I spent a good deal of time talking to, and learnt a lot from, one of the other visitors: an Englishman, Gyan, who had lived for many years in India, shaved his head, and often wore the saffron dhoti of the saddhus. A tall handsome man in, perhaps, his late forties, he swam in the river near the ashram most days that we were there. He was pleasingly irreverent, as well as gentle with his fellow human beings, and often supplied some welcome light relief. He told me of a silent retreat he had attended some years ago in Australia. A friend of his passed him a note which said, “Are we being silent, or are we trying not to talk?” Though he now lives in Italy, running a yoga centre with his partner, Gyan is still very close to his Indian experience and is a prime example of a spiritual man not needing to attach himself to a single named faith or to possessions. He told us that he had never owned much and had no insurances or pension: living in the present, like the lilies in the field. I asked if he had not found it difficult to leave his cell and come back into the world. He answered “I carry it with me.”
Gyan was able to shed some light on a remarkable event. At the end of the lane running alongside the boundary of the ashram beside our hut was a local meeting point with a brick shelter. One day we heard a lot of singing and banging of drums and tambourines and saw a procession coming down the lane, with a garlanded cart. We had seen just such a scene on a Bede Griffiths video the previous night, so we recognised it as a Hindu funeral. Stephen and I did not feel we could intrude, particularly in my case, since all the procession – one could not call them mourners – were male. But we looked on from the step of our hut and could see that the body had been placed in the shelter – the crematorium, it seemed – and, after some incantations and prayers, it was smeared with mud, sprinkled with what Gyan told us were coconut juice and hay and set alight. We did not venture past it for a day or so, but for some time the smell drifted over the fields and into our hut. Gyan told us that such ceremonies are carried out wherever there is a river, often many in a day. He recounted gruesome stories of how bits of bodies are left unburnt, and devoured by the stray dogs of the neighbourhood.
I had little to do with the nuns, who did not live on the premises, but I was keen to visit Sister Stephanie, who lived as a hermit near by. We travelled to her home by bus, and were startled to find quite a big house with large grounds. The main building housed a chapel and several rooms, one of which was occupied by Father Martin, the most intellectual of the brothers at Santivanam. He was on sabbatical at the time, though he travelled abroad a lot to lecture. (Indeed, we attended one of his talks on our return to England.) Sister Stephanie’s home in a separate building was under repair, so she too was living in the main house. There were several staff, a cow and a lot of activity. Not my idea of a hermitage.
While we sipped tea, Stephen asked Stephanie, “What is the difference between living alone and being a hermit?” The million dollar question.
She paused then said “Silence in the heart. That is the true hermitage, the hermitage of the heart.”
A day or so later, I had a brief word with Father Ivan, the Italian monk at Santivanam, over tea. His was a sharply defined face with a little beard and big eyes. He often smiled a greeting to the cook, to me, and to others, but his general demeanour was serious and withdrawn. I sensed a keen intelligence and a devout spirit. Here, I felt, was a man who might teach me something. He was visiting the ashram to verify the implementation of policies agreed by delegates of the Camoldoli monasteries to which Santivanam is allied.
When I expressed the problem of adapting to a totally interior life, he said it was the same for them – even when withdrawn from the world, there was the problem of remaining “conscious” in word and deed. I said that with no words, as in Quaker practice, when there was nothing, there was, well, nothing, and he laughed.
I repeated Sister Stephanie’s phrase of the “silence of the heart”. He thought for a while then said,
“Maybe that is because it has a breath in it, a presence.” Yes.
I was increasingly attracted by the idea of eremetic living. After a lifetime of trying to fit in with those I lived with, perhaps it was time to live alone. Certainly emotional turmoil played havoc with the interior life that was becoming increasingly important to me. I recalled an Englishwoman I had met on a Quaker course who had expressed the intention of becoming a solitary, and thought I might visit her on my return.
After visiting Sister Stephanie I had an appointment with the inhabitant of the next hut to ours. Father Augustine is an elderly and infirm Indian monk who has been at Santivanam for a number of years. He husbands his energies carefully and did not appear often at the regular tea and coffee-time meeting points. He had showed us great warmth in all our meetings, but had not felt strong enough for a long encounter until this moment. It was hot, but he sat in a woollen cap and waistcoat, anxious not to be in a draught as we held a wideranging conversation on prayer and doubt, with constant references from Father Augustine to Jesus’ life as a guide. I told him that I had been growing in the realisation that meditation in the form of a sterile emptying of the mind was not for me. I found that when I approached a centred state prayerfully, lovingly, I fell into it peacefully, without noticing. This process was more like that in a Meeting for Worship – and indeed, I now recognised that there could only be one kind of relationship with God, not two different modes. Father Augustine told me that what I had described – prayer leading to contemplation – is a recognised procedure in Christian practice, though I do not feel myself to be a Christian.
During my time at Santivanam, my mind was often on my father, who became a Catholic when I was five, and who was also diagnosed a schizophrenic at about that time. My life at the ashram was so like his – praying and reading all day, often prostrate and tired. How cross we used to be at his “laziness”. He wanted to become a monk later on in life, and they would not have him, both because he was married, and because of his history of mental illness. But as I lived among those who had been accepted into that life that he craved, I felt his pain, rejection and frustration. No wonder he thought of himself as Job.
A book I was reading challenged me to pray for what I really wanted and felt, not what I thought I ought to want and feel. It was true. All my life I had been so duty bound, I had hidden my real wishes from myself. A second book bid me stop playing games with myself, and let the inner and the outer become one. Part of the same thing from two different sources.
It was at Santivanam that Stephen and I started a study of modern Hinduism that has continued. From our reading there and later, we learnt of a whole tradition of Hinduism that was far from the general understanding in the West of a polytheistic faith verging on the superstitious. Brahmo Samaj (the Society of God), founded in 1828 by a Bengali Brahmin, Ram Mohan Roy and taken up by the father of the poet Rabindranath Tagore, rejected that polytheism and emphasised the importance of the formless universal spirit: the monotheistic basis of Hinduism and its links with other faiths. I had always found it hard to equate what I read from the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita with what I saw in the multifarious images of Hindu temples in England and in India. It was good to understand that Vishnu, Shiva, Kali, or Ganesh could be seen as entry points to the deeper mystical faith behind.
As we moved from ashram to ashram in the south and east of the country, often recommended by other “pilgrims”, we found ourselves in a universalist Hindu tradition that included such figures as Ramakrishna, whose centre we visited in Delhi: Vivekenanda, Sri Ramana and Sri Aurobindo. From all we felt a spiritual charge, and a recognition of the similarities of our faith. From an anthology, The Power of Prayer, Swami Swahananda’s comment that “group prayer is not an aggregate but a symphony” might have been a description of a Quaker Meeting for Worship.
At these ashrams we did not recapture the feeling of community that we had felt at Santivanam. At Tiruvanemali, for instance, an ashram devoted to Sri Ramana, there were a lot of Westerners wandering about, chatting, and very littl
e silence, ironic since the sage himself, it appears, preferred to communicate through the power of silence, a silence so profound that it stilled the minds of those who came to visit him. Something of that silence remained in the small whitewashed cave where he lived; we climbed up to it, and contemplated its serenity.
The ashram was all much bigger, spread out and less intimate than we had been used to, though redeemed by the glorious peacocks on the roof and by the less glorious monkeys who tried to get into our room. Stephen had bought a dhoti and wore it with aplomb, though it took time to learn how to sit on the ground at mealtimes without revealing all. What a transformation from a man wedded to his boots and socks.
A number of the visitors seemed somewhat self-conscious. It is hard for Westerners to look good in Indian clothes, especially when compared with the beauty and elegance of Indian women. The clothes simply don’t hang well on our different shapes and gaits. But some, including a delicate French woman dressed always in white, had been in India a long time – five years in her case – and seemed completely at home.
While we were at Tiruvanamali, I heard of a job in the UK that would have been just up my street: part of the organisation I had been working for, but looking at microcredit in a European context. If I had still been in “career” mode, it would have been the natural next step for me. As it was, I knew that I must keep myself free until my return. Still, temptation would not be temptation if it were not attractive, just as faith would not be necessary if everything could be known for sure.
After some time in the library I found myself sated with guru literature, partly because I disliked the devotion shown to human beings, and partly because all the analysis did not help, rather it impeded me. Having read summaries and hand-picked examples of Hindu mystical thought in Huxley and other anthologies, none of what I was now reading seemed very fresh. Doing it is what is important, and hard, and I found that my resistance to some of this reading was contributing to my resistance to letting go in meditation.
We bumped into Frs George and Ivan from Santivanam, who were also staying in the ashram. George was so much more relaxed away from his responsibilities, with a smile of greeting from the heart and through the eyes. We also met again Klaske, a young Dutch woman who has set up home in India, not far from Dharamsala and devotes her life to spiritual practices. When I asked her whether she was a Buddhist, she said,
“Oh, I’m not anything.”
I said, “Oh, you mean you are everything.” And tendered for the first time the possibility that I too could be everything. We don’t need a name or a label, or to fit into a pigeonhole: our faith is our own.
I was moving on. The Spirit is dynamic; we do not believe today exactly what we believed yesterday, which is why Quakers have no creed. We are on a journey and things of the past may not work in the present. It was brought home to me by re-reading Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics. I had greeted it with such passion a few months before in the States; now it hardly resounded at all.
Is the Divine the supreme fact of your life, so much so that it is simply impossible for you to do without it?… This is the first thing necessary – aspiration for the Divine. The next thing you have to do is to tend it, to keep it always alert and awake and living. And for that what is required is concentration – concentration upon the Divine with a view to an integral and absolute consecration to its Will and Purpose.
The Mother
Mary is an Englishwoman who has lived in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in the French town of Pondicherry for the last thirty years – she is also a member of our own Quaker Meeting. Mary is 92 and is a delicate mixture of forgetful old age and a spiritual being wrapped in silence. She lives in an ashram flat, receiving all her food from the ashram kitchens. She is surrounded by photos of Sri Aurobindo and his disciple, the French woman known as The Mother, with whom she had several private silent audiences. Mary spends much of her time in meditation, but feels very connected to her Quaker Meeting, and was much moved by the Meeting for Worship that we held in her flat. It was the first she had attended since her last visit to Britain some ten years before.
We talked gently of important subjects. Mary believes firmly in reincarnation; I am more sceptical. But our spiritual journeys move on, and who knows what we will feel about it in six months’ time. The little that I had managed to read of a book by Henri Le Saux (Abhishiktananda), one of the founders of Santivanam, was so revealing in its detailing in journal form the process, the changes in his spiritual life; how, in very human terms, he “got to” the position of sanyasi in later life. For once here was an account that rendered the possibilities in our own journeys comprehensible.
Meeting Mary reminded me of Father Bede who said at the age of 86 that he had learned more in the last two years than in the previous 84, and of my mother, the same age, to whom I had recounted it, to cheer her. Later Mary wrote: “No doubt it is too much to ask for you to come and give us another visit? But if you do … then our arms are waiting for you!” A year later Westminster Monthly Meeting recorded her death.
Pondicherry vibrates with the influence of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother; their photos are everywhere, and much of the town is owned by the ashram – to the extent, apparently, that it is more influential than the town council. We stayed in an ashram guest house and took breakfast and dinner with other visitors and monks in the dining area, but I did not feel part of any community. I couldn’t identify either with what I saw as the idolatry of those prostrating themselves at the graves of Aurobindo and The Mother. It seemed out of kilter with their teachings. Many years ago, another visitor, disturbed by this worship of the then living Mother, wrote to her and asked “Mother, are you God?”
“Yes,” she replied, “and so are you.”
I also felt uncomfortable at living in all these ashrams without being given any voluntary work to do. At Santivanam at least we had been able to help each day. I had prepared the vegetables for lunch, and Stephen cleaned out the cow shed. It was a shame that none of the other ashrams seemed to include useful activity as part of their ethos.
Another discomfort was an insight while walking down the road to the ashram. After watching with delight a pair of beautiful butterflies, I became aware of a far from beautiful boy at my side – dirty, unkempt, downcast. I barely noticed him, and passed on. It was only later that I realised how little attention I had given him, indeed had been giving to all destitute human beings in India – how little beauty I saw in them. I felt I had left behind my understanding of and empathy with the excluded. In England, though I do not give money, I buy food, have a conversation. Here I was doing nothing – I could not converse, of course – and was passing by on the other side. At Tiruvanamali I had witnessed the daily feeding of the poor: a sobering long queue of saddhus, holy men who depend on charity, but also indigenous local poor, receiving a large bowlful of rice. As I ate another generous meal I couldn’t help feeling the imbalance: it should have been we who received the one bowl of rice, and the poor our three good meals a day.
A few miles from Pondicherry is Auroville, an area of 15 square miles given over to an international community, which was set up in the 1960s by The Mother “to be the first realisation of human unity based on the teaching of Sri Aurobindo, where men of all countries would be at home”. With its luxurious café with newspapers and internet facilities, it did not feel like India – it could almost have been in Covent Garden. We found ourselves in an expensive guest house, a delightful leafy enclave of middle-class visitors, some of them considering the possibility of joining the community. Though everyone was perfectly pleasant, I felt ill at ease, out of our usual environment.
We had come to visit Joss, an Australian Quaker forester who is one of the founder members of the community, and who had joined us in Meeting for Worship with Mary. The distances are great and there is no public transport to the spread-out residences, so we hired a scooter (aagh!) for less than £1 and went off to visit Joss and his wife, Anita, for lunch. They run a
fascinating project, an important strand of which is the education of local women about herbal medicine; growing and attempting to reintroduce the herbs into local communities that have lost touch with their traditions. We also rode off to visit Bob, a back specialist, who treated Stephen and gave me some advice about my knee, but declined payment. Members of the community, it seems, only ask for donations. Bob mentioned that Pondicherry attracted strange events (Saturn’s influence, he said), and that it was possible that Stephen’s back problem and the pain in my knee were results of being there.
At the centre of this town is the vast meditation centre planned by The Mother, and not yet completed, called the Matrimandir. In the queue was Gyan. It was good to see him again, and he was amused at our ailments. Echoing Bob, he said, “India is obviously good for you and Stephen; you are getting the reactive ailments.”
I explained the possible physical reasons.
“You’re right,” said he mockingly, “it’s not spiritual.”
Before being allowed to meditate at Matrimandir one has to join the vast queue of mostly Indian people who come simply to see it as a tourist attraction. It’s a frustrating experience, full of form-filling, all for a few seconds’ glimpse of the interior. However, once having passed that test of patience, one is allowed a pass to enter for meditation. And it was worth the effort. In a vast golden globe centred round an enormous crystal, the white marble hall provides an atmosphere of electric purity, a huge cavern of soundlessness. A place, as the Mother said, “for trying to find one’s consciousness”.
Sometimes my respect for Indian customs wore thin – especially when one of our companions on the train persistently spat long-distance into a far corner. What I chiefly found difficult was the expected servility of women: the way our hostess in an enlightened middle-class family served us and her husband first (referring to him throughout as Mr), standing behind us to deal with our every wish; a couple on the next seats to us in the train, in their sixties, not exchanging a word, eating continually, she serving him at every moment.
Call of the Bell Bird Page 13