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.

A Refreshing Fast

 I've recently spent 10 days away from the media, television, the internet, the "news", everything. Aliens could have landed and I probably wouldn't have known. A politician could have said something sensible. I've just been walking, swimming in the sea, eating freshly caught fish and drinking local wine. When you return to simplicity the absurdities of modern life are even more absurd but at the same time so ridiculous you know they cannot last. They are not like the rock in the first picture or the sea in the others, not parts of solid reality. They are seen as terrible aberrations but essentially trivial, even childish. They will be swept away eventually though they may do a good deal of damage before that happens. But they will pass.

This is one of the supposed sites of Atlantis before its destruction. I don't believe that theory because, for one thing, it is in the Aegean not 'beyond the Pillars of Hercules' (i.e. Gibraltar), and, for another, the volcanic eruption that put paid to the Bronze Age site in present-day Akrotiri was in the 16th century BC and Atlantis went down long before that. But archaeological digs have revealed a thriving, well-developed and prosperous prehistoric city that probably traded with Minoan Crete and ancient Cyprus, a major source of copper. Apart from the usual pottery vessels and, less romantic but more practical, advanced (for the time) drainage system, the site has revealed numerous beautiful frescoes such as the ones below.

Minoan City and Ship

A Fisherman

A Saffron Gatherer

All the men in the paintings have ruddy skin while the women are white which perhaps reflects ideas of masculine and feminine beauty. Or maybe the men just worked outdoors more. There are also pictures of blue monkeys, now in the local museum. When you consider these are over three and a half thousand years old it makes you curious to hear their music too. Would it have been of the same quality?

It's spiritually healthy to get off the internet completely and away from the world for a while but one can't remain lotus-eating for long or one becomes soft. That doesn't mean we should spend too much time online but we are here to overcome the world both out there and within ourselves, and so for now it's back to what is amusingly called reality.

It's a pity some of the pictures overlap with the text at the side but they look better bigger.

Repost 2: A Visit to an Ashram

 Meeting the Masters is mostly about a single year in my life, the year my spiritual guides made contact with me and the first year of my tuition by them. This was also the only year I recorded their messages in a systematic (or relatively systematic) way. During that period Michael and I made a month long visit to India which is described in the book. However, shortly after that we returned to India to live and we stayed there for five years, during which time the Masters continued to talk to me through the mediumship of Michael. It seems that part of the reason we went to India was that it was easier for them to do this. I doubt it's the case now but India, or the rural parts of it anyway which is where we mostly were, really was less materialistic than the West back then. Our teachers also wanted  to separate us out from the world for a spell so that we could devote ourselves to the spiritual quest without distraction. 

We spent the first few months in and around the city of Bangalore (now Bengalaru and greatly changed since 1980, its population having exploded from 2.8 to 14 million which means I have no desire to go back) before moving up to the hill station of Yercaud in Tamil Nadu where we bought a property which comprised two bungalows. This property was on the side of a hill with the bungalows on different levels of a terraced garden. We lived in the top bungalow and ran the lower one as a guesthouse. It only had three bedrooms and the season was relatively short but it gave us a small income as well as something to do of a practical nature. The Masters always encouraged me to keep myself occupied and not lapse into the sort of over-introspective mysticism which leads only to self-absorption. As they told me shortly after we arrived in Yercaud. “Work more with your hands so that you keep busy, and do not dwell so much in thought as that will only make you self-centred and inclined to lose yourself in speculation that goes nowhere. You will not gain the knowledge you seek through thought”. The Masters were practical mystics and that same attitude is what they seek in their disciples. Ora et labora, one might say. The correct balance between inner and outer is important on the spiritual path, and the Masters were always keen advocates of working with the hands which they saw both as a pure, i.e. natural and spontaneous, form of self-expression as well as a means of keeping the over-activity of the mind at bay.

"You will not gain the knowledge you seek through thought." That's precisely the opposite approach to the modern one. It does not mean that thought is wrong but it does tell us that spiritual knowledge is only found on a higher plane than the conventional mental one. Spiritual knowledge, as opposed to knowledge about spiritual things which is of the mental plane, may not be the only sort worth seeking but it is the most important.

Our bungalow in Yercaud

I regard those five years in India as the most important of my life but didn't include much about them in the book partly for reasons of space, but also because I wanted to focus on the words of the Masters as recorded during that first year. The following piece is something I did originally include but then cut out as not particularly relevant to the main thread of the story. It's not without interest though, and I hope earns its place as a post in the blog.

'This is not a personal history so, although there are many other things I could write about our time in India, here is not the place to do it. However, I might mention a visit we made to the ashram of Bede Griffiths, the Christian monk who had adopted the lifestyle of a Hindu sannyasi. Michael and Bede Griffiths had a mutual acquaintance who had given us a letter of introduction and so one time when we were travelling in the vicinity of his ashram, we decided to pay him a visit. By one of those little quirks of fate which implies that someone on the other side has a sense of humour, it transpired that Bede Griffiths had that very day gone to Yercaud where we lived for the funeral of a fellow Catholic priest. However, he was expected back the next day and the people at the ashram kindly said we could stay there. I recall that the ‘bed’ we were offered was basically a slab of concrete jutting out from the wall, resembling a shelf you might put pots and pans on more than something you would want to sleep on. Still, you don’t go to ashrams for the creature comforts. The site itself was idyllically situated on the banks of the sacred river Kaveri, the Tamil equivalent of the Ganges, and though the life led by the devotees there seemed simple to the point of austerity, the natural beauty of the place more than compensated.

   Father Bede came back the next day. With his long white hair and beard, barefoot and simply dressed in an ochre robe, he looked every inch the holy man. We talked to him for an hour or so and it was clear that his appearance was a true representation of what he was which is by no means always the case. He had been a pupil and friend of C.S. Lewis and we spoke a bit about that. I've forgotten our conversation but there is an interesting article about the two here.

 I very much liked Father Bede but I did have some reservations about his ashram and the form it took. The church was built along the lines of a southern Indian temple with statues of Jesus and Mary in the form of Hindu deities which made it look like something out of an Indian Disneyland. We went to a service which was half Mass and half Puja and, although conducted with obvious sincerity, seemed to me to be fundamentally misconceived. When you mix the outer elements of religious traditions you end up with a hybrid that may preserve something of the externals of both but has nothing of the inner nature of either. Truth may be beyond form but form can express or misrepresent truth, and if you try to blend traditions that have grown completely separately, you lose most of what matters and are just left with a caricature of both. It is true that religions have borrowed from each other and that, for example, the now unmistakably Eastern form of the Buddha owes much to Greek influence but when a religious iconography and ritual has taken on a settled and defined form, to mix it up with that from another tradition completely and negates its whole purpose which is to act as a channel from the inner to the outer.

 I am not saying that religions cannot learn from one another nor that they may not have the same inner truth behind them, but to seek to combine their outer trappings and forms of worship robs them of their operative value and results in a maybe well-intentioned but effectively confused mish-mash, style without substance. The mystical elements of the various religions may be reaching for the same inner truths but you cannot mix and match the externals, and to see a picture of Christ sitting like Siva seems blasphemous to me. I understand that Father Bede himself was aware of the dangers of syncretism, and I mean no disrespect to his person in writing of my impression of his ashram like this. He was born in a time when religions were very exclusive and it is understandable that as a mystic he sought to move beyond that, but I think the approach tried at his ashram was a mistaken one even if it was well meaning and sincere. '

My visit to Father Bede's ashram was nearly forty years ago and it may be completely different today, but that's not the issue. My point here is that the 'all religions are one' attitude, popular during the 20th century, doesn't really work. Because there is nothing hidden anymore and we appear to have easy access to everything that has ever existed, it is tempting to blend traditions and think we are getting the best of all worlds. But greater breadth often means less depth. I do think we can learn from other traditions, and one of the advantages of living at the present time is that we have that possibility. But if you blend the outer forms of traditions that have sprung from totally different revelations you will lose the connection they both might have had to the source of all.

When I visited Father Bede I was more persuaded of the idea that all religions express the same truth than I am now. Today, we can see that God is conceived very differently in some religions compared to others, and the desired heavenly destination is not the same in all cases either. Obviously, there are strong similarities and the mystics of every religion do have much in common, but we live in a world which is increasingly dominated by spiritual evil and it seems clear to me that only Christ has the power to stand up to that evil. I wonder that if Father Bede were still alive whether he might reassess the wisdom of blending Hindu and Christian iconography at his ashram.

Repost 1: A Holiday in India

 I noticed the other day that there have been 1,000 posts on this blog since it started. This seems a good moment to repost one or two from the beginning, slightly re-edited to reflect my present thinking. My spiritual intuitions are largely unchanged but the form they take has developed through the writing of the blog which is one of the reasons for doing it.

There is a chapter in Meeting the Masters, the book about the early part of my spiritual journey, that recounts a trip to India Michael Lord and I made shortly before going to live there on a more permanent basis. This was in 1979 while we were living in Bath and I was just beginning to find my spiritual feet. It was the Masters' wish that we went to India though they did not tell us that until after we had decided to go. This is a basic rule of the spiritual life. You are not told directly what to do. You may be impressed by the higher powers but you must respond to impression and make your decisions for yourself.

In the book I mentioned that Michael had taken a few photographs during the trip, and I would have liked to have included some of them in the book but production costs made that impossible. However, a blog has no production costs so I can add them here.

Michael's camera in 1979 was a pretty basic one, even for the period, so the pictures are not of a high quality. Also, though he took around 20 photos over the month we were there, not many have made it though the intervening 45 years. It's not like today when people take hundreds of photos and, as far as I can tell, rarely look at any of them again.

We started our trip in Delhi where we visited the Red Fort, the Jama Masjid and other tourist sites but the first photograph I still have was taken at the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, one of those  grand buildings the British put up in the Indo-Saracenic style which mixes Mughal and Gothic revival architectural features. It's now a museum.

As you can see, I was not a particularly willing subject. There is a definite 'get on with it' expression on my face.

While in Calcutta we stayed at the Ramakrishna guesthouse and visited the Swami who had initiated Michael into that order a few years previously. He was a venerable old gentleman but still fully fit and demonstrating the inner calm that the Masters were frequently telling me to acquire but which I lacked then and don't have as much as I should do now. Inner calm may be easier to maintain in a monastery or ashram than in the hurly-burly of the world but, as a mental attitude, it should be unaffected by outer circumstances, whatever these might be. This is because it is not a question of controlling emotion but of being centred in the real and therefore responding to the external world as just that, external. A criticism that could be levelled at the Asian mentality which may find it easier to attain inner calm is that it does this by disassociating itself from the reality of the external world so one has to be careful that detachment does not come at the price of the rejection of the subsidiary but genuine reality of outer things and conditions. Spirit is primary but matter is real in its way too.

After Calcutta we went to Darjeeling and then Varanasi but no photos remain from those visits. They were mostly just standard tourist photos of the Himalayas and the Ganges so no great loss though I do regret the absence of a group photo of the Buddhist monks who were staying in the same lodgings as us in Varanasi, with some of whom I enjoyed a game of football. There was no problem in getting them to smile for the camera, something I have always found difficult. Other lost photos are of the Ghoom monastery near Darjeeling which apparently is now called Yiga Choeling, and of the very ancient-looking monk with skin like cracked parchment we spoke to there. This monastery is known for its 15 feet statue of the Maitreya Buddha (that's the Buddha who is to come) of which Michael took a now lost photo. Here's a substitute which is probably of better quality anyway.

While flying to Delhi en route to Kashmir something unpleasant got into Michael. I had been warned of the possibility of this by the Masters, and told that my conduct was the key as to whether it happened or not. In this case, having the puritanism of the spiritual neophyte back then, I had argued with him over what I perceived as worldly behaviour. He had reacted with anger, and the resultant 'bad vibrations' had given the entrée to some kind of demon which had possessed him. I didn't realise what was going on at the time but was profoundly shocked by the transformation. He hissed at me and then shouted, oblivious to anyone who happened to be nearby. His eyes became a dull reddish colour and his skin turned sallow. He was totally uncompromising and hard, quite unlike his normal self. This lasted for the entire flight to Delhi and the thing was only ousted when Michael fell asleep while we were waiting for our ongoing flight to Srinagar. He remembered nothing when he awoke. The Masters told me afterwards what had happened and said that they permitted it as a means of showing me externally what my own lack of control looked like. An extreme policy but I have to admit it was effective. Demonic possession may not be accepted nowadays by the general populace but it remains a possibility, especially for those of a mediumistic tendency which Michael obviously was. Similar experiences were noted in the case of William Coote, the medium in The Boy and the Brothers book.

Michael was well protected by those he served and this sort of thing happened on only a very few occasions and when it did it was always initiated by a spiritual lapse on my part. That is why the Masters permitted it. They told me they could always banish the demon but it might take a while. I don't pretend to understand the mechanics of it but can simply pass on what I was told and what seemed to be confirmed by observation.

Kashmir was a good place for healing and rest. We stayed on a houseboat on the lake called Nagin Bagh and for a week did little more than read, walk, swim and laze in the sun. Here's a picture of the boat,

and here's a not very good picture of Michael in a shikara, the narrow rowing boat that ferries people around on the Kashmiri lakes.

The Masters came frequently while we were in Kashmir, and it was there that they explained what had occurred at Varanasi airport. They told me that there was no need for fear but I should remain vigilant which sums up how the spiritual aspirant should respond to the problem of evil. When I first wrote this piece I was conscious that the word evil might offend because there was this naive idea among some spiritual seekers that evil is just ignorance and in the higher worlds everything is goodness and love. Unfortunately, that is just not true. Evil exists in the spiritual world. In fact, that is where it comes from. I think that nowadays this has become much better understood, especially as it is becoming harder to deny the presence and activity of evil in the world. It always has been understood in serious religion but post-'60s New Age-type spirituality thought it knew better. It didn't.

From Kashmir we returned to Delhi and then on to Agra. North India is a confluence of Hindu and Muslim culture, and the latter reached its apogee in the Mughal Empire which by any criteria must be one of the most splendid ever to have existed. By the criterion of architectural excellence its only rival would be the cathedrals of medieval Europe, and this excellence comes to a peak at Agra. Naturally, Michael took a picture of the Taj Mahal which is undoubtedly a miracle of art and design but I preferred the Tomb of Akbar at Sikandra, and here is the photo I mention in the book as the only one in I which I smiled.

Sometimes you feel a connection with a place. When I visited the tomb of the emperor Akbar I felt like a little piece of a jigsaw puzzle that slotted into place. It fitted. That's the only way I can describe it and it is why I am smiling in the photo. Oddly enough, when I went back to the site 3 years later it was just an impressive building. The spirit seemed to have gone, but that first time was remarkable.

Strait is the Gate

 A few days ago I was out for my usual early evening walk. The particular circular route I was taking this time started off in a local park then proceeded up a road that goes to the downs and then across a field with horses that leads to a small wood from where it's a mile or so home. I like this walk because of its variety but this day I was feeling the routine and, to be frank, monotony of my daily life more than usual. Many years ago I was told by my teachers that my life must continue in a routine until I left my physical body, and such has been the case up until now. I realise this is necessary, unglamorous as it seems, as a spiritual discipline but sometimes it can become frustrating and on this occasion I was feeling that frustration. The spiritual darkness of the contemporary world was also weighing down on me and I lamented this out loud, asking God and my guides if a little break in the clouds might be possible. Don't be weak, came the response as a thought in my head. You are lucky to be in the position you are in where you can see what you do. When you reject the world you cannot expect worldly reward and satisfaction. When you allow God to work on you, you must be prepared for hardship on the level of the earthly ego. That was all very well, but still I asked for a little light in the darkness.

When these thoughts were going through my head I turned off the road going to the downs and into the field with horses. Luckily I had my phone with me as I was expecting a call from my daughter. I don't usually carry it when I go out. This is what I saw. 

The last time I had gone through this field there was a path that led to the woods at the end and it was twice the width it was now. There had also been no gate. The landowner had clearly decided to reduce the size of what was a public right of way through his field and put up a gate and posts to narrow the path. That was a pity but what struck me was that here, almost immediately after I had asked my question, was the answer to it. It came from Matthew 7:14. "Strait is the gate and narrow the way which leadeth unto life and few there be that find it." I had been lamenting the circumscription of my life but here I was being told in no uncertain terms. "What do you expect? This is how it is. Stop complaining, open the gate and go through!"

If it weren't for the fact that this teaching is applicable to others I wouldn't mention it here. After all, it's a tiny incident and its significance would be lost on most people. That significance could even be entirely imaginary. But I do think God speaks to us at certain times. He does not thunder from on high. He speaks so softly we might miss it if we weren't paying attention. On this occasion, though, it seemed to me that he answered my question in a perfect way.

Not Quite Human

(Advance warning: This post has nothing to do with the theme of the blog). 

I recently had my DNA tested by one of the several companies that specialise in this service. You provide them with a small sample, in this case by swabbing the inside of your cheeks, send it off for analysis and await the results. My father came from Yorkshire and his family had been there for several generations, my mother's father came from North East Scotland and his mother was from the Hebridean island of Benbecula while my maternal grandmother was Irish so I roughly knew what to expect, but here are the results.

Europe

100%

Great Britain and Ireland

98.7%

Ireland

27.5%

Northumbria

21.8%

North Yorkshire

10.4%

Northern Ireland and Southwest Scotland

8.8%

South Yorkshire

7.4%

Lincolnshire

5.9%

Aberdeenshire

4.6%

Central England

3%

Cornwall

2.3%

Northwest Scotland

2.2%

Northwest England

2%

South Central England

1.7%

East Anglia

1%

Europe (North and West)

1.3%

Northwest Germanic

1.3%

All fairly typical for a British person or an actually British British person. The big surprise to me was the amount of Northumbrian but I suppose that is not far from Yorkshire. The other interesting (to me) element is the relatively high quantity of DNA from Lincolnshire and Aberdeenshire. My Scottish grandfather's surname was Ledingham and this name was apparently first found in Lincolnshire but is also associated with Aberdeen. I have DNA from most places in Great Britain and Ireland but none at all from Wales. This would have pleased said grandfather who harboured a prejudice against the Welsh for reasons I never found out. When his only son, my uncle, married a very nice Welsh girl he was so annoyed that he trained my brother and I, aged around 6 and 4 at the time, to recite the old nursery rhyme "Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief" at the wedding reception in Cardiff. Apparently we weren't a great success with the family of the bride.

The reason I chose this particular company, which is called Living DNA, is because they also give you an estimate of how much of your DNA came from the Neanderthals. It used to be thought that Homo sapiens did not breed with other forms of humans but we now know that Homo sapiens did, in fact, interbreed with Neanderthals during the Late Pleistocene, soon after moving out of Africa some 80,000-50,000 years ago. So, although we are the only surviving human species we do carry traces of earlier human species within us.  At least, those of us who are of European and Asian ancestry do. Neanderthal DNA is not found in sub-Saharan Africa though in that part of the world there are traces of other even earlier types of Homo.  That counters claims made at the time the genetic code was first unravelled which maintained that all human groups were exactly the same. DNA analysis has completely disproved this always obviously wrong and ideologically based theory.

I have 1.89% Neanderthal DNA which is roughly average for someone of my background. I also have 0.18% Denisovan DNA. Homo denisova is another form of archaic human whose DNA survives as part of the modern human genome though they themselves died out thousands of years ago. It survives mostly in populations from Asia and Oceania and presumably does because it is useful in some sense. Ability to adapt to high altitude is thought to be one of the benefits bestowed by Denisovan DNA and that makes sense as the populations are believed to have been centred in areas around Siberia and Tibet. The first discovery of a fossil of this type of human was actually in a cave in the Altai Mountains in Siberia and, though there have been a couple of other places where it has been found since (in China and Laos), scientists are working with extremely small samples, bits of a finger or a molar, to extract their DNA. I have to say that the work in this field has been truly remarkable and led to fascinating results. It makes you wonder how much more there is to be discovered, locked up inside our bodies.

As a result of this analysis I am delighted to announce that I am only 98% human, or modern human if you want to nit pick. Of course, you probably are as well.

On a more serious note, and returning to the blog's actual theme, as interesting as this kind of study is it should not blind us to the fact that we are in a particular body but we should not be exclusively identified with that body. But then nor should we go to the other extreme and do as many do now and think it doesn't matter, we're all the same. We are not all the same and we are meant to be what we are. At the same time, our true self is the soul and when we die that is what we will return to. And yet I do believe we shall take something of what we are now with us as an additional flavour or colouring. Nothing is wasted and just because we are not the body that does not mean that the body is not in some sense part of us too. Approach this question on an intuitive level rather than a strictly intellectual one and you will find that you can reconcile apparent contradictions.