Spirituality is a False Path

"I'm not religious but I am spiritual". This has been a popular way to present your authentic spiritual credentials for some time. It is supposed to say I am a sensitive, caring person in touch with the deeper aspects of life and able to expand my consciousness beyond the limitations of a materialistic worldview, but I am not restricted by dogma or authority.

Well, that's fine as far as it goes, but there are problems. It is true that all religions are, to a greater or lesser extent, moribund now. They have run their course, and we have entered into a new phase of human evolutionary development. But it is also true that you can only go beyond something when you have fully absorbed it, and most spiritual but not religious people have not absorbed the lessons of religion. What they are really saying is, I want the benefits of religion but I am not prepared to pay the price. I want the rewards without making the sacrifice. I want the elevation without first going through the abasement.

Far too many spiritual but not religious people think of spirituality in terms of their feelings. But spirituality has nothing to do with your feelings. It has to do with feeling but not your feelings because it is not to do with feeding your soul but getting your soul right with God with no expectation of reward, no selfish motive. Only those who turn to God for love of God rather than the hope to get something in the exchange will find what they are looking for. The rest will follow paths lit with false light to the land of illusion. Religion is there to protect these foolish wanderers from going astray. By eschewing its firm guidance many souls will fall into spiritual darkness, even if to begin with this darkness has a glow to it.

When you die all that matters is the orientation of your will. Whether it be towards God or towards self. Your spirituality counts for nothing since spiritual beliefs can be just as ego-centred as materialistic ones if they are directed towards the satisfaction of the ego. Religion may be limiting in many ways to the developing soul, but just as the embryo needs the protective shell of the egg in which to grow safely so the soul needs the structure of religion. Eventually the soul must, as it were, hatch and go beyond this structure but only when it has developed to the point at which it can safely do so, and the safety here refers to threats to its integrity both internal coming from the ego and external coming from the dark powers, the blacks as they have been called, those forces which stand ever ready to lead souls astray, always preying on their weakest points.

If spirituality means unstructured chasing after feeling satisfaction, it is a tool of the blacks. If it means dedication to God and to serving his will then it has learnt the lessons of religion and the individual can proceed with confidence. But so often these days to be spiritual but not religious simply means to be a taker not a giver. Many people over-estimate their position on the spiritual path, imagining they are closer to the goal than they are. If you reject religion and think you can do better on your own or by following one of the many replacements for/imitations of religion that have sprung up over the last 100 years, you had better make sure your motivation is right. If it's not, you are liable to fall into darkness and illusion.

Islam in the West

History tells us that Islam cannot co-exist with Christianity or anything else for that matter. It must either dominate or it must work towards dominating. This has been forgotten by most secular governments in the West over the last few decades but it is becoming a matter of increasing significance so I reproduce here what was going to be a chapter in my forthcoming book A Survival Guide to the End Times. I cut it out due to its peripheral relevance to the theme of the book but it is hardly irrelevant in terms of where we are today in the Western world. Some of it has already featured here in previous posts but here it is all in one place.

I was flipping through The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis recently, a book I first read many years ago and had forgotten about. It's a short work, based on lectures he gave in 1943 and is not overtly religious in theme even though it is in essence. What it does is defend universal spiritual values against the contemporary assault on them, specifically in the field of education, which denied that moral and aesthetic values were grounded in something objective. It was the beginning of the moral relativism, now so firmly established, which dismisses the idea that there are universal truths which are rooted in an absolute reality. 

Lewis argues for what he calls in this book the Tao which for him is something like Ma'at in ancient Egypt or just objective reality, the foundation truth of the universe and of being in general. The Tao is not provable by materialistic, rational, intellectual, logical or scientific means because it derives from a ground much deeper than can be accessed by these on their own. It is recognised, known, accepted, seen (or not by the spiritually blind), but it is not verifiable by empirical evidence as that phrase is normally understood. It should be self-evident but cannot be proved by any of the ways materialists demand proof. 

At the end of these lectures Lewis provides a compendium of sayings illustrative of Natural Law drawn from many different sources and traditions ranging from Egyptian, Roman, Greek and Chinese to Christian, Hindu and Jewish to Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Babylonian, Native American and even Australian Aborigine. But there is nothing from Islam.

This might seem a strange oversight, but it reminded me of the time I first became interested in spiritual matters and studied scriptures from all the main traditions. I knew the Bible reasonably well but reread the Gospels in the light of my new-found interests and beliefs. I read Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, Plato, the classics of Taoism and Zen and some collections of wise words like Lewis's compendium. All these spoke of mystical understanding, perhaps in different ways and on different levels and some more than others but they all had an insight into higher reality. Then I read the Qur’an expecting to find more of the same. 

What a disappointment. There was nothing here that approached the profundity of other scriptures. It barely reached the level of Old Testament spiritual understanding, never mind the New Testament. It was clear that the compiler of this text, which seemed rather like a New Age type channelling, albeit in the context of its time and place, was nowhere near the spiritual level of the founders of other religions.

Now, maybe these teachings were a step forward for the people of that time and place but they have little to say to us today unlike other scriptures which can transcend time and place and still speak to us across the centuries. It is often said that the three monotheistic religions worship the same God. However, they approach him in such different ways that this is hard to maintain in any seriousness. For the Christian, God is a loving Father, but the God depicted in this holy book demands total allegiance as a despot does from a slave. He may be a benign despot if you obey him, but he leaves no room for you as a free individual.

I'm not disputing there have been many pious worshippers of God in this religion but there are also encouragements to violence and, though these are often glossed over and excused by believers, they are plainly there in the source texts and recorded sayings of its founder who was a war leader as much as he was a prophet. Not all Muslims are active extremists, of course, but the extremism in Islam is fundamental to it. It is not a distortion of it but an integral part. The West used to know that, and from hard-won experience.

If the modernist ethos of relativism, as described by C.S. Lewis, is one way of abolishing man so too is an absolutist religion which gives all power to the deity and leaves no freedom for the individual human soul. It must obey. It must submit. It's in the name, after all. But God does not want obedience. He wants love.

If Islam were just a religion, it would still be a simplification of more profound teachings but it would not be a problem for those outside the circle of the faithful. However, it is not just a religion. It aims to encompass every aspect of life leaving nothing to the individual human being whose only task is to submit. As a result, there is no separation between religion and politics. There is not a religious version of this religion and a political one. These are two aspects of the same thing. Christ said, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's", drawing a clear distinction between the spiritual and temporal aspects of life, but for the Muslim God is Caesar and the effect of that is to reduce the human to nothing, stripping him of proper agency, creative potential and freedom.

Islam must dominate every single aspect of the life of its believers, not just the spiritual but the political and social too. It even forbids certain forms of artistic expression which you might think a good idea seeing where complete freedom in that regard has got us to in the West over the last century, but the result in this case has been spiritually crippling not ennobling. To be sure, Islam has produced some beautiful architecture and design and poetry, but these are often in spite of it not inspired by it. The fact that it is forbidden to show the human form is very revealing. It demonstrates that humanity is effectively banned. For the Christian, God is revealed in the human form but in Islam he remains totally transcendent and cannot be approached except in a servile way.

The Muslim faithful are under instruction to convert everyone to their cause and not to rest until they have done so. Islam is not willing to share power and will accommodate itself to its perceived rivals in the short term only for long term advantage. That has been demonstrated historically repeatedly. Muslims are even authorised to lie and deceive to this end if that is to the unbeliever. That is regarded as a virtuous act and history shows that they will go along with their hosts when in a minority only to enforce their will when their numbers are sufficient. It is naive to ignore this reality and yet that is just what the West has been doing.

What is the solution to this problem, since problem it is and one that will get worse? From the point of view of the West, it is to recognise the reality of the situation. These believers believe in their religion, and they will obey its diktats so we should know what these are. For the believers themselves the way forward is through religious reform. Their focus on prayer is commendable but they must abandon those aspects of their religion that may have been appropriate 1300 years ago but are not now. Actually, they weren’t then either. If you have any understanding of the way God works you will know that his aim is to bring us up, not to crystallise us in ways of the past but to spiritualise our understanding. Therefore, these believers need to pay attention to the mystical path of their religion, to Sufism, for God has sent them this to remedy foundational mistakes. The letter kills but the spirit gives life. This is the primary lesson the followers of Islam need to learn.

If the modern world demonstrates the tragic results of banishing God from the world and giving supreme power and authority to man, then Islam has the opposite problem. That may tempt some people to see it as a solution to the problems of modernity. In fact, as opposites reflect each other, it is equally flawed, just in a different way. The only real solution is to see God and man as partners working together creatively though God, of course, remains God. And where do we see this brought to perfection? In Christ, God made man.

Some people would say that any religion is better than none. Any acknowledgement of God is better than rejecting him. I would say, it depends. For one thing it depends on what sort of God you follow. What are his demands and expectations, how does he frame the good? There are many excellent practices in Islam such as faith in God, prayer, almsgiving, fasting, pilgrimage, the 5 pillars. These are undoubtedly beneficial to the soul, turning it away from worldly preoccupation and towards the spiritual world. But in the form in which they are presented and followed they are good for souls who need strict external guidance. They become restrictive for souls who are beginning to take spiritual responsibility for themselves. Sufism was provided for such souls but it never really established itself other than on the peripheries of the Muslim world, and was often condemned by the mainstream as heretical, the strong influence of Vedanta being too much to accept.

If Islam is to become a positive force in the world it must change. It remains too intellectually and morally one-dimensional and can only function as a rigid system for people who have not yet separated from the herd. Then it must renounce its political and territorial ambitions and its religious exclusivism. Like Marxism, it is a totalitarian ideology that demands complete control and absolute authority. It has sought to propagate itself through violence but must abandon that aspect of its supposed mission and stick to the 5 pillars. But even these 5 pillars must be seen in a different light, as signposts to inner understanding rather than rules and regulations to be followed without thought. In religion there is an outer path and an inner path. Islam has always given the outer path even more importance than most other religions, and goodness knows this is a fault common to them all.

Islam was born in warfare and spread through the sword. This aspect of its heritage must be renounced if it is to serve the will of God which will be difficult because it will mean a radical reinterpretation of its core beliefs and an acceptance that its prophet was not the perfect image of a man they say he was. Jesus may have said he did not come to bring peace but a sword but quite obviously he meant by this the sword of truth which separates truth from lies, good from evil, love from hate. He also said those who live by the sword, die by the sword. Unfortunately, it is the second usage that Islam has followed.

In the days when I studied the various mystical traditions, I found Sufism one of the most interesting, full of insight and including many souls of great spiritual authority. Sufism contains the inner principles behind Islam and interprets the simplistic injunctions of the Qur’an on a genuinely spiritual level. Muslims who wish to be closer to the guiding impulse behind their faith should explore Sufi teachings more deeply. They should also know that Islam is not and never was intended for the West. Those who try to enforce it on Western countries are not doing the will of God but going directly against it. The principles of Islam are opposed to those of the West which are to do with freedom and individuality. Freedom and individuality in God, but freedom and individuality all the same. Islam denies both. It certainly cannot save the West.

I was recently asked why Christianity is better than Islam by a young man, some of whose friends had decided that if they were going to follow a religion then Islam seemed a more attractive proposition than Christianity as it had a greater sense of where it stood on issues and didn't prevaricate or sentimentalise which Christianity in its official forms now does. On the face of it, it's hard to disagree with this view. Islam is firm in its beliefs and doesn't seek to accommodate itself to the secular world which modern Christianity often does as its leaders try to justify their existence by pandering to social changes. Also, Islam has not become feminised which Christianity along with the whole Western world has, and this appeals to younger men who see in feminism a civilisation destroying influence.

However, whilst it is true that many Christian churches have succumbed to the world and replaced the spiritual with the anodyne charms of secular humanism, Islam never had much connection with the spiritual to begin with. It has a view of God based on primitive conceptions of the deity and is unable to open itself up to higher dimensions of being. Its virtue that it doesn't change is also a major weakness. It is stuck in the past, unable to evolve as consciousness does. This inflexibility might be regarded as a positive, but the rights and wrongs of inflexibility depend on what refuses to change. Islam may have been a corrective for polytheistic pagans in a 7th century of warring tribes but it has nothing to say to a 21st century consciousness.

But the best answer to this question is to rephrase it and ask why is Christ better than Muhammad? And even a casual look at the lives of these two teachers shows the gulf between them in terms of spiritual understanding. They both spoke of the one God but for Jesus he was a loving father while for Muhammad he was more like an over-promoted tribal deity who demanded absolute allegiance, and so, while Christianity is based on love, Islam is based on law. Further, as we have already pointed out, Christianity is grounded in freedom whereas Islam demands obedience. This is illustrated in the postures for prayer of the two religions. A Christian kneels in humility but his back is straight. The full prostration of a Muslim in prayer also shows humility but it is more that of a slave before its master than a free individual.

I have not even spoken of the fact that Jesus was the Son of God who healed the spiritual damage caused by the Fall while Muhammad, even in the eyes of his own followers, was no more than a prophet, and one who just mixed and matched from Jewish and Christian sources. He brought nothing new whereas Jesus showed us the way to become sons of God ourselves - see John 14:12 "Whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these." At best, Muhammad was a messenger while Jesus was a window into heaven. In fact, not just a window. He was and is a doorway.

Mentioning heaven brings us to another critical difference. Is the Muslim paradise the same as the Christian heaven? Hardly, since one is the perfection of earthly existence while the other is the total transformation of being. When you understand that the next world has many planes of existence you see that the paradise of Islam is what is known as the wish fulfilment plane where all your desires are fulfilled but only to the extent that allows for the exteriorisation of your earthly wishes without the impediment of matter. Your mind can create palaces and gardens insofar as you conceive of such things, but this is still no more than this world brought to what you think of as an ideal state. You remain limited by the narrowness of your own vision whereas in the true heaven of Christ you are freed from the boundaries of your circumscribed self. The Islamic paradise gives the lower self what it wants but Heaven is entry into the glorified existence of higher being. Doubtless many nominal Christians will go to a place that is a Christian version of paradise on the astral plane, as the psychic world is also known, but that is due to their deficiencies not those of their religion. The fact is Jesus and Muhammed promised their followers completely different destinations. They spoke from completely different spiritual perspectives.

Soul Loss

 The well-known Alice Bailey books are a development of Theosophy though with greater emphasis on Christ than Blavatskian Theosophy, even if he is still not the Christ that Christians know but a kind of grand hierarch. But then, since the assumed source of these books is Buddhist, that might be expected. Also, we must remember that Theosophists were often reacting against the 19th century version of Christ, a time when he was well on his way to his conversion to humanitarianism and starting to lose his purely spiritual qualities. So, when they downgraded Christ that may have been part of an attempt not to be bound by the developing materialism of Victorian Christianity.

That admittedly large failing aside, by most other criteria these books are impressive. Their sheer volume for one. Then their wisdom. Yes, I do think there is much spiritual wisdom in them though that doesn't mean I agree with all that is there. I also think they come from a reputable spiritual source though I would guess that there is a fair amount of Alice Bailey and her own ideas in there too. Maybe she was impressed on a non-verbal level and clothed the ideas in her own words. Or something along those lines. But there is a happy medium between complete acceptance of these writings on their own terms and total rejection. I accept what makes sense, and a lot does, reserve judgement on what seems to me to be doubtful, and reject what I think is wrong. I haven't looked at the books for a long time, and I'm not sure I've ever read one all the way through, certainly not A Treatise on Cosmic Fire. But using the index to pick and choose was a helpful way to approach them for me, and the compilations that condense the several thousand pages to manageable proportions are also useful.

I bring this up because in a recent comment on Bruce Charlton's blog in response to a post on AI I wrote that "the real basis behind all these developments (in AI and computer technology in general) is spiritual destruction, going beyond mere atheism up to and including the destruction of the spiritual component of our being which I believe is possible when we reach the point that we totally deny all that spirit is."

My point was that for a long time many developments in technology and thought have supported the denial of the soul, the aforementioned spiritual component of our being. AI is the latest and most serious. Every time we get on board with one of these developments, all the way from simply not rejecting it to accepting it gladly as a real advance, we play into the hands of the forces of spiritual destruction. To a certain extent, it doesn't matter if we think we don't believe in God as long as we act, both mentally and in day to day life, as though there was some kind of spiritual reality to our being. For example, we might revere beauty or believe in free will. These are something though probably not enough. But they are something. But every step we take away from the soul, and embracing AI is a giant step in that direction, the more we lose contact with what it stands for, and the more we do that, the closer we are to severing our connection to it completely. To losing our soul.

After I wrote my comment I was reminded of something in the Alice Bailey books so I looked it up. Here's what she says. It actually comes from A Treatise on Cosmic Fire though I took it from The Soul, the Quality of Life which is one of the compilations I spoke of above. I've edited it slightly.

"If man neglects his spiritual development and concentrates on intellectual effort turned to the manipulation of matter for selfish ends, and if this is carried on for a long period, he may bring upon himself a destruction that is final for this cycle. He may succeed in the complete destruction of the physical permanent atom and sever his connection with the higher self for aeons of time. We must emphasise the reality of this dire disaster."

This warning comes in the context of discussing occult work and saying it must be undertaken in the light of spirit and guided by love and unselfishness. Consequently, it might be considered irrelevant in terms of the current scenario. But I would maintain that computer technology is a form of magic, and its development is motivated by the same ungodly impulses that motivated the black magician. Any attempt to bend matter to our will that is not guided by spirit is illicit. By the same token, any behaviour that denies the soul is selfish which may be an unusual definition but is true on a deeper level than the normal one. From a spiritual perspective, selfishness is acting according to the earthly self - even if the earthly self considers itself to be spiritually motivated, a common phenomenon. That aside, the more we deny spirit, and AI is the denial of spirit almost by definition, the more we cut ourselves off from it, and there may come a time when certain people who go all the way into this dark place cut themselves off entirely. The tragedy of the modern world is that the whole culture is sending us in that direction.

Thoughts on the New Pope

 It's understandable that Catholics are happy they have a new pope. A page has been turned and there is naturally a feeling of optimism for the future. Not being a Catholic, I have a slightly different perspective. It may be that the pope makes a difference to rank and file religious Catholics, but from the deeper spiritual perspective the pope is irrelevant. I know nothing about the new incumbent but while a good pope is better than a bad pope (though different people will define good and bad differently in this context), the pope is merely the representative of an outer institution. That institution may carry some spiritual force derived from the inner worlds, but in and of itself it is an outer thing which means it is of the world. This is even more the case in our day when all outer forms have less contact with spirit than has ever been the case - and that includes all religious institutions and organisations.

The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit. No doubt this can be interpreted in various ways, and clever theologians will bend it to say what they want it to, but its essential meaning is obvious. Spirit cannot be put in a bottle, any bottle. Some bottles are beautiful and some are cunningly fashioned but even those that hold refreshing liquid cannot hold more than a limited amount, and people who wish to drink deeply from the well of life must go elsewhere. The great problem in being a Catholic is that you have to be a Catholic. That is to say, your Catholicism must take spiritual precedence over your own connection to God. But God created you. He did not create the Church. Even if you believe Matthew 16:18 as interpreted, God is certainly in you more deeply than he is in the Church. For the ordinary man or woman it may be enough, but for those who wish to know the mysteries of existence more fully there is a point at which adherence to an outer structure becomes spiritually limiting.

I'm writing this for those who already, in some part, agree with its premise. I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything they don't believe, and any faithful Catholics who come across this piece will reject it out of hand which is fine. But for those who have doubts, I would say use the church as support if you wish but seek the deepest truth within yourself. You are made in God's image. The church is not. It may be able to guide those who cannot yet find the spirit within themselves, but it is not the living image of God as you truly are.

The time has come when God will only be found by those who are willing to break barriers and cross frontiers. I do not mean this in a rule-breaking or antinomian sense, but in the sense of going beyond the everyday. It is the pioneers exploring new land who will find God not those who remain in known territory. This is not an excuse for individualism or anything that goes against nature. What was unlawful remains unlawful. However, new wine cannot go into old wineskins, and the Catholic Church, like all churches, is an old wineskin. You don't have to reject it because the truth that was in it remains in it, and transcending something means seeing it in a new light, from above, not necessarily rejecting it completely. But you do have to expand beyond it.

This can be a dangerous doctrine because not everybody is ready to strike out into the spiritual wilds. However, the rewards if you are and if you can do so with humility and wisdom are commensurate with the risk. It may be the new pope can reorient the Catholic church to its traditional self, though I personally doubt it. In any case, in our day, that is no longer enough.

Mysore and Secunderabad

When we realised that we would not be able to buy a property in India we had to reassess our situation. While living at the Shilton Hotel we had become friendly with several fellow long-term residents. One was a German called Max who worked at the Goethe Institute in Bangalore. He had an Indian wife who took a great shine to Michael and he called her for some reason known only to himself, because it certainly wasn't her name, Petunia. Here they are together in the grounds of the hotel.

Another acquaintance was also given a soubriquet by Michael though this one had some kind of rationale to it. This gentleman was the ex-Iranian ambassador to Switzerland who had gone into exile after the Iranian revolution when the Shah was deposed a couple of years previously. It must have been quite a comedown, from being an ambassador to living in a middle ranking hotel in India, but he seemed to take it all philosophically. He had lost his wife, and his daughter was still in Iran so he was by himself. His daughter did come out to see him while we were there and she was a totally Westernised woman in terms of education and dress, but now she had to cover her head when in her own country. Unlike her father who seemed to accept the situation in his homeland, she had a decidedly fiery attitude to the new regime. When asked what she thought about it she drew her finger across her throat and said "I want to kill them!". One forgets how Westernised Iran was under the Shah, though maybe it was only the case for the educated elite.

I don't remember the ambassador's real name but it was something like Monsieur Mogadon. I give him that title because his French was better than his English so we spoke to him mostly in French, a language in which Michael was fluent, having lived there for a while in his childhood, and I was reasonably competent, having done it to A level standard. Michael called him Moggie which delighted him and they used to play cards together in the evening. Here is a photo of Michael, Moggie and Max in Whitefield with a flame of the forest tree in the background. 

Inspired by Michael, Moggie had also bought himself a solar topi.

Here's a photo of Moggie and me in the same place.

We were in Whitefield because after we found out we couldn't buy the bungalow we decided to move there anyway. We rented a small house with a little garden for 6 months, and some of our Bangalore friends would occasionally come by to visit. However, we still needed to find a more permanent solution and an Indian friend suggested that Michael apply to the Maharajah of Mysore, a friend of whose grandfather he had once known, for a job of some kind. Over 40 years later this seems a strange thing to have considered, given our original purpose in going to India, but Michael wrote to the Maharajah anyway and he replied quite quickly suggesting an interview. So, off we went to Mysore.

In fact, we had visited Mysore on a day trip earlier as it's not far from Bangalore and is one of the more interesting cities in Karnataka state. It's famous for its palace which is a mixture of the magnificent and the kitsch. Designed by an Englishman in the early 20th century in the Indo-Saracenic style for the grandfather of the current (in 1980) Maharajah, it combines European and Indian influences for a result that is undeniably impressive but veers towards Disneyland on occasion. More to my taste were the 1,000 year old Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple in nearby Srirangapatna and the 18th century summer palace of Tipu Sultan.

We arrived at the palace for the interview with the Maharajah and were inevitably kept waiting for an hour or so. This was only to be expected as the hierarchy must be enforced, but eventually a servant arrived to tell us that His Highness would see us now. This caused Michael to crack a smile and he told me as we progressed through dark passages to meet the Maharaja that his father, who was a large man, had been affectionally known as His Heaviness. When we got to the royal chamber we could see that the family propensity for a generous girth had passed from father to son. The Maharajah was seated on a throne raised on a platform with his petite wife sitting at a lower level, more or less at his feet. Here's a picture of the two of them at their wedding about 4 years previous to our meeting.

He motioned to us to be seated on a bench about 15 feet away from him and asked if we would like some refreshment. We thanked him at which a servant brought us some coffee in one of the metal cups often used in South India. Then we saw why the Maharaja might have got to be the size he was. He was given four cups of coffee and a whole chicken. Rather than drink the coffee, he just poured it down his throat, one cup after another. Then he ate the chicken with his fingers during which time we sat silently. When he had finished he asked Michael a bit about himself. Michael talked about his previous time in India as ADC to the Governor of the Punjab and the Viceroy, and the Maharaja nodded politely but there was no mention of any job. His wife didn't speak during the interview but sat silently staring ahead the whole time. I was asked my name but not much more. After about 20 minutes the Maharaja indicated that the interview was over. We got up, thanked him and were escorted from the palace. We never heard anything more. It was all rather strange.

Michael's second attempt to get some kind of job was almost as odd as the first. Someone told him that the club at Secunderabad was looking for a new secretary. Clubs in India were an inheritance from British days when people would get together after a day's work to socialise and drink. The game of snooker was invented by a British army officer in the 19th century in an Indian club. Michael wrote to the Secunderabad Club offering his services, and they asked him to come for an interview. I was against this because, as before, it seemed to have nothing to do with our reason for coming to India, and I had no interest in being a hanger on in such circumstance. But by this time we had been in the country for several months and all our plans had come to naught so I agreed to give it a go and see what transpired so we went to Secunderabad.

Secunderabad was a twin city to Hyderabad, the two being separated by a large lake, but they have now more or less merged into one. However, originally Secunderabad was developed by the British while the old Indian city of Hyderabad was ruled by the Nizam who at one time had the reputation of being the richest man in the world with jewels the size of eggs. The nearby mines of Golconda were renowned for producing diamonds in the 17th century amongst which was the famous Koh-i-Noor now set in a British Royal Family crown and on display at the Tower of London.

We stayed at the club for a couple of days and it was very pleasant as you can see from these pictures, still run as it would have been in British times with a strict dress code and servants waiting on your every whim.

But it was not why we were in India and when it turned out that the club was not looking for a secretary after all I was pleased though I did wonder why on earth they had asked us to travel over 300 miles to inform us of that. We returned to Whitefield to see what might happen next.

I have not mentioned the Masters but they did occasionally speak to me through Michael at this time. I would never have asked them what we should do, that was up to us, but I believed we would be guided and such did turn out to be the case.

Atheistic Idolatry

There's been some recent discussion in the part of the online world I inhabit on AI and its usefulness or otherwise. I haven't much to add to the wise words of William James Tychonievich, Frank Berger and Bruce Charlton, but I would reinforce all that they say. As far as I am concerned, AI might have some value for students wishing to submit essays without actually doing any work or learning anything, but, from the spiritual point of view, it is not just a negative but something approaching a Satanic snare. 

What is the point of something that knows everything but understands nothing? If knowledge does not come from a place of understanding but what is effectively a void then it can only be harmful, harmful to the mind and harmful to the soul. For it is not the informational content of knowledge that matters so much as that from which it arises. In the case of a human source that would be a living mind. It is the mind that gives food for thought. There is no nourishment in AI for the knowledge it provides comes from emptiness, and anything that comes from such a source is devoid of truth and light. AI is the endarkenment of the human mind, and that is not even going into its potential for demonic exploitation.

Note: I took the idea of AI being a form of idolatry from Bruce Charlton.

In Bangalore

 After a few weeks in Bombay (see previous Indian Story posts), we took the train to Bangalore which we intended to use as a base from which to explore the south of India, our idea being to buy a property to run as a small guest house. The journey took about 24 hours, and we arrived late at night with no plan as to where we might stay. Somewhat misguidedly, we put ourselves in the hands of a taxi driver at the station and, given we were Westerners and not hippies, he took us to what was obviously one of the most expensive hotels in the city. Being too hot and tired to go anywhere else at that time of night, we booked a room there but the next day after making a few enquiries, we transferred to a place called the Shilton Hotel which was in St Marks Road, and this was to be our home for the next month.

The Shilton was an old fashioned hotel which had rooms in small individual buildings spread out over a compound which is what you call a garden in India. The trees and flowers in the south were all new to me. The main tree, which lined roads all over the city, was the Flame of the Forest which puts out bright red blooms when it flowers so that the tree really can appear, especially at sunset as though it is on fire. There was one of these in the compound, in flower when we arrived, and there were also several beds of canna lilies which are also red though there are orange and yellow varieties too, all very different to the more subdued English flowers I was used to. 

Bangalore was favoured by the British because its elevation on the Deccan Plateau at nearly 3,000 feet above sea level gives it a relatively cool climate, cool for the South of India. The British established it as a cantonment town, meaning an army garrison, and from that beginning it became a Civil and Military Station, developing into one of the more attractive cities in the country with many fine buildings, both state and residential. The cantonment was established in 1809 for a mixed civilian and military population and comprised bungalows, gardens, race courses, clubs and parade grounds. It stood apart from the main Indian city with a definite colonial air and there was still a trace of that remaining in 1980. All of these colonial houses were attractive and some were really quite grand. Alas, most of them have been pulled down now in the usual acts of cultural vandalism to be replaced by ugly modern buildings, but in 1980 there were still a large number around the city, with many in the area where we were staying.

Michael had been a captain in the Guides regiment of the Indian army in pre-independence days when it had British officers, and he dressed accordingly, favouring khaki shorts with long socks and heavy Afghan sandals which he called chappals. All topped off with a solar topi, the pith helmet that the British wore during colonial days. I certainly wasn't going to dress like that but he did insist I wear a hat while in the sun for which I am grateful as many Westerners in those days didn't and suffered the consequences. I wasn't going to wear a topi but a cotton cricket hat offered sufficient protection. I never wore sun cream the whole time I was in India. People didn't in those days, no doubt unwisely.

After a short period looking for properties we found a bungalow with enough rooms for a few guests in the small town of Whitefield, about 15 miles from the centre of Bangalore. We fixed on this as Whitefield was the site for one of the main ashrams for Satya Sai Baba so there was a constant stream of Western visitors. At that time it was just a small village with some old bungalows and a few modern houses, a sleepy little place where nothing much went on except for the ashram. Now, since Bangalore has become the IT capital of India, it has been completely transformed. See here. One can either admire the industry that affected this transformation or be horrified at the wholesale destruction of a pleasant rural village with no building more than one floor high, and its conversion into a giant temple to Mammon.

Before we left the UK we had visited the Indian High Commission to ask if foreigners could buy 'immovable property', as it was called, in India, and we had been assured they could. All that was needed was the appropriate permission, and that was just a formality. Consequently, we didn't anticipate any problems in buying the Whitefield bungalow. We were wrong. We hired a lawyer (always a risk in India) to make the application, and were told the necessary permission should be granted in a couple of weeks. The two weeks turned into a month and then 6 weeks and then we were informed that permission was refused. The formality had become an impossibility.  We re-applied, wasting more money on the lawyer who was probably just stringing us along, but permission was once again turned down and we had now wasted 3 months. Later we found out that if we had greased enough palms at the ministry in Bombay we might have been successful, but either through naivety or integrity that did not occur to us, even to Michael who was familiar with Indian affairs and knew you could basically trust no one. Indians are generally very kind and friendly but the fabled spirituality of the sub-continent rarely extends to the moral sphere. Actually, the owner of the property we had been hoping to buy was an exception to this rule. He had kindly taken his house off the market while we were waiting for permission to buy, and we felt we had let him down but he was philosophical about it, and held no ill-feeling, even inviting us to dinner. The moral of the story is that generalisations are generally true but one can't assume them always to be so. I met many kind and generous Indians while in the country. On the other hand, we were ripped off and cheated several times. This was just the first. 

Back to square one. While waiting for permission to buy the house in Whitefield we had moved out of the Shilton to somewhere cheaper. The costs mount up when living in a hotel, even in India.  In fact, we only moved a few hundred yards to a guesthouse called the Bombay Ananda Bhavan which means Bombay Bliss House. This wasn't what you might think from the name, being a perfectly respectable establishment run by an old gentleman by the name of Mr Gupta. It was situated down a side street called Grant Road just off the main strand on which the Shilton stood, and was a two storey bungalow with a dozen or so rooms. I found some pictures of it on the Internet from about 10 years after we were there but it looks exactly the same.

The entrance

A bedroom with mosquito nets

The first floor balcony

The guesthouse was used by devotees of Sai Baba and they would take taxis twice a day to his ashram 15 miles away for darshan which is when the holy man graces his disciples with his presence. Michael and I were the only people in the guesthouse who were not devotees. For those who don't know, Sai Baba was a popular guru in the 80s and beyond who claimed he was God incarnate in human form. He had a large afro and wore a long orange dress which was peculiar to himself, not traditional garb. His main claim to fame was that he had magical powers. He could produce objects out of thin air and regularly did so, often holy ash but also sometimes small religious artefacts etc, even gold. I don't doubt that he really could do this. He wasn't just a sleight-of-hand prestidigitator. I am equally sure that he was not a genuine holy man. For one thing, no true holy man indulges in this spiritual showing off of miraculous power. The siddhis, as they are known, are regarded as diversions and stumbling blocks to the seeker, and to display them is spiritual vulgarity on a grand scale. Then there was his claim to divinity. This is another sure sign of inflation and inauthenticity. But most of all, as far as I was concerned, the vibration he gave off was decidedly unholy. I am not going to include a picture of him but look it up if you are interested and see if you don't agree that this is not the face of a holy person. There were scandals that surrounded him even at the time but I won't go into those here. 

Having said all that, the Western devotees we met at the guest-house and elsewhere were all good and decent people, sincere, albeit naive, spiritual seekers. Sai Baba was obviously an exceptional individual but a good example of how you must exercise discrimination while on this path. The devotees were constantly asking Michael and me to go with them to a darshan, and eventually we did. I have to say that all my suspicions were confirmed by the sight of Sai Baba coming out to the awe-struck crowd and, in lordly fashion, accepting their love and unconditional adoration with benevolent condescension. He produced some vibhuti or holy ash, took a few letters with requests for blessings or whatever, and then after a brief period went back inside. That was enough for the devotees who had taken a round 30 mile trip for a 15 minutes mass audience, and were prepared to do the same again in the afternoon. "He cured my diarrhoea!", one young lady told me excitedly. I was only 24 at the time and somewhat concerned that my feelings about this man were totally at variance with what most other spiritually inclined people thought of him, but Michael told me to trust my intuition and go by what I felt, and I have to say this is excellent advice for anyone whose instincts point them in a certain direction, even if good opinion is against you.

To be continued.