The Road Not Taken

23 November 2011 09:39

The Road Not taken

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The Road Not Taken 23 November 2011 09:31

In October 2006, Clive and I left New Delhi for a weekend at Lucknow. I had just spent a successful business year as lead adviser to the Minister of Oil, India, helping to get a major gas project off the ground. We proposed to build a huge gas pipeline from Iran, through Pakistan and deep into India.

The project, if it went ahead would be the biggest of its kind in the world. Fourteen of the world’s government ministers had come to New Delhi to hear of the progress of the project, and then to listen to my personal views in a presentation on the future development of gas in Asia. That evening at a Gala dinner to celebrate the event the Minister of State gently touched my arm while I was concentrating on the wonderful Thali that we were sharing with over 400 distinguished guests. Large screen televisions were on (and very loud) all around the room. The minister said to me, ’look, Kelvin. You are on television all over the world tonight!’

This would surely qualify as the high point of any business career, and little did I suspect that on this night that this was to be not only the case for me, it was also to mark the end of my time where my main focus would remain in business. My ego massively flattered and preening in my 15 Minutes of fame, we flew to Lucknow for the night and the weekend.

Lucknow sits in Uttar Pradesh, just below where the foothills of the Himalayas rise above Naini Tal. It is where the old British Army was head quartered during the days of Empire. I knew this because my maternal grandmother as a child used to live in Naini Tal. She would come down to stay at the main family house at Lucknow at school times. After school, she would often sit outside the house gates, just across the road from the main camp entrance with its wide sweep of golden dusty promenades and strutting languid peacocks, waiting for her father to return home from the Barracks in the early evening light.

She would also then sometimes (she was here about 6 years old) pick small flowers and gently and lovingly press the flowers into her Bible which she often read in the garden while waiting for her father. This I also knew because my grandmother gave her Bible to me close to the time of her death, in Bath, Somerset in 1976 (I was then 23). And as a small boy I remember that I had often sat at her side while she, when pressed by me to do so, would show the little flowers folded, creased, faded, and sadly broken and decayed. The flowers were always a source of exotic wonder and delight to me.

Flying out to join me for the holiday was Clive my lifelong partner and love. He had brought out to India with him, at my request, my grandmothers Bible. This must have been a strange request for him to receive from me, a confirmed humanist not given to sentimentality. This Bible had for the last 30 years suffered a deliberate, discarded and disregarded fate, lost ‘on purpose’ at the bottom of a bookcase somewhere well out of sight. The book was an embarrassment to me both in terms of its dubious content and in terms of my understanding of its power, when in the wrong hands, to be the most deadly of weapons ever invented (and used) by man. The adage ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ is I expect supposed to be somewhat of an anachronism. For me this adage was a grim reality. So this particular Bible had for 30 years faced a shunned away time, much as most Bible’s on lost bookcases do these days I have no doubt.

The giving of the Bible to me by my grandmother in 1976 was itself an act of defiance from a fiercely proud, stubborn, loving and compassionate little old lady who was determined to ‘nail me’ with the ‘book’ before she died. As a near death bequest, she knew that I would not be able to spurn her gift.

She was a devout spiritualist and very important in spiritualism in the West Country for the whole of her life. Regular ‘circles’ were held at my grandmother’s house each Tuesday evening and at the close of the proceedings I would, when a small boy, be allowed to walk around with tea and biscuits for our often very distinguished guests. Therefore, in 1976 with reluctance I accepted the Bible gift and hid it away. For thirty years.

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The next morning in Lucknow after a thoroughly English breakfast in our sumptuous hotel (we were the guest of my employer and thus treated like royalty), Clive produced the Bible from his case and we both solemnly made our way to the garden. The hotel was where my grandmother had lived.

Perhaps we were not actually in precisely the correct building, but if not, then probably we were now ‘next door’. I had persuaded Clive to join me in a small ceremony to commemorate our Mothers lives. Clive’s relationship with his mother was deeply close and loving. Both of our mothers were by this time recently dead. The thought had occurred to me that it would be a good thing to be together with Clive, to respect our memories of our Mothers and to spend time together picking more little flowers and placing them in the Bible. They would sit alongside those picked by my grandmother 100 years earlier.

We sat in the beautiful gardens in the soft exquisite light of the morning. Now the colours of the garden, the warm white marble of the house walls and the even the dusty spare road had melted in the morning to opaqueness, to a translucence that denied substance. We had no plan. We both simply sat in silence and waited. Clive was drained from his stressful journey out from England on his own the week before, and I could not this day easily adjust from the egoic highs of the previous day, though I now sensed that my 15 minutes of fame were long gone.

Slowly we took it in turns to walk about the garden, lost in our own thoughts, each of us occupied thinking about Mother, our relationships, where we were, where we were heading. Occasionally we stooped and reached amongst the plants to pick the small flowers in order to let them concretise and then memorialise our thoughts. Then returning to our seats we each pressed our flowers into the musty old pages of grandmothers Bible.

Then I did a strange thing. Quietly and to myself, but with great earnestness, I made a Promise. I promised that I would seek God. It was my promise of reconciliation with my beloved grandmother, and with my mother, (she too was an active spiritualist). I suspect here that my not net fully dimmed ego craftily joined in this promise too, no doubt thinking that having conquered the heights of business why not now once and for all prove the nonexistence of God as well. A week later Clive flew back to our home in Dunchurch, taking the Bible, which now contained our flower thoughts with him.

I was now alone working out of a hotel in Delhi and wondering just what to ‘do’ about my promise.

Reaching into my bedside cabinet draw, I pulled out a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita that had been placed here for the edification of guests (just as the Gideon’s Bible is so placed in similar hotels in the West). I began to read about the beautiful Krsna, and to gradually immerse myself in the world of India’s rich epic and mythic past and to discover the Vedanta.

Two years later, I was sat 1 September evening in the conservatory at our home in Dunchurch. This is the place where I always settle to read in the best of light that the variable the English climate will allow. I had returned to England soon after our time in Lucknow and then for many months I continued my spiritual journey, largely by reading in the Vedanta which I supplemented by reading the modern Western interest in advaita. I had in this time learned much by reading. I tried, as far as I could to supplement reading with such few opportunities that I could find to experience.

Back in India, I had quickly discovered Ramana Maharshi and was greatly and deeply impressed by his simplicity, gentleness and the way that he taught in silence. I think Ramana Maharshi was the first person that I had read about who seemed to me to exude holiness. I felt a strong pull towards this great soul. I dreamed of going to his Ashram at Tiruvannamalai. But my days in India were now long passed. However I did manage to find and visit a few times a small group of English people who ran a society devoted to him. They would meet Saturday afternoons, once each month in Hampstead Quaker Meeting House.

I was fortunate to be able to spend three days with the Dalia Lama at his Nottingham satsang, in New Section 1 Page 3

I was fortunate to be able to spend three days with the Dalia Lama at his Nottingham satsang, in May 2008. It was the first time that I had been immersed within a great spiritual community. At the close of the satsang His Holiness without much fuss or ceremony, just simply and quietly left the building. There was no immediate or active response from the community of 2000 or so. Instead the silent tears and holding of hands in one spontaneous outpouring of communal prayer amongst so many brought me once more to a point of silence.

I have always had a strong academic interest in the purity of intellectual argument and I needed at this time a good academic grounding in theory, and especially so for my study of Advaita. I found Shankara. His patient, precise and lucid analytical techniques combined with the sureness of his powerful vision was an enormous help in getting to grips with Indian philosophy, and especially how to discuss in words that which lies beyond words. His interpretation of the Brahma Sutra and his explanation of the Advaita system became both accessible and ordinarily verifiable to me. I began to feel at ease and comfortable in my reading of so many terms and ideas that had until I immersed myself in Shankara’s thought seemed strange and alien to me.

Earlier in my life in England I had studied the Greeks. I studied with a wonderful woman called Lisa.

She was exotic, sophisticated, feline and richly feminine. Lisa and I met at the Acropolis in Athens many years ago. We were both doing an Open University degree course in History of Art at the time.

I had chosen to study this subject because my employer had refused to provide to me the financial support for a business degree course. I had chosen to do an arts course as a token of meaningless defiance instead. But I learned a lot from that time of structured academic study in the arts, and above all I had found Lisa. She was happily married to an oil industry executive and we were both at that time of life when we had the maturity to appreciate a long platonic relationship that was full of joy.

Together we had tacked the Greeks, their art, history, philosophy, politics and above all culture. We discovered the immense extent of Greek influence over every aspect of Western culture and we observed that it had subsisted undiminished over a very long time, right up to the very present. The weight of ‘Greekness’ lay heavily on everything that we explored in Greece, Italy and other places that we visited. Lisa and I went in pursuit of the real. That means we tried hard to strip away the ‘Greekness’ and we tried to discover the true expression, in the fine arts, religion and ideas that lay behind and underneath their Greek mantle.

In all of my Indian studies however I felt that something very big was somehow missing. I would later learn that what I sought was communion. I was content that perhaps some very clever, devout and determined people, after possibly years of effort could achieve Moksha either by austerities or by sheer determined will power. (I was very suspicious of American Advaita devotees who claimed that you could get to Moksha by simply reading one easy little book – the one that they had just written) I also accepted now that I would not find God by just trying harder.

I began and ended my Indian period of spiritual study with Krsna. It was he who was the first Indian spiritual voice that I had heard when reading alone in my hotel room in Delhi. Krsna is Love and the more love you give to him the more you then will have from him in return. I also began to appreciate the rightness of non-involvement in action as set out in the Bhagavad-Gita. The idea that my acts should just be right acts, irrespective of my personal interest in the results or implications of my actions seemed intrinsically right to me. But again I did not at this stage know why that should be so.

I still have a love of Krsna; however the lack of substance in his mythical nature left me feeling uncertain about the robustness of this love. I also felt dissatisfied that Krsna’s love seemed to me to be conditional. It was required of me to offer love first.

So here I was in 2008 and after this long journey in time and space from Delhi sitting tired in the New Section 1 Page 4

So here I was in 2008 and after this long journey in time and space from Delhi sitting tired in the conservatory at Dunchurch. I felt that I had experienced a little and learned much over the time that I had spent on this quest. I was now out of ideas and I had not found God. Picking up the latest Indian philosophy book that I was now to begin reading I determined to give up the Quest. I mentally prepared for this to be the last book that I would read on the matter. I was resigned and resolved that my search would end in disappointment. I would immediately return to the world of business and in pursuit of the ego, and be content that there really was no God. It was then that God quietly came to me and turned me round.

In order to show how this happened I need to very briefly explain my life up to this point. In very simple terms I was a Curriculum Vitae under constant dynamic development. I was also in business a market player. That means being driven to be competitive by spoiling opportunities for those who might succeed better than me. I was driven to act partisan in the pursuit of advantage, power, and faction in all my business interests. This great game especially thrilled me. All of my resulting pleasures were conspicuous, showily indulgent, needlessly excessive and very, very short lived. My joys and those of my compatriots in business, were measured in hang over’s, belly aches, minor heart and lung problems and a clever self-centred, self-serving small minded aggressiveness.

Combine all of these, pull it off well and loudly, and still be carousing when all the others fail and you have the ultimate successful business man. At least I think that it is so in the west. Businessmen will plead and fawn differently but the strength of the transient drug of greed is too powerful. I had become aware of the hollowness, shallowness and simple plain undesirability of such a life. I was not quite looking forward to my return to business and the market place.

Finally in the conservatory in Dunchurch in 2008 I was at what I thought was the end of my journey. I began to read the introduction to the new book that I had just selected to read. I was only half hearted and not paying much attention to the words on the page. It was another book about the life of Ramana Maharshi the guru whose life I had studied throughout this quest. Then suddenly another name leapt off the page and caught my attention. It was Paul Brunton. Apparently Paul Brunton was a poplar and influential commentator on eastern mysticism from the 1930’s to 1950’s and it said here that he had played a significant role in developing awareness of Ramana Maharshi in the west. I knew the name Paul Brunton, but where from?

It is hard now to describe just what happened to me then. I can list the sequence of minor events as they occurred but I cannot at the same time describe the cumulative and mounting effect that these insignificant little events were having on me. It was at this moment that words written later begin to appear a poor representation of what I was experiencing at the time.

Deep inside me somewhere, in my mind, in my brain, in my increasingly agitated body, and above all in my heart, something was happening to me. I let it happen. I was being show another path in my life. A new path that I had followed quietly since childhood and one that I had not even noticed I was walking. Events long forgotten were coming together in perfect sequence, and very fast – just like I hear drowning men report events moving quickly before them. Paul Brunton, a profound spiritual thinker and devotee of Ramana Maharshi, and the Maharshi himself had brought me to this point of intense awareness.

Brunton I began to realise had been a dear friend of my grandmothers. I remembered now that he had actually been at some of those Circles in Bath in the late 1950’s when I was a small boy. I had myself served him tea. A direct link had immediately opened up between me and a completely different ‘other’ past. Tea in the Circle room in Bath in the 1950’s, receiving my grandmothers first gift of the Bible in Bath 1976, my years spent doing Greek with Lisa, pressing flowers in the Bible in Lucknow in 2006, and then finding my mother’s gift, here today in Dunchurch in 2008, and many other utterly forgotten ‘other’ life events were now crowding my senses and my mind. Brunton, and Ramana Maharshi now linked together all of the pieces and made a new coherence of my life.

The conversation in Bath that day in 1976 was then fully recalled in the conservatory in Dunchurch New Section 1 Page 5

The conversation in Bath that day in 1976 was then fully recalled in the conservatory in Dunchurch 2008. Here was my grandmother again, handing me her Bible. She was sure that someday it would work its magic on me. For the first time in 30 years I actually and vividly recalled all of my grandmother’s words spoken to me then. My mind racing even more memories came flooding, and then another compelling piece of lost information, Nan had given me another book at the same time as she gave me her Bible in 1976.

Suddenly I was compelled to hunt for another book. Grandmother had said something odd about it, “Don’t even think of trying to read this book, you are too young and you are just not ready. Keep it.

It is a gift from me. Someday this book will help you.” Her words were now sure and insistent. But where was this other book now?

I shouted to Clive and told him what had happened and we together set about the house in search of the book which I instinctively knew must have been written by Paul Brunton. Eventually we found it. It was called The Wisdom of the Overself. I trembled as I held in my hand my grandmother’s other mysterious gift. I had never looked at, opened it or even been curious about it over all the years. It had laid, just like its gift companion, my grandmothers Bible, forgotten and lost on a book shelf. I opened it. A letter fell out.

The letter folded in the pages of Paul Brunton’s book fell to the floor and I looked at it thrilled that now I would be able to read a message from my grandmother from 1976. I picked up the letter and turned it in my hand. It was written in my mother’s handwriting.

If I was emotionally inaccessible to my grandmother, then I was even more inaccessible to my mother. She had been six times divorced, she was very much a lady’s man, and incapable of providing a stable home for a child. She would be off with the first handsome man who came along, leaving me (and in later life my brother Paul) in the care of almost anyone at all. Even so I loved her without question or condition. But I could not reveal the weakness of my love for her. All through her life she constantly tried to find a way to express her love for me too. We never quite made it, and we always left things unsaid, and devalued to the point of nudity the few things that we did say.

Our love for each other had never been expressed.

Even before I read the letter I smiled because I guessed that my mother would have tried back then on that day in 1976, to find a way to infiltrate and take possession of grandmother’s gift by placing this letter in the book. She had succeeded. It was a simple letter, full of praise from an unsophisticated mother to her angry young man of a son. But it was the words unsaid, now said at last.

“What a proud feeling being a mother, Know that you have grown up Gone out into the world of temptations.

I can hold my head up high to think of my son Who kept on a good pathway of life To know that I have done my duty towards him, And not cast him aside when my pathway was hard.

He will always be with me in thoughts I pray that God will keep him from any dangers that may come along I am blessed with a good son who will tread this world.”

At this point my convincement was complete and familial emotion and love began to overwhelm New Section 1 Page 6

At this point my convincement was complete and familial emotion and love began to overwhelm me. I was deeply confused. It had all begun in Lucknow two years previously. Clive and I had spent time collecting flowers, pressing them in the Bible and thinking of our mothers. It was then that I made my Promise, - to seek God. I had since then been on a very long journey that I now realised had been led by the spirit, and by the study of Ramana Maharshi I had now in an instant condensed time and space and the entirety of my life into this one moment. I was now able to hold to the light and see for the first time together all of my childhood and early youth experiences with my grandmother and the full impact of her gifts to me, expressed in my mother’s letter hidden in Brunton’s book. I had been shown the meaning of my search.

This other life that I had led appeared to me as translucent and almost shimmering, just like the early morning in the flower garden at Lucknow two years previously. I ached that I had missed this other life and I was completely beyond even thoughts that so much of significance had been so close, so near to me, I could have easily stepped aside from my egoic life and led a life closer to God. In that moment I gave up. I gave up my life in business, I gave up my ego, I gave up my will, and above all I gave up my search for God. For God had now found me. I felt as if in my heart I gave a cry of release and I fell into silence, a warm welcoming silence which has lived in my heart ever since.

I have always loved a Robert Frost poem called ‘The Road Not Taken’. This poem now has greater meaning for me.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveller, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference.

I too it seems had taken the road less travelled by, but in circumincession with the road to business that led to the market place. Whilst in my egoic life I had triumphed along the broad highway, my soul had at the same time had a quieter walk through a very different life. It was a missed life that I now perceived had been richer with real meaning, a life led by feminine qualities and deeper intuitive connections.

Drained after my Convincement I slept. The next day, while out shopping with Clive we passed in the New Section 1 Page 7

Drained after my Convincement I slept. The next day, while out shopping with Clive we passed in the street a group of ladies standing by a simple trestle table. The table had small leaflets spread all over it. It was hard to see why the ladies were there. As I walked past I paused, returned and then walked up and said “Hello”. They were Quakers from Rugby Meeting on their annual outreach event in Rugby Town. Within minutes I had promised to come along to Quaker Meeting the very next day.

They looked amusingly quizzical because I had shown real no grasp of what they were about. The speed of my intentions and the naive readiness with which I asserted that I would come along to Meeting was too hasty. I was too fast to give confidence. But I had become a man of my word, and my ‘yay’ I was about to discover from now on meant ‘yay’.

A few months later I was fully accepted as a Friend by Rugby Meeting. I still up to then knew little about Quakerism, for instance I had not heard of George Fox. Rugby Meeting had however taken me in. They took me without asking that I conform, confirm, or commit to anything. I was welcomed in to share in their own very special Silence. They were a small tender, loving and nurturing community, exactly what I then needed. Here with Quakers I could quietly come to terms with my Convincement and take time to reflect and wait. I waited and still do, for God’s guidance. I dared not even mention my convincement to my new Friends yet. It was too confusing, too new for me to be able to express it, and I feared that I would look silly and maybe a bit odd if I spoke about it.

Eventually of course, being by inclination a historian, I found George Fox’s Journal on our Meeting library bookshelf. I read it. George Fox talked a lot about many instances of Convincement. This offered me much support and comfort in that I had indeed chosen the right people to undertake the next stage of my spiritual development with. Fox also showed me how he had lived his great faith, basing all of his life in its entirety on his profound understanding of revelation, which he took from the Bible that never seemed to be out of his hand. Fox’s experiences as set out in his journal both impressed and compelled me to respond, but I did not know how. I was still a stranger to the Bible and whilst I had now fully and in good heart accepted my grandmother’s gift, I had certainly not yet accepted the idea of the book itself. Quakers then asked me if I would like to lead the Bible Class. I agreed.

Happy working within my nurturing Meeting I took on the task working with a small group of enthusiastic Friends. Other Friends I know had distinctly different paths that took them deep into environmental, justice, peace and other concerns. For some of these other Friends their suspicions about the Bible and its social uses came very close the those concerns that I was also troubled about in respect of the Bible. We dealt tenderly with each other during the coming months. Over time I also settled into a private course of study at home and complimented this study by working in and with the Meeting Bible class.

I knew that as a Quaker I would seek above all to experience the Bible. I did not want to become clever in analysing, quoting and presenting argument. My only desire was to listen to the voices of early Christians. I wanted to see if I could get a glimpse of their Faith and then by extension to better understand the faith of early Quakers who had so prised the experience of early Christian voices.

There are I discovered, many voices in the New Testament and my first thought was to bring these voices out of the Bible.

Next I knew that I would strip away. I would try to strip away the ‘Greekness’, and the ‘Romanness’ from my thinking so that I could hear with open ears. Friends helped me to do this by setting me good preparatory reading. It would still be some considerable time in related study designed to strip away the accretions of centuries before I would actually read any of the book itself. Even more difficult was the need that I saw for me to strip away my prejudices, stubborn assumptions and disinclination to take the Bible seriously. Eventually I got there and at the recommendation of Friends I began to read Paul’s letters. I was seeking to listen to his voice, hear his testimony and then to simply and openly accept it.

Later I would write my own Letter to Rugby Meeting in the style of Paul. I did not do this as an New Section 1 Page 8

Later I would write my own Letter to Rugby Meeting in the style of Paul. I did not do this as an academic exercise. I wanted to see if I could say what Paul says, think what Paul thinks and stand up and talk like Paul talked. My Quaker attitude meant that I would do this tenderly (I am a gay man and I needed to use understanding when dealing with some of the personally challenging statements that were recorded in the letters). I would also seek simplicity, avoiding argument or debate for its own sake. Above all I would seek experience, and I found that writing my own epistle gave me an experience which enabled me to achieve depths of intuitive and contemplative appreciation and understanding that no clever technical reading could possible give me.

My journey into faith now only left me with one major stumbling block. In working so much previously within the separate disciplines of the Vedanta and then more recently within Christianity I now held within me two distinctly different and apparently irreconcilable strands of philosophical thought and indeed world view. It seemed that I was back to Robert Frost, what to do about the Road Not Taken. It would be impossible for me to now take my leave from Ramana Maharshi, Krsna and the Vedanta. They had brought me so far in faith and indeed had brought me safely to God. I could not now ‘swap horses’ and adopt Quakerism and Christ in the place of the Vedanta.

I was lead to Bede Griffiths. Bede was a Cistercian monk from Prinknash and he had spent the years from 1955 to his death in 1993 In India, where he lead a Christian Ashram called Saccidananda, or Shantivanam. Reading Bede’s kindly, gentle, and solidly profound grasp of both Christianity and the Vedanta deeply impressed me. His thoughtful understanding of interspiritual matters and especially how he patiently set out before me how someone like me, whose spirituality had been grounded in Krsna, could also and without issue freely and fully embrace Christ. Reading Bede I started to experience the bringing together of the two strands of my thought, Christianity and Vedanta.

Above all I was convinced of the rightness of his intuitive, contemplative experiential faith that did not shy away from mystery. I now know that above all what I wanted was to experience that ‘every day’, common revelation that permeates all aspects of life. Bede’s own convincement was based on just this kind of communion and revelation. I found his story compelling me onwards.

“One day during my last term at school I waited out alone in the evening and heard the birds singing in that full chorus of song, which can only be heard at that time of the year at dawn or at sunset. I remember now the shock of surprise with which the sound broke on my ears. It seemed to me that I had never heard the birds singing before and I wondered whether they sang like this all the year round and I had never noticed it. As I walked on I came upon some Hawthorne trees in full bloom and again I thought that I had never seen such a delight or experienced such sweetness before. If I had been brought suddenly among the trees of the Garden or paradise and heard a choir of angels singing I could not have been more surprised. I came then to where the sun was setting over the playing fields. A lark rose suddenly from the ground beside the tree where I was standing and poured out its song above my head, and then sank still singing to rest. Everything then grew still as the sunset faded and the veil of dusk began to cover the earth. I remember now the feeling of awe that came over me. I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel; and I hardly dared to look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it were a veil before the face of God.” Bede Griffith’s writings enabled me to circuminsise both of my experiences with the Vedanta and with Quakers and only later did I discover that Bede Griffiths had worked with Henry Le Saux, and he in turn was a disciple of Ramana Maharshi, the great guru who seems to be always there, in the silence, gently pushing me onwards. My journey into faith could now begin.

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