Off Grid Living
Off Grid Living. What exactly is that? On my Facebook platform, it is one of the suggested pages I follow, along with Tiny Homes and several others which are specifically dedicated to Indian heritage or travel destinations. I leave them there as they are attractive enough to have on the feed, given it seems impossible to opt for no adverts or suggested pages to follow. Mountain Cabins in another much like Off Grid Living, featuring seductive looking scenes of chique rustic dwellings with designer interiors and picture windows opening onto expansive mountain vistas, with lakes, waterfalls and pine forests. Much like where I am living now in fact, minus the interior designer crafted casual luxury of course, given my home is currently at a small guesthouse in a traditional Himalayan village.
Living in Dharali is in some ways reminiscent of the different times I spent living in the Andes, the lifeways are so similar. Of course there are significant dietary differences given Andean people are enthusiastic meat eaters, including the Andean festive favourite: pork, eschewed here in what is largely a vegetarian culture (occasional chicken, eggs and, more rarely, mutton excepted), but also proscribed as profane within the Hindu religion. That other characteristic Andean all purpose domesticate – the guinea pig – is similarly absent.
As, at least until recently, a self styled sadhu, purportedly living a simple life as a renunciate in a Himalayan village, I am well enough aware that this is stretching the definition of what a sadhu really is, in Indian terms, although the genre is eclectic enough. Certainly there are many sadhus on the roads around these parts given it is the main route up to Gangotri, one of the four important Chardham pilgrimage destinations. But whatever category of wandering holyman they conform to, they are clearly without home or possessions, dressed simply in plain robes, usually of the classic saffron colour.
As explained in my other website In the Spirit, I have never really opted for assuming the clothing, or uniform of any order, to demonstrate to the world who I am, or perhaps better said, what I consider myself to be. Throughout all of the main Pilgrimage years I always wore pretty much the same sort of clothing I have always worn, excepting for the times I conducted formal pujas at temples, when I generally had a special outfit for that purpose. More recently, in the run up to leaving the UK to return to India, I got myself a string of the mala rudraksha beads and a long orange silk scarf, which were important to define a sort of promise to myself, that I was returning to the sadhu life I felt I had lost touch with since the several returns made to the UK, and all that had entailed, in the previous two years. This new website was similarly envisaged. They were the outward expression of my inner intention. So, what happens when you complete the journey?
The two previous years seem to have been about just that: finishing the journey, although it is always hard to get a valid perspective on where you are when you are still in progress. Since my arrival – finally – here into the Gangotri region, I have felt the entire imperative of this extraordinary period, started at the end of 2019, fall away, together with all the props and adopted rituals that had been so necessary to sustain it. They seem irrelevant now. So what do I return with? I return with my Self (literally realisation or connection with what Eastern theology terms the Ātman ie Self [1]) and with something else too, the memories of that extraordinary journey that gave me what Jesus calls ‘the Pearl of Great Price’.
Off Grid Living has now become a concept to lure the affluent into investing in a vacation home somewhere ‘away from it all’, out in the wilderness. The plush interior furnishings and the table on the balcony set for two, the distant view reflected in a glass of wine, belie the hardness of real off grid life: the wandering of roads, the rough sleeping, the begging for food, the coldness of the nights at high altitude. This is the lot of the true ascetic, though whether all ascetics find eventual Enlightenment is debatable. It was never my lot to live like this, and I doubt I would have had the capacity to anyway, but I had renounced enough of the former life that had defined me, perhaps just enough, still to qualify.
I have used the term ‘sadhu’ more as a concept to define a period so necessary in any true spiritual seeker’s life, of leaving their world of mundane reality with all its conditionings and comfort zones, to go off into the real wilderness where the only true wisdom is ever found [2]. That is off grid living. It’s strange, terrible sometimes, frequently obscure, entailing long empty periods when nothing much happens at all. It courts you with visions and tortures you with doubts, and challenges all of your cherished notions and norms. But there are moments so sublime, so inspirational, so impossible to be rendered into mere words, that when, eventually, you do return, you will never be the same again. It has changed you forever, and, as all true alchemical processes, will have remade you of gold.
[1] Many theologies, particularly Christianity, use the generic term ‘God’ for this, whereas the far more nuanced and meaningful term ‘Self’ (Ātman in ancient Sanskrit text) is most often used in Eastern theologies. I discuss this and related concepts in https://elizabethcurrie.info/of-god-and-self/ and https://elizabethcurrie.info/self-and-self-realisation
[2] A concept explored from the perspective of Siberian shamanism in Michael Ripinsky-Naxon, 1993. The Nature of Shamanism. Substance and Function of a Religious Metaphor. Suny Press. “The only true wisdom is found far from humanity, out in the wilderness, and is only gained through suffering”.
