While I was still at Burnham she had sent along another book by Mouni Sadhu, in the wake of my beloved Tarot, called In Days of Great Peace. I read it without much excitement. It was about a particular guru in India, but I can’t say he made a huge impression. I was even able to read the sentence, ‘He walked with difficulty, as his joints and knees were affected by acute rheumatism’, without realising I had come across a spiritual leader tailor-made for me. A guru with rheumatism — wasn’t that just exactly the ticket?
When you feel grace tugging at your heart and start looking for the Guru, it actually means he’s already found you. He was installed in your deepest life all along. You never met him because he was never not there. Grace proceeds not by ambushes of glory but sidelong and stealthwise, in a rosy pervasion.
I don’t know why I hadn’t responded more strongly to that first refracted glimpse of my guru. Spiritually I had lain fallow for years, but now I was mysteriously cleared and ready for sowing. My mind was bringing a crop of language towards the brutal harvest of an exam, but in another way this was seed time, a season of rapid growth from nothing.
Or perhaps the comparison should be with the germination of mushroom spores — in the wider world, rather than the botched artificial version Dad and I had tried to make happen at Trees. Under the ground the mycelial threads thicken and mature, but nothing appears above the surface until the right moment. Dry weather conditions impede any further progress, but when the drought breaks suddenly there are sporocarps everywhere, prodigious fruiting bodies.
The label on Mrs Pavey’s bombshell was Ramana Maharshi and the Path of Self-Knowledge by Arthur Osborne. I expect it was the blurb which alerted her to its suitability: ‘Many forms of Yoga are unsuited to the Western way of life. The Yoga of Wisdom and Understanding as taught and lived by Ramana Maharshi, however, is a point where East and West can meet, since it does not demand withdrawal from the world. Nor does its practice entail tortuous exercises or the tying of the body in knots.’ Bless the blurb! And bless the librarian who popped the book into Mum’s bicycle basket.
I had read about yoga, and been fascinated, though excluded from the physical practice. Yoga can give you a lovely flexible body, but only if you start off with one.
As for withdrawing from the world, it was not an attractive idea for me. I had only a toehold there and could easily lose my very marginal place. To adapt an old joke: the family is an institution — but who wants to live in an institution? Certainly not me. Even if I established some sort of independence from Mum and Dad there would always be institutions — hospitals, ‘homes’ — yawning to swallow me. To enter one of those would not be a way of transcending the world, only being shut out of it. That’s not mystic withdrawal, that’s eviction.
All my impetus was towards involvement. Between them my spiritual and pragmatic sides cooked up a rationale for this that suited them both: If you weren’t really part of the world then withdrawing from it had no value. Let me get stuck in to the life people lead. Then I would transcend its futility. But not before.
Leisurely thunderbolt
Before I read Arthur Osborne’s book I was searching at random. The fact that I didn’t know what I was looking for is proved by my having read about Ramana Maharshi in Mouni Sadhu’s book without really noticing. Now I was saved from any possibility of spiritual dilettantism by a leisurely thunderbolt of affinity. There’s a lot of guru-hopping goes on, but I’ve never swerved since then from Ramana Maharshi. Also known as Bhagavan. The change from the Maharshi as refracted by Mouni Sadhu and the robust presence in dear Arthur Osborne’s book reminded me of another subtly drastic change, only in reverse — the time that my ‘illuminous’ watch went to Maidenhead for its thousand-day service, and came back stripped of its radioactive paint.
Mouni Sadhu’s book was like my watch after its service, weakly giving back the light it had been given, soon merging with the darkness. Arthur Osborne’s was like the same watch fresh from Canadian Jim’s wrist, charged with every sort of potency. As I read Ramana Maharshi and the Path of Self-Knowledge, the part of me that had been asking who-am-I? for so long, since I was first ill — getting no further than the sense of a brown and waxy haze — was bombarded by illumination. Ramana Maharshi as he manifested himself in Arthur Osborne’s book was an active source. His smile was powered by the radium of enlightenment.
It was all so clear, and so easy. Ramana Maharshi didn’t just ‘not demand’ that you changed your way of life, he warned against that temptation. His principle was that if you can discover the meaning of life in the jungle you can do it just as well on a bus. You could do it even in Bourne End.
He himself led a wonderfully inactive life. As a boy in Tiruchuli in southern India, his most obvious talent was for deep sleep. Then one day he went through the experience of death, and got over it. He understood that the death of the body has no relevance to the Self. A little later, still a boy, he set off by train to the settlement of Tiruvannamalai and the holy hill Arunachala. He walked the last miles, shed his privileged status as a Brahmin without premeditation, and never left. For a long time he neglected his body, but not out of a need for mortification (the Hindu word is tapas). It was a profound unawareness. He didn’t eat, so people assumed he was fasting. Left to himself he would have starved to death, but if food was placed in his mouth he would chew and swallow unresponsively.
He didn’t speak, and people assumed he had taken a vow of silence. An ashram grew up around him but he fled it more than once. Finally he accepted that he would always be a focus of worship, and simply stipulated that there should be no restriction of access to him, no charge made. He left no gospel, though he wrote a number of poems and hymns. Sometimes he answered questions and sometimes not. His ego had fallen away. Even in the letter he left to explain his departure for Tiruvannamalai he didn’t use his name. As he explained, there was nothing deliberate or conscious about this. It was simply that the ego didn’t rise up to sign it. Or as he put it another time, ‘After the photographic plate has been exposed to the sun, does it continue to retain images?’
He loved analogies from technology. He would certainly have kept up with developments if his body had been around now, but it didn’t matter. His Grace was already inside my system like a spiritual computer virus, twining its spiderware round every function.
Despite his absence of an ego, I experienced the presence of my guru as something very unlike a blank. There’s another way of referring to the status of the ego after enlightenment, apart from the photographic-plate analogy: it resembles the moon as we see it in the daytime. A minor light operating in its own sphere. Ramana Maharshi had shed his personality yet retained his character, which was a delightful one. Playful, warm and dry.
Buying knickers on the Moon
At some stage in my reading it occurred to me that if this captivatingly earthy mystic made sense to me instinctively, then I myself must be a Hindu, not a Christian nor in any meaningful sense an ex-Christian. The thought didn’t trouble me unduly. Very well, I was a Hindu. There didn’t seem to be any procedure for signing up — it wasn’t like the Rosicrucians, the Brotherhood of the Rosy Dawn, who had so fascinated me when I saw their advertisements in Prediction magazine promising Cosmic Consciousness. I had only been held back by the necessity of sending my subscription (supposed to be a week’s salary, so it would have been virtually nothing) made out to AMORC, a somehow unappealing acronym — standing for the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosæ Crucis, but still rhyming in the mind with Pork.