Advaita Vedanta

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Written by Patrick Misson

Parent Category: Content

Published: 24 August 2012

Created: 24 August 2012

Last Updated: 01 July 2015

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CHAPTER FORTY EIGHT

 

IN INDIA AGAIN

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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WE GET USED TO THE VOYAGE

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

ARRIVAL AT BOMBAY

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

MADRAS, ERODE, OOTY AND ALWAYE

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

BUSY DAYS AT VARKALA

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

IN NORTH-EAST INDIA

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

THE YOGA CONFERENCE AT MONGHYR

 

 

Monghyr.

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

THE CAPITAL CITY OF INDIA

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

ONCE MORE IN THE SOUTH

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

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CHAPTER FORTY NINE

 

THE MAGNUM OPUS AND THE CALL OF THE ISLAND

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

 

THE TRIALS OF AUTHORSHIP

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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CHALLENGED BY STRANGE CROWDS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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THE WATER-BUFFALO-LIKE ISLAND BECKONS ME

 

 

The Beach at Ezhumalai.

 

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

 

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

 

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ON THE ISLAND

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

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CHAPTER FIFTY

 

FESTIVALS AND FOREWARNINGS

 

Cannanore Temple.

 

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

 

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

 

CANNANORE AND ERODE

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

THE ANNUAL GURUPUJA FUNCTIONS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

OCTOBER-NOVEMBER FEASTS AND DANGER SIGNALS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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CHAPTER FIFTY ONE

 

AUTUMNAL DEPRESSIONS AND AFTER

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

THE NEGATIVITY THAT WOMAN REPRESENTS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

BEFORE AND AFTER JANUARY, 1967

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

 

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

 

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

 

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THE 'PIRATES' AND 'MUSKETEERS' ARRIVE

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

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CHAPTER FIFTY TWO

 

HOSPITAL LIFE WITHOUT TEARS

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

 

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

 

BLINDED IMMOBILITY ON AN EMPTY STOMACH

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

NEGATIVITY IN GENEROSITY

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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BAD MIDNIGHT NEWS IN HOSPITAL

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

 

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

 

MANGALA MERGES INTO THE MATRIX OF ABSOLUTE SUBSTANCE

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

491

AT DAYBREAK ON THE FUNERAL DAY

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

 

A GOOD FUNERAL AND AFTER

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

 

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

 

492

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

 

BANGALORE AND ERODE BIRTHDAY CELEBRATIONS

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

 

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

 

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

 

493

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

 

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

 

 

 

494

CHAPTER FIFTY THREE

 

STILL TO TURN THE CORNER

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

495

THE EMANCIPATED WOMAN

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

496

FEMININE DISTRESS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

497

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

 

GODDESS WORSHIPPED FROM GOA TO CAPE COMORIN

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

 

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

 

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

 

498

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

499

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

 

POST-OPERATION REST AT EAGLE ESTATE

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

500

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

 

ARRANGING THE ISLAND HOME

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

501

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

 

MORE BAD OMENS

 

The beach from the Gurukula Island Home.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

502

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

503

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

504

CHAPTER FIFTY FOUR

 

TURNING TO THE PROSPECTIVE

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

 

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

 

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

 

505

NITYA RETURNS FROM SOUTHEAST ASIA

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

506

LAND OFFERED AT PALGHAT

 

Palghat.

 

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

 

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

 

PRELIMINARY WORLD PEACE CONFERENCE AT EZHUMALAI

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

 

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

 

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

 

CATCHING UP WITH CONTEMPORARY EVENTS

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

 

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

 

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

 

JOHN'S SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY

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

 

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

 

OVERWHELMING PRESSURES AT THE CONVENTION

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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TRIBALISTIC NEGATIVITY

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

 

THE TRAGIC LINE BETWEEN PROSPECTIVE AND RETROSPECTIVE LIFE

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

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CHAPTER FIFTY FIVE

 

BOLDER FLIGHTS INTO THE UNKNOWN

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

 

MYSTIC AND AXIOMATIC THINKING

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

THE TRAGIC DIVIDING LINE

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

 

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

 

THE PROBLEM OF SQUARELY FACING DEATH

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

 

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

 

BEGINNING A NEW WAY IN LIFE

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

THE MATRIX OF THE UNIVERSE

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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THE DYNAMICS OF SPIRITUAL PROGRESS

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

 

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

MY EARLY POETIC CAREER

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

 

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

 

TO MOUNT ELY

0 Island peak brooding over the deep, Mount Ely,

That from a small mouse derived thy name

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

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

Would wing its way, past all dross of memory.

As when Hippalos, Marco or Batuta around thee came

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

Since then many a billow broke and red sun set,

Eternally announcing the Word in low or loud voice,

As already heard at Sinai, while its echo met

The same from within each heart in hope to rejoice,

Engulfed in one surpassing glow of a double light,

Eclipsing day and night yet not darkness nor too bright!

 

 

 

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CHAPTER FIFTY SIX

 

PROPHETS, IDOLS AND HIPPIES

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

 

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

 

THE PROPHETIC AND THE APOCALYPTIC

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

IDOLATRY AND IDEALATRY

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

TOTEMISM, FETISHISM AND IDOLS

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

 

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

 

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THE LIVING WORD AND THE DEAD LETTER

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

DIARY LEAVES

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

THE NEW ABSOLUTIST CHALLENGE OF THE HIPPIES

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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I dedicate the following sonnet to them:

 

TO THE FLOWER PEOPLE

Sweet Flower People, known by whatever name,

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

Come let us speak the secret language we have found

In non-verbal colour patterns, which watched become

Eloquent within each of us, revealing the same

Contentless glory by mere union of light and sound,

Expansive mystical experience of sweetness unbound,

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

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

Halfway round the globe your ever-loving hand,

A fellow pilgrim long labouring for the same and

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

Wonderland - Let us together witness in inner space,

abstract and mute,

The dark-splendid colourful vision of the Absolute.

 

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

 

 

 

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CHAPTER FIFTY SEVEN

 

THE ROLE OF PROTOLINGUISM IN UNIFYING SCIENCE

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

 

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

 

THE APOCALYPTIC VISION

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

 

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

 

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

 

RELIGIOUS ART AND THEOLOGICAL SPECULATION

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

 

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

 

HINDUISM AND THE APOCALYPTIC NOTE

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

A LANGUAGE OF UNIFIED SCIENCE

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

 

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THE WOODBRIAR TEMPLE FESTIVAL

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

 

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

 

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

 

GITA CLASSES AT COIMBATORE

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

THE PLEASANT ROUND OF LIFE AT FERNHILL

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

 

FURTHER IMPLICATIONS OF STONE LANGUAGE

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

 

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

 

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

 

STRUCTURALISM IN MODERN PHYSICS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

THE UNIFIED LANGUAGE OF STRUCTURALISM

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

 

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A LANGUAGE WITHOUT PARABLES

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

A SONNET TO SCIENTIFIC IMMORTALITY

My birth was an accident to the world around

That happened with its echo within, in reciprocity,

When an electromagnetic wave-complementarity

Cancelled out in brilliant supersonic sound,

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

Conforming to a colour-solid schema of power and beauty

Adequate to universal reason's instrumentality.

Verifying laws and equations on reversible ground:

Death must needs belong to a similar event,

Viewed as a retroactivity, catching up ever the same

Equal state - negentropy gathering what entropy spent,

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

No double loss here; only vertical gaining

Absolute Value counts; all else is horizontal feigning.

 

(Fernhill - March 29th, 1968)

 

 

 

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CHAPTER FIFTY EIGHT

 

MORE THOUGHTS ON HIPPIEDOM

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

THE HIPPIES ONCE MORE

 

Smoking dope.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

VISIONS ARE VISIONS: PSYCHEDELIC OR APOCALYPTIC

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

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CHAPTER FIFTY NINE

 

INTIMATE MEDITATIONS

 

Old Singapore in the 60's.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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UNITIVE UNDERSTANDING AND WORLD PEACE

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

'If Shiva should only when united with Sakti

Get the power to manifest in becoming;

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

How then could one of unaccomplished merits

Have the privilege of bowing to or even to praise

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SIXTY

 

A VISIT TO MOSCOW

 

Moscow in the 60's.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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ABSOLUTISM AND A SUCCESSFUL CAREER

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

 

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

 

RENEWED CONTACTS AT BOMBAY

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

 

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

 

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

 

OVER THE HIMALAYA

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

LANDING TROUBLES AT MOSCOW

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

 

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF MOSCOW

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

 

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

 

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

 

VISIT TO THE RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

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

 

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

 

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

 

TOLSTOY'S HOUSE

 

Tolstoy's house, Yasnaya Polyana.

 

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

 

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

 

562

MOSCOW PERSONALITIES

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SIXTY ONE

 

TIME AND SPRING TIME IN BELGIUM

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

 

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

 

GASTRONOMY IS MADE TO MEET ASTRONOMY

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

 

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

 

NIGHT FLIGHT FROM LONDON TO BRUSSELS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

SPACE AND TIME

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

WINTER TO SPRINGTIME TRANSITION

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

 

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

 

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

 

AN ABSOLUTIST TRIES TO LIVE WITHIN A RELATIVIST FRAMEWORK

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SIXTY TWO

 

CONTACTS WITH HIPPIES AND HIGHBROWS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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TURN ON, TUNE IN, DROP OUT, OPEN UP

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

OTHER CONTACTS OF NUMERATOR VALUE

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

THE NUMERATOR ASPECT FOR THE UNDERGROUND TRIPS

 

Drug users in the 60's.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

THE ABSOLUTE AND 'COMMONSENSE'

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

577

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

 

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

 

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

 

MY MORNING CLASSES ON A SANSKRIT TEXT

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

 

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

 

578

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

 

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

 

PARTICIPATION IN SELECT GROUPS

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

 

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

 

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

 

579

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

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SIXTY THREE

 

HIPPIE ADVENTURES IN ENGLAND

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

581

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

 

CROSSING OVER TO JOHN GILPIN'S LONDON TOWN

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

583

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

 

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

 

FROM THE PRINCE CONSORT TO QUEEN ELIZABETH II

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

 

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

 

584

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

 

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

 

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

 

LOVELY LAWNS AND SCREAMING LADIES

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

 

585

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

586

FRESH ADVENTURES AWAIT US AT DAWN

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

 

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

 

587

HARROGATE BY THE A1 HIGHWAY

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

 

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TRYING TO BE MANNERLY

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

589

CHAPTER SIXTY FOUR

 

ICELAND, THE NORDIC PARADISE

 

Iceland.

 

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

 

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

 

RELATIVISM AND ABSOLUTISM NOT RIVALS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

AN EMERGENCY GURUKULA RESULTS FROM A BAD GAME

 

Deurle.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

AT THE YOGA INSTITUTE OF BRUSSELS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

594

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

 

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

 

AN ICELANDIC INTERLUDE

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

 

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

 

595

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

ONE DAY OF SIGHTSEEING IN ICELAND

 

Iceland.

 

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

 

596

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

 

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

 

597

FROM ICELAND TO 42ND STREET BUS TERMINUS, NEW YORK

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

598

CHAPTER SIXTY FIVE

 

AT THE NEW JERSEY GURUKULA

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

599

THE NEW JERSEY GURUKULA, THEN AND NOW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

MORNING CLASSES AND EVENING PARTIES

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

I FAIL TO MEET THE PROFESSORS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SIXTY SIX

 

WITH PROFESSORS AND DROP-OUTS IN CHICAGO

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

 

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

 

IN VIVEKANANDA 'S DAY

 

Vivekananda in America.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

ON BEING RECOGNIZED

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

 

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

 

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

 

DIAGNOSTICS AND TREATMENT

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

MY FRIEND MARSHALL

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

THE PRAGMATIC PROFESSORS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

WHERE CASTE IS DROPPED

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

 

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

 

GHETTOS AND DROP-OUTS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SIXTY SEVEN

 

THE BENARES OF THE DROP-OUTS

 

San Francisco hippie scene in 1968.

 

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

 

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

 

CHALLENGE OF THE NEW GENERATION

 

Julan Beck.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

I LAND AT SAN FRANCISCO

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

 

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

 

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

 

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IN GOLDEN GATE PARK

 

Golden Gate Park in 1968.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

A DROPOUT COMMUNITY

 

Commune scene.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

A SITUATION SAVED

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

LON AND RENA GOTTLEIB AT MORNING STAR

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SIXTY EIGHT

 

TRIPS IN INNER AND OUTER SPACE

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

 

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

 

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

 

CONFUSIONS IN A COURT

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

MORE DROPOUT CONTACTS

 

Steve Gaskin in 1968.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

VISIT TO BERKELEY CAMPUS

 

Berkeley in1968.

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

TRAPPED IN A TRIP

 

Mount Tamalpais.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

625

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

DREAM-LIKE AGONY

 

LSD trips.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

627

CHAPTER SIXTY NINE

 

CALIFORNIAN MIDSUMMER ORGY

 

Midsummer celebration.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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A MIDSUMMER MIDDAY

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

SUMMER MADNESS GATHERS MOMENTUM

 

LSD-fueled celebratory dancing.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

A GURUKULA IN PRINCIPLE COMES INTO EXISTENCE

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

VISIT TO SUFI CENTRE OF NOVATO

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

 

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

 

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

 

GOODBYE TO CALIFORNIA

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

634

CHAPTER SEVENTY

 

STRANGE MEETINGS IN HONOLULU

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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A BEACHCOMBER'S SECRET INTEREST

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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AN APPARITION OR JUST ANOTHER INCIDENT?

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

MESSING WITH TELEPHONES

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

A VISIT TO THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII

 

Hawai.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

MIDNIGHT FLIGHT TO NANDI

 

Temple at Nandi.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SEVENTY ONE

 

CROSSING THE DATE LINE

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

DOMINANT AND RECESSIVE CIVILIZATIONS

 

Suva town, Fiji.

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

AESTHETICS AND ETHICS VARY WITH LONGITUDE AND LATITUDE

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

 

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

 

GREATER INDIA IN A PACIFIC ISLAND

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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A NEW FRIEND

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

PROSPECTING ON A LONE ISLAND

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

OFF TO AUSTRALIA

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

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SEVENTY TWO

 

GLOBE-CIRCLING

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

ANOTHER IMAGINARY LINE CROSSED

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SEVENTY THREE

 

BUSY DAYS IN MALAYSIA

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

 

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

 

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

 

ANOTHER TWO MONTHS IN SE ASIA

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

TROUBLES IN KUALA LUMPUR

 

Kuala Lumpur in 1969.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

PRESS INTERVIEWS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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THE PEACE CONFERENCE

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

 

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

 

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

 

AUGUST 5th TO SEPTEMBER 5th 1969

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SEVENTY FOUR

 

MIDNIGHT CHEESE AND OTHER PROBLEMS

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

 

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

 

HOUSE WARMING AND FIRE RITUAL

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

 

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

 

A RECEPTION AT THE ASOKA HOTEL

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

THE HIGHER PATH IN CONTEMPLATION

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

THE PENULTIMATE LAP OF A ROUND-THE-WORLD FLIGHT

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SEVENTY FIVE

 

PROBLEMS SOLVED AND UNSOLVED

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

 

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

 

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

 

DISENTANGLING GURUKULA MUDDLE

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

WEDDING RECEPTION IN THE PALACE

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

THE TAIL END OF THE ROUND TRIP

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

 

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

 

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

 

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I VISIT KALADY, SANKARA'S BIRTHPLACE

 

Kalady.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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Why did Sankara write only in Sanskrit and not in Malayalam? Perhaps Malayalam did not exist in any sufficiently mature form for him to make use of it at the time. This same circumstance could apply to the status of the so-called Malayala Brahmana or Nambudri of that time. Parasurama is even said to have made fishermen into brahmins by giving them their fishing lines for use as sacred threads. This might be a caricature of what might have taken place, but the enigma still stares us in the face. The affinities of Sankara with Kalidasa, and his visits to the Narbada region not far from Ujjain, add plausibility to the theory that Sankara must have been born to a South Indian non-Aryan woman, so as to justify his reference to himself as a 'Dravida Sisu' (child of the Dravidian culture by race of birth).

 

Recognition has recently been given to this tomb of the mother by all the important Sankaracharyas now claiming to be his successors in different corners of India, North, East, and West. Mr. Rao took me to the various new additions or modern buildings in cement and mosaic that have been added to the original ones, spoiling the place of antique interest with garish streamlinings.

 

At the end of the second day before midnight I was driven to Alwaye station to entrain for the Island Home at the northern limit of Malabar. As I found the compartment where I was to sit, two strange faces known to me in Belgium several months before emerged from another compartment. It was a pleasant surprise that Freddie and Curran, dressed in yellow robes, had hitch-hiked through Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan and joined me as promised just when I was starting for the Island.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SEVENTY SIX

 

MYSTICISM AND TRAVEL TWILIGHTS

With my arrival at Cochin airport, where I was received by my friend Rao, the world tour was, in principle at least, to be treated as over. After a strange meeting with the Belgian contingent in the midnight train at Alwaye, a kind of 'marching home' atmosphere began to prevail, instead of one of a constant succession of packing to leave.

 

Some persons always pack and leave but others are destined to stay put for decades at a time. Through a surfeit of change of sleeping places, it often takes some people several minutes to remember where they last went to bed. That vacant minute between sleep and waking is where a secret kind of beauty, sweetness or joy resides, which is essentially mystical in content. Hungry hours alternating with feeding, and sleeping with waking, produce twilight periods between them as when day meets night in close mutual embrace. All conjugates or counterparts in life-experience are caught in an ambivalent interplay of seemingly contradictory factors that absorb their shocks when verticalized by the constant making and breaking of life currents.

 

The result is a kind of thrilling or flabbergasting experience of something that hippies call 'high' or 'far out'. This is the same as the 'lahari' or intoxication that Sankara deals with in his Saundarya Lahari which had been absorbing my attention and interest all through the months of my travels and with somewhat the same pressure even after. Ambivalent conjugates have a reciprocity, a complementarity or a compensatory character, as also finally a cancellability with a parity between right-handed or left-handed, virtual or actual shades of the same. Colours clash, blend or have shades, tints or saturations ranging between ultra-violet and infra-red which are subject to the same exchange of the four factors mentioned above. When opposites are abolished, joy results.

 

There is thus an ascending pleasure of sleep which comes from the rest of the lower limbs and organs, and another kind of sleep in which one can experience another kind of joy coming from a descending sense of peace or repose.

 

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All consolations, whether ascending or descending, result from the cancellation of counterparts. Eroticism and aesthetic tastes can be vulgar or select according to the weakness or strength in the cancellation of counterparts. There could be lukewarm reciprocity, which is not so verticalized a bliss as when an all-overwhelming sense of joy overtakes one wholly by a full cancellation of counterparts.

 

Hurdles and hazards of travel thus have their sweet uses. In spite of paper worries and worries due to heavy objects having to be transported from place to place, alternating travel and homecoming, when blended together, bring much felicity in life. Vertical joy spells absolute bliss, while horizontal pleasures can yield only satiation through surfeit.

 

FROM A MIDNIGHT SURPRISE TO RECEPTION AT THE ISLAND

After a few words of greeting exchanged at midnight at the Alwaye station, I woke up next only on the morning of September 21st when the Malabar Express reached Calicut. Well-wishers who entered my compartment to greet me on coming home included Bharati Trivedi of Ahmedabad who was passing through Calicut that night. Chandra, her companion, was not present due to some indisposition. Shivaprasad and others of the Gurukula fraternity were also there. As more friends got on each time the train stopped at Mahé, Tellicherry, Cannanore, and finally at Payyanur about eight in the morning, there was quite a crowd of such members of the fraternity joining into a regular pilgrimage to the island.

 

Kumaraswami had arranged about a dozen other smaller wayside receptions, at each of which I alighted and faced audiences, big or small, to say a few words. The bus that conducted us from Kottikadavu ferry-point to the Gurukula grounds had to stop for us to receive garlands and ritual offerings. It was thus a fully-triumphant homecoming event, culminating in a thousand people participating in the hospitality offered by Kumaraswami's efforts, as the date also coincided with the birthday anniversary of Narayana Guru.

 

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Travel fatigue added to sleeplessness and the fatigue from public engagements in which I had to participate without any interval of rest. The hours of sleep that followed on arrival at the Gurukula Island home were a veritable elixir blend made up of ascending and descending thrills of so special a kind that when cultivated further in the same sense would surely have led at least to the state which constitutes absorption in the Absolute. Such sonorous words as samadhi or the satori of the Zen Buddhists are not altogether outside the scope of everyday experience. Homespun and glossy varieties of fabric can be made of the same stuff.

 

CHANDRA AND BHARATI

Chandra and Bharati are the names of two inseparable ladies - both much travelled and fully-trained educators who, hardly a year before, had returned from the USA via Italy as specialists with about ten years of actual teaching experience with children of early school-going age. They held many degrees and diplomas that easily made them eligible for cushy jobs, judged by the premium that the Indian public still places on what is called 'foreign qualifications'.

 

These two girls, who behaved as if they were twin birds on the same stalk, hailed from Gujarat with Bombay or Allahabad affiliations of a so-called Vedic background, although such orthodoxy is at present to be found only in a form mixed up with later Mogul or Persian influences. Hindu orthodoxy in North India has its paradoxes wherein opposing patterns as well as life-values from both sides of a situation involving challenge and response can have flavours that clash, or at best only roughly complement each other. If we should add to this a Yankee veneer with an overall drop of the dropout flavour, we get an utterly new effect wherein many components still remain in the form of a mechanical mixture rather than a chemical compound. Even at that, such a compound could still remain amorphous or crypto-crystalline. For the inner molecular structure to cling together more closely and organically the finishing touch of the unitive understanding that the Gurukula represents is needed at least to act as a catalyser. Super-saturated crystals need a crystallising principle which need not necessarily be part of the liquid itself. The case is like that of an umpire who could be in a field, fully participating in the game by his interest and influence, but who need not necessarily play the game himself. He is 'oceans apart', although within the totality of the general situation. The Upanishadic touch is the catalytic agent, as I see it.

 

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Although Chandra, as a purusika (positive maiden), often dominated Bharati who was more of an Aphrodite than a Diana type, they were complementary, compensatory or reciprocal elements or particles capable of being put together. They were thus sufficient unto themselves. They had already had a few years of an Upanishadic touch, to which they responded readily, under Harry, the Head of the New Jersey Gurukula, who put them on the way.

 

After an interval of about seven months, since seeing me off at Bangalore airport about the end of February, 1969, they were more determined than ever about getting Gurukula wisdom in Calicut on September 28th, 1969. They really were two brave Indian girls, equally educated in the West, prepared to take the risks together for a fuller adventure into the unexplored waters of the Absolute. Their earnest desire for Gurukula wisdom and their self-sufficiency between them, made it easy for me to allow them to be a part of my entourage for many months thereafter.

 

THE VAITHIRI CENTRE

 

Vaithiri.

 

The stay at Calicut at the ample apartments belonging to Mr. Kesava Mudaliar was good example of generosity as well as hospitality. Little did we realise that Mr. Mudaliar was to pass away within a few months of this meeting of friends in his house, especially as he was seen that same night generously treating a group of North Indian men and women who had come to see the Guru of the two ladies who were instrumental in bringing about a spiritual contact between the two sections of North and South Indians living in comparative isolation of each other, although hitherto in the same city.

 

Next morning we all started in a car lent by the proprietor of C.C. Brothers for a point in the Wynad (on the way to the Nilgiris), just less than forty miles from Calicut, where Jean and Nicole Letschert, a French-Belgian companionate couple, were building huts on the five-acre grounds offered to the Gurukula some months before. We stayed first at the Eagle Estate where Ratnakaran, the son of the proprietor, had a modern bungalow. Then we peeped into the hut in the forest near the lakeside not far from the main road. The hut had been abandoned by the couple because it is well known that, after Cherapunji in the North-East, the place known for the highest rainfall is just this spot, and the hut was not waterproof. Heaven's waters seem to have chosen this lake for establishing some contact with the earth, and the rainy season is the time when the Ganges has its home equally above as below through this point of participation between heaven and earth.

 

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The way a Gurukula can grow, given a forest and a freshwater lake and some dropout-like individuals, half-mystic and half-rational, has been proved time and again in the history of mysticism all over the world. What we saw at Vaythiri was again another example of how persistent people with a will to live will make headway in spite of inclement weather or adverse circumstances. Noah's ark was built in the bad weather of the Deluge; spirit triumphs and even matter stops short in failure and is left behind.

 

The stay at the Eagle Estate was very enjoyable, surrounded by mountains with clouds lighting on them. We extended our stay by one more day to rest our limbs fatigued by the heat and perspiration of the plains. A touch of cold, however slight, can correct the evil done to the body by many head-perspiring nights spent in the plains under mosquito nets. The yaksas and kinnaras of Kalidasa are seen to be very particular in choosing the point in the cloud-line levels where they can escape extremes of inclement weather, hot, moist or cold.

 

Intelligent man, likewise, must secure his health and happiness by readjusting the workings of the thermostat with feedback arrangements of his psychophysical cybernetics, tallying inner with outer psychosomatic, entropic, thermodynamic or even electro-magnetic conditions. This is why 'change' is recommended by wise doctors and is seen to do good in almost every case when discreetly adopted. Ooty not only readjusts the cybernetics of good health, but overhauls the system, as it were, sometimes with hammer and pliers not always used in a pleasant manner. After the two girls had a good jeep ride in the countryside which Ratnakaran arranged, we boarded a bus at Chandrayil at noon on October 1st, to climb the heights through Gudalur and past the Pykara waterfalls to the highest point in Fernhill dominating the Keti Valley.

 

THE ANNUAL FEAST AT FERNHILL

The Gurupuja or feast for the Guru falls about the second Sunday in the month of October. Rains stop just before this date and the second monsoon is often in the offing. As a result we just missed a wet feast when hundreds of men, women and children come to eat good food with all of us once a year.

 

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The preparations for this event start at least a month in advance. Karunakaran takes charge with Nitya and Prasad acting at a distance from wherever they happen to be. Calicut and Cannanore friends readily respond with other contacts all over India and abroad. It is the atmosphere of fraternity, openness and outright generosity that makes for the success of this event, now repeated in almost the same way over more than three decades.

 

Principles of inner growth and elements of dialectical import come into interplay in such events when Gods are said to be propitiated above by the burnt offerings of material below. Humanity has believed in this kind of efficacy through the days of the siege of Troy to the present. There is a cosmo-psychological structural dynamism implied here as with semantics, logistics, cybernetics and quantum or space-time relations known to modern man.

 

Sunday, October 12th, was thus another of the memorable days in which Gurukula friends reaffirmed their dedication to the Absolute.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SEVENTY SEVEN

 

TWO KINDS OF RESOURCES AND INITIATIVES

The resources at the disposal of a man of contemplation who, while remaining a full contemplative, wishes to avoid falling into states of negativism or quietism like that of the Trappists of South Italy or Greece, and the resources of a big church or state body, are not of the same order. Time is the wealth on which he has to rely rather than on the power of the dollar. One affiliates oneself to the world of horizontal values by putting the dollar before Time or Pure Duration, which is the same as the Kingdom of God that one is called upon in the Bible to seek first and foremost. One has to mark for oneself an Omega Point or arrowhead for directing one's resources or efforts, whether spiritual or material, of a given time or chance-opportunity.

 

The Gurupuja or feast in the name of a wisdom teacher gives a chance for teacher and disciples - together with other sympathisers and camp followers of any Guru movement - to press one more pace forward to success. Negative 'blue' states of depression or despondency are thus passed through by the pilgrim crossing the valley where the 'dark night of the soul', in the words of St. John of the Cross, might mar the joy of a veritable 'mystical marriage'. Instead of the witch scene of Macbeth or the monkey scene of Faust we have an atmosphere of festive openness and generosity which makes one and all feel better. After the spurt of the actual event, one enjoys the quiet time that succeeds. Quietism and festive joys in company have to go hand in hand.

 

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QUIET DAYS AT FERNHILL

The Fernhill Gurukula was destined to be my contemplative home. When I first stepped into its grounds, then overgrown and wild with trees and thistles, I repeated often within myself those words of Alexander Pope, which I had recited at school earlier and which spoke of the happiness of a man 'whose wish and care a few paternal acres bound' and:

 

'Blest, who can unconcernedly find

Hours, days, and years slide soft away,

In health of body, peace of mind,

Quiet by day.

 

Sound sleep by night; study and ease,

Together mixed; sweet recreation

And innocence, which most does please with meditation.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown,

Thus unlamented let me die,

Steal from the world, and not a stone'.

 

After my seventy-fourth birthday I had a chance to feel the truth of these lines.

 

Curran De Bruler of Chicago was acting as my secretary for the World Conference for Peace through Unitive Understanding which was to take place (as a kind of dress rehearsal) a month later at the new Gurukula Island Home in Cannanore District in Malabar. The two ladies from North India, Chandra and Bharati, were there to help and sit together with me for lessons - either in the Saundarya Lahari which I was carefully scrutinizing, or in perfecting plans for the projected Conference. Soon we were to be on the scene for action at the no-man's-land end corner of the island, where the steep slopes of the mountainside sank into the deep blue waters of the Arabian Sea.

 

Publicity materials had to be prepared, setting out the nature of the Conference and its aim, ways and means. The ladies helped in regulating study hours as also in odd clerical work, making available a manifold copying machine which they had brought in anticipation from America when they returned to India. They were a self-sufficient pair of ladies who resembled a couple in the usual sense, but in fact they only complemented each other without conflict between them. Although a reciprocity or ambivalence seemed to be present in their relations, as with two inseparable birds or buds on the same stalk, they did not obtrude into Gurukula life with the fickleness or negative unpredicability that had been experienced or rather taken for granted in the case of some former woman inmates who had come to live and travel with me previously, as recorded already.

 

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Even the weak complementarity between them was mostly free from the contrary or cross-purposes often noticed between two women bracketed together as they happened to be. I saw no reason why they should not be allowed to benefit from the life of the Gurukula as others of the other sex. Moreover, at that very time, I was formulating the words for a message to be given out at the end of the year in which marriage and sex life in the Gurukula were to be overtly clarified for the guidance of all concerned.

 

MAN-WOMAN RELATIONS

Man-Woman relations imply and involve subtle dialectics by which the relations can be sublimated from the context of conflict to one of harmonious reciprocity, by recognizing the ambivalence of personal traits and treating them as complementary counterparts, permitting one element or trait as compensatory to the other, so as to add to the total gain rather than effect the double loss that might otherwise accrue.

 

The general good and good of all have to be remembered together in the Gurukula game and, above all, 'off-sides' and unilaterally-motivated foul play with rival egos coming into the picture have to be carefully avoided. After the Gurupuja in Fernhill, October, 1969, I was still ruminating, experimenting or carrying out observations in such matters.

 

THE APPROACH OF THE 1969 CONFERENCE

The one purpose that filled the minds of all Gurukula inmates after the middle of October was to make the coming conference a success. A folder in coloured print with photographs, maps, etc., giving all details of the events, was printed in Trivandrum under the supervision of Curran. It was prepared with the co-operation of the two ladies. We also tried to make our own copies of handouts for the conference, but mechanical expertise was still inadequate in handling the machine which arrived at the Island when we reached there after ten days at Varkala. Soon the event began to call for a hasty and all-out effort and we were obliged to plunge headlong into it more or less haphazardly.

 

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A contingent of about twenty delegates from Australia were to arrive before the conference began. Yati Nitya Chaitanya came from Australia before the group arrived and, after a few days spent in Varkala, arrived at the Island with his offer of valuable service and financial support.

 

He took over the whole management so as to relieve me of my direct burden and, with his usual facile versatility in such organisational matters, was able to run the show with ease. He was free and bolder than I in his dealings, and friendly understanding and generosity characterized his movements and relations. He over-did the stunt perhaps towards the end of the conference, and had something like an emotional crisis for a short time. His delicate system could not carry crude heavy-duty loads or bear rough handling, into which way of life I found myself stepping unawares now and then. Even otherwise, Guru-Sisya relations have very delicate adoption-disadoption mechanics which, as in electronic machines, can get stuck in cybernetic feedback adjustments, so as to cause hold-ups or 'noise' unrelated to the flow of eventful 'information'.

 

THE DIALECTICS OF DISADOPTION

Man and woman, even when well united by marriage, are subject to strange dialectical laws, sometimes with tragic reverses in the way they love or hate each other. When unstable, such a relationship can become an eternal toothache to both the parties concerned, as Tolstoy puts it in his Kreutzer Sonata. Women are more often prone to this kind of disadoption, for which one tries in vain to find a cogent reason. There is, however, a subtle dialectical law regulating relations, and when frustration of emotional satisfaction is involved, a tragic situation can arise unawares. The 'Dasa-kumara-carita' of Dandin even refers to a woman, otherwise a model of constancy, being overtaken by such a tragic contrariness that she pushed her life-long companion of a good husband into a well when her deeper emotional appetites were starved by him.

 

Woman are known to suffer 'capalya', which refers to an absolute unpredictability in their basic nature. Shakespeare would call it fickleness and equate it to the specific personality of womanhood itself when he speaks about it in Hamlet as 'frailty thy name is woman!' A Sanskrit saying is that the fortune of a man is as unpredictable as the mind of a woman.

 

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Another Sanskrit saying is that woman deserves no freedom - modern women resent such doctrines outright. Ancient wisdom thus comes into direct conflict with modernism. The reason is that moderns think of mechanistic equality or justice while ancients had the complex fourfold Absolute for reference.

 

 

 

EPILOGUE

I have been using the pages of the English Appendix to the Gurukulam magazine - and previously those of 'Values' magazine -  to narrate to its readers what I have called 'The Autobiography of an Absolutist'; trying to tell the story of my own life with relevant remarks that I thought could make it both interesting and thought-provoking. In my last instalment, I remember to have been treating the subject of pure memory and forward-flowing time. I had premonitions about my present ailment of paralysis of both my left limbs while staying in Ootacamund in the summer of 1971 and, confined to a hospital bed in Trivandrum as I am writing these lines, I was just narrating an account of those early warning signals which presaged the calamity which was to come to me one year later. Let us now catch up with that part of the narrative.

 

It is a familiar and trite saying that coming events cast their shadows before. I think that even Shakespeare somewhere in his writings has seemingly lent support to this notion. If we should treat this as valid, the consequences thereof would be more significant than might ordinarily be expected. It would be tantamount to admitting that omens and premonitions are not to be dismissed as mere superstitions, and would compel us to believe that what is called pure consciousness has a prospective as well as a retrospective reference. In the summer of 1971 I had the earliest premonition of this kind while staying at the Fernhill Gurukula. On the 7th of June, while taking my usual walk with two or three disciples down to the railway over-bridge towards the burial grounds, I went to a certain point and decided to turn about for the return walk. Just at that moment I felt that I was losing my spatial orientation and balance, and the cold Ooty air must have added whatever slight complication it could to the non-functioning of the inner ear with its semicircular canals, etc., both vertically and horizontally disposed, which is the delicate mechanism supposed to be in charge of spatial orientation. I had to sit down on the side-bank of the road for a moment before walking back to the Gurukula. This was surely a mild form of 'red light signal' forewarning me of the real stroke that was to come just one year later. Thus it is within my own recent personal experience that coming events do cast their shadows before.

 

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PURE TIME

Pure Time is a concept, when written with a capital 'T'. Time is not a simple forward-flowing event but is rather a two-sided one, with both action and retroaction and prospective and retrospective references to it that imperceptibly alternate within pure duration. Retroaction takes over when the forward function of action is finished. It is as if two consciousnesses are involved together in a sort of relay race, with a kind of indirectness of cause and effect. Sometimes the effect comes before the cause. It is a double-sided event, and not just a simple flux. The notion of 'free will' becomes compromised almost completely if we accept this Shakespearean dictum.

 

This brings us to the question, 'Who is an absolutist?' - which has to be answered as early as possible. An absolutist is one who regulates his life with the Absolute as his norm of reference. He is generally a man who refuses to make compromises. Earnestness, whole-heartedness, honesty to oneself, and serious life-long dedication without compromises are some of the prerequisites which distinguish the state which is natural to the so-called absolutist. Of all the philosophies of the world, Advaita Vedanta - which makes the bold statement, 'You are That' (tat tvam asi) - in other words, you are already the Absolute - may be said to correspond to an outlook which could be described as absolutist. Advaita means non-dual. That means that duality between matter and mind, forward-flowing and backward-flowing time, or between any other pair of rival antinomian categories is to be abolished.

 

ABSOLUTIST SOLUTION

Doctors keep on telling us that worry is the cause of high blood-pressure and that high blood-pressure aggravates heart troubles such as the present thrombosis from which I am now suffering. How can one ever stop worrying? One is worried when one finds something is too difficult or impossible to do. If the elder son of an old man does not obey the father, the old man gets worried and might develop complications of the heart and limbs. As a bachelor and sannyasi, I was under the impression that worries could never operate in my mind seriously, because I have no dependants like sons or a wife.

 

683

But the very thought of a certain task that you might set yourself might be the root cause of such a worry, even when you are not attached to a wife and children. In the summer of 1971 there was a series of impossible tasks with which my mind seemed to be confronted and obsessed, to which I seemed very seriously and inextricably committed. I had made up my mind to use the medium of videotape cassettes to write a visual commentary of the Saundarya Lahari of Sankara. This work of the great advaitic philosopher happened to be one that was particularly suited for this task of using visual language instead of words to explain deep philosophical verities. And as days went on I was lured more and more into deeper and deeper involvement, the impossibility of which became more and more evident as days went on. Furthermore, the work of the Gurukula itself was expanding and broadening out every day. I had to depend upon a group of disciples who were brought to me almost by the hands of accident from the farthest corners of the Earth. To make them toe the line in regard to my favourite ideals seemed a task that had become more and more impossible, especially at this stage of my life. Further, there were technical problems belonging to a world quite outside my own, which also added to my worries. Thus there was a series of impossible items that seemed to loom into my life one after another to build up some kind of an adverse tension within me, which must have resulted in the present calamity. I have been intensely considering a solution of at least some kind of consolation from religion or philosophy, and I am glad to say that I am still hoping to fix it on to the way of life called the Advaitic way of life, which is otherwise more simply called Vedantic. Abolish all dualities and difficulties! That is the sweeping answer that it gives us. It is easy to make such a demand, but not so easy to carry it out so as to abolish worry altogether. Man is caught in a world of necessity, cabined, cribbed and confined forever, and his dreams of freedom have to lie in another world, opposite to that of necessity, which could be called the world of free contingence. 'Free contingence' refers to the world of intelligent light, while necessity refers to matter, darkness, and ignorance. Is it humanly possible to bridge the gap between the two rival worlds of necessity and contingence? That is, in short, the problem which each man is called upon to face each day in his life, if he is to escape worry at all. I am glad to say that the answer happens to be in the affirmative.

 

684

Each man really belongs to the world of bright light and wisdom, of great beauty and value. To be conscious of this every minute of one's life is the solution, and there seems to be no other alternative. Textbooks such as the Saundarya Lahari and the Kali Natakam of Narayana Guru contain precious indications in this direction. That is why Narayana Guru's works deserve our special scrutiny and critical study. I have been engaged in just this kind of study while still confined to a hospital bed these last months, and hopes are not lost. On the contrary, hopes are becoming brighter every day for me.

 

The notion of the Absolute is the universal solvent of dualities, whether within the mind or the psyche or the personality as a whole. And what is human life, but what concerns the personality of man as a whole? It is in this sense that philosophy and wisdom can be consolations to human life. It must be only in this sense that we say 'knowledge is power'. All evils in life arise from lack of knowledge. This is the essence of the philosophy of Narayana Guru and Sankaracharya. Our lives constantly alternate between the world of light and that of darkness. Darkness is the source of all evils. Therefore abolish darkness and you are saved. I know that this sounds too simple, but I want it to be taken seriously and literally. Its extreme simplicity is its weakness as well as its strength. Living examples of those people who have taken this point of view seriously are to be found even in our own days. Such men are known as gurus in India, but India is by no means the only place where such great men live. They can be found in any place in the world at any time, though distributed as only few and far between.

 

In the ward next to me I can hear groaning voices of important persons, of VIP's who have been admitted here for dire diseases such as my own. Thrombosis, polio, cancer, brain abscesses and ulcers of various kinds prove to me every minute that life is a suffering, although I do not like to be classed among oriental pessimists. But the fact is too evident to be overlooked, irrespective of pessimism or optimism.

 

Individual human life has been compared by Narayana Guru to bubbles of spring water which enter a well from the bottom, while similar bubbles descend from rainwater downwards from above. Two bubbles could greet each other in the middle of the well, and that would represent what is called human society. The whole thing takes place within pure water, which suffers no change because of the bubbles.

 

 

 

INDEX

 

A

Abelard, 175

Absolute, 64, 91, 117, 122, 123, 142, 158, 166, 167, 177, 196, 215, 243, 278, 335, 365

Absolutism, 90, 112, 118, 134, 174, 257, 267, 300, 615, 655

absolutist, 75, 109, 114, 115, 116, 158, 267, 295, 395, 456

abundance, 280, 395

academic life, 48

Achutananda, Swami, 287, 288

Adam Smith, 293

adhibhautika, 373

adhidaivika, 373

adhyatmika, 373

Adi Dravida, 71, 72, 75

Adler, 208

adolescence, 27, 78

adolescent years, 59

Adolphe Ferrière, 191

Adonis, 230

adrsta, 142

Advaita Ashram, 99, 101, 102, 105, 112, 114, 118, 169

Advaita Bhakta Sabha, 71

ahimsa, 87, 197

Akhandananda, Swami, 371

Alps, 236, 309

altruism, 63, 64, 69, 74

ambivalent polarities, 28

Andrews C.F., Rev. 106, 216

Anna Karenina, 433, 482

apat dharmam, 137

apocalyptic, 535

apocryphal, 535

apodictic certitude, 534, 650

a posteriori, 512

apperception mass, 80, 228

a priori, 512

apurva, 142

Archimedes, 233

architecture, 229, 230, 231

Aristotle, 53, 132, 329, 456

Arjuna, 60, 74, 174, 459, 476

art, 229, 230, 388, 392, 393, 394

artha, 60

Aryan, 71, 668

ashram, 99, 101, 102, 104, 118

astangahrdaya, 120

atavistic types, 95

Atkinson Henry A., Dr. 303, 315

Atlantic, 311

Atmopadesa Satakam, 504

Aurobindo, 390

authorship, 468

Ayer A.J., Prof., 435

 

B

Bacchus, 239

Bach, 435

Bahai, 191

Bahuleyan, 122

Balzac, 449

Bannerjee, Surendranath, 26

Barcelona Gallery, 392, 394

Baroda, 269

Beethoven, 435

behaviour prototype, 4

Bentinck, Lord, 26

Bergson, 161, 204, 246, 334, 347, 454, 469, 470, 510, 655

Besant, Annie, 26, 87, 114, 245, 361

Bhagavan Prasad, 141

Bhandarkar, 21

Bharata, 117

bhikhu, 164, 165

Bible, 54, 61, 282, 324

bipolar relationship, 5

bird life, 86

Boccaccio, 55, 437

Bodhananda Swami, 123, 128, 130, 135, 173, 259, 287

Bombay, 256, 258, 268, 371, 416, 557

Bovet Pierre, 191, 247

brahmachari, 147, 371

brahmacharya, 60, 169, 204

brahmin, 71, 72

Brahminism, 163, 164

Brahma Vidya, 302

Brooklyn, 317, 318

Bruno, 175, 575

Buddha, 18, 118, 164

Buddhism, 163, 164, 165

 

C

Caesar, 231, 244, 308, 413

Cairo, 308

Calcutta, 87, 376, 377

calligraphy, 83

Cambridge, 1, 17

Campbell, 62

Candide, 14, 227, 384, 437

Canova, 229

Cape Comorin, 117, 177

Carnot Equation, 354

caste, 9, 65, 71, 557

catacombs, 233

Cérésole Pierre, Dr., 241, 242

Ceylon, 2, 11, 62, 63, 69, 77, 163, 165, 169, 448

charity (begins at home), 75

Chattambi Swami, 463

Chattopadhyaya, Mrinalini, 76

Chidbhavananda, Swami, 147

Chimacoffs, 334, 335

Chintadripet, 63, 71, 72, 73, 76

Christ anti-, 19

Christian, 29, 46, 50, 52, 59, 183

Christ Jesus, 19

Christian morality, 8

Christianity, 18, 215, 228, 231, 233, 325, 405, 417, 419

Cicero, 177

civilization - dominant and recessive, 642

Claperède, 246, 247, 252

Cochin, 3, 122

Colombo, 13, 180, 181, 184, 189, 359

colonialism, 77

compartmentalization, 54

Conan Doyle, 28

Confessions, 59, 162, 297, 511

Conjeevaram (Kanjipuram), 163

conscience, 181, 193, 194

contemplation, 275, 382

Conventions, Varkala Gurukula, 366, 378, 462, 484

cosmos, 91

cosmological, 64

Count d'Aarschot, 414, 415, 452

Crates, 525

cubists, 83

cybernetic, 354, 431, 454, 595

 

D

Dalton Plan, 80

Dante, 419, 445

Daridra Narayanas, 74

Darsanamala, 302

death, 116, 404, 487, 514, 551

death of a cow, 277, 278

Deccan, 2

dedication, 108, 134

Dehra Dun, 269

denominator, 487

depressed classes, 71

Descartes, René, 254, 265, 567

Desdemona, 118

destiny, 68

Dewey, 133, 296

dharma, 60, 354, 376

dialectical, 70, 74, 347

dialectical dragons, 368, 369

dialectical revaluation, 347

Dina and Bianca, 421, 425

Dickens, 28, 383

Dorothy Hodgkin, 445

double gain, 75

Durkheim Emile, 165

 

E

East Africa, 77

economics, 344

economy - abundance and opulence, 280, 291, 292, 609

education - experimental, 82 83, 295

- theory and practice, 81, 82

educative process, 191, 435

Edward VIII, 87

Eiffel Tower, 185, 214, 243

Einstein, 246, 321, 455, 469

Ellis Island, 314

Emile, 82, 132, 203, 204

Emma Thomas, 195, 199, 207

empirical intelligence, 6

Empiricism, 24

England, I, 439-447

entropy, 354

Ernakulam, 3, 94, 95, 99, 109, 173

eroticism, 27

Eton, 22

etymological, 83

Europe, 82, 243, 281, 341, 416

Evans-Wentz, Prof., 153

exhibitionism, 31

Experimental Psychology, 210

extra-curricular studies, 27

Ezhumalai, 471, 493

 

F

Failure, 106, 107, 114, 301, 326

fakir, 100, 395

fashion, 383

fate, 196, 264

Father's Mansion, 94

Fernhill, 139, 274, 295, 377

Fichte, 53

figure-of-eight principle, 327

food, 353, 443

France, 187

Fraser A.G., Rev., 16

Fred Haas, 463, 469

freedom, 395

French, 6, 10, 191

Freud, 208

Froebel, 82, 83, 133, 201

 

G

Gandhi M.K, 32, 33, 34, 37, 60, 84, 89, 91, 145, 241, 280, 290, 296, 318, 390, 476

Gangadharan, 91

Ganges, 329, 464

Garibaldi, 231

Garry Davis, 346, 349, 356, 357, 389, 410, 411, 425, 427, 432, 449, 593

Gauguin, 267, 392, 628

Gaussian curve, 488, 517, 539

Geneva, 181, 186, 189, 191, 193, 256

Geo-dialectics, 349, 368, 369

Germany, 238, 239

Gevaert Céline, 404, 405, 438, 443, 450, 457

Gevaert Edgar, 355, 417

Gevaert girls, 401

Gevaert family, 401, 437, 447

Gevaert Marc, 399, 403, 413, 434

Gevaert Martine, 398, 400

Gent, 398, 399, 404, 414, 416, 417, 429, 434

Gita, Bhagavad, 60, 61, 64, 101, 122, 166, 174

Gita Govinda, 35, 148

Gland, 199, 200, 237, 247, 256, 319

Gobbo, 192

God, 59, 521

Goethe, 215, 629, 630

Gokhale, 34

Govindananda Swami, 163, 259, 287

Grieve, R.G., 81, 85, 89

Gujarat, 87

Gulzarilal Nanda, 375

Guru, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45

Gurukula, 4, 132

Gurukulam Magazine, 363

Gurukula principles, 338, 349

Gurukula, Somanhalli, 379

Gurupuja, 281, 475

Guru-sisya, 73, 213, 247

Gurukula vasa, 169

 

H

Hanuman, 2

happiness, 345, 395

Harappa, 71

Harijans, 72, 73

Harishchandra, 72

Harrow, 22

hierophantic, 485, 536, 541, 569, 661

Heloïse, 297, 430, 445

Heraclitus, 67

Herbart, 80, 228

hero-worship, 27, 41

heuristic, 80, 81

Himalaya, 117, 558

Hinduism, Vedic, 474

hippies, 529, 530, 545, 573, 580

Hippolytus, 116

Hitler, 227, 238, 241

holi, 203

homam, 366, 413, 463, 508, 585, 657

homologic, 355

homeostatic, 355

Homer, 386

Home Rule Movement, 87

homo sapiens, 53, 82

honesty, 315

Hoover, 315

Hugo Victor, 14, 29, 123, 185, 297, 328, 395, 449, 482, 489

humour, 334

Huxley Aldous, 623

Huxley Julian, Sir, 54

Hyderabad, 76

hylozoic, 536

Hypateia, 175, 430

hypochondriac, 80

hypostatic, 536, 541, 569, 661

 

I

Iambic tetrameter, 22

ideals, adolescence, 24

ideals, naturalistic, 20

ideals, negative, 20

ideals, pragmatic, 20

Impressionists, 83

Indus Valley civilization, 71

indeterminism, 28

India becoming a Nation, 34

Indian National Congress, 87

Integrated Science of the Absolute, 382, 385, 402, 456, 540, 571, 574, 579

Ipomea biloba, 53

Isa Upanisad, 64

ista and purta, 64, 130

Italy, 418

 

J

Jain, 87

Jakobsen, Harry, 327, 335, 364, 599

Janaka, King, 174

Janus, 117

Jean Convent, 381

Jean Valjean, 300

Jesus, 175

Jews, 183

jnana-karma samuchaya, 115

Joan of Arc, 175, 297

job-hunting, 49, 268, 269, 270, 271

John Spiers, 304, 363, 369, 378, 463

Johnston, Mrs., 282

Josephine De Story, Miss, 239

Julian Beck, 612

Jung, 208

 

K

Kaggalipura, 369

Kalathoor Muniswami Pillai, 71

Kali, 196, 600, 620

Kalidasa, 12, 29, 131, 297, 403, 568, 650, 653, 668

kama, 60

Kandy, 12, 15, 62, 63

Kant, 452

Kanva, 12

karma, 212, 264, 286, 354

kartrtva, 31

Kashmir, 177

Katha Upanisad, 116

kausala, 286

Keats, 232, 246, 409, 471

khaddar, 88, 124

Kindergarten, 82, 83

Kipling's 'Jungle Book', 151

Koru, 141

Krishna, 60, 141, 476

Krishnamurti, 245

Kumaran Asan, 304, 518

Kuppuswamy, 141

Kural, 251

 

L

Labro, 422, 425

Lacombe, 343, 457

Lakshmana, 117

Launcelot Gobbo, 323

League of Nations, 357

Leibniz, 209

Leifra, 245

Leigh Hunt, 70

Léman, Lake, 188, 197

Leonardo da Vinci, 230, 232

Les Misèrables, 28

Lévy, Sylvain, 343

libido, 94

life, 332, 365, 426

Light of Asia, The, 118

Lingua Mystica, 554, 577

lokanuvartana, 97

London, 70, 72, 82, 184

love, 75, 159, 249, 250, 251, 297, 298

luck, 423

 

M

Matrika Pathasala, 168

Mauritius, 32

Maya, 287, 300, 320, 332, 454, 494, 565

Mediterranean, 233

Merchant of Venice, 228

meta-language, 537

Michelangelo,230

Michelet, 239

Midsummer Night's Dream, 20, 629

Milton, 384, 422, 468

mimamsaka, 44

modernism, 468

modernization, 440

Mohenjo-Daro, 71, 233

moksa, 60

Monroe, 446

Montessori, 80, 82, 84

Montmartre, 83, 211, 396

moral standards, 345

morality, 305

Morin, Madame, 352, 354

Moscow, 556, 558, 559

Mozart, 436

Muhammed, 423

music, European, 436, 437

Mussolini, 227, 231, 258

Mysore, 1, 44, 61

mysticism, 388, 395

 

N

necessities, 264, 286, 289, 566

New York, 70, 316

nickname, 8

Nietzsche, 482, 504, 510

Nikhilananda, Swami, 324, 325, 326

Nilgiri Hills, 123, 124, 125, 235, 267, 274, 275, 281, 286, 296,

Nitya Chaitanya Yati, 375, 378, 460, 465, 505

normalization, 13, 543

normative goal, 25

numbers, 452

numerator, 487, 575

 

0

Obligations, 97

Oedipus Complex, 116

Ootacamund, 125, 276, 278

opulence, 98, 333, 334, 395, 433

orphan in God, 100, 126, 323

Oshawa, 415, 451

Othello, 118, 282

Oxford, 17

 

P

paedocentricity, 82

Passive Resistance, 34, 80

pedagogue, 80

Penelope, 265

peripatetic, 132

personality development, 59

personality type, 28

Pestalozzi, 80, 82, 84, 201, 236

Petrarchan, 422

Peter Cadby, 351, 352

Picasso, 83, 392, 394, 628

Pitar Natty, 200, 320

Plato, 132

Politics, 605, 654

poor feeding, 69, 73, 74, 506

Portia, 430, 445

poverty, 333, 334

Prasad, 467, 490, 665

prasadam, 111, 179, 509

Presidency College, 49, 50, 51, 63, 68, 69, 268

principle of uncertainty, 267

probabilities and possibilities, 5, 69, 659

Project Method, 80

Prophets, 521

proto-Aryan civilization, 71, 72

proto-language, 537, 553, 577

protozoa, 53

psychedelics, 612

psychic research, 375

psychological, 64

Public school, 170, 171

purusarthas, 60

purvashrama, 115

Pythagoras, 297

 

Q

 

R

racial discrimination, 332, 333

radicalism, 655

Radhakrishnan S. Dr., 24, 321

Raghuvamsa, 29

Rai, Lajpat, 26

Rajagopalachari, C, 241

Ramakrishna, 69

Ramakrishna Mutt, 26, 322, 324,

Ramananda, 145

Ramana Maharishi, 298

Ramanuja, 375

Ramayana, 117

Ranganathan, S.E., 66

relational asphyxia, 120, 121

relational triangles, 432

relativism, 112, 116, 119, 158, 175, 179, 181, 295, 344, 349, 615

religion, 63, 347

Religions, World Conference of, 316, 318, 321

religious sentiment, 12

Rembrandt, 394, 628

Renaissance, 228, 229

renunciation, 101, 108

rivalry, 119

Robinson Crusoe, 28, 118

Romain Rolland, 216, 240, 246

Rome, 84, 230, 231, 308

Roosevelt, 315

Round Table Conference, 72, 242

Rousseau, 18, 38, 59, 80, 82, 132, 133, 162, 169, 173, 175, 188, 189, 191, 197, 201, 203, 213, 234, 252, 274, 282, 296, 297, 309, 357, 399, 400, 408, 446, 449

rural uplift, 291, 292

Russell, Bertrand, 209, 442

 

S

S. Africa, 87

Saidapet, 68, 69, 78, 79, 80, 86, 268

Saint Simonism, 187

Sakuntala, 12, 29, 131, 403

Salvador Dali, 392, 394

samadhi, 287

samatva, 198

sampat, daiva and asuri, 28

samsara, 139, 147

Sanderson, 16

Sankara, 115, 328, 363, 635, 650, 668, 669

Sanskrit, 1, 6, 21

Shantiniketan, 240

sannyasin, 97, 101, 102, 115, 124, 127, 133, 164, 165, 171, 259, 266, 280, 288, 359, 371, 395, 457

Saraswati, 196

Sartre, Jean Paul, 449

Sarvodaya, 293

sastras, 127

satyagraha, 33, 72, 87, 88, 89, 91

school, 2, 6

Schopenhauer, 482

Scott, 28

Self, 91

Self-surrender, 61

sex and ideals, 59

Shakespeare, 29, 81, 106, 215, 228, 422, 440

Shanmathuran, 141

Stevenson, R.L., 14

Suez Canal, 184

Sufi, 191

superman, 32

supernatural, 96

surplus value, 96

Surrealists, 83

svadharma, 77, 91, 163, 167, 168, 171 33,

Svetasvatara Upanisad, 64

Swamidas, 141

 

T

Tagore, Rabindranath, 34, 35, 37, 106, 107, 239, 240, 423

Tamils, 78

Tao, 68, 77, 86, 91, 97, 135, 191, 195, 196, 216, 266, 287, 303, 347, 348, 354, 379, 414, 423, 427, 448, 453, 454, 586, 654

tapas, 349

Temple of the Sacred Tooth, 15

Tennyson, 32

Thackeray, 28

Theological, 64

Theosophists, 441

Theseus, 116

Thoreau, 87

tyagi, 101, 166, 307, 366

Tibetan Yogi Milarepa, 153

Tilak, 258

Time, 332

Time and Space, 386

Tintoretto, 229

Tippu, 10

Tirukural, 71, 504

Tiruvalluvar, Saint, 71, 504

Tiruvannamalai, 298

Todas, 282

Toilers of the Sea, 482

Tolstoy, 87, 133, 159, 433, 482, 561, 604, 613

Transcendentalism, 69

Travis Mrs., 282, 283, 284, 290

Trinity College, 15, 19, 23, 62

Trivandrum, 1, 8, 9, 22, 94, 106, 107, 108, 110, 113, 184, 265, 289

type diagnosis, 353

 

U

Ulysses, 182, 244, 386

unitive wisdom, 94

Upanishads, 117, 169, 298, 329, 344, 404

untouchable, 113

USA, 303, 321

utilitarian, 105

 

V

Vaikom, 72, 88

Vaishnavism, 88

'Values', 39, 349, 356, 361

Vande Mataram, 25

Van Gogh, 394

Varkala, 107, 108, 109, 279, 359, 484, 485, 489, 490, 549, 661, 662, 665

Varnashrama, 72

Vatican, 3, 231, 232

Vectorial, psychological, 58

Vectorial space, 30, 83

Vedanta, 467

Vedantic, 64, 227

Vedantin, 115

Vedic orthodoxy, 71

Venezia Santa Lucia, 229, 258

Venice, 258

Vertical, 232, 304, 388, 396

Vicar of Wakefield, 28

Victoria Hostel, 64, 65, 68, 69, 77, 78, 79, 88

Vidyananda, Swami, 268

Vihara, 164

Vijayan, 141

viksepa sakti, 300

Vinca roseas, 53

Vishnevsky, Mme, 413, 414, 415, 416

Vishnu, 87

Vivaldi, 435

Vivekananda, 34, 35, 37, 42, 69, 238, 321, 470, 519, 605, 618, 622

Voltaire, 14, 175, 227, 366, 384, 437

 

W

Walter, 402

Washington, Booker T., 105

Wealth of Nations, 293

weaning process, 95, 121, 505

Wells, H.G., 16, 18, 189, 240

Whitman, Walt, 448

wholesale solutions, 24

William Mac Dougall, 210

womanhood, 482, 485, 487, 635, 694

Word of the Guru, 350, 363

Wordsworth, 235, 409

World Government, 349, 369

World War II, 24

 

X

 

Y

Yeats, W.B., 35

Yoga, 394, 451, 452, 461

Yogananda, Swami, 622

Yoga Conference, 464, 465

Yogi, 98, 101, 166

Young India, 72

 

Z

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Details

Written by Patrick Misson

Parent Category: Content

Published: 23 August 2012

Created: 23 August 2012

Last Updated: 29 June 2015

Hits: 18017

175

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

 

PASSAGE TO EUROPE

Life is a prison house in which relativistic rival interests hold the spirit down from flying into its innate freedom in the Absolute. Subtle chains bind all men, whether they are conscious of it or not, and like unhappy birds in cages, all are subject at each moment to the bondage implied in rival claims of relativistic interests of group life.

 

Our movements, thoughts and words are circumscribed, and if one asserts one's absolutism in a relativistic setup, the usual consequences known to all truth-lovers of human history come into evidence. Socrates had to drink hemlock; Mohammed had to fight for forty days to save his disciples and their wives just for insisting that there was only one God; Jesus was crucified. Bruno, in more recent years, was burnt at the stake for holding absolutist theological views, nearer to science than religion. Rousseau and Voltaire suffered banishment and shame. Hypateia, Joan of Arc and Abelard had to pay the price too in their own times and places at the cruel altar of relativistic idolatry, actual or ideological.

 

The latter can be more harmful than the former because the evil is invisible. One is caught finally on one horn or other of the relativistic dilemma, ambiguity or paradox. When thus caught and unable to take a firm decision, absolutism suffers defeat and is, in principle, dead. All possibility of a moral or spiritual life becomes impossible in the asphyxiating atmosphere, social, moral or religious. Thus it is that often the battle for absolutism is lost time and again in individual human life or history. Fleeing relativism again and again is thus the only answer.

 

THE GURU OPENS THE CAGE DOOR

How I was taken for granted and treated as a nonentity among the followers of the Guru, although the Guru himself looked upon me with favour, has been recounted. I seemed to make no impression at all on anybody and felt myself unwanted, although not told so openly.

 

176

I could not fit myself into any actual working context as, like one who had missed his proper vocation, I sought to affiliate myself to one group after another in vain. Each leader or group conformed to types or degrees of relativism, representing compromise with first principles that were precious to me but not so important to them. A rarefied set of value-worlds thus presented to me offered no point of affinity or stable contact of any wholehearted kind. Lukewarm affiliations of course could not last long.

|

Thus jostled and pushed around by attractions or repulsions in a world of pluralistic values, I was dazed and confused like a fluttering bird caught in the hands of a naughty boy. I had to breathe the free air of absolutism, and the stagnation of the fen in which I found myself gave me no enthusiasm to live a full life in keeping with my age or temperament.

 

The Guru alone could understand me and, as I have stated, had arranged for the money needed for a voyage overseas where I was to go to complete my training in education. I could not stand any more the lifelessly thin air of relativistic interests and, like a half-starved cow released from its tether to which it was uselessly tied all day as an apology for grazing, I took to my wings one day into the larger open world of what is called Western Civilization.

 

THE GURU HANDS ME CASH WITH BLESSINGS

I must have been a problem disciple of the Guru. All others belonged to one camp or other, but here was a lone ranger, a franc-tireur or a freelance who wanted to fight his battles alone. Although it was not normal for a Guru to take interest in the career of an individual, he seems to have understood my one-pointed dedication to the Guru cause and went out of his usual course to help me both with cash and blessings to go abroad.

 

I was then headmaster of the English school started under the auspices of the Guru, which I was to shape as a model educational institution. My plans in this matter did not tally with the local committee and I had to work out my salvation in other larger fields. The Guru's keen eye saw my plight and he opened the cage door for the confined bird.

 

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I was first to go to Colombo and take ship from there. An address was to be presented to me on the eve of my departure from Varkala. The Guru was there, resting in one of the newly-finished rooms of the school building. The function for sending me off was organized by the citizens of Varkala and one sentence stands out as I read the words of the address dated 20th May, 1928, which suffices to show that, mostly taken for granted by the public as I happened to be, there were some silent admirers lurking behind the scenes who were conscious that my life had some deeper significance, though it seemed frustrated at first sight.

 

The English assistant of the school, who evidently enjoyed drafting the address in the name of the public - though merely a matriculate schoolmaster of Edwardian India - showed himself capable of literary ability in a foreign language when he wrote: 'Your career may be likened to that of Cicero who, on consulting the Delphic Oracle as to how he should attain most glory, was answered that he should make his own genius and not the opinion of the people the guide of his life'.

 

How true this oracular verdict has been in my case could be verified by the same person, Mr. Ram, whom I met recently in Singapore, a grand old man with children and grandchildren round him, a peacetime hero who gave the best of his life as an unknown schoolmaster to the cause of child education far from his native land. After a lapse of thirty-five years I pay back now, in January 1964 in these words here, the compliment he meant for me. Let such compliments, in spite of lapse of time or distance, glorify human nature in the name of the Absolute to which all belong, whether as an echo or a light of Eternity.

 

I remember the intimate gathering at the other wing of the school building from that where the Guru rested, a witness to all the fuss that was being made about my departure to the West. After the function I was ushered into the Guru's presence. He was bedridden with his last illness which came to take him away from the world of actuality of touch and hearing. He lives, however, intact in a world as real, where touch, taste, smell or hearing do not count, and has a certain independence in a more subjective zone of the personality, nourished by the reputation it built up when actually alive.

 

I took leave of him as usual and inclined before him, not always touching his feet nor prostrating. I complied only sometimes to this traditional requirement, which is perhaps one of the most touching of the remnants of old India persisting from Kashmir to the Cape to this day. To take the dust off the feet of a Guru is a time-honoured gesture which marks Indian life and behaviour from the rest of the world.

 

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I wish I had been more traditional here than I actually was, although in the name of modernity and revised scientific Vedantic notions, my own inclinations with folded hands could be considered good enough. Kow-towing might be considered not in keeping with the sense of dignity of modern man in a democratic setup - but in a contemplative world of values it should still hold its fully-dignified status in man's relation to man. Man and God can be interchangeable terms enhancing human dignity rather than bringing double degradation to both involved. It is the dialectical way of double assertion that should finally decide the question.

 

PARTING WITH THE GURU

There was a short parting talk which had its own wisdom lesson to teach me, as precious as any other he had richly bestowed on me on many a previous occasion. About one year before this he had given me the signal that his lessons in wisdom to me, spread over the years, were to be terminated.

 

This was at Trichur, where he was resting with his chief disciples, concerned as he was at that time about the continuation of the work he had started after his time. I generally had a time all to myself with him, and it was understood between us when this hour or two of teaching was to be during the four or five days we were to be together. The subject of wisdom followed an inner sequence strictly observed by the Guru as in the case of any professor of a university - only here it was more tacit and implicit. On that occasion, seeing me enter into his presence for the lesson, he sat with closed eyes instead of starting the conversation as usual. This was to tell me that the lessons had ended.

 

On the same sojourn at Trichur, a group photograph was taken of the disciples and, because of some irregularities on the part of the organisers, I was keeping away from the group. The Guru noticed this and himself asked me to sit for the photo which visibly records the event to this day.

 

Such details are many, and the Guru's silent look of approval or disapproval has lighted on me on many an occasion and guided me more eloquently than actual words could have done. The present occasion was to be the last physical contact I was to have with the Guru. He handed me a roll of currency notes which, he was particular to say, belonged to his personal account and not to any legally constituted body at that time, to which he knew I did not wish to belong. He asked me kindly how long I would be away, and when I said 'about eight months', the Guru said, as if thinking aloud, 'four months'. Then he ordered a 'prasadam', a parting gift of fruit, to be given to me, and two attendants brought two fruits, a mango and a pomegranate.

 

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Handing me these, he blessed me fully and said that the two fruits that chance brought meant that I would have double success. Thus the parting took place, which in effect, brought us together more intimately than ever before. I was re-dedicated to the Guru cause more inseparably than ever.

 

ECHOES OF THE PARTING SCENE

Why did the Guru say 'four months' when I had said that I would be away eight months? This was the enigma that put its question persistently again and again within my subconscious mind like the call of a brain-fever bird. As I walked with the boys carrying my luggage up the sloping road to the Varkala railway station another bad omen was noted in the form of an attendant of the Guru who tried to dissuade me at the last moment from going. He must have acted out of jealousy at the favour shown to me by the Guru. My spirit of adventure prevailed on me to go forward, not heeding the language of ill omens. They must have been conspiracies of negative relativism to try my resolve at the last moment. Those who can watch with a keen eye the workings of omens, rumours and conspiracies can discover many strange goings-on in the world of relativism everywhere.

 

As to the difference of four months in the words of the Guru himself, it was readily solved by me by interchanging the subject and the object. As 'I' and 'you' do not matter in the context of wisdom's language, the Guru was telling me indirectly that he would pass away in four months, and that if I came after eight months I would not find him a physical entity like me. Truth was inter-subjective and trans-physical. Echoes, suggestive signs, omens good or bad, flourish in a dull world of relativistic values side-by-side with valid contemplative suggestions or signals; and all we can say about the parting scene is that it was not unlike that of two lovers who talked their own mystical language meant to be understood between the two concerned. All other implications did not count. Men may come and men go but the bubbling brook goes on for ever. Such is the way normal to absolutism.

 

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PREPARATIONS FOR THE VOYAGE

 

 

Colombo in the 1920's.

 

Starting from Varkala, I caught the Mail Boat at Madura next afternoon and reached Colombo after crossing the ferry at dusk in the morning. Finding a lodging with Kerala friends in Dam Street, Colombo, I contacted shipping agents. The steamship called 'Chantilly', named after one of the three musketeers of Dumas' novel, was what was available within a fortnight.

 

More money came to the post office, sent by the Guru as promised. A new black suit and hat were purchased, and so, with an old overcoat, I was a gentleman ready set for sailing. A send-off was given me at a night school of which I was supervisor. On the eve of departure a strange character who looked a typical crook - a miserable and familiar figure found in almost any port anywhere in the world, a by-product of modern collective life - prevailed on me and another young Indian student to stay in his questionable boarding house. He did petty services out of sheer good will as he pretended, but wanted to blackmail both of us, keeping back the passport and tickets which he had helped to collect, as a kind of self-appointed sub-travel agent. I had to do a bit of shouting at him before the ship sailed, as he insisted on abnormal charges at the eleventh hour when the ship's siren had already sounded once.

 

Released thus from the last clutches of relativism, I could see the coast receding fast as the ship's propellers sent the waters boiling behind in a broadening streak, while the bow cut the billows with great strength. The bitter experiences of my failures were only slowly erased as the ship carried my thoughts further and further into the new world of adventure which was opening before me in strange lands among strangers with strange tongues, costumes and ways.

 

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ON BOARD THE 'CHANTILLY'

In those pre-war days the 20,000 ton ship on which I embarked at Colombo was a luxury liner, but it was destined to be a discarded old tub soon after the end of the Second World War, as I saw it again in 1960 on the quayside of the new harbour at Marseilles, with all its glories forgotten and almost in disgrace among more modern boats, berthed apart in lonesome neglect.

 

Air travel was not known then and the first class dining room of the ship with its French garçons and tables richly loaded with red and white wines, was considered chic enough for those days. The bellboys announced dinner soon after embarkation but I had to rush to the purser to see that I had vegetarian food served me. I talked to him in English, but as a true Frenchman is always expected to do, he pretended not to know English.

 

I was seated at table beside a Paris medical student from Delhi, a Bombay jeweller returning to his gem business in Paris, a Bengali going to study perfumery in Geneva and an Italian from California interested in yoga. We soon made friends and found ways and means for life together for spending the three weeks before us. The jeweller was a stuck-up fellow who talked as if he was an authority on correct table manners, himself unconscious of violating some elementary rules. To eat with the fork 'à la fourchette' without the knife or spoon that poor Englishmen used, was more French.

 

I happened to discover that the 'pommes rôties' (roasted potatoes) had a piece of lard in it, although served as fully vegetarian, and that the vegetable 'potages' (soups - not the consommés, which had meat) had a suspicious taste of 'stock' too. Thus I could remain vegetarian in principle only, and began to take eggs, whose animal life-element I considered negligible. I swallowed a fly once while hiking and panting in summer, but still consider myself a good vegetarian in principle. My conscience in such cases was adaptable to necessities when imperative enough. Sabbath was for man and scruples to be respected only within limits of normality.

 

A wine-bibber with side whiskers, coming from Goa on his way to Portugal, was a nuisance at table, as he began collecting the bottles left undrunk by sober passengers like me. He thought himself lucky and unfortunately, in the cabin he had the upper berth to mine. Dead drunk already at Colombo, he had lost all his money at a house of ill-repute and was raving and in distress all the night, spitting and ready to vomit, while alternately praying for the purse he had lost. Thus he made of himself a thorough nuisance, in which light the negative relativism I had left behind had something to be said in its favour. Thus the Western world opened itself out to me with a bang, as it were. More surprises were still to come.

 

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EIGHT DAYS OF ROUGH SEA

Forming coteries on the deck both at sunset and at morning hours; responding to dinner bells; watching deck games; making new friends among men and women; with parties where some drunken sailor performed tap dancing; witnessing clandestine love-affairs during the night where drunken officers were implicated, reports of which came to the cabin - were the normal occupations in which the passengers passed their time.

 

As days passed, however, the Arabian sea became rougher. Foaming crests of waves extended menacingly more and more, and as there was no end to this, whichever way one turned, a negatively mystical fear was induced in some. It took time to gain one's sea-legs. Meanwhile half the passengers were noticed to be absent from breakfast, and their share of butter on the table was grabbed by the more greedy. The billows rose higher still the next day and there seemed to be a ground swell too through which the brave ship had to plough. Pitching and rolling too, with breakers beginning to wash over the deck itself, instilled more concern. An Indian family did not know how to close the portholes and had to be saved from a flooded cabin. The small spirit of man shrank into its own narrower dimensions, and the non-self gained all importance and took up more spiritual space. All might be lost at any moment. The looks of the crew and officers did not instil the former confidence into the passengers either.

 

I was myself feeling fine for the moment, bravely swallowing saliva whenever there was a dip, with a funny feeling at the bottom of the stomach each time the ship seemed to go down under my feet, relieved later by its counter motion when passing the crest of a billow. For days on end all we could see were occasional vessels passing or counter-passing our ship, giving strange signals which the mysterious captain, seated above in his top cabin like a god, could alone understand. Lifeboat exercises made the danger seem still more real. Finally, land was sighted and one felt like a Ulysses or an Ancient Mariner. Djibouti, the French port of African Somaliland, was announced, and it was a consolation for the group of men and women to stroll on the seaside in the hot sun, greeted by the black eyes of Africans and Hindustani-speaking labourers. We were in the land of Islam. The neglected and barren land had almost no attractions to offer the dazed seafarers who, like a motley crowd of Sinbad's men, wandered in gay colours over the grey sands of the beach. Port Said was going to be more interesting, but I had taken ill by that time and was confined to bed and could only hear of reports from cabin mates about the bad reputation of this latter port where all the worst features of mercantilist colonialism were concentrated.

 

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PASSAGE THROUGH THE RED SEA

The Holy Land of Jews and Arabs as well as that of Christian Gentiles lay on either side of the Red Sea as the 'Chantilly' went through the calmer water in the midsummer heat of June 1928.

 

I had to learn my first sentence in French by sheer thirst which made me go to the maitre d'hotel to ask for water. 'Donnez-moi de l'eau, S.V.P.'. (Give me some of the water, please) was the only way I could do so and not call for water straightaway in English. Iced water again and again every half hour made me ill with some kind of influenza. Two other shipmates who died of the same illness found their watery graves soon after when the Captain had their bodies lowered into the sea. The hungry sharks must have benefited. Port Said was announced. The drunken Portuguese young man on the top berth climbed down to mine at night and began to hug and implore me to pray to God that he should get his money back at Marseilles. His exaggerated fervour made me, weak as I was, fight him physically, pushing him away with all my remaining strength. He had guessed that I was the kind of person who might have some favour with God as he understood him to be, not knowing that God might also be with a profligate or a publican too. The favour of an absolutist God is no monopoly of the goody-goody or the merely respectable. An absolutist touch has to be there to deserve the grace of the Most High.

 

THE CALMER WATERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN

Soon we passed beyond into the region where orange groves and olives spread their balm into the cooler Mediterranean air. Under the shadow of Stromboli, the lonely sentinel of a barren volcanic isle rising steeply and sheer from the blue-black waters, the passengers were already transported to the mental climate of Europe, although the temperature was only a few degrees lower.

 

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One could live no more in the mental climate of Colombo; while to think of Paris or London became easier, though for no actual reason of distance or time. The transition takes place inside without notice, and one adopts unconsciously the mental idioms and behaviour patterns that go with a new epicentre of a civilization, each of which has to have its personality or soul associated with a city, language or with a name or group of names.

 

It was the Guru Narayana who first pointed this out to me when referring to the inner transition that takes place between Trivandrum and Nagercoil in Kerala, the latter being now properly included in the Tamil-speaking State of Madras. Linguistic geography proves as real to people's minds as the geography marked by rivers or mountains.

 

The approach of Etna in Sicily made all bring their binoculars up on the busy deck. Carpet and curio vendors had already invaded the ship between the Suez Canal ports. Now, passing through the ancient location of the Scylla rock and the whirlpool of Charybdis, we steamed on our way and reached Marseilles in the early hours of the morning two days later.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

 

CHANCE BRINGS ME TO GENEVA

 

Marseille in the 1920's.

 

The 'Paquebot Chantilly' had done its work well and was berthed quite early in the morning at one of the quays not far from the old port of the antique rumble-tumble city of Marseilles, ominously dominated by the St. Barthélémy Hill. The old port known to seafarers of ancient times still existed, and the Place Canebière and the Gare St. Charles where we had to entrain were landmarks known to travellers, then as now, to be counted as rival sights in fame only to St. Mark's Square in Venice and the Eiffel Tower of Paris.

 

The reputations of cities live on, giving depth and meaning to their personalities, some of which are definitely feminine, while others are neutral. Modern towns sometimes fail to have a character at all and leave an insipid taste. Marseilles could not be classed among them. It had its characteristic life, both underworld and above-board, of night and of daytime - so fully French or Provençal that years of contact with the outer world could not erase it in the least.

 

With the clearing of baggage, the health inspection and passport formalities, it took us to nearly ten o'clock to get out of the ship which I was to see again only after two decades as a discarded old tub. With some more shouting to do before everything was settled with bogus baggage agents whose respectable looks and printed cards should not beguile anyone, and who change their rates without notice - as bad as in Colombo or any other port - we found ourselves settled in a small hotel near the steps of the Gare St. Charles.

 

Breakfast-lunch (déjeuner) was soon served in a dining room with large glass windows facing the street from which little hungry gavroches looked in greedily at the diners, pressing their noses flat and pale on the glass panes from the pavement which was their home. Victor Hugo knew them well.

 

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I CHANGE MY MIND

During the last days of the voyage I had changed my mind and, instead of heading towards London, which was what I thought I would do at first, I decided to go to Geneva.

 

To change one's mind is the privilege of every free individual, but to do so too often and too much without proper reasons would make for no virtue, even for a gentleman at large. Something told me that London, with its pounds and shillings to spend and rigid educational rules, was no fit place for an adventurer like me, trying his luck, largely depending on what possibilities could open their doors to me as life unravelled its scroll - full of many possibilities but only a few probabilities.

 

One's discretion has to be used, and it is when there is a fifty-fifty chance involved that we call the discretion intuition, which is only a respectable name for guesswork. The Bengali student whose friendship I had cultivated in the meanwhile, having contacts in Geneva, could be relied on for finding accommodation on reaching there. I was myself armed with a letter of introduction to Dr. P.P. Pillay, then employed in the International Labour Office at Geneva, given by his father in Trivandrum. Although Geneva, with its French, German and Italian and no English, would be a stranger place for me than London, prompted by some whispering little bird within me I cast my lot for the former. The absolutist outlook and the spirit of the gambler go together when both are faithfully or earnestly treated.

 

PICKING CHERRIES

Five or six miles out of Marseilles lived a Frenchman with his wife and child in a country cottage. He was known to the Bengali friend, Mr. Sen, and took us for a ride to see his home and orchard. Cherry blossoms, which gave it a festive garb in spring had, by the end of June, 1928, ripened into fruit, and it was a favourite pastime all over this Mediterranean region - especially for children, but even for grownups - to spend days on little ladders, picking the fruit by way of harvesting - although a portion of the yield was harvested directly into the mouths of the pickers. This was considered quite in order, as it created no further economic problems for experts to solve.

 

The abundance of Nature fed the children's hunger directly, and the world of opulent currency notes was just bypassed in the simple way that God perhaps likes better.

 

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High walls of grey granite, schist or shale enclosed orchards of olives and oranges, besides plums and pears. Vineyards were not unknown either, next to the blue sea water or the cypress-clad hill slopes. Like Naples or Greece, the Alpes Maritimes or the Côte d'Azur lured holidaymakers from the bleak domains of Northern Europe, for whom it was a veritable dream come true after the winter and early spring snows and blizzards. Europe went out of doors into the sunshine then. A festive spirit of holiday prevailed for all and spread both its wings freely and drank of the blue sky and the warm light of the sun. Man was in the embrace of Nature and got full nourishment thereby.

 

FIRST PEEP INTO FRENCH FAMILY LIFE

This little visiting interlude, before we were brought back by our host in his self-driven tin lizzie-like car - violating traffic rules a hundred times, driving right instead of the British left, which was heterodox enough for us as we sat seeking security inside - gave us the first peep into French country home life, which has retained its validity in spite of many later contacts.

 

Our host was a lover of India, and his wife studied books on 'Indian spirituality', whatever that meant. India was a magic name for many other votaries far flung in all corners of the world. She refused to be civilised in the modern sense, and this must have been her secret recommendation to the hearts of simple folk anywhere on the globe.

 

Ugly, ignorant, poor or silly, as one might call her, this is a moral asset stronger than any victory that wars can bring in the future, and worth many diplomatic victories put together. Let modernism never wreck this subtle treasure, by dint of which India has survived many storms and upheavals like the humble grass that bends its head to conquer the violence of gales that can push down many a giant forest tree fated to fall, uprooted with all its pride, before the first storm.

 

Some civilizations survive by the simplicity of their lives. France, like India, has its point of contact through the economy based on land rather than on mercantilism. Saint Simonism, which France has produced, may have economic affinities with what India too wants at present.

 

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Our tickets had been booked early and, with white linen-covered pillows for our heads, we found our places in the continental train, about eleven at night, speeding towards Geneva. Grenoble was passed at night, and it was daylight that revealed the landscape with hedges and waterways, with half a hundred culverts and bridges over which the engine pulled us full steam at about one hundred kilometres an hour. Lovely silver birch trees and rows of poplars with summer daisies, red poppies and cornflowers peeping through tall grass as one farmyard after another went past, with cattle and sheep grazing, made the pastoral South European scene new to me and full of interest.

 

Geneva was reached at about ten in the morning. The friend of Mr. Sen was there in the station to receive us, and we trotted out into the city. After a light lunch at a restaurant, we crossed the famous bridge across Lake Léman, past the monument of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

 

We had already found a lodging in a costly hotel next to the station and, putting our baggage there, went out for sightseeing. The spirit of Rousseau hovered over the city and no wonder, therefore, that this watch-making, milk-canning village grown big became by President Wilson's wish, an international city and the home of the League of Nations. Rousseau was the 'Citoyen de Genève', which, by its very innate veracity, made him in the minds of men a Citizen of the World by implication, which all could feel if sensitive to such values at all.

 

FIRST CONTACT WITH WESTERN CIVILIZATION

 

 

Geneva.

 

My first contact with Western civilization was, by some strange chance, through contemplating the statue of Rousseau on the island in the Lake of Geneva. There he sat on a tall pedestal, with scroll and pen in hand, sculpted or moulded - that lover of truth and of humanity who once shed his tears into that very lake out of sheer love for it and Nature, of which it was the nurseling. This simple thought was overwhelming to his spirit and, although accused of over-sentimentalism by other Europeans of his time, his was a genuine soul that was fully alive to all human values.

 

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As days went on, this contact, which seemed incidental and almost accidental, gained further significance in my life, and gave me the first key to the spirit of the West. White and black swans swim round this little island of poplars, washed by the river Rhone as it passes out of the Lake of Geneva into the sunny southern lands.

 

Although he is recognized as the father of modern education, my full course in India on this subject had left me only superficially acquainted with this great name. Rousseau was too good for the average Englishman who wrote the textbooks for teachers' training courses in India to understand, and so he was bypassed and neglected, while in verity Indian education, more than any other, stood in need of Rousseau to shape its own course along its natural lines.

 

To the educated Englishman like Wells, Rousseau was only a hypochondriac who wrote undignified sob-stuff, his deeper mystical and contemplative traits being wrongly evaluated from a mercantilist background. If the East can meet the West, it must be through the link of Jean-Jacques. Human sentiments weld humanity into one family.

 

BEFORE SETTLING DOWN TO WORK

 

 

Old Geneva.

 

There I was in the strange city, first trying to find a cheap room where I could stay, and then to find the convenience for useful study or work. Fully conscious of my pocketbook which showed that more than three-fourths of the cash I had been given had been already spent on tickets and clothes, my movements had to be quick and cautious. Four hundred Swiss francs which I held in Cook's cheques could not last me more than two months, however I economized.

 

Faced with the danger of being thrown on my meagre resources soon - an utter stranger to the language and still more so to the people and their ways - I relied on a Bengali medical student to find me a room, which happened to be in the Boulevard du Pont d'Arve, a name I could hardly pronounce properly.

 

As I sallied forth into the streets I could not fail to notice how strange a figure I cut with my Colombo-tailored suit and felt hat, both of which were many days in date and degrees in latitude out of mode for Geneva, which was nearer to the epicentre of all European fashions, which was destined to be Paris for ever by a strange conspiracy of the world of tailors, and which had already adopted what Colombo was to know of three months later.

 

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Uniform conformity, even to the point of an imperative cruelty to any sense of individuality left in one, was demanded in the fully-living Western civilization. Fashions changed, and it was a hard task to keep up with its detailed demands. My felt hat had a brim perhaps one centimetre more than what was fully in fashion then, and to add to this, short and round as I was in build, the long hair that I grew, which showed curls from behind the hat-brim, must have been the reason why giggles, sometimes suppressed, sometimes failing to be so, burst from children and even from a group of grown-up ladies, who quickened their paces to get past me on the street, trying their best to conceal the inevitable outburst, as common courtesy would demand. Soon, however, I became a familiar figure, something like the bonhomme seen on Quaker Oats packets and, except for schoolboys who followed me for no reason, they were getting used to me. But young women could not contain their giggling, in spite of their desire to be polite to a stranger. I once saw a mother reprimanding a grownup daughter in a shop to behave better, but she could not help being outrightly impolite. Soon the incidents passed off, at least along my frequented roads and haunts.

 

I found a boarding and lodging place for about two hundred and fifty Swiss francs (almost the same as rupees) a month with a Swiss family in the Boulevard leading to the river Arve on the southern side of the city. The family at table consisted of Madame de Negro with a son and his stepfather, a man with a weather-beaten face and past fifty or so, in love in his belated dotage .

 

The young man took me on a hired bicycle to bathe in the lake and showed me the city which was just lapsing into autumnal cold after the hectic days of late summer. Before the month was out I paid my boarding and lodging promptly and found a humbler room in the Rue de l'Aubépine with an Armenian landlady with a divorced husband, Mr Eltchian. The rooms were smaller, but I could cook my soups in a kitchenette adjoining and have baths free, for less than half the price I paid before. I went out for my buns and rolls morning and evening, and made different soups with packets of Potage Maggi, which had scores of varieties to choose from, and began to feel settled down, although my pocketbook began to show that I was to touch the bottom of my resources soon.

 

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To make my Sunday breakfasts easy to cook, I allowed myself the luxury of selecting small cakes from a nearby boulangerie (bakery); otherwise I practised all the virtues of parsimonious living that I was capable of. I attended different Sunday services, beginning with one at the Cathedral St. Pierre, through Sufi and Baha'i to a Quaker meeting, which last seemed to suit my temperament best.

 

Thus I fully abandoned myself to the hands of chance at Geneva in the late summer of 1928. There was an Institute of the Science of Education, otherwise called the Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau, where I got myself admitted as a student, and began seriously to do library work and attend courses under well-known educationists like Dr. Edouard Claparède, Dr. Pierre Bovet and others who held higher positions in educational matters. There was also Dr. Adolphe Ferrière who was the Founder of the New Education Fellowship in Europe, with whom I soon came into touch.

 

I proposed to write a thesis on the subject of 'The Personal Factor in the Educative Process' and consulted the authorities of the University of Geneva for the purpose. Meanwhile I got the information that the University of Paris was a freer and more open one, where foreign students could enter without rigid governmental restrictions belonging to states imposed on university education.

 

How I could finish my course, after mastering sufficient French, was vague to me, but there was some faint voice within me which made me believe that I could do it. Languageless, penniless and friendless, I still ventured, depending on the Tao to do the rest.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER NINETEEN

 

THE CRIMINAL CONSCIENCE OF AN HONEST MAN

Man is an enigma to himself. One cannot tell oneself 'I am an honest man under all circumstances'. Absolute honesty always hides its own version of criminality.

 

One is false to the state when making one's own counterfeit coins; but a neighbouring state can indulge in such a luxury with impunity. Dry or prohibition areas in the same state can be divided from the wet areas by a bamboo placed across the road; and what is a crime on one side of it may be a virtue for a drunkard citizen on the other side.

 

A line can divide two conflicting consciences. What is duty at one time might become an offence at another. An absolutist conscience can neither be wholly right nor wholly wrong. It can only say 'amen' to both or either of rival claims and remain neutral, lest our conscience should make cowards of us all. Neutrality is the best form of bravery.

 

In my early Geneva days, when utter indigence and I seemed to walk hand in hand, a stranger in a strange land, I had occasion to bring my own conscience under, as it were, a sort of X-ray scrutiny.

 

In Gobbo's language conscience is something 'hanging at the neck of one's heart', but he would not have been right if he had considered it as having a fixed voice. In fact, it often has a sliding adjustment, and what it does not permit in the policeman's presence is in order when he is gone. Society is often the custodian of the conscience of certain people, while others look up to God to regulate it.

 

A conveniently adjustable conscience is what most people have - sometimes obeying society and at other times the voice of 'duty' as they call it, as 'the stern daughter of the voice of God'. Treachery, tyranny and sheer homicidal glories may be conveniently covered by the name of 'duty' to crown, country or God - without ever being recognized in their true colours. Even rank fanaticism can pass muster in the name of religious zeal or duty. Any conscience at the behest of relativistic interests must, however, be considered suspect. A relativistic conscience would be far worse than having none at all.

 

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FALSE LUCK COMES MY WAY

Returning from an evening walk on one of the last days of my stay in Geneva, finding what luck had in store for me, conscious of the end of the resources that should make my life possible without being reduced to utter penury in a civilization that looked askance at beggars, my conscience if any had a very unstable position within me.

 

When I neared the Parc des Eaux-Vives on the lakeside road coming to Geneva, in full view of the evening glow of Mont Blanc, a piece of folded paper lying on the sidewalk caught my attention. I picked it up with alacrity and, as I already suspected, it was a currency note for a thousand German marks. For a moment I thought that luck had favoured me just at the time I was in dire need. I looked at it a second time to see if it was a genuine one with all the required inscriptions. It was so. I could change it for Swiss money in any bank and that would keep me going for a month or two. I put it into my pocket but looked round to see if anyone was watching me. My conscience came into play just then and I began to have a moral sense of some strange guilt. I should, as a man of integrity, surrender the money to the police to return to the person who might have lost it.

 

With these thoughts I went to a garden seat in the nearby park. As I sat and thought about the thousand Reichsmarks in my pocket, I could definitely feel that my conscience said one thing at a given moment and just the opposite at another. Instead of hanging at the neck of my heart as Gobbo felt it, saying 'budge' or 'budge not,' it seemed to sway upward or downward, touching the plus and minus poles of its full amplitude, making me alternately a criminal or a respectable citizen. It could not be stabilized, at least for some time.

 

At last I prevailed on myself to equalise my intentions and said I would keep still till some right answer came by itself. One or two days thus passed and the thousand marks lay in my pocket without affecting my heart one way or the other. Neither the thought of luck nor ill luck was to cross my mind. I had swallowed up the thoughts, as it were, and kept them motiveless within myself. My wobbly conscience was thus stilled for the time.

 

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But the curiosity about the luck that seemed to come my way remained active still. At last I brought the question to a friend, an Indian domiciled in Geneva, to find out the value of the note. He examined it and said that it still could be cashed in a bank, although it belonged to the pre-war regime of Germany - but the exchange value would be about a thousandth of the face value.

 

This was a veritable anticlimax to the whole episode, but I was glad that my poor conscience was no more to be disquieted by this piece of paper. False luck, that thus came to tempt me, at least made me confirm the truth of the proverb that an open door will tempt a saint. I could at best expect to be an honest man with a criminal conscience. One or the other had to prevail at a given moment and make me the same fundamentally as any other fellow man. We can at best live a stable or unstable life at the core of a conscience belonging to all men in an absolute sense, which is neither a criminal nor an honest one. No conscience can be permanently stabilized in any other sense.

 

THE DOORS OF CHANCE OPEN AGAIN UNSOUGHT

In spite of such false scents that lured me off my track, the main doors of chance were not shut against me, as experience soon revealed.

 

It was at one of those Sunday-morning meetings of the Quakers at the centre of the old city of Geneva that chance conspired to open a secret door for me. I was sitting for the second or third time in the silent Quaker Sunday service. There was no priest nor preaching, but all sat silent for a while, and when half an hour had elapsed, could speak when 'moved by the will of God' or the spirit or whatever moved or quaked man from his own inside consciousness. The voices often came gently, without passion, as if from the other side of life if there was any such. Instead of a priest as a representative of holiness or God, they had only a man or a woman who functioned as 'clerk' to the meeting. Votes were not counted even at the business meetings of the Quaker 'Society of Friends' as they called themselves, but the consensus of opinion at the meeting was recorded honestly by the clerk, who could exercise his discretion to some extent to keep the votes from becoming too brutishly quantitative.

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The ways of such a Christian group became interesting to me, especially as they respected all religions within limits, and did not descend into vulgar methods of proselytism in the name of winning souls to the Church and in the innocent name of Jesus, as most missionary groups do, almost with unholy haste. Often we see an over-zealous missionary of Christ beginning to have rather a nuisance value by his excesses and exaggerations, reviling other believers in the same God. The Quaker meetings could not be charged with any such vulgarity, and therefore their ways appealed to me as coming nearest to that of the attitude of the tolerant and 'mild' Hindu within me.

 

Miss Emma Thomas happened at the time to be the 'Clerk' for this Geneva Quaker meeting. I sat silent mostly at the meetings, and was treated as a 'friend of the Friends.' On this occasion, prompted by some strange urge which I cannot analyse, I went up to Miss Thomas, the Clerk of the meeting, when the service was over and, having understood that she was the head of an international school on the banks of the Lake of Geneva about twenty kilometres outside the city, where new educational methods were being applied under her direction, asked her if she would permit me to stay somewhere near and frequent the school so as to observe at first hand the new teaching methods employed.

 

The lady looked rather confused at my request and seemed for a minute not to understand exactly what I wanted. One of the young English teachers at her school had recently left and the room in which he lived, and his work, had to be filled before the winter term began, which was to be in one or two weeks. She could not believe that I was asking her for no more favour than to frequent the school as a mere observing student, which I was at that time. Moreover the police office where I had to report myself not long before, had told me in so many words, that I was 'interdit de prendre emploi' (prohibited to take employment) in the Canton de Genève, and a seal to this effect was stuck on to my visa by a grim-looking fat Swiss gendarme in unmistakable terms.

 

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A TEACHER IN IDEAL SURROUNDINGS

 

 

The Lake of Geneva seen from Gland.

 

The Tao, however, could not permit gaps or a vacuum to exist, whether in the world of words or of actualities. The lady took it for granted that I was indirectly asking to be employed and appointed to the vacancy which she suspected I was aware of, in spite of my complete ignorance of any such. The myth-making instinct supplied the rest and, strangely enough, she said something to the effect that I was welcome as a teacher in the school and that the only formality in the way was putting the application before the staff meeting to take place in a few days. She promised to write me the result.

 

Fortunately too, as I found out, I would not be breaking the law by accepting the job because Gland, the little lakeside village where the school was located, was just two or three kilometres outside the limits of the Canton of Geneva. The promised letter did not fail to follow soon, and I was to be a teacher of science, all found and paid an allowance too of a hundred Swiss Francs per month, which was an amount received equally by the Directress herself as well as by the cook and the gardener, on a principle of equality and Quaker fellowship. The amount was not much by other standards, but was sufficient for my simple needs.

 

Thus it was that the myth-making tendency, which always fills up gaps where they exist in nature, and the Tao, a vague principle in the Absolute, working hand in hand with subtle possibilities-probabilities to throw up chances which we mortals call luck or good fortune, saved me from the brink of dire penury and want, after having tested my conscience and its stability under the experimental circumstances related.

 

Necessity and Providence which, when conceived in very crude or brute terms of given facts or events, is also called Fate, is made of sterner tragic stuff. Kali, the cruel goddess, can thus be also the favourable mother of wisdom, Sarasvati, when viewed in the less harsh context of a general chance situation. The language and science of mysticism or contemplation recognize these factors less empirically. Believing in such matters is not to be treated as an article of faith in any hide-bound religious sense, but as a free recognition of subtler factors that make up the stuff called life in which human values are woven or strung or built in. The Tao thus conspired to help me go on with my studies and follow up my ambitions for five years, unhindered by any necessities of ordinary life.

 

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I could go swimming in the lake, and rich vegetarian food in plenty, with baskets of fruits and nuts, not to mention milk and butter, were provided by the same hand as sports and pastimes. Forty boys and girls and a dozen teachers of all ages drawn from different parts of Europe and outside, Chinese and Negro, French and German, with an overdose of American and English, basked in the free international atmosphere on the borders of Lac Léman dear to Rousseau, and with their animation and frolics brought some semblance of rare values to prevail on this green planet of ours. Geneva was a specially favoured spot in this respect - a holiday home for fellow mortals here.

 

QUAKER PACIFISM AND VEGETARIANISM

The 'Ecole Les Rayons', as the school was called in which I was to spend the next five years of my life - teaching while preparing for a doctorate in education - combined many happy features which made my good fortune all the more so.

 

It was an international school where national frontiers did not count and, as for race and sex too, these were not much respected either in the matter of keeping humans from getting together in a normal way. Many languages were spoken, though for the time being this was limited mostly to the European ones by geographical limitations. Quakerism implied the principle of pacifism and that of non-killing, of which vegetarianism was a corollary. Thus it was easy for me to conform to the principle of non-killing or ahimsa, which was one of the articles of my behaviour-pattern that, next to absolutist doctrines, took its place as the very first item of my ideas of what made up a spiritual life.

 

Between extreme vegetarianism that made all animal produce taboo, as with some sects in India, and gross carnivorous habits, I was willing to include milk and unfertilised eggs into my menu when diet otherwise called for their inclusion in cold countries, especially outside the limits of India, where vegetarianism was enforced sometimes as a religious scruple and sometimes on the basis of the principle of ahimsa. One had to draw a line between taboo and scruple on the one hand and the requirements of a scientifically-understood adherence to vegetarianism. In one sense even eating green leaves would be wrong, as it does hurt life, and, at another extreme, we can think of cannibals who would justify the eating of their own kith and kin.

 

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Here again, between the maximum and minimum of quality or quantity in the possible applications of this principle of non-hurting of fellow creatures, each one had to make up his mind about where to draw the line. I willingly therefore conformed with the ovo-lacto-vegetarianism that prevailed in the Fellowship School of the Quakers where I found myself. In Rome one had to be a Roman, when no fundamental principles were violated.

 

Extremes of exaggeration have to be avoided in the name of Absolutism when neutrally and normally conceived. The Gita recommends such a middle way called samatva, which implies harmony between extreme possible positions. Moreover, in actual practice one finds that it is often difficult to break away from conforming to prevailing standards in such matters unless one insists on being an out-and-out individualist in behaviour. Strict standards often become disturbed by outer circumstances calling for adaptability to existing environments. A man living in utter retirement can manage matters even more easily  without any compromise. Drupes and berries which leave the life-elements intact when the fruit has been eaten enable an easy practice of non-hurting. A farmer with his cattle who found a tiger lifting one of them each day can hardly be asked to forego them all in the name of this principle. Between the necessities and contingencies of the situation one strikes a middle course, which is the yogic way recommended by the Gita.

 

Thus it was that I found myself quite at home in my new surroundings as a pacifist, vegetarian and a cosmopolitan with flexible, open and dynamic notions of religious, moral or spiritual values.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER TWENTY

 

I SETTLE IN A SWISS LAKESIDE SCHOOL

I arrived at Gland railway station, bag and baggage, one pleasant forenoon after the summer months were over, from my habitation in the Rue de l'Aubépine in one of the less rich districts of Geneva where I had settled for some time. The electric train in which I came had a stop at a small station previous to Gland, and I was about to alight there by mistake because of its not being a fast train but one of the ordinary ones. I quickly discovered my mistake and put my heavy trunk and belongings back and got to Gland.

 

By a strange chance an English couple who were on the staff of the Fellowship School where I was to teach, lodge and board, were present to meet some other arrival by the same train, and they offered to put my luggage in the 'char' (small four-wheeled cart) that they had brought with them from the School, which was a mile off on the borders of the blue Lake Léman. Except for some ugly remarks made by a lady who knew India and thought that I was an upstart coolie pretending to be the equal of Europeans, who want to look down on black colonials as inferior when they go east of Port Said, my welcome to the Fellowship School was fully cordial.

 

All turned out on my arrival at the School to have a look at the newcomer. As the School was divided into family units for dining-table facilities, with a male senior member, a woman senior member, two senior students, male and female, and children of different ages to make up seven or eight round a table, the senior boys and girls vied with one another to book me for their family as an interesting asset.

 

That I came from distant India was a special recommendation. The male teachers, they soon explained, were known as 'Pitar' because the Head of the School, Miss Emma Thomas, had discovered this Sanskrit name more suitable than the word 'Father', which had become somewhat hackneyed by long use in Catholic Schools.

 

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Deus-Pitar as the derivation of the name Jupiter, the Most High God, also helped in this choice, as the 'Pitar' of Jupiter  was traced by philologists to the same root as 'Pita' in Sanskrit. The corresponding feminine was 'Mata', which when Miss Thomas spelled it happened to be 'Moto' so that she was called the Moto of the School as a whole, and each woman teacher had Moto prefixed to her Christian name, while men had Pitar similarly used.

 

Thus it was that I was called Pitar Natarajan, or more endearingly, Pitar Natty for short, especially by the younger teenagers, both boys and girls, with whom I became very popular and even a favourite before hardly a month had passed.

 

BETWEEN A BOGEY MAN AND BONHOMME

I have a strange weakness for children which, as a personal trait, like a constant in mathematics, has always haunted me through my life wherever I have gone. In the strangest of countries, children discovered in me, as often as a dog or cat did, a familiar friend. They took it for granted that I was going to be good. Sometimes even the smallest of them took liberties with me on the road in the strangest of places, whether in the countryside of India itself or abroad.

 

In the village of Gland, where simple peasant boys were sometimes quietly grazing cattle and I had to pass them on the road, I could notice how they feared me as a kind of bogey-man, as children often called figures which were suppositious only and not real to them yet. A strange short figure, black or brown, was enough of a puzzle and reminded them, perhaps, of some Negro doll they might have seen. As I approached, I could see the boy in great difficulties trying to hide his fear and praying for me to get past him somehow without any fearful problems for him to solve. As the distance shortened between us, the confusion and fear mounted in inverse proportion of the square of the distance between us.

 

At the critical moment he would just manage to say 'Bonjour Monsieur', and when I went past without harming him he would gain his breath again, after being dumbfounded and almost tongue-tied. To hear me talk in response to his laboured greeting made the confusion more confounded, as in certain cases with younger children, especially after I had added, in later years, a beard to my enigmatic face, which once scared two tiny tots who were about to cry on seeing me approach, but could not help bursting into loud screams when they found that the bogey man could not only walk but even speak like others who were not bogies at all.

 

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School-children have followed me everywhere and, although I treated them as pets, I was obliged to look upon them as pests or nuisances when I could not get rid of them. When there was no elder person to scare them away with a grumpy voice, I found myself often mobbed and, as it were, marooned, surrounded by ragged urchins who took no end of liberties with me, treating me as a harmless 'bonhomme', no more harmful than the weakest among them.

 

How they were able to guess my helplessness so readily has remained a puzzle to me. I can remember a girl in rags, hardly six, who went far in making faces at me and treating me like a strange monkey or other animal, while I only smiled benignly and looked on. She continued her efforts to disturb my equanimity for several hours at a time and for several days on end, so that I began to wonder how much wickedness could remain stored in little imps of her small size.

 

As a schoolmaster I had to be a disciplinarian and the demands of this side and the extreme latitude that children took with me often created annoying problems, especially in a school which was fully committed to pacifist Quaker ways. All physical punishments were taboo too, and both the parents and teachers adhered to rule as best they could. I had to be an exception in this matter and often fell back on hitting myself when no other honest way could be found. Children understood and excused me. I made up quickly and we were all friends again.

 

NEW SCHOOL FOR OLD

'New Education', whatever the term was expected to mean, was the rage in the school world of Europe at the time I became one of the staff of the Fellowship School in Gland. From the Negative Education of Rousseau to the Free-Play method of Froebel and Pestalozzi, one heard such expressions as 'the Child-Centred School' and the 'Ecole Active', where education, instead of being given or driven into the pupils, as thought correct till then, was rather drawn out with a programme or syllabus based on the natural interest of the pupil, paedocentrically, as against a programme of subject-matter where books to read took the central position.

 

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Such schools were sometimes called 'experimental schools', either because they were based on experimental psychology or because the schools themselves were looked upon as experiments in educational research. The children were not only to be left alone, unpunished or uncoerced, but enjoyed what was called 'freedom', which often verged on license, and chaos sometimes reigned in classrooms.

 

In most cases the individual rather than a group was catered to. Sometimes the children were grouped according to age groups or subject groups, with projects to accomplish, whether within laboratories or in the open air. 'Learning through free play' was another doctrine in vogue, and the teacher was mostly an onlooker or a companion only, rather than the all-knowing village schoolmaster whom Goldsmith had portrayed. One talked in terms of 'a garden of children' where the horrid school bell and the grammar-school atmosphere through which a David Copperfield or an Oliver Twist had to be ground or licked into shape by the free use of the birch by the Murdstones or stepfatherly educators of the old school; or where the boy had to make good at any cost along the lines that the state or the county council demanded; or be banished into the army or the navy as a good-for-nothing - was no more the case.

 

On the contrary, sheer impishness and the terrible features of the spoiled child often came to evidence. Gloating over the two cross clauses of the full declaration of freedom of the child, which were 'I can if I want to' do such and such, and 'I don't have to', completed the condition which often made chaos prevail where all had been dead discipline and silence before.

 

Calligraphy and the three R's naturally suffered in such a setup and there was not much difference between a school working day and holiday. Such was the educational paradise into which I entered. As the teachers too, naturally, took their vocation as lightly as the pupils did, my life at the Fellowship School was no drudgery at all. Nestling among the mountains on the border of the lake, it was for me five years of freedom with everything found.

 

FROM STOIC TO EPICUREAN

Thus study and ease together mixed with the games and recreations in a Swiss village in full view of the Alps and their twilight glories reflected in the lake where swans glided and icicles melted as the seasons passed, not far from Nyon where Rousseau was born as the son of a watchmaker. Life was for me a pastoral paradise in earthly surroundings, which could not be any better.

 

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The table too, at the school, lacked no nourishing food. Plenty of butter, fruit, and milk, with all imaginable luxuries belonging to a rural gastronomy were provided in plenty. Natural honey and nuts and seasonal fruit and vegetables, with a cuisine that catered to all European tastes, French, Italian, or that of the New World; with a company of men and women in full healthy holiday mood - was just the opposite phase for me of the immediately preceding austere years that I had left behind in India. I feared that God was being too kind to me and tried hard to bring a touch of old austerity into the merry-making world in which my lot happened to be cast.

 

Dinner was on a cafeteria basis and all helped themselves at a large kitchen. Ad lib was the rule as we passed in single file round the various items of the full three-course meal, beginning with vegetable soup and ending with dessert. In the beginning I was so repulsed by the gourmandising atmosphere that one day I decided to be satisfied by the first course alone. I could not continue this severity on myself without being discovered by my young friends who became so touched by it that they stood round me one day, protesting and asking me to eat for their sakes and not be such a killjoy. It was not fair to all the rest, they argued, and I had to give in finally - which was not difficult as it was austerity which was unnatural. I was obliged to conform and soon began to grow fat on rich ovo-lactarian food, with other open-air activities.

 

When autumnal evenings began to be colder, indoor games and assemblies were organized and it was fun and frolic round the clock, except when one was in the nursing arms of sleep. The grape-gathering season was over, during which the vendangeurs and vendangeuses, young and old, had their time of gay orgies of kissing and being kissed while they plucked the grapes - which was quite normal then as between young and old of both sexes. This was a Swiss custom which had its origin from Rousseau's time and excites the people each year like the Holi of India.

 

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I AM DEEPLY TOUCHED BY 'EMILE'

 

Jean-Jaques Rousseau.

 

One day when it was my turn to be on duty in the kitchen of the school, making toast for supper for the whole community of fifty or sixty as the autumnal days set in with that strange touch of inner sadness that creeps into one at the time of the falling leaves before full winter, I remember that I sat near the fire and, while watching inside the large iron oven to see that the toast did not burn, I pored over the pages of Rousseau's 'Emile'.

 

My knowledge of French was still poor. By reading signboards and newspaper headlines and more particularly by scanning a textbook in which one page was the translation into English of the facing French text, I made headway inch by inch, always annoyed by the complications that the conjugation of irregular verbs presented and by the bugbear of gender that made syntax a hurdle for foreigners to the language.

 

Still I plodded on, burning the midnight lights. I made full use of the only full phrase I knew at the beginning which was the English title of one of Keats' poems, 'La Belle Dame sans Merci' and naughtily repeated it to some of the girls to make them mock my aptitude in learning French. Instead of taking easy books with no interest to me, I adopted the contrary way of following as best as I could the thoughts in difficult books such as those of Bergson and Rousseau.

 

I distinctly remember when I read in Emile the following, 'It is to thee that I speak, gentle and foreseeing mother' etc. in the introduction where, continuing, Rousseau says that it is the mother alone who can put a fence round the growing child in the initial stages of its education so as to protect it from those who might tamper and distort the growth of the tender plant when it needs full protection. 'C'est à toi que je parle, douce et prévoyante mère' ran the actual words which enthralled me for the first time as I read Emile to find its affinity with Indian concepts of education. I could see the kinship between 'negative education' and the idea of brahmacharya as understood in the context of Indian education. This was an eye-opener for me in my researches on the 'Personal Factor in the Educative Process' which was to be my chosen subject for a thesis I was to write for Paris.

 

I was also deeply moved by another sentence there which ran as follows: 'Reader, remember always that he who speaks to you is neither a philosopher nor a savant, but a simple man, a lover of truth (un ami de la vérité)'. How often since then have I repeated these words, each time with an increasing emotion, till sometimes I have been so deeply touched as to have tears filling my eyes.

 

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Rousseau became thus for me a key to Western civilization more and more; and a sure contact was thus established between me of the East with the West by my understanding of the dear spirit of Rousseau who combined the 'Solitary Promeneur', the 'Lover of Heloïse' and the 'Teacher of Emile'. He was a Citizen of Geneva and at the same time a Citizen of the World. I have not been able to forget him for the rest of my life. 0 Kindred Spirit! I now greet thee again from this distance of time and space, after two hundred years have passed since you lived with vivacious emotions, the same as when I read your precious words!

 

Autumnal evenings merged and blended with colder winter days and, after an initial cold and attack of fever by which my system seemed to adjust itself to the challenge of real winter in a European climate; with a sense of fear of what was going to be, and with deep-seated emotions being revived within, both intellectually and instinctively, with new sets of relations with people around - I felt a strange sense of the numinous not unmixed with a touch of agony, anxiety and even exaltation at the strangeness of the situation as a whole. Admiration for Rousseau became more and more justified as I read more of him and allied literature in preparation for my work at the University.

 

FOREWARNED OF A SECOND LOVE AFFAIR

Before the last embers of my first affair with a woman had died out, I had early forebodings of another that was going to erupt, as it were, from underground. A pretty French teacher at the school was in question this time. As each family table had to have a father and mother and enough children of both sexes, I found that by some strange chance this particular person was at my table.

 

I had already been looking to her for help in learning French. Something forewarned me that I should change my family table and not be bracketed with this pretty mistress. I did so. In the long run, however, this deliberate avoidance did not avail. A strange intimacy began to grow between us, which seemed to have the approval of all nature. She was the teacher willing to teach me, and I had to be closeted with her in the newspaper room of which I was in charge and where I had my own books for my work and gave lessons in science for the junior boys and girls three or four times a week.

 

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It was the warmest and cosiest corner too for me to remain most of the late autumnal days. I spent many hours alone there, sometimes half-drowsily listening to a girl at her piano practice in the adjoining school hall. Some of the haunting notes of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata sank into my own subconscious and became part and parcel of my own nature while it seemed also to interpret the colourful autumnal scene which I watched through the windows.

 

While sweet memories brought also memories bright or dark around me, it was at this period that a strange letter was received from the woman in a far-off land whose story I have already told and by which the last embers of my love affair with her were to be soon extinguished. At the time she was still treating the matter seriously. The long letter described how she had made the acquaintance of another man who was keen on having her as a life companion. She wished that I should permit her to enter into alliance with him and absolve her of any understanding with me. I gave her this assurance readily and thus a chapter was properly closed, though the ashes continued to be warm till death on her part extinguished them finally about three or four years later. The new love affair was ready to leap its surprise on me already - and however much I tried to avoid it, all my efforts only made it more difficult for me to completely call a halt to further developments.

 

On a certain evening I was going to catch the night train to Paris for the first time to see the professor who was to interview me about the thesis that I was to submit in another two years or so. The kind lady accompanied me at dusk as far as the railway station, and on the way put me a strange question which I did not understand at first, which was clothed in the simplest of words: 'Pitar Natty,' she said, 'What do you think of me?' I could not answer her so simply and straightforwardly as she was able to put this momentous question. She was bringing out into the open something she could not express. In the world of love affairs, however, it was an event as important as the eruption of a latent volcano.

 

Next school year after winter, however, the illness of her parents kept her away from the school, and I had for the time being no problem to solve. I continued my life playing mixed football matches or tennis; indulging in swimming whenever the weather permitted; and taking language lessons in French and German, while I gave my lessons, in class or to individuals, in English and in science subjects, for seniors as well as juniors.

 

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A STRANGE CHANCE EVENT

In India one hears of psychic powers or siddhis, which ought really to refer to spiritual attainments or perfections of some kind, but are often imagined to be supernatural or extra-sensorial aptitudes or abilities such as divination, telepathy, clairvoyance or the power to produce some desired results at will. Materialisations and hallucinations too get mixed up with these, but the officially-recognised siddhis or powers of a yogi in Sanskritic lore, which are eight in number, are said to belong to the series: anima, mahima, laghima, garima, prakamya, isitva, vasitva, prapti - with many others sometimes added - and comprise powers of being or becoming small, big, light, heavy; of mastery, divinity, control and attainment.

 

Sleight of hand is responsible for some so-called powers, but others are more psychic or occult. A mixture of elements, apparent or real, can produce puzzling effects. To see light between the eyebrows when meditating, and to hear sounds or have visions of holy lights with singing of heavenly choirs are other familiar forms of siddhis, besides levitation and flying into thin air.

 

I have been strangely innocent of any of these during the course of my spiritual practices. I tended normally to discredit them and only hoped one day to discover their scientific basis, while generally preferring to be sceptical about them. I cannot say, however, that I never had an experience of an order that could be suspected to be supernatural or abnormal.

 

This, as it so happened in my case, has been connected with books. When I wanted a book badly, by some strange chance I came up against it, almost as a rule. The need had to be real and the desire fully genuine. It may be possible that there is a subjective element involved, so that when a certain expected event happens, you tend to match a desire for it as its cause without any intrinsic cause-effect relation between them - it might have been a mere sequence and you have read more into it than there is actual justification for in the case itself when treated without fuss. All such views are possible, but one cannot fail to note a coincidence, especially when it is of great significance to one's life.

 

Miss Thomas had decided to give me a room near and overlooking the lake with only the fishing boats and the pebbled beach intervening. A fisherman was living next door, with two or three motor-propelled boats with which he went fishing with his wife.

 

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The broad lake, with the French Savoy opposite, was rich in finny population of various kinds. In this room was where the chance event took place which I tell without any distortion of circumstances at all.

 

A TREASURE TROVE OF BOOKS

It was a longish room, with doors and windows opening towards the lake only, and my bed and table were at the end where there was enough light. I was to begin my work seriously on my thesis, and was preparing to make the first skeleton outlines and explore for preliminary books which would give me ample data.

 

I had to take a decision to start the work on the thesis in right earnest and had drawn two tables together and got ready the writing materials. I sat down, determined to make a beginning - but I thought of the preliminary books I had to read. I was not acquainted enough with the new school of analytical psychology. Freud and Jung were the rage at the time, and Adler too was much talked about. How could I prepare a thesis without knowing about them? And there were experimental aspects of psychology which I had not mastered and without which my thesis would be feeble in its documentation and cross-references.

 

I raised my pen several times to start writing the first paragraph of the introduction. The pen gave me some trouble too. I felt disgusted with myself on not being able to muster the first sentences which, when well begun would have made my task half done, as the adage puts it. A first, second and a third time I made my attempt, but I felt no confidence in what I wanted to say, which had to be one hundred per cent honest and original. I was not going to get a doctorate with made-up theories or on findings of a second-hand order.

 

When I found that my confidence utterly failed me a third time, I put my pen down in disgust, rose from my seat and began to pace up and down the longish room. How was I to reach the books on psychoanalysis and have a better grounding in experimental aspects of psychology? I had already ransacked the school library and asked the other members for any books in their respective collections. The only alternative was to go to the nearest library in Geneva, which meant a day's journey each time.

 

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As I paced up and down, I clearly remember noticing, for the first time, a curtain hiding a door at the hindmost end of my room. I removed the curtain, pushed open the door and entered a lumber room where old things were stowed away. There, on a broken piece of furniture, I found a pile of big volumes. I looked at their titles and what was my surprise when I found that they all referred to abnormal and analytical psychology which I wanted to consult very badly indeed just at that moment. Miss Thomas had wanted these books to be put away from adolescent readers because they contained sex anecdotes. And there they were, together worth a couple of hundred Swiss francs, and all waiting for me to make use of them.

 

If the coincidence did not tally with the very moment I was in anguish for them, I could have dismissed it as a mere accident - but put together with my inner agony for lack of them just at that very moment, I could not treat the event merely mechanistically. There were more than merely brute mechanistic factors involved, whatever name I might give to the chance element which was a blend of probabilities and possibilities of a fifty-fifty world of subtle occasionalism. As I claimed to be both a sceptic and a believer at once, as one dedicated to absolutism, I left this as an open question and I do so even now. It could be treated just as a mere coincidence if I thought like Bertrand Russell; but in the light of the principle of pre-established harmony in the universe of a Leibniz I can look upon the same event as a wonder and a mystery. I like to accept both of these and fit them into a common scheme of the Absolute, as a fact as well as a mystery at once.

 

While I am on this subject I must also say here that a fortnight after this event I found another book I wanted in the same mysterious way. It was the book on experimental psychology that interested me then, which I wanted to revise from end to end before starting on my thesis. I had asked all the teachers, especially the English couple, Mr. and Mrs. Best, who had a fine collection of books in their flat upstairs, also overlooking the lake, just above my room.

 

It was Easter of 1928 and the whole school had gone to Arles in the South of France for an excursion and historical study round the Greek remains there. The couple had entrusted their flat to my care and I could use their library when they were away, as also their crockery and all the jams and conserves they had left behind. I did not let the chance slip and helped myself freely to the provisions.

 

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I looked once again all over for the wanted book, although I had already asked the owners if they had it and they had denied it. At a moment of keen need felt inside, I bent over the bookshelf again, and a smallish book with peculiar Sanskritized lettering on the back, belonging to the 'Temple Series' as it was called, seemed to beckon to me to come closer and take a look at the title. When I bent more closely, I read, to my surprise, the very words 'Experimental Psychology, by William Mac Dougall'. No better book could have come to my hands just then, and I grabbed it with prayerful avidity and a thankful drop of tears in my eyes - confirmed sceptic and unbeliever that I otherwise ordinarily claimed to be in other moments of my life. Life consists both of facts as well as mysteries.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

 

WALKING THE CORRIDORS OF THE UNIVERSITY

 

Paris in the 1920's.

 

Paris, Paris! This name has endeared itself to modern man in many ways. Its charms have attracted many a globetrotter, and to repeat the name brings to mind a cluster of associations that cling together almost into a persona.

 

Paris has a female personality which one never fails to sense on entering through its walls. Besides the Cathedral so called, some fashionable 'Notre Dame' occupies mentally the core of Paris, trotting the pavements in a quick high-heeled pace. It is the woman and not the man who is respected in Paris, and if anywhere in the world the word 'Madame' gains meaning in modernism, it is at Paris that its high-water mark gets recorded every time you utter the word. The aristocrat or bourgeois here takes off his gloves to shake hands with a mere servant-woman, which one does not do elsewhere in civilised cities.

 

To love Paris is to respect Woman, irrespective of her faults which might be more glaringly revealed in the night-life of Montmartre than anywhere else in the respectable world. Thus it is that the 'amour' of Paris is 'pour toujours' (forever). Like the thing of beauty which is 'a joy forever' as Keats would say, 'Paris toujours' is the slogan natural in the mouth of the young dandy or old flirt.

 

Much intellectual life has also to be associated with Paris, with its life dating back to the fall of Rome after which soldiers, priests, sailors and philosophers jostled and rubbed shoulders in what is called 'la vie de Paris', lasting for centuries. Even the concierges and charwomen were respected like vestal virgins here. Such was the Paris that in the autumn of 1928 I walked into, unconscious yet of her charms and claims to be worshipped on the part of a votary from a far-off shore, suckled by other strange 'pagan' and 'barbarous' cults and customs.

 

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LIFE IN THE LATIN QUARTER

'See Naples and die', goes the saying, but the smells and sights

of actual Naples might be repulsive. After alighting at the Gare de Lyon I was conducted through the streets of Paris by an Indian friend who later become famous as a physicist. It was still early in the morning and the autumnal sun was hardly visible in the dull air. The shops and boutiques were opening, and the trams and Métro only beginning to wake up the lazy giant city from its prolonged slumbers after a busy previous night. Most of Europe is dead drunk still at eight in the morning, and the carpet-beating of some wilful man on a fifth-floor balcony only makes the sleeper turn onto the other side to get his lost forty winks again. The polite policeman of Paris breathes mist like a fiery horse, and the wayside vendor begins to arrange his flowers or stockings with a yawn. The waitresses too shake off their slumbers as best they can before the revels begin again with glasses clinking and pavement cafes begin to work in full swing through the day into the recesses of the night.

 

'Le Quartier Latin' is where all Parisian life converges to reveal its most unconventional liberties. Past the University area where blonde girl students can be seen walking arm in arm with their jet-black counterparts from the interior of the Dark Continent, or sipping café noir sitting on high seats in restaurants, one reaches the Porte d'Orléans, where fish and rabbits hanging upside down are displayed alongside chic shops with flower- or newspaper-vendors, with roasted nuts too. All this makes for the busy life of the more common Parisian. The latest Paris cries can be heard here as in the days of old.

 

I finally went off the Boulevard to a smaller side-street where I was to live at No.5, Rue Marie Davy, 14th district, where my kind hostess Madame Morin was expecting me. This lady was a friend of Indians, many of whom enjoyed her hospitality over many years. Finally her love of India brought her to Delhi, where she still lives, broadcasting in French for All-India Radio. To have become such a mouthpiece must have been in her karma in this or a prior life. Such thoughts do not sound strange to an Indian mind, although they might rub a Papist the wrong way.

 

I had a room to myself which belonged to the son of Madame Morin, Jean-Jacques, then about twelve, who was then in a boarding-school. There, sitting up many times on autumnal mornings carrying the foretaste of winter to come, I formulated the contents of the thesis I was going to write for the Sorbonne University. Many tentative skeletons were made and torn up before something satisfactory emerged.

 

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The agony of finding shelter, learning a language, paying for my lodging and board, finding guides or friends, were still uphill points for me to climb and reach if possible. Faith alone was on my side then. I felt much helplessness and ignorance, keenest at this time of my life; and to Madame Morin goes the credit of giving me some attention which is still appreciated by this man who is 'ever yours truly', no other than a 'satya-dharman' - a lover of truth trying to walk in its path.

 

THE SUBJECT THAT HAS REMAINED DEAR TO ME

'The Personal Factor in the Educative Process' was the title of the thesis I was going to submit to the University. Even before going to Paris I had made up my mind in this matter, as I have always been of the opinion that the core of education consists of proper rapport between teacher and taught. This principle has been understood through all time in India, as even a peasant woman to this day would strongly vouch for in asking her child to touch the feet of a passing saddhu or itinerant teacher. From the learning of the first alphabet to wisdom, this Guru-sisya (master-pupil) relation counts; and this belief, tacitly accepted by millions for ages, needed to be restated in a revised form for moderns to understand. The subject had enough research features involving psychology, pedagogy and philosophy.

 

The whole theory and practice of Indian education had to be revalued and restated, and this topic that touched the core would, I thought, command a basic interest that would not pass away quickly. Modern education under the New Education Movement started by Dr. Adolphe Ferrière, Dr. Edouard Claparède and Dr. Pierre Bovet, whose personal acquaintance I had already made at Geneva while at the Institute Jean-Jacques Rousseau where I had completed short courses already, had given me enough modern ideas in education to give flesh and blood to my study of the role of the Guru.

 

Taking the dust off the feet of a Guru walking the dusty roads of India has been a gesture dear to the Indian mind, even before the great Buddha's days when it was fully recognised; and the unique character and personality India possesses to this day is owing to this respect for Guruhood. To analyse this regard and give it, if possible, a new lease of life was to be my contribution through my thesis.

 

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I am sure the idea is dear to India still and perhaps will remain so whatever else changes and passes. At least that is a hope, even if all else should be lost. Whether in early 'negative' education, in later adolescent 'natural', or mid-life 'pragmatic', or in 'idealistic' education before death, the bipolarity as between teacher and taught holds good as a law in education.

 

Nature's pages could substitute for the Guru in a sense, and a living guide represent the Guru-ideal - but these are partial aspects of the total situation in which a full osmosis could take place between the two poles of the situation. Both gain equal transparency in the end when the Absolute vision is complete. Such were some of the implications of the subject I had chosen.

 

I MEET MY 'RAPPORTEUR'

The nights began earlier and lasted longer, and this gave me a strange sense to which I was unused and which I cannot describe in words. It had an element of self-realization which made it interesting to me as I sat one evening in a Métro that had emerged from underground, where it properly belonged, to above the houses and roads in the area of Paris where the Eiffel Tower raised its head and was visible like a ghost from far off, through the misty atmosphere lit up with blurred lights. The Trocadéro and the triumphal arch passed by and I was being conducted to the study of Professor Wallon by my good hostess Madame Morin.

 

Wallon was the name of a young professor of the Faculty of Letters of the Sorbonne who was to be my 'rapporteur'. Madame was my interpreter in French and I readily handed in the abstract in French that I had got ready. He scanned the items and turned the pages silently for some time and seemed satisfied, but soon added that Indians were generally 'sentimental', and the thesis had to be  'objective' and 'critical'. I knew already that these words were dear to the modern Western mind. 'Demonstrable', 'operational', 'pragmatic', 'scientific' and 'realist' are other modern words which are dear to the West - and anything that even smells of the a priori is at once suspect and thus repugnant. The modern man forgets that all speculation is immersed in truths taken for granted as a priori, whether as axioms, postulates, theorems, riders, corollaries or lemmas which all depend on the principle of the a priori.

 

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I took up the challenge of the professor from that day, and have tried to fulfil the requirements of the critical approach in all my speculative writings. A science must have its due proportion of both speculation and criticism, which together bring up the total knowledge-situation in the progress or procession of thought, speculative or scientific. It was thus that I struck another bargain in my life-long research of the Absolute.

 

ICE-BOUND WINTER COMES WITH SANTA CLAUS

By the time I returned to Switzerland the trees had shed their leaves and winter sleet and slush were announced, with the Mistral or the Bise that needed double shutters to keep out the cold. There are many kinds of killing winds in the world 'nor good for man nor beast', rising from land or sea. Of these the Bise with its league-long wings was special to the lakeside Canton of Vaud in Switzerland, as the Mistral is to the South of France. It brought blizzards which alternated with hoarfrost and unhealthy mists decking the pine trees in various fantastic costumes from day to day or week to week, revealing or hiding Alpine scenery both near and far.

 

Icicles and frozen lakes were common, favourable to iceskating and other winter sports. Migrating water birds of many kinds, and robins who ate crusts off the windowsill, lent the winter air a mystical content of joy. Indoor cosiness and comfort had its counterpart in the bleak skies outside, so that one reflected the projection of the other with a subtle one-one correspondence between the inner and outer spaces.

 

Winter too had its glad tidings and greetings of the season, presided over by the pagan Santa Claus figure of the pine-clad Nordic clime with a sled drawn by reindeer. Christmastide, with its carol singing when the first snows are evident, brings the pagan world of witches, Pucks and Jack-O'Lanterns into full view, as reflected in Goethe or Shakespeare. Christianity can never hide its pagan background in spite of its Passion Plays belonging to the Greek context.

 

Warming myself in bed and keeping fires going all round were responsibilities I shared with all others. Shutting doors after one and not letting the heat warm the garden outside were precautions to be taken, and thus winter days passed memorably for me as we enjoyed its close embrace.

 

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STUNG BY A WASP BEFORE BAD NEWS REACHES ME

Coming events cast their shadows before. Strangely, an instance of this kind came into my experience when winter days were beginning and we were planning to go to the Dôle, the highest peak of the Jura Mountains, a formation of a different geological origin from the Alps, to the north of Lake Geneva.

 

In September I had celebrated the birthday of the Guru Narayana at a place in Geneva, the 'Salle Quo Vadis', which a kind Theosophically-inclined lady, a follower of Abdul Baha, had lent me for the day. It had a small auditorium with separate places for cooking and eating. I sent out invitations, asking people to bring an offering of fruits or flowers to the Guru, whose picture was placed on a pedestal and decorated with flowers and adored in right Indian style, not omitting incense and the waving of the camphor flame.

 

A dinner of rice and vegetable curry was also cooked by me. About fifty Europeans responded and participated in these quaint formalities with open-minded willingness, and a very fine atmosphere prevailed during the day. The Rev. C.F. Andrews, passing through Geneva, sent a note too, with a few rose-flower offerings, saying that he was on his way to Marburg University that day, after visiting Romain Rolland that morning, to meet Dr. Rudolf Otto, whose book 'The Idea of the Holy' ('Das Heilige'), was just then a sensation of the season.

 

This event was on September 14th, and on September 28th the Guru Narayana attained samadhi (final peace) in life. I was still ignorant of this event in the school at Gland, on that winter day when I was preparing with two others to climb the peak of the Dôle. On that morning, a wasp, angry that summer days were over but who continued to survive in the colder days, had stung me, and this mishap, though negligible in itself, had induced a strange state of anxiety in my mind, sensitive as I have been always to adverse red lights wherever they flickered as signals or omens against me. One always waits for what adverse event might follow. I was aware that all this was nonsense but could not help noticing the coincidence for whatever it was worth. Coming events do cast their shadows, however faint, before - though not as a mechanical rule, but in the subtle language of chance or omens. It is the voice of the Tao, for those who are sensitive to its whisperings.

 

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The wasp-stung mood of anxiety had scarcely passed away when I got the news that the Guru Narayana had passed away in India. What heightened its significance to me was the fact that the date was roughly four months after I had taken leave of him, as recounted already, and his words 'four months' when I said I would be away for eight months, were still ringing in my ears. There are still, small voices that one can listen to within oneself if one is sensitive and can properly tune in to them.

 

MY VISIT TO ROMAIN ROLAND

 

Romain Rolland.

 

The great pacifist writer of France, the author of 'Jean-Christophe', a novel in several volumes, was living in retirement or self-imposed banishment at a small lakeside retreat in Switzerland at the other end of the same lake on whose borders I too lived.

 

Soon after the birthday celebrations of the Guru Narayana at the 'Salle Quo Vadis' in Geneva, I had a letter from the author of international fame whose books were no sooner issued then they were read in several languages in far-flung corners of the Western world. He had heard about the Guru Narayana from the Rev. C.F. Andrews, and wanted to meet me as the Guru's disciple. A date and time were fixed which I tried to adhere to as best as I could. At Lausanne station, however, where I had to change trains for Villeneuve, I made the mistake of being exact to the minute to try to get into the train, and when two minutes still remained, started from the first platform to the second, but in spite of my carefulness, by over-punctuality rather than neglect, I missed the train by one minute, as the railway clocks were automatic and my watch worked second by second instead of the minute-hand jumping once a minute rather than progressing by seconds. When I said there were still several seconds for the last minute, the railway clock had changed position twice. A sort of Zeno paradox involving Achilles and the tortoise - the former never being able to overtake the latter - was involved here. I learnt to respect Zeno from that day, but as I had to take the next train I arrived at Romain Roland's residence nearly an hour late. Otherwise the interview went well.

 

I was received in the drawing room of a villa bordering the high ranges of the Jura as they closed on the Alps from the southern side of the eye-shaped lake. I forgot to make any apology for being late, as the great writer, then a bachelor past sixty, and his sister Madeleine greeted me.

 

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Soon the conversation touched the subject of the Guru. I happened to mention that the Guru mistrusted excesses like killing to please God in the name of religion. Not having visited India, the sharp grey eyes of the moustached visage of the lean and pale-looking Frenchman seemed to peer into mine questioningly. Between Bengal and Kerala a racial difference of temperament was soon read into the story, although actually there are no two ethnic groups in India that could be bracketed together as alike as the Bengali and the Malayali. He then scanned me with cat-like eyes, and with his natural penetration took me to be a representative man of Kerala, which in many respects I do not think I am.

 

In one of his posthumously-published diaries he has a small note about meeting me and pays me the compliment of being ugly. Although I do not consider myself very good-looking by Western standards, from my own inner standards I have never had any misgiving about my good looks. My mirror has always praised me, whatever others might have thought of me as fat, round or bald, as I actually was. One sees Helen's beauty in an eye of Egypt, as Shakespeare would put it about a lover's imagination. On my part, the slanting moustache, grey eyes and pale look of Romain Roland himself did not make any particular impression on me either, and thus we can be quits on this subject, I suppose, at least at this late hour.

 

A short footnote in 'The Life of Ramakrishna' which Rolland was at that time writing, shows how he made use of the interview in getting all information he could. We sat and sipped tea together and, on hearing a cough and a voice from the next room, Rolland remarked to me that it was his father who was nearing a century in age. 'He talks to himself sometimes', he added. Rolland's ability to read into the general climate and implications of Indian spirituality without ever visiting the country, it must be said, does much credit to him.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

 

IN EUROPE BETWEEN THE WARS

Three more years of holidaymaking on the continent of Europe still remained for me to enjoy. From 1930 to April 1933, many unexpected trapdoors of chance opened for me to give me peeps into the history and civilization of Europe. I had only to let go and not make my own plans, to be taken free of cost to all the best scenes, art-galleries and museums, cities, and hubs of what together make up Western civilization.

 

But we cannot afford in these backward glances to linger too long over each item. A peep through each door left ajar for me to get a passing view is all we can attempt here. Let memory bring its 'sweet light of other days' again. Regrets, if any, could have been bitter when mixed with memories, which can never attain to the full savour of sweetness; but in my case, regrets are not strong enough to mar in any way the sweetness of those unforgettable days.

 

I shall tell here the story of a stranger from the Deep South of India as he found his way in post-Georgian Europe after the First World War. The heart of Europe was still beating strong at that time, with not yet any signs of the decadence which only became evident a little later. From the fall of the Roman Empire through the French and Russian Revolutions to the League of Nations, reborn as the United Nations, the events are too many - but the pulsations of the heart of Europe were sturdy and sound still and held out a promise of world-wide repercussions which were to be far-flung and significant to impress the age the world over with its characteristic contributions - whether good or bad remains to be judged by posterity.

 

I FIRST TURN MY EYES TO ENGLAND

I had early located the heart or epicentre of European thought in the 'Citizen of Geneva', the solitary 'Promeneur' and lover of Truth, who was none other than the much-misunderstood and persecuted Rousseau.

 

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Without him at its core, European civilization would be an empty shell of opulent glamour hiding poverty in the form of economic scarcity, with no true value-content within, as Voltaire correctly indicated in his 'Candide'.

 

With all his faults, it was Rousseau who proved that Europe still had a pulsating heart. True, his own is considered to this day as over-sentimental by some of Europe's best sons; but to the view of an outsider like me, Rousseau's sentiments alone acted as an eye-opener to civilization as applied to Europe which otherwise would have remained a closed book to all men sensitive to the human values.

 

Both Rousseau and Voltaire were hounded round different parts of Europe for the opinions they expressed, and the game of ushering in the Age of Enlightenment in Europe can be said to have been played with a ball that was passed from one side that was sentimental to the other that was over-rational - as represented by Rousseau and Voltaire respectively. Both found The Hague of those days an open-minded city where they could take refuge from the closed and static loyalties of the old regime.

 

England too, nobly played the role of protector of the freedom of thought with its sceptical Protestant and empirical outlook, and gave hospitality to these men off and on. The credit and glory that this brought to Great Britain, as both belonging to Europe and outside its mental climate, linger on in the reputation for stern common sense that the British people still enjoy in the eyes of the rest of the world. It was thus right that I should turn my eyes to England to know modern Europe.

 

CROSSING THE CHANNEL IN A CHOPPY SEA

Known as Pitar Natty in the little international lakeside community in Switzerland where I had spent my first two years in Europe, I soon became a favourite among the boys and girls who clung round me constantly with familial familiarity. One day, even before the limit of the two years was over, an elderly lady from Wales belonging to an old Quaker family, Miss Edith Roberts of Nelson, Glamorgan, who had watched me with the children of the school, and who was dressed in a broad-brimmed straw hat and plain untrimmed robes, accosted me and with deep seriousness in her face and offered me a blank cheque which I could fill with any amount I wished, to enable me to visit England and Wales.

 

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The reason she gave was a touching one, and I could not disrespect her sentiments, even if I did not want to take the chance. 'My father built railways in India', she said, 'and I have always wished to return part of the gains to an Indian'. I was myself broke, with my bank balance dwindling and at that precise time altogether inadequate for a trip to England and back. Besides the blank cheque, she had procured a return ticket for me in a comfortable second-class to London, via Paris, Dieppe and Folkestone.

 

Starting sufficiently early the previous day, Paris was passed at night and the Dieppe-Folkestone crossing was announced during the early hours of the next morning. It was a long schooner or cutter that waited to ferry us over the chafing channel, on whose deck we soon found ourselves huddled with our belongings. The crossing was not long, but the chilly winds and choppy weather were all unfavourable for any tender sentiments, least of all lovemaking, as I could not omit noticing with some couples or pairs of them around me. No doves can coo in adverse weather. Love calls for a calm atmosphere - it is vertical and bad weather is horizontal. They cannot go together.

 

At long last the daylight announced itself and the ferry was within sight of the English coast. A fellow-passenger who was an English student in London stood beside me on the deck and pointed at the first English roof that caught our eye in that dear old country. He taught me to recognize the pub which is always to be associated with Merry England. Soon on English soil my friend helped me to find my way to London. A taxi soon took me to Gower Street Indian Hostel, where, after a few hours waiting, I got a bed-and-breakfast lodging in famous London Town.

 

CHANGING LONDON AND CHANGEFUL WEATHER

 

 

 

London in the 1930's.

 

John Gilpin's London Town with its turnpikes and towers must have changed after the Great Fire and the Plague recorded in old Pepys' Diary. Dickens too portrayed a London in his 'Pickwick Papers' and 'David Copperfield'. Sir Roger de Coverley saw a London that was pre-Victorian as revealed in the Spectator essays of Addison. My familiarity with London was supplemented by what was heard and seen in pictures and from the Illustrated London News. The Thames Embankment, Tower Bridge, and the Houses of Parliament had figured on the top of biscuit boxes or as wallpaper designs. Stereoscopes had made me familiar with the fabulous policeman of London and the newsboy, representing London types in life already known.

 

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Ever-changing London presented to me three different pictures on my three visits and sojourns there; the first in 1930, the second in 1951 and the third in 1969. Each time it was almost a different London that I visited, although at its very core London retained its personality. The London of winter was quite different from the hot London of summer with its unexpected thunderstorms and showers. It was in such an uncertain London that I found myself on my very first visit in 1930. It was a cold, sleety, misty and bleak London that I visited in 1951. I remember walking under Big Ben on Christmas Eve of 1951 with my overcoat, hands kept warm in my pockets. The short days were closing in even at five and, in the boarding-house in Tavistock Square where I stayed, I had to keep warm by putting pennies in slots for the gas fire to burn as in the good old days. Changeless London still lingered on as a state of mind in spite of change all round. Hyde Park Corner and Picadilly Circus retain still some of their fine old aspects. Greater London with its suburban life is where change was seen greatest during my 1969 visit. The familiar Londoner was being displaced by people from all the far-flung corners both of palm and of pine - dark, fair or mixed, to make of modern Greater London a mosaic pattern of different complexions and mentalities.

 

AT PILGRIM PLACE, NELSON, GLAM.

The countryside of England gives a better picture of English life. I had already an invitation to spend a few days at a typical old Quaker house in the Welsh town of Nelson, near Cardiff, removed from urbanism and hiding within typical country surroundings. I took a train at Euston for Glamorganshire. The Great Western Railway engine soon gathered full speed as its big wheels covered the countryside like a dart. The waiter soon after announced lunch and, while bridges and fields went by as I watched through the dining saloon window that shook characteristically because of the luxury springs beneath the bogeys, an Englishman sitting facing me at table put me a question which was queer to me though natural enough from his standpoint. 'Is Gandhi still giving trouble in India?' he asked.

 

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'Sure', I nodded assentingly, swallowing my patriotism, if any, to accommodate the conversation that naturally followed afterwards. Yes, the Mahatma was a troublemaker, only he made such trouble that one group liked and another disliked. There were racial and geographical boundaries involved, however generously interpreted. If there was absolutism in the trouble, it was not at least evident on the surface.

 

The Bristol Channel was crossed under the estuary rather than by an overhead bridge. It was a new experience for me to be told that we had passed from England to Wales at an estuary in daylight without seeing the water that we had crossed. Changing to a smaller-gauge railway line at Cardiff, I continued through winding hilly country scenery, not unlike that of the Indian Nilgiris, into Wales proper past Welsh towns whose names I could hardly pronounce. Beyond Pontypridd I found my way to the little village of Nelson in Glamorganshire to the house of my hostess, whose sister received me with the charming hospitality of old Wales, now unknown in urbanised parts of Great Britain: mixing with the people of the place; attending an educational conference; cooking a much-relished Indian dinner for the inmates of Pilgrim Place, as the centre I lived in was called; and airing all my views openly and freely without reserve.

 

After spending five days, I returned part of the way to Cardiff in a cart with an ex-member of Parliament in charge of doling out help to unemployed Welsh workers in social centres scattered over South Wales. The troubles of the labouring section became fully evident to me as I was taken in a spin to more than a dozen places. I was dropped at a wayside station in the afternoon from where I reached Cardiff sufficiently early to attend a lecture by Mrs. Annie Besant in the biggest half of the town, with Mr. Shiva Rao on the platform with her, speaking on Indian Home Rule. An Irish lady speaking on Indians in Wales gave me fresh perspectives in politics. Cardiff, I discovered, had some colour prejudice because of Negro sailors, who were not welcome in some inns and restaurants. I bought some clothes in a main-street shop before returning to the baggage I had left in the station, and took the train late at night back to London. Arriving too early, before daybreak, I waited till it was daylight to find my room again in the Gower Street Hostel.

 

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Sight-seeing for its own sake was against my principles in life, and, for the reason of insisting on sights coming to me instead of my seeking out sights, I spent a whole afternoon sitting on one of the benches opposite the British Museum. Rare exhibits of interest, especially as I was a naturalist and indologist, must have been missed, but curiosity must have a break and what we learn must come by natural interest contacts of time and place. I would not go out of my way to seek new satisfactions. Sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof. More sights have come to me by this negative attitude than to many others equal to me in other respects who have cultivated interests more haphazardly. The world of interest outside and our own curiosity must be correctly linked so that an osmotic interchange of essences involved between them can naturally take place.

 

The Nelson monument, Covent Garden, the place where Johnson lived in the Haymarket, what was said to be the Old Curiosity Shop pictured by Dickens, Hyde Park Corner - not to speak of Kingsway, the East End where Quakers worked in slum areas, and High Holborn - none went out of my view. Sight after sight came before me.

 

Once entering Hyde Park, summer as it was, the lawns were filled with holidaymakers basking in sunlight. Spring fever was still lingering on and, unlike in India, love-excited men and women with flushed faces were having a good time. I sauntered along with my broad-brimmed hat and long hair showing its curls behind. As I entered the park, I created a sensation as I must have appeared a queer figure like the man figured on Quaker Oats packets. I could not explain the uproar that went on around me wherever I walked that day, till I had proved experimentally that it was the curly hair beneath the broad-brimmed hat that had gone slightly out of fashion that acted as a cynosure, by returning to the same spot without creating any excitement after I had a haircut, everything else remaining the same as before,

I visited my Bahai friend, Lady Bloomfield, and was taken in her brother's car to have a spin round the sights of London. Another day I took tea in Parliament House overlooking the Thames with the famous Labour member, Fenner Brockway. I dined another noon in the suburban residence of two other senior parliamentarians after attending a Quaker meeting at Euston.

 

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I missed my way many times, walking the streets and shop-window gazing, catching wrong buses to add to the confusion. I used the underground 'tube' and climbed by revolving staircases at Tottenham Court Road. I did not omit Woolworth's, also once attending a Church service at St. Martins in the Fields. The blank cheque was filled in by me with 'pounds ten' which I cashed at the Trafalgar Square branch of Lloyds Bank, and I had time too, to get a London tailor make a coat and plus-fours - in fashion then in London - made of heavy woollen worsted.

 

After a full fare of London's attractions, major and minor too, like eating at the Lyons' Corner House restaurant or witnessing a Punch and Judy marionette show, I returned to Geneva the way I went, this time the train rounding the outskirts of Paris from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon, to avoid breaking my journey there. A special midnight train brought me to Gland, although I happened to be the only passenger in the bogey that could take fifty.

 

The London I again saw in 1951 had many familiar spots blown out of existence. Some were being rebuilt, but others seemed to take a laborious time to recover, contrasting in this respect with Germany where recovery seemed comparatively vital and fast.

 

THE RECRUDESCENCE OF LOVE

As I have related, my first love affair in India was at a time when I was ill-fed and steeped in poverty. In Europe it was the opposite condition that prevailed. Butter, cream, nuts and the equivalent of two or three eggs a day, with fruits and three-course dinners regularly, was normal, and I could not baulk out of it although I made a trial at first. The second love affair that came up, as I have related previously, came with a bang of surprise and interest when I was better fed. As the Gita says, food has a direct bearing on appetites such as sex and only a full vision of the Absolute can effectively cure man of this basic biological disposition. (Gita, 11.59).

 

Seasickness, love-sickness and homesickness are like all other ailments, which are essentially fleshly in origin. Their origin is not deep-seated in the human system, but belongs to the peripheral epiphenomenon aspect, full of the changing glamour of interests. Some take them seriously as belonging to the soul of life. The true love of Shakespeare's Sonnets has its reality in anthologies of lyric poetry where it is treated seriously.

 

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Lyrics become more serious in Romantic literature, culminating in such works as Victor Hugo's 'Hernani', where the play ends and the curtain drops over two lovers who at the end of five or more acts full of tragedy-verging romance drink poison from each other's hands and lie dead on the stage at midnight. Love stories in Hamlet and Othello become instilled with sterner stuff till they attain to white heat again in Greek tragedy in the hands of master artists like Euripides and Sophocles. When love thus transcends death and rises to an absolute status in the scale of human values it deserves to be respected, otherwise it is no more than a stomach ache, nostalgia or mal de mer.

 

The affair that was in evidence in my life when I was in the better-fed atmosphere of the Swiss lakeside boarding-school was perhaps one of those billows that begin with early adolescence, gently at first as a sort of ground swell, but which are succeeded, as one approached middle-age maturity, by surging waves that sometimes dash against the beach as breakers. Tidal waves thus come and go, leaving behind the rock they swept over when true love emerges and survives all stages of life.

 

These truths were known to me, but my affair with the pretty French schoolmistress was not yet closed. I had a telephone call in a lady's voice one day after winter's ice had thawed and spring flowers like cowslips and buttercups were still hiding under the grass waiting to announce the glorious spring that all poets of Europe have ever lauded. The call was a familiar one and, interspersed with sighs and deep breaths, it announced the death of her father. A further link was established thus with the same young lady who is the subject or object of this love affair or romance, the second wave that passed over me after attending a Quaker meeting at Euston - a taller billow than before by its lack of deeper content. How I lived through this second upsurge and tided over my emotional crisis I shall tell later.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

 

HOLIDAYS ON THE CONTINENT

England to me was not a strange land. It was known through books and some aspects of England forgotten or taken for granted by the Englishman himself were known to me more intimately. Not so with the continent; it held its close secrets even for an educated Englishman whose course of culture could not be considered complete without being finished by a continental tour.

 

A smattering of French often added to the stature of an English snob, and to have had a French nurse in infancy gave a continental touch to enhance aristocratic superiority. In most cases this kind of little knowledge did not go well with the bowler-hatted conservative and suave Londoner who could never make a good Parisian dandy brought up in the free and easy atmosphere of the continent.

 

The continent had a liberalising effect, although through the Dark Ages to the time of Voltaire there lurked at its heart many vulnerable spots which were the subjects of the vitriolic indictments contained in 'Candide'. A whole generation was later to be disillusioned by Voltaire about the value of the mercantile civilization of Nordic Europe. The Latins retained some culture in spite of these forces of opulence and gold rush.

 

Hitler and Mussolini were still alive when I had the chance to spend several holidays in rare parts of Europe still holding out cultural treasures for the edification of moderns. A pilgrim from the East had many new matters to absorb from art galleries, museums and music halls and even from the range of wines that required the cultivation of 'good taste', the last distinguishing mark of one whose education was not neglected.

 

ANNUAL CULTURAL PILGRIMAGES

 

Arles.

 

The chronological order of my several holidays in Europe eludes me at this distance of time, but each such period comes within the purview of my retrospective glance like a separate island rising above the water level of consciousness.

 

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Each year, invariably at Easter, the Fellowship School programmed a visit which was called a 'pilgrimage' to the warmer climes of southern Europe. I had purposely missed the very first of them, which took the school to the Greek ruins in and around Arles in the south of France. I found time for all such tours the rest of the five years. Each teacher as well as student had months of preparation before the pilgrimage began in which courses were given and library references made in respect of the sites and scenes to be visited. This preparatory course was compulsory for both pupils and staff.

 

The history of art and architecture was explored so as to throw sidelights and give proportion and perspective to history as gained from mere textbooks - much of which book-work often evaporated without leaving any impression on the pupils once the white heat or boiling point of the public exams were over. The brains then remained clean slates again with no living interest fixing the facts and figures into memory. Personal visits helped to make the programme of interest supplement the programme of mere study. As in the 'look and say' method, one appealed to the visual and the other to the auditory, till both fused into one 'apperception mass' as educational psychologists call such, after Herbart. Some neglected aspects of my own education were thus to be compulsorily and free of cost made available to me, even though rather late in my career.

 

IN AND AROUND VENICE

 

Venice.

 

It is Shakespeare's 'Merchant of Venice' that introduces this city to the undergraduates of English universities. Padua, Verona, Vicenza and other smaller and less-reputed towns have also their stories to tell about classical times, both Roman and Greek. The Jew like Shylock entered the scene only after the fall of Constantinople, bringing in his trail the Renaissance, with Christianity spreading from the time of one pope to another. European civilization had its cradle here. Master sculptors and painters found patrons through the centuries: now under the Church; now under the rulers who ousted each other in turn in domains big and small.

 

Venice has retained its character through all these vicissitudes. The favourite landmarks in terms of which the modern tourist thinks of his itinerary remain here, such as the Bridge of Sighs; the Lido; the Rialto on which Shylock shouted for his daughter, offering ducats; St. Mark's Church and Square; the Clock; the Doge's Palace and the Church of Santa Lucia of whom the gondoliers sing as of old their long-drawn songs of praise - give Venice its time-honoured personality.

 

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Balconies and loggias speak of ancient love-smitten couples who must have been serenaded from road or canal under conditions in which Shylock's daughter herself eloped at night by torchlight reflected on the dark waters. The glass-blowers too must have been there because Venetian glass has a reputation dating back quite far into history.

 

It was at a station before reaching Venezia Santa Lucia that we were unexpectedly told to alight with bag and baggage from the long compartment in which forty boys and girls of all nationalities, together with the staff and some guests who were allowed to join the holidaymakers, had travelled from Switzerland. We detrained in a hurry and each took care of his own and other people's things in promiscuous mutual aid. As a result, when we reached the Italian boarding school for adults where we were to lodge I found to my distress that my suitcase, which contained my typescripts for my thesis, was not among the boxes that had arrived. It was too precious to me to be lost and, after telephoning from the same station, the next day the lost article was traced at the terminal station, Venezia Santa Lucia, whose very name became thus associated in my mind with something dear to me. The song in praise of Santa Lucia still rings in my ears although I can hardly repeat the beautiful cadence reflecting the leisure with which I have heard the gondoliers themselves sing it in praise of the Holy Mother of Light.

 

Vicenza itself was not without its important places of cultural interest. Each day of our stay large tourist buses took us in different directions, including the ancient City of the Dead where remnants of past civilizations lie buried. I could learn about elements of architecture; distinguishing the Gothic from the Greek style or from the Byzantine or the Renaissance over which the genius of Palladio, a native of Vicenza, had exercised his architectural imagination that is said even to have influenced Sir Christopher Wren of St. Paul's of London fame.

 

Among sculptors the name of Canova stands out for the purity of his work on marble; and for paintings in the various galleries too numerous to mention, the ultramarine used by Tintoretto in his painting of the Virgin or of the Immaculate Conception stands out. The little I knew then has mostly evaporated by lapse of time and other interests.

 

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Even if I could recall some more details here they would only show how superficial and meagre my knowledge was in proportion to the richness of material that was presented to me. Madonnas can be graded by the austere touch in their faces or by their jocund smiles into a series representing the stages of the revaluation of the ancient art of the old regime to that of the days after Leonardo. I could recognize Rubens and Michelangelo in broad terms. The composition that counted in paintings relied sometimes on natural tones, some more realistic; while others, of a miniature style, had their own sense of proportion. Grand creations on canvas alternated with ones that loved details of birds, flowers, fish or festoons of babies hanging from on high; and delicate and robust ones could be distinguished, as could those that used chromatic colours profusely and those that used them sparsely. The good taste that remained for me after all these sights and criticisms has at least enabled me to be sensitive to the architectural monstrosities and clashing colour schemes that have contributed to the large-scale vandalism that prevails in India at present, where laws of line, light and colour are all violated by authorities, from municipalities low down up to those sitting in the Viceregal lodges of old on high, who murder art in many ways and bury taste everywhere at present in public squares or parks all over the country. No one protests, which is a pity.

 

I GO TO ROME

 

Rome in the 1930's.

 

Another Easter pilgrimage took me to Rome. Even before reaching there I kept repeating to myself on the train those lines from Shelley's 'Adonis':

 

'Go thou to Rome - at once the Paradise,

The grave, the City, and the wilderness;

And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise

And flowering weeds and fragrant copses dress

The bones of desolation's nakedness

Follow when all is fled - Rome's azure sky,

Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words are weak

The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.'

 

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I shall not be tempted here to describe in better words what Shelley said so well, but simply add my own signature or confirmation to the words after staying on two different occasions in this city. The Rome of Mussolini's time presented, however, some features which Shelley could not foresee. Multi-storied apartment houses raised their architecture inspired by le Corbusier rather than by a Palladio or a Wren. Side by side with sepulchres and ruins infested with families of cats which bred in the very centre of the city, modern constructions in reinforced concrete in plain, futuristic, or cubical styles went sheer up to break into the sombre monotony of the antique background whose limit was masked by the Renaissance. Between the old Rome and the new that raised its head, one could visually measure the span of the history of the city of the suckling wolf and the gargoyles to the age of skyscrapers, whose time-range was marked also by the names of Caesar, Garibaldi or Mussolini.

 

THE VATICAN

Even to do bare justice to the treasures that Rome offered to a pilgrim in search of cultural secrets would take volumes, and I shall not venture any further here. The Vatican as an institution interested me personally, and I frequented St. Peter's many times and was present on a certain Easter Sunday at a service in which the chief of the cardinals of the Pope went past in the service conducted there. It was too much for me to aspire to have a personal interview with the Pontiff himself, but the sight of the cardinal was itself one which a constant crowd waited patiently to gain a glimpse of.

 

Although a Pagan I respected Christianity as much as I could without considering myself as belonging to any closed group. One could not only tolerate other religions, which some might feel is sufficient, but one could even go into the spirit of another religion so well as to be as good a papist as the Pope himself by inner sympathy. One becomes as royalist as the king without violating the openness and truthfulness that all absolutist views imply as corollaries.

 

I was therefore as much a Catholic or a Roman in Rome as any other in the world without inner contradiction; though, horizontally viewed, I remained an Oriental Pagan while all others around were Occidental believers in a True God.

 

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As all spirituality depends on an inner vertical view, to speak of Jew or Gentile, Kafir or unbeliever, unless mutually recognized by both parties as such, makes contradictions for purposes of war or clash by rival worldly interests.

 

I cannot linger on this subject of Rome longer and must omit my visits to the several churches and memorials to bygone popes and emperors. I did however snatch a special occasion to visit the graveyard of both Keats and Shelley, and also a museum where the originals of Keats, who died a young poet, were preserved. I could actually read in Keats' own hand the first lines of his 'Endymion' which read, 'A thing of beauty is a joy forever, its loveliness increases, it will never pass into nothingness' etc. The art galleries in the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican would take pages to cover. I shall therefore pass on to my next pilgrimage, penetrating deeper still into European history, religion and art in deeper southern latitudes.

 

A MONTH'S HOLIDAY IN SICILY

 

Catania.

 

The tyrant Dionysius ruled in Syracuse, the port and capital of Sicily, in the days of Plato, who is said to have been his tutor or political adviser. Starting from Switzerland on another Easter pilgrimage we passed through the Simplon tunnel, crossing the Alps into sunny Italy. After staying at Milan to see the famous cathedral and the church in which the original painting of the 'Last Supper' by Leonardo da Vinci still attracted many tourists, we travelled along the coastal route past Genoa, again to Rome and on to Naples, breaking journey in each place for long or short periods. Passing through tunnels that alternatingly contrasted with open vistas into the sea as we passed at express speed, it was a memorable joy-ride that took us to the toe of Italy where we crossed the straits, the whole train-load carried into the ferry-boat, to continue on the other side of the Straits of Messina, passing the rocks from Scylla to Charybdis instead of through them.

 

We soon went past Catania, overlooked by Etna whose eruption was an ever-present sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of the citizens of Catania and its neighbourhood, as Vesuvius was to Pompeii. Arriving at Syracuse in the afternoon we found our home for more than a month's séjour in an orange grove of several hundred acres. There were cargo ships of smaller size loading and unloading in the quay and, unlike the opulent exterior of northern Europe, the countryside presented an air of poverty.

 

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Tonsured priests of a Capuchin order were to be seen here and there, and bullock-carts were also in evidence with decorations on their wheels, much like what one finds in India.

 

THE CATACOMBS AND THE LAND OF THE PAPYRUS

Of all the sights of importance in and around Syracuse, by far the most important we visited was the Catacombs. These have reference to the earliest chapters of Christianity in Europe and were supposed to be the Christians' hiding and burial places where they sought refuge from persecution at the hands of the Greek-Roman Gentiles as well as Jews. Some marks like the swastika and the fish were to be seen near some of the niches of burial in the underground caverns where we had to go with candlelight. These have prehistoric kinships in common with larger civilizations that prevailed before Christianity, as in the case of Mohenjo-Daro in India (presently in Pakistan).

 

The land of the papyrus, which lies on smaller islands off Sicily that we also visited in smaller boats, took us to the days when there were commercial links between the Dark Continent and Europe through the Mediterranean; thus taking us back to a stratum in history that could be called almost prehistoric. Papyrus was the source of the earliest-made paper known to man.

 

I APPEAR ON THE STAGE IN A GREEK AMPHITHEATRE

 

The amphitheatre in Syracuse.

 

With the special permission of Mussolini, the Director of the school staged a dance recital in one of the largest amphitheatres remaining from Greek times near Palermo, the famous tourist centre. I was also to appear, dressed in an ochre turban and flowing robes, with two damsels who were supposed to do an Indian dance with me, and music set to a Marathi tune that was harmonised and orchestrally adapted to a special orchestra arranged for the occasion.

 

More than twenty thousand tourists watched me standing on the stage perhaps two thousand years old, as people did perhaps in the days of Archimedes, who died in 212 BC and still has a road named after him in honour of his birth in Syracuse.

 

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The big fiddle of the orchestra struck up the Marathi tune and myself in Indian yellow robes had to play the fool, as it were, in public, as Rousseau is reputed to have done. The 'Corriere Della Sera' reported the dance in two columns as a great success as an international event of the season, and all ended well for the time.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

 

EUROPEAN WINTER TOURS

 

Gland in winter.

 

The first European winter, for one bred in the year-round warm ocean breezes of the extreme south of India, was an experience in itself. Although the essence of winter could be tasted in India itself in the high altitudes of the Himalayas or in the Nilgiri or Palini hills of South India, winter will only whisper its inmost secrets in Nordic climes where snow and sleet, fog and hoarfrost, with mists, icicles or frozen rivers and lakes, and blizzards now and then, are familiar features.

 

Then the winking eye of daytime blinks no summer sky, and flowers, birds and butterflies are all steeped in dire distress. Playgrounds remain neglected. The fireside and flannel wrappings are favoured. Dull grey overcomes the gay rainbow colours of warmer lands. Indoor life encroaches into the night, reflecting an incubating inwardness of feeling which has its dark yet splendid linings. Palm and pine are contrasting presences, each with its own proper world to bring for man's love of alternating bitter joys. Ugly winter breezes, often cruel to man and beast, still hide within their wide wings the whisperings of a strange, outlandish, inner fullness.

 

As I have already related, the first forebodings of a European winter came upon me at the Dôle in the Jura in the late autumn of 1928. Since that first acquaintance, my friendship with winter grew and went through months of holidaymaking and sports each year successively for a full five seasons. Robins eating crumbs at the windowsill while you are in over-heated apartments is an artificial falsification of winter. Young and old, dressed up like Eskimos, go out to face the snows in a full spirit of sport and adventure. The complexion of winter dark changes into the burning brightness as from within a cave. I remember seeing snowflakes floating down the open courtyard sky and, as I caught and examined one's feather-like structure, there was a joy then that was but the negative counterpart of the leaping heart of Wordsworth when he saw a rainbow in the sky. There is a one-one correspondence implied  between summer joy and winter closeness which actual experience can alone reveal.

 

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SPORTS AND HOLIDAYS AT LES RASSES

 

The peaks of the Dents du Midi.

 

The Hotel les Rasses, from the top-storey balcony room of which I was the occupant during the winter in 1930 or so, opened its front windows to a full view of the range of the Alps. On sunny days one could see far-off all the famous peaks, some of which had personified names known to the Swiss peasants. Human faces and forms were imaginable in their outlines, and the 'Teeth' of Provençal France as the peak, 'Dents du Midi', was called, stood out in its pointed specificity beside the massif of Mont Blanc which looked more like an enthroned emperor shining in all tints from light violet to pink. A sceptre and a crown, with vassals sitting or standing round, were not hard to put into the glory of the scene by an eidetically-predisposed onlooker.

 

The spot overlooked Yverdon, known as the home town of Pestalozzi, the schoolmaster who brought kindness to children into the classroom. Its other importance as a modern township consisted in a factory for making musical machines. One looked over a sea of mist, called 'la mer de brouillard', when one woke on certain mornings to look at the sunrise through the window curtains, and it would then be easy to imagine oneself sailing on open seas. These were attractions to the less-active holidaymakers, like me disposed contemplatively.

 

The majority of Europeans loved active life and were fully at home with skis and sleds, and armed with flannels up to their teeth against the cold. The pine-clad hillsides round the spot presented a world that belonged to Aladin or Santa Claus. Snow-bedecked pine trees stood in rows with gleams of sunlight showing here and there, reflected from the sun that could be unbelievably hot at times. Radiated heat from the snowy ground gave to winter-sporters that tan in their faces which made them resemble darker peoples of other climes - and they loved the change too, with a certain secret, paradoxical pride.

 

I tried skiing, putting on the things needed, but gave up after some attempts. Skating was more repugnant to me as being more incompatible with the contemplative that I claimed to be. I preferred watching ice-skaters performing their graceful figures, and took strolls into the woods with my galoshes sinking as much as two feet deep sometimes. I often returned to the hotel vestibule strewn over with flakes of snow, and shook them off my overcoat and changed into indoor shoes each time.

 

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My sport had little to do with the space outside, but I enjoyed it by inward sympathy as much as anyone else of the company, which consisted of the whole Fellowship School of Gland.

 

The comfort of my room favoured my thesis-writing work which I kept at with persistence, progressing para by para and page by page, with effort at each step. I can remember too the return bus journey from Les Rasses to Gland, with bus tyres bound in chains to keep then from skidding, and the whole road frozen over so that, if the authorities had not posted guiding poles all through to help the driver distinguish the limits of the road, he could easily have driven us all unwittingly into some precipice or valley. Bad visibility, deep snow and just cold, made travel full of hazard. But we reached the Fellowship School safely, although again I had forgotten my precious manuscript in the drawer of the table of the hotel where we stayed, and had to put in a long-distance call to get it back.

 

ZERMATT, GORNERGRAT AND MONTE ROSA.

 

Mont Blanc.

 

A snow-capped peak or even a massif such as that of Mont Blanc or the several famous peaks of the Himalaya, viewed in winter or summer, when sunlight glows on them in its glory, is almost a divine event. The word 'celestial' gains a meaning from such views on earth. I have elsewhere told the story of my vision of the Himalayan scene from Simla and Mussoorie. My impressions dated from my later or earlier wandering among the alpine scenes, both from the Jura side of the Lake of Geneva as from closer quarters in Chamonix. Only a grand musical symphony can have the same transporting effect on the human spirit. Heaven is not a myth but a reality to one who has had this normal human experience.

 

Although it was in summer, one of our Easter outings from the Fellowship School was in the area of Zermatt where the needle-shaped peak called the Matterhorn, a challenge to adventurous mountaineers, raised its head in steep and sheer snow-clad glory above all lesser mountain-tops. The Monte Rosa that was on the boundary between France and Italy was also favoured by mountaineers because of the glacier there, where we had to go with nailed boots and steel-pointed alpenstocks to save us from falling into the sea-green gaping crevasses. We climbed over the glacier and looked on the Italian side from a point of vantage.

 

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In the little village of Zermatt we bought the souvenir of an alpine stick decorated with plaques naming our mountaineering conquests in the Alps.

 

I remember keeping away from a nightly visit to a national dance of the villagers to be able to produce a sonnet the next morning at breakfast because, in a spirit of bravado, I had blusteringly wagered to a fellow holidaymaker to produce one next morning, although we returned late and tired in the evening after walking about twenty miles to and from the foot of the Matterhorn. I sat up late at night by sheer wilfulness to make good my wager, and was satisfied fully with what I wrote. This was my special way of being wilfully impossible with myself, which I recognise now as a slight touch of a tragic trait in my character.

 

Age has sobered me a bit, I do confess, but not altogether, even at sixty-nine when I pen these lines. Five or six sonnets had previously come from my pen. This was a special hobby I cultivated even from my high-school days in my teens. Previously the Adam's Peak of Ceylon inspired one such. I can remember too that I wrote one on myself on attaining the age of twenty. Another had the praise of a young lady for its theme; while I devoted another to the fame of Vivekananda, the hero of my young days at school. The pleasures of rhyme-making and phrase-weaving interested me always; and playing with words and their happy combinations still pleases me even now much more than hair-splitting or logic-chopping.

 

THE RHINE FALLS, LAKE CONSTANCE AND HITLER'S LAND

 

The Rhine Falls.

 

Singen was a little township in Germany where the school holidays took us another Easter time. Streamers decorated the street in honour of the now forgotten absolutist of homicidal glory whose name was a byword of the time everywhere. I need not spell the letters H-i-t-l-e-r here for anyone of the present or one more future generation at least.

 

I could have seen him if I had waited on the street side another hour, but I preferred to climb up a hill where holidaymakers crowded into a pub for drinking beer, the national habit dear to all Germans. Instead, I sipped a glass of lemonade, watching the Sunday crowd of young and old with plenty of cooing couples, hand in hand, seen on all sides, while summer skies warmed up their heartbeats in sympathetic pulsations of love, natural to gods and men alike.

 

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Bacchus is there in Europe in spite of all Christian respectability; and Pagan Europe, in and through all outside Sunday sacredness, still persists to the present day with its obtruding profanity. Near the Rhine Falls and the forests around, there is a turreted old castle into whose large courtyard many horsemen could enter or exit galloping in numbers. The castle, sometimes fired from the West by the setting sun as one watched it from a distance, revealed a typical German scene. Schaffhausen was a large town in Germany whose acquaintance I made, where Germans were said to be of a shorter stature and finer features than their compatriots further north, where Latin features gave room to Anglo-Saxon ones.

 

Once we sailed on Lake Constance in a steam launch. This was another of the unforgettable interludes in my travels which I can refer to here in passing. Gone, gone forever are those days, but I shall never regret them, as looking forward is the rule of normal life.

 

AN ORIENTAL POET IN EUROPE

The Orient visualized mentally from Europe presents a view such as great historians like Michelet have described. The open skies and warm expanses where ships can go sailing on and on in endless adventure, past Suez or rounding the Cape of Good Hope, opened a vista of possibilities for any ancient mariner. The Orient was a state of mind in which human life could thrive and multiply.

 

Europeans were generally well informed about the Near East, but when they were asked to think of the Extreme Orient or the Middle East, they often became overpowered, and a fabulous glamour filled their admiring minds. Actual visits to these places disillusioned some, but in most cases they remained staunch admirers of all that the East represented. The three wise men came from the East, as also the star of hope. 'Ex Oriente Lux' is still a recognized saying. An Eastern sage represented all these factors together in the mind of the young men or women seeking fresh fields for their energies of maturer years. Thus it was that Tagore was welcomed in Europe with enthusiasm, exultation and even ecstasy, especially by young men and women, when he visited some time in the thirties.

 

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My friend Miss Josephine De Storey was an unmarried rich heiress of England who had made Geneva her home. She lived in good style in the classy quarter of the clean international lakeside city, then the seat of the League of Nations. She maintained a free reading-room and library of special spiritual literature for the benefit of university students, where they could come and feel at ease. She published luxury editions of the writings of the Oriental sages Abdul Baha and Baha-Ullah of the Near East. She was one of the ever-increasing number of European seekers of new wisdom outside the Sunday churchgoing world, and had visited India and Tagore in Shantiniketan itself.

 

She came back and reported to me that she was rather disappointed by the dust, untidiness and lack of order generally in India, including Shantiniketan. She had invited Tagore with his camp-followers to spend some days in Geneva as her guest. A spacious house with a garden was made available, and the hostess invited me to stay there too to enjoy the poet's company. I availed myself of the invitation. A dozen well-known Indians, ladies and gentlemen, forming the poet's entourage or just admirers, were accommodated in the big house, with some in tents in the garden, as it was summertime. Some Bengali ladies from London cooked special dishes to please the poet who spent his days apart upstairs, while the entourage talked and mixed on the ground floor, basking in the poet's fame in reflected pride or glory.

 

I had a chance to have more than one intimate talk with the poet, who complained of his visit to Travancore for collecting funds for his Shantiniketan and the poor purse given to him by the royalty there. He also mentioned how some Kali-worshippers in Calcutta still had the practice of smearing sacrificed goat's blood to sanctify their foreheads - which was repugnant to him as a man of civilised ways. I remember too how H.G. Wells came to the house to pay respects to the poet, as also Romain Rolland, another Nobel Prize laureate, who came walking with his sister, alighting from a tram without any of the pomp or fuss that surrounded the Oriental poet. The pompous world of the good old Haroun al-Rashid was present still round the poet, while the modern plainness of a man among men was the context to which Romain Rolland belonged. The contrast could not be missed. In this respect Gandhi, who also visited Europe when I was there at roughly the same period, thought more like Burns who said that 'a man's a man for all that'. Oriental pomp has no place any more in the plain world of the modern man.

 

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GANDHI'S VISIT TO EUROPE

 

Gandhi and Romain Rolland.

 

Gandhi erred, if at all, in the opposite sense - he dared to face all the modern respectability of Western civilization in a bare loincloth. He was not a nabob but rather a fakir as known to European literature. Both, however, had their value as curiosities for the European of Hitler's day.

 

This time it was Romain Rolland himself who took interest in writing to me to arrange a meeting between me, as an Indian he knew as a disciple of the Guru Narayana, and the Mahatma. We were to meet at the home of Rolland at Villeneuve, but the engagement did not transpire for some vague reason or other. Instead, I had occasion to sit at the Quaker Centre in Lausanne one cold evening in early winter. Dr. Pierre Cérèsole, the great Swiss pacifist and founder of the 'Service Civil Volontaire', the group of peace-lovers who went in groups to render service in other lands each year as a mark of international amity, was to speak to a select gathering at three in the afternoon. He had his own brand of pacifism and conscientious objection. Military love of dress, decoration and ceremony were to be pressed into the service of peace to attract the common man from the side of competition and rivalry to that of active collaboration and partnership, and thus strengthen the bonds of humanity and fellowship between man and man. Such was his formula.

 

It was a sight to see the Mahatma squatting on the floor, working away at his spinning wheel in the presence of a group of Quaker Friends and sympathisers that memorable afternoon. Good Quaker ladies watched the hungry-looking brown man with emaciated limbs and austere face sitting silent as in some picture belonging to another world.

 

The situation was too strange and august for anyone present to dare to break the tense silence. After waiting a moment, I mustered enough courage to break through the barrier of silence and presented myself to Gandhiji, saying I was a disciple of Guru Narayana of Kerala, to which he gave a smile of recognition, but continued his silent spinning. I turned to Devadas Gandhi, who was also of the entourage. I introduced myself to him as one of the very first batch of Hindi students taught by him in the house of Mr. C. Rajagopalachari at Madras in about the year 1920.

 

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Mr. Rajagopalachari and his daughter were with me in the same batch, and out of the lessons taught by young Devadas to the young lady, there must have been lurking too the silent language of love between them, as their later union in wedlock amply proved. Devadas asked me if I could speak Hindi, which I said I could not with full freedom. Gandhiji had come to Europe to be present at the Round Table Conference in London, called together by Ramsay Macdonald, the then Prime Minister, so as to prepare the ground before granting Commonwealth status to India as an autonomous country, from being a subject empire. Gandhi's simplicity and austere earnestness, and the type of politics he represented, were all new to the world of Western politics. He was an enigma to many. Some journalist in Italy, I remember, could not explain this extreme personal simplicity when he noted, side by side with it, that the baggage unloaded from the ship from which Gandhi disembarked at some Italian port, had to be transported by a lorry fully loaded with trunks and suitcases, all belonging to the Gandhian entourage.

 

Later, at Lausanne Cathedral, Gandhiji addressed a more public meeting, and I sat in one of the pews listening to him hold out bravely in praise of Indian womanhood, who could tell them all, he said, when questioned about the secrets of pacifism. At the earlier gathering itself I heard him answer a question put by Dr. Pierre Cérèsole himself about what he would do if, after getting freedom, India had to have militia to protect its borders. His categoric answer was that he would then quit India himself and step into the ocean.

 

 

 

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TWENTY FIVE

 

THE CLOSE OF MY FIRST CHAPTER IN EUROPE

All reminiscences are tinged with some bitterness. Regret and retrospection taste the same as a drop of tears. One passes one's old schoolhouse after many decades, where perhaps one remembers playful days of old on the lawns amidst sunshine or among flowers. The same scene might be present visually decades after, except that an element of an unsought tear of regret dims the view, as it were, from within.

 

It is not altogether impossible to brush the feeling aside and switch on a prospective attitude visualizing fields of adventure. Retrospection counters the spirit of adventure, and to this extent it can be a tribulation and an impediment to spiritual progress. Adjusted correctly between the two tendencies, however, no harm results, and the neutral clarified vision that refuses to take either side reveals the blissful light of the Absolute, free from any bitter taste. Such bliss is situated between life's tears and smiles - which are both false.

 

REVERIES IN VIEW OF THE EIFFEL TOWER

One afternoon in late summer, if I remember rightly, I was sitting in the park near the Trocadéro in Paris after I had a 'séance' with my professor who was my 'rapporteur' in respect of my thesis on 'The Personal Factor in the Educative Process', which had already taken me four years of patient labour to complete and submit.

 

I heaved a deep sigh of regret, thinking of the unfavourable way in which my 'séance' with Professor Wallon had terminated. He made many small corrections in my thesis, which was then less than one hundred typewritten pages. Marginal instructions read 'Expliquez-vous!' (explain yourself), or asked me to elaborate further some subtle point that I had made. In and through the criticisms he seemed to indicate more than once while talking to me that I should make the thesis a little more lengthy.

 

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The volume was not thick enough to make a conventionally respectable thesis. How long, how long must I remain a forlorn student in a far-off land? Like Ulysses who found the wind god driving him away from home, when the coast of Ithaca was already in sight, because of some inadvertence of his crew, I felt for the time depressed, losing hope of ever satisfying the cruel and exacting professor.

 

The crisis soon blew over when my host, Mr. Best, reassured me that, since the professor referred to the size of the thesis more than once, that was the main drawback which he wished me to amend. My soul was not dead to the love of India, my labours were not to be lost altogether, and I could still persevere in hope of terminating them satisfactorily. Relapses of homesickness sometimes mildly or forcefully affect the lives of all of us, however brave otherwise. Such were my reveries while I sat on the bench in the park of Trocadéro in full view of the Eiffel Tower.

 

SMALLER SEJOURS IN FRANCE

 

Nice in the 1930's.

 

Christmas 1931 was spent by me at Nice. Provence was a part of France which retained something of the oldest strata of European civilization. Remnants of Caesar's rule and those of the Gauls were in evidence here and there, and old castles and manor houses are retained to the present day, reminiscent of the regime that has given place to the new order. The Provençal dialect and mentality is a joke still for the Parisian; and his tendency to exaggerate is a charge that one still hears made, although to me the folk of the South of France and round Nice were simple peasants who had their own singsong way of speaking, and resembled peasants anywhere round the Mediterranean region, whether in France, Spain or Italy.

 

I lived in a villa up the hill from Nice, called 'Les Mimosas', whose tenants, Mr. and Mrs. Best, my hosts, had gone to England, leaving only my friend Walter Smith in charge of the orchard of orange trees and olives, with some beds of seedlings covered with paper or glass panes to keep them from the bite of frost. Winter round this region resembled our own Nilgiris climate or as I hear it is round northern California. The Riviera spells joy to the holidaymaker of Europe forever, and its affinities with the Dark Continent beyond give it a touch of mystery all its own as the coast where Phoenicians came and went, linking the white with the dark peoples alternatingly through history.

 

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Big colourful oranges could be still picked from off trees while I was there, and the blue skies and vistas of the countryside have not been forgotten.

 

My stay came to an end after I was treated to a Christmas dinner where I sat at table unable to eat or drink any of the numerous courses except for some lettuce, cabbage and potatoes because of being a teetotaller and vegetarian to boot. Neither the rows of wine glasses nor the varieties of venison and turkey roast, carved by the hostess with great pains, meant anything to me, which circumstance surprised the company present, the embarrassment of which reached its climax when I refused to peel an orange, saying it looked more beautiful held in the hand than when eaten.

 

Krishnamurti, 'the Messiah in a smoking-jacket', as some called him, was there too at that time and, although I tried once to contact him, I did not succeed. It was perhaps better that way because there was hardly any point of contact between me as a plain blunt man and one whose reputation was built - even though it happened to be on his refusal to be the messiah that he was meant to be - by Mrs. Besant, his godmother. I could breathe neither the thin air of Messiah-hood nor even its vehement denial. Both left me gasping for fresh air.

 

AT THE 'UNIVERSITE POPULAIRE DE FONTETTE'

'Liefra' was the name of a socio-economic-educational experiment conducted by Prof. Paul Passey of the University of Paris, where I was invited to participate at an International Conference of Phonetics under the auspices of the Université Populaire de Fontette. It was a land of rolling acres cultivated by peasants on a basis of 'Liberty, Equality and Fraternity', and from the initial letters of each of these words this novel experiment derived its name. Away in the interior of the South-West of Old France was the chosen venue of the experiment. The phonetic conference had attracted hundreds of delegates from England too. Taking an out-of-the-way route from Lyon, I wended my way to a place beyond which there was no railway at all.

 

It was getting towards dusk and I had the choice of walking while there was sunlight, cutting across the side of a triangle to reach Fontette, covering about ten kilometres; or reaching the apex of the triangle later at night, to return by dogcart to the same point.

 

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I preferred to cover the unknown country by foot, and it was an unforgettable experience to go past the undulating French country of the deep interior, where peasant hamlets nestled up the river and over the lea, with the same kind of dogs barking at pedestrians as in any countryside of the world.

 

My friend, Captain Pétavel, had taken a horse and carriage to the end of the funiculaire and returned disappointed after midnight, and slept on the other side of a village where I had been given a bed by Miss Passey earlier in the night. We discovered each other, as I remember, in bright sunlight after the soundest sleep I had experienced in years, and each told his story whose poignancy was already lost by the result of our happy meeting at daybreak.

 

I gave a series of talks before the International Phonetic Conference and returned to Geneva after seeing one of the boldest economic, sociological and educative experiments of modern times. I came to know of dreamers beside me who dreamt of Utopias or Eldorados of their own imagination. The world is too bad for such dreams to come true, I suppose. Too many such dreamers have dreamed, some more urgently than others, only to be buried or forgotten in the lapse of time, alas!

 

THE YOUNG CLAPAREDE ALSO ENTERS MY LIFE

 

Claparède.

 

At the very time that a pretty French schoolmistress had crossed my life's path, there was another beautiful person, a young man this time, for whom I cultivated a deep and lasting friendship. Born of a Russian aristocratic mother, whose father was the philosopher African Spir, who had settled in Geneva about the time of the 1917 revolution, and was a full professor of Geneva and author of the standard book on Child Psychology, Dr. Edouard Claparède, this young man of about twenty-two, combined in himself some of the best features of Western Civilization. He lived among the trees of the paternal manor-house at the very heart of Geneva. His features were those of a Greek Apollo. Before the friendship could come to its full maturity, death, as with Keats, took him away when still young, because of God's love. A perfectly behaved gentleman, a scholar fully alive to the highest point of thought of his own age, represented by the writings of Bergson, Romain Rolland or Einstein, he himself began the role of professor after his famous father.

 

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It was a sight to see the old professor carry his books for him on the son's maiden lesson at the Institute of the Science of Education which Dr. Claparède had founded with Dr. Pierre Bovet and Dr. Adolphe Ferrière - three luminaries of the New Education Movement on the continent. He had plans too of coming to India after I had returned, and listened to what I said at the discussion groups that I had organized at his house with full affiliation, resembling that between a guru and sisya in the familiar Indian scene. The contact held out much promise for both of us, but it was perhaps too good to come true.

 

THE 77TH BIRTHDAY ANNIVERSARY OF THE GURU NARAYANA

During each of the five years of my sojourn in Europe, I made it a point to gather a group of men, women and children, sometimes reaching a hundred in number, to spend a day together in memory of the Guru Narayana, whose way of life was becoming dearer and dearer to me each year. An Indian dinner which I cooked myself used to be served, with floral decorations and burning of incense also, out of a desire to cater to curiosity rather than in the name of any Hindu ritualism. The Guru was as much a Hindu as a member of any religion that implied absolutist attitudes and values.

 

After the first celebration of the kind at the Salle Quo Vadis in Geneva in 1928, two were held at Gland, another in a vegetarian restaurant in Geneva City, and the fifth in the house of Dr. Claparède. My intimacy with young Claparède had grown so strong on one side; and his position as the only son of the highly cultivated and aristocratic family was so secure on the other side; that he took the liberty to ask his father and mother to vacate the big house, kitchen and all, for a whole day for the use of the celebration.

 

The guests who came included Dr. and Mrs. Cousins of Ireland, Dr. Privat of Switzerland and many Indian and Genevese friends of the League of Nations. A memorable day was again spent, the last of the kind I was going to organise myself, as I then thought, but as it transpired actually, there was another after an interval of nearly thirty years.

 

The exotic spicy dishes, the atmosphere of worship and the reverence of a particular kind for the Guru, gave an outlandishly quaint touch, neither Pagan nor Christian, to the atmosphere which none missed recognizing. They were transported to some strange world of Old India.

 

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The novelty was too much for certain temperaments, but when they did sympathise they could go further than expected into the spirit of the situation. The father and mother Claparède kept out of the house almost the whole day according to the desire of the son, and came in only for the lunch and the conversation at teatime. Without reserve all praised the special atmosphere.

 

THE FORTNIGHTLY GROUP MEETING

Besides the annual celebrations in which I spread the message of the Guru, I had also made it a rule to gather together friends under the name of the 'Groupe de l'Ashram.' The object was eventually to establish a spiritual retreat in Europe.

 

An interested group of cultured people responded, and we talked over tea and refreshments each fortnight in one or other of the houses of the group, alternately. Mademoiselle Marie-Anne Ferrière, grand-daughter of the founder of the Red Cross and sister of one of the founders of the New Education Fellowship, took much interest in the group discussions, and her chalet on the fashionable Route de Florissant in Geneva was where our company met. Lessons on the Gita and on the Guru were given by me. New members were drawn into the familial formation. Instead of putting the Guru's message as a saving gospel blatantly as Christian missionaries often do, I tended in my work to keep the Guru in the background lest the message should become static and closed into a cult for any local fixed group.

 

Open dynamism to universal fluid values, which alone would be called truly spiritual, was more important to me than the mere fidelity of adherents forming a well-knit group with strict articles of faith or rigid patterns of behaviour. Like a jealous lover who kept the picture of his or her loved one secretly away from the gaze of all and sundry, the intimacy of personal regard with which I looked on the Guru made me err on the negative side of missionary zeal in this respect. I often thought such zeal violated the requirements of common decency as seen practised by over-zealous men and women of Christ who fished for souls to save, often in the troubled waters of questionable politics or tribal rivalries.

 

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The fortnightly group could not be called propagandist at all in such a sense. The vulgar extremes to which such a spirit could go is seen often in the United States where I have once watched a van for collecting old clothes making the appeal in the name of the Son of God Himself by a blazoned slogan to the effect in large letters on the body of the van. Zeal often buries good taste very deeply in such matters.

 

THE FLAME OF LOVE KEEPS BURNING STILL

In and through these activities, the intimacy that had developed between me and the French schoolmistress was far from being extinguished. The death of the mother of that poor lady followed her father's expiry by one year or so. In the group that formed round me she was an inevitable common factor. The boys and girls of the school had taken note of this intimacy, which on my part, I had tried to avoid developing as best as I humanly could, at the beginning stage at least, as I have already related.

 

It was clearly understood between us from the very start that the friendship was not one that could ever culminate in the usual marital union; but to make decisions overtly is one thing and for fate to see it observed in actuality is another, and matters took the usual course that nature's ever-flowing currents dictated. We were linked together by young people as inseparables, jokingly most often, but seriously at least once. I know that when an adolescent Russian boy of fifteen was asked to write a composition on ideal friendship he was known to have cited our intimacy as an example.

 

Little girls and boys joined in improvised songs made in our honour and all nature seemed to conspire against my efforts to steer clear of the affair as understood in the more usual sense. Who was there to believe in an affair fully pure, even if it should have been there? How much less should I expect, therefore, the usual readers of these lines to refrain from raising their eyebrows as I say that I claim to have remained innocent? A childish trait in me has always protected me in this respect and I can say that I never dared to treat any woman as belonging to the context of man and wife in relation to me in the ordinary sense.

 

Although I cannot claim therefore full freedom from all earthy touch, I can at least claim that a flame, though smoky still, burnt within me, keeping me on the side of purity rather than of taint. As a human born on earth, the red streak of earthiness in the flame was there in evidence too, side-by-side with the brighter tongues of flame called 'all-tasting' in the Upanishads.

 

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My own conscience can always be quieted by the thought that my tendency to be earthy was at least equally balanced by its opposite all the time, though I remain open fully and freely to the judgement of fellow humans of posterity. I wish to be judged as one of those who has loved and lost so as to gain entry into a larger world of values in which both are the same.

 

MY THESIS GETS ACCEPTED AND MY THOUGHTS TURN HOMEWARDS

'Vu: le 14 Octobre 1932, Le Doyen de la Faculté des Lettres de l'Université de Paris, H. Delacroix. Vu et permis d'imprimer, Le Recteur de l'Académie de Paris, S. Charlety' - such were the two inscriptions with which the copy of my thesis on 'Le Facteur Personnel dans le Processus Educatif' came back to me late in October 1931, not long after the celebration of the birthday anniversary of the Guru related above. The silken streamer of my life-interests began to be wafted homeward after this event and, although intellectually I had gained dominance over homing instincts, gentle breezes still played to sway the silken sails in the homeward direction, though nothing to be proud of.

 

The august event of the 'soutenance' still remained, and many loose ends of strings had to be tied together to make my séjour and return fully consequent, among which the intimacy with the girl in question was by no means an unimportant one. This presented to me a delicate and difficult problem. I wanted her to fall seriously in ordinary love with someone else, and save me from possible blame of irresponsibility, lack of faith or untruthfulness. The unkindness involved would cut across my soul like the keen bite of the winter wind that kills life as it prevails.

 

To do well in sustaining my thesis before the Senate of the University; and also to be absolved morally before the Judge of Judges of all errors and evil possible in human life hereunder - both were subjects that worried me at superficial or deeper levels of my life-stream at that time. How I managed to live through the ebb and flow of such considerations is the story I have still to tell before being actually homeward bound by April 1933.

 

As I look back now at the age of sixty-nine when I pen these lines, I can clearly see that I have had one trait that has kept me apart from treating actualities of any situation as seriously as I see others around me do.

 

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This tendency has held good all through, and even in this affair where a serious relationship could have been normally expected to result, like the wind that passes through a tunnel, I seemed to survive unaffected by the more vitalistic pulsations of life.

 

It was not a difference of kind but only of degree. Life is like a pencil drawing for some, one-dimensional rather than real in all perspectives. The possible colorations or overtones of sin and good, the profane and the holy, belief and scepticism, alternate between opposite poles more mildly than with any brusque change of gear. My love for women was there, it is true, with all its implications, good or bad, as with all mortals. The stresses and strains - the accentuations of highlights of the situation as between enjoyer and the thing enjoyed - had a different timbre, though the scale remained the same. The kind of love that the young woman could give me did not therefore tally with my own inner inclinations, and this incompatibility was the cause of my concern at this time.

 

THE SILENT ELOQUENCE OF EYE TO EYE

The Kural, the most saintly of books, puts the situation of love as dialectically understood when it asks: 'What is the use of words when eye speaks to eye?' The spark of true love is never one-sided but kindles in both hearts at once. Earthly love rarely fulfils this condition nor satisfies such a subtle equation. The usual love that ends in wedlock and progeny is often a one-sided affair, and incompatibility creeps in sooner or later, making marriage a martyrdom for one or the other which in effect necessarily affects both. The course of love never runs smooth when viewed in its earthy setting of relativism.

 

I had developed enough theories on these lines already and also learned to distinguish Platonic love from companionate marriage with all the possible sub-varieties, but this did not save me from getting involved in a complex relationship brought about by forces of nature. I had never thought of my relation with the young lady as conforming to the usual pattern as between man and woman, but nature, in spite of all my wariness, had conspired against me, and little by little I found myself in a position from which I could not easily back out.

 

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As a way out I thought that I should try and arrange a normal alliance for her, and took some initiative in putting her in contact

consciously and expressly with others with whom she could get united normally. A new professor who came into the school was, I thought, suitable at first; but although their eyes met, the spark was not natural. Nature itself had to set to work in such matters. It was a situation not unlike the one in the Midsummer Night's Dream.

 

NATURE'S CONSPIRACIES PROVE STRONGER THAN MY MANOEUVRES

Young Claparède, whose intimacy with me became very strong at this very moment when I was thinking of returning home, was present at one of our fortnightly discussion gatherings at Nyon in the house of the very young lady in question. After tea and table talk we decided to take a rowing boat from the lakeshore and take a short trip on the blue waters where Rousseau himself two hundred years ago went rowing behind the boat of a lady whose love he had lost.

 

The evening was a pleasant one and my impending departure to India was known to all the company. Although I avoided sitting beside my lady friend, young Claparède took the initiative to place me beside her on the boat. On the other hand, I was nurturing the idea that some sort of intimacy would crop up between them. Claparède was a more suitable match for her in every respect; she having herself descended from the stock to which Rousseau's watchmaker father himself belonged.

 

I did not keep this thought a secret either, and if nature had not actively conspired against my wishes, it should have reasonably transpired by all possible calculations. The mother of young Claparède was a consenting party too, as I understood, and all, I thought, would work out well when I was not on the scene any more to divert attention.

 

The boat trip terminated pleasantly that memorable day when I actively manoeuvred to change places in favour of a rival suitor for one I liked and even loved, though from a rather theoretical position. Young Claparède however, was taken mentally ill soon after, frustrated in love as his mother complained to me, and sent word to see me from a nursing home where he was admitted - which I did. I also arranged for the young lady to visit him in the hospital.

 

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All my campaigning, however, was in vain, as later events two months after my return to India proved. In anticipation of telling the rest of this story in more leisurely manner, let me only indicate here that the sad news of the death of Jean-Louis Claparède came to me in India two months later. What transpired with the young lady in the meanwhile, and how one chapter at least was partially closed soon after by her getting married to a third person, and how it closed more firmly and finally for me twenty years after, has yet to be told in its proper place.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

 

HOMECOMING AND AFTER

A story is as long as one makes it, but the best is the shortest. Trivialities and events of import get twisted together like the fibres in a thread. To be effective, story-telling has sometimes to travel backward to catch up afresh with the loose ends left out and to continue the thin line made up of flowing interests long or short in duration. It was on the note of love that I finished the last chapter of my life-story of thin and ever-thinner interests. It is the gleaming streak of thin continuity running through life which is the most interesting aspect of an autobiography.

 

It might interest the reader, however, to know of several events which, by exigencies of narration, I have inadvertently skipped. The 'soutenance' of my thesis at the amphitheatre in the Sorbonne where, from the time of Descartes, many philosophers, theologians, statesmen and psychologists before me had faced the ordeal before exacting professors who seemingly enjoy playing with aspirants for the doctorate like cats with half-dead mice - where many innocent post-graduates have broken down - passed off well for me on March 10th, 1933.

 

I had previously been wrongly conditioned by kind spinsters and ex-students too, some of them with forebodings of sure failure, which they ominously supported with index fingers pointed at me, or even shaken against me. How I smiled and lived through the trial before the jury consisting of senior members of the Senate of the Sorbonne; and how the tables turned in my favour in the middle of my defence by which the judges seemed more afraid of the poor accused in the box; and how finally Professors Wallon, Block and Fauconnet consulted between themselves in the anteroom and conferred a 'très honorable' distinction - I seem to remember covering once already in these pages.

 

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MY PASSAGE HOME IS BOOKED

It was Mr. Ronald and Mrs. Ethelwyn Best, who lived in a big apartment house in Meudon Val Fleury in the north-western suburbs of Paris, who offered me hospitality during the days of these academic trials. Mrs. Best was particularly interested in my career and the mother-instinct in a good woman can alone explain the type of kindness she showed me.

 

By the time I had paid the University for my doctorate and printed three or four hundred copies of my thesis, about half of which number had to be given free for the University to exchange with other results of research in universities in France or outside, I was all but totally broke financially. With the famous old booksellers, J. Vrin, next to the Sorbonne, I deposited about one hundred copies of my thesis and they paid me an advance of some percentage, which helped me to keep floating still. Indigence again haunted my life, but inside I felt rich with the intellectual training I had gained, and among my baggage I carried two bundles of books which were precious to me because they had been produced by my own humble labours. Although in terms of cash-value they meant nothing at that time, they kept me morally supported from within, keeping me from actually touching the bottom of my resourcefulness.

 

I could still have continued in the Swiss school to replenish my resources, but something told me that my days there were to be ended. Mrs. Best, whose confidence I enjoyed, discouraged me too, and even offered to pay for a passage which I could return after reaching home. She treated me to two typical Paris entertainments also: one at the Grand Opéra, where I saw Salomé shouting and singing hysterically at her male counterpart, raving in megalomaniac frenzy as the curtains fell and then rose again and again till past midnight, while I watched from a box seat beside my hostess. A contemporary farce from a French writer at another well-known Paris theatre was added by her, by way of finishing my education before I left Gai Paris, for some unknown period.

 

Thus overwhelmed and encumbered somewhat by the motherly generosity so natural to an open-minded English lady, to which I have always remained comparatively cold and unresponsive in my own non-expressive South Indian way, where even thanking or excusing oneself seemed to obtrude, left still a slight sense of guilt within me.

 

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I accepted the lending of a passage to India which Mrs. Best had arranged for me on the Italian luxury liner Conte Rosso, bound for Bombay by the end of April 1933. It was, however, the cheapest deck passenger ticket that was bought for me, as the coat had to be cut according to the cloth available.

 

LAST DAYS AT GENEVA

Two educational conferences organized on a world basis: one international conference held with particular reference to the Indian freedom struggle from British rule; and a delegate status and representation in the Central Committee of the World Conference for Peace through Religion - all held at Geneva - widened my contact with world figures like F. Nansen, the Polar Explorer, and Sir Francis Younghusband, who climbed the Himalayas, besides priests, prelates, soldiers and scholars - all conspired to give me some rough idea of the intellectual or spiritual attainments of fellow-humans with similar ideals from far-flung parts of the world. Dr. Henry A. Atkinson, Secretary of the Carnegie Foundation for Peace, and Dean Shailer Mathews, the President, became my special friends, through whom, nearly twenty years later, I participated as an official delegate from India in a Conference held in New York City in 1948.

 

I spoke at these conferences and participated in committees of different kinds, rubbing shoulders with intellectuals of almost every nation. I had already cultivated an international outlook through being in touch with notables connected with the now-defunct League of Nations. Among my autograph-book conquests I can include ex-viceroys of India, ex-Vice Presidents of the US, Madame Curie, Sir J. C. Bose, ex-Presidents of the Indian National Congress and several VIPs of the Old and New Worlds. Each such contact added, as it were, a feather to my cap, and propped up my ego in a subtle way, only to be thrown, later in my life, into a waste-paper basket when I could properly revise my life-values.

 

TOUCHING SCENES BEFORE ADIEUX

'Au revoir' (till we meet again) and 'adieu' (unto God, farewell) have a qualitative difference between them, not measurable in terms of actual time. The second is more absolutist in content. It was this quality that the children of the Fellowship School at Gland, with many of whom at least, in spite of the floating population, I had spent five of the happiest years of my life, seemed instinctively to recognise in their own way, in bidding goodbye to me before the summer holidays came in 1933.

 

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Secret parties were given for me in special rooms where favourites met over a cup of tea. Money was secretly collected too among the youngest of the children to hand me enough pocket money for chocolates, as they said, during my deck passage to India. Mlle. Ferrière had bought tubes of condensed milk which I could use to whiten the black coffee served on a crude table before a bench where I would be seated on the deck, as I had to sip my mug for breakfast, while all others dined in luxuriously-laden tables in the saloons of the ship.

 

Dr. and Mrs. Privat had invited me to spend the early night on the day of my departure at Montreux in their lakeside villa, and had taken care to include the lady I was intimate with in the invitation. The electric train moved off from Gland as the boys and girls young and old waved 'adieu' to their favourite Pitar Natty. After dinner at the Privats' in Montreux, the Grand Orient Express, with giant engine wheels and a bogey marked 'Venezia Santa Lucia', stopped for less than two minutes and my luggage, which I thought would be left behind, appeared only one minute before time by lift from below, to be promptly put into the van of the train with automatic precision.

 

There was a hurried last-moment goodbye, and Dr. and Mrs. Privat retired from the scene abruptly and perhaps before the last minute - evidently to allow me the last chance to say 'a proper goodbye' to my 'lady love'. This did not, however, take place in any of the sentimental styles usually expected in Europe. The poor lady just looked on somewhat dazed as the train moved off while I watched the parting scene grim and motionless in cold blood. That was too much for anybody, and then to make the chance afforded fully vain and useless was inexcusable perhaps - but it had to be so because of my peculiar introverted temperament. It was perhaps a pity that I was not a good lover in the usual sense so well understood in France. Voluptuousness and absolutism cannot go together.

 

Soon Europe was to be reduced into a memory on a par with memories of many, many past years ago, as I sighed my last sigh of regret over the scene at Montreux the next morning, and the conductor announced the station Venezia Santa Lucia in the country of Mussolini, as my sleepy eyes opened on the signboard, although it was as late as 10 AM.

 

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DECK PASSENGER ON AN ITALIAN LUXURY LINER

 

Bombay docks in the 30's.

 

The usual luggage handlers soon appeared on the scene and, after passing through the by-lanes of Venice where the artist's version of Venice could differ most from actuality, where one had to tolerate much squalor and bad smells with ugliness, I crossed the calm waters in a gondola to where the dignified white ship lay in all her heavy majesty, sending out a long flowing streak of smoke resembling the tresses of a high-born Egyptian beauty as she aired them in the morning sun, ready to take me to the further shore of safety and homeliness, beyond the raging main.

 

Soon the luggage was on the aft deck and I paid up an exorbitant charge with the lira, without complaining as I had done many a time before. Fortunately, I found a compatriot too, who travelled in the same class of the ship, returning after specialising to teach French in Bombay. We talked and walked, or sat in nooks and corners of the ship, and spent nearly a fortnight together, thinking that we had made a lifelong friendship - but now the illusion has passed away for me, having never met him since landing in Bombay. Travel friendships are often too short-lived.

 

I took precaution, as Bombay was announced, to throw overboard certain papers concerning the disappearance in Germany of an Indian known to have had a seditious attitude to the British rulers of those days, lest the intelligence men of Bombay, mostly half-educated men, should treat me as a political suspect. My compatriot had greater difficulty than me, because of a typescript in his possession in which they could see the name of Tilak appear more than once. It was whisked away by a retired sergeant who was almost unlettered. The lean-legged policemen of the wharves of Bombay who seemed to open and shut gates religiously, unlike their alert counterparts in Western ports, struck me as a peculiarly Indian feature. A Victoria horse-carriage soon took me across the slums of Bombay where ill-clad, ill-kempt and undernourished pavement-dwellers declared the failure of India's peasantry to adjust itself to the cruel demands of modernism with all its mercantilist implications. The honest Indian peasant is poles apart from life based on such gross values.

 

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The irony here is that those who are most responsible for it look down on India with the greatest contempt. The sight of rags hanging to dry from chawls near Byculla repeated the same sad tale as I approached the house of a kinsman employed in Bombay, where I stayed till I took a train to the South, to arrive in the cool Nilgiris about a fortnight after.

 

I AM EXPOSED TO UNCERTAINTY

 Ootacamund in the 30's.

 

Normally a man of my age, then thirty-eight, fully qualified to fit into a professional career and lead a family life, must have strong motives not to follow such a line. On my return from Europe in April 1933 I found that I fitted into none of the contexts open to a man of my training or temperament. In the first instance I discovered that after the passing away of the Guru in September 1928, the disciples who had claimed the properties left by him through a registered organization hastily improvised at the last moment of the Guru's life, and not in full conformity with his own will and testament, were fighting a long battle in the law-courts to retain their claims. As a monastic order loosely knit together, through divided loyalties between relativist and absolutist interests clashing within the situation that necessarily prevailed in the absence of the Guru's noble leadership, this state was but natural.

 

Clashing interests between groups with rival bones of contention made it impossible for me to find a place within any group of the existing set-up. True to the loyalty to the Guru's cause, I broke my journey at Arkonam Junction, near Madras, to get my first contact with the Guru's disciples, who had a good centre of medical service at Conjeevaram. I reached this place late at night in moonlight to make my first contact with fellow-disciples. Two of the Guru's leaders had already been taken away by the hand of death - Bodhananda had left his mantle to Govindananda who survived him only for a couple of years before he himself passed away, with Achuthananda at the helm. Long litigation had riddled the Guru-interests with holes, and mutual mistrust prevailed in the movement. Strangers outside the proper vertical hierarchical line of succession had queue-jumped to occupy positions of power. Suspicion instead of trust strained the cementing factors, disrupting unity and growth. As I spread my bed on the veranda of the ashram that night, I heard one of the new sannyasins actually saying that I had come to spy into the affairs of the institution.

 

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I left next morning for Ootacamund, picking up my luggage left at Arkonam Junction and reaching the cool hills in summer, and spent a fortnight or so in a rented house near to the land where the young Maharaja of Travancore had laid the foundation stone of the Gurukula five years earlier. I found that valuable trees had been cut and sold; the foundation stone stolen; the water pipeline I had fitted before leaving had been removed without authorisation of the Municipal authorities by some interested office-bearer of that time; the books, vessels and furniture had been reduced to trash remnants with a musical instrument, a cycle and other valuables gone - although a village woman had been supposed to be left in charge of them all.

 

I had the task of beginning to build all over again. The straw hut that I had managed to put up had been set on fire and a wooden bench within burnt. Nearly broke to the last cent, I was saved by payment of some money due from the sale of trees in my absence, which was only a fraction of what should have come to my hands. All these minor disasters did not disturb me and I took the train to Varkala to see if I could at least find a place from where I could start all over again as a disciple of Guru to whom I was still correctly dedicated. I also visited Trivandrum where my parents, sisters and brothers still lived. They too welcomed me, but I could not fit into the family context either, although the debt I had incurred for my return journey from Europe was promptly returned to Mrs. Best at the instance of fatherly generosity that still lingered on. I remained however, a sort of rebel, a misfit of a devil's disciple within the family circle, feeling like a fish out of water, though strangely back within its own original pond. I was a prodigal son in an inverse sense.

 

I SERVE IN THE MIDDLE SCHOOL AGAIN

I had expected an enthusiastic welcome for me in the Guru-fold, but facts proved otherwise. Although I had returned a fully qualified educationist according to the desire of the Guru who had intended me to direct all his educational institutions, I found other masters in the places meant for me, wilfully clinging to positions where the least power or pelf was involved. There was not even a crevice left into which I could strike my roots and thrive.

 

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At last, a very small opening seemed to come to me. The headmaster of the Higher Elementary or Middle School, where I had served before going to Europe, had to go for his legal studies, and I could fill his place for the time being on about fifty rupees salary a month. I agreed to do so as I was eager to insert myself into the context of the Guru-cause somewhere; but later events revealed that the manager of the school did not want me to continue even in this occupation so totally incompatible with my capabilities and qualifications. After submitting to the misfit discipline for three months, I again bid for a life of free adventure and chance, but within India this time.

 

INSULT ADDED TO INJURY MEANWHILE

The monastic disciples of the Guru, from whom I expected better treatment, let me down coldly. I was treated as a fly in the ointment or a frog in a chamber. The opposition became more and more unmistakable. Lip-sympathy however, continued to be shown as long as I did not try to enter preserves of interests or power. The tone and complexion changed if by any mistake I approached too near. A bat cannot belong to the camp of birds or animals. Such was my case even with the camp rival to the monastic disciples.

 

The organization called the S.N.D.P.Y., which was meant to propagate the way of the Guru, had become a closed, static and tribalistic organization, instead of the open, dynamic and free one that the Guru had meant it to be, giving it the boldest of watch-words befitting the Indian context in the words 'One Caste, One Religion, One God for Man'. Closing of barriers served vested interests better.

 

That was the story when, shortly stated, one morning the general secretary of this organization met me at the Middle School where I was teaching. He asked me to preside at the Annual General Meeting of the S.N.D.P.Y. to be held at Alleppey that year. A date was fixed. I awaited further word from him about my transport arrangements. No such word reached me, which was itself a bad omen.

 

True to my word I took a first-class ticket to Alleppey in a steam launch from Quilon, which I first reached by train. I took an attendant with me so that the dignity of a president could be kept up to standard. On arrival at the place, however, I found to my surprise that the meeting attended by thousands had a president already seated with lace turban and coat in proper form who had been proposed to take the chair instead of me.

 

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I met the secretary for the year 1933 General Body Meeting. He neither excused nor apologised, but said that a very respectable lawyer and leader of the tribe or community had taken my place without even a hint to me by him or any others. My un-tribalistic way was perhaps known to the organisers. The forty-odd pages of a Presidential Address which had meant days of desk work and research for me was in my hand, which an ex-secretary who was now in a rival group, grabbed from me to read, being himself then the Editor of a daily in Quilon from where he published one column of translation as a sample, to support the news of my disappointment and quick return by the next available boat. To this day no explanation has been given to me.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

 

ADVENTURES IN JOB-HUNTING

The glamour of cushy well-paid jobs, especially in government service, is a craze with Indian youth. The transition from an economy based on land and produce from farms to one of paid jobs was full of false lures which trapped the imagination of the peasant population, used to plain living and high thinking. The position became reversed, and to gain a government job became the ambition of youth and has become increasingly so with the lapse of years.

 

My reaction against it was quite strong, even when I left college, but after a lapse of over ten years after leaving the University of Madras with two degrees with distinction, and having returned in 1933 to India with a first class Doctorate of Education from Paris, I thought that I must conform to the craze of job-hunting as all others did, more because of not wanting to have cause for regret later than with any full zest for jobs as such.

 

Cold-shouldered by fellow disciples; the Guru's love for me not being there any more; let down by organisations which should normally have supported me; I was lastly disillusioned by the fact that even in the job I was filling as headmaster of an English Middle School started by the Guru on a pittance of a salary of 40 rupees per month I was not to be incumbent in office on any permanent basis.

 

A short note from the manager of the school indicated that I had to vacate for another who had gone for legal studies and returned. This acted as the last straw to make me decide in favour of fortune-hunting, which would allow chance to open some other door when I found the last of the naturally-expected doors slammed against me. It would also afford me a chance of seeing India, the lack of acquaintance with my mother country still being a disqualification against me.

 

The four acres of land that I had got for a Gurukula Educational Institute had suffered neglect from adverse circumstances and, as I have already related, I had reached the end of my tether in respect of that undertaking. I had already burnt my fingers once and was now twice shy about going back to the same task.

 

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Half as a fortune-hunter and half as an adventurer in job-hunting, I decided to give chance its full scope by fleeing from Varkala into the wide world of unknown chances. To live without a vocation would have been asphyxiating. Ground rent had to be paid by me for the land in the hills and I had myself to keep my pot boiling. There were other necessities seen from the workaday angle that assumed a capital N at certain moments, though most of the time they were spelled with a small n, by the grace of the same absolute principle involved. Sinking and rising above the level of Necessity alternately is the lot of all who are born with a body on this earthy planet of green hills and deep waters.

 

I LET GO MY HOLD ON RESPECTABILITY

A man who is not able to fit into his normal occupation and thus becomes a misfit in society, having lost his hold on practical realities, tends to become abnormal. Judged in this way, although I had gained high academic honours, I was to be considered nothing short of a madman by conventional standards of 'respectable' or 'sensible' people.

 

A vague idealist dreamer pretending to be a renouncer of the world is just one who has missed his vocation, as they say, and could be a lion under sheep's clothing in Aesop's old idiom, making a virtue of necessity. To die in one's proper vocation is better than to pretend to fit into a way of life not fully one's own. Such misfitting is fraught with danger, as the Gita puts it quite bluntly. The danger is to one's contemplative life, and a misfit in society can run amok in extreme cases, or at least have a nuisance-value in milder cases of incompatibility. Chance or luck, which are only milder terms for false kismet or karma, must be given opportunities to regulate one's life and make inner urges compatible with outer occupations.

 

These two factors were at loggerheads in my case just at that time. A life of free adventure was the only answer open to me so that Fate could decide what calm calculation could not accomplish. Thus it was that I wandered the length and the breadth of this motherland as an adventurer who carried with him his solitude and orphanage in God to let destiny have its way with his petty life. Job-hunting was not to be ruled out for me in the attitude of resignation that I was forced to adopt. One cannot live in vacuity.

 

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EVEN MADNESS MUST HAVE A METHOD

The Guru had intended me to return from Europe with fresh ideas on education, and my part of the task was fully accomplished when I came back with a Doctorate in Education from the University of Paris and admission into the Royal Society of Teachers in London, giving me full professional status. I had taken shorter courses and attended many conferences. The school which the Guru had in mind in Varkala was one that would combine the best features of a Western Public School and the basic features of ancient Gurukulas of India. The theoretical bearings of such a combined pedagogics were worked out patiently by me and incorporated in my researches at the University after five long years of labour. When the prize was about to be won, however, on return to my chosen scene of action, strangers, like Penelope's lovers, were in the seats meant for me by the Guru. He was gone, and the usual country gentlemen - who had themselves no ideas or programme on education that would suit the times; and in spite of my having presented the proposal at the inaugural meeting in the presence of the Guru before I went abroad - had illegally usurped all places, including mine, and I had to try my luck from scratch elsewhere wherever a door might have been left open for me.

 

Even though such frustration could have driven one mad, I followed a method even here and started on my adventures in job or fortune-hunting or both, fully conscious of what I was doing. Without claiming any rights of my own or striving for power, I shall tell the story as best as I can. Like the methodic doubting of Descartes, I had to have some kind of system in my adventures.

 

I BEGIN AT TRIVANDRUM AND END UP AT NEW DELHI

 

Trivandrum.

 

I heard from my father of respected memory that his own father, having passed a Pleader's examination in Travancore State, was refused a government job about the year 1860 on the basis of a 'traditional State policy' which did not permit such entertainment for certain sections of the subjects of the ruler. In other words, a form of theocratic orthodoxy which prevailed stood against him in fulfilling his career normally like any other subject of the State. About twenty years later, in the last century, my father had become a medical graduate.

 

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He sought government employment but became excluded from state service for the same reasons of a 'traditional State policy' as the endorsement of the Dewan said in so many words. In 1933, two generations after, it was my turn again to approach the Adviser to the Ruler of Travancore, as an MA, LT (Madras), Doctor of Letters of Paris, and as a member of the Royal Society of Teachers.

 

I was given a patient hearing by the administrative advisers of the theocratic State, and I was asked to bring my father to support my written application. This I could not do, as I had broken away from all family loyalties, having already become a full-time disciple of the Guru Narayana ten years earlier. The motive behind this condition thus imposed on me was not clear to me, but I guessed then that it was not anything above board, whatever its nature. Such was my first failure in job-hunting which I began methodically and systematically at the very southernmost toe of Mother India, as was natural and legitimate.

 

A victim thus hereditarily to theocratic forces involving cruel tribal exclusiveness too complicated to describe, I set my face against the land of my parentage, though not of my birth, destined to hunt for fortune in other lands. Thus was spelled out in large letters the story of my first failure in systematic job-hunting. It was better this way than to have resigned myself to my fate prematurely, with no failures, and to the success that was to be mine by the will of the Tao. One of the definitions of God that I formulated much later in life is relevant here, as it said: 'God is what is right when you are wrong'. Years have now proved to me that what I considered my ill-luck then has been more compatible with Chance with a capital letter that has a hand always in shaping the affairs of men.

 

I GROPE TO FIND MY PROPER VOCATION

My education was on Western lines with a strong loyalty and devotion to the Guru Narayana on the other side. To become a sannyasi in the conventional sense filled me with mistrust. To fit into the family setup, as one among brothers and sisters, did not agree with my inner absolutist inclinations. On my return from Europe I tried to stay in a hotel at Trivandrum first to steer clear of the relativistic atmosphere of the family with father and mother still living.

 

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The sannyasins of the Shivagiri Ashrama on their part were lukewarm in the welcome they gave me, as I did not conform fully with all the conventional requirements which included many articles of faith and patterns of behaviour not natural or acceptable as such to me. Disadopting natural blood-relationships on one side and unable to fit into the context of an outmoded pattern of a holy or religious life, I had to strike a line of life all my own, and thus plough, as it were, a lonely furrow. Cold-shouldered or blackballed by one or the other side, I had to deny myself the easy way of being fully adopted by either. My personal problem too, existed - I had heavy taxes to pay for the land then vacant that was in my name in the Nilgiri Hills; and it was a question of making a living too without being false to myself in any way.

 

Finding my chances at the school where I worked had reached the breaking-point, I decided to remove myself from the whole context in Kerala, as already related. I found from the newspapers that an English teacher was wanted in a tutorial college in Madras, and I remember sitting in a train to Madras late in the summer of 1933, again absconding from shackles, real or imaginary, which I wished to shake off like a wet horse or dog would when coming out of water. I bid for my freedom again for the second or third time. One has to liberate oneself again and again in the life of an absolutist, and the more often one is able to do this the better is the quality of his absolutism. Narayana Guru was a perfect model here, for he often changed his abode, almost between any two of his meals. He represented in himself thus the principle of uncertainty, which belonged to the phenomenal aspect of Absolute Truth.

 

UNSETTLED LIFE IN OLD MADRAS AGAIN

Although sticky and incubator-warm at times, with its smelly stagnant waters and dustbins from which stray cattle on the roads could sometimes be seen to eat of the garbage, one falls in love with lazy Madras with its half-naked sun-tanned population in a strange way, as Gauguin would with Tahiti. The cries of old Madras that street hawkers raise persisted still with their outlandish strangeness during the heavy-laden hours of the afternoon siesta.

 

Madras life has a way of getting under one's skin, and with all its ordure one begins to like it. Those creaking tramways at Broadway and Harris Bridge are no more, perhaps, but the breezes of the Marine blow now, I am sure, as ever they did. I have sung these praises of Madras already.

 

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It is enough to repeat the dear name of Madras to feel the joy of the embraces of this lazy, sea-washed city, roughly on the same latitude as Mexico City in the New World. It can be said confidently, however, that Madras laziness does not rob one at least of intellectual alertness. One compensates for the other.

 

I took up lodging first in a hotel in Broadway, and taught for a month or so in a tutorial college, coaching students privately for the intermediate or matriculation examinations of Madras University. My many-lettered degree titles helped the manager of the institution to gain publicity, but actually he was unable to pay me even the one hundred rupees he had agreed upon.

 

Then I took up lodging in Mambalam Extension near Saidapet in a little cottage which I intended to be a meeting-place for students of philosophy, but the locality was inaccessible, with muddy dirt roads. I finally ended up by staying with Swami Vidyananda who had a free dispensary at Old Mambalam where I was received with some degree of welcome, at least greater than the warmth of the welcome in other centres where the Guru's disciples lived. When I found that the manager could not pay me anything, being himself an adventurer like me in financial distress, I got an offer to go to Bombay as a kind of baby-sitter in my sister's house in Bandra, a suburb of Bombay. I grabbed at the opportunity which would enable my adventures in job-hunting and wandering in India to continue.

 

Meanwhile, I had also tried to see the Director of Public Instruction at Madras because of my past service for two years as demonstrator in Zoology at the Presidency College, Madras - but technical objections of break of service and over-age for fresh recruitment were raised against me, although once before it was ruled by the same department that, having received a stipend in the Teacher's college in 1922, it was binding on me to seek service in Madras State.

 

Rules and by-laws can be quoted against you as easily as for you, depending upon whether you had some uncle to do the wire-pulling from behind, which was exactly what I lacked. No mere paper application for a job, specially for one involving more than five hundred rupees a month, could lead to a positive result if not supported by somebody's personal interest. Often the competition for any such chance would be so keen as to make sparks of deadly rivalry fly from the looks of fellow-applicants for the same job.

 

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I had to learn this verity the hard way, as I shall tell presently and, if I had been wise enough to know in advance, I should not have wasted my time. On the whole, I do not regret having gone through the experience without turning back. The discipline involved and the preparation that went on while I waited for one chance after another did me the good of widening my wisdom, both worldly and bookish. Even when the chance was lost, I had improved my understanding about ever-fresh educational aspects. In this sense no experience is a waste but a training that rounds out one's education.

 

BARODA

 

Baroda palace.

 

It was in this way that a teacher's college opening made me read the latest books on educational methods. A chance in a public school in Dehra Dun made me look up all about that; and a research job in experimental psychology kept me active similarly for several weeks. I nearly got an appointment order as principal of a Parsi seminary for young priests, but this was cancelled at the last moment before the actual offer made to me could be confirmed.

 

Many were the chances that came my way and slipped away from me before my lips could touch the cups. I spared none of my chances and applied for all and sundry, leaving no stone unturned in order to prove to myself that if I did not succeed it was not due to my negligence of details. Such details are too many to remember or recount here. All I can say is that the over-all impression was that I could not deceive fate whose thin Ariadne's thread on my path always seemed to regulate my chances.

 

I met the Registrar of the University of Bombay and even obtained a letter from the Dewan (Minister) of the State of Baroda himself, recommending me for the job of Director of Education there. The letter was obtained before the minister was about to sail for Europe on leave, and was addressed to his assistant. I thought myself likely to get the job through his son, who happened to have been my hostel-mate in the Madras Victoria Hostel. Chances seemed to conspire for me sometimes. It was almost equal to having two birds in one's hand, possessing the letter from the minister himself to the appointing officer - but even the surety of one bird in hand was not present in the letter, in spite of my having obtained it with much tact and trouble, as results soon proved.

 

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I need not say that I took the train for Baroda and, staying in a posh hotel near the railway station, took a horse carriage to go to the Secretariat in good form. I was dressed in a new tussore silk suit with a white stiff collar, as decent standards of the time required of a would-be Director of Education under a maharaja.

 

Alighting from the carriage, saluted all along by liveried peons, I presented my precious credentials to the officer. An Englishman was then involved as adviser to the administration, and his voice counted higher than that of the Dewan himself in actual affairs. Whether there were other snags unsuspected by me, I know not. Hopes thus fizzled out at the last moment and I returned to Bombay to begin my job-hunting all over again.

 

ANOTHER ROYAL FAVOUR IS FOILED

 

Indore Palace.

 

It was the Maharaja of Indore himself who interviewed me in his palace situated in a large garden where I arrived in 'bonne tenue' (good form) another month of the year 1934, if I remember rightly. From the waiting room I was ushered into a well-furnished drawing room where I was received by the young Maharaja himself. He questioned me minutely about my plans and ideas. I handed him a copy of my thesis for the University of Paris, and another elaborate plan for revising secondary education in India, to make it more work-biased than bookish. He scanned the typewritten sheets and seemed to approve of my appointment from all I could guess. He retained the book, which was my printed thesis for Paris University, saying he would duly return it. There was, however, a bad omen right in the beginning of the interview. The chair on which I had to sit while being interviewed was a fancy one, standing on three legs and, what was worse still, I had been warned by whispers in my ears from the secretary who ushered me into the princely presence that I should take care not to upset the chair, but I did the very thing I was warned against. For one who believed in omens this was a bad augury in itself. Being, however, more hard-boiled than to be disturbed by omens, I optimistically expected that I would be selected for Indore State.

 

That night I happened to be staying at Dewas State not far from Indore, as a guest of one of the Council of Ministers of that much smaller State, also ruled by a maharaja.

 

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He was my schoolmate who, by uniform favour shown him by a British official well-wisher in the political department, had come to occupy an important place in Central India's administration, which was dominated by diplomatic moves in which the voice of the ruling class, naturally enough, rang higher than all others.

 

Within the palaces too, various varieties of intrigue, favouritism and nepotism flourished side by side with conspiracies and personal rivalries in which the many wives or paramours in the harem of the princely families freely had their say to make the confusion all the more confounded. Often, when all was settled according to correct official procedures or rules of selection, a last-minute telephone call from some lady with a higher political status foiled all and superseded with a shrill voice all the red-tape work that had been done before by lesser officials - each with his own secret axe to grind - while all the time putting on a big artificial front of impartiality. The façade deceived none but innocents seeking jobs, like me. Often a job-hunter travelled thousands of miles in response to a 'wanted' announcement in one of the newspapers of his own corner of India. He had to look presentable and be provided with the proper paraphernalia and have at least a second-class ticket, often for a four days' journey across the peninsula. The crease of his pants counted, and the way he brushed his hair. He must have a proper professional look in keeping with the nature of the position he was after. A panel of interviewers often put him embarrassing questions; and stock techniques and catchy surprise methods might be employed to make the poor interviewed applicant blurt out, in his confusion, something that would disqualify him. Over-preparation for the interview could be considered a disqualification. Often a young officer from the ruling or royal family, representing more circumscribed interests, would himself outdo the milder questions put by the other members of the interviewing panel.

 

When all was done, that inevitable telephone call from a lady with a shrill voice from the palace or vice-regal lodge came, and all the game was over and to be closed. The victim of the interview wended his way back to the corner where he belonged, often a couple of thousand miles away. There were, of course, others who lay in wait in Delhi itself as habitual job-hunters ready to pounce at another opportunity as soon as it presented itself; and if they could fulfil both celestial and mundane requirements which could make varied demands on them, they at last got the much-coveted job.

 

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Murderous looks had to be exchanged before any such event really happened, after one had the lack of decency to queue-jump or rudely elbow through a crowd of fellow job-hunters who had to be treated as rivals.

 

Such were some of the bizarre aspects of the situation normal to job-hunting in India at that time. I was fully informed of such necessities and contingencies, but it was different this time. The palace of the prince was invaded late at night by his royal relations, mostly female who, it was reported, had broken down in tears before him, pleading for a young lady of the family who had the minimum qualifications for the job.

 

This last-minute feminine onslaught on the young prince turned out to be too much for him to resist. It needed much bravery to face the tears of womenfolk of the inner family circle. The ill omen of having upset a tripod chair should have told me in advance what would happen if I had the sensitivity to understand the language of omens. All was lost again, I soon understood, as reliable first-hand news reached me before dawn from those present at the nocturnal palace scene. The reply was sent to me officially and the papers which were to be returned were forgotten.

 

All the happenings above did not take place at Dewas State - the last minute telephone call refers to a later event at Delhi which was the scene of my adventures in job-hunting not much later. I was not the victim there, but several others who gave up after much waste of time and energy. It can be laid down as a general rule that job-hunting without a godfather to support you at every step or without being a nephew of some sort of VIP is foredoomed to failure in the normal course. Blood is thicker than water and money can make many things, otherwise wrong, quite right. Often the conditions advertised were fixed for a particular nephew with whose qualifications it tallied. Sometimes chance worked retrospectively, adopting eliminatively instead of selectively. The rest was often a farce or a formality that just had to be gone through. I know it is not quite a respectable lesson to learn, but I have to record it, with apology, for the guidance of young job-hunters who might come after me, lest they should think that any cushy job will come to them just because their application shows the required qualifications. If you want a job, you have to want it badly enough to be prepared to stoop low enough to get it.

 

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JUNAGADH, SIMLA, GWALIOR AND DELHI FAIL ME

 

Simla.

 

Besides a chance of being appointed head of a training ship for the Navy, I remember one for a high office in the Education Department at Junagadh in the Kathiawar peninsula. It had for chief administrator an Englishman named Caddell whom I interviewed with early in the Bombay Club where he stayed. He was fully satisfied that I had the qualifications, but lisped something about the last incumbent in office having been resented as a South Indian.

 

In Simla I met a member of the Viceroy's Executive Council who was in charge of the Doon Public School newly started by the late S.R. Das, with whom I was in correspondence even before my visit to Europe. His death had taken the edge out of the hopes he held out for me in 1928. Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, the celebrated poet of India, gave me a letter to her friend recommending me strongly to a post in Gwalior where he was a high official. I met the appointing authority but the strong recommendation letter remains with me, more as a souvenir of Mrs. Naidu who later became the Governor of a state in Independent India and a heroine in Indian political life. Official change was responsible for my failure in this particular instance.

 

Finally Delhi, too, where I took lodging in the YMCA for over a couple of months, failed me - and that was enough to turn me back forever after from the onerous task of job-hunting in India, whose aftertaste could not be said to be pleasant at all in my mouth.

 

This time it was no less a figure than Pandit Madan Malaviya, the founder of Benares Hindu University, who received my cleanly typewritten application, which I presented to him personally, taking an opportunity that presented itself during his sojourn at Birla House in Delhi. A Principal was wanted for the Teachers' Training College at Benares. Sitting on a white linen-covered mattress on a divan (raised seat), propped up with plenty of sausage-shaped pillows, he scanned my application carefully, took off his spectacles, and turned his white-turbaned head to regard my person for a minute. He actually expressed his surprise at the unique qualifications detailed in my application, congratulating me.

 

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But one small question cropped up at the last moment which brought into the picture, as I watched him, that fatal element of anti-climax. Was I a married man or a bachelor? That was the deciding factor. I was a bachelor and all hope was lost, as I could see him put away the papers with the usual promise to look into the matter. That was all.

 

Let me not linger too long on this subject of job-hunting, but life is not strewn with flowers all the way. Thorns and roses have to be treated together. One question remains unanswered. That is, how did I find money to have all these adventures? My baby-sitting income was fifteen rupees a month, with free board and lodging with relatives in Bombay, mostly near that notorious back club area of Byculla Central Station where free fights between Hindus and Muslims could be witnessed from the windows every day. I supplemented this income by giving private tuition in school lessons to two girls of the Agha Khan clan at the Napier Road Girls' School in the Fort Area, where the sister of Mrs. Sarojini Naidu was Principal and kept an open salon like the intellectual French ladies of the time of Rousseau in France, where select men and women met and discussed art, philosophy and literature. Many notables of the day, artists and intellectuals, called at her well-appointed apartment and enjoyed her open hospitality. I took an interest in the dance performances of Mrs. Sunalini Devi, the sister of Mrinalini, the elder Cambridge tripos lady. Subhashini too, the younger sister, who was leftist in her inclinations, brought her friends; and the three sisters differed between them like the three madonnas created in De Quincey's opium reveries. At Delhi too, I made many similar contacts.

 

For paying my taxes in the Nilgiris, I took on the job of canvassing advertisements for the Medical College Magazine, going up and down the lifts in the Fort Area to gain enough commission. I was also engaged in selling special books at a Meddows Street bookshop to oblige a friend. I also took the sister-in-law of Mrs. Naidu to her home in Calcutta, staying some time in Ballygunge, the residential suburb of that city.

 

After the failure of the interview with Pandit Malaviya while at the Delhi YMCA., I decided to close down the chapter of job-hunting. The four acres of land in the Nilgiri Hills had not lost their charm in my imagination and, like a vagrant who knocked at many wrong doors before realizing that his first love was good enough for him, I returned to Fernhill after just two years of adventure, in the summer of 1935.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

 

CHEQUERED PATTERNS OF INDIFFERENT FORTUNE

Life is a glimmering chequered pattern consisting of patches of light and shade. This characteristic of the whole of any man's life was particularly applicable to the years between 1935 and 1945 in the middlemost decade of my life-span, calculated on a basis of an expectation of a hundred years given to man in principle, though not in actual quantitative terms of statistical averages.

 

Kaleidoscopic life patterns, viewed from inside, correspond to their own outer counterparts of pure consciousness, subtly oscillating between plus and minus poles in colourful or sombre schematic outline patterns. When fully active, the alternation is so fast that there is a white apperceptive light absorbing both name and form aspects, algebraic or geometric, as the case may be.

 

Eventfully reviewed, the colour content of each phase of changing life glows dim or bright when different scales or colours, as with sound, cover the gamut of possible interests within life's amplitude of change and becoming. A flux, in which phenomenological components make for unitive epoches representing the soul and the universe at once, makes up the stuff of life, with time and space as warp and woof of its fabric.

 

It is in this sense that I refer to this period as a passing show or a flowing mirage - expressions dear to the mystics of India. Viewed in this perspective of a subjectivism of the right degree, contemplation treats life neither seriously nor lightly, but with the characteristic indifference of the absolutist.

 

I START ALL OVER AGAIN

 

The view from Narayana Gurukula, Fernhill, Oootacamund.

 

It was a relief to find myself again in the Nilgiri Hills after an absence of hectic job-hunting of two years, as recounted already.

 

'Happy the man, whose wish and care

A few paternal acres bound,

Content to breathe his native air

In his own ground'.

 

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This was the refrain of a schoolboy recitation piece (Pope's 'Ode on Solitude') which haunted my memory at this period, although the acres were not 'paternal' in my case. They were the hangovers of my first love to whom I ruefully returned after the setback in fanciful fortune-hunting adventures. I took a room at the foot of the hill slope of the land acquired for the Gurukula nearly a decade earlier. It was a coolie line in which I could find the nearest room from which as base I could apply my shoulder to the Gurukula cart to make an effort all over again to get the Gurukula of my dreams going.

 

A friend in Bombay, Mr. A. Bose, had paid me eighty rupees for putting up a small zinc sheet shed in the eucalyptus grove on the slope of the hill next to the topmost point. I got some round posts of eucalyptus trees and stuck them in the ground with a frame for the roof to make a bunk, eight by ten feet, with two small glass windows and a panel door. Although the money with me could, at first, only buy three sheets short for finishing even such a hut, it made me as happy as if I had built a pleasure dome.

 

I papered the walls inside to insulate the room from the extremes of heat and cold to which the Ooty climate exposed it. Such was my home for the time being. A boy to help to cook my meals at the coolie room below, and later on a cow that was given to me nominally as a gift, but really against about thirty-five rupees which a man in Coonoor had borrowed from me, were other living beings who happened to share life with me in the second starting of the Gurukula plan which was as dear to me then as now at the end of my life.

 

When the first tin cabin was habitable enough, I began fencing and the cultivation of potatoes round it. A dolichos creeper, a few tree tomato plants, Brussels sprouts, cape artichokes and small french breakfast radishes were the first vegetables which I proudly harvested after the rains of 1936. Gourds too grew in plenty, to which a friend from French Algeria, a magistrate at Pondicherry, helped himself freely. He loved the very tender ones, and it was not without a pang that I occasionally allowed him to pick them in my absence from the little garden.

 

Tending cows who slowly grew in number from one to four, both by multiplication and by purchase, kept me busy. Two grown-up cows 'went and died on me' as Americans say, making me unhappy in that particular way which only animal keepers can understand.

 

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Qualitatively, the pangs of human bereavement can be as keen with any animal pet. In spite of all my Vedantic wisdom which treated the visible world as a myth, I was no exception to the rule here and became very depressed when in two years I lost four head of cattle, the last being a case which affected me to the core for several weeks.

 

MY BEST COW 'DIES ON ME'

It was the death of a pride of an Australian cow which had been presented to me as a full-blooded thoroughbred heifer two years before, and which I had grazed and given tubs-ful of rich drinks to for over two years, and to which some of the neighbouring women used to send their contributions of rice-gruel water to help me fatten it - an animal that was reputed as the best bred and tended cow of the countryside - that made me so unhappy.

 

There were only two or three days more for it to calve for the very first time. The udder got more and more filled out with lymphatic milk content and unfolded its rich undulations each day. It was to be a bank for financing and keeping alive the Gurukula I had restarted after running after opulent power and pelf. I sometimes proudly took visitors to see the cow and explained how it was a symbol of abundancist economy, while they belonged to the opposite camp as clerks or salaried government servants.

 

But the worst part of the story was the tragic end of the cow when hardly a day remained for the golden calf to be born. I had bought a new rope bridle for it, and tethered it as usual among the bushes of acacia undergrowth within the Gurukula land. At midday I was having my usual siesta officially consisting of forty winks. But, as fate would have it, on this particular day my siesta was five minutes longer and I was awakened by the groaning cry of the cow. The neighbours announced that the cow had fallen down, and raised an alarm.

 

My laziness delayed me by half a minute as I rubbed my eyes and stretched myself before becoming fully alive to the situation. The new rope strangled the heavy fully pregnant animal as it fell forward and could not stand up again. I was too late by half a minute, but that half a minute was filled with fatality. The eyes of the cow were turned awrily upward and breathing was all but stopped. I tried artificial respiration with the help of the kind neighbours.

 

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Three of them could hardly shake the fallen animal, she was so heavy with good feeding. I watched it die helplessly with the same eyes with which I had seen it grow and graze with joy for years.

 

The blow was too tragic but I decided to brave it out. Although I thought of bringing the vet to see if any help could bring the calf out alive, and even ran three miles hastily to meet him, the scientific verdict he gave of simultaneous asphyxiation of the foetus and the mother animal turned me back to the Gurukula after a run to the animal hospital in Ooty. The news was too much for the other inmates, and the neighbourhood was shocked as rarely before. I was, however, the first again in the confusion to take the digging spade and start making a pit large enough to bury the dear animal's remains.

 

DEATH AS A TOUCHSTONE

This incident was perhaps meant by Providence to wean me out of the context of trying to make a living by the usual means. I felt it as a stern reprimand in the voice of God. The lesson went home with all the force of a bolt from the blue. I felt impoverished and weak, both economically and in spirit, like Job in the Bible. I seemed to touch again the zero point at the bottom of my resources and efforts to survive as a wilful Absolutist who had no place in this cruel world.

 

With much gnashing of teeth and clenching of fists, drinking of gall and eating of wormwood, and with a fully contrite heart, I stood, mentally at least, before the Most High counterpart of myself, the Absolute. Human bereavements have not succeeded in moving me more deeply than the case of this pet animal. I had brazened myself through Vedantic wisdom against the passing away of father, mother, a sister and a brother soon after, and treated these calamities lightly and as if assumed and anticipated. My own death too, I expect to take for granted when it comes near to me. This will prove the quality of my absolutism as a final test of my love of Truth. Prayana-kala (the time of going forth) is treated by the Gita itself (VIII. 10) as a touchstone for absolutism.

 

God himself seemed to me, during the test, to be on the wrong side of the situation, while I was on the right. But absolutism knows no inequality or asymmetry or imbalance between the Self and the Most High.

 

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Both cancel out into one unitive neutrality, which was the attitude proper for me to cultivate consciously. Instead of two wrongs one would then have one doubly right; and life's calamities could thus be transcended.

 

It was the horizontalism implied in the bereavement of a pet animal that made its pang keener than that of my own passing away. Beware therefore of cultivating horizontal values. Let favouritism be always banished in favour of an attitude in which love or preference sheds its light uniformly over the whole scene like moonlight over the white-walled town or the seashore seen on a deep and silent night.

 

PLOUGHING STILL MY LONELY FURROW

At the furthest end of the Gurukula land I discovered some laterite which could be used for the foundation of a new cottage that I was planning to construct. With a boy to help me when not engaged in other work, I broke up the laterite into blocks and carried them on my head or shoulders to a place where there was a charcoal-burning pit where the foundations for the proposed cottage were dug.

 

It was lonely work, snail-slow and uphill, but it was a pleasure to do it for its own sake. Many a sunset hour found me digging Mother Earth with deep sighs of a loneliness which was both sad and enjoyable at once. The absolutist content and purpose gave it a special flavour and taste. Sweet are the joys of that loneliness, ineffable and unutterable, of an absolutist - sufficient company unto himself wherever he may be and whatever his occupation.

 

The boy who had been helping became an uncertain factor and took eight days' leave; but went forever to get married and settle down in his native village near Varkala. I had to rely on occasional helpers from among the village boys, and cooked, washed, went to market, carried water, split wood, grazed cows and kept watch over the trees that villagers pilfered for firewood. Study and some writing work went on apace too. I invented new soups and dishes, and drank hot spiced molasses water from a plate instead of a cup, like a cow, being short of cash to buy any proper crockery.

 

Tea-drinking came into my regime only because of two visitors from Bombay who came with Sunalini Devi, sister of Sarojini Devi, both of much fame - one as a danseuse and the other as a political leader.

 

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A pot of tea with proper cups became a regular institution in the Gurukula, and the ceremony once started has stuck on tenaciously to this day when, as with Englishmen, the cup of tea has its inevitable place in the daily routine.

 

A goat that I had bought from a neighbouring farmer for seven and a half rupees was resold to the same man, as 'the poor man's cow' as Gandhi called it, became more of a nuisance than a milk-giving animal, with its constant depredations among my favourite plants; its vomit-sounding bleatings that were often sickening to hear; and its tendency to entangle its tether when left to itself for more than half an hour. This was the earliest period of my return to the Gurukula, before the gifted cow took the place of the noisy and trouble-making goat. From the poor man's cow of Gandhi to a normal herd of four or five cows was a natural promotion.

 

Cows too belonged to an abundancist context in economics which has its grassroots in nature. The roots of the economy of opulence are established in the sky, in scarcity. The world of abundance grows from below in geometric progression, while opulence as capital descends from above as a competitive factor to crush man in rags. I preferred abundance of farm produce to a bank account, and progressed slowly but surely to establish more and more Gurukulas of the same kind in different parts of the world as the years passed. This long story has to be told in bits.

 

PATTERNS OF INNER AND OUTER EVENTS

From one boy to help occasionally; one room to live in; one goat or one cow to tend; one-course dinners; only being able to afford a postcard correspondence; newspaperless; washing myself under the wayside tap; and conducting the necessary activities under a roof which gave way when rains came - my life was a veritable chequerboard of necessary and contingent events. I had to keep hold of every cent I could lay my hands on. A kind fellow-sannyasin offered half a pint of milk free from his ashram opposite, where I went to read the newspaper each evening - but this gift was soon stopped for fear of audit objection from above. I had to keep smiling still as a brave boy scout was expected to do.

 

A sense of humour is as good a saving factor in life as a knowledge of the transient nature of the world as taught by pessimistic religion. The smile is possible only when the rigid objective reality is reduced in harshness by an introspective and self-criticising subjectivity called contemplation. Life becomes bearable when its overtones and undertones are thus balanced by knowledge or a faith in the neutrality of the Absolute. Life becomes bearable when its overtones and undertones are thus balanced by knowledge or a faith in the neutrality of the Absolute.

 

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Thus years passed on while I lived steeped within the chequered stream of passing values of everyday interests and events. The Self, seated deep below the surface happenings, watchfully kept its peace and was uniformly happy throughout.

 

FEASTS AND PARTIES IN THE GURUKULA

Social events too were interwoven into the pattern, including a religious feast which was an annual fixture. I invited the élite of the hill station to the occasion, usually before the end of May, at which all came to know of the plans and progress of the Gurukula informally.

 

Once a year there was also the feast, at which there was a general feeding of all the villagers, called Guru-puja. Then rich and poor, young and old, men and women of all strata of society, races and religions broke bread together so as to open dynamically the walls of the Gurukula to all and sundry in the wide world. We went all out to be good and generous that day in the name of a noble soul who had dedicated his life to such a high, noble, absolutist way of life. Such an event has been observed by me wherever I have been in September or October each year, as also in most of the Gurukula centres I have started, whether in Europe, America or the Far East, for fifty years or more now without a break. Mass contacts have thus been made. The social parties which I have also held over cups of tea or conversazioni have helped to bring me in touch with intellectuals or the select élite of all the countries I have visited and in the Gurukula at home also.

 

I LOVED TO PLAY THE FOOL IN PUBLIC

 

Todas in the Nilgiris.

 

The hut on the hilltop where I lived commanded a view on the east of the formation of the Nilgiri Hills dominated by the highest massif of the plateau called Doddabetta, which was over eight thousand feet (2500 metres) above sea level. My habitation was but a speck to be located among the greenery of the hills when clouds or mists left the scene clear to view.

 

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The toy mountain railway that carried people up and down to the plains exposed this humble habitat of a recluse between cultivated land and wild areas far away from other dwellings.

 

Not unlike the Todas - the oldest of the hill tribes of India, still surviving in the Nilgiris - I was something of a cave man or a pagan abundancist unbeliever, outside every respectable fold in India or abroad. I was a kind of nomad or gypsy or orphan in God at heart, not fully aware of my affiliation to any group as such, but loyal vaguely to my kind, called humanity. A gentleman-at-large, a globetrotter or a world-citizen, were roles which fitted me as different caps; and I put on whichever I liked - always loving, as I did, to play the fool in public.

 

Rousseau, who put on an Armenian cap, would alone have understood me easily. A free-lance, a franc-tireur, almost a hobo who was at times conventional to boot, were traits I could also see in myself. My own image sometimes frightened me with its tragic possibilities, but mostly it was the comic side that prevailed and saved me many times from the fate of a Macbeth or Othello. At least there ought to have been some hidden trait that gave significance to my life, however faintly expressed through my personality.

 

FAIRY GODMOTHERS COME FROM AFAR

I guess now that this faint but distinct trait must have been what attracted to me two elderly ladies, one English and one Scottish, living in London. Mrs. Travis was past middle age, perhaps even nearing her seventies. Her companion, Mrs. Johnstone, was perhaps younger by ten years. I had met the former only once in Geneva where she came to visit me when I was at the Fellowship School. This was enough to start a spark of regard for me, which had no ulterior interest or motive as far as I could see, except a deep-seated maternal instinct to help an interesting dreamer like me.

 

She had taken pains to travel six or seven thousand miles out of a liking to meet the man for whom she had developed a kind sympathy, nay, love. They were messengers or angels from the West come to bless a wise man of the East - if we are to fit the plain event into the stained-glass context of the Bible. Whatever it actually was, there they were at Ootacamund, having taken residence at the YWCA situated near the public gardens. They sent word and I went to meet them.

 

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ANGELIC BENEFACTORS

Boadicea bled from Roman rods, and English slave-girls were sold in far-off markets before the time of William the Conqueror. These are landmarks in English history not less important than the Spanish Armada which attempted to violate English soil. After England became a mercantile colonial power, it became a sinner in this respect rather than being sinned against by invaders. The fair-complexioned, blue-eyed slave girls were called angels, we are told, side-by-side with similar commodities of swarthy skin exposed for sale in the same market-place.

 

It is in this sense that I here call the two God-sent benefactors angelic at this stage of my life. They were like angels from the bleak domain of snowbound Nordic latitudes. Sunburnt angels of Egypt are a contradiction in terms, although black girls can be beautiful in the context of the Song of Solomon. In more recent times, 'paleface' has becomes a nickname for whites in North America, as given by Red Indians. Standards may differ widely here, but the human heart, which is more than skin-deep, remains universally constant, free from time and clime.

 

These two British angels were dear to me and had crossed the raging main and taken the train for more than a fortnight to reach me just in time to save my life from being an utter failure a second time. My own countrymen responded but little to what I represented. I was perhaps too much above or below their heads or the time - my first chapter in the Gurukula being sufficient proof of my need for this divine help.

 

FAIRY GODMOTHERS WITH CHEQUE BOOKS

To be a guardian angel, a patron saint or just a respectable godfather - like being best man to a bridegroom - are all good, but to make such really good practically, they must be provided with a chequebook which gives their status the last finishing touch of effectiveness in this wicked world.

 

Mrs. Travis happened to be a rich widow with plenty of extra cash to throw about. I helped her to settle down in a good residence in the classiest part of Ooty town. Wrexhurst, as the big house was named, catered to the taste of the English colonial world in great detail. The garage, the servants' quarters, the sun-parlour and bay-windows,

though built in rumble-tumble flimsiness, could be painted or upholstered tastefully to make a well-ordered home, as Mrs. Travis soon did. With a table maintained with a full complement of domestics, such as a butler, cook and cook's mate, water man or errand boy and chauffeur, life was fully respectable at Wrexhurst.

 

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Finger-bowls were still in vogue at table in post-Victorian Ooty, when they had gone out of fashion altogether in the mother country. Mrs. Travis fitted well into this classy world, and servants lined up to say goodnight to her each night, as in every respectable English home. Pilfering and other troubles were constant with the servants, and I was useful in settling some of these problems, intervening between the memsahib (lady of the house) and the domestics. Pet Pekinese or King Charles' Spaniels with a Borzoi and Siamese cats added to the cosiness of domestic life, and all seemed to go well. A cheque for one hundred pounds was properly made out in my favour by the kind lady. How we got on later, and how I built a whole house for the Gurukula with this amount - hardly one-fifth of what was normally required - are interesting details to be told hereafter.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

 

OCCUPATIONAL VACUITY GETS FILLED

Usually a man of forty five spends his life fully absorbed in social and familial responsibilities, and perhaps has a profession to give him an outlet for the best part of his aptitudes and energies. My case was different. What an old man retired from active living did, was what it was given to me to do when my energies were at their peak of the possibility of their best performance. It is true that I did all incidental work that came my way with all the ingenuity, zeal and attention that was natural to me. I craved for something harder for my teeth to get into by way of more real or serious work.

 

With all the midday hours free, while the world of students went to school and all adults toiled to win bread in one way or the other, I was at best a gentleman farmer or a cowherd, interested in keeping the front of the newly-built bungalow clean. I did some flower gardening too, specialising first in a box of carnations - the double variety - whose seedlings I had brought from the Jodhpur Palace. Gladioli, dahlias, violets and pansies were all tried one after another. I had sometimes to water them at night because of the daytime scarcity of water. Cabbages and cauliflowers too were in the vegetable garden and needed watering. Pottering in the garden thus, together with study and ease mixed with sweet meditation, were all gentle occupations, but amounted only to hobbies treated seriously. It was gooey, like bread, milk and jam given to children, but too sloppy to suit the taste of the middle-aged man that I was becoming or had already become.

 

THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT

I have to go back chronologically one or two years to relate what was promised at the end of the last part of this story - how I built a house, like Jack of the nursery piece well known to all English children, where the use of the relative pronoun 'that' is used with a vengeance. In the first place, as soon as I got the cheque from the kind lady, my fairy godmother of that time, I set to work with paper and pencil to be able to cut the coat according to the cloth, as I was told I was to expect no more cheques.

 

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I had to muster all my kausala in karma (ingenuity in action) to make what God had sent me of maximum benefit to the ideals to which I had dedicated myself. The lie of the land; the materials most easily available; the labour that could be cheaply commanded without offering fancy attractions to an architect-contractor or other form of middleman - each of whom, in a series, usually came into an enterprise of the kind, usually asking for a slice each - had all to be considered.

 

The design of the building also counted, because if you thought in terms of burnt bricks or cement blocks, or even mud walls, the cubic feet that went into the work had to be balanced by the useful empty spaces, like windows or unpartitioned rooms inside, because the emptiness of a house is the most useful or valuable part of it. A room cluttered up with too many things is no room, and a house made of thick walls cuts the wrong way in good house planning.

 

A dialectical balance had to be struck between filling the chosen space and keeping it empty to the best advantage of the inhabitants. False gingerbread flourishes or decorations had to be avoided, and space-saving built-in devices, to avoid duplication of cupboard or other spaces that go to waste precious interior utility at so many rupees per cubic foot, had to be economically conceived. Tall or thick walls took more bricks, and small windows did not effect as much saving as would seem, because brickwork, when plastered and painted, sometimes cost more than the windows. Where a sun-parlour or an annexe has to be put should take advantage of the tall part of the wall somewhere. Glass had to be used profusely for light and to keep out the cold winds of the Nilgiris. The eucalyptus trees that grew tall on the Gurukula land had to be used as far as possible, with proper unwarping wood - more costly - coming in only where fully inevitable. The entrepreneur's sagacity came in thus as a surplus-value factor of great significance; and thus it was in short that, with a fifth of the money normally needed, Jack built his house in the present instance.

 

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Necessity is the mother of invention, and plenty of evidence for this is found in the comfortable cottage in which I have lived now for three decades, where three bedrooms with bath fittings for each, a large bay-window, a vestibule, an office room, a stage where meditation and worship could be arranged, with a fireplace mantelpiece serving for altar, and a space like a hall-cum-drawing room to serve as library and meeting-place too, which on occasion could take in two hundred young and old - these were all thrown into a single bargain. Wall-to-wall coir matting and curtains for the windows now add to the cosiness of this home, where the most precious of books have come almost by themselves, unsought or unbought.

 

Cheap and classy items of furniture have strewn themselves in the interior as chance itself has arranged. Such is the home that the Tao has made available for me - more out of the errors and omissions of those who were connected with me than purposefully wished for as willing contributions collected through active canvassing. Even pieces of junk that thus accumulated, by omissions rather than by commissions, have found their proper places to beautify this home which I look upon as much as a caravanserai or pilgrim-place as a home to which I am sentimentally attached.

 

A mere house becomes a home after a lot of living in it. This was true of mine, if I could say so, for between just the house that was made from the cheque that the lady gave, chance winds had to waft in more and more small items through the course of the years before it became fully liveable.

 

The fairy godmother too was not always a guardian angel to me, for I found that - as with every woman's relations with man - for no reason I could think of, she had to have tense moments of strained conversation. The workings of the mysterious Maya-factor in such relations was evident even in such a case of thin or theoretical relationship between man and woman. How much more must it be so where flesh and blood give full actuality to it!

 

PROFITLESS AND THANKLESS ASSIGNMENTS

Sinecure jobs ran away from my grasp; but onerous thankless ones seemed to seek me out. Two of them stand out in my memory, although I cannot remember which came first. When fitting the doors and windows to the house that was getting finished, I had a call from Varkala by Swami Achyuthananda, who was then the third in succession to the pontifical chair left vacant by Bodhananda and Govindananda, after the samadhi (passing into peace) of the original Guru Narayana.

 

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One of the legalist-minded disciples of the group that was managing the Guru's institutions and properties was becoming a menace to the others who were simpler folk whose lack of modern education made them less vocal or articulate in matters of administrative importance. It is the cleverer ones everywhere who get the upper hand, and Achyuthananda and Ramananda suggested that I should go to Varkala as an adviser to the sannyasins to save the situation.

 

In the beginning, when the danger of their being dominated was at its maximum point, I was treated with the full status of a persona grata. Confident of full support by all, I set out to make bold plans. My objective was to set the whole of the Guru movement on its feet again in working order after it had gone into effete disuse after the Guru's days. I conceived a bold idea of infusing enthusiasm into the situation by planning an exhibition on the extensive acres of the Headquarters of the Guru, with a Convention to take place also in which all sections of the Guru's followers could be given an opportunity to come together. I stayed at the Shivagiri Mutt and strained every nerve to make the plan a success.

 

As accredited adviser of the body of sannyasins then in management, I respected the head of the group in possession and had a prospectus printed in English and many bulletins in Malayalam setting forth the plans in detail. Things were shaping themselves to my satisfaction, although I had to be on the move from centre to centre on the West Coast and had to keep a secretary and an office running in full swing for months.

 

Adverse forces, however, were lurking within the movement itself which spelt failure for me. My position as adviser, with freedom to plan and direct, was questioned by one who was my rival - equal or superior to me perhaps in organisational or legal matters. Although he did not openly defy me in the beginning, his lukewarm cold-war attitude was evident and grew from day to day till it ended as a litigation in which the whole movement became involved, in which I had to appear before the district court in Trivandrum charged with trying to disturb the peace and contemplative life of the sannyasins.

 

In spite of statements made by the head of the group supporting my claims and position unequivocally, the litigation was effective in putting cold water into the growing warmth of the situation. Not satisfied with a civic plea to restrain me, I was also cleverly implicated in a criminal complaint of which I was informed directly by the then Sub-Inspector of Police of Varkala who got down from his bicycle one day as I was returning from a trip to Trivandrum.

 

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He himself was returning from an inquiry in the Mutt, and told me of a complaint that had been made that I had broken open a door to a room in which some records of the rival swami were kept, and had destroyed them. The inspector's prompt and on-the-spot investigation had made it clear to him that the complaint was falsely fabricated, taking advantage of my absence in Trivandrum. Good intentions alone do not always guarantee smooth sailing in life. Several sinuous ways were also later employed to obstruct me through political insinuations, with tribalistic motives attributed to me and alibi devices to make my position difficult; but I stuck to my post as best I could, and had to fight many a skirmish and even pitched battles. I tried to meet the calumny, insinuation, invective or half-truth employed against me with plain truth or fact based on weapons sharpened in the absolutist and simple armoury all my own. The single-handed defence was a trial of which the complications and resolutions are so many that I cannot repeat them all here. It is ungenerous, even to one's worst enemy, to remember all his evils. Such stories are undignified, nor are such unfamiliar to people in politics.

 

BEATING A RETREAT

In the face of other complications that set in too, I had to beat my retreat. The plan of the exhibition had to be given up at the last moment, even when the contractor, who had to construct the palm-leaf sheds required, had started work. The whole atmosphere of the State was heading towards turmoil and political arrests and shootings were taking place less than twenty miles from the venue of the exhibition. I had to take a decision quickly before matters went out of hand and landed me in discredit, loss, shame and all. Brave as I was and fully an absolutist still, I had to recognize the force of absolute factors of Necessity (with the capital letter N) when it raised its head, and use discretion, which is said to be the better part of valour.

 

Soon after that, when the danger that the swamis feared had passed, I found my own position as adviser began to lose its force, and signs were noticed of their disadoption of me. Soon I became unwanted and my presence more and more resented till even words of open rivalry or antagonism became evident.

 

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English kings had to be beheaded or banished before they could be made to submit to parliamentary control, and in France the struggle between monarchy and democracy or Pope and State expressed itself with unforgettable force. No wonder therefore, that I was thrown out of my orbit tangentially and returned to my favourite hill-retreat at Fernhill to tend cows as before. Meanwhile my English benefactress Mrs. Travis and her companion Mrs. Johnstone had died - the one in Ootacamund and the other in Coonoor - and their affairs were settled with the help of Mr. Ernest Wood who took a friendly interest in the two ladies. I found myself left alone as before. Thus ended the first thankless assignment which came my way unsought.

 

I BECOME ADVISER TO COCHIN STATE

 

Old Cochin.

 

The other profitless assignment that came my way unsought, roughly at the same period, was an invitation to tour Cochin State as Adviser in Rural Reconstruction. Sir R.K. Shanmukham Chetty was then the Dewan (Minister) of the State, and my interest in rural economy and original ideas about it had reached his ears through a common friend. Dr. J.M. Kumarappa who, with his brother Dr. J.C. Kumarappa, a Gandhi follower of Wardha, stayed with me for some time during the summer season. Gandhian economic theories were in the air at that time and economic experiments of different kinds were being tried in India, both by the British and some American experts too, interested in lifting India out of her poverty.

 

Having received the invitation to tour the rural areas of Cochin State as Adviser till I could submit a report for the guidance of the government, I thought myself favoured by luck, and with some small amount of cash that I got together to reach Ernakulam, the capital of the State, I entrained and got there one fine forenoon in a first-class compartment with my baggage and dress as near as I could make it correspond to that of any other VIP of the time.

 

The dailies of Madras announced my arrival and I was noted in the Cochin Gazette as an officially recognized Adviser to the State Ministry. A car was waiting for me on arrival and as I alighted I could see another VIP, Sir Alladi Krishnaswami Iyer, a leading lawyer of Madras, alight too from the same train. He was being briefed for a well-known Church dispute to take place in Cochin State Court at this time.

 

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We exchanged looks and I felt quite as important a man for the time being, puffed with that variety of egotism, enemy to all contemplation, that government jobs can best confer on an otherwise normal man.

 

I was soon driven to the State Guest House behind the posh ministerial residence, bordering on and commanding a full view of the backwaters and the harbour that was to be. Settled down thus for the time being in princely pomp, though of a short-lived order, I had to fit into the new rule correctly. As the Tamil saying goes, 'if one dons the role of a dog, one has perforce to bark'. Although my inside remained as ever that of a simple mendicant, I could act any part when the occasion demanded it.

 

I had the State Car at my disposal all day and even long into the night if I wanted. To keep it idle would not be fair to the machine or to the driver who waited for orders. I therefore had to improvise some visits which were not utterly necessary. I visited the rural experiment at Alwaye and went round the harbour area where dredging was going on. Meanwhile, I studied the reports of rural experiments and innovations undertaken in the state and brought my own understanding of the situation up to date by reading about some of the latest experiments in the Punjab and elsewhere. Much of the reading and hard work that was done then has not been a mere waste, for my understanding of economic problems got its real breadth and depth of perspective by this assignment. I am going to tell how otherwise this assignment proved profitless to me and even cost me a few rupees from my own breaking-point pocket. At each guest-house that we left there was an inevitable line-up of 'menials' so-called, who stretched out their hands for baksheesh, and even such amounts easily totalled up to fifty rupees.

 

RURAL UPLIFT FROM ABOVE VS. GRASS-ROOTS

Dr. Spencer Hatch was an American YMCA missionary, whose book, 'Up from Poverty', which was meant to teach Indian administrations the intelligent modern approach to the problem of poverty in India, had gone into more than one edition, and proved a bestseller at that time in India. Gandhian economics had its own solution, based on self-sufficiency and an anti-machine or homespun approach of its own. There were other economic prophets on the horizon who spoke in terms of a 'Co-operative Commonwealth' - the best instance of which was said to be in the Sundarbans, near the mouth of the Ganges, near Calcutta.

 

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An Indian Civil Service officer of England had his own ideas based on consolidation of land holdings into profitable units instead of the evil of fragmentation, which made tilling unprofitable.

 

How the State could help the lot of the farmer was a problem that eluded all experts; and in most cases where remedies for poverty were suggested, it was the man who formulated the plan who rose up most effectively from his own previous economic condition to a higher level. The plans mostly left the peasants themselves untouched. They had to pay heavier and heavier taxes to finance the experts. There was thus an element of irony here that none seemed to locate. The best help that a farmer could receive was not one dropped down from above from the side of opulence or government for him to pick up, but one that would nourish his own grass-roots.

 

Although at that time I had not clearly formulated my later theory of an abundancist economy, even then I could feel that what was wrong in the whole situation was its top-heavy handling from above, vitiated by red-tape and other heavy bureaucratic procedures which stifled the growth of that genuine economy which thrives best when left alone or nourished at its roots, as underground springs or gentle rains do best in a natural way. Opulence and abundance are poles apart and cannot be promiscuously mixed without spoiling both.

 

I took one month to prepare an eighty-page report, after being taken first to the Trichur area where the Minister for Health accompanied me. From there I was taken to various centres in the interior countryside. From visits to areas where tribal groups made baskets and mats far away from civilization as understood by others, to places where screws and nails were made to teach village blacksmiths to become mechanics on a small scale - I covered all grades in my rounds.

 

Health units, co-operative colonies, sales depots, selling and consumer agencies to stimulate the economic cycle of prosperity and whatever was understandable from textbooks, were all being tried. Methods that succeeded in countries like Norway and Sweden were transplanted to Indian village conditions, forgetting the contrasting context of conditions of opulence or scarcity of the civilised West and the abundance of raw material and human labour available, almost as weeds instead of garden produce, here in the East.

 

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Economic theories developed on the basis of Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' - the basic textbook of the London School of Economics - are still applied to Indian conditions by so-called experts who advise the government here. Those who want to protest are mostly inarticulate at present in this country, although they sometimes raise vague slogans such as 'sarvodaya' (the common good) without being able to add one more intelligible word to their theory. Opulent economy has to be based necessarily on scarcity with its corollary of competition; while abundancist economy allows full scope for the co-operative spirit. That these cannot be mixed without spoiling both is the secret I have elsewhere tried to explain with all the arguments I can muster. All plans in India have so far failed - the proof of which is that the poorest woman living in the village opposite to where I write these lines told me yesterday that she does not get enough rice or wheat per week for love or money at the age of eighty. Such is the tangible result of all the top-heavy planning that has gone on in this country after independence. It is rice and not explanations in which we happen to be poor at present.

 

Thus ended my second 'profitless assignment.' My pocket was depleted to the tune of two hundred rupees and all I gained was plenty of salutes from so-called menials or subordinates.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER THIRTY

 

THE END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR AND AFTER

I have now passed my seventieth year. In this narration of my life story, factual details and points of time have been roughly respected as the clarity of my memory varied between period and period. Such actual aspects touch that horizontal side of life's process of being and becoming in a matter-of-fact manner. The younger you are, facts and sense-impressions gain in eidetic content; while maturer years tend to take away such a colourful content, and one begins to live in a more plain and less glamorous world. If the former is rich in hierophantic values, the hypostatic values which are more theoretical than actual fill later life.

 

Having now brought up my own life story to the point where I am about to celebrate my fiftieth birthday, let me now change the key of my song to suit the more mellowed, sobered and much disillusioned outlook of a septuagenarian. It strangely happens, however, that my later years around fifty were more filled with just such events that usually attract the public attention of newspaper headlines. But writing about my travels in Europe and visits to the United States or speeches before world conferences, do not interest me as much now, with the drab spectacles natural to less-youthful years.

 

A strange law of inverse proportion seems to hold good here. To use the example of Guru Narayana: the false doll to an infant is the reverse of what meaning it makes to a grown-up man, as the world is to a wise man who treats it as equal in status to the eidetic presentation of a forest in the sky. The reader should excuse therefore my intention hereafter to be less realistic and more dream-like in the rest of the story I have to tell about the remainder of my life. Some admirer or disciple can take up the strain or strike up a fresh note from where I might leave off or where he feels my story lacks the realistic touch, lapsing too much into the reveries and reflections natural to maturer years.

 

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BETWEEN LEAVING KERALA AND MY 50TH BIRTHDAY

The Second World War was nearly coming to a close when I left the job of headmaster in the High School in Kerala and went to Bangalore where my brother proposed to start a craft-based school in a rural area outside the city.

 

This kind of creative work appealed to me more than the routine red-tape conformity to bureaucratic standards in the High School where I served. I helped to find a bit of land six miles outside the city where such a craft school could be located; and there were about twenty craftsmen already engaged in various crafts like blacksmithing, ceramics etc., who were in two rented buildings in Bangalore and who were to be moved to the new place.

 

Soon, however, some relativistic factors intervened and there arose subtle and characteristic clashes, mostly of a cold or implicit order, which made me feel like a fly in the ointment or a frog in a chamber, living in the family and wanting to behave as an absolutist. I had news also just then that the boy who was looking after the cows at Fernhill Gurukula had absconded, while other rivalries and duplications of office developed from underground - enough to foil all the good plans. Finding that there was another man already engaged to look to the routine office work, I soon became a supernumerary in the job I tried to do with my brother and his Japanese wife. Perhaps I did not look upon my job with the sense of responsibility and subordination that was to be expected. Between 'either-or' alternatives, it was mostly 'neither-nor' that more often prevailed instead of both rival interests which could work together only in very happy instances, rarely to be seen in actual life. Charity and business can never attain a stable equilibrium.

 

Relativistic and absolutist setups have to be given primacy of one or the other in accentuation if they have to co-exist. Often, when both are given equal importance, one aspect suffers at the expense of the other. The golden mean is rarely struck.

 

I TRY TO START A BUREAU OF EDUCATION

I still lacked a true vocation that fitted my training and temperament. I conceived of another bold plan of starting an 'Institute and Bureau of Education' which was to be a clearing-house for information in respect of progressive educational reform in India.

 

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The Wardha Plan of self-sufficient, craft-based, basic education was just then being promoted by Mahatma Gandhi, and educationists had to be guided through information and discussions. I cycled from one distant city or cantonment school to another canvassing support and organisational help for this new venture. With the Mythic Society Hall available for fortnightly gatherings, I managed to bring together a fairly big crowd of interested educationists and intellectuals, both men and women. The work had developed over several months and was gathering momentum when my need to be back in the Gurukula at Fernhill became more imperative. Appointing a new secretary, I left for the hills again.

 

While speaking of my work in my proper field of education, I should not omit to mention that at this period I had prepared an elaborate scheme for a rural high school which was to be craft-based and planned to incorporate the requirements of the basic Wardha Plan of Mahatma Gandhi side-by-side with the best features of the Dewey Project Method, the Dalton Laboratory and Gary Plans, as well as features of the 'Ecole Active' of Adolphe Ferrière, President of the Progressive Education Movement of Europe. A Rousseau touch was to make it resemble the ancient forest Gurukulas of India; and some Danish Folk High School and English Public School features were to be added on also. A long typescript with actual plans and estimates was prepared by me after many hours of research and library work, which I submitted to Sir Mirza Ismail, the then Dewan (Chief Minister) of Mysore, at a personal interview. He showed some interest in the plan and put me on to Mr. Sultan Mohideen, then Director of Public Instruction in the State. The plan was all but approved and Madhugiri was to be the place where the first new type rural folk high school was to be established. Official changes, politics, upheavals and post-war adjustments, however, conspired together to make these good plans fall through again, and my own duty took me to my original post in the Nilgiri Hills, where I continued as ever to graze cows and live in my own pastoral paradise.

 

A SEMI-ROMANTIC INTERLUDE

Running after some woman is seen to be a 'depravity', if we may call it so, even of old age, to be noticed in many noble minds. Even when I was nearing fifty this tendency asserted itself in a strange form in me once again.

 

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My spirit was not unlike that of Rousseau with whom I often used to compare myself. Although an ageing man like me should have been, in one sense at least, fully ashamed of running after any woman, especially one with plenty of good looks in her favour besides much intelligence - even when actively encouraged by her to do so. Above all, in spite of the humorous side to the situation which none will miss, I must confess here to a semi-romantic episode of this kind at this period, for which my only excuse or consolation was that I was in good company with some great names who have erred with me in a similar manner in this same fully human fashion. The last of the labours of Hercules was for imprisoning Iole, the young damsel of 'great name and great beauty', and Pythagoras, the austere saint, took for wife Theano, much younger than him and his pupil.

 

Some blue blood too, ran in the veins of the lady in whom were found too, ancient traditions of the Maharashtra land, round the city of Ujjain where the greatest Sanskrit poet, Kalidasa, was reputed to have lived. She was a blended Moghul, Rajput and Dekkanese, the heredity of each adding a certain finish to her natural good taste, ways and culture. An Artemis rather than an Aphrodite in type, she had the vivid brightness of a Portia and some womanly traits that brought to mind a Joan of Arc, a Hypateia or a Heloïse. Dante's Beatrice, Goethe's Margaret and Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloïse were other women who had some at least of those traits listed by Vyasa in the Gita - such as fame, prosperity, gift of wordy clarity of memory, will-power, intrepidity and meek patience - that go to give an absolute finish to the personality of womanhood anywhere. Although a brighter lamp can always have a deeper shadow below, it was the positive aspect alone that commanded my admiration in this case. With Rousseau's Madame de Warrens and Madame d'Epinay, admiration for this chosen lady attained almost to the point of adoration.

 

As Rousseau himself records in his Confessions, he often got up before daybreak from his bed, often in an outhouse meant for servants, and waited, drinking glasses of cold water and strolling up and down looking at flowers, before he could get a glimpse of the rich patron heiress who treated him as a queer scholar to be allowed only sometimes to dine at the table of his mistress when she wanted him to carry on sufficiently tolerable conversation, as she thought, when any élite guest visited her.

 

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Victor Hugo is reputed to have hidden a last love affair in his old age. Old men's love is thus not unknown to literature and exists even now in the world of sugar daddies in America.

 

I was no utter exception to this weakness, if it should be so adjudged. Idealising womanhood need not necessarily have any immoral implications, and since the derivation of ethics can originate in a closed static society or in an open dynamic world of spiritual values, there is as much to be proud of in this trait as perhaps what one should shun in the name of mere conventional respectability. My own attitude was sufficiently reflected in a sonnet that I composed in her honour. I have now lost track of it, but if it is ever found, it would correctly reflect my feelings.

 

I remember visiting her at Tiruvannamalai where Ramana Maharshi lived. Once, sitting together near and in front of the saint in the first row at breakfast, which consisted of idlies (steamed cakes of rice and gram flour) - a favourite with South Indians - with chutney and a cup of strong coffee, there seemed to be, at least to my eyes, an understanding gleam in the Maharishi's eyes as he seemed to scan us both in his usual silence.

 

I later took the brother of this lady on a tour as a guide or tutor, and pronounced benediction at the marriage of one of her sisters at Bombay, representing the bride's mother and grandmother, who could not be present. Many were the meetings at which she spoke in Hindi or English, with great fluency and interest, attracting the admiration of crowds as she recited extensively from the Upanishads or the Gita, and I joined her on the platforms as a speaker or presided.

 

Such events associated us on platforms in Tiruvannamalai town and to a limited public in Varkala too. I had hoped vaguely to collaborate with her in furthering the cause of Indian wisdom, but the woman in her at last proved stronger than any urge for being a spiritual speaker in public. She made up her mind to marry a young man of Kerala soon after and a chapter naturally closed for me in the matter of further adventures with any woman. Love without any room for jealousy can be compared to coffee without any caffeine, containing no element to shun or desire. I have as much regard for her now as at any time during this episode.

 

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THREE WEEKS OF 'ISOLATION'

Except for finding my name included as a member of an educational committee of the then Travancore State, which was duly deleted when they found out I was back in the Nilgiris, which involved their paying travelling expenses from Ooty to Trivandrum, no career opened its doors to me any more in the usual sense. I was again in the Nilgiris, grazing the cows myself and eking out a livelihood with what chance brought to me.

 

There was then a character, a down-and-out 'misérable', who used to frequent me, and who had a son who was a cowherd boy too, and thus a fellow professionalist with me. As was usual with me when expressing my sympathy with children in rags, I happened to hold this boy in affectionate embrace once, little knowing that he had just been discharged from the Isolation Hospital for smallpox. Eruptions appeared on my face four or five days later, with a high fever preceding. I was taken to the Ooty Isolation Hospital at the far end of the town, where I lay on a bed that commanded a view of a bend of the lakeside road leading to Kandal. For fully three weeks I was confined to the same view to the same bed, and I took full advantage of the quiet that the time gave me to retire within myself in introverted meditation. It was a bit of rare good luck, every moment of which I enjoyed fully.

 

VISIONS AT THE ONSET OF SMALLPOX

Some chemical changes in my blood at the onset of fever before the smallpox attack must have been responsible for some visions that I had at this period just before I was in hospital and still lay in the tin bunk which was my room from the beginning of my life at the Gurukula. From my window I could see a cluster of young blue-gum trees and, as my fevered brain's sight lighted on them, they became, as I watched more and more intently, a vision the like of which I had never experienced before. In childhood delirium once I imagined two bodies, one bright and one shadowy, trying to fight or swallow each other. This present vision, however, was different and - whether known to medical science or not - was a fully representative one whose eidetic force was great.

 

As I watched the cluster of trees intently, I could see emerging from the space where the blue-green leaves spread in the evening sunlight, a celestial group of gods and demigods posing, as it were, for a group photograph. Each had gloriously colourful raiment and their familiar weapons, such as bows, carried by each according to his specific grade or class of divinity.

 

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I have heard of such visions from others, especially couples of lovers in the voluptuous joy of communion. Comparing notes with such and similar reports, I have formed a theory that the composition of the blood on special occasions of exaltation or depression can project visions which become elaborated by the myth-making tendency found in each one of us. This is called 'viksepa sakti' (the eidetic power of projecting or superimposing on empty space representations that belong to instinctive levels, where apperception masses remain dormant till they get a chance to find expression through special emotional states not unconnected with changes in the blood plasma).

 

Life itself can be considered as a long-drawn-out dream representation of the same order, having its origin in a kind of jewel box within consciousness where apperception masses originate and put corresponding diamond-like stars in the blue or dark firmament. Such eidetic possibilities, thought of together and phenomenologically viewed, would explain the theory of Maya, which has been the subject of much speculation on the part of philosophers both for and against it.

 

I returned from the Isolation Hospital after having had many chances for such reveries and reflections. On the day I was discharged I had no proper clothes on my back. Carrying a bundle of disinfected things, I returned from hospital clinging to my walking stick on my shoulder and sneakingly took a back-door way to the Fernhill Gurukula. Broke again and at a blind alley as far as any fresh career; disappointed and totally rejected the N-th time in love; emaciated and unshorn, and in a bad state of deshabillé; I felt as miserable as a criminal like Jean Valjean searching for a roof over his head. I even looked furtively at respectable citizens passing me in cars, and imagined that they were looking at me as a contemptible man outside their respectable world. I seemed to be touching some sort of negative zero point of absolutism again.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

 

GENEVA ONCE MORE

The humdrum events of life sometimes attain tragic heights while at other times they fall flat into the world of commonplace banalities. From being a superman and falling low into the world of sensuous slavery there is a vertical amplitude within which life oscillates.

 

I CELEBRATE MY 50TH BIRTHDAY

With the sun rising on one side, while the full moon was setting in the West, I stood half-naked after a bath at four in the morning in a foaming stream near a cascade. From the top of the hill where I stood at this still small hour, I could see the silver-grey outlines of the cascade beginning to be lit up by the pink fingers of dawn. The mountaintops still lay partly in shade, like giant gods on a watery expanse that the morning mists lent semblance to. I had a favourite disciple who was with me that day, and I hardly suspected then that he would later make an attempt on my very life. I had slept in a hut with him preparing to celebrate my fiftieth birthday in a place ten or twelve miles away from the Gurukula.

 

We had walked there the previous afternoon while wild water buffaloes watched us as we wended through thickets of medicinal herbs on barren undulating ground. Gentians grew here in spring, which was not fully come, and the red clusters of rhododendrons contrasted with the deep green leaves on their antique stems as we observed in passing. I remember clearly all these details of the day previous to my birthday, on which I decided to make a new beginning in my life, though rather late, after touching the zero-point already indicated.

 

Life has many beginnings of higher ambitions and resolves in never-ending series. I might have been a Failure so far, with a capital letter, but such an absolute failure as a careerist had the potency of success with compound interest as, hoping against hope, I have always believed. The last shall be the first.

 

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The chain reaction of the splitting of the atom in the bomb explosion involves a geometric progression which, though in principle only a process, ends in a sudden event of negative significance to humanity. Contemplation leads up to a similar verticalized culmination, and every failure of this kind is to be counted a double negation that spells a success that fully succeeds, in itself, for itself and by itself. Efforts cancel out in its pure dynamic becoming. The 'unmoved mover' and the 'pure act', conspire here in the neutrality of the Absolute that is non-dual. As Narayana Guru says (Darsana Mala, VI. 6):

 

'Fire burns, the wind blows,

Rain showers, the earth supports,

Rivers flow, and ever the One

Remains alone and still.'

 

On my fiftieth birthday I was still a man of subdued and subjective interests. None of the various vocational caps that I had tried on fit me, and I left them and stood, as I have narrated already, on a hilltop to celebrate this half-century in my own original way, exposing my skin to those luminaries which represent the overt and the innate eyes of cosmic consciousness. Agony was being sublimated into a sense of utter abandon then. I made certain resolutions at that moment which may be said to mark the turning of the top half of a figure of eight that my life's unfoldment represented just at that moment. More ambitious programmes were coming ahead. The contemplative spirit, however, lives through these alternating phases in the balanced way indicated above.

 

FIVE BIRTHDAY RESOLUTIONS

To write a book about the Guru; to found a centre in the West for the teaching of Brahma Vidya; to lecture in the States on One Religion; to complete still further my education, both Eastern and Western; and to study the programmes of the United Nations and UNESCO so as to be able to form ideas about world unity - these were the main items of the five-point birthday resolution that I made for myself on my fiftieth birthday.

 

As an overall decision I re-dedicated myself to follow a more thoroughly absolutist way of life, renouncing more emphatically all relativistic affiliations. Although I had hitherto wilfully put a stop to careering in the usual sense, careers had seemed to come to me still, but from that day they finally fell off without clinging to me anymore.

 

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I DECIDE TO GO TO THE USA

At the time I made my birthday resolutions, I hardly knew how they were to come true. Steeped in poverty even to the point of not knowing how to live without starving for the next week, it was an impossible dream to think of going to the United States. But the Tao has its own way of turning impossibilities into possibilities. The switch for such happenings is on what is often referred to as the 'other side', the 'Para' (transcendental beyond). All that I could gather together if I wanted was about five hundred rupees from the sale of a bit of land that had come to me through partition of my mother's properties.

 

Meanwhile I was in touch with Dr. Henry A. Atkinson, of the Church Peace Union, New York, which was about to hold a World Conference of Religions in New York in 1948. I had made his friendship in Geneva in the year 1932 or so, when I participated as a Delegate and Member of the Central Committee of the World Conference for Peace through Religion under the auspices of the Carnegie Foundation. This valuable contact had persisted and I was invited to attend the World Conference at New York, as an indian delegate representing the universal teaching of brotherhood, the Guru Narayana's movement.

 

The letter from the World Conference for Peace through Religion reached me after I had taken the decision to go, and before I had found the money for the costly trip. The date of the Conference was coming close and I had difficulty in obtaining shipping accommodation to reach New York in time for the event. At the last moment I had to decide on an air passage, at least as far as Geneva, in order to be able to catch the boat called SS Washington, if I remember rightly, sailing from Cherbourg to New York. More than a couple of thousand rupees had to come to me, which I did not actually have when I wrote to the shipping agents in Bombay, Thomas Cook and Sons, to fix a passage quickly by air or surface route, whichever was most easily available.

 

A FAIRY GOD-MOTHER COMES INTO THE PICTURE AGAIN

If the fairy godmother previously referred to was from an unknown clime and a far-off shore, it was a lady who could claim blood relationship with me who came into the highly improbable situation in which I found myself in early 1948.

 

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The travel agents had asked for a deposit in advance to negotiate my passage, which was difficult to arrange still in those post-war conditions. I did not really know where the two thousand rupees were to come from. But, strange to say, just at that time the wife of the poet Kumaran Asan happened to visit the Ooty Gurukula, and readily promised to advance the amount needed without any difficulty. Years later she even waived her claims and what was meant to be a loan was made into an outright gift.

 

The motives for such generosity cannot be easily analysed, especially because this lady was related, on my father's side, to me. Other blood-relations, even the most near, had disadopted me for my abrupt and absolutist ways, but there was some absolutist factor which the Tao itself seems mysteriously to employ in my favour. My intimacy with the late poet who, like Shelley, suffered the nemesis of a watery grave somewhat prematurely in the most promising period of his life as a poet, must have also had at least something to do with the throw of chance in my favour. All thus went well and I remitted my passage to Bombay in time without any hitch.

 

When I think of how naturally all this happened without my having to press any button anywhere, and especially as I was not in touch with any relations for many years, I cannot, even as a confirmed sceptic, but feel that there are many happenings hereunder not spoken of in the work-a-day philosophies of individuals, but which still do happen by the invisible hand of chance rather than by cut-and-dried causes and effects in the more evident and usual manner. The world is a mixture of vertical and horizontal elements.

 

A FRIEND AND DISCIPLE FROM BOSWELL'S LAND

 

Nataraja Guru with John Spiers and Nitya.

 

John Spiers, who had by this time lost the mother who had adopted him and finished with his odd offices which he had held during or after the war, arrived at the Gurukula at Fernhill soon after. I still lived in the original tin bunk with papered walls which was put up in the eucalyptus grove in 1934. Now it was nearing 1948. John and his adopted Indian boy, Sandy, about fourteen years old, and two others of his age, were put in the new building and in the cottage that was the second to come up on the Gurukula's grounds as years went by.

 

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A cook with his wife and child who had worked with John came too and fitted into the life of the Gurukula for some time, sharing the partitioned kitchen of the time.

 

Intimates thus increased, and with Soman, Shivan, Balan, Vijayan and Raman coming in too, soon after, bread-winning for the increased family became more and more difficult. John was always known for his open generosity, a natural corollary of absolutism, and had known enough hardships and changes in his own life that adaptability to even the worst of circumstances was nothing to him.

 

Begging and borrowing which touched the lowest level; even stealing by the half-starved boys in dire need; became a boast or a joke sometimes overlooked, condoned or reprimanded. Necessity, which knows no law, was the mother of invention or resourcefulness, and all morality was capable of some accommodation and adjustment within the limits of permissible error. Honesty seemed a luxury meant for the respectable high-class 'haves' for whom such morality was advantageous rather than for the down and out 'have-nots' to whom it was often a high luxury. Moral standards sometimes have to be thrown into the crucible to melt and be made into new models. Absolute morality thus remains ever an ideal only to be approximately attained hereunder. Respectability tended to be thrown to the winds as morality alternated between its relative and absolute limits. Cowardly consciences tend to be unstable; while even with most honest men some gentle alternations exist.

 

How we again faced the situation is not clearly to be recollected at this distance of time; but that we did survive, with pawning or selling of some precious or semi-precious presents or heirlooms, for which we explored the bottoms of trunks each week to pay the grocer's bill, is a story I cannot tell in detail. We can promise only that we did not commit highway robbery, but within certain tolerable moral limits, we survived against some of the hardest days. Stewed vegetables and potatoes substituted for regular rice and curry, and some time after I even heard that the boys subsisted for a week on some pounds of dates alone which someone had gifted to John. This was when I was away in the States. But an important episode took place before I went.

 

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THE SISTER MARGARET EPISODE

It was during these low-grade conditions of life that an episode developed in which a lady, past seventy, who had been a nurse on ships, called Miss C, living a retired life at the border of the lake at the end of the town all by herself, was reported to have fallen unconscious one day as she returned after marketing. This lady was a friend of John and had expressed her desire to spend her last days as an inmate of the Gurukula, calling herself Sister Margaret. The idea of letting her live as an inmate of the Gurukula was in the air and when I thought over the matter I saw no harm. Instead of spinsters and widows having to suffer loneliness, as I have seen in Europe, confined to garrets in big towns from which they emerge only very occasionally on special invitation to mingle with other fellow beings, I thought the ennui of such neglected people could be countered by collective life in colonies meant for common welfare.

 

THE KIBBUTZ OF PALESTINE AFFORDED A MODEL.

As reveries such plans were tantalising, but when put in terms of actual living together there were snags, pitfalls and hidden traps into which one can unconsciously fall or get caught in spite of all good intentions. Soon after Sister Margaret had sold her cottage at the edge of the lake and come with her belongings to the Gurukula, she began to show signs of abnormality and complained that her food was being poisoned. This tendency, lurking behind a decent outside conversation and behaviour, became more and more pronounced till she created a scene in which John was criminally implicated in ill-treating her. Although a police van came to help the lady, through conspiracy with the villagers, John stood absolved from blame. Frustrated attention must have been the psychological cause on the part of a spinster who lacked the intimacy of friendship all her life. When I was preparing to go to America she was still a misfit in the Gurukula, and after I went the plot was hatched. Happily, however, the clumsy episode closed by her quitting the Gurukula of her own will with all her belongings for a Home for Friends in Need started by Lady Wellingdon in the British days.

 

The episode meant much irritation for John, who wanted to be her generous friend. Instead the annoyance that resulted was not tolerable. The problem thus solved itself and I again burnt my fingers trying to be kind at the wrong time, to wrong persons, in wrong circumstances. This chapter is now all but forgotten, and except for the lesson it taught me, it is better so. I have never again thought of admitting any woman into the Gurukula without being twice shy in the matter.

 

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I TAKE OFF FOR EUROPE EN ROUTE TO THE STATES

Such humdrum details of life deserve to be forgotten quickly. Life however has other moments which are more interesting and worthy of being treasured in memory. My first flight, from Bombay to Geneva in a TWA Constellation was an experience in itself. Starting at ten in the morning, we flew alternately over the sea and desert lands with sparse vegetation when we came to the tropical belt of the earth. Flying below the clouds most of the time there was more to see on the way than in more modernised international flights in jet planes that get lost above the clouds. At best you can enjoy the lunches served and the pretty air hostesses who sometimes smile with gilded angelic smiles while they flit up and down corridors or gangways.

 

After several hours of flight over thickets of undergrowth and desert sands bordering on oceans whose billows, tier on tier, looked like ripples in a tea cup, we landed at dusk at an airport near some oil wells in Saudi Arabia. Black and turbaned Arabian cooks served a meal of baked beans in tomato sauce, which was perhaps the standard meal approved by the TWA company, and notables rubbed shoulders in the canteen for about half an hour before the plane took off again after the usual bells and signals, which drill all went through religiously in the interests of their own safety.

 

Asaf Ali was returning from New York just then, alighting from a plane bound in the opposite direction, and was seen at the same dining room. A young Parsi lady going to see her relations in the Geneva Embassy and a Tamil woman alighting at the Saudi Arabian port to join her missionary husband were the persons I talked to. The former young lady seemed to be somewhat in distress, travelling alone and feeling anxious about finding her friends when she reached Geneva. I had to be chivalrous and allay her anxieties, which was not an altogether unnatural role for me to fulfil as a sort of gallant, though remaining a tyagi (renouncer). I remember other pretty ladies in distress to whom I have felt parental concern or have been a knight-errant. These are natural dialectical counterparts which can belong together happily even as birds of passage as fellow passengers in a plane. That friendships thus made are often of the least lasting nature only adds to the free and easy content of human fellowship.

 

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THE LIGHTS OF CAIRO ARE SEEN LATE AT NIGHT

 

Cairo.

 

Near midnight the denizens of terra firma must have been disturbed in their slumbers when our plane circled over Cairo, following light and sound signals from the ground to correctly guide its eagle wings onto the runway. A logarithmic spiral with a golden number implicit in its proportion, supported by the notion of a time-space continuum of a summation of differential and integral elements, must have been respected by the mathematically-minded soul of the pilot, whose sense of a graceful landing without bumps must have been wedded to the delight of correct mathematical calculations of split-second precision in the instruments that he controlled or responded to alternately from ground or sky.

 

The magic city lay as an illuminated carpet below with blinking lights of different colours here and there. Cairo was a state of mind as well as a starlit world of Aladdin's lamps. Sitting cosily within the plane without disembarking, and obeying the red and green lights or their flashed signals, even this magic city was soon left behind and we were heading drowsily for Rome. The passports were collected and handed back at each place that we touched or passed through, with queer marks seen on some pages which were not unlike the hieroglyphics of the world of mummies and sphinxes. Taking some aristocratic Italian Signora with her bambino on board at Cairo, the dawn took us to Rome. Lack of lira currency and exchange facilities kept me from taking a café-au-lait at the airport.

 

Rome's azure sky and ruins with memories of a thousand years passed through my mind, wherein wars were waged for the expansion of the Empire now fallen into the disrepute of more prosaic days. Tiberius Graccus and his son stood out with Caesar and Brutus in my reveries as they went as far as the cradles of Christianity in Crete and about Syracuse. The night flight was full of rich dream-content and when the day had dawned we were passing over the countryside of Naples and Florence, and I peeped through the porthole to locate Capri and Anacapri.

 

At about nine we were nearing Switzerland and could see the characteristic greenery that contrasted with the dry and dusty Egyptian areas. Steeper-gabled, red-roofed dwelling places and farmyards brought into the picture the touch of Europe. The summer blue in the sky was like a sigh of relief for the European who had survived many days of winter.

 

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The housewives beating their carpets or shaking their sheets from balcony windows gazed with joy at the bright sky while more sunbaked lands praised instead the shade of trees. Like gnomes and angels or like the Kinnaras and Gandharvas of Indian lore, the human spirit is happy at different levels of light or darkness, above or below the clouds, and hastens from one level to another to seek favourable environments. These quasi-celestial personifications only represent the cravings of the human soul for differing degrees of happiness available to man, released mentally from earthy bounds. Robin Hood's fellows and fairies exist in this sense, and fit into the value worlds proper to each, whether called hobgoblins or gnomes.

 

LANDING IN GENEVA AGAIN FROM THE AIR

The chalets and villas, with farm houses interspersed, bordering on blue lakes and vineyards, when the light greenery that covered the spring buds was turning darker with all thickets and bushes overladen with flowers galore, turning to fruit or seed in the glut of the summer season with its own riot of colour, with red poppies and blue cornflowers showing through tall grass yet to be mowed, from where straw-hatted girls in summer clothes fondly gathered and bundled them up - such was the scene through which the luxury bus, with glass top and sides, took us to the centre of the city on landing from the airport several kilometres away.

 

It felt like a second homecoming to me on reaching this city associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the seat of internationalism through decades and centuries. The placid blue lake and the high jet of water near the principal bridge joining the two parts of the town nestling amidst the Jura Alps were filled with some strange consoling associations in my mind.

 

The colourful spectacles with which I had looked at the same scenes twenty years before in 1928 were changed into more mellow, almost achromatic tones when I viewed the same scene again in 1948. The eidetic content of values change from one pole to the other within the phenomenological frame of reference within which even empirical life, not yet fully contemplative, has to move. Mellowed by maturer years, Geneva was still interesting to me as a place where I could surprise old friends with an unexpected visit, which in itself was a joy like that of hide-and-seek of which children cannot ever miss the joke.

 

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An element of this play lingers on even in more advanced years. To mention only one instance, I met by chance a young woman in her late teens who told me that her mother was Russian and that she was going to college in Geneva, while her father was a Doctor in Calcutta. Memory linked me up with a Bengali medical student by the name of Sircar whom I used to see taking walks in Geneva with a Russian girl in 1928, and the rest of the story of the girl student needed no explanation on her part. Nature had not missed to do her work and that was all. It was just a matter of putting two and two together to know almost all about the young lady.