Chapter IV: THE YEARS OF AHRIMAN1

Since the departure of the spiritualist Major who had previously occupied my room the atmosphere at the boarding-house had become increasingly violent. The LSD sessions had alienated me from most of the other lodgers who thought of me as a weirdo. Except for the couple who lived in the apartment upstairs who were tolerant and open-minded. Maurice lectured at the London School of Economics and his wife was an ex-actress. He and I used to have long talks about religion and the LSD experience.

One day my landlady’s agent called me about a complaint I had made about the lack of fire regulations in the house. He was accompanied by the tough from next-door who seemed to spend his evenings drinking or fighting with his wife. The next thing I knew the tough was attacking me with a wooden post he had torn out of the banister. Holding him off I cried for help. Maurice heard me and came downstairs.

He stood in front of my assailants and glared furiously at them. “Just what do you think you are doing!” he hissed. They looked at him guiltily and slunk away. I got up off the floor and nursed my bruises.

“If you hadn’t come down then they might have killed me,” I stammered, thanking Maurice for his timely intervention.


I left the boarding-house and found new lodgings. After what had happened I decided I had had enough of the violence of city living. By the autumn I had managed to secure a teaching post through the good offices of a professional association which had investigated my college references and found in my favour. The year that followed was far from easy but by the following summer I had passed my probationary year and had qualified as a teacher.

On the last day of term I packed my belongings into a battered old VW Beetle and after school headed for the countryside. With me was a colleague who had asked me to drive him home to west London. He too was an Asian and we had spent many happy hours together discussing Hinduism and Buddhism. Looking back on our friendship, I believe that in many ways he had been my ally in a staff-room from which I had absented myself for much of the time. In those days I had never heard of Sai Baba but perhaps it was he who had moved my colleague to defend me when my absences had been commented upon!

I took a few weeks off and camped in a tent at St Ives Bay in Cornwall. Sitting in the sand dunes as dusk began to set I would fall into a timeless reverie. I felt more at home in those other dimensions than in this world. But soon I would have to find some kind of work to make a living. LSD might have dissolved the barriers of perception but the effects of blasting open the chakras had left me psychically sensitive in a world where I remained a stranger. It was only many years later that I understood the psychic dangers of sensitizing oneself in this way. “Anyone who attempts to force the citadels of the spiritual worlds through lack of inner preparation imbued with love and humility falls a victim to the enticements of either Lucifer or Ahriman, or an alliance of both.”2

Any strong drug or emotion can tear open the Astral or Emotional Body, leaving it vulnerable to the entities and emotions that swirl all around us in the Planet’s atmosphere. The more sensitive we become the more important it is to protect oneself from such entities. Too often, negative emotions enter into us and we remain unaware that what has caused a change in mood has been attracted to us floods in and attempts to possess our emotions. I believe this is happening on an ever greater scale in our communities where drug-taking, alcoholism and other forms of excessive indulgence have continued to increase.


I found a casual job working on a building site shovelling liquid concrete aggregate. It was hard, physical work. Months later I became a postman. My favourite round was the afternoon delivery in Dorchester-on-Thames, a sleepy old Oxfordshire thatch-roof village, where I would pedal around quiet lanes on a red GPO bicycle with letters and parcels.

The following spring I got married and found a better-paid job working nights on the production-line of a car factory in Oxford. Every evening I travelled down the country back roads into the city. I entered a different world as soon as I walked through the factory-gates. The peace of the country would be replaced by the noise of tortured metal and the smell of burnt grease. With hundreds of others I would clock-in for an eleven-hour shift. It was in those ‘satanic mills’ I first came face-to-face with Ahriman who reduces the human into a mindless robot seeking contentment in material gratification.

For over four years I did my time in workshops that echoed to the sound of hammers and screeching metal, smelling of the ever-present scorched grease and steel. Like everyone else I would switch myself off and become an automaton for each eleven-hour shift. And only by forgetting the drabness of my workplace could I find it in myself to return for yet another shift. How that smell and noise could depress and anger the soul!

During breaks I would take my book and go outside for some fresh air. But the smell would cloy to my clothes and the yellow sodium glare of the lamps outside provided a stark vision of that man-made world. A waggon-train loaded with body-assembly parts would clatter by leaving behind a cloud of diesel exhaust fumes. I was in a kind of open concentration-camp of the twentieth century where people might live-out the greater part of their working lives. How could any civilization permit its populations to live in this soul-less way? Modern factory-production depends on the robotizing of humans and many of us spend our lives doing meaningless jobs. “Loading-unloading-loading-unloading,” as I have heard Baba observe. We forget that our mass-produced world depends for its survival on the dehumanization of millions of souls who grudgingly keep our civilization going. It is only through our collective amnesia and the Creator’s infinite patience that the whole thing trundles on from day to day.

During those years of forgetfulness I tried to put the memories of LSD behind and sought normality desperately. It took that long to understand that I couldn’t run away from an experience that had opened the way to a greater perception of reality. What I had considered to be normality I began to see now as a respectable form of narcosis. The idealism of the ‘sixties was over and people were becoming well-behaved consumers.


By September 1975 I had saved enough money to buy an air-ticket to Canada which I planned to travel across by Greyhound bus to look for work. During six weeks I must have covered about 4000 miles on my season-ticket: Winnipeg, then a week in Saskatchewan and another in Vancouver B.C. Back on the road to Edmonton, Alberta, three whole days east to Hamilton, Ontario, on to Quebec City and back all the way to Vancouver. I saw and learnt a lot about Canada. And ran straight into its bureaucrats who told me yes, I could have a job if I had immigration-status and no, I couldn’t be given status without a job! Tired, angry and broke I returned to my cousin’s house in Vancouver to be told there had been a call from the Department of Indian & Northern Affairs in Regina.

The Department had arranged an interview in southern Saskatchewan near a reservation. Perhaps I should have slept on it before giving my answer. I was tired of being given the runaround and homesick for my wife and child. My Greyhound ticket had expired and I felt too proud to ask my cousin for a loan. I felt defeated and cynical. Feeling sick in the pit of my stomach, I turned down the interview offer.

Days later I was on a ‘plane returning to England. As it flew high over the forests of North Dakota I walked up the long aisle towards the tail section. Feeling sad and unhappy about leaving this way, I stood by the hermetically-sealed doors and stared out of the window. Something, down there in the great forests, kept calling me. When the Greyhound bus had driven through Alberta and the autumnal red of northern Ontario I had experienced powerful feelings of déja-vu. I seemed to know that country well. Now, miles up in the sky, I felt that I was leaving some part of me behind in the wilderness of north America. Once again the bureaucrats had thwarted my ambitions.


Back at the factory I carried on working the night shift for another seven months before deciding to leave.

“What will you do?” they asked. “You may never get another job.”

The economic climate had changed for the worse since someone had asked that question of me four years before. People had begun to hold on fearfully to their jobs and the spectre of recession and terrorism haunted a world that had become preoccupied with security. To stay in that dead-end job would have meant self-betrayal. I had gone to the factory only as a means to save the price of a ticket to Canada. Now I had no ambition or plan and my life lacked any further meaning. But the factory had become part of my life and the thought of leaving began to bring up a lot of insecurity. I detested it there but taking a leap into the unknown had become my most difficult challenge.

Though extremely boring my job had been very easy and had left me plenty of time to read between the rows of car body-shells which would make their way slowly towards my work-station. My desk was full of the different kinds of trim specification cards which were to be allocated to each model. It didn’t take long to put the cards into a line of cars and that gave me five minutes more to read before another line was ready.

I never read so many books in my life. And it was on the factory night shift that I first discovered Swami Vivekananda, Krishnamurti and Rudolf Steiner. My eclectic reading opened me up to many new worlds and my mind dwelt in them as I worked down the production line.

“I knew a man who worked here once,” a concerned foreman warned me, “who went crazy after reading too much”!

“Nothing could be crazier than having to put up with working in these surroundings,” I replied.

The only way I could preserve my sanity was to immerse myself as much as I could in the world of my books. One night I met a fellow worker who was a spiritualist and the ensuing talks we had during our meal-breaks provided a refreshing change from the factory’s drabness.

Finally, I took courage and left the factory for good. I had no idea what the future held in store. But for the first time in years I indulged in the luxury of sleeping during the night, absorbing the velvet-black peace and thinking about all those workers clocking-in and out.


That summer my wife visited her mother in Poland. My three-year old son and I went with her. I had travelled all over western Europe but this was the first time I had gone to the east. We took the Hook of Holland-to-Moscow international express. Sometime during the night we crossed into East Germany. There was a lot of shunting backwards and forwards. Early next morning the beep-beep of police car sirens and the rushing noise of the U-bahn told me we were in Berlin. Later that day we crossed the River Oder and were on our way to Poland where we would leave the train at Poznan.

The three weeks that followed educated me and helped change my views about eastern Europe. I discovered that people in those countries lived their everyday lives just as we all do. Life in a one-party state was not the same but essentially the differences were not as great as might be imagined. For how free are we, after all, in the West and are our freedoms not dependent on personal wealth and social privilege? Does our kind of ‘freedom’ not mean the freedom to do whatever we have the power to do despite the possible damage we might cause the community and environment if we behave greedily or thoughtlessly or recklessly?

We do a lot of talking about freedom without ever questioning what we might really mean! We have made a religious ideology out of it with which to bludgeon those whose economic systems our own masters oppose as well as to reassure ourselves that after all our way of life is not so bad. I believe that we deceive ourselves and our fellow humans everywhere. For freedom is earned, not given. And today what we experience, in a world where Economic Man is hero, is the undermining and erosion of the rights for which generations before us have struggled long and hard. We have taken our parents’ gifts for granted and now they are being taken away from us.

Freedom cannot ever be taken for granted and perhaps it is in the way of things that it should be lost and recovered by each successive generation so that its meaning might be learnt anew and understood within the greater plan of things.

My most treasured memory of our visit to Poland is of a picnic on a beach in the middle of a prohibited Naval Base at Świnoujście. We baked potatoes on an open fire made from driftwood and drank awful Polish beer from a huge tea-urn provided by two young servicemen we knew. On the horizon I saw the dark grey silhouettes of Warsaw Pact ships conducting a huge naval exercise in the Baltic. If a war had started that moment we would have been incinerated by the nuclear weapons of the West. What a grotesque farce!

I have a photograph of my little son Jan chuckling with glee while being cuddled by two boys in khaki, Polish Navy fatigues. More than anything, I think it was the memory of that bizarre day on the beach that helped me find a politics of spirituality and humanity within the divided world in which we live. I had come a long way since the days of my own ideological bigotry.


In late 1979 we were informed that Cruise missiles were to be based in Britain. These nuclear weapons were different from their predecessors as they had been designed to provide First Strike offensive rather than defensive capabilities. The way in which the media had been used by the government to quell public concern about the new nuclear missiles was in itself alarming. Public opinion was being massaged. It seemed that George Orwell’s 1984 had come about a few years earlier than he had predicted.3 An entirely new chapter in Cold War politics was to be written and we, the inhabitants of a Planet already under threat of environmental extinction, were to be its victims.

One morning I woke up to realize that my nightmares no longer came during the hours of sleep. I awoke into them. Our rulers were indulging in a massive public fraud in order to carry out the military rearmament of the West. Most of our population fell for the Big Lie. Something had shifted and it seemed our materialistic civilization was sinking ever-deeper into an insidious form of consumer-based, ideological totalitarianism. The rhetoric of hate which our politicians began to express towards the East might have originated in Big Brother’s propaganda against Eastasia in Orwell’s novel. What struck me most was the general depression affecting people. It was as if we all knew deep down that none of the propaganda was true but that we had to play along with it, anyway, because to question it meant putting our whole way of life — our attitudes towards others as well as ourselves — on the line.

At every level of society people were beginning to experience the deep angst of inner crisis. The future looked ominous and everywhere there were increasing signs of social breakdown. It was easy enough to blame everything on a ‘Communist threat’ which had to be met by increasing our arms production. In fact, the world in which we lived had moved into a permanent arms economy and rationales had to be sought and presented to the peoples of the West why less money should go into social spending and more into capital-intensive high-technology of which armaments development are a major aspect.

Man has become his own worst enemy but continues to blame his sad predicament on others. The microcosm of the inner war which we wage against ourselves — denying our true divinity and our need to love and be loved — is reflected perfectly in the macrocosm where the human race remains divided by ideological, political, religious, racial, national, individual bigotry and aggression.


In my own life I had run away from my inner fears. Inadvertently, and in a reckless manner, I had expanded my awareness and had to deal with the subsequent over-sensitizing effects that LSD had caused. I had tried to forget all of it by attempting to live ‘a normal life’. But the experiences wouldn’t forget me! Now the outside world reflected my fears back. There were skeletons in the cupboards which were impatient to get out. It is as if I had seen the future and kept running away from it in fear.

One very cold night I couldn’t sleep, wheezing with bronchitis. Going downstairs, I took a Valium capsule, wrapped myself in a blanket, put some music on the hi-fi and began to listen to it on a pair of headphones. I felt cold both physically and psychically. There was something inside that demanded to come out. I was a prisoner trapped in a frightening world which wouldn’t go away. So, deep in the cold of that night, I took a pen and paper and wrote. As I did so I began to play out, once more, the personal inner myth which though I sensed its presence I hadn’t had the courage to face:


I awake out of terribly real dreams,
drowning
in a sea of loneliness
where memories are ghosts and God is afraid of himself.

Being becomes PANIC
and I am alone in my self-made 20th Century dungeon
this wintry, carbon-monoxide night.

I stagger in the haunted Here-ness,
and bang on the walls of a cell
I made through cleverness and knowledge:
“Is this what it amounts to in FINAL SUM TOTALITY?”
But God does not answer in the cold, unspeaking Northern Dawn.


Everything was frozen hard in the depths of mid-winter. I was caught in the sub-zero temperatures both without and within. Negation seemed to rule a life in which I felt a stranger haunted by Ahriman’s ghosts. It seemed as if the world was going insane and I with it. But the insanity would soon come to an end. I got the picture of a crippled aeroplane falling out of the sky towards the ground and destruction. Would the last thing we learn tell us how terribly wrong we had been? Inside me the pilot fought desperately to keep his ‘plane up in the air.


Here I am then, a sleepless wreck
trying to disown his muttering ghosts
and a final rhyming of knowledge:
The eternal sky-pilot tries to save his airplane
from the drop into Chaos:
“I need to stay high!”


But the imaginary ‘plane never hit the ground. It was as if that final moment of desperation had to be repeated over and over again as the myth of the 20th century hero fighting against all odds and the law of gravity itself to keep his passengers and crew alive. Then, into this frightening end-game appeared a being from another reality. A warmth began to flow into my heart along with a sense of light and comfort. I was being saved from my waking nightmare by a being of pure love and compassion.


O, gentle Magic Man
Who walketh on the waters,
and whose soul is so light it floats beyond gravity,
I cannot ask your help
because I must find you tomorrow, again and again,
and You must have another name.

Bringer of the Light, I’m not sure how to understand you,
yet, everytime I turn away in hopelessness
Your mythical figure returns,
and the clinical silence is full of Your name remembered!


Looking back on those lines now I wonder how in 1979 I could have guessed that I would meet the Saviour “again and again” and that he would have another name? It could have been only the intuitive, poetic mind anticipating the time when Sri Sathya Sai would come into my life for I knew nothing of the Avathar then whose inner music flowed like a warm summer stream into my parched soul that freezing night. I gazed at the flickering candle and made contact with this life force:

I am returning quietly to the Silence
which knows how to speak without meanings.

The Wise-Man-Inside-Me says:
“You were never alone. You just played your clever, little game
of Hide-and-Seek.
Now, go to sleep until it’s time to wake again!”


It was as if the entire Age of Kali had played itself out and had come to an end inside me. I felt as if I had come through. Blowing out the candle, I walked over to the sofa and, wrapping myself in several warm blankets, fell asleep.


I could allow myself either to be haunted and depressed by this fearful world or I could do something to resist its evils. I began to see how we were brainwashed subtlely and how the media news was managed by national and multinational interest groups, how a nation’s history-books were written chauvinistically and its children conditioned by the dominant values of what Marx described as ‘the prevailing mode of production’. Everything was geared to exploiting the Earth’s natural (including human) resources. Most of us were gripped by a sense of helplessness to change anything. Yet this was the future our children have to face. If I did nothing to try to change it I would betray my own child. And if we believed truly in the principles of democracy then it was our duty to speak in the defence of life.

The following spring I attended the World Disarmanent Conference at the Westminster Central Hall, London and then began to help start local peace groups in my own county. For the next three years I devoted practically all my time, money and energy towards that purpose. Using Edmund Burke’s aphorism, “For the triumph of evil it is only necessary for the good to do nothing,”3 on a letterhead I joined with a few others to help create nine peace groups in as many months in the southern part of our county.

The first group we formed was in our home town of Wallingford. It was perhaps no accident that our early meetings were held and our constitution established in the old Quaker Meeting House in Castle Street. The ethic of non-violence which remains an essential tenet of the Quaker way of life played a very great part in the formation of those umbrella groups and gave us a great deal of inspiration.

The influence of the Quakers on the western peace movements it seems to me was entirely disproportionate to their actual numbers and is itself a tribute to their moral integrity. Of such is history made.

Local peace groups had begun to burgeon everywhere and hundreds of thousands began to attend CND marches in October during United Nations Peace Week. What had begun for me as a local two-man door-to-door campaign had become a great European and World Movement for Life on Earth. Peace marches were allowed to enter eastern Europe and headed for Moscow. Everywhere, crowds gathered to welcome the marchers, some who had marched all the way from Washington DC and then through western Europe. Exchanges began to take place at all levels between East and West. If our governments would not stop trading in death then the ordinary people would take the initiative by making positive moves to end the Cold War. The human race was waking up.

But, as the years drew on, it became clear that no matter how hard we worked, despite our using every conceivable channel to put across pleas that sanity should prevail, the Caesars remained unmoved and their servile media continued to pump out the same dreary old stories of ‘Red Menace’. The historian Edward Thompson observed that though the Peace Movement had won the argument we were unable to turn back one single missile. So much for democracy. I decided it was time to learn more about the Cold War propaganda with which I had been indoctrinated since childhood though I had been born in a country which, since its independence, had declared itself to be a non-aligned nation. This Cold War then was not my heritage. Yet it dominated our world. What were its origins and why did our rulers seek so stubbornly to perpetuate it through their rhetoric?

It was the profit nexus. The arms industry was a highly capital intensive area which in the words of President Eisenhower had grown into a huge Military-Industrial Complex. Since the mid-‘seventies western governments acted more or less collectively to cut back on social spending and at the same time to increase expenditure in weapons production because this had been deemed to be more profitable. But the market for weapons is caused by wars and these had to be started. So, apart from the many ‘little’ wars that were kept on the boil by the world’s weapon manufacturers, a new Cold War against the Soviet Union had to be stoked-up in order to justify the production and sale to governments of a new generation of vastly expensive advanced, high-tech, microchip weaponry.

Ideological confrontation appeals to the lowest aspects of our nature and keeps the human race divided. As I discovered more about the motives of the cold warriors I realized that the schizophrenia they engendered did no more than reflect the collective fear of an entire civilization foundering on the brink of social, economic and environmental disaster. Deep down we all know that something is very wrong with the way we live. But, collectively and individually, most of us are afraid to face up to those fears and instead seek some sort of compromise through which to escape having to deal with them.

“What a world; we all seemed to be sleepwalking like cruel, friendly strangers — bumping into each other but never really making contact with what was true ... talking past and over and around each other ... afraid of our own words as much as we were of those we might hear from others ... until our futility became institutionalized, almost as though it had become safer not to know what our lives really meant.”4


Once committed to the Peace Movement I knew there was no turning back. It wasn’t just about protesting and marching. I learnt about non-violence, Mahatma Gandhi and the Reverend Martin Luther King. Non-violence and peace started within our hearts. It wasn’t enough to march or just to learn the tactics of non-violence, to identify the evils of capitalism or to establish external causes and symptoms. We were all responsible for the world’s predicament. I had to begin to look at my own life and ask myself how much peace there was in it.

One July I loaded my old car with a week’s provisions, put our dog Sally on the back seat and with my son drove to Pilton Down in Somerset to a small gathering of a few hundred folk organized by the Green Party. For the next week we led a happy existence together there, in the Vale of Avalon at the Green Gathering. In the evenings, we sat around camp-fires under starry skies to talk and dream of a future time when the world would be a joyful place in which to live.

© RW 1989