Was it all a Dream?

After writing ‘Return to the Source’, last in the series of posts for the website In the Spirit(1), a long empty impasse opened into my life, which I struggled to make sense of. After a fleeting return of a sense of the numinous around my return to Gangotri mid-March, the following weeks panned out slowly, increasingly leached of any of the magical feelings that had so sustained me the previous years. Wherever I went, the harsh uncompromising reality of modern India, devoid of any sense of the numinous, beat noisily upon my shores.  I left Rishikesh and went to Goa for six weeks, a real frying pan to fire experience, given the heat of the season. The relentless overwhelming tourism of the north was replaced by charmless beach culture, the entire coast, beautiful enough on its own terms, taken over by a combination of sunseekers from disparate global locations and new age wellness groupies. I had determined to sweat it out (literally) by doing without air conditioning to try and save money, condemning myself to nights drenched in heat and mosquitos, the overhead ceiling fans beating futilely at the air like relentless helicopters. Superheated air descended blanket like during frequent power cuts. The days and weeks extended interminably. Returning eventually to Rishikesh, an abortive attempt to relocate in Higher Tapovan away from the noise and crowds of the Badrinath Road backfired as the location proved to be an epicentre of the new age wellness yoga scene, together with several guesthouse dogs that roamed the premises at night barking long and loudly, ensuring sleepless nights and stressful days.

Hotel Greenhills had ever seemed a kind of proxy home for me since the long months of lockdown in 2020 and I had ever returned there. Now however it had become a lot more expensive and overrun with the urban tourism emanating from Delhi and surrounding provinces. There seemed nowhere else to go, and my trusted guide and driver Sahdev assured me that everywhere in the north and the mountain locations were similarly overrun and destitute of the peace I longed for. Two polarities struggled awkwardly: to force the issue and stay and try to perpetuate a sense of my spiritual journey, or to accept ‘reality’ (defeat in fact) and return to the UK as I had done almost exactly the same time a year ago. With no new insights or personal strengths to call on, probably inevitably it proved impossible to keep the dream alive and so, with a heavy heart,  I made plans to return.

I am writing this in a little café overlooking a footbridge across the river and the looming medieval castle of a small historical city in the north of England. I have lived in this region these last six months since the turmoil of my return from India last June, and the frantic search for accommodation that succeeded. It has been the hardest time, yet also I must acknowledge much needed, to make sense of the barren and purposeless feeling period which followed the formal ending of the Pilgrimage years. Since concluding the period of the Nepal extension in November 2021, the sublime spiritual energy that had sustained me gradually dissipated. A renewal of some kind seemed called for, some phoenix emerging from the ashes of the old, but however would this be achieved? As the months wore slowly by, and I struggled unsuccessfully to adapt to my changed life circumstances back in Britain, an order of life I have ever found meaningless and deadening, I made another sort of journey, deep into my inner world and workings to see what clues might be found there as to why I had not been able to sustain the challenges of the journey, what the way forward might be and what would be needed for it.

I wonder now if the 2019-2022 Pilgrimage was in fact a kind of dress rehearsal for something far more ambitious. Most certainly it achieved many of the sought goals, but returning these several times, finally to confront the truth that I had lost any sense of direction and effectively stalled, told another story: that something had been required of me at the end of that set of journeys that I hadn’t recognised. I had needed to evolve or transcend to a higher plane of being, otherwise all I would do would indeed be to go around in circles. This required it seems what I have since called ‘spiritual maturity’: a deeper self awareness and a more evolved vision and instincts that can go beyond the boundaries of existing circumstances at the level of the original journey, to whatever beckoned beyond. As the billboards proclaimed in Delhi International airport back in those Pilgrimage days: ‘The Best and Beyond’.

I began to see that what had been called for was not an ending, but a new beginning, phoenix like indeed. Simply looking to perpetuate the experiences of the original Pilgrimage with no further personal growth would inevitably lead to going round purposelessly in circles. Unless engaging in the iterative learning process to advance and illuminate the life process, then probably inevitably one will do just that, as so many people do in fact, getting stuck in the same place for most of their life, getting older certainly, but not much wiser.

With the passing of Christmas and the coming of the New Year, I could feel the long impasse lifting and new creative energies and with them, a better sense of purpose, starting to flow once more. I felt I had built, or otherwise reinforced foundations upon which new growth could be made. And, after feeling I would never see India again, having burned out on that experience of the land when I left back in the summer, I realised that most certainly I could, and indeed should, return there in the spring, with the confidence that I could now sustain the challenges of that strangest of countries, with its awkward juxtaposition of the sublimely spiritual, and the stridently material. The next stage of the Journey – Pilgrimage 2 – beckons, as the dream becomes reality again.

(1) https://elizabethcurrie.info/2023/04/05/return-to-the-source/

(2) Image of Phoenix from: https://medium.com/thethursdaythought/the-phoenix-must-first-burn-to-emerge-phoenix-businesses-phoenix-life-963493b33d83