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Written by Patrick Misson

Parent Category: Content

Published: 24 August 2012

Created: 24 August 2012

Last Updated: 01 July 2015

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CHAPTER FORTY EIGHT

 

IN INDIA AGAIN

 

While we three passengers (Céline, Romarin and myself) were getting used to the crowded accommodation available in the SS Cambodge - which was far from being a luxury liner, carrying thousands of passengers each time back and forth from the Far East to France - our thoughts still lingered on the friends who would be wending their way to Alma's place in the south of France.

 

 

I forgot to mention that we had passed a few days in the same place en route for Marseilles during which a happy event took place which brought together two souls who had long been waiting to be united as husband and wife. I found myself sitting at the same table with these two persons during the fraction of a day that remained for us before driving down to the docks of Marseilles. They were there, unable to make up their minds - like many characters in Molière's plays with long-drawn-out love affairs, not ending well as they ought to; but with the clever insight of some bright servant-girl the love-torn couple is finally able to solve their problem. Here there were the same two aching hearts involved, wanting something to happen by way of initiative.

 

 

The Tao by itself seemed to be helpless and seemed to be calling piteously for an instrument which, like Arjuna in the Gita, was to be an incidental and indirect cause only. There are many situations in life in which even the most neutral of individuals may be called upon to play, consciously or unconsciously, this incidental, instrumentalist role.

 

 

I shall not mention the names of the persons involved in case the subtle and occasional factor might have again misfired after all. I was, however, motivated by the best of intentions when I suddenly had the bright idea of asking the man if he wanted to marry the girl and, with equal directness, put the same question in reciprocal form to the girl. I took the hand of the girl and put it in the hands of the man and that was that. I have never been quite sure whether what I did was right - especially as I hear that the persons are not living together - but who knows whether they are not living together in their heart of hearts?

 

 

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WE GET USED TO THE VOYAGE

All this belongs to the great unknown and I was trying to forget it as I was rearranging my trunks under the lower berth of the cabin which had more than four others, mostly Indian students or merchants talking 'très ordinairement'. The dinner bells and crowded dining rooms offered possibilities of contacts with an assorted jumble of persons belonging to different parts of the Near or Far East, and many interesting passing contacts were made.

 

 

The familiar ports of Port Said, Suez and later Aden were passed, which I shall not describe again, having done justice to life in those parts in previous travel accounts. Céline, Romarin and I were found most often on the deck in odd corners; shielding ourselves from the strong winds near anchors or lifeboats; and reading again and again books on modern mathematics, especially that of Edna Kramer, each chapter of which we tried to digest together.

 

 

Céline took the opportunity to join the Cook's conducted tour to Cairo and the Pyramids and Sphinx and joined us at night on November 27th. Aden was passed by the first day of December, and the last lap of the journey began after we left that free port where moneychangers looked contemptuously at Indian currency offered to them by passengers. An elderly Indian in the dining room wanted to have a word with me privately one night after dinner, and sat with me on a deck bench in darkness, making exaggerated expressions of devotion and love. He had criminal lines on his face and this made me hang on to my wallet which, when he noticed, caused him to let me go and never renew his friendship again. My homeward thoughts returned with greater force as we put our luggage together again.

 

 

ARRIVAL AT BOMBAY

We arrived at Bombay at 10 AM, and Nitya, Fred and an interested couple, Mr. and Mrs. Umrolla, contacted by Nitya, who came right into the economy-class cabin below on the prow, made the rest of the harbour formalities quite easy. We did not hurry to join the long queues formed near the first-class lounge, but preferred to wait on the luxurious sofas till the crowds became negligible; and with a young bearded Western saddhu and the ladies being received with bouquets and garlands by various Narayana Guru followers of Bombay, we made a motley and interesting group, attracting all eyes to us for about two hours.

 

 

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It took us nearly till midday lunchtime to extricate ourselves from the mesh of harbour rules and paper or rubber-stamp-made hurdles to human freedom. This kind of self-made barrier of a barbed-wire world is setting its traps or meshes, conferring more and more complicated indignity on the human person each day that modernism progresses.

 

 

A good Marathi-style lunch, served us with kindness by the Kales in their little flat on the fourth or fifth floor of the Reserve Bank quarters of Byculla, Bombay, was the first real contact with India that Céline and Romarin must have made - with the Indian home life of a city at least. The Umrollas also gave us a party a few days later in a more classy section of Bombay where friends met and sipped tea over music and talks on December 8th, 1965. Spirituality, especially Yoga, interested this highly cultivated Parsi couple, and a lasting cultural contact seemed to be made very readily.

 

 

The remaining three or four days that we spent in Bombay were marked by a visit to the Atomic Research Centre at Trombay and parties or receptions given by followers of Narayana Guru settled in different parts of Bombay, between whom bickerings and rivalries had to be glossed over. We had the task of retrieving the Guru's movement, as far as possible, from the mire of social or group considerations into which it had been allowed to bog down. The leaders themselves lacked the proper perspective in such matters, and men of otherwise striking intelligence showed their low level when it came to spiritual matters. Much zeal and loyalty thus washed down the drain. I had a bad tooth extracted and we were group photographed many times before we entrained for Madras at 7 AM on December 9th.

 

 

MADRAS, ERODE, OOTY AND ALWAYE

We stayed in Madras at the big house of Mr. N.C. Kumaran between the 11th and 14th of December, renewing contacts with Gurukula friends and writing revised petitions to the district revenue officers about the grant of the Erode land which was being sabotaged by a woman who at first was interested but became opposed as soon as she found out that she or a relative of hers could not be the sole director of the proposed new centre. These ugly circumstances are better omitted than stated in print. Fred went to Bangalore and we to Ooty on December 14th, 1965.

 

 

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We had only a short stay at Ooty because we had to be at Varkala by the second half of December in view of the arrangements for the annual Gurukula Convention there. We broke our journey at Coimbatore to see the revenue officer about the Erode land again. After a day with Mr. G.N. Rao at Alwaye, bathing in the broad and shallow river there, set in the green undulating country scene of Kerala with its elephants and palms - which was a thoroughly new experience to the two European ladies with me - we reached Varkala itself about noon on December 20th.

 

 

While in Alwaye we visited a big, Spanish-sponsored seminary where European fathers drawn from many parts of the West did mission work. They included many who resembled mystics and true contemplatives rather than zealous or hard and dogmatically-set preachers. We were able to borrow some of the latest volumes on Christian mysticism, science and higher criticism such as those of Teilhard de Chardin, now so popular in the West. The incessant pressure of literature-hunting in view of the big work underway was never relaxed in spite of all these travels.

 

 

BUSY DAYS AT VARKALA

Nothing absorbed my interest or activities at the end of 1965 and throughout 1966 more than the increasing of my inner agony to the white heat required to actually begin and then finish the projected one thousand-page book on the Science of the Absolute. Every minute of my waking hours and most of the subconscious state within light or deep slumbers at night was filled with this non-event of thinking of expressing my thoughts in as clear sentences or paragraphs as possible. The agony of ascent soon attained its peak within me, but the 16th Convention of December 1965 called for some other work connected with fully earthy matters like levelling the hilltop for a future institute of a Science of the Absolute which had to be given its share of attention.

 

 

The pressure of effort was sustained by early morning, afternoon and night readings and discussions in which many, including Céline and Romarin, were regularly present at the site of the Brahmavidya Mandiram itself where a cabin had been made for me with cement floor and asbestos-sheet roofing.

 

 

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I carried my own big box of reference books around and Fred Haas and John Spiers joined the group at Varkala on December 23rd. The Convention programme, waxing stronger each year, began on the 26th; its many items like homam (fire sacrifice), assemblies and meetings, select reunions, classes and consultations going on as a seven days' wonder.

 

 

Public opinion was slowly veering round in favour of understanding what the Gurukula Movement represented, although in the beginning many Narayana Guru adherents were full of mistrust about this movement which they thought was a rival to the mother institution. The relation was, in reality, only that of a complementarity, implying verticalized unity rather than the horizontal principle of contradiction. Such subtleties need much philosophical insight, which one should not expect at once from the masses.

 

 

I lingered on at Varkala till about January 18th, the group having visited Shastangota as guests in the ashram of Kambalath Sankupillay. This ashram was dedicated to the memory of Chattambi Swami with whom Narayana Guru was associated. Another visit took us to Mayyanad at the invitation of Dharmadas of Singapore who intended to open a rather irregularly-conceived branch of the Gurukula, whose character as such we had an opportunity of explaining at a tea party in the presence of a distinguished gathering including ex-ministers of the state.

 

 

IN NORTH-EAST INDIA

We already had an invitation extended to us by the Umrollas of Bombay by which I was to preside at a Yoga Conference at Monghyr organized under Swami Satyananda and Ma Yogashakti. Nitya had arranged our route via Madras and Calcutta, in each of which we had a day to spend on our long railway journey within the peninsula of India. We reached Calcutta on time on the 23rd and had a reception at the railway station given by prominent Calcutta disciples of the Guru. During our one day in Calcutta we were invited to two dinners and two tea parties at the house of a controller of tea and on the banks of the river where we were guests of a high officer in the Admiralty.

 

 

We also visited within the span of this one day one of the most ornate Jain temples that I have ever seen. A Shiva temple would be by contrast austere to the extreme opposite limit. Naked Jain Tirthankaras also resemble Shiva in their common austere touch but, by contrast, this Jain temple reminded me of the pomp and glory of the peak days of the Moghul Empire. The relation between the Moghuls and Jains in North India has always intrigued me. Paraswanath and Padmanath might have had something in common between them.

 

 

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On the night of the 23rd we took the famous No.10 down train which passed along the Gangetic plain with its rich alluvial vegetation. By about 10 AM we reached Monghyr, associated with the terrible earthquake of 1934. Historically the city takes the mind back to the time of Clive and Mir Jaffar when there were intrigues and counter-intrigues between rulers of different dynasties in that part of North India. Rival European nations who claimed supremacy on Indian soil at that very time only added to the confusion. But the Ganges must have said to itself, 'Men may come and men may go but I go on for ever.'

 

 

THE YOGA CONFERENCE AT MONGHYR

 

 

Monghyr.

 

The eldest son of the richest jute mill owner, who was sponsor as well as patron-in-chief of the Yoga Conference, was at Monghyr station (rebuilt in reinforced concrete after the famous earthquake). We drove for more than twenty minutes past Hindu, Islamic and European historical remains. Our host, this rich magnate, had inherited the best part of the palaces of Mir Jaffar situated on the ample terraces bordered by balustrades and overlooking the broad-bosomed Ganga-Mayi (Mother Ganges). Forests of flowers have been thrown into her waters by worshipful saddhus sitting prayerfully on her banks, from distant places such as Hardwar and Rishikesh where her torrential waters first attain the plains, linking  several Indian cultural units into one blended spiritual loyalty. The Ganges has ever flowered here irrespective of the rulers, whether Hindu, Moghul or European.

 

 

We soon accommodated ourselves in an octagonal summer palace said to have been used by Mir Jaffar and built in a modified Moghul style with cypress groves and lawns of a well-kept garden around it, and plenty of chaprasis (servants who are sometimes called bearers), also waiting on us hand and foot, although confused about the proper breakfast they should leave for us. The three or four days that we spent in this Moghul paradise were quite memorable except for the noises that came to us from the combined lunatic asylum and prison for which some of the other ancient buildings were being used to save money for the government.

 

 

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We were driven morning and evening to the corner of the public gardens whose gates opened to receive us each time. Swami Satyananda was given the tail end of the large domain which belonged to the same rich man.

 

 

I had to speak and hold conversations several times on the variety of Yoga that I stressed, which was in many respects different in approach from schools of Yoga that often sporadically sprout in the minds of individual Yoga teachers on the soil of India. In spite of this difference, my long speech on the principal day of the Conference was very well received and translated by the Swami in charge, though interrupted by the funny Monghyr trains which went whizzing past the walls of the Yoga School, hissing as with asthma, spurting off steam now and then as they carried colourful crowds of passengers on their way.

 

 

THE CAPITAL CITY OF INDIA

After this happy interlude in old Monghyr we took the same No. 10 down train about midday on the 29th. We arrived on the wrong platform of the Old Delhi main station. This resulted in a comedy of errors by which we took a taxi and arrived at the Institute of Psychic and Spiritual Research while being followed by Nitya and a group of others who waited for us and received wrong directions - but we met happily and all the ado was soon forgotten.

 

 

For twelve days we were to be the guests of the Psychic Research Institute of which Nitya Chaitanya Yati was the first organiser and director. Although the Institute was said to be government sponsored it had to propel itself by its own steam in its initial stages. To the credit of Nitya it must be said that he handled everything with versatility, grace and originality. It was a brand new building in which the plumbers and electricians were making the last fittings with their bangs and hammerings, and drainpipes passed over stairway-fronts where good tapestries are usually hung. Oh Inconsistency, thy name is architectural originality in India! But nothing matters and we did not care either, not even about the duplication of two costly staircases where one would have sufficed both by logic as well as convenience.

 

 

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The ladies found their accommodation in two corners of the large hall and I settled down in a large carpeted room where the Gita classes were held each day. Nitya had arranged a number of visits to families, mainly of Kerala, but not without including a good proportion of Punjabis and distinguished citizens of Delhi. It was a round of visits each day. The culmination was a talk for which I printed invitations - an élite gathering where intellectuals of Delhi were brought together almost on the last day.

 

 

Meanwhile we did not relax the tense efforts to be able to actually begin the first sentence of the book. The pressure was made to mount each day by our readings over early morning cups of tea 'that cheers but does not inebriate'. Thus we suddenly found ourselves ready to actually pen the first sentence. Well begun is always half done because a bad beginning can always entail endlessly-brewing troubles as the writing proceeds. The first sentence affords a peg on which everything else hangs. Thus we hit upon the short and pithy sentence which by its brevity was the mother of wit. It read, 'Science seeks certitude'. This beginning has augured well for us and has meant smooth sailing throughout.

 

 

ONCE MORE IN THE SOUTH

We entrained for Madras on 12th February, taking the Grand Trunk Express which took two nights. On the second day of the journey we encountered an American pilgrim who was dressed like a Vaishnavite Brahmin of North India and was able to cleverly hide his Yankee origins under his adopted Vishnu worship even to the detail of wearing marks on his forehead. Even the ecstatic singing and chiming and beating of cymbals was not omitted while he sat with other Indian passengers who seemed to take him seriously enough. Céline had an Indian drum, a kind of tambour, which he borrowed so as to keep himself merrier and more ecstatic for the rest of the journey.

 

 

We arrived in Madras Central at about five in the afternoon and our good friends Shanmukham, Sadanandan, and Engineer Kumaran were at the station. The first two offered to guard our luggage while we visited Mr. Kumaran's family. We came back to take the train for Bangalore that night, which luckily came to the same platform at 8 PM. We reached Bangalore Cantonment on the 15th and, after a short stay at Mr. Kumar's reached John's Gurukula, although I went a little later to the Somanhalli Gurukula five miles further on the same road, 18 miles from Bangalore, to stay there till my 71st Birthday on February 18th.

 

 

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This celebration went off with the usual éclat, with several hundred villagers being fed, and terminating with a gathering for a discussion of Vedanta as understood by villagers even in out-of-the-way places. Even without the patronage of universities or governments, this ancient wisdom-tradition seems to persist like the humble plants of the land and has brought its consolations to the philosophically-minded men and women of India from the days of the Upanishads to the present. In this sense India can be said to be chronically spiritual - however low the standard of discussion might be - relieved only now and then by radiant human insight into life. No one who knows about this hidden treasure of wisdom can altogether hate the common Indian people, however steeped in rags or dirt they might happen to be.

 

 

After the Birthday celebrations were over, a party of us, including Céline, Romarin, Prasad and Solomon, took a bus journey via Satyamangalam to Erode. We spent the night at a choultry (resting-house) before reaching our rocky hill site four and a half miles from Erode, where the government was still in the process of assigning to us seven and a half acres of land not far from the confluence of the two rivers, Kaveri and Bhavani. It was situated within easy reach of the most central of railway junctions in the Tamil Nadu of South India. This new Gurukula centre had a special significance, marking the stage of the growth of the Guru's movement from within the limits of Kerala itself where it had hitherto been established.

 

 

We conducted a fire ceremony on the top of the hill on February 25th without much publicity, but unexpected groups came from Tiruchi and other places. A small-scale feeding was also part of the programme, with informal talks by me. Prasad took ill with a high fever so, while the rest of us took a train for Ooty, Prasad and Solomon entrained back to Varkala. We arrived in Ooty on February 26th and soon settled down to the serious work of writing the first pages of the big book on the Guru's teaching.

 

 

 

 

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CHAPTER FORTY NINE

 

THE MAGNUM OPUS AND THE CALL OF THE ISLAND

Authorship involves an inner agony. Before bringing any serious book to light there are birth-pangs and long anterior labours culminating in the event; and during my life I have more than four times experienced this inner tribulation. One is disgusted with one's own thoughts in whatever way one tries to put them. One sometimes begins with wrong starting statements and tries to go backwards or forwards in support of the wrong premises assumed. The pen, when forced, carries on for some time and comes to a standstill like a horse that cannot climb a steep point. One begins all over again, and good pages go into the wastepaper basket for no intrinsic fault of their own.

 

THE TRIALS OF AUTHORSHIP

At last a day comes and the agony is at its peak, when one says to oneself: 'Well begun is half done'. Even such a feeling could again prove to be a false start, and thus by successive efforts the first paragraphs begin to roll with the ease of Milton's 'Paradise Lost'. Even after this beginning has been made the writer has to avoid following wrong tracks or false scents and be careful that he neither says too much nor too little. Deciding this last question he has to be inwardly aware of the work that he proposes to himself as a whole. What one wants to say must avoid the professional hesitations of head-scratching, or verbose vagueness, or padding of unnecessary paragraphs; and one must be conscious of the number of times one is allowed to repeat oneself. Sometimes repetition cannot be avoided and at other times it is an unforgivable vice. Sentences should not be too involved and 'modernism' is not in favour of clichés. One has to decide also how far one errs on the side of journalese or of a rigidly understood academic style. The difficulty of the subject can be foisted by mistake by many readers on the style adopted by the author.

 

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Thus the trials of a sensitive writer, who is neither a journalist nor a man holding an academic post, are difficult, as I realized when, with the help of Céline to read the French books; Romarin to refer to the latest volumes gathered round me; Fred to read out passages in Sanskrit and to finger the brand new typewriter presented to us for this purpose; and Gurukula assistants to read out Malayalam texts - we jointly set our hands to the task of launching the ship on its long voyage.

 

Once launched, the ship went on smoothly as far as writing was concerned, although in the meanwhile a controversial invitation from the Mahé followers of Narayana Guru to install a statue at a temple there disturbed the tranquil progress of the pages that were being finished each day. Bergson's book on Einstein's relativity was a hard nut to crack. My eyesight being feeble, I had not only to make Céline read and re-read it, but rearrange my translated quotations from it several times before I could see the transparency of Bergson's arguments. The Mahé function went off without the threatened conflict between the rival parties and we spent some summer days of April at our embryonic centre in the far north of Kerala.

 

Mid-April 1966 found me with Céline and Fred staying at the Cheruvattur Gurukula. We were still intensely occupied with the chapters of the magnum opus. Romarin had gone away to England at the beginning of April. Although it was still the hot season, I wanted to promote some rice cultivation on the five and a half acres of land at Cheruvattur. In order to encourage the planting of useful fruit trees, which also would shade the ashram grounds just beginning to be laid out as an orchard garden, I stayed there in special sheds put up to receive our party of three by a kind disciple, Narayanan, then Labour Welfare Officer in that area. He and Soman, a contractor, had known me as their headmaster in a High School near Varkala about the year 1938, and both of them lent a helping hand. Genuine old contacts are never lost. Nothing is lost that is precious in the life of an absolutist.

 

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CHALLENGED BY STRANGE CROWDS

Fred Haas was busy typing to my dictation each day while sitting inside the improvised sheds put up in our honour. The midday hours made us take refuge under the shady trees or in the recesses of the thatched sheds, but the work of writing - especially the hard part of getting into the spirit of Bergson's criticism of Einstein - took all the energies of the three of us who sat together and went from page to page, paragraph by paragraph, and even line by line. As my eyesight was fading more and more with cataract trouble, Céline Gevaert had to be depended on to a point of sheer fatigue for the drudging work of reading and re-reading for my benefit. However, we plodded through this task.

 

To add to the heat of the day and the hardship of the work we also had strange groups of visitors from the surrounding countryside who came out of curiosity because of some of the publicity that I had recently received in the local papers. Not a few of them were journalists or those who claimed to know about Indian spirituality or Vedanta. They had mainly been brought up on the cheap literature available in journals on such subjects. Swami Vivekananda's turbaned figure when he lectured in Chicago at the end of the last century afforded almost all of the idioms, ideograms or clichés necessary for them to present as their stock-in-trade.

 

Stock phrases and clan reactions were glibly bandied about and there was much of what we could call 'putting on a big front' or façade behind which nothing genuinely original could be discovered. Much pretence goes on in the name of spirituality in modern India, and most people either play the role of an oracle when they are silent or else blurt out something which, on further questioning, they cannot substantiate. Such empty talk is what is sometimes referred to as blah-blah.

 

There were some who insisted on telling me that if I were a true Guru I should prove it, not by any teaching, but by some psychic or other miracle. They often had their own favourite models of spirituality up their sleeves and were more keen on opposing me for the reason that they could stand on my shoulders to glorify themselves. I found that I could not deal with them in any gentlemanly fashion, and found myself snubbing them like an old schoolmaster - which was a role familiar to me. Somehow I escaped untoward incidents taking place, which could easily have happened, especially as my own admirers, not without a tendency to pugilism, were watching keenly for any opportunity to enter into the fray themselves.

 

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THE WATER-BUFFALO-LIKE ISLAND BECKONS ME

 

 

The Beach at Ezhumalai.

 

One of the visitors during our stay, whom Soman had brought with him, mentioned incidentally that he possessed some land on the island of Ezhumalai, which he was not using except for growing cashew-nuts by government subsidy. I asked him for five acres of land, which he said he would give for a nominal price. I have described already how the misty blue outlines of a distant hill that dominated an island which looked like a water-buffalo lying in the sea, had attracted my attention many times as I passed that region. I had also climbed to the topmost peak where a whole village of ancient monkeys still survived through the centuries in a sort of discontinuous distribution as in the Galapagos Islands.

 

It was only my own sympathetic response to the element of the numinous that constituted my guiding interest in this strange island mountain. Soon the hint from the Tao came that seemed to say definitely that I should take the offer of land that seemed to come to me so naturally. There are thin, invisible leading-strings that, like Ariadne's thread, can sometimes guide you through subterranean labyrinthine paths, of which chance elements life essentially consists. At times, one almost hears one's own name called from a distance and sees some strange hand beckoning from afar, leading one from one kind of probable possibility to another kind of possible probability. Thus wending our way through probabilities and possibilities we may finally arrive at the beautiful glory of nothingness that the Absolute presents. If the reader now wonders if nothingness is my philosophy, I can quote here with advantage from Keats: 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever; Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness...' Here we see that Beauty and Nothingness are treated as interchangeable terms.

 

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ON THE ISLAND

By the invitation of the friend who first offered some land free for the Gurukula, we set out in a party to explore the island which till then to most of us was nothing more than a numinous presence. Just as a beautiful girl with a rose in her hand is better in a painting than when she is actually seen walking or talking or, as in the case of a dove or a peacock which are only beautiful to see at a distance; so too in its natural setting the actual island onto which we crossed over at a proverbial fording-place a mile south of the Payyanur railway station, made a comparatively drab and humdrum impression as we walked in the growing heat of the morning sun on the five-mile road that extended from one end of the island to the other. The idealist picture of finding an island home within the close embraces of the Arabian Sea still added its value from above, as it were, and the sight of small homesteads, narrow alleys and stiles through which we passed, often accosting half-clad primitive-looking men and women, sweating for bread in the sweltering heat, offered to us the usual picture of any island in the Indian Ocean.

 

Soon we came in sight of the palm beach with here and there a vista of the blue expanse suddenly opening up to our view, calling for a deeper emotional response than the drab surroundings. As we proceeded further on the same road, past an ancient temple and fig trees that must have been there many centuries, we came across Valkyrie-like Amazon women collecting firewood from the neglected hills and carrying it on their heads into the town for sale. I stopped one of them to enable Céline Gevaert to understand something of the economic conditions of the place: they could sell the head-load for one or two rupees after a day's labour.

 

We allayed our thirst with tender coconuts offered to us both at the temple as well as when we were half-way. As I was too tired to continue to explore further after the fourth mile, I let the rest of the party, consisting of Fred Haas, Céline Gevaert, Narayanan, Soman, D.K. Narayanan Poduval and another landowner, go almost to the end of the road where two peaks rose with sheer height into the sky and the road lay about one hundred feet above the beach, offering a breath-taking view of the ocean.

 

This place reminded me of popular seaside resorts anywhere in the world. In any so-called progressive part of the 'civilised' world, it would have been filled with signboards which said '100 Rooms with 100 baths'. Here it was a neglected corner of a sort of Land's End, fit for mermaids perhaps who could rise from the sea at midnight and sit on the rocks of the beach, as in 'The Forsaken Merman' of Matthew Arnold.

 

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Round the corner of the Land's End where there was an ancient fort and harbour on a promontory jutting into the sea, the road led us to a busy fishing village with its dugouts and boats, reminiscent of crooks and gun-runners and contraband traders, not to speak of pirates and other lords of the sea who have their adventurous life - the same now as centuries ago. The party was too tired to continue these interesting investigations to any further fruitful finish, but with a few more vague promises of land made by both Mr. Kunhikannan and Mr. D.K. Poduval, we decided to beat a retreat. There were no vehicles plying on that day - such availability was more of an exception than proved the rule. From the other side we took a taxi and soon reached the Cheruvattur Gurukula, leaving part of the company at their own places.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER FIFTY

 

FESTIVALS AND FOREWARNINGS

 

Cannanore Temple.

 

The Cannanore Temple Golden Jubilee celebrations were to begin on the very date that we planned to return to Ootacamund. I had agreed to perform the inaugural function, although I had grown out of the temple movement of Narayana Guru in the first decade of the century. He founded a chain of temples all along the West Coast for the use of the common people. Weavers, coconut climbers, traditional physicians, astrologers, and fishermen along the whole coast, together with the hunters on the hill ranges of the interior, constituted a population that did not belong to the orthodox or opulent context of Vedic Hinduism. They were rather to be looked upon as the salt of the earth; while the Vedic group exploited them through a theocratic setup manned by people who were mostly interlopers or intruders from other lands.

 

Between the sea coast and the high ranges towards the east, a three-hundred-mile-long strip of land was populated by a peculiar anthropological stratum of common men who, generally speaking, could add no titles to their names. The chain of temples that came to be established under the leadership of Narayana Guru filled a gap that separated prehistory from modern religious movements in terms of the religious life of the people concerned.

 

CANNANORE AND ERODE

The Cannanore Temple was an interesting example of this revised kind of popular temple which met the requirements coming from the people's side for a revaluation of spirituality for which the Guru himself was responsible. Temple theocracy and Vedantic philosophy cannot easily be accommodated together. For this reason I had to bypass this aspect of the Guru's work, interested as I was in the higher form of criticism and philosophy as taught by the Guru. However, in order not to break away and thus lose the popular touch, I agreed to attend the function at the request of the managing directors who represented the popular will.

 

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Thus Céline, Fred and I found ourselves sitting in a hall adjoining the Sundareswara Temple at Cannanore. The presence of a Western man and woman sitting on either side of me intrigued both men and women present. Young Fred in his sannyasi robes and a sprouting beard looked like the familiar oriental Christ in a well-known painting; and Céline looked like the model of a 'good lady' who would not hurt even a rat. They received their homage from the crowd and we took train; Fred to Bangalore and we to Calicut en route to Ooty.

 

On reaching Ooty, Céline found she could not continue to live at that altitude because of some lung troubles developed in the cold Belgian climate. Fred had just returned from Bangalore and we hurriedly decided to send her there. As it was also necessary to see the Erode revenue officer at the sumptuous waiting-rooms at the railway station in connection with a grant of land, we found a lodging-place in the town where we stayed for a couple of days and Céline had the chance of being taken around to some of the old temples at the meeting-place of the two rivers, Bhavani and Kaveri. Our old friend Nagaratnam sat on the rocks at the confluence of these two holy rivers by moonlight and sang some unforgettable Tamil devotional songs which, though strange and outlandish to Western ears, impressed both Céline and Fred by their hauntingly numinous content.

 

Céline was put into the train to Bangalore and was to stay there a few weeks under the care of Padma to learn all about Indian cookery and the secrets of wearing Indian clothes such as the sari. She was already preparing for her return journey and John later took her to Bombay to see her off; while Fred and I returned to Fernhill to continue steadily with the writing of the book. The strain of the work was too much for Fred after one or two months, and he took a holiday to go to Bangalore, roughly when we had reached the 700th page of the writing. Work continued with interruptions while Fred was away.

 

THE ANNUAL GURUPUJA FUNCTIONS

Depending upon the return of the Sun and Moon to the positions they held at his birth, the birthday of Narayana Guru may come anywhere during the months of August-September. The season that corresponds to this period is when the monsoon has abated and changes over from South-West to North-East.

 

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This is the season when general harvesting also takes place on the West Coast. Every year, just as Persephone comes out of the Pluto-world to restore prosperity to the earth, so there is an atmosphere of thanksgiving for what the harvest has yielded for hungry human beings.

 

From the days while a student in Madras when I organized a humble celebration for the Guru when he was still alive and sixty years old, through all these years I have been associated with similar events in different parts of the world and, as the movement of the Guru broadened, my relation with it made it almost my duty to be present at a growing number of functions and to make speeches or write for souvenirs in connection with them. By September 1966, I began to feel that I had done my bit in this direction and I tried to extricate myself from this atavistic repetition of the same pattern of behaviour. I was willing to allow an intermediate stage and unwillingly consented to unveil a statue of Narayana Guru at Mahé on the birthday in the month of August.

 

There were two parties, one of which objected to Narayana Guru's statue being established on an equal basis with that of Mahatma Gandhi on two sides of the gate. They thought that a politician and a Guru should not be given the same status. Feelings ran high and mediation between the two rival parties seemed almost impossible but, on inspecting the spot on my previous visit to Mahé, I had suggested that the two figures should face each other as if engaged in a dialogue. Such a basis of equality between two persons is recognized in the Gita in its last verse where Arjuna is a warrior and Krishna is a Guru. Furthermore it was a well-known historical event that Mahatma Gandhi came to visit the Guru at Varkala and sat face to face with him as guest to host of equal status.

 

Although I got anonymous threatening letters for some time from those who objected, I explained the dialectics involved openly and nonchalantly at the actual meeting. I had come in a jeep all the way from Cheruvattur with a party including a Nambudiri recluse and Fred Haas. The head of Pondicherry State, as well as the Administrator of Mahé, were present on the platform with their wives. As one of the anonymous letters even personally threatened me by referring by name to the man who shot Mahatma Gandhi at a prayer meeting, I openly invited anyone in the crowd to do the same if I was wrong. Fortunately no-one put a bullet into my heart which still seems to beat quietly as I pen these lines.

 

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Soon after the function we returned by jeep to Cheruvattur by the time the feeding of about five hundred people was just finishing there; the rice used having been sent all the way from America by Harry Jakobsen. The programmes in the two places thus went off well.

 

We arrived in Fernhill again to continue the heavy going in the chapters after the 700 pages of typescript then ready. Before the Gurupuja at Fernhill, we again had occasion to visit the island of Ezhumalai and inspect the actual plot of fifteen acres on the hill bordering the seaside. It was the day of the Onam harvest festival on which, after sitting on a stone in full view of the sea under a tree with the perfume of lemon grass all round, we feasted at the family house of Kunhikannan near the palm-beach lagoons. Then we paid in advance half the amount of the price of the land with the contributions of Kamala Bai of 500 rupees and about 1,500 received from Harry Jakobsen. Thus the dream of a Gurukula Island Home, not only bordering the surf and expansive sands, but also with the fresh air of the mountains and plenty of good earth for cultivation, was well on the way to being an accomplished fact.

 

OCTOBER-NOVEMBER FEASTS AND DANGER SIGNALS

We returned to Fernhill to continue writing at the end of September. Fred Haas, who had been continuously taking dictation from me and typing out the manuscript, left for Bangalore so that P. Karunakaran there could leave to come up to Fernhill to do necessary work in preparation for the Gurupuja in October. Romarin Grazebrook, who had gone to England for a visit in April, spent some time in France on her way back and arrived at the Gurukula on September 22nd, 1966, about noon. Her last letter had indicated that she was making an advance payment on some land at Menton on the French Riviera, evidently intending to settle down there. She had changed her mind at the last moment and her arrival had the same enigmatic touch of surprise as on two or three previous occasions. She came just in time to join me in the work again after the stoppage of it on Fred's leaving. My heart too had strange thumpings and missings of normal beats just at this period when I was fully in the hands of a disciple whose later behaviour, if I had known of it in advance, would have been good reason to make me afraid.

 

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He had the touch of a superman and his perversions included the forgery of cheques, both stolen and obtained under false pretences. He seemed to enjoy his own crimes and cultivated them through the years. I knew this trait in him but expected that kind treatment and a refuge under the Gurukula roof would reform him, but later events, alas, proved the contrary. He could easily be called a bandit, cut-throat, perjurer, mean pilferer, burglar, contraband- or gun-runner, liar, cheat or other beautiful epithets that could have been applied to him - but as a man he was intrinsically as good as any other. His daredevilry could also have had a touch of the superman who is beyond good and evil, but there was no question of his nuisance-value to others who had to seek their happiness themselves with the freedom that was each man's birthright.

 

When I returned from my hospitalisation at Calicut for a cataract operation, I came fully face-to-face with this disciple who could keep up outer semblances so correctly. Just at the time that Romarin returned I was fully in the hands of this strange character, who must surely have had some West Coast pirate's blood in his veins. Feeble of vision, weak in heart, lonely and humbly preparing for my last days, I left under my pillow a signed cheque for a thousand rupees for my own burial expenses in case, as I really suspected then, they should find me not alive in bed one day. Romarin's return brought at least one more person who could neutralize the situation. I began to dictate the unfinished chapters of the book.

 

Soon the Gurupuja and general feasting of Fernhill Gurukula came round on October 9th, 1966, and Nitya, who had gone to Singapore earlier from Delhi, was finishing his successful tour in South-East Asia and returned in time for the function, by air. He brought such a lot of good news that a festive atmosphere again prevailed and all Gurukula members, including Swami Mangalananda (for his last time in Fernhill) made the event more memorable than ever before. A tape-recorder gave us all a true account of all happenings in the Far East as groups stood round to listen to recordings made in Malaya as also some made in Delhi at the time when Swami Mangalananda stayed there with Nitya.

 

In mid-November, a Gurukula party was again staying on the cherished island itself, and we were able to register the land and pay the rest of its price. On November 12th, which was a new-moon day, we had already put up a pandal (coconut thatched awning) on the new site and cleared footpaths through the lemon grass to reach a terrace about 100 feet above the level of the road.

 

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Due to continuing rains that year and wet weather, the celebration of the inauguration of our new Home had to be performed under a roof a mile and half away from the new site. Swami Mangalananda made one of his best speeches on the morning of November 12th. Little did we know then that his voice was to be stilled forever about two months later.

 

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CHAPTER FIFTY ONE

 

AUTUMNAL DEPRESSIONS AND AFTER

The late summer months of the year 1966 were not specially eventful except for our steady progress in getting on with the writing work, chapter by chapter, page by page and sometimes even line by line. Fred went to Bangalore for rest from the strain for some weeks, but we kept on working at high pressure through the late summer months into the autumnal September days.

 

I had to visit Cochin harbour to clear about ten bags of rice that Harry Jakobsen had sent as a gift to the Gurukula, but between the cup and the lip there were many customs rules, paper hurdles and man-made difficulties before the hungry people for whom the gift was intended could eat the rice. Interstate movements of foodstuff were forbidden and even to pick it up we had to take precautions, which we were lucky enough to arrange with the help of several friends in Cochin under the guidance of Mr. Narayanan.

 

One whole bag, however, had been forgotten in some wharf and pilfering of grains had decreased the weight of each bag. Other impediments made me spend several hours at rationing or customs offices, all of which made the gift more of a trouble than the consolation it was generously intended to be by Harry, who thought he was doing good to the hungry people of India. Horizontal factors complicate ends and means, and intentions are foiled on a large scale for the benefit of no one in particular. Such is the zone where Maya reigns supreme.

 

On the birthday anniversary of the Guru I found myself at Cheruvattur still writing the seventh chapter of the work with Fred, after Céline had gone back to Belgium from Bombay late in summer. I went by jeep from Cheruvattur to Mahé, as already reported, for the unveiling of the statue.

 

THE NEGATIVITY THAT WOMAN REPRESENTS

Looking backwards from October 1967, as I write, at the negative factors that hovered round me one year ago, I can now discern a conspiracy of subtle forces. Missing heartbeats were innocent, single or simple disasters, but a fast-failing eyesight that encroached into my life and opportunities, though a less immediate factor, had more serious consequences for my life.

 

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My 'dear disciple' was a Damocles sword hanging over me of which I was unconscious. He was actually engaged in cheating me in every way from pilfering to forgery, as I have already mentioned. Similar happenings were taking place at the same time at the Gurukula at Varkala involving thousands of rupees running down the drainpipe due to other 'dear disciples' who lacked the simple qualification of integrity. Two dear little heifers, newly born, died of neglect around the same period. One of the truly dearest disciples of the Gurukula was also soon destined to die.

 

As if to announce and further accentuate the negative import of the total situation in which I found myself, that lady who had joined me in London the previous autumn and, after being with me some months in the earlier half of 1966, had been absent for three or four months, returned on September 22nd, 1966. She arrived at the Gurukula proposing to build a hut somewhere and live a life of independence from social or family ties.

 

As she was a woman who loved wandering in strange lands without much concern about how she impressed others, and gave me to understand she was attached neither to family nor property, I had nothing to tell me definitely that she was not fit to be a member of the Gurukula fraternity. By her own wish and half-silent assent, and by favourable views held on such a relation by many of the senior swamis present at the Gurukula Convention in 1966-67, a few months after her reappearance, she was duly admitted into their order. Strangely enough, as it has now turned out, before the next Convention to be held in December 1967, she has denounced the Guru and disconnected herself. A woman's entry into an organization of the kind the Gurukula intends to be has many subtle problems which hide below the visible aspect of the iceberg to which the situation could be compared.

 

The gist of the problem can be stated by saying that a woman's reason works in reverse of the manner in which a man's reason works. When these two reasons come together to solve any problem or meet any situation in ordinary life, whether petty or serious, an element of tragic absurdity often erupts into view like volcanic lava or something corresponding to a blind spot in the retina, which often has hidden tragic portent.

 

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Fickleness has been equated with a woman's mind by Shakespeare, who also refers to a 'woman's reason'. To a woman, freedom according to the sannyasa way of life is unthinkable, although she can be deified on a par with the Absolute itself. It is said that even God cannot guess the workings of a woman's mind. Schopenhauer considered women both ugly and unworthy. Nietszche's views on women are blatantly revealed in his Zarathustra where an elderly woman commands him to go to any younger woman with a whip in hand. The Gita (X.34) combines the subject of womanhood and of death in the same verse, both being perhaps equally negative factors in life.

 

The great Buddha was cautious when it was reported that women were to be admitted into his Sangha. Many religious or philosophical fraternities have been ruined or wrecked soon after the entry of a woman as an important inmate within their structure. If many cases of such still survive, they do so in a direction often the reverse of what the male founder would have meant as an ideal. There is a tragic factor involved here which is hard to state in cut-and-dried terms. Henpecked husbands or marital martyrs are seen in plenty in which one of the parties has had his or her life wrecked. Tolstoy has devoted a whole novel, Anna Karenina, to picture the nature of this element hiding behind glittering tinsel appearances. Victor Hugo in 'Toilers of the Sea' has two worlds of love to win: that of an octopus hiding within the rocks under the sea, and that of a rival lover on terra firma.

 

Within a year of the admission of a woman into the Gurukula the mistake began to be equally evident to both parties concerned. My worst fears, as stated in this biography written on first meeting the lady in question, before the mistake became evident, have proved true. I learnt again, in spite of all the forewarnings on the subject, what my previous life's experience had already taught me. I hope for the last time to beware of a woman, especially a frustrated woman.

 

Narayana Guru, in his composition relating to the inner structure of an ashram, has given the warning that those for men and women should be kept strictly separate. He often put the matter pithily, 'Go too near, gone'. My pride in being more modern-minded than Narayana Guru made me insufficiently heedful to this caution, although I had put down on record that the condition laid down by the Guru must be strictly honoured when giving the new lady a place within the Gurukula organization.

 

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Like mixing petrol with water and putting it in a motor car, the mixing of men and women, whose reasons work in reverse of each other, within the same organization is a danger based on a structural secret of the Science of the Absolute - which like gravitation is imperative in its demands to be respected by any intelligent organiser.

 

BEFORE AND AFTER JANUARY, 1967

The new home on the island hill near the sands of the sea was still a dream when we left for the hills again in the middle of November, 1966. Romarin helped by taking down my dictation and was able to send notebooks filled with texts for Fred to type out and put in order in Bangalore. Thus the work progressed steadily in spite of negativity whose shadow was portending still darker days for me with my failing eyesight. Dark forces from the world outside seemed to draw close to me in proportion to the increase of my own helpless disabilities. I could not travel alone and stood the danger of being easily run over at road crossings etc. I also misjudged the depths of steps which I had to descend. Newspaper reading became a luxury, not to speak of letter writing or scanning a book at a leisure hour. Like all grandfathers I sometimes kept searching for things under my nose or on my nose itself. I asked children their names more than once and put the same questions, once answered. My sprained leg gave trouble and teeth had to be extracted every three or four months, leaving some on the upper jaw with no counterpart on the lower. Still I have reason to be proud of the actual number of teeth I have left and with which I can munch toast and grin broad smiles. Such disasters, major or minor, were making life a greater nuisance than before as age advanced. But I still remained an optimist as I always try to be.

 

It was in such a state of depression that I decided to travel to Varkala, taking the Madura night express. I did this on 14th of December so that I could visit the Government Eye Hospital in Madura where an American eye specialist was practising. I had a sentimental objection to maiming myself with operations and thus welcomed the promise from the doctor of other aids. The prescription given resulted in my ordering glasses so convex and thick that they disappointed me and I decided to suffer the inconveniences again.

 

Romarin helped me to put down my last words of the book and went to get the new land on the Island surveyed and settled. I reached Varkala ready for the Convention on December 16th.

 

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THE 'PIRATES' AND 'MUSKETEERS' ARRIVE

Four Belgian Gurukula friends had started on an adventure to visit India in a van that they drove from Europe. Two of them were bold innovators in architecture and one a lawyer who left his profession in favour of a contemplative philosophical life based on freedom. The fourth was an ex-sailor who had seen much rough sea life. We called him a would-be pirate and the three others were fondly called the three musketeers. The pirate's name was Freddy and the three others were Jan, Walter and Marc.

 

They set out from Europe evidently prepared to face any hardship, and when they arrived at Varkala a few days before the Convention they looked tired, like mangled dogs that had badly bitten each other. They said that had been given a compulsory haircut and shave by government officials while passing through Yugoslavia. Undaunted, most of them appeared draped in bed sheets wound round them.

 

From Belgium, known for its respectable habits, it was a far cry indeed to see four Europeans breaking through all the barriers and conventions. They said their car had been confiscated or left at the Pakistan border for some unknown reason. Unkempt, unshod, unshorn once again, they presented together a sight that had a touch of humour of the type well known to Laurel and Hardy. Though they took life lightly they were downright earnest in their determination to help the Gurukula have its institute for the Science of the Absolute both at Erode and Varkala. They had in mind buildings constructed in the latest style after Le Corbusier. They stood for a new world of architecture in which buildings fitted human life as a sea-shell fits an oyster. They had all the technical knowledge and know-how needed for their dream of creating a new building. Their zeal knew no bounds and they wasted no time in making plans and taking measurements. Walter even made clay models of the proposed buildings.

 

It was an excellent instance of East and West co-operation in the best of spirits. The Convention went through its usual programmes with more than half a dozen Western visitors, although John himself could not be present because of suspected stomach ulcers due to suspicious adulteration of cooking oils, etc. Romarin Grazebrook came from the Island Home and was given sannyas and named Sannyasini Ramarani on January 1st, 1967.

 

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All went off better than usual at the Convention, which was a seven-day affair in which the whole countryside lost itself in varied programmes, some very popular and some select and distinguished. The homams (fire sacrifices) in which Gurukula inmates chanted Upanishadic mantrams each morning were the crowning feature that added dignity and calm to the event. Thousands came to have a darsan (view) of the new hilltop with earthwork completed before actual foundations for structures began to be laid.

 

After a short visit to Trivandrum for the first time in nearly a decade, I contacted Dr. Gopi about an eye operation. He recommended Calicut, where a specialist was available, because the one at Trivandrum was absent. I stayed with an interesting self-made man called Natesan who had built up from zero an international business of antiques and art objects, including indigenous ivory carvings with which he had started four decades ago as a lone hawker in hill-stations, searching for Western art-treasure-hunters both genuine and dilettantish. He too had traits of a Guru like me but worked at a level on the vertical axis where matter and mind meet more intimately than with me. Women understood him better and could vie with him and often go one better than he could in hierophantic esoterics.

 

I returned to Varkala after contacting this world of Goethe's Faust, which could be called that of the Atharva Veda. Like the holy Kaaba of Mecca founded in the name of Abraham, this hierophantic world contains the same absolutism implied in it as the more overt and much-publicised prophetic version of the same spirituality presented in cathedrals and bright and beautiful mosques. One has to know how to deal with them. Sometimes the study of Satan can be more profitable than the study of an Olympian Apollo. More later about this as also the bright side of womanhood.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER FIFTY TWO

 

HOSPITAL LIFE WITHOUT TEARS

The dark forces of life always work hand in hand with bright ones. Life is a constant oscillation between the plus and minus poles of a vertical parameter. This relational dimension is a pure or ineffably delicate silken or golden thread which has its horizontal reference line crossing it at different levels. At any given moment these structurally compensatory counterparts are operative within consciousness. The mind that can keep these contingencies together within its global awareness holds its balance neutrally between their rival claims. Such a neutral attitude, when consciously cultivated through a Science of the Absolute, establishes itself in a consciousness in which the concrete world is counterbalanced by its own reciprocal aspect of the abstract conceptual.

 

This can establish the personality in a neutral state that is stable and unmoved. The 'Unmoved Mover' of Aristotle corresponds to this notion. The Indian yogi also cultivates this state of neutral immobility between the dark and the bright. My hospitalisation in Calicut Government Hospital between the 16th and 31st of January, 1967, for an eye operation gave me some chance to try this theory out with myself as the experimental rabbit.

 

BLINDED IMMOBILITY ON AN EMPTY STOMACH

Complete rest in bed on a liquid diet without much change of posture prevented even yogic meditation. The upper arm was riddled with shots and there were pills to be swallowed. This was the order of the day which, along with the moanings of suffering fellow patients which I heard from my corner of a general ward, was a depressing experience.

 

The absolutist, however, has a way out of this sort of predicament. His soul is one that can easily oscillate between a bright vertical pole and its corresponding dark counterpart. Whether in a happy or sad outside environment, his self swings easily from one pole to the other, compensating what is outside with what is inside.

The numerator of the situation and its own denominator inside are always kept equally important by him so that one of them becomes cancellable by the other at any given time.

 

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The resultant is an absolutist attitude that ever spells the same happiness. Absence of conflict itself is of the essence of this happiness, which is for itself, of itself and by itself, and is of the nature of an inner experience confirmed by an outer idea or name referring to the non-Self. Thus Self and non-Self together spell the final state possible for man to aspire to, whether in piecemeal or wholesale fashion. Minor and major conflicts of the mind are inclusively comprised herein to be dissolved.

 

Hospitalisation and depression thus became corrected at every minute by a love of the sweetness of adversity till the neutral state involved became an ascending state of joy. Optimism was soon cancelled by pessimism and both poles of the crystal, half dark and half bright, were mutually merged into the grey colour of a pure transparent dull light of the non-dual consciousness.

 

NEGATIVITY IN GENEROSITY

A woman's mind naturally loves to linger on the form or negative ontological aspect and the spectre of death - often so appalling to a male human spirit - can make a truly womanly heart enjoy its tragic import. The smartly-dressed nurses in the hospital seemed to prove this theory because in no other occupation did I ever see women so at their own natural ease. A lady who visited me at this time unconsciously gave a finishing touch to this theory when someone said to her that there was a man hanging dead from a tree in view of the windows of the hospital. She openly admitted that such a tragic sight gave her a special kind of thrill which was not unlike the thrill that some persons refer to when they say, 'That was a good funeral.'

 

It is in this sense that I earlier referred to the negativity that womanhood represents. There is a strange curve of chance or probability-cum-possibility that is at the root of the fickleness of woman. Woman is made so as to be the principle of giving birth and nourishment by her body to other living bodies. She has thus to find a place between two limits of existence: one that is rigid or solid; and the other that is flexible or liquid. Malleability and viscosity belong to her body-mind which is at a given time neither one nor the other.

 

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Logic and reason have to obey instincts and emotional states more imperatively than with man whose body is made, like Adam's, to delve. Eve more naturally sat spinning or knitting as modern Eves in European parks are seen to do. A woman's beauty can be defined as the sinus functions of a Gaussian curve when transparently visible to the eye of a keen philosopher.

 

Waves and wrinkles in space represent the stuff of beauty, which is best revealed to the lover, madman or poet who are of the same imagination. Like the rays of a sun that has set but whose finer ray is visible above the horizon fading into the stillness of night, a woman's beauty is a dark-splendid value factor. Sad sighs and generous sympathy coexist here. This is the reason why, in the colloquy of the gods of the Katha Upanishad, the sun-god Indra was considered the most competent among the elemental gods to know the content of the Absolute. It first presented itself as an enigmatic spirit to their view, and they were puzzled until the vacant space revealed the overwhelming beauty of the goddess Uma, the daughter of the Himalayas, to Indra.

 

Joy and glory have their negative as well as their positive aspects. The dark splendour describes the negative; and the positive resembles the rising together of ten thousand suns. Structurally intrapolated, it is more legitimately of a female form; while when positively extrapolated it becomes thinned out into male mathematical terms. The pretty girl with the curl who had extremes of goodness or badness expressed through her alternating nature makes her the mother of woman's fickleness or of the absurdity which becomes more evident in maturer years.

 

The strange lady who joined the Gurukula but later changed her mind did so because she represented normal womanhood nearer than others who have less fickleness evidenced in their nature. A merely-earthy working woman cannot enjoy this luxury of being hysterical. We add here that a woman's mind always wants the steadying influence of a man. Without resting on his shoulders her life is like a boat tossed on the waves of a choppy sea. Thus we get a picture of woman whose nature has puzzled wise men through the ages. A woman tends always to feel lost without a man.

 

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BAD MIDNIGHT NEWS IN HOSPITAL

News of importance in one's life, whether of a positive or negative import, often takes one unawares. It is like the ushering in of seasonal changes, often gently announced by wistful breezes. Like creeping strange shadows or colourful skies, good or bad news often enters life when one is least prepared for it.

 

The knocking at the gate of Macbeth was a unique and tragic dramatic situation in which the outer world waited for the news of the midnight murder of Duncan. On the verge of death, Jean Valjean did not expect to see his adopted daughter Cosette and her husband Marius again when he wrote his will, leaving a secret fortune meant for the happiness of the dear young couple. It so transpired, however, as Victor Hugo tells, that he died with his dear children who had by chance arrived at his lonely flat, blessing his last departing breath with their radiant presence by a will of Providence, as it were. The ways of the Tao are mysterious.

 

MANGALA MERGES INTO THE MATRIX OF ABSOLUTE SUBSTANCE

It was well before midnight. The hospital patients had settled down after the evening meal. Sleep was making their moanings less frequent. The lights were partially out and I was awake lying on my back without change of posture for the ninth day. To make my fasting more enjoyable I did not take even liquids, thus submitting myself wilfully to a regime stricter than what was laid down by the doctor. I was not to cough, to talk or strain my abdomen. When the doctor opened my bandages he gasped to find that the incision he had made two days before had gaped instead of healed. The regaining of normal sight was thus in question.

 

I had received a letter from Varkala that same day which said that the well that was being dug at the Guru Narayana Giri had not struck water and the diggers were giving up hope. Later events proved this was premature as plenty of clear water was found a few feet deeper. Hope was at its low ebb for me that very night, and unknown to me then, I found that my 'dear disciples' were cheating me and neglecting their duties to such an extent as to make young calves die. The meaningless tears of a woman were another factor at this time. Everything seemed out of joint.

 

 

Before midnight had struck, an untimely telephone call came which was first transmitted to Dr. Rajan of Varkala who was attached to the Calicut hospital. He came on tiptoe to my bedside to break the bad news - which he did with professional correctness - of the death of Swami Mangalananda at Punalur where he had gone for a speaking engagement. The news was broken to me very cautiously and the doctor began by saying that Mangalananda was not well at Punalur, but within a few minutes he was asking me to decide where he was to be buried. Another telephone call came from M.N. Prasad at Varkala for further detailed instructions on the same subject. This was the first time within the Gurukula that the question of a burial had been posed so squarely for me to answer. I had to decide on the spot and at short notice. Luckily the Narayana Smrti contained sufficient indications and, as for the spot, it was right to think that an absolutist disciple could neither be treated as an ancestor nor as a mere demiurge or divinity. The elemental principles cannot be obstructed in their urge of necessity to 'become'.

 

I soon had to telephone back that Mangala's body could be brought to Varkala itself. He had just become merged into the matrix of the Absolute. His voice was stilled and he breathed no more. That was all. No fundamental change had taken place. His good repute continued to operate even after these other functions had ceased. Let him be interred into the womb of mother Earth without fuss. No rites were needed nor any painted sepulchre entombing worms. The soul goes marching on although the body lies mouldering. Honouring a dead body is an insult to the soul. Both had to be avoided. The procession of Nature for the good of future generations who still live should not receive a setback because of the dead who have to be buried. Such were the questions and answers involved. I soon took the decisions. He was buried on the side of the Brahma Vidya Mandir hill. No structure was to be raised. A plant could grow on the spot as a symbol of positive life, rather than any inert monument with its arrow of significance pointing backwards.

 

Such were the directions given. The Shivagiri sannyasins could take part in the ritual but they were not to be in charge of any arrangements. Thus the final instructions were given to Prasad and confirmed to Jenard three times from my hospital bed through Ramdas or Narayanan who were waiting on me those days. The latter was to go post-haste by the next available bus to confirm my instructions and supervise as my personal emissary. They were to wait till he arrived at Varkala by four in the afternoon of the 26th of January 1967.

 

491

AT DAYBREAK ON THE FUNERAL DAY

The teleprinters clicked their message through the night of the 25th past the midnight hour ushering in the 26th morning, along with full news about what had happened in the hospital and with the disciple who had gone forth into the matrix and mystery of the ever-present reality of every place. The Manorama Malayalam daily had put in the latest photograph of Mangala and let everyone know the precise time and place where they could go and respect his repute, though not necessarily his dead body. The Absolute itself was to be the ritual priest as mentioned in the obituary prayer from the pen of Narayana Guru, where the soul is referred to in a matter-of-fact way as dehi, the body-agent or owner. Relays of Gurukula students continuously recited Upanishadic chants from the Brahma Vidya Hill. The crowds had to be regulated and emotions kept under control till four in the afternoon when Narayanan turned up and Badiruddin gave a helping hand in immersing the ash-camphor-embedded body in Yogic posture into the loving arms of the sweet-smelling sacred earth to be absorbed into the elementals again in a natural way. John and Nitya arrived from Bangalore and Delhi to give final touches to this first of interments of a Gurukula disciple. They were late only by a dozen hours or so. Narayana Guru has written that when the kindly man dies he leaves his formal body but he continues to live here in the form of his own good repute, which is at least not a lesser reality than the body. The soul never dies and thus the idea of a good funeral is not totally absurd.

 

A GOOD FUNERAL AND AFTER

I continued in the hospital till Sunday, January 29th, and spent the last days of the month at our friends, the Kesava Mudaliars, which whole family, with Shivaprasad and his sisters, mother and brothers, had adopted the Gurukula way for some years already. Thence, on the first of February I, with John, the Jenards and Romarin, was driven directly to the Fernhill Gurukula by the generosity of the bus fleet owner, Cochukutty of C. C. Brothers.

 

This saved me a tedious bus journey and I could comply with the instructions of Prof. Sankaran who had successfully operated on my right eye except for a snipping that had still to be done with another hospitalisation and convalescence between March 31st and April 2nd.

 

492

The value-content of the two-months interval between hospitalisations was not better than the goodness possibly implied in the funeral already described. One hidden crime after another came to view in which the best of disciples were implicated as if from under the board. Absurd reasons with a woman's tears also marked out stages. The most basic of the currents of life's eternal becoming, however, remained the same all through, whether men came or went.

 

BANGALORE AND ERODE BIRTHDAY CELEBRATIONS

I had to wear dark glasses for about two weeks after being discharged from the hospital. Medicaments, dictation of letters, articles etc. went on, with Romarin acting as a kind of personal secretary. All seemed happy outside with her but deep down there was an element of dissatisfaction building up. As soon as it was taken note of by me it was automatically effaced for the time being - but only to resurface as a fresh eruption of the poison of absurdity vitiating the otherwise normal atmosphere. I was still learning the lesson referred to already, and I had to learn it for myself the hard way in spite of the words of wise men of the past. The only gain was that I could watch how it happened with a more alert and open mind.

 

My 72nd birthday was celebrated on the 19th of February. Three or four days before the event I started by bus with Romarin for Mysore. At the Bangalore City Market on the way, I consulted the optician who was to deliver new glasses to me. He was not fully satisfied with the result of my eye operation. He noticed a black scar not fully healed and remarked that the snipping of a new growth had to be done.

 

The celebrations at Somanhalli went off with more than usual éclat and in spite of food restrictions we managed to feed hundreds on the 19th Sunday. Old friends met me, among whom to be remembered is Gopi, a young engineer forcibly separated from his newly-wedded one because of family intrigues and campaigning rival relatives. His young child could not come to the arms of his dear father. The long story of a young man's tears had marred the happy events of my birthday celebrations in the same way for the previous two or three years.

 

493

He frequently sought my advice and mentioned to me the words of my letter asking him to bide his time and to press no button because 'time is a great healer'. Allah is referred to as the Merciful and as Mercy itself in the Quran. This time the three members of the family were seen happily united again and the long story of cruel separation of young and loving hearts was all but forgotten.

 

The Erode birthday celebration was also a happy event in which the same Absolute resulting from the equation of the Self and the non-Self was objectively explained by a fire sacrifice performed before a larger crowd than in previous years. The fire sacrifice took place at the top of Nataraja Giri before ten in the morning on Sunday the 26th of February, 1967. A contingent led by Prasad from Varkala and another from Tiruchi under P.V. Anandan met at Suriyanpalayam and saw to it that all went well. The visit of a van full of students from the Arul Neri Mandiram in Erode gave a finishing touch to the events. After making precious contacts with sympathisers for the movement thus inaugurated, and after putting Velayudhan Adigal in charge of the new centre with a hut put up illegally by some others and taken possession of and improved by us. Romarin went to Ezhumalai, Natarajan, Kumaraswami and myself went to Ooty, while Prasad went to Varkala and P.V. Anandan back to Tiruchi. We reached Ooty Gurukula on the 2nd of March, 1967.

 

 

 

494

CHAPTER FIFTY THREE

 

STILL TO TURN THE CORNER

Gurukula affairs had not yet taken a brighter turn by the Ides of March, 1967. No sooner had I settled down again in the hills, after the various celebrations and eye operation with new glasses, than troubles seemed to reveal themselves from some underground dark place of negativity. One by one they came into view: more cheating by disciples, more cruelty to animals and more meaningless tears and absurd complaints involving money too, from a woman who became attached to the Gurukula as a would-be sannyasini.

 

The bills which I had paid in cash to the Ooty Municipality through the same 'dear disciple' mentioned before remained unpaid; and surprise demand notices reached me, threatening legal action for amounts large and small. The grocer for whom I had left checks made out to cash had not been paid and cash had gone into the wrong pockets for several instalments. What was even more promiscuous was unauthorised borrowing done under false pretences.

 

To crown all, I found one sheet of my chequebook - the last of the book - had been carefully pilfered, forged, and cashed for hundreds. Over and above this crowning crime I discovered that a whole chequebook had been obtained from my bankers with which further cheques were being issued by this disciple. Almost every week I had to meet and answer claims made by cheated strangers from far and near within a range roughly of two hundred miles.

 

The shame involved was more unbearable to me than the cash. It could involve any amount, and the capacity to cheat depended ironically on my own good repute for integrity with friends in such matters. An inner conflict inflicted on me a keener crisis of conscience although the rot stopped when only a few hundred rupees from my own account had been lost. Although money belongs to the false value-world of Maya, the moral tribulation connected with it cannot be overlooked. I belong to the same world as my neighbour, and as one cannot reverse the laws of nature such as gravity, all the moral imperatives have to be treated as a categorical factor connected with the Absolute Necessity in life. Nuisance itself can attain to absolutist limits, and good repute was not a merely horizontal factor to be lightly overlooked. It involved one's personal honour.

 

495

THE EMANCIPATED WOMAN

The sannyasi, the hobo, the beatnik or Beatle and the hippie all have their modern counterparts in the emancipated woman who believes in a gypsy-like wandering life and takes refuge in an artistic temperament to hide a free and easy form of moral life, sometimes annoying, sometimes more healthy or normal.

 

She hates to be treated as a softie and likes male company without a rival female beside her. Often she shines in slacks or blue jeans and is fond of a beachcomber life of freedom from too much dress. All this might be thought natural enough, especially in the name of the equality of the sexes. Like two brackets which have to turn opposite ways in order to enclose anything at all, true equality is not mechanistic, but implies a subtle dialectical reciprocity. The emancipated woman of modern times does not often see this reciprocal bracketing principle but thinks she can behave like a man by imitating him like a mirror-image without reciprocity.

 

The new woman disciple began to show the first signs of some deeply hidden dissatisfaction on March 4th, when she returned from the new Island Home of which she was in charge. I had sent a helper, Achyuthan, to do hard work for her while she engaged coolies for putting up a hut when I was recovering from the shocks of being cheated. This lady made her appearance, vaguely complaining that she did not like the behaviour of the helper I had sent. She also discussed money matters in which it was not quite clear if she was spending for herself, for me, or for the general Gurukula.

 

These motives showed from behind her words alternately but not sufficiently clearly for me to take a decision one way or the other. She said she was not used to life with a servant which, she added, I had forced on her, although in fact she selected the man and took him herself. I could not quickly diagnose her trouble, which was one normal to all women - that of living with a male companion who loved and obeyed her. Fool as I was then, I could not read this underlying motive in her words which were then full of flower and foliage outside, with only occasional hidden tears.

 

496

FEMININE DISTRESS

'Men must work and women must weep' is a refrain from a poem by Kingsley which I studied in school. A woman's tears are her weapons in making even a big battleship-like man veer round to comply with her wishes. She can be a Portia or a Hypateia in her intelligence when she likes; but when she begins to be unhappy for absurd outward reasons, the man involved has to be wary of some sort of negative downfall or disaster. I had survived these tearfully fond tests of distressed femininity four or five times in my life, as told already in this life story. The woman in question now was more enigmatic than all the others known before. She combined gypsy ways with a sphinx-like look of a penetrating psychic power already mentioned as noticed at first sight.

 

Now the absurdities covered with tears first began by her referring to unsuitable servants whose ways or looks did not suit her. She once complained of starvation when I knew she had eaten. On an early date (April 14) she complained she was bypassed in the matter of being allowed to sleep in the half-finished hut without walls where I, a new servant, Adigal, and a boy, Raju, son of Narayanan, began to cook and settle down. I did not prohibit her but suggested that her own room with a proper bed, a mile and a half away, would be suitable.

 

She came in great tearful distress next morning complaining that she had not had any supper the previous night. No explanation could console her. Soon after, on June 14th, she began objections about the new helpers, whether Adigal or Kumaran, and said the grown-up boy's presence was a form of disturbance to her. I reminded her of the important understanding laid down by Narayana Guru himself that men and women must live separately. She seemed to accept this for some time. I recorded in my diary four times how tears and absurdities erupted from her to upset normal life. On June 22th she complained that I forced her to eat rice and curry. In fact I had encouraged the contrary many times. She also charged me the same day that I had suggested a jeep ride to town when she preferred the van.

 

This fifth alarm signal I thought was enough to warn me against trying to overlook living under one roof with a woman for any Gurukula male inmate. Somehow, in all such cases something went wrong and there seemed no remedy.

 

497

The opposite poles to which men and women belong must be the deep-seated reason for such absurd eruptions from time to time. In married life the children born balance the entropy factors. The expected crisis by which the woman broke off and went with another man to start an independent institution with him, disadopting me with some violence, took till August 27th to erupt in full force and vomit all its lava. Before telling the whole story of a distressed woman, otherwise intelligent by fits and starts and not always wrong, I must go back to where I left off.

 

GODDESS WORSHIPPED FROM GOA TO CAPE COMORIN

From Fernhill I had to go back to the Island Home on March 8th, to save the lady from the servant who was said to be rude to her. I took a bus to Calicut and continued the same day by express bus taken after the midday meal at Pachukutty's at Calicut, and arrived at Cannanore at six the same evening. The next morning train took us to the Island by noon of March 12th.

 

We still cooked and slept in the four-room building a mile and a half away from the site of the new Gurukula hut. The question of the rude servant had solved itself as we found he had absconded or left without notice. I tried to teach the lady how to save cooking tears and headaches by cutting vegetables and blowing fires to make soups and salads with dainty biscuit and mixed-fruit desserts within the room on earthenware stoves, with terra-cotta bowls and mugs to match. No progress was made with hut building because the workmen were half gentlemen farmers on the island and not fully proletarian in status.

 

We went there, however, on foot and rested under the roof that stood up without walls. I helped to revise the plans which were too artistically conceived to be liveable with convenience by the lady, who claimed to be 'creative' in all she did - whatever that term meant to moderns who used it - at least sometimes - as an excuse to cover irresponsibility. It was a freelance nonchalant defiance, sometimes good, sometimes questionable in what it covered justly or unjustly. I taught the lady how to make biryani with rice fried first and steam-cooked with vegetables later. I claimed as much creativeness in that as any modern artist.

 

498

Some visitors from Cannanore came and partook of our biryani lunch and incidentally showed me a souvenir luxuriously printed on art paper for the Guru's temple at Cannanore, in which I found some obscene references to Guru-pretenders, written by a Sanskrit scholar with me in mind, by way of slinging mud on my rising reputation as a Guru. Instead of pretending not to notice it I insisted on explaining it publicly and repeated my reference at the Cannanore Temple Jubilee meeting itself where I was invited to be present on the platform on the night of March 23rd.

 

After showing how one could live without a servant we witnessed an interesting ritual at the temple of Poomala Bhagavati - a learned and beautiful lady who, according to tradition, reached the northern end of the Island in a wooden ship from what she called 'Aryan country' in the north. The main item of the festival was watching two scholars having an argument in Sanskrit exegetics, rhetoric, semantics and grammar. They were ceremonially dressed in black sashes and scarlet cloths and each had a chela or disciple who went round a pole as the argument went on for hours. Women watched from their special pavilion at a distance and men sat wearing their gold ear-rings, with their palm-leaf umbrellas put aside in orderly decorum, listening to the tourney-torrent of words within the main hall.

 

Each of the contestants came from rival villages nearby and taught the recitation of their own epics to their disciples for one whole month in preparation for this annual contest in public. The humblest workman gladly contributed as much as two rupees with which to pay the eight hundred rupees, besides keep for a whole month, which was the time-honoured remuneration for each Pannikar or pandit.

 

The goddess they honoured here through the centuries was different from her more bloodthirsty sister goddesses who had to be propitiated in blood with animal sacrifices rather than by a 'poomala' or flower-garland. Evidently this is a dialectically revalued and Sanskritised version of Mother-worship whose various intermediate grades, from Kali to Saraswati, are still represented at the Mysore Dasara festival on ten nights - one for each.

 

At the other and southern tip of the same Ezhumalai Island there is a similar but prehistoric goddess still worshipped with bloody sacrifices. Thus this island contains in telescoped miniature form the epitome of the process of dialectical revaluation of Mother-worship, as Kumari (Cape Cormorin) in the Absolute Principle. This Absolute Feminine Principle, we have seen, was revealed to Indra as Uma, the daughter of the Himalaya, in the Katha Upanishad.

 

499

Ten more acres of land - rather rocky and steep but facing the vista of the sea - offered for sale by Mr. Kunhikannan, who preferred coconut gardens, was also bargained for on this visit. We settled on 3,000 rupees down, offered by V. Natarajan, late of Singapore, who readily donated 5,000 rupees for its purchase and development.

 

POST-OPERATION REST AT EAGLE ESTATE

On March 24th I again saw Dr. Sankaran at Calicut who thought that a further two-day hospitalisation was needed to snip off a growth from under the previous not fully-sealed incision in the eye. I visited a Buddhist vihar and a Guru mandir eight miles from Calicut and spoke there.

 

I returned to Fernhill just in time to discover that Sukumaran had cashed cheques, forged letters, misappropriated money, taken things from the Gurukula which did not belong to him, brandishing a revolver, genuine or imitation, to frighten the inmates, and had disappeared into the unknown underworld of crime again, after a year's life under the protection of the Gurukula.

 

I was again in Calicut by March 30th and operated on by 8:30 AM the next day. I was kindly offered a resting place for ten days at an altitude of 3,000 ft. by Mr. Cochukutty of Calicut with a special butler sent in advance to prepare mixed Western and Indian-style dishes for me in a streamlined modern villa in a cardamom and coffee estate where a baby elephant had been trapped previously in the year.

 

Partial bandaging of the eye; the heavy negative presence of a distressed woman with me who helped me with letter writing and eye-drops; and the expectation of fresh reports of criminal cheatings from my disciple who had escaped with a whole cheque-book of mine - spoilt for me the otherwise pleasant stay which I still made the best of as far as could be. News of fresh cheatings came almost each week, involving hundreds of rupees each time, for which my moral reputation, though only by indirect responsibility, was at stake. I could neither swallow nor spit out the bitter pill in the form of a pricked conscience within me.

 

At the same time, as I understood later, similar cheating in a milder fashion was taking place at Varkala where, before and after the last days Swami Mangalananda, the supervision of income and expenses was badly neglected.

 

500

The main disciple responsible absconded without an address for several weeks, threatening suicide, but reappeared in his home, hale and healthy with unjust advantages gained from his mismanagement of the Gurukula over several years.

 

ARRANGING THE ISLAND HOME

After leaving Eagle Estate we arrived at Payyanur railway station at about 8 AM and, crossing over to the Island, transported all things in a rubber-tired bullock-cart, with almost all our belongings, except the lady's personal effects, left in a locked upstairs room. Arriving at the half-finished hut with bags of cement, a gifted cot and other utensils and stores, we started cooking in the new place with incomplete mud and stone walls on April 13. Adigal was a carpenter and Raju, too, had some training with tools. All of us got busy, with occasional visitors like Sadanandan, Gangadharan and Manoharan from Varkala.

 

Joining in teamwork we were able to have cement floors and mat-partitioned rooms for three and the beginnings of a kitchen by April 23, when I entrained for repairing another half-finished hut at Erode, leaving the others to do what they could to finish the hut at the hillside Island Home.

 

It so happened soon after that the whole sixteen-acre plot with ten-feet-tall dry lemon grass caught fire by mischief or accident and blazed for days, sending up smoke to redden the sun's rays at dawn and dusk. The same kind of fire spread into the other ten acres on the adjoining slope of the same hill also owned by us. The conflagration frightened the two servants and both of them absconded, to the distress of the English lady trying to settle down on this far-off island. This time it was surely a form of undeserved punishment, due perhaps to dubious loyalties or just sheer ill luck.

 

The fire itself, which was kept at bay from attacking the hut by one of the two inmates, was a blessing in disguise, because anyhow the lemon grass had to be burnt (but carefully) or cut each year before a proper crop could sprout after the first rains. It saved us hundreds thus while hundreds were going down the drain at other ends of the Gurukula institution.

 

501

This fire-fighting took place when I was fitting a new door to the hut on the seven-acre site got for the Gurukula at Erode. News of it reached me only when I had arrived at Fernhill on April 29. Thus good and bad luck came together when I was trying to get a short spell of quiet at Fernhill for the full month of April and a week in May, before I had to go to Ezhumalai Island Home again.

 

MORE BAD OMENS

 

The beach from the Gurukula Island Home.

 

On May 10th I reached Payyanur and finished the registration of the ten acres of land and proceeded to the Island Home. The shed was made a little more secure against the impending monsoon as well as against burglars, though they were scarce in the locality. I had left no-one behind and Balan, a tribal boy whom I had employed at the Island, was to look after the place when I went back to Fernhill via Vythiri where I stopped for inspecting the site offered for a public school near a fresh-water lake.

 

The English lady expressed her desire to change from the Island Home to Vythiri because of the possibility of more English-speaking people there. This was the first signal from her of wanting to back out of her previous commitments. Reaching Fernhill again with her on May 16th, further reports and visits of the police and persons cheated by forged cheques made the atmosphere surcharged with disadoption and mistrust. John wrote disapprovingly of the Peace Conference proposed for 1970, which I had mooted. He gave reasons that did not make sense to me. I had to write a long letter to him complaining of his tendency to form an isolated Gurukula within the general one and of the tendency to disadopt me. This was soon denied. Fred too had gone out of the way to meet with those who were against the Gurukula, asking for finance to print books for us. I suspected even then that the presence of a woman in the wrong place was the subtle cause of these evidences of disruption. I told the lady in clear terms for nearly an hour on May 19th that her interest in helping the Gurukula was sometimes based on womanly instincts which needed to be adjusted and rightly placed.

 

She soon left for Madras to see about her passage arrangements to England and returned on May 24th after a few days absence. She helped me to re-write my Bulletins Nos. 1 to 5 for the proposed World Conference for Peace through Unitive Understanding for which preparations were to commence even in 1967, November 11th to 19th inclusive.

 

502

Nitya arrived on May 31st and came to Cannanore with me and the lady. We were to spend the whole month of June facing the brunt of the monsoon on the Island. We planted many trees with Kumaraswami who joined us after ten days' leave from Fernhill. The rains came. We worked and got the hut liveable and an acre of land cultivable. Between July 1st to 30th, I was at Varkala and Trivandrum submitting memoranda to Government Ministers to improve amenities on Ezhumalai Island.

 

Devidayananda, who had been in charge of the Somanhalli Gurukula twenty miles from Bangalore for over seven years, came to Fernhill because of health, he said; but soon he became dissatisfied and abruptly broke away for no tangible reason to join a neighbouring ashram twelve miles away. The lady went into a sympathetic strike with him and did not attend evening studies, saying the atmosphere of the Gurukula had some non-creative factor which she could feel within herself. To synchronise with these dissensions, two local swamis who had volunteered to stay and help with cows and garden also left.

 

To crown all these ills, just when I was tired of explaining that the atmosphere of the Gurukula was the same throughout and that disadoptions came only because of not being in tune with the Absolute, a dog came unawares and committed a nuisance just in front of the holiest of holy places in the Gurukula. All negative aspects, including nature, seem sometimes to work hand-in-hand with women, pets or children in your fight against the forces of Maya. I suspect such a situation to be familiar to many brave heads of families. This might sound superstitious to some modern minds. But the matter could be stated in fully scientific terms when we think of God as a supreme value-possibility, and ill-luck as an occasional negative or dark probability. To the careful contemplative eye, life is seen to swing between these limits. Thus omens good or bad are not outside the scope of scientific thinking.

 

The dog's contribution to the nuisance of the negative situation in the Gurukula took place on August 9th. The cow-boy proved a burglar the same day and broke a lock to steal provisions to take away to his nearby house. I had to get a new cow-boy, Bhimaraj, at short notice.

 

A surprise visit from a man who had come to see me and the lady at Ezhumalai on August 13th, was another signal for a minor ill-fated development in the Gurukula. He was about forty-five and married without children. He had worked on an Indian Navy ship and visited the Mediterranean regions.

 

503

He spoke good English and evidently wanted to join the Gurukula as an inmate. His help with cows and kitchen was welcome just then but, lurking below the surface, an association was brewing which I did not suspect. Guru Kripananda, an old man who had been a rickshaw-puller for Guru Narayana and who was given sannyasa, came to help but became homesick and wanted to go back to his family in Varkala.

 

Meanwhile, my presence was needed at Cheruvattur and Ezhumalai for the Guru birthday celebrations at each place, to take place the same day, August 21st. The two functions went off well, a procession of three cars crossing at the ford at Payyanur onto the Island and returning at 4 PM to enable me to attend both the functions and the feedings, etc. at Cheruvattur and the Island Home, which was an encouraging feat.

 

The next day, August 22nd, was the absurd climax with the lady. It came unexpectedly when she got wet in the rain and left for Fernhill to see the new friend there. She gave other excuses and returned with her things on August 26th. The absurd charges she made against me and how she turned later into an enemy of the Gurukula and me need not be repeated. As I sat in the mail train to Calicut on August 27th, on my return journey to Fernhill, she was seen with her luggage leaving the Island along with the new friend.

 

 

 

504

CHAPTER FIFTY FOUR

 

TURNING TO THE PROSPECTIVE

After a hectic month spent on the West Coast, travelling between Vythiri in South Wynad and Calicut, Alwaye and Varkala from December 13th to January 15th, 1968, I am now back at the quiet mountain retreat at Fernhill which has been my consoling mother for my solitary life from adulthood through middle age to the mature old age of seventy-three at present. This 'Queen of Hill Stations' is a sort of paradise, though not without its whimsical, wet and cloudy days which help to enhance the beauty of this prostitute-like queen, but the final vote always comes in her favour when bright and good days are counted against bad ones, compared to the extremes of other climates.

 

Let bygones be bygones, let us forgive and forget or learn to bury our hatchets and not remember the evil done to us. As Tennyson would say, 'Ring out the old, ring in the new'. In this New-Year mood I am hardly able to switch back to where I left off in the last chapter, where I said some words about a lady which  might still have an uncharitable ring about them. The Tirukkural of Tiruvalluvar, the famous Tamil spiritual classic, also holds up the noble attitude of forgetting all ill done to one and covering it with positive generosity. Nietzsche said there was great tribulation in anything that made us say 'that was'; and Narayana Guru in his 'Atmopadesa Satakam' harps on how the past can bar spiritual progress. When such a memory factor is fully transparent, however, the evil can be avoided.

 

I can myself feel this lightness from the strangling weight of  the past, especially of the immediate dross of the past just gone by at the time I am switching over from the past to the future while I write these lines on January 18th, 1968. Let me make my narrative up to date without lingering on uncharitable or unpleasant aspects any more; and try to preserve the transparency of memory's winds playing on the silken sails of life's boat so as to make it as tender as possible, now that all the ill omens and negativities mentioned above are as good as gone for ever.

 

505

NITYA RETURNS FROM SOUTHEAST ASIA

Nitya Chaitanya, who was in Delhi for three years, planned gradually to fit more correctly into his svadharma (proper way of life) and to the work dear to the heart of Narayana Guru. Even while a student he had organized an inter-religious conference at Alwaye and given me a central role to play therein. What began in him as a vague form of hero-admiration had matured gradually through the years into full-fledged discipleship. On finishing his MA in philosophy he joined the Gurukula at Varkala for some time, but disadoption and adoption alternated in him still, and rival emotions sometimes become evident. As he belonged to a family of poets or artists with a sensibility to higher tastes and values, he could be easily upset and was given to exaggerations in certain matters. The weaning process in the last stages of an idealistic adjustment in his education sometimes showed signs of inner or outer disturbance.

 

Towards the last week of August, 1967, after the bad omens and negative lags in life indicated already were over and, when Nitya was on a visit to Singapore, he developed heart and other troubles - half-imaginary and half-real - which expert doctors diagnosed variously, but which I felt were due to his general weaning troubles from past moorings in life to those which suited his personality more properly.

 

As he was the only qualified disciple who could carry on the work at Varkala left behind by Mangalananda, I was more anxious about his health than I ought to have been as a sannyasin. He too tried his best to recover and by September 6th he was again thinking of his normal engagements, having had to cancel several important ones which fell before that date. This date coincided with a letter which Mr. Damodaran, at whose house Romarin was then living, wrote enclosing her statement that she had severed connection with the Gurukula but continued as a free sannyasini outside.

 

Brighter days were thus beginning to be announced. I had one of my bad teeth pulled and had a new cow-boy instead of one who could break the locks of the storeroom when my back was turned.

 

506

LAND OFFERED AT PALGHAT

 

Palghat.

 

On September 14th an offer of fifteen acres of land near Alatur in Palghat took me to that area from which I returned on September 17th to find that Damodaran had left the Gurukula at Fernhill to meet Romarin, then living in his house. Another short visit to Trichy for the Guru Birthday feeding there on September 24th; and a similar function on October 1st at the hill at Erode; with the final function at Fernhill on October 8th at which eight hundred people were fed - all kept me busy while I anxiously awaited news from Nitya who gave less and less cause for anxiety.

 

He soon returned to Trivandrum by air and arranged for his stay and work at Varkala, building a new stone hut for himself. He came to meet me on October 25th and I made sure that at least half of his trouble was a 'maladie imaginaire' and connected with his inner adjustments in regard to fully respecting his svadharma. We travelled together again to Palghat to perform a fire sacrifice, inaugurating a new centre there on November 1st. We appeared on two platforms together at Yakkara Temple on November 1st and at Chittoor College on November 3rd. Nitya then left for Bangalore en route to Bombay and I made a speech at Calicut Gurukula Study Circle on the 5th, and reached Ezhumalai Island Home Gurukula by 3 PM on the 6th.

 

PRELIMINARY WORLD PEACE CONFERENCE AT EZHUMALAI

I arrived at the new Island Home just in time to hold the preliminary World Peace Conference on the hill slopes and sand beach at the land's end of Ezhumalai Hills. Bamboo worth more than a hundred rupees was luckily available at the ferry itself. In four or five days' time we had to put up a conference pandal; clear footpaths to a point on top of the hill six hundred feet high with a panoramic view of the sea several miles away; and arrange for the feeding and stay of volunteers and participants. The Conference lasted from November 11th to 19th, including two Sundays. Coolies and voluntary helpers did a fine job, showing how teamwork could accomplish what seemed impossible. Shanmughanarayanan came with a car which gave much trouble but served the purpose of transport, so scarce on the island then. The roads were narrow and bumpy but the group never got discouraged. Kumaraswami, Soman, Narayanan, Anandan, two Anandans from Tellicherry, Nandan and Sreedharan, Jenard, Kamalabai, Murali and contingents from Kasargod and Cheruvattur and many local enthusiasts all helped with vigour and joyful effort. A pandal 25 x 18 feet was strewn with white sea-sand and decorated.

 

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Classes began before six in the morning and discourses after 10 AM, at tea time and before supper, took place for hours - all of which kept the disciples busy. The influx of visitors increased from day to day till the successful climax was reached by Sunday November 19th. All were satisfied that the Conference for 1970 would not be at least without sufficient response, even in that forsaken land and strand. As it was the first occasion of the kind, I took upon myself the task of giving talks for five or six hours each day, and covered in outline the subjects to be discussed at the final conference in 1970. On the last day all religions and shades of opinion were represented and all went well.

 

On November 21st I was taken to Kasargod where a group attached to the Subrahmanya place of worship, intended for a temple, received me. I talked to them about how correct spiritual ways according to the way of the Guru had to be followed instead of their current style of worship that was mostly amorphous. On my return journey, I stayed overnight at Tellicherry and talked at the Mission School Hall to about five hundred people at five-thirty PM on the 25th. On the 27th I went to Vythiri, reaching Eagle Estate by 2 PM to inspect a site for a Gurukula there, and returned to Fernhill Gurukula by 4 PM on November 29th.

 

CATCHING UP WITH CONTEMPORARY EVENTS

I have only to tell about a month's story retrospectively to catch up with events that could be called contemporary diary leaves from the life of an absolutist. Apocalyptic scripture is more helpful to spiritual progress than Old Testaments or even Vedic values depending on smrti (memory). Freedom lies before us and the bondage of the past binds our footsteps on the sands of time from behind. From regretful reveries and reminiscences it is good to feel the freedom of the freshness of the breezes of future life still to be lived, whether here or hereafter, however dimly visualized or visualizable.

 

As if to punctuate the past from the future, our brown cow, Sundari, caught lung trouble as its mother too had done, and died after about ten years' life on December 6th. I had it buried on the grounds.

 

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I visited Vythiri again for the inauguration of the new Gurukula Centre at the Lake View plot with a homam and a good gathering at 10 AM on December 9th. John arrived from Bangalore the same day. Nitya also came with a party from Calicut and all met at Eagle Estate and proceeded to the five acres dominating the fresh-water lake in the forest. There was distribution of rice pudding to children of the Tribal School and to hundreds of others after the event at which John, a Christian Father, a Muslim Mullah and Nitya spoke after I myself had a chance to explain the ritual. All went well.

 

JOHN'S SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY

At Calicut on December 10th there was a large gathering to felicitate John on his sixtieth birthday, at which the editor of the Mathrubhumi daily, Mr. K.P. Kesava Menon, presided. I also made a short speech, but the main Calicut representative Lohitakshan did the lion's share of speaking at the Krishna Tutorials courtyard before a fairly large crowd. The next day was spent at the Birla Rayon Mills at Mavoor near Calicut where John spoke, as also Lohitakshan, before the staff club members. These speeches helped to banish misunderstandings about the character of the Gurukula, which is distinct from a mere socio-religious affair.

 

I took a State Transport bus to Alwaye from Calicut on December 12th, and spent the afternoon enjoying the luxury of bathing in the warm river, with Mr. Rao, Gita, his little daughter and neighbouring children. I then entrained from Ernakulam for Varkala, arriving there - having been accompanied by a talkative fellow-passenger most of the way - on December 13th At five in the morning of December 14th, I awoke after a good rest at Varkala Gurukula, with all the inmates and boarding boys, and Nitya in good health and optimistic.

 

OVERWHELMING PRESSURES AT THE CONVENTION

On December 16th I moved to the Guru Narayana Giri and began getting the existing rooms and shed repaired in view of the multiple events to take place on an all-India scale under the various auspices of the Shivagiri Mutt, Dharma Sangham Trust, the committee for installing a marble statue, an exhibition committee, etc. - with duplicate functionaries expressing themselves along a mile route of sprawling roadside establishments and grounds. Roads were being metalled in haste and Presidents and Ministers galore from the Central and State Governments were to be present for programmes from December 19th to January 9th, 1968.

 

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The crowds were unprecedented and the Gurukula Convention - usually a quiet affair of chants and discourses - was all but overwhelmed by the glaring or garish events of exhibitive vanity. Politics, tribal interests and a low grade of religious fervour filled the atmosphere. Some attempts were made to commandeer Gurukula lands and use them illegally as a car park, but such attempts were promptly nipped in the bud. The seven-day programme of the Gurukula was gone through in spite of quantitatively stronger rival elements prevailing all round. The Convention was a greater success than in previous years.

 

At least fifteen thousand people visited the Gurukula and paid their respects to the Guru; and I had to keep responding to various prayers for consolation, cure or blessing from vast numbers of men, women and children, most of whom touched my feet and got prasadam of holy ash, sweets or other eatables, all seven days and even three or four days after. The devotees looked on dumfounded, and women with careworn faces stood in contrast to plenty of little ones with their innocent bright eyes and faces. Relativism was writ large on the faces of the elders while youth revealed the clear natural touch of the Absolute. No wonder Jesus said that of such was the kingdom of heaven. Youth and spirituality are the same. Innocent love and wisdom are likewise to be treated as synonyms.

 

The generality of men and women in Kerala seemed to me at this time unable to express themselves in speech or normal behaviour. A sub-normality of tribalistic groups seemed to be evident more than ever. The evil of drink or trade in liquor as also killing for food seems to have poisoned the healthy souls of these good people during generations. This must have been the reason why Narayana Guru insisted on advising his followers not to have anything to do with drinking nor with killing for food. In the New Year Message I gave out on January 1st, 1968 these factors were specially alluded to besides three other items of importance to the Guru movement as a whole.

 

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TRIBALISTIC NEGATIVITY

The pressure came from dumb crowds who gazed on without any expression, sometimes for an hour at a stretch. I lost my patience once or twice and told them to their face that while they looked at me with the curiosity shown to an animal in the zoo, I silently prayed that a bomb would drop from mid-air to break the awful, arid nothingness that I had to endure in the situation. I even discovered one case in which the poison of negativity had sunk so deep in the progeny of the people that a youth of fifteen of otherwise normal intelligence and bright looks and reported to be a good student of the fifth form could not answer such a simple question as 'What is your name?' He looked on helplessly and all he could do in response was to shed tears while he tried hard with quivering lips for several minutes with the honest intention to respond. It was a strange case of aphasia or apraxia, or both combined, to which abnormalities in speech Bergson has devoted very enlightening paragraphs. The poison of alcohol for generations might have been responsible for this extreme case of negativity. This instance has set my thinking in the direction of the negativity of psychophysical adjustment in tribalistically-conditioned youth, which I think would make a fit subject for an educational thesis.

 

THE TRAGIC LINE BETWEEN PROSPECTIVE AND RETROSPECTIVE LIFE

Scientists are beginning to say that Time's arrow could point backwards as well as forwards. The grand and universal flux of eternal becoming, however, is really experienced as a forward flowing one. Better still, we could say that the breezes play on the silken sail of life, ever pushing it forward, although the wind could blow 'where it listeth' as Jesus would put the verity.

 

There is a grand respiration of the universal spirit with which each man breathes his breath, pushing life step by step forward. In vainly trying to reverse its course we are trying to reverse the progression of life's car of Juggernaut, with all the tragic necessity it implies. It must have been in this sense that Nietzsche called all retrospective values in life a tribulation or a tragedy. As I write these memoirs, I can feel the intensity of this tragic element increase within me as a kind of strangling factor within, the more I approach near to that line of demarcation in my life-story which separates the past from the future - which is just that zero point of the eternal moment of the everlasting present. To avoid the conflict let me now stop to explain for a moment.

 

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The object of this autobiography has been a self-portrait of a common man of the present generation. Spiritual life has usually been tainted with much pretentious cant and many tinsel ornaments have often been used to embellish the image. The natural man with his humanity as such needs no polishing up. Gold needs no gilding, nor the lily any paint. It was Rousseau who in his Confessions showed perhaps too well how this could be done through his over-honest writing. Mahatma Gandhi tried the same but said many things that lowered the standard of normal human nature. I have tried a middle course, but with the same purpose.

 

Retrospection and regret mean the same in essence. In telling the remaining story of about a fortnight from the end of the Convention at Varkala on January 9th, 1968, I have now only to add that I visited Trivandrum and the sea beach of Kovalam on that same day in the evening at sunset. On the 11th, I started for Ernakulam and motored with Mr. Rao to Alwaye. I spoke before the Sankar Theosophical Lodge of Ernakulam on the 11th, and on the 13th I started for Trichur and was taken by car to Engandiyur by Shanmughanarayanan. I spent the 14th evening watching a pink sunset near a sandbar on the seashore close to a ruined Dutch fort at Chettuvai. On the 15th till nine in the morning, I regulated land affairs there.

 

I was also glad to have put up a third hut after the model invented by Jan Bruitsaert, the young Belgian architect who had outwitted all primitive people at their own game with the simplicity of his hut building. It consisted mainly of a tetrahedron covered with coconut thatching. Only four bamboo poles of fifteen feet and two more split up for cross rafters, with coir strings, were needed. It could be built in half a day by two men. Here modern architecture met and shook hands with native life at a zero point. A modern man can sleep on a cot, sit on a chair and write or read books from a rack within this tent-hut.

 

Let me now stop on this note of a zero point which is applicable to the simplest of all huts that man ever built as to the turning point in my own life. In future instalments I shall deal month by month with events from my diary leaves without complications coming from regrets or retrospections.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER FIFTY FIVE

 

BOLDER FLIGHTS INTO THE UNKNOWN

I am at the threshold of my seventy-fourth year and have now almost finished telling my own story up to this point. I have crossed the tragic line that separates retrospection from prospective and free adventurous vision. My birthday is only like a milestone planted, if it could be at all, in a forward-flowing Time which, in proportion to the lucidity of inner vision, could point its arrow both ways as the wind that bloweth where it listeth. The future and past, when pushed forward or backward by our imagination, must attain a nominal limit which, like an Euclidean point, cannot have any dimensions.

 

MYSTIC AND AXIOMATIC THINKING

How do we know this? Because we do not or cannot know anything otherwise. Like 'A = A' we attain here to axiomatic thinking which is neither a priori nor a posteriori. Like the truth of man's mortality, this is not within the scope of laboratory demonstrations, while still remaining fully scientific in validity.

 

Having devoted several hundred pages of writing to the story of my past life, let me turn to some bold flights of the 'alone to the Alone' and indulge in random reveries free from retrospection. Like the light of an electric torch in a mist, the future is amorphous and clears only to the extent that the torch can penetrate. One feels like a prophet faced with an apocalyptic agony or frenzy; as when Jesus raved about razing the stones of Jerusalem. One thinks of doomsday and has to go beyond death before this mystical exaltation can be felt within one. The actual events of the future are there in virtual and undeveloped form, as in a raw film or photo-slide, but the events happen to us when we have our turn to meet them in pure or inner or qualitative space and time treated together.

 

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By now I hope I am justified in explaining in this manner after having written for three or four decades on allied subjects. Between the rueful regret of the past and the frenzied adventure of future conquest, life is a process of double correction and travail which, when freed and made transparent to itself, could spell out that immortal joy promised in all the great scriptures of the world. My life has been in this sense a constant promotion from the regret of retrospection to the joy of the advent of future days. Seated back to back, the regretting and the joyful faces of the Self have ever remained a double-headed Janus moving in the eternal present, carrying its own 'mobile image of eternity'.

 

Yogic meditation is nothing but the recognition of the union of two aspects of the Self in reciprocal, complementary, compensatory or fully cancellable relationship with each other. Beatitude is the absolute resultant where subject and object merge into one and the same matrix or mother-liquid. Otherwise pictured like a crystal of double tetrahedrons base to base, consciousness clings to a vertical parameter within the Absolute Self and, like a vermicular helicoidal living being, goes up to the Omega Point or downward, through the Zero, to the original Alpha Point which is the lower ontological limit of pure being.

 

This parameter itself could shrink from both ends and become that Light of all lights; filling all possible times and spaces; remaining still conceivable or experienced as a universal concrete alternating between the model of a colour solid with the incipient phenomenal aspects implied in some movements - but rising with every cosmic respiration into the whole brilliance of pure incandescence, effacing its own structural outlines with other movements.

 

THE TRAGIC DIVIDING LINE

Between name and form, substance and attribute, time and space, or energy and matter, there is a tragic line that separates the one Absolute Value horizontally; while the vertical logical parameter passes without contradiction, penetrating the separating film between the above pairs of conjugates. The Self and the non-Self, cause and effect, reality and appearance - have between them the indeterminate principle that introduces a tragic element into an otherwise intelligent life that man could have at his command. All the great scriptures of the world have the teaching of this truth at their core as a secret which is both esoteric as well as exoteric. Belief and scepticism have to go hand in hand for the discovery of this absolutely significant value.

 

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During four decades and a half from 1923, when I finished my usual educational career in India, I have travelled, studied, taught, made speeches, held discussions, and written many pages to justify what I am boldly asserting now in what I have just written. The reader must clear for himself the vagueness or the tall claims or generalisations herein, if any, by referring to the explanations I have given in various contexts in my life-long writings.

 

THE PROBLEM OF SQUARELY FACING DEATH

Death has a central, and structurally a total, position in the centre of what is called life. All true contemplation has to take account of this factor which no one can bypass. The vertical parameter as a road goes past this city of death. It has its origin in the womb of the Mother as its Alpha Point, leading through the Zero Point to the culminating doomsday marked out as the Omega Point on the plus side of the vertical axis.

 

Spirituality has to be both apocalyptically positive and regretfully negative at one and the same time if it is to be true to the Absolute, which is sometimes called the Most High God. Whether personified or thought of impersonally, God and Absolute are to be understood as interchangeable terms. A horizontal tragic line, however, divides the totality of forms from names, or the geometrical truth and its algebraic counterpart. It is as in the Pythagorean theorem which proves in two ways that the same certitude of the Absolute is involved - whether through name or form; through the algebraic approach or the geometric. The normative Absolute is the point where both of these meet and where the paradox of life and death reside together. Vertically there is life and horizontally there is death.

 

BEGINNING A NEW WAY IN LIFE

Such in short is my own philosophy, formulated at the end of my main writing career; at the end of my active outer life and the beginning of a fuller inner contemplative absolute life. I am to enter my seventy-fourth year mid-February, 1968, and my autobiography has to turn also on that date from retrospective to prospective visions.

 

The above remarks are meant to announce the new orientation for the guidance of the reader for any future autobiographical indications. In my writings I expect hereafter to be less conditioned in what I have to say by my own background and history.

 

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Even Narayana Guru, who has been my guide in my life, will be allowed by me to fade more and more faintly out of view into the background of yesterday's hundred thousand years; and even prospectively he shall loom less and less significantly in my vision of the Day of all days that is to dawn for me or is ever dawning with its red glow within the mental horizon.

 

There are, however, certain esoteric indications in the writings of the Guru which lie hidden in some of his earlier positions. Insofar as they can be brought out and presented to the modern reader in the light of exoterics rather than mere esoterics, I shall indulge in adhering still to the less-known texts of the Guru to which I feel I have not yet done full justice. With his thoughts at their subtlest and my own understanding of them sharper than before, these references are to be presented in these pages hereafter.

 

THE MATRIX OF THE UNIVERSE

Matter, mother, matrix - all could refer to the same 'world-ground' of Hegel or the emanation on which vertices could form themselves in the cosmogony of Descartes. Bergson's flux of creative becoming in which the 'élan vital' could operate is another. Quantum mechanics, Maxwell's equations and Einstein's three bold visions of the physical world have all to be fitted into the language of the world of modern physics, which presupposes decimal digits or points of numerals of six integers and where the exponents could range from quantities, functions or factors, or obey laws or respond to equations or graphs from zero through unity to N or -N. The entropy and negentropy of thermodynamics; exosmosis and endosmosis of biology; and implosions or explosions of energy as referring to particles or super-novae which have between them a one-to-one correspondence, both complementary, reciprocal, compensatory, reversible or cancellable against each other - bring in a new vision of the universe. Double notions of conjugates such as time and space, matter and energy - their variety and uncertainty are referable still to mathematical laws expressed by formulae based on probabilities or graphs with Cartesian co-ordinates as their common basis - thus we speak today a new scientific language which can be understood by a Russian or an American, irrespective of geographical or linguistic frontiers.

 

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Such are some of the suggestive features of modern knowledge, into the correct and revised context of which old wine has to be put into newer and newer bottles to help the understanding of present-day humans, so as to make them feel free through a truth both experienced as well as conceived. At the Omega limit we have the unknown and the unknowable; at the Alpha limit we have the source of all things in their original matrix which is homogeneous in content but follows the outline of the Self that alone can grasp or experience it. Concept and percept thus condition and limit each other in this matrix which is both physical and metaphysical, insofar as it implies a logistic matrix where semiotic processes can live and move.

 

The failure of the Michelson-Morley experiment; the Lorentz transformations as well as the contraction of Fitzgerald - all make meaning, with the velocity of light as constant, only in this new version of the universe which is neither like earth nor water, but participates neutrally in both - and my only excuse is that I am warning him that hereafter in my writings I shall be taking these matters for granted. By way of concluding the situation to which we have so far kept company as reader and writer together, let me be allowed to sum up schematically the bare framework which we have tried to justify and understand in respect of the Absolute as the highest significant value in life. The following figure and indications are self-explanatory.

 

Along with the static figures, we have to supply the dynamic aspects of the motor-scheme in which life is a process with a double assertion and a double negation involved. The paradoxical will still remain to be solved by inner experience. Here imagination and intuition have to work hand in hand to bring the goal of human understanding within the grasp of the seeker. Peace or happiness describes the goal.

 

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THE DYNAMICS OF SPIRITUAL PROGRESS

Life is a pulsation that can conquer the future or clarify the past with its lucid transparency when all opaque factors of dross are banished by a boldly determined will to understand. The two limits within which life's values, ontological or ideological, are confined snap their hold and the spirit moves about within its amplitude to range within the field, as structurally outlined above. Transcendental exaltation can neutralize a down-to-earth apodictic certitude, and both result together in a normative inner experience of truth. This truth is not elsewhere nor at another point in time. It is already with us. We have only to assert it vertically and deny it horizontally. The various phases of such an inner dynamism will be seen in the verses of the Guru's major works which we have translated and commented upon profusely elsewhere.

 

 

 

 

Life is a dynamic spiritual progression through fields of beauty, joy or freedom. A secret Gaussian curve is implied in such a progress to the goal. This takes place in a spiral ascent or descent within the colourfully-transparent tetrahedron or dome of life, refracting values that end in events pleasing or unpleasant. Each event implies the meeting-point of occasional probabilities with their corresponding descending possibilities - to be conceived individually or collectively or both. At the existence level the event could be a thing of beauty; at the subsistent level it could be a pearl of truth to be understood inwardly; and at the top value-level it could represent a price with which to measure all other lesser values in life.

 

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The soul of man ascending the vertical parameter within the colour-solid of crystal could be a vermicular figure like that of an aeroplane propeller. Both action and retroaction have to be thought of as possible here. These are perhaps somewhat over-fanciful ideas, but without freedom for the flow of fancy, speculation cannot soar on its proper wings but needs must flutter and fall from its mid-air career, especially when we are in search of absolute value.

 

No apologies to conventional writing will therefore be made from now onwards. The freelance, the franc-tireur, the non-conformist or open attitude to new visions of the unknown is avowedly accepted as a model for our speculative writings of the future, which could be called vague reveries, both wakeful and half-sleeping like a kind of day-dreaming going on continuously. It is in such a crucible that fable and fact can mix. Absolute truth can find only in such a matrix its natural habitat.

 

Neither prose nor poetry is good enough for the full style of this kind of writing. What we have in mind could be called a confection of free verse mixed with the rules of a sonnet in strict Petrarchan pentameters, interspersed with factual prose at random. Prose and poetry, like savouries and sweets, must tickle the palate alternately to spell out the satori that is in the simple vacancy of a pure or empty life - i.e. empty with the content of the Absolute that is beyond paradox or doubt. Life would then be for itself, in itself and by itself.

 

MY EARLY POETIC CAREER

It is said of a famous English poet that his father punished him for trying prematurely to be a poet. I had a similar juvenile ambition and had a well-bound notebook from my father's student days filled with sonnets and Wordsworthian lyric poetry composed by myself. I was less than sixteen when I wrote my first sonnet, 'On Sunrise from Adam's Peak, Ceylon, 1908'. I proudly emblazoned on the notebook the words 'The Complete Poetical Works of P. Natarajan'. Some strange thought that crossed my mind, however, a few years later, made me destroy that volume of about fifty pages of lyrics, translations and sonnets and throw the torn sheets into the dustbin.

 

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I do not even now regret this act without which perhaps my genius would have remained stultified in bad poetry, rather than finding a scientific outlet in good though heavy-going prose for over 4000 pages for which I have been responsible to this day. Phrase-manipulation and word-building or playing with the mechanics of English syntax has been my hobby all through my life. Long translations from the Malayalam of Kumaran Asan's 'Fallen Flower' and 'Nalini' were on the pages of that lost notebook. These received the praise of the original author. One noble Petrarchan sonnet was devoted to Swami Vivekananda who was my hero of adolescent years. I cannot recollect the actual words. The third was devoted to the event of climbing Zermatt valley in Switzerland. Yet another sonnet was devoted to a beautiful Italian lady who I had to praise because of a lot that was cast of names at the international school near Geneva where I taught. I got the prize for this competition in which many other English-speaking teachers also competed. Such is my record as a poet which I now want to continue in my own particular way in a style both reminiscent of English literary tradition as well as an Upanishadic one more truly mine as an Indian. My last sonnet of the series that I started so early in my life was the one written at Labro in Italy. By way of keeping up this habit of expressing myself through sonnets at least once in a decade, let me try my hand again here by way of conclusion:

 

TO MOUNT ELY

0 Island peak brooding over the deep, Mount Ely,

That from a small mouse derived thy name

Tho' thy long tale could vie with Himalaya's fame.

Inspire thy votary, whose eye, sweeping over sky and sea

Would wing its way, past all dross of memory.

As when Hippalos, Marco or Batuta around thee came

With palmer, pirate, or hunter of fortune's luxury.

Since then many a billow broke and red sun set,

Eternally announcing the Word in low or loud voice,

As already heard at Sinai, while its echo met

The same from within each heart in hope to rejoice,

Engulfed in one surpassing glow of a double light,

Eclipsing day and night yet not darkness nor too bright!

 

 

 

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CHAPTER FIFTY SIX

 

PROPHETS, IDOLS AND HIPPIES

Reveries, when free from the dead weight of the past, can wing their way freely from the 'alone to the Alone'. Suns can rise or set and eternal breezes blow, proclaiming the same Word, independent of actual space and time under a law of interchangeable cause or effect in the purely qualitative core of Absolute Space. Here the logic with contradiction meets to neutralize the logic without it, understood as a vertical parameter of high word-value. Such was the note on which we ended our previous thoughts. The Self is placed at the core like a helicoidal structural entity ever expressing itself through pulsations of alternating light or dark, ascending or descending the parameter by double correction, or reciprocal compensation, or even neutral cancellation.

 

The term of all reveries is revealed in such a vision where sound and symbol may be said to meet in a golden lamb seated on the throne of God himself as a supreme principle of sacrifice needed for wisdom to become fully absolute. A bright and a dark orb join here side by side and back to back, rising or setting together in the same space - neither within nor without the Self-consciousness. One can experience or understand this alternately or together till all throbbing vibrations or pulsations come to a standstill in the Absolute. Reveries can then reach their term of flight into the unknown and become one with the unknown itself, in silence mute.

 

THE PROPHETIC AND THE APOCALYPTIC

The Apocalypse of the Bible and revealed religions like Islam represents the prospective trend in spiritual thought. When pushed to their limits, prophetic religions tend to become apocryphal. Over-rich in fancy, they tend to lack ontological control, as it were, from the negative pole. Jehovah and Zeus with his thunderbolt suggest gods who are angry and punish sinners or evil-doers. Unlike Demeter, who lacks that prophetic touch, Dionysian and Olympian gods take up intermediate positions on a vertical axis between the Alpha and Omega Points in the scale of values.

 

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The range for prophecy thus lies between the source of all knowledge in the Self and the Omega Point in a vertical ascending scale of reference. The frenzy of prophets like Jeremiah - before which Jericho was to fall, like Babylon and Jerusalem later in the spiritual history of the world - represents that positive attitude which marks out prophetic religions from others with a lukewarm fervour for life's higher values. Razing the stones of ancient cities to build on their ruins a New Jerusalem or Rome is the idiom familiar in the mouths of prophets who are not merely passive onlookers. Prophets are throbbing instruments of God ready to plunge into most effective and radical action at a given moment. Such is of the very essence of the impetus of the will to live, to believe, and to create a new order from the old.

 

When St. John the Divine wrote the Revelations he marked out the final point at which the future could be conquered - though only expressed in allegorical terms. God's wrath or voice is more or less vehement or mild; but when fully sublime it expresses itself in apocryphal mystical poetry of a high order. The Day of Judgement or Doom, the end of the world, or the time when there shall be gnashing of teeth and clenching of fists, etc. - bring up the limiting point in this positive impetus of revelation, revaluation, prophetic frenzy or agony.

 

Fanaticisms, orthodoxies or heterodoxies with attendant possibilities for martyrdom to or for a strong doctrine or article of faith, are tragic items which form corollaries to this prophetic attitude to Absolute Truth. Socrates, Copernicus, Galileo, Bruno, Rousseau, Joan of Arc, Hypateia, and Heloïse and Abelard bring up the long list of heroes or heroines of peace who were fervent devotees of Truth. Reformations and counter-reformations - in which sometimes there is nothing much to distinguish between the two fervent sides involved in the challenging and responding - go on in the pageant of religious history the world over at all times. The blood of sacrifice is shed, whether human or animal, of lamb or calf - often involving an innocent Isaac or Iphigenia in this cruel progression of tragic necessity in the history of religions.

 

Without a dispassionate outlook on such matters the tragedy is bound to be repeated forever. It is the sober Science of the Absolute alone that can make humans see that the offering of a cucumber to propitiate God has the same symbolic or semantic effect in terms of wisdom - which is all that counts. Isaac was about to be sacrificed by primitive unwisdom. A mathematical God can be appeased by a merely symbolic gesture.

 

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All wisdom is thus merely meant to save man from treating sacrifice too realistically with its horizontally actual or real implications of death or bloodshed. Ironically, however, wrong absolutism can itself defeat this purpose and help to heighten the tragedy instead of mitigating its evils. Patriotism demands blood sacrifices in war. A Calvin or a Luther had on their faces the same fervour of the Jewish prophets of old. There is a cruelty evident on their features which was in the name of some stern duty coming from a vague voice of God.

 

It is thus the whole truth understood in its neutral non-dual glory that can save man from future possible genocide. Such bloodshed can add or detract nothing from Absolute Value, correctly conceived. The reactions that we are now beginning to witness in the Church with the revolt of youth must be understood as protests by the coming generation against the exaggeration of prophetic values. Youth can no more be threatened by doomsday or punishments in Hades.

 

IDOLATRY AND IDEALATRY

The three great prophetic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, unequivocally forbid with a categorically emphatic voice the adoration of man-made idols. Before the desert sands of Mount Sinai were reached by tribes who later became transformed through history into these religious groups such a condemnation of idol-worship was little known. In India the worship of idols is so general that no one gives a thought to see if it has any evil elements lurking within it. The whole of East Asia from Bodh Gaya to Kamakura is strewn with millions of images of the Enlightened One in meditation, sometimes smiling, sometimes sad.

 

The language of the worship of icons has been more esoterically perfected on South Indian soil where, starting from the phallic model of the Shiva Lingam through Pasupati or Ganapati, thousands of forms, often with multiple series of heads or hands, are worshipped zealously with full zest by votaries of the many gods permitted by the Hindus.

 

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A complex protolinguistic imagery is implied in them and, like the Cross, the stone or metal icon is used consciously or unconsciously as a structural version of the highest God, whether called Shiva, Vishnu or Brahma. Each of these forms marks three points or cross-sections in the grand process of phenomenal becoming in the heart of the Absolute. Ideals and idols are meant to meet here in reversible or interchangeable terms.

 

The hierarchy of divinities or demiurges of the Hindu Pantheon are infinitely numerous. The Upanishads give us a choice between three gods to start with and thirty three or thirty three thousand three hundred and thirty three as the ramified classes or sets are further elaborated into corresponding sub-sets. All these meet in a class of classes at the central point of origin. The elemental, hierophantic, or animistic entities which do not belong to the prophetic context are to be given their positions between the Alpha Point and the point of origin at the central zero. After the zero thus touched, the prophetic side contains similar positive, conceptual or theological values representing deities like Zeus or Apollo, Indra or Varuna - hypostatic entities of the positive side, having a one-one correspondence with the elementals.

 

Above and below, thus conceptually and perceptually understood at once and together, we have a schematic pattern where hypostatic gods have their corresponding hierophantic values represented below as above by a one-one correspondence between sets of equal status in the duplicated ensembles.

 

Thus we get a variegated double schematic pattern, within as without, as when the glow of embers is projected through holes in a perforated fire-pot - to use the example of Sankara in his Daksinamurtistava (Verse 4). It is this double-sided Self, neutrally placed between the negative and positive aspects respectively of the Self and the non-Self, that is to be kept in mind when a correct idol-worshipper worships idols fully, knowing the Agamas (secondary wisdom literature of applied spirituality) in the proper context of Vedantic wisdom.

 

Narayana Guru, who had to install many images at the request of his disciples, ended such a programme by asking them to be satisfied with a mirror in place of an idol, so as to bring Self and non-Self face to face. Such worship, inasmuch as it adores the Absolute, is not to be treated on a par with mere idolatry objected to by the prophetic religions trying to rise above sordid relativist values.

 

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Thus there can be an idolatry regulated by correct idolatry, as distinct from mere fetishism regulating such. In every case it is the Self as an idol that is equated to the non-Self as an ideal or vice-versa. The implications of such an osmotic exchange of values are moreover inevitable in any form of adoration, Christian or Pagan, prophetic or primitive. Every form of adoration is as between an adorer placed in the Self and the adored in the non-Self; the one being a mirror-reflection of the other, with neither of them superior within the homogeneous matrix of the Absolute. It is the absolute value that counts finally.

 

TOTEMISM, FETISHISM AND IDOLS

When Muhammad iconoclastically broke the idols of Mecca but left intact a meteorite in the Kaaba to mark a place of annual pilgrimage for millions of his believers, he meant only to abolish a plurality of local, fixed, tribalistic fetishisms or totemisms, but not idols which are God-made like our own bodies.

 

A beautiful Mumtaz-i-mahal (the elect of the palace) was glorified in marble in the Taj Mahal. The prophetic impetus here unconsciously turned retrospective in the Mogul emperor, Shahjahan, and fixed in an idealised worship of feminine virtue or beauty. When a man or a woman admire themselves in a mirror, a subtle and perhaps a naturally excusable form of idolatry or fetishism might be implied. The towers of a church or mosque - being local, fixed and man-made things - can be looked upon as open to the same objection. The four minarets and dome in Santa Sophia of Constantinople or Istanbul glorify, perhaps unconsciously, the virtue of virginity, purity, chastity or austerity as could be reflected in architecture. The minarets protect a rare value such as a vineyard where the black beauties of the Song of Solomon were to be jealously guarded against mixing with all and sundry outside. Avoiding idolatry, even in these subtle implied forms, is thus not easy in any civilization. Viewed in a correct perspective, the image, the idea, the percept and concept, name or form, can be made to meet and cancel out effectively in the Absolute.

 

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THE LIVING WORD AND THE DEAD LETTER

The bronze image of a Shiva Nataraja dancing in glory over the recumbent figure of its own negativity of value is a supreme example of how a dead image can speak a living word and cancel out the static by the dynamic within the amplitude of a two-fold frenzy.

 

When unilaterally understood, both the word and the letter can be alternately dead or living; and when correctly viewed in a dialectical perspective proper to the absolutist context where the sign or symbol can operate semiotically along a parameter representing a constant differential factor, the objection against one or the other can vanish. Non-dialectically understood, idolatry alone is therefore evil, but is not so when it is dynamic, where name and form meet, revealing supreme Value.

 

The Taj Mahal is a marble structure reminiscent of a woman's beauty that a Mogul emperor treated with respect or admiration. Appreciation of such a building has implicit in it the same intentional value-content as an idol such as that of a Nataraja in bronze, where the essence of the bipolarity involved is critically understood. Idolatry in one form or other enters by the back door of adoration, implicitly or explicitly; and even when one anoints oneself or orders a luxury bath in a high-class hotel one can be charged with making a fetish of one's own body. Some latitude has thus to be made so that iconoclasm itself may not become a fanatical fixed idea. Both ideolatry and idolatry can be equally objectionable when not viewed in the proper context of absolutism to which both must non-dualistically belong without conflict.

 

Crates, a Greek philosopher, is said to have had a woman philosopher companion, Hipparichia, who insisted on behaving as his wife, without any sex being implied between them. Unable to get rid of her, he allowed her to go about with him wherever he went to teach. She once had a strange argument with the man, which ran somewhat as follows: 'If you beat yourself you are doing harm. If I beat you up it must be the same'. On hearing this, the man threatened that he would strip the woman, but she showed no objection from a womanly standpoint. This incident (in Diogenes Laertius, VI. 97-98) shows how, when man and woman are correctly related dialectically, both together interpenetrate into one personality, as in the case of the androgynous Shiva, where the image and the idea can merge vertically and with a perfect complementarity so as to reveal the same Absolute Value beyond conflict.

 

The marble statue of the Guru Narayana, installed at Varkala on January 1st of this year, could be treated dialectically so as to abolish its stigma of unilaterally static implications. The secret here is contained in Chapter III, Verse 10, of the Darsana Mala of the Guru Narayana.

 

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It is up to the worshippers and those who installed the statue to make this aspect of their worship clearer than what they have been able to do through ignorance of this dialectical approach.

 

DIARY LEAVES

As promised, the autobiographical memories here become changed into diary-leaf notes covering each month. I had told my story up to my seventy-third birthday celebration at Somanhalli in my last instalment. It was just enough to mark a milestone in my life, in which the thoughts about myself retrospectively understood were the subject-matter.

 

As a local-fixed entity at a point in time, my birthday has no importance, but as a phenotype of a universal concrete human being at a given point in time, I have my significance for all human beings forever. I have a dark human side and a bright divine side complementarily mixed up as interpenetrating counterparts in my personality. The interplay of the idea and the image, the sign and the symbol, the visible and the intelligible, can attain to cancellable transparency of crystalline colour or smokiness, or else have an alternating iridescent glow of tints, shades or saturations. Every man has essentially the same elements in play within his life. In this sense my own story is meant to be that of anyone else. The plus and the minus, the male and the female aspects, are always present even in the purest of celibate sannyasins. It is the mind that matters over the body as such.

 

From mid-February to mid-March my reveries were focused on man-woman relations and on an interesting summary of that characteristic negative revolt of youth in the West called variously the Unlimited Freak-Out (UFO), the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Hippies or Flower People. The latest news that has interested the Indian public in this connection is that this movement has taken favourably to Indian spirituality or mysticism - at least as represented by Mahesh Yogi of Rishikesh. But first let me cover matter-of-fact events of this period before going into side reveries connected with them.

 

I left Fernhill for Bangalore on February 11th, 1968, and took a taxi from Mysore to reach 16, Infantry Road, quite early the same evening. The Kumars were waiting for me.

 

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Maya put me in the Somanhalli bus at about ten and I reached John's place to have lunch and rest time there before reaching the 18th mile Gurukula by 4 PM. Preparations were underway there under Mogappa's guidance and the place was to have a face-lift with whitewashings and a pandal to be decorated ready for the birthday of the 18th.

 

The function went off well with about eight hundred persons fed biryani (fried rice), payasam (milk pudding) and buttermilk chutney. The usual visitors came and a greater influx of local devotees sat and sang bhajans (hymns) together with a meeting in the morning where Mr. Kariappa, a leader of the district, spoke in support of Gurukula ritual and teachings. The second edition of The Word of the Guru was brought speedily by air from Ernakulam by Mr. Pai, the publisher himself, and was released for sale. Prasad came from Varkala and conducted the fire-ritual, which was taught to a local group.

 

Gopi came again and remembered the sad story of his separation and reunion so reminiscent of what Victor Hugo pictured in respect of the heart pangs of the father of Marius of 'Les Misèrables', who was reported to be seen at a certain seat in a church and to shed sobbing tears through the years, as others noticed, at the sight of a boy and a nurse who came to the same church. He was the father of the boy but a cruel lawsuit based on class discrimination had prohibited him from ever visiting him. He consoled himself by watching the boy as he grew up through his teens, with tears shed Sunday after Sunday.

 

In Gopi's case the pang of separation had disappeared. He had shed tears of joy the year before for their reunion, and this time the separation was for maternity reasons only. In spite of all this, the same tears rolled again down his cheeks and the same emotions overwhelmed him as on two previous occasions. Emotions are in all of us, independent of events, waiting to express themselves. Solipsism seems thus a conditioning natural to man, and we are unhappy or happy with or without sufficient outer reasons. Some Hippies are said to be able to induce in themselves a 'honey of the spirit'. Tears could perhaps be as sweet in certain cases, of which Gopi must be a good example. There is no basic difference between a smile and a tear, four-dimensionally speaking. Disasters do not happen to man, but we happen to disasters.

 

I started for Erode on the 22nd at noon, and after a similar but smaller birthday celebration at the new Gurukula hilltop on February 25th, returned to Fernhill on the 27th evening.

 

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One of the news items missed out in the Gurukula news refers to the marriage of Fred Haas with Shadja, a young Kerala teacher with whom he has been friendly for some years. The news of their registration as husband and wife came as rather a surprise. Civic marriage as such is non-understandable in the Gurukula context, which can be characterized in the language of the pop music of the underground as 'anti-middle-age, anti-boss-class and anti-young-marrieds'. Absolutism tends to be deaf or dead to civic respectability as such, and the sannyasa pattern of life cannot easily accommodate within its scope couples bracketed with each other whose interests, by necessity, are bound together by horizontal factors such as earning and supporting a prospective or real family. As in propositional calculus, if 'p' and 'q' are related as binary elements, there are sixteen possibilities of fact or logic-truth probabilities in such a relationship. It must have been for this reason that Narayana Guru himself laid down a rule for all ashrams (absolutist retreats) that men and women should live separately and mix only when they help higher values to manifest.

 

Fred had consulted me on how he was to fit into the Gurukula as a married man in mid-November 1967, when the marriage proposal was first mentioned. Fred had not yet made up his mind to live in the Gurukula. At the Gurukula convention at the end of the year. Fred took off his sannyasi robes and together we went fully into the implications of his continuing in the Gurukula as a married man. John got both of them to sign an agreement so as to keep the Gurukula from being involved too much with individuals who have to favour each other above Gurukula general interests. The conflict of the Good of All and the General Good had to be avoided.

 

I was therefore happy to meet the couple at Somanhalli on the morning of February 14th. Shadja looked a less formidable woman than I had imagined and reminded me (as I told her as a joke) of the heroine of Bernard Shaw's 'A Black Girl in Search of God'. Whether she is a good woman or not, as with any other woman, cannot be judged by my masculine standards of goodness or badness. Such is the paradoxically dialectical snag here. I have nothing against marriage, as some might suspect. In fact I am definitely for it for the simple reason that it is normal to man and woman.

 

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In the name of false spirituality sex tends to be discredited by great religions like Buddhism and Christianity.

 

Narayana Guru had warned me against obstructing marriage on the very first occasion that I mentioned to him my idea of starting a Gurukula. I wish to respect this hint to the fullest extent, but wish also to be guided by the logistics and dialectics of the situation, which is by no means a simple and mechanically solvable one. One has to face double loss or double gain in this kind of bargain. One has to be prepared always, however, to take the cash and let the credit go, in the spirit of the Lord's Prayer. A full formula for all such coupling contingencies is expected to be evolved as experience gains ground.

 

THE NEW ABSOLUTIST CHALLENGE OF THE HIPPIES

On February 21st, before I left Bangalore for Erode, John put into my hands a magazine called Encounter (October 1967) in which I was to read an article, 'A Map of the Underground' by Peter Fryer. John himself had sympathies with the 'Underground' and he has been helpful throughout these last decades in drawing my attention to any interesting articles or other publications in English which he thought would particularly interest me.

 

The article by Peter Fryer covered nine sections, with a crowding-in of information about what the sub-title specified as 'The Flower-Power Structure and the London Scene'. We shall examine the concluding sections mainly to offer our remarks, in order to bring the movement into proper perspective in relation to a Science of the Absolute we have ourselves always stood for.

 

IX (p. 20): The writer refers to the 'fundamental solipsism' of the Hippies which prevents them from a 'campaign on civil liberties issues'. 'Sensation is the essence of life' according to them, by which 'practical activity' is considered 'meaningless' by them. They look upon themselves as 'self-sufficient individuals'. As stated by Beatle George Harrison, one of their spokesmen, 'Try to realise it is all within yourself. No one else can make you change'. In ushering in their Golden Age, 'policemen are kissed and given flowers and offered a month's pay if they will leave the force and look for another job'. On the basis of the above, the over-all charge that the writer flings at the Hippies is that they are 'solipsistic' and suffer from 'puerility'.

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'Solipsism,' like pantheism, as an objection to spirituality could be both deprecatory or laudatory in the light of a total and scientific view of a science of human values. Here it is flung at the Beatles and Hippies as a kind of nickname for purposes of discrediting them or by way of caricature. It is the same with eclecticism and syncretism, which are similarly seen to be used by critics of Vedanta and religious writers in the West. To follow aggressive political programmes interfering with others cannot be compatible with watchwords such as 'liberty, equality and fraternity', which are basic to the search for collective human happiness as declared as the first desideratum for any popular constitution or movement. Even modern physics recognizes a degree of subjectivism in its epistemological outlook.

 

VIII: The Importance of Colour: The serious charge referred to in this section is 'mindlessness', lack of 'critical intelligence' and lack of 'outstanding talent'. Other expressions meant to discredit them are 'cultural nihilism' and 'iconoclasm', together with 'outright mysticism'. The Hippies are also blamed because they 'gaze for hours at abstract coloured lights'. They are not interested in football pools or in television, but 'simply dream'. The writer admits, however, that there are similarities between these occupations of older people and the 'full-time dropout' or Hippy.

 

This interest in coloured light is the discovery of the structure of the Self in man. By including colour as a reality in the Self the Hippies and the Beatles are on the verge of a great discovery of the universal concrete reality within themselves. This discovery by itself will have a greater revolutionary value for the world of tomorrow than any aggressive political programme, howsoever rationally conceived.

 

VII: In an earlier section more specific references are made to the possibilities of a language free from words or a way by which 'non-verbal communication' is attained by Hippies. 'The visitor sees a collection of charming but withdrawn individuals, smiling vaguely at friends, jerked at times by the music's rhythms, but ultimately quite self-sufficient and self-absorbed as each intently explores his private world and savours his private visions'. It is a 'contentless' form of entertainment. The 'aim is to communicate intuitively rather than verbally. Tight and bright-coloured dresses go with the 'hung-on-you style' that is at present catching on. All this is also becoming a paying concern'.

 

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'Stroboscopes project flickering lights which are supposed to synchronise with the brain's alpha rhythms'. 'Much use is made of hollow slides, into which coloured oils and other fluids (evolving jelly etc.) are injected'. Both musical and 'extra-musical effects' are used, which the others outside this 'sub-generation' cannot understand, and they anticipate 'printed culture to be doomed' in the 'Golden Age' that is being ushered in when youth will 'slough out' of the old. To the same context belong the 'doctrine of inner space' and 'Flower Power'. All this is implied in a 'state of mind'. The stage itself is meant to represent what is sometimes referred to as an 'experimental environment.'

 

VI: This is the longest section in the article, devoted to how the drug act is being misapplied to these gentle non-aggressive youth of a much-misunderstood sub-generation who dream of 'breaking through to the spiritual fountainhead within each person, instead of taking it from any authority' Cannabis users are cruelly rounded up in London by the police. Marijuana and LSD, like the Vedic soma juice, induce a 'dreamy state' where 'love, career, ambition, home and family-formation' are pushed into the background. The adolescent revolt is based on inner experience such as 'Lucy in the sky with diamonds' or other visions of 'marmalade skies' or having 'kaleidoscope eyes'. Such experiences are referred to as 'mind-blowing' or 'mind-expanding' or 'psychedelic'. In such a state they 'try not to hurt people' although smashing musical instruments in an attitude of nonchalance is sometimes considered normal. The actual drug-addicts are said to be 'one in fifteen'. Alcohol-based morality is repugnant to cannabis smokers. Many young innocents suffer from blind police harshness. One of the sympathisers with these people put up £18,000 to pay for a full-page advertisement in The Times of July 24th, 1967, under the caption, 'The Law against Marijuana is Immoral in Principle and Unworkable in Practice'. Medically speaking, the drugs favoured by the Underground are said to be far less harmful than alcohol and tobacco (Storr, Sunday Times, Feb. 5, 1967).

 

The subject of the relation of drugs to mystical feelings is not directly connected with the philosophy of the 'adolescent revolt.' All we have to say here is that the anti-drug law must be applied with a sense of equality, justice and human understanding, whether by the London police or by their counterparts in the USA.

 

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The remaining earlier sections of the article deal with the attempts to put down the movement in the name of indecency or pornography. Elizabethan morals, mostly outmoded now, are in vain and convey a sense of humour and anachronism as they are upheld by the London police in respect of this young generation. About the nature of the Hippies and the Underground themselves, the following summary extracted from the first section of the article must suffice.

 

They have been described as 'These natural-born heirs to the Beat Generation' who represent an 'anti-authority and anti-police syndrome, comprising a related cluster of organisations in London with widespread American affiliations. The UFO (Unlimited-Freak-Out) Club in Tottenham Court Road, London, acts sometimes as its mouthpiece. They are further described as 'internal émigrés' or as a 'Freudian proletariat'. Their guiding principles are enumerated as follows: (1) Do your own thing, regardless of what anyone else thinks or says or does; (2) Drop out; (3) Turn on every straight person you can reach - if possible, with cannabis or LSD; if not, turn him on to beauty, honesty, fun and love; (4) If authority interferes with you, love it to death'. One section is called 'Diggers', who dispense food and clothes. A favourite song sums up the attitude of Hippiedom as follows: 'With our love - we could save the world - if they only knew'.

 

Now that the Hippies or at least the Beatles have taken sympathetically to the 'Transcendental Meditation' of Mahesh Yogi of Rishikesh, the details about them given under these reveries may help others like me to try and understand them. My own estimate is that they are not to be treated light-heartedly. In them I see the beginnings of a new start in an absolutist way of life in the youth of the West. It is a fully-stated Science of the Absolute alone that can save them and save humanity from the kind of mess against which theirs is a vague and still to-be-formulated protest.

 

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I dedicate the following sonnet to them:

 

TO THE FLOWER PEOPLE

Sweet Flower People, known by whatever name,

Beatle, Hippie, or Freak-Out of the Underground,

Come let us speak the secret language we have found

In non-verbal colour patterns, which watched become

Eloquent within each of us, revealing the same

Contentless glory by mere union of light and sound,

Expansive mystical experience of sweetness unbound,

Pointing from dark infamy here to tomorrow's bright fame!

To me, a stranger by clime and time, do extend

Halfway round the globe your ever-loving hand,

A fellow pilgrim long labouring for the same and

With you, young, long-haired, bright-eyed orphans of

Wonderland - Let us together witness in inner space,

abstract and mute,

The dark-splendid colourful vision of the Absolute.

 

(Fernhill, Nilgiris, India, March 4th, 1968)

 

 

 

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CHAPTER FIFTY SEVEN

 

THE ROLE OF PROTOLINGUISM IN UNIFYING SCIENCE

Reveries have to depend on moods. They do not have any direct relation with the cross-sectional world of actual dates or events. One travels in a liquid stream of consciousness when one sinks into reverie. The stream can be sluggish and carry the dreamer slowly, or it can be lightning-fast. Lazy day-dreaming and a split-second atomic explosion could be thought of as limiting instances.

 

The blinding light of such an explosion can efface all regrets and wipe off retrospections, except perhaps the most transparent of its rays which can look at reality both prospectively and retrospectively at once with the full mutual transparency of a direct or indirect luminosity. Self-luminosity and its reflected glory can become equally brilliant when full knowledge dawns.

 

THE APOCALYPTIC VISION

When the contemplative searchlight of vision is directed to the future of the Self in a most general and abstract sense, apocalyptic visions result, like those recorded in the words of St. John the Divine at the end of the New Testament in the book called Revelation.

 

Prophetic religions speak in a stern Zeus voice of a doomsday or day when all will have to stand before God to be judged; when there will be fire and brimstone portents, the clenching of fists, gnashing of teeth, eating of wormwood or drinking of gall; and when all relativisms will be absorbed into a grand synthesis in the supreme value of the Most High Godhead. Allah is equally uncompromising but is the very embodiment of generosity. Apodictic certitude about such matters results from axiomatic thinking where logical proof is not called for. The conclusions are said to be 'necessary' or the arguments 'adequate'.

 

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The goodness of God is an apodictic verity because it cannot be otherwise. It is the Omega Point in the structure of thought that decides such a question in the same way as when a teacher writes A=A and says it needs no demonstration or proof. All apocalyptic literature in any scripture, Parsi, Buddhist, Sikh or Jaina, has such a basis for certitude; but when questionable contemplatives or authorities in theology write by guesswork and where imaginations run riot, the demands of pure axiomatic or intuitive thinking are vitiated. We then get a body of literature called apocryphal where the norms of thought come under suspicion of being loosely applied.

 

RELIGIOUS ART AND THEOLOGICAL SPECULATION

The glorification of the Lamb on a par with Godhead figures in prophetic art and literature to this day. In the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican one sees the painting of God the Creator on the ceiling represented as a full-blooded, though old, bearded and generous human form. Although God is not to be visualized too realistically, concessions are seen to be made in the name of Art or Literature when the value of such is sufficiently high. The Rosy Cross or the wondrous Cross of Fire are seen to be substituted - by the same need for myth-making in man - in the place of idols consisting of human figures. Islam is sometimes seen to tolerate the open palm as a symbol of the Most High, although all indirect language, even metaphorical analogy, is not approved.

 

The architecture of the house of God or the cubical walls of a New Jerusalem are not so strictly prohibited, and the Kaaba contains a meteorite which is acceptable to orthodox Muslims as a 'predicative' object of reverence not considered as coming under the worship of stones as such. It is supposed to represent the universal concrete coming from God and not from the hands of mortal man. Here both Islam and Christianity are seen to approve of structural instead of actual forms of humans or gods.

 

HINDUISM AND THE APOCALYPTIC NOTE

Epiphany, or having a visible vision of God, is not countenanced favourably in the light of correct Christian belief, although hearing God's voice is considered normal. There is a whole chapter in the Bhagavad Gita which might be said to be open to this objection. Hierophany, however, is recognized in the description of a hierophant or holy person with ecclesiastical authority.

 

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Visible gods seen from the earthly side are presences rather than divinities of hypostatic grades. The elementals and nature gods of the hylozoic or animistic context are generally omitted from the divinities of the prophetic religions.

 

It is the hypostatic idea of God which is favoured in this prophetic tendency in religious thought that developed beyond Sinai and round the Mediterranean regions. India has not been touched by this tendency very much. Wherever there was need in the scriptures for a god who would punish sinners, we find the opposite tendency stressed. Hindu thought has tended rather to glorify sex and other factors attributed to concupiscence as a gift of God, where rules of conduct are not transgressed. Krishna and even Vishnu enjoyed a normal sex life. They even included eroticism under the type of mysticism that they valued. The Hindu pantheon contains some jealous gods who lift cattle or steal wives, and a primitive form of pure natural sex is not taboo. These were all treated as nothing but human.

 

Rousseau in the West would also perhaps agree here. Pagan or classical gods like Bacchus or Hercules lost nothing of their dignity through being endowed with love of wine or women. The legendary 33,000 gods of Hinduism revel and run riot with hierophantic features of a Dionysiac rather than an Apollonian form of values. The carvings on the temple towers, especially in South India, support many grades of divine or semi-divine figures or entities; and both heaven and earth as well as inter-space tend to be overpopulated with mythical products of the fecund mystical imagination of which it is hard to teach the usual Hindu even now to be ashamed. The Puranas (traditional legends) and epics give recognition to all grades of hierophantic or hypostatic hierarchies. Their very language depends on these forms and denizens of the world of airy nothingness thus created to support popular contemplative or religious values. They have become an inevitable part of everyday life in India.

 

Fact and fancy thus interlace to make an otherwise humdrum life sufficiently interesting to the common people, giving them the wherewithal to build culturally closed commonwealths based on varied ideological or linguistic heritages. In a semi-dreamy state of existence the rich deposits of wisdom imbedded in language, like sediments that have settled on the bottom of a waterway or lake, remain thus everlastingly in the dull background of the collective or group consciousness.

 

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The mind of man finds consolation and repose in these figures drawn from the prototypes which fill the rich carvings of rock temples in India. This fanciful stone-language has its own dialectical way of communication.

 

In some of our earlier writings we have gone into the intricacies, delicacies and dialectics of this kind of speaking through stones across the frontiers of generations. Side by side with the metalanguage of signs, there is a more primitive and basic way of communication of deeply significant information which is made possible by geometric characteristics. These we have elaborated sufficiently under the name of protolinguistics. What we would like to underline here regarding protolinguistics is that there it is geometry that counts; while in metalinguistics, there is scope for algebraic expression. When both are used to the advantage of each other, wisdom gains in depth and clarity.

 

As a religion of a non-prophetic kind, Hinduism tends to favour protolinguistic expression through form. We find in it rich possibilities of an aspect of reality which remains only vaguely revealed to the more positive religions, which tend to favour metalinguistic expression. It is not a question here about which is superior. When put together into a common structural whole, both bring to light a powerful instrument of great beauty for research in thought.

 

A LANGUAGE OF UNIFIED SCIENCE

At the present moment we are on the verge of this momentous discovery in the history of humanity. When discoveries coming from adventures into outer space link up with the rich protolinguistic deposits in ancient literature, such as those found in the stone language or in the highly suggestive style of the Upanishads, we shall have in our hands a new means of approaching total or final reality which ever remains the one all-absorbing subject worthy of human understanding. The hierophantic gods of Hinduism and the structural suggestiveness of the Upanishads and even the Vedas, when looked upon in the light of semantics and logistics, reveal a rich outcropping of the human heritage which could be used to further the cause of human solidarity.

 

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THE WOODBRIAR TEMPLE FESTIVAL

Such is the apocalyptic vision which filled my reveries between the 15th of March and the 15th of April, 1968. My reveries on hierophanies started on the 15th April at the Subrahmanya Temple Festival, which I have been attending regularly for nearly twenty years. The installation of the stone image of the Lord Subrahmanya was performed by me accordingly.

 

This festival was meant mainly to appease the hunger of working people through an absolutist gesture of generosity, whereby all could eat ad lib at the table of the Deity, as it were, in contrast to Christian worship, where only intellectual food is distributed, even at the expense of a starving stomach. I was put down for a speech at 4 PM and I sat before a small audience of about a dozen people, and happened to speak on the very topic of these reveries.

 

After the festival, as just before it, Karunakaran and I were the guests of Major Kunhi Raman at Brookview Cottage, Gudalur, which was by itself a pleasant though short interlude. On the 16th evening we reached Fernhill Gurukula to stay one night only.

 

GITA CLASSES AT COIMBATORE

As a pleasant surprise we found Yati Nitya and two others from Varkala, V. Natarajan and Chandran, already at the Gurukula before us. Nitya and I had to compare notes and exchange ideas on many matters of detail in connection with interesting and ever-new developments in the widening Gurukula movement, with seven or eight centres beginning to function within the limits of India itself. We lost no time in briskly finishing this work. Dr. N. Subramaniam of Coimbatore came the next day (17th) at about eleven to take us all to Coimbatore for a couple of days' stay to give talks at the series of Gita lessons arranged to be given at the Savita Hall in that élite town. All of us left after lunch to go to the nursing home of Dr. Rithupaman, after a comfortable drive down the Nilgiris ghat road, driven by our friend Sankaran in his beautifully conditioned car.

 

There were three gatherings at which Yati Nitya and myself spoke, two at the Savita Hall where there was a gathering of about two hundred people interested in new comments on the Gita. I had to face an audience of orthodox persons who asked pointed questions about the semantic implications of Vedic texts. The other meeting consisted mainly of followers of the Guru Narayana. Most of them had come from Kerala to settle in Coimbatore.

 

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It took some explaining on the part of Nitya to show how Guru-wisdom and tribalistic loyalties to the great Guru as a social reformer or leader had to be treated separately. The Gurukula was interested only in the wisdom of the Guru. An impressive new building was being put up by the group to disseminate the Guru's teachings.

 

On the 19th I was taken back to the Gurukula after a lunch at Dr. Rithuparnan's, who was our chief host for the stay. Other contacts were also made and a new group of disciples or students became virtually founded at Coimbatore by this visit. Nitya and party went to Varkala the same day.

 

THE PLEASANT ROUND OF LIFE AT FERNHILL

I made plans to stay till mid-April at Fernhill. My daily life has fallen into a strict routine where recreation, reading, talks and quiet meditations, with meals at proper hours, keep my old-age life full of peace, ease and a sense of fulfilment. I never miss my mile walk down to the Lovedale Lake view and back uphill, taking the climb as easily and slowly as I can out of respect for my heart which I do not want to tax unduly. Old age and death have to be faced squarely with all they imply in the life of a man, just in the same way as when in infancy life was faced with a light-hearted, carefree nonchalance. Like morning and evening they have a reciprocal complementarity between them. They are counterparts to be cancelled out into a perfectly self-possessed normality or neutrality in the absolute and eternal moment.

 

FURTHER IMPLICATIONS OF STONE LANGUAGE

The talk I gave at Woodbriar festival set my reveries going forward in a certain direction. After returning from the Coimbatore trip, the refrains of some of the early devotional writings of the Guru Narayana kept ringing within me as an automatism of word-idea content.

 

The six-headed Subrahmania represents vertically the six points where plexuses indicate psychophysical functional synergic centres. There is a sinuous bend at the hip of the sculpture which represents the function of a simple harmonic wave or rhythm, corresponding to the Gaussian curve or Fourier function which regulates all alternately phased life-pulsations where wave and frequency functions enter into complementary relations from the possible as well as the probable sides of the total cosmic phenomenological situation.

 

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Each such event takes place at the core of the vertical axis, and the androgynous God of the Cosmic Dance, Nataraja, represents these functions which are now clearly known to modern physics and mathematics. The female principle is the negative and the male the positive impulse. Subrahmanya and his elder-born, Ganesa, represent between them the same complementarity in this proto-linguistic dialectical language spoken through stones.

 

STRUCTURALISM IN MODERN PHYSICS

Post-Hilbertian mathematics, where algebra and geometry meet on common mathematical ground, together with the implications of the theory of ensembles of Cantor and others, has brought to light the legitimacy or adequacy of axiomatic and structural thought. These stem out of the schematismus of Kant, which was restated in dynamic terms as a 'schéma moteur' by Bergson. In terms of biology, and in the context of osmotic interchange between liquids of different concentrations, exosmosis and endosmosis are spoken of as two complementary living processes going on hand in hand. The terms of electromagnetics and thermodynamics, with their theories such as that of the big bang, or that of the violet or red shifts in an expanding or contracting universe where supernovae or twin dwarf stars create positive or negative disturbances in interstellar or galactic space, are all becoming familiarly incorporated into language. Implosion and explosion, entropy and negentropy regulating microcosmic or macrocosmic events or happenings, are now part of the pattern of thought-expression beginning to overcome and break through the old frontiers of vernaculars.

 

What I have surprisingly come up against in my most recent reveries is that there is an epoch-making discovery of the first order which needs to be openly stated - in stating which I become bolder and bolder each day, especially after the long efforts I have made recently in giving form to an 'Integrated Science of the Absolute.'

 

From the times of the Vedas or the Pentateuch a certain mystical, structural, wisdom-language has persisted in all lands, incorporated in literature of a magical or apocryphal order. The conundrums found in Upanishadic literature have presented a major challenge even to masterminds such as Sankara and Ramanuja, each of whom tried to fit them into a consistently global or whole philosophical vision of their own.

 

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The high quality of literature we have inherited from these great teachers and their successor-disciples has all but left the great heritage of wisdom in a cul-de-sac. The light of scientific philosophy from the West, like that of Minkowski who viewed the structure of time-space in an absolutist context; and the three great theories of Einstein: the restricted, the general and the unified relativistically - have all now come together to support us in our speculations. Metaphysics and physics can be expected soon to reveal a Unified Science of a Truth which cannot be dual or plural. Such suppositions would hurt the understanding of man and demolish the axiomatic basis for all speculation.

 

Cartesian co-ordinates and reversible equations give us new references of thought. The language of pagan hierophany has as much to teach as the more refined, civilised or conventional language of hypostatic prophetic values. Scientific certitude is where both of these can meet. If put together they would result in a language of unified and universal science - dissolving all the mental or actual frontiers that man places between himself and his fellow men. The confusion of tongues after the Tower of Babel would vanish, and thus human understanding would gain a pace forward in its progress to the goal of that Truth which shall make man free. Such are some of the bold reveries or fancies that have filled my thoughts.

 

THE UNIFIED LANGUAGE OF STRUCTURALISM

Revelations or apocalyptic literature, along with the mythology of nations, tries to speak a contemplative language across linguistic frontiers or actual ones, which tragically create misunderstandings between culture and culture. All speculation must have a normative reference. Just as sailing without longitudes and latitudes drawn for structural purposes across the globe is dangerous; so too with speculation, which should not sail in the mist without a compass and rudder guiding and regulating its possibilities or probabilities. A structural language alone can save man from shipwrecks, major or minor, due to hidden rocks or gliding icebergs. There are streams and currents, besides trade winds, to keep in mind. High and low tide floods have also to be counted. Therefore, it is not a fanciful recommendation on our part to speak of this new approach.

 

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A LANGUAGE WITHOUT PARABLES

Religions so far have spoken in parables or proverbs. Jesus himself is seen to be aware of a new and more universal language suited for speculation or theorisation, whether physical or metaphysical when, as we read in St. John's Gospel (XVI. 25). He says:

 

'These things I have spoken unto you in proverbs; but the time cometh when I shall no more speak unto you in proverbs, but I shall show you plainly of the Father.'

 

This same promise is foreshadowed in the book of Revelation where, towards the end of the book (Chapter XXI) we have unmistakable indications of a language with fully evident structural implications:

 

'I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end'. (6)

 

'And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain and showed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem descending out of heaven from God'. (10)

 

'Having the glory of God, and her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal'. (11)

 

'And he that talked with me had a golden reed to measure the city, and the gates thereof, and the wall thereof'. (15)

 

'And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal'. (16)

 

'And I saw no temple therein, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it'. (22)

 

'And the city had no need of the sun neither of the moon to shine in it; for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the Light thereof'. (23)

 

Here we have an example of a kind of mythical or mystical language in which letters of the Greek alphabet are employed to advantage; as also mathematical and, what is more, colourfully solid geometrical or crystalline forms - speaking the lispings of a special schematic or structural language. It would be vain to unravel the mystery of the hints or suggestions thrown out here by St. John the Divine, inspired by angels or voices of God in the presence of the Lamb which has a very high status beside the throne of God. The beginnings of protolinguistic structuralism are thus foreshadowed in unmistakable terms at the end of the New Testament.

 

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As no believer or sceptic could be expected to be correctly balanced between tendencies to orthodoxy or its counterpart of heterodoxy - both of which tendencies necessarily co-exist in human nature - this apocalyptic text will be considered apocryphal by some, while a few will see in it the apodictic language of structuralism. Normalization and re-normalization of thought are here called for. In the light of what we have already written on such subjects we shall not venture one step further in reading meaning into this vision in which angels, gems, pearls, thrones, voices, with a bridegroom and an enthroned God - all shine in the heavenly light shed by the Lamb in a quadrangular, crystal-clear unit suggesting a tetrahedron, with the tree of life on either side of a stream. We can only say that it is interesting to note that Kant, Minkowski, Eddington, Weyl, Schroedinger, Riemann and a host of modern thinkers are also beginning to use a similar language. Fancifulness is not discredited by scientists any more.

 

By way of concluding these reveries, the following sonnet is offered as one instance of how fancies could follow modern scientific notions or at least not be incompatible with them:

 

A SONNET TO SCIENTIFIC IMMORTALITY

My birth was an accident to the world around

That happened with its echo within, in reciprocity,

When an electromagnetic wave-complementarity

Cancelled out in brilliant supersonic sound,

Condensing within a split-second span, Time-Space unbound,

Conforming to a colour-solid schema of power and beauty

Adequate to universal reason's instrumentality.

Verifying laws and equations on reversible ground:

Death must needs belong to a similar event,

Viewed as a retroactivity, catching up ever the same

Equal state - negentropy gathering what entropy spent,

While the twin-bang of implosion-explosion kept up the game;

No double loss here; only vertical gaining

Absolute Value counts; all else is horizontal feigning.

 

(Fernhill - March 29th, 1968)

 

 

 

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CHAPTER FIFTY EIGHT

 

MORE THOUGHTS ON HIPPIEDOM

As I turn my diary leaves I find that no event of importance transpired after I returned from my Coimbatore visit in mid-March until the end of that month. I continued my quiet days, planning practical details in view of the World Conference at the seaside Gurukula. My reveries were influenced during the first half of April by old articles by Allen Ginsberg, a top beatnik or hippie about whom John sent me a full report that had appeared in LIFE magazine. He was being referred to as a Guru, and this word seems to have found an acceptable place in the vocabulary of the English-speaking world. I corresponded with Garry, Marc and Harry and tried to explain how I looked upon the Conference about which they and John did not at first see eye to eye with me. A better basis for common effort has now been established.

 

On April 16th I started for Vythiri where Nitya with Mr. Pachukutty and Mr. Lohitakshan were to join me next day for consultations in respect of the school land there and in respect of the various committees to be nominated for the Peace Conference. Our work was finished on the same day and we reached Calicut by the 17th, at night. Nitya and I entrained for Payyanur on the morning of the 18th and reached our Island Home by 4 PM. Together we visited the Cheruvattur Gurukula and satisfied ourselves that the hundreds of trees and the cultivation there were being properly looked after and supported. On returning to Payyanur next day we had two public-speaking engagements; one opposite Payyanur Railway Station at night, and another on the 21st at the centre of Ramanthali township within our own island. We tried as best as possible to remove misgivings or suspicions in the public mind about our comings and goings, especially in respect of plans for a World Conference. The response showed support and confidence.

 

Nitya left Calicut on the 23rd, while I continued at the new Gurukula to help the two inmates there grow their own food and vegetable crops. I had the luxury of gazing on the expanse of the sky and ocean whenever I was not asleep, whether during the leisurely hours of midday or midnight.

 

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I discovered that such wakefulness was equal in status to sleep in the rest it gave, whether in terms of the positive or the negative aspect of the personal relational parameter or axis within whose amplitude rest moves up or down, giving its wakeful or sleepy benefit.

 

After more than ten days of such luxury, I returned via Tellicherry and Mahé to Calicut. I made some contacts in view of our Peace projects and came to Fernhill by dusk on May 1st to stay for the rest of the beautiful month when Ooty is most favoured by contrast with life on the plains, as also on its own merits as the long-reputed Queen of Hill Stations in India. The culminating event, after the alternating sunny and rainy days, with horse racing as in England and the Dog Show in between, is the famous Ooty Flower Show which, however, has lost its distinction of olden days and become more of a popular village fair. Man must have his holiday mood now and then in whatever form it may be. To see humans happy does one good, any time, anywhere.

 

THE HIPPIES ONCE MORE

 

Smoking dope.

 

The taxonomy and classification of hippies has to depend on a diagnostic aetiology of symptomatic expressions of their peculiarities of belief as well as behaviour. The hoboes known as beatniks have their own sub-generation of hippies, of which such groups as the four Beatle entertainers might be more generally known.

 

From those who smoke strong tobacco and sing or swing to music nonchalantly in nightclubs to those who pass pot pipes, there is a gradation that is noticeable. When one reaches the stage of smoking marijuana and treating it as nothing wrong, one becomes properly admitted to Hippiedom.

 

The complex world where hippies 'freak out', 'tune in' and 'turn on', is a challenge of this substratum of society that modernism has to face. Here repression seems wrong. Life's arrow cannot be turned backwards. The authorities have to ride on the tide and find a solution. The key to the nomenclature of the varieties of hippies can be found in the kind of drug they prefer. In this matter, besides the theoretical diagnosis of hippie philosophy, I found an interesting paragraph in LIFE (July 24th, 1967) written by Albert Rosenfield (Science Editor) which is worth copying here;

 

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'What exactly is marijuana? It is one of the most ancient of 'psychochemicals' - the drugs that affect the mind. It is neither an opiate (such as heroin) nor a barbiturate (sleeping-potion). It is rather one of the hallucinogens, which include mescalin, psylocybin and the much-publicised LSD. LSD is the most potent and hazardous of these, marijuana the mildest and least harmful. They all derive from the Indian hemp plant, cannabis sativa. When extracted and concentrated, the resin becomes the most potent of cannabis drugs, hashish.

 

Marijuana - known as kif in Morocco, bhang in India, and dagga in South Africa, among a whole lexicon of other names - is a smoking mixture made up of dried and crumpled parts of the hemp plant... the same dose affects different people differently, and can even give the same person different kinds of 'highs' depending upon his mood...Marijuana raises blood-pressure and lowers body-temperature somewhat; raises the pulse-rate and slows breathing. It dehydrates the body and increases the need to urinate. It lowers blood-sugar levels and stimulates appetite. It renders the hand less steady...'

 

The 'high' state induced by drugs is not unlike the state of mind well known among wandering sadhus of India. Dr. Dana Farnsworth of Harvard says 'they believe that they belong to a superior order of human beings, as actually observed by outsiders. They tend to be irresponsible and uninterested in things like pursuing studies, keeping a job, or supporting a family.' The similarity this attitude has with the detachment of a yogi as described even in the Gita, cannot be overlooked. Whether the yogic 'high' state is induced by drugs or not is not the most important question for us. Our own interest lies in the fact that the hippies are discovering a new vertical dimension to their own personalities which modern civilization had so far denied them and kept as a closed or secret chamber. An absolutist revision can banish problems here easily and save a whole rising generation from possible pitfalls.

 

VISIONS ARE VISIONS: PSYCHEDELIC OR APOCALYPTIC

If prophetic religions give credit to apocalyptic visions such as we analysed in our last two chapters, hippiedom likes to speak of visions which refer to the lower half of the vertical axis. These two are complementary and have to be given an equal importance.

 

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When the balance between them is correctly struck it would not be wrong to predict that such whole, integrated, or high knowledge would pave the way to human solidarity. Shift the accent one-sidedly and troubles between closed static groups start to spell disasters, big or small. Such is the secret that a full-fledged Science of the Absolute alone can lay bare or solve.

 

As my reveries this month have lingered on some of these contemporary topics which John as usual made me aware of by sending me clippings from journals, they also rested awhile on some of the rarer works of the Guru Narayana, which I had hitherto avoided translating because of their deeper implications. By a strange coincidence I took up one entitled 'Ten Verses of Phenomenal Reduction' (Prapanca-suddhi-dasakam). Orthodox punditry in Kerala, it is strange to note, has not dared to touch such compositions, even with a pair of tongs, because the speculation here is on the originally and structurally-based lines of a new mystical, though scientifically conceived, language. Myth or fable is seen to be almost fully avoided, and even when metaphorical analogies are fully relied on, a physico-logistical frame of reference is seen threadbare as underlying the warp and woof of the speculative fabric.

 

The composition is conceived neutrally from the normative meeting point from where eidetic presentiments, positive as well as negative, range themselves in the vertical parameter, participating both ways as lines or figures of light. Self-luminous or shining by reflected or refracted light, chromatic or achromatic - the visible, phenomenological presentiment of the actual world could be reduced into purer and purer terms, culminating in the vision of the Absolute as such in its full purity. In other words, we could say that the horizontalized version of the world of ordinary experience is reduced step by step into its own verticalized version which is only given to one who has attained to the pure wisdom that shines when all vital urges have been transcended.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER FIFTY NINE

 

INTIMATE MEDITATIONS

 

Old Singapore in the 60's.

 

Like Sherlock Holmes, I have to come back to the reader afresh after an interregnum of about four months. I took a ship from Madras and reached Singapore on August 27th. My life in Singapore kept me engaged with classes, lectures, radio talks, visits and Narayana Guru Birthday celebrations till September 15th. The same kind of programme was continued after I went by air to Kuala Lumpur. On the next day, I motored to Malacca, participating in the Theosophical Society's annual celebrations with a lecture. I addressed a public meeting in the Town Hall the same night. Talks on the Gita and other lectures continued at Seramban till September 23rd, when I travelled to Ipoh by plane.

 

Afterwards I visited Penang and repeated a similar three-days' programme there. On returning to Kuala Lumpur on October 1st, I continued there till October 19th, the days being filled with serial classes on the Gita and Vivekacudamani (the 'Crest Jewel of Discrimination' by Sankara) at the Vivekananda Ashram. I stayed at the Batu Caves on the outskirts of KL and spoke at the Town Hall on Gandhi Jayanthi (birth) Day in the presence of an international gathering of diplomatic and other dignitaries. Then, after fitting in a three-day programme at Klang on the way to Singapore, I reached the quiet atmosphere of the Gurukula there after over a month of hectic days.

 

Although the Chinese food there agreed with me very much, the general depressing atmosphere of exaggerated ancestor-worship with its heavy negative drag had a strange, unmistakable, psychophysical retro-effect on me. From this there arose a strange setback in my metabolism, which had already become sluggish. The equatorial feebleness of the earth's magnetic current also caused me to lose my appetite for several days. Also on November 4th I ran a low temperature but slowly recovered by taking manibhadram, which is a rich confection of ancient Ayurveda containing senna as an ingredient, which acts as a rare rectal peristaltic stimulant which cleared my ileum of all its mucous blockage which otherwise would have tempted expert allopathic surgeons to open up my entrails just to see what was wrong. From John's case and Nitya's experience I cleverly avoided this possible disaster.

 

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On November 23rd, I was fit and ready to have a full-dress send-off to India by jet plane at the busy airport where all friends, old and new, were fully represented. I must have lost to the theory of relativity three hours contraction of time while in flight to Madras because, as common sense should always prove right, Shanmukham waited for me at the Madras airport completely oblivious of the three hours that I had lost while flying many thousand feet among the clouds.

 

On November 27th, after three days in Madras, I flew to Trivandrum where again I had a full reception by friends and disciples. Next I was back at Varkala to continue my normal routine at Guru Narayana Giri. Pierre and Annette Gevaert, who had come all the way from Belgium by car, after chasing me in vain in Madras and other places, met me after all on December 5th at Varkala, but I could be with them for only a couple of days. I went to Cochin, Calicut, Ezhumalai, Cheruvattur, Tellicherry, Vythiri and Minangadi, sleeping in different beds almost every night, finally reaching good old Ootacamund to face the challenge of its frosty December days. Leaving Ooty again on December 18th in Dr. Subrahmanyam's car, I reached Coimbatore and entrained in the Cochin express to arrive at Varkala.

 

The rest of December till January 1st was spent in the usual preparations for and participation in the annual Gurukula Convention. Five international visitors: Dr. Carroll Raum and Mr. Hilarion from the USA, Bhikkhu Aryananda from Australia, Bhikku Vivekananda from Thailand, and Jean Letschert from Belgium, and of course John, again in good health after his four months of anxious time and a stomach operation, made the Convention specially bright.

 

The seven days' programme of wonder passed off with the usual éclat and all became quiet at the Guru Narayana Giri where I had at least a thousand devotees to greet or bless or argue with - including men, women and children - each of the ten days, when streams of them came up to the hill which was brightened with lights and decorations for the festive occasion. An atmosphere of greater triumph prevailed this time in spite of countrywide bus-strikes at this very period.

 

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On the cool and misty mornings through which sunbeams played on the creepers and bushes around the bandstand-like pavilion with a coconut-leaf roof, the Giri seemed a paradise of simplicity as I began to get ready a final correction of the typescript of the magnum opus which was carried in formal procession to the hilltop by Nitya with the help of two pretty lady typists and a regular professional man from a Government office, by the evening of January 9th, 1969. With a fire sacrifice and chants by Gurukula boys on January 10th, six of us sat round tables correcting, collating, clipping and arranging; often retyping pages - involving both contrition and nearly tears of despair.

 

The sea breezes coming from the ocean's breast were, however, a consolation. But even this sometimes failed to improve how the whole panoramic valley was filled with insects, big and small, which became a nuisance as they were attracted in thousands round the open electric lights under which we sat bending our heads. Light was their attraction while wisdom was ours, and destruction now or a little later was the common goal for the big or small insects, including humans. Life can go out of focus or come back into focus with meaningless alternation while it goes on ever the same within the matrix of the neutral Absolute. Thus we worked days and nights on end wherein, round the clock, we felt like a bird standing still in mid-flight when relative time cancelled-out against absolute time, melting both in the oblivion of common sense, which has an absolute status of its own.

 

We change the key of our biographical jottings. I am now heading towards my 75th year of life. I have tried to keep up my morale and health, which seemed to touch a low trough after my 70th birthday. My eyesight has been going from stone-blind to high gravel-blind except for the right eye, miraculously saved by the dextrous operation performed by Dr. Sankaran of Calicut two years ago. My sprained leg with which I limped at places from Benares to Belgium has since become better through sheer correction by use. My meditations and yoga practices, though mainly negative - regularly kept on through the last decade more intensely and consciously than in almost all the previous decades of my adult life, with devotional practices reaching backwards even to my teen years - seem to be standing me more in good stead as I advance in years. Early rising and being absorbed in solving some hard problem or work at writing has helped to balance any otherwise negative or inert nature which has characterized my life, as I said, from my school days.

 

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Added to all these items of personal regime, a regulated diet and proper bowel movements, supported with timely reflexes - with enough rest thrown into the bargain - keep me sufficiently lively and jovial as a happy-go-lucky septuagenarian through this usually chilly Christmas season. I delivered the usual New Year Message on January 1st, and find myself a confirmed pagan with my own variety of obstinacy, which can even be called a form of healthy-mindedness. A sort of minority-mindedness has always been my personal trait as I remember from earliest days. This has cost me many lonely hours in which I had to keep my own counsel as well as my own company, with a touch of wilful self-righteousness. But all these have been fully compensated for by the growth of a strong sense of joy from within.

 

Death stares in the face of everyone at all times and when one thinks of one's own death it refuses to be limited to the cessation of life of one individual. Another man's life takes up the relay race from beyond the point where the former might have left off. Thus, collectively, the general flux of life goes on uninterrupted, and any cross-section we might try to take of a truncated flow of time is bound to fail as badly as when we should try to cut a rising flame with a flashing sword or abruptly interrupt a mounting melody upsurging within our own heart. Men may come and men may go but life goes on forever. We can divide this flux, if at all, only schematically by a horizontal line or plane interposed at right angles to it. When so analyzed, the subjective and objective strands of individuality or of action, virtual or actual, pass from one side to the other of the interposed plane, encroaching both ways. Watertight compartments are not possible. We are living death every moment and its fear melts away when we are fully aware of its meaninglessness.

 

In this part, after this interruption of four months in my biographical writing, I request the indulgence of my admirers to let me lapse into one more degree of intimacy and vagueness in the style of my writing. Factual aspects of my life are not important any more. The rest of my biography should be treated as a dialogue between myself and myself in the form of intimate thought or self-meditation.

 

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UNITIVE UNDERSTANDING AND WORLD PEACE

Before such an intimacy with myself becomes fully affirmed, let me refer to Nitya Chaitanya Yati, who deputised for me fully at the headquarters at Varkala. He had his own troubles and tribulations when he realized all of a sudden that the World Conference for Peace through Unitive Understanding to be held for the second year from November 10th to 19th at the Gurukula Island Home at the ample seaside of Ezhumalai, was a burden placed by me on his shoulders which was too heavy for him to carry. He had to pass through days of anguish at Calicut when he reached, as it were, the zero point of desperation, not being able even to bring out the first printed programme of the Conference in time. The island was inaccessible to traffic. How were the expected delegates to be fed? What was the simplest way of accommodating them? What about pandals (open thatched halls) to be put up? Of course, sea and freshwater bathing facilities were there. But still a full-fledged World Conference had the word 'impossible' written on its face. One could say that it was by supernatural intervention that I got the report, before starting from Singapore, that everything had arranged itself favourably at the eleventh hour, making the Conference a successful event at which all who took part could legitimately congratulate themselves. The high standard of discussion and exchange of human understanding was effected by common living together and mutual participation.

 

Another event worth mentioning, which also took place in my absence was the arrival of Jean and Nicole Letschert, a Belgian artist couple who lived an unmarried life 'while still married' as they said of their relation. It was a sight to see them both working hard, carrying half-buried stones from the ruins of European houses that once existed on a hill within a thick wooded area, overlooking an ample freshwater lake, acres in extent - a rare spot where five acres of land had been gifted to the Gurukula. They worked almost continuously and, when I gave them a surprise visit at Vythiri, they already had a roof and had raised the parapets for a hut four feet high, and were ready to cement the floors. They seemed to be thoroughly enjoying their work.

 

Their paintings, some of which I also saw, were of a non-representational kind where the human form, when faintly present, blended with geometric patterns which cancelled-out each other in glorious symmetrical designs of colour and form.

 

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I at once thought of the possibilities of a colour language to serve as a lingua mystica to explain protolinguistically the verses of the Saundarya Lahari (the Upsurging Billow of Beauty) of Sankaracharya, whose cryptic verses had recently intrigued me highly and allured me towards attempting a structural analysis of this much-misunderstood yet truly advaitic text, hitherto lost to the pseudo-scientific esoterics of Tantrism and the Sakti cult of post-Buddhist decadent India.

 

Further scrutiny of about forty verses with the comparative study of interpretations by scholars, including the verse translation of the same by the famous Kumaran Asan, has convinced me that all of them have fallen short of a truly critical estimate of this masterpiece. Sankara himself must have thought in terms of a structuralism, then understood, belonging to the Tantra and Sakteya background whose remnants still persist as remains of past culture both in Kerala as well as in Bengal at the present day. This stratum with its precious esoterics has been more or less overcovered by other debris accumulated and deposited in other parts of India, where the chequered rule of emperors and kings and chieftains - with greater or lesser Muslim permeation - has succeeded in covering up even the outcrops of this stratum. The Tantra school has its protolinguistic traditions. The Mother Goddess is also a favourite in the esoterics of yoga. Thus we touch here a rich deposit of ancient wisdom of rare beauty and quality. Protolinguistic speculation excels itself here.

 

Having thus struck upon a vein of treasure-trove, I have been directing my interest in scrutinizing and analysing structurally some of the verses. Even the title has been intriguing and elusive enough to attract my interest. The words 'Saundarya Lahari', which are the title of these hundred verses in classical Sanskrit, suggest both the intoxication resulting from beauty as well as a general overwhelming upsurge of the aesthetic sense in the contemplation of the Absolute Self. This aesthetic sense, arising out of the Supreme Bliss-Value, is of the essence of the emotional content of the Absolute. Ethics, aesthetics and penetrating metaphysical analysis meet in the upsurging of the sense of beauty within the contemplative as understood here by Sankara.

 

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In this composition Sankara proves to be fully absolved from the possible charge of being a dry-as-dust philosopher, with which appellation he is associated in the popular mind because of the exegetics and logistics in which he indulges in most of his commentaries. Although Sakti-Tantrism is the evidently-assumed background of the composition before us, there is unmistakable internal evidence that seems to suggest that Sankara, the well-known Advaitin, is its author. His seal can be discovered as imprinted on every verse by the clear absolutism revealed, and by the classical finish of the verses - as inimitable as in the case of Kalidasa. In order to give the reader just an initial foretaste of the delicacies and delights of this composition from a master philosopher and dialectician, we translate here the first verse of this series.

 

'If Shiva should only when united with Sakti

Get the power to manifest in becoming;

If again, without such, he has no ability even to pulsate,

How then could one of unaccomplished merits

Have the privilege of bowing to or even to praise

One such as you adored by Hari, Hara, Virincha and others?'

 

Here we have more than one rhetorical question by which Sankara fulfils the conventional requirement of adoration of a deity. As an Advaita Vedantin, his praise has necessarily to refer to no other high value than the Absolute. The upanishadic way does not give primacy to ritualistic or meritorious works for emancipation. The structural and literary requirements of the Vedic context are, however, retained for linguistic purposes here as useful for a negative way by default, rather than by open obligation for direct worship or praise of a single goddess or deity.

 

The goddess here belongs to the context of Brahman (the Absolute). This and every other verse of this series approaches the Advaita by the negative way of omission rather than by recommending adoration of Parvati or Sakti as the followers of the Tantra school, more properly so called, might do. The Tantra background however, is seen here to be taken advantage of and adapted to serve the requirements of the highly suggestive and structural language proper to the lingua mystica of Vedanta.

 

In the last line, reference is made to the triple gods, Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma, who have the functions of preservation, destruction and creation respectively in the theological and mythological context of Hinduism. He implies here that, as a devotee praising the goddess as the negative absolute factor coupled with Shiva (who is positive as the counterpart of the feminine principle), he is not on the same footing even of the Vedic gods who belong to the context of only relativistic and meritorious Vedic ritualism.

 

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The schematic analysis in the diagram below will reveal more of the structural implications applicable to the aesthetic value of the Absolute when viewed from a negative rather than from a fully positive perspective.

Note here that it is the totality that is indirectly adored or praised.  The question of merit does not even arise when the total Absolute Value is intended here. The manifesting function is that of the horizontal negative, and the pure Absolute itself is beyond action, as it is comprised within pure verticalized positivity. There is thus only a direct praise of the Absolute initially at the start of the work, from a negative viewpoint.

 

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SIXTY

 

A VISIT TO MOSCOW

 

Moscow in the 60's.

 

I stayed at the Gurukula proper at Varkala after finishing the correction of the big manuscript, and was ready to go to Bangalore, which I did by air from Trivandrum on February 10th. I stayed with the Natesans on the night of the 9th. About a score of friends present at the airport helped me to finish the formalities and emplane for Bangalore with stops at Cochin and Coimbatore.

 

It was a clear forenoon and I could see the ground below as the aircraft flew fairly low, revealing rivers, roads and lakes with fields and forests or farms where humans were bound to varying degrees of necessity involving mutual action and reaction, alternately drawing close or pushing apart from their fellows. It was like a motley pattern of some rich fabric spread below as the wings combed the distant ground vista as if inch by inch while we covered at least five miles per minute. The ghats were passed like wrinkles in space and the dry sunlit scene revealed to me a bird's eye view of Bangalore where I had been born 74 years before - grown from a plague-ridden village to a modern soaring city of parkways, avenues and factories.

 

From February 10th to the 25th at noon I had to be in the two Gurukula sites at the 18th mile at Somanhalli and also at the new Gurukula centre at Suryapalayam, four and half miles from Erode, on the 16th and 23rd respectively, where my own 74th birthday was an excuse for the gathering of all interested in Guru-wisdom. Both these events went off better than expected. New friends, including the two Ahmedabad ladies, Chandra Bhatia and Bharati Trivedi, returning from the New Jersey Gurukula, participated in the functions. The exchange of generous mutual goodwill was more strikingly evident than ever before. Again on the 25th at noon I was at Bangalore airport with a dozen friends to give me a send-off.

 

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ABSOLUTISM AND A SUCCESSFUL CAREER

At Bombay also friends met me. The four Natesans: the father from Trivandrum, his son Dinesan from Bangalore and Mahesan and Kalesan from Bombay, all offered transport and lodging facilities on a very luxurious scale. They were all self-made men, and each had inherited a type of absolutism of his own. The first Natesan started his career as an antique dealer from scratch and it must be because of this absolute zero in his career that his sons go from one success to another, toeing the same hereditary line. Caste, when based on heredity and when thought of occupationally with no spiritual difference involved, is thus incidental and harmless. It is when put on a pedestal and glorified for its own sake that it becomes the monstrous menace that it is. Matching profession and type can alone be the support that caste can claim for a scientific basis. In itself it is a dangerous superstition. Indian authorities and religious leaders have still to realise the malignity of the caste system. A free India and caste cannot live together.

 

Mahadevan Natesan's flat in Malabar Hill, Bombay, left almost nothing to be desired, both in situation and in accommodation. While the sea lay in front of both the opposite balconies, the interior had admirable treasures of art and interesting inmates. I took rich and wrong food at wrong times and again had to correct my inside economics. The well-regulated regime of the Gurukula life proved thus to be both an advantage and a disadvantage. Mechanical routine must alternate with living adjustment and change if life is to function progressively, adapting itself by action as well as retroaction. There must be chances of feedback and retroaction as in the diastole and systole of the heartbeat, which sets the functional model for a healthy life.

 

RENEWED CONTACTS AT BOMBAY

Skyscrapers of twenty or thirty stories had become usual in the new Bombay and the old villas of the Victorian aristocracy were overwhelmed by bolder new-world architectural forms, though drab and like matchboxes in outer aspect. The last word in suitable architecture for India is still to be spelt out letter by letter.

 

Four days in Bombay brought me in contact with friends old and new and groups young and old, with some of whom I had to be vehemently outspoken against the closed and static ways in which they persisted in thinking in respect of building up the movement of Narayana Guru. The Guru-role still remained covered up by less important social values. With them I touched the possible limits of my protest and wish hereafter to leave the matter alone.

 

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On March 28th there was a regular party at the flat at which three swamis and the Consul General of France, with many Bombay and Kerala friends and European ladies and gentlemen, talked over cups of tea. I sat answering questions on the dialectical solution to problems, including that of World Government.

 

OVER THE HIMALAYA

March 2nd was the day I had to go from Bombay to Moscow, covering three or four thousand miles by air across 'the earth's measuring rod', as the Himalayan range was called by the ancient poet Kalidasa. One felt elevated to a superhuman and semi-celestial sphere by the very thought.

 

After Delhi, which was reached before 8 AM after leaving Santa Cruz Airport, Bombay, at 6 AM, the very voice of the announcer in the plane sounded a little outlandish by its scraggy, nonchalant loudness and a strange harshness of voice, as if coming from some other side of space. Flying at thirty thousand feet, we were told that we were soon to be within the air space of Pakistan after flying over the famed city of Udaipur. The morning was sunny and daylight streamed into the airliner, but soon it headed into thicker and thicker mist as the crinkled foothills of the Himalayas were crossed into Afghanistan by the Hindu Kush and Pamir regions. For more than half of the total time of six hours to reach Moscow the ground was lost to view. There was visible, however, an island-like patch which the voice referred to as the historic city of Samarkand. My mind went back to the days of Alexander's campaign to India. An hour and a half later, we were asked to see the Volga in the USSR, whose waters could be seen winding through rich fields of vegetation. Most of the rivers were ice-bound except for streaks of water visible at the centre of their courses.

 

The last lap to Moscow had to cover the two hours' lag that we again had to pay to Einstein while common-sense time remained again valid at Moscow. Thus the world had not only to be divided by geographical boundaries, but by areas which accepted the same standard time. How fluid time and static space could belong together still puzzled me as something strange, both to common sense and to any unified science that could be thought of with consistency or correct consequence.

 

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It is here that an Integrated Science of the Absolute was required and I was just then carrying the corrected copy of it in my handbag. Broken pieces of standard times necessarily belong together as one time, at least for our refractory planet - this green earth which is a visible reality to every jet-plane passenger of today.

 

LANDING TROUBLES AT MOSCOW

The landing at Moscow was announced, but the ground was all white and snowbound. The temperature was minus-two farenheit and all was bleak except for sunlight which came with us, as it were, announcing spring prematurely. I had trouble at the health control counter where a smart-looking Russian lady quickly counted on her fingers and found the discrepancy of one month's lapse in my cholera certificate. I had overlooked the month because of the thirty days of the month it was issued. Our friend at the Indian Embassy, Mr R. Natarajan, came to meet me at just this time, but his pleadings in Russian with the two ladies of the section only helped to further tighten their control. I was to be taken to the quarantine centre for five days of isolation and, according to friends in the know, including the manager of Air India, no power on earth could make the Moscow Health Authority relax its rules. 'It has never happened before', they said, but I still remained calm and confident like a Christian Scientist and only meditated inwardly that all wrong must right itself when well left alone. The lady finally seemed to relent and a last telephone call by her to her superior officer quickly brought the consoling news, giving me full freedom. Thus we went off, with baggage and customs formalities over, in a car driven by a hefty leather-jacketed Russian driver along the 25-kilometre straight parkway to Moscow, with its broad prospects of snowbound avenues where Greek and not Gothic architectural motifs with Byzantine spires or domes broke the monotony of the drab apartment houses looking matter-of-fact in plainness.

 

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF MOSCOW

The whole city had a silent dignity of looks, and the sidewalk or pavement restaurants or shopping centres were glaring by their absence. Perhaps the five cent go-as-you-please underground railway of Moscow also reduced the pedestrians on the top boulevards which seemed to vie with Fifth Avenue, New York or the Place de l'Etoile in Paris in more than one centre in the big city.

 

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The skyscrapers of Manhattan were not there but were compensated for by the tall spires of multi-storied hotels put up in different parts, sometimes even thirty stories high. The skyline thus had its monotony broken, and Moscow proved it could hold its own among the world's great capitals with a subdued grave dignity.

 

The frozen river of Moscow had many skaters in the afternoon sunlight and, dressed up to the ears in black overcoats and fur caps with earflaps, there was a sombre look in the passers-by. The cold was cruel, and it is no wonder therefore, that Russians normally feel the world is against them. Every minute meant harder work. Charity has to begin at home by necessity and one can love one's neighbour as oneself only by way of contingency. This explains many of the other peculiarities that I began to notice later on. The balance of give and take, as between home and abroad, needs constant dialectical adjustment anywhere in the world. One can easily fall into the error here of robbing Peter to pay Paul, which can only be adjusted by an overall sense of Absolute Justice or Equality, conceived dialectically and not mechanistically.

 

VISIT TO THE RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

On March 4th, I was taken to the Friendship House where Mme. Valentina V. Lubomoudriva and Mlle. Irena Yershova received me and talked to me over cups of tea in the beautiful apartments of the Soviet-India Cultural Society. The former lady had just returned from a tour in Kerala and the Nilgiris in India and was fresh with impressions of the people and the places. In the afternoon there was a gathering of more than a dozen experts on Asiatic and other cultural studies, ladies and gentlemen, presided over by Prof. V.V. Balabushevich, D.Sc. I was given an account of the work done for cultural understanding and I also had a chance to explain my own work.

 

They were interested in the various Gurukula Ashrams in India and the ladies were particularly interested to know if married couples could live in Gurukulas and if women could be admitted. I had spread on a table the various chapters of my own typescript of the Integrated Science of the Absolute which were also inspected with interest by Prof. Balabushevich and some others.

 

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'Contemporary History' was the favourite interest of many members of this group and all problems were best studied in their social, economic and historic setting rather than in vacuo or in abstracto. The Russian mind loved the zeal which treated as identical the practical and the material. There was an empirico-critical approach, which they claimed to be dialectical and not mechanistic.

 

TOLSTOY'S HOUSE

 

Tolstoy's house, Yasnaya Polyana.

 

On March 5th, I was guided by Dr. Alexei N. Kochetoff, Director of the International Tolstoy Museum, Yasnaya Polyana, Tula - 200 kilometres from Moscow, situated on nearly six hundred acres of land with ample buildings. However, we did not visit this favoured country residence of Count Leo Tolstoy but his home in Moscow, where he lived the last twenty years of his life with his children for the sake of their education. This house, with an acre of wooded garden adjoining, preserved exactly as it was between 1890 and 1910, put me in a mood in which Rousseau, Ruskin, Gandhi, Thoreau and a galaxy of other writers and thinkers like Emerson and the New England philosophers of America had their common source of inspiration. In the year 1924 I was influenced by the writings of Tolstoy, especially the 'Kreutzer Sonata'. Over forty years later, I stood and looked at the very table and chair used by Tolstoy himself. In and through the changing vicissitudes of life there seems to be a thin guiding thread leading one again through labyrinths to the same line placed on a parameter representing the flux of time's becoming.

 

This experience by itself has made my visit to Moscow worthwhile for me personally. Tolstoy belongs to the world without frontiers. I was honoured by the presentation of a souvenir token badge to wear, as also a facsimile of Gandhi's letter to Tolstoy dated 1-11-1909. I was glad to find that the memory of Tolstoy was not lost to the later Russian leaders and that Lenin himself, whose role came after, as placed within the actual limits of revolutionary activity with its fully-horizontalized implications, had decreed that the lesson taught by Tolstoy was not to be lost. He was there as a 'mirror' to present-day politics, as Dr. Alexei Kocheroff, the director of the larger Tolstoy museum, who was acting as my guide, explained.

 

562

MOSCOW PERSONALITIES

On March 3rd, I was presented to the Indian Ambassador, Dr. Dhar, who talked to me most cordially and kindly. On the 4th I was received at ten in the forenoon at the Union of Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries by Mme. Valentina V. Lubomoudriva and the General Secretary of the same society, Mme. Irina Yershova. The same evening I was presented to a group of scholars and experts under the leadership of Prof. V.V. Balabushevich at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and there was an opportunity for me to present my viewpoint and hear all about the work done under the direction of the Professor, who was also the Vice-President for the Society of Soviet-Indian Cultural Relations. Mr S. Roerich of Bangalore had already introduced me to this great authority directly and I had no difficulty in establishing very cordial relations with him and all others of a group of about twenty research workers and writers of the USSR. Valentin Zagrebelny could speak French, English and Hindi and readily offered to keep in touch with me on a permanent basis.

 

My visit to the Pioneer Palace dedicated to youth in a dream-like children's paradise of a glass house extending at least a furlong and three stories high - with the free grant of one and a half million roubles from the Government for its upkeep - proved how earnestly the USSR believed in working for a new world of scientific and cultural advancement.

 

My sightseeing terminated on March 7th, when I stood at the stroke of the midday hour at the Big-Ben-like Red Square clock facing the Lenin Mausoleum at the change of guards. I also saw the imposing pile of buildings of the University and monuments to space experts. A demonstration against China filed past on the same day, which gave me an idea of political events seen at close quarters and not merely from newspapers read from distant armchairs.

 

By the evening of March 7th, Mr. R. Natarajan of the Indian Embassy drove me twenty kilometres to the famous Moscow airport. I said goodbye to Mr. and Mrs. Damodaran and thanked them for their continued hospitality during my five days' stay, then found myself flying due west in a British European airliner.

 

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Time stood still at the twilight hour all the way as the jet flew 30,000 feet above a sea of mist looking almost like a fleecy white ocean, with pink lights playing on it for hours.

 

After a lunch which had the same menu for vegetarians and meat-eaters, London airport was announced, where I waited for nearly two hours without contact with any friends who might have to greet me at the outer reception hall.

 

Within an hour I reached Brussels airport by a Belgian Sabena plane.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SIXTY ONE

 

TIME AND SPRING TIME IN BELGIUM

Did I go to bed at midnight or two or three hours later, and if so, by what clock should I go to have my identity fixed or determined by time and place? If I lose the game to relativity, do I gain it for the Absolute or merely common sense? Is the latter a legitimate substitute for the Absolute of the everyday life of the so-called man-in-the-street or the schoolboy who might be credited with knowing slightly better? Is time unique and universal as a truth in itself, for itself or by itself? Is Greenwich Mean Time to be respected over standard times of other unit geographical times known by accepted or prevailing conventions? How could I best observe the rule I had made for myself in the matter of rising exactly as the hour struck 5 AM?

 

What satisfied a common-sense norm could not satisfy a philosophical or a modern physical norm. A major puzzlement was involved here. Did my appetite obey the prescribed times which verified the relativity theory or did it more often take refuge in common-sense guesswork adaptations of what was best to do under given circumstances? Sleep and hunger contributed or contrived together, as they seemed to me, playing the double game of indeterminism within my personality that night when I tried to compose myself in the new and heavily blanketed bed that was given to me with the luxury bathroom that Freddy, at the instance of Céline and Marc with Mother Gevaert's approval, had assigned to me.

 

GASTRONOMY IS MADE TO MEET ASTRONOMY

On arrival at Lathem in Belgium I was still feeling guilty about having merely omitted the non-vegetarian items of the 'lunch' tray handed to me by the air hostess of British European Airlines, at some hour supposed to be lunch or dinner time, indifferently treated as one or the other by the waiter who, as a British person, could not be effectively corrected by me, as one who did not strictly belong to the English-speaking world.

 

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Conventional lies had to vie with natural indeterminism here. Although some Indian philosophers are apologetic about using the time-honoured term, Maya, to describe this kind of puzzlement; Maya for me could be both experienced and understood theoretically when my travel speed approximated to the rotation of the planet on which I lived. The philosophy of the rishis suffered no discredit with me, even if I took fully into account the latest developments of modern science. I was just then carrying my convictions in such matters within a travel bag which contained half of the chapters of the 1300-page typescript, the other half having been put into the suitcase because together they weighed six kilos or so - too much to carry personally.

 

NIGHT FLIGHT FROM LONDON TO BRUSSELS

From the BEA plane I had had to change into one of the famous Belgian Sabena planes after 9:30 PM. Going by the official clock of the airport, I could have had a snack or drink at London airport transit waiting lounge if I had wanted, but my hyper-logical mind said to me that if I was in the charge of Air-India International who fixed my itinerary, I should not look after myself but let them take care of my legitimate hours for meals.

 

The neatly built and well-finished Belgian aircraft took off and did not fly too high over London with its millions of lights visible in dotted patterns from above. They were more thinly distributed over the suburban areas and were gone when we crossed the Channel in the more slatey light of later sunset hours when most late diners on earth were still at table or on their way to bed. Uncertainty, indeterminism, the cloud of unknowing, the veil of ignorance, non-predictability - are all terms that imply one another in connotation or denotation, making for the same puzzlement that generally dulls human intelligence with a nescience acting as a negative principle of inertia in the total context of common human life.

 

Thus Maya was real to me. Londoners were subject to its dullingly dead weight as much as Continentals. In spite of this overall human verity weighing down the intelligence of all, one could recognize incidental and negligible differences between England and the Continent. The dotted lines of lights marking the roads were straighter on the side of Brussels. The Sabena plane itself was more streamlined in its pure white ivory beauty, and the Continental touch was unmistakable. English character could perhaps be credited with less rigidity or formal rigour, trusting in the chance element of 'muddling through' difficulties.

 

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All closed groups have their incidental ways or strategies in the matter of cancelling-out necessities against contingencies as collective or individual life unravels like a spun thread or woven fabric in variegated patterns of colour or design. Endless is the particular way the warp of probability holds its own plane or place in the woof of possibility or vice-versa, as these subtle twin factors weave between them the outer fabric. These clothe deeper personal levels which tend to meet abstractly, generally and unitively. It is in this sense that actual or ideological frontiers become unimportant.

 

While such intimate thoughts steeped me in reveries, half a glass of fresh orange juice was handed to me by the Sabena air hostess who, though not graceful in a flowing sari and black-painted fish-shaped eyes, gained what she lost in such details by a buxom, blithe and debonair attitude of stable efficiency. Each person attains inner equilibrium in his own way; while all can have an equal possibility of peace or joy at different levels under the unitively serialised aegis of the vertical parameter. Each has its own monomark inside its proper level within the total amplitude, plus or minus as the case may be.

 

SPACE AND TIME

The story of how the Sabena plane touched down and how I soon found myself losing or gaining time between my several absolutisms has already been related, except for the fact that my main suitcase did not arrive with me but was delivered at Lathem two or three days later. I was glad that Freddy went to the Gent railway station and saved me the trouble of bringing it. It was a pleasant discovery to open it and find none of the most precious parts of its contents were lost, consisting of the first part of my magnum opus and other personal effects. I had to take two or three days after arrival to make inner adjustments to outer movements and conditions both longitudinal or latitudinal, as well as those more connected with other sidereal factors. In other words, gastronomy had to catch up or tally with an astronomy or astrology of its own.

 

Books like the Tao Teh Ching and the I-Ching, based on the universalised and generalized meeting of probabilities with their corresponding possibilities on the thin ground of absolutist occasionalism, such as Descartes would speak of, tend to belong more and more to a Science of the Absolute.

 

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In a total science, gastronomy is not only related to astronomy in the outer sidereal or galactic space of an expanding or a contracting universe, but also to a chemistry within the physiological totality of each person as a psycho-emotional unit. The helicoidal movements of the planet on which we live as it takes its sinusoid course within the Milky Way have been proved to be related to the chemistry of the body by thousands of experiments recently conducted by the Italian scientist Piccardi. In my recent travels in South East Asia I have been minutely watching my own metabolism at different seasons and at different latitudes. Food and sex systoles reflect the alternations of the cosmological as well as psychological agreements of life within with life without.

 

The astronaut flying away from the earth into outer space is not in the same qualitative inner gastronomic space as his earthy counterpart. Conceptual space, which tends to substitute perceptual space and absolute space, containing both of those as counterparts, is a space of unified quantity and quality. Interiorly viewed, both could belong to the same schematised context. Each astronaut carries a schematic space within himself which is both quantitative and qualitative at once, as structural aspects of the same normative or unitive Absolute. Common sense can attain to this kind of unitive abstraction or understanding. A dog in a sputnik has less trouble in tallying inner metabolism with outer space factors because of being innocent of theories such as that of relativity or demi-relativity. Common-sense gastronomy is thus as near as can be to the absolutist version of unitive reality.

 

WINTER TO SPRINGTIME TRANSITION

When day passes into night or winter into spring, inner life responds qualitatively with a reciprocal rhythm. Alternating behaviour patterns result, made up of unit links of a chain of systolic and diastolic ambivalent functional phases. These are held together interiorly by a hierarchy of synergic centres falling within the amplitude of the parameter of functional reference. An interiorized view based on the free fancy of intuitive imagination is able to reveal the alternating workings of our life.

 

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One recognizes subjective adjustments in the form of attendant emotions. On the aesthetic content of events such as the coming of Spring, poets have lavished their powers of literary expression from the earliest pre-classical times within the span of the history of each cultural expression, growing through reigns or epochs, whether measurable by centuries or decades. There is thus a spring feeling within which baffles description.

 

Kalidasa as well as Shakespeare worked on these emotional upsurges which tend to be more evident near the polar latitudes than in the equatorial zones. The alternation is sometimes helicoidal but always involves a pulsating succession of unit functions, as with a hive of bees or firefly families round a tree at night in some warm tropical forest. When these fall into a unitive line a sense of well-being or whole-heartedness is felt, which Indian Yoga holds out as a high value for its votaries. Cults that depend on tantra and mantra also thrive on this vague emotional background of pleasurable or painful states. Eros also lives in this ground or stratum within.

 

AN ABSOLUTIST TRIES TO LIVE WITHIN A RELATIVIST FRAMEWORK

This was the third time I become a quasi-inmate of the Gevaert family. I had not known the peculiarly enigmatic members of this family in 1951 when, on my way back from the United States to India, in the ample lounges of the French luxury 50,000 ton liner, I contacted certain New Yorkers going to attend a so-called World Constituent Assembly to be held in the beginning of the year 1951 at Geneva.

 

The life and soul of this event happened to be an artist and idealist with an almost impossible passion in him in favour of One World Government, Peter Cadby, who travelled with me on the liner, and with whom I established a ready contact because he was going as a delegate to this conference and also knew Garry Davis. Although my destination after crossing over from Southampton via the French coastal town across the Channel, was to be Paris, where a bed and breakfast was awaiting my arrival through Mme. Morin, my old friend-in-need - my newly aroused interest in the Geneva meeting prevailed. As a result I changed my mind against my will and took a train the same night at the Gare de Lyon in Paris before midnight.

 

The World Constituent Assembly took place with dignity and proper procedure for several days. Although I was present only as an unofficial witness, I walked the corridors and was present at different committees like a presence that was both personal and impersonal.

 

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The event left nothing sufficiently tangible behind except some big bills that Mr. Edgar Gevaert told me later he had to foot from his personal account. At best it had an educative value only. This convinced me that present-day opinion on the possibility of realizing a World Government came within the scope of probable politics. Even this was for me a great matter for self-congratulation.

 

This one-sided contact with the Gevaerts proved itself to be a dispensation, judged from the fact that at roughly five-year intervals since then I have found myself living with them for weeks or months each time. I was a guide to Marc Gevaert who came to India to meet me by paying his passage with the amount of a prize he had won for passing his last examination with honours. Then I came to Belgium and lived as the respected guest of the Father and Mother Gevaert, in or about the year 1960; my relations gradually becoming more intimate and internalised to the setting of their family life about the year 1965, when I attempted in vain to try to found a Gurukula in the south of France.

 

This time my stay at the Gevaerts was more intermittent than on the previous occasion. Relativist family considerations came up against positively open tendencies. The death of Father Edgar took place when the subtle interplay of hypostatic and hierophantic factors was most evident and reflected accentuating individual differences of tastes or temperaments. It is not a correct rule of conduct for a sannyasin, as I was, ever to stay as a part of a family - or even as a guest within it - for more than three days. I was conscious of this every minute and tried to conform to its requirements as best as I could within the limiting factors of necessity.

 

The gentle transition from winter to spring was just then accomplishing itself fully after I had been staying there four weeks. Except for a visit to a small township twenty kilometres in the direction of Brussels where I saw a group of Belgian men, women and children fully enthusiastic about yoga as a form of psycho-physical discipline through postures and breathing exercises, under the guidance of some Indian swamis who visited and initiated the leaders of the group in this new interest, I followed the quiet routine of the Gurukula centre beginning to function at the Gevaerts under the guidance of Marc and Céline. Paulo and Freddy with their familial or friendly circles formed the core of the Gurukula life, but the patriarchal pattern of negative relations could not be expected to accommodate itself easily within or round an absolutist group.

 

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An open and dynamically-based nucleus of utter strangers who verged on being considered misfits, hobos or hippies was the cause of bothersome situations developing, as it were, from underground. Although no one lacked generosity or goodness under the aegis of one and the same Absolute, the various value-systems of the apartments in the Father's Mansion called the Absolute had many levels. Some were subterranean basements and others storeys that rose freely and brightly into the higher levels over the horizon. The parameter with the Alpha and Omega limits which regulated the life and relations of this complex structure were not yet understood. There were apartments with single bedrooms or double ones, and those that were complex with different grades of combinations or sets with subsets of value-ensembles. The delicate criss-cross network of objections to certain members and favours readily shown to others baffled analysis. Life became a bedlam or boredom alternately.

 

At times it made life there swing beautifully from the numerator side of the total situation to the denominator side. There were reciprocities, compensatory factors, complementary counterparts or cancellable elements, which wanted to be reduced in terms of least-common-factors or greatest-common-measures. Frustrated males or females vied with corresponding empty-minded idealists, each of whom pretended to stand for their own brand of absolutism.

 

Here was a challenge for me which was presented on a small scale for which, if I found the formula through my science of the Absolute, I would have proved its practicability or validity for the whole world. I had many occasions to admit openly that the task was next to impossible. There were other moments, however, when I could still see a silver lining. On three occasions I nearly burned my fingers and felt like stopping playing with fire. Harsh glares and even threatening letters crossed the path. As the confidence of the group in me as a Guru seemed to be improving rather than waning with the passage of time, and with the central figures of the Gevaert Father and Mother operative, even if one of them was physically absent, I was able to manage, at all times that I talked at table at mealtime or at the Sunday gatherings, not to upset the apple cart altogether.

 

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Garry Davis came in his posh new car to stay a couple of days with me at Lathem on March 23rd. He offered to interview for me one of the Chefs de Cabinet (departmental heads) of UNESCO, and I was to have gone with him to Paris on the 24th to have lunch with him to explore any possibility of UNESCO being interested in the Integrated Science of the Absolute, essential parts of which he took with him while I decided to stay behind at the last moment by premonition, not feeling that any good would come out of the interview, as subsequent events amply verified. Hurdles of paper formalities like red tape effectively stood in the way of great and good things happening normally.

 

The Gurukula programme went on, with me having to speak eight hours each day. Madame Gevaert represented neither the numerator nor a denominator factor, but her sterling common sense silently saved the situation from deteriorating by being tilted lop-sidedly one way or the other. Except that I made contacts with new personalities or learnt a new lesson in the application of my theories to actual life, no events worthy of mention took place except the overall coming-to-be of the imperceptible wonder of spring in Europe. The praise of this great and glorious happening is seen in many lines of poetry old or new, whether in German, Flemish or Italian, not to speak of others of the same language families. The last three days of the first week of April saw the full coming in of sunlit hours to which all had been looking forward during the cold and dark months. Although winter has its inner richness, spring excels in a feast of rich life spread out before us. Words are weak here.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SIXTY TWO

 

CONTACTS WITH HIPPIES AND HIGHBROWS

'To be in England now that April's here' were words that came to my lips when still in Belgium, intending to visit England in May. On this trip to Europe, Moscow and Russia had impressed me, but Russia's personality had big and bold Asiatic implications with a touch of superman-hood, which had an altogether different character.

 

Life in Lathem savoured of more fanciful and less quantitative human interests. New departures in art and sculpture; interest in natural food; world unity or orientalist spirituality, with Judo, Yoga or more subjective disciplines such as those offered by Zen or Subodh; Esperanto, New Economics, World Government, and promiscuous unconventionalism - had brought life in the West onto the verge of a new brinkmanship. The new developments in science presented additional problems to intelligent youth inside or outside academic life. All these seemed to be too much for them just at the time when the buds of April were ready to burst into bloom all around with brighter skies above.

 

One heard of persons who had been 'opened up' by post-hypnotic suggestion; who had been cured by 'Scientology' or yogic postures; those who had 'dropped out' and 'turned on' or 'tuned in'; who experienced 'inner mind expansion' through various drug addictions, who were referred to as 'sort of friends', 'diggers' or 'pushers'. Prudery and sacredness had gone to the winds and a full, unrepressed vent was given to all profane impulses. Prayerfulness or reverence as basic dispositions were looking for ever-new interests or objects. One could have any number of accidents including clashes with concierges or policemen, or take 'trips' anywhere with LSD or other new drugs too numerous to classify.

 

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TURN ON, TUNE IN, DROP OUT, OPEN UP

Latihan is a form of jitters under post-hypnotic suggestion verging on negative and collective hallucinations produced by extreme relaxation and submission. This is one form of new experience which is not unlike the discipline of yoga in which inner space, variously called the subconscious or subliminal self, libido or persona, operates in terms of reflexes and automatisms. While the Subodh movement of Indonesian origin calls it 'opening', the Hippies prefer terms like 'drop out', 'turn on', or 'take a trip of mind-expanding experience'. The corresponding term in Upanishadic lore is pratyagatma, which is the ontological self as opposed to its more positive counterpart, the positive self.

 

The subconscious part of our psyche has become a haunted storeroom of repressed material turned effete by long disuse, through generations of modernized public behaviour-patterns. The malaise in the academic world and the hatred for all above thirty by the younger generation are symptomatic of this strange discovery and consequent change that has come over Europe, which was not there during my visit five years previously, and which I can see becoming accentuated almost month by month.

 

My life in Lathem, as I continued to give eight hours of talks each day between seven in the morning and eleven at night, with intervals of a total of three hours for both meals and meditations, was strangely gathering momentum. Joost Bloom came from Antwerp; Curran de Bruler from Chicago; and Davy Redinsky of Colorado came with his family from Provence, with many other dropouts. We all ate and drank at the Gevaert table and Mother Gevaert generously catered to us all. Rosemary flew there from San Francisco, and Charles Erikson of Texas joined from London. These, with the friends of Walter de Buck, the representatives of three yoga groups, with dropout music each night, made the Gurukula at Lathem a rendezvous for a mad medley of personalities both male and female.

 

I was driven 200 kilometres to a village on the boundary of Belgium called Turnhout where, in a big hangar or factory shed badly heated with oven-box fires, beat musicians and dancers came from various European centres. Coloured lights danced to drums and cymbals and to music from electric guitars, banjos or Indian tablas. The music they played was called 'Hard Rock', of which the Rolling Stones present a variety. The show was based on the 'living theatre' of Julian Beck and the music was taken from the style of black Rhythm and Blues.

 

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We drove back from this Walpurgisnacht nightmare of drug fiends in various frenzies, some of them verging on true Dionysiac exaltation. Driving back to Lathem after midnight, wrapped in overcoat and leather gloves against the last winds of winter lingering on, I felt that everything seemed to be going out of joint in Europe.

 

OTHER CONTACTS OF NUMERATOR VALUE

Besides this underworld of Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg or Julian Beck disciples, I had occasion to contact a professor of physics of Gent, two professors of psychology and two post-graduate students of Louvain University, one from Kerala, and a Belgian representative and editor of a weekly of the Ecumenical Council, at my talk at the Princesse de Mérode's in Brussels.

 

Two groups of student teachers also called on me with whom I failed to establish any real dialogue because they could not state clearly, analysed into items, what they wanted to gain by their revolution which was in full swing with the arrest, at that time itself, of five hundred students in Gent. Their difficulty in establishing good contact with their professors was due to a lack of proper academic formation on their side. They still had only vague ideas about deductive and inductive hypothetical methods of science and were unfamiliar with the epistemological implications of modern physics. Eddingtonianism still puzzled them. On Sunday April 14th I almost upset two professors of physics of Gent, one of whom still defined science classically as consisting of measurements, without putting the observer and the observed together in a common frame of reference as modern physics would require.

 

On April 16th, Prof. Carrol Raum, Ph.D., Head of Group Therapy, Portland, Oregon, USA, who had visited me at the Varkala Gurukula in December, 1968, arrived at Lathem to stay as the guest of Marc Gevaert's Gurukula. He had been touring India and the Far East for months, and was interested in The Integrated Science of the Absolute, the whole typescript of which he read within ten days or so. Efficiency and energy were assets with him, but the 'formation' that is understood in such universities as Paris or Heidelberg was a factor that had at best only weaker substitutes in the finest American universities. I had to state this unpleasant verity to offend Charles Erikson too, who was staying at Lathem at the same time as the other US Professor of Portland, Oregon.

 

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Apology made amends for sensitive touchiness here, and an interesting dialogue, good for both parties, was soon established. No dialogue is possible when there is no overlapping or common platform of the academic formations of two persons in any dialogue on a subject of significant cultural import. For a change, however, I once gave an interview to a Protestant representative of the Pope's newly formed Ecumenical Council. From the doctrine of the origin of evil or the fruit of the forbidden tree he questioned me on the importance of the cardinal principles of Christianity as a prophetic religion. He insisted that the concreteness of the personality of Jesus was missed by other religions. I had to point out that good and evil were transcended in the Absolute and evil was the necessary counterpart of the goodness of God, which by itself represented only a half-truth. Kali the Terrible was at least as valuable as tragedy in drama. A Christianity which had martyrs to science against it like Bruno and Galileo, and martyrs from innocent women saints to active mystics like Hypateia or Joan of Arc, had to recant its own errors for its guilty conscience. The Eucharist was not unlike the rites of idol worship. After about two hours of discussion he came to agreement with me, and we shook hands and joined a common dinner.

 

Rosemary arrived by air from San Francisco on the basis of a phone call from Curran; a friend of Mimi Gevaert, a Bahai, came from Copenhagen and, due to inner politics at the Gevaert family, was eased out of a dinner gathering in Homère's new house on the occasion of a grandchild born to him. There was a child, Céline, born to José and Olga, neighbours who frequented the Gurukula. Ottavia also was expecting a baby, while Marc had another girl born to him the same month or fortnight. As for myself, I lost two of my lower incisors as universal springtime pressed creatively all round. Kali was taking her toll each second while Brahma ushered new buds into life. Vishnu just looked on in luxury and comfort. Horizontality was his only enemy.

 

THE NUMERATOR ASPECT FOR THE UNDERGROUND TRIPS

 

Drug users in the 60's.

 

LSD, heroin, opium, and marijuana were used illegally all around me, and midnight drummings went on freely, going from bad to worse as each day passed. Marc and Céline braved the situation and the limit of their good sense and the generosity of Mother Gevaert was all but broken.

 

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Walter was running a restaurant for students at Trefpunt ('The Meeting Point') in town where I was guest of honour for tea and talk for two hours on Friday May 4th. Walter had triumphantly emerged out of charges of pornography just then, and spoke of plans to come to India that very autumn. Charlie, Freddy, Joost, Curran, Seragian, Jacques, Rosemary and others were seriously deciding whether to hitchhike or drive to Ezhumalai by the land route. Visits from Mr. Van der Zalen and Mr. Van Lyzbeth also brought new contacts based on the general interest prevailing there in yoga.

 

Danny, a youth of Gent, was an unconscious Dionysius with his satyr-like hand or hip movements. His goddess, who was dressed but whose body-outlines were fully visible, was seated in front of him. An after-dinner conversation at Joseph Vercruysse's and an invitation to Brussels from the Princesse de Mérode to speak to some élite aristocratic persons present by select invitation of the Princesse, gave the final touches to the month's stay in Belgium. Another lady called Bandt, who taught yoga in Switzerland, as also a lady who represented Scientology, visited me, thus giving me a complete cross-sectional view of new spiritual movements there.

 

The Provos of Amsterdam had their arch representative in our Joost Bloom who identified himself early with the Gurukula. He lost no time in saying goodbye to his wife and putting his car into the care of the garage, while giving up his lucrative job to follow me - as if taking up the cross, as he said. I was not wholly unaffected by these strange goings-on, and kept saying to myself, 'I never, I never', and feeling how strange were the ways of the Absolute.

 

THE ABSOLUTE AND 'COMMONSENSE'

 

The Guru with Curran, Freddy, Brigitte and some drug-crazed hippie disciples.

 

By the end of the sixth week at Lathem it became clear that the gap that separates an intellectual notion of the Absolute from what the common man can grasp is difficult to bridge. But it was at the same time a consolation to come to know that there is a deep-seated understanding in all men, women and children who feel, however vaguely, an interest in the notion, when stated in simple words with examples from daily life.

 

The examples clinched the point and sometimes were even treated wrongly as good arguments in themselves. Common sense, so-called, in any country is supported by linguistic usage; and the fact that proverbs enshrine the same wisdom independently of vernacular frontiers suffices to show that all men are equally capable of understanding.

 

577

Long parables fill biblical and Upanishadic literature, and telling stories figure in the form of favourite myths. From antiquity until now, man everywhere has never managed to live without a mythology of his own, even in the most remote regions of the globe.

 

There is thus a rich deposit of precious common-sense wisdom, which often is found to have a downright and apodictic quality of certitude. It is adequate and qualifies with the same certitude as the highest secret of any pundit or professor emeritus of any university. Both sometimes succeed in agreeing when common sense hits the nail on the head and attains the Absolute in spite of any unfavourable training or miscellaneous conditionings.

 

As between the pundit and the common man, I have now, by experience, learned to prefer the common man and his down-to-earth wisdom. The Upanishads excel in this quality, though their lingua mystica makes them highly cryptic and enigmatic so as to make both the common man as well as the pundit strangers to their context. Protolinguism was the answer here and I did not fail to use it freely.

 

MY MORNING CLASSES ON A SANSKRIT TEXT

Nearly a year before, I had discovered the value for me of a much-neglected and misinterpreted Sanskrit text of rare and antique quality. The unique structural implications and high speculative assumptions - conforming to adequate and scientific requirements - appearing in each of the hundred verses of the composition, give internal evidence of its authorship - attributed to the great Sankara, as tradition itself approves.

 

Each verse of this work, the Saundarya Lahari, could - at least to my eyes - be considered equal in weight to one of the best theses submitted by good scholars to the best of academic bodies in the West. Coming upon such a work when I was just looking for one by means of which the project of the proto-language that I had proposed and developed could be illustrated, was one of those rare coincidences of my life. Having finished my magnum opus, I wanted something hard enough to bite on for my lessons over the morning breakfast cup of coffee.

 

578

The lessons were intended primarily for my own benefit, but I welcomed others and soon found that it gathered momentum; snowballing with persons coming by cars, trains or even planes for the purpose of sharing the rare wisdom contained in the verses, even as early as seven in the morning. Experience thus proves that the possibility of language without myth or parable, promised in the Bible, comes true.

 

The thrill of this discovery comes upon me unawares at odd moments, but as one whose attitude is absolute neutrality to Truth without any one-sided exaggeration or distortion - called in Sanskrit yatha-tathyam (as-itself-ness) - I do not permit myself such luxuries. Messianic exaltation has been played out by previous ages in which rival religions and myths proper to each of them played ducks and drakes with orthodox or heterodox sentiments. A healthy sober-mindedness is called for in the present age when norms must spell one world understanding. My scrutiny of each of the Sanskrit verses was no less a wonder to myself as to the heterogeneous motley crowd of hippies and hysterical women as well as professors and students who came in increasing numbers to attend my morning classes.

 

PARTICIPATION IN SELECT GROUPS

My conviction about the inferiority of meta-language came to evidence pointedly when, at the end of April, I had a discussion with a group of persons of a Ph.D. grade arranged by the special invitation of Dr. Joseph Vercruysse at his sumptuous riverside house in Gent.

 

One was Swiss, another of Louvain, a third and fourth from Gent and the USA, respectively - with our host and family present as regulative factors. The discussion was maladroit and went awry even from the start when one of them stated that he used his terms without the help of a standard dictionary. The formation of the four disputants belonged to divergent academic contexts and as a result, attained one climax of absurdity after another. I had to assert myself rather impolitely and even sarcastically more than once. In spite of this, we were able finally to shake hands and depart in good grace, cordially hoping to meet again to continue.

 

As already mentioned incidentally, I had the honour of being invited by the Princesse de Mérode in Brussels, as I had been four years before. This time it was to her ample apartment at the centre of the city. Those invited arrived one by one and included Mr. Poduval of Kerala who was writing a thesis at the University of Louvain.

 

579

I was to explain 'The Integrated Science of the Absolute' and I quickly covered chapter by chapter of my now-finished work, beginning in English with a French interpreter, but on finding I was having some difficulty in expressing my thoughts, I lapsed directly into French for over an hour. A discussion followed, which again disappointed me by the lack of consequential formation or a proper starting position taken before arguments could proceed on even roughly right lines. What was more, I shocked the highly sophisticated crowd by openly saying I was hungry, which no one in good company is ever expected to do so abruptly, as I half-mischievously seemed to enjoy doing. The entourage of the Princesse was visibly flurried and there was some ado. Biscuits and sandwich pistolets (rolls) were brought in and, after a continued standing tête-à-tête, the conversation came to an end before ten-thirty at night. Either I talked over the heads of those present or only the Princesse herself, with perhaps another exception, seemed at all impressed. Meanwhile plans for my visit to England were at their final stage.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SIXTY THREE

 

HIPPIE ADVENTURES IN ENGLAND

The cold and sometimes wet days of winter in Belgium had spoiled the chance for some of the early flowers like buttercups and primroses to open in April; but May in England seemed to make amends for the freakish seasonal behaviour. Nature was far from being mechanistically correct and Newton's Laws often co-existed and operated with a deeper underlying rhythm. Life is a drama with more than one curtain hiding truth, and some curtains let us see behind them with degrees of transparency or translucency. Our eyesight itself could have degrees of stone or gravel blindness in Gobbo's language. We live, as it were, in a hall of mirrors, and cannot know in advance which door is to open for us to escape into a still-better prison.

 

The Ides of March and the April showers that open the pink and yellow primrose buds could mix with other omens or forebodings, bad or good, to make for adventurous entries or escapes from all matters mistaken for settled facts. Life is a silvery mist of a process of becoming in which each participates like a big fish in mid-stream - sometimes waving its fins, but mostly carried forward by the flood of the universal and eternal flux, in whose matrix life lives and moves.

 

Almost half the month of May was spent in England with a group that often travelled in two cars on the highways. The other half of May I was back in Belgium till I left the eight or twelve disciples and flew from Luxembourg on May 25th to New York via Iceland. Some of the escapades were in terms of turning tail and running, routed by forces of negativism or relativism, but at other bright moments the Gurukula group that was visibly integrating itself in a strikingly unmistakable fashion made triumphant entries into new domains of adventure and all-round profit.

 

One had to ride the ebbing tide and yield to the flow while being carried forward within the totality of the grand flux of pure becoming. Nothing succeeds like success in this sense and all is the same ever. Ugly, mean and untoward events have to be treated as part of the show. Like the bark of a tree or like the shedding of its skin by the snake from time to time, absurdities such as the death of the body are to be tolerated as incidental.

 

581

Nothing happens in the turiya (the Fourth) or deepest flux of consciousness, where subject and object merge in the Absolute that is within and without, divided only by the thin cross-sectional plane of the eternal present spreading all round each of us at all times.

 

CROSSING OVER TO JOHN GILPIN'S LONDON TOWN

Curran de Bruler and Freddy Van der Borght with Céline and Alma filled the touring Renault car of Céline, with me sitting next to the driver's seat, taken over alternately by the two aforementioned formidable dropout inmates of the Gurukula. The parkway, autostrada or carriageway - as a two-way high-speed road is variously called - was a straight and easy one to take, linking Gent to Ostend. One rested in the car, but kept a keen eye all round not to take the wrong turn or miss any of the numerously repeated and foolproof protolinguistic markings - signs rather than symbols - which sometimes gave ominous warnings or welcome blinks of light round the hours of the clock. Overtaking was not in order but some cars went sailing past like comets among the more steady orbs in the galaxy. The supermen had to confirm their superiority relativistically in this mean and ignoble way, as one could easily feel when seeing them while sitting back relaxed.

 

We drove right into the hold of the ship, which became a road itself when the sea crossing was over. Except for a young immigration and customs officer who questioned the motley group of men and women with suspicious eyes and asked searching question after question about our plans and intentions in England, and who deceptively let us pass but telephoned to his henchmen nearer to the exit from the Dover side of the customs barrier, all was smooth sailing. The famous chalk cliffs of Dover held no more novelty for me, as this must have been the sixth or seventh time that I had crossed the Channel, more than once at the same fording points.

 

Strange attentions and extra directions were given to our car as we went to the first barrier before taking to the high road to London. We were asked to stop at a special booth and half a dozen uniformed men came out, asking us all to get down from the car. One noted the number of the car and another had everything in the car minutely examined.

 

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No hiding place was omitted and I sat unmolested, while all stood explaining the contents of each of the packets which had to be opened. My ayurvedic laxative came under fire and they suspected it to be one of the drugs they were sure they would find because of the unkempt dropout looks of a few amongst us. They turned our belongings upside down and finally gave us the sign to go, looking foolish and fully frustrated. The winding roads that mostly led to London, some via Canterbury and others more directly to London Bridge, presented little difficulty to the two expert drivers, Freddy and Curran, who have known many roads elsewhere - but we had to stop on the highway to telephone before reaching our address in the heart of the aristocratic Grosvenor Square area in the Westminster district where Charles Erikson was to wait for us.

 

As we came nearer to the same London town of Dick Whittington and John Gilpin we had muddled road signs to follow and once, within the limits of London Town itself, no longer as famous as in bygone days, we had to stop and ask, in spite of the open map before Céline. The Londoners were polite and would stop and give detailed instructions for many minutes before we could go and again had to slow down and ask. At last we reached the macrobiotic restaurant in the basement of a building which was the favourite haunt of all the drop-outs or all those who protested in their own ways against the demands of conformism or conventionalism. As we entered the corridor under the basement, we found Charlie waiting for us with his pretty wife who was a teacher with the London County Council.

 

Charlie was a darling and an innocent victim of many forces, both dark and bright, that alternately attracted and repelled him. We had already spent weeks together at Lathem in Belgium, but he had a flat in Brunswick Gardens in the Westminster district near where Queen Victoria lived in her time. A graduate of the University of Texas, he had travelled in Italy and in Arab countries and his present status was that of an ex-dropout with all the experience that normally goes with it. At the instance of some kind ladies living in the same flat, he had been 'opened up' through a 'latihan' (expressions used by Subodh followers for extremely negative auto-suggestive experiences). The Subodh movement, with its epicentre in Jakarta, was spreading its mysteriously negative influence even as far as the Hawaiian Islands and fast entering into many English homes. If Islam is prophetic and positive, this new way may be looked upon as its necessary complementary and negative counterpart.

 

583

For the first night the hippies found beds at the Hare Krishna centre in London. This was another movement which had originated in San Francisco and was catching on wonderfully in the very heart of the Western streamlined rubber-balloon plastic garishness of effete modernism. They cultivated 'Krishna Consciousness' under an Indian Vedantic teacher, with the approval of Guru Allen Ginsberg, the dropout leader, and had their own Gita commentary.

 

The men wore tufts of hair like Indian brahmins and said 'Aum' or 'Hare Krishna' with mystical devotion throughout the day and night. Thus in the macrobiotic restaurant we sat with them singing bhajans with tabla drum and harmonium, and the wife of the leader, dressed in a sari, explained myth and ritual in great detail. We were even invited the next day to their proper centre to take prasad and even maha-prasad offered at a niche of idols and pictures of Krishna. Add Subodh to this and shake the mixture up with various other derivatives from the ten varieties of hippiedom, and one could then get a concoction that flavoured of the essence of the atmosphere emanating from the most conservative of enclaves of Old London.

 

FROM THE PRINCE CONSORT TO QUEEN ELIZABETH II

The effluvia of old London wanted only two or three drops of the Gurukula type of absolutism to set matters ablaze. By the second night we were in London, some of us had to find our beds in sleeping bags on the drawing-room floor of the old Victorian apartment house.

 

The flowers on the cherry trees on the roadside were just that day bursting into bright blossom. May Day was just one day ahead, but evil forces such as elementals were already at work in the flat. The ladies upstairs were deputising for the landlady in charge who had gone to Jakarta as a Subodh disciple. They, along with two men - one a European convert to Islam and another from Indonesia more directly representing Subodh - came into the drawing-room and went out, with no evident purpose, and next morning a lady was reported to be fainting and screaming, complaining of evil forces at work which affected her heart through the two ceilings that separated us. Whispering men and women made entries and exits and all seemed to be going wrong. Erikson, Curran and others began to feel peculiarly latihanish effects and I had to repeat our mahamantram to calm them down.

 

584

We were told to find beds in hotels by an intermediary who was still on talking terms with Charlie. I appealed in the name of the Holy Qur'an to the neo-Moslem young man to see if reason could prevail, but the scene was premeditated. The disturbance over a rival Guru in the same flat where the majority felt the direct influence of Ibu, the wife of the overt head of the movement, grew stronger every minute. I was determined not to flee in a flurry. A beautiful walk before lunch to Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens nearby gave all the forces ranged against one another a short respite. The ancient aristocratic spirits must have turned in their bed-graves to think of their dear Westminster houses invaded by hippies under an Indian Guru daring to sleep on the carpet of the living room itself in sleeping bags. Whatever had become of London!

 

As we walked past the Albert Hall into the gates of Kensington Park, everything was as bright as could be on that memorable May Day. I watched the faces of a group of middle-aged ladies going for some May Day meeting and seemed to see a touch of gloom out of tune with the dancing daffodils and narcissi in full bloom under the trees of the avenues bordering the green lawns.

 

The enormous or rather formidable monument to the glory of Albert, the consort of good Queen Victoria, was still there in its pure alabaster refinement, representing English taste of the end of the last century, as when my top-hatted and kid-gloved father must have admired it as a medical student. I looked at the same monument over seventy years later, after having first become familiar with continental sculpture, and could note the difference only too well. There was something rigid and logistical which still made English art a dressed-up affair with a touch of threadbare dilettantism showing through the fine fabric. Art had to be more supple and subjective, abandoning the requirements of intellection. Logic cannot force artistic creation.

 

LOVELY LAWNS AND SCREAMING LADIES

First we loitered freely through the lawns as far as the Serpentine Lake which has seen, over decades, many children drowned in it while they ran round this favourite London fountain driving their hoops.

 

585

The sunlight was clear and warm for the first of May and we sat in the solarium basking with lazy leisureliness, watching the features of Londoners and trying to read some effete touch of gloom in their features which I thought was unmistakably there. With the wobbly pound and political uncertainties, all was not bright for England, but it still plodded on nonchalantly, smoking its Churchillian cigar or carrying its umbrella and wearing its bowler hat, as unruffled by bad weather as ever.

 

More mediators and emissaries came from the screaming ladies upstairs when we returned to our flat, and it was mentioned that the landlord himself came to speak to Charlie not to try the patience of all concerned by setting black forces at work from below. I gave only indirect moral support to Charlie but did no confrontation of the evil spirits myself. We decided to perform a homam (fire sacrifice ceremony) to meet the challenge of hysterical or elemental factors of suggestibility at work in our little gossipy Cranford.

 

Charlie remembered a couple of his friends living on a farm of 140 acres near Cambridge, in Ashdon village, Saffron Walden. They were dropouts, or nearly so, from the group to which Charlie and his wife Suzanne had become half-dazed adherents or victims. Whispering rumours made the twilight conscience full of fears and forebodings. Anything could happen. Thus a last-minute telephone call to the Ivytodd Farm in Essex brought us much-needed relief, enabling us to turn tail on the whole situation. We were welcomed to the safe farmhouse, far from flats and landladies, into the very arms of happy hippiedom in the open countryside of old England.

 

Meanwhile, preparations were afoot for the fire ceremony. Friends were invited over the telephone and by eight in the night I had explained to all on a big sheet of brown paper, not only the meaning of the fire ceremony, but also about protolinguism, the Science of the Absolute and the coming World Conference for Peace through Unitive Understanding. Three or four readily registered themselves to take part. Then two carloads of old and new friends, including Joost Bloom and Rosemary Morgan who had joined us in the restaurant the previous night, wended past roundabouts or turnpikes and bridges past London towards Cambridge just before midnight of May Day, 1969, leaving all the screaming ladies far behind.

 

586

FRESH ADVENTURES AWAIT US AT DAWN

The absconders found themselves among haystacks and inside barns, except for me who had a fairly good bed in the attic of a straw-roofed cottage at another end of the big farm. Céline shared the extra bed in Elaine's room and all woke up for a late breakfast at the farmhouse round a table loaded with good things, including fish, tarts, and various cheeses. Our hosts were Graham Hoar, twenty-five, with his newly non-wedded wife Jane, herself a speed-freak, and Gerald Brown, forty, with a tall blond schoolgirl-like wedded wife. We soon began to refer jokingly to the two newly-wedded wives as the two whirlpools: one married to Henry VIII whom Gerald Brown resembled, and the other to the younger man Graham who, with his side-whiskers and clean-shaven pointed chin, looked like the younger Pitt or even Lord W. Bentinck. Between them, they formed a quarternion set that seemed most interesting. They were freelancers, acid-heads or hippies or whatever you might call them. They had become life partners in the farm which the younger man had inherited from a Quaker uncle who died in prison for something like objection to war. Neither of them had a taste for farming but were seeking spiritual consolation of some sort. They had knocked at many a door and were under the influence of Mr. Bennett, an English follower of Gurdjieff.

 

At that very moment they wanted wisdom-guidance and the whole lot of hippies thus stumbled into the affair as if by the hand of the Tao. Further talks each morning over our morning coffee lessons and even at dinner times - which went on uninterrupted throughout, come what may - only brought the partners closer to our own point of view. One could see clearly that a Gurukula was coming to be by itself. No hurdles could even be imagined. We inspected the grounds of the undulating Essex countryside together, passing the rivulet, the horse-pastures, the camping grounds bordering a clear gurgling brook and over the lea through many neglected farmhouses, barns, ponds for ducks, etc. into the large hangar of asbestos roofing and sides which could be used for a living theatre along the lines understood by Julian Beck. There was amongst us a trombone player who had just come out of prison for boxing the police who wanted to arrest him for possessing grass (marijuana). There seemed to be dawning within each of us a new hope for all, on scientific lines this time, and not on the basis of any fresh holy enthusiasm. This double gain came after the double loss of the previous episode.

 

587

HARROGATE BY THE A1 HIGHWAY

Graham and Gerry, the younger and elder partners of the Ivytodd farm, were still clearing their last doubts about the scientific validity of the various economic, educational and spiritual implications of the Gurukula point of view. The elements had to be pressed together firmly to make any meaning at all. We proposed to come back to the farm after putting in a visit to my old friend Mr. Christopher Leslie at Harrogate in Yorkshire. We started out again in two cars on the sixth of May. Before driving almost bumper to bumper up the main A1 arterial highway for a hundred miles or more, we had to fit in an interesting interlude. Many years before, I had heard of Letchworth School, which happened to be on the way. My curiosity about seeing the school was secondary to the strange possibility of looking up Raymonde Noel whom I had known as a girl of ten more than thirty years before. She had become a middle-aged woman, had married a Kipling, and changed from her original Letchworth school to another nearby. At 10 AM we visited the school and were kindly shown round the new classrooms. My days as a teacher in Switzerland vividly came to mind. After fumbling with the telephone book, we contacted Raymonde, that dear child who had now become an elderly woman. I heard the same ring in her voice in spite of the lapse of years. The surprise and joy of this unexpected meeting, though negligible in itself, was great. In ten more minutes my friends and I were invited to join the refreshment break of the staff at the Redford Infant School, Redford Way, Herts, which we gladly accepted. The motley crowd sipped tea in a modern cubic-built glass-sided school building, after being greeted while still on the way to the staff room by a veritable bevy of seven- or eight-year-olds who came out of their classes to welcome us. Black and white, blondes and curly brunettes were mixed, as also boys and girls. The reaction was so spontaneous and happy that I felt like Pitar Natty of the Fellowship School of Gland in Switzerland once again, though I looked more like an equatorial edition of Santa Claus. Mrs. Kipling introduced the members of the staff and we assisted at a lesson on nature study by television. I was presented to the saplings as the teacher of Mrs. Kipling. They were surprised that Joost Bloom, though a Dutch boy, did not wear wooden shoes. He satisfied the young ones by saying he had left them behind.

 

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TRYING TO BE MANNERLY

Speeding neck to heel we stopped over for a one pound twelve-shilling snack of sandwiches and coffee at a wayside inn. We reached Harrogate about six in the evening and rang the bell for Christopher to open the door. He did so with many apologies for the cook and housekeeper being on their weekly day off. This was our first stroke of luck, because Christopher had forewarned us not to upset the scruples of the conventional English cook and housekeeper who often bossed their so-called masters. Thornton Grove has its own Caleb Balderstones to respect. There was 'my man Jeeves' hiding somewhere, or some valet de chambre of a country squire like Sir Roger de Coverly.

 

On my part, I had warned my hippies to behave themselves well, which I am glad they did. Beds were soon assigned to the eight or nine of us, including one of the afore-mentioned whirlpools, the speed-freak wife of Graham Hoar. Some had to sleep in the loft in sleeping bags. Thornton Grove was thus rudely shocked and violated, a situation which the domestic personalities could take more easily as an accomplished fact the next day.

 

On May 7th I helped Céline and Rosemary cook a regular Indian curry-and-rice dinner with tomato rasam (a sourish mulligatawny soup). A doctor and his wife who had served on the World Health Organization dined with us. Discussion at the table became rather tense when Joost Bloom insisted that an axiom needed no proof while the Cambridge doctor thought that it still needed experimental demonstration.

 

Christopher drove me and two others to nearby Fountains Abbey of the days of Catholic England. Excavations showed a humerus bone in a grave several feet below one of the basements. In the evening at seven or so I gave a talk to the Harrogate Theosophical Lodge. I did not think I made a good speech on the Gita but my host insisted it was a greater success than that of nearly five years before when I had spoken at the same time and place.

 

 

 

 

589

CHAPTER SIXTY FOUR

 

ICELAND, THE NORDIC PARADISE

 

Iceland.

 

The return journey to Belgium was through the winding roads of the undulating countryside of Old England. We stuck to a road that bypassed London to avoid its maze of roads with signals and one-way warnings at most unexpected points and went under the Thames by tunnel to Canterbury and Dover. At a very respectable wayside restaurant where we stopped for breakfast-lunch or brunch there was a dark-skinned man who, to my surprise, spoke Malayalam and came from Calicut. He was being trained by a cement company of Ipoh, Malaysia, at a factory near London. His name was Unnikrishnan and he mentioned he belonged to a sub-tribe called Kidavu, one of the hundreds of such that divide Kerala society mentally even now into narrow rival camps, each a little Pakistan for itself.

 

The world is full of groups with common interests, as was even the case with Ali Baba. We are each of us Ali Baba or one of his clan for benefit or robbery in the name of half-hidden values. I too had my tribal fetish or totem within me, but as we met on the A1 road of England the camps that divided us were momentarily forgotten. Unnikrishnan took a group photo of all of us in sunlight and we parted as brave sons of Kerala. Tribes must exist in this world as the world itself exists. The only way to abolish tribalism is not to deny it but to cancel it out against its unitive counterpart of One Humanity as an overpowering, all-inclusive tribalistic loyalty for all of us. In other words we are fellow tribesmen in the One Absolute Tribe of all tribes.

 

RELATIVISM AND ABSOLUTISM NOT RIVALS

The forebodings recorded in my autobiography relating to the Ides of March through the third week of May have now become justified. Coming events cast their shadows before. Prognostics are possible. I am now proving to myself what I wrote before actual events, regarding the end of April.

 

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'A Midsummer Night's Dream', 'A Comedy of Errors', 'Much Ado About Nothing', 'The Taming of the Shrew', are titles of Shakespeare's plays reflecting the same fever of summer madness when the goddess of the seasons seems to don her variegated sari of surpassing beauty. The joy of alternating dim or bright shades becomes too much for mortal man to admire. Romance and tragedy can easily meet on the same playground to play games that break all rules in order that sheer absurdity might triumph. A game is played best when winning and losing are equally joined.

 

On May 12th there was a noisy family meeting at the Gevaerts, after which, at dinnertime, I was told that Marc was upset and needed my consoling visit. He had walked out in protest against others who objected to a Gurukula grafted onto a natural family. Homère, the eldest, was the mouthpiece of many others, especially the women members who felt the difference between blood and water together. Blood is naturally thicker, and Mother Gevaert could not but recognize it as a fact. Marc was sadly and tragically isolated and when I visited him in the bedroom of his home with Mr. Vanderzalen who was the manager of the affairs of the family, he could see no alternative but to leave the family. His wife was anxious and a situation that had been worsening day after day since my arrival came to a head.

 

On Ascension day, May 15th, Homère asked me to talk with him through Mimi, but I preferred to talk to Homère directly. He told me Marc was not going. He got upset at my not understanding him and said, 'I shoot you. You are a liar' etc. These same words were repeated in the garden in the hearing of all. I could feel that something was coming out into the open, but the next morning at the breakfast table with Garry, who had arrived the previous night, there seemed to be reconciliation on the face of Homère as he entered the dining room.

 

He shook hands with me and I made him embrace and kiss his brother Marc, which he did most affectionately. I thought for the moment that the experiment was succeeding after all, but hopes were again soon lost. Garry had sung and demonstrated the water-vitalising apparatus at dinner the previous night. The next morning, May 17th, Charlie reported to me that Homère had kicked Curran of Chicago and, when Céline intervened, had pushed her away. The mother, who was present, embraced her son to calm down his anger. She was later heard by me to explain that Curran was at fault and all would have gone well if Curran had obeyed the hint given to him earlier that he should remove some wood as a task he had been asked to do.

 

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By Sunday breakfast-time, next morning, it was clear to me that these incidents had been premeditated and I decided to take breakfast in the part of the house set apart by Marc for the Gurukula where strangers could congregate under his leadership. While I was explaining the Greek tragedy called 'Iphigenia of Tauris', where the King discovered that his wife and treasures had disappeared through a back door while the front door remained intact, Homère entered with a dangerous look and interrupted the conversation by saying, 'Shut up, Guru!'. I thought that the limits had been reached and went to my bedroom, got my belongings which were already packed, and adjourned to Marc's own house for lunch and talk that Sunday noon. Later we decided to go to Deurle where Freddie had rented a good cottage in first-class residential quarters adjoining Kappitteldreef.

 

AN EMERGENCY GURUKULA RESULTS FROM A BAD GAME

 

Deurle.

 

Although this cottage was not a streamlined one, the score of dropouts who were round me soon found a new Gurukula at Rode Beukendreef 9 in Deurle, where no one played 'off-side' as Homère seemed to insist on doing. He seemed to want to have the referee's whistle and also to kick the ball from the wrong side. Not knowing the rules of the game, he perverted them. This was natural and perhaps excusable as mere ignorance. He was generous and good within his own frame of reference and perhaps better than many others who played the game on his side - I could even say he was an absolutist in his own way, and essentially a good man, only with a blind spot.

 

The lesson I learned from this was that the private side and the negative side, which latter naturally belongs to woman, have to be kept separate with at least an imaginary central line dividing the two teams of the game. If and only when this rule with its corollaries is respected, could a game be played wherein the absolutist and the relativistic counterparts could play any game enjoyable equally to both as a Game with a capital letter.

 

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Every game has its rules and one game cannot be played on the court of another. The contending teams must keep respecting reciprocity, complementarity, compensation and cancellation. Foul play spoils the whole game and a good sportsman has his nobility and honour to uphold. There has to be give and take, and the play is most enjoyable when both sides are equally matched. These maxims can yield a rich crop of applied wisdom to an organization such as the Gurukula wherein marriage is not taboo. Some men are women and vice-versa, and if the teams are kept true to each and all, while still treated as two within one, the game can go on yielding maximum joy to all. Otherwise all is lost because blood, again as always, is proved to be thicker than water. One can add strong acid to water and not vice-versa. A secret savoir-faire is implied here.

 

Although the actual game ended from May 19th to the 23rd, we had a large influx of visitors, some of whom came to explain or make amends. Homère himself brought a present of bread and his wife brought a big block of cheese. Eight pounds of butter came from Ottavia, and Gurukula life went on merrily as ever. On May 23rd we were all ready in two cars to go and spend two nights at the Yoga Institute of Mr. Van Lyzbeth at Brussels by kind invitation of the founder-couple.

 

AT THE YOGA INSTITUTE OF BRUSSELS

A general interest in the discipline of Yoga as known in the context of Indian spirituality has been an evident feature of the life of Europe. Vedanta, Zen Buddhism, Judo, Theosophy and dietetic reforms based on abstinence, had prepared the way for this kind of interest in personal discipline. Although understood only in the light of the Latin proverb, 'a healthy mind in a healthy body', it had now come to stay - not only with men and women of all ages and walks of life, but even with boys and girls of school-going age. The lotus posture (padmasana), the control of breath (pranayama), the various other poses (asanas) knots (bandhas) etc., were absorbingly interesting to all.

 

Swamis from India were in great demand and there were whole villages or townships which took to this new way of life quite seriously and with much evident benefit to health and peace. 'Relax', 'stop worrying', 'counter the high speed of technocracy' and 'repeat mantras' were the watchwords. They even indulged in Sanskrit chants, (though most times out of context and innocent of the implications of what was repeated).

 

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They participated with full earnestness and perfect dedication to the demands of Hatha Yoga, which had a greater popular appeal than what some of them vaguely distinguished as Raja Yoga, understood to be a higher spiritual or philosophical way of yogic discipline. All these were evident and fully in vogue.

 

International conferences on Yoga (with a monthly magazine devoted to and entitled 'Yoga') were conducted under the auspices of a Yoga Institute at 286 Chemin de Vleurgat, in Brussels, under the guidance of Mr. and Mrs. André Van Lyzbeth. A sumptuous interior apartment overlooking a garden quadrangle, away from the din of traffic, offered to Yoga lovers all forms of Yoga instruction and the conveniences of practice, including sauna (steam) baths common in Finland, resting-places and halls for mass instruction in Yoga meditation. Madame Van Lyzbeth was directly instructed by Swami Satchidananda of Ceylon who gave her lessons and demonstrated each item personally. There were plenty of foam-rubber mattresses on the floor in each of the rooms for men and women.

 

The Gurukula group arrived there in two groups on May 23rd to spend two nights with full freedom. There were ten of us when we conducted a fire ceremony in the large and well-lit upstairs room to explain the secrets implied in the fire ritual laid down by Narayana Guru, on lines reminiscent of the Pentecost.

 

Garry Davis, who arrived by air on the morning of May 25th from Mulhouse to be able to drive to Luxembourg the same night to see me off to Iceland en route to the USA, correctly made up the ninth disciple besides Marc, Paolo, Freddie, Curran, Céline, Jacques, and Mr. and Mrs. Lyzbeth. Mr. and Mrs. Vanderzalen made up the two others who were with us at Brussels, thus bringing our number to twelve. At noon on that Sunday, May 25th, remembered as that of the Pentecost, we found ourselves driving in two cars along the luxurious double highway towards Luxembourg, about two hundred miles south from Brussels.

 

We had enough time before the Icelandic Air Service took off from there at 10 PM to wander in the park and fort overlooking the viaduct and the old river valley. We remembered that it was after the Ascension that the disciples of Jesus also showed intelligent interest in a kind of five-sided structural language for mystical value-communication.

 

594

The kicks of Homère were symbolic, as he himself mentioned, and thus a symbolic crucifixion must have also been implied on Ascension Day - all of which my fully scientific and modernized mind seemed oblivious or apathetic to - but it was a coincidence that eight of us were discussing a structural proto-language for inter-cultural communication on that very day of many centuries ago.

 

By 9:20 PM I was ready waiting to be called to emplane in the beautiful jet waiting to take me to an Icelandic interlude. After touching goodbyes we parted.

 

AN ICELANDIC INTERLUDE

The Loftleider plane was a big white Rolls-Royce jet which was rather noisy but gave no trouble. It must have taken a parabolic route passing near to the Arctic Circle after it had taken off from Luxembourg at ten at night on May 25th. After a dinner served later in which some so-called vegetables were shrimps, having the appearance of a dish of macaroni with tomato sauce, which I tasted before suspecting it. I unwittingly swallowed a bit before I could catch myself breaking my vow of ovo-lacto-vegetarianism to which I have uniformly adhered in the name of kindness to fellow-creatures, though not as a fad or a religious scruple. I reclined in my slanting seat and had the oblivion of about twice forty winks when the airport of Iceland was announced. Seatbelts being fastened with clicks were heard all around, and we landed at Keflavik International Airport, 45 minutes' bus ride from Reykjavik, capital of the outlandish island of Iceland.

 

Outside it was overcast and a lurid gleam hung over the scene which, being devoid of trees and of volcanic origin, had the semblance of the surface of the moon, very unlike what was known to me as one from a more equatorial clime. The contrast was great and midnight seemed like a day of dull weather. The roads on which we drove to the hotel where we were to sleep at Reykjavik were narrow and wound round about rocky plains all grass and stones - unnecessarily, I thought. Here and there a vista of the Gulf Stream-warmed sea or a rare patch of cultivated land was visible. Homesteads were not in evidence and clusters of apartment houses were seen only in townships like Reykjavik itself.

 

595

On reaching the Hotel Loftleider the luggage was handled by an automatic revolving belt. Self-service seemed more in order and even more dignified, rather than asking for a porter - which I did by mistake, bringing an elderly uniformed man of great politeness who opened my room on the third floor of the 108-bed-and-bath streamlined hotel of the 'dernier cri'. He bowed himself out without even waiting for a tip, which was against usage too. His dignity acted as a chiding to my self-respect.

 

I did not know whether I was really sleeping after midnight or before breakfast of the next morning when the claims of relative time were settled as against common sense once again, as in Gent. Siesta and midnight sleep seemed interchangeable, as also breakfast and supper in the bleak northern light of the midnight sun.

 

I did not know whether I was expected to sleep or to admire the room with its wall-to-wall carpeting, double switches, table- and indirect and hidden lights; the full mirrors covering the walls; heaters operated by geyser water cybernetically regulated; radio, television, telephone, revolving chairs and collapsible beds - all finished with perfect carpentry and knotted pine panelling - with lockers and wardrobes and luggage stand all complete within a whole ten-foot side of the single bedroom - and windows opening out on the seaside with sliding adjustable doors giving access to a sun parlour to be used when the weather was good. One enjoyed privacy too, which prevented garglings and chair-pullings from disturbing any others in the next rooms.

 

I studied and admired how the spick-and-span Nordic workmanship evident in space-saving and other services was fully and intelligently employed. Sloppiness was foreign to the place and this was a form of Yoga that the gentlemanly Nordic peoples in all their wholehearted though sometimes almost childish earnestness seemed to share with the Aryan people of the dawn of civilization. The beautiful magenta of dawn left its imprint on their character, and a Vedic hedonism and love of life seemed to belong naturally to the same context. In short I secretly fell in love with Iceland and its people overnight.

 

ONE DAY OF SIGHTSEEING IN ICELAND

 

Iceland.

 

One of the first features of Iceland that makes it very interesting is that it is not icebound in winter. The name is said to have been given to mislead rather than attract visitors and divert them to Greenland, which is icebound most of the winter. The hot ocean streams warm the sea all round the place, and one soon notices too that hot springs supply the whole city of Reykjavik with hot water in pipes in all its bedrooms and kitchens throughout the year.

 

596

One might think on looking at a distant view of the city how well it resembled a side of populated Bombay, but without any smoke or even any chimneys reeking pollution into the air. The guide was heard to say that there had only been three days of snow the last winter and he said that on May 6th it had been as hot as any day in summer, though not hot enough to make you want to take off your coat. The clean town skyline was composed of concrete blocks of six-storey apartment houses which had been constructed to survive the seven or eight mild earthquakes expected each year on average. There were swimming pools of tepid water all over the town, where schoolchildren and others were asked to bathe as part of their obligatory educational programme. The economic climate was as easy as the climate outside one's pocket and there was evidence of abundance of wealth everywhere, except for raw produce from forests. The sea was rather the source and linked the island with equal bonds both to Russia and the United States, giving it a neutral place between the great economic blocs.

 

There was thus a lack of tension and an air of simplicity and ease reflected in human relations which one could not miss noticing. The simple Nordic people were children of the light of dawn. It seemed to give their character a straight, crystal-clear, whole-hearted and innocent nature, unlike the seething populations of the warmer seas of South-East Asia. There, abundance was the watchword, and men, as De Quincey observed, tended rather to be like weeds than garden plants. This I was later to verify first-hand at Fiji where I spent some time before going via Djakarta and Singapore to Kuala Lumpur within a month and half. Women in Fiji wear coloured saris or sarongs while the Nordic skies reveal the glory of the sari of the goddess in the aurora lights, showing to men a view in all its celestially variegated array. Visa and financial rules were easy in this far-flung island suddenly brought within the range of the highways of the modern world by the development of air transportation. As I watched through the ample glass front of my hotel room, all sizes and shapes of aircraft were seen to land and take off, looking not unlike ladybirds or dragonflies or other bugs on a spring lawn.

 

597

FROM ICELAND TO 42ND STREET BUS TERMINUS, NEW YORK

At one in the morning by Icelandic time I was awakened in bed by a telephone call to remind me to emplane in two hours. I left my 108-bath luxury hotel - a fool's paradise of gormandizers at fancy food buffets and swimming pools - with no regrets, since I naturally feel more at home under coconut trees in the paradise where the beachcomber can shake hands with the yogi. The gay vanity of tourists' greed and love of light pleasures lacked the mystic note which alone can add true depth of beauty to life within as without.

 

I was again seated, at about three in the morning by my uncorrected watch, in the white jet plane flying longitudinally North to South at a shorter oblique-angle route by a projection more suitable for flight than for the mariner. Squaring a circle was the problem involved. I noticed some of the passengers turning, at that strange hour of past midnight dawn, to peer through the portholes to the aft of the aircraft to the horizon we were fast leaving behind. Lo and behold, the blue of the sky was seen kissing the pink glow of sunrise and the result was a magic of tint, saturation and shade that alternated with a brilliance which seemed to have a psychedelic dimension added to its magenta, as the colour treasured by Sankara in his Saundarya Lahari which I had just finished teaching in Belgium a couple of days before. I was myself intoxicated with the philosophical and absolutist implications of this colour of all colours that the Vedic sun-worshippers called 'Aruna', which was neither red, orange, scarlet, pink or carmine. Magenta could grade into deeper violet shades, attaining to deep darkness, but it still had a dark splendour of its own, unmistakable to the mystic. The Alpine and Himalayan glow of dusk or dawn is left far behind by this, of which I had only a passing glimpse.

 

The announcer later, in fuller daylight, said we were flying over Boston and we obeyed signals and landed safely at Kennedy International Airport. The customs formalities took me about an hour more and the two bus rides, one to the East Bus Terminus, New York, and another to the West 42nd Street Terminus, took until 8:30 AM. Harry answered my telephone call. He and his now hefty six-foot-tall son Johnny, whom I had known twenty years before as a boy of six, were bending to greet me one after the other, as I sat waiting and reading on a bench. Soon I was on a highway to New Jersey in the sumptuous Impala of Harry, on the way to the Gurukula.

 

 

 

598

CHAPTER SIXTY FIVE

 

AT THE NEW JERSEY GURUKULA

Since being in North America between the years 1948 and 1951 for over two years, with an intervening period at Paris of four or five months, this was my first visit to the USA after a gap of about twenty years.

 

Harry and his son Johnny drove the deluxe car along an equally deluxe highway leading to the very heart of the mountains of New Jersey where, two decades before, Harry and I had found eleven acres of semi-cultivated maple forest land, reminiscent of Hiawatha's country of laughing waters. It was a good feeling to get away from New York where, while waiting for my friends to save me, I had to find a dime to put in the slot-machine of the door of the toilet even for such a basic need as answering a call of nature. I had to go downstairs at the beautiful terminal building to get the coin to fit the slot correctly. Opulencist economics had touched the limit here as against just natural conditions, making life more complicated under technocracy where time- and labour-saving devices had an ironically opposite effect, judged by actual experience.

 

Even a single cup of coffee cost 65 cents which, if I had spent in a restaurant in Madras, would have covered the requirements of a family of four people at least. Poverty can enter as a wolf in sheep's clothing, both by the back as well as the front door of the economic situation. Scarcity economics with high prices cancels reciprocally with a compensatory complementarity into the central value in life, whether at the low level of public conveniences or at the highest limiting point of yielding absolute human happiness. A law of double gain or loss both ways is applied here.

 

This is the back-to-back paradox of the total structural situation, demanding double correction to be righted to save civilization from the crossroads of paradox and disaster. As I travelled from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, the double-sidedness of the frenzy in which humanity is trapped became transparently evident to me in clear fluorescent light. If New York is the epicentre of the failure of a system, San Francisco with its vista open to the East, though the Pacific Ocean bids fair to be the other limiting bracket of the case for building a New Jerusalem.

 

599

THE NEW JERSEY GURUKULA, THEN AND NOW

The dream of a Gurukula had started in terms of a bare piece of land about sixty miles from New York for which a cottage had been ordered, erected and paid for within the winter months of 1949 or so, almost all done by telephone or post and by pre-fab methods. It was put up by men who came in lorries to dig the foundations in snow-covered land and who left the key for Harry to find under the door when we drove there on a sunny day of late February. The cottage was still there with a gay garden of flower-bushes around it. The fruit trees that had been planted many years before had matured and their spring flowers were strewn on the grass. Such was the sunlit scene that awaited us at Long Valley.

 

Instead of one unfinished pre-fab erected on vacant ground, there was now a spacious workshop fitted with all varieties of cutting and grinding machines where three young disciples worked. The hut behind, hidden near the spring water source within the sugar-maple woods, had now become a cottage in which a whole family of three or four could live comfortably. George Semanison had been living in it for several years. The deer and other wild animals were his only next-door neighbours, coming especially during the greener non-wintry months.

 

The long machine shop had an upper floor where complete cooking, heating and study amenities were available for one or two guests at a time and for others to write or study in occasionally.  My first interest was to find out how the Gurukula had been functioning. The report of Harry was in this respect encouraging. He had just married Mary after the death of his first wife when I had left for India twenty years before. In the meanwhile his eldest daughter Edvarda had married and settled down in Boston. Joyce, the second daughter, was well employed without any marital intentions, and Johnny, the youngest, now a hefty man, had come back to work in his father's toolshop, somewhat like a prodigal son, after strange adventures in which his physical fitness proved to be his worst enemy.

 

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Mary had her own daughter and grandchildren in Florida. Two female Indian teachers also formed for some months part of the Gurukula. All the inmates, including Garry, Pete and Roy, were trained to use their hands by Guru Jakobsen, while also cultivating their understanding each morning at daybreak when they sat over cups of coffee doing some reading from serious books like the Mahabharata or the Gita. This feature had been uniformly kept up all through the two decades of the life of the Gurukula, and the results were evident in that it had changed at least somewhat the minds of each one of the inmates and oriented them effectively towards the wisdom-value of the Absolute. Thus, although a Gurukula did not function here in the more usual sense of a community or boarding school, it had served the same purpose.

 

The lapse of twenty years, however, was telling on the health of Harry and I noticed that he was becoming overpowered by his own loving and generous attitude on the one hand and by well-intended negative attentions on the other. Although I had spoken to him of the Kali principle hiding within women as a negative absolutist value to drag men down from their positive and public idealisms, Mary and his own daughters could not help having a Deianeira effect on him. Thus even Hercules, the strongest of men, in the days of his last labours had to groan under the magic of the shirt that his loving wife had given him.

 

MORNING CLASSES AND EVENING PARTIES

The cobwebs of relativism, which the comfort-loving spirit of man complacently accepts when old age and decreasing vitality operate within him, have constantly to be torn asunder and cleared if a man desires to die happily. Life is a battle fought constantly within the battlefield where the dark relative self gets lit up alternately by the positive absolute light. A tragic, radical and non-compromising passion or enthusiasm for truth to prevail is involved in the fight for victory at every moment. Relaxation due to doubt, even for a moment, could spell disaster.

 

I found myself face to face again with a situation like the one which had burnt my fingers at Lathem in Belgium. Absolutists cannot fit into a relativist family setup without inevitably proving for the 'nth' time, that blood is thicker than water. Such was the attitude within me when I had settled down in the cosy top study-room of the machine shop which was assigned to me by Harry, with all amenities for cooking and even air-conditioning provided with great foresight. A beautiful array of books with work tables big and small made the place conducive to hours of meditation, study and ease.

 

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Harry had his favourite pipe and sat listening opposite me in the airy study with windows facing the drive and garden below. I soon revived a coffee-party combining a wisdom lesson with small table talk. Protolinguism was again freely resorted to, as in Belgium. Clem, George, John and Mary listened carefully, although Harry himself preferred to rest. Each day a new wisdom point was made and from May 27th to June 16th this interesting event went on uninterruptedly. Finally, I felt the cobwebs of cosy easy-chair attitudes giving way to a radical attitude.

 

Some women of the neighbourhood also began to attend. The United States abounds in a certain type of strong-minded woman descended from the pioneering days of the Pilgrim Fathers. Some such blood, when mixed with Red Indian blood, reveals strange feminine types with great psychic powers and possibilities. Between the so-called Daughters of the American Revolution and such women of mixed origin, one finds a treasure of assorted types that, when canalised and directed to high ends, could easily be made to form the nucleus of a world fraternity or sorority. Many a Blavatsky or Besant now lies unknown in such a stratum.

 

Clem brought one such lady. Joyce, the second daughter of Harry, also revealed some extraordinary loyalty to higher values. Erotic mysticism, as revealed to me by the repeated scrutiny of the Sanskrit text attributed to Sankaracharya called the Saundarya Lahari, gave me fresh insights and vistas into the secrets of the psyche under the perspective of a negative absolute Value called Beauty.

 

My talks at evening after-dinner gatherings at the New Jersey Gurukula were fully nourished in these new sidelights. After about a fortnight of such a routine all faces beamed with a strange agreement about the high numerator value of the Absolute. I had thus again won a victory over the hearts of friends I had contacted more than two decades ago.

 

On June 16th I was to leave my friends. Garry Davis was to visit me, which he did at the eleventh hour when we were already at Newark Airport with a new air ticket as far as Kuala Lumpur, stopping over at Chicago, San Francisco, Honolulu, Fiji and Sydney. It was on the morning of the 16th that a touching goodbye was given to me before Harry and his beautiful daughter Joyce took me to Newark Airport in his new Impala.

 

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Mary embraced and kissed me and the younger inmates looked at me from outside the tool-shop where working hours were just about to commence. George was soon to quit his job in favour of a more adventurous beachcombing and globetrotting life in some of the Pacific islands. His seventeen-year-old daughter Linda, who had been influenced by George in simple, austere ways by long years of quasi-hermit life in the cottage in the backwoods of the Gurukula where I had spent some afternoons to keep him company, was finally to finish her education and possibly follow her father to the Gurukula Island Home of Ezhumalai. Such were some of the distant prospects in time and space which filled both sides as we parted on that memorable day, never to feel really separated from each other, whether by sea, air or the all-pervading consciousness in which we eternally live.

 

I FAIL TO MEET THE PROFESSORS

One of my objects in undertaking the world tour, in the middle of which I found myself in June, was to make contacts with academic circles to study reactions to my views on the Science of the Absolute. The contacts I had made while in Moscow, Gent, Brussels and England, already seemed to indicate that these views of mine stood isolated because of the new lines of epistemology, methodology and axiology that I had developed with some bold originality derived from the Guru-wisdom of ancient Upanishadic lore. I found to my great chagrin that I had not been able to establish a real dialogue with any one of the professors I had met so far.

 

I had counted much on meeting Dr. Robert Oppenheimer at Princeton while staying in New Jersey. I even wrote a letter to him asking for an appointment. After posting it I wanted to be doubly sure of his being available when Harry could drive me the distance from Long Valley to Princeton, so I telephoned the information office. However, I was strangely informed that he had died two years before. I had personally known his father and mother, and his younger brother happened to be a student of nature study in my class when I taught at the Gland School in Switzerland. I had counted on crossing swords with this outstanding physicist, the father of the atomic bomb, but that was decreed not to be.

 

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My next hope was to meet my other friend and disciple who was the Dean of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Dr. Marshall Hodgson had been my student and favourite when he was just six years old at the same school on the banks of Lake Léman. His mother had also been there, travelling in Europe with her husband.

 

Marshall had been a nervous, restless and highly-sensitive boy, never consoled but ever seeking better ways of finding self-satisfaction. By dint of a certain innate earnestness, brought up in a Quaker atmosphere of responding to one's own inner voice, he rose by sheer hard work from one promotion to another wherever circumstances put him. He was a pacifist and refused military service, and his early career after college was on a sidetrack, not helpful in pushing him to the forefront. Sterling qualities of head and heart never get overlooked by rival forces operating on the surface of the striving sea of life. Each solid floats high or low by dint of its own specific gravity. Marshall was a genuine person and he left his impression indelibly in and round the place he lived by always keeping his academic, religious and social environment open and dynamic with his own calm and pacifist Quaker spirit, which was also stern and uncompromising. It was fated, however, that I was not to meet this dear friend alive again. His mother gave me the news of his sudden collapse while working in the garden of his house at Woodlawn Avenue near the University campus, when all the stars guiding his career were in the ascendant. His wife Phyllis and the mother whom I had known well in Switzerland forty years before, made more than full amends for the husband and son who was no longer present to greet me.

 

I had also counted on Dr. Jack Baumer of the University of Hawaii and Professor Gliek as fifty-fifty certainties or probabilities when I was to pass through Honolulu within the next month. But even there, strange factors such as love or a long holiday from the university worked against me at the last moment. The telephones rang in vain and announced in other voices that my friends were not available. There is thus many a slip between cup and lip. Life flows like a tortuous river, shaping its course with great uncertainty and indeterminism - known as the great cosmic principle of becoming or Maya, now acceptable to both modern Science as well as to ancient Vedanta.

 

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The send-off at the Newark Airport between 9 and 11 AM was interesting because Garry caught up with me at the eleventh hour by phone from New York just when I was ready to start from Long Valley Gurukula with my black raincoat, beret and walking stick - thus easily mistaken for a Santa Claus resembling Tolstoy. The airport was bustling with hum-hum zooming as well as announcer voices. The brief meeting of Harry, Garry and Joyce over clinking strong cups of coffee and cake snacks added to the One-World character of the prevailing airport atmosphere.

 

The United Airlines jet sneaked into its position on the airfield populated with strange flying units, from moths to helicopters to airliners, blinking or winking energetic lights from inside to tails or other tips of their dragon bodies, with strange stripes or letters of varied tints or shades.

 

Garry Davis fitted into this world naturally and I was merely a witness belonging elsewhere and there at once. Greetings of 'Hello, Santa Claus' came to me from most unexpected quarters from young friends walking with their mothers. When I turned to them to respond I found invariably that such greetings were un-premeditated and the authors unconcerned witnesses who were ready to take Santa Claus for granted in the modern bustle of an airport. We said touching goodbyes at the appointed gate and the mysterious coming together of friends with warmth within was soon cooled into normal temperature as the plane took off for Chicago.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SIXTY SIX

 

WITH PROFESSORS AND DROP-OUTS IN CHICAGO

Chicago, where mists prevented me from landing on time, was a city long known to me by reputation. Indians of my generation had surely heard of the Chicago World Fair of 1893 where an unknown wandering Indian yogi in a turban surprised huge audiences by speaking very good English without any accent.

 

The dominated East was thus heard by the dominating West stating its case in clear and confident terms. This time the counter-attack came as a spiritual echo of the voice of humanity whose dignity had to be reasserted. This contact with the white man by a coloured man had its secret thrill not missed by either side, and my own little heart was not outside its tender influence.

 

IN VIVEKANANDA 'S DAY

 

Vivekananda in America.

 

Man was facing man in terms of conscience or consciousness. Vivekananda became the favourite mouthpiece of millions of sensible or sensitive humans overnight; and fame itself thus became glorified as a high value. Vivekananda was the hero of my adolescent years, and my father was his personal friend while he was in Madras in the early nineties. It was he who spoke of Vivekananda to me first when his name was becoming well known. At twelve, I could recite the whole of his Chicago address for the pleasure of my father.

 

On finding myself in that city, however, strangely enough, I felt inwardly a gentle aversion to visiting the institution founded by him which was near where I had been invited to stay, round the University campus. While I felt inside that I was a humble continuator of Vivekananda as I had originally grasped him, the twists and turns the teaching had actually taken in historical terms gave it a complexion often the opposite of the one it wore in its earliest years.

 

Politics, religion and nationalism often swerve in course of time from the right to the middle or left of the road, besides becoming rigid dead letters.

 

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Vedism was heterodox to the early followers of Kapila, and the tables were turned conversely in later years of the growth of the great tree of Indian Wisdom. Even within the movement of Narayana Guru there are certain aspects that leave for me a bitter taste as it flows over the uneven socio-religious ground.

 

When Vivekananda first addressed the audience as 'Sisters and Brothers of America' there was continued applause, and he went on sonorously to assert that he belonged to a religion 'into whose sacred language of Sanskrit the word exclusion is untranslatable'. He said also that Hinduism was based on toleration. My later studies have, however, revealed that the Brahma-Sutras have a section in which homicide is condoned in the name of caste or racial exclusiveness - which should have, properly speaking, constituted a blot on the Hindu conscience in the light of what the great 'Hindu Monk' claimed in Chicago in 1893.

 

But the irony is that it remains valid as a canonical injunction to the present day. Modern religious movements like those of Sri Ramakrishna and Shivananda seem to accept the invidious discrimination which remains unexpunged in an independent India where the equality of all men must be basic. It is high time this homicidal blot on the so-called 'Hindu conscience' is given the treatment it deserves in the name of the equality of all men.

 

ON BEING RECOGNIZED

Dr. Jayaraman and another friend from Kerala recognized me at the airport in Chicago in spite of crowds present all over the building - guessing mostly by my beard and from what he had heard about me from his brother in India. Here we have a good example of how the logic of postulation (arthapatti in Sanskrit) operates. 'Idea first and confirmation later' is a form of inductive reasoning that gives a sufficient degree of reasonability in the domain of possibility, rather than in terms of a weak probability on which modern scientific induction largely relies. It is possibility that gave certitude in recognizing me, which impossibility alone could rule out. No question of probability was involved.

 

The two young Indians approached me, cautiously guessing, and the situation clicked or worked. I was soon on the Kennedy Expressway driving neck-to-neck at standard speed past avenues, parkways and highways or freeways where roads of lesser dignity merged or fell apart, which we left behind or bypassed, making way to the residential suburbs of Berwyn and Oak Park. We pulled up at the corner of Windsor Avenue in front of a beautiful villa.

 

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Soon I could look out of the upstairs bedroom window where I found myself resting in a well-ordered, quasi-modern, space-saving flat. I had a view of Chicago's residential suburbia more generously laid out with avenues and gardens than its counterpart in the Greater London area. More green lawns and shrubs and avenue trees were in evidence. Dr. Jayaraman and his wife, also a doctor, were both qualified members of the medical profession. While I stayed at their house, I could not decide who was the cleverer of the two. They were working at US hospitals by some kind of international arrangement.

 

DIAGNOSTICS AND TREATMENT

The Ayurvedic medicine of India differs from Western allopathic medicine diametrically, in that the latter starts with objective empirical standards and gives primacy to symptoms rather than deeper aetiological sources of pathological conditions. Allopathy excels thus in diagnosis and pleads helpless in treatment, in which Ayurveda excels with traditionally-tested medical materials. Many days of hospitalisation at exorbitant cost are involved before diagnostic tests are fully applied to patients. When expert doctors begin to differ, the prognostics can already have a dismal import. Ayurveda often relies on simple herbal treatment based on a philosophy of pathology itself. Judged by results rather than sophisticated diagnostics, Ayurveda is seen to be based on a sounder aetiology and a general theory of pathological conditions.

 

I had just arrived in the home of the two young Indian doctors after recommending simple senna powder for relieving pressure on the heart to Harry at the New Jersey Gurukula. Compared with usual hospitalisation and tests the remedy seems ridiculously simple, easy and cheap, and is often laughed at for that reason. Harry was convinced of the efficacy of senna and his doctor, who had already charged bills of hundreds of dollars for diagnostic hospital tests, finally approved of it as efficacious.

 

Drugs such as tranquillisers, together with expert techniques with no aetiology worth the name, are at present making medical treatment a menace.

 

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But those who profit by them cannot be expected to admit it, at least from correct professional standpoints to which they stand committed in advance. The young doctor couple were highly sensitive to the dignity of modern medicine and it was only inadvertently that I referred to senna as a simple medicine against heart attacks, most of which prove to be 'maladies imaginaires' after elaborate and costly and even sometimes fatal tests have been applied.

 

MY FRIEND MARSHALL

Meanwhile it was arranged by the good offices of the late Dr. Marshall Hodgson's mother and widow that I should stay at the International House at the University of Chicago. As a guest of the Hodgson family and what is more, as one admired by the deceased Dean of the Committee on Social Thought, I was a doubly-welcome guest. It was even whispered here and there that the Guru of the teenage years of Dr. Hodgson, who was himself respected as a Guru both academically and in the Quaker religious circle of Friends at the Woodlawn University Area Meeting House, had arrived from India.

 

On driving up to the imposing International House Buildings, I was soon introduced to Dr. Ballard, himself the Dean of another church group, who was in charge of the administration of the International House. He admired Dr. Hodgson, which showed that Dr. Hodgson had admirers outside the Quaker group. In fact the intimacy that had existed from 1929-1968 between Marshall and me had a deep fourth-dimensional character which subsisted in spite of time and distance and operated somewhat in a neutrino fashion, influencing both our minds uniformly. His mother even mentioned overt affiliation between us when he had visited India in 1934 or so, which I had totally forgotten.

 

He was against racial discrimination. He was a pacifist. He was an authority on Islamic culture and left a monumental work being posthumously edited and published by his disciple Dr. Ruben Smith, entitled 'The Venture of Islam'. I was given a chance to look at its pages and was convinced it was a major contribution to the understanding between 'those of the Book' - Kitabis i.e. Christians and those of Islamic culture and religion. I found that his widow, Phyllis Hodgson, was as great as her husband in having that same open and dynamic outlook that the husband represented.

 

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She was just then engaged in moving out of her house in the Woodlawn area to a 19-acre farmhouse on Route 1, Avoca, Wisconsin, called by an Islamic name signifying an open and dynamic attitude of universal brotherhood.

 

One of his two crippled children died, leaving the other, about seven, confined to a wheelchair. Here was a tragic touch in Hodgson's life which he put up with in a spirit of quiet patience and submission, almost reminiscent of martyrdom. The Quaker spirit is capable of calm agony and submissive suffering for the sake of what belongs to the will of God.

 

THE PRAGMATIC PROFESSORS

I spent a happy afternoon with the family and had a direct taste of the earnestness and devotion of the departed friend among friends. I was treated to dinner the same day and I had the good fortune to meet several professors of the University and inmates of the International House. I addressed a select group of students and staff, with others invited by Mrs. Hodgson at a special meeting-room of the International House on Thursday June 19th, where I had the chance to explain how a self-supporting, retroactively adjusted, double-sided community could work - with opulencist and abundancist economics complementing each other to establish a homeostatic floating model of an absolutist sociological unit. Geared always to the normative Absolute as a high and also a normative value, an institution on Kibbutz lines could work to ease future economic problems such as crowded city life and the spiralling of living costs. Poverty hides in cities at the very core of outward opulence based on a 'Parkinsonian' principle, whether referred to seriously or in joke.

 

I was invited to dinner the same night where friends represented the attitude for which Chicago as an academic centre stood: that of pluralism, democracy, pragmatism, operationalism and functionalism, permeated by a sceptical outlook where no absolutist or dogmatic belief could ever enter.

 

Even in such a citadel of this modern outlook, it was surprising for me to see some professors carrying on the work of higher learning. My one-hour tête-à-têtes with the Professor of Phenomenological Psychology and with the Professor of Indology, who was a great Sanskrit scholar too, left lasting impressions on the mind.

 

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Although the impression of Chicago University as a centre standing for social values was not effaced thereby, I had the more favourable impression that teacher-pupil relations entered into the work of the various departments of this large university by the back door, as it were, to give originality and character to the work done there, not the least of such departments being the one devoted to 'United Science', though carried on under a 'Committee for Social Thought' - an expression which was meant to cover up any over-ambitious intentions inconsistent with plain pragmatism.

 

WHERE CASTE IS DROPPED

An Indian lady who taught speed-reading at Northwestern University invited me to tea on Friday June 20th. There was another Indian lady and one from Italy present and we had common ideas which made the time pass quickly. Common intellectual interests reflected in the conversation filled the whole afternoon, at the end of which Dr. and Mrs. Jayaraman appeared in the lounge to take me back to Berwyn again for a stay of two days.

 

Some other contacts with Indians, especially from Kerala, who had long been settled in professions in and around the Chicago area were made. It was interesting to note that in far-off Chicago all separatist caste, clan or cult identifications were forgotten and Indian men and women moved together as one social unit. A Marathi doctor of mathematics also spent many hours with me. One evening he took me out to see the imposing skyline with its skyscrapers and lights looking like a psychedelic fairyland, reflecting in the expansive freshwater Lake Michigan. It was a grand sight showing how human life inserted itself into nature's gifts in a large way.

 

GHETTOS AND DROP-OUTS

The Chicago of Swami Vivekananda's 1893 days did not present two features of which I found evidence as I moved about that city of distances and its suburbs. Negro children, mostly teenagers, moved about in small bands and lived in areas called ghettos where conditions made them discontented with white society. Trouble could be expected at any moment. I was sitting in the car of the Rev. Dr. Ballard when a group of teenagers, seeing a white man sitting on such friendly terms with a coloured man, came near the car to put questions.

 

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Moreover, I looked like a brown Santa Claus to their eyes. Dr. Ballard explained the situation, often explosive, that persisted in many parts of the old Chicago area and how the behaviour of the curious teenagers reflected a certain rare confidence and curiosity at seeing the absence of racial segregation.

 

My contact with dropouts of Chicago who avoided the old city and lived in residential suburbs was a more direct one. After I visited the mother of one of the new dropout disciples, Curran, at Oak Park, a number of visitors came to take me to an apartment given to dropouts. There were about ten men and women who lived a non-conformist and unconventional life of their own. Many of them held respectable jobs such as teaching at schools, but were not to be mistaken for straight people. They had been 'turned on' and had themselves been 'turned in' or 'turned into' a new free and easy way of life full of generous fellow feeling. Pot smoking was taken for granted, but there was no mistaking that a new and strong generation of absolutists was being born, both in such dropout pockets as well as in the ghettos, of which there must have been thousands.

 

That thousands of such places existed was evident from the upsurge of troubles so characteristic of the times in which coloured people and dropouts made common cause with students and workers on the rampage within or without various campuses, contributing their share to that feature to which magazines like Time, Life and The New Republic devoted ample space.

 

My contacts convinced me that the movement was deep and world-wide, a serious one that could not be stifled by mere sporadic police action or excesses. After Chicago I was to visit the epicentre of those unrests, which was none other than the Western coastal strip of California. San Francisco was at the time a kind of Benares for the dropout flower-people movement. Berkeley was a storm centre. I looked forward to contacting this new variety of absolutists with whom, even a couple of years before, I had established an intellectual sympathy.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SIXTY SEVEN

 

THE BENARES OF THE DROP-OUTS

 

San Francisco hippie scene in 1968.

 

Not to miss visiting San Francisco had been in my mind since I had started on my travels this time. From speaking to the new generation in Belgium and reading about the aspirations of modern youth, whether Provos around Amsterdam, Beatniks, Diggers, Flower People, Dropouts or just Hippies, with attitudes of warlessness, bomblessness or representing pacifism of various grades, my interest in them and desire to make real contacts with them became keener each day.

 

I was introduced to psychedelics and learned how, through colour, sound and play with lights, a new form of art was in the offing. Julian Beck's Living Theatre represented this urge. Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg were two of the apostles of this new outlook and way of life. The May 1968 revolutions of Paris and the unrest at almost all university campuses the world over were symptomatic of an unmistakable discontent deep-seated in the heart of the youth of humanity.

 

CHALLENGE OF THE NEW GENERATION

 

Julan Beck.

 

The Guru-role consists of meeting such a challenge and answering the questions asked in a better way than before. There was no mistaking the absolutist nature of the protest coming from youth. They insisted on a new sexual morality. They sought to know the inner rather than the outer man, if need be by means of drugs that affect the doors of perception. Yoga and Tibetan or Zen Buddhism had a special appeal for them. The syllable AUM became meaningful and significant to them as the Word of words or Existence of existences or as a value inspiring their deepest aspirations. They began to live a common life in an inner space about which there began to be a consensus of mutual agreement. Psychedelics became a science capable of being treated not only esoterically but in terms of yogic inner experience, on which the leaders of thought of the new school could compare notes and make valid or adequate abstractions and generalisations, building up new psychological notions nearer to human experience common to both young and old, men or women.

 

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They tended to transcend racism, nationalistic frontiers and linguistic barriers. They questioned institutions and wanted to replace opulent economics with abundant economics. World Government naturally entered into their dreams. Individual taste in dress was in order with them and they sometimes went so far as to think of nudity as normal.

 

Most of the time they were gentle and harmless when left alone and tended to moronish subjectivity rather than to any form of obtruding mischievousness. Besides AUM their slogans also contained that rare word 'Guru' which means the personified Absolute in the context of 'Paradise here and now'. Their originality led them to seek something other than the conventional, whether of the old Papal or Victorian order. They liked to live underground and 'freak out', 'tune in' or have an experience of 'going far out' or 'getting high' - which were all aspirations normal to them.

 

New religious groups from India and Indonesia such as the Hare Krishna Group; or from Europe, such as Scientologists, offered them some consolation. Natural living with what was called 'macrobiotics', which was a new dietetic mode that formed the corollary of natural living, preferably in farms away from cities in self-sufficient free communities, appealed to them.

 

These features have also appealed to me as the founder of several Gurukulas. I was also inspired early by such Western writers as Rousseau, Voltaire, Tolstoy, Thoreau, Ruskin, Carlyle, Marx, Engels and Quesnay, St. Simon, Comte, Emerson and a galaxy of thinkers who fanned the socialistic elements culminating in Anarchism or Kropotkinism.

 

Narayana Guru added the last straw to the situation as far as I was personally concerned. The result was irresistable and thus it was that I became favourably disposed towards the whole of the new generation, loosely called by the label 'hippy', which I would rather paraphrase as 'naturally happy' people. The California coast was readily guessed by me to be the veritable seismic epicentre of this newly evident order of things. A changing scheme of value-standards in the total situation called life-ethical, religious or just necessary welfare aspects was involved. Setting the whole house in order was called for imperatively in the here and now and not in a promised paradise.

 

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Thus it was that San Francisco became a place of pilgrimage to me. It was a kind of Benares of natural, free and easy revised ways of 'hippy' life. Only a normative Science of the Absolute could contend with the wholesale situation presenting itself as world-wide discontent.

 

I LAND AT SAN FRANCISCO

The flight from Chicago to San Francisco took about four hours, starting at about ten in the morning. I found myself in full view of the Bay and about to land soon after 1 PM. The Pacific coast has many other points from which international flights take off overseas to Hawaii and the Asian countries. In spite of this I found the airport crowded with passengers and as busy as New York or Newark.

 

Mr. Shivaram, who was a dancing and yoga teacher long settled there, recognized me by reputation and helped me to collect my two pieces of baggage. They had arrived a long distance from the landing gate at another end of the ample buildings fitted with automatic conveyor belts for baggage instead of porters. My bag was helplessly going around at the delivery point like an orphan looking for its parent to claim it and give it salvation from Samsara. We were soon on a bus taking us to the centre of the city several miles away for two bucks each. Arriving at the bus terminus, we took a taxi to Fulton Street to the Aurobindo Cultural Centre where Mr. Shivaram had arranged for my preliminary stay.

 

Without telling me where I was being taken, he took me to a room which was locked. The key was not with the lady caretaker, as someone else had taken it. I was very kindly given a makeshift bed in a clean vacant corner by the wife of the director after a telephone consultation. The hospitality seemed lukewarm from the beginning but I still decided to stay a few days from the 22nd to the 27th, on which day I found a room at the School of Natural Living at 273, Frederick Street, in the Haight-Ashbury area, an area reputed to be free from racial discrimination as well as sufficiently respectable by residential standards or requirements. It was further the natural haunt of the new generation.

 

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IN GOLDEN GATE PARK

 

Golden Gate Park in 1968.

 

The view from the rear windows commanded the Twin Hill slopes dotted with villas amidst green trees or gardens with lawns which, although slightly out of date in architectural features, gave a restful prospect. The roads were very steep and rose or fell into valleys, calling for cautious driving. The Bay and downtown skyscrapers were clustered on the opposite side. While staying at Fulton Street, I had already acquainted myself with the Golden Gate Park and taken a walk at dusk into the thick woods with open green spaces where rabbits could be seen in the very centre of the city.

 

At about sunset I heard some notes from a clarinet or flute, which seemed to issue from a strange semi-divine gnome or fairy coming out of a cavern built in the park. Someone told me that it was a hippie who usually haunted the park at that time, enjoying the plaintive plain notes he made with his instrument. Self-sufficiency was another feature that distinguished the hippies. Often they suffered hunger rather than foregoing the effects of narcotics. They picked up their girl or boy friends very casually and dropped them informally.

 

On my very first day I had found a live hippie with these characteristics hiding in the cave in the park. He was called Michael and was partly employed. Negligently dressed, he carried his flute and seemed innocent, smiling and happy. He asked me to teach him more about yoga and meditation. I invited him to my room. He came the next day with his girlfriend and I talked to them over cups of tea. He said he would like to come to India.

 

For two or three evenings I gave public talks on what I represented at a Health Food centre. The response was good and many more contacts with dropouts were made. My host, who had put me in the Aurobindo centre, told me that I was to find a new room. Perhaps my contact with dropouts or whatever I spoke about informally over meals to other people present in the common dining room did not agree with the authorities. The classroom where I had been sleeping was abruptly requisitioned by some lady other than the one who had offered it to me. I thus again had to beat a retreat against negative forces unknown to me.

 

All that I knew was that I could not fit into such a context. An absolutist generally has to be prepared for such reverses and, as the Bible puts it, must leave even the dust of his feet behind him with no regrets. Relativism and absolutism can hardly live together, and every experiment to combine the two results in proving that blood is thicker than water.

 

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273, Frederick Street, Haight-Ashbury, was a house on whose second floor the School for Natural Living was located. The inspiration for it had come from a young man who was not altogether a dropout. He worked for a good salary and had not yet neglected his haircut nor his professional appearance. But he had seen that all was vanity and vexation of the spirit in what pertained to conventional or institutional life in the USA.

 

He objected to food poisoned through chemical spraying or fertilising. Monopolist big business geared to an artificial wartime economy in which farmers were paid to keep lands untilled so that price-levels could be maintained by artificial scarcity, and the war in far-off colonial regions had revolted him early as an undergraduate about to sit for a final examination in chemistry and allied subjects. Growing vegetables and eating fruits, nuts and natural foods interested him. The chapter on the Apocalypse largely motivated his spiritual promptings. He rented a flat where he could offer dropouts a chance to regain a natural balance in life. His younger brother and sister, who had come from Los Angeles, were also college products who loved original and independent ways which did not support the institutionalist set up.

 

Strangely enough, also living in San Francisco was a cartoonist who produced a serial comic cartoon figuring a short, grumpy old man with a white beard like mine, called Mr. Natural. This had been brought to my notice even when I had been in London. It was published in an underground dropout paper called the I.T. or International Times. I spontaneously suggested Mr. Natural to all who met me. Thus I fitted into the home of happy and natural hippies. Mark Albert was the eldest and Ross the youngest who dabbled in creative cinema film art on his own original experimental lines, which I inspected and found promising.

 

A DROPOUT COMMUNITY

 

Commune scene.

 

Thus good luck had found for me just the right setting for establishing further contacts with hippiedom in its very citadel or den. Mark owned both a car and a van and we took several dropouts for long drives, sometimes fifty or sixty miles from San Francisco. The very first afternoon we drove round San Francisco Bay and had a full-moon view of the Bay waters as we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, the pride of the city.

 

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Another day we went to the Berkeley area across the long Bay Bridge, around to Mill Valley and back. Our excursions allowed personal contact with various grades of dropouts living singly or in communities which we visited within a range of seventy-five miles of San Francisco. I was also present at a hippie meeting near the seashore in a large hall where Stephen Gaskin, an accepted hippie Guru, gave talks on the new psychedelic and psychological experiences shared by all members, men and women, of this new generation.

 

Alampoly was the name of a seven-hundred-acre farm in a place called Novato. It was founded by Don McCoy. He called himself by the megalomaniac title of The Emperor of the World, and had under him a 'Holy Mother', as in the Aurobindo Ashram. They grew their own vegetables, baked their own bread and were an independent dropout community practising nudism and every other natural way of life already mentioned.

 

A SITUATION SAVED

Just on the day I happened to be there, the 'Holy Mother' was in distress and, as far as I could understand from her story, two children had accidentally drowned or rather one of them nearly so the previous day. Out-ganged by relativist women and their supporters, the real absolutist dropouts were being exposed to persecution and police intervention at the instigation of the conservative community.

 

This had upset the balance of the founder to whom I was taken to visit in a nearby mental clinic. I was able to console him by pointing out the nature of the martyrdom he was passing through. On the same day I saw the half-drowned baby in one of the hospital beds, being given artificial oxygen respiration. There seemed to be hope mounting every minute in the parents and friends waiting outside. The police officer also talked to me and was not without sympathy for the institution and its bold ideals, but there was helplessness all round.

 

The fate of Alampoly was hanging in the balance of relativist and absolutist forces acting at cross-purposes. Indian literature would refer to such a situation as the absolute lustre of the moon coming under the relativist shadow of Rahu (a generalized negative astronomical factor).

 

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I was looked upon by some as a godsend come to save the situation as a sort of Daniel with his judgement regarding the writings on the wall of evil portent.

 

I explained to Don McCoy, with the permission of the psychiatrist under whom he was hospitalised, how women could gang up with other relativists and scuttle an absolutist ship floating on the ocean of Maya's indeterminism. There was a brightening of the man's features and an understanding smile told me while I spoke that he was still within the scope of hoping to save the would-be Gurukula. They were also expecting an Indian Guru of Bengal to help them to find their own proper spiritual bearings. They told me the Guru's name was Chiranjivi and he lived in a rural area near Howrah, Calcutta.

 

LON AND RENA GOTTLEIB AT MORNING STAR

Another more interesting experience in the Californian non-conformist world was my visit on July 1st to a thirty-acre orchard and open land with springs and fruit trees shedding their apples, plums and pears plentifully on the ground. We arrived there at about five in the evening and went round the vegetable garden and hothouse. Here and there I found some neglected structures occupied by one or two hippies. Some of them slept under trees and nourished themselves evidently on fallen fruits, but spent most of their time living in their own common inner space.

 

After about an hour prowling round the grounds near the crossroads where the entrance signboard 'Morning Star' hung on a tree, I went to a hut not far from where the climbing roads met at a clear area at the top. I was looking carefully at some strange structural representations, not unlike my own, having philosophical implications, when I turned to look at the road and saw two big cars chasing one another, the first driven by the founder of the Morning Star Ranch and his young and brave wife who was his companion in all his adventures in the dropout cause. They both drew up not far from me. He was a tall French-bearded, middle-aged man with a confident gait and look. He was a musician. The young lady had equally positive traits in her features, not unlike those of Vivekananda. There was a nonchalant simplicity in her ways.

 

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Both approached me and I was surprised to hear Sanskrit words of greeting meant for Gurus with the striking Indian gesture of touching the feet of the Guru. It took me one minute to grasp the seriousness of the situation. The second car contained armed police officers of the nearby Santa Rosa area and Lon was to be taken away into custody that very evening. No time was to be lost. He asked me abruptly to take charge of his wife and turned to the waiting police car to be borne away from his young feminine comrade-in-arms in their fight against closed and static ways of life.

 

She told me the long story of their victimisation and how absolutist ways were foiled by adverse relativist forces. There were, however, neighbours on their side. As she could not sleep in her own hut, by magisterial order based on flimsy objections concerning sanitary or health requirements interpreted adversely against them rather artificially for other reasons of unconventionality, she left her car, the key of which was with her husband, and we drove in her van to find for all of us a 'git' for the night. This was afforded by Jim and Carol Kimmel, a couple in a farmhouse a mile or two away from Occidental District in Pengrove. Beds were found for all six or seven of us in odd places. I cooked rice and curry for all and got to sleep for the night before midnight on July 1st.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SIXTY EIGHT

 

TRIPS IN INNER AND OUTER SPACE

On July 2nd 1969, all of us who had gone to bed in the country house of Jim and Carol Kimmel late the previous night, fatigued with the terrible adventures of the day before, rose quite early. All except Rena Gottleib - who called herself the 'Sudra Woman from Bengal', with her impossible Kali laughter - found ourselves together for our early morning lesson, which happened this time to be centring round the subject of Yoga.

 

Rena had to be unique in her own way and could not be traced anywhere, even among the trees of the garden, where sleeping was still possible and enjoyable. We gave up hunting for her and expected the unexpected, which actually happened that forenoon when, at about ten, we all went to witness the trial of Lon, the husband of Rena, who had been dramatically taken into police custody the day before.

 

Santa Rosa was the district headquarters within whose jurisdiction the magistrate was to hear Lon's case. A few minutes before the presiding officer entered the modern streamlined courtroom, many men were seated on the benches meant for visitors. Numerous victims of law or order were ushered into the presence of the judge who spoke in a court jargon, which was less clear to me than the words of Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck. Each of the States of the USA has its special accent or even dialect, and as I was more used to Madras Brahmin English, I could not follow the proceedings intelligently at all.

 

CONFUSIONS IN A COURT

I noticed that most of the law-breakers were young men who just wanted to be different. They often stood for a 'paradise now' or 'something else' or 'good karma', where each was responsible for his own sacredness or sin, with a tendency to believe in speeding or flaunting conventional rules of the road. Many also came under the narcotics act, which lent itself to be interpreted lightly or strictly according to the whim or temperament of one officer or another who could even be sinners in a conventional sense.

 

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Who were the real sinners and who were those being arbitrarily victimised as sinners by the institutionalized society in the US - while they were really more sinned against than themselves sinning - such was the ambiguity of the situation.

 

Young law-breakers were often haunted by a sense of guilt, premonitions of déja vu, and fear complexes often referred to by psychiatrists as paranoia, by which the uncertainty of highly strained minds became conducive to greater road or other accidents. There was a criss-cross meeting of fact and fancy. Such was the nature of the air one breathed on the California coast, which I too felt within me as I sat in the courtroom of Santa Rosa. Every convention and institutional life in general seemed to have been put into a melting pot. Policemen and magistrates seemed as confused as the would-be dropouts. Rena irritated the cross-belted young officers, who were trying hard to keep up seriousness, with her laconic bursts of provoking chandini-like hi-hi-hi laughter as she passed them.

 

As I sat in my ochre robes and grey beard with a number of admirers of Lon Gottleib on the visitors' benches, I felt that I was the cynosure of all eyes. A whispering campaign seemed to be going round about me by which I was imagined to be a yogi and a Guru come in the nick of time to save the ugly situation in which a highly cultured, rich and bold man, an artist on the piano, was to be tried and punished like any ordinary law-breaker. What was the magic that the yogi was going to work? All seemed to hold their breath in expectation.

 

At last, after many minor victims were disposed of by the judge with varying pronouncements, the hero of the day came out of the room where he must have been confined the whole night. A tall confident man of about forty, with a beard trimmed after the manner of a French professor, was presented before the court. The usual mumblings went on for a while, the upshot of the whole of which, as it was explained to me later, contained unmistakably that element of wonder which Dame Rumour had already anticipated. Lon was again scot-free, and when he had signed some more papers he could hug his wife and vice-versa, not as a criminal but as a free man does his partner in life.

 

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The joy of the event had to be celebrated. The newshounds were sniffing around already to discover what slant to give their report the maximum value as a non-stale news item direct from where the hot cake was being baked. A dozen of us sat on the lawn near the fountains of the courtyard garden where there was a monument to a man who stood for natural living on the land. Swami Yogananda and Vivekananda had earlier contributed to the crisis that we were passing through, showing that it was but the natural culmination of what California stood for in Western America.

 

We all agreed that the epicentre of a great change in world affairs was to be located in just the area where the San Francisco Conference after World War II marked a definite punctuation. Mexico was mentioned also as a place where new forces contained in large volume were tending to reveal a world of tomorrow in which the old order could yield place to new. We thus lived in a world of bold expectations and intentions. Feelings ran high and all shared in the exalting absolutist participation of mind with mind.

 

MORE DROPOUT CONTACTS

 

Steve Gaskin in 1968.

 

July 4th was celebrated with fireworks in San Francisco, which a group of us watched from a point of vantage. I had witnessed such fireworks before when King Edward VII's coronation had been celebrated in India. The display had its psychedelic implications because of the varieties of glittering or scintillating light-effects bursting above the dusky horizon. One watches in foolish or childish laziness the fluorescent, iridescent or worm-like effects chemically tracing patterns that resemble vegetable structures or designs. Man enjoyed fireworks in almost the same way in the post-Victorian as in the post-Kennedy epoch and with almost the same degree of childlike enjoyment, irrespective of Apollos that have now (i.e. the end of November 1969) landed men on the moon twice. Progress bypasses and leaves intact certain constant human levels of enjoyment or entertainment.

 

After the fireworks we went to a favourite meeting-place of hippies near the beach in a popular showplace. Stephen Gaskin was giving his second or third series of talks on the psychology of the new generation. He used terms borrowed from the language of Indian Yoga, such as manipura, sahasrara, etc. These chakras or adharas meant something that could be shared and understood in terms of psychophysical inner experience as was revealed by questions, comments or answers that were interchanged after the talk.

 

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Gaskin himself was a favourite figure in the world of the dropouts. Casting my glance at the gathering in the large hall, I could not help noticing strong-minded women and men. Some of the women looked equal to a man, 'even two' as Balzac is famous for remarking about 'la Femme Belge'. Not even one husband-pecked hen was evident to my eyes as I scanned the forms or features of the couples sitting on the floor.

 

Steve Gaskin was a flaxen-moustached man past middle-age sitting on the platform in a heterodox yogic posture of his own, without crossing his legs, but rather kneeling and sitting up erect. His eyes glistened with inner peace as he raised his horn-shaped instrument to blow three calm and long AUM blasts into the air.

 

The lecture that day was more of a chat across the floor, and notes on inner experience were spontaneously exchanged in a technical jargon being born as a hybrid between yoga and psychedelic experience. The bursting of the synapses was interpreted with gestures and sounds, and all who had ever gone through an LSD trip could verify one another by the echo of experience which they often expressed as best they could by verbose descriptions, often onomatopoeic in form, supplemented by lively gestures.

 

We were witnessing a new psychology of inner space being born. It was neither Tibetan, Yogic, Zen, Freudian, nor that of Jung nor Adler - but a fusion of all of them in the guiding light of drug chemistry or experiences. The dropouts were on the threshold of new doors of perception by which, as Aldous Huxley pointed out, pharmacology, biochemistry, physiology, neurology, psychiatry and parapsychology all met in terms of inner space.

 

VISIT TO BERKELEY CAMPUS

 

Berkeley in1968.

 

My next contact with the Flower People was near the Berkeley University campus. A German lady past middle-age, full of the German will to live and eigensinn, had a beautiful art studio next to the storm-centre of the student protesters. Governor Reagan was the 'baddie' in question when I visited the German lady, who was the originator of a new school of art suggestive of Christmas trees, mandalas, the Baroque and a psychedelic play of colourful firework effects. I even found others who belonged to the same mandala-art

school, which must have been a recent development at the time the 'transcendental meditation' of the Mahesh Yogi brand became so popular. There was a group of students who believed in this kind of antidote to the threat of narcotic addiction.

 

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Timothy Leary had inspired many forms of psychedelic thinking, of which the Living Theatre of Julian Beck was a partial application. Kropotkin's anarchism appealed to many, and girls were in the front line opposing steel-helmeted forces of repression with their maliciously tender confrontations. Paradox became more pronounced each day. There was an unmistakable mounting of psychic tension on the whole of the West Coast of the United States.

 

A lunch was served at the studio for my friend and me in full continental style consisting of salad and noodles. The group, consisting of Albert, Judy, Jill, Betsy and myself, enjoyed the general atmosphere of both the campus in revolt and the studio. At that time in Berkeley they were even expecting a dropout to be elected governor of California by the next year.

 

TRAPPED IN A TRIP

 

Mount Tamalpais.

 

One of the picnic spots of great beauty, near enough for the city-dwellers of San Francisco and reached in less than an hour by car over beautifully winding highways, is the formation of hills called Tamalpais. The name itself is reminiscent of some ancient people, not perhaps wholly unrelated to the Tamils of India, although such associations might sound too far-fetched to the orthodox scholarly ears of ethnologists or philologists.

 

One could climb up the forest reserve or National Park area planted with a variety of trees, mostly pines, and a wagonload of us selected a sequestered spot to spread our cloth and sit round in a light-hearted leisurely mood. We commanded a prospect of the city below lost in thin mist that graded into the floating white of cloud at the horizon, which was well below the horizontal meeting point of the skyline. The blue, white and green vista with the red of the earth gave a total perspective of the visible world as if it represented a duplicate of the inner world, which a drug trip was presently to open out to me unawares.

 

I was trapped into a trip by a chemical kindly put into my tea handed to me by kindly-looking ladies at the instance of Mark, who must have been planning for me the adventure into the inner world which I was not bold enough to undertake directly under my own initiative.

 

625

Thanks thus goes to Mark and to some of his female accomplices - perhaps Judy and also Betsy - who thus gave me an experience which I wanted to have but which was delayed because of the last vestiges of a socially moral conscience hanging at the neck of my heart even now in late years.

 

I was just becoming slightly freer and more adjustable in respect of this socialized conscience, to trace the source of which I have to thank my mother's indications against being 'bad', even as early as when I was just growing out of my toddler habits. That thin cordon of the voice of obligation was cut at last and I became qualified to be considered as a comrade of the new generation of dropouts.

 

As if to test whether I was already in the grips of the STP - said to be an elder-brother drug to LSD - Mark took me, after the potion was drunk, for a walk in the woods. I was normal from my own inside experience but I came back to the picnic spot to stretch myself after the eats and drinks. There was a couple near me rolling on the grass who must have been more old-timers in dropout practices.

 

One of them carried a flute on which he played outlandish kinnara- or gnome-like musical strains, which perhaps made him seem to hearken to the ends of space, as I could guess from his forlorn and eager glances as he produced one wailing outlandish melody after another on his simple pipe. His partner lay dazed on the grass, looking at him with all the tenderness in the command of her female psyche, full of generous appreciation of her lost or melancholy music-making mate.

 

I had my usual siesta of the famous forty winks. Strangely, on sitting up and looking at the city below through the white patches of cloud floating on a light blue ground beyond the trees under which I had rested, I noticed somehow that the world which was presented to my view was lighter and more dreamlike than I had ever known before.

 

DREAM-LIKE AGONY

 

LSD trips.

 

Some lights of the basement of the skyscraper to which I could compare my inner space or self seemed to have fused out from where they joined the main vertical line above.

 

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Dropout psychologists like Steve Gaskin would call it burning out of the synapses and perhaps imitate the inner event with apt outer gestures supported by a bursting series of sounds made by the mouth. When visible interpretation adequately accords with inner experience, so that all those who have had a trip could share in common, the proof of the pudding is right there as in the eating thereof. Such coming together of evidence and experience is the strongest point of support for this new branch of phenomenological psychology that is emerging as a direct discipline referring to inner space.

 

Sitting up as the trip started, my first feeling was that I was experiencing a sort of agony suggesting that of death. The terra firma beneath was giving way and I felt as if lifted further and further out hypostatically. A world of Christmas trees, tangerine skies, ice cream with tinsel candles and bursting flames, by a strange superimposition, made the scene before my eyes lighter each minute. Time experience tended to be lengthened rather than shortened. It was thus a suffering rather than an enjoyment, which latter alone, by definition, could shorten the experience of duration. One could examine oneself as if by travelling the stages of a lift, non-stop or stopping at will, passing through all possible intermediate levels of consciousness. It was not indirect psychology but psychology itself given directly to experience. The textbooks tried to teach the same, only indirectly. The duration and intensity of the trip varied and one could feel a fanwise expansion of colour effects, a shrinking of highlighted patches, overlappings and cross-permeations of each disjunct area with greater or lesser overlappings.

 

The trip went on for eight or nine hours, but became heavy or light with a horizontal-vertical reciprocity, compensation, complementarity, parity or cancellability of counterparts in a graded organic fashion as between numerator-denominator or actual-virtual interchangeability of terms. Some of those in the middle of the trip were seen evidently going through special emotional agonies, expressed by their getting up, standing, falling or rolling.

 

Women seemed to be affected differently from men, and erotic or sex feelings were opposite as experienced by men or women. This I could verify later only, but during the trip I sat up and acted as a commentator on my own inner events much in the same manner as a radio announcer who described the progress of an important cricket match.

 

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It took us until about dusk to feel confident that we could be driven back by Mark who was still gleefully high up or far out in his own way of encountering the trip. We went carefully to where the car was parked and, as we drove down the main highway to San Francisco, we felt lucky that no cop discovered that we were not all there while being driven by Mark, himself elsewhere, steering cleverly through the traffic lights and hairpin bends. We went to the site where the monument of the San Francisco Conference of 1948 stood with its great Greek columns celebrating the great event. With unsure steps at dusk I passed through the scenes and reached the water's edge nearby, almost mistaking water for terra firma, hardly conscious of any difference between an actual or a dream world where we walked with faltering steps haltingly and hesitantly taken, as if the ground was not sure beneath our feet.

 

Thus by the evening of July 10th, 1969, my first experience of STP came to an end; the interesting part of the trip having lasted over five hours. I said 'Wow' to myself in hippie fashion, but there was to be a hangover of the trip next day.

 

 

 

627

CHAPTER SIXTY NINE

 

CALIFORNIAN MIDSUMMER ORGY

 

Midsummer celebration.

 

My experience at Tamalpais was not the only interesting chapter that opened out new vistas to my vision while on my pilgrimage to the Benares of the dropouts. There was another chapter deeper still that was being revealed to me, like day passing into night or vice-versa, at once gradually and instantly all through this period between the last week of June and the third week of July 1969.

 

I have described the inner world that the strange drug called STP had opened out for me in terms of a psychedelic experience inside. There was a hangover of this drugged effect on me for nearly three days. The chiaroscuro of Rembrandt, the shadowless worlds of Picasso, the heavy sex-laden worlds of Gauguin and the world of ice-creams and tangerines with scintillating gleaming or fluorescent light tints and magenta patches kept on coming to me, pushed upward from within. I sometimes even imagined or really smelled the LSD odour in the rooms.

 

Appearance and reality, fact and fable, myth-making and truth, seemed to blend and encroach constantly into the domains of one another. A lack of adventure or ambition seemed to have a benumbing or dulling effect that put a wet blanket on my personality, which could be described only as a sort of moronish lack of zest in life. The deeper consciousness alone remained unaffected by these events which were still comparatively peripheral only. I could even conduct a lesson on the same subject next morning, having somewhat overslept by fatigue. By tea-time next day the hallucinatory hangover had become altogether negligible, except that I could still sympathise with the various states at will. The magenta patches - sometimes distinct, sometimes overlapping - were the last of the horizontalising effects of the drug to be finally abolished.

 

The purely mental part could not be separated from the psychophysical, and therefore it is hard even now to put a clear line between what the drug did to me and what I made up. Thirty-six hours after drinking the potion could be roughly fixed as a limit for the duration of its effects and after-effects.

 

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A MIDSUMMER MIDDAY

Goethe's 'Faust' has a Walpurgisnacht and Shakespeare his 'Midsummer Night's Dream' - which are mad creations of the lover, madman, and poet mind of sheer imagination. Sunday the 13th of July 1969 shall ever remain fresh in my mind with some such memory. Maya has rooms for everything to happen in this world; and if Allah is great in His wakeful domain of hard facts, this goddess is full of fecund possibilities and probabilities, irrespective of day or night, winter or midsummer.

 

I had suggested earlier to Lon Gottleib and to the 'Sudra woman' Rena that I would like to have a Gurukula established at the Morning Star Ranch in Occidental, already described. Lon had already made many a legal and other declaration to the effect that his land belonged to God and not to him personally.

 

As a logical result all persons were free to live in the orchards and brook-side sites of the more than thirty acres. He would not move an inch from this fundamental dedication; and when I said that the Gurukula also belonged to God and not to me personally, both the legal and factual hurdles to establishing a Gurukula on that site by the common consent of Lon on one side and me on the other, were completely abolished.

 

'Let us set about to make the Gurukula an accomplished fact', I said to him, and he saw no objection at all. I was not keen on the legal possession of property. All Gurukulas according to me depend on the one and only condition above all others, which is the dedication of all inmates to the Absolute. 'Seek then the kingdom of God and all else will be added unto it as surcroit (extra)'. We established a cordial entente at once. I proposed that I perform a fire ceremony on the site on Sunday 13th. All the dropouts in the area were to be invited and we were to cook enough food for all.

 

SUMMER MADNESS GATHERS MOMENTUM

 

LSD-fueled celebratory dancing.

 

Speed fiends exist on highways as much as dope fiends in California; and midsummer madness can affect men or women equally when youth presses inside each one as an upsurge of horizontalized vital energy.

 

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Goethe's Walpurgisnacht gives us the negative abandon where midnight madness prevails more naturally. Midday orgies are possible only in veritable Gardens of Eden such as what the California coast can always present late in summer.

 

Mark had gathered his party, with enough provisions to feed a hundred persons, into his van. Speeding neck and neck and tail-light to tail-light in numerous lanes side-by-side with cars going out of town on Sunday morning, gave a relativistic picture of comparative motions when happy motorists went sailing past each other, each family or other group bent on its own fun of sporting, swimming or fishing. All-out fun was what each wanted according to age, sex or temperament, but all agreed it was just fun they all wanted

 

Bright sunlight and the bracing air with God's plenty revealed in the miles of orchards we drove past, with wooded patches and ideal picnic spots beside river or lake, seemed to be inviting youth to abandon itself into the arms of a wild orgy with plenty of dope thrown into the bargain.

 

Dozens of men and women clad only in the pure space around them with half-dropouts or fuller ones, came together at Morning Star Ranch at ten and joined hands to lend support to the mad midsummer event. Adolescent boys and girls were excited beyond measure by the wild example set by elders supposed to be more mature than themselves. The world seemed to go out of joint as the climax of midday was reached.

 

Fortunately Mark Albert had the forethought of bringing enough rice and vegetables for a feast and a fire festival which I was to perform. Lon and Rena, we found after arrival, were so oblivious of the practical down-to-earth requirements of the hippies who each lived in his or her own artificially created dope paradise that no one there had thought of such mundane matters as a midday meal. The prophetic or Socratic traditions still had subtle hangover influences on the outlook of the so-called dropout, who still had to catch up a long way to be fully pagan. Lon himself avowed on the one hand that he had no use for philosophy, but on the other hand called himself first a musician and then a dropout only by some sort of second choice. He intended to be kind to dropouts with certain reservations of his own which I could not fully understand. It seemed, on final analysis, to lack that unitive understanding of what the dropout movement fully represented.

 

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It called for an all-out sympathy so that prophetic and pagan values could be seen to belong together without any trace of contradiction to one and the same absolute whole. One cannot serve two masters - or conversely one cannot have half a hen to lay eggs while having the other half served on the table to eat. A paradox lurked at the heart of this problem when viewed dualistically, which can vanish only when the unitive standard of a single reference is applied to it. This is an advaitic secret which I tried in vain many times to explain to my friends, including Lon, whose best of intentions lacked just this unitive touch. Bread and freedom have to belong together, and one without the other is nullifying to both.

 

A GURUKULA IN PRINCIPLE COMES INTO EXISTENCE

All the dropouts, who included many mothers with children and men with long hair, burning as it were with post-spring excitement or fever, must have been hungry when, at the corner of the ranch, a few of us were busy cooking rice and curry. Some important ingredients, like a touch of lemon, were lacking to make of the items a masterpiece. Earlier, I was given a quiet spot for a talk and the intended fire ceremony. Police came on the scene with loaded revolvers as I sat quietly explaining my intentions and immediate plans. All listened in solemn silence, many of them dressed like Adam or Eve the while. It was a strange sight to see that, instead of intervening, the armed police walked away.

 

The deck was soon cleared for the full Walpurgis features to assert themselves. I had to go to the cooking place to give the last touches of salt or sour needed to make the curries as interesting as the appetite that was building up within each negatively. Soon, casseroles of food met corresponding hunger in the vague insides of natural nudes, men and women. Some of them stood in clusters huddled together promiscuously, and many a Venus de Milo or Apollo or Olympus figures mixed their forms or limbs to resemble groups of Greek statues found in fountains or gardens such as that of Versailles.

 

Eros reigned supreme whichever way one turned. This was especially true of a maiden who, like a Diana, seemed to be caught within a group of men like satyrs or hunters. As my regard lighted on this figure so young and innocent, she burst into sobs for no imaginable reason and approached me as I was beginning to explain the fire ceremony, which it was not possible to demonstrate in practice but only attempt to explain in principle.

 

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I tried to do this as best as I could within the confusion of excited passions let loose all round. This slim alabaster Diana approached me, sobbing for no reason I could divine. All I spontaneously felt like was blessing her, which I did with evident consoling effect on her. She seemed to say it was not her fault she behaved as she did in utterly negligent abandon. Existence viewed in its absolutist perspective seemed to imply this form of agony as its natural corollary.

 

After explaining the fire ritual as best as I could, I sent for Lon Gottleib to come and vouch personally for the fact that in principle he had given his consent for ten acres of the land to be used for the purposes of a Gurukula which, as an absolute dedicated fraternity of wisdom-lovers, had to get established and grow on the basis of international principles rather than by any transfer of legal rights. Thus the cordial understanding was openly entered into and, just as after marriage, in principle, the rest of what takes place between the couple is their own concern, I terminated and withdrew into the orchard as pots and pans were fully cleaned out by hungry hippies in the throes of a full all-out abandonment.

 

After resting some hours, nourished on apples and plums brought to me by boys and girls who found them under the fruit trees, the day came to a close by about five in the afternoon. We were again neck-to-neck on the highway alleys back to San Francisco, escaping traffic jams so usual on late Sunday afternoons.

 

VISIT TO SUFI CENTRE OF NOVATO

Before reaching home that night, however, we had to stop at the Sufi Centre of Inayat Khan where ice cream, coffee and big hunks of cake awaited us as if to compensate for the meal that was short at the ranch.

 

The Sufis created their own atmosphere of cordiality and openness without any exaggerations or excess, and group dances and games were organized by a direct disciple of Inayat Khan, with whose strikingly mystical personality I had almost come into personal contact nearly forty years before when I was in Geneva in Switzerland. I felt my new contact to be more intimate and real as I moved among friends in Novato. It was arranged that two days later I would be interviewed at San Francisco by the official editor of the Sufi journal called 'The Oracle', the mouthpiece of the Sufi movement.

 

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Sufism was proving itself after forty years to be as living a force as any other of the many spiritual movements that were fully alive and articulate within the new ferment of spiritual life expressing itself on the California coast.

 

GOODBYE TO CALIFORNIA

July 15th was my last day in California. Yogananda, Vivekananda, the Aurobindo movement, the Hare Krishna cult; the presence of the leaders of the dropout movement with macrobiotic or other unconventional restaurants called 'Good Karma' or 'Something Else', standing for natural or health foods and open, original and dynamic attitudes - all put together amply helped me to confirm the opinion I had held even before visiting that area - that something was in full ferment along this coastal strip of the Pacific flank of the New World.

 

Mexico could also be included within the scope of this epicentre of disturbance originating on a world scale. The body of water separating Japan and San Francisco perhaps had some subtle numinous elements in the air that wafted across the far-flung islands scattered like precious stones upon the expansive waters. One felt as if breathing the air of fresh adventure. Time took to its wings across space, and sunsets and sunrises seemed to cancel themselves out into an utter neutrality of freedom.

 

I was to take the plane for Honolulu before noon that day and was driven to the airport by Judy, Jill, Barney and Bill from the Aurobindo Centre. After touching goodbyes in the free and easy style in vogue on the coast of California, I found myself flying in a Pan-Am jet to Honolulu, the reputed paradise of beachcombers. My California experience had in effect baptised me into more open and honest ways by clearing away the last cobwebs of conventional conditionings.

 

 

 

634

CHAPTER SEVENTY

 

STRANGE MEETINGS IN HONOLULU

The impressions of the touching goodbyes at the airport at San Francisco were still fresh when the Pan Am jet zoomed into the midday sky, heading towards the famous holiday centre of Hawaii, the islands set as a group of gems within the blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean. It was a beachcomber's paradise par excellence and my mood, which was still wistful and mellow with the maturity of my age and thoughts that are natural to it, had a touch of the free spirit of sporting in pure space as the vista became less and less eventful geographically and physically.

 

After four hours of flight of the alone to the Alone, the sounds of the well-fitted flying machine changed cadence and rhythm as some islands came within its ken at a great distance. Still another gear changed and, veering round, the floating inertness dipped its nose

more and more and landed as beautifully as it took off, making logarithmic spiral curves on firm earth. Soon it was a question of following others who obeyed signals or signs to the checkout point where luxury buses waited to drive us into the district of surf or tower hotels at the Benares of bathing holiday-makers, mixed with mere beachcombers, at about three in the afternoon.

 

Honolulu was as hot as any part of India, only the heat was relieved at night by fresh breezes like those of the Indian sisira season, which comes in late January. The heat of the summer day was beautifully cancelled out by the just-sufficient touch of winter cold, and the blend revealed the sheer or absolute delight implied in the equalizing warmth and coolness. Neutralisation or normalisation, even in terms of climatic conditions, can make the mind of man sometimes attain to a glimpse of the Absolute. The similar thrill of the magenta of early dawn has been referred to already. One can feel the Absolute within or see it reflected outside. Both can cancel out to yield pleasure, joy, bliss or delight as occasion allows.

 

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A BEACHCOMBER'S SECRET INTEREST

I checked into the hotel called Reef Hotel Towers. As good luck would have it, none of the nine-dollars-a-day type room that I had booked in advance were available. Instead, I was given a full apartment suite of rooms overlooking a silent courtyard in a sister hotel nearby for the same price. I had a full refreshing bath in its luxury bathroom and, after having a snack-bar drink, sauntered out along pavements fully populated with men and women in fancy-coloured bathing dresses with broad or loud patterns, some of them even carrying rubber boats or surf-riding contraptions.

 

It was a whole world of luxury hotels, with open-air restaurants gaily or festively decorated, sometimes in full Hawaiian style. Women freely went barefooted, with their waists and navels exposed to view. This region of the woman's body has intrigued me personally and has been the object of my meditations and study, especially since the day it dawned on me that Sankara, the great Advaitic philosopher, pointedly referred to it in his famous composition called Bhaja Govindam.

 

The reference there by itself was not sufficiently explicit to my mind. However when read together with the hints contained in his deeper philosophical poem called Saundarya Lahari, the scrutiny of which work on mystical beauty-appreciation as a way to absolute attainment I had started about two years before, I began to be aware of a new and all-absorbing Advaitic approach to spiritual progress, having its locus not in the Aryan North, but in the Dravidian South.

 

When one abstracts and properly generalizes the structural implications of the female body in the fullness of the function of motherhood, eliminating carnality, but holographically making the structure reveal the universal-concrete in its purest form, there is revealed a flabbergasting or overwhelming experience of sheer beauty-value that can attain the Absolute.

 

After the experiences of the midsummer California event at Morning Star already described, I, in my beachcomber role, could not avoid some interest in watching out for this secret in the female forms that went past me on the pavement as I leaned on a coconut tree near the Reef Tower Hotels, each with 500 rooms and 500 baths humming like beehives with the goings and comings of sea-bathers and holidaymakers. Greek and Indian sculpture has lavished its art or craft through centuries of steady devotion to details, especially of this region where the vision of the source of motherhood can be actually, though only vaguely, visualized.

 

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AN APPARITION OR JUST ANOTHER INCIDENT?

Apparitions often prove to be just normal incidents and vice-versa. This had happened to me forty years before in Geneva about 1930, when I thought a bearded old man in a black suit rode past me on a Geneva boulevard as I walked on its pavement after the exaltation of speaking at a World Conference of Religions there.

 

It was twenty years later, on my next visit there, when I consulted men who knew Geneva, that the mystery of this event of hearing the voice of the bearded cyclist praising me directly in so many clearly-heard and understood words was cleared up. There was an actual man who had lived in that city two decades before. He was a sort of inspired man, they said, who sometimes talked to himself. The mystery was much reduced by this assurance, but was not abolished altogether for me.

 

While at Honolulu, somewhere near Waikiki surf-bathing beach, I was walking on the narrow path along the breakwater parapet round the beach bordering the excellent bathing area when I had two surprise encounters. First, I was beckoned to by an elderly gentleman sitting on a parapet wall overlooking the gentle-breaking surf. He said that he wished to talk to me. His wife, who looked like one of the aristocratic daughters of the American days of independence, grey-haired and respectable, was happily married to this Scotsman who had retired from being a marine engineer in the nordic seas. I asked him for information about how surf-bathing beaches were planned and he gave me some precious hints.

 

After some minutes of conversation about American and English ways of life, I left the couple and walked along the breakwater ridge bordered with luxury hotels where people were sipping drinks about dusk. I rounded the corner and was passing crowds of bathers returning or going out on the pavements of the adjoining busy shopping area with its lights beginning to be lit. Out of some crowd that was confused and assorted in nature, there emerged towards me the maiden figure of a nut-brown dark-haired girl in her teens. She held a garland of beautiful orchids in her hands and singled me out walking somewhat apart, and, before I realized what was happening, garlanded and accosted me with kind words of welcome greeting.

 

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Who was this angelic figure? Had she any mundane motives? I only had time to ask her the barest of questions to find out. She told me she was just a native of the area outside the city of Honolulu and felt like greeting strangers to make them happy. I was still surprised and dazed by this touching gesture from a perfect stranger, a damsel who could easily have been sent from the other side where the Absolutist Mother of Aesthetic Value was ever present, presiding over all significant happenings on this green planet of ours floating in the blue sky. My mind had a predisposition to believe this myth, if it is to be correctly so called. The myth-making instinct is natural to man, and this episode at the twilight hour on an unknown island far out in mid-ocean could well be fitted as easily both ways into a context of fact or fable. I kept an open mind and only next day tried to verify by consultation with others who had lived in that area. The evidence tended to confirm the touch of mystery. Unable to make up my mind one way or the other, I am keeping this story as a pleasant secret pertaining to an affair that has to do directly with the Mother of the Beauty of the Universe. When ignorance is bliss it is folly to be wise.

 

MESSING WITH TELEPHONES

For more than one year in the case of Professor Glick, Professor of Sociology; and for over ten years or so in the case of Professor Jack Baumer - both of the University of Hawaii - I had kept in touch personally from the Far East or India respectively, looking forward to meeting one or both of them while visiting the Hawaiian Islands. In San Francisco too I had had a whole page of addresses, some of them quite sure as judged by previous correspondence or actual personal contact. Most of them, however, misfired when I telephoned them. In many cases private telephone numbers were kept secret, or the line had been cut off for non-payment. More often the subscriber was absent and other voices were heard explaining, and sometimes too, numbers had been revised. Add to these the ringing of telephone bells at unexpected or impossible hours or times such as when you are in a bathtub, and the nuisance of having to dress to come out to answer the phone only to say the words 'wrong number'. Such are some of the vagaries of the world of the fat book of telephone numbers of many big towns or cities.

 

Honolulu did not lag behind in this matter. Jack Baumer's number responded with a strange, otherworldly voice from the exchange saying that his number had not been in use for months because of a default of some kind.

 

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Professor Glick's house had been sublet to friends who told me as kindly as they could that he was still in the Far East as a visiting Professor in Sociology. He had presided over one of my lectures at Ipoh in Malaysia in the autumn of 1968.

 

All the buttons one might press, even in this modern mechanistic world, need not necessarily click, and there is much room still for the element of chance, good luck, providence or occasionalism which regulates human affairs - whether you are willing to call such elements of probability or possibility divine or just ordinary. Here again we have to recognise two sides to the total situation in which human life is to work out its future. Sceptics disbelieve, but believers have to invent a surrogate for God.

 

A VISIT TO THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII

 

Hawai.

 

When I had almost finished messing with telephones, as luck would have it, the most unexpected address and phone number that a dropout friend had volunteered at the Morning Star Ranch in California, of a professor in the same Department of Sociology at which I had sought in vain to have a contact, responded in full favour.

 

It was Professor Gene Kasselbaum, whose wife was a musically-talented Indian lady born in Bangalore, where I had myself been born. She readily offered to pick me up at my hotel at about eleven in the morning. We were soon on the way to the university campus where Gene did his work. My luggage was deposited there till we could pick it up later, and I was shown the East-West centre where students from all parts of the world met, lived and studied all subjects together.

 

While still walking in the gardens I could see on the lawns of the campus signs of Far Eastern flora and fauna, such as the Indian Mynah bird sitting on the fig-tree of Buddhist memories. The air at that latitude well above the equator was more bracing and fresh. Varieties of vegetation in the landscape garden placed behind the main dining hall and conference rooms added a pleasing Rousseau touch, especially the artificial lakes which were made to retain their natural beautiful sinus curves or bends. Why should swimmingpools have an angular shape at all? Pebbles in varied colours were used for decoration most simply and naturally. My host, Professor Kasselbaum, stood me a full cafeteria midday meal served by girls who studied in the East-West centre.

 

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The first of these girls who served me some green vegetables was one who looked like a Tamil from India. I wanted to be chivalrous and paid her a compliment to support her pride if any about the culture with which I thought she would be proud to associate herself. I said she resembled Kannagi of the Silppadikaram, the famous Tamil Classic of antiquity. When I was told her name by Professor Kasselbaum, however, it turned out that she was a Muslim, which put a cross complexion on the original compliment and perhaps made it void or nearly so. Thus my gallantry missed fire as I remember it has done many times in my life, and I went with my tray to the next pretty one for another item of the meal. As a result of thinking of too many things at once in that busy place, the composition and cost of my meal received almost no attention. The cost, however, was the headache of my kind host who paid it - but the eating of a bad menu put together any old way, resulted in a form of punishment in effect because I was to eat it myself, which I managed as best as I could.

 

MIDNIGHT FLIGHT TO NANDI

 

Temple at Nandi.

 

After the meal I was taken to the hilltop residence of Professor Gene Kasselbaum. He had to pick up Mrs. Gayatri Rajpur, his Mysore wife, and Krishna, their dear four-year-old son, who went to school nearby. A fully Mysorean atmosphere was induced into the little car into which we settled ourselves to mount the steep streets to Bertram Street. This Hawaiian residential area vied with any other of its kind with its thick grass lawns and sidewalks round villas big or small, some like nests or painted cages, and others like Swiss chalets or more eastern models of pretty atap houses, as they are called in Malaysia.

 

This suburban point of vantage gave a full view of all the areas lying below as one looked around. Our Mysore hostess made for me a favourite Mysore dish of lemon-flavoured rice somewhat like riz espagnol and I was taken in the evening to a coffee party where a journalist, a biologist from Geneva, a sociologist and two university students from the Far East discussed various subjects of common topical interest. I learned through gossipy rumour also that Jack Baumer, to whom I telephoned in vain earlier, was off to Canada and it was not any other disaster than that of finding a mate that was the cause of his absence from Hawaii.

 

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We kept talking sufficiently late and the ghotuvadyam, an Indian musical instrument somewhat like a vina, was played by Mrs. Kasselbaum who was evidently a celebrity much in demand on the island. Before midnight we were beginning to break up and I was thinking of the plane I had to take for my flight from north of the equator to south of the equator, during which I was going to cross the International Date Line - another line on the globe put there for metaphysical rather than physical needs.

 

We dropped the lady and child at the hilltop residence, climbing steep and sinuous roads giving night-lit vistas of Honolulu again, and I found myself in the complex and very extensive airport. We had no difficulty in checking in my luggage and my host stayed till all formalities were over and I followed the directions to the distant gate from which I was to emplane.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SEVENTY ONE

 

CROSSING THE DATE LINE

The equator is a line used in everyday life which belongs to a special frame of reference whose reality hides in an angle at the centre of the earth or rather in the absence of such in terms of a latitude of greater or lesser deviation from the horizontal. I emplaned at Honolulu at 1:30 AM, local time, on the 17th morning. It should have continued to be the 17th except that the plane passed over the International Date Line, which is just an imaginary but conventionally-accepted longitudinal line passing by agreement between certain boundaries of islands strewn over the Pacific in its broadest, landless cross-belt.

 

The plane was not full and I was given a whole set of three seats together by the air hostess, along with a blanket, so that I could be as fully ignorant as I pleased while we crossed the vertical imaginary line whose daylight and night (moon) light could meet on a wavy line passing from North to South like the line of hair on the stomach - Sanskrit poets are fond of such comparisons, as vouched for in the compositions of Sankara and Kalidasa, which have recently been engaging my deep interest.

 

There is an absolutist and purely schematic frame of reference for a contemplative geography - as distinct from one for an actual geographical map of mere factual features, used both for its poetic descriptions as well as for its contemplative presuppositions. It takes account of the intentional world prospectively, and memories of the collective psyche retrospectively. Our planet becomes a refractory green and blue and red orb or unit floating in the infinity of space. The International Date Line belongs to such an absolutist context of intentionality and retrospective experience.

 

We were served a special snack after midnight by the Pan Am line at 2 AM by Honolulu Time, and a second snack at 5 AM by the same time. We landed when it was still daylight at 5:45 AM at Nandi, which was also called Nadi (its natural Fijian version). Suva, about 100 miles off on the coast of the Fiji islands, was the capital of the region and Nadi Airport served as its air gateway, with only one hotel of internationally standard specifications for air travellers at the tip of the coast, where I landed at dawn.

 

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I was driven to this nearby hotel by some sort of luxury taxi or limousine service without extra charge, and at daybreak I was waiting to check in at the counter where a well-built Fijian woman happened to be in charge of reception. While I was checking in, the news was gently broken to me that I was taking my room on the 18th instead of, as it logically and factually should have been, on the 17th. Something factual or imaginary or both had happened to me and those who were with me in that plane or that time between Midway and Wake island of the unknown expanse of the Pacific ocean where the people were negligible to the eyes of the 'more civilised' and articulate section of humanity who inhabited the bigger continents or land masses.

 

DOMINANT AND RECESSIVE CIVILIZATIONS

 

Suva town, Fiji.

 

 

The test explosions of bombs were also imposed on such regions by the powerful nations by a law of might being right, even in days when they seemed to take pride in a free world of equality or fraternity. There were thus unjust laws on the high seas answering to those of the jungle. Parochialisms and expansionist attitudes can equally violate norms of absolute justice. Herein lurks the danger of reactions that might begin small but spark off and spiral as chain reactions filled with explosive conditions in international relations. Balances tilted at one pole could have disastrous repercussions at the other, and conversely, unilateral injustices sometimes get glossed over by the mass mind when invidious distinctions take refuge at the core of total situations, often under complexions that derive their strength from superficial spiritual pretences. God sometimes seemingly waits too long to bring good luck or punishment, but the slightest injustice anywhere must have its compensatory adjustment at one part or other of the totality of the world when understood contemplatively and factually at once.

 

The violation of ethical laws could have incidental occasions for cause, but at the peripheral horizontal end effects might attain to proportions both disastrous as well as monstrous, as when a short-circuit in electric wiring might burn up and mar a whole marriage festival by a flare-up that might easily get out of control. There is no big or small, long or short, near or far, straight or sinuous, ramified or central, collective or personal in the world either of aesthetics or ethics as understood in terms of Absolute norms of reference.

 

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Reciprocity as between counterparts implies compensation, complementarity and even cancellability of factors, with horizontal parity as between an object and its reflection, or when vertically viewed, as when pure rainwater mixes with equally pure spring water.

 

The International Date Line is one which has a vertical parity in time and horizontal reciprocity as between the actual and the virtual. A structural vision of a universe viewed thus in four dimensions is what both modern science and ancient wisdom are bringing together from opposite poles for the establishment of unitive understanding, thus effecting the integration of all values, both cultural as well as actual.

 

AESTHETICS AND ETHICS VARY WITH LONGITUDE AND LATITUDE

Nandi at dawn, after I had crossed the enigmatic date line, brought such thoughts into my mind as daylight filtered through my artificially curtained off air-conditioned hotel room window. When I pushed the curtains apart, I saw miles and miles of sugar-cane fields spread out before me, with thin grass lawns and a garden of warm latitudes. The tentacles of the great tourist business were invading even the quiet preserves of far-flung Pacific islands, and the basic conditions of an economy of abundance co-existed with the opulence of the world of cheque-books and standard streamlined air-conditioned hotels as if from opposite horizontal poles.

 

I could feel how Iceland had its erotics and consequent ethics different from this island in the infra-equatorial region of the Pacific where the warm seas were cooled by waters from the South Pole rather than from the North. Human nature has to be placed correctly within its ecology so that aetiology could diagnose human well-being or ill-fate using both inner and outer four-dimensional categorical imperatives - which could be called not natural but moral laws. A structural pattern is implied in both.

 

GREATER INDIA IN A PACIFIC ISLAND

I felt first like a perfect stranger lost in a far-off island within the expansive waters of the Pacific. I had no address with which to establish a contact although I always carried within me the usual ambition of starting Gurukula units for unitive understanding wherever I wandered in this wide world, whether at home or abroad.

 

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This was almost a chronic depravity not only of my old age but even of my early manhood or even adolescence. No nice hilltop or river scene passed my eyes without my wanting to start a Gurukula there. Impossibility had to be ruled out in every case by the master passion that has motivated me through decades.

 

This sustained purposefulness offered a numerator that could balance any lopsided world lines in my interests or thoughts. To create neutral islands where philosophers could form fraternities to teach or learn the great value represented by the Absolute is still a burning desire that I carry as a secret streak or fire within the ocean of my general consciousness.

 

The telephone book was the only object that could open up any hope of contacting any of the inhabitants of this strange island. Just then I felt as lonely as Alexander Selkirk or Robinson Crusoe or even Napoleon on Elba. I was as ambitious as Jason in search of the Golden Fleece for a Utopian Eldorado of my own variety in terms of a philosophical fraternity that lived self-sufficiently on plain life with high thoughts. Such a world of inner values is also seen to be described in mystic poetry by Kalidasa in his Kumara-Sambhava (canto 6, verses 33 to 47), which is neither an Aryan heaven nor a conventional earthly paradise. It is a zone of normal values adjusted neutrally and negatively. A Gurukula has to be a community based on the respect for contemplative and absolutist values.

 

This master passion within me made me reach out for the thin telephone directory. A scanning of the alphabetical list of inhabitants soon revealed that the island had a majority of Indians, although it was ruled by British agents from some Crown Colony headquarters situated in Australia. Tamil labour had been recruited first. In the wake of their emigration to the island, merchants and money-lenders from the North of India became attracted to the area as settlers, so that Fiji became a unique instance of a Greater India coming into being in far-flung parts outside India itself. This must have happened many times before in the long history of the expansion and contraction of India, alternating through epochs of response or attack in the world of shifting values as between rival cultural or racial units, whether based on economics or higher values.

 

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A NEW FRIEND

Men are alternately dispersed or brought together to build their towers of Babel to declare their days of prosperity or poverty of spirit. God's curse or blessing sheds light on the destiny of nations or other closed groups by some mysterious alternating law. The fate of the Fiji Indians is still hanging in the balance as other linguistic units overpower the original settlers and create new situations in the checkerboard game that goes on for ever in politics. By numbers at least the Fiji Islands have an Indian majority, but this does not spell safe politics for them yet. As outposts from where unitive understanding and world unity could be cultivated, I found both Iceland and Fiji interesting, because of the isolated conditions in which men could live more normal or natural lives than citizens within power blocs where chains have to be heavier and more brutally binding on the free-born spirit of man.

 

I remembered a friend who was a swami of the Ramakrishna Order, whom I had known about 1933. He had been sent to Fiji by request of the Tamil community there who needed a socio-religious leader. I looked in vain for his address in the telephone book. After a Fijian-style breakfast, I wandered out of the hotel into the open fields. I arranged my flight to Australia and then took my chances, going towards Suva, the capital town - not knowing it was a hundred miles away. As luck would have it, however, Nandi town was only two miles away and all seemed to know of a swami who was Indian and who had been resident there for about a decade.

 

I soon found the road near the main road where the Ramakrishna Mission building was situated, and entered the front room asking to see the swami in charge. He was upstairs and I went up and was ushered in and stood face to face with my old friend, but he could not recognize me. Here was a case of unilateral dialectics. I tried to explain, as Sakuntala had with Dushyanta, but I still remained one-sidedly related to myself without the click on the other side taking place. I had had this experience only once before. In most cases I had ready recognition, and people often touchingly said that not a day had passed for years in which they did not talk or at least think of me during intervals as great as decades of separation without any contact at all.

 

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In this case the swami stared at me vacantly trying to recollect and make sure I was not a false coin. There was sufficient recognition, just enough to convince him at least that I could not be wholly a counterfeit, and I was presented to another important old citizen of the island, one Appasami Pillay, who was just then enthusiastically referring to the first man landing or about to land on the moon. I soon became a sufficiently good friend of this genuine Tamil man, though he had long been cut off from the continent of his birth and culture, and even had an Australian son-in-law.

 

PROSPECTING ON A LONE ISLAND

He had a big car in which he offered to take me to select a site of ten acres on a riverside about fifteen miles away from Nandi, which the swami himself suggested on my revealing without reserve or delay my passionate depravity in the matter of founding Gurukulas all over the world.

 

The idea strangely caught on and, after dining and resting at the ashram, I spoke the same evening at the Vivekananda High School not far off. After forty-five minutes of speaking before grownup boys and girls of the upper classes who understood Western values better than Eastern ones, I was able to extend my contacts on the island. A Kerala couple and several others were there on the occasion of the national fête of Nandi town on the next day, and I was invited to dine at their house. In the evening I drove through Fijian forests, plantations and undulating hill slopes to a Tamil Mother-Goddess temple where the usual South Indian bhajans went on late into the night. Tamils must create their own religious atmosphere wherever they settle.

 

On Sunday July 20th, I woke up as the cock crew like anywhere else in the wide world. A bird that is reared for the table is also the chanticleer that announces the coming of each day to man on both sides of the international dateline. Its crowing has thus an idealistic and universally concrete status in the Hegelian sense. There was a Sunday worship gathering at the ashram that day in which many Gujarati and Sindhi ladies joined and feasted together, mixing freely with South Indians with a cordiality, strangely becoming thinner in inverse proportion on the home sub-continent itself. Common nostalgia perhaps binds hearts together when geographical space contracts within isolated insular limits. I spoke for thirty minutes and there was a feasting together after the bhajans at midday.

 

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Mr. Appasami Pillay readily came in his van to take some of his family and a group of us, including Swami Rudrananda, to the foothills on the fringe of the island to prospect for the much-dreamed-of Gurukula project, which dream must have been equally dear to all concerned, as seen by the general and ready interest evinced.

 

We did find a valley with a river of clean water in the pure sands of its rocky bed, sufficiently deep within the heart of the sparsely populated and thinly forested undulating countryside. Boys ran errands on stray horses grazing at will without harness, jumping on the back and trotting, cantering or even galloping to find our fellow prospector friends who had wandered away. At last we met with smiles and excuses as they came from another end of the river. We named a committee for the Gurukula project and all agreed to co-operate to get at least ten acres at that spot. After this bargain was struck we returned to Nandi for a night feast before going to bed.

 

OFF TO AUSTRALIA

The plane which I took in the early hours of Monday July 21st, was a Qantas instead of a Pan Am in which I had travelled from San Francisco. Swami Rudrananda drove me in his car to the airport. While waiting to emplane I was accosted by a well-built fluffy-haired Fijian woman who almost bumped into me, as it were, by her nonchalant open way of starting a conversation with a perfect stranger like me. Modernism takes away shyness from women, and Fijian women can come under this influence as easily as any others. She wanted to know if I was a yogi or a swami, and was as interested in the subject of Yoga as almost everyone in the wide world was at that time. Yoga had become something like the latest fashion of the 'dernier cri de Paris'.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SEVENTY TWO

 

GLOBE-CIRCLING

A rolling stone is said to gather no moss, but is it not better so? Is man meant to die where he was born, like a tree, or is it more natural to think that, provided with two legs, he was meant to be a globe-trotter or a parivrajaka, an itinerant sojourner moving on our planet ceaselessly? Some are swayed by the homing instinct while others are held by wanderlust. Displacement by choice or necessity results equally in producing both the sannyasi and the Wandering Jew. The caravan routes and the life of a Marco Polo or a Vasco da Gama prove the same, both by way of exception as by rule.

 

My lot in life was one of alternately staying at home or at least in the various Gurukulas that I treated as my home, for about half a decade at a time, and of sallying out of them to go abroad hundreds or even thousands of miles away to find more temporary homes anywhere. The homes of my best friends were treated as my own in many instances, but, more often than not, such homes themselves became Gurukulas for my friends and homes for me with varying degrees of success for the parties concerned.

 

Whether at home or abroad, life has always had for me the same constant element of adventure. Inner ventures accomplish tasks like writing or study, while outer adventures cover distances in space. Both can go on apace or alternately, so that there is no great difference felt at any time, and none of the sets of items of progress suffered any unilateral setback. Nor did age interfere with this constant urge to surmount space or time having its own agony or ascent that always goes with one's effort for self-happiness. Regrets are disastrous because of their negativity. When individual effort is for the collective good and the same motive force in life operates vice-versa, we have the unitive or unified way of life of the yogi or the contemplative. Without pressing unnecessary buttons, it has been natural for me to be absent from South India for months, years or even fractions of decades at a time.

 

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After my seventy-fourth birthday it had been so destined that I should encircle the globe. Thus, on leaving Sydney airport on July 23rd, 1969, in a streamlined Qantas jet for Singapore, I was on the last lap of this wholesale but perhaps not final adventure. Although I tried before starting to economise on travel charges by finding cargo ships by which to complete this ambitious project - as the trip actually worked out, I found all the means to fly throughout as if almost prearranged for me by the Tao. I took naturally to jet travel almost as easily as a bird takes to its wings and my baggage followed me by automatic arrangements without being much of a burden to me at any point of my journey, except when checking in or out of airports.

 

Limousine or bus services were available without major hitches, and I could even say that the whole of the inconvenience in encircling the globe weighed less than that of a normal trip in South India itself. The airports are fast expanding their aluminium-tube ramifications almost each month, and jet travel is now becoming the order of the day, although someone reading these lines a decade from now might find me hopelessly outmoded.

 

Such is the pace of what is called 'progress' in modern life. Such progress, however, leaves the core of human relations untouched. It is in the domain of peripheral values that there seems a Parkinsonian spiralling up of operative values or standards. A mother is as much a slave to her child. Sexes do not repel now more than at any time in history. Children are seen held by straps to their mothers to keep them from going astray, just like being tied to apron strings. We can notice here that horizontal values alone change while vertical relations remain constant. Thus again we have to face the paradox between change and uniformity which only a unified outlook can dissolve or abolish. The demand for a solution is becoming every day more general as well as imperative. An absolute perspective alone can help.

 

ANOTHER IMAGINARY LINE CROSSED

Having crossed the International Date Line a couple of days before, I was then to cross another less imaginary line which is the normal reference for latitudes. This is less imaginary because the Equator is a parameter in physiography which goes from the hottest temperature to colder on both its flanks, the maximum cold being attained in the polar regions of the North and South. Thus there is an internationally recognized temperature parameter line as well as an international time line crossing at right angles wherever you go on the globe.

 

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These might have only a mathematical status in a total frame of reference, which may be schematic only, but nonetheless real. Humanity lives, moves and has its being within this frame of reference, and when the alternating phases of its heartbeat-like pulsations of life are taken into account with their natural rhythms or spans, we see how it is possible to think in terms of a living, dynamic, structural language of reference.

 

As this is actually experienced by a traveller like me - more definitely in these days of jet travel - the acceptance of such a schematic frame of reference is not theoretical or hypothetical. Induction and deduction verify each other epistemologically and methodologically here and now in this matter. A common structure comes into view as reality, both with an apodictic as well as a directly-experienced certitude. What is more, this frame of reference becomes valid, adequate, universally concrete and real, both conceptually and perceptually at once. The languages of science and philosophy begin to meet and coincide here without inner conflict or outer contradiction. Our jet age has thus its normal experiences that verify what remained esoteric mysteries or theories till now. The hermetic, cabalistic and the tarot approach to universal relation-relata complexes are just mysteries without a clear methodology or epistemology presupposed or prestated on definite lines.

 

The structuralism emerging from the Vedic background finds its culmination in the writings of poets like Kalidasa and philosophers like Sankara who revalued it and restated it - especially in the Saundarya Lahari which had been receiving some attention from me during the previous year. The sister work attributed to Sankara called Shivananda Lahari covers the same ground from a slightly different perspective.

 

As I pen these words, I have thus arrived at a point at which I can assert confidently that the same structuralism spoken of by Eddington or Bergson and implied in Vedic, hermetic or cabalistic esoterics, is also implied in Sankara who inherited the same from Kalidasa and the Upanishads. Pythagoreanism supports the findings of modern mathematics, logistics, semantics and cybernetics. My own writings have already given a revised status to all these treated together.

 

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The only event that requires mention before my arrival in Singapore at about 5 PM that same day from Sydney was that the Qantas company gave each passenger a special message in artistic print, as if addressed from Neptune himself, which made pointed reference to our crossing the imaginary temperature-based dividing parameter called the equator, which we had taken for granted hitherto, but which became directly experienced as we flew that memorable afternoon over the Indian Ocean.

 

The date did not change this time, but passengers had to put away their warm overcoats and gloves, which were normal wear at that time of year in Sydney. A landing temperature of about 80°F. was announced as we approached the island of Singapore. From freezing to Turkish-bath heat was the transition to which we were subjected in the phenomenal world (not noumenal this time) as we went from one side of the mathematical line to the other.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SEVENTY THREE

 

BUSY DAYS IN MALAYSIA

Transportation by jet from the 'Wild' West to the mid-Pacific world of far-flung clusters of islands and then dipping deep southwards to find myself, during the last two weeks of July 1969, within the warm embraces of South East Asia again, seemed quick in the bright dream-state of adventure, even in the mellowed outlook proper to my age.

 

Consciousness in its purest form has no age conditioning and one is as gay and happy, whether in one's teens or approaching octogenarianhood. Life is a constant adventure when petty worries are carefully weeded and kept out of its cultivated garden. The will fills the mind with plans big or small, stretching out into greater or lesser spans in time. These cause worries and anxieties in the subconscious, and the contemplative has to keep weeding them out if the conscience is to have freedom to enjoy life legitimately. Such enjoyment has a touch of absolute delight and does not seek mere pampering pleasures that come from eating or drinking.

 

The adventure of life treated totally in this way spells beauty or bliss. Ethics and aesthetics can meet here. Even economic values in broad outline form could fit into a global or contemplatively-revised context without conflict, to yield grace and peace to life, both in its sublime as even in its common-sense aspects. Life can be a joy and an adventure in beauty or truth when viewed in the right verticalized and positively-oriented perspective. Otherwise it could spell evils or disasters major or minor. One has to take its tide in the flood.

 

ANOTHER TWO MONTHS IN SE ASIA

Landing in the familiar airport of Singapore was replete of the spirit of adventure. I was soon in fully familiar and homely company again as Mr. Ram, Mrs. Varma and Gurukula inmates with children, and Nitya too, recognizable even from a distance among them, greeted me with a warm welcome as many times before.

 

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It was planned that we would visit the Gurukula at Sembawang first and then go that very night to Johore Bahru, eight or ten miles north across the famous causeway onto the mainland of Malaysia.

 

Thus, after inspecting the improvements made at the Gurukula in Singapore with the new sanitary fittings, we spent the later night at Johore Bahru in the house of Mr. Chelliah, whose whole family represented a model of devotion reminiscent of ancient Tamil flavour nurtured in Jaffna in Ceylon and transplanted to Malaysian soil. Hinduism is no church-going religion but a state of mind that can spread its chronic contagion in others who can sympathise with it. The Tamil culture preserved in Jaffna has its profound appeal of pure devotion kept alive across generations by means of simple prayers that continue to be chanted, however far removed the devotees may be from the place of the culture's origin in South India by space or time. The Shiva Pitranam of Manikkavacakar is one such prayer attaining to Upanishadic dignity, as Guru Narayana recognized in his writings. Thus there is a South Indian spiritual empire still alive, with its fidelity spread out into islands even as far removed as Fiji in the Pacific.

 

The mystic content of the state of mind involved in this kind of spirituality is so deep that its clear and limpid waters can compare with that of the Manasarovara (mind-lake) where Kalidasa says golden lotuses bloom with roots in ontological levels deep down in absolute consciousness. This lake, when it receives rain from more hypostatic levels, is the source of the Ganges in the sky - such is the picture presented in the last verse of the first part of Kalidasa's 'Cloud Messenger' which has come within my range of interest in recent months. Spirituality can thus have its roots in ontology.

 

TROUBLES IN KUALA LUMPUR

 

Kuala Lumpur in 1969.

 

Nitya and I left Singapore by air for Kuala Lumpur at 4 PM on Friday, July 25th, having re-crossed back to Singapore after a one-day visit to Johore Bharu. We were to participate in a full-dress conference of two days consisting of four or five sessions.

 

As usual, our young and energetic friend Mr. S. Narayanan and his wife Padma took a keen interest in organising this Peace Conference. Although plans had been begun nearly a year in advance, it was a strange coincidence that communal troubles manifested as an unexpected landslide just a couple of months before our conference was to be held.

 

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As we entered KL by night and drove through the areas of the city before going to bed before midnight at Brickfields, the air was still surcharged with the mass murders and other crimes which had been committed in that area less than a couple of months before.

 

The ruling class of Malaysia was caught between people of Chinese and Indian loyalties. Their right to rule depended on a majority that could only come by swinging to the favour of one side or the other from their somewhat precarious middle-of-the-road position.

 

Love of power in politics is a temptation and, in order to secure their own interests, the ruling community - whose main claim was that they belonged to the soil - had a group of supporters at its tail end who tried to force the pace artificially in order to make it swing in their favour, wishing to make their position more secure. They introduced artificial props by linguistic or other innovations or preferences which did not involve the enthusiasm of the other two sections to their right or left. Misdirected enthusiasm had let loose group instincts which resulted in a genocidal madness in which Chinese children and women were brutally killed or maimed in sufficient numbers to shock public opinion almost to the roots of its confidence in the government. Those who were able to hold their heads above the disturbed feelings were finding it difficult to stabilise and give confidence to the people. The Peace Conference thus came at a very opportune moment, almost as if by the workings of the Tao.

 

PRESS INTERVIEWS

While we lived in the new house of our host, Mr. Narayanan, who had become more and more within the Gurukula movement and was the live wire representing the Gurukula message or action in that area, he and his wife Padma were still working hard to organise the two-day Conference on World Peace and get all papers connected with it printed and distributed in advance.

 

Top leaders of thought from both the academic as well as the administrative branches available in Kuala Lumpur were to participate in the deliberations. We had good press coverage, and at a press conference some very pointed and delicate questions were asked to see if some political complexion could be given to us.

 

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Absolutist politics is, however, without sides - racial, religious, economic or political. At the same time, one should not err by being lukewarm. A goody-goody attitude for peace is not the same as its own dynamic version. Radicalism and absolutism go together, and complacent conventionalism does not go with the strong uncompromising attitude of the stern absolutist way.

 

It is a pity that genocidal group fanaticism often gets set loose in the political life of many countries. The colour problem of America, the anti-Semitism of the Hitler context, and the Hindu-Muslim feuds that have drenched the earth with human blood - could be viewed either realistically and unilaterally or in a bilateral and total perspective. The latter is global, but need not be less vehement or downright for that reason. Positive absolutism can belong to a vertical axis while still being active and not merely passive. Inner errors can be corrected by double negation, but outward or overt errors require the positive note of double assertion to correct. Henri Bergson wrote on this delicate distinction as follows:

 

'But it is a far cry from this kind of equilibrium, achieved mechanistically and invariably unstable, like that of the scales in the hands of justice in ancient times, to justice such as ours, the justice of the rights of man, which no longer evokes the idea of interrelation or measure but, on the contrary, that of the uncommensurable and the Absolute.' (trans. from 'The Two Sources of Morality  and Religion').

 

This absolutist approach is what we refer to as the unitive, in which duality is abolished. Genocidal tension is not to be blamed on only one side or party or another. Group psychology can be explosive or eruptive with rumour, suspicion and fear to fan the flames of conflict. Such tense conditions can spark off and set in motion evil forces that resemble a landslide or an eruption of the kind that Kuala Lumpur witnessed on May 13th 1969, with similar circumstances conspiring to produce the same type of group phenomenon. It could explode anywhere - given ingredients that are similar - when occasionalism also operates in its favour.

 

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THE PEACE CONFERENCE

On Saturday, August 2nd 1969, the Peace Conference opened in a spacious hall at the Girl Guide Headquarters of Kuala Lumpur. Its first session was dedicated to World Law. Of the two sessions next day, one in the morning was devoted to Economics and the later forenoon session to Education. In the evening of the same day a Philosophy Conference was held. Top dignitaries, authorities or heads of departments participated, but there was an air of stiffness and artificial reserve to be noticed. One or two of the participants even admitted that they were not free to express themselves openly on such subjects because their careers would be adversely affected

 

I tried at the tail-end of the Conference to introduce fresh ideas such as 'Negative Education', 'Opulent Economics', 'Unified Science' and 'One World Philosophy of Science', as well as 'One World Law'. As the general standards only averaged to undergraduate levels, most of what I had to say was treated as interesting but not taken seriously. The London County Council's 'Theory and Practice of Education', Adam Smith's Economics, internationalism without integration, and a piecemeal hesitant approach to philosophy were still seen to be dominant idioms or ideograms in the far-flung parts of the glorious British Empire on which the sun could never set except into a total fade-out.

 

As for the success of the Conference for Peace, as I write this on April 19th, 1970, I read in the papers that there are again danger signals of a possible genocidal, fanatical or mad political outburst. Rival groups are beginning to dig fresh trenches. I tried to explain away the events of May 1969 as an unexpected or ill-fated landslide, but the memory of this event seems to portend fresh landslides, artificially created by Dame Rumour and nourished by vague political loyalties. History likes to depend on atavistic repetitions of old or archetypal habits or patterns of behaviour cyclically, like the seasons. Nature and habit thus support each other psychologically as well as cosmologically.

 

AUGUST 5th TO SEPTEMBER 5th 1969

After the Conference, I spent one more month giving Gita classes by invitation, or fulfilling major or minor engagements at temples or mutts near Kuala Lumpur or Batu Caves. I was invited to tea or dinner by groups interested in spirituality of one kind or another. I was present at Kuala Lumpur airport when the disciples of Swami Pranavananda gave him a send-off on a world tour.

 

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Nitya, who had been with me, went on a lecture tour on his own to North Malaysian cities including Penang. Some Kerala families living in Petaling Jaya also honoured me.

 

More significant than these were the events at Seremban where friends like Sittambolam and the Narayanan couple were in constant waiting, whether at picnics or meetings in and around the Theosophical Lodge. A site for a Gurukula centre was inspected by all of us at Port Dickson, made possible by an offer of land by Mr. Narayanan. We had a homam on August 9th to mark this decision. There was cooking in the forest on the top of a promontory a couple of miles outside the crowded area of the ancient port overlooking the forest land bordering the port itself. There was a visit soon after to the hot-water springs near KL and a flight back to Malacca, where Nitya joined me and we stayed together at a new and empty house. Gita classes were held there on August 12th at the Sindhi Hall where I substituted for Nitya who felt tired. The classes concluded on August 15th. Between Seramban and Malacca, Port Dickson as well as Bukit Bahru, we had speaking or other engagements till we flew from Malacca airport back to Singapore and the Gurukula. We again spent five days at Johore Bahru giving a series of Gita classes there. The same was repeated at select gatherings at dinner-parties at Mrs. Varma's place in the residential area of Singapore. The main events culminated in the Guru Birthday anniversary celebrations at the Narayana Gurukula at Kee Ann Road, which went off with more than usual éclat.

 

The programme which fell on August 28th-29th was a repetition of those of previous years, except that we initiated Purushottamam Thyagi as a full-fledged Gurukula inmate. Non-Malayalis began to take fresh interest in the Gurukula movement. Nitya went on an Australian tour on Monday, September 1st. I stayed on, preparing to return to India, which I did on Saturday September 6th, taking to the air on the last lap of my tour round the world on that evening when a representative gathering again saw me emplane at 9:15 PM.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SEVENTY FOUR

 

MIDNIGHT CHEESE AND OTHER PROBLEMS

The jet plane that took off from Singapore International Airport at 9:15 PM on September 6th took only till midnight to bring me to the Madras suburban bungalow of Mr. N.C. Kumaran, finding myself settling down to sleep. About two hours had to be added vertically in terms of inner fatigue, though not in horizontalized time according to the clocks, which showed the same time in Madras as clocks in Singapore showed upon take-off. Thus simultaneous time is abolished by relativity, but absolute time is left unrecognised by physics - though real enough to metaphysics. Moderns become dropouts because of time that thus goes out of gear.

 

While on the plane we had what was supposed to be a Madrasi dinner with rice and sambhar curry. But a hunk of Dutch cheese was included in the menu without any bread to go with it. As the rice was deficient in quantity I was tempted to eat the cheese to improve the quality of the night meal, but my poor stomach found its lump inside giving stomach pains after the midnight hour of Madras was well past. The red signals within continued to pulse spasmodic pains which a drink of water allayed. Somewhat later, I fell asleep.

 

HOUSE WARMING AND FIRE RITUAL

Next morning was a Sunday and it had been arranged that a house-warming would take place. Dinner for about a hundred guests was being prepared under expert brahmin supervision and in the sumptuous drawing room of Mr. Kumaran's new house a Gurukula-type fire-ritual and explanation were to be given. The families of friends of our host turned up one by one. As they watched the fire-ritual, I took care to explain how it was intended to cancel ritual by corresponding numerator formulations in metalanguage, just as I had each time I had had a similar opportunity on other occasions.

 

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They seemed to get a glimpse of the implied structuralism that was meant to reciprocally equate the Self and the non-Self, yielding the Absolute as an existing, subsisting or significant value in life. Such a lesson is not easy to teach at one sitting and has sometimes to be learned in terms of a whole dedicated lifetime. The Gita even speaks of many lifetimes being needed, more often than not. One has to think in terms of the parable of the sower of seeds to visualize the effectiveness of such teachings. Possibilities and probabilities contribute equally to the occasionalism of effective results, which must remain somewhat problematic.

 

A RECEPTION AT THE ASOKA HOTEL

The gathering in the forenoon at the ritual was a select and familial one covering Kerala people of the middle class domiciled in the large city of Madras for one generation or more. Many of them were my contemporaries who had lived under the Victorian or at least Edwardian rulership of the Empire that has not been here for more than a quarter of a century. In spite of independence gained by India, the hangover from the ancient regime still flavoured the tastes, style of life and thought that influenced the so-called élite of Madras.

 

The Chief Justice of the High Court of Madras who was presiding over the reception to be given to me had inherited some of the paraphernalia of the times of Lord Clive. The Madras of the days of Lord Macauley was reflected in his outlook, especially in such matters as the spirituality of a Ramana Maharshi or of a Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. Heritages truly Indian were forgotten or nearly so and what English education under the British rule had contributed to the making up of a so-called gentleman at large, as could be seen in modern Madras, had some unmistakably Pickwickian touches that were neither sublime nor ridiculous. These elements often conspired and ended in caricatures of both of the noble civilizations concerned, proving to the hilt Kipling's much-refuted dictum that the East could never meet the West.

 

My friend and well-wisher, who had graduated from Madras University about the year 1919, was the Head of the Committee of Hosts who had organized my reception at the Asoka Hotel. He was a barrister-at-law of the Inner Temple, London, and reminded me of the days of Charles Dickens or Edmund Burke, which perhaps produced personalities like the Younger Pitt or the minister of Queen Victoria, Disraeli.

 

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The puisne Judge, who was all Tamil within the accoutrements of a Knight of the Garter, was another monstrous anachronism of Madras. I had to speak after he had lauded me with compliments that sat awrily on me. An Islamic speaker who functioned perhaps as president for the full-dress reception that was intended in my honour, given in good old rumble-tumble Madras city, now gone extremely native, was to come after other stilted speeches in an outmoded conventional jargon into which I could not feel myself as belonging properly. Moreover, the other effects of the stomach-ache and loss of sleep due to cheese with curry and rice eaten at midnight in mid-flight between Singapore and Madras, made me feel all the more queer, inside as well as outside.

 

I stood up to make a formal speech, but courage failed me till I found myself grumbling and flopping to the point of utter floundering. I soon adopted a blustering idiotic style of speaking as a last refuge and complained publicly of the lump of cheese with sambhar served by the Air India International to vegetarians like me. Fortunately the Chief Justice had left the hall with his aide-de-camp by the time my bavardage had attained to its nonsensical climax. The reception was treated as a great success all round, as was evident from the smiles and greetings as those invited entered their cars to go home.

 

THE HIGHER PATH IN CONTEMPLATION

Contemplative relationships have their ups and downs. The Guru could be exposed at one moment to disadoption by the disciple and, like quantum pulsations, the energies absorbed or given out when the alternating process of adoption or disadoption takes place can hurt one side or the other with extra radiations of heat or light in terms of unit quantities belonging to types or men or relations involved.

 

Lohitakshan, who had become attracted to the Gurukula movement a few months before, was caught within the throes of such an alternating process. Radiation of energy can take place at different levels. Certain levels are beyond the reach of corresponding temperaments, according to whether action or knowledge is the life-motive involved. After taking a false step forward at a moment of enthusiasm, some relapse into phases of regret.

 

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If the uniform pressures for the ascent involved are disrupted one may suffer a setback and become stabilized at a lower level. Sometimes bipolar relations become disturbed or disrupted altogether, and partial stages of recovery can also be noticed in the relational set-up. The first chapter of the Gita depicts this very type of conflict.

 

Nachiketas and Rama of the 'Yogavasistha' have milder forms of despondency. The transition from works to wisdom involves unitive understanding of physics and metaphysics, with graded values in life from hierophantic ones to hypostatic ones. A normative middle ground is necessary for double correction. Vertical relations are back-to-back while horizontal interests are like the usual relations between the sexes. Conflicts can be more or less disasters but a would-be guru should take care that the wiring of the machines is such as to avoid a short-circuit blow-up.

 

Such situations need gentle and careful handling. This kind of possibility is referred to in the Gita (III, 26). When the personality is caught between the alternatives of a programme of action or one of wisdom, an important crisis sets in. One can become a misfit for life if one does not quickly stabilise oneself one way or the other.

 

On the morning of September 8th, 1969, standing on the terrace room of our host's house in Madras, I explained to Lohitakshan how he was exposed to the danger of contrary winds and how he could avoid it by taking leave for a while to find his bearings. I offered to pay for his travel or adjustments, but after seeming first to agree with all I said, the same evening he had a relapse of mistrust in the Gurukula way of life when sitting in a car at the end of Mount Road on the way to Nehrunagar. I heard him say, almost to himself, 'words, words'. I asked him what he meant and was soon able to elicit sufficiently clearly that he had relapsed again into mistrust of what had been agreed upon that same morning. An emotional crisis was also evident, with alternate wavering between opposing alternatives. He went to Kerala without making up his mind definitely. When I met him at Varkala a few days later his vacillations were more accentuated and he became less and less amenable to reason till normal contact could not be maintained any more. One last attempt also failed. Further pressure would have complicated matters still more. I thus desisted from applying any more pressure.

 

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He had already permitted outsiders to open a badminton court in the Gurukula grounds without the permission of Prasad who, though a younger person, had been put in charge earlier. He let his wife interfere with the arrangements in the kitchen as well as override in the school for young children. Relativistic and absolutist ways thus clashed. Legal complications, too, soon came into play, and I had to take some emergency measures on arriving at Varkala a few days later to guarantee that a contemplative atmosphere prevailed rather than one in which success in a relativistic set-up would have compromised the case of an absolutist approach. As crabbed age and youth cannot live together, the two rival attitudes had to have a dividing line between them, possibly to be abolished fully only when non-duality could prevail.

 

THE PENULTIMATE LAP OF A ROUND-THE-WORLD FLIGHT

Wednesday, September 10th, is to be remembered as making the penultimate lap of my round-the-world flight which started from Trivandrum on February 10th, thus lasting seven months - if I should add the three months spent in South-East Asia at the end of 1968, I could say that I constantly moved and went round the world for more than one year, scarcely sleeping in the same bed for more than a week at a time, and mostly changing every night. Constant travel liberates the mind of man, which tends to attach itself to dead things like benches and chairs. The wandering mendicant has thus a more transparent self, unsullied by external conditionings. Between the truth of the proverb that a rolling stone gathers no moss and the truth that one should be free from parochial preferences, one has to strike a golden mean so as to be able to follow the pure vertical parameter that marks the spiritual progress of any man. Regrets are equally to be avoided by a spirit of ever-renewed adventure. A state of normalized neutrality is the ideal to be kept in mind always.

 

Thus my return flight to Trivandrum from the Madras Meenambakkam Airport was a homecoming in one sense for me as the son of my mother, but a form of subtle punishment for me as a free globetrotting absolutist. I had to strike the balance between these two paradoxical considerations, just in the same way as Jesus could be of Nazareth or the Anointed One at one and the same time. At every turn in life one faces paradoxes, and any philosophy which does not treat this squarely is only procrastinating in intellectual laziness.

 

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Starting soon after six on a Friendship plane, I was seen off by Shanmukham, Santhana and a new friend, a professor of the Christian College at Tambaram. On the flight we had breakfast at Trichinopoly, now called Tiruchirrapalli after independence. Madura had its stopover too where scores of tourists from West Germany joined our flight to Trivandrum. There was Professor Sambamurthy in white turban and coat sitting next to me in the plane all the way. He was Professor of South Indian Music in Berlin. I asked him some questions on South Indian Music, such as the relation between colour and sound, on which he gave some rare references. There are sound octaves which have a one-to-one correspondence, structurally, with colourful elements.

 

While we were still talking on such a thinly speculative topic, I noticed that our plane had crossed the hills where the Sabarimalai pilgrims went each year in such great numbers at the border of Kerala and Tamilnadu, not far from Shenkottah or Kottayam. Reveries on the legend of Ayappa filled my thoughts, after which the plane dipped for landing over the sand dunes of Sankham-mukham, not far from the scene where, bordering the palm and paddy-fields, my mother's house was located. I was moved just enough to mention this fact to the orthodox professor sitting by me and all this was lost when familiar faces actually greeted me on landing at Trivandrum Airport.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SEVENTY FIVE

 

PROBLEMS SOLVED AND UNSOLVED

One could be mentally at home anywhere abroad and feel lost, as if abroad, when actually returning home. When both states are cancelled out on a basis of perfect parity, what remains is a strange numinous sense of the Absolute. As the plane swooped down, circling over the fringe of the ocean a little to get poised for the landing at Trivandrum, land, sea, air and sky met and neutralised each other, creating vertical or horizontal parameters both within and without, causing a total sensation not unlike that of a Dance of Nataraja.

 

Life pulsates in a figure-of-eight at the centre of consciousness, and ascends or descends the plus or minus of both parameters - now reminding one of childhood days and at another moment opening new vistas for future adventure. Familiar faces take memory back to different depths, and fantastic future possibilities are suggested by newer and newer friends as they cross to the positive side of the vertical lifeline.

 

A fully representative crowd waited to greet me at the airport as I walked in after the plane had come to a military halt after its grasshopper or dragonfly-like turns and strutting. Familiar figures, garlands in hand, could be recognized even from a distance, and mixed among them, strange groups of European tourists watching me as if I were some celebrity of the new sensational world of yogi bums. As the event resembled previous ones on similar occasions, the files in different drawers in memory tended to mix up and be substituted for each other. Dovetailing is natural to memory items, but actualities tend to exclude each other.

 

DISENTANGLING GURUKULA MUDDLE

This time, after landing, my stay in Trivandrum was short in view of a proper visit planned there later by invitation for the marriage of one of the Natesans, a gala affair. On the same day of landing I was taken by car to Varkala after lunch at Natesan's.

 

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At Varkala, Gurukula affairs were in a muddle. Every muddle is a tangle arising from four limbs of the quaternion inevitably involved. There will be some question of money or women, as also love of power or will to dominate due to what one hears now often referred to as 'ego-play'. Suspicion and rumour fan and accentuate the polarities involved till murderous glares are exchanged between rivals and groups.

 

Besides men and women contributing to closed rival static groups within the total group of the Gurukula, there could be racialism, tribalism, party and religious loyalties to add to the complexity of situations that often go out of control. After analysing Lohitakshan as well as Prasad against whom he complained, it was easier to go into the 'ego play' between these two - the former being a householder with wife and family and thus with interests outside the Gurukula unit proper. It was not difficult to analyse the group within the group and the offside involved, and then to locate the actual trouble spots or seismic epicentres.

 

The public-school idea, with women teachers living side by side with sannyasins, developed troubles within the machine. The engine was highly heated up by the time I reached Varkala. Since Nitya was away, I had to take the initiative. Prasad was senior and loyal but Lohitakshan, as a would-be public-school headmaster with a wife and family to support, had a cruder and braver ego to suppress as against his puny but powerful contemplative rival who looked like a schoolboy. The latter stuck to his guns correctly. Possession of land and rooms with keys were already involved in the power game, and men and women, with the connivance of interested neighbours, were about to torpedo the spiritual character of the Gurukula so as to tilt it in favour of becoming a more utilitarian institution.

 

I took one day to analyse the factors, using a big blackboard to separate the items. Physical intrusion was threatened. The next day at prayer I decided to declare a general state of emergency. Those to continue in charge were re-appointed in order to re-establish the contemplative balance for the Gurukula which was going to be lost. Lohitakshan could not make up his mind whether to stay or go but continued somewhat dubiously, obstructing developments. Top-heavy items were clipped and women were given a clearer idea of how not to play offside as against the swamis. Thus a small battle was won by timely action, although some hangovers from the indecision of Lohitakshan still remained.

 

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Either one wants a Gurukula that is contemplatively absolutist or compromises with rival factors. The middle line is hard to strike. Meanwhile the cause of a contemplative tradition, whatever its worth, has to be given support.

 

WEDDING RECEPTION IN THE PALACE

Like a tide in the affairs of men and women, marriage comes with a certain tragi-comic urge of necessity or luxury. Sparrows have to be busy building nests at certain seasons in the village trees when there is much chattering and many things going on between them as they fly from one branch to another. A marriage season exists similarly in village parts when trains or buses are filled with relations with pots, pans or provisions. Instead of laying eggs, with humans babies are born in numbers and maternity hospitals get over-filled. Between the alpha and omega limits of birth and death this is a central event in the subtle contagious significance of which men and women, especially the well-to-do, get involved, to be bound intimately to the roots of social obligations and necessities.

 

The Natesan family, which leaped within the span of decades from levels of mere necessity into the lap of opulence by the sheer self-made enterprise of Natesan himself, could not escape the promptings of this seasonal urge that binds the generality of mankind. The Indian mind more than many others is fond of atavistic repetitions of archetypal patterns of behaviour. The marriage of Rama with Sita is the model to seal marriages with sanctity; while Western types of behaviour proper to such functions as a wedding party, including a reception after the ceremony, have also gained ground here.

 

The Natesans had to respond to both patterns and there was a discarded royal palace of the erstwhile Maharaja of Travancore where a reception could be held with all the pomp and dignity of a durbar. The élite of Trivandrum was present as I was conducted to a front seat from where I could see the happy young couple being presented with the guests as they arrived in groups. Classical Indian music from the best-reputed lady vocal musician was in progress. The clang of teacups went on on the terrace and in the ample balconies where well-dressed and turbanned waiters were kept busy at the numerous tables spread out at the Kannakakunnu Palace. An Arabian Nights' atmosphere prevailed and I had a chance to meet friends whom I had last seen thirty or forty years before.

 

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One seemed to awake again in a quasi dream world of a Vanity Fair, but since all was vanity and vexation of the spirit anyhow, there was nothing to be excited about. At dusk, after the gala event, we returned to a rice porridge meal at the Gurukula Study Circle centre at Madhavamangala, as guests of the Jenards. Next morning, I had a chance to discuss modern colour-film techniques with Gopi who had specialized in them and was known as being the brother's son of Swami Mangalananda. After lunch with the Balagangadharan family we returned by car to Varkala.

 

THE TAIL END OF THE ROUND TRIP

The round trip circling the world was virtually over on reaching Trivandrum, but a tail-end of validity of total mileage could still bring me by air as far as Cochin. I availed myself of this extra facility on September 19th, as I wanted to go to Ezhumalai Island Home to initiate preliminary preparations for the full-fledged Conference to come in November 1970. On September 19th, I was met at Willingdon Island airport by Mr. S.N. Rao, head of the Food Technology Centre at Kalamassery a dozen miles away. I had a formal demonstration lunch served by the trainee students at which two new and important guests were also present by special invitation.

 

One was a science professor and the other was Mr. M.K.K. Nayar, head of the big plant run by the Government of India for producing chemical fertilisers on a large scale. The dialogue between myself and the two guests who represented the opulent governmental side could not have been established without the intermediate link that Mr. Rao represented in his person who, though a technologist in government service, was also keenly interested in contemplative cultural matters.

 

Mr. Nayar was organising a World Parliament of Religions, originally intended to be held at Kottayam, in which undertaking he suggested I should take direct interest. As he was the elected President of a large religious movement, the Ayappa Seva Sangham, I felt at once that something interesting was brewing, but still had doubts and misgivings about the role I could effectively play in such an avowedly religious 'Parliament', as it was to be called. I agreed in principle and we parted for the time.

 

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I VISIT KALADY, SANKARA'S BIRTHPLACE

 

Kalady.

 

After the lunch at Kalamassery, near Alwaye, Mr. Rao drove me to his new home which was right next to the reputed birthplace of the great Adi (original) Sankaracharya, the greatest name in Vedanta philosophy. A Punjabi friend, born in Fiji and studying in Coimbatore, was already at Kalady to meet me, sent by Dr. Subrahmanyam, and all three of us had that day and the next until midnight together to visit Sankara's birthplace.

 

Sankara's life, however, is still shrouded by major enigmas which no serious research has succeeded in throwing any light upon - to banish or clarify. He was supposed to be of Nambudri Brahmin origin which, if it were not questionable in some way, could not explain the well-known circumstance that the brahmins of the locality were not helpful to Sankara when he had to perform the funeral rites of his mother. Puerile evidences are still advanced even by academic authorities here, showing how low critical and objective standards can be made to descend.

 

From a direct reference to himself in the 75th verse of the Saundarya Lahiri, where he prefers to affiliate his culture or personality to the Dravidian context, it must be at least clear that the taboo under which he seems to have suffered at the funeral of his mother, whom he worshipped with particular devotion of an absolutist character, did not belong to the context of Vedic, Aryan or even brahminical orthodoxy. The nature of the culture which he inherited bears unquestionable affinities with the philosophy of the greatest Sanskrit poet, Kalidasa, whose works amply reveal a non-Vedic complexion, judged by the secondary place given to Vedism as such in them. He gives primacy to a form of Vedantism which treats Aryan Vedism as its counterblast or at least its less important or complementary counterpart only.

 

We all bathed in the broad river in front of the still-existing math or ashram or home known as the locality marking the birthplace of Sankara. The only unquestionable monument in evidence there to vouch for such a claim referring to an event at least 1200 years ago is the tomb of the mother where the common villagers, not necessarily brahmins, it is stated, even now light lamps or bring religious offerings of some kind.

 

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Why did Sankara write only in Sanskrit and not in Malayalam? Perhaps Malayalam did not exist in any sufficiently mature form for him to make use of it at the time. This same circumstance could apply to the status of the so-called Malayala Brahmana or Nambudri of that time. Parasurama is even said to have made fishermen into brahmins by giving them their fishing lines for use as sacred threads. This might be a caricature of what might have taken place, but the enigma still stares us in the face. The affinities of Sankara with Kalidasa, and his visits to the Narbada region not far from Ujjain, add plausibility to the theory that Sankara must have been born to a South Indian non-Aryan woman, so as to justify his reference to himself as a 'Dravida Sisu' (child of the Dravidian culture by race of birth).

 

Recognition has recently been given to this tomb of the mother by all the important Sankaracharyas now claiming to be his successors in different corners of India, North, East, and West. Mr. Rao took me to the various new additions or modern buildings in cement and mosaic that have been added to the original ones, spoiling the place of antique interest with garish streamlinings.

 

At the end of the second day before midnight I was driven to Alwaye station to entrain for the Island Home at the northern limit of Malabar. As I found the compartment where I was to sit, two strange faces known to me in Belgium several months before emerged from another compartment. It was a pleasant surprise that Freddie and Curran, dressed in yellow robes, had hitch-hiked through Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan and joined me as promised just when I was starting for the Island.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SEVENTY SIX

 

MYSTICISM AND TRAVEL TWILIGHTS

With my arrival at Cochin airport, where I was received by my friend Rao, the world tour was, in principle at least, to be treated as over. After a strange meeting with the Belgian contingent in the midnight train at Alwaye, a kind of 'marching home' atmosphere began to prevail, instead of one of a constant succession of packing to leave.

 

Some persons always pack and leave but others are destined to stay put for decades at a time. Through a surfeit of change of sleeping places, it often takes some people several minutes to remember where they last went to bed. That vacant minute between sleep and waking is where a secret kind of beauty, sweetness or joy resides, which is essentially mystical in content. Hungry hours alternating with feeding, and sleeping with waking, produce twilight periods between them as when day meets night in close mutual embrace. All conjugates or counterparts in life-experience are caught in an ambivalent interplay of seemingly contradictory factors that absorb their shocks when verticalized by the constant making and breaking of life currents.

 

The result is a kind of thrilling or flabbergasting experience of something that hippies call 'high' or 'far out'. This is the same as the 'lahari' or intoxication that Sankara deals with in his Saundarya Lahari which had been absorbing my attention and interest all through the months of my travels and with somewhat the same pressure even after. Ambivalent conjugates have a reciprocity, a complementarity or a compensatory character, as also finally a cancellability with a parity between right-handed or left-handed, virtual or actual shades of the same. Colours clash, blend or have shades, tints or saturations ranging between ultra-violet and infra-red which are subject to the same exchange of the four factors mentioned above. When opposites are abolished, joy results.

 

There is thus an ascending pleasure of sleep which comes from the rest of the lower limbs and organs, and another kind of sleep in which one can experience another kind of joy coming from a descending sense of peace or repose.

 

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All consolations, whether ascending or descending, result from the cancellation of counterparts. Eroticism and aesthetic tastes can be vulgar or select according to the weakness or strength in the cancellation of counterparts. There could be lukewarm reciprocity, which is not so verticalized a bliss as when an all-overwhelming sense of joy overtakes one wholly by a full cancellation of counterparts.

 

Hurdles and hazards of travel thus have their sweet uses. In spite of paper worries and worries due to heavy objects having to be transported from place to place, alternating travel and homecoming, when blended together, bring much felicity in life. Vertical joy spells absolute bliss, while horizontal pleasures can yield only satiation through surfeit.

 

FROM A MIDNIGHT SURPRISE TO RECEPTION AT THE ISLAND

After a few words of greeting exchanged at midnight at the Alwaye station, I woke up next only on the morning of September 21st when the Malabar Express reached Calicut. Well-wishers who entered my compartment to greet me on coming home included Bharati Trivedi of Ahmedabad who was passing through Calicut that night. Chandra, her companion, was not present due to some indisposition. Shivaprasad and others of the Gurukula fraternity were also there. As more friends got on each time the train stopped at Mahé, Tellicherry, Cannanore, and finally at Payyanur about eight in the morning, there was quite a crowd of such members of the fraternity joining into a regular pilgrimage to the island.

 

Kumaraswami had arranged about a dozen other smaller wayside receptions, at each of which I alighted and faced audiences, big or small, to say a few words. The bus that conducted us from Kottikadavu ferry-point to the Gurukula grounds had to stop for us to receive garlands and ritual offerings. It was thus a fully-triumphant homecoming event, culminating in a thousand people participating in the hospitality offered by Kumaraswami's efforts, as the date also coincided with the birthday anniversary of Narayana Guru.

 

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Travel fatigue added to sleeplessness and the fatigue from public engagements in which I had to participate without any interval of rest. The hours of sleep that followed on arrival at the Gurukula Island home were a veritable elixir blend made up of ascending and descending thrills of so special a kind that when cultivated further in the same sense would surely have led at least to the state which constitutes absorption in the Absolute. Such sonorous words as samadhi or the satori of the Zen Buddhists are not altogether outside the scope of everyday experience. Homespun and glossy varieties of fabric can be made of the same stuff.

 

CHANDRA AND BHARATI

Chandra and Bharati are the names of two inseparable ladies - both much travelled and fully-trained educators who, hardly a year before, had returned from the USA via Italy as specialists with about ten years of actual teaching experience with children of early school-going age. They held many degrees and diplomas that easily made them eligible for cushy jobs, judged by the premium that the Indian public still places on what is called 'foreign qualifications'.

 

These two girls, who behaved as if they were twin birds on the same stalk, hailed from Gujarat with Bombay or Allahabad affiliations of a so-called Vedic background, although such orthodoxy is at present to be found only in a form mixed up with later Mogul or Persian influences. Hindu orthodoxy in North India has its paradoxes wherein opposing patterns as well as life-values from both sides of a situation involving challenge and response can have flavours that clash, or at best only roughly complement each other. If we should add to this a Yankee veneer with an overall drop of the dropout flavour, we get an utterly new effect wherein many components still remain in the form of a mechanical mixture rather than a chemical compound. Even at that, such a compound could still remain amorphous or crypto-crystalline. For the inner molecular structure to cling together more closely and organically the finishing touch of the unitive understanding that the Gurukula represents is needed at least to act as a catalyser. Super-saturated crystals need a crystallising principle which need not necessarily be part of the liquid itself. The case is like that of an umpire who could be in a field, fully participating in the game by his interest and influence, but who need not necessarily play the game himself. He is 'oceans apart', although within the totality of the general situation. The Upanishadic touch is the catalytic agent, as I see it.

 

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Although Chandra, as a purusika (positive maiden), often dominated Bharati who was more of an Aphrodite than a Diana type, they were complementary, compensatory or reciprocal elements or particles capable of being put together. They were thus sufficient unto themselves. They had already had a few years of an Upanishadic touch, to which they responded readily, under Harry, the Head of the New Jersey Gurukula, who put them on the way.

 

After an interval of about seven months, since seeing me off at Bangalore airport about the end of February, 1969, they were more determined than ever about getting Gurukula wisdom in Calicut on September 28th, 1969. They really were two brave Indian girls, equally educated in the West, prepared to take the risks together for a fuller adventure into the unexplored waters of the Absolute. Their earnest desire for Gurukula wisdom and their self-sufficiency between them, made it easy for me to allow them to be a part of my entourage for many months thereafter.

 

THE VAITHIRI CENTRE

 

Vaithiri.

 

The stay at Calicut at the ample apartments belonging to Mr. Kesava Mudaliar was good example of generosity as well as hospitality. Little did we realise that Mr. Mudaliar was to pass away within a few months of this meeting of friends in his house, especially as he was seen that same night generously treating a group of North Indian men and women who had come to see the Guru of the two ladies who were instrumental in bringing about a spiritual contact between the two sections of North and South Indians living in comparative isolation of each other, although hitherto in the same city.

 

Next morning we all started in a car lent by the proprietor of C.C. Brothers for a point in the Wynad (on the way to the Nilgiris), just less than forty miles from Calicut, where Jean and Nicole Letschert, a French-Belgian companionate couple, were building huts on the five-acre grounds offered to the Gurukula some months before. We stayed first at the Eagle Estate where Ratnakaran, the son of the proprietor, had a modern bungalow. Then we peeped into the hut in the forest near the lakeside not far from the main road. The hut had been abandoned by the couple because it is well known that, after Cherapunji in the North-East, the place known for the highest rainfall is just this spot, and the hut was not waterproof. Heaven's waters seem to have chosen this lake for establishing some contact with the earth, and the rainy season is the time when the Ganges has its home equally above as below through this point of participation between heaven and earth.

 

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The way a Gurukula can grow, given a forest and a freshwater lake and some dropout-like individuals, half-mystic and half-rational, has been proved time and again in the history of mysticism all over the world. What we saw at Vaythiri was again another example of how persistent people with a will to live will make headway in spite of inclement weather or adverse circumstances. Noah's ark was built in the bad weather of the Deluge; spirit triumphs and even matter stops short in failure and is left behind.

 

The stay at the Eagle Estate was very enjoyable, surrounded by mountains with clouds lighting on them. We extended our stay by one more day to rest our limbs fatigued by the heat and perspiration of the plains. A touch of cold, however slight, can correct the evil done to the body by many head-perspiring nights spent in the plains under mosquito nets. The yaksas and kinnaras of Kalidasa are seen to be very particular in choosing the point in the cloud-line levels where they can escape extremes of inclement weather, hot, moist or cold.

 

Intelligent man, likewise, must secure his health and happiness by readjusting the workings of the thermostat with feedback arrangements of his psychophysical cybernetics, tallying inner with outer psychosomatic, entropic, thermodynamic or even electro-magnetic conditions. This is why 'change' is recommended by wise doctors and is seen to do good in almost every case when discreetly adopted. Ooty not only readjusts the cybernetics of good health, but overhauls the system, as it were, sometimes with hammer and pliers not always used in a pleasant manner. After the two girls had a good jeep ride in the countryside which Ratnakaran arranged, we boarded a bus at Chandrayil at noon on October 1st, to climb the heights through Gudalur and past the Pykara waterfalls to the highest point in Fernhill dominating the Keti Valley.

 

THE ANNUAL FEAST AT FERNHILL

The Gurupuja or feast for the Guru falls about the second Sunday in the month of October. Rains stop just before this date and the second monsoon is often in the offing. As a result we just missed a wet feast when hundreds of men, women and children come to eat good food with all of us once a year.

 

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The preparations for this event start at least a month in advance. Karunakaran takes charge with Nitya and Prasad acting at a distance from wherever they happen to be. Calicut and Cannanore friends readily respond with other contacts all over India and abroad. It is the atmosphere of fraternity, openness and outright generosity that makes for the success of this event, now repeated in almost the same way over more than three decades.

 

Principles of inner growth and elements of dialectical import come into interplay in such events when Gods are said to be propitiated above by the burnt offerings of material below. Humanity has believed in this kind of efficacy through the days of the siege of Troy to the present. There is a cosmo-psychological structural dynamism implied here as with semantics, logistics, cybernetics and quantum or space-time relations known to modern man.

 

Sunday, October 12th, was thus another of the memorable days in which Gurukula friends reaffirmed their dedication to the Absolute.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SEVENTY SEVEN

 

TWO KINDS OF RESOURCES AND INITIATIVES

The resources at the disposal of a man of contemplation who, while remaining a full contemplative, wishes to avoid falling into states of negativism or quietism like that of the Trappists of South Italy or Greece, and the resources of a big church or state body, are not of the same order. Time is the wealth on which he has to rely rather than on the power of the dollar. One affiliates oneself to the world of horizontal values by putting the dollar before Time or Pure Duration, which is the same as the Kingdom of God that one is called upon in the Bible to seek first and foremost. One has to mark for oneself an Omega Point or arrowhead for directing one's resources or efforts, whether spiritual or material, of a given time or chance-opportunity.

 

The Gurupuja or feast in the name of a wisdom teacher gives a chance for teacher and disciples - together with other sympathisers and camp followers of any Guru movement - to press one more pace forward to success. Negative 'blue' states of depression or despondency are thus passed through by the pilgrim crossing the valley where the 'dark night of the soul', in the words of St. John of the Cross, might mar the joy of a veritable 'mystical marriage'. Instead of the witch scene of Macbeth or the monkey scene of Faust we have an atmosphere of festive openness and generosity which makes one and all feel better. After the spurt of the actual event, one enjoys the quiet time that succeeds. Quietism and festive joys in company have to go hand in hand.

 

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QUIET DAYS AT FERNHILL

The Fernhill Gurukula was destined to be my contemplative home. When I first stepped into its grounds, then overgrown and wild with trees and thistles, I repeated often within myself those words of Alexander Pope, which I had recited at school earlier and which spoke of the happiness of a man 'whose wish and care a few paternal acres bound' and:

 

'Blest, who can unconcernedly find

Hours, days, and years slide soft away,

In health of body, peace of mind,

Quiet by day.

 

Sound sleep by night; study and ease,

Together mixed; sweet recreation

And innocence, which most does please with meditation.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown,

Thus unlamented let me die,

Steal from the world, and not a stone'.

 

After my seventy-fourth birthday I had a chance to feel the truth of these lines.

 

Curran De Bruler of Chicago was acting as my secretary for the World Conference for Peace through Unitive Understanding which was to take place (as a kind of dress rehearsal) a month later at the new Gurukula Island Home in Cannanore District in Malabar. The two ladies from North India, Chandra and Bharati, were there to help and sit together with me for lessons - either in the Saundarya Lahari which I was carefully scrutinizing, or in perfecting plans for the projected Conference. Soon we were to be on the scene for action at the no-man's-land end corner of the island, where the steep slopes of the mountainside sank into the deep blue waters of the Arabian Sea.

 

Publicity materials had to be prepared, setting out the nature of the Conference and its aim, ways and means. The ladies helped in regulating study hours as also in odd clerical work, making available a manifold copying machine which they had brought in anticipation from America when they returned to India. They were a self-sufficient pair of ladies who resembled a couple in the usual sense, but in fact they only complemented each other without conflict between them. Although a reciprocity or ambivalence seemed to be present in their relations, as with two inseparable birds or buds on the same stalk, they did not obtrude into Gurukula life with the fickleness or negative unpredicability that had been experienced or rather taken for granted in the case of some former woman inmates who had come to live and travel with me previously, as recorded already.

 

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Even the weak complementarity between them was mostly free from the contrary or cross-purposes often noticed between two women bracketed together as they happened to be. I saw no reason why they should not be allowed to benefit from the life of the Gurukula as others of the other sex. Moreover, at that very time, I was formulating the words for a message to be given out at the end of the year in which marriage and sex life in the Gurukula were to be overtly clarified for the guidance of all concerned.

 

MAN-WOMAN RELATIONS

Man-Woman relations imply and involve subtle dialectics by which the relations can be sublimated from the context of conflict to one of harmonious reciprocity, by recognizing the ambivalence of personal traits and treating them as complementary counterparts, permitting one element or trait as compensatory to the other, so as to add to the total gain rather than effect the double loss that might otherwise accrue.

 

The general good and good of all have to be remembered together in the Gurukula game and, above all, 'off-sides' and unilaterally-motivated foul play with rival egos coming into the picture have to be carefully avoided. After the Gurupuja in Fernhill, October, 1969, I was still ruminating, experimenting or carrying out observations in such matters.

 

THE APPROACH OF THE 1969 CONFERENCE

The one purpose that filled the minds of all Gurukula inmates after the middle of October was to make the coming conference a success. A folder in coloured print with photographs, maps, etc., giving all details of the events, was printed in Trivandrum under the supervision of Curran. It was prepared with the co-operation of the two ladies. We also tried to make our own copies of handouts for the conference, but mechanical expertise was still inadequate in handling the machine which arrived at the Island when we reached there after ten days at Varkala. Soon the event began to call for a hasty and all-out effort and we were obliged to plunge headlong into it more or less haphazardly.

 

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A contingent of about twenty delegates from Australia were to arrive before the conference began. Yati Nitya Chaitanya came from Australia before the group arrived and, after a few days spent in Varkala, arrived at the Island with his offer of valuable service and financial support.

 

He took over the whole management so as to relieve me of my direct burden and, with his usual facile versatility in such organisational matters, was able to run the show with ease. He was free and bolder than I in his dealings, and friendly understanding and generosity characterized his movements and relations. He over-did the stunt perhaps towards the end of the conference, and had something like an emotional crisis for a short time. His delicate system could not carry crude heavy-duty loads or bear rough handling, into which way of life I found myself stepping unawares now and then. Even otherwise, Guru-Sisya relations have very delicate adoption-disadoption mechanics which, as in electronic machines, can get stuck in cybernetic feedback adjustments, so as to cause hold-ups or 'noise' unrelated to the flow of eventful 'information'.

 

THE DIALECTICS OF DISADOPTION

Man and woman, even when well united by marriage, are subject to strange dialectical laws, sometimes with tragic reverses in the way they love or hate each other. When unstable, such a relationship can become an eternal toothache to both the parties concerned, as Tolstoy puts it in his Kreutzer Sonata. Women are more often prone to this kind of disadoption, for which one tries in vain to find a cogent reason. There is, however, a subtle dialectical law regulating relations, and when frustration of emotional satisfaction is involved, a tragic situation can arise unawares. The 'Dasa-kumara-carita' of Dandin even refers to a woman, otherwise a model of constancy, being overtaken by such a tragic contrariness that she pushed her life-long companion of a good husband into a well when her deeper emotional appetites were starved by him.

 

Woman are known to suffer 'capalya', which refers to an absolute unpredictability in their basic nature. Shakespeare would call it fickleness and equate it to the specific personality of womanhood itself when he speaks about it in Hamlet as 'frailty thy name is woman!' A Sanskrit saying is that the fortune of a man is as unpredictable as the mind of a woman.

 

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Another Sanskrit saying is that woman deserves no freedom - modern women resent such doctrines outright. Ancient wisdom thus comes into direct conflict with modernism. The reason is that moderns think of mechanistic equality or justice while ancients had the complex fourfold Absolute for reference.

 

 

 

EPILOGUE

I have been using the pages of the English Appendix to the Gurukulam magazine - and previously those of 'Values' magazine -  to narrate to its readers what I have called 'The Autobiography of an Absolutist'; trying to tell the story of my own life with relevant remarks that I thought could make it both interesting and thought-provoking. In my last instalment, I remember to have been treating the subject of pure memory and forward-flowing time. I had premonitions about my present ailment of paralysis of both my left limbs while staying in Ootacamund in the summer of 1971 and, confined to a hospital bed in Trivandrum as I am writing these lines, I was just narrating an account of those early warning signals which presaged the calamity which was to come to me one year later. Let us now catch up with that part of the narrative.

 

It is a familiar and trite saying that coming events cast their shadows before. I think that even Shakespeare somewhere in his writings has seemingly lent support to this notion. If we should treat this as valid, the consequences thereof would be more significant than might ordinarily be expected. It would be tantamount to admitting that omens and premonitions are not to be dismissed as mere superstitions, and would compel us to believe that what is called pure consciousness has a prospective as well as a retrospective reference. In the summer of 1971 I had the earliest premonition of this kind while staying at the Fernhill Gurukula. On the 7th of June, while taking my usual walk with two or three disciples down to the railway over-bridge towards the burial grounds, I went to a certain point and decided to turn about for the return walk. Just at that moment I felt that I was losing my spatial orientation and balance, and the cold Ooty air must have added whatever slight complication it could to the non-functioning of the inner ear with its semicircular canals, etc., both vertically and horizontally disposed, which is the delicate mechanism supposed to be in charge of spatial orientation. I had to sit down on the side-bank of the road for a moment before walking back to the Gurukula. This was surely a mild form of 'red light signal' forewarning me of the real stroke that was to come just one year later. Thus it is within my own recent personal experience that coming events do cast their shadows before.

 

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PURE TIME

Pure Time is a concept, when written with a capital 'T'. Time is not a simple forward-flowing event but is rather a two-sided one, with both action and retroaction and prospective and retrospective references to it that imperceptibly alternate within pure duration. Retroaction takes over when the forward function of action is finished. It is as if two consciousnesses are involved together in a sort of relay race, with a kind of indirectness of cause and effect. Sometimes the effect comes before the cause. It is a double-sided event, and not just a simple flux. The notion of 'free will' becomes compromised almost completely if we accept this Shakespearean dictum.

 

This brings us to the question, 'Who is an absolutist?' - which has to be answered as early as possible. An absolutist is one who regulates his life with the Absolute as his norm of reference. He is generally a man who refuses to make compromises. Earnestness, whole-heartedness, honesty to oneself, and serious life-long dedication without compromises are some of the prerequisites which distinguish the state which is natural to the so-called absolutist. Of all the philosophies of the world, Advaita Vedanta - which makes the bold statement, 'You are That' (tat tvam asi) - in other words, you are already the Absolute - may be said to correspond to an outlook which could be described as absolutist. Advaita means non-dual. That means that duality between matter and mind, forward-flowing and backward-flowing time, or between any other pair of rival antinomian categories is to be abolished.

 

ABSOLUTIST SOLUTION

Doctors keep on telling us that worry is the cause of high blood-pressure and that high blood-pressure aggravates heart troubles such as the present thrombosis from which I am now suffering. How can one ever stop worrying? One is worried when one finds something is too difficult or impossible to do. If the elder son of an old man does not obey the father, the old man gets worried and might develop complications of the heart and limbs. As a bachelor and sannyasi, I was under the impression that worries could never operate in my mind seriously, because I have no dependants like sons or a wife.

 

683

But the very thought of a certain task that you might set yourself might be the root cause of such a worry, even when you are not attached to a wife and children. In the summer of 1971 there was a series of impossible tasks with which my mind seemed to be confronted and obsessed, to which I seemed very seriously and inextricably committed. I had made up my mind to use the medium of videotape cassettes to write a visual commentary of the Saundarya Lahari of Sankara. This work of the great advaitic philosopher happened to be one that was particularly suited for this task of using visual language instead of words to explain deep philosophical verities. And as days went on I was lured more and more into deeper and deeper involvement, the impossibility of which became more and more evident as days went on. Furthermore, the work of the Gurukula itself was expanding and broadening out every day. I had to depend upon a group of disciples who were brought to me almost by the hands of accident from the farthest corners of the Earth. To make them toe the line in regard to my favourite ideals seemed a task that had become more and more impossible, especially at this stage of my life. Further, there were technical problems belonging to a world quite outside my own, which also added to my worries. Thus there was a series of impossible items that seemed to loom into my life one after another to build up some kind of an adverse tension within me, which must have resulted in the present calamity. I have been intensely considering a solution of at least some kind of consolation from religion or philosophy, and I am glad to say that I am still hoping to fix it on to the way of life called the Advaitic way of life, which is otherwise more simply called Vedantic. Abolish all dualities and difficulties! That is the sweeping answer that it gives us. It is easy to make such a demand, but not so easy to carry it out so as to abolish worry altogether. Man is caught in a world of necessity, cabined, cribbed and confined forever, and his dreams of freedom have to lie in another world, opposite to that of necessity, which could be called the world of free contingence. 'Free contingence' refers to the world of intelligent light, while necessity refers to matter, darkness, and ignorance. Is it humanly possible to bridge the gap between the two rival worlds of necessity and contingence? That is, in short, the problem which each man is called upon to face each day in his life, if he is to escape worry at all. I am glad to say that the answer happens to be in the affirmative.

 

684

Each man really belongs to the world of bright light and wisdom, of great beauty and value. To be conscious of this every minute of one's life is the solution, and there seems to be no other alternative. Textbooks such as the Saundarya Lahari and the Kali Natakam of Narayana Guru contain precious indications in this direction. That is why Narayana Guru's works deserve our special scrutiny and critical study. I have been engaged in just this kind of study while still confined to a hospital bed these last months, and hopes are not lost. On the contrary, hopes are becoming brighter every day for me.

 

The notion of the Absolute is the universal solvent of dualities, whether within the mind or the psyche or the personality as a whole. And what is human life, but what concerns the personality of man as a whole? It is in this sense that philosophy and wisdom can be consolations to human life. It must be only in this sense that we say 'knowledge is power'. All evils in life arise from lack of knowledge. This is the essence of the philosophy of Narayana Guru and Sankaracharya. Our lives constantly alternate between the world of light and that of darkness. Darkness is the source of all evils. Therefore abolish darkness and you are saved. I know that this sounds too simple, but I want it to be taken seriously and literally. Its extreme simplicity is its weakness as well as its strength. Living examples of those people who have taken this point of view seriously are to be found even in our own days. Such men are known as gurus in India, but India is by no means the only place where such great men live. They can be found in any place in the world at any time, though distributed as only few and far between.

 

In the ward next to me I can hear groaning voices of important persons, of VIP's who have been admitted here for dire diseases such as my own. Thrombosis, polio, cancer, brain abscesses and ulcers of various kinds prove to me every minute that life is a suffering, although I do not like to be classed among oriental pessimists. But the fact is too evident to be overlooked, irrespective of pessimism or optimism.

 

Individual human life has been compared by Narayana Guru to bubbles of spring water which enter a well from the bottom, while similar bubbles descend from rainwater downwards from above. Two bubbles could greet each other in the middle of the well, and that would represent what is called human society. The whole thing takes place within pure water, which suffers no change because of the bubbles.

 

 

 

INDEX

 

A

Abelard, 175

Absolute, 64, 91, 117, 122, 123, 142, 158, 166, 167, 177, 196, 215, 243, 278, 335, 365

Absolutism, 90, 112, 118, 134, 174, 257, 267, 300, 615, 655

absolutist, 75, 109, 114, 115, 116, 158, 267, 295, 395, 456

abundance, 280, 395

academic life, 48

Achutananda, Swami, 287, 288

Adam Smith, 293

adhibhautika, 373

adhidaivika, 373

adhyatmika, 373

Adi Dravida, 71, 72, 75

Adler, 208

adolescence, 27, 78

adolescent years, 59

Adolphe Ferrière, 191

Adonis, 230

adrsta, 142

Advaita Ashram, 99, 101, 102, 105, 112, 114, 118, 169

Advaita Bhakta Sabha, 71

ahimsa, 87, 197

Akhandananda, Swami, 371

Alps, 236, 309

altruism, 63, 64, 69, 74

ambivalent polarities, 28

Andrews C.F., Rev. 106, 216

Anna Karenina, 433, 482

apat dharmam, 137

apocalyptic, 535

apocryphal, 535

apodictic certitude, 534, 650

a posteriori, 512

apperception mass, 80, 228

a priori, 512

apurva, 142

Archimedes, 233

architecture, 229, 230, 231

Aristotle, 53, 132, 329, 456

Arjuna, 60, 74, 174, 459, 476

art, 229, 230, 388, 392, 393, 394

artha, 60

Aryan, 71, 668

ashram, 99, 101, 102, 104, 118

astangahrdaya, 120

atavistic types, 95

Atkinson Henry A., Dr. 303, 315

Atlantic, 311

Atmopadesa Satakam, 504

Aurobindo, 390

authorship, 468

Ayer A.J., Prof., 435

 

B

Bacchus, 239

Bach, 435

Bahai, 191

Bahuleyan, 122

Balzac, 449

Bannerjee, Surendranath, 26

Barcelona Gallery, 392, 394

Baroda, 269

Beethoven, 435

behaviour prototype, 4

Bentinck, Lord, 26

Bergson, 161, 204, 246, 334, 347, 454, 469, 470, 510, 655

Besant, Annie, 26, 87, 114, 245, 361

Bhagavan Prasad, 141

Bhandarkar, 21

Bharata, 117

bhikhu, 164, 165

Bible, 54, 61, 282, 324

bipolar relationship, 5

bird life, 86

Boccaccio, 55, 437

Bodhananda Swami, 123, 128, 130, 135, 173, 259, 287

Bombay, 256, 258, 268, 371, 416, 557

Bovet Pierre, 191, 247

brahmachari, 147, 371

brahmacharya, 60, 169, 204

brahmin, 71, 72

Brahminism, 163, 164

Brahma Vidya, 302

Brooklyn, 317, 318

Bruno, 175, 575

Buddha, 18, 118, 164

Buddhism, 163, 164, 165

 

C

Caesar, 231, 244, 308, 413

Cairo, 308

Calcutta, 87, 376, 377

calligraphy, 83

Cambridge, 1, 17

Campbell, 62

Candide, 14, 227, 384, 437

Canova, 229

Cape Comorin, 117, 177

Carnot Equation, 354

caste, 9, 65, 71, 557

catacombs, 233

Cérésole Pierre, Dr., 241, 242

Ceylon, 2, 11, 62, 63, 69, 77, 163, 165, 169, 448

charity (begins at home), 75

Chattambi Swami, 463

Chattopadhyaya, Mrinalini, 76

Chidbhavananda, Swami, 147

Chimacoffs, 334, 335

Chintadripet, 63, 71, 72, 73, 76

Christ anti-, 19

Christian, 29, 46, 50, 52, 59, 183

Christ Jesus, 19

Christian morality, 8

Christianity, 18, 215, 228, 231, 233, 325, 405, 417, 419

Cicero, 177

civilization - dominant and recessive, 642

Claperède, 246, 247, 252

Cochin, 3, 122

Colombo, 13, 180, 181, 184, 189, 359

colonialism, 77

compartmentalization, 54

Conan Doyle, 28

Confessions, 59, 162, 297, 511

Conjeevaram (Kanjipuram), 163

conscience, 181, 193, 194

contemplation, 275, 382

Conventions, Varkala Gurukula, 366, 378, 462, 484

cosmos, 91

cosmological, 64

Count d'Aarschot, 414, 415, 452

Crates, 525

cubists, 83

cybernetic, 354, 431, 454, 595

 

D

Dalton Plan, 80

Dante, 419, 445

Daridra Narayanas, 74

Darsanamala, 302

death, 116, 404, 487, 514, 551

death of a cow, 277, 278

Deccan, 2

dedication, 108, 134

Dehra Dun, 269

denominator, 487

depressed classes, 71

Descartes, René, 254, 265, 567

Desdemona, 118

destiny, 68

Dewey, 133, 296

dharma, 60, 354, 376

dialectical, 70, 74, 347

dialectical dragons, 368, 369

dialectical revaluation, 347

Dina and Bianca, 421, 425

Dickens, 28, 383

Dorothy Hodgkin, 445

double gain, 75

Durkheim Emile, 165

 

E

East Africa, 77

economics, 344

economy - abundance and opulence, 280, 291, 292, 609

education - experimental, 82 83, 295

- theory and practice, 81, 82

educative process, 191, 435

Edward VIII, 87

Eiffel Tower, 185, 214, 243

Einstein, 246, 321, 455, 469

Ellis Island, 314

Emile, 82, 132, 203, 204

Emma Thomas, 195, 199, 207

empirical intelligence, 6

Empiricism, 24

England, I, 439-447

entropy, 354

Ernakulam, 3, 94, 95, 99, 109, 173

eroticism, 27

Eton, 22

etymological, 83

Europe, 82, 243, 281, 341, 416

Evans-Wentz, Prof., 153

exhibitionism, 31

Experimental Psychology, 210

extra-curricular studies, 27

Ezhumalai, 471, 493

 

F

Failure, 106, 107, 114, 301, 326

fakir, 100, 395

fashion, 383

fate, 196, 264

Father's Mansion, 94

Fernhill, 139, 274, 295, 377

Fichte, 53

figure-of-eight principle, 327

food, 353, 443

France, 187

Fraser A.G., Rev., 16

Fred Haas, 463, 469

freedom, 395

French, 6, 10, 191

Freud, 208

Froebel, 82, 83, 133, 201

 

G

Gandhi M.K, 32, 33, 34, 37, 60, 84, 89, 91, 145, 241, 280, 290, 296, 318, 390, 476

Gangadharan, 91

Ganges, 329, 464

Garibaldi, 231

Garry Davis, 346, 349, 356, 357, 389, 410, 411, 425, 427, 432, 449, 593

Gauguin, 267, 392, 628

Gaussian curve, 488, 517, 539

Geneva, 181, 186, 189, 191, 193, 256

Geo-dialectics, 349, 368, 369

Germany, 238, 239

Gevaert Céline, 404, 405, 438, 443, 450, 457

Gevaert Edgar, 355, 417

Gevaert girls, 401

Gevaert family, 401, 437, 447

Gevaert Marc, 399, 403, 413, 434

Gevaert Martine, 398, 400

Gent, 398, 399, 404, 414, 416, 417, 429, 434

Gita, Bhagavad, 60, 61, 64, 101, 122, 166, 174

Gita Govinda, 35, 148

Gland, 199, 200, 237, 247, 256, 319

Gobbo, 192

God, 59, 521

Goethe, 215, 629, 630

Gokhale, 34

Govindananda Swami, 163, 259, 287

Grieve, R.G., 81, 85, 89

Gujarat, 87

Gulzarilal Nanda, 375

Guru, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45

Gurukula, 4, 132

Gurukulam Magazine, 363

Gurukula principles, 338, 349

Gurukula, Somanhalli, 379

Gurupuja, 281, 475

Guru-sisya, 73, 213, 247

Gurukula vasa, 169

 

H

Hanuman, 2

happiness, 345, 395

Harappa, 71

Harijans, 72, 73

Harishchandra, 72

Harrow, 22

hierophantic, 485, 536, 541, 569, 661

Heloïse, 297, 430, 445

Heraclitus, 67

Herbart, 80, 228

hero-worship, 27, 41

heuristic, 80, 81

Himalaya, 117, 558

Hinduism, Vedic, 474

hippies, 529, 530, 545, 573, 580

Hippolytus, 116

Hitler, 227, 238, 241

holi, 203

homam, 366, 413, 463, 508, 585, 657

homologic, 355

homeostatic, 355

Homer, 386

Home Rule Movement, 87

homo sapiens, 53, 82

honesty, 315

Hoover, 315

Hugo Victor, 14, 29, 123, 185, 297, 328, 395, 449, 482, 489

humour, 334

Huxley Aldous, 623

Huxley Julian, Sir, 54

Hyderabad, 76

hylozoic, 536

Hypateia, 175, 430

hypochondriac, 80

hypostatic, 536, 541, 569, 661

 

I

Iambic tetrameter, 22

ideals, adolescence, 24

ideals, naturalistic, 20

ideals, negative, 20

ideals, pragmatic, 20

Impressionists, 83

Indus Valley civilization, 71

indeterminism, 28

India becoming a Nation, 34

Indian National Congress, 87

Integrated Science of the Absolute, 382, 385, 402, 456, 540, 571, 574, 579

Ipomea biloba, 53

Isa Upanisad, 64

ista and purta, 64, 130

Italy, 418

 

J

Jain, 87

Jakobsen, Harry, 327, 335, 364, 599

Janaka, King, 174

Janus, 117

Jean Convent, 381

Jean Valjean, 300

Jesus, 175

Jews, 183

jnana-karma samuchaya, 115

Joan of Arc, 175, 297

job-hunting, 49, 268, 269, 270, 271

John Spiers, 304, 363, 369, 378, 463

Johnston, Mrs., 282

Josephine De Story, Miss, 239

Julian Beck, 612

Jung, 208

 

K

Kaggalipura, 369

Kalathoor Muniswami Pillai, 71

Kali, 196, 600, 620

Kalidasa, 12, 29, 131, 297, 403, 568, 650, 653, 668

kama, 60

Kandy, 12, 15, 62, 63

Kant, 452

Kanva, 12

karma, 212, 264, 286, 354

kartrtva, 31

Kashmir, 177

Katha Upanisad, 116

kausala, 286

Keats, 232, 246, 409, 471

khaddar, 88, 124

Kindergarten, 82, 83

Kipling's 'Jungle Book', 151

Koru, 141

Krishna, 60, 141, 476

Krishnamurti, 245

Kumaran Asan, 304, 518

Kuppuswamy, 141

Kural, 251

 

L

Labro, 422, 425

Lacombe, 343, 457

Lakshmana, 117

Launcelot Gobbo, 323

League of Nations, 357

Leibniz, 209

Leifra, 245

Leigh Hunt, 70

Léman, Lake, 188, 197

Leonardo da Vinci, 230, 232

Les Misèrables, 28

Lévy, Sylvain, 343

libido, 94

life, 332, 365, 426

Light of Asia, The, 118

Lingua Mystica, 554, 577

lokanuvartana, 97

London, 70, 72, 82, 184

love, 75, 159, 249, 250, 251, 297, 298

luck, 423

 

M

Matrika Pathasala, 168

Mauritius, 32

Maya, 287, 300, 320, 332, 454, 494, 565

Mediterranean, 233

Merchant of Venice, 228

meta-language, 537

Michelangelo,230

Michelet, 239

Midsummer Night's Dream, 20, 629

Milton, 384, 422, 468

mimamsaka, 44

modernism, 468

modernization, 440

Mohenjo-Daro, 71, 233

moksa, 60

Monroe, 446

Montessori, 80, 82, 84

Montmartre, 83, 211, 396

moral standards, 345

morality, 305

Morin, Madame, 352, 354

Moscow, 556, 558, 559

Mozart, 436

Muhammed, 423

music, European, 436, 437

Mussolini, 227, 231, 258

Mysore, 1, 44, 61

mysticism, 388, 395

 

N

necessities, 264, 286, 289, 566

New York, 70, 316

nickname, 8

Nietzsche, 482, 504, 510

Nikhilananda, Swami, 324, 325, 326

Nilgiri Hills, 123, 124, 125, 235, 267, 274, 275, 281, 286, 296,

Nitya Chaitanya Yati, 375, 378, 460, 465, 505

normalization, 13, 543

normative goal, 25

numbers, 452

numerator, 487, 575

 

0

Obligations, 97

Oedipus Complex, 116

Ootacamund, 125, 276, 278

opulence, 98, 333, 334, 395, 433

orphan in God, 100, 126, 323

Oshawa, 415, 451

Othello, 118, 282

Oxford, 17

 

P

paedocentricity, 82

Passive Resistance, 34, 80

pedagogue, 80

Penelope, 265

peripatetic, 132

personality development, 59

personality type, 28

Pestalozzi, 80, 82, 84, 201, 236

Petrarchan, 422

Peter Cadby, 351, 352

Picasso, 83, 392, 394, 628

Pitar Natty, 200, 320

Plato, 132

Politics, 605, 654

poor feeding, 69, 73, 74, 506

Portia, 430, 445

poverty, 333, 334

Prasad, 467, 490, 665

prasadam, 111, 179, 509

Presidency College, 49, 50, 51, 63, 68, 69, 268

principle of uncertainty, 267

probabilities and possibilities, 5, 69, 659

Project Method, 80

Prophets, 521

proto-Aryan civilization, 71, 72

proto-language, 537, 553, 577

protozoa, 53

psychedelics, 612

psychic research, 375

psychological, 64

Public school, 170, 171

purusarthas, 60

purvashrama, 115

Pythagoras, 297

 

Q

 

R

racial discrimination, 332, 333

radicalism, 655

Radhakrishnan S. Dr., 24, 321

Raghuvamsa, 29

Rai, Lajpat, 26

Rajagopalachari, C, 241

Ramakrishna, 69

Ramakrishna Mutt, 26, 322, 324,

Ramananda, 145

Ramana Maharishi, 298

Ramanuja, 375

Ramayana, 117

Ranganathan, S.E., 66

relational asphyxia, 120, 121

relational triangles, 432

relativism, 112, 116, 119, 158, 175, 179, 181, 295, 344, 349, 615

religion, 63, 347

Religions, World Conference of, 316, 318, 321

religious sentiment, 12

Rembrandt, 394, 628

Renaissance, 228, 229

renunciation, 101, 108

rivalry, 119

Robinson Crusoe, 28, 118

Romain Rolland, 216, 240, 246

Rome, 84, 230, 231, 308

Roosevelt, 315

Round Table Conference, 72, 242

Rousseau, 18, 38, 59, 80, 82, 132, 133, 162, 169, 173, 175, 188, 189, 191, 197, 201, 203, 213, 234, 252, 274, 282, 296, 297, 309, 357, 399, 400, 408, 446, 449

rural uplift, 291, 292

Russell, Bertrand, 209, 442

 

S

S. Africa, 87

Saidapet, 68, 69, 78, 79, 80, 86, 268

Saint Simonism, 187

Sakuntala, 12, 29, 131, 403

Salvador Dali, 392, 394

samadhi, 287

samatva, 198

sampat, daiva and asuri, 28

samsara, 139, 147

Sanderson, 16

Sankara, 115, 328, 363, 635, 650, 668, 669

Sanskrit, 1, 6, 21

Shantiniketan, 240

sannyasin, 97, 101, 102, 115, 124, 127, 133, 164, 165, 171, 259, 266, 280, 288, 359, 371, 395, 457

Saraswati, 196

Sartre, Jean Paul, 449

Sarvodaya, 293

sastras, 127

satyagraha, 33, 72, 87, 88, 89, 91

school, 2, 6

Schopenhauer, 482

Scott, 28

Self, 91

Self-surrender, 61

sex and ideals, 59

Shakespeare, 29, 81, 106, 215, 228, 422, 440

Shanmathuran, 141

Stevenson, R.L., 14

Suez Canal, 184

Sufi, 191

superman, 32

supernatural, 96

surplus value, 96

Surrealists, 83

svadharma, 77, 91, 163, 167, 168, 171 33,

Svetasvatara Upanisad, 64

Swamidas, 141

 

T

Tagore, Rabindranath, 34, 35, 37, 106, 107, 239, 240, 423

Tamils, 78

Tao, 68, 77, 86, 91, 97, 135, 191, 195, 196, 216, 266, 287, 303, 347, 348, 354, 379, 414, 423, 427, 448, 453, 454, 586, 654

tapas, 349

Temple of the Sacred Tooth, 15

Tennyson, 32

Thackeray, 28

Theological, 64

Theosophists, 441

Theseus, 116

Thoreau, 87

tyagi, 101, 166, 307, 366

Tibetan Yogi Milarepa, 153

Tilak, 258

Time, 332

Time and Space, 386

Tintoretto, 229

Tippu, 10

Tirukural, 71, 504

Tiruvalluvar, Saint, 71, 504

Tiruvannamalai, 298

Todas, 282

Toilers of the Sea, 482

Tolstoy, 87, 133, 159, 433, 482, 561, 604, 613

Transcendentalism, 69

Travis Mrs., 282, 283, 284, 290

Trinity College, 15, 19, 23, 62

Trivandrum, 1, 8, 9, 22, 94, 106, 107, 108, 110, 113, 184, 265, 289

type diagnosis, 353

 

U

Ulysses, 182, 244, 386

unitive wisdom, 94

Upanishads, 117, 169, 298, 329, 344, 404

untouchable, 113

USA, 303, 321

utilitarian, 105

 

V

Vaikom, 72, 88

Vaishnavism, 88

'Values', 39, 349, 356, 361

Vande Mataram, 25

Van Gogh, 394

Varkala, 107, 108, 109, 279, 359, 484, 485, 489, 490, 549, 661, 662, 665

Varnashrama, 72

Vatican, 3, 231, 232

Vectorial, psychological, 58

Vectorial space, 30, 83

Vedanta, 467

Vedantic, 64, 227

Vedantin, 115

Vedic orthodoxy, 71

Venezia Santa Lucia, 229, 258

Venice, 258

Vertical, 232, 304, 388, 396

Vicar of Wakefield, 28

Victoria Hostel, 64, 65, 68, 69, 77, 78, 79, 88

Vidyananda, Swami, 268

Vihara, 164

Vijayan, 141

viksepa sakti, 300

Vinca roseas, 53

Vishnevsky, Mme, 413, 414, 415, 416

Vishnu, 87

Vivaldi, 435

Vivekananda, 34, 35, 37, 42, 69, 238, 321, 470, 519, 605, 618, 622

Voltaire, 14, 175, 227, 366, 384, 437

 

W

Walter, 402

Washington, Booker T., 105

Wealth of Nations, 293

weaning process, 95, 121, 505

Wells, H.G., 16, 18, 189, 240

Whitman, Walt, 448

wholesale solutions, 24

William Mac Dougall, 210

womanhood, 482, 485, 487, 635, 694

Word of the Guru, 350, 363

Wordsworth, 235, 409

World Government, 349, 369

World War II, 24

 

X

 

Y

Yeats, W.B., 35

Yoga, 394, 451, 452, 461

Yogananda, Swami, 622

Yoga Conference, 464, 465

Yogi, 98, 101, 166

Young India, 72

 

Z

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Details

Written by Patrick Misson

Parent Category: Content

Published: 23 August 2012

Created: 23 August 2012

Last Updated: 29 June 2015

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311

CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

 

ATLANTIC CROSSING AND AFTER

Atlantic crossing in luxury liners is a feature of modernism which has an interest of its own. I was already looking forward to that experience after arrival in Geneva by air from Bombay. I spent some days in a hotel near the railway station in Geneva, visiting my friends, the Naidus, at an upper flat overlooking Lake Geneva, and most often dining with them too while they stayed at the house of Madame Morin, the lady who had been my hostess in Paris when I had been there for my studies twenty years before. Then I took a train from Geneva to Paris late at night from the Gare Cornavin, having had, I remember, to carry my baggage myself up a flight of stairs, forming one of those long queues that became a general feature everywhere in civilised Europe after the Second World War.

 

PARIS AGAIN

I just managed to add my leather suitcase to a pile of others over the heads of passengers when, without those repeated whistles and bells which in India only ensure that the train is still not leaving, the streamlined night express engine began to gently ply its giant flywheels. It soon gathered momentum, tearing through the lakeside vistas and passing many a bridge, culvert or tunnel, all of which both my drowsy state and the spirit of night kept me almost oblivious of, although bangs, groaning, roaring, creaking and bleating noises came from over the rails as the heavy wagons were pulled powerfully along by the steam giant from where electric power ended. I was jolted up, down or sideways as I leaned in fond unconscious repose over a fellow passenger next to me. Sleep often tends to make one forget conventional standards and leaves one wonderingly ashamed of oneself.

 

Arriving at the Gare de Lyon more than an hour at least after daybreak, and depositing my luggage at the baggage room, I went with two pieces only to find a hotel near the University, a locality whose acquaintance I had not renewed for nearly twenty years.

 

312

My intimacy with Paris and its unforgettable personality as a great cosmopolitan city was thus revived, and I found myself as before sipping tea sitting in a pavement cafe facing the Panthéon. I also spent some days taking familiar walks and visiting my friend Swami Siddheswarananda of the Ramakrishna Order, who lived at the other end of Paris near the Bois de Boulogne, before he moved to a suburb called Gretz to a palatial house with a marble staircase in it, where I met him one year later on my return to Paris from the United States.

 

The ship I took at Cherbourg and the details of my first and second visits to Paris about the year 1948 have got mixed up in my mind, and the names of the big ships SS Washington or SS America, life on which was alike, going or coming across the Atlantic, have also got confused in my memory, as not to be separately recollected in clear detail. Food rationing still marred the fair face of Europe when I started, and as I passed from Paris to the port many were the beautiful bridges or buildings on the way that had become ruins that one pointed out to another from the railway window, marking the devastation of the war that had just preceded my visit. The gale of war had passed but had left destruction behind, and the gloom had not yet turned into the freshness of a recovery which may be said to have happened only five or six years later.

 

ON THE ATLANTIC

I entered what was called the stateroom of my ship, but whether at Le Havre or Cherbourg I do not remember. The efficient travel-service men already had my heavy luggage there, collected from the Gare de Lyon on my instructions. I was thus fully 'taken care of' in a sense not as fully understood by similar agencies functioning in India, where much sloppiness and consequent worry is still present. Habits of efficiency and savoir-faire take as much time to cultivate as pure wisdom, and often the harder way has to be followed for years before good sense prevails.

 

As on all luxury liners crossing the Atlantic - whether the Queen Elizabeth of Britain, the Liberté of France or the bigger ships of America like the one which I was on at that time - the tables were usually overloaded with varieties of edibles from olives to cream crackers, with nightly snacks of hot dogs as specials. Gormandisers were at large then, having, as they said, a good time, flirting or necking in cosy corners.

 

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They often did more than justice to the various items on the table. I took care to walk up and down every part of the ship between decks, climbing steps or passing the bridge from fore to aft or vice versa many times before each meal, to keep me fit inside while I silently watched the interesting strangers whose acquaintance I made only little by little.

 

The Irish coast, where we called first, brought on some interesting missionaries with whom I talked about John Scotus Erigena who was supposed to have originated in Ireland, then included under Scotland, and called Scot by a sort of transference of epithets. Only on one of the six and a half days it took us to cross over to New York was the sea rough. A round of entertainments and activities planned by the officers on board kept everyone happy through cinema shows and improvised games on deck or in the big rooms. One passed many pretty strangers with a nodding acquaintance first which soon developed into various forms of intimacy, depending on age or sex. All seemed to be arranging itself wonderfully, and it was interesting to me to watch how Dame Nature was at work with perfect ease, finding a friend or mate for each as easily as with sparrows on telegraph wires, as seen anywhere.

 

We had, by way of education, a film that showed New York City life and, for a new visitor like me, the map of that city with its blocks on the Eastern and Western sides looked like mazes in which rats in experiments were expected to obey lights while walking in squares. Half of the life in New York consisted of such and other obedience tests where civilised man fitted intelligently into his artificial man-made context.

 

On the morning of the sixth day, land was sighted and people thronged to the deck to point out the place where the Statue of Liberty was to be seen; but soon even this sort of liberty was curtailed in the name of those inevitable queues in which you had to keep up with your labelled luggage while you only carried your smaller belongings. Coney Island came into evidence with its green look and innumerable cars that were already plying its broad streets. I had a natural distaste to elbow any fellow-passenger to keep my front place, and I rather backed out more often than pressing forward. As a result I arrived rather late before the group of intelligence officers seated at tables, who were to put me through a volley of questions covering the same points once covered in the various forms I had already filled.

 

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When I referred this matter to one of the police or FBI people, he rudely retorted 'That does not mean a thing to us', as if treating one department of the government as totally unconnected with another. In them I heard the voice of two governments.

 

THE OLD ELLIS ISLAND EPISODE

 

Ellis Island.

 

Ellis Island was a kind of purgatory where unwanted refugees or immigrants from the 'Old World' - often consisting of cranks, crooks or criminals who could not make good in their respective countries - were detained before entering the States, to be filtered or weeded out before they could manage to become, clandestinely or otherwise by more or less questionable methods, respected citizens of the United States. Every ship from Europe brought a load of living cargo of such a commodity and, although the days of adventure and colonialism were over, Ellis Island still remained the last remnant of a system that lingered on at the time I tried to enter the land of the almighty dollar, as it is sometimes called.

 

With my crumpled felt hat two seasons out of fashion by the broadness of its rim, and an overcoat whose big buttons were almost bursting in order to enclose my fat and short body - I must have looked, in the eyes of the clever intelligence department men, to be that very type of dark-skinned adventurer whom they seemed to know quite well. They first abruptly asked me in a good Yankee accent, by way of shocking me, whether I liked the States because of the money I could earn there or any better reasons. One of them went so far as to insinuate in a mocking tone that I wasn't going 'to get away with it' and another mentioned that I would be taken to the notorious Ellis Island to be kept undernourished and like a suspect for several days, sometimes weeks, before I could prove my bona fides and normality.

 

I was asked to sit down near the table of a special expert who knew the technique of eliciting answers to leading questions. There were half a dozen of them trying to study me all together, some of them senior officers, while others were just new initiates in the technique of finding out the types to be kept out. Why did I come to the United States? 'By invitation', I replied. This was not enough. I had to wait still. I sat watching. In the meantime another police officer, this time a lady psychiatrist, was questioning a migrant from Yugoslavia who seemed an innocent peasant who had come to make an easier living in the United States, like millions of others who had become absorbed since the days of the Mayflower which first carried Huguenots or Quakers.

 

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These, when once settled down and not suspected, became known by such respectable titles as the Sons or Daughters of the American Revolution. The Italians were not personae gratae, nor was the Jewish fortune-hunter in the beginning stage of this sifting and selecting process. When the Catholics dominated, other preferences displaced the former prejudices. The New Englanders were to be seen no more. Hoover and Roosevelt had their chances of tilting the scale in favour of one group or racial element or another. I could see that the lady officer adopted more gentle and intimate methods of questioning than the shock-treatment ways of elicitation adopted by the male officers. A certain intimate motherly interest substituted those crude shock methods of the men, and the private life of the poor peasant who was being x-rayed as it were, was bared as I sat watching still, soon to become, perhaps, the last man to be let out of the ship.

 

RESCUED

Meanwhile, there was another scene developing down on the quay where persons waiting to meet their relations had to stand behind a cordon. In my case, I was being met by a representative of the Carnegie Foundation who was the assistant secretary of the Church Peace Union, also acting for Dr. Henry A. Atkinson, the General Secretary, as his personal envoy.

 

As I was seen to be unduly delayed he began to ask questions of some of the younger police party who were acting as links between the questioners inside the ship and those who waited for the passengers to come out. It luckily dawned on one of these intelligent young policemen that this important New Yorker who was beginning to show signs of impatience at the delay in my being let out, was doing so with reference to myself. Soon I could see a signal he passed to the chief next to my table, while I tried to resign myself to my prospect of spending some days on Ellis Island without a murmur.

 

The complexion of the officers soon changed to one of lively interest and even respect for me, and I could take my hat and baggage and depart from the more than an hour ordeal of detention, almost in a hurry, as I was conducted out of the gangway onto American terra firma to breathe for the first time the air of its proclaimed liberty, which still had some snags and blemishes of the colonial period. I soon found myself seated in a car and driving through the midday shades of the skyscraper district of that city known as the hub of modern civilised life.

 

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A MONTH IN THE HEART OF NYC

 

New York in !948.

 

The Hotel Roosevelt was situated in the heart of New York City, not far from the famous Times Square and Broadway. I was soon established in this well-ordered and select residence on about the sixteenth storey, in one of those self-sufficient units with private bath attached.

 

One has to pass ominous-looking red signals in wall-to-wall carpeted passages from the lift; and one could not escape a sense of insecurity not unlike that of animals caught in artificial mazes. Often, from the road below came the sound of fire engines or the frightening shriek of some car that had to put on a sudden brake to save itself from some accident that just barely did not happen. The room too had other warning notices about not leaving razor blades about, lest the women who were to make the beds or clean the tubs should inadvertently cut their fingers. On the terrace in front of my room, as the skyscraper reached above sight, I noticed too a poor pigeon which was bereaved of its mate, round whose dead body the living bird kept circling all day.

 

Liberty seemed to be furthest away from any plain countryside of India here, where one had to behave oneself, both in the name of one's own safety as for respectability, almost every minute of the day. One dressed up or undressed, whether to dine or catch a bus; and if for any reason one had forgotten anything, one had to repeat the process of smiling to the bowing elevator boys and many similar formalities in trying to be free to do what one liked in New York City. I could order my breakfast through the telephone, and more often because of the actual difference between edibles or drinks and their names, I made the characteristic mistake of either ordering too few items or too many. A fully-liveried butler brought the breakfast in a rolling trolley wagon up the back-door elevator meant for the staff only, with iced water, napkin and all.

 

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As there were still several days before the World Conference of Religions for which I had come as a delegate, I spent the time between such meal items in taking a look at the city and visiting some of my disciples or friends who had been known to me before when I was a teacher in the International School at the lakeside of Geneva and who had to be traced where they lived in and around the city.

 

I was also engaged in preparing my speech for the coming conference in which I elaborated about the Guru Narayana Movement of South India which worked for the integration of all religions for peace under the slogan given by the Guru of 'One Caste or Race, One Religion and One God or Goal for all humanity treated as one'. This slogan itself was to be understood directly as a corollary of the non-dual Advaita teaching of the Guru. Such was the fully open message that I represented, as chance brought me to the World Conference for Peace to be held in the Town Hall of this important city late in the summer of 1948, if I remember rightly. The speech, which came at the end of the second day, was well received and the official purpose of the visit was thus got over quite easily.

 

ACTUAL MANHATTAN AND BROOKLYN AS A STATE OF MIND

Brooklyn is tauntingly referred to as a state of mind by matter-of-fact Manhattaners, and there is a rivalry between the two adjoining boroughs of New York. The Hudson River, the George Washington Bridge and the subways that go under the river are the main communications between these parts; and with Long Island and Newark, New Jersey, on the other side of the river, life in this part of the world has many interesting features of its own. It is round Macy's department store on 34th Street, that most of the shopping pulsates; and for night life Times Square is the most favoured. The Empire State Building and Rockfeller Center were other landmarks and, if all these are put together with Harlem where the coloured people live, one gets a rough idea of the place. Parkways and avenues with bus routes and subways criss-cross the thickly populated area where every crossing of the road is fraught with danger.

 

Sitting around in cafeterias was another normal feature both in downtown and uptown districts. From the International House for students from all over the world at the north end of the city, lying beyond Central Park and its classy surroundings, to the Coney Island Amusement Park, beyond downtown and in the borough of Brooklyn, the city offered a newcomer like me many attractions from window-gazing to watching television, which that year was just coming into evidence here and there.

 

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Munching selected roasted nuts from special shops that sold assorted packets of them for a dime, and learning to suck ice-cream cones without spilling them on one's coat front were other diversions that even respectable-looking New Yorkers seemed not to be ashamed of. Lake Success was then a favourite place for visitors, now superseded by the modern cubical buildings of the United Nations bordering the East River. The wonders of New York are too many to enumerate here.

 

On the day of the World Conference I walked past Fifth Avenue in my Indian dress with turban and sherwani at the special request of the Secretary, to be press photographed in the interests of the publicity for the Conference. I was greeted on the way by some ex-sailor who knew Hindustani and shouted from the pavement 'Jai Hind!', seemingly in all earnestness, to which I responded with all the seriousness I could retain in a situation that also had its humorous aspect. That was the only time I appeared in Indian dress in New York City, except for the Gandhi birthday held at the Community Church two years later, where all the Indian population had gathered, and where, except for Dr. Asirvatham, I happened to be the only man to be dressed in national costume. Many Indians glibly talk of national costume, but prefer to bring back to India superior Western-style dresses, even when returning to their own country. There is some irony here that requires to be explained. Lip service to one pattern of life and actual loyalty to another sits ugly on many an Indian student I have known. I have always tried to avoid such persons who served two standards, whether on board steamers or on land in Europe. I could even say that I was scared of having to converse with many of them.

 

After my speech at the World Conference of Religions, which went off well, and after the Conference, still staying on at the hotel in Manhattan, I started out in a different direction in New York, trying to contact old friends. I remember one of those outings into the Brooklyn area, which is worth recounting in detail.

 

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I SEE MYSELF AS I WAS TWENTY YEARS AGO

Many surprises were awaiting me in and round New York, where friends seemed to remember and speak about me almost every day in some cases, as I have been told. Some friendships strike deep roots in this way for no evident reason.

 

I had a touching episode of this kind when I visited a family I had known in Switzerland in 1928 whom I met again after twenty years. The father of the family had spoken to his wife and children about me, and they told me that not a day passed in which my name had not come up in conversation during those long years. Another farmer living far-off at the foot of the Dôle in the Jura, whom I visited after a similar interval, put me up in his farmhouse and when I was about to retire at night, and he had said good night, remembered to bring me a cup of hot water, saying that it was my habit to sip hot water before retiring to bed twenty years ago when we lived together at the International School at Gland. These are reminiscences that touch one deep down somewhere in the Self.

 

The genuineness of such continued regard often needed no fresh evidence other than that coming from children who were born in my absence, taking to me as affectionately as if they had known me all their lives. Such incidents have touched some deep seat of human kindness within me, and must belong to the context of the Absolute, where alone sparks of affection live independently of all physical considerations. Children respond to such sparks of the pure light of the heart best of all.

 

One of my outings from the hotel in Manhattan was towards the Brooklyn area. I had the address of two old pupils called the Rubensteins. It was in one of those favourite avenues called either Oak, Maple, Grand or Washington - so common in most cities in the States. This particular address had a door number which ran into four digits. I first located the street and, thinking that tracing the number would be a simple matter, began to walk from the lesser to the greater number; but the stupid houses would not count more than a few hundreds by the lapse of hours. Treating the matter as part of my evening walk, I still foolishly persisted, in an indifferent mood, to try to find the friends to whom I had fondly intended my visit to be a pleasant surprise.

 

As a last ray of hope however, when fully fatigued and forlorn, from where I walked on the avenue sidewalk I thought I discerned the name Rubenstein on the front of a nice garden and villa. On a closer look I saw that it was true that some Rubenstein lived there but not with the same initials.

 

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I mustered courage enough to try and speak to them, whoever they were, and rang the bell. The family was at supper and the door opened with an astonished interjection from a thin young lady who pronounced my name, 'Pitar Natty', in a subdued voice. Nedra and Elaine Rubenstein were cousins to these Rubensteins. They had married and had children who had seen me in a film taken in Switzerland twenty years before when the mother was a schoolgirl and the father an adolescent lover. Maya's waters had flown under the bridges of Time's years or decades.

 

When all had finished their dinner, they came to greet me as old Pitar Natty, and they insisted that I should see the film where I could see myself standing or talking as I did while the lakeside breezes could be watched by myself as they ruffled my long hair of those days of 1928. I could not believe my own eyes, as memory could not confirm all the details the silver film had taken care to record and preserve all through the years, while memory itself was subject to a different kind of decay or disintegration.

 

Meanwhile a telephone call had been put through to the actual Rubensteins whom I had meant to surprise before the comedy of errors, due to Maya, had intervened to complicate or simplify matters. Nedra came with her car, taking Elaine and me. She drove us to the nearest delicatessen where I was treated to a snack dinner of double-decker vegetable sandwiches which I thought it was ugly in company to bite into with a fully open mouth like a walrus eating a big fish. I managed well, and Nedra drove me to the nearest subway where there were many different lines with names too hard to remember. On the way, she used a slang word when another car went past saying, when I asked, that it was her ex-boy friend who had let her down in favour of a blonde. I was then let out at the station to return to my hotel.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

 

AFTER THE WORLD CONFERENCE OF RELIGIONS AT NEW YORK

My life in the posh hotel at the very centre of New York City for several weeks was to come to an end, the Conference of Religions for Peace having finished its sittings. The best intellectuals and men of good will, as well as of any fame or position, were called upon to participate in it. Most of them were personally present on the platform of one session or the other. Albert Einstein, who lived at the University of Princeton, sent a paper instead of being present. Sir S. Radhakrishnan of India was to have presided at the sessions in which I was to speak but was substituted by another eminent Indian professor who was then domiciled in New York. Each of the known universities of the United States had sent a representative, sometimes in a scientist, sometimes in a theologian.

 

Most of the Church denominations and other religions too and their dignitaries participated, as also well-known names in the world of internationalism. I cannot now recall all their names, but the published reports on all such details must be available. One of them, 'The World's Religions for Peace' included the speech that I had submitted in typescript before it was delivered. It was around the subject of the movement of the Guru Narayana, which had declared itself as open and dynamic, recognizing one race, one religion and one Goal or God for man, about which I had spoken.

 

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE USA

 

Vivekananda in America.

 

More than fifty years before me, Swami Vivekananda had delivered a similar message before the Parliament of Religions in Chicago. He spoke then of the attitude of tolerance and lack of exclusiveness in the religion that he represented. The world had become more used to such ideas by the time I could deliver my message. Religious, racial and ideological rivalries have still continued to tear men from men.

 

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It was good, however, to think that there should always be a group of good people who think in terms of peace on earth, human solidarity and goodwill. Lukewarm enthusiasm, however, has always been there and it must be clear that more positive determination through more radical understanding is needed if man is to live in peace with fellow man. A stronger and sterner dose of the absolutist attitude, scientifically understood with a more apodictic certitude, can alone make men free. The future education of the race has to be geared seriously to such an aim.

 

Checking out of the Hotel Roosevelt with all my bills duly taken care of through the telephone by the nice lady in the office of the Church Peace Union near Central Park, I next took lodging at another hotel uptown past Central Park not far from the Ramakrishna Centre in that area. My pocket had also been replenished by the Church Peace Union Office with a couple of hundred dollars which was almost all I possessed at that time. The summer days were not yet over and a riot of foliage was in the parks still, light green before autumnal days could turn it to more warm or mellowed shades from lighter tints. The change from the chromatic tints to achromatic shades induces into one's subconscious the essence of the seasons, which poets and artists have tried to depict in many ways. The feeling is the original for all such attempts which have to be pieced together to produce the total feeling they are meant to represent.

 

I used to sit on the seats of Central Park and then eat my supper before sunset while the days were long, in one of those diners where one paid more and got less. Teacups with string bags of tea dangling their labels on their sides did not look homely or inviting to me, used as I was to the proper pot with a cosy round it. The cup of tea is always an excuse for some relaxation, but when it is hastily handed to you across the diner counter or buffet opening while you sit on raised stools with others waiting to do so after you, you have to hurry up and drink it. Tea does not taste the same when thus hustled or muddled through, and teatime is not the consolation to the tired man that it generally is meant to be, where there is more sense of leisure. It is the Chinese, or better still the Japanese, who know how to give honour to a tea-pot - more than even the Englishman who is always talking about his 'cup of tea'.

 

While sitting in Central Park I heard different jargons spoken by new arrivals from Europe which did not differ much to my raw ears from the Donald Duck language that was meant to be a caricature but was too real to be so.

 

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Good American English had still a long way to go to become acceptable in respectable circles through an educative process that often takes place somehow or other through Reader's Digest articles that tell you 'how to increase your word power', or other haphazard ways. This however does not correct the duck-like twang in the accent by which one can tell an American unmistakably anywhere.

 

AN ADVENTURER AT LARGE AGAIN

I could not afford to live indefinitely at the new hotel where I had checked in after I had checked out of the Hotel Roosevelt in the heart of New York City. The kind lady who had arranged the second hotel for me had taken care that it was not as costly as the first one so that, while the dollars lasted in my pocket, I could endure longer in the States, having whatever adventures I was resourceful enough to carry out. I was thus at large again, as once previously when in Geneva in 1928. I felt as I did then, like a criminal or a fortune-hunter with the unsteady conscience of a Launcelot Gobbo hanging at the neck of my heart, dictating to me to budge or budge not in one direction or another.

 

I was still going to try my confusions or conclusions with my luck as I have ever been prepared to do throughout my life. What was I going to do when the bucks were all spent? This was as much a matter of indifference then as now, when I am penniless except for ten rupees in my purse which no one wants to take; travelling to Europe as I type these lines at Port Said on the 21st of May 1965 at fifteen minutes to noon in my cabin on the freighter MV Annenkerk, destined to reach Rotterdam. Money in other people's pockets must be as good for an absolutist as in one's own. The absolutist is always an errant adventurer, whether known as a knight in a romance, a wandering minstrel or a sannyasi of the Vedantic pattern. The beatniks and hobos belong by temperament at least to the same world-wide fraternity, whose members are kinds of stray birds or orphans of God.

 

How to make a living when broke again or at the end of my tether? Frontally faced with such a contingency, that is the proper attitude to cultivate always. I thought of Macy's department store and, with just the dollars enough to buy a new Hermes typewriter, signed the forms for a hire-purchase arrangement for payment.

 

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I wanted also to see how clever the girl who had to interview me about my solvency could be. She showed no signs of suspicion, as there was a regular network of spies employed by the firm who delivered the article in three days time only after they had made sure secretly about the soundness of the deal.

 

I thought that as my status was that of a writer I could at least write articles and make money to live that way, but ill-luck as much as good luck has its whims in playing with you, and before three days were over the full payment for the new typewriter was taken care of by a simple phone call on the part of a friend whose acquaintance I had just made within the next two days, as it happened, and the machine was duly delivered to me at Bloomfield, New Jersey, where I went from the hotel uptown. How it all transpired so easily is an episode interesting to tell by itself.

 

I SPEAK AT THE RAMAKRISHNA CENTRE

There are two Ramakrishna Centres, one of them distinguished as the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Centre, not so directly affiliated to the Indian headquarters at Belur Mutt as the former. I had called at the latter and found to my surprise that the old Swami in charge there recognised me, having known me as a boy in my teens at Bangalore, where he came to visit my father who was a direct follower of Swami Vivekananda in those early days. He received me very kindly and told me about the functioning of the Centre where good New York ladies studied Sanskrit besides attending Vedanta lessons.

 

The other centre, which was at the other side of the park, east or west, I do not remember, was not far off either. Swami Nikhilananda was a younger Swami who was in charge, and I attended one of the Sunday services there. The altar and pulpit resembled any other Protestant low church that rang the bells later than the high ones, usually before noon, so that New Yorkers could have their dinners soon after services each Sunday. The sonorous sentences from the pulpit came the same way as in other churches, as also the sermon and the benediction worded from Hindu scriptural sources instead of from the Bible. On the walls near the pulpit were hanging the pictures of the Holy Mother and of Ramakrishna, tallying again with the form of Christian worship prevailing in that part of the world.

 

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The dimes and quarters were collected after the services as in other Churches too, and the Swami in broad sleeves pronounced benediction with raised hands. The sepulchral touch of Christianity was copied unconsciously in every detail - to please the congregation perhaps. Invited to dine, I found meat served as freely as elsewhere and the mixed gatherings resembled those of a university rather than that of a monastery. Except for some Vivekananda literature there was nothing distinctly Hindu about the institution. The Swami was himself held in high esteem on a par with the clergy of other churches in the city and was also invited to the occasional interdenominational gatherings.

 

In effect thus the poignant irony of the situation was that, instead of bringing all religions together, here was a new church added to the already existing ones in New York City, with corresponding counterparts for each of the items. Even Christmas was observed as others did. This attitude revealed adaptability, it is true - but what was there specially Hindu or even Vedantic about it? That was the question that came to my mind.

 

I remember speaking the following week at an evening gathering at the special invitation of Swami Nikhilananda. The subject I had chosen was 'How to Read the Gita', and I remember how, as I went on developing the subject, which was all original ground which I was myself bringing under the plough for the first time. I began to fumble, becoming more and more conscious of the New York audience used to formal sermons all ready-made and well-ordered. I began to suspect that I was cutting a very poor figure as a speaker before them. Soon the thought took away whatever little confidence I could muster up in nicely finishing my speech. Instead, the loss of confidence progressed in negatively geometric progression, and as a result all could see me fumbling and casting about in an effort to find correctly sequential sentences. The abruptness with which I apologised for my speech made the situation worsen to its last limits and, after admitting to the audience that I could not go any further, I came to the undignified close of a subject that was otherwise so dear to me and one on which I later wrote a whole work. In short I fumbled and flopped and was a failure, especially on a pulpit where speeches with a classical finish usually came from Swami Nikhilananda and others.

 

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Strangely enough, this failure, for which I have never ceased to be fully ashamed, had its compensatory side, as I learnt later. The failure worked out to be the only stroke of a strange chance that brought me good luck when I was broke in my situation and wanted a miracle to happen, not only to pay for the typewriter that I had ordered but even to eke out a living in the States as I had planned to do. Returning was equally as difficult as staying on and there was nothing to choose between the alternatives.

 

A MIRACLE HAPPENS AGAIN

The miracle did happen again. There was in the congregation or audience a simple Norwegian sailor who had jumped ship and settled down in the States. He was a full-blooded man to whom mystical interests came normally and who was beginning, vaguely at first, to take some interest in spirituality or mysticism of some unconventional type. He was the owner of a machine shop and an expert inventor of tool grinders, known for his genius in several states in and round New York and just making good as a self-made engineer. Tall and well-built with all human instincts in normal function, he was also a natural mystic who had confidence in penetrating any problem that any other human being could. He had contempt for eggheads who pretended to know more than they actually did.

 

This rather shy and sensitive man was listening to my speech that day and watching me too, as he told me when we became the best of friends forever a month or two later. He admitted then that he felt a strange attraction for me creeping over his whole being, just when I began to cast about for words in vain and finally failed floundering. He had established a sympathetic kinship with me which became further signed, sealed and delivered, as it were, to him just at the time he watched me admit my failure to make a good speech and abruptly break off.

 

This was just the thing that worked in my favour with him so finally and fully, as he admitted that he decided straightaway that he had found the man he was looking for to teach him. That I was introduced by Swami Nikhilananda as a direct disciple of a Guru in India and that I could still be found failing in that characteristic way was for him too good to be true. After the lecture when all were dispersing, one Mr. Home of Lyndhurst, who was a friend of the sailor turned machine-shop owner, whispered to me that he had found someone in East Orange who would give me a cheaper room on the other side of the Hudson in East Orange, New Jersey.

 

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It turned out soon that it was none other than Harry Jakobsen, the same mystically-disposed machine-shop man. He was there himself to confirm the availability of the room. It was to be free and I could be his guest as long as I liked.

 

All was fixed and understood in a trice and the next day he came in his car to take me from my hotel round the corner uptown with luggage and all for a drive of about forty miles to his home. Luck has a way of turning the most difficult corner quickly, and what should have been the reverse soon happens by the pressure of the hand of luck, to be primed like a water pump in just that favourable way which, once started, gives water forever. This is what I have called the 'figure-of-eight principle' hiding behind chance events when it works anywhere. Rains come down after many such figure-of-eight efforts, as one can see if one is trained to watch rain clouds as they darken or clear many times before the downpour.

 

At dinner the next day I was seated with the Jakobsen family in a country villa in East Orange, a suburb of New York City, after driving through the Lincoln Tunnel and then past the skyways and the smoky dumping belt round the city to the green avenues dotted with well-planned and painted cottages with some garden or grass and shrubs bordering the shady avenues. The two daughters, Edvarda and Joyce, were then about thirteen and eleven respectively, and Johnny, the son, was about six. Mrs. Jakobsen was a slim dark-haired woman of Russian extraction, but the children were all blondes, although Joyce tended to be a little on the side of the brunet.

 

Next morning I was taken to the workshop of Jakobsen whom I began now to call Harry with intimacy. There the telephone call went through to Macy's Department Store hire-purchase section, telling them that Harry would send a cheque in payment for the typewriter for the amount due, all in a lump. I sat in Watsessing Park nearby while Harry was at work and translated some of the Malayalam verses of the Guru into English. Once or twice as I sat there on a bench I thought a cop came and watched me suspiciously, as I hardly knew at that time that parks were places where undesirable characters sometimes took refuge from the glaring watchful eyes of cops. I sat innocent of pickpockets, delinquents, sex-abnormals and other hobos that the police had to chase away from time to time. How many misfits of that category there must be in the States I know not even now, but I am sure there are plenty of such 'misèrables' now, as in the days of Victor Hugo in France.

 

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Taking a walk at night, soon after Harry came home, to buy some soft drinks round the corner under the maple trees in dim street-lights, I remember to this day this strange Harry asking me quietly and in so many words, 'Do you know that Narayana Guru has put me here to receive you when you came?' Harry has behaved ever since exactly as if these words were literally to be treated as true. I tend to treat it metaphorically by its laksnartha (indirect meaning), as Sankara would prefer; but there are more mystically-attuned temperaments to whom the difference between the literal and the indirect meanings are negligible. It was thus that I found a friend in need, who turned out to be one indeed.

 

LIFE IN EAST ORANGE, BLOOMFIELD AND MONTCLAIR, NEW JERSEY

 

 

East Orange, New Jersey.

 

Driving each evening forty, fifty or sixty miles into the countryside around the East Orange area became a habit with me and Harry. While he sat at the steering wheel and the children were in the back seat, I sat next to him talking philosophy which, instead of tending to make for more accidents, seemed to be favourable in avoiding them. Traffic jams and icecream parlours and fried-snack places went past, as also deer parks and swimming pools on those hot summer days; often detaining us when New Yorkers, like all others, drove round to 'cool off' as they say.

 

To be at the steering wheel was for most Americans to be at home and at rest, as others say of India. To go swimming or take morning drives to Eagle Rock, except on ominous thunder-shower days when lightning bolts sounded worst in that area, were other diversions less regular. The excuse for these long outings which worked subconsciously with me and Harry too - to whom I had mooted the idea of starting a Gurukula in the countryside quite early in my conversations with him - was to find a sufficiently interesting spot for that purpose. Prospecting for the proper place for the location of a Gurukula which was to conform to the requirements of a fraternity seeking dialectical wisdom for unitive understanding and universal brotherhood, went on side by side with the cooling-off programme of each day, while Harry drove through the countryside and I sat beside him. All aspects of Gurukula life were talked out threadbare, and all nooks of the countryside were explored. Real estate men and lawyers were soon consulted and the final steps were soon to be taken.

 

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Meanwhile I had moved into a room by myself in Washington Street, Bloomfield, near Harry's machine shop. Instead of eating Chop Suey or Chow Mein in the Chinese restaurant in the growing township of Bloomfield, which had its highways and trams leading from Newark to Montclair, the classy township situated in a hilly ground where well-to-do blacks and whites just managed to live as neighbours, I could now cook my own rice and lentil curry each day and have a bathroom to myself in the mornings, which was important for an Indian wishing to be holy in the Brahmanical sense of bathing in the Ganges.

 

The greatest of the advantages for me, however, consisted in the fact that I could from this location easily reach four libraries, two of them perhaps the biggest of their kind, one in New York City and the other in Newark; both of which were better stocked with books than most of the biggest libraries in cities in India. I frequented them not only daily, but both mornings and evenings, borrowing or poring over books and taking notes for hours. Harry came frequently to my little room upstairs; took care of the landlady's bills each week; and left me enough greenbacks to meet my expenses, leaving still a generous margin of pocket-money.

 

I asked him, by way of testing his will power, to come with his car to the room on the dot of seven in the morning to drive together to the Eagle Rock where we had some of the most interesting of the first lessons in the Gita, walking more often than sitting down. One or two others who were working with Harry joined these classes sometimes. The books borrowed from each of the libraries gave me plenty of work, which I did with full seriousness as when I was preparing for the doctorate in Paris. I read not only subjects of my immediate interest but wandered widely over subjects like Egyptology, Biblical research and Ancient History, and looked over the general literature books besides books on philosophy and psychology. The Upanishads too received my attention, as well as original source books like those of Aristotle and Plotinus and theologians or mystics whose lives I studied with their works in order to obtain the broadest of bases from which to do my own writing.

 

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The autumnal months were approaching, and forest colours changed slowly as the eye of day began to wink more and more by length. The routine of reading, cooking and eating, with the Gita lessons thrown into the bargain, went on. Occasionally Harry drove me to more far-off states like Virginia, where he had to go on his work, and I did a bit of sight-seeing, mostly covering the Eastern half of the States, leaving the wild West out of my province for the time being.

 

How a Gurukula was founded in the Schooley's Mountains near Hackettstown and how I tried a bit of teaching again in the Manumit School in Pennsylvania are stories yet to be told. I have to relate too how, before the next spring could assert itself properly, I found myself prematurely in the new Gurukula premises and how it was just short of a miracle that I survived in the cold there in the prefabricated cottage which was still to be insulated against the below-freezing blizzards and temperatures that still prevailed for weeks before warmer days came - thrilling episodes to be told in detail later.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

 

I MAKE UP FOR MY NEGLECTED EDUCATION

 

Watsessing Park, New Jersey.

 

The park where I spent my early days next to the toolshop of Harry was called Watsessing, and its aspect began to change from summer to winter conditions, which contrasted in the northern latitudes of America much more strikingly than in Europe whose winters I had already tested. America was a harsher place, especially in and around New York. The sticky summer months when children cooled off under city hosepipes turned on themselves, while the bare-bodied men drove all round to the bathing places in the countryside, seeking to escape the vapour of the season, changed, and instead of poison ivy and poison oak by which allergic persons were exposed to skin scars that sometimes lasted weeks, resisting all recommended cures, we were exposed to freezing winters when the blizzards left us frostbitten. Often they swept off the asphalt plate roof coverings nailed onto wood as usual all over the state. Often cars came to a standstill on snowbound highways, leaving passengers marooned for hours in out-of-the-way places.

 

In between these extremes of summer and winter, the mellow days of autumn had their intimately rich whispers from the inner sources of joy in all men. The seasons thus played different movements in a sonata, which perhaps some symphonies unconsciously reflect or subtly imitate in soft or sharp sounds.

 

Within the range of the four libraries which I frequented I made amends for my neglected education. I loved to get lost in a forest of strange aspects of knowledge as I rambled freely in adventure. The Lackawanna railroad could take me sometimes to New York City where I went into the big library on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue to pore over favourite out-of-the-way books, dreaming of distant parts of the world of bygone days. Watsessing and Lackawanna unmistakably had associations with the Red Indians who were the original masters of the land before the white man conveniently 'discovered' it. The discovery had its dark side in the lengthening shadow of the racial problem still troubling America.

 

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Left to myself for days on end in my little room in Washington Street, Bloomfield, New Jersey, where the landlady was Mrs. Adler, a widow with a pet dog living by herself downstairs and having lodgers upstairs, of whom I was one in the smallest of rooms behind, where, closeted close, I spent all my waking hours with open books.

 

All these details come back to my memory as I type these words in a ship's cabin at summer's end 1965, seventeen years later. This itself is bound to become like a legend a minute from now and help to fill the history perhaps of ten thousand years to come. It is thus too with all other items in life making for the totality that is the flux of Maya as universal becoming traced on the background of Time within each man's heart. When all these elements are well mixed and made into a sort of confection where joy and pain blend into one, we have a strange wine which could be called life in general. The Red Indian names of the railroad and park with mellow autumnal feelings gave to the total situation a flavour or savour of mystic life-content eluding ineffably all powers of language to describe. Inwardness of living and loneliness have their rewards thus - in spite of such charms being sometimes questioned by marooned men in far-off islands who had too much of solitude, like Alexander Selkirk, the original Robinson Crusoe, depicted in a poem of my schooldays.

 

LACKAWANNA RAILROAD TAKES ME TO NEW YORK WITHIN HOURS

One reaches Hoboken and takes the train through the Hudson tubes to New York, and thousands go the whole distance of thirty or forty miles each day by car or train, both by sky-ways and underground, like routine clockwork, and treat it as normal. The single-class compartments of clean trains were luxuriously upholstered and tickets were put on the backs of the seats themselves for verification without the old-fashioned way of asking for them each time. No words were wasted and outward efficiency, at least, had its last word and public manners and polite service were automatically guaranteed here.

 

If one purposely looked for racial discrimination one could find it in the most unexpected places. The conductors or the cops and even hairdressers or the dentist's nurse, not to speak of some select restaurants, made such discrimination so unobtrusive that it could hardly be detected. They had a technique of giving a 'brush off' to unwanted people.

 

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As it is as bad to show discrimination as to find it when it is sufficiently hidden from public view, I do not wish here to take space and spoil the strange game of hide-and-seek that goes on even in and around Washington D.C. or New York in the name of the shade or tint of your skin. It is a case where something only skin deep could seemingly penetrate as deep as to affect the heart, effectively dividing man - at least in superficial social life. More intelligence is needed on the part of men who so discriminate, and that is the shortest answer I can think of. A silly ailment must find a silly remedy like being obliged to do something foolish in public.

 

My visits to New York were quite frequent. Surprise meetings with friends almost gone out of my life forever had an element like the pleasure that children have when they play hide-and-seek and in innocence can never get over the sheer joy involved. The alternation of the perceptual and the conceptual always reveals the implicit wonder of the underlying principle of the Absolute. As a serious philosopher past seventy now, I still have my full sympathy for the repeated bursts of laughter children are capable of at the age where mere taking notice gives place to more intelligent observation of events around them. I surprised some of my old friends or pupils of Switzerland in exactly such a spirit at the age of fifty-two.

 

TWO ENJOYABLE EVENINGS AT NEW YORK AND AT NEWARK

 

Rockfeller Center in the 40's.

 

Schaffers' near Rockefeller Center, which was the hub of some of the fashionable élite of the city of New York, was the common rendez-vous for diners in the evenings. I happened to be invited there by Miss Truda Well who had been a colleague with me while I was on the staff of the Fellowship School in Switzerland nearly twenty years before. She had in the meantime risen in her office to be then in charge of Child Education under the New York City authorities. Greedy New York gormandisers had already occupied all the available tables before we arrived at the place.

 

One had to wait in a queue for one's turn, somewhat like forming a breadline, which often enters indigently, as it were, by the back door into the heart of the world of opulence. To me any place where obscene language is heard in the mornings is a slum; and having to wait one's turn for food when hungry, or for the bathroom to give the green signal to impatiently waiting people - whether in ship, train or posh hotel, always implies a form of poverty. One elbows through a crowd of fellow humans to be first served.

 

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What human condition could be more damaging to dignified human behaviour than this pushing out another brother to be first to get something? Yet opulent civilization dares to mock poor people in so-called 'backward' countries like India who never eat a morsel of food without offering or sharing it with others. As India gets civilised, even the breadlines come into vogue.

 

Opulence hides a subtle form of poverty which enters and sits in the middle of the civilised or rich situation - otherwise full of glamour - and stares mockingly like the god Dionysius of Greek legend. Rich-looking places often hide slum life, proving the truth of the saying, 'Painted tombs do worms enfold', as also 'All that glitters is not gold.'

 

We had our turn at last, and after dinner my friend who stood me the treat suggested that we go to a short film show nearby to enjoy Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck cartoons with newsreels and some select cultural items thrown in. We sat enjoying together in the uniform quarter-dollar seats in a permanent theatre. I must mention also that my friend, who wore high-heel shoes in my honour that day, had a small mishap as she tripped and fell on the Fifth Avenue pavement. I had to play the gallant man to help her to stand up again - which had its touch of humour, as always with a bitter taste of sea brine. According to Bergson all humour has a horizontal value and spells bitterness against someone. I could not laugh outright therefore on this occasion without being cruel. There was also the absurdity of contrasts, as the lady happened to be well-built and too heavy besides for me to prove my gallantry with.

 

The second interesting hide-and-seek episode took place as I walked one evening down Broad Street in Newark on the other side of the Hudson River from New York. In size and appearance this neighbouring city, although it was the business capital of a lesser adjoining state, was no less opulent nor less elegantly streamlined than New York itself. There was a delicatessen on the other side of Broad Street, which corresponded to the number of the address of an old pupil of mine, Misha Chimacoff, and I made bold to enter to ask if Chimacoff had anything to do with this restaurant serving delicacies like fruit ice creams, as its name indicated.

 

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As I stood within the room of the restaurant and asked a waiter, the proprietor overheard me from inside a partition and came out to greet me, calling me Pitar Natty. I had never before seen the man and was rather surprised at his familiarity. He was Mr. Chimacoff, the owner of the delicatessen and father of Chimmie, as we called the son.

 

The surprise heightened when he said that he had had heard all about me from Mrs. Chimacoff, the mother, who had been in Switzerland when I too had been there twenty years before. He assured me that they had all often talked about me through the two decades.

 

I thus lived continuously in the minds of friends dispersed and distributed in time and space. The same kind of evidence has come to me more than once, and I am inclined to believe that what they said, even when every concession has been made in the name of conventional praise or exaggeration, had a considerable residue of truth. Some children born in my absence and passing their teens when I met them in Switzerland itself after a similar interval gave me unmistakable confirmation in this matter. The affection of an absolutist might have nothing to give by way of actual reciprocation but all the same is very real both for the giver and the receiver of such affection or regard.

 

Soon a telephone call went to the home of Mr. Chimacoff while I was treated to a wine glass full of the best icecream of the house as a special favour of the proprietor, and the return call came by which I was invited to dine with the family on the top floor of a building bordering and overlooking a park where President Truman happened to be haranguing his constituency for his election to the presidency. Harry Jakobsen and Mrs. Jakobsen, who was of Russian extraction like the Chimacoffs, were contacted by phone and came after the dinner to join the coffee party that followed, with the son Chimacoff himself who had returned from a long trip in a car from the Pacific Coast to the Atlantic. He was a grown-up man now, earning a living. There was a radiant fellowship prevailing all through the evening which could not be laid at any door other than that of the absolutist element implicit in the situation as a whole. The Absolute is a cementing factor as also a leaven that leavens the whole lump.

 

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GITA LESSONS ON WINTER MORNINGS

My matchbox-like room at the back of the Washington Street house in Bloomfield where I sat pouring over books, wedded to the same chair and table, continued to be home through the winter months when storm windows had to be put on by me to help my landlady to keep the rooms protected from penetrating currents of cruel air, often several degrees below zero centigrade, as was usual in winter in the Eastern states. The neon-lit streets with their coloured reflections on the snow had a different glamour in winter.

 

I went my rounds as usual between the libraries in the four towns or cities. I bought myself a pair of galoshes and warmer underwear to withstand the cold but did not omit my early-morning baths, about which my landlady talked grudgingly to her friends, as I could hear from my room. A daily bath was considered too much where once a week a whole tub-full was wasted instead of the one inch in the tub when I took mine each day. What is respectable in one country becomes an item of disrepute in another.

 

Winter months thus went past with the eye of day becoming more and more closed. Harry would come with split-second correctness, even on dark winter mornings, at the dot of six to take me for a ride to the same Eagle Rock promontory which was now seen with frozen or sleety roads leading up to it and icicles forming on the eaves of the top pavilion. Harry had responded with full willpower to my suggestion for early morning lessons on the Gita. The eye of day slowly opened again as the spring equinox started the procession of the seasons in the reverse sense. The newspapers were expecting that day on which groundhogs would bore through their holes and come out to see if there was to be good weather. If they turned tail and returned to the hole, bad weather was supposed to continue for a month or at least a fortnight more.

 

A PREFABRICATED GURUKULA COMES INTO BEING

 

 

Long Valley, Schooley's Mountains.

 

While the snowbound roads and fields were still around in a delayed sunny spring that the groundhog refused to usher into being by turning tail in the reverse direction from what presaged good weather, Harry ordered a company which specialized in prefabricated houses to put up a house with five rooms and a cellar on the ground which he had meanwhile purchased in Long Valley, New Jersey, on the top of Schooley's Mountains. This was the name of a promontory lying between the nice little township of Long Valley and the more important Hackettstown in New Jersey, about three hours by the Greyhound bus service that connected it with their own bus stands located near Macy's at 34th Street and at Madison Square Garden at 50th Street in New York City.

 

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As one climbed the steep hill by the winding road and turned right on a dirt road from State Highway 24, one arrived at a rectangular plot of ground eleven and a half acres in extent. Nearly half the plot of land was covered with a thick forest of hickory, ash, beach and other lovely trees, shrubs and wild flowers; and through the thickets two small streams flowed along their sandy bottoms like the laughing waters of the country of Hiawatha. Legend holds that it was one of the favourite places of the Red Indians who used the water for healing purposes. Deer were supposed to roam about the area, although I never saw one except domesticated ones within a fence near to the place. A half-frozen stream in a forest where wild animals of America roamed and Red Indians once lived has an attraction all its own.

 

The thaw that had set in in the early spring of 1949 tempted me to move from my Bloomfield room to the new prefabricated house. While the snow still lay thick on the ground the house had actually been built through an order given by telephone to the fabricators who did it in two or three days with bulldozers and ready-made units of building materials transported to the spot by that kind of co-ordinated effort in which America excels. The first coat of paint was already put on and, except for the insulation of the floor and inner walls against cold, all was finished, as if by Aladdin's magic genie, in a trice. Even the key of the finished Gurukula house was to be found at the door, hidden away from view.

 

Before I decided to move into the new place I was warned by several well-wishing weather experts that winter in New Jersey had its whims and that winter conditions might continue for another month. My own instinct for pioneering and starting a new Gurukula was too strong to heed these warnings and I gathered together my belongings into Harry's car and set out to settle there in the mountains.

 

East and West have two different histories of thought, and to bridge the chasm that separated the Guru from modern Western thought, which was so deep and wide, one had to begin at the very beginning with fundamental notions, and find the language too that could transmit the flow of human understanding from one side of the situation to the other. Such was the nature of my life-work.

 

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At the new place I wanted to go to my task with all my force and thus found myself driving along the sleety road leading from Netcong to Long Valley and on the lakeside drive to Schooley's Mountains, with Harry at the steering wheel and the car loaded with paints and brushes to put the rooms in at least temporarily fit - though not in insulated - condition to make life safe enough for the bold adventure that I had wilfully initiated.

 

We arrived at the place about nightfall and with a benzine stove I began to cook my supper in one of the half-finished corner rooms where I tried to make myself comfortable. Harry, still having his workshop at Bloomfield and his home at East Orange, had to leave me to settle down by myself as best as I could.

 

ALONE IN THE NEW GURUKULA

There was a farm opposite this Gurukula, as it was soon after named by Harry himself who meant it to be a wisdom centre along the lines I had spoken about to him four months previously. This name was also found in Funk and Wagnall's Dictionary. It was not a new word in the language of the country and even if one day the Gurukula might not be exactly what it was meant to be, the name could continue for a house or a home. 'Whatever act one does for one's own sake must spell at once the benefit for another'. This was the old formula of Guru Narayana with which I reasoned here.

 

Harry was a man with wife and children but this should not be an impediment to the wisdom of the Absolute thriving in any chosen locality. He himself could be the representative of the Guru by belonging to the Guru parampara (hierarchy); and his children need not have to go out of the Gurukula just because they happened to be his children. One had not to prove the public character of the Gurukula by going out of the way wilfully to bring strangers' children only into the place dedicated to the Absolute. Both these extremes were not absolute in its strict neutrality. Harry had to live in the Gurukula with his children without contradicting the principles of the Gurukula in any way. Such was the new formula that I was seeking.

 

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As I was beginning to say, on the other side of the road, on a farm of twenty-odd acres, a gentleman farmer of America lived. Besides the Toyes, for such was the name by which the family was known, living on the Toye Acres, as the homestead was called, with the two children born to them, there were four other girls who were called 'State Children' because they were children under the charge of the State who had had to be separated from their parents for legal complications in the conjugal life of one or the other. These came to visit the Gurukula now and then and were the only inmates in the beginning who could even indirectly be considered so.

 

After Harry had returned to his work the same evening, and as night fell, a slow breeze developed. As the ventilators in the cellar below were not closed and the floor not without crevices between the planks, there was no way of keeping warm the very first night of my arrival, but I managed to protect myself with paper spread on the floor and round me to make an enclosure against the cold currents of air from below and from the sides. Some sunny days, however, soon intervened and I continued to manage to live there somehow. On certain days when there were grey skies and snowfall, I shut myself up in the room and cooked and ate all alone while the winter birds sang repeated homesick phrases around. In the continued loneliness that I enjoyed there in those post-winter days, with red sunrises and sunsets seen through the beautiful forest and the trees that had shed their leaves and over the white snow, a rare joy was felt within me. The voices of birds in the mornings while I was sitting with my coffee percolator on the stove seemed to repeat some phrase again and again to me which sounded as if they asked, 'Peet, peet, where is your coffee?' The eidetic tendency in the mind can put on to any sound any meaning to which it is emotionally predisposed. The emptiness of a lonely mind favours such superimposition of meanings.

 

I PAY THE PRICE FOR PIONEERING ZEAL

I tried to live in the corner room of the half-finished Gurukula with full innocence of how New Jersey weather could be deceptive. The semblance of summer that came was only a sort of Indian summer, as they called it, which passed into winter conditions again. The coal-fire stove in the room had a chimney whose height was less than that of the top of the gable of the building, and whenever a gust of wind came from a certain direction the obstruction of the A gable made some smoke come down the chimney into the room. Because of lack of draught the fire, once lit, could not be sustained by my best efforts.

 

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It even happened that on a snow-bound morning I had to climb to the roof by a sort of questionable ladder in the cold to try to fix it by turning the outlet of the chimney away from the gusts of wind that entered therein, but I could not stop the smoke from coming into the room so as to put the fire out again and again.

 

It was one specially cold morning that I woke from my sleep quite early to make sure that the fire did not go out completely, and found that the temperature was well below freezing, touching twenty below zero Fahrenheit. The lemon and the onions in the room had frozen and I had to cut ice instead of vegetables with sap in them. The lobes of my ears were frozen to brittleness and my hands were beginning to be benumbed. Repeated attempts to start the fire had failed and I had climbed to the top of the roof, facing the danger of falling from its steep sides. The fire was going out and the winds came through the crevices in faster repeated gusts. One could freeze to death in really cold climates, I had heard. I therefore made my last efforts to survive.

 

The neighbours even thought, as they told me later, that the 'strange Indian' who was seen carrying buckets of water each day to his room from their well and who was seen outside the house only when he went to buy his weekly provisions at Skinner's General Store, about one and a half miles off, would be found dead one morning within the freezing room. The reader can guess even now that this did not happen, as I say that I am past seventy now and am typing these reminiscences in the south of France at the end of July 1965, not far from the antique little town of Vaison-les-Remains where I am engaged in starting another Gurukula at present. This kind of pioneering has proved a fixed idea with me and I have always been trying to do something nearly impossible as a practical corollary of my absolutism.

 

On the morning in question, finding my life in danger, at least as I believed then, I was trying to keep alive, as close as possible to the last spark of fire left in the room at the bottom of the coals in the oven. That too was about to go out to freeze me finally. I was not going to leave the post where I thought my duty lay and finally thought I would climb on the stove to stand there to keep at least my feet warm. It was at this point that I heard Harry's car outside. He had just brought the cement sheets to insulate just one room and thus proved my saviour. By noon all was right and I cooked my lunch again in a room that could retain its heat.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

 

SECOND VISITS TO EUROPE AND AMERICA BEFORE RETURNING TO INDIA

How I was miraculously saved by Harry while expecting the fire to go out and with it my own life as I stood on a stove that was being put out by gusts of cruel wind many degrees below freezing was the tragic scene at which the last chapter of my life-story ended. Better days followed soon and full summer set in, making the new Gurukula a kind of paradise except for the Poison Ivy and Oak that one inadvertently touched, giving blisters to the allergically-predisposed, of whom mine was not an extreme call.

 

Waving flowers on the wayside of New Jersey woods at the beginning of summer were a sight to see. Ever since I had landed in New York in the summer of 1948 I had had the intention of touring the States, giving lectures at academic centres and peace foundations. I had contacted several lecture bureaus and agencies, but learnt that such agencies filled up their programmes almost a year in advance and that most lecture programmes from coast to coast were already made up. In spite of my belated efforts a few interesting lecture appointments came my way, of which the one at Columbia University in New York City is what I vividly remember. I spoke also at night at the big training college in Poughkeepsie where I had a very interested audience of educated men and women. Miscellaneous similar engagements came to me from the High School near Long Valley in New Jersey as also from the Lion's Club in Dover about thirty miles away from where I lived. I carried water, cooked and ate all by myself through the weeks that matured spring into more summer-like days, and one year was thus about to be completed of my first visit to the USA.

 

The Church Peace Union, of which I was the guest, promptly paid a cheque for nearly a thousand dollars for the one speech I had delivered and for my collaboration with their efforts by sitting on some committees for Peace and Understanding which the rich endowments made by Carnegie had made possible.

 

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I cashed this cheque at the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York City in one of the biggest buildings of the banking area there, but not before the man at the counter had scanned me, as a coloured man with a cheque for an amount large enough to raise his suspicions. He hid it, however, under the politest of manners, but took care to contact the Church Peace Union office. Finally, with my pockets full of dollars, I went to Cook's office and soon booked my passage to Paris by an interesting American boat called the SS Marine Flasher. It was one of those popular Atlantic one-class ships that easily cut across the billows and groundswells without any pitching or rolling like other more drunken types of bigger ships. I soon found myself in a miscellaneously jocund company of farmers, artists and students who were all put together on berths arranged tier on tier near the hold of the ship. I remember an old farmer, settled in the States for many years, returning to his old country after a long lapse of Americanisation. He often broke out into a rather disreputable ditty about a cock-eyed wife while others tried to compose themselves to sleep. A young painter would shout him down from a top berth, only to find that he started his ditty again.

 

There were several Indian students too, returning to India after their studies, who proved themselves gay, if not gayer, than their paleface fellow-passengers in chumming up in pairs with their counterparts of the opposite sex. As I walked on the decks above, I found pairs of such couples everywhere and, before I had a chance to make any selection, all possible matchings had been already accomplished. As usual, I found myself left out of the game and kept consoling myself wandering from deck to deck in daily rounds before and after each meal.

 

I did, however, make enough interesting contacts even thus, including that of a young lady in distress, as we landed in Antwerp from New York after about seven days. She was travelling alone and had to be helped to go to a suburban station in Antwerp from where the next train to Paris had to be boarded. After making only one mistake, arriving there in the evening we found many of our fellow passengers  already waiting there to take the same train late at night. I chivalrously stood them all a tea, oblivious to the fact that in Belgian railway stations they made the additions of the bill mount up in squares of what I mentally expected. I paid the fabulous amount, half in protest, but glad to afford it, seeing that my pockets were full with the amount I had recently received from the USA.

 

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The rich dim-lit city of Brussels rumbled past as we sat in the compartment with two well-dressed businessmen who did not omit to take some interest in the stray, rich-looking young American lady to whom I was only pretending to lend my paternal protection.

 

L'AMOUR DE PARIS POUR TOUJOURS

The refrain of a favourite hit song among Parisians just before that time which spoke of 'L'amour de Paris pour toujours' (a love of Paris forever) was a chronically mental automatism with me then as I found myself in a small hotel in the Latin Quarter of that city whose charms many men have felt and recorded before me. The rich young lady who had travelled with me took chic rooms on the other side of the river where dinners cost ten times what they did in hotels run by Greeks and Italians round about the Place St. Michel, mostly meant for the student population to patronise. I dined at one hotel after another to study the specialities of each, which usually mounted up to 150 francs, more than ten times the price when I myself was a student there twenty years before.

 

Now when I write these lines in September of 1965 from Harrogate, England, the prices have moved one more decimal point to the right, making for a logarithmic or geometric spiral progression in prices. Post-war conditions in Paris had eased a little in other respects, however, during the year that I spent in the States.

 

Again, by the hospitality and uniform kindness of Madame Morin, I had the whole of her flat of four rooms in the 14th arrondissement all to myself. The lady herself was employed in Geneva and visited Paris only once a week or fortnight. As of old, once again I began to frequent the corridors of the University, attending the lectures of Professor Lacombe who had by then succeeded to the seat occupied by the famous orientalist Sylvain Lévy. I renewed several friendships that were beginning to be forgotten over long intervening years of neglect and even organised weekly after-dinner gatherings of friends who came to discuss with me subjects of common interest, mostly related to Indian thought.

 

Aspects of Vedanta and the Bhagavad Gita came under scrutiny, and I visited the Ramakrishna Centre at Gretz, one hundred kilometres from Paris, where my old friend and college-mate of Madras days lived and taught in a new ashram.

 

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Some subtle clash of rival loyalties as between one spiritual teacher and another had intervened to spoil our long friendship and I had to learn the lesson alluded to in the Bible about the sheep that belonged to one fold being kept from others of a different fold - although there could be, as Jesus said, sheep belonging to him in other flocks. This lesson implied the same riddle, which is dialectical in essence, of Jesus saying, 'Those who are not with me are against me and those who are not against me are with me'. One had to use a special tact not to set one group against another. Even Vedic Gods have been accused in some of the Upanishads of being greedy and of stealing the cows (meaning beneficial believers) of other Gods. Rivalry of this kind however is limited and confined to relativistic outlooks in spirituality and does not go with absolutism.

 

MY ACCOUNT WITH A BOOKSELLER IN PARIS

There is an interesting little episode which I must not omit to relate because of the valuable lesson it taught me in economics as it applied to me personally. Lest I should be repeating myself here let me make this aspect of the story as short as possible. When I took my doctorate in Paris in 1933, I had entrusted the extra copies of my reprinted thesis to a bookseller opposite the University buildings to be sold on account with me. I held a receipt for the balance still owing me after the first advance instalment paid in 1933. Now, after a lapse of over a decade and a half, within which a Second World War had interfered with men as well as their affairs very drastically, there was a ten-fold devaluation of the token currency coin that signified actual value. I produced my receipt at the counter and found that all the copies had been sold out. The proprietor quickly put down some currency notes in full settlement, which was ten times less than what I expected according to the prevailing coin values, and which could only buy me a dinner.

 

The notable lesson that this transaction flagrantly taught me was just this: the five years of work, the correct production or the successful sale of a product, need not necessarily mean any significant economic value if larger factors in the world situation do not co-operate to create value. The usual mechanistic theories in economics thus stood defeated in my experience, signally in this personal case, at no stage of which was there any flaw in the transaction as such.

 

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THE CHARM OF SOLITUDE IN A BUSY CITY

Solitude may not hold any charm to a man marooned in an out-of-the-way place, but from personal experience during this period, I can vouch for its joy within oneself when one is lonely in a busy city. The months I spent in late summer and early autumn in 1949 in my flat in Paris proved to me its possibilities beyond all doubt.

 

I spent most of the hours of the day without speaking to anybody. I cooked, ate, studied or slept and often went for walks in the nearby Parc de Montsouris. Silent solitude lasted for weeks at a time. Silence induced an inner richness and loneliness within me which seemed to have a mellow glow of emotional plenitude and was fully self-sufficient and enjoyable for oneself and in itself. One can enjoy life in and through itself, and horizontal relations and activities are often vain dissipations that dry up all sources of joy within.

 

Most people, especially in the West, seem to have lost this power and depend on stimulants and palliatives with sleeping drugs in a life of overcrowded dissipation, trying desperately to be, without just being happy and at peace with oneself in this rich inner loneliness. I often sardonically smile within myself at this paradoxical situation in which I was lonely within the busy life that I saw around me. One should not try to be happy but be happy. Children and animals respond characteristically to a man who wanders among them carrying this kind of loneliness. It is a rich endowment in itself.

 

I DECIDE TO CROSS THE ATLANTIC ONCE AGAIN

I was then engaged in writing the book called 'The Word of the Guru' but had indulged in composing some poems in English, adopting a form of free verse so that the tension of writing a regular work could be alternately relieved. I sent one such poem to the Evening Standard, London, on how the illegitimate child born to a famous film star, then a hit in the news-world, was quite legitimate in the pure innocent eyes of Nature. This was to show that there were two possible moral standards - one of which Nature approved and the other that society banned. The latter was horizontal, though perhaps fully necessary in societies that were closed, static and tribalistically minded. At the present day such a duality or paradox in life is seen every day to become more and more aggravated in the West.

 

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I decided to cross the Atlantic again before full winter winds began and booked my passage by one of the bigger luxury liners sailing from Le Havre or Cherbourg. The send-off dinner I gave to all the friends I had contacted in my stay in Paris included many contacts which have been of life-long interest to me and, although some have dropped off, I retain contact still with many of them. My grateful remembrances to each of them would be impossible to do justice to in this running narrative, which should not swell beyond proportion. Let them each know from their sides my thankfulness unstinted and forever.

 

I MEET GARRY DAVIS IN MID-ATLANTIC

 

Garry Davis declares World Government in Paris.

 

The name of Garry Davis had at that time become a household word. He leapt into fame by the single dramatic act of renouncing his American citizenship and pitching his small tent on international ground near the United Nations Headquarters in Paris, calling himself a World Citizen. The story of his later adventures for over a decade has been interestingly related by him in a book called 'The World is My Country', which reveals also how my meeting with this strange and intrepid spirit took place characteristically in the Atlantic when we were both on the open sea, free from national frontiers, sailing in the same ship, the SS America, going to New York. Just before the forty-thousand-tonner raised anchor, strange cries were heard from the docks from a group of Garry Davis fans which had followed him to the French coastal town. From my cabin I could hear clearly that they cried 'Davis, Davis!' and were agitated about finding him, trying to enter the ship at the last moment.

 

At the remote aft of the ship I shared the upper berth in a cabin with a fellow-traveller who happened to be a French anthropologist returning to Mexico. When the slogan-shouting had subsided somewhat, I was still looking at the strange book left on the lower berth of my cabin by my fellow passenger who had gone out to see about bringing in his other belongings. I had greedily picked up the book he had left, without his permission, because it seemed to beckon to me, saying, 'Here I am, just what you want.' It was a history of religions lately published by Professor M. Eliade of the University of Bucharest. I excused myself to the owner later and found chapters in it of absorbing interest which influenced my way of thinking about the growth and maturity of religions by what Eliade called 'dialectical revaluation'.

 

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Bergson's 'Two Sources of Morality and Religion' had already meant a lot to me, and now this book was a further elaboration of the basic principles of comparative religion and allied problems. I refer to this to show how, even in a ship, you can be guided and educated in your thoughts by a strange chance that can be explained only as belonging to the Tao.

 

On hearing the shouts subside and the anchor ready to be raised, I strolled out of my cabin to look around and breathe some fresh air. There was a red-haired man of under thirty at whom many were pointing their fingers, sitting and typing in the smoking room. All seemed to keep aloof from him as if from a strange animal. They only whispered sotto voce 'Garry Davis.' The man himself looked confused, lonely and tired to his wit's end. He looked furtively around now and then like a frightened rabbit. With my knowledge of his chapter in Paris for World Citizenship, which I knew of in detail through friends who worked for the movement and who were also known to me, I got a transparent view of his mental state.

 

World unity was a subject dear to me and I had my full sympathies for this daring man who stood facing all the relativistic internationalists of the world and finding it too much, just as I thought at the time on watching him from a distance. I decided to accost him, which I did. I had my own answer for the problem before which he seemed to recoil just then. The dialectical or bilateral approach, rather than a mechanistically-conceived unilateral one, would cut the knot, I thought. I felt a maximum sympathy for Garry Davis and, although it was not usual with me to go out of my way to preach to anyone who did not seek my advice directly, I decided to make an exception in this case.

 

I went near him and spoke to him. At first he seemed surprised and seemed to disadopt me, but soon our relations became one of mutual willingness to listen. Soon interest was evinced in what I said. He seemed eager to know more of the new approach to the problem. A friendship was soon established which has now lasted more than fifteen years. It has grown since to be of an absolutist bipolar understanding likely to last a lifetime.

 

At the harbour in New York I left Garry in the hands of the police who took time to decide to let him go home with his father, mother and sister who had boarded the ship with news cameramen who wanted to include me in their story soon to be splashed all over.

 

348

I escaped publicity as premature at this stage for me and got lost among the thousands of others who were going down the gangway. Sure enough, Harry, the big man, was there to relieve me of my heavy baggage and he soon carried even my big trunk to his car without letting any porter touch it. We were shortly driving to East Orange, New Jersey, where I stayed at his house again for a couple of days before he could take me to Schooley's Mountain Gurukula at Long Valley. His first wife had died while I was in Paris, and he was also preparing to move into the Gurukula where I was to go in advance. The car was loaded with my belongings and a new set of the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica as well. This set of books had been a Christmas present from his wife who had died, and he was still paying the instalments for the gift. It was thus in effect a gift made to himself for immediate use by me - most needed at just that very moment. Another Tao coincidence.

 

AUTUMN AND WINTER 1949 AT SCHOOLEY'S MOUNTAINS AGAIN

 

Schooley's Mountain.

 

After the pleasant six-day crossing to the States, again passing through the volley of questions from the FBI before being let out, I soon reached my favourite Gurukula in the Schooley's Mountains. A turkey farm had been started next to the Gurukula, where the 'cackle, cackle' of the birds started with any strange noise they heard and only subsided minutes later. Harry was planning to sell out in East Orange and settle at the Gurukula. He had big plans to remodel, alter and add to the building already put up. He also planned to have a flower and fruit garden, and to build a shop for his toolmaking business.

 

Before he could arrive, I was installed in a small room with the volumes of the Encyclopaedia within easy reach of my writing table where I went on clarifying my ideas day after day for hours at a time. My typescript had grown to more than six hundred pages, but half of this I was deciding to write all over again so that by adding a new volume anterior to what I had written I could avoid the nuisance of too many footnotes in the later volume. Only now as I type these lines from Harrogate, England, on September 13th 1965, holidaying in Yorkshire with Christopher Leslie, do I feel satisfied with what I have been revising and publishing in the pages of 'Values' regarding the Guru's philosophy, appearing from my pen in monthly instalments  of about twenty pages each time. Patient plodding through thousands of pages of writing has been my lot or hobby almost all my life.

 

349

As late summer changed into autumnal months, there were some sunny days left in which I did some gardening and tried to deepen a pool of spring water in the forest behind. It was a surprise to find one day among the thickets a pear tree loaded with semi-wild tasty ripe fruit which had gone unnoticed by all till then.

 

Garry Davis visited me for a day and stayed the night in the unfinished bedroom with his first wife Audrey. They were planning to leave by air for Haiti in a few days. We had absorbing tête-à-têtes far into the night where we first discovered the possibilities of a new political science called 'Geo-Dialectics' which was to be based on a dialectical approach to world problems. Outlines of this we then elaborated while together in India about five years later after long joint consultations on a full Memorandum on World Government, containing 'talking points' on the main principles for a World  Government.

 

Harry and his family soon moved into their fully-furnished and insulated bedrooms at the Gurukula, and sanitary fittings came soon after their arrival. All was going well towards a Gurukula nucleus in New Jersey, as it was beginning to function. A private family could get itself sublimated into an impersonal public and absolutist Gurukula if those concerned understood the theoretical and practical implications of such a bold experiment in institutional life. That Harry had his own children staying with him and going to school each day by bus was not to be considered a disqualification in itself for the Gurukula to be considered a full-fledged one in the fully open and dynamic absolutism that it was, in principle, to represent always. There were some sparkings and short circuits in the process of this kind of sublimation from relativistic levels and patterns of behaviour to absolutist ones.

 

Harry has been bravely submitting himself to the agonies and tribulations of the painful transition of ascent known in India as tapas. His latest letters to me now prove that our experiment has not failed in the long process. Even his having married a second time has not materially harmed the Gurukula ideals that he has always correctly represented in himself. Even noble failures to live up to absolutist ideals should often be counted as success, as implied in the dictum 'Nothing succeeds like success'. The Bhagavad Gita makes concessions for such in Chapter IX, verses 30 and 31.

 

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I LEAVE AGAIN FOR EUROPE EN ROUTE TO INDIA

My manuscript for 'The Word of the Guru' was almost ready, and I began to think of returning to India. We even had an early snowfall in December. Harry whispered to me one day that he had reserved a thousand dollars for me to enable me to get back to Europe first and then on to India, and assured me that, although I did not need all that amount for the passage, he wished willingly and deliberately that I should take the amount that he had decided to give me. As I had received money on starting from India from Mrs. Asan, without knowing whether it was 'lends' or 'keeps' as children say, I thought that the extra amount would do for paying her back on reaching India; but this kind lady was also equally generous and waived her claims. I was thus bounded by generosity on both sides.

 

I cannot go on telling my story at length in all its details. After driving with Harry near Niagara Falls and visiting the state of Virginia, I went with all my things to the pier where the superliner SS Liberty lay berthed in New York harbour about the end of the year 1950. When this big ship and its huge funnels was seen from the Southampton wharves as I disembarked, it seemed to tower like a superhuman giant, vomiting its smoke overhead into the cold air of the English coast. I reached London, Victoria, about noon and, as I had hardly any time to find a cheaper room, I entered a costly hotel near the station where I had bed and breakfast for one day for more than one pound sterling. It also had luxury marble bathroom fittings. I quickly found lodgings next day with Mrs. Titterton of Tavistock Square. With both my hands in my thick overcoat pockets I remember walking under Big Ben at the stroke of five on Christmas Eve, 1950.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

 

I RETURN TO INDIA TO BE RECOGNIZED AS A GURU

I omitted to say that before walking on Christmas Eve 1950, a chilly winter day, under Big Ben in London, I had made some contacts by chance with some passengers on the luxury liner SS. Liberty.

 

They were going to attend a conference in Geneva at the beginning of the new year, 1951, which was called the 'Constituent Assembly of the Peoples' (of the World). The luxury liner was said to have originally been a German ship which changed hands after the Second World War and was renamed from 'Bremen' to 'Liberty'. It was over 50,000 tons if I remember rightly and, strolling from one end of the ship to the other, I felt like I was walking the streets of a city. With so many stairs, passages and bridges, rows of cabins, saloons, and staterooms, one felt like a rat in a maze in a behaviour test.

 

Molotov, at the peak of his fame as a UN orator for the USSR, was one of the distinguished passengers on board. I remember how two innocent American students, who had the curiosity to visit him in his cabin on the top deck, were chided strongly by other American compatriots on board with such harshness that they were made to feel very small indeed. Serious nationalism made no room even for innocent curiosity but cruelly labelled them traitors straightaway. There seemed to be here something of the same spirit as that of the Inquisition, although it was patriotism and not religion that was involved this time.

 

Peter Cadby of New York was a public relations officer of a business group who was to attend the 'People's Assembly', and so was a Quaker lady whom I had met years before. A young lady who was secretary to a white missionary who stood against colour discrimination in South Africa also became a member of our coterie as we sat in the salon of the big ship, talking about politics and world unity.

 

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I GO TO GENEVA AND THE WORLD CONFERENCE

By consultation with them I changed my programme of staying in Paris and instead was attracted to Geneva and the World Conference to be held there. We soon became very intimate and friendly, especially as I told them that I knew World Citizen Garry Davis. Peter Cadby invited me to be present at the Assembly and sponsored my visit in the name of some committee of which he said he was a member. I soon felt the hand of the Tao in this coincidence, because I could be there merely by changing my immediate destination from Paris to Geneva. In both of these cities I had my kind friend and hostess, Madame Morin, to give me a place to live. A warm bed and a sure breakfast were waiting for me at Paris but, starting from London by one of the boats that crossed over to Calais from Dover or Folkestone (I do not remember), tagging my luggage along to the train that was ready with engine warmed to take us to Paris, I arrived there at nightfall, after one day. In Paris, instead of going to where my bed and breakfast were guaranteed, I changed my mind.

 

This is perhaps one of the most interesting things one can do in life. I have seen sparrows in summer in a bird bath that I had provided, enjoy doing just this again and again, as it were for its own sake. They splashed in the water for a while, then sitting on a twig, they took great trouble to dry their feathers, putting them in order. Then, after all care and time had been bestowed on such a scrupulous toilet, they decided to take another dip and begin all over again. Children sometimes throw their toys away for the changeful joy of having to name or find them again. Elders soon become incapable of such a sheer spirit of sport. They cannot truly belong, in principle, to the absolutist way. To the absolutist, the play and the thing become interchangeable or reversible as equations.

 

At last, after waiting in the Gare de Lyon for a porter to put my baggage onto the train for Geneva at some thirtieth platform or other at the far end, I was beginning to be anxious and desperate. The first time limit was over and I stood wondering whether I would have to rush with my things myself, when suddenly the fellow made an appearance in complete nonchalant unconcern, to rush with the things and push me into the train with my belongings at the very last moment.

 

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I groped for the correct change to put into his hand but could fish out only a big silver coin that was valued at five times what I would have had to pay normally. He seemed disinterested and took the whole, and the train moved off. Whether his last-minute comeback was a ruse or not remains a mystery to me. Haste and bustle must be favourable hunting grounds for crooks.

 

ARRIVAL IN SNOW-BOUND GENEVA

 

Geneva in Winter.

 

e travelled all night along a snowbound railway track with white-capped hills that we passed when we came nearer to Geneva, though they were not visible directly in the early hours of the morning as we came into the basin at the high altitude where Lake Léman was. All this made itself felt in all its awe of cold majesty. We waited to enter the city where the lake reflected Mont Blanc on one side and the Dôle of the Jura on the opposite side. I was back in my favourite Geneva again, this time in icy winter.

 

After arriving at about eight in the morning at the Gare Cornavin, I took my breakfast of bread rolls, butter and jam and a big cup of coffee in a nearby restaurant. French breakfasts of brioche and coffee, with or without butter and never with jam, reflected a more intellectual level of taste; while the Swiss came in between them and the heavy breakfasts of bacon, eggs and porridge for which Londoners expectantly get out of bed each day. Sometimes a Welsh breakfast has fish, and soup is not ruled out in some high-class ships or hotels that I have known. The South Indian idlies and sambhar may be thought of here as reflecting a Dravidian type of mind. Each was interesting enough to the people in the place concerned, but became incompatible and absurd with people whose hunger did not have a one-to-one correspondence with the ensemble of edibles at the particular meal hour.

 

As a man's dress will proclaim him, so also the type of food eaten by anyone lends a diagnostic key to the type he represents. But this is only diagnostically true. To turn this relation the other way about and say that if you wear the dress of a gallant you become one, or if - as they often say on the authority of the Gita - that hot spiced food makes a man rajasik (or passionate-active), the truth becomes somewhat far-fetched and distorted into a caricature in terms of the workaday actualities of life. Aetiology and medicine should not be mixed up.

 

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LUCK AGAIN IN A PLACE TO STAY

After the Swiss breakfast, as I was going to say, I went over to see my friend and former hostess of my Paris days in the thirties, and she was again good enough to offer me a place to stay. One of her lodgers, a young Englishman working in the United Nations, was just then taking a holiday in the hills at Montana. I was in charge of an empty flat again as Madame Morin herself was to go to Paris for a period, so I could cook and eat in her place and look after it also in the meantime. I knew many others, just at that time in Europe, who were looking for a place to stay, waiting at the end of a long list, while they spent their days in hotels before they could actually move in. In my case the Tao took care that it was easier. An absolutist who relies on the Tao is subtly favoured by it.

 

A cybernetic backward-feeding calculus seems to be implied here. We all belong to the same cosmos in which the theory of cybernetic information also seems to work. Fed alternately by negative or positive entropy, in which order is possible and disorder always more probable, we are carried on the tide of time amply strewn over with bits of chances, positive or negative, vertical or horizontal, that come or come not our way. Neutral abandon to the total situation, which is neither positive nor negative, possible nor actual, seems the most intelligent mode of conduct. Surrender to the will of God has to be understood scientifically in this way alone. There is a fifty-fifty probability between good and bad luck as a constant before us always. As a basis for such probability to function or operate there is also an overall absolutist situation of possibilities. One can transcend the paradox of the impossibility of non-existence and the full possibility of some significant purpose in life and thus get neutrally attuned and at peace with the wonder of the Absolute.

 

Human understanding has to guide itself between these polarised alternates of possibilities or probabilities by a cybernetic matching of ends and means in a circular servicing as between actual and imaginary elements. All this belongs to a world of information and follows the same scheme as in the second law of thermodynamics only when the Carnot equation is considered reversible.

 

Such a way of describing the wheel of dharma or karma, which is no other than that of Providence or 'The tide in the affairs of men' that Shakespeare would speak of, comes to me on the 9th of October 1965, again in Belgium fifteen years after my visit to Geneva, as I am now writing about it in this autobiography.

 

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While using here the new scientific language that belongs to the scheme of cybernetics, let me add that man is a machine or the machine is a man if we think of extrapolations and interpolations of the unitive schema to which life conforms as a reversible or irreversible process, with a wide range of homeostatic or homologic references that could cover all values or purposes significant to human life. The scientifically-restated theology of the future might speak some such language as the above which I have ventured to wander into here in an easy way of careless anticipation.

 

I ATTEND THE WORLD CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY OF THE PEOPLE

It was in the first week of January 1951 that the Constituent Assembly of the People of the World was held in Geneva. From summer 1948 to January 1951, with nearly two years in the USA and less than a year in Paris, was the period of my travels out of India until this conference in Geneva. In April of the same year I was to sail for India by the old French steamer André Lebon from Marseilles to Colombo.

 

I had arrived quite by chance at this strange conference organized by the same Edgar Gevaert in whose house I am typing these lines fifteen years later, without then knowing him even by name. The Tao, when in league with pure chance, can open doors in the most unexpected places, wherein one enters to find just what one was seeking. The intimacy and the full understanding with which this has been accomplished is proved now that almost all the members of this unique family, each so interesting in originality and independence, and verging on even being peculiar in some respects, have now become my best friends.

 

Auto-educated and trying to be too original or individualist in following causes dear to each, ranging from World Government to dietetic reform, each of the Gevaerts had to be known by himself or herself. A fully pagan love of nature was found in the father and in modified form in each of the others; and the Christian love of martyrdom was often a tragic trait too that sat on their features, for which many of them had to pay a high price in one form or another. The dangers and hazards of the Second World War had also made the family unique by its singular share of exile, incertitude, insecurity and sheer homeless indigent wandering, seeking a roof each night.

 

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The father often had to carry children on his shoulders while about ten of them, boys and girls in adolescent or teenage years, walked behind. Providence cried halt to their long tale of woe and settled them again, much bruised in spirit and humbled, though they remained bravely proud in many respects. It was thus that the thought of a World Government became natural to all of them. Through common friendship with Garry Davis and through values, a contact became established with this interesting family, which bids fair to become more intimate than ever. All these before me now were present fifteen years earlier with the father (who has recently died) at the Geneva Assembly.

 

I walked up and down the conference halls, corridors and annexes of the Bâtiment Electoral of Geneva, the dignified building good enough for a world conference of that kind. Most of those who participated were either interested, for or against Garry Davis, and were influenced by him directly or indirectly. Although I did not directly participate in the conference, I was there for its educative value to me and as a kind of observer or almost a spy, inasmuch as I was only a curious visitor and personally interested in Garry Davis. Just at that time Nehru, the Prime Minister of India, was passing through Geneva and a delegation from this conference waited on him at the airport to seek his approval for its plans, which he gave.

 

Dr. Edmond Privat, my old friend of Gland days, occupied the chair and there could be seen interested cliques and coteries, some British, some French, who pulled in opposite directions. For a moment, however, everything seemed to be going well. Some even thought land had actually been sighted. Rival groups however, spoiled the game at the last moment. My reading of what happened as I watched them has been amply confirmed by the words of Edgar Gevaert himself, who was the moving spirit of the show, recently before he died. What was more, as I understood later, it was his pocket that was most seriously touched. Delegates representing South Africa and even Japan had flown to the meeting and the high enthusiasm that prevailed at least proved one thing clearly - that a great volume of public opinion was in favour of a World Government. None however had given this vague desire a formula that could be thought of as clearly workable.

 

My interest was all the time focused on this one point of formula and savoir-faire, and to find one who was to bell the cat.

 

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My visit to this conference, treated together with my knowledge about international problems ever since the time of the League of Nations in 1928, opened my eyes to the need for a dialectically-conceived approach which I was able to formulate for Garry Davis many years later.

 

GOODBYE TO GENEVA FRIENDS AGAIN

 

Mont Blanc, seen from Geneva.

 

From the top storey of Madame Morin's flat on the rue Thalberg, one got a glimpse of Lake Léman; and Mont Blanc was in full view from nearby on the lakeside when one took a morning stroll. After a month I was offered another room by Madame de Tonnac nearer the lake, at the heart of the city on the Quai des Berges, not far from the Ile Rousseau. The Rhone narrowed down into the neck of a river near here and the currents were stronger. They distorted the reflections of the coloured neon lights of the city, making them resemble the flow of music, rather than clusters or rows of light. Instead of my having to pay for the good room that I occupied, Madame de Tonnac presented me with a watch and took care of all my needs for the month that I stayed.

 

Dr. William Gunning came to see me in the meanwhile and I visited him at the Institute Monnier in Versoix on the lakeside, about fifteen kilometres from Geneva. I stayed with him about a fortnight, during which time we became so intimate, sharing our most profound thoughts, that we became related by that bipolar situation of wisdom seekers favourable to the osmotic exchange of mature experience both ways. Although he decided one day to openly accept me as a Guru, I have considered him with at least an equal respect because of his maturer years and his greater share in living experience of actual life. We lent moral support to each other and he was at that time more in need of such. Thus a lifelong friendship started which has endured to this day.

 

Through him I was introduced to Mr. Rohrbach, who is the founder-director of the AVM (Artisans of a Better Life) and its educational section called JEAN of which Mr. Rohrbach was director. Several other precious contacts were also made and old ones renewed at this period. Leela Maya was not a negligible friend among the number. She was a girl of twelve or so then, born to my friend Dr. Naidu of UNESCO and a Swiss lady. I valued her friendship among many others of her age which I cultivated and kept up in my life.

 

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She became a talented musician and later I heard that she lived the life of a film star in the suburbs of Bombay after a married life that failed. The Bublins and the Ferriers and the Sauvageots have to be remembered here for their kindness and understanding.

 

As the day of sailing from Marseilles drew near, I remember one day when spring came with all its glory near and around the lake of Geneva with cherry and other blossoms, and with gentians, crocuses, cowslips and primroses showing their heads from below where they had been buried in snow for months. I took a walk round the Ile Rousseau with Marc Rohrbach, and in solemn silence entered into a pact by which we were to make combined efforts for one-world ideas with the dialectical wisdom that Rousseau represented.

 

BY TRAIN TO MARSEILLES AND ON BOARD THE SS ANDRE LEBON

I was embraced and kissed a warm goodbye by Dr. Gunning at the Geneva railway station soon after. This event remains in memory because of the unusualness of two old men, one of the them with a bristly French beard, greeting the other who grew a beard more mosaic and profuse only ten years after his return to India from a visit to Belgium and Geneva again in 1960. I have now met Dr. Gunning several times again, especially at the Rousseau Pilgrimage to which all friends came in September 1959. Four such pilgrimages have been celebrated, the last and most recent of which I was again present for on the 26th of September 1965, at which the contact though not direct presence of Dr. Gunning and others has again been renewed. Thus my friendships have been kept alive through common interests in good undertakings, though kept apart by silent and long intervals, sometimes lasting even for decades.

 

Arriving at Marseilles early in the morning I was accosted by one of those characters who reminded me of a 'misérable' portrayed by Victor Hugo. He took my luggage almost on his own initiative and made me follow him as he went before me at great speed. Instead of the luggage office of the shipping company who were to take care of my luggage, where he pretended first to take me, he ushered me into the street outside and down to a cellar nearby where a man was newly establishing a rival agency for baggage transport to the harbour several miles away.

 

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He was one of those familiar and loveable crooks, but I let myself be waylaid by him, only half in protest, because of interest in him, for which, after spending a day walking round the old port of Marseilles, on the next day I had to pay the price of having to wait impatiently till almost the last minute for the luggage to arrive. When in the confusion it did arrive, the agent could blackmail me by asking double what was officially due.

 

All ports breed the same types of crook. They always manage to get away with it because they deal with people who are in passage, with no time to call the police. Sometimes the latter too plead helplessness in view of the actualities of the situation. Without letting myself be fooled too much by questionable but interesting characters, as in the Gare de Lyon at Paris, I escaped this time by adding only an extra tip to the porter who placed my belongings in the cabin for two in the old tub of a ship called André Lebon.

 

FROM COLOMBO TO VARKALA

Fifteen days or so after, the ship touched Colombo and I alighted there in the steaming heat of noon. There was a South Indian restaurant in the Fort area near the harbour where I found I could eat rice and curry again. Without being waited on, I gobbled up my meal in just that informal way after missing it for years, with a gusto that a dog or a modern beatnik would have understood. South India excels in this simple and direct relation to food, often taken off a simple banana leaf while seated on the ground. I thought at first that I would burst after the unusually big meal, but nothing disastrous happened and atavistic reactions automatically established normality in the metabolism within after a three-year break.

 

After a few days to renew acquaintances in Colombo where I had been with the Guru Narayana several years before in connection with the Guru's centre there, I took a train to Madura where I had to break journey for a day, staying in the retiring room in the station, by request of a man from Varkala who met me there to tell me of a reception that was waiting for me at the Varkala station when I returned there on a day fixed after my nearly three years' absence.

 

Representatives of all sections of the public, inclusive of all shades of Guru-followers, were waiting at the station at Varkala when I actually arrived there of an afternoon two days later.

 

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The sannyasins of the Dharma Sangham welcomed me by garlanding me while others followed in precedence, each representing the lay organisations of the Guru. Although I was a sort of devil's disciple or a prodigal son to many among them who could not understand me fully, the spontaneous welcome spoke volumes to me and clearly showed two distinct strata in which a man's reputation could live and grow. The deeper of these grows best and stronger when one is dead while there is another superficial one which is full of officious effusiveness but really less rich in content.

 

I soon regained the quiet precincts of the Gurukula at Varkala, but on the next day at the Sasi Theatre of Varkala all representatives again met under the presidency of Dr. P.N. Narayanan, an accredited lay disciple of the Guru, to do me honour more formally. Then a lady present at the meeting, Sadanam Narayani Amma of Quilon, when speeches were over, rose to her feet to propose that I be recognised publicly as the successor of the Guru Narayana. The response was spontaneous and unanimous but, as I even then suspected, it was the effusive reputation of the moment that prevailed, which later events amply proved. Relativistic forces were also let loose then which turned this climax in my reputation into an anti-climax. The story is not worth telling in any great detail.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

 

THE GURU CENTENARY COINCIDES WITH MY SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY

The story of my life, which I have been trying to tell, has been told in various moods, and the style and presentation has been coloured bright or dark according to the temperament prevailing at the time of writing. As a man advances in years, retrospection and regret become more evident than when the breezes of life blow more freely in less mature years. It is therefore natural for the reader to expect that I should continue my story in a slightly different key, especially when these lines are being written after my 72nd birthday. The fifteen years since my homecoming in 1951 have been filled with many interesting events, including two trips to the Far East and two to Europe, each of them lasting between six and nine months. Some accounts of these travels appeared in 'Values'. Other writings in 'Values' will also give the reader particulars about my state of mind during these years. I can thus afford to omit direct reference to events or to reflections meant to reveal my state of mind during this period.

 

I was in my fifty-fifth year when I returned, and there were only five years before an event in which I was directly interested, namely the centenary of Narayana Guru, which fell in 1954-55, thus leaving a period of time that would make the event coincide with my own sixtieth birthday. After I had become seriously interested in Narayana Guru, I can remember that I was twenty when he attained his sixtieth birthday - an event that I have already related (see 'Early Reminiscences of Narayana Guru' in 'Values', October, 1960). It was celebrated at the Young Man's Hindu Association (YMHA), in Georgetown, Madras, an organization started by Mrs. Annie Besant. She was also present in the building at the time, but unfortunately could not attend the function.

 

After the meeting at the Sasi Theatre at Varkala where I was openly recognised as a Guru by a representative gathering of sannyasins and laymen directly interested in the Guru movement at the reception given to me; even though certain relativistic rivalries were let loose underground by interested persons, obstructing any possibility of my assuming charge where cash and power were directly involved, in which context I myself kept carefully aloof; yet overt and overboard factors did not fail to force events in my favour. It is a well-known law that those who are openly shocked at the table are also those who act shockingly below the table. Barking dogs do not bite and, conversely, biting dogs do so almost before you are aware that you have been bitten. Thus it was that I could watch a double-sided football game in which I was myself a centre-forward. Foul play with offside handling or kicking the ball on the sly took place all the time, and I pretended to be sometimes unaware but did not succeed in keeping strictly neutral all the time.

 

THE GURUKULA GATHERS MOMENTUM

While relativistic forces worked underground, overt factors prevailed above board. In preparation for the coming centenary of the Guru Narayana, I conceived the idea of a Gurukula Convention and a Gurukula magazine in Malayalam. Only preliminary groundwork for such projects was in the air in 1951. At the end of the year we brought out prospectuses and held an informal meeting next to the small building at Varkala during the Christmas-New Year interval of holidays, coinciding with the annual pilgrimage to Shivagiri which had started several decades previously under the guidance of Narayana Guru. Although the sonorous name of Gurukula Convention applied to the event was incompatible with the simple gathering under the trees, by 1965, after fifteen years, it has grown to gather enough momentum to justify such a name.

 

KERALA AND THE 'GURUKULAM' MAGAZINE

 

Swami Mangalananda.

 

The magazine, edited by Swami Mangalananda, also went on with uphill work to create a favourable public opinion in Kerala and give a more dynamic, positive orientation to the further movement. But Kerala was a land which suffered from a surfeit of journals and journalists, not to speak of poets and poetasters. There seemed to be at least as many authors as readers of poetic or prose compositions, big or small, and there has been at all times a plethora of them in this land of mahakavis (authors of epic stature), to be counted sometimes even by the fingers of two hands, though often the standards of literature fell below normal.

 

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This paradox is even reflected in the fact that, although Kerala can boast of a university, it does not yet have a decent dictionary written by a son of its native soil for its own language; and even the name of the father of Malayalam literature is still to be guessed from that of brothers of lesser repute. How a Sankara and a Narayana Guru could have been produced here has remained an enigma to me, but this is a question to be discussed separately, as I have recently attempted to do in an article for a souvenir to commemorate the name of a great Kerala author. Need I say, therefore, that the 'Gurukulam' magazine was a short-lived venture of four years or so? However, shortly before its demise, an English publication emerged from Bangalore called 'Values', which has survived its less-fortunate predecessor even to this day as the main organ for the Guru-movement, especially for the benefit of the world outside of closed and limited Kerala whose virtual forty pockets have made the climate unfavourable for a Gurukula magazine within its limits.

 

The credit of keeping 'Values' going against odds, both actual and ideological, goes to the absolutist dedication and sacrifice of John Spiers who has persisted against odds of necessary factors by sheer love of the cause of wisdom. He has also been equally responsible for the publication of the first major work on the Guru, called 'The Word of the Guru'(written by myself), when it was published during the same intervening period of preparation for the centenary of Narayana Guru and my own sixtieth-birthday celebrations.

 

POPULAR APPROBATION

Besides these events of the publicity world, there was also a series of public functions at which addresses were presented to me in the name of the citizens or Guru followers in various major towns in Kerala. Cannanore, Tellicherry and Calicut responded in this respect spontaneously and were later followed by Trivandrum and Trichur. In most cases, purses were also presented to me; sometimes touching the lowest limit of three digits, while others even touched the upper limit of four in the majority of cases.

 

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Publicity and minor improvements at Varkala absorbed these amounts, which supplemented the margin left over from travel expenses paid to me by Harry Jacobsen and the Church Peace Union earlier, with which I had economised. But six or seven inmates at Fernhill meant increased grocer's bills. But in spite of all these items which included a bill for printing 'The Word of the Guru' exceeding 5000 Rupees, we were able jointly to survive financially by a sort of 'muddling through' as Englishmen sometimes proudly say about winning the First and Second World Wars. Secret snags and hitches had to be tided over, and even some hurdles jumped bravely and more intransigently on occasion, to keep us in a sort of semi-solvency by the will of the Tao, as it were.

 

Meanwhile we even found time to look for a new Bangalore centre where John could stay, with better printing and publicity facilities in a milder climate than the one at Fernhill. We stayed for some time six miles out of Bangalore in a neglected choultry (rest-house for travellers) at Madivala on the Hosur Road, by permission of Mr. A.D. Anandan, an old friend and close admirer of John, who owned it as part of his family patrimony through services rendered by his ancestors to the one-time Mysore rulers after the time of Tippu Sultan.

 

LIFE IN MADIVALA VILLAGE

Life in Madivala remains more memorable, however, because of the mosquitoes, buffaloes and monkeys, rather than by association with any sultan or raja. While we could watch water buffaloes wallowing in mud pools, or sometimes even pigs who fulfilled unofficially the sanitary function of the Health Department; the day-time monkey menace rivalled only that of the mosquitoes at night as we slept on a big pre-Victorian four-poster bedstead large enough for all three of us, the third being Sandy, the adopted son of John, who was seeking a job (then as perhaps even now), protected by three mosquito nets joined together. Some of the more vicious and intelligent mosquitoes would already be within the net which, instead of protecting us throughout the night, left us exclusively exposed to their pitiless mercy from their privileged position within rather than without the protective curtain.

 

There were also intelligent monkeys who walked right into the dining room as all of us were seated before our stitched leaf-plates of rice and curry and, after the dignified manner of some professors who entered the classroom while the students watched, the monkeys picked up the tomatoes and other edibles where they were kept on the window sill.

 

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They were holy Hanumans who could not be shot in any Mysore village because both Hindu and Muslim villagers would gang up and blackmail the stranger who dared to kill a monkey, demanding, with the dead animal on their shoulders, payment supposedly enough to give it a decent totemic burial. Even the government proved helpless in removing the monkey pest, for we could watch and see how the same tail-less or lanky one was walking the wall or rooftops soon after they were supposed to have been trapped in cages and transported for banishment far off. In short, monkeys and mosquitoes vied with each other in making life at Madivala both interesting and memorable.

 

CONTINGENT AND NECESSARY SIDES OF LIFE

In the meanwhile, job-hunting for Sandy and land-finding for a future Gurukula in the vicinity of beautiful Bangalore went on apace. John and I were often driven to far-off outskirts of the city or cantonment, mostly in vain, to find some suitable acres for a Gurukula habitation. By some strange chance, we found some land leased by the Government under the wartime 'Grow More Food' plan. Here we were able to set foot tentatively, although it took ten years to regularize the property because of irregularities on the part of the person supposed to have initially leased the land from the Government. Such details may not be as interesting as the mosquito-monkey episodes, but must find a place among the 'necessary' events outside the purely 'contingent' factors of life wherein man often has more freedom of choice.

 

Between the contingent and the necessary aspects of life there is a subtle form of reciprocity by which the converse of propositions are only sometimes true. If a native talked in his own language to a foreigner, the latter could not reply with equal justice in his own vernacular. Inner structural reciprocity has always to be respected even by the most thoroughgoing of absolutists. The Absolute is not thus of an empty content which imposes no laws on man, as some nihilists might mistakenly suppose. During these years I divided my attention between Varkala, Bangalore and Fernhill. The addresses and receptions given to me, especially in and near Cannanore and also in Tellicherry, can be described as fully popular and rousing as the Gurukula party drove through miles of countryside with crowds waiting to felicitate us en route.

 

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These developments, taken together with my being asked to preside over important centenary celebrations like the monster gathering at Palluruthy near Cochin and some others, made me feel that my popularity with followers of the Guru in general was at its zenith, although anticlimax factors also lurked behind in each case - enough to warn me against exposing myself to the limelight of cheap popularity available on platforms, which often faded out into neglect and ignominy when the crest of enthusiasm had been passed. Garlanding and applause, when accepted without reserve, often spoil their own case. Voltaire and Rousseau both understood this verity in their own lives only too well.

 

I TAKE FORMAL SANNYASA

Meanwhile the Gurukula Conventions went on year by year and, by the end of 1955, which coincided with the centenary of the Guru Narayana and my sixtieth birthday, the Guru-movement had taken a forward step through the countrywide celebrations to mark the event. My own sixtieth birthday was celebrated with éclat in the Town Hall of Bangalore with full co-operation of friends and sympathisers of the Guru-movement. Soon after, at one of the Gurukula Conventions at Varkala, I formally assumed the outer insignia and formalities of a full-fledged sannyasin. The public declaration I made on that occasion, on 1st January 1956, which received wide publicity in the Kerala papers, bore witness to my more formal and public re-dedication to the Guru-cause, not only as a tyagi or renouncer, as I had been informally till then, but as a mature sannyasin with shaven head, staff and kamandalu (water-pot), as laid down by convention belonging to the context, after a special viraja homam (a ritual fire-sacrifice prescribed by the Narayana Smrti). The object of going through such a seemingly-outmoded formality was mostly to fix my legal status as a person dedicated to the Absolute. By suggesting what in legal parlance is known as 'civic death', the integrity, security, character and rules of succession of the Gurukula movement seemed to be better guaranteed than by any other method. I registered a will and testament on the same occasion to further ensure the legal status of the Gurukula in such matters.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

 

DIALECTICAL DRAGONS AND NEAR MURDER

The dim twilight of those days of the distant beginnings of my life lived in memory has some intimations of immortality of a certain glowing richness which maturer years do not present. Breezes blow more freely on the silken sails of infancy where life's adventure starts; the sails are made of coarser stuff and the wind ruffles them more sternly in middle life; then they blend again into less vitally-coloured outlines in the horizons of the mind of old age. The world is a refractory colour-solid floating in space that belongs to our own minds and presents itself more or less saturated with colourful reality according to urges of vitality inside us; changing sides between infancy and old age between ambivalent poles of the noetic or the noematic, as modern phenomenologists would say. The years of my life between my sixtieth and seventieth birthdays, which I wish to cover in a general way here, have thus a drab complexion compared with the deeper hues and brighter tints characterising the world of interests of earlier or middle years of my life.

 

GARRY DAVIS IN INDIA

I can clearly visualize or experience this kind of eidetic difference when I think of my youthful impressions of Geneva, which I visited first in 1928 and later in 1948. The coloured picture seemed to have changed into a black-and-white etching or pencil outline sketch with less richness of eidetic content. Drab details do not interest me, nor even colourful interests. I love to live now more and more in the world of schematic outlines and mathematical generalisations near to the dull grey radiance of Absolute Reality, as I feel the glow dimly within myself giving me consolation and lasting purposefulness to my life. (Some future disciple, if he feels it worthwhile, may be able to supplement this running account with notes of factual details).

 

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My first visit to Singapore and Malaya was an event of outstanding importance after my sixtieth birthday celebrations. It coincided roughly also with the visit of Garry Davis, World Citizen Number One, whose contact I had made in 1949 or so, crossing the Atlantic to the USA, as related already. Garry had stayed with me in the New Jersey Gurukula near New York during the time the Gurukula was being built, and we had thus a chance to make our first contact into a more intimately-welded one. We sometimes kept talking till past midnight and found many points of agreement about how a new science called Geo-dialectics, as we agreed to name it, could be developed, into which World Citizenship could be fitted as a natural corollary without conflict. World Government had to be based on a formula of recognizing the 'General Good and Good for All' on the basis of the motto of 'All for One and One for All', which was blazoned on the shields of the Geneva monument commemorating the Swiss Confederation, as inspired by Rousseau's Social Contract.

 

Later, Garry Davis went to live on one of the islands of the West Indies with his newly-wedded wife, and soon got lost in those adventures which make interesting reading in his own later published book, 'The World is My Country', where his further contacts with me and the Gurukula movement are recorded. The arrival of Garry in India and his turning up in a taxi at the portico of the Gurukula at Fernhill marked a further stage in this strange friendship between a dynamic representative of modern dominant progressive thinking and a disciple of a Guru of recessive South India.

 

DRAGON'S HEAD AND TAIL

This friendship itself had the character of the meeting of dialectical counterparts representable or imaginable as that between two dragons of value-growths or formations in the sky, as Chinese art loves to fancy figuratively. The dominant and the recessive of each growth of civilization can be thought of as the dragon's head and the tail: the former vomiting fire or sulphurous vapours at the capitals such as Berlin or Moscow, where the head ends of rival dialectical dragon-growths representing historical civilizations interlocked in deadly rivalry, as from the sides of walls separating zones so clearly and tragically dividing Berlin at present into two camps.

 

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Garry responded readily to these imaginative descriptions and, full of creative intrepidity as his disposition has always been, helped in cementing our understanding into a life-long and never-to-be-separated relationship, as subsequent events have amply proved. As a man originating from Kerala parentage, I represented the tail end of an Eastern dragon that covered the Gangetic plain and passed through the Nile basin, through Alexandria and Paris to the heart of New York City where its rival dragon-head was hiding, reeking smoke and fire under the shadows of the Empire State Building.

 

Ever since our first contact, Garry has been an enthusiastic supporter of Geo-dialectic ideology, and the lure of these wild imaginings which established a contact between two kindred enthusiasts has not abated even today in adding ever-increasing interest to our friendship.

 

After his visit here at Fernhill and Calicut, Garry took a room in Bangalore Cantonment where I spent a few days with him engaged in preliminary talks for bringing out a Memorandum on World Government. Again we often talked till past midnight. Although we were unable to arrive at a formula in which both saw eye-to-eye in every aspect of World Government, a great deal of common ground was discovered.

 

During this period I moved constantly between Bangalore, Ootacamund, Varkala and Cheruvattur at the northern limits of the Malayalam-speaking West Coast of South India, where some land was offered in the name of Mrs. C. Koran of Cannanore, a well-wisher of the Gurukula. It took several years to start even the nucleus of a Gurukula there, with compound wall, well, trees, hut etc., and a cow. Besides the ten acres and building occupied by John Spiers at Kaggalipura at the 13th milestone of the Bangalore-Kanakapura road, which was also growing into self-sufficiency by very slow degrees, we had the offer of another ten acres at the 18th mile on the same road near a small river called Suvarnamukhi, for which the initiative came from Dr. Ramaswamy, then the Assistant Surgeon at Kaggalipura, who spoke to the village head of Somanhalli nearby. Again we had to start from scratch with some beginnings of a unit room made ready by the same village head or Patel.

 

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I remember Garry and I walking the 18 miles on foot once, picking ripe mangoes that had dropped on the roadside and eating them with the monkeys while we sat on some culvert parapet to rest our legs now and then as we sauntered leisurely along. We cooked a picnic lunch at midday on the rocky banks of the rivulet and walked back to Bangalore, as none of the crowded buses would take us. This last Gurukula centre is also growing slowly. Garry himself decided to stay in Bangalore for World Government work.

 

MORE TRAVEL, EAST AND WEST

 

During the ten years that I am thinking of here, I had occasion to visit the Far East twice and also put in a visit to Europe, followed by another similar European tour in greater detail after my seventieth birthday. My visits to the Far East were for spreading the message of the Guru in the name of institutions or affiliated groups in Malaya or Singapore.

 

The European tours were undertaken more in my own interests in connection with my researches in the domain of an integrated or unified science of the Absolute. A monograph on a language for unified science was prepared by me during this period, which received the seal of approval of the Royal Academy of Brussels. A Gurukula Centre was run for several months in a village eight kilometres or so outside Gent. I participated in a Rousseau Pilgrimage at Geneva, besides lecturing at summer camps in Haute-Savoie.

 

The Far-Eastern visit included the northernmost State of Trengganu and Bukit Best from where iron ore was being shipped to Japan. Moth aeroplanes took me, with John and Mangalananda, over the forested regions of Malaya, then infested with 'terrorists' who considered decapitating a fellow-man light-heartedly. We established contacts at Kuala Lumpur and lectured in many small townships. On my second visit to the same area I visited Penang, that interesting pearl-like island in the gleaming warm Straits of Malacca. The China Sea water was once touched by me as we stayed adjoining it, although I was not tempted to try a sea-bath there. Such adventures seemed to me too much like work.

 

My second visit was more filled with lecture engagements and I went, not by ship as in the first trip, but by Constellation, and returned after three or more months stay in the new Gurukula buildings at Seletar in a BOAC jet, which was a unique experience. Leaving at lunchtime and flying many miles high, lost among white cloud formations of presences that were literally celestial in majesty, I was taking tea at the Udipi Hotel in Egmore, Madras, still too early for Madrasis to take their tiffin.

 

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ATTACKS BY PEN AND CUDGEL

 

Somanahalli, Karnataka.

 

In between these visits I also visited Amritsar and Bombay, spending happy holidays in Hardwar and Rishikesh, presiding over a Vedanta conference at Amritsar and the Gita conference in Bombay that had been organized on a grand scale. My Bhagavad Gita translation and commentary was published soon after. It received both favourable reviews and mean attacks from closed groups in India who sometimes even quoted fabricated passages not found in my comments, so as to put me wilfully on the wrong side. The Vedanta Kesari of Madras made one such fabricated quotation which, when pointed out to the editor, brought neither thanks nor acknowledgement other than a minute correction in the next number, hidden away obscurely at the bottom of a page. These and other attacks not fully above the belt soon put me on the alert, and I did not expect any popularity for my work because perhaps it was too openly true. The Governor of Bombay, Sri Sri Prakasa, however, honoured the publication on the eve of the victory of the Goan conflict, by receiving it at a public ceremony held in Bombay where the dean of the sannyasins of that meeting, Swami Akhandananda, presented it to him. The best appreciation came also from the review of Professor Kurt F. Leidecker of the University of Washington and Maryland, Fredericksburg, Virginia.

 

These compensated sufficiently for the other attacks. Besides mean attacks by the pen I had also the experience of being assaulted with a wooden cudgel by a man who, in murderous dastardliness, lay in wait for me when I was living with an octogenarian gardener at the new 18th Mile Gurukula, Somanhalli, near Bangalore. The attack did not come from any stranger, bandit or wild animal. It was a favourite disciple to whom I had given special powers of acting for me legally when I had to be away in Europe or America, who got the notion that he could take possession of the properties, because these powers were not properly or formally cancelled by gazette notification on my return. Although he was a celibate brahmachari in the Gurukula, normal urges to live a full family life were asserting themselves in his subconscious. As they became stronger, he proportionately felt a misfit in the Gurukula.

 

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He could not resist the call for a more relativistic mode of life and expressed his discontent in various abnormal ways. He craved for private property and to be the father of a family, which pattern of behaviour or thought, so normal to adults, was a dangerous urge to frustrate consciously or even unconsciously, as I might be said to have been guilty of in this case.

 

Guru Narayana had warned me of such a danger on the very first occasion when I had mentioned starting a Gurukula, as already related. So, at a weak moment, as this depraved young man was feeling more and more like a fish out of water in the Gurukula, he stole from my trunk of records valuable documents and took them to his sister's house to keep for use when I would not be there to claim them. On discovering the theft I had to report it to the police who promptly recovered them - but the young man expected me to withdraw the case generously while he himself would not apologise. He took it for granted that I had to be generous while he justified his mistake.

 

On finding that I still insisted that he apologise before I would withdraw the police case, his criminal tendencies, occasionally noticed by me already on other occasions, became fanned to a flame until, waiting outside the lonely hut near to midnight with a heavy baton chosen from a pile of firewood, he called out to me when I was about to sleep, saying he wanted to sleep inside the hut as there were snakes in the place where he had been hiding from me all afternoon. I soon suspected his intentions and opened the door with my malacca cane in hand with which, held by both hands I tried to push him out of the fencing. When I had pushed him half-way along, he picked up the stick he had laid aside and aimed a blow at my bald pate which began to bleed profusely. I advanced on the disciple, brandishing my stick. Possibly because he was scared by the sight of the blood and feared a murder charge, he took to his heels and disappeared.

 

 

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CHAPTER THIRTY NINE

 

WANDERINGS AND ENCOUNTERS WITH PROVIDENCE

If my life-story had ended with the attack on my person as related in an earlier chapter (Dialectical Dragons and Near Murder), I would not be writing these lines after my seventy-first birthday. The doctor who stitched up my head scar and other minor wounds, and the nurse who dressed it for a few days after, had kind words of sympathy for my suffering at the hands of a disciple rather than from a bandit or wild beast, which would have been more natural to expect.

 

The Sastras say that all human sufferings come from three sources: adhibhautika, from elemental nature; adhidaivika, from unseen forces above, such as providence, bad luck, etc; and adhyatmika, from conflicts within oneself. A postcard with no signature, received by me a few days later, said that I was being punished by the assailant (who evidently wrote it) for my 'absolutism'. I have thus the consolation of being a sort of martyr to absolutism, which is not altogether a bad cause, although sometimes too much for the world to take.

 

When I came back from getting the wound dressed the morning after, I had to make tea for the policeman who had come to investigate the crime, despite my wounded head and other injuries. I also had the task of chasing monkeys away, as they were ravaging the vegetable garden of tender tomatoes and breaking the heads of newly-sprouting papaya trees that I had planted. By shaking the tree near the hut, these monkey people made dry twigs fall, which gave me enough fuel for my cooking. Nothing is altogether an unmixed evil. I told the octogenarian Timma Maistry, who was the one and only witness to the event that Devi, the goddess, had punished me for some masculine excess in my character, as Aphrodite is said to have done to Hippolytus in a Greek tragedy. The chorus singers of Greek dramatic interludes are the custodians of such wisdom not given to all to claim.

 

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A VISIT TO BELGIUM

I think I have covered in some detail my visit to Europe in 1959. I sailed by SS Strathnavar from Bombay and, although I had four or five purposes in mind, the most important of them was to gather notes in support of a projected monograph on 'A Language for Unified Science'. During the eight months of my stay in Europe I travelled in France, England, Switzerland and other parts and, after making valuable contacts, returned by MV Cambodge of the Messageries Maritimes Line just in time to participate in the Gurukula Convention of December 1959-60, at Varkala, Kerala.

 

Meanwhile, a new project, that of a Brahma-Vidya Mandiram (Institute for a Science of the Absolute) was taking shape on a small hillock near Shivagiri, the original seat of the Guru movement at Varkala. The monograph took two years to complete and was duly submitted to the Royal Academy of Brussels, which gave it its seal permitting its publication.

 

The Cheruvattur Gurukula also took forward strides, and had a small room and sheds added to it with compound wall, well, a cow, a banana garden, coconut, mango and jack trees all planted in rows. We even had a rice crop, and pepper vines were to be trained onto stumps of trees already planted and sprouting. Small happenings of this kind add up to important proportions in human happiness.

 

I SPRAIN MY LEG

Most of the events between my 65th and 70th birthdays elude me at present as I sit, past 71, to pen them with as many realistic touches as possible. But I cannot but remember how I slipped and fell descending a slope of gravelly earth as I went by a shortcut to the little hill of the Brahma Vidya Mandiram at Varkala. There was a torsion of the right ankle at such a peculiar angle that some delicate inner bone or tendon got disrupted. Twisting of a cartilage might have been involved. I had the attention of two FRCS bone specialists the same night and lay with a crepe elastic bandaged leg for several days. The swelling took not only months but years to disappear completely and, even after four or five years now, the ankle gives some trouble. I had the help of a hereditary bone-setter and was taken all the way to the extreme south of Travancore where I lived in the house of a friend, Kumar Das, who came to stay in the Fernhill Gurukula for some months.

 

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I had my leg trampled on twice in reverse positions to make the ball of the joint fit properly into its socket. The treatment seemed to help, but a lingering elusive pain inside the bones still remains.

 

My stay in that part of the country was, however, beneficial in the matter of completing my Ramanuja studies, as I could trace some ethnic links between people from Gujarat who had followed the progressive penetration of the Vishnu religion in the South through Kanchipuram, Madurai and Padmanabhapuram. Remnants of such a migratory group are evident to the present day. After my stay in Mir Jaffar's palace in Monghyr, between Delhi and Calcutta, about four or five years later, other links have been established in a theory of the relations of the Ramanuja cult both in the north and the south. I returned to Varkala from Kolachal, near to Cape Kanyakumari or Comorin, and soon found myself back again at Fernhill.

 

I VISIT DELHI, BENARES AND CALCUTTA

After my 67th or 68th birthday celebrations at the Somanahalli Gurukula near Bangalore, I started for Madras en route to New Delhi to visit Nitya Chaitanya Yati, who had gone there a year or two previously to start a psychic research centre under the patronage and guidance of a Cabinet minister of the Indian Government, Mr. Gulzarilal Nanda.

 

This invitation was an indirect recognition of some of the ideas that the Gurukula stood for, as Nitya was an avowed inmate and disciple thereof. He took my permission to go, which I readily gave because of the opportunities it presented for larger fields of work and contacts. His work has now progressed and enlarged its sphere and a monthly journal called 'Adhyatma Saroj' has been started by him under the auspices of the Psychic Research Institute. His work shows much promise for the future and the foundation of a great undertaking already seems to be laid. His contacts have increased and intellectuals of the universities in and around the capital of India are being increasingly drawn into the ambit of the influence of the new Institute.

 

After a stay at the Aurobindo Centre in Delhi for about a week, I went to Benares for the first time in my life. It was a surprise to me to find that the famous Shiva shrine of Benares, the Mecca or Jerusalem so-called of the Hindu Religion, was of negligible importance.

 

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It was the broad river that had robbed all the importance that Shiva would otherwise have had for himself. Perhaps the god was glad that a larger part of his glory went to the celestial river that began its beneficial course on earth through the tresses of his hair higher up near Kailas in the Himalaya. The Ganges is a hierophantic presence here on earth of a hypostatic principle of high heavenly value capable of doing good to man for long-enduring years.

 

I participated in the life of an orthodox ashram of Benares and contacted others of different sects. I met pundits and cleared some of my doubts about Jaimini's definition of dharma. I was still limping with the sprained ankle as I wended my way through pilgrim-crowded narrow alleys that led to the sacred shrine of Benares. With outstretched arms one could reach the rows of shops selling holy articles on both sides of the road at once. A stray holy cow often blocked the narrow way of pilgrimage. At the turning place I recognised the black stone image of the Varanasya, the elephant-headed god of auspicious beginnings in absolutism, decorated with glittering tinsel like the Hindu confections made of thick solidified milk for North India's exaggeratedly sweet palate. At the ghat or bathing-place I saw many streams of bathers who have washed their sins away perennially since the time of the ancient horse-sacrifices, forty in number, which lent their historic name to the road leading to the ghat. There were also to be seen throughout all hours of the day dozens of international tourists, mostly from the USA, whose presence on the scene broke its timeless monotony through the ages.

 

Two days after, I found myself in the outskirts of the city of Calcutta, living in a neglected garden-house with its own private swimming-pool and sumptuous living arrangements, to attend an all-India Yoga Conference held at the heart of the city, seven or eight miles away.

 

Besides speaking on yoga for about half an hour at the gathering, I made my first visit to Belur Math, and was shown the room where Swami Vivekananda spent his last days. The swami who took us round was seen to be still capable of being visibly moved by the report he gave of this event, which would perhaps have moved me more deeply in my youthful years rather than when time had turned my fibres of feeling more stern and immune to sentiment, whether for better or worse. Noble sentiments are more a strength than a weakness. After about a week in Calcutta I took a train straight to Madras and Nitya went back the same night to Delhi.

 

377

I AM AGAIN SAVED FOR LIFE ON EARTH

It is said that Lord Clive tried to shoot himself without success three times. In my case I can similarly remember three occasions when my life seemed to be saved miraculously by the intervention of what can only be called divine factors, providence or absolute chance.

 

The first of these happened in my early teen years when I jumped into deeper waters than I could stand in, without knowing how to swim. I sank and floated and drank a lot of water, but onlookers thought I was playing while I was really dying, according to myself. The second escape came when I was preparing and packing to leave Europe after taking my doctorate at Paris. I was weighing my travelling trunk with a lever balance whose big steel knob grazed my ear as I unwittingly lifted the weight from a hook while the balance hung from the roof of a low cellar.

 

This third time the organisers of the Calcutta Yoga Conference had bought me a first-class ticket and I had travelled in comfort for a whole night and till the next midday with only one other passenger opposite to me. The two upper folding berths were unoccupied, but the one on my side had been let down for placing articles on it at night. It came to about my shoulder level. At a junction on the way the compartment had been given a cleaning and the cleaner had pushed up the heavy upper berth to fold it against the wall, but forgot to bolt it in position. When the train was just gathering momentum after both of us had our luncheon, my good fellow passenger offered me an orange. I stood up and was bending to receive it when the unbolted upper berth came down with a bang, grazing my ear again. Gee! I said to myself - what a close shave! Thus I escaped sure death with only a one-per-cent statistical probability to save me. Judged by its effect, this small probability can be equated correctly with one-hundred-per-cent good luck possibility. Life-values can change the complexion of modern probability calculation, sometimes out of all recognition.

 

378

THE BRAHMA-VIDYA INSTITUTE

Returning to Fernhill Gurukula after having my passport re-endorsed and my typewriter put in order at Madras, I was looking forward to the visit of a friend from Belgium, Jean Convent, who had been a member of the group in Gent who closely followed my talks during my 1959 visit to Europe. He came to India after finishing his compulsory military service. The overt and active tempo of life in the West did not suit his quiet artistic temperament and he sought the consolations of philosophy in India. It turned out, however, that even this intellectual and most conceptualised consolation did not agree with him because his interests had long been closely connected with the world of colourful, perceivable works of art. An artist can become passionately attached to works of art - and the world of ideas then seems a pale replica of reality to one with such an all-absorbing passion. One modern painter at least is known to have been a martyr to such a passion, which is a feeling almost unknown in the contemplative East, as far as my knowledge goes.

 

At the Gurukula Convention of 1964 at Varkala, Jean Convent was with me. We started classes on the Science of the Absolute on a levelled part of the hilltop, now named Guru Narayana Giri. A hexagonal pavilion with coconut-leaf thatching gave us shelter from sun and rain for our yellow-coloured pilgrim gatherings, where lessons went on with blackboard explanations by John, Mangala, Nitya and myself for hours on end. A beginning was thus made in a much dreamt-of direction, and the Upanishadic chants preceding each forenoon session had a soul-absorbing charm of their own.

 

All sat in silent mood for the inner feast of ideas after the fire ritual was performed in the spirit of the time-honoured ways of the days of the dawn of the Upanishadic age. The birth of a new spirit and attitude was felt by all who participated, many of whom were seen sometimes to be moved to tears for no real outward reason. It was a new form of Holy Communion known to simple early Christians near the Sea of Galilee. Such a feeling can never sink into nothingness.

 

379

SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY AND EUROPE AGAIN

Earlier in the year John had somehow started a correspondence with European friends, proposing that he and I visit Europe again together.

I did not take this seriously but, as always, kept myself forewarned and fore-armed against any eventualities that the will of the Tao might imperceptibly lay in store for me to comply with in a normal and natural way. I took care therefore not to press any button myself and to let things happen, as it were, by themselves. As Bergson would put it, accidents do not happen to you but you happen to them. The neutral attitude between these alternatives is the correct way of the Tao.

 

Mid-February 1965 marked the seventieth year of my life on earth under the sun. At the Somanahalli Gurukula, 18 miles from Bangalore, my annual birthdays were celebrated with large-scale feasts for the villagers with increasing éclat each year. This time greetings came with gifts of money as well as things from various corners, John and Nitya being responsible for creating some interest.

 

Improvements were made little by little to the straw-roofed huts on the ten acres there bordering on the Suvarnamukhi river, a small rivulet that joined the larger Arkavati, itself a tributary of the great Kaveri River. Swami Devidayananda who took care of the riverside Gurukula retreat loved quiet contemplative ways with a touch of severity which sometimes seemed sad. But all went well, and the new centre improved each year.

 

After the celebrations a party of Gurukula disciples consisting of Mangala, Jean, Prasad, and Devidayan came with me and spent a night at Bhavani, near Erode, where a small birthday ritual was held on the seven-acre hill that the Gurukula was to get there. On return to Fernhill, preparations for going to Europe had in the meantime come to a head. John, who had started the game, preferred on second thoughts to remain behind and let me visit Europe in company with Jean Convent who was himself due to return about the same time.

 

We were to sail from Cochin to Rotterdam by a Dutch freighter with first-class cabin accommodation for about a dozen select tourists. There was a last-minute hitch about a Reserve Bank of India permit to go abroad. I went to Madras at the beginning of May and, on representing matters personally, got over the paper difficulty. The ticket was paid for from Gent by Dr. Joseph Vercruysse who has been uniformly generous to me throughout my two visits. He represents one of my more intelligent admirers who silently looks on and acts only as a friend in need.

 

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The SS. Annenkerke lay along the quayside at Cochin in full leisurely fashion even after numerous friends, including John, Mangala and others had given me a send-off in the luxurious saloon of the ship. The captain and chief steward were specially kind and dignified in their attentions in their formal uniforms and the correct manners for which Dutch people seem to be reputed. Belgians too behaved like perfect gentlemen, although I heard the Dutch mistrusted the Belgians and vice-versa in this matter. I had a luxury cabin with a single bed and a private bath all to myself. Jean Convent had a similar cabin to himself. We sailed on Monday at 10 AM on the 10th of May 1965.

 

 

381

CHAPTER FORTY

 

A HOLIDAY CRUISE TO EUROPE

As a pilgrim or an ambassador or one seeking modern wisdom in the West to correctly relate it with the wisdom of the East - such was the free holiday spirit of adventure in which I found myself soon after my seventieth birthday on board the neat and well-ordered SS Annenkerke of the Netherlands Lines. Although a freighter, it offered passenger accommodation that was better than liner first class and, being limited to twelve passengers or so, had a select distinction of company which agreed well with the leisurely cruising spirit in which I travelled. Jean Convent and I found our places at a separate dining table for vegetarians in the luxury dining hall as also in the smoker's lounge where all gathered for café noir or tea in the afternoons.

 

The tall and brass-buttoned officers also sat with the passengers. We felt as honoured as they seemed to feel, evidenced by the importance they gave to the passengers and their preferential treatment of Jean and I at the Captain's table later on in the voyage. As an oriental bearded Guru with a meek European disciple we were twin cynosures which excited exotic curiosity. We were as much left alone for the same reason, as we left all others to themselves.

 

The ship was to take fully one month to cover what normally would take a passenger ship less than half the time, and was to touch at Aden, Port Said, Genoa, Marseilles, Barcelona and Valencia before reaching Rotterdam on rounding Gibraltar. The ship's schedule was not strict either, for she could spend two or three days in each place as she pleased.

 

THOUGHTS ON SAILING FROM COCHIN

These lazy and uncertain considerations enhanced the prospect of pleasure that the trip meant to me in my mood of the time. Mere pleasure-seeking, being one-sided, would not really have satisfied my deeper-seated hunger to fulfil some serious and purposeful function of high general value in my life.

 

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This factor was luckily ever present within me, as I was seriously planning the chapter headings and sub-sections of the great work on The Science of the Absolute, which has long been my one ambition to accomplish before my life on the planet came to an end.

 

This all-consuming passion often put me in an agony. The birth-pangs of a book often have this form of strange inner suffering, especially just before the chapters get born from the cogitations and notes laboriously gathered months or years before in anticipation of the trial. I had to make many false starts on the proper beginning of the book, which when well begun, as I knew, would be half done.

 

Lifting anchor at 6.15 AM on the 11th of May 1965, the memorable ship sailed out past the familiar harbour residences of friends and through the narrow entrance to the natural harbour between Fort Cochin and Vypeen Island where I had sat many evenings in absent-minded reveries during my college days, about forty-five years before, as already related.

 

Like the time that had glided imperceptibly past, the good ship passed over the placid warm waters of the summer seas, crossing the bar into the open ocean. Memories receded, as also the palm beach of olden days with all its associations, ancient and recent. A mystic air filled the prospect outside as within, as life unfolded itself in the eternal process of being and becoming treated together. Contemplation is made of no other stuff than this strange feeling of joy and regret in which life proceeds forever, whether here or hereafter. We have all felt at one time or another, I suppose, an orphanage in this wide world hereunder, seeking consolation in vain outside while carrying its source within, like children crying for the moon while ready to smile through the undried tear on their cheek.

 

Except for long-span ground swells that tilted the ship as a whole at rhythmic intervals, we had smooth sailing for a full four days. The Chinese chef de cuisine and waiters were good at manipulating meat dishes which we did not eat. The wine too went unasked for at the buffet after dinner. I had ginger ale as a substitute when offered a drink by a fellow passenger. Jean was not such a teetotaller as I, but refused and resisted the temptation most of the time in deference to me. Egg dishes were substituted for meat at meals and sometimes seemed to get on the nerves, but we put up with them with a grin as we looked at each other each time they came. Any protein deficiency in my system due to a rice diet in South India must have been compensated for with a vengeance during those days of voyage.

 

383

STRANGE SIGHTS AT ADEN

 

Old Aden.

 

The Arabian coast was sighted to starboard and the queer port of Aden came in sight soon after on the 15th of May. I went with Jean into the city, thinking of getting a ream of typewriting paper. The shops - which had all makes of typewriters, pens and watches galore, dumped into the free port market that had grown overnight - had all the manufactured goods of Europe at rock-bottom prices. Arab hawkers jumped onto the ship from their small craft waving the best of modern gadgets, all going for a song, from transistors to leather jackets.

 

Next to where our ship had anchored there was berthed the big white-painted P&0 Liner SS Himalaya with about two thousand Australians on board who were going to Europe on a tourist trip. Out of the open gangway from the hold of the ship sallied forth so-called civilised specimens of homo sapiens dressed in the oddest of summer clothes, which they imagined as correctly conforming to the prevailing fashion of Europe where the Australians, mostly of plain peasant extraction, were going. Jean Convent could not control his laughter at the sight of so many straw-hatted and dressed-up men with multiple gadgets like cameras or transistors with them. The sleek women made themselves even funnier by their innocent violation of fashion - amounting sometimes to the murder of plain good taste. Trying to be fashionable is worse than to be honestly dressed in rags.

 

Furthermore, these evidently newly-rich people seemed to be on a spending spree, buying all kinds of things in the shops loaded with junk. They were seen proudly sallying out of the area of new shops set up to cheat tourists who seemed not to care about being subjected to such treatment. Over-industrialisation of one part of the world and poverty at the other must produce such freak individuals and corresponding dumping grounds as marginal economic phenomena. Civilization needs both polarities to operate. Aden presented some features of a shopping fairyland that could fit into the context of the Arabian Nights. Dicken's 'Dombey and Son' would have supplied the new-rich population that moved back and forth from the ship as Jean and I watched them with differently critical eyes.

 

384

MIDNIGHT FEARS AT SUEZ

Lifting anchor on Sunday afternoon, the 16th of May, the ship showed the unsteadiness of an intoxicated person, pitching and rolling in the Gulf of Aden as it entered the Red Sea on the 17th. Lips were held together more tightly. I walked the deck and bridges, visiting the upper children's playroom to cancel from my own inner adjustments the drunkenness of the ship's movements outside. The bad weather, however, did not last long, for clear and calm weather greeted us as we passed the coast of Mecca and Medina and then Mount Sinai, which Jean tried to locate precisely with the help of the detailed American atlas in the smoking room.

 

At the mention of the names of these ancient places dear to the two great prophetic religions, my mind lingered fondly on the opening lines of Milton's 'Paradise Lost', which I had learned by heart in my schooldays in Ceylon. 'Of Man's first disobedience...' I repeated within myself again and again. It put me in a strange mood of reflection on original sin and the sex obsession with which Christian thought had begun to cast its shadow in its later development, against which there seems at present to be a definite protest. After the vogue of psychoanalytic education, youth now tends to be proud of sex rather than to feel guilty as good Christians are expected to. Perhaps this exaggerates the opposite attitude somewhat in the case of existentialists and beatniks. Judged by their effects there is not much choice between these two attitudes to sex.

 

I had developed a fresh mistrust for Western civilization generally after reading Voltaire's 'Candide' late in life. Having also had my own personal experiences with ports infested with crooks and various other adventurers, often in league with the so-called responsible officials belonging to governments old and new, who worked largely through the rubber stamp or paper orders - I was forewarned. The captain had himself instructed caution in ports at night when the doors of cabins were best kept locked against strange pirates or other sea-thieves who might not be saintly enough not to be tempted by open doors.

 

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As the midnight hours went past, we saw the red and green signals of the Suez Canal area where Arabs or Egyptians were known to take liberties with officers of ships in the lawless no-man's belt that often persisted between rival magisterial authorities, especially when birds of passage had to deal with those who gambled with their own lives by way of adventure. Anything could have happened and, unable to compose myself to sleep, I listened to the strange voices near to the Chief Steward's cabin, which sounded highly suspicious. Ladies slept next door to me with their belongings in gold and silver. Wine could tempt some ruffians too, I thought. The conversation in low voices continued for a long time and I could distinctly hear the clinking of glasses - perhaps the young Chief Steward was being blackmailed by some ruffians, officially or non-officially. Night itself, with lurid lights at a distance, could tend to distort or exaggerate dangers in one direction or the contrary, making the coward more timid or the adventurer more bold. Wine, women and gold in strange midnight darkness made inner and outer conditions fearful through the obscurities or the over-activities of the mind suspended between alternative probabilities or possibilities. Bravery consists of arming oneself against all possible dangers and not in being immune or ignorant of such. Thus it was that positive and negative attitudes alternated within me during the midnight of May 19th, 1965.

 

AGONY OF LITERARY CREATION

As the day dawned, a convoy of twenty-five ships was allowed into the Suez Canal, one of the triumphs of British statesmanship of the time of Disraeli and Queen Victoria, now long forgotten except by once-true British subjects like me. I alternately retired into my cabin, sat near the stern, promenaded the deck, or sat in meditation - which the captain noticed from his conning tower as he later told me. I was engrossed throughout the voyage, mostly in the vain frustration of agonising effort to shape the first paragraphs of my great project of giving birth to a full-fledged Science of the Absolute.

 

The subject seemed to need a Himalayan effort on my part, but I persisted with tenacity and finished almost half a ream of typewriter paper that the steward had generously provided me with when I failed to find it in any of the shops of Aden. A score of false starts made by me are still in my files, mostly yet to be discovered, except for the valuable quotations I had gathered in over forty years of library work, which I tried to incorporate intelligently in support of my main thesis in the work.

 

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It was dialectical structuralism in thought to be schematically understood that passionately interested me at the time. All prospects of presenting this subject eluded my reach more and more each day in proportion to my wilful attempts and resultant sense of agony. The very suffering within, however, made the holiday spirit sweeter, as it were, by compensation.

 

A motley flotilla of ships was loading and unloading as I looked at Port Said through the morning mists; some with strange names in Russian, Japanese or Chinese, one of which left, sounding its outlandish siren at midday as we watched. They had miniature human figures moving out of proportion within each ship which seemed bigger or smaller than it actually was by a strange relativity of mutual perspective in visible space. The eye can tell lies as well as the mind. Time can eat up space and vice-versa, leaving humans caught in its reciprocal flux of expansion or contraction. We lay lazily anchored at this port for fully three days.

 

I kept to my writing desk all the days while loading and unloading bangs and crashes went on and stevedores worked the cranes by signals known only to themselves. This fraternity resembled each other in all ports, but also differed in many details of their way of work. The resemblance had to be considered basic and the difference incidental. They must all be considered to have taken birth by the operation of two sets of causes: one of necessity hereunder and the other of contingency governed by God above. Such is said to be the modus operandi of the theory of reincarnation, as Sankara would put it.

 

STROMBOLI AND THE PUDDING

We left the flotilla behind, distributed helter-skelter on the placid blue waters, half-hidden by the gleam of the misty sunlit scene at 10 AM on the 25th of May. Cool Mediterranean breezes soon began, which made the air-conditioning no longer needed. Next day we passed the island of Crete and reached the Straits of Messina at dusk the day after. We went so near to the town at the toe of Italy that we could hear the horns of cars in lines on the roads of Scylla, which Ulysses had to cross, as Homer describes.

 

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It was somewhere in this area, if I remember rightly, that the Chinese chef de cuisine seems to have put on his thinking-cap about something of a surprise to the officers and passengers to justify his as well as their humdrum days. While we were seated at lunch with the nice ladies and gentlemen, some of whom had finished munching tough meats for a third or fourth course of gormandising, the chef himself entered, triumphantly brandishing a gleaming pudding - a special form of confectionery with cream and nuts which was named in the menu after the volcanic island of Stromboli which we were passing, as we could see just at that time.

 

By its associations with Ingrid Bergman's film of that name and its macabre presence showing sheer out of the deep waters in its uninhabited loneliness, Stromboli perhaps haunted the mind of the chef as it could naturally that of any sensitive man or woman. My inner travail perhaps had to have a corresponding numerator outside so as to cancel out to make for a life-feeling where pleasure and pain meant absolutely no difference. Such was somewhat my mood during the time we turned northwards, heading towards Genoa. Although the sea off the coast of Italy became rougher as we passed by, the harbour of Genoa was reached on the morning of May 29th. We lay outside the harbour from 2 AM until berth space was made available and the pilot boat arrived.

 

 

388

CHAPTER FORTY ONE

 

ART REFLECTIONS AND HAPPY HOBOS

 

Marseilles.

 

Genoa, where the SS Annenkerke berthed in dawnlight on the morning of the 29th of May, 1965, was the first European port we entered. Europe has its own special soul, and contact with it brought a sensation within which was intensely interesting in its own way - to my pagan and uncivilized self at least - according to norms and standards that have always kept the West distinct from the East. Port Said and Alexandria were beginning to be forgotten, as also the islands that have figured in the story of ancient Greece from the time of Homer.

 

Now it was Marseille that was coming. The old French port had its own personality. Then Barcelona and Valencia were also to be touched by the ship. These Spanish cities had their own tales to tell of the invasion of the barbarians and of the Armada which marked an important date in the history of England. Then round the Straits of Gibraltar from where we were still to look forward to choppy seas in rough weather for which the Bay of Biscay has always been notorious. By the 10th of June we were expected to reach Rotterdam, passing through the English Channel into the North Sea. Meanwhile the freighter seemed in no haste at all. Sometimes the Captain changed his mind and stayed one or two more days than was scheduled for loading and unloading.

 

The area we were in still had far-off echoes of Napoleon. The glory of Napoleon's story is one that can inspire the spirit of adventure in young people for all time and of anywhere. If we forget the homicidal implication of this tragic memory in the history of Europe, the content and type of heroism that agitated the mind of the Corsican could be included in a category of active mysticism. We should not mix it with values extraneous to its pure content. Mysticism is a liquid that has to be separated from its more active or solid accretions or implications. Activity is horizontal and incidental only; and mysticism refers to its pure vertical content. Seen in this perspective, Napoleon's name can be said to have an ennobling or purifying effect on mankind.

 

389

A SURPRISE VISIT

At 5.45 AM on May 31st we were anchored in Marseilles. Garry Davis, with whom I was in touch, was to come and meet us. He was on his return journey from Nice, where there had been a Conference of World Lawyers at which he had spoken. His point of view, however, seemed too impossible to the others assembled there, but his failure left Garry as undaunted as ever.

 

As I opened the gangway door leading to the corridor of our cabins, it was a pleasant surprise to see Garry's familiar face again, smiling and optimistic as usual, this time though with a beard that he had grown and kept trimmed in French fashion. As it was quite early, no one seemed to have stopped Garry from entering the ship and he came right into my cabin just before the cabin boy brought in the tray of morning coffee. I asked for an extra cup and soon we were all three - Jean Convent of course being the third - sipping coffee together before the ship's crew knew who was on board. Garry cannot usually be stopped from where he wants to enter. There is a Dionysian touch in his personality which I had noticed before. His enigmatic smile had also the same mischievous touch as he talked enthusiastically as ever, and although he had now become the sole breadwinner of a family of five in France, nothing seemed to weigh down on his features.

 

After coffee, I introduced him to some of the other passengers on the ship and Garry really began to do serious canvassing for his World Government among the nice ladies and gentlemen present in the launch which was taking them to the pier. Some took him seriously, while others reacted to him as some kind of curiosity. Garry has always been dear to me and we have understood each other quite well. The basis of our friendship is built on the dictum 'to err is human,' but there are great and interesting errors as well as mean ones. Garry's failings are of formal and pure content and his intentions have always been noble. His good intentions and intrepid actions have sometimes taken him even so low that they could only be considered criminal by the conventional standard natural to the Pharisees. The clear liquid of mysticism in the character of Garry has been evident to my eyes from the very first day I met him on an Atlantic liner in 1950 or so. Our friendship has increased from strength to strength ever since, and it is the steel link of absolutist regard that binds us together. The colour of the wine should not mislead the connoisseur.

 

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Garry went into the city and returned before noon to invite Jean and I to lunch with an admirer of Garry who worked for the Waterworks Department of Marseilles Corporation. After posting our letters, we sat round a table in a cosy flat in the centre of the city. The lady of the house brought one speciality of French cuisine after another, and we chatted of many things, from World Citizenship to Aurobindo and Gandhi. Indian mysticism seems to have taken a strong grip on the imagination of the common European man and woman. Romain Rolland's book on Ramakrishna must have been the eye-opener for many of them, I guess. At the black coffee stage of lunch a Theosophist joined in the conversation, which became more diffuse until it came to an abrupt end.

 

We regained our ship by a taxi, not without hearing some swearing from the driver 'en bon français' against the government which did not do its job properly in letting his cab enter the harbour area without delay. Garry again made himself popular with the people in the smoking room, offering them World Passports with a seriousness and earnestness that was wholly lost on many of them.

 

My own status on the ship was enhanced or degraded by the rumour that spread to the effect that this white-bearded Indian in a brown robe and Basque beret was the Guru of World Citizen No.1. Whether Jean Convent also basked in the borrowed glory is not known to me, but he seemed to be enjoying the situation as a whole.

 

VISIT TO BARCELONA

 

Barcelona Port in the 60's.

 

Our next stop was Barcelona. The name itself had strange and poetic associations in my mind, coming from some accounts of this big Spanish city which I had either read in tourist literature or had heard from tourists themselves. Although Madrid was the capital, that name did not convey the same magic glamour as that of Barcelona, which I considered more beautiful for no actual reason. Sometimes poetic names add to the value of places or things, and a sonorous name itself might unconsciously heighten the reputation of a person, as I have often thought in the case of Rabindranath Tagore. Some names are not good enough to go to bed with, while with others their very sonorousness is definitely an added qualification. Barcelona had some such effect on my mind, and I looked forward eagerly to have even the least contact with the value that this ancient Mediterranean port represented.

 

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On the morning of June 1st, the land off the coast of Barcelona was sighted and then the loading and unloading operations went on for two days. After breakfast, Jean Convent and I went out and sat on the blocks of rock making the harbour embankment. I was still in the throes of the inner agony of giving birth to a full volume devoted to a veritable Science of the Absolute. The task seemed Himalayan and beyond my reach at certain moments, but I was inwardly determined to scale the ambitious heights at any cost. Sitting on the rocks together facing the sea, watching a young Don Juan having a sea-bath in the warm but fresh sunlit Mediterranean air, I went over the whole ground of the various chapters of this magnum opus which was supposed to mark the culminating point of my career as a writer.

 

It was not fair that I unconsciously used Jean Convent as a kind of whetstone for my wits, but he was a meek and patient listener as he has always been. The floods of sheer intellectualism that I poured out on this young man seemed too much for him, as he was not himself an intellectual but rather one who revelled in visual artistic refinements. I must have rubbed him the wrong way by using him without full consent on his part as an experimental counterpart for my own benefit.

 

This was evidenced more and more, as I found him less and less interested in my conceptual metaphysics. He preferred to visit art galleries by himself thereafter without taking me along, perhaps because of the dampening effect of too much intellectual criticism directed at artistic specimens of value. He has his own perceptual standards coming directly from his practical intimacy with a palette and brush with which he mixed paints into holy or unholy combinations. The same afternoon he visited an art gallery by himself and refrained from communicating his enthusiasms to me, but I began to suspect that a subtle disadoption was taking place between us, which later events seemed to prove more clearly.

 

The next morning, leaving the stevedores at their job with cranes dumping cargo with horrid bangs, we sallied out again together and went four kilometres into Barcelona. The customs-houses and other buildings had the same drab look as customs-houses anywhere. We passed a group of simple fishermen mending their nets half-spread on the roadside. This was a picture of ancient Spain as it had always been before the warehouses had been built.

 

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Then, passing the grocers, the cafés and the GPO built in polished stone, we crossed the well-trimmed lawns of the public garden where orange trees with ripe fruit on them served an ornamental and not the usual utilitarian purpose. We sat near a fountain for a while before entering the art gallery of Barcelona a few yards away within the precincts of the park. We paid a small unit coin of Spain and enjoyed visiting the several sections from about nine o'clock to twelve when we had to be back on board ship.

 

IN THE BARCELONA ART GALLERY

Art as understood from the Indian background takes one back to the frescoes of Ajanta. Indian art is neither an imitation of an imitation, nor a mere imitation of nature in an Aristotelian sense. Art in India is meant to reflect contemplative inner values, and line, light and colour are bent to serve some deep mystical purpose. A meditating Buddha with half-shut eyes and with a finger gesture called the jnana mudra, where the details reveal a calm inner attitude of self-absorption, is a masterpiece revealing the mind of the old masters.

 

In modern times much dilettantism passes for connoisseurship in art, and the range of art from pre-Raphaelite times through the Mona Lisa (which is a jocund version of the Madonnas of the Renaissance period) to artists such as Goya, Gauguin, Picasso and Salvador Dali, offers to an untrained Indian such as I, visiting an art gallery such as that of Barcelona, a number of puzzling predicaments. The first rule that I formulated for myself was not to say that any work of art was good or bad in itself. No artist worth the name could have been thinking of valueless absurdities when he devoted his time and energy to some sort of creative work that must have interested him. Every work of art, therefore, wants to say something to the person looking at it and trying to appreciate it. I was willing to place myself in that correct and open-minded attitude as I stood before each of the paintings or sculptures, trying to establish a connection between the mind of the artist and my own mind.

 

I can say straight away that my appreciation was for a life-size marble statue of a woman in dire distress, weeping, with dishevelled hair that covered her features, half-sitting, half-lying prone on a rock, probably by the seashore.

 

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The rock was only half-worked and revealed the scratchings of the chisel, while the body itself revealed the minutest touchings or turnings of muscles in great detail, and was polished to perfection. In every other part of the despairing figure, as I looked at the position of the limbs, I could see the contrition of the agony which she suffered reflected in the tension of the toes and of the leg. Every shape, line and light co-operated in accentuating this intense anguish as if solidified in pure white marble.

 

I stood admiring the details for several minutes. The material of the art and the limitations it imposed on the sculptor, who could not correct even the slightest mistake of chipping off too much, made the work of art a creation in a special sense. The figure had to exist in its perfectly finished form already in the mind of the artist before he could be expected to avoid taking off too much of the marble anywhere, even at a point that involved details of muscles or lines.

 

In a certain sense such a work of art is not the result of a gradually-ascending creative process, but one in which the end is to be treated in advance as given to the mind - and a negative process of elimination of what is extraneous to the art is all that counts. In plastic-art modelling, the technique calls for a reverse kind of creativity. I remember standing in wonder before another piece of similar workmanship in which a nymph about to be ravished by a satyr stood half-changed into a sapling tree. The way the sculptor accomplished the portrayal of the metamorphosis of the maiden into a tree because of her inner effort to avoid the ravishment required another kind of creative imagination which was not only realistic but Platonically idealistic at the same time.

 

In modern India, public gardens and museums are filled with examples of art which are neither classical nor modern, neither Eastern nor Western. Art standards have failed and the foreign standards prevailing now can only belong to the context of caricature or vandalism. Pink-painted Gandhis in public parks under tin umbrellas; and imitation Venus de Milo fountains, with proportions taken from Kalidasa's poetry are, to say the least, an eyesore at present to art lovers of India. Government authorities are very often to blame in this matter, and glorified drawing masters often claim to be considered painters in the true sense. Nothing can cut the soul deeper than bad taste. We can only wish that lost standards will soon be re-established.

 

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The story of painting in the West through art criticism serves the same purpose as Yoga or spirituality in India, because through understanding art we can also understand the workings of the human spirit in all its varied possibilities. The few hours that I spent in the Barcelona Gallery thus provided another piece of art education for me which was missed in India. From old masters to Salvador Dali, who were all represented, I could also see how the colour-solid could be applied as a normalising factor in art criticism, especially in the matter of the choice of primary, secondary, chromatic, achromatic, and clashing or harmonising combinations in the world of line, light or colour. A Rembrandt and a Picasso belong to two opposite cones of the colour-solid which combines these three elements into a unitive structural system. Van Gogh avoided shading, and if he painted a sunflower, would do so avoiding all dark shades; and therefore the theory is that his place is in the top cone of the colour crystal. If one stands long enough facing a painting and tries to talk to it and let it talk to one, one invariably discovers some hidden artistic value. Good taste could thus be cultivated endlessly, and when thought of in terms of self-criticism of the non-Self by the Self, one gets the same spiritual benefit from art as that derived from Yoga.

 

THE HAPPY HOBO OF BARCELONA

Before leaving Barcelona I must not forget to mention how I established contact with a happy hobo. As Jean and I came out of the art gallery and were thinking of lunchtime on the ship, we were accosted from behind by a very happy-looking man, of full size and with full-blooded vitality evident on his features.

 

He was one of those happy hobos of Europe who seem to carry a sort of self-sufficient satisfaction wherever they go. He was sitting on the lawn of the neat park on one side of which there were teenage girls dressed in their regulation school pinafores, who were equally happy, as nature herself seemed to be at that time. With sunlit flowers and sunny oranges on the trees and with the characteristic blue of the Mediterranean sky, happiness was in the air.

 

The hobo seemed to have remarked from my peculiar dress and that of Jean too, who wore blue jeans and an informal jacket, that he recognized some sort of kindred spirits belonging to some other part of the world.

 

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A truly human contact was quickly established between us and it was evident that he wanted us to stay on and talk to him longer - but we had to be in time for the ship's lunch-hour and had to excuse ourselves, not without some reluctance, because the man conformed to a fully-mature type of human being who could be recognized in various forms or degrees of misfitting into normal social life. The beatniks and the mods and rockers may be said to be more modern versions of the same hobo trend of dissociation with normal social life. They represent some sort of anti-social protest, which is not unlike the sannyasin, sadhu or fakir of India. Only the latter belong to a recognized indigenous group accepted by common people within the limits of India. The great God Shiva is a divine Dionysian non-conformist and for this reason, the most adored as the Godhead of the Indian pantheon.

 

There is always a touch of mysticism in any independent, self-sufficient and happy man, and the hobo who accosted us was no exception to this rule. He looked well fed, as also a nice terrier that he carried in a sack with him, which seemed to reflect the same natural happy state. They ate together, slept together and talked to each other, seeming to be fully satisfied with each other's company.

 

Paris is said to have its happy gamins who, like the Gavroche of Victor Hugo, are comparable to the sparrows because of their happy-go-lucky attitude towards life. As long as a person is happy, that is the best he can do according to himself and with himself, and all such individuals should in reality be considered assets rather than liabilities in any society. As an absolutist myself I could not but recognize this, although more respectable economic theories would refer to them as unproductive, wasteful and undesirable elements to be got rid of.

 

Even India might one day get rid of its sadhus for the same kind of scarcity-based economic reason which is not that of old India. Standards of life may be raised, but satisfaction tends to recede from view the more economy is geared to opulence rather than to abundance. A free and happy man can never be a liability to any society. There are happy men of this type to be seen in Paris. Sometimes at the entrance to houses of entertainment there, one sees a hobo into whose pockets the kind ladies seem to put coins spontaneously even before being asked. One of them stood in drizzling rain as I watched him in such a situation. There is always some patron behind each such person, who must enjoy and appreciate the value of such an individual, though perhaps called a nuisance by a man of a different taste.

 

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Freedom must include freedom for all men, including freaks or out-of-the-way specimens who may not conform to conventional standards of behaviour. Very often, as I have found, it is the kind heart of a woman, not necessarily aristocratic, which is behind the happy face of a hobo. The pavement artists of London and their counterparts of Montmartre all have their direct or indirect patrons somewhere behind the scenes; and as long as both the parties are happy, society has, in reality, no reason to complain. The wandering minstrels and the troubadours of more romantic times, even of Europe, were treated as valuable representatives of society. Life would be less interesting without such individuals.

 

VALENCIA

We moved on to Valencia soon after. I did not go out of the ship this time with Jean, who made his visits to art galleries on his own. I was more keenly engrossed in completing the skeleton of the contents of my projected work while putting up with the bangs and crashes of the loadings and unloadings that went on; and also in my protest against some black, big and vicious mosquitoes that seemed to infest the harbour area.

 

It must have been the same Valencia about which Macauley wrote somewhere that here the earth was water and men, women. Life in some Mediterranean regions becomes so easy that it does not present the same struggle as in more Nordic regions. The African coast on the other side of the Mediterranean drew ever closer to us as we passed the Rock of Gibraltar. It was reported by somebody that there was a man who had a family on each of the continents and kept visiting them alternately. Whether or not it was true, it was sufficiently interesting to remember. Continents cannot divide human hearts, because the heart is of a vertical order and geographical space belongs to the horizontal context.

 

NORTHWARDS TO ROTTERDAM

Though it lasted three or four days more, the rest of the voyage was neither exciting nor eventful. On one of these days we had a Captain's dinner, which was a sufficiently interesting event in itself.

 

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The big fat Captain who came from a city in Holland called Bergen (not the one in Norway) was joined by his wife in Marseilles who sat next to him in a place of honour, and Jean and I were given places next to her, perhaps by a concession made to an Oriental mystic and his disciple, as they took us to be.

 

The second officer was a tall, well-built Dutchman who looked as if his uniform and buttons were fitting to him rather than the other way about. I felt like a dwarf near him, but he seemed to be a man of good humour and spirits and of good looks too. I told him for fun that he was so good-looking that if I had been a girl in his village I would have fallen in love with him, and the big officer in uniform blushed under the strain of this unnatural remark of the Indian Guru. I heard him at table making the childish remark more than once when ice cream was brought: 'I scream - you scream'. I was told that these words were taken from a popular film, but in the mouth of a big officer at the official dining table it had somewhat of the effect of a puerile anti-climax.

 

After the sumptuous dinner where the table was loaded with every kind of good thing, all retired into the lounge for drinking and dancing till midnight. I asked for ginger beer as a substitute for hard drinks, which perhaps Jean Convent would have preferred had he not been taken as my disciple. I kept watching the dancing couples, and one of the passengers from Scotland asked me how I enjoyed it, as I neither drank, ate meat, nor danced. As a reason for not drinking, I said to the lady that as long as children were afraid of a drunken father coming home I would not be a party to alcoholism. And if even one pet could be put on a table after one had enjoyed its sight as a living bird or animal, no sensitive person could really eat it - that was my objection to meat-eating. And as for my reaction to ballroom dancing, I remarked that it must have originated in some kind of commercial climate, not the context of aristocratic courtship. But my objection to it was not openly stated, and I suggested that it was like wearing second-hand clothes when genuine ones were available.

 

I noticed also that one of the passengers whom I had seen sitting in odd places in the ship was present as a kind of special concession made at the dinner. She often came into the lounge, as if apologetically, when regular passengers were not there. She wore her hair in mermaid-fashion, letting the tresses flow in front of her face, which I was told was the latest in hair-do styles in Europe.

 

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I pointed to her often as an actual mermaid who had got into the ship somehow, but on further inquiry I was told that she was being taken to Holland as a free passenger at the instance of the Government. She was supposed to work her passage but was never really seen to do so by a sort of tacit concession. She was seen in different parts of the ship like some sort of forsaken mermaid. The mystery vanished when the whole story about her was told to me.

 

We entered the canals leading to Rotterdam from the North Sea on June 10th. People were gathered on the seashore enjoying the sunlight after the last day of late snowfall, and the European summer was just being announced. All on board said we had brought sunlight from the East. As I watched from the deck while we touched the wharf at Rotterdam among its forest of cranes, who should I catch sight of, sitting in a parked car next to the ship, but Martine Gevaert with Marc standing anxiously looking up to spot us. The formalities at the port were negligible and minimal, as they could not afford a full-time passport officer for a simple freighter. The official did not even care to ask for our passports, which in fact said that we were bound for Antwerp and not for Rotterdam. We soon found ourselves driving through the riotous flowers of springtime heavily bending over the fences, as we passed the Zuider Zee and went on into Gent itself within a few hours.

 

 

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CHAPTER FORTY TWO

 

EUROPEAN CONTACTS OLD AND NEW

After racing through the shortcuts and bypaths which Marc Gevaert alone knew how to take, negotiating many a sharp curve on the road, we arrived at Gent. On our way we passed some old Flemish villages, some of them with cobble pavements and humble red brick or grey houses with some old lady watching us from a balcony or sidewalk. We passed half a hundred hedges laden with the last blossomings of spring that had just expressed its full fecundity in nature.

 

As the car passed the main road at Zeveneken (Seven Oaks) where Jean Convent's house was located, he mentioned that he had noticed his father standing in front of it. Jean had now become an absolutist and did not care to stop and see his parents until he first saw me settled in Gent. We crossed the quaint town of Gent by roads which were familiar to me from my previous visit. Gent reminds me of Geneva, which was my first love among European cities with its lake, Rousseau Island and the Darian cottage industries, which kept Geneva both opulent and abundant at one and the same time. Gent is also a university city, accessible by a navigable river from the sea, and by not being too opulent has an atmosphere which is certainly not garish when compared to Brussels and Antwerp.

 

Marc put on the brakes and stopped the car suddenly before his quaint little cottage at Lathem St. Martin. His cottage was located at the fringe of the ample Gevaert grounds, and the atmosphere was very peaceful and quiet. His small cottage was almost lost among the green grass and riotous herbage of late spring. He lived there with his wife Martine and their child Natasha. Although I began later on to consider her the naughtiest girl I ever met, this cute infant just beginning to walk made a lasting impression on me. As hard-boiled as I was, when she shouted her 'yes'es' and 'no's' at me, she became still more interesting. I finally conquered her heart by the magic word 'cookie' which seemed to have a direct effect on her radical psychophysical mechanism. She came to me with outstretched hands and I had to carry her to where the cookies were.

 

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Marc's humbler cottage where Natasha lived was itself a miniature painting. It was furnished in the latest of rough-hewn styles that was just becoming the fashion among ex-aristocratic families in that area. The brick fireplace and unworked planks serving for shelves in the den where Marc did his literary work, warming himself in winter with a fire fuelled by all the leaves and sticks picked up from the garden, also attracted my interest. It was there that his young wife would bring trays of steaming hot coffee many times during the day when he called out for them.

 

My fresh contact with European civilization was just beginning again. Cochin Port in India where I started from and the India it represented were fast receding to the background of my consciousness. I was once again in Old Europe where anything Indian could not really enter into the new context. It was this strange and mutual exclusion of the subtle personality, character or atmosphere that divides civilizations and countries that must have produced the strange feeling in me when I found out that Marc had decided to honour my visit by testing out some new Indian musical records he had recently purchased. This included a nagasvaram (clarinet) performance of South Indian temple music with plenty of drumming. This seemed to produce an antique Indian atmosphere at once in the very heart of the European surroundings where I was placed. Something strangely moved me to tears because of this mixed effect of Indian drumming heard in the heart of Lathem St. Martin. After a sip of Martine's strong and hot coffee, which she made in her pretty little kitchen, we soon found ourselves in the main family house of the Gevaerts.

 

I soon fell into the same routine as I had the first time I was their guest in 1959. At that time I stayed for many months. Father Edgar Gevaert - the veteran world citizen, lover of Rousseau and leader of an original school of Flemish painters - was a wilful patriarch who might very easily belong to the Old Testament. He greeted me with the same cordiality as ever. He had become older and some of his eccentricities were accentuated. The wilful abstruseness of some of his convictions, which had already made him such an interesting character in my eyes, had become further pronounced. He complained of aches and pains all over his body and said he was not far removed from the last of his days.

 

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He had just recovered from a stroke of some sort, but his conversation was as lively as ever. He chatted away while he unconsciously continued his chain-smoking, often burning his fingers because of his absentmindedness due to the absorbing topic he was engaged in discussing.

 

As usual we dined at the open and hospitable table of Father Gevaert. The food could not be called dainty but it had its own unique quality because it was home-made and honest. The vegetables came from the garden where Father Gevaert worked each day and the house was full of his large-size paintings. This all gave a fully hempen and homespun atmosphere to the Gevaert family house. The Gevaerts have always been known for their kindness in the countryside, and the Gevaert girls, now grown up and perhaps beyond marriageable age, often made the country swains look aside and make a whispered remark about their peculiarities, often disapprovingly or not heard by the girls.

 

I felt as important as ever before the dining table at night where Father Gevaert contributed to the conversation by exaggerating the value of heterodox and fully unconventional points of view in the name of the absolutism he said I stood for. If the Gevaerts were queer, I was more so. It was their queerness that made them so interesting in my eyes, and Father Gevaert was possibly the most interesting of them all. When the midnight hour was near, one of the grownup sons, usually Paul, would go into the family wine-cellar to supplement the tea or coffee with wine. The clinking of wineglasses soon sounded as the precious liquid was poured out, reflecting the smiles and gaiety that went round. I sat apart from such new chapters that often began late, and finally excused myself to go to bed while the talk and laughter continued in the dining-room. Thus it was that I inserted myself into the life of the interesting Gevaert family once again.

 

The first night I spent at the Gevaert family table seemed to set the model unconsciously for many similar nights in which I renewed old contacts and made new ones. After a few nights spent at Paul's house, helping his wife Nicole to keep Allan and his baby sister from getting into constant mischief, I was taken by Dr. Vercruysse to his quiet riverside home near the middle of Gent. The children's playroom and kitchenette on the top floor was to be all for me. I spread out my belongings and settled down with my typewriter and papers around me while each night old acquaintances were renewed and new ones were made.

 

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My interest was wholly in continuing my research in every possible direction for further clarifying my work on the Science of the Absolute. All my friends co-operated with me day after day as I explained each evening the new ideas that developed with me. Soon there was a regular group coming to listen to my talks. A Brussels group, led by Mlle. Vishnevsky, Count d'Aarschot and his disciple Noël, all came and sat around listening to me.

 

My early sleeping habits brought from India were rudely broken into. To compensate for this I slept long hours after breakfast so as not to feel dazed at the meetings later on. As I looked through the window of my bedroom I could see one of the canals linking the river Lys. I could also see the tall poplars and singing birds. There was a boat tied up by some cruising holidaymakers down the river where one could also see modern apartment skyscrapers of the latest matchbox style.

 

On Sunday the Gurukula party was fairly well represented at the country house and farm of Walter de Buck which is about 20 kilometres from Gent. Walter was a sculptor and had already been to India where he spent some time in the Fernhill and Kaggalipura Gurukulas. At the time we visited, he was trying to build up a new home in rural surroundings. He belonged to a Flemish family and married an unsophisticated girl who did not care about the French refinements imported into Belgium but preferred to remain a simple and honest Fleming. As the saying goes, a Flemish woman is equal to a man in her ability to manage all normal affairs of life. Balzac went further and said she is the equal of two Frenchmen. Paula looked after her two children with little complaint, even when absent-minded Walter was absorbed in his own world of art, causing him to forget about providing for the family table. In this he had a touch of the beatnik artist, but the negative features of beatnikism were sublimated to a higher level. He was developing into a most popular type of artist-absolutist and had a group of disciples round him.

 

We were to have a Sunday picnic at his farm near the lowlands of the Dutch border. We found ourselves eating a grand lunch, consisting of macaroni and cheese followed by large summer strawberries and cream. We lay lazily on the lawns under the tall fir trees and could hear the cuckoo, so often associated with the cuckoo clock in almost every rustic house in Europe. Both clock and bird succeed in epitomising the spirit of late spring or summer, producing the same echo in the lazy contemplative listener lying on the grass under the trees.

 

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Poets and poetasters have often sung the glory of this silly-sounding bird whose more respectable counterpart is the koel of India. The koel's long-drawn-out notes have inspired Indian poets and mystics. Kalidasa's play Sakuntala praises the koel. The content of this mystical feeling is perhaps milder and more diffuse compared with the strong response produced by the European cuckoo, bursting the human heart at the beginning of summer. The bird and the song are both interchangeable terms, as also the seasons that correspond to the cuckoo or the koel, irrespective of time or clime. No wonder therefore that the bird has often been compared to an eternal spirit, side by side with its feathered fellow-creature of almost equal representation, the skylark. I remember how the sound of the cuckoo made a deeper impression on me that time. The bird was more than a bird.

 

After a day spent in leisurely laziness, where Dr. Vercruysse also mixed with the more disreputable hobos, forgetting his professional status in the city, we returned to town just before nightfall. There was another dinner served by Walter in which jugs of sambhar and rasam were made, with chapatties. We all sat on the ground eating with our fingers, and finished off the pile of chapatties like primitive cavemen. Refinement was ruled out and everyone entered into a gormandising unity of spirit through gluttony. Nobody seemed shocked.

 

SUNDAY GATHERINGS AND THE LAST TALK WITH FATHER GEVAERT

Sunday lunch gatherings were a feature which had become a habit carried over from my previous visit to Lathem St. Martin when the Gurukula was located in a cottage of its own in a quiet riverside location. In principle that Gurukula was supposed to have been absorbed by the new house which Marc Gevaert, the eldest of the disciples, was moving into after his marriage to Martine Christophe, now better known as the mother of that rare character, Natasha, already mentioned.

 

Somehow married life and the open ways of the Gurukula did not seem to go together, in spite of the open-mindedness of Martine. Spiritual patterns of behaviour nonetheless have a way of repeating themselves atavistically. There is a subtler wilfulness that develops in that direction once a habit has been formed.

 

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Although I was not keen on repeating the classes held on Sundays during my prior visit, a repetition of a similar gathering took place almost automatically, as it were, by common consent. I was still the guest of Dr. Vercruysse, a name which was associated with deep-rooted Paganism, which flourished in Gent full-blast before the coming of Christianity. It was at his home that many contacts with books and personalities were cultivated. I even met two professors of physics.

 

The next Sunday gathering took place on July 3rd. We counted about 55 people. The Gurukula homam (fire sacrifice) was again repeated by common request in the Gevaert family house. Céline and Mother Gevaert co-operated with the preparation of a sumptuous Indian dinner. Father Gevaert had been convalescing from some kind of nervous breakdown after some days of anxiety which he had given to his family over his dubious health. He complained of pains and long sleepless nights. He was composed enough, however, to talk of his own death now and again. I told him of the analogy in the Upanishads of the king having to get up from his seat before the ministers could depart with him even if they wanted to. The king represents the mukhyaprana or chief vital air and the other tender groups that were at the base of vitality were such that even one's afflictions could not bring about a general exodus, however intensely the preparations for partial departure might be felt by the person concerned. Going from one life to the next has also been compared in the Upanishads to the flight of a swarm of bees from their hive going to a new hive with the queen bee in the lead. Another Upanishadic analogy is that of a caterpillar reaching the tip of another blade of grass from the blade it is on. It does this by stretching out and only letting go when it has a hold on the new tip. The snake shedding its skin on a discarded anthill while it gets a more shining one is another example from the Upanishads. The departure of the pranas has been compared also with a horse shaking off its loose hair, which represents the items of good and bad merit which go to one's friends and enemies. Life cannot depart without having a method in its supposed madness.

 

Father Gevaert's talk revealed to me the imminence of this event, which I could clearly anticipate. His zest for life and strong convictions were not however weakened in any way. His perverse absolutism, implying an unconventional attitude to life by which he refused to be a mere 'yes man' in society, still made him one of the most interesting people I have ever met.

 

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He insisted on saying that the fathers-in-law of his own dear sons had stolen their affections from him. One of his elder daughters, Céline, was his secretary and chief support. She was almost like his shadow throughout his last days. They were as inseparable as Oedipus and Antigone. The father turned for the approval of his favourite daughter, even for some of his idiosyncrasies, which he readily received from his quiet and docile fair maiden daughter. He was an ideal family father and an absolutist. Even his perversity was an ornament. His unique kind of absolutism only heightened his character by a sort of double negation. He could easily be as much a pagan as an Old Testament patriarchal head of a family. Many of his paintings revealed his exuberant love of life with a touch of Old Testament suffering belonging to Lot or Job. True Christianity often reveals this paradox and proves that the sacred and the profane can complement each other without entering into any conflict.

 

Father Gevaert had recently published the first volume of his 'La Nation'. He was just finishing the second volume with his final remarks. The first volume referred to the Garden of Eden and man's first disobedience through the poisonous guile of the serpent. After the class was over, the conversation I had with Father Gevaert, which was the last meeting on earth for us, turned on the theme of Christianity as opposed to Paganism. When I said that even stone and mud have their own value in the total axiological situation in life, he seemed to be rubbed the wrong way. He protested saying, 'What is the good of a broken chair, for example? An object has to be beautiful before it can be good. Mud and stone are not dignified enough to be fitted into a proper Christian world of values where high heavenly values alone count. Even the golden calf is too pagan to belong to such a world. Flowers and fruits are beautiful, but not the worship of the golden calf.'

 

Father Gevaert's art revealed a strange mixture of the pure and the pagan, and he had not yet made up his mind about the value represented by the golden calf. He tried to combine a worship of Bacchus with Jehovah. I was for a minute taken aback by his question about a broken chair and its uselessness and lack of value. Still I was resourceful enough to be able to evade the situation by saying that if a queen had to cross over a puddle of mud a broken chair could always be used instead of a courtier's velvet cloak, as with Sir Walter Raleigh.

 

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Although the golden calf could have its pagan value when put in its proper place, my answer seemed to silence the old gentleman, who went home and seems to have added a postscript to his unpublished second volume in which pure Christian values were capable of being replaced by earthy ones, however humble, when time and circumstance enhanced their vital value to life.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER FORTY THREE

 

SEARCHING FOR A GURUKULA IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE

If you ring the doorbell at any one of the residential houses in most of the cities of central or northern Europe in early summer, you will most likely be responded to by a girl in charge of the vacant house whose sloganised words are 'à la campagne' - gone off to the countryside. You are expected to be satisfied and turn away.

 

This state of exodus to the South in search of warmer seas and bluer skies has become almost a craze or a fashion, not to say passion, not only for the middle classes but percolating to much lower economic strata. The richer group plan larger overseas travels, and intellectual life in universities remains only nominally alive. The professors themselves prefer to wander like hobos, sometimes with a guitar or a paintbrush in their hands, having a free time after the drudgery of the darker winter months when they really work hard.

 

WORLD OF THE AUTOMOBILE

There was therefore no use in my trying to seek any more intellectual contacts in the cities of northern Europe. The contagion of the love of the Rivieras, whether Spanish, French or Italian, did not leave me unaffected by its craze, which amounted to a sort of fever. Jean Convent had had his car overhauled and correctly conditioned and was waiting eagerly to make a dash across France, passing through Ermenonville, Paris and Fontainebleau; through the undulating countryside of Provence to the very borders of the Alpes Maritimes.

 

Jean by temperament loved fast driving and was also proud of the fitness and performance of his car, which had its unforgettable features for me because it opened out to my view a post-Hitlerian Europe of straight autostradas, sometimes fifty miles long.

 

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Dozens of parallel lanes were marked out on which one kept the car at top speed, doing nothing more than touching the steering all the time. These autostradas fitted the spirit of the automobiles correctly - if they had any spirit at all except what was derived from gasoline. One  entered where a certain number indicated the starting point of the race where a policeman, who resembled a marionette or an automaton in his movements, received the cash and delivered the ticket with a 'Thank You' and a bell which gave the OK for one to set off. All was correctly decided upon and no accidents were supposed to happen at all. But even under such strict conditions the love of blind speeding for its own sake caused graver accidents than ever, as in one case I heard about where a whole family was crushed to death while they parked for a minute in a side space declared to be safe for such purposes. Free-spirited automatic drivers keeping their own speed and directions were sometimes oblivious to the contingency of a family thus taking it leisurely by the roadside as in the olden days. It had dramatic consequences too gruesome to imagine.

 

ROUSSEAU'S ERMENONVILLE

 

Rousseau's tomb at Ermenonville.

 

On the Gent-Paris route the first lap of the journey that lay before the adventurous spirit of Jean Convent was the landmark of Ermenonville, for which we had to take a side road from the main autoroute. It was the place where Jean-Jacques Rousseau is said to have spent his last days in a castle by a lakeside and an extensive park which seems still preserved intact by the Touring Club de France. Strangely also it has a region covered by sand-dunes which seems to put a bit of Africa into the heart of northern Europe. This is used as an entertainment park for children who ride live camels or a mechanical merry-go-round.

 

One enters these historical preserves enclosing the lake, the park and the original tomb of Rousseau (his body is in the Panthéon in Paris) at the centre of the island of poplars bordered by extensive lawns with conifers of all varieties, making of his place of last repose a calm paradise reflecting his own love of nature's peace.

 

We picnicked in some of the wayside thickets and parked the car outside the gates while we walked on the lawns round the lake (including some sort of universal temple of peace, half-finished and neglected by some Rousseau-worshipper of his time), not omitting to notice some imitation 'prehistoric' remains on the rounds; but we could not help being affected by the same spirit of that Nature which made Rousseau exclaim at the very opening sentence of his Emile: 'Everything is good coming out of the hands of the Author of things; all degenerates in the hands of man.'

 

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Nature with Rousseau was not just the love of nature poetry, as with Wordsworth or Keats, but included a state of the soul understood in deeper philosophical terms. Nature referred to the whole of the habitual dispositions proper to human nature. When the spirit is tuned to such a Nature, one could become as sentimental as Rousseau himself, as when he is said to have shed his tears in Lake Léman at Geneva for no other reason than by mere sympathy with its beauty. Although the sturdy English spirit of an H.G. Wells would call this behaviour undignified and sentimental, in the contemplative mystical spirit that was my own I found here a sympathetic light and an echo which gave me perhaps the surest contact with the soul of Europe, whose presence I had not even seriously suspected during my superficial student days in India.

 

Rousseau lived there with his servant who was also his life-companion, married only nominally to him after she functioned as such for many years. She was only a common representative of her sex and bore him two children whom he is charged with having neglected. In spite of his apologies for such and other reasons which generous spirits must grant to such a great soul, there are prudes and gossipy old women who still enjoy pelting him with this same stone which they picked up light-heartedly from his own deep confessions, pretending to be morally superior to Rousseau himself. Thérèse herself is said to have had her own failings as all human beings have. This is just what makes them human, and God himself must have left a margin for this. No flame can be considered utterly smokeless except when the flame and light are treated as the same.

 

With such thoughts we walked out of the gates of Ermenonville park into a wayside restaurant, and as we sat sipping our cups of strong French coffee, the proprietor himself sat at our table and began a most interesting conversation, saying that he had a son-in-law in Bombay who once sent a whole dinner cooked in India for some function through the Indian Embassy in Paris. This proprietor was M. Henri Levet, a sort of bibliomaniac specialising in rare manuscripts referring particularly to Rousseau: so much so that he could be said to be buried in a Rousseau world wherein he found full satisfaction for himself.

 

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He soon offered to waive the bill for the coffee and was so interested as to conduct me across the pebbled road where he showed us many etchings, emblazonings and rare prints which he said no Rousseau collection elsewhere possessed.

 

This contact has since then grown in intimacy, and a whole group of Rousseau pilgrims met in the same place on September 26th, to which event we shall come presently. After this pleasant interlude, filled with reveries of the solitude of Rousseau, we were soon driving through the main autoroutes, especially pronounced as we came to the great city of Paris, for whose embellishment much American money seems to have flowed. The rest of the journey was not much more than a press-button business, except when nearing the busy outskirts of that great city which really began, when measured outwards from the centre, where the Metro stations ended.

 

WITH GARRY DAVIS IN PARIS

Garry Davis had already telephoned to me at Gent and given me the address where I had to call on arriving at the heart of Paris. We had to contact him at his office to confirm the hotel reservation he had made somewhere near La Madeleine. He took care of the charges himself and we were lodged in one of those typical Parisian hotel rooms with big windows fitted up with lace curtains overlooking the quiet garden of some big office building. The prices of hotels in Paris, which I remember to have counted at less than twenty francs a day, had soared up more than a hundredfold; and even in gold francs, each of which was worth a hundred times more than when I first knew Paris in 1928, had soared very high indeed. I was not used to such high costs and did not therefore prolong my stay in that costly city which better suited the pockets of American businessmen or their staff.

 

Garry was working for the Culligans now and, although not yet affluent, was heading towards some financial stability, being in charge of sales of their water-softening devices in a large area. He came with two important friends interested in World Government, one of whom had read my Memorandum on the subject and was interested in meeting its author. He came with his lady friend who was of Indian origin though now fully domiciled as a Parisienne. Garry came back after dinner with these friends and we talked till about midnight.

 

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He promised to come early the next morning, which he did as we were preparing to pack and depart after a typical petit déjeuner served in the room.

 

There is something unchanging which persists even though Paris is forever changing its façade. Bathrooms had to be fitted into odd corners of bedrooms as more and more standardisation of accommodation became imposed by the pressure of modern demands. Hotels thus lost much of their classical air and proper Parisian ways had to bend low to please the standard demands of today. The true spirit of Paris must have felt humiliation.

 

Garry had just enough time to discuss plans for meeting at Ermenonville on Sept. 26, and to discuss his other ambitions about World Government, enthusiasm for which has persisted with him at all times that I have met him - with equal fervour though with changing stress on aspects of the same problems for One World. He was more subdued and mellowed in his ambitions now and felt cowed down as a breadwinner for about half a dozen of his family. The depth of his absolutism was, however, always the same, and this was what made our friendship equally dear to both of us. Nothing else was interposed between this love of the Absolute. We understood each other fully and took the cash of absolutism from each other, letting all other credits go to the winds.

 

Our friendship thus got a character of being one of a unique type. It was based on something beyond good and bad. Later letters from Garry have helped to confirm this belief and shown amply that good friendships can effect changes on both sides by an osmotic interchange of interests, always in the interest of the absolutism that must prevail above all else. The bills were all taken care of by Garry as he waved us off from the pavement in front of the hotel at nine that morning. I could not help but notice the weight that seemed to hang on his features as the responsible father of a family trying to make both ends meet. Prodigality and parsimony are hard to combine, except in a neutral absolutist dedication in life.

 

A COTTAGE IN PROVENCE

The leisurely pleasures of travelling through the countryside of old France are now nearly forgotten except for a short stop for lunch off the main road near Fontainebleau.

 

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We sped along at a high rate, passing forested areas, crossing famous rivers and bridges and many-monumented city squares and gardens. We stopped again for a cup of coffee at Valence and, after a short spell of ease under the plane tree avenues in front of a quaint cafe, already Provençal in style, we entered the more undulating country roads near turreted castle hilltops here and there as we drove on in the afternoon through narrower and more winding roads. Sometimes we passed neglected churches reminiscent of the Middle Ages, and the landscape soon became that of the familiar grey-coloured stones piled up to form walls and spires of places of worship, some of which were still attended by Christian believers.

 

Lyons was a typical Provençal town that we passed soon after, with a panoramic view of the hills near round Mount Ventoux, an area where retired artists and authors loved to live in renovated houses often with adjoining grottoes sometimes used by hermits in ancient days, as also, more rarely, in modern times by those who love solitude.

 

Soon Jean found a narrow avenue which went into an open space in full view of a grand old pile of stones which was lit by floodlights at night so as to reveal the antique beauty of the church, marking the transition between early and modern Christianity. A neglected Roman road was cut through a valley nearby, and it was on its precipitous sides that Alma, one of the Gevaert family, lived in her rumble-tumble renovated house with Bob, her husband, an engineer who worked at Grenoble and came only on weekends to visit his wife and three children. The last of these was Bernard, a typical enfant terrible of seven years or so.

 

The family was at supper when the car drew up on the upper lawn, from where rude steps led downwards to the cosy but antique-styled dining room. Beds were all ready for us in barn-like rooms or lofts at a higher level than the dining room. The cool air had a bracing and life-giving freshness which made me think of my own home in the Nilgiris, where the air, though equally bracing, seemed to lack that inwardly nourishing quality which, except when the cruel Mistral blew over Provence, gave to the air of the Alpes Maritimes a refreshing quality of its own. Here I received some letters awaiting me from India and America, and rested my tired limbs after long speeding through highways. I must have dreamt of Old India although I do not remember the dreams clearly. Dreams are best, anyhow, when quickly forgotten.

 

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PLANS FOR ANOTHER GURUKULA

My stay in and around Mirabel-aux-Baronies (the little town near which Alma lived), that beauty spot surrounded by a range of much-furrowed hills, lasted from July 8th to August 2nd. Some of my friends had the idea of exploring this region in view of a possible Gurukula centre. Marc Gevaert had taken the first initiative and had entered into an understanding with one M. Chamberger who, with his pretty wife of Indian extraction, was himself the founder of a spacious home for artists and idealists; the house dominating a whole hilltop at a place called Piégon. The idea was to merge a Gurukula community in this centre and to run both on revised lines after my arrival. But petty clashes of interest split the minds of the two leaders concerned and they fell apart.

 

However, the plan for a Gurukula was pushed further by Marc, who located a beautiful abandoned city next to Vaison-la-Romaine which fully represents, even now, a whole array of exhibits of Roman colonisation of the South of France, the Roman 'Province'. Caesar's Gallic wars must have been carried out here. The remains of forts, causeways, aqueducts and whole areas strewn with amphitheatres and other monuments of Roman colonisation give to this region, with its olive groves and orchards laden with various fruits, some features of a much-coveted paradise. The blue skies and mild climate attracted holidaymakers.

 

Marc went so far as to pay an advance for a large domain of land with a barn and living rooms within its precincts. As he could not fulfil the conditions of payment in time, Madame Vishnevsky of Brussels, herself interested in a kind of health and cultural centre, paid for the land, and my hopes of using the same for a Gurukula centre were still high. The nucleus for a self-sufficient Gurukula with its own cooking arrangements, library and classroom, was established in the upper rooms of Alma's own house at Mirabel. Visitors came to this tentative centre and I conducted a homam (fire ceremony) on Sunday, July 18th, at 10 AM in the large garage of the half-renovated house. A group of interested people from the surrounding area attended this function and were favourably impressed by the ritual and the Indian dinner that followed, but quite an equal number of the more conservative type seemed to have dropped off, although having previously been sympathetic to my projects and plans. The atmosphere was surcharged with a revised form of Catholicism; and Bohemians, both artists and authors, had their own free ways.

 

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Mr. and Mrs. Ratel, who were highly sympathetic to Indian spirituality, lived in a sumptuous house not far off. They had more pronounced mystical predilections, and my own matter-of-fact and basic approach did not have that touch of luxury or other distinction to appeal to them completely, as I could see. I tried to buy a piece of land with a grotto and a spring next to Alma's house and, while still living with Alma, was interviewed by the broadcasting officer of the Marseilles area who, with his wife, recorded a long interview with me. Later in the same area the television authorities screened me sitting near the grotto I was bargaining for and talking or walking with the people in various colourful postures. I only heard reports of this television programme in which I became a proverbial Indian swami so as perhaps to be recognized readily if I should go there again any time. But I left before popularity could follow at my heels and curiosity could not be satisfied.

 

PROJECTS AND HOPES

I visited another site of forty acres where a friend with similar ideas lived, a site which had forests, ravines and grottoes. This place, in the region of Mirandol, had an interesting history of its own in which my hostess was a specialist, and rattled away with details which were all easily forgotten. I had hopes of linking my ambitions with this couple, but the plans fell through again for vague reasons.

 

The arrival of a daughter of Mme. Vishnevsky, along with the Comte d'Aarschot and his disciple Noel who had full sympathy with my plans, having visited me earlier at Gent, took place late one evening when we were about to retire at Alma's place. They had driven all the way from Brussels and wanted only to go to bed straight away, which they did on improvised beds. Madame herself was to arrive next day and my hope was still to see if something favourable would not happen if I followed the lead of the Tao in proposing to go with this group to the same site for which Marc had bargained first.

 

Thus we left in two or three cars for the hilltop a dozen kilometres off where the farmhouse with a spacious loft and a drawing room below stood neglected and unoccupied, dominating the Roman city of Vaison already described.

 

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Noël, disciple of the Comte d'Aarschot, wanted to make a living picking fruit in the area for some time at least, and joined me to begin to live in this new place by ourselves, while the more respectable company found rooms in country hotels nearby and visited me off and on.

 

Here I lived from July 23rd to August 2nd, again nourishing in my mind the chronic weakness of wanting to form a Gurukula in some unknown or new place - a pattern of behaviour which has haunted me all my life since my college days. I could hardly look at a beautiful hilltop or valley without imagining myself living there, grazing cattle or growing vegetables. Although such a project did not actualise, life at Vaison gave me almost the same satisfaction as if it had. Noël Michel was a good listener to all I said while we cooked and washed together using the old-fashioned iron stove fed by logs of wood found in plenty all around, which he helped each day to gather. Dr. Megong, who was interested in what I taught, although affiliated to his own macrobiotic school of dietetics and treatment from his mentor - a Japanese called Oshawa - was also a good listener, as he took profuse notes of all that I said, for use with his own quasi-religious congregations in and around Bruges in Belgium.

 

My second fire ceremony was conducted at Vaison on July 23rd. I did not extend formal invitations by name, and as a result much of the rice and curry which I had cooked, anticipating a spontaneous crowd, had to be consumed by a group of unexpected visitors in the evening. The ceremony was held under a cicada-infested lime tree, the shrill voices rising and falling in crescendos, having a note of wilful persistence and an orchestral rhythm of their own throughout the summer days.

 

PEACHES AND THE POPE'S PALACE AT AVIGNON

 

The Popes' Palace at Avignon.

 

We put in a visit to the fashionable centre of the little historic town of Vaison-la-Romaine, as I expressed the wish to eat ice cream, a gesture which I made to Marc in gentle protest against the chivalrous exaggerations of macrobiotics which seemed to have affected the company present, consisting of the Count and his disciple and Madame Vishnevsky's own family. We peered at the Roman statues through the railings and walked with Sunday holidaymakers through the amphitheatre still being used, and returned to our hilltop again.

 

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On other sallies outward by car, which were several in number, Madame Vishnevsky drove me in her Volkswagen throughout the countryside adjoining Orange and Avignon. The Pope's Palace at the latter place, not far from the Pont d'Avignon, with its huge proportions and dimensions, was a revealing site which helped me to demonstrate how the Papacy prevailed in all its force, even outside Rome itself. Thus I had a chance of drinking fully of the atmosphere of Romanized Provence during the best part of the season, for peaches and plums galore could be plundered or had for the mere picking, because only the best grades went in tissue-papered baskets to the wayside shops in towns. Under the full avenues of lime trees, Madame Vishnevsky treated me to coffee and cakes on the pavement seats and I remember pocketing the fancy sugar packets with a sense of kleptomanic enjoyment in doing so.

 

Greek tragedies were being enacted to crowds of thousands by international actors in the courtyard of the Pope's Palace. Avignon was caught in full holiday spirit, but I had no time for interests other than my main work of writing my last big book. However, I did meet an interesting actor and his wife, who stopped specially to greet me, seeing an Indian waiting near the central fountain for Madame Vishnevsky to return with her car repaired and reconditioned. The beautifully bangled Turkish lady who sat in the car insisted that the husband greet me as she had done, because she had, as I understood, recently visited Bombay. Such wayside friendships have their own sidelights of interest which sometimes could even be unforgettable.

 

ON THE ROAD TO ROME

On returning again to our own new home, I understood from Madame that her husband had his own business-like plans for the place, and my dreams soon faded away into the background again, and Marc's payment was to be adjusted or waived. The search for a Gurukula in the South of France thus came to a close because I too realized that such a centre away from the heart of Europe would only be duplicating conditions already available in India for the Gurukula movement. My mind turned to Gent itself, which is not an uninteresting city, more useful for possible visitors from India to benefit from contacts, equally accessible to and from London, Paris, Brussels and Berlin.

 

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On August 2nd, Jean Convent, who had been spending his days painting with an artist lady of his own age, teaching each other their particular techniques, came again for a long cross-continental drive through Avignon to the environs of Rome. The passport office of Avignon was closed and we had to think of Nice as an alternative. So we went at breakneck speed throughout, taking bypasses through canyon regions, stopping for refreshments only at long intervals.

 

I should have remembered to mention the sad news that Father Edgar Gevaert had died in Gent two days before we left Vaison. Alma brought the news to our residence on the day we were out in Avignon. She had already left Mirabel for Gent when we went there to get details. Her father seems to have had a peaceful death and collapsed while working in the garden, having sent his daughter Céline to England to save her the shock of his death which he must roughly have anticipated. Thus ended the life of one of the most interesting personalities I met in Europe. He was a combination of Paganism with a perfected form of Christianity, with both art and authorship to his credit, together with haunting music and a staunch sense of world citizenship. He was an honest man although not necessarily logical in his words by conventional standards, even though such were his intentions.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER FORTY FOUR

 

SUMMER DREAMS IN ITALY

I had known Italy before and had lived near Venice and in Rome and enjoyed the beauty of the Bay of Naples. I had several times travelled the length of the leg-shaped peninsula and spent several months too, in Syracuse in Sicily. Italians loved their country in a way slightly different from what the French or the English temperament permitted. One thought naturally in terms of poetry and lisped words inspired by the Muses more easily there.

 

The prospect of passing Florence interested me much while I waited in the public garden of Nice, as Jean Convent and Herman van Hecks were buying ripe peaches for our lunch. It took one full day for the grand Italian consulate officials to get the consul to sign a visa for me to cross the French-Italian frontier. When at last we picked up the passport after queuing for it, I even suspected that the officials enjoyed the suspense and subtle cruelty involved in obstructing simple movements on God's good earth.

 

Just at the time we were passing Nice the papers had headlines about what they called 'the menace of nudists'. But we were soon driving fast again through the French and Italian Rivieras with the summer craze for beach life lingering on with its unabated fever. We passed through many interesting Italian towns and stopped at midday for a wayside river bath which was a joy in the summer heat. The train to Rome passed near the river on whose sand banks we sat picnicking soon after, and I remembered how I had passed by that same train about thirty-five years before.

 

At dusk we found a place to sleep high up, commanding a view of the Gulf of Genoa, and in the early morning we continued and soon entered Florentine country. We stopped for a very short period of sightseeing in Florence itself in the early afternoon. The size of the monuments and buildings impressed me again and made me think of a culture that imposed such an influence on European civilization, shaping its art, politics and religion.

 

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HALF-PAGAN UMBRIA

We passed through the regions of Umbria and, expert driver as he was, Jean could not avoid a small accident at the market place of Perugia. This was a dream city built on a spacious hilltop with the expanse of the clear green lake Trasimeno nearby; with well-fed cattle grazing on the slopes where the undulating land was covered with fruit-laden orchards and olive groves. No wonder St. Augustine spoke of a City of God and the Greeks of an Acropolis. The Bible has its idiom of a house built on a rock - all of which seem natural in this Umbrian countryside.

 

Dante was associated with this area in his day, and the monasteries of St. Francis of Assisi found in the abundance of the place a natural self-sufficiency, especially for the numerous communities of nuns who must have lived happily, judging by the numerous remains of convents and cloisters even today. No wonder this land was the cradle for Romanized Christianity. Its abundance favoured the Paganism on which what were called Christian ways had to be constantly enforced; and even now one can hardly say whether the forces of Paganism or true Christianity gained supremacy in this land of good food and wine in plenty. At least I had the impression that the nuns that I saw here and there looked very normal and happy and the priests also tended to be on the side of well-fed specimens. It showed how Paganism could still subtly defeat the demands of true Christianity.

 

ON THE ROAD TO ROME

All roads lead to Rome - which was not built in a day. Rome still has the Appian Way, and the road on which I was moving was a highway traversing the Etruscan countryside. The Papacy and Roman Christianity were products of the way of life and thought of these ancient people of the city of the dead about which I knew only vaguely, although I had visited the tombs three or four decades before. My education about them was still largely incomplete, and I wish to make amends for it one day. My interest was in the actual beauty of the countryside which presented itself stage by stage as we drove away from the lakeside into regions where St. Francis lived with his nun-disciples drawn from the cream of the aristocratic life of that region, of whom St. Clara was the head. St. Francis' own religion resembled that of the Aryans in its love of the Sun, so dear to Julian 'the Apostate'.

 

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The dividing line between Paganism and Christianity was very thin with St. Francis, but the Pope of his days evidently saw no objection to the particular form of Pantheism that St. Francis represented. This must have been because, as I have just said, the Papacy itself was a product and not the source of the thought that Umbria represented in its long history. My later talks with the Curate of Labro have confirmed the truth of this statement, because the history of Count Vitelleschi and the attitude of the Labro priest sufficiently evidenced superiority over the authority and the doctrines of the Catholic Church.

 

ARCADIAN PLENTY

 

Labro.

 

When we had travelled far enough towards Rome to look out for signboards showing where the roads bifurcated to Piediluco from Temi, the winding roads went through valleys and hillsides. We could not mistake the beautiful lakeside city of Piediluco which Madame Ottavia Vercruysse had already described as within easy view of her own hill-top ancestral castle of the Vitelleschi which dominated the village of Labro clinging on its slopes.

 

The rays of the setting sun lit up the whole castle-topped hill as we were trying to locate our destination for the day so as to end the long journey. After a few more unexpected turns we were right within the grounds of Labro and parked the car on the pebbled side of the winding road so as to be as near to the castle as possible. We had then to walk several yards through antique roads with narrow alleys and arches or steps to come soon to the pebbled courtyard of the castle. Vinyards surrounded the courtyard below the eaves over which the castle battlements rose high, and from where a panoramic view was presented of the whole countryside about thirty miles distant all around. The towers were built with crude stones picked locally and, although crumbling here and there, were considered quite safe.

 

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LAY NOBILITY AND PAPAL AUTHORITY

I had been invited by Madame Ottavia Vercruysse, one of the direct descendants of the line of nobles of the days of the earliest popes, to this castle with an interesting history. The big Encyclopédie Larousse mentions this name and indicates how one of the Vitelleschis was a rival of a Pope in ecclesiastical authority, though remaining a lay nobleman still. Knight errantry and the spreading of the gospel must have gone together in those days in ways hardly imaginable now. Thus it was that a Vitelleschi ancestor was confined and fatally poisoned by order of a Pope. But the next Pope seems to have tried to make amends for this crime by granting the family a hereditary pension, which accumulated fortune, as the story was told me, remains unclaimed to the present day.

 

Ottavia's father, the last of the nobles of that line, had his fortunes in far-off Brazil, and cared for his family castle only by way of remembering his blue blood. The royal apartments of the castle were still kept intact, with gilded furniture, coats of arms and other accoutrements reminiscent of days when knight errantry and spiritual lordship vied with one another in the Italian countryside.

 

The courtyard, with its chequered summer shadows of evening enclosed in tender green vine creepers with towers above them, was filled with a group of children playing hide and seek, and among them I could not mistake little Natasha who had been invited by Aimé and Ottavia to spend her holidays there with their own and other children who were to come in a few days. Natasha was no other than Marc Gevaert's eldest daughter who had come in advance of him with her mother Martine. Two helpers in the household, Bianca and Dina, carried typical pitchers on their heads, full of clear water from a spring on the slopes of a hill, and water was also available within the courtyard itself in picturesque fountains fitted under arches.

 

THE PAST INVADES THE PRESENT

The whole place seemed an antique painting come to life, and I myself as a bearded Oriental swami from India and part of the scene, found it at first difficult to fit in with the holiday spirit that prevailed. But Ottavia, who had always shown special consideration for me from the time of my earlier visit to Gent four or five years before, soon put me at my ease by conducting me to an apartment distinguished with antique gilded furniture and paintings, fit even for Louis XIV himself.

 

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Original old master paintings in full size hung from almost every available wall space both in this royal bedroom and in the adjoining reception hall which was filled with coats of arms, helmets and armour, preserved as in a museum but arranged in a liveable way. I spread my papers and books in this hall which had within it just that long table and chairs for all the knights under their chief who must have had many nightly bouts and carousings with a smattering of beautiful ladies who, I am sure, must have added to the complexity of the situation.

 

I could take my early morning cold baths in a modernized bathroom which Ottavia had taken care to install under an adjoining vault, and thus soon I felt quite happily settled down for the next two weeks. For writing, my thoughts were fixed on my still-vain attempts and agonies at getting started on my magnum opus, the pangs of whose birth had by now lasted several months - nay even years. I was still reading rare books from which to glean support for schematism or structuralism, and just then I was reading the pre-Socratic hylozoist philosophers.

 

The castle window opened out below the battlements and towers into the cool autumnal air that was beginning to be evident already in late summer. As I thrust my head through the high-placed window to take a bird's eye view of the panoramic vista of Umbria spread before me soon after sunrise or before sunset, I could not but help being drunk with the thought that breezes from both the seas which bounded Italy, the Tyrrhenian on the west and the Adriatic on the east, alternately whispered their messages to me as they met the sunlight. All these factors soon put me in a sufficiently poetic mood, as a result of which I composed a sonnet combining Petrarchan and Shakespearean models without Miltonian continuity. It is here reproduced;

 

'TO LABRO

Labro, simplest village of mid-Italia

Clinging close to castle-dominated hill, where

Sunbeams and breezes meet daily from sea to sea,

Under the blue skies of mystic Umbria.

Speak to a pilgrim from afar, whose nostalgia

Rivals only his passion for one humanity!

Whispers again of Pythagoras and of Assisi

And of that author too of La Divina Commedia.

Thus in consoling reveries lost in promenade

Or seated still in view of Terminalo's peak

Let him with you breathe near lake, spring or cascade

That fresh air of freedom that all equally seek.

May God the noble Vitelleschis bless

Humble Dina and Bianca no less.'

 

PROJECT FOR A CENTRE OF WORLD UNDERSTANDING

Ottavia had suggested already in 1960 that the castle of Labro could be used as a Centre for World Understanding under the Gurukula, and thought that her father could be persuaded to help in such a bold scheme. My own appreciation of this part of old Italy with its beauty spots like Perugia where an international university already existed in working form not far from the lakeside town of Piediluco, within view of the Labro Castle, made me think that God had destined that such a centre should come into being. In all matters I have always put the forebodings or admonitions or even mere intimations of the will of God, the Tao or Allah on one side, and tried to follow, however vaguely, its leading-strings from my personal side which was always kept free from personal preferences or prejudices. My mind worked with possibilities and probabilities which were always given full freedom of interplay.

 

Muhammad on one side and the mountain on the other had to decide between them as to which of them moved, while I kept looking on at my own doings as a mere impartial witness, with no definite say in any matter. Luck or providence had to be given its own free chance so that it could come in any one of the 365 days of the year in which it might choose to favour one. All was in the lap of God. With such a resigned attitude I said to myself that it was both probable and possible that a veritable Centre of World Understanding could come into being in this beautiful place thus offered to me, though only by the daughter, whose influence with her father was not, as far as I could understand, a negligible factor.

 

Such mathematical calculations are sure to appear foolish to more matter-of-fact people, but it is the weak trait in my character which I openly avow for what it is worth, without apology. It is God that carries man like a reed-pipe through which music is to be played whether on hill or dale, as Tagore would put it. With this attitude I wished to save humanity at that moment, an over-optimistic and confirmed dreamer as I have always been.

 

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As Milton says in his famous sonnet on his blindness, 'They also serve who only stand and wait', as equally as those who are active. So, nothing can be lost by always trying to do something noble and great.

 

As luck would have it the Mayor of Labro, who had been a personal friend of Ottavia in her girlhood days, was enthusiastic about starting some cultural centre in this beautiful historical remnant which, he otherwise feared, would be condemned by the civic authorities and abolished forever. The Curate of Labro, to whom I spoke over wine cups, also seconded enthusiastically the plans being hatched by the Mayor. Just at that time one of the four important ministers of Rome visited this very castle with all the men and women authorised to effect whatever changes they liked in different parts of Italy. I was asked to present a full case for what I called 'A Centre of World Understanding' before this influential group. This I did by explaining first and handing them later a typewritten prospectus explaining the project at a tea party at which all were seated at the long royal table with its high-backed gilded chairs.

 

The minister promised to supply the finances necessary and Aimé Vercruysse was appointed as a correspondent for further negotiations. All seemed in order. And when nothing is against a thing to happen, it was perfectly just to think that it would take shape. Such is the argument by possibilities which is as valid as that by mere probabilities, which is of a lower earthy order. I was guided by both these factors without pinning my faith merely on probabilities as a man of modern physics would have done. By giving importance to both I could claim to be a man of an absolutist way of life.

 

WITH PRIEST AND BISHOP

The visitors during this period included also the Archbishop of Rieti with his velvet cap, purple tunic and full robes, leaving his retinue of brass-band players and schoolchildren who gave him an ovation as he came to inspect the administration of the church of Labro village and thus play the role of the Good Shepherd, as bishops have always done. As he came into the courtyard I felt like a fly in the ointment in such a fully Catholic Christian situation. I had already had the experience of entering into an argument with a young Christian man who seemed to be rubbed the wrong way when I said that I was vegetarian while Jesus loved to eat fish and loaves.

 

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The Catholic world has its own value-references of profanity or sacredness, and as an Oriental and Hindu Swami I knew I had to be careful not to create any bothersome situation. But the Archbishop himself extended his hand to me with a gracious smile on his features which had a summer glow at the end of the festive events of the day.

 

Three priests also visited me specially to discuss my theology and philosophy one evening. Two of them were brought to meet me by the official priest of Labro who was a professor of philosophy. I remember sitting with them for long hours at night, and whenever the two visiting priests raised any objections to my views I found that the Labro Curate took my side, cutting short their arguments again and again by his 'momentino!' voice so as to put in his own explanations, always justifying my viewpoint. Thus the curate and the priests, not to speak of the Archbishop and the minister of state, turned favourable one by one. Even Dina and Bianca reported that the first suspicion of the village women and children about a black non-Christian man staying at the castle as the best friend of the Contessa, eating plenty of macaroni and spaghetti with olives and figs at the sumptuous table each day, had been fully banished. All began to appreciate the sonnet which was being handed round in translation, which last gesture seemed to make my conquest of the heart of Labro full and complete.

 

OTHER AMBITIONS AND FORTUNES AT LABRO

Garry Davis, foremost advocate of World Government, had chosen another part of Europe for his summer holidays with his wife and children. I got his letter saying so as my visit to Labro was fast drawing to a close. Dr. Joseph Vercruysse's sister was married to a doctor and joined the group of families already holidaying at the castle. The rest of my days there consisted of small outings round the countryside, including a visit to a waterfall, several hundreds of feet high, of the river that fed the lake of Piediluco, where there was always a throng of summer bathers even at dusk when the sun had warmed the waters. Ice cream eaters sat round tables under trees and, as with the rest of Europe, people went gay and compensated for bleak winter months in a way unknown in warmer climes.

 

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The Terminillo peak, the highest point of the hills surrounding the valley, watched the waterfall and the lake as a witness from above, corresponding to the conscience of each of the holidaymakers. The outer scene has to be compensated by the inner state of mind in order to represent the felicity resulting from both, which is often in the best cases a constant that knows no change. Thus it is that little pleasures can attain to a felicity by which each one of us, if we know how to discover it within ourselves, can be possessed, free from the vicissitudes of time or place.

 

In and through such exalted states of mind, I had my own weaknesses and ambitions which prompted me to look at neglected houses 'going for a song', as it were, in the neighbourhood of the castle where I could start a small Gurukula centre. I inspected one or two such houses during my various evening outings, but good luck would not favour my fixing on any of them. It had to tally with its own counterpart of ambitions in order to come true. When they do tally the event is like that of the chosen Man of God as against a mere John the Baptist who could be greater than the former. The Gita also states this principle when it says that much learning is of no avail in spirituality except when one is chosen by the Absolute Principle on high.

 

Thus it is that ambitions and good fortunes constantly play hide and seek and elude each other eternally in our various life experiences in referring to values big or small. Life is a wild-goose chase or a wanderlust or a sowing of wild oats most of the time. Probabilities and possibilities cross each other, only sometimes resulting in good luck. It is in this sense that I must relate how tempted I was at this particular period of my life when I was driven to a domain of several hundred acres planted with different conifers and other foliage trees just overlooking the beautiful lake and in full view of the peak and the valley golden at dusk.

 

LETTING GO OF A DREAM

 

Terminillo mountain.

 

It was a long drive that took us to the front of the villa with forty-five commodious high apartments with doors and windows of very generous proportions, as also staircases and corridors, built in plain modern style. It was reported that the owners, who were American millionaires, had been killed in a car accident soon after they built the place.

 

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As it was not claimed by anyone, it was being cared for and repaired little by little at a time at a cost that the local municipality of Piediluco could afford. It was too grand a place for any project that Piediluco could think of, and if Garry Davis could have claimed it at that time it would have been possible to use this as a Centre for World Understanding, for Integrated Science and Philosophy, or even World Government. These ambitions were not quite compatible with my own love of simple ways but, just as a cat may look at a queen, my imagination was for a time fired, even like the glory of the sunset seen outside. That dream has now lost its fervour for me. I have learned the lesson that ambitions and fortunes can come true only when they tally with the will of the Tao.

 

After one day more spent in the paradise of a heavy-laden orchard of ripe fruit belonging to the Curate of Labro - where I was by his special invitation to all the party on the 21st of August, Jean Convent was preparing to leave Labro - intending to drive all day, heading towards the French frontier beyond Turin. It was after breakfast that all, young and old, turned out to the roadside and then ran back to the towers of the castle to watch from there our waving hands as our well-conditioned car appeared and disappeared among the trees on the road on the opposite side of the valley. It was a genuine, touching and spontaneous send-off. It is a pity that I cannot remember all the names of the young ones whose affections I had gained as I have always done throughout my life. The elders were also evidently impressed by my words as a philosopher, always enjoying a good tête-à-tête on philosophical themes which have always been my consolation wherever I have gone.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER FORTY FIVE

 

EVENTFUL ESCAPADES ACROSS EUROPE

From August 22nd, when I left Labro and the beautiful country of Umbria in Italy, to September 17th, when I was once more in the safe hands of the Gevaert family in London, my travels were filled with escapades and interesting events. I had to rely on a self-propelling kind of retroaction with a feedback arrangement during this period. Here one's personal savings came into action as in the case of a thermostat. The machine begins to throb again when left to itself. It takes its course along a vertical parameter which is within and outside oneself at once. The kindly gifts made by various personal friends like Herman and Walter made my personal economy resemble the course of cybernetics whose secret was an alternation of self-reliance and initiative with an element of automatic self-sufficiency.

 

BACK TO FRANCE AGAIN

 

Mirabel-aux-Baronies.

 

Jean Convent decided to remain behind as a painter when he reached Mirabel-aux-Baronies again, after waving goodbye to the children on the tower-top at Labro. Jean drove very fast indeed to reach Alessandria and Turin, crossing the French border at dawn, and traversing the rugged canyon area to the more evenly undulating countryside of Southern France.

 

On the way near Alessandria, before we had crossed the French frontier, I narrowly escaped being run over by a car while sleeping on the ground at the forking of a country road in a sleeping bag with camouflage waterproof covers. I had selected the space between the two roads because it was the only clean area I could discern, and I even had the strange suspicion that some car might make the mistake of running over me in my state of perfect camouflage which would absolve the driver from any blame of homicide. My fears came true when I woke suddenly after some hours of sleep, and could almost reach out my hands to touch the headlights of a car which had taken the same bypath to disappear for a time into the thickets. The driver, however, changed his mind at the last minute and took the other road of the forking, so as to leave me alive.

 

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The formalities of the frontier were fairly simple, though unexpected rain made the driving difficult for Jean. The great sleeping city of Torino was passed in the twilight hours before dawn. We had to get our generous helping of French café au lait served by a typical comfortable-looking Provençal waitress, and our petit déjeuner consisted of petit pains and brioches as usual.

 

The rains cleared as we went up and down the corniches, with caverns that we passed through here and there to emerge into the beneficial beauty of sunlight again. This is how the orb of the sun is said to represent a high value in Dante's Divine Comedy.

 

ARRIVING AT ALMA'S ONCE MORE

I was in the company of old friends again and they took charge of me so as to save me from being a self-propelling unit in life, though only for a short period of a couple of days. Peter Gevaert had also arrived at Mirabel-aux-Baronies with his whole family; proposing to camp at the end of summer in the Camargue. My big trunk of books was consigned to his care, to be brought to Lathem near Gent after his holidays, and thus I felt lighter and freer in my further adventures through Europe.

 

I was proposing to pass through Grenoble, Lyon, Strasbourg and Luxembourg and then through Gent, to cross over from Ostend to Dover in answer to the invitation from my old friend, Christopher Leslie, in that beautiful spa of Harrogate in Yorkshire. My purse contained various coins and currencies which could help in propelling me by action and retroaction as they alternately came into play.

 

The first lap of the journey lay between Mirabel and Grenoble, and thence to Lyon by noon, starting with Alma driving her jeep in the morning. The beauty of the countryside was revealed at its best as we traversed the lonely roads with alternating views of some church or castle lit by the rising sun among the cypress groves or grey stones. We arrived at Grenoble a full hour before lunchtime and we sat in one of the best restaurants in the centre of the town waiting for Mr. Balet to meet us there. It was thus that I said goodbye to the South of France during my 1965 visit, except for having to pass through the same area later in the year to catch my ship to India at Marseilles.

 

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We had to wait a long hour at the restaurant before Mr. Balet, Alma's husband, could join us at lunch. Through the large glass windows of the restaurant, I could see Indian students who went to the famous university of Grenoble walking up and down the pavement. Grenoble had other academic associations for me because of my late friend Swami Siddheswarananda, who had been popular in his lectures at this university, comparing Ramakrishna with St. John of the Cross.

 

VALUABLE TALKS AT LYON

The lunch was typically French with salad and chips and a special cheese which I cannot name. The husband of course had to foot the bill while I looked on innocently, and of course he readily took to the steering wheel as we drove off towards Lyon. He had some work in the Embassy and I had planned to meet a lady mathematical genius whom Alma had mentioned to me as her favourite friend, but who had been away in Turkey at the time I had been living near their house not far from Mirabel.

 

This lady had married a guitar expert who gave lessons. They both wandered through Turkey for their holidays, singing their way like minstrels, and had just returned to their proper home in Lyon where the young mathematical lady, Madame Lucile Castet, had a leading job in the nuclear physics department. Alma's favourable description of this slim young lady with absentminded ways had already predisposed me to eagerly look forward to meeting her. I have always had a theory that women and mathematics could not pull together - and if and when they came together in the same person, it could only be as in the case of a Hypateia, a Heloïse or a Portia.

 

The couple lived in a flat in the Rue Sebastien Gryffe on the third floor, to which place Alma conducted me. We were to spend the night there, although correct behaviour in Europe required that I should take a room in a hotel. I got round this difficulty by offering to sleep on an improvised bed and to cook an Indian dinner by way of compensation. After the dinner there was to be a coffee party to which Professor and Madame Pierre Janin had also been invited by my good hosts who had seen that I was interested in modern mathematics.

 

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Formerly student and teacher, the Janins had been drawn together in wedlock by their common intellectual interest. The coffee party lasted till the early hours of morning, with the young and intelligent wife of the professor adding her valuable, highly original remarks now and then.

 

My arrears of sleep were not going to be paid even the next night when I was invited to a dinner at the professor's own luxury quarters outside the city where we again sat up till midnight, comparing notes. Meanwhile, during the intervening daytime, the professor had been so taken by my monograph on a language for science, that he took a photostat of it during the time I lent it to him for a few hours in the afternoon. Professor Janin was under orders of transfer to Beirut at that time, and was kind enough to exchange valuable notes with me and to present me with notes of the latest university courses he had given, bearing especially on the subjects of cybernetics and axiomatic thinking. This contact with a fully modern thinker of Europe was a most significant event, favourable to my efforts to formulate a veritable integrated science of the Absolute with maximum attainable mathematical precision.

 

I dined with the family, with rice and curry specially cooked for me, for which Madame Janin already seemed to have gained a reputation. The curry was negligently poured over a salver of well-cooked white rice after the manner of a French chef of creative genius.

 

BY TRAIN TO STRASBOURG

The train which I had to take started from Lyon station near midnight and I was kindly driven there through the long lighted boulevards of the city by the professor, who saw me seated in my compartment after putting my valise on the top luggage rack to which I could not lift it myself. Carrying baggage across platforms had already made me suspect the beginnings of a lumbago which became quite acute later in England. As the train passed through the border regions of Alsace and Lorraine, I could see that it brought groups of people returning from holidays from as far away as Corsica, all speaking French with a German accent, or vice versa. Gleeful or sombre in their ways, they reflected alternately the Latin and the Teutonic temperament existing within them.

 

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The Germans were effusive and hilarious as they joined their comrades at Mulhouse which we passed on the way to Strasbourg, reaching there at last by about eight in the morning. Except for the address in the Rue de l'Université which I knew was that of Garry Davis, I was a perfect stranger to this once-important city, now wearing a somewhat effete look.

 

As usual, I took refuge in a taxi and pretended to the driver that I knew all about Strasbourg so as not to be cheated as is usual elsewhere. However, he proved to be a taxi-driver of a respectable sort, and not only stopped in front of the address, but went inside the gates of the Renaissance-style aristocratic residence and got the portals opened for me. Both Garry and his wife Esther fitted into this atmosphere as world citizens. Fortunately, Garry was at home although it was Esther who greeted me first. I had known her before her marriage and I was not sure whether she considered my influence on Garry a good one or not. For this reason, there must have been many thoughts that crossed both our minds which did not find ready expression.

 

RELATIONAL TRIANGLES

Staying with Garry as his Guru and guide - or even as a mere philosopher-friend - I had to be wary of subtle relational complications which often formed dangerous red triangles in the inner world, although everything on the surface seemed perfectly in order. Esther was a woman first and a world citizen or wife only second. She had her own child by a former marriage, in the same way as Garry too had had more than one marital alliance in his life. Both were fired equally with the idea of world government or world citizenship, and had put in many years of zealous work for this noble cause. Common ideals in an overall sense did not, however, spell domestic harmony. The stepfather and stepmother factors cut into the plain roles of being the breadwinner or mother of a relational group.

 

The complexity of the situation seemed to flicker red lights occasionally, which made me feel like a fly in the ointment or a frog in the chamber during the three or four days that I spent under their roof in the Rue de l'Université. There were 'my' children and 'your' children and 'our' children to be considered at once; and naturally 'my' guest was not 'your' guest, so I could not be sure where I stood, in spite of the most correct outward behaviour or intentions.

 

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On my part I tried to be as neutral as I could be within the forces of absolute femininity and almost criminal masculinity with which latter I had classified and credited Garry's absolutism for a long time. The tragedy consisted in that both of them were to be placed in a frame of reference in the same vertical axis, but tended on occasions to pull with all their might in opposite directions, making or marring their conjugal felicity into the absolute type of true love or a tragic pact of suicide.

 

All married life could be said to conform to this model, with polarities more pronounced or mild, making of life a comedy, tragedy, or both incessantly. As a brave sailor likes to be tossed in the sea, humans seem to ask for it and get it. In some cases the dose of absolutism has to be very strong indeed to keep life within normal limits at all.

 

A KIND OF ELOPEMENT

Tolstoy saw this truth in his Anna Karenina, and compared it to an eternal toothache. To me, as the confirmed bachelor that I have been all my life, except for periods of being a lover as elsewhere described, the goings-on that confronted me there were a familiar story which I watched merely as a witness, trying my best not to take any side. I cannot say that in spite of all my efforts I succeeded in keeping neutral.

 

I was to be implicated the very next day in a sort of elopement or kidnapping bout which Garry was hatching in his mind so as to take me away for a few days outing. To prevent last-minute objections to the plan, I was to wait outside on the road near Garry's car so that the elopement could be successfully accomplished - which ruse was discovered only late in the evening by the frustrated wife as she spoke in a shrill voice to Garry as he called her up on the phone before acting out a dramatic comeback. But all went well again when, after the full day's outing, we did come back.

 

During the day, Garry took me to his various customers and business centres; gave me a general idea of the Strasbourg countryside; and stood me a high-class lunch at a wayside hotel where each cover amounted to twenty-five new francs. This was a measure of the opulent economy to which Strasbourg was geared, and in this respect it resembled more the fast-recovering economic condition of Germany rather than that of French-speaking France. New York, of course, always sets the normalising standard in opulent economy.

 

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At noon next day I was to depart by a train for Brussels and Gent. Garry had wired Marc Gevaert to meet me at Brussels Midi, but I made the mistake of getting out at Centrale, one station before, at about 10:30 PM. The train had passed through the capital of Luxembourg, which still remains one of the smallest of monarchies in Europe, reminiscent of the ancient regime. In spite of its size, however, the man who looked at my passport seemed better-groomed and better paid than his colleagues in Belgium. I noticed that the formalities were less strict. With plenty of Belgian and French money in my pocket I had no difficulty in buying a ticket from Brussels Centrale to Gent and, in spite of my suspected lumbago, carried all my luggage myself through the corridors and ample staircases covered by towering walls that distinguished the architecture of this important station.

 

LATHEM GATHERINGS CONTINUED

While I was waiting to enter the approaching train for Gent, who should appear but Marc who had evidently had time to come from Midi station after I did not alight from the right train. He asked if a bearded Indian had passed that way and they said 'no'; but when he again asked if a bearded Indian priest had passed, they said 'yes' - and he spotted me correctly just before I could step into the train. Being a strong man, he relieved me of all my luggage and took me to the car where Martine was also waiting.

 

We covered the autostrada quickly and were soon under the firs of the Gevaert domain before midnight. I went to sleep in Nicole's house where she and Paul welcomed me. They had returned from their American tour and received me with a warm room with an open fire, furnished in antique rustic style, but with all press-button conveniences.

 

The next five days or so, which I spent with the Gevaert family before crossing over to Dover from Ostend, were eventful only in the sense that I kept up my nightly sittings at the main dining table of the family, as I had done at least a hundred times before, airing my views on almost every subject under the sun with ever bolder self-confidence, as I could not help observing that I was being listened to more and more attentively. I contacted Homère, the eldest of the Gevaerts, who went as far as to state blatantly that all education spoilt a human being.

 

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A stump of a tree was superior to an educated human being because it never bothered about anything. I tried hard to agree with him, but succeeded only to the extent that ontology is always nearer the truth than teleology, which often gets lost in mere verbosity.

 

Education that made a man more verbose could not therefore be superior to one that made him a better man. A walking stick which you might be shouting or reaching out for could declare itself without words by contacting your hand. Words are like play but facts are things in themselves, needing no words at all. An ontologically-biased philosophy like Vedanta must thus be considered superior to mere verbose metaphysical 'nonsense', as Professor A.J. Ayer might put it.

 

There was another Gevaert cousin also present as a guest from the Dordogne with a fiancée whom he had brought from that region. Conversation with him revealed that he was a kind of Don Juan - educated in the classics, with highly cultivated tastes both in music and in painting. His uncle, the late Edgar Gevaert, had been a kind of Guru to him. He happened to be at that time full of rapture and praise for a disc that he kept on playing. It was Mozart's Requiem. He invited me especially to listen to it so as to find out what impression that long-drawn-out piece made on one of a strange civilization.

 

REFLECTIONS ON MUSIC

On the previous night I had listened to a variety recital given by Homère's wife specially for my benefit, although others were also present by request. To my Oriental ears, European music remained mostly opaque, although I did see some light through pieces like the Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven, a few others by Scarlatti and Vivaldi, and the fugues of Bach. These were recognizable among high-class musical compositions that appealed to my sense of clarity and geometrical structuralism produced through the mere succession of simple notes. The more emotional pieces like that of Beethoven often brought to my mind the picture of a man's heart filled with loneliness and emotion. It was a lover's plaint that I recognized in them. Otherwise Western masterpieces only succeeded in giving me visions of hunting or of conquest, in which a pack of hounds or horses suddenly emerge into the morning light from the depth of a forest glen.

 

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Sometimes music only reminded me of the rippling of waves or the twittering of birds and rarely too, it was a desert scene with hardly a bush in it that I imagined as the lover with the complaint of his utter loneliness to his partner in life.

 

These initial findings of musical criticism had developed in me an interest in trying to analyse more complex compositions, and this composition of Mozart happened to be just that challenge for which I was waiting. Jean Convent said that no other composition made such a deep impression on him as this one when he heard it for the first time in his teens, and he had appreciated it ever since.

 

I listened with all my critical acumen in action, as much as a dilettante like me could. After listening, I typed out my impressions and asked the Gevaert cousin also to do the same, so that we could compare our notes. We did so soon after and discovered that we said almost the same thing, although I had added some historical picturesqueness to the feeling-content represented by the variegated play of voices and sounds in the composition.

 

Western music in general is based on movements resembling swells or billows on the ocean, grading down to ripples and sounds of bubbles or liquid drops that the keen ear can enjoy with some attention when all the big sounds mix melodiously. This was just the basis of the movement on which Mozart's Requiem seemed to my ears to be based. There seemed to be a pyramid of human voices that followed the cadences of the liquid movements cleverly imitated by the composer. Some others, dominant, were seemingly pleading for pity, while subdued sighs or groans seemed to be implied in the sounds that followed the grand or little movements that were brought into rhythmic interplay.

 

MOZART, MUSIC AND HISTORY

 

Mozart.

 

All music must have some memory or adventure elements suggested by it, and a lonely note of suffering or agony is natural to some of the less gay compositions. Anyone who looks at the features of a Mozart cannot miss discerning a sensitive specimen of a human being, a product of high refinement drawn up by the mixing of various races of those days in European history in which ships crossed from the dark continent or from Semitic Palestine and the Moorish and more barbarian countries of the West. In those days when piracy and slavery and traffic in women was the order of the day, the holds of ships must have contained displaced persons of all races.

 

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Crooks and contraband articles must have been transported along with unfortunate women whose only fault was their looks which made them into articles of trade. Sidelines on such a picture that remained can be gleaned from The Decameron of Boccaccio and from the later vitriolic writing of Voltaire such as his unrivalled indictment of Western civilization in Candide.

 

The memories that Mozart's Requiem revived in me belonged to a background in which a dominating Levantine pirate was steering his ship bearing these miscellaneous commodities towards new and promising land on the opposite side of the dark continent. Jews saying their prayers and seasick children must have been in the holds of such ships, consoling themselves as best they could in fair or stormy weather. Mozart's features reveal a delicacy and strength reflecting this kind of story, which must have produced such a personality. The whole composition suggests the story of the adventures of a whole people which was beginning to belong to the civilization that the beautiful riverside city of Vienna now represents. One follows the movements of the waves throughout the composition and, although all the movements cannot be clearly distinguished, it is not hard to divide the composition into two parts, at least where one could legitimately imagine oneself ploughing through the billows of the sea into the more subdued zone of a broad estuary. Instead of supplications and groans, dominated by the pirate's voice, one begins to hear more hopeful notes as the city where Mozart's ancestors finally settled beckoned the group nearer to it. The composition is thus a form of repetition of the history of the race in the living memory of an individual, which is a law sufficiently recognized in biology.

 

Racial memories can persist inclusive of group histories in the form of atavistic or archetypal patterns and lend their character and colour to civilizations. This must be the reason why the young Jean Convent was so influenced when the musical notes of Mozart revived them as a whole. He could not help responding to such a rare combination of rhythms and sounds.

 

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BY CAR TO ENGLAND

The absence of Father Gevaert at the evening reunions must have been deeply felt by everyone present, but none was so undignified as to wear his feelings on his sleeve. Madame Gevaert bore the bereavement bravely and I too conformed to the general spirit of keeping business going as usual, although all must have missed the erstwhile centre of attraction.

 

An outing for Madame Gevaert was being planned by her children in order to take her mind away from her loss. My plans to go to England were known to them and it was decided that Céline would take her mother and me to England in her car. Thus at ten PM on September 6th we set for out for Ostend, all passports and permits having been cleverly arranged in advance by the lifelong helper, Céline.

 

We queued in the long line of cars waiting to be admitted into the side-deck of the ship which would reach the English soil of Dover by early next morning. When we entered the ship named after King Baudouin, brass-buttoned Belgian officers bowed us through well-furnished rooms and passages, and we found our seats near the buffet-restaurant after a formal passport examination.

 

Soon I separated from the ladies who had their resting-rooms below decks, and went to my own cabin with other old men like me, while others sat on the deckchairs throughout the night, drinking and merry-making. In the morning, announcements in harsh-sounding Flemish, French, German and English gave me only less than half an hour to set foot or rather to continue to roll on to this other side of the Channel. Of course we sipped tea and cakes again and Céline readily paid the bill, which I knew quite well was not gallant to allow.

 

Before the day had dawned the fabled English policeman gave the signal to go and off we went through the cliff area into the rolling countryside. The houses had the same look as they stood in rows in the villages that we passed, and seemed in queer contrast to similar ones on the other side; the bay windows on the second floor being a feature adhered to, perhaps, by some queen of England who started the fashion. Often, however, the carpentry was inferior to the standards on the continent and the garden fences were less mathematically straight. As already noted, the English temperament seemed to accommodate the rumble-tumble and be satisfied with things that were practical and workable and put into some sort of shape. As the sun was rising we had to stop for Madame Gevaert to recover her balance after the Channel crossing by swallowing a peppermint lifesaver. All was okay again and we were heading towards London by the available roads.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER FORTY SIX

 

IN GOOD OLD ENGLAND AGAIN

We were heading towards famous London Town from Dover, taking heed of all signs of turns and winding roads which seemed all to lead to the same Rome whichever one took. Past lawns and fields 'up the river and over the lea', Céline drove fast till we actually reached the limits of London itself. We had the problem of finding the right road to take in order to reach the suburb of Pinner, Middlesex, and Céline seemed a bit confused as she retraced her way more than once near King's Cross about the time when all Londoners were up and eating their bacon and eggs breakfasts, the smell of which seemed unmistakably present in the morning air of Tuesday, September 7th, 1965.

 

Céline consulted her big map of London and seemed to be making up her mind more than once. At last the route to Pinner was found, and the rest of the task was easier because inferential logic was all that was involved in following signboards and finding numbers leading to 32, Cecil Park, where Lucie, one of the Gevaert sisters, lived in a typical villa. She was married to a Hungarian biologist, Mr. Bossanyi. After a late lunch, I slept almost till suppertime in the warm room overlooking the backyard garden. After talking to visitors till late at night, the next morning I took the Tube railway, changing at Baker Street, and found myself tugging my luggage up the steps to the platform at King's Cross. A well-built elderly gentleman readily gave a helping hand and put my baggage near the booking office, and I entrained at 7:30 AM, travelling via Leeds where I had to change into a diesel coach for Harrogate.

 

A MODERN YORKSHIRE FARM

 

Bishop Thornton.

 

I arrived about noon and my old friend Christopher Leslie with his children was awaiting me on the platform, looking sharp to recognize me because of my rich grey beard and flowing Indian gown in which he had not seen me before. With the girls and Chris we drove through undulating countryside typical of Yorkshire in an autumnal air that felt not too good and rather humid for September.

 

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Thornton Grove at Bishop Thornton, a few miles from Harrogate, was a well ordered English-style homestead, tending more towards opulence rather than being a mere farmhouse. A farm on very modernized and mechanised lines was being run by Christopher. After I had settled down and had a first night's rest with supper and television showing the latest on the Kashmir war then fully raging in India, I was shown round the latest improvements in the farm, which included a tower for storing grain, automatically worked by power. The two or three hundred Jersey cows in perfect condition were also milked electrically, and the latest methods employed in the USA were also found in the English countryside, now so different from what Washington Irving, the New England author, once described with such quaint picturesqueness.

 

Modernisation, however, had economic disadvantages that always follow on its heels, such as excessive taxes and social security payments that often made farming an impossibly top-heavy business and anything but a sinecure. Chris was wistfully mentioning both these aspects as he took me to a harvesting tractor and handed me fresh unhusked wheat grains from the field, which I tasted.

 

The rose garden and big lawn with tall trees bordering it made of Thornton Grove a typical country dwelling-place of old Yorkshire. The frequent evening drives in Chris' luxury car further convinced me of the quiet dignity and select beauty of the countryside. Hills alternated with forested areas and green lawns or farm lands with cosy-looking homesteads evenly distributed without too much small clutterings of villages, comparing favourably with the south of France and Italy except for the famous contagious mists and spells of bad weather of this island fortress. It could be good when it was good and very bad otherwise. A secret Gaussian curve seemed to regulate the possibility or preferability of good weather in England. It had the fickleness of the woman known to Shakespeare himself. Italian skies perhaps had more homely ways.

 

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I DEVELOP EYE TROUBLE AND LUMBAGO

The after-dinner comforts of the drawing room where I perhaps enjoyed the warmth of the red electric fire too long, as also some vertebra strained by carrying my own luggage in railway stations, together with the questionable weather of England in early September, gave me lumbago pains. My cataract, which was more developed in my right eye than in the left, had still several months to mature. My Indian robes were not so well suited as woollens for the weather and climatic conditions of England. My daily morning hot baths added to the trouble in spite of fully wood-panelled rooms with central heating and wall-to-wall carpets on the floors of Thornton Grove.

 

I consulted a lady ophthalmic specialist of repute, to whom Christopher took me. A pinhole disc was fitted to one of the eyes, which cut off extra sidelights that kept the iris contracted also. I could still read and write letters. The lumbago was evident to others only when I made vain attempts in my efforts to sit or get up from seats. It was only when a trained chiropractor in Gent later told me that lumbago was due to certain pent-up liquids of the vertebral column which oozed out through some sort of opening, that I began to better understand the nature of the trouble.

 

As for my eye trouble, I found that the more reputed the specialist the busier he is likely to be, and the summary disposal of cases thus becomes normal. The development of visual aids before an operation has been badly attended to so far in spite of striking advances like grafting of other people's lenses, with or without contact lenses. Over-specialisation often overlooks common-sense remedies. This time in Harrogate it was a lady specialist who was a theosophist whom I had the good luck to consult. As a woman she had a more personal approach than male specialists, and the pinhole device helped me much where other specialists could suggest nothing.

 

A TALK TO THE HARROGATE THEOSOPHISTS

Lumbago made me stay longer in bed for a few days. In spite of bad eyesight, I contrived to read and follow up lines of modern research helpful for a unified science of the Absolute which I was interested in formulating in one or two years. This time it was a picture-book for children called 'The Universe in Forty Jumps' by Kees Boeke (Faber and Faber, London, 1957) that opened up for me a new scientific perspective on the physical world. The forty jumps were represented by views either through a telescope or microscope which portrayed the universe in graded scenes where sub-atomic or supra-stellar worlds were alternately described and pictured.

 

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Observable space thus fell in graded order along a vectorial, tensorial and scalar space-structure with a positive or negative parameter relating the biggest and the smallest in the universe. Structuralism thus became observationally justified.

 

While profiting thus by my stay indoors, I had a speaking engagement to fulfil on September 15th evening, sponsored by the Harrogate Lodge of the Theosophical Society. Mrs. Sheppard presided and an élite gathering, including many eminent doctors and members of other professions, was present as I spoke on 'A Common Frame of Reference for Physics and Metaphysics.'

 

It was an unusual subject and most of what I said went over the heads of the listeners, although it seemed to hold the interest of the audience unmistakably. Christopher Leslie himself was fully pleased as he said when we drove home to Thornton Grove after a pleasant conversazione that followed the meeting over strong cups of coffee. A lady doctor of medicine even thought that what I said about the 'Principia Mathematica' of Russell and Whitehead was not wholly fair as Russell was a great man. Others referred to eminent Indians who had previously addressed the gathering. My concern was merely not to disappoint my host, Christopher, who, being a staunch lover of Indians and a theosophist of long standing, would have, as my personal sponsor, felt somewhat let down if my speech had been a flop.

 

As it happened, however, I went to bed at 11 PM, patting myself on the back as it were, remembering those numerous days in my life in which good public speaking had failed me. The best speaker is only occasionally so. There seems to be the same lurking Gaussian principle of probability or possibility involved here as in phenomenal nature outside. The ups and downs of chance elements of life-value import are what Indian philosophy refers to as being rocked in the sea of samsara.

 

ON FOODS AND THIEVES

Holidaying in Yorkshire came to a close for me by the morning of the 17th of September. I stayed at my friend's house sometimes as a member of the family, visited other relations and cooked Indian curries for him many times. These reminded him of his days in India, but the nurse of the children and the cook suspected their spicy nature too much to let the children take them freely.

 

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English food excels in being plain or bland, but spicy Indian curries are known to be too exotic and easily upset the balance of the European stomach, more used to cheese, eggs, butter etc., and pampered, if at all, only by the more dangerous poisoning due to alcohol. One could hardly choose between the possibility of stomach ulcers either way. Food to one could easily poison another. It is best to strike a middle way.

 

The remaining few evenings before the 17th, when I left, I was treated to an Indian dinner at a Pakistani restaurant in Harrogate, filmed and tape-recorded - gadgets for both possibilities being present more usually than ever before in the West. One evening, visiting one of Christopher's brothers, Charles, for tea, there was an orchard stealing reported in the back garden. A ruddy youth was readily caught by Leslie's alertness and let off. Shakespeare himself is said to have committed this form of crime so natural to youth, so that it could be thought that this failing has a place in human nature when the full-blooded urges of vitality have not yet been canalised or controlled. There could be a superman touch even in the criminal, but most of them are just mean pilferers or poachers. Some birds, beasts or reptiles are nobler than others. A tragic touch might mark out a true hero, though the converse is not necessarily true.

 

Leslie tried to put me in touch with mathematicians and engineers from Leeds and Oxford universities; but except for one engineer friend I had met before, I could not actually contact any. My stay in Yorkshire thus terminated by being driven to York junction instead of Harrogate to save me having to change trains at Leeds, which would have been a problem with my lumbago pains still present.

 

Except for some brief engine trouble, the ride from York to London was very enjoyable, especially because on the way a well-groomed young English waiter smartly handed me coffee and biscuits which one took without having to get up from one's seat. This opulent touch marked the difference between train travel in India and in England; but in terms of cash value one paid almost ten times less in India. The livery and polished boots and buttons absorbed the value paid, rather than the food itself. I reached King's Cross by lunchtime. A coloured porter was available to put my baggage in one of the taxis that queued up at the entrance to the station and Céline, my good guardian angel through my troubles in Europe, was seen waiting for me, and all was thus made easy for my moving about in London again.

 

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LYONS CORNER HOUSE NEAR THE STRAND

After depositing my baggage in the corridor of the Strand office of Asia Publishing House, who had nearly sold out the first edition of my book on the Gita, and ordering a presentation copy to be sent to Christopher who said he had not seen it, our first concern was a buffet like that served in chain restaurants in New York. Self-service through automatic gadgets was more perfected in the cafeteria system there. In London one had to ask the pretty service girls, while pressed buttons brought cups of coffee by the slot system. Different London Corner Houses had automation introduced to a greater or lesser degree. One had to compose one's own menu carefully if one was to have a good meal. The crowds and confusion often made one forget what one really liked or wanted so as to satisfy a hunger that could be half actual or belong to an imaginary world of luxury choices. I asked for mashed potatoes and baked beans but Céline was wiser than me in her selection. We sat down with our own selections at tables and a dubious lunch was all we had because our minds were not quick enough to decide what was best for us.

 

The Asia Publishing House office had only one Parsi and another West Indian girl working in the office at the end of lunch-hour. Soon after, the head of the office came and I finished my business with him and went to the Belgian Consul for renewal of my visa, but they thought it was not necessary due to the date stamps having been omitted at the Luxembourg border, which I had not noticed. The vagaries of passport rules are endless. One has to learn as one goes, finding one's way within a forest of stamps, endorsements, cancellations, additions, amendments and other entries. Paper troubles are sometimes more of a nuisance than actual ones. At long last I found myself before evening at 32 Cecil Park, Pinner, again to rest my wearied limbs.

 

A TANGLE OF TELEPHONE CALLS

The next trouble that awaited me was that of getting involved in a tangle of engagements through letters and telephone calls which finally led to nothing.

 

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One of my main intentions in visiting Europe at that time was to contact intellectuals, especially a woman mathematician and scientist. Young Toby Hodgkin had toured India about 1964 and had stayed with John at the Bangalore Gurukula. His mother, Mrs. Dorothy Hodgkin, was a scientist, mathematician and Nobel Prize recipient for her study of crystal structures. She taught in Somerville College, Oxford. Edna Kramer, who taught higher mathematics at Columbia University, was another lady whom I admired and wished to meet. Mme Lucille Caslet whom I had met at Lyon nuclear physics laboratory was another of those ladies for whom I had a soft corner of secret admiration. They conform to a Hypateia type and represent the absolutist principle when it tries to show itself as brilliance of brain, reputation or beauty through otherwise negatively-weighted feminine nature. The Gita refers to this Portia touch in certain women, and Rousseau's Sophie and Heloïse belong to the same Joan of Arc order, together with Dante's Beatrice and Goethe's Gretchen. The Saint Theresa type makes women mystics absolutist in another sense altogether.

 

It was Mrs. Hodgkin of Oxford whom I was somewhat strongly interested in seeing when at Pinner, London, on my return from Harrogate. I had already had a first disappointing reply from her in a letter which had reached me at Harrogate a week before, in which she had said that she was going to the Far East and would not be available when I proposed to motor from Pinner to Oxford. She said, however, that her elder son, Luke, was better qualified than herself to enlighten me on such subjects as the Unified Field Theory of Einstein and allied questions. Lucie went to the telephone for me and first contacted Toby, the younger son - but he was too sleepy at about 10 PM on Saturday September 18th. His brother Luke, whom Lucie was able to contact at another number gotten through the first, sounded, as Lucie reported, only lukewarmly interested in meeting me the next day, when we proposed to make a Sunday outing to Oxford.

 

Thus my passionate hunt for a lady scientist fell through. All that it cost was a tangle of telephone calls with their waits, slot payments, wrong numbers, buzzes of lines engaged during busy hours, and detailed spelling out of letters of inaudible words by saying 'A as in Apple' etc. For this reason, and because of the complicated variety of instructions in different telephone books of big cities like New York or Paris, I have always had a fear of the apparatus itself, and took care to keep at a safe distance from it.

 

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It had, to my eyes, an anti-contemplative, ominous presence in a corner of an otherwise nice sitting room. Nothing is worse than when you have jumped out of a warm morning bath, hastily wearing a bathing gown or towel round you, to be told by a complacent voice at the other end of the ringing telephone, anticlimactically, that it was only a wrong number after all. I have never been at home with telephones although my father had one in the house when I was less than ten, while at Bangalore in 1902. I consider them a nuisance even today. One gets affiliated to a horizontal world of values through them. A buzzing door signal adds sometimes to the noises of the telephone, refrigerator or thermostat in certain modern houses. Screaming sirens, fire-engine bells and other signals sometimes upset normal nerves, though only for seconds at a time, contributing to make irritable men and women.

 

TALKS WITH A SCHOOLMASTER AND MEETING ROMARIN

Even after the application of two kinds of embrocation and wearing flannel underwear, my lumbago persisted; but I did still not omit to visit the London County Council Library of the district and even walked downstairs for long talks with a London headmaster who had served in America recently through an exchange system prevailing between the two countries. Conversation with this gentleman revealed, surprisingly to me, that the educational theories of Rousseau, who was mentioned in the standard Monroe Cyclopedia of Education as the 'Father of modern Educational Theory', were not familiar even to a trained teacher with experience in two highly civilised modern states.

 

At the same late evening gathering, there happened to be present an unexpected and strange-looking guest who called herself Miss Rosemary or rather Romarin Grazebrook. She had bobbed light copper-coloured hair and strange psychic eyes. Taciturn in her ways, with downcast looks, she had placed her light gypsy-style baggage at the entrance of Lucie's house as I returned from my visit to the library. I was told she had crossed over from Brussels on the previous evening and had spent the night on one of the benches of a railway station in London in order to see me. I became alarmed at the prospect of having to deal with an abnormal woman, with which form of punishment I had already burnt my fingers more than once in my life. I kept watch on this stranger who hardly said a word, but listened attentively to the midnight conversation I was having with the big-moustached schoolmaster I had met at Lucie's place.

 

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We sat talking till after midnight, when we proposed to disperse, before doing which the strange lady, knowing that we were to cross back to Ostend the very next morning, asked to stay and to be taken too. I tried to put her off by saying that she should ask Céline - which she did not - but went off somewhere in London in the schoolmaster's car. I thought I had gotten rid of this strange lady, but how she was present at Dover next morning and how our relations grew through later years is a story yet to be told.

 

Lucie herself was the disciple of another Indian Guru about whose teaching we had several talks with others who belonged to this group under a reformed Sikh teacher of the Punjab. What he taught had many points of contact with my own teaching or that of Guru Narayana. There seemed to be a whole group of Indians and English men and women who gathered and broke bread or had Indian-style feasts together in the heart of London and in the country round about in the name of this Guru. A thirst for a new outlook in religious life seemed general in London at that time. In trying to convert and rule India, many Englishmen seemed to have been subjected to an involuntary sort of adoption, as if by Nemesis, for everything Indian. Miss Grazebrook's case revealed this strange reaction, as shown by her personal story in which her father was a top military officer in the very Nilgiris from where I myself sallied forth with my counter-message to the West. Adoption and disadoption have a Nemesis principle involved.

 

Next morning, as the formalities of the Port of Dover kept Mother Gevaert, Céline and myself waiting - with just one empty seat in the car - who should we catch sight of but that strange lady whom I had tried to get rid of gently in the very early hours of the same morning. The same kind of coincidence took place in Marseilles later in the year; and each month heightened the enigma that Romarin represented. We soon crossed over by the same ship called MV King Baudouin, and touched Ostend soon enough to enable us to arrive by the straight autostrada at the doors of the Gevaert domain, with the enigmatic lady whom Céline and Mother Gevaert were generous as ever to invite to live with the open-minded family. Gent was reached by about 5 PM on the 21st of September, 1965.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER FORTY SEVEN

 

RARE GIFTS FROM THE TAO

I remember the nearly dozen times that I have been on a ship expecting to see the Indian coast when returning to India. The earliest of such remembrances was in my schooldays when I crossed the sea from Ceylon to come back again. Later it was either to the Far East or the West that I had taken a ship to come back to this land. I never prided myself in being a patriot, except perhaps in the earliest years when I was influenced by the Home Rule movement of the India of those days. My soul was not, however, dead to the import of a homecoming. A passage to India has always been interesting even to those, like Walt Whitman or Count Keyserling, who have not been born there and never called it their native land.

 

In my own case each passage to India had its inner meaning to my soul, differently graded between the limits of a horizontalized patriotism and a fully verticalized love of what India meant in cultural or spiritual terms to any man. Thus there is a vulgar as well as a noble version of the love of one's native land, and the distinction lies in what Rousseau has described as 'l'amour de son pays', which he got not directly but was taught to have by his father in the famous words, 'Jean-Jacques, aime ton pays'. Such patriotism, transmitted from generation to generation, is a nobler and more verticalized version of that same sentiment whose vulgarisation can attain to extremes of hatred of neighbouring countries, especially in times of war.

 

In about two months after my return to Gent - that is, between September 22th, and my sighting of the Indian coast again on December 5th, my thoughts turned once more to India. I had put off my plans for a visit to the United States, although Harry Jakobsen and some friends had offered to finance me. This postponement, I learned later, had disappointed Harry, but my persistent lumbago made me fear that long travel would find me a disabled man somewhere before reaching some place where I could remain quiet for longer periods. In those days when passport and passage hurdles were complicated, I did not want to risk taking more time abroad.

 

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For my stay at Gent a new, well-heated and large studio room with tall windows allowing full northern light was given to me, with a special kitchenette and bath attached; and there I could conduct morning lessons and evening tea parties each day, without having my usual routine broken into by long and elaborate hours at the Gevaert family table.

 

1965 PILGRIMAGE TO ERMENONVILLE

The next event after returning to Gent was the Rousseau Pilgrimage, the first of which had been inaugurated in Geneva on September 20th, 1959, and repeated there under John's guidance in 1961. The third pilgrimage was moved in 1962 to Ermenonville (about thirty miles from Paris) where Rousseau spent his last days, and had been held there annually thereafter. In 1965 the enthusiasm and attendance were still subdued and select only. It was proposed by Dr. Joseph Vercruysse that two cars of pilgrims should start from Gent for Paris just for the night, and then depart for Ermenonville early next morning, which was September 26th.

 

The whole company met happily, first at the famous restaurant called Brasserie Lipp in the Boulevard St. Germain, which Balzac and Hugo are said to have frequented and opposite where Jean-Paul Sartre was then living. We all found rooms in the nearby Hotel Dragon at 150 Frs. for the night. Reassembling at the Brasserie Lipp at 9 AM next morning, the 26th, both cars went to Ermenonville, which was reached half an hour later. Soon we met a press reporter and also the Secretary of the Association J.-J. Rousseau, whose head office is in Paris, Monsieur Maxime Nemo. He was a grey-haired man of seventy-seven or so, very enthusiastic about Rousseau. Soon we were joined by Pierre Gevaert, Garry Davis (who came all the way from Strasbourg) and the strange lady from London who also alighted into the situation unexpectedly, as if from nowhere (she likes such surprises). The Guy Marchand family also came, but a little later.

 

Thus we were a good enough company and the bright sun, after the previous night's rains in Paris, was happy and inviting enough to make us sit in a circle on the grass which was so green, by the lake and in view of the poplars. After preliminary talks with Monsieur Nemo, which revealed that we had no differences of approach, I spoke, explaining how we are neither sceptics nor believers but both, according to a dialectic that is beyond paradox, and by transcending which, Rousseau became a great wisdom representative.

 

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Garry and M. Nemo, Dr. Joseph and Aimé Vercruysse, Walter De Buck, Jeanne and Mother Gevaert, all took turns to speak. Marc stressed the psychological aspect of Rousseau's contribution. It was one o'clock before all had their turn, and we adjourned for lunch at the restaurant kept by M. Levet, another Rousseau admirer who had dedicated his life to studying him, with a library of four thousand books on Rousseau and allied subjects. He lived nearby, and in his restaurant we all enjoyed the sandwiches that had been made ready for the occasion by Madame Gevaert and Céline (who could not come as she was in charge of Pierre's children in the family house at Lathem). There was plenty and to spare, four pistolets (rolls) and tomatoes each, and cups of coffee from the hotel supplemented the lunch.

 

I asked Marc to write a kind of minutes about our areas of agreement, namely: the desirability of forming a Wisdom Institute in which the study of personality problems would feature and where education would be reoriented; and that the park and castle grounds should be announced as world territory. All signed, and we left at about 4 PM - Garry for Strasbourg and most of the company for Gent, which we reached between 9 and 10 PM. Rousseau, the Swiss watchmaker's son, represented the absolutist contemplative value as near as it was possible in a Western context, after Joseph the carpenter's son and the wisdom lessons of Greece and Rome were sounded.

 

AMONG YOGIS OF GENT AND PYTHAGOREANS OF BRUSSELS

Esoterics in Europe, thriving in an ancient matrix of pagan or perennial beliefs natural to man anywhere, has always subsisted behind the outward façade of formalised religious beliefs expressed through established churches catering to more public or socialized needs. Tarot cards are secretly kept and seen by those who tend to be Rosicrucians and with select persons who love ancient cults temperamentally. Hermetics, Freemasons, Swedenborgians, believers in Mahatmas or Angelic Hierarchies have always persisted behind the show-windows of civilization, unhampered at all times. More than forty per cent of the total, comprising the so-called socialized or other groups not included in the overtly Christian, remain attached to forms of Paganism to the present day.

 

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Officially recorded history might not reveal them, but they still remain operative below the level of the waves that lash horizontally when political or religious clashes or upheavals happen more or less overtly. The love of Indian Yoga, imported cults like Zen Buddhism and other tamer groups such as that of vegetarians or other food faddists, nature-cure believers and even nudists - has persisted through time behind the respectable front or façade of European life; and nothing can stop dancing dervishes or other more or less exalted or inspired groups or individuals from thriving right within so-called conventionally civilised beliefs and behaviour-patterns natural to those who aspire for some sort of spiritual progress.

 

Faith-cure miracles attract large numbers to places like Lourdes, and experts in medicine like Alexis Carel have devoted approving volumes to them. Psychoanalysts from the time of Freud, Adler and Jung have had their own varieties of admirers - each group claiming to be esoterically or exoterically valid, as the case may be. As a disciple of an Indian Guru, I myself had my share of interest shown to me during my visits to the West.

 

Mr. Gomez, Professor of Physical Culture at the University of Gent, was a friend known to me from three or four years before when I visited Belgium the previous time. He had just then married without Christian rites. Now he was head of the Department of Physical Culture and invited me to give my views on Yoga in which he had been instructed by an Indian Christian Yogi teacher of Geneva. Yoga has now become recognized as a sufficiently respectable academic discipline in many Western universities and, next to Zen, Judo and Ju-Jitsu, is perhaps one of the most popular methods of physical culture now being adopted in the Western educational world.

 

A mechanical mixture of these imported elements with a questionable food fad called Macrobiotics, brought into vogue by a clever Japanese called Oshawa, had rare success in the region just when I came. The leisured classes almost went mad about this school of thought which had its network of centres in Europe and America. Sugar was taboo and salt could cure almost any disease thought incurable. Such were some of its claims. The Gevaert family had divided loyalties in respect of this tenacious group which seemed to have the power of converting certain minds with a great force of adoption.

 

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A chiropractor trained in USA, living next door to the Gevaert estate, had his own group to whom he taught yoga combined with techniques of medical massage. I was invited to evening coffee parties in both these places. My own views about Yoga ranged from Hatha Yoga (which often tended to bodily torture) to the higher dialectical view of Yoga. In this view, Yoga is a sort of mental balance between counterparts of a given bipolar life-situation or problem - whether of the ontological or teleological domain - that one has to face with a disciplined, regulated, poised and harmonised approach. My perspective thus required careful explanation of its scientific, methodological, epistemological and axiological bearings and presuppositions. All listened with great interest in the stand taken and both the men and women seemed to approve of what I had to say, though often being highly mistrustful of other teachers, whether back in India itself or abroad.

 

Through my friendship cultivated some months earlier in the south of France with Count d'Aarschot - a nobleman of Brussels and a well-known art critic and connoisseur who belonged to a Pythagorean group - I was invited to be present at the Pythagorean Temple in that old capital city of Europe, on October 5th, 1965. The Head or the Grand Master of the select group welcomed me and gave me an honoured seat from where I had to speak and answer questions put to me by non-Christian or rather pre-Christian Pythagoreans who had continued their select and rather secret gatherings within the heart of this city through the centuries, nay, millenia. Pythagoras himself is credited to have visited India and to have been influenced by its secret lore and by that of Egypt too. I myself claim to understand the Pythagorean theory of numbers in my own way as related to the schematismus of Kant.

 

Numbers have their corresponding forms. When examining the multiplication table of 9, one finds that a strange and awful symmetry of structure based on numbers can be seen to stare back mysteriously at the examiner. The experience could be lightly explained away by those who give primacy to scepticism, but the question would still keep staring and asking for a reasonable solution. The Pythagorean triangle called the Tektraktys occupied the central place in the temple upstairs where I was conducted all by myself by the Grand Master who alone seemed to be then privileged to step with me into the sacred precincts. An other-worldly feeling crept into me as I accepted the honour.

 

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But to my Indian mind the most esoteric form of thaumaturgy, ritual, or secret could only be less so than the secret doctrines acceptable to the Upanishads. Narayana Guru himself, whose disciple I was, had already initiated me into such mysteries that fade out in the light of the full flood of absolutism in which I had been trained to be quite at home. I thus could say amen to the voice of this ancient philosopher, which reached me there through the long corridors of the centuries gone past. After soft drinks sipped together. Marc and I took the autostrada and soon reached our beds before midnight.

 

VALUABLE CONTACTS AND GOOD CHANCES

Most of the month after this Pythagorean meeting my time in Gent was taken up by morning lessons; library work at the University till noon; evening parties when all joined at tea and snacks, with the weekly feature of Indian curry and rice dinners on Sunday noons, which proved very popular and were well attended.

 

These gatherings brought many valuable contacts, and the Tao saw to it that some rare good chances also came my way. There was a group who were either Bahai's or Macrobiotics by affiliation, under the Gevaert daughter Mimi. Then there was a group under the leadership of Walter De Buck who had come to India as a sculptor and architect. He had gathered a group of workers round him and was fulfilling the role of a Guru for a sort of natural guild which undertook modern renovation work in shopfronts which needed the latest style based on the Fourier-wave-transmission sinus curve style instead of the cubist tendency previously prevailing.

 

A group of jazz players were under the inspiration of Paul and Nicole. Football fans had Marc as their hero, who also attracted his admirers and disciples, both men and women. Thus about fifty persons came on Sundays, and we slowly began to form an integrated group. Ottavia, daughter of Nobile Vitelleschi and married to Aimé Vercruysse - now living on the Gevaert estate - had her own noble contacts of various counts or barons who had lived together, making their fortunes in Brazil after the aristocracy in Europe had suffered a setback. Architects, artists, artisans and aristocracy drawn from distant lands thus came together, forgetting their static and closed loyalties in the open, dynamic one that we celebrated week by week and day by day.

 

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A RARE FIND

I had a rare opportunity when I was invited by M. Christophe, the father of Martine, Marc's wife, for tea in his library. He had been disabled in one leg, but this did not prevent our talking freely over cups of tea. He was a specialist in cybernetics and used computers on a large scale for codifying information in one of the largest establishments of the kind in that part of Europe. I was able to borrow four or five valuable books from him. He also telephoned to arrange for me to visit the establishment soon after. I was able to see how feedback arrangements and the electronic channelling of information through a cycle of matrices worked; and further reading gave me enough indication about the structural secrets and logical parameters implied at the very core of cybernetic operations, circuits, retroaction or functioning.

 

This was one of the items of a rare good chance that came my way so naturally; but there was a greater surprise for me of the same order that the Tao had arranged while I was approaching the very last weeks of my stay in Europe, which had been mainly intended for gathering all possible information about structural or mathematical features of the Science of the Absolute which I was intent on formulating at that very time.

 

Good luck as well as bad news have a strange way of hide-and-seek and often take you unawares when you least expect them. They do not reach you when you openly wait for them. There is a smokescreen of sly or suspicious goings-on before they enter into the situation as if by the back door. The belated buds of mango trees hidden among leaf clusters may bloom; or the tree may put forth tender foliage instead with a strange hesitancy of a Gaussian curve of a 'maybe, maybe not,' chuckling attitude towards the owner of the orchard who might be near them speculating about a crop failure. Nature has its eternal game of hide-and-seek, of expectancy and despair, smiles or tears. The concept of Maya is to cover this indeterminate uncertainty in all phenomena.

 

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THE WORK WHICH BERGSON WITHDREW

 

Henri Bergson.

 

During my previous visit I had picked up a strange book by Henri Bergson, that mastermind, epoch-making writer of modernized scientific philosophy. The title mentioned that it was meant to be a critical examination of 'Duration and Simultaneity' in the light of Einstein's theory of relativity, and was noticed by me not to have been included in the complete centenary edition of Bergson's works.

 

At a corner of this new edition one could read that Bergson had to suspend the publication of this great masterpiece, with the following words 'Le livre a été souvent mal compris' (the book has often been badly understood). Bergson thus mildly puts the reason for the suppression of the book, in spite of the immense spiritual agony its production must have cost him. As can be seen, there is a major tragedy of modern thought revealed here to the eye of a keen critic who is partial neither to physics nor metaphysics - these representing respectively the visible and calculable aspects of truth.

 

The Europe of Bergson's time was not prepared to listen to him. Many modern minds have reacted unfavourably - and seem to do so still - to this great work which perhaps saw the light of day prematurely. How prematurely and by how many decades it is to be measured, is not easy to determine. One of the recent remarks about it which appeared in one of the French journals of 1966 seemed to suggest that it was unfortunate that Bergson wrote the book at all. I had looked at the book on my earlier visit and tried to scan its intriguing section headings, but had put it down then, unable to penetrate into the intentions of the author. The book, however, insisted on coming to my hands in the strangest of ways this time.

 

It was on one of my frequent visits to the University Library of Gent, about a month before saying goodbye to Europe, that Jeanne Gevaert said she would also like to work in the Library. Owing to my lumbago I had changed into my warm European trousers and coat, and with my French beret and white beard, rode into town to rare bookshops in search of books on structuralism and Bourbakianism, driven by good Céline as usual, this time with her sister Jeanne as well.

 

This sister of the Gevaert family was a kind of devil's disciple as a rival to the father both as a sculptor and a World Government organiser. Though somewhat soured by continued spinsterhood beyond the natural limits for such, this once-attractive and intelligent girl became a problem to herself and related sometimes to others like a thorny rosebush. She used to listen to my philosophy and sometimes contemptuously remark that it was only 'baby talk'. In general, I took care not to cross swords with her but on this trip she proved to be an angel chosen by the Tao to call my attention to that same Bergson book which I had put down as uninteresting a couple of years previously in the same Library.

 

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Because of my aloofness to Jeanne, I was not inclined to look at the book again, but as the Tao would have it this time, I felt intrigued by the summary titles of sections of the five or six chapters given at the end. Soon I discovered that this same book could easily be the very link in modern European thought which bridged the gulf that exists and existed more keenly then, between perceptual physical disciplines and their own conceptual counterpart, commonly referred to after the time of Aristotle as metaphysics.

 

The epistemological and methodological lacunae in the task of bridging the gap between these two broad sets of disciplines in exact thinking were indicated in instrumentalist and functional or operational terms in this critique of relativity. The transition from relativity to absolutism was fully worked out, not only in terms of logico-physics or mathematical equations, but also in visible, structural four-dimensional terms by Bergson.

 

This was a feat that was too good to be appreciated by even the best of his fellow-thinkers of his own time. It took nearly a year for me to appreciate in detail each of the steps of Bergson's reasoning. I became convinced that this product of the thought of a modern Westerner - reached after wireless propagation marked a new departure in the basic notion of motion on non-Euclidean lines - would lend itself not only to being a bridgehead for integrating both physics and metaphysics, but also to finding points of affinity between Upanishadic and the new absolutist vistas just emerging to view in modern scientific progress. How I made use of this good chance is revealed in the chapters of the 'Integrated Science of the Absolute' whose writing was accomplished by the end of the year 1966. The hand of the Tao was visible to me in the sly and secret way by which this great book insisted on coming into my hands again.

 

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INVITATION FROM A PRINCESS

Autumn had advanced and the harbingers of biting winter winds were already being somewhat prematurely announced by frozen bits of slushy roads and the early starting of heating systems. I had more than one telephone call and a letter from the Princesse de Mérode of Brussels, inviting me to a place called 'Le Dialogue' situated in a forested domain where she had a kind of ashram. She said she had heard of me from a European swami who lived near the grottoes of the South of France not far from where I had been that same summer. I could not recollect having personally met this white sannyasin, but accepted the royal invitation as I found the lady very philosophically-minded and acquainted with Vedanta as taught by Professor Lacombe of Paris. She also mentioned an Indian swami who had lectured in her luxurious flat at the centre of Brussels some time back and wanted a copy of my Gita to read.

 

The ashram or hermitage 'Le Dialogue' was about forty miles south of Brussels, past Charleroi. The rooms upstairs were badly heated and, as a guest of a royal princess, my thoughts naturally went to the fate of Descartes who died in 1649 after catching a cold while a private tutor to Queen Christine of Sweden (who was described as a 'headstrong masculine girl' by another famous mathematical lady, Edna E. Kramer). In this instance the princess did not conform to such a description, but was a very intelligent person with a full philosophical formation of her own, as conversation based on my Gita showed, when I visited her again at her sumptuous apartment of 87, Avenue Louise, in Brussels, two or three days later.

 

She was able to enter straight into the implications of the doctrine of niskama karma of the Gita as different from the usual unilateral way of understanding 'sacrificing the fruit of all action'. A Brussels friend, M. Yves de Vertel, made a photostat copy for me of the treasured Bergson book mentioned already. Marc, who promptly picked me up at the Hermitage, stood me an Italian lunch in Brussels and, after seeing to a Swiss visa to allow me to spend a day in Geneva on my way back to Marseilles, we were on the main road to Gent again by the evening of November 5th, 1965.

 

THE RETURN VOYAGE

By November 9th, we heard of our sailing date from Marseilles fixed for November 23rd at 5 PM. Céline and Romarin were also to sail with me and the ship Cambodge was again found to be the most suitable. Bookings had already been made.

 

The last days were not eventful except for an interview with a Paris Professor, Dr. Vanderheiden, whom Joseph had invited to meet me on the evening of the 10th at his residence.

 

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An influx of about sixty friends was present at our last Sunday lunch on Saturday, November 13th - most of whom stayed till late at night after taking supper in informal Indian style at the main Gevaert table - this last event serving as an all-round occasion to bid 'bon voyage' to the departing three.

 

Another important book on structuralism by Madame Detouche-Février of Paris University completed my book baggage with other miscellaneous literature in French and English that I had been gathering. We started for Paris with Mother Gevaert and Mimi who went as far as Alma's place in the South of France. Alma and Mother Gevaert were with Marc when we were heading towards the dock in the Old Port of Marseilles where the SS Cambodge was berthed. We passed one day and night in Paris with M. Hubert; and in Geneva with the Gunnings and Bublins; at Vienne on the way to Lyon; and finally at Mirabel again. Romarin made a surprise appearance as usual, after the ship's warning bells had sounded, when we thought she was lost. The ship sailed at 6:30 PM on November 23rd, 1965.