on the opposite side of the same street and possesses waiting rooms resembling lounges in expensive country clubs, with magazines that are still selling on news stands. To reach the Health Centre you have to phone the Hospital, proving their affiliation. Yet unlike the grand and reassuringly efficient Hospital’s entrance, the Health Centre is approached through grimy doors opening onto a space reminiscent of both an east European consulate and the Beograd railway station. Seemingly homeless people looked as if they were living on one part of a filthy concrete floor, across from the entrance to a run-down pharmacy looking as if it specialized in handling methadone addicts. Built into the far wall was an elevator which would have been more at home in a ghetto high-rise. The eye clinic was on the sixth floor, I think, and my expectations of emerging into an environment of hi-tech medical science and St Mike Hospital-style cool, attentive, reassuring efficiency, along with state-of-the-art design and general consideration for the needs and comfort of eye calamity victims, were immediately stomped into extinction by my very first glimpse. The space looked like an office for sanitary engineers or low-end accountants that had been continually meddled with since the 1940’s, creating a proliferation of ever-smaller windowless rooms, possibly sublet to book keepers and penny-stock scammers to help make ends meet. Locating the office dealing with my new doctor, which was about six feet square, I was greeted with a blend of scorn, suspicion, and outright hostility, ordered to produce documents, cards, IDs, and proof of my residence. Once a file was pried from a Victorian stack of manila, I was told to wait outside in the waiting area. This was in fact the same chair-lined corridor leading back to the elevator. It boasted perhaps twenty chairs, none of which was vacant, since some thirty patients, in linen eye bandages, or Ray Charles shades, were waiting. I hate waiting, which, when you cannot even read, is all the more hateful. At this stage, however, I still had one reasonably working eye, so I seized a copy of Newsweek from under a battered table, taking a few minutes before noticing it was nearly four years old. The international news within it, however, seemed scarcely different from that which I’d heard earlier on the radio. Tired of leaning against the wall, I took a stroll down the labyrinth of makeshift corridors extending off past my new doctor’s bitchy secretary’s lair, seeing on the wall as I proceeded a sign reading AVERAGE WAITING TIME: SIX HOURS. This sign was not visible in the waiting area itself, though, and perhaps for sound psychological reasons. Passing many closed doors of obviously tiny rooms, I came to an open glass door belonging to the office of another doctor, presumably a colleague of my new doctor. On a wall inside was a poster promoting the annual gathering of something called The Retinal Fellowship. Most of this poster was devoted to the image of a man wearing a toga and laurel crown, with an ambiguous smirk on his face, and a background of noble classical ruins that were not so ruinous they could not be rented out for gala events. The image hinted of riotous behaviour, of Bacchanalian excess, of Maenads, nymphs and satyrs gamboling just out of sight behind the pillars, in which direction the smirking man and his toga were heading. The rest of this office wall was completely covered in framed certificates vouching for this doctor’s education, numerous other qualifications, and stalwart standing in the community, one of which affirmed his membership in The Retinal Fellowship. He was clearly proud of these certificates, all of which, except the poster, had been professionally framed. An attractive Oriental secretary or assistant was looking at me without hostility, so I said to her, “Boy, those retinal fellows look like they have a wild old time when they party, don’t they?” She did not reply, still observing me with what I interpreted as benign detachment. Then she said, “Go away, please.” The ‘please’ lacked any sincerity. I went away, and after three hours snagged myself a seat in the waiting hall. Seven and a half hours after my scheduled appointment I saw a doctor. And so three more scalpel operations were added to the two I had already received at another hospital. Again, no anesthetic, the knife visible as it descends on your eyeball. Again, the bandages; again the expectation of full repair. Instead, I would sit in that Third World waiting room for an average of six hours (in truth it ranged from five to eight) to be examined, then told I needed laser surgery, a process I found excruciating, like having you eyes prodded with a toothpick while being dazzled with a coloured light brighter than flashbulbs. “Do not blink,” I was constantly told by an irritated technician. But the instinct to blink was not controllable. By the time it was considered that all possible treatments had been effected and I need only return for a three-monthly check-up, not one doctor had told me I would now remain blind forever. There was never even an indication that the treatments and operations had failed. No one advised me to seek assistance from the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, nor the counselling of an expert in handling post-trauma stress. No one so much as suggested my life, as I had known it, was now fucked, finished, over. It was like having both legs amputated and no one suggesting a wheelchair or physiotherapy, but instead acting as if the legs were ostensibly fine, merely not functioning. I would like to gate crash that Retinal Fellowship shindig in Delphi, or wherever they hold it, and drop LSD in the punch, then do a CIA job on every fellow until they swore to take courses in compassion, manners, and professional responsibility. And, the reader asks, what has this got to do with God? Well, surgeons do not think they are gods; they know they are. They heal, they cure, they restore, with no help from cosmic forces. If their efforts fail, of course, it is entirely the fault of cosmic forces. Not one of them even suggested that an optician might be able to construct me spectacles which would make the seven percent of my visible world slightly less blurred. We cut, we laser, we don’t get into your personal problems or offer advice. This is not in our professional field. Do not mistake us for human beings like yourself. To be honest, however, they did say that the gas bubble implanted in my eyeballs to create a pressure helping to hold the ragged retinas in place now made flying impossible. The air pressure in a plane might burst the eyeball apart as the bubble in it expanded. Even high elevations on earth were inadvisable. I imagine that an exploding eyeball on an airplane, these days, would get you arrested for terrorism: the eyeball bomber.

And so we arrive at the CNIB, sole resource for the blind here, yet, of course, largely run by the sighted, for purely pragmatic reasons. In Toronto their offices are situated in an area very hard to reach by public transport, and consisting of a structure designed, at a doubtlessly fabulous cost, by some architectural genius – possibly the same one who divined that what the Toronto Public Library needed was not space for bookshelves and seating, but instead a vast fountain dripping down over hanks of wool – who, after much research and deep thought, realized that what the blind really needed from a building in which they would be the principal visitors were round walls, not straight walls with hazardously sharp corners, but curved ones that never led to 90 degree turns or, God forbid, 180 degree dead ends. The gentle, intelligent service dogs leading people around CNIB Central seemed unimpressed or unconcerned with the curvature. They had navigated the Eaton Centre and the University campuses, so no architectural catastrophe of right angles or irrational walkways was going to faze them. Their owners relied on the dog not the architect, and their main problem was getting to the CNIB, not traversing its interior. Thanks to a friend’s kindness, I was driven there, and even by car the place was not so easily found. After a brief wait, someone examined my eyes by various methods, then diagnosed that I was legally blind, thus entitled to a free transport pass and all the CNIB services, which were outlined upon the CD I would soon receive by mail. I was also entitled to a free white stick – though cautioned that subsequent white sticks would have to be paid for. This complimentary stick would even be brought to my residence by an instructor, who would help me learn how to use it. I wondered how hard a device this device would be to master; was it, perhaps, like golf, nothing like as easy as it looked. In the CNIB lobby was a shop specialising in gadgets and useful appliances for the blind, or really the nearly blind, for whom a day-glo pink golf ball might be of some use, as would the deck of giant playing cards. My friend described these wares to me and I decided that a very powerful magnifying glass would conceivably be helpful, so we requested the item from a salesman-like figure, who promptly took offence, saying this was a showroom, not a common shop. If we wanted this item we should purchase it from a nearby shop, whose business card he happened to have in his pocket. The shop was ten minutes by car, yet probably would have taken two hours to reach by dog. It did not have the very powerful magnifying glass, but it did have something I would find equally useful: a talking wristwatch, on special offer this week too. I bought it, since I need to know the time around four times an hour. I enjoyed its little voice and precise information. Then it died, without warning, and no one – not even the vendor – could fix it.

Days after my CNIB initiation a deluge of mailed information began, starting with the CD outlining all the services to which I was now entitled, and the activities in which I could participate. Some of these activities seemed somewhat inadvisable for a blind person – I cite archery and sailing as examples, but there were many others. Nowhere did I find an offer of music lessons, though, nor one of employment advice. The Art Gallery of Ontario, however, upon presentation of my CNIB membership photo-ID card, would admit me free of charge, since the blind are renowned for their love of great painting. Philanthropy is not what it used to be in the good old days of Mayhew and Dickens, when people actually gave away their own money with no benefit to themselves from the act whatsoever (except, perhaps, up where moth and rust corrupt not, or the heart is weighed against a feather, or by a Judge). The AGO was not exactly sacrificing a fortune in entrance fees, was it? Or, I wondered, with cost of great art these days and the massive expenses of world-class renovation, was its charity toward the blind really more like the woman who gave her mite? I doubt if the passage where Jesus advises the rich man to give all he owns away to the poor is ever read in the church on Wall Street, if indeed there is one.

In due course a portly Caribbean lady arrived at my door with my first free white stick. What she first wanted to know was, “Can you see me at all, dear?” I told her she was visible as a shadowy silhouette, which she found to be excellent news, then offered to give me on-street instruction in using the stick, including adventures by bus and subway. I declined the offer, feeling I had a good handle on the basic principles involved, and would never contemplate tackling the subway with or without her. I had never enjoyed subterranean travel when I could see, so had no desire to navigate escalators, get jostled on narrow platforms, or hurtle through dark tunnels in a jam-packed metal tube without the advantage of vision. Somewhat disgruntled by my ingratitude, she demanded to observe me deploying the stick to walk ten feet from kitchen to sitting room, remarking that I did well and had a good grasp of this technology, which essentially enables you to sweep the ground ahead for unexpected obstacles. In reality it does not perform this function very well, and is never used by people who are totally blind (who also have no need of big sunglasses). Its real job is to warn others that they should step aside as you approach; and it also gets you on a bus free, generally without having to produce the ID card entitling you to free travel. Contrary to popular belief, however, no one gets up to offer their seat to the blind man in order to let him sit close to the entrance. No one even offers to help him locate a vacant seat. But the white stick does allow you to swipe at legs with impunity, and even attempt to sit upon laps. Another popular misconception is that most people are eager to help the blind in any way they can, and would never dream of cheating them out of money because they cannot easily tell a five dollar bill from a fifty. On three occasions cab drivers tried to bilk me out of change, handing back fives instead of tens, for example; and variety store proprietors were shameless in their attempts to charge me for items I had not purchased. Such incidents made me wish I carried a powerful handgun or a huge hunting knife. The white stick instructress had not warned me of the perils it might cause alongside its benefits. To some it might be a symbol, but to others it signifies opportunity, profit potential.

Soon after acquiring my stick, I next found a Chinese man arriving at the door, declaring that he had come on orders of the CNIB to install my new free computer and its colossal HD screen, as well as instruct me in the use of such a device. But, alas, as large as this new screen was, I could still not see its icons, nor read its endless popping orders and options. Then he clicked open a program called Zoom Text, which made an internet page grow to the size of a billboard. I could certainly read some of the words on such pages in this manner – usually, I admit, just the now-100-point font titles – but navigating the entire page made me feel like an ant trying to read the New York Times by forming words one letter at a time. It would take an hour just to read one photo caption. No thanks, I thought, while thanking him profusely, and hoping he would soon solve the technical issues my poor wiring had created and then go. Computer geeks truly believe that computers are the solution to all problems: Blind? No worries, just blow up the page by a million percent, and if that doesn’t work, activate the voice robot and have everything read for you by something that can pronounce any word but not understand a single one, thus treating them all equally. Try, for an example of its downside, listening to this thing read you an essay in Harper’s. It might be good with the Dow Jones Index, or even basic news stories, but I don’t ever read these. I find the GPS voice on Kara’s treasured iPhone very helpful in getting her through the collapsing maze that Montreal likes to believe is a highway system, but I wouldn’t want it reading me Infinite Jest, or even John Le Carre (by the way, GPS voice, your pronunciation of French street names is shamefully embarrassing; you need to take a brief course in it or something, before the Language Police fine and ban you).

My ex-mother-in-law firmly believed I had been the cause of my ex-wife’s death during this period too, and, as if I did not have quite enough to bother me already, began phoning ten times a day, generally from 4 p.m. on, when she began to get into the Sambuca. We had never liked one another, mainly because I had spotted her as a tyrannical bully and would not take her shit, which had always before then been the family custom, out of fear for some, and for others simply to keep the peace. Not once did I ever hear her say a good word about anyone. She even dissed family members – except for her son, from whose ass the sun perpetually shone – behind their backs, criticizing everything from her daughter-in-law’s weight and laziness, to her brother’s stupidity. I liked her husband a lot, but, until he died, she didn’t, and resented any attempt he made to interrupt her dinner monologues or diatribes by conversing with him. She had no understanding at all of the conversation as a concept; in her mind communication meant that she talked and you listened. If she gave advice it was unquestionably right, and whatever you believed was patently wrong. I imagined that she must have greatly admired Mussolini, until he’d reduced the country to rubble and lost the war – which, possibly, was a result of his not taking her advice. Her mother, the previous family despot, had certainly voted for Il Duce (which must have been like voting for not having the right to vote), so the bull-headed ego-monster must have been popular at home during some part of her youth. Knowing how she spoke about those she ostensibly liked, I could only imagine what she said about me, who she had good reason to hate going back to the moment when I told her to shut up and listen for once in her life. The moment happened to be when her sister was also present, so the shame factor put gasoline on this already blazing fire. Yet her hate had generally been, for her daughter’s sake, bottled up like a genie.

Now, though, thanks to death and divorce, along with Sambuca, the bottled demon had been set free. With her first call I attempted a reasoned, sympathetic, eminently understanding conversation, trying to sound like a Buddhist psychoanalyst. But I had forgotten her idea of conversation, which was now honed down to a Niagara Falls of abuse, character-assassination, thinly-veiled threats, sheer paranoid fantasy, blatant anti-Semitism, and much else that her heavy jangling Italian accent made incomprehensible (after all, in her defense, she had only been living in Canada for sixty years). My attempts at consolation and, yes, loving kindness were not merely ignored, they were drowned beneath the roaring torrent of her personal Nuremberg Rally key-note harangue, which, from sheer habit, I had tape-recorded. So I can still listen to myself eschewing Buddhist detachment after fifteen minutes and telling her to fuck off before hanging up. She called back immediately, but I let the answering machine put up with her this time. This latest torment now occurred at least four times a day, with the answering machine getting through four cassettes, recording for posterity such gems as, “I will have you wearing concrete boots beneath a bridge,” (a form of mixed Mafia metaphor, I believe), and, “Someone will come to your door soon and make you sorry.” When I found I could simply have her number blocked from calling mine, I did so, feeling certain that Sambuca would prevent her driving to a telephone booth. Instead, however, she began calling everyone I knew, since she had come across her daughter’s old address book, which had also been my old address book. My ninety-year-old mother in London, and equally aged aunt in Sussex, could barely understand a word she said, deafness being as big a factor as accent, so they simply apologised for this deficiency in themselves and hung up. My brother, in St. Topez (the jammy bastard), listened for some thirty minutes before coming to the conclusion that he was listening to a mad woman, and thus punched the off button on his fancy mobile. Friends in North America tried the sympathetic approach too, before eventually feeling forced to block her number as well. I actually felt sorry for her losses and loneliness, but have never encountered another person who repelled sympathy as if wearing a Haz-Mat suit impervious to it. When she phoned my divorce lawyer’s answering machine (perhaps unaware that anyone was likely to be in the office at 10 pm), where she called her ‘ugly’ before making unsubtle death threats, she found her call returned by the police, who advised her to make no more calls of this nature, unless she wanted to appear in court on serious charges. She even called editors of publications I had worked for, who, if they even knew what she was going on about, told her that slander was a serious business, and she should provide verifiable evidence before making outlandish accusations to the media against me or indeed against anyone else. After all, this was not Fox News or the National Enquirer.

The calls to England still continue, if now only sporadically, but my oldies over there can’t figure out the complexities of blocking a transatlantic phone number, believing it to be impossible. But these days they just say sorry and hang up the moment they hear that venomous echoing rasp.

            I will admit that the concrete boots and man coming to my door threats did have a rattling effect upon whatever remained of my nervous system, since I definitely knew she was a mad malicious bitch, possibly capable of any monstrosity, but they were not the reason I decided my time in Toronto had come to an end. The ex-family, I recalled, actually did have a figure they referred to as their ‘Godfather’, yet I could not picture some aged retired Mafioso, if indeed he had ever been mobbed up, agreeing to whack some crazy old hag’s son-in-law for no discernable reason. They have a code, don’t they? Some bikers might have done the job for five grand, but I felt sure she knew no bikers. I was rattled but not really worried. No, I left town because I needed a new life, a new start with a woman for whom I felt awesomely deep love for the first time in all my many years. True, she is half my age, but this is something you cease to notice after a while; for what we really love in the beloved is the deathless and ageless divinity in her heart, not the mortal flesh and bones, nor even that ever-shifting entity we call a ‘self’. Besides, if my mother and aunt are anything to go by, my death will not be that long before Kara’s own. Not that lives come with any warranty, and all that we know for certain about the future is that things will change, perhaps beyond all recognition, perhaps by subtle increments of nuance. Yet there is another certainty which only a soulmate invokes: that our love, like our souls, will not ever die, even when the mountains sink and the stars fall from an eternally silent and empty sky. It is the very fabric of new universes and endless other worlds. John Lennon had it right: “Love is the answer, and you know that for sure…” It is a pity we keep forgetting what we know for sure, making our world the same old nightmare over and over again, always questioning the one thing, recreating the sole problem for which we truly know an eternal answer. We know it for sure.

Before you can begin a new life, however, you must heal the wounds inflicted during the old one. I have now added a ‘Towards’ to the title of this entry, since my real troubles with God and the dark night of my soul only began in their most terrifying and potent form once I was settled in the deep peace and unequalled beauty of the Laurentian mountains. If the reader has managed to get this far, he or she may presumably be willing to hang in for my next entry, which ought to relate the nature of our new life in Quebec. For now, though, I suggest we’ve all had quite enough of me, and should get outside for some air (ours being minus 20 degrees Celsius at present, a temperature it is customary to term ‘invigorating’ rather than ‘very, very cold’).

As always, I remain sincerely,

Paul William Roberts.

 

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