I was twenty-seven before I met a holy man. I was a default atheist in spite of my inability to gel with the world, its inhabitants and institutions. I didn’t consider that I needed a solution beyond materialism, I just thought I needed more material. I was highly suspicious of Jesus; I was introduced to him in the usual C of E way, blank and unconvincing tinsel-spattered dioramas. Hopelessly literal interpretations of the Gospels. Herod, mangers, shepherds, Joseph, angels, wine, fishermen. What am I supposed to do with that in Grays, Essex? Me and my mum were up in London one day – I was ten years old, I feel like I was off school for some reason and it was the hinterland between primary school and high school. I was due to be sent to boarding school and was disturbed by the prospect. Some Mormon evangelists buttonholed us at Baker Street with an invite to look around their educational centre. For some reason I was keen to go. I faintly recall being led round an exhibition outlining Joseph Smith’s unlikely discovery and what it meant for us now. I feel like even then the particulars of Mormonism’s origin myth struck me as troubling – the missing Gold Plates, Jesus living in America – but I liked the aspiration and I certainly wasn’t beneath using the experience to challenge my mum’s decision to send me to kiddie-prison. The most vividly recalled moment being when I asked the most vocal Mormon whether he agreed, in theory, with children being sent away to school and him solemnly saying that he did not. Why I thought the views of a passing Mormon would sway my destiny I do not remember, suffice to say I ended up at that school and the rupture was never undone.
Perhaps I was destined to be the type of child who lives inside his head, the teenager that disappears into substance misuse, an adult that craves approval before eventually finding faith and connection; even in my forties it feels like it was pivotal in my severance and mistrust.
I am twenty-seven and just clean and kind of insane. The people around me were bigging up this holy man before I met him. At Bhaktivedanta Manor the devotees were buzzing, the anticipatory air of excitement that precedes the arrival of any high-status individual. The Hare Krsna movement from its arrival in the west has been associated with counter culture and the high-profile inhabitants of that shabbily sparkling realm. Prabhupada, the swami who brought Krsna consciousness to New York and San Francisco, before settling in Watford, of all places, both rode and enhanced the wave of hippie fervour that signalled the end of post-war conformity and the onset of the individualism that began in the late sixties. While awaiting the arrival of his student and heir, Radhanath Swami, I am absent-mindedly drinking in this myth. I am most enamoured of and fascinated by the connection between The Beatles and these be-robed holy folk, the connection between psychedelics and meditation, the connection between the rejection of the material world and the embrace of mysticism. To me, even as a young and uneducated man, there is something important contained within these relationships. We are outdoors, there are an assortment of ordinary British Asians, people in religious capes and blankets with clay on their foreheads, flowers, incense, some cows – all in the grounds of a mansion donated by George Harrison. It is very stimulating. I meet some of the former Beatle’s friends – Shamusanda, a puckish Ken Kesey refugee from the sixties, and several other talkative and friendly devotees – before I am directed to Radhanath Swami, who has ghosted in as if on wheels concealed by dry ice and now stands warm, aloof, benign and disruptively silent in a way that I now know is commensurate with enlightenment. I knew there was something appealing about this radiance, something that I needed to understand. Charisma is by its nature appealing in a way that is hard to quantify; it was clear to me this smiling and daunting monk had a connection to something that I needed.
My bespoke pantheon of mentors will unlikely fulfil all of your needs; on the surface you probably have very different requirements to me – you might want to become a florist or a cage fighter and have little need for an assembly of counsellors, TV producers, monks and junkies – but you will need external coordinates of some kind upon which to focus your intention in order to bring into being your latent power. In my forties I can see the strata through which I have passed in order to progress from drug addict, to bewildered performer, to co-dependent love addict. I can see how significant relationships with elders and teachers enabled me to exceed limitations that I was bound by in solitude. I can now speculate more accurately as to what the next levels of progress might be. I know I need to continually learn how to be a better father and husband; I want to learn how to be effective in bringing positive change into the lives of vulnerable people; I want to serve as a conduit for impersonal, powerful forces that have guided human destiny for as long as there have been humans (is that too much to ask!).
These varied intentions will all require that I have a connection to inner power that cannot be accessed through purely rational means. I need to have a relationship with the ‘unknowable’. This impulse that led me to bother dear Rob Newman in a green room as I mistakenly believed he had some voodoo he could convey is now better directed at people who understand the nature of my intention and the parameters within which our relationship can operate. Throughout school, drama school, life on benefits and hopeful destitution I was looking for a way out, I was waiting for someone to whisper me the codes. Meanwhile I dealt with the steep city and its low gutters by burrowing through the underworld, alone and intoxicated, unable to receive teaching, even if it were offered.
Radhanath Swami is part of the guru–disciple tradition. He is himself from a western background and spent his early life disenchanted with the solutions that modernity offers to spiritual yearning. Somehow, without conventional instruction, he found his way to India and searched for a teacher who could help him to direct this nameless yearning, this yearning which I now believe is in us all and in its splintered and refracted form accounts for all superfluous desire. He met Prabhupada, for whom he felt immediate love and trust. When I imagine this love that disciples describe feeling when they first encounter their gurus, this love at first sight that Radhanath Swami felt for Prabhupada, that Yogananda felt for Yukteswar that Sheela felt for the Bhagwan, I can only compare it to romantic love. The plunging, elated, deracinating nausea that I have felt a dozen times across my life that surely through some divine lens could yet be viewed as glistening scars across my past. Always a woman, usually a stranger, always temporary, unsustainable. Searing, overwhelming, transcendent love: Anna Dear at eleven, Nikki in the next street at fourteen, Louise at sixteen, Penny, Chloe, Kerry, Amanda, Katy … when I view them as a list it becomes almost impersonal, as if they were a living ceremony, a sign that stirred this dormant and demented longing. As I got older I had relationships with these women and fell apart as they descended from the heavens where I’d placed them and to the earth where they belonged. Some of them loved me back. Curiously the feeling in me was no more sophisticated when I was a man than when I was a child. How could this feeling survive the demands of the material world? Of sex and gas bills? How could it endure the mundanity of bad plumbing, burnt toast and erectile dysfunction? This pure and blazing energy that means to pull you home to God and yet seemingly alights on angels. I envy the naturally religious; not nutters, not homophobes or those fixated on controlling others – that’s not religion. I mean those who quickly see that no material thing will ever make them feel whole, but that the invisible world is humming with love and they are able to connect to it. I fantasize about donning some ‘religious garb’, a robe, a dog-collar, a habit, even, and perhaps especially a blanket, to denote my resignation from formal society and my membership of the mystical. If only I’d known at eleven that I would never satiate the bilious compulsion through romantic obsession, that only a Higher Purpose would do – ah, the savings on chocolates, flowers and gold-plated bracelets, the poems and the inconvenience to uninterested women.
It has been said: ‘Addicts are not enslaved by drugs, drugs serve as an escape from the false ideals of a materialistic society.’ Our ideals are false. Our patriotism, our religion, our consumerism, our romanticism, our individualism – all false ideals of a materialistic society. Ideals that are used to ensure that material resources remain in the control of a limited group. Myths and stories, philosophies and systems congeal around this simple truth. What is it that is trying to express itself through the yearning I felt for those girls and women? I can tell you candidly it was not lust. They were almost always asexual quests I had unconsciously nominated these females as symbols of divinity, holiness, wholeness, completion, because I felt incomplete, tarnished, dirty.
Infidels, without fidelity, out of alignment with the ‘true frequency’. Like a needle that cannot ride the record’s groove. What is the ‘true frequency’? Are we really living in a post-truth world? Or does even that claim belie our awareness that there is an absolute truth that we are now failing to acknowledge? What are the values to which we refer? Forget God, what is good? What is kindness? What is love? And those who claim these too to be constructs are they not just wounded cynics, hurt and without hope? There is no measure of space or molecule sufficient to eliminate love. There is no way to step outside of the sphere of our sensory realm and its obvious limits to declare, ‘There is nothing out there, there is nothing in here.’ Those that would deny the sublime on the basis of the gross are making a leap of faith greater than any believer, they are excluding the possibility that there are phenomena that exceed our understanding, and the short history of our tiny kind has shown again and again that the limits of our knowledge are not the limits of knowledge itself. Neither do we possess the instruments to assess what true knowledge may entail. Therefore Faith. Therefore Acceptance. Therefore Love.
And yet we live as infidels, faithless, out of the groove of the invisible sublime, scratching through life as if we were just bodies, mouths, stomachs and shit and cum. This is the world materialism begets, this is the legacy of rationalism, strip away the iPhones and the comfort and this is our contract; we trade connection for distraction.
It is popular to reiterate, largely because of the irrefutable persuasiveness of Dr Jordan Peterson, that with values come hierarchies, that our order is immovable. But if we cherish the methods that enable us to inwardly connect, then we experience the depth of our sameness and the superficiality of our difference and we realize that outward systems that give precedence to our difference, even when underwritten by apparent values, are disingenuous, in that they contradict the deeper truth of our connection.
In order to live like this as an individual, let alone as a culture, we need mentors that have managed to overcome the systems that we are born into. For me as a white, western, working-class male, now economically privileged, I need mentors that know every aspect of that journey; not every mentor needs to know every aspect, but I do need guidance in each area. It’s not that my sole goal is to smash the state and dismantle the machinery of capitalism, I’ve done very well out of the state and capitalism. I’m typing this in a lovely house on a nice computer, I’m aware of how much worse it could be because it has been much worse for me, personally. Also, I do not doubt the horrifying tales I hear of suffering in Bangladesh as they struggle to accommodate Burmese refugees, or of the embattled people of Palestine, or even of the homeless of High Wycombe, but fifteen minutes away. I know I am lucky, materially and in many other ways. But the same way I can trace my adolescent infatuations to ill-fated marriage and ultimately to spiritual connection, I can trace my sense of personal injustice and longing for fairness to a broader more general belief that the world must become more fair. We all feel it, and the feeling is not naivety, it is the intuitive knowledge that a better reality is trying to be born through us.
The mentors I need now are to help me to maintain my connection to duty as a husband and a father, my focus as a professional and a provider, but I also need mentors to help me navigate the void within me to the planes where continuing external change is possible. I need men and women that have rejected the systems that contain me, inner and outer – whether those systems are personal insecurity or consumerism, our programming and conditioning depend upon the relationship between the inner and outer states. Radhanath Swami, like Amma, has entirely rejected the possibility that the material world can bring satisfaction. He prioritizes eternal principles such as compassion and integrity over temporary phenomena like prestige and haircuts. I need to study this as I still have a foot in each camp. Sometimes in meditation I experience impersonal consciousness that I can only recognize in retrospect (because when I am in it there is no I) and I feel the truth in it. Then I feel at some point in the same day lonely or tired, and the first idea that occurs to me is to look at porn or eat cake. ‘How do you not succumb to base emotions?’ I asked him. He said: ‘When I feel jealous or prideful it reminds me that I need to move closer to God.’
Actually it was Karl, my mate, who asked him, on a pleasant and peculiar occasion when the Swami visited our family home, on a day when my mum and her friends Jan and Derek were also present. It was a particular joy to see Jan and Derek, lovely people, perched with tea cups near the silent and beaming Swami. The word ‘swami’ means ‘he who is with himself’ and he was certainly with himself then. Everyone else just sat all awkward while he gazed at unfolding scenes from the Bhagavad Gita in the battlefield of his mind. It’s also what it’s like to be around Morrissey. Everyone else just has to deal with it.
The point is, even elevated souls are subject to the emotions that cause us agitation but they are able to use them as spurs to move closer to the light, more kindling to burn in ascension, rather than ignition for penurious action.
I’m, at point of writing, not planning to become a celibate monk, and most orders I’ve raised the possibility with have made it pretty clear they won’t have me. These gurus, though, will continue to mentor me as I relinquish a life where prestige, privilege and power continue to be my objectives, deliberately or otherwise. I live in a liminal space, half looking back to the man I used to be, mostly fixed forward on what I am becoming. I often feel the pull as real and as peculiar as gravity, a backward yearning, particularly when all before me is new and – in truth – often unclear.