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An overnight train is different, but a pleasant, easygoing way to travel
long distances. We boarded in Cochin early evening, and
at 6:30 in the morning we were in Bangalore.
Walking along with the throng, I spotted someone holding a sign for
Vivekananda Kendra, and this turned out to be our contact for the next
taxi ride. Chino, Lefty, and I were joined by a young shaved-head English
pilgrim and a young Indian couple for the by-now-typical dodgem-car
ride through an astonishing variety of conveyances. In the big cities as
well as the country there are trucks, cars, and busses, but also huge
numbers of autorickshaws, motorcycles, bicycles and three-wheeled
trucks, as well as oxcarts and camel drays, and all kinds of human powered wagons and trailers. Cows and occasional goats seem to wander freely, unconcerned by the rushing vehicles. Chino says they all do belong to someone, and indeed they know where home is. But it remains surprising still to see a cow peacefully chewing her cud in the median of a road with half a dozen ill-defined lanes of traffic, or a little herd of goats, kids and all, trotting along the road, evidently confident that the rushing, honking cars and trucks will go around them.
Our next segment is 40 km of the worst road ever, going to the
Vivekananda Kendra. The late, heavy monsoons have flooded and destroyed
many roads, and this one is under repair, meaning that crews of men and
women are cracking and distributing rock by hand here and there. No
machinery in evidence, just people, probably earning 100 or 150 Rupees
per day, scraping gravel and sand into buckets and bags and head
baskets. The women seem to do a lot of the lifting and carrying. We
drove by chaotic-looking quasi-villages of ragged tents and hovels which
are home to these otherwise homeless transient workers.
Our trip takes two hours or so, but finally we arrive at the Kendra, which
is a number of cottages and buildings set in a campus of 100 acres. The
Vivekananda School is a deemed University, and has faculty and lecture
halls and an enthusiastic student body all focused on yoga for health,
for education, for science and philosophy. We had a personal caretaker,
Sanjay, who looked for ways to be helpful. Coincidentally, it turned out
our favorite server in the dining hall was his lady friend. Good match.
My invited talk here is one of four in a session of the 15th
International Conference on yoga and physical science. It
went well,
though I had my doubts about the casual, last-minute style of the
techies. There is serious and widespread interest, but it is possible
to touch only briefly on the relationships of GCP's work and the yoga
themes. My panel includes Dr. Swamy, who is a jewel of a man, wise and
humorous, and a kindred spirit with regard to what is science and what
is mostly imagination. The next day, I have a chance to talk at some
length with Dr Nagendra, the founder of Vivekananda, and several of the
senior faculty. I also talked with some of the students working with REG
technology, and in the process came to see how much work needs to
be done to develop the competent scientific research they wish to do.
On the last day there,
in a sort of meaningful coincidence, I met the dean of the management
school, Ravi, who it turns out is a highly competent statistician and
understands the requirements of good experimental design. He is
interested in the REG-based research, and I think willing to take a hand.
Everyone is busy though, and the politics of the situation requires
engaging everyone in the process. I know Nagendra's intent, and believe
he recognizes that it is essential for his students to take advantage of
resources like Ravi.
Each evening, the center provided an entertainment. An especially nice
example was a "Dosa evening" which included not only excellent food, but
musicians playing traditional wedding dance music for the crowd
gathered by a great bonfire. Another evening, in a deep chamber called
the stadium, surrounded by stone bench walls, a group of villagers did
magical performances, ritually breaking cocoanuts on each other's heads to the
accompaniment of chanting. There were flying banners and energetic
dancing, and rituals culminating in a firewalk through coals in a pit
perhaps 7 meters long. The crowd was excited, and many of the students
and others also walked. Here Chino introduced me to Sraddhalu, a
remarkable man from Auroville. We sat together and talked immediately of
interesting things. He is a leader or guru at the Aurobindo ashram, I
think, and looks the part (Chino observed he actually looks very much
like Aurobindo himself). He asked me if I had a meditation practice, and
I told a little about my present state of some hesitation and lack of
focus. When he invited me to join with him and a few students in the
morning, I said yes. It was fine -- his room was spacious, beautiful for
the purpose, with a whole wall of windows looking out to the palms and
grasses. The meditation was to open up to the ocean of peace, and allow
it to flow in to pervade one's being, there to become a focus for inward seeing and feeling.
Later, I went to the yoga and education session where Sraddhalu and two
others spoke. It was crowded and only single seats were free, so Lefty
and I separated. The seat I chose was quite by accident next to Andrew
Cohen, who was there to give a featured talk in the afternoon and a
retreat a day or so later. I should have taken the opportunity to
introduce myself, because I admire his work, but didn't. We did go to
his talk, and though I was a little disappointed in his
style, the content was ultimately right on -- he, like Sraddhalu,
and Barbara Marx Hubbard, and so many others lately, is talking about
conscious evolution. It is my message too in my recent shift to an
education mode. I am ending my talks with a discussion of the evidence
that consciousness is creative, and the implication that we have the
capability and the responsibility to choose our future -- to proceed with conscious evolution.
Then it was back to Bangalore, once called the garden city, and now
famous as Silicon Valley, India. It is still beautiful, in bursts amid
the traffic and building chaos, but intensely busy. We went a shopping
mall, very modern, where I bought a shirt and a pair of pants, and Lefty
and I had a pizza! Afterward we completed our escape from the trials of
camping, going on to the National Institute of Advanced Study
(NIAS) which is a concentrated and intellectually intense small campus
that I think is part of the Indian Institute of Science, a major
university in Bangalore. Lefty looked into the room for our overnight
and came out smiling, thumbs up. I was in a mild ecstasy because with
help from the technical guy, Ramakrishna, who set up the projector for
my talk, I had an Internet connection using my own computer (hence, a
secure connection to my server) for the first time in a couple of weeks. But before settling in, I met Prof Sreekantan and Dr Vaidya, with whom the conversation immediately went remarkably deep into consciousness and the work. Turns out Vaidya has spent time in several places in the US, and just came back from watching his son's graduation from Swarthmore. When I said my sister-in-law, Debby Kemler-Nelson teaches there, he said,
"Yes, I met her, and was impressed by her enthusiastic connection
to the students."
This small group of 30 or so high level faculty have as one of their
interests a consciousness forum that is thinking seriously about the
issues and possibilities. My talk was to a group of 40 or 50, and was
well received -- too well, in the sense that their questions (which I
like because they enliven talks) were so numerous that it became
overlong. But invigorating, except for the regret for keeping people,
and the resolve to control questions better next time. We also had time
to walk the main campus and have a coffee (black for once!) in a busy
India Coffee Shop. The campus is beautiful, only about 100 years old,
and created apparently by the generous social intent of the Tata family,
one of the giants of Indian industry, builders of cars, trucks, telephone networks and more.
The next day we went on to the School of Ancient Wisdom. This is a
beautiful place, created by a woman Chino has known from childhood as
another who grew up in the Theosophical Society -- they are
second or third generation theosophy people. Manize is about
70 now, and began building the School in 1995 with the help
of Ram Menon. It is a 9 acre estate with truly beautiful
architecture in the houses and halls, surrounded by
magnificent gardens. Manize had a career as an interior
decorator and designer, and is responsible for the elegance
and beauty of the grand plan as well as the fine detail. It
is comfortable and inviting, so much so that I have dreamy
notions of coming to stay for a month sometime just to
write. Now I am sitting on a balcony overlooking the
boundary of the estate, marked by granite posts, huge
agave-like cactus, and tall, lovely trees with fronds of
fine-cut leaves. Just now I hear a plane in the distance,
but otherwise it is birds, or an occasional barking puppy,
most likely one those we met, perhaps
Toto or Socks, or Lucky Lady (what's her real name?)
The School is held by the Jewel in the Lotus Trust, and it is clear that
Manize hopes to discover its future in the care of someone to follow
her. I remarked that she appears to have an astonishing schedule of
activities, to which she responded, "Time is short." I believe she has
had some illness, and in any case she is a person of wisdom who seeks a
right way for the Trust and the School after she and Ram are gone.
There's more to say about the School of Ancient Wisdom, and perhaps I'll
come back to it -- indeed it is a place that has a drawing quality, and the idea of sitting on the balcony and writing for a month or so has an appeal.
Our peripatetic schedule next brings us to a special featured part of
the plan Chino has created, our visit to the Theosophical Society estate
in Chennai. The TS, as it is called, has its international headquarters
here, on grounds that occupy 250 acres on the river and seashore (the
Bay of Bengal). It is
prime land, beautiful groves and fields and a magnificent beach -- which
is now polluted because the river running through Chennai to the Bay
is gifted with
that city's wastes. When the Tsunami struck (exactly a year before,
during the opening ceremonies of the 129th International Meeting of the
TS) the campus was saved because the broad river absorbed the huge wave.
But it overflowed the banks and collected the proliferate garbage from
the streets and deposited it on the shore. A year later they still are
cleaning up, and still warning not to swim in the otherwise attractive
waters. Chino grew up at the TS, and as a young boy ran through its
forests and swam in the bluegreen waters that have become brown. It is
very interesting to talk to him about the TS because it is his
intellectual home since his parents were Theosophists. Over the course
of the days we were there, we met many people with as many as 5
generations of background in the society. The ideas that are the
foundation came from some remarkable figures in the late 18th and early
20th century, Anne Besant, Charles Leadbeater, Helena Blavatsky, and
Henry Olcott. They accessed the ancient wisdom of the Masters, sometimes
called the perennial wisdom, that pervades and centers all the great
religions and philosophical forms. In any case their beliefs in the
essential brotherhood or oneness of all mankind created a center of
attraction for people of all faiths that maintains today. We met many of
them, and found it a pleasure to share in the prayers of all
religions in their various languages, expressing this communal and collaborative feeling.
We stayed in the Leadbeater Chambers, a huge building from 1910 that has
space for more than 100 people, mostly in large rooms partitioned with a
curtain into two bedrooms. We
shared with Linda and Pedro, from Sydney, very nice folks who had been
there a few days before we came and thus had had the place to
themselves. But no problem, they adapted to the shared situation, and
Pedro especially has such a wonderful humor and Linda so gentle a
presence that it was easy. (Despite Pedro's world-class, grizzly-bear
snoring!). We arrived on Christmas eve, about 10 pm, and made our way to the Christmas mass. Next morning, we discovered that the officiating priest was none other than our roommate, Pedro. We were a little mystified, since he and Linda seemed to be a married couple, but mystery solved when we learned he is from the liberal catholic branch (which was news to me, but not a bad idea.)
The TS campus is quite beautiful, and is an oasis of green in otherwise intensely populated Chennai. We saw a couple of jackals and a mongoose on our first morning walk, and the bird population, though dominated by raucous crows, is numerous and variegated. The last day we were there, we finally saw parrots after Chino's daughter Veena pointed them out. We just had not looked in the right places, and it happens they are there in great numbers, large and flashing light green colors. The flowers and trees are spectacular, and I have dozens of pictures of exotic blossoms and magnificent trees, including a panoramic set taken in the midst of the world-famous Banyan tree that covers an area more than 250 feet in diameter. The main, mother trunk fell in 1975, but these trees are immortal in the sense that their rooting tendrils propagate the tree indefinitely. Some special places for me are the beach, with access for a couple of hours at sunrise and again at sunset, and the Garden of Remembrance, on the riverside path half a kilometer from the Leadbeater Chambers. There is a star-shaped stone-walled garden with marble plaques remembering the early Theosophists, Besant, Olcott, Blavatsky, Leadbeater and others. Surrounding this are flower clusters and several lotus pools with glorious blooms at their maximum beauty early in the morning. Walking the grounds was lovely, but the meeting, which was the 130th annual convention of the Theosophical Society was also interesting. One after another of the talks reflected back the ideas and implications I see in the Global Consciousness Project's results.
Of course this linkage is a personal note, but when I gave the Theosophy-Science invited lecture, there was obvious resonance in the audience. Many people wanted to talk more, and over the next couple of days I had a chance for deeper discussions with those who were especially interested.
We took a day and a half away from the TS to go to Pondicherry, some 150
Km south of Chennai and also on the shore. We stopped first at
Auroville, just short of Pondicherry, to visit the village created by
The Mother, who was the worldly and powerfully creative partner to Sri
Aurobindo. Auroville is populated by some 2000 Aurovillians who have
come from all over the world to join this leaderless community
(described only a little tongue in cheek as a cooperative of 2000
dictators) to create a living, continuing source for the wisdom and
insights provided by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. There are also about
5 or 6 thousand native people who work in the farms and businesses, and
getting to the Center Guesthouse where we stayed the night was by
of bumpy dirt roads through villages that could have been from
1000 years ago. But the primitive passage brought us to one of the
nicest accommodations we had yet seen in India, and good food including
the first salads we felt safe to eat. And wonder of wonders, the main
green was arugula! We had a short, efficient tour led by Tina (German)
and Krishna (Indian, with the luminous presence of long meditation),
first to get a taste of the business/manufacturing aspect of the
community, talking with a delightful man originally from Belgium but captured by the possibilities here 35 years hence. He manages an impressive assortment of service, research, and light manufacturing operations including architectural/structural materials, solar energy applications, and industrial management services.
Then we visited the Matrimandir, the gorgeous centerpiece of Auroville.
It is a giant oblate sphere, maybe 15 stories high, ultimately to be
covered with more than a thousand huge gold disks. The construction
manager (he says he really is just part of a committee, again a
leaderless operation) visited from France as a young man, and when he
went home was drawn back irresistibly. He says 9 of 10 parts of his
being argued for staying in comfortable Paris, but the 10th part, his
soul, won over, and he's spent his whole life here. When he came,
Auroville was a barren place, with only grasses and a few lonely trees.
Now it is lush, covered with what appear to be old forests, blooming
gardens and farms. The Matrimandir was just some concrete foundations
and flat surrounds. Now it is nearly complete -- he predicts the work will be done in March or April (but apparently such predictions often have been premature). It is already magnificent. We had a privileged tour, and could go into areas tourists don't see. One of these was a meditation room called Peace, which was so beautiful and felt so right that I wanted to stay. There are 12 such rooms (many things about the structure are symbolic and 12 is a particularly important number.)
After this too-quick tour we went to the place I was to give a GCP talk,
arriving as it was to begin. But the setup was quick and all went well,
for a talk that was well received, not least because the basic
philosophy of the people there is aligned with the implications of
global consciousness and especially with my bottom line message about
the capability and the responsibility for conscious evolution. Good
questions and bright, interesting people.
After a pleasant night, I was up early and sat on the terrace to write,
and saw another mongoose. I hoped he would, as advertised, stop and
assess me for a bit, but he disappeared through the garden wall. Then it
was off to Pondicherry and the Aurobindo Ashram. We met Sraddhalu at his
home just behind the Ashram and talked for a while about the way of
life, the sources and the nature of the Aurobindo presence. He is a fine
guide, a model of the wise, calm teacher in the tradition of the place.
There are here also about 2000 committed people, and again no
hierarchical leadership. But the Ashram is prosperous and has made
Pondicherry more so. It interpenetrates the town, and wherever you see
their buildings, painted a light gray, the neighborhood looks well kept. We walked to the main building and got a pass to visit the rooms where Sri Aurobindo lived for several decades, emerging only four days each year. It is kept as a shrine, and an endless stream of people seek to visit. Lovely and touching, though the adulatory mode is not right for me. We met Sraddhalu's mother too, in a bookstore where we were gifted with a full set of the necessary texts. A brief look shows poetic wisdom, and I will look forward to some time to read when we are home.
Then after a walk along the shore, we went back to the TS in Chennai for the night.
On December 31, Chino put us on the train to Visakhapatnam,
this time successfully installing us in the two-person coupe he had
reserved 60 days earlier. It was delightful, and gave us a unique New
Years venue and the most charming and intimate celebration. Lefty had
thoughtfully prepared for this two weeks before, by sequestering two
small bottles of red and two of white from the generous provision on British
Air. Forbidden on the train (India has widespread strictures on alcohol)
but we didn't tell a soul, and we rang in the New Year in classic style, with only the camera as witness. If you have a patient friend in India to make the reservation (apparently you must be at the office at 08:00 to stand in line exactly two months ahead) this is a nice way to travel. Once you're safely on the train, after a good nights sleep, it is a slow cruise
through an endlessly interesting countryside of rice fields and
sugarcane, bullock carts, goat herds, and farming done by families and
clans working in a unique communal mode -- 15 or 20 people planting or harvesting together in a small field.
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