Advaita Vedanta

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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.

 

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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.