From India to York and from York to Nepal
When my year in India eventually ended in November 2020, I returned to the UK and to York, a town I have lived in on and off for many years. I would be there, it transpired, until June the following year owing to mandatory coronavirus restrictions which had closed borders and limited international travel, both in the UK and Nepal, the country I had felt called to travel to as the next stage of my journey. As I write, there’s the loud clatter, sound of power tools and shouting from workmen setting up scaffolding three doors up; and music from their all-weather outdoor stereo system. From time to time they sing along with it. I have the windows closed although it’s a lovely sunny spring morning. The house I currently live in is on a street of Victorian terraced housing and there are always several home improvement, roof replacement or maintenance projects underway. What price peace?
It’s hardly just here either. This is the way the world is now. During the eight long months of lock down in Rishikesh last year, I was fairly hemmed in by construction noise on every side. When construction work was permitted to resume, they started with widening and resurfacing the road just outside my room and it went on from there. The first two weeks, however, everything shut down and the peace was startling. You could hear the wind and the bird song and just about nothing else. Down on the banks of the Ganges, the white water rafters had gone together with the adventure tourists, yoga schools and day trippers. I sat there one morning in the sunshine, quite alone, and listened to the sounds of the river and the birds, the rushing of the waters and soaked in the sheer sublimeness of it. I guessed it wouldn’t last long. This was how it had been from time immemorial, until the arrival of the twentieth century probably, when the tides of social, economic and technological change inexorably changed it forever. New hotels, guest houses and ashrams are under constant construction. When I checked up on the number of ashrams in Rishikesh alone recently, there were around a hundred of them.
The world we live in now is all consuming. When the key spiritual texts of India such as the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Agamas, the Puranas and the Bhagavad Gita were written, it was over a thousand or more years ago and the world was a very different place. Certainly there were the kinds of social distractions commonly identified and warned against when pursuing a spiritual pathway, but the learned sages can have had no idea of how much the world would change to how it is now. If it was considered difficult to commit to the spiritual pathway and disciplines required for that then, how very much harder now. In the third stage of the four stage life pathway set out for a Hindu person, the individual lets go of the world and their personal commitments and seeks the peace and seclusion of the forest and communion with nature, before finally renouncing the world completely, ahead of their death, where they might seek out a sacred pilgrimage location such as Varanasi. However is that possible now?
In India it is still part of the traditional life that some people, usually older males, although occasionally younger and more rarely female, espouse the wandering monk state as sadhus, but in highly developed industrialised nations, including those often referred to as ‘the west’, unless you have managed to retire on a reasonable income and have access to private accommodation, it is almost impossible to seek this kind of seclusion. You cannot really wander the roads with no fixed abode in developed countries with laws against vagrancy and a predisposition to see non conformist spiritually motivated people as mentally ill. Complicated and expensive visa arrangements are needed to live in other countries. The sheer size of humanity has increased exponentially, together with the vast urban developments they live in; industry and agriculture have expanded at the expense of the yearly dwindling forests and wild places. Beaches are developed for leisure and water sports and only the very wealthy can buy themselves something that approaches genuine aloneness. With the massive growth of adventure travel, mountaineering, trekking and so on, it is harder to find oneself alone in the unspoilt wilderness. To enter an ashram or a retreat presumes you have the legal status to be in the country and the income to sustain you there. For sure there are people who find inventive ways to live in the gaps in between as it were, but these are generally the exception, not the rule.
The eight long months of lockdown in the Tapovan district of Rishikesh were in several ways like a kind of retreat for me, a time when, perforce, I engaged with the contents of my personal depths in the wake of having given up all that had constituted my life when I left the UK the previous November and embarked upon the final stage of this pilgrimage. But despite the location being an attractive hotel on the edge of Tapovan, with a nice garden and restaurant and friendly supportive staff running the place, if I thought I would be able to enjoy solitude and silence to advance my spiritual practice, I was sorely mistaken. Instead it proved an opportunity to practice strict Zen style detachment and engage with those aspects of my life conditioning that have ever made me noise averse. The best I could ever manage was accepting the noise, whilst also accepting that I will never be someone who ‘likes’ noise, particularly modern day noise consisting of large diesil engines, power tools and amplified sound.
The garden restaurant of the hotel beyond my balcony played 60s popular music throughout the day and evening, so I couldn’t escape the kinds of songs that I grew up with as a teenager, and I am not someone who nostalgically loves reminders of the music of their youth. I wanted peace and quiet, but that wasn’t to be, especially when the hotel management used the hiatus in hotel bookings consequent on the pandemic lockdown to renovate and upgrade many of the hotel rooms around me. In the end I was able to achieve a kind of vicarious truce which, whilst acknowledging the desirability of quiet, accepted that I shouldn’t be seeking literal peace in the ambient world, but within my own depths. Needing the world to be in a particular way in order for you to feel at peace only serves to bind you to conditions of the world. And, of course, the more money and power that you have in the world to buy or dictate the conditions you require, the less likely that you will ever learn the skills of detachment so fundamental for spiritual advancement.
And so here I am again, this time in York UK, with the opportunity to re-engage with spiritual practices learned back in India. My guidance has ever been those lines from the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna exhorts Arjuna that to be a true yogi, one must be able to experience conditions of the world: pain, pleasure; success, failure; praise, blame, all with the same detached peace. I have most certainly improved over the years, but it is on-going practice and, still being human, there are certainly times when I do find it still a struggle. As the inward spiritual imperative is to seek out the mountain or forest retreat, solitude and silence (as Krishna himself says), to find myself back in noisy suburbia with its full impact of traffic, home renovations, outdoor music, barking dogs and so on can all feel to me rather like the medieval practice of wearing a hair shirt, so that the world is never too comfortable for the spiritual aspirant.