India 2

         It’s often the quirky little things in a country that make it either delightful or infuriating. I’ve been nearly two weeks in India and done lots of very ordinary shopping with cash but have not yet handled a coin. When I came a few years ago there was still a one rupee note. Now I think the lowest denomination is five rupees; almost exactly 5p. Small change in shops is given in chewing gum or matches or biscuits. It’s delightful and I suppose means that you can’t deal with vending machines which would never read the dirty, worn banknotes of India, but with real people. More infuriating in Goa, a green fertile area is that green salad in a restaurant consists of thin slices of peeled cucumber (to remove all traces of green), and tomatoes, onions and carrots. I am beginning to think I must be crazy to want lettuce, spinach, watercress, rocket…I’ll gorge on that when I get home. Delightful, is India’s creative ways of spelling English words. Here is my favourite from an earlier trip;  If I was setting up a Secretarial Service I think I would check the spelling of the word before having the sign made!  Still, there are probably more native, mother-tongue English speakers in India than in England so perhaps we are wrong.  Mixed, is the constant power cuts. As I have a laptop; when the power goes I still have a couple of hours left to run and have never run out of juice yet. It’s just harder to see any paper documents and the novelty of candles on the table wears off after a while. Delightful is clichéd or old-fashioned English in the newspapers. A phrase like “the long arm of the law nabbed the ruffians in the wee hours.”  is not uncommon.  

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India - some final thoughts.

I'm back home! I left England in the depth of a January winter I have come back to the miracle of Spring - greener and with more flowers than I ever saw in India. 

So how can I summarise India? It is more of a continent than a country and inevitably I only saw a little of it.  I spent very little time in large cities, but I did travel from the very southernmost tip of India, up to the foothills of the Himalayas in three months.

It has changed in the twelve years since I was there last. It is more crowded. Everyone seems to have a mobile phone - there are 350 millions mobiles in India. Bottled water and the resulting plastic bottles are everywhere along with plastic bags.  Often, with no bins or means of rubbish collection, plastic lies everywhere, and is eaten by cows or burnt releasing toxins. 

It is a country without atheists where spirituality suffuses everything. A sense of the sacred is everywhere. It is also a country full of contradictions; I saw a woman perform her sacred Ganges worship and then throw her bag of rubbish into the river. It is impossible to separate deep spirituality from habit and superstition.  The line between politicians, Bollywood film stars and Gods is blurred.  By the side of the road there can be a coloured concrete statue of a local politician complete with sunglasses. Motorcycles can have five or six people on them without any sign of a crash helmet. Traffic is so chaotic that it is a wonder that the very high death rate isn't even higher (at present about 140,000 a year killed). Air pollution in cities is awful and getting much worse as more families get cars.  Of course this chaos is also vibrant aliveness with the  vivid colours of the saris and the flowers alongside the dilapidated paintwork and rubbish. 

However, I wasn't there primarily as a tourist. In the South I was mostly learning mantras, attending satsangs and seeing Shiva temples. In Varanasi I was meditating, performing pujas and learning more of Kashmir Shavism; and in Rishikesh I was learning and practicing tantra-yoga.  All drawing from the vast spiritual heritage of India. The Dravidian culture in the South going back perhaps over 7,000 years; Varanasi having been a spiritual centre by the Ganges for over 4,000 years; and Kashmir Shavism, only being written by Abhinavagupta a thousand years ago is a compliation of spiritual  pratices and wisdom developed and elaborated over  many thousands of years.  

The high point of India tantric culture was about a thousand years ago. Society then was positive about sexuality and women, there was a vibrant culture. All civilisations rise and then decline and for India the immediate cause was the Muslim invasion, followed by the Portugese and finally the Puritan British colonisation.  Temples and statues were destroyed, women had to wear saris and finally the India middle class became more puritanical than the British campaigning to ban devadasi, the temple dancers. 

There is a sense of a culture in decline now which industrialising and having call centres and more computer programmers than America won't arrest.  If I had to put my money on India or China, I would choose China despite it having an aging population whereas India has a population where three quarters are under 40. The pressure of overpopulation and pollution together with the pervasive poitical corruption and administrative inertia is everywhere. It is a beautiful country but behind it all I feel a sadness at the lack of interest and curiosity most Indians have in their own cultural heritage. Perhaps it is only through foreigners' interest that they can re-learn what a precious jewel they have. 

Arunachala

It's twilight and above me the sacred mountain of Arunachal is becoming a silhouette against the sky, a mountain older than the Himalayas, dedicated to Shiva. In its caves over thousands of years many have realised enlightenment or samadhi. Ramana Maharshi lived on this mountain in modern times. It is the eve of the full moon and hundreds of thousands of people are walking aound the mountain, though it feels more like walking though a long funfair of stalls with small temples every few yards. Some walk in silence, many are in groups chattering excitedly. At other times, some even roll around the mountain for all of its 14km circumference. I walked alone a week earlier in the early morning chanting all the way Om Namah Shivaaya and singing Arunachala Shiva. The cave where Ramana lived for several years is particularly powerful and we were able to chant in there, the vibrations of the chants filling our heads and bodies shaking out thoughts to create luminous space to dissolve in to. All spiritual practices require some way of stilling thoughts to allow the spaciousness of being to a recognised and mantra is a particularly powerful way to do this (see www.mantra-yoga.com) . Ramana at the end of the ninteenth century experienced sahaja samadhi (spontaneous awakening) when he was sixteen years old and from that experience developed Self-Enquiry as a method to realise the Self. It is simple to enquire in the identity of the experiencer. Can the seer be seen? We so readily get caught up in the experiences or try and become the witnesser of the experience and never enquire into the nature and reality of the expereincer.

India is a great place to practice this. Old distractions are muted and the sheer intensity of the experiences in the present moment make it easier to stay present and then, as if putting a mirror in front, look for the reality of the experiencer. So who walked around the great mountain of Arunachala? And were they separate from the mountain and the crowds.?