Going to Ceylon (2)



It may sound strange to you but the fact is that sometimes I see people who would like to come to me, walking along this street, but they cannot find my house.

(spoken by the 'Magician' (Gurdjieff ?)from The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin by Ouspensky)


Yes, so I had arrived in Delhi with a certain sense that a fate was a fait accompli. Still you can't just decide your own fate in the way that might be expressed as 'this has to happen so I will decide to make it happen'. This is a 'saved' Calvinist tense that I could not comprehend then and cannot now. I could not simply decide to make my journey home a pilgrimage as a freak of my own, it was not part of my religion sanctioned by God or Guru. No, it was too dangerous to go all that way through India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Greece,Yugoslavia, Austria, Germany, England and then finally to Ireland penniless. It amounted to unwarranted testing of my luck and would end in death by the side of the road. I had given my contact address as the American Express office in Delhi to my parents and I knew that they would send some money there or so I thought but I hadn't come right out and asked for it, a double-minded vacillation while entertaining my romantic project.

No money came to the American Express for me and though someone who had befriended me at the Siva Temple near Connaught Circus was giving me meals of chapati and vegetable curry I was sleeping at the railway station. 'Excellent facilities at the Delhi Railway Station' said a fellow sleeper in in the waiting room. While sleeping there I had my recurring dream of being harried by a large dog. Suddenly a figure appeared in a black robe with a spear like a Sikh sadhu. Flinging this at the dog he killed it on the spot. I have never had that dream since.

I was getting the feeling that it was time to move on so the ultimate recourse of the marooned traveler would have to be resorted to – the Embassy.

When I look at the journal again, its violet ink retains its fin de siècle tint, I see that there are a great many references to glyphs and symbols that now baffle me. It is as though I swam in a sea of omens and when I think of it the sea is itself for mariners a force that cannot be controlled and gives rise to the multitude of superstitions that chart it on the subtle plane. It was the alertness of fear and its attempt to control through augury what cannot be so controlled that made me interpretive beyond reason.  I note the remark on the top of a page “I wouldn’t like to tell a psychiatrist any of this”.

In any case I made for the Irish Embassy which was in the region of Golf Links Road at that time.  I probably walked there and I remember that the day was foggy.  This was in late November.  I had the address and I walked up and down but couldn’t find it.  I wasn’t lost or anything like that, the fog wasn’t so bad  but having spent hours looking for it I finally gave up the search.  The strange thing is that two years later I was in Delhi and had reason to go to the Embassy and I walked straight there  It was a  nice villa in a very pucca neighborhood right where I had been looking.

‘This is not meant to be’, I said to myself and turned to make my way back.  An elderly man passing by stopped  and started talking to me.  He turned out to be a devotee of Baba’s and he brought me along with him to a youth club that he was connected with.  He gave me tea there and let me sleep on the floor for the night then in the morning he gave me breakfast and 20 Rupees.  Having changed my mind or accepted that I should not have recourse to the Embassy  the speed at which my fortune altered was, what else, a sign.

Forward Memory

The journal that I mentioned before in Going to Ceylon
journal
is like a palimpsest in which by the magic of ultra-violet recovery some lost message is deciphered. There are hieroglyphics in it no doubt influenced by Bayley’s Lost Language of Symbolism
Lost Language
which was an influence as were the cones and gyres of Yeats. However meaning fades even as I look at it and my only hope is the cultivation of the godess Mnemosyne.
mnemosyne

One of the forms of memory which adepts cultivate is forward memory a term I prefer to pre-cognition as it retains the fallibility which we accept with normal memory. There is a tincture of Lethe waters even with the simple past but the future is usually a full strength potion. In dreams there may be mitigation of that opacity and in that liminal state between waking and sleep, the hypnagogic, there can be a dart forward to the future before the shutters come down. Luckily we can only know that it was a future when it becomes a future but the oddness of the images and their disconnection from the events of the day give that uncanny flavour which the adept can discern. Like Macbeth we may be won with honest trifles and betrayed in matters of deepest consequence so I prefer to not dabble in divination by oneiromancy.

We Westerners slept on the closed in veranda of the cottages of the long-term residents of the ashram and like everybody else except mad dogs and Englishmen took a long siesta after our midday meal. Just before waking I had a strange dream in which I was listening to the boom, boom, boom of Big Ben and somebody talking about the rag trade in London which was removed from my daily life in South India geographically and noetically. Very strange.

Some months later hitch hiking in Iran I got a lift from a man in a large American limousine. He put on the radio to the BBC world service, boom, boom and then a news item on the rag trade just as I had earlier dreamed. An honest trifle but the matter of deepest consequence was whether I would ever get home being penniless and no money having arrived from my parents at New Delhi and Kabul. It seemed that I was to be kept to my promise to go home as a pilgrim relying only on God to sustain me. Before he dropped me off the driver pressed 500 reals on me which was just enough to get me from Erzurum to Istanbul by train. In December that part of Eastern Turkey is very cold and I would surely have perished on the road.

This was a sign to me that I was going home, that the interim had already happened and I would just have to surrender and complete it but it was like being toyed with being left to the very last moment to be rescued.

Going to Ceylon

As with any other disease, treatment depends on removing the cause. Removing the cause of cowardice involves bringing out the irascible motives in a proper way - that is, by making a person sufficiently angry about his own state and weaknesses so that he will wish to change, using the poison itself as the starting remedy. Where there is a sickness therein lies its cure.

Certain masters have used the remedy of deliberately subjecting
themselves and their followers to situations where dangers were faced, or embarking on perilous journeys. They placed themselves in situations which brought about a natural confrontation with their own fears and cowardice - as a result, they set in motion a course of events that brought out their irascibility, of which courage is the ultimate virtue. Subjecting a person to these conditions in a properly guided manner can awaken and cause to grow in one that appropriate energy of anger, which is now used in a predetermined channel for a positive and balanced outcome.

from The Journey of the Self by Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri Pg. 137
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When there was a fire in the caravan in which I was living, I wasn't there at the time fortunately, most of my books were utterly consumed, hardbacks amongst them. What was spared was badly damaged too, so much so that I got rid of them as too depressing to handle. One little A5 plastic covered notebook was preserved with just the slightest filagree of scorching: my journal of the journey from India to Ireland. As my last 13 rupees were stolen by a pickpocket in Allahabad that travelling was mostly by thumb.

It seemed to me then that my resolve after my conversion to make my way home as a pilgrim was going to be demanded of me whether I liked it or not. The meaning of a conversation that I had with my teacher or rather that Wendell had on my behalf, implied that I would make it after many adventures. Hanuman in the Ramayana had to go to Ceylon to rescue Sita.

I was in the darshan line with my letter asking permission to go in the normal way of Indian etiquette, which was not automatically given if the time was not auspicious. Baba came and stood before me and took the letter. I couldn't speak. Wendell took up the conversation:
- He's going home to Ireland Baba.
- Yes, yes he's going to Ceylon
- Not island Baba, Ireland.
- Yes, Ireland but first he's going to Ceylon.

At that Baba put his hands over mine which were joined in Namas pushing them down. I had an experience of a fragrance and the depression of the mental pause button. The following morning the pujari of the temple came over to me with some coconut prasad as a blessing.

Meditating under the pipal tree on the hill I had heard quite clearly in my head 'Take the reins', a reminder of the injunction of Krishna to Arjuna. I took it to mean that this abode of peace had to be left behind and it was time to engage with the world again.

I know where that journal is.