It was almost obligatory to spend a year in London after school finished where I grew up. It was like an unofficial ‘rite of passage’. So that is what I did, I went to London. But it started off with a series of misadventures. Some of which I am speaking about in Part 1 of this podcast…
After some time in London I went and sat by the Thames one day, and had a strange experience, it was like some kind of a voice(or a command, maybe) that I had to go to India. I haven’t had anything quite like that since. It seemed like there were many things I should do, and many things that I was expected to do, but I had to go to India. Many years later when I read Joseph Campbell about the ‘çall to adventure’ I thought about that time on the Thames.
It was like something fateful broke through. And so I went to India. One of the first things that happened was a man came up to me on the street and said 'Éxcuse me Sir what have you been thinking about God’? That shook me up from the start. There is a culture shock when you first go to India. No-one had ever asked me that before. Usually, in my ‘normal’ world, people ask ‘What do you do for a living’’? or maybe ‘How much money do you make’?
And there I was in India and there were cows wandering around on the street, and so many bright colors. There were temples to different gods and goddesses, and people making offerings to them. There was incense. And I was thinking maybe I am hallucinating, either that, or maybe everyone in India was taking hallucinogenics. I was in an unfamiliar world. And someone told me about a temple in the North of India, where if you gave your time and date of birth, they could give you a copy of your ákashic records.
Someone else told me about another temple where the monks stood on one foot. By now I had realized I had really wandered out of the familiar world, and into an unsual world, which had seemed like a good idea at the time. But in retrospect, I was thinking maybe I should have stayed in London and watched cricket on television. I had somehow been led by a strange voice into an unknown land. And India was challenging my view of the world. And it wasn’t quite like the ‘normal’ modern secular world where I lived.
And there were so many different gods and goddesses, like Kali, and Brahma, Vishnu and Shankar. And i don’t think it is possible to go to India and come back quite the same. And a friend said to me that 'Many people have spiritual experiences in India after riding in the back of a Bombay (Mumbai) taxi". And i think I knew what he meant. When you are faced with your own mortality like that it does tend to push you more towards spirituality.
But the religious symbols of Christianity had never really spoken to me, but in some strange way some of the symbols of India did. I was taken by the symbol of Natraj(the dancing Siva). I liked the sense of the cosmic dance or dancing in the fire of creation. Many Years later I read this in Heinrich Zimmer in his book ‘Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization’: It is quite long this excerpt from Zimmer, but it says so much about India:
Nataraja, "King of Dancers."
Dancing is an ancient form of magic. The dancer becomes amplified into a being endowed with supra-normal powers. His personality is transformed. Like yoga, the dance induces trance, ecstasy, the experience of the divine, the realization of one's own secret nature, and, finally, mergence into the divine essence. In India consequently the dance has flourished side by side with the terrific austerities of the meditation grove—fasting, breathing exercises, absolute introversion. To work magic, to put enchantments upon others, one has first to put enchantments on oneself. And this is effected as well by the dance as by prayer, fasting and meditation. Shiva, therefore, the arch-yogi of the gods, is necessarily also the master of the dance.
Pantomimic dance is intended to transmute the dancer into whatever demon, god, or earthly existence he impersonates. The war dance, for example, converts the men who execute it into warriors; it arouses their warlike virtues and turns them into fearless heroes. And the hunting-party dance-pantomime, which magically anticipates and assures the successes of the hunting party, makes of the participants unerring huntsmen. To summon from dormancy the nature-powers attendant upon fruitfulness, dancers mimic the gods of vegetation, sexuality, and rain.
The dance is an act of creation. It brings about a new situation and summons into the dancer a new and higher personality. It has a cosmogonic function, in that it arouses dormant energies which then may shape the world. On a universal scale, Shiva is the Cosmic Dancer; in his "Dancing Manifestation" (nritya•murti) he embodies in himself and simultaneously gives manifestation to Eternal Energy. The forces gathered and projected in his frantic, ever-enduring gyration, are the powers of the evolution, maintenance, and dissolution of the world. Nature and all its creatures are the effects of his eternal dance.
Shiva-Nataraja is represented in a beautiful series of South Indian bronzes dating from the tenth and twelfth centuries A.D. (Figure 38.) The details of these figures are to be read, according to the Hindu tradition, in terms of a complex pictorial allegory.The upper right hand, it will be observed, carries a little drum, shaped like an hour-glass, for the beating of the rhythm. This connotes Sound, the vehicle of speech, the conveyer of revelation, tradition, incantation, magic, and divine truth.
Furthermore, Sound is associated in India with Ether, the first of the five elements. Ether is the primary and most subtly pervasive manifestation of the divine Substance. Out of it unfold, in the evolution of the universe, all the other elements, Air, Fire, Water, and Earth. Together, therefore, Sound and Ether signify the first, truth-pregnant moment of creation, the productive energy of the Absolute, in its pristine, cosmogenetic strength.
The opposite hand, the upper left, with a half-moon posture of the fingers (ardhacandra-mudra), bears on its palm a tongue of flame. Fire is the element of the destruction of the world. At the close of the Kali Yuga, Fire will annihilate the body of creation, to be itself then quenched by the ocean of the void. Here, then, in the balance of the hands, is illustrated a counterpoise of creation and destruction in the play of the cosmic dance. As a ruthlessness of opposites, the Transcendental shows through the mask of the enigmatic Master: ceaselessness of production against an insatiate appetite of extermination, Sound against Flame. And the field of the terrible interplay is the Dancing Ground of the Universe, brilliant and horrific with the dance of the god.
The "fear not" gesture (abhaya-mudra), bestowing protection and peace, is displayed by the second right hand, while the remaining left lifted across the chest, points downward to the uplifted left foot. This foot signifies Release and is the refuge andsalvation of the devotee. It is to be worshiped for the attainment of union with the Absolute. The hand pointing to it is held in a pose imitative of the outstretched trunk or "hand" of the elephant (gaja-hasta-mudra), reminding us of Ganesha, Shiva's son, the Remover of Obstacles.
The divinity is represented as dancing on the prostrate body of a dwarfish demon. This is Apasmara Purusha, "The Man or Demon (puru$a) called Forgetfulness, or Heedlessness (apasmara)." * It is symbolical of life's blindness, man's ignorance. Conquest of this demon lies in the attainment of true wisdom. Therein is release from the bondages of the world.
A ring of flames and light (prabha-mandala) issues from and encompasses the god. This is said to signify the vital processes of the universe and its creatures, nature's dance as moved by the dancing god within. Simultaneously it is said to signify the energy of Wisdom, the transcendental light of the knowledge of truth, dancing forth from the personification of the All. Still another allegorical meaning assigned to the halo of flames is that of the holy syllable AUM or OM.* This mystical utterance ("aye,""amen") stemming from the sacred language of Vedic praise and incantation, is understood as an expression and affirmation of the totality of creation. A—is the state of waking consciousness, together with its world of gross experience. U—is the state of dreaming consciousness, together with its experience of the subtle shapes of dream. M—is the state of dreamless sleep, the natural condition of quiescent, undifferentiated consciousness, wherein every experience is dissolved into a blissful non-experience, a mass of potential consciousness. The Silence following the pronunciation of the three, A, U, and M, is the ultimate unmanifest, wherein perfected supra-consciousness totally reflects and merges with the pure, transcendental essence of Divine Reality—Brahman is experienced as Atman, the Self. AUM, therefore, together with its surrounding silence, is a sound-symbol of the whole of consciousness-existence, and at the same time its willing affirmation.
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