The Song is Over

There’s an old 1970s song by the Who that has, at seminal points across my life, surfaced at times when a key life stage has finally reached an end. Certainly the overall theme of the song itself and words are in general not particularly relevant to my life story, and it’s often a mistake to try and push symbolic equivalence too far anyway. But there is something about the melody and words of the opening bars that, in the way that only music perhaps can, conveys an ineffable feeling of the moment of an ending, the significance of that, even a strange triumph in it, and perhaps also one that needs to come into being.

 

 

 

I first used to listen to this song many decades ago as a young archaeology graduate student making my first trip to Ecuador, as South America had ever been the ‘land of my dreams’, and there the mountains were the Andes and the sea the Pacific Ocean. Hearing this now, towards the end of my life instead of then when I was still pretty much at the beginning, connects the me I am now with the me I was then in that all important completion of a circle. Then and indeed for many years it was unimaginable that I would ever find myself in India, living in that melting pot of cultures, that oh so hot land of plains, foothills, forests, or in the high cold Himalayas, where I have been coming since the commencement of the Pilgrimage years in 2019. India had little to no symbolic significance for me across most of my life, excepting inasmuch as it was where my father had grown up and gone to school in Dehradun, with the family based in Kanpur, back in the days of ‘British India’. The culture, the religion, its history and politics, and everything else about it remained quite unimportant to me, so it came as a shock to realise that I felt an increasingly strong calling to come here following the ending of the project I had been employed in up to then with the University of York, that had involved my being based in Ecuador for the first two years of its three year duration. The imperative to wrap everything up and leave for India within a month of the project end was felt with increasing urgency.

Since arriving into India this latest visit I have felt as though under a sort of spell, and been completely unable to write. It feels more than a classic writers’ block, but something more ‘existential’ and serious. It’s as though a new cosmic order is emerging from the depths to displace earlier modus operandi and their attendant personality dynamics.

I talk about being ‘called’, but how should I explain this, what does it feel like to be called and how would you recognise this from something that can be experienced equally strongly, desire? The need to confront oneself and conditionings is a necessary prerequisite to undertaking the spiritual journey, so that one is better able to distinguish these, because otherwise and probably inevitably, deep seated unconscious desires will invade the system and try to hijack it for their own ends. Because of this, each new stage of the journey will often entail a difficult process of ‘stripping down’ of the innate self and a purgation of the will demanding complete surrender. This surrender cannot be achieved as an act of the will of the ego, but entails a process of submission to the dominant Divine will achieved through the actual circumstances of one’s life at that particular stage. This is not in any way a comfortable experience!

To be ‘called’ feels very different and manifests more as an insistent inner drive of psychic energy in a particular direction that will brook no interference. I have described it as being like a salmon returning to its spawning grounds across oceans, and up steep river courses, a drive that will brook no obstacle. There is no effective choice of the will in this whatever, but something that takes over the will and forces the process. How many times have I longed for the perceived simplicity of a more conventional notion of life than this all consuming drive for a goal so impossibly high it even defies description and involves the renunciation and sacrifice of everything deemed to be “normally human” (1).

So, what ‘song’ is over then?

The whole notion and attendant paraphernalia of this Pilgrimage conducted within the framework of the Hindu (largely Shivaite) religion entailing pujas at temples and explicit espousing of the associated beliefs and rituals, that started way back on New Year’s day 2020 in Kerala, with my visit to the Guruvayoor temple. Although, in fairness, there was never a time when I actually internalised this practice in a way that led me to believe I had actually become a true convert (2), it was nevertheless accorded to me as a kind of visa that permitted me to operate within that world with legitimacy. The calling I felt when still back in the UK, from Christmas onwards, to return here to the Gangotri region and to the ancient Kalp Kedar temple, was in the nature of how I described it above, producing the first version of this new website and blog, a set of rudraksha mala beads and orange silk scarf, all representing commitments to return here. I arrived into India the day after my birthday and was based in Rishikesh for four weeks before I eventually was able to travel up to the mountains and I can see that that time was very necessary to prepare me by letting go of many of the earlier associations I had had with the place and developing the ‘spiritual maturity’ I had written of earlier (3).

And so I eventually arrived into Dharali late one afternoon to begin my stay. It was met quite unexpectedly with a sense of everything that had so motivated me to return in the preceding months being abruptly take away, as with the analogy of the rug being pulled from under your feet. It felt immensely destabilising to confront the total loss of everything that had represented the container for this Pilgrimage practically since its inception. Whatever the numinous significance of the mountains and associated scenery and however transcendental my earlier experiences here all evaporated into a complete nothingness. The region was just the region, the mountains and their sublime spruce forests just mountains with trees, the settlement itself just a small simple Himalayan village where people lived very basic subsistence lives.

Eventually over the succeeding weeks I was able to work through this experience to reach an understanding which allowed a new way forward. But although it is helpful, even necessary to understand, by constructing new frameworks of interpretation, the actual experience itself can feel pretty annihilating when you have built your entire life and rationale upon it. I watched, as it were, the entire India experience and associated religious observances fall away from me totally, leaving nothing behind. As I was working through this, the May Shiva festivity took place at Kalp Kedar temple, attended by hundreds of the local community. Thither I also went, dressed as of old in one of my Indian festive outfits and made one final puja of letting go, when I left my mala beads on the altar. And I came away certain that this constituted the final and definitive ending of this period that had stretched on intermittently since my first arrival here in 2020.

So here I am in India now with no apparent reason to be here any more, the entire Trojan horse of the container it represented having fallen apart. Should this matter? Not really. It’s not the container that matters, but what it contains. A religion or spiritual tradition is but the means to an ultimate end, not that end in itself. When you look at the substance of a rocket before it is launched into space, it seems immense, its physical body is composed of several parts, each designed to play a role in placing the object (such as a satellite) into orbit. Once that is achieved, or whatever the relevant stage is for that part of the rocket, then it will simply fall away, back toward earth to be incinerated in the earth’s atmosphere. All that mattered was achieving the placement of the satellite into orbit. Unless you can break free of the container, then it could become your prison or your coffin. How many religions or so called spiritual traditions become just this? There is always a point you have to leave the conveyancer and continue your journey to its ultimate destination on foot.

And so where to now? Wherever the Spirit leads me. Time, as ever, will tell …

 

 

 

(1) https://turbulentpriest.net/2024/02/03/the-price-of-enlightenment/

(2) Explained in In the Spirit website: Pilgrimage. A Very Personal Journey

(3) https://turbulentpriest.net/2024/02/13/was-it-all-a-dream/

(4) Translation by Juan Mascaró