Varanasi Delirium

“What is God? He is the breath inside the breath.” Kabir

Benares, May 1971 

From chapter 32 of Sovereign Souls

It must be at least 35 degrees. I groggily stagger up to the deck of this houseboat on the Ganges suffering from a delirium caused by acute dysentery. I should never have eaten that in Rawalpindi! One rupee a day to sleep here on the most holy river in all India. I am eighteen years old and (on reflection now) in search of my own soul. I lurch into the relentless sunlight. My foot finds the sharp edge of a knife that someone has left stuck vertically on the wooden deck floor. It surgically cuts deep into the soft tissue between my big toe and the next. This means that my one and only respite from the damnable heat, to slip into the cool river daily, is gone. Instant infection would be the result of an open wound in this open sewer where millions come to be purified. I do not have the same faith in its purity as these pilgrims, some of whom know they will die here after their final ablutions in this ancient and powerfully shamanic city. Death is inescapably present.

These pilgrims would not have far to go as the ghats here are full of burning pyres where the dead endlessly go up in smoke. Their charred bones are hurled into the river day and night. Swimming here is therefore a navigating between the charcoal remains of bodies who were breathing humans yesterday, probably looking at this same surreal scene as I am now. Who looks out of these young eyes, old eyes, sick eyes and final eyes?

I bandage the foot roughly and fall back into the bunk below dejected, back into delirium, to sleep and fitfully dream the day away until the evening cool returns. But then! There is something acutely poignant about watching the fires burn as the sun sets over Benares. It is basically indescribable how the soul can see beauty absolutely everywhere in its well-seasoned awareness of perfect transience.

I believe there is a strong correlation between extreme circumstances and soul revelation. In times of security and peace, prosperity and stability people will clearly feel little need of a soul. Why would you need an invisible, supernatural and unscientific entity like a soul when the bank account is full and when three meals a day is a given?

I have left that world intentionally to be here where death is just across the water from this houseboat and indeed floats all around me. These people have no doubt about their souls, their atman. They believe that we re-incarnate again and again based on our actions while we are alive. Nearby this city is where Buddha started his life as a preacher reminding people of that key tenet of Buddhism, anicca, everything passes, everything changes, nothing lasts.

For much of human history all we had was a belief in soul. Scientists of the mind will confidently tell you we invented spiritual entities like souls to deal with the extreme deprivation and danger of our evolutionary past.  They will insist that man created God and not the other way around. They will also tell you that it is fatal to drink the water of the river here at Benares. But hey, look how he and she does! Every day the believers come here to the ghats to sincerely purify in it and yes, some diehards do drink it like an elixir, so holy is this place in their hearts. And yes, they do have faith that the waters of the river Ganges are so powerful in washing away our ‘bad’ karma. The water does nothing. The mind does everything as it always has and always will. Try bottling Ganges water and gifting it to a sick friend. Then you will know how dysentery feels no doubt as you urinate from your anus at the most inconvenient times!

Does the wet brain concoct such a belief? And if so, how do electrical and chemical impulses manage to override the biology of bacteria and infection? Yes, the placebo effect we all know about but as yet nobody has sufficiently explained the actual mechanism by which a belief changes our physical reality. How does a multiple personality harbour ten or more ‘people’ who each have differing physiologies, some with deadly allergies and others with none? Bill eats strawberries and has anaphylaxis but Jane eats them with relish? All in one body? Pray explain that Herr Doktor!

Somehow, I knew that a life of wandering and deprivation would bring me closer to this soul I felt surely existed but had precious little information or experience about. Many of the great yogis and masters I had already studied by age eighteen, such as Sri Aurobindo whose book The Adventure of Consciousness had gripped my mind like a vice back in Old Delhi (with the French heroin addicts), had indeed led lives as beggars.

Thousands of sadhus throng this city every day. Their trident spears and their near naked bodies are the proud symbols they bear of a belief in Shiva and exemplified by their total renunciation of material comforts. Here the people gladly support them with food and sometimes shelter because they are doing what we all should do at least once in our lives. It is surely found in every tradition on the planet: Be a pilgrim. Barefoot and wearing only a loincloth I got much support too. Was there really an essential difference between the nagar baba sadhus four times my physical age and this emaciated teenager some may have looked on as privileged? As souls, no.

Sri Aurobindo

We all need to live on the very edge (at least once!) to understand where we have come from and where we are going. My fever-fed delirium was getting worse. I almost feared I might end up soon on a pyre too when the sheer heaviness of my situation bore down upon me.

Yet when I was finally awake, usually in the evening or very early morning, the magic of this place was completely intoxicating. As far as I could be from the security of a developed Western nation here, I was able to start picking up transmissions from my soul about how to conduct this inscrutable pilgrimage on earth. The noise of white man entitlement was radically dimmer here. These signals from my soul were very scrambled in the beginning but one of them was so recurrent as if it had become a mantra in itself. This message said,

“Don’t worry, it will all work out!”

Put yourself in that situation now. You have no money beyond the next few days boat rental. You have not the strength to get off the boat and weave through thousands of devout Hindus to find a morsel to eat. Besides you know that to eat means more diseased gut eruptions. You have no friends here but occasionally a fellow traveler will rent the sleeping space below too and hand you a banana. You could die here. No big deal. Everybody else does! You await the cool evening air and the possibility of awakening from torpor to remember why you came here at all. All my childhood friends were now at university or working as plumbers, street sweepers or bartenders. They were on a different planet altogether. Why choose this? At the time I would have been hard pressed to deliver any kind of answer to that fundamental question.

Decades later I am reading a book by an esteemed Tibetan Tulku (spiritual master) by the name of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche entitled In Love With The World. The subtitle reads A monk’s Journey through the bardos of living and dying and includes a very important chapter in Varanasi, or Benares as it used to be called when I was there half a century ago.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

Born into a spiritual family of Tibetan Buddhist adepts he was trained to control his mind through meditation from a very early age and by the time he left it all at thirty-six he had established meditation centres around the world and was treated as something like the Dalai Lama by his devotees East and West. The praise! The devotion! The fame!

And yet no doubt fueled by the same inscrutable longing as myself back then the young master just fatefully slipped out of his monastery one night. What an amazing decision for a spoiled young spiritual superstar such as he! He had never been in a taxi or on a train in his entire life! He had never, ever been without attendants and devotees since birth. His spiritual heroes included Milarepa however. That icon of Tibetan Buddhism led an extraordinary life of extremely evil sorcery that led to an ascetic wandering spanning decades. This culminated in his profound understanding of his own multidimensional-soul-reality. Milarepa was a true bum. So too would Yongey become himself in order to properly test his ability to practise the eightfold path, to truly live as a Buddha in a world of ceaseless change.

Almost dying at one point from severe food poisoning the sincere monk spent four and a half years as a wandering bum, a sadhu of sorts, before finally returning to his monastery having really practised what he had preached. If you can recall, Falco (in an earlier chapter) the leader of the Italian community of Damanhur did something similar. At the height of his success in creating a spiritual/ecological community he suddenly announced he was leaving to practice the Game of Life. You might see that as part of an ancient tradition which has always existed to short circuit the ego who wants to be spiritually advanced. Falco and his merry band of alchemists just took off one day leaving the remaining ‘devotees’ totally non plussed. They returned years later to more fully develop the spirit of a radical community bent on changing the catastrophic timeline humanity now appears well ensconced in.

It was for this reason that in the early centuries of Christian history many hungry souls left the cities and the churches that had begun to control the religion, and subsequently disappeared into the Egyptian desert for the rest of their lives. Living in extreme poverty and with absolutely no outward show of religiously moral behaviour they shut themselves in their cells and prayed without ceasing. They are called the Desert Fathers. For them such a life was a blessing since they knew full well that the progress of the human soul, the polishing it needs to emerge through the thick fog of sense, is a very tricky undertaking that often requires great abandonment of security and the very real courage to face the unknown alone, day after day. People like that can scarcely be seen to exist in a century so wholly devoted to nonsense.

But of course, that is not the only way to approach your soul. Kabir was a great poet who was born in Varanasi in the late fourteenth century. He was well aware of spiritual materialism too and wrote in, Saints I've seen both ways: “Hindus and Muslims don't want discipline; they want tasty food. The Hindu keeps the eleventh-day fast, eating chestnuts and milk. He curbs his grain but not his brain, and breaks his fast with meat.”

"Wherever you are is the entry point." Kabir