This part is Submitted by Sri D.C.D. on 25-8-1944

1. Japa of koham is not correct. Put the question once and then concentrate on finding the source of the ego, and preventing occurrence of thoughts.

2. You should not attend to the breathing if you are capable of concentrating on the enquiry without it. Some may have to attend to the breathing if unable to concentrate on the enquiry alone. Some may practise kevala kumbhaka during the enquiry. Some may require the help of regular pranayama also to steady the mind and control the thoughts. All these practices are to be given up when the mind becomes strong enough to pursue the enquiry without any aid. Pranayama is to be practised with the usual caution. It will gradually increase the power and duration of kumbhaka. It will make the mind one-pointed. Take help if unable to concentrate without it. Pranayama is like reins to control the mind-horse, or like brakes to control wheels of thought … ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Whence am I?’ are one and the same. They refer to the ego only. No such questions can be asked in the case of the Real Self.

3. Suggestive replies such as Sivoham etc., to the enquiry, are not to be given to the mind during the meditation. The true answer will come by itself. Any answer the ego may give cannot be correct. These affirmations or auto suggestions may be of help to those who follow other methods, but not in this method of enquiry. If you go on asking, the reply will come. The method of enquiry is dhyana, and the effortless state is Jnana.

14. Look at your Self or Atma, rather than anywhere else. The eyes may be kept open or closed – it is immaterial. There is only one I, whether you spell it ‘I’ or ‘eye’. There is no point in opening or closing the eyes. Attention must be focused on the inner ‘I’. You are not an eye that can be opened or closed. You may close or open the eyes according to your liking or inclination. It is immaterial, and not important. You will cease to think of the world when you think of the Self. If you are in a room and close your eyes and do not look out, it is immaterial whether you close the windows or keep them open. (The body is the room, the eyes are the window.)

Looking at ajna-chakra, etc., is not necessary in this method. It may help in keeping the mind from going out towards external objects. Concentrate on the Self without which there are no chakras. They do not exist without you. You are all of them. All centres (chakras) are in the Heart. The Heart is not the anahata chakra, which is in the spinal cord. Heart is ‘I’.

15. First find out whether the ego, who is depressed by these thoughts, exists. Find out how you got the idea of the body. Solve this problem for your ego, then see if anything remains to be solved.

This Book is written by Arthur Osborne.

This believe: I tell you what I know
From own experience; nothing of hearsay;
What I have tried and proved and found it so,
Following a guide, a Master of the Way.

SECTION ONE

But first what sense-perception tells us all.
The world in endless vista trails away
Into a past remote beyond recall.
Endlessly too the future looms ahead.
Between the two your pin-point life-days fall,
From the being born up to the being dead.
And then the ripples that you caused subside;
Another holds your office, sleeps in your bed,
While Life moves on with unperturbed stride,
As though you had not been. Even while you are,
Nothing is there secure, little for pride.
Health is on loan from time; frustrations mar
Ambition and achievement; friendships end
In death or forgetting. From afar
Old age creeps on, filching the zest you lend
To work and pleasure, chilling the vital power,
Still narrowing the circle you defend
Of life’s attachments, till the final hour
When thoughts, drawn in from schemes for which you fought,
From work you lived for, office held or power,
From wife and friend, from child, things sold and bought,
Converge on one point only, your next breath;
Stripped of attachment, to naked being brought,
To be squeezed out through the narrow womb of death.

This Book is written by Arthur Osborne.

Of course, the book was not ended, because the quest still continued. Progress was still in waves. They were more

visible now and followed one another more closely, while the troughs between them were shorter and less deep and gloomy. Nevertheless, any trough at all had become intolerable. Even a day or a part of a day deprived of the current of awareness was like being thrust down into an underground cell with no sunlight or fresh air, no freedom of movement. The time had come when the very concept of any other mode of life was unthinkable.

After about three years a series of great waves started, each one beginning at the crest and gradually subsiding into a level stretch, when it was necessary to cling to it tenaciously till the next wave arose. Each constituted a new mode of approach, one might almost say a new revelation, not to be lost in the end but rather absorbed as another strand in the totality of meditation. Such stages are not merely successive but can be progressive also.

This was in November 1961. The previous winter I had suffered from a severe bronchial infection leading to suffusion of the lungs and suffocating attacks, and for a while recovery was considered doubtful. It was cured through my wife’s homoeopathic treatment but there was continued shortness of breath and liability to a relapse. At this time a relapse did occur — perhaps due to my carelessness in continuing to sleep with open windows once the cool night winds had set in. Anyway, giving no thought to the outcome was a good opportunity for the attack on vasanas.

With some clear understanding of the meaning I felt better. Physically my cough was clearing out old deposits from the lungs; spiritually old vasanas were being cleared out from the mind.

There are cases, on a devotional and ecstatic path, where the aspect of bliss develops first. Despite the intense joy, this is more dangerous and less satisfactory. The times of joy are interspersed with periods of black misery when the Face of the Beloved is veiled; moreover the violent alternation and passionate longing may induce irrational behaviour or even over-balance the mind. Therefore, for instance, it is a dictum of the Sufi masters that the path of sobriety is preferable to that of inebriation. Even so powerful a master as Ramakrishna was thought mad when he first became immersed in ecstasy.

I never knew when they would come and in what form. It was quite irregular. For instance, ‘Waking and Sleeping’ took about two weeks to write; a fragment, perhaps no more than a line and a half, coming one day and then, after several days’ interval, another fragment. On the other hand, ‘The Expanse’ and ‘Be Still’ were both written the same day.

After the first few poems, I found that they tended to be either blank verse or regular rhymed lyrics, the more philosophical being blank verse and the more intuitive lyrics. The outer difference between poetry and prose being that poetry is formal and disciplined language and prose comparatively informal and undisciplined, it seems to me unnatural to write formless poetry. If it is not going to conform to the discipline of verse, let it be prose.

Or

Silence.

DURING   OUR STAY in Calcutta we usually spent the summer holidays at Tiruvannamalai. The journey itself consumed a week, there and back, leaving only about a month to stay there, sometimes less, and at the hottest time of the year; but it was worth it. We appreciated every day of it. Even though the meditation can be continued in any place, there is a vibrant peace at Tiruvannamalai that is immensely invigorating. One holiday we spent at Kalimpong in the Himalayas, but the atmosphere was empty and flaccid in comparison. We visited Shantiniketan in West Bengal, where Tagore had lived and where he founded his university, but felt no living presence.

Altogether we have travelled little and seen few swamis or holy places. As long as the children were at school in the hills we naturally used to spend the hot season with them; and later, when I was working, we were drawn nearly every holiday to Tiruvannamalai. In any case, we had little impetus to travel or explore. After Bhagavan, who else is there to see? We began to feel the same also about Arunachala.

is the ocean and we are the rivers that run into it.”

This Book is written by Arthur Osborne.

It was about 6 o’clock one June morning in 1956 that the first awakening to Reality occurred. I was alone in the room when I awoke and sat up in bed. My wife and Frania were sleeping in the next room, and Catherine had already married and left us. I just was — my Self, the beginningless, immutable Self. I had thought ‘nothing is changed’. In theory I already understood that it is not anything new; what is eternal cannot be new, what is new cannot be eternal. The only description is what Bhagavan has given: “It is as it is.” Only now I experienced it. There was no excitement, no joy or ecstasy, just an immeasurable contentment, the natural state, the wholeness of simple being. There was the thought: “It is impossible ever to be bored”. The mind seemed like a dark screen that had shut out true consciousness and was now rolled up and pushed away.

Of course, it is a paradox to speak of the mind being rolled up and at the same time of thoughts coming. Similarly, the mind of the realized man, such as Bhagavan, is said to be dead, but he has thoughts. It seems quite natural when it happens. Perhaps the best explanation would be that the mind as an active centre originating ideas, imagination, plans, worries, hopes and fears ceases to function, but the mind as a mirror condensing pure awareness into thoughts still works.

religion teaches about the after-life is relatively unimportant and can interest only philosophers and theologians. Judaism and the original Taoism say nothing on the subject, while Buddha refused to answer questions about it; and therefore scholars gravely argue whether they believed in survival or not. From a spiritual viewpoint, death is not important. “There is no existence of the unreal and no non-existence of the Real”, either before death or after. If the ego does not exist now, it does not exist after death either; if an illusory ego seems to exist now it will seem to exist after death also. The thing to do is to strive to awaken to reality now, in this lifetime, and then, as Bhagavan said, death can make no difference; no further change is possible.

This Book is written by Arthur Osborne.

In my youth I was tormented by the desire to be a writer. When I actually became one, some twenty years later, it happened almost by accident — so far as anything can be an accident; that is to say, without planning on my part.

After two to three years at Tiruvannamalai it became necessary to earn an income again and I took a job as an assistant editor of a newspaper in Madras, the nearest large town. Thus my destiny took the shape that Bhagavan approved for his followers — a period of intensive training followed by the practise of Self-enquiry in the life of the world.

I took with me a life-sized reproduction of the photograph painted over in oils, a gift from a devotee who had, over the years amassed a fine collection of pictures of Bhagavan. Before leaving I showed it to Bhagavan who took it in his hands and then gave it back to me, saying: “He is taking Swami with him.”Such was the impersonal way in which he would speak of himself. After that it had a peculiar significance for me. It is one of the most inward and profound of the portraits, though less obviously gracious and immediately accessible than some of the others.

Now that the beloved face was no longer with us, my wife at last started work on the long delayed sculpture. It was felt that there should be a statue of Bhagavan and the ashram had several times commissioned one, but the results were deplorable. One can measure features, but to reproduce the expression of the Divine Man would require love and understanding. My wife got some clay and started work on a bust. For over a year she worked at it, never quite satisfied, always changing and perfecting. Finally the face came to have a beautiful expression reminiscent of the living Bhagavan, but the poise of the head and shoulders was still not right. Then she went to Tiruvannamalai for a few weeks and it dried up and cracked. The face fell off in one unbroken piece, while the rest broke into bits. Taking this as a sign, we made a plaster cast of the face alone.

The only other task remaining was the revision of The Cosmology of the Stars, the book I had written in camp on the philosophy underlying astrology. There was really no need to bother with it, but I have a tidy mind and do not like leaving loose ends, so I dug the typescript out of the cupboard where it had been lying. To my surprise I found that it required very little change in substance but had to be completely re-written in order to eliminate the arrogant and aggressive tone that had permeated my style under the influence of Guenon. I sent it to Yorke, but he decided, probably quite rightly, that there would not be sufficient market for such a book, so it remained unpublished.

The parts of this chapter about Bhagavan’s teachings are largely based on The Teachings of Ramana Maharshi in His Own Words. There are also quotations from Ramana Arunachala.

I found my wife changed when I met her at Tiruvannamalai after four years. She had been mature in character before but now she was mature in understanding also. She no longer asked for explanations but gave them. And as she was explaining the same truths in a different idiom, that of Bhagavan instead of that of Guenon, it took me some time to adjust myself.

Bhagavan did not immediately reveal himself to me. I felt far less from his bodily presence than I had from his invisible support in camp. His photograph had been more real and vivid to me than any person, and yet now that I saw him face-to-face I felt his presence much less. This did not unduly worry me; it seemed merely a confirmation of what I had been told, that he was not a guru. I will give my impressions as I wrote them down at a time when they were fresher in my mind. “I entered the ashram hall on the morning of my arrival, before Bhagavan had returned from his daily walk on the hill. I was a little awed to find how small it was and how close to him I should be sitting; I had expected something grander and less intimate. And then he entered and, to my surprise, there was no great impression. Certainly far less than his photograph had made. Just a white-haired, very gracious man, walking a little stiffly from rheumatism and with a slight stoop. As soon as he had eased himself on to the couch he smiled at me and then turned to those around and to my young son and said: ‘So Adam’s prayer has been answered; his Daddy has come back safely.’ I felt his kindness but no more. I appreciated that it was for my sake that he had spoken English, since Adam knew Tamil.”

The change came a few weeks later at one of the big festivals of the ashram year. “There were huge crowds for the festival and we were sitting in the courtyard outside the hall. Bhagavan was reclining on his couch and I was sitting in the front row before it. He sat up, facing me, and his narrowed eyes pierced into me, penetrating, intimate, with an intensity I cannot describe. It was as though they said: ‘You have been told; why have you not realized?’ And then quietness, a depth of peace, an indescribable lightness and happiness.

“Thereafter love for Bhagavan began to grow in my heart and I felt his power and beauty. Next morning, for the first time, sitting before him in the hall, I tried to follow his teaching by using the vichara, ‘Who am I?’. I thought it was I who had decided. I did not at first realize that it was the initiation by look that had vitalized me and changed my attitude of mind. Indeed, I had only heard vaguely of this initiation and paid little heed to what I had heard. Only later did I learn that other devotees also had had such an experience, and that with them also it had marked the beginning of active sadhana (quest) under Bhagavan’s guidance.”

Then, for the first time in my life, I began to understand what the grace and blessing of the guru could mean. “My love and devotion to Bhagavan deepened. I went about with a lilt of happiness in my heart, feeling the blessing and mystery of the guru, repeating, like a song of love, that he was the Guru, the link between heaven and earth, between God and me, between the Formless Being and my heart. I became aware of the enormous grace of his presence. Even outwardly he was gracious to me, smiling when I entered the hall, signing to me to sit where he could watch me in meditation.”

However, with the Sadguru, the Divine Guru, this simple, idyllic state could not long continue. Although the devotion never diminished, it had merged with understanding. “And then one day a vivid reminder awoke in me: ‘The link with Formless Being? But he is the Formless Being.’ And I began to apprehend the meaning of his Jnana and to understand why devotees addressed him simply as ‘Bhagavan’, which is a name for God. (I should have said: ‘A word meaning God’). So he began to prove in me what he declared in his teaching: that the outer guru serves to awaken the guru in the heart. The vichara, the constant ‘Who am I?’ began to awaken an awareness of the Self as Bhagavan outwardly and also simultaneously of the Self within.

The specious theory that Bhagavan was not a Guru had simply evaporated in the radiance of his Grace. Moreover, I now perceived that, far from his teaching not being practical guidance, it was exclusively that. I observed that he shunned theoretical explanations and kept turning the questioner to practical considerations of sadhana, of the path to be followed. It was that and only that he was here to teach!

Before going any further I will try briefly to elucidate the differences of meaning in the terms ‘saint’, ‘mystic’, ‘initiate’, ‘yogi’, and ‘sage’. It will help to show what we implied by using the term ‘Bhagavan’ and what Bhagavan prescribed and therefore will not really be a digression. These terms, of course, are not rigorously precise definitions; neither are they mutually exclusive; nevertheless they do indicate real differences, even though there may be overlapping.

Imagine people living in a miasma at the foot of a mountain, stunted, undernourished, wasted by disease. They have been told that there is a wonderful plateau on the mountaintop, with fruit and flowers, invigorating air and cool, fresh water. But the ascent is arduous and they would have to leave their hovels and their few miserable possessions behind, so they stay where they are. Only a few of the more enterprising, either seeking the mountain summit or simply striving to rise above the heat, miasma and mosquitoes of the plain, have climbed up some distance and made themselves dwellings on the hillside. The plain-dwellers would refer to them all alike as ‘people of the hill’ and yet there would be endless differences among them. Some might have developed a farmstead and have fruit, milk and grain to give away to the sick and needy below, while others might be resting in a cave with a little more than their immediate needs. Some might have set forth on a deliberate enterprise to attain the summit, while others were driven merely by the urge to get up higher into cooler air and more beautiful, health-giving surroundings, not even knowing that there was a summit to attain. Even among those who started out with a plan of ascent, some might have put it aside till a later, indefinite date, once they had made a home somewhere along the path, while others might regard each pleasure-grove they came to as no more than a resting place from which to plan the next stage of the ascent.

No less varied are the people known as ‘saints’. Not only in their level of attainment do they vary but in their understanding of the goal and their dedication to further striving towards it. Also in the powers they manifest and the benefits they bestow. Only the Roman Catholic Church officially canonises saints; in other religions they are simply recognized. One criterion the Church demands is the performance of miracles. Power may flow through a saint, but it is by no means necessary that he should be interested to manifest powers. Also, the possession of powers is no proof of sainthood. This the Church recognizes. Not only that, but Christ himself warned against false prophets who would perform signs and wonders.

The mention of powers invites consideration of a slightly different category, that of the yogi or initiate (for the yogi is simply an initiate of one particular type of Hindu path). There is no clear demarcation; indeed, a saint may be a member of an initiatic order, while an initiate who has attained to a higher state will be a saint. Nevertheless, the accent here is rather more on powers and faculties and less on sanctity. The initiate is following a definite technique intended to cause changes and development of mind and character and ultimately to lead to beatitude; the saint also may be, but he may have been swept up by the sheer force of his aspiration and devotion, not knowing in theory whither he is being borne or by what means. There were initiatic sciences (hermetic or alchemical) in mediaeval Christendom and still are in India (yogic and tantric sciences) which develop powers and faculties in a man such as would be generally termed supernatural. Purity of character and motive are supposed to be essential in these sciences, but unfortunately there are people who practise them without and become rather occultists than saints. I myself have seen people in India who could perform wonders, and there was nothing spiritual about them. The great Tibetan Buddhist saint Milarepa (whose life has been translated into English by Evans-Wentz) first attained occult powers for the egoistic purpose of revenge on relatives who had dispossessed his mother and himself; when he turned to a genuine spiritual path he had to undergo terrible austerities to purify himself from this aberration. The meaning of ‘initiate’, therefore, ranges all the way from ‘saint’ on the one hand to ‘occultist’ on the other, apart from the many initiates, indeed the great majority, who achieve no recognizable development at all as a result of their initiation.

The term ‘mystic’ also is vaguely used. Both a saint and the initiate may be a mystic — in fact it might be held that the genuine saint and the successful initiate must be. However, there can be mystics who are neither saints nor initiates. The emphasis here is rather on intuitive knowledge, vision or ecstasy than on either sanctity or powers. Moreover, it may be a passive state without either the theoretical understanding or the practical disciplines of the initiate and without the saint’s striving for purity. What is held to characterise it is the occasional largesse of vision or beatitude, descending unearned. Even here there is a very wide range of what the mystic glimpses, from pure Self-realization to sensual visions and divine visitations.

There is one flank of the mountain where the ascent is sheer, with no pleasant groves to rest in on the way, where, to compensate for this, the path is direct and the crest already visible from the plains below and throughout the ascent. This is the direct path taught by Bhagavan. There are no stages on this path. Indeed, followers of Bhagavan are apt to be impatient when they hear of stages or degrees of realization upon some indirect path and to say: ‘What does all this mean? Either a man has realized the Self or he has not.’ This attitude is right as regards their own path but not necessarily as regards others, for there are paths on which the wayfarer does not aim at realization of the Self, the ultimate end of Supreme Truth, or at any rate not directly, and the term ‘realization’ is used with a different meaning, to signify merely the attainment of some higher state which, however, is equally transient and illusory within the ultimate reality of the Self. However, although the wayfarer on the direct path does not attain to any higher states along the way, he may be blessed with glimpses of pure Self-realization, beyond all states, which will suffuse and irradiate his whole life. Speaking of pure Self-
realization and the direct path to it, Bhagavan affirmed quite definitely both, that there are no stages in Realization and that Realization is not normally permanent when first attained. It may come in occasional flashes but cannot be permanent until the vasanas (inherent tendencies impelling one to desire one thing and shun another) have been eradicated. Two modes of conscious planned ascent have now been indicated, whatever name one may give them (apart from the occasional transportation of the mystic and the uncharted elevation of certain saints): that of the man who ascends in stages, becoming stabilized in this lifetime in some higher state, possibly with higher powers, but with no direct, and often even no theoretical knowledge of the supreme state of Self-realization, and that of the man who envisages the supreme truth of Identity, strives towards it, perhaps has occasional glimpses of its Realization but, until attaining it, is not established in any higher state. Which is preferable? The question is unrealistic, since each aspirant will follow the path that accords with his temperament and that his destiny makes available.

Another question that may be raised at this point is that of the benefit to those below. Reverting to the symbol of the mountain: should the hill-dweller who is facing downwards, having established a homestead not too high up from which he can supply the sufferers in the plains below, not be considered preferable to one who has turned his back on them and struggled up on his lone path to the summit? He might be if the symbol held good, but it does not. It is cancelled out by Christ’s saying that to him who attains the kingdom of heaven all else is added. It is therefore he who has greatest power to help others. One’s own Self-realization is the greatest boon that one can bestow on others, while at the same time, paradoxically, it reveals that there are no others to whom to bestow boons. It is like waking up from a dream; and to ask what can be done for others is as senseless as worrying what happened to the people one saw in last night’s dream. And yet waking is the best way to help them. Both are true.

Plontinus is usually spoken of as a sage and Eckhart as a mystic, and yet they would both appear to fall into the same category of wayfarers on the direct path. In theory they both showed complete understanding of the absolute Oneness of Self-
realization, of what Guenon called the ‘Supreme Identity’; in practise also they both seem to have had glimpses of realization such as Bhagavan refers to, although it is clear from what they themselves wrote that they were not permanently and irrevocably in the state.

To be thus established is possible although very rare. Again, “Among thousands, perhaps one strives for realization; among thousands who strive for Realization, perhaps one knows Me as I am.” (Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 7, verse 3). This does not imply knowing as one does another but knowing by being. It means simply to realize the Self that you always were by complete dissolution of any other-than-Self in you, or, more correctly still, by complete dissolution of the mistaken belief that there ever was any other-than-Self in you.

This is the supreme state. It is beyond revelation, for who is to reveal to whom? Beyond prayer, for who is to pray to whom? However, the realized man may consciously act a part on the stage of life where prayer, like any other activity, is to be performed. He may act any part in life — that of king or hermit, married or celibate, famous or obscure, according to his apparent nature and destiny. I say ‘apparent’ because in fact he has transcended nature and destiny.

Such a one was the Bhagavan I knew. He was the most simple, natural, unassuming of men; he was what a man should be, quite without affectation, like a child; and at the same time with an indescribable beauty and wisdom and with such power that many trembled in his presence and feared to speak to him. To address him in the third person, as ‘Bhagavan’, seemed less inappropriate than saying ‘you’ to one who was leading us beyond the duality of ‘you’ and ‘I’. When the meaning was general and warranted it, he would also say ‘Bhagavan’ — “even if you let go of Bhagavan, Bhagavan will never let go of you”. In simple daily affairs he would play the part of an individual, just as an actor could play Lear’s frenzy without himself being frenzied, without supposing that he was Lear.

Unfortunately, few in the West understand the possibility of this supreme state. To make matters worse, the philosophers and theologians, who should be the ones to explain it, introduce confusion by misunderstanding and therefore denying or misrepresenting it. In the East there is the opposite trouble— that this possibility is widely understood and is therefore claimed indiscriminately for every one who can gather disciples. Bhagavan was also commonly referred to as ‘the Maharshi’ or ‘Ramana Maharshi’. A pundit once explained to me that this title, condensed from ‘Maha-Rishi’, ‘Great Sage’, is applied to one who does not merely continue a tradition but inaugurates a new spiritual path. Certainly that would justify its application to Ramana Maharshi.

In speaking of spiritual men, the question also arises of their recognition. It is not uncommon to hear some one express confidence that he would recognise a spiritual man if he met one. This, however, is not always possible. High spiritual attainment, even complete liberation, is not always recognisable. Naturally, it is not easy to give examples of this, for this very reason that they are not recognised, but one very striking one is that of Christ before he set forth on his mission. According to Christian doctrine, he was born without original sin (which means Self-realization from birth) and attained no new state when he went forth on his ‘Father’s business’; and yet he exerted no influence on others before that but went completely unrecognised. Not only is there no record of crowds flocking to Nazareth, as they would have in any country or age to the seat of one recognized as a holy man, but, on the contrary, when he returned there with his disciples his fellow-townsmen expressed surprise, if not incredulity that the local carpenter should have turned out a prophet. The Maharshi also was not recognized when he first attained Realization but only later when he began to shed Grace on others and act as a Guru.

The reason for this is that it is not a man’s inner state which is felt by others but the Grace flowing through him towards them. Perceptible Grace may thus flow through one who has not attained the Supreme Identity (as has been the case with many saints) or even through one who has not attained any spiritual state at all; and again it may not through one who has. There may be other spiritual functions besides the guidance of disciples, for some of which anonymity is desirable. If so it will be maintained.

With a guru, of course, the question of recognition ought not to arise, since it is, so to speak, his function to be recognized. It is important that he should be, because my saying that perceptible grace can flow through one who has not attained does not mean that he can guide others farther than he has gone himself. There may be other and more exoteric purposes for which the Grace is channelled through him, but as a guru he can only guide as far as he has gone. (And that was why Martin Lings warned me off my first murshid). That was the real ground for the Buddha’s dissatisfaction with the gurus he went to before attaining Enlightenment. Finally (as may happen with the opener of a new path — as happened also with the Maharshi) he attained Enlightenment with no outer guru. The disciple who sets no limits to his aspiration needs a guru to whose achievement there are none.

Actually, recognition of a guru is complicated by impurities in the disciple which make him imagine perfection where it does not exist and overlook it where it does. There were many who did not recognize the Maharshi as a Guru and there are many who ascribe a high or the highest state to gurus who have only a formal legitimacy, if that.

The twofold possibility of finding a realized Guru and observing the orthodoxy of whatever religion he professed must have seemed pretty remote to many of Guenon’s readers at the time when he wrote; it is vastly more so today, in view of the rapid breakdown of tradition, drying up of spiritual streams and acceptance of modernism not only in the West but throughout the world and in all religions. To prevent despondency, Guenon gave the assurance that Christ’s saying that whoever seeks shall find is a divine law of universal application. This implies, however, that there must be some technique by which it can still apply even in this present age, when a genuine guru has become so rare to find and orthodoxy, for most people, impracticable. Guenon never suggested what this technique might be or even seemed aware of the need for one. The adaptation necessary to meet the conditions of the new age was, of course, formless guidance, to which I referred briefly in ‘Adventures on the Path’, such as could reach the heart of whoever seeks, independent alike of religious orthodoxy and formal initiation. There may be various such currents of guidance in the world today; certainly one was instituted by the Maharshi.

In accordance with the needs of this path, he restored the term ‘Guru’ to its true and highest meaning, which is essentially the same as the Christian doctrine of ‘the Christ in you’. This introduced a certain mystery into his use of the term. The following dialogue illustrates how it made the laying on of hands or transmission of a mantram by a human agent unnecessary:

Devotee: “Bhagavan has said that without the grace of the Guru one cannot attain to the Self. What precisely does he mean by this? What is this Guru?”

Bhagavan: “From the standpoint of the path of Knowledge, it is the supreme state of the Self. It is different from the ego, which you call your self.”

Devotee: “Then if it is the supreme state of my own Self, in what sense does Bhagavan mean that I cannot reach it without the grace of the Guru?” Bhagavan: “The ego is the individuality and is not the same as the Lord of all. When it approaches the Lord with sincere devotion, he graciously assumes name and form and takes it to Himself. Therefore they say that the Guru is none other than the Lord. He is a human incarnation of Divine Grace.”

A human incarnation, yes; but he also said that the Guru need not necessarily take human form; and since he shed the body the meaning of this saying has become clear.

It is obvious that this supreme definition of the Guru can apply only in a very limited way to one whose legitimacy depends on human appointment; in its fullness it can apply only to Bhagavan, to the Jivan-Mukta (emancipated while yet in the physical body). Bhagavan is indeed the universal divine Guru.

In another sense also he is universal. One who has attained the supreme state is above all the forms of religion. They are the paths leading up to the peak, but he is the peak itself, and everything else. A guru normally guides his followers along the path which he himself trod, and Bhagavan’s approach to Realization was through an act of self-enquiry unconnected with the forms of the Hindu or any other religion. This also was what he taught. He came as an answer to the needs of our age, proclaiming a path which, with his grace and support can be followed by aspirants in any religion, and indeed whether they observed any formal religion or not.

It might be thought to follow from this that Bhagavan’s initiation would be freely and openly given; on the contrary, it was concealed. Had it been open, the constant stream of visitors from India and abroad would have demanded it, putting Bhagavan under the necessity of accepting one and rejecting another; for ordinarily many seek initiation without pledging themselves to the quest, merely as a sort of spiritual tonic. As it was, the aspirants’ own understanding or lack of it performed the selection which in a secret order would be performed by the guru. Preparedness for initiation was the first hurdle, those who were not prepared never knowing that they had missed anything, and therefore not being subjected to jealousy, resentment or despondency, as they might otherwise have been. If asked, Bhagavan would never deny that he gave initiation, but he would also not openly affirm it. The only time I have heard him do so was with Hartz. Sometimes he would answer that the Guru-disciple relationship is a reality from the point of view of the disciple and is necessary to him, although the Guru cannot affirm it, since for him there are no others and therefore there can be no relationship. It will be noted that Hartz’s question was phrased in a form which made it possible to give an affirmative answer without any statement of relationship. This, of course, applies only to the perfect Guru who abides at all times in the state of Supreme Identity. Nor was the initiation and guidance for Bhagavan’s lifetime only. If it had been, it would have brought only a very temporary solution to the problem of modern world conditions. When asked: “Does the contact continue even after the dissolution of the physical body of the Guru or only so long as he is in the flesh and blood?” he answered: “The Guru is not the physical form; so contact will remain even after his physical form vanishes.” When his body’s death seemed imminent and some devotees asked how they could pursue their sadhana without his continued guidance, he replied with the cryptic rebuke: “You attach too much importance to the body.” Indeed, one who has understood what is meant by the Jivan-Mukta, in constant, unwavering, conscious identity with the Self, does not need assurance; he understands that the presence or absence of a body can make no difference. “There are no stages in Self-realization. There are no degrees of liberation. So there cannot be one stage of liberation with the body and another when the body has been shed. The realized man knows that he is the Self and that nothing, neither his body nor anything else, exists but for the Self. To such a one what difference could the presence or absence of a body make?”

And in practise his devotees have found it so. Not only that, but new devotees continue to be drawn to him and experience his guidance as before. Many of those who come to Tiruvannamalai never saw him in his lifetime; many also follow his guidance from a distance, being unable to come. There are not the crowds that there were before, but many of these were sightseers who craved some limited blessing; the proportion of true devotees is higher now. The support and guidance is no less.

Being the universal Guru, Bhagavan proclaimed his teaching openly. It has been usual for a guru to maintain secrecy about methods of training, even though he might write openly on theory; indeed this precaution was necessary, since it was illegitimate and might be dangerous to practise any technique without personal authorisation. Under Bhagavan’s guidance, however, understanding and aspiration are the only qualifications and their absence the only barriers.

A visitor once asked him: “May I be assured that there is nothing further to be learnt, so far as the technique of spiritual practise is concerned, than what was written in Bhagavan’s books?” He further explained, “I ask because in all other systems the guru holds back some secret technique to reveal to his disciples at the time of initiation.” And Bhagavan replied: “There is nothing more to be known than what you find in the books. No secret technique. It is all an open secret in this system.”

Open and yet secret, because, although expressed openly, few seem to understand all the implications.

The method is Self-enquiry: Who am I?

Sometimes he would say: “Whether or not you believe in the reality of the world or of God, you know that you exist, so start with yourself and find out first who you are.”

Who am I? What is the reality of me? Not my body, because it changes constantly from youth to age, from sickness to health, but I still am. Besides, I say that I have a body, not that I am one, and what I have is not what I am. Who is it that says ‘my head’, ‘my hands’, ‘my body’? Also not my thoughts and feelings, ambitions and desires, likes and dislikes, hopes and fears: all these stay with me for a while and then pass away; those I have now are quite different from what I had ten years ago; but I still am. Besides, I have none of them when in a deep, dreamless sleep, and yet I still exist. And of them also I say ‘I have’, not ‘I am’. What, then, am I? What remains when all that is adventitious has been taken away?

All this is not what Bhagavan meant by Self-enquiry. It is a useful mental introduction to it, but Self-enquiry, as he taught it, is not a mental but a spiritual exercise. Therefore any mental or verbal answer must be wrong. ‘Any answer the mind can give is wrong.’ To give an answer means mistaking for a philosophical conundrum what is in fact a spiritual exercise.

“The enquiry ‘Who am I?’ really means trying to find the source of the ego or ‘I’-thought. You are not to occupy the mind with other thoughts such as ‘I am not the body’. Seeking the source of the ‘I’ serves as a means of getting rid of all other thoughts.” It is also not a psychological study or a technique for getting to know one’s qualities or aptitudes or uncovering one’s subconscious urges, but for realizing the Self behind the ego that has these qualities and urges. “Just as it is futile to examine the rubbish that has to be swept up only to be thrown away, so it is futile for him who seeks to know the Self to set to work enumerating the tattvas that envelop the Self and examining them instead of throwing them away.”

Nor is it one ‘I’ seeking for another. There is only one Self in you, not two.

A visitor once asked: “Isn’t it funny that I should be searching for the ‘I’? Doesn’t the enquiry ‘Who am I?’ turn out in the end to be an empty formula? Or am I to put the question to myself endlessly, repeating it like an incantation?”

And he was told: “Self-enquiry is certainly not an empty formula; it is more than the repetition of an incantation. If it were mere mental questioning it would not be of much value. Its very purpose is to focus the entire mind at its source. It is not therefore a case of one ‘I’ searching for another. Still less is it an empty formula, for it involves intense activity of the entire mind to keep it steadily poised in pure Self-awareness. Self-
enquiry is the one infallible means, the only direct one, to realize the unconditioned, absolute Being that you really are.”

Just as aspirants were warned not to make a mental investigation out of Self-enquiry, so also they are warned not to make an incantation out of it and not to confuse it with the meditation ‘I am He’. “Self-enquiry is a different method from the meditation ‘I am Shiva’ or ‘I am He’. It rather lays stress on Self-knowledge, because you are first concerned with yourself before you proceed to know the world and its Lord. The ‘I am He’ or ‘I am Brahman’ meditation is more or less mental, but the quest of the Self is a direct method and is superior to it.”

Usually a man’s mind is turned outwards, creating or following a course of action or of thought. Instead of that it is to be turned inwards upon itself, asking ‘Who am I?’, not seeking an answer to the question but simply experiencing the sense of awareness, of I-am-ness, letting that alone remain in the consciousness.

Man has three functions: action, thought and being. Being underlies the other two and is the necessary substratum for them, and yet is almost completely overshadowed by them, so that it is very rarely that a man is aware of actual being, of his pure I-am-ness. To use a simile that Bhagavan often made use of: it is like a cinema screen on which a film is shown. The spectators are not aware of it but only of the pictures passing across it; and yet it is real and they are shadows on it; it exists unchanged before the showing of the film and while the pictures are moving across it and after they have come to an end. And it is quite unaffected by them: a fire in the picture does not burn it nor a flood make it wet.

It is this awareness of being that is to be cultivated. It is developed by Self-enquiry; indeed, the quest for it is itself a mode of Self-enquiry. Sometimes Bhagavan would say: “Your duty is simply to be; not to be this or that.” And therefore he would quote as the perfect name of God ‘I am that I am’. He also often quoted the sentence from the Psalms: ‘Be still and know that I am God’. Keep the mind still, free from thoughts, and know that the ‘I am’, the pure Being, is God.

Bhagavan used the term ‘meditation’ for the practise of Self-enquiry, and that term is used in this book also, but it does not mean meditation as a dictionary would define it. It is not meditating on anything or concentrating on any one thought. It is different in kind from the Sufi meditation I described in an earlier chapter, since it is not thinking but suspending or stilling thoughts while holding the mind alert in quest of itself, or in pure awareness of being, of I-am-ness.

So far is Self-enquiry from being a mental exercise that Bhagavan enjoined those who used it to concentrate not on the head but the heart during meditation. This does not mean thinking of the heart or trying to visualize or imagine it, for that would be a mental exercise. You do not think of the eyes or visualize them in order to see; you simply look with them. And in the same way the sense of awareness starts simply by concentrating on the heart which is all pervading. Simply to sit concentrating one’s sense of ‘I’-ness, of being, in the heart and at the same time asking, ‘Who am I?’ — not constantly but just once, in order to hold the mind in that direction, repeating the thought only as a weapon to drive out other thoughts when they arise.

Moreover, when Bhagavan spoke of concentration on the heart he did not mean the physical heart on the left side but the centre of spiritual awareness at the right side of the chest. Some of the ashram publications refer in this connection to the verse from Ecclesiastes: ‘The wise man’s heart is at the right hand and the fool’s heart is at the left.’ (Ch.X, v.2, authorized version). This centre is not one of the yogic chakras. The direct method is not concerned with them or with the kundalini technique. The following dialogue explains this:

Devotee: “Bhagavan was saying that the heart is the seat or centre of the Self?”

Bhagavan: “Yes, it is the one supreme centre of the Self. You need have no doubts about that. The real Self is there in the heart behind the ego-self.” Devotee: “Will Bhagavan please tell me where in the body it is?”

Bhagavan: “You cannot know with your mind or picture it with your imagination, although I tell you that it is here (pointing to the right side of the chest). The only direct way to realize it is to stop imagining and try to be yourself. Then you automatically feel that the centre is there. It is the centre spoken of in the scriptures as the heart-cavity.”

Devotee: “Can I be sure that the ancients meant this centre by the term ‘heart’?”

Bhagavan: “Yes, you can; but you should try to have the experience rather than locate it. A man does not have to go and find where his eyes are in order to see. The heart is there, always open to you, if you care to enter it, always supporting your movements, although you may be unaware of it. It is perhaps more correct to say that the Self is the heart. Really the Self is the centre and is everywhere aware of itself as the Heart or Self-awareness.”

Devotee: “When Bhagavan says that the heart is the supreme centre of the Spirit or Self, does that imply that it is not one of the six chakras (yogic centres)?”

Bhagavan: “The chakras, counting from the bottom upwards, are a series of centres in the (subtle) nervous system. They represent various stages, each having its own kind of power or knowledge, leading to the sahasrara, the thousand-petalled lotus in the brain, where is seated the supreme Shakti (Divine Energy). But the Self that supports the whole movement of the Shakti is not located there but supports it from the heart-centre.”

Devotee: “Then it is different from the manifestation of Shakti?”

Bhagavan: “Really there is no manifestation of Shakti apart from the Self. It is the Self that becomes all these shaktis. When the yogi attains the highest state of spiritual awareness (samadhi) it is the Self in the heart that supports him in that state, whether he is aware of it or not. But if his awareness is centred in the heart he realizes that, whatever centres or states he may be in, he is always the same Truth, the same Heart, the one Self, the Spirit that is present throughout, eternal and immutable.”

More specifically, he explained on another occasion: “The sushumna is thus a curve. It starts from the solar plexus, rises through the spinal cord to the brain, and from there bends down and ends in the heart. When the yogi has reached the heart the samadhi becomes permanent. Thus we see that the heart is the final centre.” (It is interesting to note that Lama Govinda explains similarly in his Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism that on the Tibetan path epitomised by the incantation ‘Om Mani Padme Hum’ the initiate, after attaining the highest centre, which is in the brain, comes down to the heart for final stabilisation. Unfortunately he presents this knowledge as exclusive to Tantric Buddhism. Obviously, no truth of general application can be confined to any one religion or path).

The above dialogue indicates a technical explanation why there are no stages on the direct path. There is no successive development of the various subtle centres, each of which has its own types of power and perception; instead there is concentration from the beginning on the Self to which all powers belong and the Heart from which all centres radiate and by which they are supported.

Self-enquiry is, of course, not a new method. Being the most direct method, it must be the oldest. In ancient times, however, it was a path for the recluse striving in silence and solitude; but in more recent ages diminishing spirituality has 110 caused it to be little used. What Bhagavan did was to restore it as a method that can be used in the conditions of the modern world. Its independence of doctrine and ritual, in fact its primordiality, already made it potentially universal; and Bhagavan further adapted it by combining it with karma-marga, that is with progress through activity. Not only did he not expect his followers to renounce the world, but also when they asked his sanction to do so, he refused.

“Why do you think you are a householder? The similar thought that you are a hermit will haunt you if you go forth as one. Whether you continue in the household or renounce it and go to live in the forest, your mind haunts you. The ego is the source of thought. It creates the body and the world and makes you think you are a householder. If you renounce, it will only substitute the thought of renunciation for that of family, and the environment of the forest for that of the household. The mental obstacles are always there for you. They even increase greatly in the new surroundings. Change of environment is no help. The one obstacle is the mind, and this must be overcome whether in the home or in the forest. If you can do it in the forest, why not in the home? So why change the environment? Your efforts can be made even now, whatever the environment.”

And when asked whether it is possible to experience samadhi or spiritual awareness while working he replied: “It is the feeling ‘I work’ that is the hindrance. Ask yourself ‘Who works?’ Remember who you are. Then the work will not bind you; it will go on automatically.”

Similarly, he did not insist on celibacy. Indeed, in traditional Hindu society all householders are married; only the sadhu, the world-renouncer, is a celibate; and it was this 111 outer renunciation which he discouraged. Inner detachment is the real renunciation.

Sometimes he gave the example of the actor on the stage, playing a certain part as the author has written it, although knowing that he is not really that person; sometimes of a bank cashier who pays out thousands coolly and efficiently, knowing that it is not his money that he is paying.

The usual way is to devote a certain time to meditation daily, for instance in the early morning and the evening, and for the rest of the time to try and remember during the activities of the day. At first this remembering is mainly a mental and moral discipline — ‘who is flattered by this attention, pleased by this letter, slighted by so-and-so’s action? Who am I?’ After some practise, however, it takes a deeper tone, becoming an extension of the more potent meditation.

Few of Bhagavan’s devotees lived permanently at Tiruvannamalai. It was (and still is) more usual to live in the world, engaged in some business or profession, and pay only occasional visits, to re-charge the batteries, so to speak.

Although Bhagavan spoke and wrote mostly of Self-
enquiry, that is, of the ‘Path of Knowledge’, he recognised also the path of love and devotion among his followers. To some who took this path he has made the tremendous statement: “Submit to me and I will strike down the mind,” or: “Only keep quiet and I will do the rest.” But it is not easy to submit or to keep the mind quiet.

These different paths are not mutually exclusive in practise, although they might theoretically appear to be.
To return to my story.
Throughout the years of our separation my wife never doubted Bhagavan’s guidance. She had complete faith in him. 112 When I joined her after the war and suggested showing him a photo of Martin’s guru and telling him that this was our guru, she was horrified. “But you can’t possibly do that!” she exclaimed. “How could you tell Bhagavan that somebody else is our guru?”

“But he himself is not a guru,” I protested with crude logic, repeating what I had been told.

“But you can’t possibly do that!” she repeated. “It would be a terrible thing to do.”

And I didn’t.

Nevertheless, despite her complete reliance on Bhagavan, she continued the exercises into which we had been initiated and never found it necessary to write to Martin about the change of allegiance. For someone as indifferent as she was to the theory of initiation and guru, and who, moreover, until coming to Bhagavan, and been so half-hearted about the whole matter, such behaviour was quite natural; but could I do the same?

I soon found that I could not continue the practises into which I had been initiated and which represented a different and less direct path. They became a terrible drag and burden on me. I forced myself to continue them for some time out of a sense of duty and then asked Bhagavan’s permission to drop them. He gave it, saying: “Yes, all other methods lead up to Self-enquiry.”

There was never any question of becoming a Hindu, which (even supposing it were possible) would have meant taking on myself a new burden of formalities.

I felt therefore an obligation to inform the guru through whom, even though indirectly, the exercises had been prescribed, since it was in effect a change of allegiance. There was also the question of correcting Guenon’s mistake. Not only did I owe that to him, since it was he who had brought me forth from a life of 113 ignorance to quest for the Goal, and thereby indirectly to Bhagavan, but there was the consideration of all the others who were inspired by him to seek a path and yet, by this mistake of his, might find the path blocked by his ‘no road’ sign, as I had so nearly done.

It must be remembered that Guenon was strongly opposed to modern empirical methods of thinking, instead of which he advocated the traditional method of understanding the basic principles and applying them to actual circumstances. He usually did this successfully, but I have already mentioned instances in which this was not the case, by applying principles in too doctrinaire a manner. It now transpired that his mistaken denial of Bhagavan as a Guru had more serious implications because it was likely to have graver practical repercussions on those seeking guidance. Initiation had always been transmitted through strictly orthodox channels and in a formal manner; Bhagavan’s initiation and guidance was not formal and did not follow the orthodoxy of any religion; therefore, he argued, it did not exist. It did not occur to him that since most of the orthodox channels had dried up, and the waters of life which they formerly conveyed had become inaccessible to almost all mankind, the Divine Grace might have opened a new path in accordance with the needs of the age. He often referred to such a phenomenon, to the outpouring of Grace being channelled in a new way to suit the conditions of a different age or community, but he did not admit or perceive that this had happened in his own age also. Of course, what he ought to have done before issuing such a grave denial was to come and verify for himself, but, as with his rejection of Buddhism, this was just what he would not do, as it smacked of empiricism.

I decided that I should write a letter to Martin to be shown to his guru and Guenon, explaining that Bhagavan was a Guru and did give initiation and guidance.
114 However, there was one great impediment to this. As I have already stated, one of Guenon’s enthusiasts had been to Tiruvannamalai and, failing to understand the silent initiation and guidance, had reported back that there was none and that Bhagavan was not a Guru.

Could I expect Guenon to take my word against his, especially when his confirmed Guenon’s theory and mine refuted it? It seemed most unlikely. I therefore wrote a letter containing the definite statement that Bhagavan was a Guru and did give initiation and guidance and showed it to Bhagavan, asking his permission to send it. Although he did not normally give any affirmation in this matter, I hoped that, in view of the importance of the case, he would make an exception, He did. He read the letter through carefully, handed it back and said: “Yes, send it.” I sent the letter to Martin with a postscript explaining this.

Bhagavan himself never wrote letters; therefore a letter sent with his express authorisation could be taken as a message from him. The last chapter of Guenon’s Man and His Becoming According to Vedanta showed that he understood what was meant by the Jivan-Mukta, the Divine Man fully Self-realized. Now he would be receiving a personal message from one. I hoped that he would accept it and not make himself like those who had denied Christ because he did not come in the form they had expected.

In september 1942 our long and beautiful Kashmir holiday came to an end. But where next? The Japanese had already occupied French Indo-China (as it then was) and were adopting a belligerent tone. Thailand might well be the next on their list. The Consulate had asked British civilians in Thailand to stay at their posts as a means of maintaining some influence there, and in fact had let it be known that they would be turned down if they enlisted. And in any case the life I was leading there seemed more in accordance with my nature, and therefore more conducive to the quest, than campaigning. It was decided that I should go back while my wife stayed on in India with the three children.

But where? She was between two worlds. She had also received initiation, but she was certainly not quite convinced about the path we adopted; and followed it more for my sake than her own.

Once in Bangkok we had seen an exquisite little stone figure of the Buddha sitting cross-legged with the naga, the seven- headed serpent, reared over him to give him shade; a figure of rare serenity. The price was very high or so it seemed to us, so my wife persuaded the shopkeeper to lend us it for a week so that she could obtain some clay through our neighbour, an Italian professor of sculpture, and set to work. What she produced was far from the original, but it was nevertheless an impressive piece of work. Being caught by the love of sculpture, she made next a bust of me. This was really excellent, so we had a bronze cast of it made. Shortly before she was due to leave Thailand we received some photographs of the Maharshi and (here is the point of this digression) my wife immediately felt the impulse to make a sculpture of him. Perhaps this was the deciding consideration, because she was still far from certain how far the quest was genuine and how far it was all play-acting.

One of our original Guenon group had a house at Tiruvannamalai and when he invited her to spend the time of our separation there, she immediately thought of the sculpture and it seemed the perfect solution. Even socially it seemed ideal, the people there being neither modern in the sense of superficial nor traditional in the sense of obscurantist.

We parted at Lahore railway station, my wife and children going on to Bombay and the south, I to Calcutta and Thailand. I spent my 35th birthday in Calcutta on my outward journey; I was to spend my 39th birthday there on the way back before I saw my wife or children again.

Catherine was the first to see Bhagavan. She stepped into the hall where he used to sit, a small, beautiful child with curly gold hair, bearing a tray of fruit in her hands, the customary offering. Bhagavan pointed to the low table beside his couch where such offerings were placed, and she, misunderstanding, sat down on it herself, holding the tray in her lap. There was a burst of laughter. “She has given herself as an offering to Bhagavan,” someone said.

A day or two later my wife entered the hall and sat down. Immediately Bhagavan turned his luminous eyes on her in a gaze so concentrated that there was a vibration she could actually hear. She returned the gaze, losing all sense of time, the mind stilled, feeling like a bird caught by a snake, yet glad to be caught. An older devotee who watched told her that this was the silent initiation and that it had lasted about fifteen minutes. Usually it was quite short, a minute or two. She wrote to me that all her doubts had vanished; her objections no longer mattered. The idea of making a sculpture had been put aside; it seemed presumptuous. She had complete faith. She knew now that the teaching was true and that nothing else mattered. The most beautiful face, she told me, looked commonplace beside him, even though his features were not good. His eyes had the innocence of a small child, together with unfathomable wisdom and immense love.

For her this was the time of grace and wonder, as the first reading of Guenon had been for me, only far more vivid, having the living Master before her. She felt his power and guidance constantly. During the years of our separation — most of those four years with no news of one another — she did not worry, although by temperament prone to worrying. When offered a job she did not accept it, although by nature provident. The time to go out into the world would come later; this was the time to be with Bhagavan. Once, when she wanted to take leave of him before taking the children to the hills for the hot weather, she met him alone as he was returning from his daily walk on Arunachala and said to him: “Bhagavan, I understand that all I have to do is to keep quiet and everything will be alright”. And he confirmed it, his eyes shining with approval.

He has been known to say: “Only keep quiet and I will do the rest”. But how hard it is to keep the mind quiet!

He was very gracious during these years both to her and the children. They would come and show him their toys and tell their secrets. At one of the big annual festivals his couch was roped round with a sort of fence to keep the crowds from pressing too close, and Adam scrambled through to tell him something. He laughed and said to the attendants: “See how much use your fence is!” In general he avoided touching people or being touched by them, but each cool season when my wife brought the children back from the hills, he touched Frania the youngest at some time or other, and once he picked her up and carried her. He was always very gracious to her.

My wife was receptive also to the spiritual power of Arunachala. Before even she knew that it was a sacred mountain, she dreamed one night of a terrific storm, when the thunder crashed overhead, the wind uprooted ancient trees and the rain beat down on the roof, that opened and revealed a majestic figure, its personification, who summoned her imperiously to the hill. Almost daily she walked there, feeling its power of love and protection. Much of her meditation she did on the hill. Lying on a sun-warmed rock one evening, she had a vision of the whole world with its cities and men drawn into her mouth as she inhaled.

The Japanese entered Thailand on December 8th, 1941. After a few minutes token resistance the Thais surrendered and became their allies. As I afterwards learned, they had previously asked for help from Singapore but had been told that they would have to help themselves. I think it was on December 7th that the Consulate sent word around advising us to leave the country; certainly it was too late to do so. The few who tried were turned back before they reached the frontiers. Moreover, the banks were closed so that it was impossible to draw out money.

In order to save the expenditure of manpower in creating a civilian administration and of the troops in holding down a conquered country, the Japanese decided to treat Thailand as a self-governing ally, and as a result their troops kept strict discipline and there were no atrocities, as there were in China and Malaya. I took a cycle rickshaw and went to the university, but there were Japanese officers and troops all over the place. In the university grounds I saw some officers with no trousers on, standing fishing in the klongs, the canals that run everywhere alongside the roads in Bangkok. It was impossible to resume duty, so I came back. After a day or two Europeans were placed under house arrest. Gradually they were rounded up and taken to an internment camp. My turn did not come till January 11th, one of the last. It was about time, because my salary had not been paid and I could not get out to cash a cheque.

While communications were still open I had received a letter from my wife telling me that Catherine and Adam had gone to Bhagavan and asked him to bring me back safely and he had smiled and nodded. From then on I never doubted that I should come out of it alive. There was also a letter from Catherine, one of the most moving I have ever received: “Daddy, you will love Bhagavan. When he smiles everybody must be so happy.”

We were interned in the premises of the University of Political and Moral Sciences (not that in which I had taught). There were several long buildings on the bank of the river, a field big enough to play basketball, a gravel road running the length of the camp. Some of the buildings were partitioned off into cubicles where the married couples and a few other fortunate ones enjoyed at least visual privacy, although every sound could be overheard; most of us had beds in common dormitories, with a little floor space each, which we fenced off as best we could with our belongings. There was a large shed at the back where we set up stoves and did a little private cooking, although our regular meals were sent in; also a shop where various articles from town made their appearance or could be ordered. After some time cash allowances began to be received through the Swiss consul. We were allowed to elect a camp committee and president to control the internal running of the camp. At first we were badly over-crowded, but after some time the Americans and Dutch and a few others were evacuated, and we ended up with not much more than a hundred.

The Thai, always keeping in mind that our side might win the war and hold them responsible, refused to make the camp over to the Japanese, so there were no atrocities. Indeed, one of the main evils to contend with was boredom. Any one who knew anything that others didn’t started classes; books were circulated; amateur gardeners took over plots around the various buildings and made ornamental gardens. Towards the end, when victory and evacuation were visibly approaching, my garden became an excellent symbol to me of life in the world — I gave it daily care and had real interest in bringing it to perfection, while at the same time prepared to leave it at a moment’s notice.

We knew well enough that victory was approaching because a small group of internees had taken the risk of smuggling in a wireless set and were skilful enough to keep it from the notice not only of the authorities but the rest of the internees also — unfortunately a necessary precaution. The news was leaked out so cleverly that we never knew from what source it came, only that it turned out to be reliable.
There were occasional Japanese inspections but the Thai commandant always warned us beforehand, so that anything that might cause trouble or be considered insufficiently austere might be concealed or passed out of the camp. The Thai soon had no more love for the Japanese than we had. Even though there were few outrages, their arrogance was insufferable.

The Thai had the bright idea of keeping their one and only submarine safe by anchoring it alongside our camp. Directly opposite us, on the banks of the river, were railway marshalling yards with stocks of rice, rubber and various other commodities, and it was hoped that our presence would safeguard them also; but it didn’t work out that way.

Thailand had been forced to declare war on Britain and America and a florid announcement was made that the Allied bases had been pushed too far back to be able to bomb Bangkok. For quite a while it was so, and then the tide turned and fleets of American Fortresses began coming over, by night at first and then by day also, when the Japanese fighters no longer dared to go up during a raid. Whether SEATO headquarters knew about our camp or not, they certainly knew about the submarine and marshalling yards. A number of times they came over and set the whole of the opposite bank aflame with incendiaries. The submarine was not hit, but after one or two near misses, it sought shelter elsewhere. After bombing the opposite bank the huge Fortresses would zoom up over our camp, so low that they seemed to be skimming the roofs, their under-bellies glowing red from the reflected flames. Several times, when smoke blanketed the river, bombs dropped on our side also. We heard their deep, heavy thud around us. In the daytime we would see them actually leaving the planes and swooping down — always on a trajectory. Twice, bombs fell within the camp precincts, but I was not the only one who preferred the risk of bombs to that of snakes and scorpions. There were many who never went underground. The flimsy modern buildings, with ample door and window space, stood up to the blasts better than more solid structures might have done.

I neither gave nor attended any of the numerous classes, but it was in camp that I learned astrology. One of the internees, Leslie, was a lifelong addict and brought a whole trunk full of books in with him — all of Alan Leo and Carter and a number of other books, including a good one on the progressed horoscope, besides bound volumes of periodicals. Making a purposeful break in my non-reading epoch, I went steadily through them, studying and making notes. This took me some months, after which I reverted to my non-reading. There were books circulating in camp, but I did not borrow or read them. Leslie’s interest had remained mainly theoretical; he had very seldom actually attempted a horoscope. I, of course, wanted to practise, and under my influence he also began to. We made horoscopes for everyone who wanted them in camp; and a number of internees, pleased with the product, asked for them also for wives or children or others outside.

Many people dismiss astrology in the same doctrinaire attitude of mind in which Guenon dismissed Buddhism. If they were to read through a study in several pages of some person the astrologer did not know, giving his characteristics and aptitudes and the main lines of his destiny, they would see that it could not be lucky guesswork, just as Guenon would have seen, if he had studied Buddhist texts, that they could not be giving the true teaching by accident; but they are unwilling even to consider the evidence, so convinced are they a priori that the movements of planets in the heavens cannot influence the lives of men on earth. Actually, it would be rather a crude definition of astrology which said that they could; the real interpretation is more vast and more profound: that the entire universe is one tremendous harmony, that the same forces are at work in the macrocosm and the microcosm, the cosmos and the individual, that the tendencies in a man and the events in his life flow to the same rhythm as the planetary movements in the skies; that, although the intricacy of the arrangement would make a mathematician’s mind reel, no individual can be born except at the moment when the position of the heavens is such as to mirror his nature and destiny.

It is a typical misunderstanding which led some people in camp to argue that a man’s character is not formed by the positions of the stars at his birth but by heredity. Actually, it is never said that the positions of the stars form a man’s character but that they indicate it; and heredity is one of the influences which they indicate. It often happens that several members of a family are born at about the same time of day or have birthdays at about the same date, and both of these are varieties of family likeness which would show in a horoscope, though, of course, by no means the only ones.

Leslie and I had an interesting case of family likeness showing in horoscopes. There were two brothers in camp, middle-aged, whose families were outside — evacuated while there was still time. One of them asked me to do his horoscope and the other Leslie. Satisfied with his own, the one who had asked me then asked me to do that of his ten-year-old son, whom I had never seen. I was struck by the fact (although I did not tell him so) that the boy’s horoscope showed no likeness to his own. Some days later I saw Leslie working on a horoscope which at once struck me as showing a distinct family likeness to that of the boy. Intrigued, I asked him whose it was, and he told me that it was that of the daughter of the other brother and that it showed no similarity to her father’s. I may say that the two brothers themselves were noticeably alike. I then went to them and told them that their two children seemed to have a strong family likeness but not to take after them. “Yes,” they said, “both of them take after our mother, but we don’t.”

When I said that Leslie had previously confined himself mainly to theory, I meant the theory of applied astrology, but there is also a more profound type of theory, the divine or spiritual cosmology writ in the symbols of the stars. Jupiter and Saturn, for example, are the twin forces of expansion and contraction — creation and dissolution of the universe, the day and night of God, the breathing out and in of Brahma. In human life they may show as prosperity and adversity, indulgence and discipline, in caricature as Sir Toby Belch and Malvolio; and on the quest they are the complementary process of expansion and contraction to which I referred in an earlier chapter. I worked out this more essential theory partly from study and partly from my previous knowledge of spiritual cosmology and wrote a book on it which I called The Cosmology of the Stars.

After leaving camp and coming to Bhagavan I gave up astrology. I was not sorry to have learned it, but cosmological theory is unnecessary on the direct path, which I was now following, and there was no point in occupying my mind with it. It can, of course, be not merely unnecessary but harmful if one gets too engrossed in it. I have known more than one Hindu (and Hindu astrology concerns itself more with predictions than Western astrology does nowadays) who has dropped it because it was too accurate. Foreknowledge of misfortunes awaiting persons who consulted them caused them so much distress as to destroy their peace of mind.

To return to the level of applied astrology: I have nothing against Uranus; indeed he can be a very useful ingredient in a horoscope; but they do say that when in conjunction with the Moon he is liable to push even an intelligent person into occasional acts of unpredictable folly. I have recorded two such already. The first, my throwing away the chance of an Oxford career, concealed an underlying wisdom; it was not foolish in itself but only in the way it was carried out. The second, my profession of Islam, was foolish both in itself and in the way it was done; nevertheless even here there was some underlying grace in it and, if unnecessary at the time, it was soon to become necessary according to the code by which I was living. At the time of my arrest Uranus scored a third victory, this time with an act of pure unmitigated folly with no grace or wisdom in it at all. I came into camp wearing a turban and long gown and with a string of prayer beads round my neck.

It was not exhibitionism. Indeed I simply estimated that the internment would not last for more than about three months and decided to devote the time entirely to prayer, meditation, incantations and reading the Arabic Quran and to hold completely aloof from the profane crowd in the camp; and I dressed to symbolise my decision. Also I am of a retiring disposition and prefer to remain inconspicuous. Actually the internment lasted for three and half years and I soon changed into normal clothing and, for the first time in my life, did mix with a crowd of ordinary, unpretentious people, and found that I liked them. This was a necessary phase in my development, making good what I had failed to do at Oxford, for my refusing to mix there had been due only in part to disappointed idealism; partly also it was a mixture of timidity and conceit.

One of the things that struck me most powerfully was their fair-mindedness. I do not refer only to their acceptance of myself as soon as I was prepared to be accepted (though that might well be called magnanimous); but throughout the years of internment it happened a number of times that one person or another would make himself unpopular, and in every case I found that as soon as the cause of disapproval was removed, the camp as a whole spontaneously recognized the fact and, so to speak, welcomed him back into its fellowship. Of course, there were quarrels; it was a very average community and I do not want to make it appear in any way ideal. Some of the women took advantage of being in a minority; also there was tension among the camp politicians who aspired to get elected to the committee and run things; but on the whole there was a good spirit.

Another thing that struck me was the prevailing dissatisfaction with life — and I do not mean conditions in camp but with life itself, as it had been outside before they were affected by the war. And these people were not misfits or failures. Most of them were at least averagely successful, with a good job, a wife and family, better pay than they would have received at home in England, comfortable house and servants, and a full social life; yet it was surprising how many would confide that life held no meaning for them and that, while outside, they had drunk heavily in order to forget and not to think.

It is dissatisfaction with the false that leads a man to seek the true. When asked why one should seek Self-realization, Bhagavan has been known to answer: “Who asked you to? If you are satisfied with your present life, stay as you are. But many people become dissatisfied, and when you realize the Self your discontent will vanish.”

There were also more specific signs of discontent — three broken marriages, four cases of madness, one suicide. A very sociable, good-hearted man, a complete extrovert one would have said, borrowed Paul Brunton’s A Search in Secret India from me in order to read about the Maharshi. On giving it back, he said: “Yes, well, when one reads about something like Ramana Maharshi one either does nothing about it — or else…” He seemed so unlikely to do anything about it that I said no more to him, nor he to me; but soon after the camp broke up, at the end of the war, I heard that he had committed suicide.

The most dynamic sign of discontent was that as many as seven of the internees joined me, pledging their lives to the quest, apart from a penumbra of others who sympathised without deciding to take the plunge.

However, before that happened I passed through a lengthy period of dryness and tribulation, a dark night of the soul when I knew the taste of tears, even though with no outer weeping. It no longer seemed a quest that I was making but a vast impersonal process that was taking place, hammering the living being into shape, and with no anaesthetic. Suffering seemed the very essence of life and ‘pain-bearer’ the definition of man. I was tempted to despond, to regard God as a tyrant Who torments His creatures.

There seemed no light, no grace, and no hope of progress; and yet to go back, to renounce the quest, was even more impossible; in fact the very idea never arose. I just clung on grimly, suffering. The outer conditions of life accorded well with the inner misery but did not cause it, any more than outer conditions cause the unspeakable bliss when grace floods the heart. Indeed, before I left the camp I was to know periods of some grace also, though not at it’s fullest. There was a lot in me that had to be burnt out, and this period of savage pain was largely due to the cauterisation. Even at the time I knew this, but that did not make me like it.

I did not proselytise. The love of argument was one of the things that had been burnt out of me. I preferred to avoid it as far as possible. I still do. Some approached me themselves; some persuaded each other. This, of course, was proselytism, even though I did not do it myself. Proselytism cannot always be condemned, although it is better to be chary of it. Spiritual understanding places an obligation on a man, and if he has not the endurance and integrity to take this up he is more culpable than before. That is the point of Christ’s saying that it was not a sin to be in darkness when there was no light but only to cling to the darkness when light was made available. Therefore the reckless proselytiser may be doing a disservice to those to whom he speaks. That is why initiatic bodies have normally kept their teaching secret, and why Christ warned against casting pearls before swine. Incidentally, this is one of those sayings of Christ’s which can have no possible meaning to those who have reduced Christianity to an exoteric shell. What are the pearls and who the swine? And what is there they need fear to reveal? All that they know they proclaim endlessly to whoever will listen. On the other hand, what wonder if those who seek the pearls of wisdom and are given only the exoteric shell find the religion they are taught unsatisfying?

Louis Hartz was one who approached me himself. A very conspicuous young man from Holland who, for some reason or other, had not been evacuated with the rest of the Dutch; short, with black hair and eager eyes, he was obviously seeking. Several times he engaged an associate of mine in long discussions but went away unconvinced. Then I saw him walking up and down the camp with an elderly gentleman who had at one time been the head of a school or college and overheard a snatch of their talk as they passed:

“When I was younger I read the Bible, but of course I don’t believe it now.”

“Well — er — Mr.Hartz, what exactly in the Bible do you not believe?”

“All of it.”

In view of such a brash reply, it can be imagined that I was not disposed to explain to him at any great length, much less to enter into an argument, when he approached me a day or two later and announced that he wanted to know the Truth.

“I will tell you one truth,” I said. “Infinity minus x is a contradiction in terms, because by the exclusion of x the first term ceases to be infinite.”

Yes, he saw that.

“Very well, then,” I told him, “think of Infinity as God and x as yourself. Now go and think it over and come tomorrow and tell me what you make of it.”

That was all; no more explanation. When he came back next day he told me that there had been no need to think it over. Before even he got back to his place in the dormitory it had flashed on his heart that it was true.

He had been ripe for understanding and therefore a single explanation had been enough. Moreover, it had been the right kind of explanation that I was led to give him, because, like my wife, he had the intuitive type of mind which cannot read a whole chapter about what can be said in a sentence. He could never read Guenon, but he read and re-read the Tao Te Ching. However, brilliant initial understanding is no guarantee of a smooth or rapid quest. Since Realization is quite different from mental understanding, every preoccupation with the ego is an obstacle to progress on it. The process must continue until the whole nature is transmuted and all egoism dissolved.

The internees found various occupations during the daytime; in the evening many of them used to sit around on the lawn in small groups, and ours formed one group among the others. A certain power flowed through me at that time. Sometimes two of the group would discuss some point and decide to ask me about it in the evening, and when evening came I would spontaneously explain it without the question being raised. One person who joined us was of a psychic disposition, and the first time he sat in our evening group he saw a vortex of blue light encircling it and rising to a spiral in the centre. In general I had a feeling of how to respond to the needs of the various people, what to say and do.

This illustrates the dangers of a false guru. There is nothing personal in such powers. I had never consciously practised telepathy and I myself never saw any blue lights; even if I had it would have meant nothing; and yet on the basis of such happenings a man can build up a reputation for himself and start posing as a guru, and if he attributes the power to himself it will be both to his detriment and to that of the people he is supposed to be guiding.

Fortunately I was not drawn into any such aberration. Indeed, before the camp broke up I had ceased to exert any influence or to guide the others at all. There was a psychic crisis in camp when one went mad and most of those who had joined me took fright and drew back. That was what was visible outwardly, but inner events are more fundamental, and in myself I felt at this time a cessation of the power of guidance. I no longer felt that I knew what to do and say; I no longer felt any influence over the others; nor did they any longer feel it. This did not seem to me a privation or a cause for regret, simply a change of course, because the interest in guiding others evaporated together with the power to do so. I vaguely felt it to be a transfer from the spiritual influence of the order into which I had been initiated to that of Bhagavan. More and more I felt his presence and he seemed to dominate and to bestow grace. Although I had only seen him in photographs, his face was more vivid to me, more easily visualized, than any I had ever known. I was content simply to feel his pervading graciousness without occupying my mind at all with what I had been told about his not being a guru.

Bhagavan, as I was later to discover, did not encourage people to play the guru, even to the limited extent to which I had been doing so. He would not absolutely forbid it, for that would be doctrinaire. If asked he might say: “If it is a man’s destiny to be a guru he will be.” And he knew that some of his devotees acted so. But on the whole he discouraged it. Even apart from the direct and obvious danger of flattering a man’s ego and perhaps inducing him to let himself be regarded as a realized man when he is not, it means a turning of the energy outwards when the aspirant still needs to turn it inwards. If it does not actually put a stop to his further progress, it at least makes it more difficult.

And what happened afterwards? Of all those I had known in camp only Hartz was drawn to Bhagavan after the war. For the first year or two he concentrated on building up a business and making money. Then he broke a business trip from Europe to Thailand to spend a few days at Tiruvannamalai. It was the hot season when I was in the hills with my family. The children were going to a convent school in the hills and we used to spend several months there in the summer, so as to be able to take them out of the boarding house and have them at home with us. I went to Colombo to meet Hartz and we spent the night at the house of K. Ramachandra, a friend who always welcomed devotees of Bhagavan. Next day we flew to Madras and stayed with Dr. T.N. Krishnaswami, another devotee. The railway journey from there to Tiruvannamalai is roundabout and takes a whole day and night, and the excellent bus service which now plies had not yet been started, so Hartz hired a car for the trip. He was not averse to showing the advantages of being wealthy.

Bhagavan was very gracious to him. Indeed, a photograph of Bhagavan taken by him on this trip is evidence enough of the love and encouragement with which Bhagavan regarded him. He received the initiation by look, but, although told by the devotees that this was Bhagavan’s mode of initiation, he wanted to make quite sure and therefore said: “I want Bhagavan’s initiation.” Bhagavan replies: “You have it already.” This is the only occasion of which I know when he explicitly confirmed having given initiation.

In another way also Hartz desired assurance: he perhaps feared that when he got back into life of the world with all its distractions his steadfastness might weaken. He asked Bhagavan for some guarantee and was given the tremendous assurance: “Even if you let go of Bhagavan, Bhagavan will never let go of you.”

Once Bhagavan has taken up a person, his destiny becomes more purposeful, is speeded up, so to say. From a worldly point of view this may be for good or ill; prosperity may be needed for one man’s development, adversity for another. Evidently Hartz was of the latter type, because from this time his business got into difficulties and within a few years it had evaporated completely. He had planned to come back and even to build a house at Tiruvannamalai, but he was not able to. How many such cases have I seen, where the first visit was made easy but a planned return was frustrated year after year! He went through many vicissitudes and for a period of years I did not hear from him at all; but Bhagavan did not let go of him.

And the others? Perhaps some of them followed some other path, perhaps not. I have already indicated in an earlier chapter that what educationalists would call ‘the percentage of wastage’ is very high on the quest. Christ warned of this when he said that many are called but few are chosen — another of his sayings to which exoteric Christianity can give no meaning. Called to what and chosen for what? Certainly not to membership of a Christian church or it would be manifestly untrue. They take as many as they can get. Then for what? For heaven? That would carry with it the rather grim corollary that the great majority of mankind go to hell. But as soon as one understands the esoteric teaching of the quest, the saying becomes a statement of what happens and corresponds with what is taught in all religions. The Bhagavad Gita says the same, only expanding it to show that the not-called are even more numerous: “Among thousands, perhaps one strives for Realization; among thousands who strive for Realization, perhaps one knows Me as I am.” (Ch. 7, v. 3).

It rests with the aspirant himself. No one can do the work for him. The Buddha’s last words to his followers were an exhortation to strive and be a light for themselves and a haven for themselves. Sometimes a devotee would try to inveigle Bhagavan into a statement that his grace alone was sufficient without effort on the part of the devotee, but without success. He said once: “If the guru could just give Realization there would not be even a cow left unrealised.” In the language of mediaeval mythology, the guru may give the magic sword and the cloak of invisibility, but it is the hero himself who must use them and achieve victory — or fail to do so. True, these people had not yet any guru; but at least they knew where to seek. When I first read Guenon I did not even know that. Whoever perseveres is guided somehow or other, although he may be sorely tried on the way.

A small group of us came to Guenon at the same time; I think the others were all younger than myself and all unmarried. I was to meet one and another of them under various circumstances on the path, but at the time I knew only Martin, or had just met two others as visitors to him. He, I think, knew them all. I do not mean a group in any organic sense, for that we never were — the only grouping Guenon would have approved of was that of guru and disciples. Just a number of people who were drawn from the circumference towards the centre at the same time and in the same way.

Read with understanding, Malory’s ‘Morte d’Arthur’ is a very sad story. The whole noble company of knights were gathered together at Arthur’s court for the feast of Pentecost, and while they were seated at the Round Table the Sangraal passed through the hall on a beam of light, but veiled so that none actually saw it. They were asked who would undertake its quest and all alike pledged themselves and rode forth with courage and high hope. Some, however, soon turned back, finding the tug of the world too strong; some perished by the way; some were daunted or overthrown by the dragons of the ego; some bewitched or cast into dungeons by enchanters, the false guides who beset the path; some turned aside to lesser adventures or settled down in castles along the way; some attained a single vision of the Sangraal and recognized that, for them, that was sufficient achievement for this lifetime; and out of all that noble company only three pursued the quest to the end.

Guenon had said that the only thing to be done was to find a guru, in any religion, who had both horizontal and vertical authenticity, that is to say who was both the validly appointed successor to an initiatic chain and a realized man, and to seek initiation and guidance from him. Therefore it was a matter of mere expedience to us what religion we joined. It simply depended where we could find a guru — an easy matter, we thought then, in our simplicity. However, he had also said he had failed to find any Christian organization which still combined full theoretical understanding with spiritual potency; and therefore we decided that it would be necessary to look farther afield. Technically he may have been right, and certainly my earlier failure to find an opening in Christianity inclined me to accept his verdict; however it may be possible to attach too much importance to technical considerations in spiritual life and not enough to the Grace that bloweth where it listeth. Later I was to come upon evidence of spiritual currents in the Christian West, some of whose representatives seemed by no means inferior in power and understanding to Westerners who had transplanted themselves to Eastern religions. Nor were such signs of life confined to the Catholic Church, to which alone Guenon would allow some technical legitimacy. In view of this it does not seem absolutely necessary for Western aspirants in general to seek a path outside their ancestral religion and even less so to take on themselves the burden of a foreign orthodoxy. It is, moreover, to be remembered that the spiritual power of any religion or church is not a fixed quantum but a living, vibrating force, continually radiating with greater or less intensity, attaining an incandescent heat or cooling down and growing inert, according to the fervour and sincerity and understanding of those within its orbit. And since every thought, every action, every aspiration has its repercussions, those who draw sustenance from a spiritual body thereby also increase its potency, while the reverse is also true, but those who devote their lives to its services, asking no reward, thereby draw sustenance.

Some undoubtedly will be drawn to an eastern religion or to the formless path of Self-enquiry which will be described later in this book, and this cannot be considered regrettable. The characteristic of our age being the mutual acquaintance of doctrines and paths which had previously remained isolated, it is a good thing that those of the East should have representatives in the West to temper the obtuseness and smug superiority to which the Western intellect is so prone. On a more profound level also, the existence of various spiritual currents side by side cannot but increase the present fermentation and renewal of spiritual life. For this is a time of renewal: even more, it is a time of division between those who have completely rejected the mild religious restraints of their ancestors and those who seek something more vital with fuller understanding and stronger purpose.

And about myself? If I had learnt of the life and testimony of the Christian mystics and came upon their modern followers when I was searching so vainly at Oxford, should I have found a home there and avoided the ten barren, wasteful years that were to follow before I discovered Guenon? Such a hypothetical question is always unreal, since things could not really have happened otherwise than they did. Certain it is that it was only Guenon’s mode of expression which could fully satisfy my intellect, and, much as I revere the beauty and profundity of the various paths, Christian, Islamic and others, only the quintessential doctrine of Non-duality and the Maharshi’s path of Self-enquiry based upon it corresponded with my needs and temperament and offered me perfect fulfilment.

Moreover, people’s destinies are so interwoven as to make any might-have-been illusory. If I had found an opening in England I should not have drifted to Poland and therefore not to have met my wife and snatched her, from the chaos that Europe was to become, to Arunachala, at the feet of the Maharshi, where she also was to find the only fulfilment this life could offer.

At that time, however, I, like the others of our group, took Guenon’s verdict unquestioning and simply presumed that it was necessary to abandon Christianity and seek farther afield. I could not avoid a feeling of regret that, whereas the others were all free to go to the East in search of a guru, being unmarried and for the most part, sufficiently well-to-do, I had no prospect of leaving Europe. However, as it turned out, within a year I was in the East while many or most of them were still in the West.

A person’s destiny is not an accident. It is not something extraneous to him. From one point of view it is the outcome of his thoughts and actions, an inevitable, automatic system of repercussions which can be called reward and retribution, and from another point of view the milieu necessary for his development. What obscures this from sight is the wrong habit of considering worldly happiness or prosperity the purpose of life, whereas it may often happen that the reverse is what a man’s development needs. It is understandable, therefore, that once a man has recognized Self-realization as his conscious goal and turned in that direction, his destiny should become more recognizably beneficent and meaningful, even though it may involve hardship.

After four years at the Maritime College I left Poland for Bangkok where I took up the post of lecturer in English at the Chulalongkorn University. Having taken a degree in one subject and drifted into teaching of another created difficulties in my academic career. This proved a blessing in disguise in our case as it prevented us from being caught up by the Nazis in Poland a few years later or by the Communists in Lithuania. In one way or another all the members of our little group were brought safely through the war. The lower reality of events does not condition but subserves the higher reality of the quest. That does not mean that no one who has dedicated himself to the quest can die before its conclusion but that his worldly success or failure, prosperity or privation, even life or death, will be such as his progress on the quest demands.

I liked Siam, as I had liked Oxford. I liked the Siamese — a cheerful, easy-going, friendly people; and yet Siam was the second great wave of disappointment to me, as Oxford had been the first. I had built up a dream-picture of Oxford which the reality could not substantiate; I had come to Siam imbued with Guenon’s descriptions of the traditional East, where political and social conditions subserve the spiritual discipline, where authority rests, openly or secretly, with the guardians of tradition, where the quest of Realization is recognized as the goal and the purpose of life; and instead I found a nation tumbling over itself to acquire the materialist civilization which I was trying to discard, and flinging away with both hands that to which I had dedicated my life, turning their back on it, trying to forget that it had ever existed. I had already known one Siamese, Seni Pramoj, a great-nephew of King Chulalongkorn, after whom the university was called, who was Siamese Minister in Washington during the Second World War and Prime Minister after the war; he had been Denzil Batchelor’s room-mate at Oxford. He was a dapper, practical little man whose great interest in life was tennis and he thought Denzil and I mad for our preoccupation with poetry and ideas. He was typical of his people.

Even before the quest started I had found kindred souls in England opposed to modern civilization with its materialist values, its divorce from nature, its rush and noise and superficiality. But when I got to Poland I found the viewpoint of Eastern Europe was quite different. There modernism and industrialization still had a glamour. The term of contempt for a slum, for anything dirty or old-fashioned, was ‘Asia’, while the national pride was a coalmine or a steel foundry. If I even mentioned my viewpoint I encountered the suspicion that I was the cunning Englishman who, having industrialization in his own country, was trying to beguile East Europeans into putting up with backwardness in theirs. I was to find the same spirit in the East. In fact, I was to find that it was in the West, among those surfeited with materialism, that the renewed search for spiritual meaning was arising, while the East was rushing headlong into modernism.

I found that even the traditional arts and sciences, about which Guenon wrote so much, were disappearing. The last generation of Siamese architects had refused to initiate apprentices, saying that the age of tradition was ended. As a result, modern buildings in the Siamese style, such as the university in which I taught, were mere imitations planned by Italian architects.

True, there were the Buddhist monasteries in Siam, and I might have made a more careful investigation of them, but so far as I could gather from talks with my students and colleagues there was no very potent spiritual current there. Yes, there had been a Buddhist monk in the north who was said to be very holy and many people had visited him, but he was dead now. No, there was no one else. Incidentally, I recently saw, as a sort of confirmation, on reading The Wheel of Life, the autobiography of my postwar successor at the university, John Blofeld, who is a Buddhist, that he found no living current in Siamese Buddhism but had had to go to Sikkim to seek a guru.

Guenon’s description of the East, I found, would have been idealized and doctrinaire even in an earlier age; today it simply would not apply.

We soon heard from Martin that he had taken up a post as English lecturer at Cairo University. Guenon also was living at Cairo and Martin got to know him and gradually became a sort of unofficial secretary to him.

Before long Martin wrote to us that he had found a Muslim guru, approved of by Guenon, became a Muslim, and had been initiated by him. He also expressed the opinion that we should probably eventually be driven to join the same religion and even to follow the same guru.

With Guenon’s approval, our group had undertaken the translation of his books, each selecting one. Martin was translating Orient et Occident and I its sequel, La Crise du Monde Modern which appealed to me as a beautiful, condensed and fundamental work. I finished the translation just before the war spread to the East, and I am told that Luzac published it under the title The Modern Crisis. I never saw a copy; I was cut off by the war at the time, and later I never troubled to get one.

One of the benefits of this work was that it enabled us to correspond with Guenon, who was very punctilious about the details of translation and about preserving his long sentences and careful system of punctuation. In the periodical for which he wrote he had inserted an announcement that he could not answer personal letters or give advice or guidance. Perhaps this was necessary to avert a flood of correspondence in answering questions and explaining points of difficulty.

I took advantage of this correspondence to tell him of the disappointment I had experienced from the contrast of the present reality of Siam with his idealized picture of the East, and it was partly as a result of my representation that he, or Martin Lings for him, explained in the English translation of Orient et Occident that eastern countries of today do not correspond with his description of the traditional East. Such an explanation was, however, inadequate; the books should have been revised throughout to make it clear that it was not the East as it is that was being described but an ideal.

Driven by impatience, I followed Martin’s example in becoming a Muslim. In my case, however, this ran rather counter to Guenon’s injunction that one should first find a valid guru before making a change of religion. It might be said that I had indirectly found the one followed by Martin of whom I was told that Guenon approved; however, especially in view of the war, there was no knowing how long it would be before I was able to approach him directly; and if I had meanwhile discovered a Buddhist or Hindu or Taoist guru it might have put me in an awkward position of having to change my religion a second time. Theoretically, if I required any emotional support before finding a valid guru, I should have sought it in the religion in which I had been brought up. In actual fact, however, it would have been hard to revive a jaded piety, whereas I did find immense support in Islam.

In Bangkok, I appreciated the occasional evenings of Arabic song and incantation that my South Indian Muslim friends held in a large hall above a cloth merchant’s offices. There is one of these that still rings in my head at times. In translation it would be: “I ask pardon of God for what (in me) is not God; and all things say ‘God’!” The first phrase is an enunciation of pure non-duality, of the Supreme Identity, regarding all ‘otherness’, all separate individuality (or illusion of it) in oneself as a sin for which to ask forgiveness. This is, in its deepest sense, the sin of shirk, of associating any ‘other’ with God, which is described in Islam as the one unforgivable sin— naturally, because when this is finally overcome there remains no other-than-God and therefore no sin or sinner to forgive. The second phrase describes the entire utterance of the name of God. And the men who spent their evenings in this manner were neither scholars nor men dedicated to the spiritual quest but simple merchants. It was amazing and very refreshing to feel the warmth and depth of their faith and to see the naturalness with which they regarded their religion as an absorbing reality and a constant topic of conversation, so unlike either the normal Western indifference or the truculent assertiveness often found in those who are religious. Here at last I was coming in contact with the traditional East, even though their standards may have fallen far short of what tradition demanded. Theoretically at least they recognized the supreme goal, as the incantation translated above testifies. In practise they received initiation and followed a discipline though without full understanding or complete dedication. Even among them some of the younger generation were becoming lax both in life and worship.

I began harmonising my breathing with my pulse beat. With a little practise it is easy to feel one’s pulse internally without putting one’s finger on any spot; and harmonising it with the breathing helps to rhythmetise one. When walking I kept my footsteps also to the same rhythm. To enhance the vibration it is very helpful to repeat silently a mantra, a ceaseless inner prayer attuned to the breathing and heartbeat like ‘Arunachala Siva’ or simply ‘Om’. In Islam one would repeat the shahada, the Islamic confession of faith, silently — ‘there is no god’ while breathing out and ‘except God’ while breathing in — so that every exhalation becomes a denial of the ego and every inhalation an assertion of the One Self.

Years later I discovered from reading that this was a form of the ceaseless inner prayer, which in one form or another, is practised in all religions. Perhaps the best-known illustration of it is the constant prayer ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me’, also attuned to the breathing and heartbeat, used by an anonymous Russian pilgrim, as described in The Way of the Pilgrim (English translation by R.M. French, SPCK). It may not suit all wayfarers or every path. At that stage of the path it was most useful to me. It maintained a living spiritual rhythm and also helped to guard against sins of forgetfulness.

There is no rigid barrier between the physical and spiritual. The spiritual current can be kept up during our daily activities as a sort of substratum and then the work performed will not only not suffer but will go on more effectively because it will be more spontaneous. Rhythmic movements during prayers, prostrations and rituals emphasize this and one may feel intuitively the need to extend the rhythmetisation to the body also. Indeed, mental, moral and physical harmonisation is the threefold basis of spiritual development. It is true that physical harmonisation alone does not lead to spiritual growth, but neither does mental understanding alone nor moral rectitude alone; it is the combination of the three that is needed. On the direct path, total harmonisation is produced spontaneously and such disciplines leading to it can be ignored; but that was a path to which I had not yet been led.

Early in 1939 news came that two of our group, who had been travelling about in India for some time, had at last found a guru. It is easy to remember the date, because it was less than a fortnight after the birth of our son that my summer vacation started, and my wife, knowing how much it meant to me, raised no objection to my going.

As soon as I reached India I had the peculiar feeling of being at home for the first time in my life. I had never felt really at home in England but had always intended to make my living abroad. Neither had I felt at home in Poland or Siam. It was not that I preferred the Indians — indeed, the gay cheerfulness of the Chinese shopkeepers in Bangkok was something I missed in the Indian shops. Nor were the parts of India I then visited particularly beautiful — dusty, sun-bleached plains, dilapidated villages, bleak, white-washed houses. There was simply the indefinable feeling that I belonged here, that this was home.

I stayed in a middle-class hotel in a hot, white-walled, dusty town through the worst of the summer heat. A single-storey hotel, no fans, very cheap by European standards. I shared a room with my two friends — I had not met them before but they immediately became friends, companions on the quest. There is a hadith, a saying of the Prophet: “There is no friendship but only companionship-in-Islam.” At night we and our neighbours in the hotel took our beds out into the courtyard to sleep — the Indian charpoy, a light wooden framework with cord criss-crossed between it and a mattress only about an inch thick thrown over.

I adapted myself easily, and here again I appreciated the atmosphere: mostly business and professional men — no women as far as I could see — many of the men devotional, most of them imbued with pride of Islam. They never doubted that it was the finest of all religions. Naïve? But does a Christian professor of comparative religion or a Buddhist abbot ever doubt that his is the finest religion? And is this not equally naïve? However, on the contingent level of dogma and social application the religions necessarily differ, like the sides of a mountain. Each represents a different viewpoint, and therefore each must seem best when seen from its own viewpoint and from this viewpoint every other must seem either wrong or at best inferior.

On the purely spiritual level all religions are unanimous. They cannot be otherwise, since Truth is One. It is like a mountain approached from different sides; the nature of the terrain differs on every side, and the paths run in different and even opposite directions, but the peak is one and they all converge on it. This is beginning to be widely appreciated nowadays and there have been a number of books either expounding it or illustrating it by means of comparative quotations culled from the mystics of the various religions. What is needed is simply to attend to one’s own religion or to see each from its own viewpoint. Throughout most of history the former has been the preferable attitude: so long as one sincerely followed one’s own religion it was quite unnecessary to know about any other. The average Christian, for example, hardly knew that there was a religion called Buddhism, so why should he study it? Today however, with the expansion of a uniform modernism over all the religions and over the previously diverse civilizations which they sponsored, such an attitude is rarely possible for the intelligent and enquiring. Too much is known about the existence and surface disagreements of other religions. Therefore the second attitude becomes necessary for many people: to understand and explain each from its own viewpoint. Those who claim to be authorities on religion should facilitate this process, not obstruct it, as they so often do. Because if it is not done, the observer is faced with the dilemma that all the millions of followers of another religion affirm what his own denies and deny what it affirms. Simply to brush the problem aside by saying: “We are right and all the others are wrong” is too superficial an attitude to hold the intelligent student.

As an example of what I mean by viewpoint, there is an able and learned book by F.H.Hilliard called The Buddha, the Prophet and the Christ (Allen & Unwin) which examines the views of their followers on the divinity of these three founders of religions. It is more fair-minded and impartial than most such books; nevertheless it must inevitably suggest the superiority of that religion which is based on belief in the divinity of the Personal Saviour, that is to say Christianity. From the Islamic viewpoint the essential comparison would be between the Quran, the Gospels and the Pali Canon, and the scales would come down in favour of the only one of the three religions which is based on a divinely revealed scripture, that is Islam. From a Buddhist viewpoint it might be a comparison between the Noble Eightfold Path, Christ’s injunctions to his followers and the Islamic shariah, and Buddhism would come first as the only one of the three religions whose founder had himself laid down a clearly formulated path from suffering to Beatitude, from ignorance to Light, from samsara to Nirvana. Obviously, then, a really useful and instructive comparison would be one which showed the equivalence of personal saviour, revealed scripture and clearly demarcated path; and such a study would not need to grade the religions but to simply indicate the different modes of approach.

I was taken to see the guru (or murshid) in the cool cloister of an old stone house, looking out on a dusty courtyard. He kept me waiting a few minutes before entering: a short, broad man of about sixty, white-haired, bearded and bright eyed, with a brisk, alert manner and a look of keen intelligence. He was wearing a skullcap, gown and pyjama trousers, all of gleaming white cotton, freshly laundered and ironed. It was always so that I saw him. He asked general questions about my life, my work, my circumstances, touching on nothing spiritual. I felt a strong wave of disappointment. I had no impression of spirituality but put it down to my lack of psychic receptivity — the spiritual power must be there or my friends would not have recognized it. One of them, after two years ineffectual search, when he heard of this murshid had cancelled his ticket. The other had met Martin’s guru but was more attracted to this one. Neither had any doubts.

It was some days before I received initiation. One day, during this interval, I was alone in the hotel when two of our neighbours came across to speak with me, professional men of about my age. After speaking about the pure doctrine of non-duality (which so many Indian Muslims, imbued with Sufi teachings, understand as clearly as Hindus) they suggested to me in a tactful way that I might not be very wise in my choice of a murshid and showed me a pamphlet in English by their own. I was not impressed by it and disliked his transliterating his name in such a way as to make it look English. Nor did I approve of their proselytising for a guru. I decided that rivalry was at the base of their warning and ignored it. In fact, I willed myself to believe in my murshid just as I had willed myself to be tragically in love at Oxford. Simplicity and sincerity are seldom natural qualities; they have to be acquired.

It was not into one Sufi order alone that I was initiated but into the group of great Indian Muslim orders, my murshid being entitled to represent them all. The spiritual exercises I was given are such as are only revealed on initiation; there was, however, one meditation among them which there is no harm and some interest in speaking about. There is a verse in the Quran: “He is now as He was”; and I was to meditate on the two in conjunction. If there was God alone and if He remains as He was, utterly unchanged, if the creation of the universe and all that it contains has not limited Him in any way, has not touched even the fringe of His Being, then all other-than-God is an appearance without intrinsic reality; He alone is the Real. Therefore whatever is the essence or reality of me cannot be other-than-God. I cannot say “I am God” but I can say “I am not other-than-God”; there is an enormous difference, for the former might deify the ego, the individual in me, while the latter denies its very existence; and when all the illusory other- than-God is denied, what remains? Only God, Who is now as He was. This is a good example of how the Sufi saints read the highest meaning into the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet. There have been Western scholars who have questioned their right to do so, maintaining that no such meaning was intended. This is preposterous. What it comes to is the implication that men whose whole lives are a quest for Truth, some of whom have attained the supreme super-rational Truth, have built their work on a foundation of error or falsification; also that the founder of one of the world’s great religions had himself not seen beyond the exoteric wall to the deeper meaning of his message. It is ignorance criticising knowledge. People who do not understand the universal truth, even in theory, but look upon Sufism as a mere set of philosophical ideas may accept such a view, but not those who have understood that Truth is one and universal.

Why, then, is the truth of non-duality not explicitly taught in Islam, as it is in many Hindu and Buddhist texts? Why should it be necessary to seek it in hidden and symbolical sentences? A religion has to be adapted to an entire people, not only to a spiritual minority, and the type of adaptation required varies from the age and community. The various religious traditions teach that there is a process of diminishing spirituality in the history of mankind, and therefore the latest religion revealed has to be the most hard and exoteric in order to hold the masses, which means that its higher implications will be veiled in the most cryptic and symbolical form. That is the case with Islam.

But how does belief in the existence of Sufism from the very origin of Islam, in fact as the very essence of Islam, fit in with the evidence which historians and philosophers profess to find of its gradual development and of the influence on it of neo-Platonism? There is no doubt that neo-Platonism did exert an enormous influence on the formulation of Sufi philosophy. Modern philosophers could, therefore, hardly help regarding Sufi philosophy as a derivative of neo-Platonism once they made the initial error of considering it a philosophy at all. Of course it is not; it is a path, which is something quite different. Some of those who teach or follow a path may like to give a philosophical exposition of it, but there is no necessity to do so. Studying a philosophy is quite a different type of activity from following a path. Those philosophers who study neo-Platonic or Sufi philosophy today are not Sufis, are not even training to become Sufis, since they are not following a Sufi path, whereas I, on the other hand, when I set foot on the path, was not expected to study neo-Platonic or any other philosophy. No disciple of the Sufis is. A basic understanding of the theory of non-duality is expected, but that is simple; and after that practise, not theory, is needed.

Even if the philosophers had never formulated their theories at all, if there were no other texts, no books, no theories, the basic meaning is contained entire in the shahada itself: ‘There is no god but God’; and according to Islamic tradition this has been used with full understanding, as a weapon for fighting the ‘greater holy war’, from the beginning. It is the same as that tremendous sentence from the Bhagavad Gita: “There is no existence of the unreal and no non-existence of the Real.” Whether philosophers write books about it or not, whether they agree with Plato or not, does not concern the spiritual wayfarer, whose task is not to theorise about it but to use it.

I had not long returned to Bangkok before I received a letter from Martin saying that his guru had seen photographs of my murshid and some letters written by him and was not happy about him, in fact did not consider him a realized man. My wife had already formed such an opinion prior to this as soon as she heard my account of the guru and saw his picture. This started a general correspondence among those concerned that at times became acrimonious. My murshid revealed a talent for abuse that embarrassed me. Two more members of our original Guenon group were able to come to India despite the war; they met him and were not impressed. Martin wrote reminding me of Guenon’s teaching that there were two grades of initiatic organization: that where the guru had only ‘horizontal authenticity’, that is to say valid appointment in succession to an unbroken chain of gurus, and that where he had ‘vertical authenticity’ also, that is direct connection, through realization, with the divine source of initiation. Initiation into the former should bestow a certain grace but could not lead to realization; for that the realized guru was necessary. This made a deep impression on me, for never at any time was I willing to relinquish pursuit of the Supreme Goal. I held out for a while, partly out of loyalty to my murshid, but largely also from reluctance to admit that I was in the wrong; but eventually I gave in, convinced of my error.

Years later I perceived how futile the whole dispute had been, when I appreciated at last the significance of the term ‘Realized Man’, and when I found that Martin’s guru (whom I never met) was explaining that the guru need not be realized, while Martin himself was telling new aspirants that there was no hope of Realization in this lifetime. This is not mere pessimism but a sinking to the exoteric level. It betokens a failure of the basic understanding of non-duality required for the quest, and therefore, on the spiritual level, it is an error. It is itself an impediment to realization, since it vests the unreal with a temporary reality by asking when and whether it can cease to exist. Forgetting that ‘there is no existence of the unreal and no non-existence of the Real’, it substitutes the exoteric fallacy that there is a temporary existence of the unreal, which may be replaced by the Real on some future occasion. To put it quite simply, saying that you cannot attain Realization in this lifetime means asserting what you should deny — the existence of a ‘you’ who can or cannot attain — and thereby closes the door to Realization. The question whether you can attain or not ought not to arise; it ought to be dissolved in the real question: who is it that seeks to attain?

I did not grasp all this clearly at the time, but was quite determined not to remain on a path that did not lead to the Goal. Was there any benefit from the initiation I had rushed so impatiently to acquire and all the exercises I had done? Such a question is not always easy to answer. A man is ill, he takes medicine and gets better; but is it because of the medicine or in spite of it or independently of it? There seemed to be an increased depth and subtlety of understanding after the first initiation and of spiritual vigour after the second. It may be said that there was benefit from the determination and enthusiasm that made me seek.

So far as my murshid goes, I was never really wholehearted; perhaps that was what made it comparatively easy for me to abandon him. Others have been less fortunate, becoming attached to gurus who were not merely incomplete, lacking Self-realization (in that there is no harm so long as they recognize their limitation) but false and deluded, misguided and misguiding others. It is a sign of the times — the time of false Christs and false prophets of which Christ warned his followers. Some such are widely known and publicized, others almost unknown. They make the highest possible claims for themselves, or allow their disciples to make them: this one is Christ at his second coming, that one is God Incarnate. How far they are self-deluded and how far consciously deluding others is usually very hard to say. A man may spend years in solitude, practising yogic discipline, as a result of which various powers may develop, both internal powers such as vision and audition, and outward directed powers such as telepathy and hypnotism. Then the ego, forgetting that its own immolation is the ultimate goal of the process, may pride itself on what it has acquired, regarding this as realization. In some cases this capital, accumulated during the time of training, may be gradually exhausted, like an overdrawn bank account, and the guru survives on his former reputation, if at all; but in other cases it may continue or even grow with the growth of the ego. For the ego will grow; there is no food on which it flourishes more than the adulation of disciples. The seeker needs to use great caution in estimating not only the guru but also the purity of his own motives, for any impure motive may be reflected outwardly in an imperfect guide. And then not only will he not be led forward into greater purity but will be infected by the imperfections of the guide, drifting into a worse state than before; for qualities of the ego are as infectious through psychic contact as a disease is through the physical.

Some time during my stay at Bangkok I stopped reading. I had read voraciously ever since first discovering Guenon; but the time came when I felt: “I know the theory now; it is practise that is needed.” It was not just an option but also something deeper. I felt an actual aversion to the books which had so attracted me. This was a sound intuition. In almost all cases some doctrinal understanding is necessary at the beginning, and this needs to be more or less elaborate according to the temperament of the seeker and the nature of the path followed. From the beginning I was drawn to the direct path, which I will describe in a later chapter. Because this is known as Jnana Marga or Path of Knowledge, some have supposed it to be more theoretical than other paths, but the opposite is true. What is meant by ‘Knowledge’ is not learning but direct intuitional understanding. In fact, the more direct a path is the less theory it requires; it is the indirect paths, such as hermeticism and tantrism, that are based on elaborate theory.

In any case, whatever the path followed, there is no benefit from learning and re-learning once the mind is convinced. Not only does it not help, but also it is one of the ways in which the aspirant can be sidetracked, turning away from spiritual effort to the easier alternative of mental exertion. Not only individual seekers but communities also deteriorate in this way. Often the followers of unscholarly ecstatics become scholars, but it marks a spiritual decline. This is a mode of decline that is apt to be found in all religions — from the saint to the scholar.

Apart from providing an easy alternative to spiritual effort, excessive study can actually do positive harm by breeding pride in one’s learning. I have even seen people reading to enjoy the self-satisfaction of feeling that they understood better than the writer.

The Maharshi was immensely learned but he became so unintentionally and without valuing learning. Devotees brought him books to read so that he could expound them, and his memory was such that he retained whatever he read. But he warned against barren erudition.

“What use is the learning of those who do not seek to wipe out the letters of destiny (from their brow) by enquiry ‘Whence is the birth of us who know the letters?’ They have sunk to the level of a gramophone. What else are they, O’ Arunachala? “It is those who are not learned who are saved rather than those whose ego has not yet subsided in spite of their learning. The unlearned are saved from the relentless grip of self-infatuation; they are saved from the malady of a myriad whirling thoughts and words; they are saved from running after (mental) wealth. It is from more than one evil that they are saved.” — The Collected Works of Ramana Maharshi By the ‘unlearned’ he means, of course, the simple-minded, not merely the ignorant, and by ‘the learned’ those who value and accumulate learning, not all who possess it.

For some years after this I scarcely read a book. To read books of no spiritual value — travel, fiction, politics and so forth — would have been even more a turning aside from the quest, degrading it to the level of a hobby or a part-time activity or an activity among others, one aspect of life, instead of the goal and the purpose of life. Therefore I did not read at all. Does this mean that I was a fanatic? No more than a man climbing Everest is a fanatic for not indulging in violin practise at the same time. I was one- pointed, not fanatical — and not one-pointed enough or the progress would have been greater. I never objected to reading in principle or tried to persuade others not to read; but I had an objective in life and did not want to distract my mind from it. The question has often been asked why men want to climb Everest, reach the North Pole, descend to the ocean’s depths, tread the face of the moon, or in general attain the almost unattainable, and why they undergo all manner of hardships and face death in the attempt. The true answer is that all such cravings are blind physical reflections of man’s innate urge to undertake the supreme quest for his lost homeland, for the utter freedom and perfect bliss of his true state. That is the real adventure, the well-neigh impassable road to the unattainable goal. The least the adventurer who dares attempt it can do is to be one-pointed in his enterprise. It is no idle ramble.

When I started reading again it was a different way and for a different reason, as I shall explain later.

Early in 1941 my original contract with the Siamese (by now renamed ‘Thai’) government lapsed and was replaced by a permanent one. Between the two I became eligible for six months home leave. If it had not been for the war we should probably have gone far enough West to seek initiation from Martin’s guru, but under the circumstances this was impossible. It also proved unnecessary, because Martin wrote that his guru now had a delegate in India who was authorised to give initiation in his name.

We had heard of the Maharshi by this time and had received some of his writings and some photographs of him, which made a tremendous impression on us. However, one of our original Guenon group had been to Tiruvannamalai to investigate and had reported that the Maharshi was not a guru and did not give initiation or spiritual guidance. This report had been relayed to us and it made it seem not worthwhile going there. Of this more later.

We were travelling now as a family of five. We spent some time in Rawalpindi where we enjoyed the keen, invigorating air and the scent of pine-trees, then up to Murree, a beautiful hill station, then on to Kashmir to meet the delegate. I was afraid to take a houseboat, as most visitors to Srinagar do, because the children were small and the two eldest like quicksilver, and we should have been constantly anxious that they would fall into the water. However, we were fortunate enough to get a rambling old house with a large garden stretching right down to the shore of one of the lakes. It was a delightful holiday.

When we arrived there were wild irises by the roadside and luscious red cherries in the shops. One kind of fruit and flowers succeeded another through the summer. The two eldest children were at a delightful age — Catherine five and Adam two — only Frania was still too young to be very interesting. Catherine was as intelligent as she was lovely. Strangers would stop to ask who she was. When I tried to put her off by telling her that I would explain something when she was older, she would say: “All right, Daddy, but try now, and if I don’t understand I’ll tell you”. She usually did understand. Adam was still enjoying the adventure of walking and talking.

There was no question this time of recognising a spiritual master because the delegate was not even supposed to be such. Some spiritual force seemed to be transmitted. There seemed to be an increase of vigour and power, as with the previous initiation there had been of subtlety.