Meeting The East

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.
In consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was declared by the nurse, and by some sage women in the neighbourhood who had taken a lively interest in me several months before there was any possibility of our becoming personally acquainted, first, that I was destined to be unlucky in life; and secondly, that I was privileged to see ghosts and spirits; both these gifts inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky infants of either gender, born towards the small hours on a Friday night."

David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

In 1972 November late, I had a meeting with a guru. One day M. had called, and said that there had been a Guru on CHOM radio giving a talk. He wanted to go with Nootan and wanted me to go along. We arrived in the evening on Madison Avenue in the urban area of Notre Dame de Grace, and went into a two story house. People there were a mixed group and but seemed 'pretty high'. Inside the house most of the ordinary furniture of a household had been removed, while there were cushions in the living room and the dining room which was opened to the living room. In the kitchen the dining table had been cut down to floor height and was likewise surrounded by cushions. The carpets were light blue and the walls white or pastels, the colors of a greek villa. Incense was burning for the evening meet and candles and a small spot light lit the meeting area (satsang room).

We waited for quite a while but Swami Shyam was late coming down. It was a beautiful space in that house, quiet and peaceful. The people I met there looked quite healthy and many had a glow to them; satisfaction and friendliness were everywhere, not a sad face in the house, everybody I met was easy to be with. No hassles, calm, I felt refreshed just standing in the establishment, at the center of the house, the ashram. Altered states. Wheh! Beyond waking dreaming and deep sleep. They were striving for the fourth state: Turiya. These people, for all the world, looked like some strange thing had overtaken them. The feeling was one of strength— there was a quiet energy radiating all around the house.

I was about to leave the house because we had waited for sometime and the guru was still upstairs. I thought to have a cigarette. I was going to go out on the street when Mary (Mira) came up to me and asked, "why leave?" I said that I would come back and explained that I was going to have a cigarette. She said wait a minute went away and was talking to Shyam and then came back and said that since it was very cold outside that I could smoke in the kitchen. We three went into the kitchen with a couple of people and sat and shared a cigarette.

Then we went back into the living room and were waiting. M. and I looked at one another. There was certainly something going on here. By and by he came down. He was an Indian man, short but well built. His energy was incredible and he carried himself with great dignity. He didn't have much self-respect in fact but had pursued the look with great diligence—that being inherent from India culture. When he sat on the small raised dais to talk his devotees gathered round.

I looked at one man and he was just full of joy. He gave me the longest broadest grin I had ever seen. He seemed truly happy. His name was Allan (Ananda). It look was something full of confidence. I stared at him and he continued to look at me as if I was the source of his great happiness. I was so unused to such a glowing feeling I felt disturbed and but smiled and looked away.

Shyam sat down. He was strong, intelligent, alert, and seemed loving. Shyam gave a short speech. Then asked for questions.

There was a tall man sitting in meditation towards the back of the room. He had shoulder length black hair and a beard well kept. Pierre asked in a German accent, "what is pratyahar?"

Pratyahara is part of the ashtanga, or eight-limb yoga, and is usually interpreted simply as control of the senses. By the Indian concept of mind there are ten indriyas five senses (gyan or knowledge) and five motor pathways (karma or action) and these are associated with the desires or feelings. Great art, horrifying sights are both brought to the mind for interpretation by the vision. The will does not often intercede between the seer and the seen. But if one would limit the impact of the sense on the person one, would have to do at least two things. Interpose the will between the receiving and the seer and clarifying the subconscious that drives the sense to see or act. When you hear noise you want to shut the sense of hearing down when you hear beautiful songs you want to turn the ears back on. When your mind is absorbed elsewhere the mind will not take in the sense object. When reading, for example the sight is fixed and its mode in reading mode doesn't really function as to see the words in letter by letterform, but in translated to meaning forms. Simultaneously we may not hear background noise or sound, as it is filtered out.

But Shyam said. "If I put his rose in front of my eye, I can choose to see it or not. That is controlling the senses."
Pierre was quiet.

Human Mosaic: a thematic introduction to cultural geography; Jordan-Bychkov, Terry G;
Longman, New York, 1982

Environmental perception. Each person has mental images of the physical environment, and within a cultural group these perceived images are largely shared. To describe such mental images, cultural geographers use the term environmental perception. Whereas the possibilist sees human-kind as having a choice of different possibilities in a given physical setting, the environmental perceptionist declares that the choices people make will depend more on what they perceive the environment to be than on the actual character of the land.

BUFFALO NO BIGGER THAN INSECTS: THE PYGMY AND THE RAIN FOREST,

The sun is a network of flickering lights dotting the ground, not a bright disk moving across the sky. The stars are not visible at night. The seasons hardly vary. The chief landmark of the area is no landmark at all—no distant rise of ground, no special tree standing out against the sky, nothing. Sound is supreme. In hunting, game is merely heard until it appears yards away from the hunter. The clearest idea of the supernatural that the inhabitants of this land have is not God, not a visual land to which the dead depart, but a sound: the "Beautiful Song of a Bird."

Although this may seem like science fiction, it is in fact the world of the Ba Mbuti pygmies, who live in the Congo rain forest. As an environment, the rain forest is all-enveloping and naturally affects every aspect of pygmy life, even the way they see. Living underneath a thick, almost impenetrable canopy of branches and leaves, hemmed in on all sides by lush, green foliage, the pygmies never have the experience of seeing anything from a distance. As a result, their sense of Perspective is severely curtailed.Can you imagine what it would be like to step out of that all-sustaining world for the first time? Kenge, a pygmy of the Ba Mbuti tribe, actually had the experience. The anthropologist Colin Turnbull took him to an area of open grasslands. A flock of buffalo grazed several miles away, far below where they were standing. Familiar with the size of buffalo in the forest, Kenge could make no sense of these tiny dots in front of him. He asked Trundle, "What insects are those?" "When I told Kenge that the insects were buffalo," Turnbull wrote "he roared with laughter and told me not to tell I such stupid lies." When Turnbull tried to explain bow far away they actually were, Kenge "began scraping mud off his arms and legs, no longer interested in such fantasies.

Later, as, the men approached the herd in a car, Kenge became frightened. He could see the animals growing bigger and feared that a magic trick was played on him. In fact, his eye/brain had never learned something we take for granted: the ability to correct for changes in the size of the retinal image when looking at an object, so that the image remains relatively the same size as the object moves closer or farther away, Bewildered by distance, the lack of trees, and the sharpness of relief, Kenge's brain was making wrong guesses based on inadequate experience. Used to the environment of the rain forest, Kenge, for a moment at least, found the world a less stable and predictable place.

Adapted from Collin. M. Turnbull, The Forest People, Copyright, 1961 by Colin M. Turnbull

He saluted me back. He asked, "What is your name."
I said, "I'm Eric, thanks for the evening."
"Welcome," he smiled broadly and comfortably, "Please feel free to come back."
I confess I had not felt at home there. After we left Nootan said
"He didn't ask my name did you notice, he just said, 'Hi Nootan, how are you?'"
I looked sharply at her and we marveled. We left and did not return.

The group leaves Montreal area in 1973 and goes to Kullu valley with a coterie of students after stopping in Chandigarh. They buy land and put up some teepees there (names omitted). They made a quick visit to Koonch where there is supposed to be a temple and ashram dedicated to Swami Shyam (where he never goes anymore.) He has a brother who is a 'mantra doctor' and who does anesthetics on somebody's tooth it really works (Yashoda (IT)). Shyam himself never has an anesthetic when he goes to the dentist, he takes the mantra from his brother. On a beach somewhere in California: Some toughs come along. Shyam gets up and runs away with whomever he was with. He didn't do very well in California.

1973. After we left him there I went back home. By December I had quit my Job and in the spring of the next year I went up north, out to a place called Lac Manitou near St. Agathe in the Laurentians and stayed there for the spring. I was living in a square cut log cabin borrowed from in-laws for the occasion. It was very rustic, I used an old iron pot to bake my own bread in the fireplace and I carried water from the lake, as it was a bit too cold to start the plumbing up. Some friends lived in a dome of the Bucky Fuller variety (an icohedron made of wood) not far away. I quit drinking alcohol, and was trying to eat healthy meals and had learned about vegetarianism. I did a little meditation, wrote and painted. The painting was turning out all right but my writing seemed immature, I could not find a good story that I needed to tell. I was slowly getting healthier. I did more and more yoga and was reading steadily especially Buddhism.

My credits of adolescence when I did really quite well had expired. I felt a cosmic loneliness. In retrospect I felt a deep and unexpressed need for spiritual life, truly spiritual life, and in order to recognise them and be with them I had to become spiritual. Toward the end of 1972 I began to recover. I changed radically. Quit drinking and gave up meat. I left my girl friend and a job which had been only a stop gap career move in the first place.

During the early summer of 1973 I had returned to Montreal and found a place to stay on a sublet. My bother Greg was helping me out and I was again out looking for some place to do Yoga. I ran into the same group that had sponsored Swami Shyam and started going there for Yoga lessons and finally learned how to meditate with a mantra. The fellow who was teaching me had been with the tibetan buddhist Chogyam Trungpa but had left that group because it didn't seem to be genuine to him. It was a lot like some of the hippie communes I had passed through. Many were bearded. Mellow.

I had an opportunity to go to Vancouver on business trip to help Greg with his prefabricated housing business. I was glad to get away from Montreal and from the rougher parts of my circle of acquaintance—like M. for example. I stayed in Vancouver until the end of the summer of 1974.

From there, I wrote a letter to Swami Shyam which said, in essence:
"Can you help me? I need to now what is real love"
His reply

March 24, 1974

Dear Eric;

I received your letter and it inspired me to write to you. There is no difference between your Self and the Self of Shyam. So we are already one and the same, of course, difference lies in that vision which has been trained, coloured in duality, which means seeing Shyam as separate and Eric as separate, the whole world as separate. Now this is not you. This is the mind that is ignorant of reality and you, the real self has identified itself with the mind which is incompetent and has no consciousness of Oneness, because the mind has to act in association with the senses which is seeing things different from them. So the mind becomes habituated in seeing two different realities. But the same mind can be trained to associate itself with you, the higher self and developed the consciousness of the One, because Self is always one and this Oneness of the Self underlies all the forms and beings; such as the Gold underlies all the ornaments of different forms, just as the oxygen and hydrogen lie under all the forms of cloud, rain, snow, ice and water.

This is what, I, you have to know and thus your job will be over. The forms, the name, the possession, the strength and everything if you want to develop is not going to give you that, for which you are pursuing it to be developed. In fact the urge which is you is for becoming the highest of all where everybody can be attracted and you can stand on top in your profession if you adopt any; and in your speech if you at all want to make. And the dealings that should be loved by all if you have to deal with all. Why is it? It is simply because you need to be free, that means you need to be high, inbound and not dependent on anything because with dependence you become low. So the urge of your inner being is to be freed. How to do it is through understanding, and understanding you as One Self the whole, the God, the basic material of life of which everything comes into manifestation; and that will be only through cultivating your nervous system and culturing it so thoroughly that you channel may be opened. In other words you mind may be expanded or your sense, which is 6th may be developed. So understanding is to be increased and you have to transform your mind into the spirit, which is the spirit - whole, and thus you will be fruitful.

I think I have not to tell you many things except one thing that will be of use that unless you have developed this vision of Oneness, please live the life of love, which means hurt no one, help everyone around, never depend on anybody, rather give through service. Thus read write speak all in good words, pleasing ears of everyone and if you can manage smiling all the time even in the odds of difficulties you will be my best being.

With all my love to you, Eric

Your own Self,

Shyam.

He had accepted me a student or disciple. Things were wrapping up there, in Vancouver, and I had done my service. When I came back to Montreal the folks at the ashram told me that Shyam was coming, and that I should ask him to be initiated.

I was exhausted by the commonplaces of life. The search for certainty had drained me totally. My combat was with ennui and abulia (loss of will). My wheels were spinning. No wife, no house, "friends" that I didn't really like and which didn't suit me either. The whole world at times was just dismal place as could be imagined, there was the steady decline of the environment, the threat of nuclear war, the materialist attitude of North America, the blindness, the rip-offs, all the sordid behaviors that visited me in the downtown areas, the jolting absurdity of growing into such a world and enjoying it. And yet there were many beautiful occasions in nature and with people. The joys of music and of creativity of art and of course the possibility of spirit.

I had the good as well the bad, a lot of good and quite a lot of pain, from age 22 to about twenty-seven. Something was really missing in such a world as I came to see it. I started in the Town of Mount Royal in the security, and with a love of, the white middle upper class Anglo Saxon Protestant and Catholics. I remember revisiting it in the spring and seeing beautiful crab apple trees in blossom. I felt that it was a fairy paradise, where to me no death ever entered, and no one was even ill. It was very peaceful and clean. But nevertheless it was an era of self-criticism and I soon felt the absurdity, particularly as I encountered other cultures at university. I loved the diversity of it — not authoritarianism, totalitarianism, scientific materialism, but the opposite, mentalities of humaneness, love of the best in life; uprightness, brotherliness, and helpfulness, I came away from that society in Mount Royal with many, many thoughts for the good of this world. We were striving to heal the earth in a way although quite a number of the same friends and family were somehow doing the kind of business that was the problem itself.

CIL made napalm for the American government and the whole chemical industry had denied that they were hurting any thing . . . it wasn't until Rachel Carson had written a book on the disastrous effects of chemicals in the environment that we really became aware of the dangers of what we were doing. That was only in 1968 it was well known that there was serious environmental damage to the planet. Even in 1984 there was scarcely any public awareness of the dangers of ecological destruction and the need to do something about it—very soon. For many there was despair over the condition of the world. Joan Bias would sing about the ticky-tacky boxes of Dally city California. I was suffering this miserable craving some answer that I could not even find the question for.

When I began to examine myself I felt that I was really not where it was at, as they said in those days. I wasn't very hip at all and was taking it from all sides. It soon became very clear to me that I didn't know enough about people, nor other cultures nor vast areas of human learning where I found difficulty getting a foothold. I was, in a way, embarrassed about myself, and trying to prove to myself and others that I did know. After a large number of years of searching through hippiedom, the artistic circle, drinking buddies and innumerable colourful denizens of our metropolitan city, I still felt that I hadn't got what I needed, did not ever know what I really wanted, or what was really wrong, I had not only person problems but also every problem of the world. I had got myself into a total pain. But after I had meditated and controlled my diet and done some really radical self cleansing and so on, and with a great deal of energy from the spiritual practice, my stamina came back and I began to love the world instead, as I saw myself able to really enjoy it once again.

My old sufferings and sorrows I abandoned, I leave it all behind and said hello to the eternal bliss. The Eastern view is no separation, no separation of mind and body, no separation of God and the world, no separation of religion and the daily life. God is not someone remote he is ever present. The philosopher Kierkegarde believed that God is so transcendent, so remote, that we can never have any knowledge of him really, and can only meet him through a leap of blind faith. This view is totally unjustified. God is not wholly other but the very being that we all are. God is the ground of all existence. He lurks at our feet and hovers over our heads at the same time.

The Guru and his friends: at first I was really I did enjoy the whole trip. His friends too, I enjoyed very much. We learned a lot of Yoga, and did a lot of work on it, and some have succeeded in glimpsing that experience, the light of self-realisation. So at first I just loved it, it was all new to me, and the ideas were wonderful. The writings of India were a great source of learning for me, Vivekananda and Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharshi (Maharishi or great sage) whose writings express the idea of Self-realisation, making the divine real in my life. Learning how to benefit from the Spirit, just the Spirit, was really good for me. The members of the ashram may have seemed alien in life-style to the Western standard and often seemed self proclamatory. Hatha Yoga as with famous Indian guru Iyengar is so well known in the West now. But at this time it seemed a triffle kooky and only for eccentrics.I found the philosophy and practice to be unique and different from the classic texts of my day from the Western tradition.

I grew up with a Newtonian, Darwinian, Freudian, engineering, quasi-materialist background and Indian philosophies were very attractive to me, but sometimes startling, foolish, impossible, and even childish. But with Swami Shyam, personally, I would see directly the state he was in. I could see him going into meditation and he would be with me for long periods of time while in Samaadhi state of consciousness. From time to time I would realise that, whatever was the character of the presentation, I found his ideas to be liberating and one-pointed on the nature of the Self, myself, the better part of me and him and everybody who cared to know about it.

It is here recorded a witness to the very ideas presented and which I had ultimately come to learn and for a while to love. The Yogic and the Vedantic thought worked for me. To have a guru is important in many ways: but the guru must generate love, light and knowledge for the students. He must assist growth and help to actualize the knowledge of God (that's a formidable thought—very daunting to many Westerner's). His or her presence should speak of God and the Spirit and show the student holiness, more than a title but an actual state of life, show the holiness of God to the student. That guru must live by the truth, must show generosity and compassion and must have known God-realization state of the consciousness, each his or her own. A guru, it is said, must know God at every moment, to be a Sat Guru, one who knows truly, the definition of swami is about that he or she has totally self consistentency in a life, he should be a genuine Enlightened man. Yet I felt like Jacob wrestling with God trying to get (understand) all this that I had just suddenly encountered through meeting Shyam.

Meeting True man and true God. St. Anthony, the great Christian mystic and teacher, says that a spiritual teacher must show God to the man and the man to the God. Read here the story of Jacob from the bible especially the part where he wrestle's with God 's angel one whole night. He said. "I am not going to let go of you until you give me your blessings," to the angel. He was about to cross the Jordan and attack Jericho at that time, I believe. After he had wrestled with the angel all night he had had a bad back. So did I eventually.

"Love, light & knowledge brings health and revives the true nature. Keep believing always." Swami Shyam said in a letter.

But what an utter hypocrite he proved to be.

My Christian friends.
"Be ye therefore perfect as your father in
heaven is perfect."
Matt 5.48

"Man receives from heaven a nature innately good, to guide him in all his movements. By devotion to this divine sport within himself, he attains an unsullied innocence that leads him to do right with instinctive sureness and without any ulterior thought of reward and personal advantage" The I Ching or the Book of Changes - Wilhelm Baynes Bollingen, Series XIX, Hexagram 25

"To be able to use what we call Viveka (discrimination), to learn how in every moment of our lives, in every one of our actions, to discriminate between what is right and wrong, true and false, we shall have to know the test of truth, which is purity Oneness. Everything that makes for oneness is truth. Love is truth, and hatred is false, because hatred makes for multiplicity. Love binds; love makes for all that oneness. For love is existence, God Himself; and all this manifestation of that One Love, more or less expressed"

The Complete works of Swami Vivekananda. Practical Vedant I

The invocation from the Isha Upanishada:

"This is the full,
That is the full,
The full comes from the full
Even so it remains complete."
"Peace, Peace, Peace."
In Sanskrit, this is
"OM,
poornam idam,
poornam adhaah,
poornat poornam udatchyatey,
poornsasya poornam adahya
poornam eva vashishyatey.
OM, shanti, shanti, shaanti."
 

"When once I was grumbling over being obliged to eat meat and do no penance, I heard it said that sometimes there is more of self-love than desire of penance in such sorrow." St. Teresa Avila

"Mistaking the means for the end the Puritan has fancied himself holy because he is stoically austere"

"Through the practice of discrimination and spiritual disciplines the mind gradually comes under control. Yet to try to force the mind under control all at once may prove disastrous. it must be done gradually, and with patience. The angler has to sit patiently and wait. Cling to the pillar of patience when the mind is drawn into the whirlwind of delusion. Even when a large fish swallows the bait and is caught on the hook, the angler plays a while before drawing his catch to the bank. To land it forcibly might break the cord." Swami Omakarishananda, Vedanta For Modern Man.

"You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it however."

"What we fear is not so much death as failure, as though failure were a kind of premonition of the larger and more final loss of power to come." Michael Korda, Power

I left Montreal to go back to Vancouver, to work with my brother. Then I who, had been living in British Columbia, came back to Montreal to see Shyam who was coming from India. I read what he had been writing and I had learned how to do Hatha yoga and breathing exercises or Pranayama. I had practiced meditation for almost three years now.