Chapter I: GATEWAY OF INDIA


The orange glow of a distant sunrise began to creep over the horizon as I stood on the flight deck of an ageing Boeing 707 heading towards Bombay. The journey from Cairo was half over and the crew wore expressions of boredom as they sat monitoring the banks of instruments around them. Most of the passengers were asleep. Below, the Arabian desert stretched endlessly into the distance. Flying close to its maximum ceiling, the ‘plane must have appeared as no more than a slight vapour trail high up in the pale-blue dome of the approaching dawn.


Sunrise over India from Egyptair Boeing 707, 'Mubarrak', Flightdeck

The sun’s rays began to illuminate the fuselage and to wash over the leading edge of the huge, graceful wings bearing us to our destination. I thought of the very first poem I had written in my early ‘teens ... something about the desert’s burning sands. And of another I had never completed that had risen in my mind’s eye as the vision of a vast, fiery sun over some inner world within. With it had come the phrase, ‘Burning, burning comes the dawn.’

I had feared its apocalyptic portent and it was only much later that I understood the image of the sun signified the burning away of the dross of the old world, the dawn coming as harbinger of the new. As we flew into daylight I felt the colours of my vision rise out of the subconscious and weave themselves into the present in which I found myself. After the passing of twenty-eight years I was returning to the Indian sub-continent where I had been born, whence I had begun this life.

Once, I had stood as a child, with my parents, under the Gateway of India. Bombay (now Mumbai) had been the first port-of-call since our ship had steamed away from Colombo, Ceylon. I had forsaken my childhood years for a new life in the West. A new life in the old world of my fathers: Europe. Now, I returned to the more ancient world of my motherland, Asia.

During those years of exile I had suffered a deep sense of loss and alienation. For without roots there can be no happiness and living becomes fragmented. Over many years I had sought cultural and spiritual roots to heal my fragments. Much of that healing had taken place on inner planes and what lay ahead was something far greater than the sum of any one lifetime. Today, my ‘plane’ flew towards the burning fires of Bhagavan Surya, the Lord of the Sun.

The old passenger liner that had borne us over the oceans had long since ended its life in the breaker’s yard. Part of the departed Empire into which I, like my parents, had been born. They too were gone and the world itself prepared to enter a new millennium. How far had I really travelled — how many lives had I lived through — to get to this eventful time? How many years had I waited to witness this future? Several millennia and more maybe since it is said that it takes twenty million years for the life of a human to evolve from the mineral state! And then, how many more before it merges back into God?

As I sat in my passenger-seat I knew that I was close to that journey’s end. Somewhere in south India I would reach the Avathar1 of the Age, the Divine Mother-Father, infinite Alpha and Omega. Morning burst into the cabin and its inhabitants began to stir into awakening. Inside me I felt a tremendous lightness as if a great circle of time moved towards its completion.


The year had been a momentous one. 1987, the Hopi year of the Rainbow Light Dreams when a great psychic change had begun to take place within all life on our Planet.2 The Amerindian prophecies had struck a chord of recognition within me as in countless others. That August an event forecast by the Maya over 5000 years before had moved the Earth into evolutionary convergence with all the other heavenly bodies in its Solar System.

At noon on the seventeenth day of that month — when the stars we know as the Pleiades in the constellation of Taurus lay poised over the place called El Tule in southern Mexico — the Spirit of the Thunderbird ascended from the centre of the Earth to circle it twice along two great lines of primal energy, intertwining the dual forces of Shiva and Shakti in a cosmic embrace.3 Thus, the planetary chakras or power centres were re-energized in preparation for the great transformation to take place during the quarter-century to come.

The highly sophisticated Mayan calendrics had foreseen this over five millennia ago.4 Today, the fulfilling of earthly, solar and galactic events are presaged by the incarnation of the Lord of Time and Space whose number — in both Amerindian and Indian traditions — is Nine.5 The Kalki Avathar, Quetzalcoatl, Kukulcan, Pacal Votan, Wakan Tanka, Lud the Celtic God of Light, known also as King Arthur of the Kingdom of Avalon, Ahura Mazda, Maitreya, The Christ Messiah who has come to close an old age and to watch over the birth of another, more wondrous era.

“This Planet has a purpose in the great galaxy in which it is held,” Sai Baba tells us. “That purpose is now unfolding before our eyes ... The time is approaching when all humanity will live in harmony. That time will be here sooner than one expects. Before it arrives be prepared for whatever is needed to reveal to every living thing the true purpose of existence. It is not what anyone can imagine, it is not something that one can try to aspire to. It is beyond all comprehension. I can say that its beauty is magnificent beyond all dreams.” 6

In the spring an unexpected windfall from the taxman had provided me with the money to buy an air-ticket to India. I had discovered Sai Baba three years before and a series of powerful, synchronous events had persuaded me that he really was the Avathar — the Divine Principle, incarnate in human form, who has come to answer the countless prayers of the good. My intuition told me that the Rainbow Light dreams of the Hopi were an aspect of the Avathar’s mission ... for the rainbow is the sign of the Lord’s covenant with all earthly life. So, to travel to the Lord seemed the most perfect way to end the year.

As the ‘plane began its long descent towards the Indian coast I recalled an evening in my childhood when I had held my father’s hand as we stood by the railway line outside Colombo. The Sun was lowering itself into the Indian Ocean as we gazed at the horizon. I felt excited, watching the comings and goings of the ships as they made their way in and out of the harbour. Big freighters from Japan and liners from faraway places lay anchored out at sea waiting for the call from the harbour pilot. Soon we would be on one of those ships nosing out, majestically, towards the unknown. It would carry us away to another country, another life.

I recalled the dusk and the twinkling harbour lights as I stood alone on the deck of that ship, hearing a voice inside me say, “Look well and remember this scene. Then, turn your back and walk away from it all.” Obeying, I registered the time and place in my memory, turned around and went below decks, away from the first eleven years of my life.

Next morning the harbour was gone. Flying fish leapt silver in the sunlight over a green ocean churned into a great froth by the ship’s propellers. In the distance I could see the palm-lined Malabar Coast and to the west the islands of Lakshadweep. Ahead lay Bombay, the last Asian landfall. Then the Arabian Gulf, Aden, Suez, Port Said, the Mediterranean and Europe.


The Boeing skimmed alarmingly low over a ragged shanty-town near the final approach to Sahar International Airport. Bouncing untidily onto the runway, its jet engines screamed into reverse thrust to bring the ‘plane’s speed down rapidly. It taxied onto the tarmac apron shimmering in the midday heat. Soon we were out in the busy, modern airport building. At the Immigration Desk an officer perused my Entry Card on which I had stated my purpose for visiting as ‘Pilgrimage to Prashanti Nilayam — ashram of Sri Sathya Sai Baba.’

“So you have come all this way to see Sai Baba!” he exclaimed, his face lighting up with delight. Then, reaching into his shirt pocket he produced a picture of Baba. I wondered if this was the Lord’s way — his leela7 — of welcoming my partner, Jenny, and me to India.


Now I was back in Asia would I find what I had lost there long ago? Would the Lord heal me of all my wounds? Deep inside each of us we hold the memories of many other lives. Personal ‘myths’ about who we are and who we were before. These ‘myths’ flow beyond the farther shores of finite time, beyond our mortal limitations. In them we may discover a wealth of experience we might have never imagined — stories of other times. Through these stories we may begin to open doors into self-knowledge, into other dimensions of time and space. We may begin to understand ourselves differently — to know Atma8 — for these ‘myths’ are more than fairy tales.

As I have begun to heal myself of the anguish of self-doubt and loss of spirituality I have come to understand the importance of these inner stories residing within us. And I too have become a healer, a witness to the inner stories of those who have sought my help. I have watched as others relive experiences outside the consensus-reality of what we call normal life, seen the separation between the third and higher dimensions melt away as they have made their voyages to places beyond this lifetime. Eternal places that live outside our normality as perhaps part of the planetary memory of the Gaia-field.9 Once contacted, we come face-to-face with the One who awaits our awakening.

This book is about the story of inner and outer experiences which have helped me to see beyond the illusion of the everyday struggle of existence, how I began to open myself to a realm of reality beyond the third dimension. “Go beyond the illusion!” I have heard the inner voice so often urge me, “for there you will find Me!” With slow, painful efforts I have made the first infant steps into that reality.

It is the story of personal experience — how the inner myth revealed itself and brought me to the place where the spirit lives and dreams. When I have come close to that spirit — sometimes brushing the fleeting, sometimes the eternal — I have learnt that the very best expectations and hopes we may have of ourselves are worth cherishing and holding onto no matter how daunting may seem the road ahead. For they, above all, constitute the reality of who we are and why we are here in this life.


Tired and jet-lagged, Jenny and I found ourselves thrust, all-of-a-sudden, into the noise and merry-go-round of Bombay. At Santa Cruz, the domestic airport, we tried to buy tickets for the evening ‘plane to Bangalore. “Sorry, all seats are taken. Day-after-tomorrow is earliest you can book now,” the man at Indian Airlines told us. We decided to catch a bus into the city and try the train instead. The rush and crowds and colours and smells and noise threatened to overwhelm us. We collapsed into the bus and sat dazed as it drove us down Swami Vivekanand Road, the driver — using the split-second Zen of Indian road-sense — regularly blowing on a rubber bulb-horn to clear the path for his juggernaut.

The city sprawled in a conglomeration of badly-built high-rise blocks, treeless lots where young children played cricket and the ubiquitous shanty towns which rose wherever a space permitted. The bus stopped at traffic lights and up on a third-floor balcony I watched a domestic row taking place. The drama was heightened by the wild, accusatory gestures and facial expressions of the participants which reminded me of the stylized movements of Kathakali.10 Then the lights turned green again and we drove on to Chowpatty Beach and Churchgate where we alighted outside the Bombay Talkies.

Finally, at the busy Victoria Terminus we discovered that we would have to wait until the following day to get sleepers on the Bangalore Express. “But you can spend the night in the Station Hotel,” we were told. So, that night we slept in the old, colonial railway hotel, above the pavements and crowds around the terminus. I lay restively on the bed feeling too tired to sleep. The prospect of a train journey across India excited me. During the ‘fifties I had made just such a journey as a five-year-old, with my family, when we had travelled from Madras (now Chennai) to Bangalore and then onto the Nilgiri Hills.

On that occasion we had flown in an old Dakota from Ratmalana, Colombo. Somewhere below I recalled spotting a steam train making its long haul south, leaving behind a trail of smoke. The memory of that early visit to the vast Indian sub-continent — seeming even bigger to a small child — flooded back now. Only a year ago, a friend of mine had told me that she could see rails taking me straight to Sai.11 Now it was about to come true.

At some point I must have fallen asleep. Then, about five-thirty AM the temporary lull of the sleeping hours was broken: first, by the loud morning chorus of birds and then by a harsh voice making a repetitive announcement over the Station’s PA system. Railway announcers everywhere sound unintelligible I thought slipping out of bed to take a shower before the delivery of Sunday newspapers at seven o’clock and hot chai sweetened with condensed milk.


Later that morning we took an auto-rickshaw to the Gateway of India. Several hours remained before our train left Dadar for the south and we decided to indulge ourselves in a buffet meal at the Taj Mahal Hotel where we could eat and then sit in air-conditioned comfort, watching people and recovering from the ‘plane journey the day before.

There it was: The Gateway! The same imposing Victorian monument under which I had once stood before. I had returned, full-circle, to the symbolic point of entry and departure where the great mystery of India begins. Despite all the materialistic encroachments of the twentieth century its soul has remained constant and from it the torch of Sanathana Dharma has burned through the ages for all to see.12

Out on the glistening water an oil-platform proclaimed a modern India. The Soviet Fleet was visiting. I watched a turbaned commissionaire outside the sleek glass doors of the Taj salute several times as a Soviet admiral and his entourage climbed out of a white Mercedes. He was followed by a retinue of junior officers whose rank was denoted, I imagined, by the ever-humbler status of vehicle which had carried them to the marble opulence of the hotel. That afternoon we whiled away the hours, sitting in the lobby watching neatly-dressed businessmen from Malaysia and Hong Kong, sweating European tourists and large Middle Eastern families going about their day. How very different this society was from the one immediately outside those glass doors, I thought. Around the hotel swimming pool others lay about roasting their bodies under the fierce Bombay sun.

I was overcome by a sense of revulsion. This kind of wealthy, international society existed everywhere. What claim did it have to be part of the indigenous population of any nation? It was in the streets and villages where squalor and wisdom lived next to each other that India had touched my heart. Yet I too was part of this and had chosen to indulge myself in the ostentations of the affluent. I kept seeing the young child at the railway station, begging on all fours, his limbs deliberately broken to turn him into a grotesque, spidery caricature of humanity. Yet, in his face I had seen the innocence of God shining through. For my self-righteousness — and greedy appetite no doubt — I ended my lunch that day with an unpleasant stomach upset, the only one I was to have on the journey.

Confused and emotionally fraught by the paradox of India, my stomach churning, I sat next to Jenny in the hotel lobby and felt the tears well-up inside me. What was it I was trying to grasp? How long the road I had travelled amidst wealth and poverty, joy and sorrow, bliss and terror, goodness and badness, wisdom and ignorance ... just to get to this moment? How long had that eternity taken to get me here now, only a few hundred miles away along the railway track from the Lord?


© RW 1989