Life in Yercaud

 Once we had settled in our new home it was time to get to work. The garden or compound, as gardens are called in India, was very overgrown and both the main buildings had seen better days. The basic structure of roof and walls was in good condition as they built solidly in those days, those days in this case being the late 19th/ early 20th century, and electricity had been installed but the wiring was old and needed to be replaced. The plumbing was rudimentary. There were no lavatories in the lower bungalow but the upper bungalow had three, each one with a cistern that comprised an elephant's head forming the water tank with the trunk becoming the pipe connecting cistern and toilet. I wish I had a photo.

We hired a local electrician and a plumber to sort out that side of things, and then got a painter for the interior and a gardener for the outside. We helped in both those tasks where not much skill was required. I spent quite a lot of time up in trees chopping off branches which we gave away for firewood. Few of the people in the village had electricity at that time and they all used wood for cooking. We would see women going off into the jungle early every morning with their big machete-like knives and then coming back around 3 in the afternoon with a a heavy load of wood which they carried on their heads, often for several miles. Only the women did this. It gave them the most aristocratic posture. Michael described one of them as looking like a duchess.

The gardener lived on the premises in servant's quarters at the back. He coated the floor of his one room lodgings with cow dung which, when dry, resembled smooth concrete and apparently deterred mosquitos. He came with a wife who became our house servant whether we wanted one or not which we didn't. But we were told it would look bad if we didn't have a servant so she did some basic sweeping and washed the floor rather more often than it needed. She was young and very pretty and it was clear that her husband did not like the idea of her being in the house with two males on her own while he was outside. One time she was in the kitchen washing up and suddenly gave a loud scream. Michael and I who had been on the other side of the house ran in to see what was wrong and found she had got an electric shock from the kettle. It was the old wiring which had not yet been replaced. We were comforting her when in rushed Krishna her husband brandishing his kukri knife and obviously suspecting the worst.

He had to be reassured by Saroja his wife that it was only the kettle, but from then on it was apparent he couldn't shake off his jealousy and soon after the two of them left. We replaced him with a man who had been a tea worker in Sri Lanka but had returned to Tamil Nadu when he was regarded as too old for the plantation work. Muthu (which means pearl in Tamil) looked about 70 even though he was in his mid-fifties but he was a good enough gardener. Here he is with me and Michael under one of the two avocado trees there were in the garden. I'd just come from the bathroom hence my strange apparel, an old towelling robe that had belonged to my grandfather.

Muthu kept the compound in good order and we planted tomatoes, potatoes and spinach to go with the avocados, guavas, bananas and mulberry tree already there. There were also a couple of orange trees and some coffee plants. The oranges were too bitter to eat as fruit but made excellent marmalade which was the one thing I missed from England and we got several pounds of coffee a year from our plants. Of no practical use but very beautiful were the jacaranda trees of which there were several in the garden. The jacaranda is native to South America but was taken all over the world in the 19th century - an early case of globalism. Every April our trees would burst (there is no other word for it) into the most glorious purple flowers and when these flowers fell to the ground they left a purple carpet that seemed to glow. Not having a camera at the time the only photos I have were taken by visitors who would then send me copies so this is the only record of that I have. Many of the photos were taken by my mother when she came out to visit in 1982, a couple of years after we had arrived.

A poinsettia bush with orange trees to the left and a banana plant behind

More bananas

It took about a year of hard work to get the guesthouse up and running. There was no way to advertise so we relied on word of mouth and we had a stroke of luck when a German woman from the Sri Aurobindo ashram in Pondicherry (now Puducherry) stayed with us for a few weeks. Hildegard had come to Yercaud to escape the heat of summer and we met her in the bazaar while she had been staying at a local hotel. We told her about our guesthouse which was much cheaper than the hotel and she moved in, initially for a week but eventually for a couple of months. When she went back to the ashram she told her fellow ashramites (?) about us with the result that several came and stayed in our guesthouse over the next few years during the hot weather. Also, I suspect, for a bit of European calm as a relief from Indian chaos.

Pondicherry was one of the few towns in British India that had been administered by the French and even nearly 40 years after Independence it had a very different feel to it. I've written about my visits there before and won't repeat myself in this post. See here.

Over the years we had a wide range of visitors to our guesthouse, both Westerners and Indian. Some stayed for just a few days and some for several weeks. There were Europeans, Americans and Australians fleeing the heat of the plains or else taking a break from the guru trail, there were Indians coming for a family holiday and there were even people who wanted to study the local flora and fauna. Yercaud was fairly unusual in that it was in the tropics but had a variable climate due to its elevation. It was the proud boast of its inhabitants that they could grow both mangoes and strawberries in the same place. But it wasn't just the vegetation that drew people. We had a British geologist who came to study the local rocks which apparently were among the oldest in the world, and then we had a conservationist named Romulus Whitaker, an American who had lived in India for much of his life and who ran the Madras Snake Park and a crocodile sanctuary. He came with his family on a snake hunting expedition, and I went off into the jungle with him on a couple of occasions to search for specimens. This was not the sort of jungle where you would find tigers or elephants and though there was a place called Bear's Cave there were no bears in the area then. But there were snakes, iguanas and bats as well as plenty of monkeys who would sometimes come into our garden to steal bananas. 

On my expedition with Romulus Whitaker he found a few small snakes and some scorpions but nothing to match the nearly 20 foot long python captured by local hunters a little time earlier. The story of this snake may have been what drew Romulus Whitaker to Yercaud in the first place as it caused quite a stir in the region. One afternoon Muthu came up to the house and asked us (he didn't speak English except a few words so we communicated in a mixture of basic English, some Tamil which I was learning and sign language) if we had seen the pambu (snake in Tamil) at the police station. Apparently, most of the village was down there. We knew where the police station was because it was near the baker and, strangely enough, directly opposite the village brothel run by a mother and daughter team. The mother, who was always heavily painted but still managed to look pretty ancient, would sit outside her house and hail passers by. Before we knew who she was and that the wave was to attract trade Michael would give her a friendly wave back when on his way to buy bread, but he was a little more reserved after he found out her profession.

When we got to the police station we discovered the python stretched out in front of the building and it really was enormous. Muthu had not exaggerated. There was a crowd milling about and chatting excitedly. The python was dead, shot by the hunters who had found it and who had then brought it back as a trophy. But the most extraordinary thing was that at the position of what you might call the python's neck you could clearly see the shape of a large dog. The hunters had been using this poor beast to scent out their prey, wild boar, and the hapless animal had chanced upon the python who had seized it and started to swallow it whole as pythons do. As it was about the size of an Alsatian this was no mean feat. When the hunters arrived on the scene they shot the snake but it was too late to save the dog whose hind legs and tail were still sticking out of the python's mouth.

In the next instalment of this series I will talk about some of the characters we met while living in Yercaud.

Resist Not Evil

 One of the devil's favourite tricks, tried and tested throughout the ages, is to get people who are basically on the side of good to react to evil, thereby drawing them into his net. He presents one group obviously motivated by evil in some form and then another group, seeing that evil reacts to it and in so doing succumbs to an evil of its own in the form of negative emotion, anger, hatred, whatever. Unlike the first group, this second group does have good instincts but is lured into defending them in the wrong way. The members of this group should react to evil from the standpoint of the spiritual man but instead their correct recognition of evil leads them to react to it from a lower, earthly or worldly, standpoint because they are not yet stabilised in the eternal.

God can only erase evil from the world when it is no longer in the hearts of men. In a world of freedom and choice he cannot unilaterally remove evil or darkness while men have not outgrown the capacity to behave in ways conforming to their lower nature. There is the saying that all that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing, and that saying is true. However, what is done is important. If good men fight evil with hatred and anger in their hearts they are continuing the cycle of evil. This is the hardest thing as it is natural to hate evil, and it can even seem weak not to respond to it with force, but the fact is fighting evil in conventional or confrontational ways will not remove it. It will only perpetuate it. To do bad things or to act in bad ways even if it is ostensibly for good simply feeds the evil. It may destroy it in one form but then causes it to flourish in another, and that is all the dark forces care about. They are not bothered by the type of evil, evil meaning anti-God, anti-creation thought and behaviour, that exists. Their concern is merely that evil exists in whatever form. That God is denied.

There is no doubt that you must fight evil but you cannot fight it with its own weapons. All people on the spiritual path are confronted by the problem of how to react to evil. The natural thing when you see it is to want to contest it and defend the good, but there can be a subtle egotism in this. I am fighting on behalf of God. I am God's strong right arm in the world. You may well be called to serve as God's representative in the world, he needs such, but you do that best by letting him act through you not by acting yourself or from your own standpoint. The only way to help God eradicate evil in the world is to banish it from your own heart and then let your light shine. In the spiritual world you do not fight fire with fire but confront it with a higher spiritual energy. If Jesus had actively resisted when he was arrested he would have soon been forgotten about. By allowing himself to be killed he transformed hate into love. At least he did for those who were open to him and the truth he brought.

This world is a battleground between good and evil and evil takes many forms, particularly now when most people do not know what good is or that good as the world sees it may be spiritual evil. The teaching not to resist evil does not mean let evil have its way but don't react to it on the human level. Evil will be conquered when human beings do not reply to it in its own language. Darkness is not overcome by more darkness but only by light.

Do not misunderstand this. Jesus was not saying that a quietistic approach, defined as a purely passive acceptance of things without any attempt to change them, was desirable. The non-resistance is on the level of the ego, internal only. Every person who believes himself to be a follower of God or truth is duty-bound to defend the good and stand against evil. However, he acts from love of God or truth and that means he acts correctly - as long as he really is in touch with truth and not just his idea of it.

The Spiritual Destructiveness of Leftism

The thing I am calling leftism has existed since the Garden of Eden but never in so widespread and dominant a form as now. In its modern form it started in the late 18th century and became steadily more powerful as the centuries progressed, and it did so because of the abandonment of the sense of transcendence.

That abandonment, essentially, is why leftism is spiritually destructive but it is not the whole story. Leftism is built on resentment, envy and the desire to pull down. It appeals to those with these tendencies and then encourages their propagation, rebranding them as virtue and so drawing in others who may not share these vices themselves but who are susceptible to the propaganda put out because of a lack of spiritual attunement. The devil plays for both sides and the modern right, which is in many ways a product of leftism, is often motivated by greed and selfishness. Nonetheless, in itself the right uncontaminated by leftist ideology rests on love of God, of country, of family and observance of the natural order of creation while the left rebels against all these things. That is why the right builds up while the left tears down. It tears down to a supposed level playing field but that ends up as ground level. The fact that the left can't build is why it appears and spreads in relatively late stages of civilizational cycles where it will dress itself in the garb of compassion and concern for the underdog and the victim. But really it is all about dismantling hierarchies because of envy.

Leftism is a political attitude second and a spiritual one first. It can be hard to define in purely political terms because the object of its focus changes. White working class males, once its chief concern, are now effectively despised. This shows that what really drives it is the spirit of opposition, firstly, to established authority but ultimately to God. Even when it becomes the authority it must project an enemy to which it is the valiant underdog.

How can human beings know the right way to live if they don't know what they are? Liberal nihilism, the end state of all leftism, is based on the denial of our reality as spiritual beings.  Progress for the liberal progressive rests on the idea of man as a purely material being with any spirituality merely the extension of this material being into a supposedly spiritual space. The spiritual person wants progress because life is growth but it is spiritual growth that matters and that is always from the roots. The leftist tears up roots.

It's tiresome just to criticise but unless you know what's wrong you cannot know what is right. Leftism must be rejected because it is anti-spiritual. The promised land it offers can never be reached or, when it is, it will be found to be the wasteland. The right way for humans to live in this world can only come when the reality of God is acknowledged, but this must be the true God not some manmade imitation such as exists in many, I am tempted to say most, religions. God is spirit and only those who approach him as spirit can ever know him or themselves or even other human beings as they really are.

Inner Religion

 Many people who think they believe in God actually believe in a projection of their own mind. On the other hand, there are those who do perceive something of the reality of God within themselves and these are the only true believers because they believe in a reality not an idea. Consequently, their approach to the divine will inevitably take on something of a personal nature. It must and, what is more, it should.

Human beings exist on many levels but the great majority are focussed on physical, emotional and mental planes. They are conscious on those planes but not higher ones. A minority, though one that is growing, is awakening to higher levels and these people will often not be satisfied with an outer religion. They will seek to know God for themselves. They may make mistakes in the course of their search, and they may also be condemned by those who feel that all authority must derive from an external body, an official religion, but the law of life is growth and there is only so much spiritual growth you can obtain if you rely on outer things, whatever they are. Christ wanted us to become Christ-like ourselves, and if we talk about Christ being born in us what else can that mean other than we must seek him within? No doubt in the course of that search we will stumble and fall into illusion many times, but this is all part of the growing process. To risk going in the wrong direction is better than never to move.

It is not necessary to reject religion but it is important not to be bound by it. That is especially true for modern people who have evolved a greater sense of individuality. This is in line with God's will for his creation. We cannot become gods ourselves, which is our destiny, if we remain submerged in the group. At the same time, to be an individual in isolation is what caused Lucifer's downfall. We must grow into individuality but we must then grow beyond it, bearing in mind that each new stage includes and contains the previous which is not destroyed but incorporated in the new.

Every follower of a religion must ask himself the question, what is more important, my religion or God? Because they are not the same. Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, the religion that we give ourselves to often ends up possessing us if we are not careful and that is even more problematic now when all religions are husks of their former selves so their spiritual light does not shine directly but, as it were, through reflection. Just as those who feel they have gone beyond the need for a religion and can approach God on their own must be extremely attentive to their thoughts, feelings, motivations, egotistical impulses and prejudices so the religious must carefully discriminate between what in their religion is of God and what is of man. And there is an awful lot of man in every religion.

We follow Christ to become Christ not to remain a follower. That means that at some point on the journey we must take full spiritual responsibility for ourselves. Otherwise we will remain outside the temple. Ultimately, every man must become his own pope. There is no other way.

A Pantomime Church

 The appointment of the new Archbishop of Canterbury is so absurd as to be almost comic.  It must surely be the final nail in the coffin of the Church of England and seems like a deliberate act of self-harm, proving beyond all doubt that this branch of Christianity is only concerned with social justice ideology with any real religion merely a subset of that. Other Christian churches might look on with astonishment but they should consider the degree to which they too are succumbing to the world because they are, only less so. 

But I want to write here about how this is actually a good thing or, at least, can be used to a good end.  All churches are externalisations of the spiritual but the spiritual can only be known inwardly. The external is there merely to point to the inner. It's a support and guide for those whose inner sensibility is not established. The trouble is that support can become a crutch and then it will weaken the connection we should all be developing to God. There are times when we need the support of an external organisation but there are other times when we should be outgrowing that and now is one of those times. The usual excuses are that without an outer authority all sorts of crazy, egotistical, false and deluded notions of the spiritual will arise, reflecting the psychologies and pathologies of those who propagate them. And this is perfectly true. There is plenty of evidence for that throughout the centuries, and certainly from the last several decades. Nonetheless, this is a stage that must be gone through if a true, uncorrupted inner sense of God is to be developed. A child learning to walk will probably fall over a few times, but if he stays on his backside and doesn't stand up by himself he will never walk.

Therefore, use the current state of the churches, taken to its most absurd level in the C of E, a true pioneer in spiritual ignorance, to forge your own connection to God. For Christ is within, not in any organisation or even church. He can use churches and obviously he has done so in the past, but churches only exist to show the way to those who cannot yet find it within themselves. I don't dispute that they provide a structure to belief and a communal space for worship, and I am not saying they should not exist because we need the outer and the inner. Both together make the whole. But in the context of the present time the real need is to go beyond established churches and find God within ourselves. There comes a point at which what once guided becomes an obstacle, and many have reached that point now. The pantomime that is the modern Church of England serves to bring this home with stunning clarity.

How to Respond to Current Events

All those who recognise we are living through an end times scenario have the problem of how to react with regard to the increasingly spiritually debased condition of these times. That includes not just how to face the bad there is but how to deal with the false hopes that are presented as well.

The answer is don't react. We must accept that the end times cannot be resisted. The energy behind them is irreversible and not meant to be reversed. To think it can be arrested is to put matter ahead of spirit. That does not mean we should not try to promote order, beauty and the good while condemning disorder and ugliness. We absolutely should, but our world has entered a state of dissolution and this is a natural process, inevitable in a material world which has its seasons and cycles and in which a fundamental law is entropy, things running down and running out. Entropy can be staved off at certain times but it cannot be wholly reversed and nor should it be because that would be to give matter the same rights as spirit which is a form of blasphemy. 

Therefore we must accept that the nature of these times is towards decadence and loss. That is not to say we allow ourselves to get caught up in that process. Inwardly we must resist but the outer world will go the way it is going. That is written and cannot be altered. Our task is to fortify ourselves on the spiritual level by focusing attention within and becoming detached from material things and the world out there. It is not that we do not care but we do not allow ourselves to get caught up in care and thereby lose our centre in God and our focus on the next world as the true one. What goes on in this world is not our business. Our responsibility is to put ourselves right with God and act as a beacon so that others may be inspired to do the same. We should observe the world and be aware of its deviation from truth but not let that deviation disturb us. That is hard and can seem like indifference but it is a question of balance between love, knowledge of the real and trust in God, all of which must form a part of our approach to these times.

This should lead us to doing the right thing, regardless of any outcome. The result of our actions is not our affair but the thought behind the actions is. We leave the results to God but we act, as much as we can, as his agents in this world so that he has the opportunity to use us in whatever way he sees fit. How that is is not our concern, and the best way we can serve is by attuning ourselves to the divine through love and dedication to the truth. That way the divine can come through us in some small way. We can act as channels through which God expresses himself in this world. The key as always is love but not love as the world understands love. It is love of God and his natural order. This is not a recommendation for turning turn your back on the world or, if it is, then doing so in the right way and for the right reason. Detachment is not disdain. It is simply a matter of putting first things first and then seeing where that leads you. You may act, you may not. That depends on your individual mission. But if you do you will be acting from the right place which is the God-centred soul as opposed to the worldly success seeking self.

The Recent Solar Eclipse

 

This is the chart for the recent solar eclipse on 21st September. That also happened to be my birthday and the eclipse was just a couple of degrees off my natal sun (the eclipse was late in the day and I was born shortly after midnight hence the distance between degrees for the same day). That is significant enough but an additional factor is Saturn directly opposite at 28 degrees of Pisces which is even closer to a direct opposition to my sun at 27 Virgo. So far nothing untoward seems to have happened other than a leak from a pipe in my bathroom that went through the ceiling in the room below and did quite a lot of damage. It was discovered an hour after the eclipse. A leak might involve the water sign of Pisces and also Neptune which is conjunct Saturn here but it does not have any connection with an eclipse. However, it is said that the effects of an eclipse may start several days before it takes place and continue for up to three months afterwards. 

An eclipse on your natal sun is supposed to herald new beginnings and potentially dramatic changes. With Saturn involved there can be increased responsibilities and new limitations as well. This was my 70th birthday so you might say all those factors come into play. But then everyone gets to 70 who lives that long and not everyone has this pattern on their birthday so I doubt that is all there is to it. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, goes on in my life in the next few weeks. The energies involved in astrology, whatever they are, can be processed internally if one is in tune with the cosmos and consciously aware of oneself and one's personal shortcomings. If one is unconscious and, let's face it, we all are to some extent or we wouldn't be here, they can manifest externally in the form of events that occur. I intend to be as aware as possible of my thought processes and emotional reactions in the coming weeks. Perhaps this is a good opportunity for me to watch myself more closely than usual and bring things I should be doing anyway, but often neglect to do, into sharper focus.

When I first saw the conjunction of the eclipse with my sun I felt mildly apprehensive. I've had experiences with eclipses before as mentioned in Meeting the Masters. But then the thought popped into my head. "Don't be like the heathen. Trust in God." I don't normally think in terms of heathens but that was the word as it appeared in my thoughts. I take it to mean that I should not be superstitious because of this or that pattern in the sky. The stars (so-called) do reflect the workings of creation but above them there is the Creator and one should always have confidence that whatever may play out in our lives down here on earth is always for our spiritual good. The planets are like the gods but the gods are the servants of God who is beyond them all.