Arrival in Yercaud

 The reminiscences of my time in India in the 1980s are a sidetrack from the main theme of the blog but some of their contents do occasionally overlap with that theme and I enjoy the trip down memory lane so here is another one following chronologically on from the last.

We had arrived in India in April and it was now November. The seasons in South India are described as hot, hotter and hottest and I don't remember which is when but I have the feeling that the cooler weather was on its way now as one might expect at that time of year. This was certainly the case in Yercaud which is a hill station in the Shevaroys 5,000 feet above sea level so has a very different climate to the plains down below. That was one of the reasons the British developed such towns as Simla in the north and Ootacamund in the south, but there was a commercial element too because many of these hill stations were situated in tea growing areas though Yercaud, being slightly less elevated, was better suited to coffee. Coffee estates are more visually interesting than tea estates which resemble nothing so much as neat rows of suburban hedges. Coffee requires both sun and shade so growers plant trees interspersed with the coffee and in Yercaud these were often orange trees giving two crops on the same piece of land as well as two lots of very beautiful and sweet-smelling blossom. 

The van with all our possessions got to the town of Salem at the foot of the Shevaroy Hills without mishap which was somewhat surprising given its rickety state. There didn't appear to be any signs to Yercaud but there was only one road that led to the hills so we followed it. It was a lovely drive made more interesting because as you climbed the vegetation changed from typically tropical trees and plants to more temperate zone types. The air became cooler and fresher, and the light sharper. There were monkeys in the trees and scampering on the rocks by the side of the road like these fellows.

Brother, thy tail hangs down behind

Where did I leave that banana?

Roughly half way up the hill our van broke down. I was surprised it had got this far given its condition, but the driver was unperturbed and soon diagnosed the problem. The trouble was he had to go back to Salem, a good 10 miles away, to get a spare part for the engine. Luckily, there were buses plying this route and he got on one leaving Michael and me with the van. Michael then decided he had better get up to Yercaud to make sure the bungalow we had rented was ready for us and he got on a bus going the other way. These buses came by about once an hour and there was very little other traffic so I sat there by myself looking out over the hot dusty plains spread below and watching the monkeys until I got sleepy and stretched out on the parapet that bordered the road, presumably to stop cars plunging over the side. They didn't always work. On one occasion while I was living in the area a bus went over resulting in several deaths.

Michael came back after a couple of hours and then the driver returned with the spare part and we set off up the remainder of the 20 hairpin bends there were on the ghat road. Here is one of them.

And this shows the entrance into Yercaud. Note the cloud and the evergreen trees, showing that we are high up.

The name Yercaud comes from two Tamil words meaning lake and forest, and the lake is the first thing you see on arrival. I believe it has now been developed as a tourist resort with fishing and boating but in my day it was just a lake with some public gardens beside it on one side. 

Yercaud Lake

 We drove to the bungalow Michael had rented, albeit only for a couple of months as on his previous visit he had also located a property for sale that consisted of a pair of bungalows built on the terraced hillside so that on the lower level you had a well (there was no mains water) and the first bungalow. Then on the next level there was a stretch of garden with a few coffee and banana plants and some orange trees and finally at the top the main bungalow. It was ideal for running as a guest house. Michael had found this property through someone he had met on his initial trip who was a Syrian Christian called Tharyan Matthews. Syrian Christians are from Kerala for the most part and claim religious descent from St Thomas who is supposed to have landed on the Malabar Coast just a few years after the Crucifixion. They are ethnically Indians but use the rites of early Syriac Christianity hence their name. Tharyan (the name is a form of Alexander) and his wife Elizabeth would be good friends to us during our stay in Yercaud, helping us in many ways though the friendship did end on something of a sour note in what one might call typical Indian fashion. We will come to that another time.

The rented bungalow was basic but habitable. There was one large central living area and a couple of bedrooms but one was small and somewhat grubby so we used it to store our furniture, mostly bought at auction in Bangalore when we thought we would be living in Whitefield. We shared the other bedroom, and the first night passed reasonably well though I kept hearing strange noises but since the house was surrounded by quite thick woods I just thought it was the local nightlife. The noises were louder and seemed closer the next evening and then all of a sudden in the middle of the night Michael gave a great shout. It seemed something had run over his face and then tried to burrow down into his pyjamas. We turned on the lights and there were over a dozen rats in the room including several perched on a ledge or cornice that ran along the walls. They were looking at us inquisitively. We were clearly interlopers in their territory.

I can't remember how we got rid of the rats but we clearly did because we stayed in that bungalow for the next few weeks while the purchase of the other property went through. You may be wondering how we bought this other place, given the reason we had left Whitefield was that we, as foreigners, had not been granted permission to buy what was called immoveable property despite being assured by the Indian High Commission in London that we could. The answer is Michael had so set his heart on buying somewhere that he accepted Tharyan's offer to buy it in his name. Michael supplied the money which was about £20,000 (this was 1980 so that was not what it would be now but still was reasonable for 2 bungalows and a fairly decent amount of garden) and Tharyan's name went on the paperwork. I thought this was somewhat reckless but Tharyan seemed friendly and honest, and it was not my money.

We moved into the new bungalow in December 1980. It had taken several months, and a lot of work still needed to be done on the two bungalows and the garden which was heavily overgrown, but we had finally established ourselves in India.

 

Detachment and Indifference

 A couple of weeks ago I saw a television programme in which an Indian man who had been living in England since he was a small boy and who was, to all appearances, completely Westernised went back to India in order to find acceptance for the death of his father to whom he had been extremely close. The shots where he recollected his love for his father were very touching. He came from a Hindu family but was now an atheist due, no doubt, to the influence of the world in which he, a successful journalist, lived. But his father's death had awoken something in him and though he neither sought nor expected easy answers, he did want to explore his traditional background.

The way he chose to do this was to join a pilgrimage to the Kumbh Mela which is a festival that takes place every 12 years when Jupiter, the sun and the moon form some kind of astronomical relationship. The gathering is the most enormous collection of human beings on the planet and wild horses couldn't drag me there. But for many it is the highlight of their lives. Tens of millions of people attend forming a chaotic mass of humanity, and for Hindus it is one of the holiest events with people making many sacrifices to go and bathe in the river Ganges where they can purify themselves of sin and prepare their souls for Moksha which is liberation. At least, that's the idea. I remember reading once that one of Ramakrishna's disciples asked him if bathing in the Ganges really did wash away your sins. It certainly does, he replied. The trouble is the sins sit in the branches of the trees on the riverside and, unless you are attentive, drop back on you as you come out. A good answer that satisfies both faith and reason - sort of.

In the last post I talked about the need for detachment at the present time. There is always a need for detachment but the fact of the end times makes it more important than ever. I spoke of it meaning not that you don't care but that you are not attached to the caring. This might seem a contradiction in terms so let me explain. You care because this world is real but you are not attached to the care because it is not ultimately real. This world is a reflection of a higher world. That doesn't mean it's not real but that its reality is borrowed not innate. The true reality from which springs any reality this world has is located in the higher world. In the heart of God, you might say.

I mention this because as the journalist in the TV programme was going to bathe in the river at the Kumbh Mela there was a stampede. Hundreds of people were injured and dozens died. Naturally, he was horrified and he sought an explanation of how to react from the spiritual perspective from one of the many sannyasis who were present at the event. Unusually, this was a holy woman rather than a holy man, but she wore the ochre robe that signifies renunciation from the word. 

She told him to respond with indifference because birth and death were all part of life which is eternal. This is fine as far as it goes but the problem is the English word indifference carries the meaning of being, well, indifferent, that is to say, not caring about the pain and suffering there is in the world. You might consider this is just a question of the concepts of one language and culture not transferring accurately when expressed in the terms of another, and there is certainly an element of that. I suspect the word she would have used if speaking in her own language would have been vairagya which is a Sanskrit word meaning detachment and dispassion. It describes the spiritual state of being unattached to worldly matters of any kind, including ideas and beliefs, because one is centred in the eternal reality of being, above all the ebb and flow of events in the external world of space and time. It is not a question of the suppression of desire but the transcending of attachment to it. This is an essential quality to be acquired by any spiritual aspirant, Eastern or Western, that involves transferring the locus of attention from the phenomenal world of cause and effect to the stillness of the spiritual plane which is the underlying reality behind all the movement constantly going on in the material.

In classical Indian philosophy it is understood that dispassion does not negate compassion; that, in fact, properly ordered dispassion opens up the path to real compassion. However, there is a tendency, and this seems particularly the case for the Indian mind, for dispassion to actually mean, or result in, real indifference. That's why India is famous for its combination of spirituality with material squalor and degradation. Admittedly, it can be hard to balance detachment with caring but that is the task we are set, to be detached from the world but love it all the same because of the spiritual. Jesus wept. No one knew the reality of the spiritual world more than Jesus but that knowledge did not cut him off from the suffering in the material world.

I suspect that when this holy woman spoke of indifference to the deaths of many men and women at the pilgrimage she really was largely indifferent. I don't judge or condemn her because it is challenging when removing oneself from the world and transferring conscious attention to spirit to retain concern for the world. That is why there is always an element of balancing opposites on the spiritual path, of not going too far in one or another direction but standing on the edge of the razor sharp path. We must have detachment from the world but we must also have detachment from ourself. Then we will find (or so I have been told!) that love arises.

The Creative Side of Collapse

 One wonders at just what point will the supine populations of the West revolt. The latest almost farcical absurdity is that 16 year olds are being given the right to vote in the UK. This has been talked about for a long time but it seems is now really going to happen. The assumption, presumably, is that most will vote for the the left as naive young people tend to do, but it is a deeply cynical and immoral exploitation of both the population as a whole and the young people themselves who shouldn't have to think about such nonsense. The old excuses that 16 year olds can marry and die for their country,* and that, if they have left education and work, they pay taxes, are trotted out, but so what? They are nowhere near intellectually developed enough to make proper choices in how a country should be run. Nor, for that matter, are 18 year olds and while we're about it nor are most actual adults, but you don't put a mistake right by making it worse. This is an excellent example of the replacement of qualitative criteria by quantitative ones and, as such, another significator for us being in the latter stages of the End Times.

Most of the population did not kick back against the totalitarianism of 2020 which was probably a dry run for future restrictions of freedom. Nor have they kicked back against the extraordinary number of foreigners from the 3rd World flooding their countries which has an enormous detrimental effect, both culturally and economically. There is some resistance but it is managed like a little steam that is let off so that the whole pot can continue cooking away. The recent revelation that thousands of Afghans have been allowed to come to the UK focuses more on a data leak than the fact that another huge number of unassimilable people have been let into the country against the clear wishes of the majority, certainly the indigenous majority. How much longer will people refuse to see that this is deliberate subversion? Many current policies are intended to undermine and destroy. Are we so blind and prepared to put up with anything as long as we are comfortable? What a spiritually shameful state to be in.

For this is a spiritual problem. In a materialistic time such as ours people only understand spirituality in materialistic terms which means all they see is the horizontal axis of love thy neighbour. They don't see love God or love truth. Which means they don't see that spirituality does not mean being nice or kind or good as the world sees good. It might mean compassion for all on one level, but on another more important level it means establishing the higher and fighting for the transcendental good. The demons behind the scenes through their acolytes and stooges in this world, for the most part unwitting but corrupted by the desire for wealth, power, status and sex, seek to undermine the real good and replace it by a false good which closes off access to the higher good, the real spiritual as opposed to an ersatz copy. This is why evil shamelessly masquerades as good everywhere you look in the contemporary world.

At one time it was permissible for spiritual aspirants to turn their back on the world and dedicate themselves exclusively to spiritual discipline. This is less possible now. The world situation is so spiritually dire that we are all called upon to actively resist it. This may only be mentally but we cannot just ignore the raging evil that is everywhere and in everything. We can't step aside as though it doesn't concern us. We must stand against it even if it is only in our own minds and hearts. The course of the End Times in the outer world is what it is and cannot be changed, but the salvation of souls is what counts and every individual who sets himself against the current provides added strength to the forces that are engaged in a salvage operation in these times.

Outer collapse is coming but we can build lifeboats of consciousness that will rescue ourselves and others from the debris. In this world now, some, a minority, are active agents in the process of spiritual degeneration though most are passive participants with many self-proclaimed spiritual and religious people among them. But unless you identify and, inwardly, at least, resist the evil of today you are part of it and you will be dragged down with it.

The West is falling because it has lost touch with traditions which were built up over time to maintain and safeguard its material and spiritual integrity. When a culture replaces the strong (or masculine) virtues of belief in itself, discipline, ability to sacrifice and embrace hardship in order to forge a connection with transcendent reality and thereby separate the good from the bad with the feebler qualities of tolerance and relativistic acceptance of everyone and everything, justified by a nebulous compassion, it is a sign it is worn out. It has come to its terminal phase. This is our current state

At such a time the two most important qualities for the spiritual aspirant are detachment and discrimination. Detachment because the world is falling apart, destroyed in large part by bad people using false ideology as a cover to mask their vindictiveness, resentment and spiritual emptiness, and you will find such people in every walk of life. The process, driven also by the nature of end times entropy, is so far gone it cannot be redressed without great destruction. This must be accepted which is why detachment from the world is essential. That does not mean not caring but not being attached to the care. 

Then, discrimination. This is the ability to see through the lies and illusions that are everywhere, not just in politics, the media and academia, but even in religion and spirituality. Things, bad already, are going to get a lot worse but don't let that discourage you. This is all in line with the end of an age, and the outer collapse can actually, if you see it through the joint lens of detachment and discrimination, lead to spiritual renewal.

* Actually, I discovered that they can't anymore, the age being raised to 18 a couple of years ago which makes giving them the vote even more ridiculous. Also, though they can join the armed forces they can't go on the frontline until 18.

The End of a World

 Over the last hundred and fifty years, and especially since the end of the Second World War, Western societies have systematically dismantled the protective devices that guarded them from collapse. Standards, rules and cultural norms that prevented them from internal rot and damage from external sources have been attacked, ridiculed, removed and replaced. This is often at the instigation of particular groups which have worked to make the societies more congenial to themselves. It is true that a healthy society would have resisted these groups, but still they are like viruses that can more easily infect a body whose immune system has already been weakened.

The West has been undermined by sentimentality which is a luxury of the comfortable. It is this that has allowed it to admit elements that do it harm. A perfect example is the present crisis of illegal immigration into the UK with many small boats crossing the Channel from France full of people who have no right to be here and can offer nothing to the country into which they come. The solution to this is obvious but it is unacceptable to a sentimentalised society that has never known true suffering or hardship and indulges in the naive fantasy that its present wealth will always, magically, remain at the same level regardless of what happens. It doesn't see that this wealth had to be earned and can be, is being, dissipated.

Without boundaries everything is dragged down to base level. Boundaries guard. They protect. They keep out elements that would destroy what has carefully and laboriously been built up over long periods of time. Once removed the form they have maintained starts to crumble. Form by virtue of what it is needs boundaries, and higher forms, and yes, there are such things as higher forms, need strong boundaries in order to maintain their structure and integrity. Once those go then the structure goes. Again, to take the example of the UK, though this is true in most other Western nations too, we can see how the present relaxation of boundaries is leading to great cultural and material damage. To deny this may have been possible 30 years ago when the process was not so far gone even if it was well underway. It is no longer possible now except to the terminally deluded and those who, for whatever reason, just lie.

It is unlikely there is any solution to this, and it may be that from the spiritual perspective it was inevitable and might even have been desirable. That is because all societies run their course. The West had clearly reached its limits in the 20th century. No more proper art was being created even if, paradoxically, more supposed art than ever before was being turned out, quantity replacing quality in line with the typical pattern of the end of a cycle. But that is just one aspect of the decline which is well documented so there is no need for me to go into all the signs and symptoms here. Suffice it to say that the loss of the sense of transcendence lies at the root of most of them.

If the West has run its course as a creative endeavour that advanced the spirit of humanity then we may lament its passing because of what it was but cannot shed too many tears over it because of what it has become. A dying thing must die. To be a part of the death process is not pleasant but there are lessons that can be learnt by the spiritual aspirant as his world crumbles, primarily detachment and the realisation that everything true and good and beautiful exists in the higher worlds eternally. Anything that sought to manifest those qualities in the material world is only a reflection of higher things and cannot last. That is no reason not to seek to manifest the good in the world because by doing so we build it into ourselves, but equally when destruction comes as it must we must face it with equanimity and the sure knowledge that the forces of entropy can only affect matter. They cannot touch the spirit.

One last point. Jesus said that evil must come into the world but woe to those through whom it comes. If it is part of the divine plan that the West falls, having come to the end of its useful life, that does not mean that those groups which have attacked and undermined it through infecting it with false ideologies are doing God's work. Sickness and death are never good things though they may be necessary things from one perspective. The attack ultimately comes from non-material levels and the forces behind it are seeking spiritual destruction above all. They use vessels in this world that respond to the debased energies they channel. As the West falls how many souls will fall with it because they identify with the corruption? It is one thing not to regret the passing of a society that has fallen from grace but that society is made up of many individuals and these can either be saved or lost as the society of which they are a part collapses. The only solution is to become aware of the decay and stand apart from it.

Humility and Pride

 Look in any spiritual textbook and it will tell you about humility and self-abnegation, particularly if it is a Christian one. Humility is an important virtue that shows one is not dominated by the ego or separate self which is a materialised expression/distortion of the soul. Self-abnegation likewise indicates that the disciple has overcome the ego. But are things really as simple as that? Is humility the only quality the spiritual self should possess?

There are two aspects to the soul which are to do with expansion and contraction, and both must be realised if the soul is to be complete. What, after all, is the point of the soul? What is its purpose? You may say that the soul just is as an individualised expression of divine being which is true enough, but that just refers to its raw state and there must be more or else there would be no need for the soul to descend to the phenomenal world, the subject/object world of duality in which the keywords are experience, expression and experiment. This relates to the self-actualisation of the soul which means its development from a more or less blank cipher to a glorious star being of many colours.

Humility relates to the awareness of the oneness of life and the supreme reality of God, the knowledge that all that you are comes from God. It is not yours. It is his gift to you. But the soul is also called to become great. The soul is not a servant or slave, and any religion that teaches this is not worthy of your spiritual allegiance. The soul has the potential to be a king or queen, and this is the path it must follow. The more you have, the more you can give. The soul should strive to have everything and to be everything. This is its destiny, and this is where pride comes into the the equation.

The spiritual person is proud. He seeks the exaltation of the self. He strives to express the majesty of God in his person. This is right and proper and what we are called to do. We are kings of the universe if only we knew it. We can wield powers that could destroy planets. We can master and direct the pure force of spiritual will.

At the same time, the spiritual person is humble. He knows that everything comes from God. He knows that all he has, others can have too. He is bound to the rest of life with bonds of love. He lives in a permanent state of gratitude to his Creator.

Humility and pride relate to love and will, and the two are not mutually exclusive but part of the whole. Christianity has focussed, to excess some might say, on humility, while the old pagan religions, especially those of the Indo-Europeans, sought the path of the hero. There is no contradiction between these two if one understands that they relate to different aspects of the spiritual path, the push forward of the undeveloped self to mastery and its subsequent return to the inner knowledge of God. The problem has been the expression of humility and pride in the wrong spheres. The spiritual self should have pride and the worldly self humility. Some Christians have made the mistake of transferring humility to the soul and some pagans in the past made the opposite error, but if you understand the nature of the inner and outer aspects to your being you will see that both humility and pride (of the right sort) have their place in the spiritual life.

Love Your Enemies

 As we know, the devil quotes scripture for his own ends. Nowhere has he been busier in this regard over recent years than with the matter of love which is now used as an excuse to overlook all manner of assaults on goodness and truth. Don't judge, don't condemn, be tolerant, accept everyone and (pretty much) everything because, you know, love.

When Jesus told us to love our enemies he meant we should not hold hatred in our hearts for those who do us an ill turn. This is not to benefit our enemies who may or may not be good or bad people. It is to stop the hatred corroding our soul which is what hatred does do when it is personal. He was saying that hatred darkens the heart while love brings light to it. You cannot affect what is out there in others but you can affect what is in yourself. If you want to go to heaven then you must have heaven within you. We need to remember this. After death you will go to a place, an environment, that reflects your inner state. The subjective mind and the objective world reflect each other in the post-mortem state, the spiritual world. If you have hatred within you, you cannot go to a place of love

This is why we are enjoined to take Christ into our hearts. Not merely believe in him, but actually build him into our being. This does start with belief but must progress to a form of identification. That does not mean you are Christ, that is blasphemy, but Christ is in you. Controversially for a Christian, this can work with other deity figures depending on how much spiritual light they carry, but none carries so much light, and pure light unmixed with other stuff as is the case with other deity figures, as Christ who is the image of God in human form to a greater degree than anything or anyone else. God has appeared in many images to humanity at various stages of its existence but only in Christ is he revealed as fully as is possible in this world.

So, love your enemies because love cleanses the soul and hatred makes it sick. But loving your enemies does not mean accepting evil, and if you use the excuse of love to ignore or, worse, justify evil then you are betraying love which, ultimately, is love of the Good.

Today in the name of love what is ugly is called beautiful, what is unnatural is called natural and what denies spirit is regarded as as healthy in its own way as what fully accepts it. If you really love then what you love first and foremost is God who is the author of love, and if you love God then you condemn what rejects or insults God. You don't let that condemnation affect you on a personal level because then it drags you down, but nor do you succumb to the dangerous illusion that universal, unconditional love means loving everything equally. There is good and there is evil. To love your enemy does not mean accepting evil which must be identified and unsentimentally condemned.

Resentment and Nobility

 If I were the devil what sin would I most try to stimulate? What sin would be most spiritually corrupting for those who succumbed to it, and most damaging for the integrity of any culture in which it took hold amongst a sufficient number of the people? 

Resentment is the perfect sin from the demonic point of view because it can be disguised as a virtue, both to the one who holds it and to the society into which it is introduced. One can clearly see how resentment has undermined the Western world and is causing the West to allow itself to be destroyed. It is not only resentment, of course, because there are many factors at play, but this is a prime driver of the spiritually debased condition of our day. 

Resentment is behind the push for equality, and equality is the tool used to bring down the West and all it strove for which was excellence. For equality always does bring down more than it raises up as it inevitably reduces to the lowest common denominator the standards and culture of any society in which its pernicious influence takes hold. No egalitarian culture strives for nobility of soul and that is the preeminent spiritual quest for Western man. The very word nobility is meaningless in the egalitarian world, but if I had to pick one word to describe the goal of the spiritual path that would be it.

What is nobility? It is a spiritual condition of dignity, authority, responsibility, sacrifice and love, though love understood in its fiery rather than watery context. Nobility is the sun shining in solitary splendour in the heavens, the light by which everything else sees and to which everything else aspires. It is the fully realised individual soul that is able to express the power and majesty of God. It is Christ on the cross and Christ resurrected. It is that which stands at the top of the hierarchical ladder and the justification for that ladder which, be it noted, has height but also steps whereby to mount. Climbing is harder than falling and to be noble is harder than to resent but the noble soul knows God whereas the resentful soul has completely lost sight of God. It was resentment that caused Satan's fall and he uses it to bring us down if he can find anything anti-noble in us which he can stimulate. Therefore, cultivate the noble in your heart and shun the petty. That way you will find the path to the true God who loves absolutely but is no egalitarian. He is too big for that.