Visiting Pondicherry

Pondicherry is a town in South India on the Bay of Bengal that used to be run by the French while the rest of India, other than Goa which was Portuguese, was run by the British. For that reason it has its own special character. It was also for that reason that the spiritual philosopher Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950) fled there when a warrant for his arrest was issued by the British for sedition. It might be better to say that Aurobindo became a spiritual philosopher for he started off as a political activist bent on liberating India from British rule, but after a period spent in jail on charges of planning an assassination attempt on a British official (he was eventually acquitted) he abandoned all political activity and turned to exploring the spiritual life. He wrote an enormous volume of work, none of which have I ever been tempted to read though I have looked at some overviews of his writing. But my impression was that he was more of an intellectual philosopher than a true sage which is not to say he did not have genuine spiritual realisations but he does not appear to be someone of the spiritual calibre of Ramana Maharishi or Krishnamurti.

For the purpose of this article I reminded myself of his ideas by looking at his Wikipedia page (I know, Wikipedia) and that included this summing up of his spiritual position.

"Sri Aurobindo argues that divine Brahman manifests as empirical reality through līlā, or divine play. Instead of positing that the world we experience is an illusion (māyā), Aurobindo argues that world can evolve and become a new world with new species, far above the human species just as human species have evolved after the animal species. As such he argued that the end goal of spiritual practice could not merely be a liberation from the world into Samadhi but would also be that of descent of the Divine into the world in order to transform it into a Divine existence. Thus, this constituted the purpose of Integral Yoga. Regarding the involution of consciousness in matter, he wrote that: "This descent, this sacrifice of the Purusha, the Divine Soul submitting itself to Force and Matter so that it may inform and illuminate them is the seed of redemption of this world of Inconscience and Ignorance."

I have to say that this represents an advance on the basic Indian philosophy of Advaita in which everything is one and creation has no purpose with the spiritual search being purely for enlightenment. Sri Aurobindo introduces an evolutionary element which may have been in the air at the time and has a certain similarity to the Vitalism of Henri Bergson. He was Western educated and his Integral Yoga bears the mark of Western influence, mixed in with traditional Indian mysticism. It didn't really interest me back in the day because I found the ideas better expressed elsewhere but I do see it was an authentic attempt to get to grips with new understandings about consciousness and where it should be headed.

As I wrote in the previous piece, we had several visitors from the Sri Aurobindo ashram stay in our guesthouse. One such was an Austrian called Oscar and it may have been through him that we were asked to deliver the drums of honey to the ashram canteen I mentioned before. I had been interested in visiting Pondy (as it was called) for a while and thought this was a good opportunity. Michael Lord, who was a firm Francophile as he had spent part of his childhood in Normandy, was also keen to see the place. As we were delivering the honey to the ashram they put us up in their accommodation which was the usual clean but basic setup. While there we ate very good vegetarian food in their canteen along with the ashram inmates who were the typical collection of Western seekers. However, we also visited the French quarter which was laid out like a French town and sneaked off to an excellent restaurant run by a Frenchman where we had a break from vegetarianism with some freshly caught fish. 

Garden of l'Hotel de L'Orient, Rue Romain Rolland

But the best thing I had to eat or drink while there was sugar cane juice which I had never sampled before. The street vendor with his cart on the beach would crush several sticks of sugar cane in a contraption that resembled the sort of thing with which old-fashioned laundries used to squeeze the water out of clothes and the resulting liquid was sweet but not sugary and very refreshing.

Stock photo of a drum press

Pondicherry was, and apparently still is, divided into a Black Town and a White Town with the former being typically Indian with Hindu temples and shops and general bustle while the latter was quasi-Mediterranean in atmosphere and appearance and much more sedate with many of the buildings in an attractive 19th century colonial style. The two towns were divided by a canal so there really was a pronounced division between Indian and European which seemingly bothered no one in the way it would today. This reality of two towns in one gave the place an extra character and interest and when I returned nearly 20 years later I was pleased to see it still remained.

A street in the Tamil Quarter

While there I hired a bicycle to visit Auroville which was a township set up by the ashram where people could live in love and harmony with the aim of realising human unity, whatever that is. That may sound cynical and I have to say that Auroville seems to have a better track record than most attempts to create Utopia. As far as I am aware, it lacks the sexual and financial scandals that dog similar endeavours. Nonetheless, like all such experiments its inmates will find they can take the community out of the world but not the world out of the community. There is always an air of well-meaning naivety to such projects, however well-intentioned they may be when they start out. The reality of this being a fallen world with human beings as sinners cannot be circumvented by the attempt to make a perfect environment for there is no such thing in this world and never can be. On the other hand, it is surely good to have a vision and seek to realise it. The sad truth though is that all paradises contain serpents and sometimes serpents are actually attracted to paradises.

When I was cycling back from Auroville I heard a voice shout out "Hello William!" I stopped and looked around but saw no one I recognised. Then I noticed someone waving at me. "Who's that?" I asked myself. He was a fairly heavily built European and a complete stranger as far as I was concerned. But he seemed to know me and he came up laughing. "You don't know me?" No, I had to confess. "I'm Peter" he said. I was very surprised. I did know him but the last time I had seen him was about a year ago when he was staying at my guesthouse. At that time he weighed about 100 lbs. Now he was more like 175. To tell the truth, I hadn't expected to see him again because I assumed he was going to die. 

Peter was a Swiss who had been diagnosed with stomach cancer at around the age of 25. He was told that there was not much the medical establishment could do for him other than ease his path to death. But Peter was made of stern stuff. He had decided he would try to cure himself and he would do so through diet. He had taken himself off to India to the Aurobindo ashram though he was not really interested in the spiritual side of things, but it seemed a good environment for what he was trying to do which was this. He would reduce his food intake to just fruit and just one sort of fruit at a time, whatever was in season. In the couple of months he stayed at our guesthouse in Yercaud he was eating just tomatoes and then just grapes. He drank no water, relying only on what was in the fruit to sustain him. It seems incredible but I witnessed that he did indeed do this. At this point in time I can't remember if it was his own invention or if he was following some nature cure but he did it and he stuck to it. He was quite emaciated when I knew him first but always cheery and positive. I had great respect for what he was doing. He was on his own and had very little money but a great deal of determination.

And here he was a year later, back to full health apparently. He said he had been given the all clear and was cured but was still hanging around in India because he enjoyed the life there. His diet was back to normal as proved by his weight gain, and we tucked into a large lunch together. I never saw him again after this as I went back to Yercaud and he went to goodness knows where but I will always remember him and his impressive accomplishment. Of course, I am not saying this would work for everyone. There may be all sorts of reasons for his cure, his positive can do attitude surely helped though that would not be enough on its own. But cured he was.

On my last day in Pondicherry I got up before sunrise to go down to the beach to watch the sun rise over the Indian Ocean. 

Sunrise at Pondicherry

At the time this was the furthest east I had been which seemed to mean something, especially in the context of the rising sun. Using a little imagination one could see oneself present at the birth of the world or even the beginning of creation. After all, if the lesser cycles reflect on their own level the greater ones there was a sense in which you actually were present at such a scenario. This was also a way of bookending an experience of several years earlier when I had watched the sun set over the Pacific at Malibu in California, the end of the world. These great events give you a sense of the mighty movements of creation and how both the world and time itself are guided by forces of immense wisdom and power.

Sunset at Malibu