My Life in India part 1

 In 1979 I spent a month in India visiting the north of the country, going to Calcutta, Darjeeling, Varanasi, Delhi, Agra and Srinagar. I wrote about this trip in Meeting the Masters in the context of that book. I also mentioned that I returned to live in India in 1980 and spent 5 years there but did not include much about that time in the book since it wasn't directly relevant to the main theme. However, some readers said they enjoyed the travel interlude, and suggested I write some more about my subsequent life in India. Over the course of this blog's lifetime I have put up a few posts about my time in India, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, but I thought I might now write a more sustained narrative covering that period in my life.

I am at Bath railway station waiting for a train to go to London. On the ground is a steel trunk about 4 feet long by 2 feet wide and 2 feet deep. It contains all my possessions, bar a record player. That is taking a sea voyage and will arrive at its destination in a couple of months. The record player is not travelling alone. It has been packed in a tea chest along with a few bits of furniture that belong to my friend Michael Lord. We are flying to Bombay to start a new life in India.

The date is early April 1980. Michael and I had been living in Bath for around 15 months, running a stall in an antiques centre by day but actually living a life dedicated to meditation and the spiritual path. That story has been told in my book Meeting the Masters along with how I was spoken to by spiritual beings who instructed me in the nuts and bolts of the spiritual life as it applied to told me at that time. These beings, who spoke to me through the mediumship of Michael, told me think of them as messengers from God, and from their words and quality that is just what they seemed to be. I appreciate that seems improbable in the context of the modern world but it might be reassuring to spiritual seekers to know that such beings do exist and do watch over us whether they engage directly with us on the physical plane or not.

Michael and I had been to India for a month-long holiday in September 1979, and I assumed that was that as far as my contact with the country was concerned. But in the weeks following our return we came to the realisation that it would be easier to follow our way of life out in India, and began making plans to move there. When I mentioned this to the Masters they confirmed it was their wish we did this but we had to come to the understanding ourselves without being directly prompted by them. Free will is sacrosanct in the spiritual world.

Having made the decision, we then had to determine what part of India to go to. Michael knew the north of the country well, having served there as ADC first to the Governor of the Punjab and then to the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, during the Second World War when he learnt to speak Urdu. He had also visited for extended stays on a couple occasion since, the most recent time being just before he met me when he managed the guest house of the Hare Krishnas at their headquarters in Juhu which is a suburb of Bombay. However, we decided to go to the South as that remained relatively traditional and in tune with its spiritual roots to a greater degree than the North which had seen many centuries of Muslim occupation, some relatively positive, Akbar and Shah Jahan, some much less so under their successor Aurangzeb. In contrast, the spiritual roots of the South were undisturbed over many centuries, some would say, millennia.

Our initial plan was to go to Bangalore and then make plans from there. To that end, we flew first to Bombay (now Mumbai but I shall mostly call all the towns which have been renamed by the names I was familiar with), where we were going to spend a couple of weeks staying with Michael's friends at the Hare Krishna guesthouse before going further south. Michael had never been a devotee but he was sympathetic, and although I came to the group with a slightly cynical view due to my experience of seeing Western Hindus chanting and dancing around Piccadilly Circus in their ochre robes, trying to be something they very clearly were not, I found them charming and sincere in their ashram so I have nothing but good to say of them. The majority of them were honest seekers even if I believe they would have been better off elsewhere as their cultural origins made a Vaishnavite Bhakti religion deeply rooted in Indian tradition quite alien to them. It would require them always to be playing a role which could never be theirs. That is not a good basis for a spiritual path.

While we were staying at the Hare Krishna ashram we visited a few local places, local by Indian standards that is. But the first really was close by, being an island located in Bombay Harbour a mile or so offshore. This is the site of the famous caves temples at Elephanta which were constructed around the 7th century AD, and in my opinion are one of the marvels of India. There are several rock-cut temples dedicated to Shiva on this little island, and they contain some of the most imposing statues of ancient India. The statue of a god or spiritual being should manifest that being's presence, and the ones at Elephanta project extraordinary power and even a touch of spiritual terror. Gods should be terrifying because they are incomprehensible and far above us. They are not comfortable or safe. 

A picture of the cave entrance from 1858

Inside the Caves today

The most famous sculpture in these caves is the Trimurti. It is a relief carving over 20 feet high of the three-headed Siva in his form of Sadasiva who is the Supreme God of the universe in Saiva Siddhanta. The three heads represent the traditional trinity of Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Siva the destroyer, the three principal forces in the universe according to Hinduism. These are normally three different gods but here they are presented as manifestations of Siva, three aspects of one god.

The Trimurti

The face on the right is the Brahma aspect. He holds a lotus flower, symbol of creation. On the left is Siva as Rudra, the old Vedic god, notoriously swift to anger. He has a moustache giving him a military appearance which is appropriate for the fierce destroyer. In the centre, facing the worshipper, is the Vishnu aspect who appears to be in meditation and transmits a sense of deep peace. The statue has two dvarapalas on either side. These are guards who protect the sanctum of the deity from the profane. They mark out the sacred space which the god fills with his presence, and are a barrier between the material and the spiritual, a kind of boundary marker but also performing a similar function to the cherubim with the flaming sword who stands at the entrance to the Garden of Eden, preventing Adam and Eve from returning.

To the left of the Trimurti there is a 16 feet high statue of an Ardhanaishvara who is a decidedly strange figure. Look closely at the picture here and you will see why.

A  four-armed Ardhanarishvara 

The figure is badly damaged but enough remains to see that this is a representation of a half male/half female being. Seemingly absurd, even in our deluded days, it makes some sort of sense if you see it as a representation of the totality of cosmic existence pre-creation. One side shows Siva's consort Parvati with a female breast, long hair, a womanly hip protruding out and a mirror in one of her hands. The other side depicts the masculine Siva, and the whole represents the spiritual state including but beyond the division into two sexes when Siva and his Sakti, which stand for consciousness and creative energy, are one. The ancient Indian system recognised that sex lies at the root of reality, the one becoming two in order to create so while this figure may be preposterous and even, in my view, somewhat blasphemous as a literal being, interpreted symbolically it does carry a certain truth.

In the centre of the main cave there is a shrine to the linga which is the symbol of Siva in his most primal or unmanifest form so representing the god at his most archaic level. This is the heart of the temple and source of its spiritual power. The linga or lingam stands for pure consciousness and the formless reality that underlies all things, but it is also the creative and destructive power that calls the universe into being and then returns it to cosmic dust. In the picture here you can see it as the dark, rather stunted pillar-like object through the doorway guarded by two more dvarapalas. The linga normally sits in a yoni which is the container of the female force, the two together symbolising the masculine and feminine creative powers of the universe, Siva and his Sakti which are the equivalents of spirit and raw matter in this system.

Siva linga shrine

There are several other statues in these caves and the Wikipedia article from which I took these pictures includes excellent descriptions of them. It's been a long time since I was there but I remember the impression of power and mystery present at the the site and particularly coming out from the statues. This was a religious conception very different to that which inspired the churches and cathedrals I had previously known. It spoke of deep and dark mysteries which could fascinate the soul, but there was little sense of light or purity or the upliftment to be found in Christian iconography. I recall that Michael who had seen it before said he felt somewhat repelled by it though could appreciate the artistic genius that lay behind it. I understood what he meant. To this day I am in two minds about its spiritual qualities. Siva was a pre-Vedic, pre-Aryan god and his worship goes back to the ancient past. In Indian religion nothing is rejected. Everything is assimilated and becomes part of the whole which results in profound metaphysical knowledge lying alongside very primitive concepts and practices. Siva worship undoubtedly includes both. The shrine at Elephanta is an extraordinary attempt to express the mysteries of existence but it explores the depths more than it scales the heights.

Saiva Siddhanta

 Most people who are interested in Indian spirituality will be familiar with Advaita Vedanta, the non-dualistic philosophy whose principal exponent is Sankara. This is a profound but flawed system of thought which I have written about on several occasions, chiefly to point out its flaws. See posts under the Non-Duality label. Advaita was clearly influenced by Buddhism, even though the two were rivals, and one of the reasons for its popularity in the West is that, like Buddhism though not in quite such a dramatic fashion, it does away with God who is reduced to an existent in the relative world, albeit the prime existent. This makes it seem to the unwary, steeped in/corrupted by modern ways of thinking, a deeper analysis of reality than theistic religion.

Most Westerners also believe that Advaita is the summation of Hindu thought. The Traditionalist school of René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon adopted this approach. In fact, that is not the case. In India monistic religion precedes theistic religion which probably arose in reaction to non-duality as its shortcomings became apparent. The qualified Advaita of Ramanuja, which accepts the reality of both the individual soul and God even though the two can be joined in a union of oneness, is one well-known example, and there is also the later and lesser known example of Saiva Siddhanta, the -anta suffix signifying the end of something, the conclusion to which it leads, as in Vedanta which is the end of the Vedas, their culminating point. So Saiva Siddhanta is the final word on knowledge about Siva who in this system stands for the Supreme God.

As a doctrine in codified form Saiva Siddhanta appeared in the 12th century in the south of India with mystical texts that described how the soul, sinful as it is by its own nature, cannot attain liberation except through knowledge of Siva bestowed by his grace on one who loves him. Love is important as it is not in Advaita which is all about knowledge. Souls are intrinsically divine but separate themselves from God through egotism and the impurities or bonds acquired through experience in the material world. Union with the deity is attained through his grace and is absolute in that there is no sense of separation whatsoever, but even in this union the individual self remains thereby drawing a clear distinction between this approach and that of the non-dualist. For the Saiva Siddhanta devotee God always has a transcendent aspect even when he is fully realised as immanent, so even in liberation the Creator/created relationship remains.

God is perceived as the soul of the soul, closer to you than your own self, but he is also infinitely beyond you. This idea is similar to the Christian understanding of the relationship between the soul and God, and the spiritual approach to the deity in this system also has something in common with Christian practice. Siva, which is simply a name for the Supreme First Principle or Primary Person, can only be known through love. This love has four stages. The first is that of the good servant towards his master. The second is like the child towards its parents. These tend to imagine God as external but the following stages see him as within the soul and involve meditation on his perfection. The first is compared to friendship while the final stage which brings full knowledge of and oneness with Siva is likened to the union of lovers.

I have often expressed my conviction that the Incarnation had a spiritual effect worldwide, influencing whoever was able to receive it through inner sensitivity. Naturally, the greatest effect would have been through the spread of the knowledge of Christ by missionaries. But in addition to this Christ entered into non-Christian religions, which may have been culturally resistant to the actual Christian religion, by permeating them with his spiritual being. You can see this with the idea of the Bodhisattva appearing in Mahayana Buddhism in the centuries after Christ, and you can also detect it in the Bhakti movements in both North and South India. I suggest that Saiva Siddhanta is an example of this process. I'm not saying that Saiva Siddhanta is Christianity in disguise. It is what it is, completely itself and outwardly has nothing to do with Christianity. Nor am I saying it is exactly equivalent to or equal to Christianity. But the spiritual essence of it can be compared to the essence of Christianity because Christ has suffused it with his presence and stamped it with the concept of religious love. Christ is only fully present in Christianity but I contend that he is not entirely absent elsewhere to the degree that other religions are able to open themselves up to his universal spirit.

Feminism is not about Equality

This is a subject I return to now and again because it lies squarely at  the heart of the modern deviation. It's not the cause of the deviation. That is the rejection of God and the natural order of creation, but it is one of the major symptoms of it and a big contributory factor to the ongoing rupture from reality.

Feminism is not about equality. It may have seemed so at one time but actually, like many movements claiming to be for freedom and equality, what the impulse behind feminism sought was power. The desire for power is not in itself bad because the ability to exercise power is part of our divine right, but why do we seek power, to what end? That is the point, and the feminist desire was and still is to control men, to be the one in the driving seat. 

Now you could throw this accusation right back at men and say that they wish to control women and this is why they seek headship over them, but there is this difference. The male desire to lead the female, to be, archetypally speaking, the Lord to the Lady, is based on natural justification. This is because in spiritual terms the male represents the Creator and the female represents Creation as is illustrated in simple but profound terms in the book of Genesis. Creation came out of God just as Eve came out of Adam. The fallen female desire to dominate the male is the desire of a created being to usurp the role of the Creator which is why we can accurately call the inspiration behind it Satanic. 

These may seem hard words but they are necessary because they are so widely denied. They do not mean that the male is intrinsically superior to the female in individual or collective terms, but each sex has its role and should not seek to appropriate the role of the other. Nor do they mean that the power the male has over the female is for his own personal ends. That power is inseparable from responsibility, and should be exercised with love, just as it is with the Creator and the Creation which is his bride.

To be sure, there are different masculine and feminine types as is depicted in mythology with different types of gods and goddesses, and the relationship dynamic will not always be the same, but still the basic pattern remains and should be respected if a society is to function creatively and harmoniously.

The great spiritual deception of the 20th century was that progressive and liberal ideas were precursors of the spirit of the New Age or Age of Aquarius, and that the more advanced parts of humanity would adopt them with the spiritual laggards rejecting them. In fact, these ideas are not connected to a new age so much as they are symptoms of a decaying old age. Far from being spiritual advances, they are indicative of spiritual collapse, arising when material concerns take precedence over spiritual ones. The equality of the sexes, the very idea of equality itself, is an example of what comes about as the old age falls into decay. It arises from decomposing elements of the past not from glimmers on the horizon of the future.

That having been said, feminism has made the inroads it has because there is an element of truth to it.  Over the last few centuries human consciousness has been changing, becoming more aware of the self, of personal autonomy and freedom, and this has affected both sexes which both need to express the new awareness. In a sense, you can liken this to adolescence which would imply that what underlies feminism is at the same time a need to become fully individual and a form of adolescent rebellion. So, good and bad. The problem here is that the rebellion has gone unchecked and then been justified or rationalised as a good thing instead of understood as the negative aspect of a growth process which should be got through and grown out of. Thus, one could say that we are in a period of arrested development . We have rebelled against our divine parent and the natural order of being. Women responded to the need to become fully individual but did so from the perspective of the ego rather than the soul. In the latter case, the response would have been in the context of spiritual understanding and not entailed rebellion against God and man.

As with many ideas now firmly entrenched in the modern mind it's hard to see how we can get back to where we should be from where we are now without complete societal breakdown. Things have gone so far that only when we no longer have the luxury of a full stomach and a roof over our heads will we let go of our illusions and be prepared to fall in with how things are as opposed to trying to force them to be how we want them to be. This has been necessary in the past and will be so again. It is why we need to start preparing for a future when all our assumptions will be challenged at the deepest level. We will be stripped bare and we have only ourselves to blame because we have rebelled against reality.

Books from Blogs

 Now and again I like to put out a reminder of a couple of books not mentioned in the sidebar on the right for lack of room and also because they are compilations of blog posts rather than original books. One is of posts from this blog up to about 2020 while the other derives from Bruce Charlton's Albion Awakening blog to which John Fitzgerald and I contributed. Bruce wrote the foreword to the Albion Awakening book but didn't include any of his posts because, in his words, "I used the blog rather like a notebook, and produced something like a stream of consciousness of ideas relating to the main theme. Consequently, my posts were of essentially ephemeral interest, and we decided not to include them here." I wouldn't agree that his posts were only of ephemeral interest, but the book runs to nearly 350 pages just with my and John's efforts so perhaps his decision was the right one. His posts are all still available anyway.

Here is a list of the contents of the two books which have a wide variety of topics and are, I believe, still both relevant though the last 5 years appear to have deepened the spiritual crisis and plunged Albion still further into dormancy. Perhaps we have to fall further before we can rise. 

From Albion Awakening we have, grouped according to theme:

Prophecies and Prophets of Albion

The Destiny of Britain

An Ancient Prophecy of England

William Blake

Auguries of Innocence

Dion Fortune and Glastonbury

The Magical Battle of Britain

England’s Dreaming

The Jerusalem Suite

Taliesin – Bard of Britain

Journey to the Centre of the Earth

G Wilson Knight

The Inklings

The Eighth Narnia Book

Saints and Sages of Albion

Joseph of Arimathea

William of Glasshampton

The Betrayal of the Romanovs

King Charles the Martyr

King Harold Godwinson

Roger Lancelyn Green Kathleen Raine   Colin Wilson   St Cuthbert   St Dunstan   Two Modern Saints   Is Albion an Angel?       The Land of Albion   The Old Country   Beachy Head and Albion   The British Myth   Albion Set Apart   Pilgrimage   Doorways to Albion   Christian Albion   Iona   Maumbury Rings   The Long Man of Wilmington   London   The Strange Ship   The Last of Logres   The Advent of Arthur   This Charged Land    Albion and Russia   Dwellers on the Threshold   Voyage to the West        The Decline, Fall & Possible Rise of Albion   The Vacuum of Leadership   The Glorious ‘50s   A Deeper Reality    The Old Port    Come and See   Another Chance? England Led the World into Materialism Empire and Albion Albion Still Asleep Albion Besieged What are the Signs of Decline? Deviations of Modernity Brexit Brexit and Religion Those Whom the Gods Would Destroy   Awakening Albion Awakening from Illusion True Awakening Demands Deep Penitence Inconsistency and Confusion Fantasy and Reality Intellect and Intuition Mere Christians Nationalism and Patriotism Women Readers An English Virtue Where We Are Now The Robin Hood Option Redditor Lucis Aeternae The Great Return Beyond the Grey Havens The Return of Constantine The Sleeping King When Britain Fell

From The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man we have, also grouped thematically:

God

Do You Need God to be Good?

Mysticism, Monism, Theism

God is Love and Love is God

God and Nothing

Belief in God is a Moral Matter

Philosophical Speculation

Atheism

Who Designed the Designer?

Why Believe in God if You Are Good?

Truth

Are We Intrinsically Good or Fallen?

Education and Truth

Psychologising the Spiritual

Persons or Principles

The Difference Between Psychic and Spiritual

False Prophets

First Principles

Metaphysical Error and Heresy

Truth and Ideology

Closed to the Transcendent Christ The Nativity Christmas Thoughts Christianity and Mystery Things Jesus Didn’t Say The Resurrection Mock Christianity Spiritual Transformation Paganism Christianised Jesus Christ and the Mysteries The Return of the Gods What Seek Ye?   Buddhism Beyond Oneness Mindfulness Question Jesus Wept Three in One Are You Real? Then God Is   Non-Duality Advaita and Christianity The Incompatibility of Advaita and Christianity The Temptation of Non-Duality Nothing to Attain Nothing Beyond The Marriage of Being and Becoming Negative Theology   Love Love Without Wisdom Love of Humanity Love and Law Justice and Mercy Morality The Quest for Moral Purity The Archbishop and Homosexuality Morality and the Left Sexual Morality   The Masters What are Masters? Further Thoughts on the Masters The Liberated Soul After Death Are the Masters Demons? More on the Masters Some Reflections on the Masters Meeting a Master   Evil Free Will and Evil The Persecution of the Innocents Demons Why Does God Allow It? Spirituality and Evil Evil and how It Operates   The Spiritual Path & Spiritual Practice A Question on Spiritual Practice Is Mystical Experience the Final Goal? Grace Is Meditation a Good Thing? Being Alone What is a Spiritual Person? Western Hindus How Do You Know? The Radical Evolutionist New Age Spirituality Mysticism, True and False The Mind is its Own Place   Masculine and Feminine Women Priests Feminism Reappraised The Divine Feminine Male/Female Complementarity Feminism and Power Can a Feminist be a Lady? The Divine Androgyne Some Questions on Homosexuality   Modern Times The Spiritual Corruption of the Elite Perception Politics Don’t You Want to Live in an Equal Society? Is Racism a Leftist Invention? Pollution The Age of Aquarius Albion Set Apart The Fall and the Rise Technological Gain Equals Spiritual Loss At the Crossroads Spirituality and the World Mass Immigration Mass Immigration and Christianity Why Leftism is Spiritual Poison Disintegration or Salvation Environmentalism The End of a World

Some Tibetan Deity Pictures

 When I was in India in the 1980s I met a group of Tibetan refugees who had come to the hill station where I lived to to sell some of their wares which mostly consisted of woollen items for which there wasn't much call in the south of India, even up in the hills. But they also had some pictures of Tibetan deities which were block printed on rice paper, and I bought five of these. The pictures were simple line drawings and I passed a few evenings colouring them in with watercolours which is the sort of thing you do when you live in a place with no TV and have to make your own entertainment. 

I found these pictures which I'd forgotten all about at the bottom of a drawer the other day, and so thought I might put them up here. 

This is Manjushri holding the sword that cuts away ignorance. He is associated with prajna or transcendent wisdom. His lion, which symbolises the mind he has tamed, is normally painted blue so I hope he'll forgive my ignorance.

This is the historical Buddha called Siddhartha or Sakyamuni meaning the sage of the Shakyas which was his clan in the India/Nepal border area.

I'm not sure who this is. It could be Tara, a female Buddha, or else a dakini which is a kind of divine sky nymph.

This could be the deity called Marici, the goddess of the dawn.

This one could be Namgyalma who is a deity for long life and healing.

Probably the two most important figures in Tibetan Buddhism, other than historical gurus, are Avalokiteshvara who is the Bodhisattva of Compassion, and Maitreya who is the future Buddha. I didn't have pictures of them so here they are to show how it should be done.