“Early in the day it was whispered that we should sail in a boat, only thou and I and never a soul in the world would know of this our pilgrimage to no country and to no end. In that shoreless ocean, at thy silently listening smile my songs would swell in melodies, free as waves, free from all bondage of words.
Is the time not come yet? Are there works still to do? Lo, the evening has come down upon the shore and in the fading light the seabirds come flying to their nests.
Who knows when the chains will be off, and the boat, like the last glimmer of sunset, vanish into the night?” (1)
When I started out on my Pilgrimage, I had no idea how (even if) it would end. To have planned an end would have completely negated the concept of such a journey, when you commit yourself completely to the unknown with all that means. At times I wondered, certainly felt, that I had or should become some sort of Sadhu myself, and be plying the sacred routes to different temples for the rest of my days. Clearly however, that wasn’t to be.
Having given up everything that had constituted my life when I left York in November 2019, including all pretensions to further formal University work, it took me by surprise therefore to find, as I contemplated returning to the world again, that the work I had engaged upon until I left was apparently still there, waiting for me as it were.
In the East the path of renunciation is generally a lifelong one. Sadhus, the wandering monks, never return again to the world they have left. When their wandering capacities have come to an end, they generally settle in some sacred location such a Varanasi (or even Rishikesh) and wait for that ultimate journey of transformation – death – to meet them. In Western Mystic traditions, the final goal of the mystic’s journey is union with Divinity, called, in fact, the Unitive Life (see this website), after which they most definitely return to the world with a life’s mission of some order or another, but one that serves the world with sacred work. By this I don’t necessarily mean conventional ‘good works’ or works that center upon religious or theological activities even, but something that helps to make the world a better place. In the Jungian and Post Jungian schools of Analytical Psychology, the true goal of the life journey, called Individuation, also presupposes that those who undertake it return to the world and society with healing gifts from their encounters with their personal and the collective Unconscious, encounters made in the strange worlds and experiences that their journey exposed them to (2).
So, as I embark, strangely, upon this next stage back into the world I left, it seems that University work revolving around the subjects I had most recently been engaged upon will likely be those I look to again.
Featured image: Dawn over the Ganges, Varanasi (March 2020).
1. Rabindranath Tagore. Gitanjali. 42.
2. Martin Schmidt. Individuation and the Self. Society of Analytical Psychology.
https://www.thesap.org.uk/articles-on-jungian-psychology-2/about-analysis-and-therapy/individuation/