Koji's Page

Notes of my Pre-spiritual Life

Introduction

As I grew up, there manifested within me a very strong sense of destiny. At times, I would be pulled deep into myself and would simply know from very deep down that I had to do a certain thing, or else it would not be possible to continue my journey through life in a positive way, that I would become stranded, that my sapling would not flower, rather its growth would be stunted, that I would begin to die. This sense of destiny would manifest as a very deep, serious knowledge in which any arguments would die and fall away before they could even fully manifest. The knowledge was present only as feeling, not as words, for it was far too deep to manifest naturally as words. My mind would become silent and still, and I would become absorbed in that feeling, which was the only thing that was definitely true to me on a genuinely deep level, far deeper than the conventional levels of life on which we normally operate. Needless to say, the distracting trivialities of worldly life to which we pay so much attention would never even enter consideration.

Even when I was a child, this knowledge would manifest, though not generally as a sign for my journey, for I was too young at the time to go adventuring around the world on my own, and furthermore was obliged to remain at home to go to school. At times however, when pulled deep into myself I would feel from a truly profound level that I was very old, ancient, far, far older than one could possibly become in just one lifetime, and I would feel a corresponding age-old weariness that would come with that. How could a child that experiences that engage wholeheartedly in the trivial pursuits of other children and adults? The world sometimes seemed like a very shallow place. 

I grew up into an unusual person, naturally introverted, happiest in my own company and therefore inclined towards solitude. Until I arrived in India at twenty-five years of age, anything that seemed to me really challenging and positive that I achieved, I achieved on my own. I look into myself and do not see a complex mind, yet I have somehow even now never met anyone that seemed quite like me.

I look back on my life now and it seems to me that until I went to India at twenty-five years of age, no-one else really knew me, as the real part of me that was attracted to deep questions about life was always hidden underneath an exterior. Without that exterior, I would hardly have spoken to anyone, and was always prone to lapsing into long silences, thinking about the superficiality of people's lives or the necessity to discover something meaningful or whatever. Nobody ever knew what I was thinking about and tended to become uncomfortable. I very rarely spoke about such things, because who would understand? I never cared if people knew me or not anyway.

Although I had lived in and passed through various religious cultures before I arrived in India, I had never been touched by religion personally. Religion was not discussed even once in my family for twenty-five years, though there was a general understanding that most Christians seemed not to be particularly sensible. I did not come to any firm conclusion about religion as I recognised that I did not know enough about it to form an authoritative opinion, and until I had listened to sages in India, I had never met anyone else who obviously had an authoritative opinion backed up with water-tight logic. I was an intellectual, logical and open-minded sort that would accept any point of view, but could not be properly convinced about anything unless all my questions had been completely and logically answered.

Christians I spoke to in the UK generally seemed weak and insincere in their beliefs as they did not appear to live according to their philosophy, and certainly could not answer my questions. I could not understand how someone could have a certain philosophy of life without seriously following it in practice and without trying to find out more about it, when it was obvious from their inability to answer my questions fully and logically that there were yawning gaps in their own understanding.

In addition to my lack of knowledge of the essence of religions, I also could not simply dismiss them as nonsense as I occasionally met religious people that appeared to have a conviction about their religion that seemed to be of a nature that was not born of intellectualism, yet they seemed too pure to be brainwashed. I recall a lorry driver that picked me up when I was hitch-hiking in Chile, who was extremely nice, and had a tranquillity about him that implied a level of peace which most people have not attained. He did not have a philosophical knowledge of Christianity, and I see now that he did not have a high level of realised knowledge, but he had however had some kind of mystic experience that he recounted to me that was enough to make his faith extremely firm. I had nothing to say about his mystic experience, for I had had no such experience, and had no idea what it could have been. It was, however, clear that he had experienced something, and he was certainly not religious because he was weak.

What had he experienced? Something profound, closer to the essence of religions, beyond the rituals and rules, and beyond the shallow lives of both those without religion and most of the religious. The majority of the world is religious, at least in name, and cultures all over the world tend to seem to have some base in religion. The human condition, therefore, simply cannot be fully understood unless religion is fully understood, from the point of view of the religious as well as from an impartial point of view, culture and religion, like life, being designed for practitioners rather than commentators. If there is an element in someone else that may experience something like what this lorry driver had experienced, then there must be such an element in everyone else, including oneself. The ultimate investigation is within. The serious and sincere student of life, then, simply cannot ignore religion, despite its often negative manifestations in the world, and must search for the mystic experience within himself.  

When I was around fourteen years old, I experienced the effects of a certain spiritual realisation, though I did not know that that was what it was at the time. I would be sitting in the classroom, giving extended answers to questions from the teacher and correcting what I said, with everyone listening. Sometimes the discussion was quite complex, but I appeared to be speaking automatically with the intellect working on its own, for I did not feel that I was really thinking. It was as though someone else were talking, and I was simply sitting back and observing. The impression was very strong. This used to happen so often that it was normal for me, and I was not in the habit of wondering about it. One history lesson when it was happening, however, it struck me that it was actually perhaps rather unusual, as it was a condition I had never before heard anyone mention. I later asked someone if they had also experienced anything like that, but they were confused, so I came to the conclusion that it was indeed rather unusual.

Over a decade later, I was sitting in the Benares ashram, and Swami Probuddhananda was explaining how I should observe my mind. He said that after three days I would see that I was not the mind. Immediately, the thought, “oh! I have already realised it,” popped into my mind and I was brought back to that history lesson.

During the years between, this realisation turned out to be very useful on my journey towards spirituality. It resulted in a detachment to an unusual extent. I always remained unperturbed even if no one would pick me up when I was hitch-hiking, and it was growing late or the weather was becoming rough. The realisation that one is not the mind includes the realisation that one is not the body, as the body is a gross projection of the mind. When settling down for the night in a tight spot in my sleeping bag, my attitude would not be that I was lying down uneasily to pass an uncomfortable night, but that I was placing the body in among the rocks on the back, which seemed the best position in which to conserve heat and enable it to maintain itself until morning. I would also close the mind down, as opposed to stopping thinking, as I had noticed that thinking takes up a lot of energy, which is valuable when sleeping out on a cold night on a limited diet.   
 
When I was a child, my father would take me travelling around different countries during the holidays. For many years, these were the only times I ever felt upbeat and that I was fulfilling something in some way, so I decided to study languages at university to enable me to travel more easily. The first university holiday was the time when I started travelling about on my own. That summer, I went off to Burma and Laos, thereby experiencing a newly-found and wonderful freedom, like a young bird that had just learnt to fly, very innocent in a colourful and fascinating world.

Leipzig

Several months later, I was sent to live in Leipzig in Germany to practise my German for a semester, as I was studying German, French and Russian. Not being interested in drinking, loud music and talking about trivialities, I had no inclination whatsoever to try practising German by going to bars, spending money I could alternatively spend adventuring around the world later on. I was, however, partial to seeing something of Europe. Most of all, I wanted to liberate myself further by acquiring the skill of hitch-hiking, and test myself against the elements by sleeping outside in a sleeping-bag, while doing something out in the field of life. I wanted to prove myself to myself, to become someone in my own eyes, for I was frustrated at being in my own eyes nothing more than a molly-coddled studenty type that had never been tested in real life. Practising German by speaking to drivers, as my father had done in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies, therefore, seemed an eminently sensible proposition.

I arrived in Germany in the coldest March for twenty years. The very first weekend I was there, I went to the road to Chemnitz and was immediately picked up by someone. I hitch-hiked to Colditz and back in a day to see the castle where the élite Allied prisoners of war were kept in the Second World War. I was enormously encouraged.

The next weekend, I had decided to make a weekend hitch-hiking trip through the Sudetenland in the Czech Republic along the mountainous German frontier. I had never slept outside before and had not slept in a sleeping bag since I was about eight. I set off in the late afternoon and arrived at a point seven kilometres before Chemnitz. A rainstorm had started. There was perhaps still time to hitch-hike back to Leipzig before dark, which would probably have been the obvious thing to do, as due to an utter lack of interest in the perceived mundanities of life, I did not even have a coat in those days. For some reason, however, I started walking towards Chemnitz. Looking back now, that seems like an insane decision. However, the spirits of a soul following a heart-calling from deep may not easily be dampened.

As it was, the fates fortunately conspired to halt the deluge. Neither did the rain start again on that trip, so it was quite a few weeks before I got my first midnight drenching. By the time I had walked to the other side of Chemnitz, night was already falling, and it did not seem likely that I would get picked up. Indeed I did not get picked up and so entered the forest to find somewhere to put my sleeping bag. I penetrated deep inside, wary of undesirables that could happen across me at night and steal my shoes, which was a very foolish thing to be thinking about. After all, who in their right mind would possibly go wandering about in a forest in the middle of the night in winter? That night was freezing cold, and my brand new sleeping bag was shown to be wholly inadequate, and furthermore became the bane of my existence for the next six years.

I emerged from the sleeping bag the next morning to find myself surrounded by patches of snow. It took me about half an hour to find my way out of the forest back to the road, which permanently exorcised my concern about people wandering about in forests in the middle of the night. Someone picked me up and bought me a hot cup of tea and some pastry for breakfast, so I was soon bubbling with enthusiasm as I ran over the snow at the Czech frontier. The rest of the day saw me trudging long distances along the sparsely inhabited road that was the lifeline through the Sudeten Hills, turning to face the brutally cold wind driving snow into me, whenever a car approached, when I had no hat and just a couple of light sweatshirts on. Hard as it may sound looking back now, I never felt sorry for myself when doing such things, as I felt I was coming closer to being the person I was destined to become. My philosophy was that being thrown into Hell was good, as only then do you have the opportunity to make yourself stronger by climbing out of it. The problem in my case was that I had never been thrown into Hell, therefore therein I hurled myself.

I realised quickly that hitch-hiking would take an extremely impractical amount of time, unless I went up to drivers at motorway service stations and asked them for lifts. It was always my tendency to be shy, and I was naturally inclined to look for solitude, where I always felt happiest and most relaxed. I seemed to have a character that could hardly be less suited to hitch-hiking. However, I quickly got used to it, simply because I did not perceive there to be any choice.

One sometimes comes across the choice of doing something or of not doing it, when we know perfectly well that we will be giving our destiny the cold shoulder by not doing it. In such cases, it seemed to me that there was, in fact, no choice at all, as the “option” of not doing the necessary, or of doing the wrong thing, was not really an option, and so did not exist at all. This was not really something I thought about. I knew what I had to do and had no choice about it, so simply began preparing myself mentally to do it, however troublesome it appeared to be.

The Road to Iran

That summer, I decided to go to Iran. I went to the slip road outside Leipzig I was by then so well acquainted with and signalled a car down, whereupon I hopped in. As we accelerated along the motorway, the driver asked me where I was going. “To Iran!” I said to his astonishment. By that time I could basically go pretty much wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted, across a whole continent without paying for anything other than bread and cheese. I was happy and flushed with the freedom, like a young bird on the wing. My small rucksack was almost empty and as light as my heart, as I had left my sleeping bag in Leipzig, feeling that I could not be bothered to carry a sleeping bag around in the heat of a Persian summer. Instead, I had brought a couple of plastic bin sacks with me to sleep in, which was another insane idea.

Because of my lack of a proper sleeping bag, I got overtaken on the way there in the middle of the night by mosquitoes in Austria and slugs in Hungary. On the way back in September, I ended up having to sleep outside in very cold and drizzly weather on three consecutive nights. One Bavarian morning saw me genuinely surprised to still be alive after a night during which I had crashed out on the concrete floor of a deserted pedestrian tunnel under the motorway by a service station with my body heat getting sapped away into the concrete. I woke up feeling that there was no heat left inside me, even in my bones. I had not imagined such a state before and had thought that people that get that cold when sleeping simply drift off into death without waking up. I got up and stood under the hot hand-drying machine in the toilets for about half an hour. In spite of the severity of the situation, I did not buy any hot drinks, as they are very expensive in German service stations.

Never having been much disturbed about death, I did not feel particularly bothered about what had happened, but made a conscious effort to become a bit bothered, because I could conceivably lose my life if I did not get more on the ball. I still had things to achieve in life, and it seemed a pity for one’s story to end unconsciously out of carelessness. In those days, I would have been inclined, out of lack of knowledge of any more logical-sounding explanation, to say that people just turn to dust when they die, thus making painless death irrelevant, or even good, as oblivion would mean no more necessity to suffer, and one would not be around anymore to miss the good. I was, however, not completely sure that there was no element that would continue its journey somehow, and there had always come from deep within me an urge to live life to the highest possible degree, as opposed to the animal instinct of automatically trying to avoid death and the lost soul’s tendency to make its mind search for something to do in order to give some artificial meaning to life.

It was still just past midnight, so I went into the forest to brave the drizzle this time. At worst I would get soaked, but dying while sleeping on the forest floor would have been impossible that night, though I did still end up under the hand-dryers for another two half-hour sessions.

I had found out in the lift to that service station that I had miscalculated the date due to thinking that August had thirty instead of thirty-one days. This cruelly necessitated spending another night out exposed to the elements, waiting for the day when my plane would take off from Leipzig back to England. It would have been faster to hitch-hike back to England, but all my things were unfortunately waiting to be collected in Leipzig. I hitched up to Nuremberg, where I crashed out on a bench. I hung about around Nuremburg until it was time to get onto the motorway. I hitched onto the motorway, but the big service station I had wanted to go to was closed for repairs, and so I had to get off at a little one with hardly anyone there. I sat about indoors until it was time to try to go outside to sleep. There was no shelter and it was drizzling a bit too hard for comfort. It was only September, but for the third night in a row it was properly cold and drizzling. It seemed so unlucky, as I had been expecting decent weather in that season, which was why I had not brought my sleeping bag. I did not dwell on it, however, as I did not dwell on hardships while out in the field, partly because it was pointless, partly because there was no leisure time and energy to spare to do so anyway, partly because if you start doing that, you begin to mentally cave in, which would be disastrous in such circumstances, and partly because it was simply not in my nature to do so. To this day I do not know exactly what happened that night. The last thing I remembered was crawling into a bush in the bitter cold and drizzle that was unsettlingly hard, and curling up. The next thing I knew, it was morning. I did not seem particularly the worse for wear and tear, and may even have felt strangely refreshed. It was surprising and confusing. Where the night went is something I have only ever been able to speculate about.

Toulouse

After returning from Iran, I was sent to live in Toulouse in the south of France. I was still bubbling with enthusiasm to go out into the world and test myself in new places. The first weekend saw me sleeping in a beautiful autumn-coloured mountain valley in the Andorran Pyrenees. It was perishingly cold. For good or for ill, it turned out to be an extremely cold winter again. Once, I was hitch-hiking to Geneva. I had to spend the night outside the last small service station before Switzerland. It was a cold region because the Alps attract cold weather. The ground was entirely covered by a sheet of ice. Towards the end of that night, the situation having been made worse through my poor circulation, I was forced to keep my feet in the air as long as possible, as the ground was so cold it was painful to put them on the ground. 

Sleeping out seems intimidating and brutal both before and after doing it if it is dwelt upon, but it never seemed like that when I was actually doing it. Although conditions were sometimes rather rough, I never felt I had any problem. Problems are superimpositions from our own minds. What are placed before us are merely situations to be sorted out in as effective a way as possible. To deal with them, the mind must remain clear, and one must be prepared to simply hunker down and weather out the storm if such is the necessary caper. I was never cowed by the environment. At critical times, my mind would become totally focused, tougher and empty of irrelevant thoughts, without any conscious decision on my part to make it happen. No regrets about having gone out or even about not bringing a coat or a sleeping bag ever crossed my mind when the going got tough. I tended to think that it was a useful experience for me, or else did not think at all except to concentrate on fitting into the situation as best I could. In the toughest situations I would only do the latter.

I never really felt either strong or brave when going out adventuring. There are three kinds of mind that one may have. One is a weak mind. This kind of mind does not achieve anything unless it becomes stronger either through desire or compulsion. When a challenging situation arises, a strong mind fills itself with strength and will until it becomes strong enough to carry out the necessary. However, mind is a changeable thing, and even if it be strong enough to fill itself with sufficient strength and will now, that may not always be the case, so it cannot be depended upon. There is no such thing as a mind that is 100 per cent strong, as nothing in nature is of an absolute quality. If you are strong therefore, you are still weak. There is a third kind of mind, if so it may be termed, namely no-mind. Weakness, as well as strength, will and bravery, exist in the mind. If the mind is empty, strength, will and bravery are removed, but so too are weakness and irrelevant thoughts. Therefore, if one has no mind, one simply does the necessary without dwelling on it. There is no strength, but strength is not necessary, as there is no weakness to overcome. Strength and bravery are not the end in themselves, but merely stepping-stones to reaching this condition beyond both weakness and strength, and both fear and courage. 

Looking back with hindsight, it was during that stay based in Toulouse when I began the natural internal renunciation of the world. At some point, the edge was taken off my innocent enthusiasm, and it was not just that the novelty of hitch-hiking and sleeping rough had worn off, though that also happened at around the same time. These adventures for years yet continued to be a journey both into the great playground that the world was, and one of self-discovery, but the wonderfulness and celestial sheen of the world disappeared. The end of the world’s usefulness in the context of my personal path upwards was now coming into sight, though at the time, I did not think of viewing it in that way. Travel, the whole world, and even myself were never quite the same after that. Life was not really enjoyable to the same extent, and even though most of my outwardly more interesting adventures still lay in the future, I began to have to motivate myself to do things, no longer feeling the boundless enthusiasm I used to.

My mind is taken back to one morning when I set off on a hitch-hiking trip from Toulouse. In those days, I used to live in a hall of residence just a minute’s walk from some traffic lights that all the cars heading for the motorway would stop at. Once, I was struggling to get a lift there, and was starting to walk away to try somewhere else. There was a man, fairly advanced in years and with an unkempt look that suggested that he spent most of his time in the street, walking around the cars with a sign which said something abstract about no particular poem. I did not know why he was doing that. He did not appear to be asking for money, and neither did anyone appear to be giving him any. Seeing me moving off, he called me over, and clearly quite street-wise and with a calm mind, made a sign for me on which it said, “towards Pau please,” and told me to walk along the line of cars when the traffic lights were red. On the back of the sign, there was a poem about Che Guevara. Whether this calm mind content to show drivers a message about the beauty of verse was a street-person without any need of money filling in the time, or a sage indifferent to worldly concerns, I will probably now never know, but by his grace I was enabled to get onto the hitch-hiking circuit every weekend in Toulouse, save on the ones when the motorway was snowed under.

On the day in question, however, I hopped into a car bound for the motorway along the Pyrenees. As we accelerated out of the motorway toll, over a few seconds, I felt a profoundly uplifting sensation, as though my soul were being lifted up and liberated. It was accompanied by an inexpressible deep kind of ecstasy, far purer and in a different category from anything experienced in the world, and I suspect that few people ever experience such a thing. If one is wandering in the world or in the spiritual sphere is not always easy for other people to perceive. I was not really hitch-hiking to go out into the world, see some places and have some fun, in other words for worldly reasons. I was going out into the world to know and improve myself, so the real journey was not so much one without but one within. I wanted to become freer. I had had a week at the university devoid of any interest to me, and had just managed to cut off all the shackles simply by rolling out of bed and strolling over to the traffic lights, and could theoretically hitch-hike all the way to the other end of the continent if I wanted to, sleeping outside anywhere, all for free. On paper, most people could do these things, but in practice would not, even if they wanted to, because they are not free, bound as they are by the shackles in their own minds.

I remember thinking just after experiencing this that the driver may well have been very much in the rat-race of worldly life, and it could not have crossed his mind that I was going through such an experience. Two people sitting next to each other, one in the rat-race, the other experiencing that. Freedom, indeed, is not a political state, a social one or a financial one, but very much a mental one. Perhaps what happened was the side-effect of a realisation, in which a knot in my mind was cut. After this, it was not really clear how I could become much freer in the world. I could do whatever I wanted, go anywhere with next to nothing, so in a sense had mastered the world. This kind of realisation marks the beginning of the end of the usefulness of the world, as if the world has already been mastered, how can it develop you further? There are only rough edges to be smoothed. It is true that since around that time, the world has never had for me the same importance, has never been quite the same again.

Russia

In the spring of 2000, I went to live in Voronezh, a grey city in European Russia, half-way between Moscow and the Black Sea. I became extremely frustrated there. To be able to travel around Transcaucasia and the Siberian hinterland was the reason why I had decided to study Russian, and was the primary motivation for going to university at all. If I could not do it, it would have meant that four years in the prison of university would have been a waste of time. Unfortunately, I found myself trapped in Voronezh instead of wandering around among the rolling green mountains of the Caucasus or the wide-open Siberian steppe. I knew that I would be able to do all these things eventually, and after a matter of seven months, I had indeed done them, but I wanted to do them immediately. It was not a matter of childish impatience, but something much deeper than that. When the spirit wishes to soar, it will not wait. If it is not allowed to do so, it feels like one is going through a living death, that one’s life is being sapped away. It was not the product of worldly or mental attachment. Something was stirring deep within me, and I could not ignore it. I just could not be at peace. Sometimes I felt tortured, and I, a person that would never cry, would be brought to the brink of tears. None of the other students knew properly what was happening within me. I had never seen evidence of such feelings in anyone else before, so came to the tentative conclusion that most other people did not feel the call of life as strongly as I did. As it was, whether or not people understood me did not interest me at all. I was interested only in living life, not talking about it or making myself understood. Whence comes this will to live?

When my stint in Voronezh had finally come to an end, I set off for the Altay mountains in Siberia. Over a couple of days, I hitch-hiked to the end of the dusty, long road, where there was a village. The only way to continue was on foot. I had never been on a multi-day trek before, but immediately found a place where I could leave some things, and bought some food to eat. I then walked off up into the hills, still without a tent. Without a map either, on the second day I went up the wrong mountain. I had to trek back down again. The next day I was sick, and so could only walk about one kilometre. It must have been caused by the tinned meat I had bought in the village, which should have been cooked, apparently. I did not have any other food, as I knew next to nothing about what food to take on treks in those days, and furthermore had nothing to cook with anyway. Someone who came across me gave me a slab of chocolate, which was all I ate in 65 hours of being sick and trekking up to some huts maintained up by a beautiful mountain lake. When I was apparently not far from the huts, I simply ran out of steam and virtually collapsed on a big rock on the path and crashed out in the sunshine. I woke up what seemed like hours later, weak from lack of food, and cold as it had clouded over and started drizzling. I stumbled on up the path for much longer than I had thought would be necessary, wondering if I would indeed get there or if I would end up spending another hungry, cold and drizzly night outside.

It became very clear to me on this trip that I had changed since my trip to Iran the previous year. That year, I had still been full of boundless enthusiasm, and would leap unthinkingly into any adventurous escapade with both feet. By now, however, I had motivation issues and did not really feel like putting myself through diabolical hardship, and had to oblige myself to do so, knowing that such things would be good for me, even if not particularly pleasant.

I went on from the Altay to Tuva, went up the Yenisey and hitch-hiked boats along the Podkamennaya Tunguska, where there was no public transport and no roads. These were remote places. Even on the Yenisey, the land had not been collectivised during the Communist era. They told me in a village on the Podkamennaya Tunguska that I was the first independent foreign traveller that had arrived there in living memory. I found myself trekking again when I reached the north shore of Lake Baikal. By this time, someone had given me a saucepan completely blackened from having been used over countless fires. I knew next to nothing about cooking in those days. The shore of Lake Baikal was an opportune, yet tough, place to learn, and I began learning from the very basics. The wood was often damp with dew, and the matches in those parts seemed to be of questionable quality. Half the time, I could not even light a fire, let alone cook. It was September then, so the year was on the wane, and there was already snow in the hills around the lake. It was cold in the mornings, and extremely frustrating if I could not light the fire.

The Siberian trip was a tough one both physically and psychologically, on which I seemed to end up sleeping rough, hounded by police and underfed half of the time, though I did not really notice the results of not eating enough until they were pointed out to me when I got home. Admittedly, these problems were partly down to a lack of experience. When I got back to the UK, I was quite worn down, and did not seem to recover fully for about three months.

Peru

After graduating, and having done an English-teaching course, I arrived at my new job in Ecuador to be told that there were not enough students, so I would have to wait for six weeks to start work. I therefore went travelling around Peru. I eventually found myself in the remote Huayhuash mountain range, on a week-long trek with the thirty-litre rucksack I always carried with me with a small tent strapped on top. I did not have a proper map again and so lost my way a couple of times. Once, I wasted seven hours climbing up to the wrong ridge to find the wrong valley below me when I got up there. I got sick on the way down, then had to climb up to another ridge, then run down the mountain before it got dark. It was extremely punishing at altitudes between 4000 and 5000 metres.

Ever the romantic, I decided I would prefer to make my way around the mountains, working as a guide in the great outdoors surrounded by solitude, 6000 metre high peaks, the beauty of nature and the wide-open spaces where the spirit could soar rather than teaching English in Ecuador. I also wanted to live, work and make my way with people unlike those that I had grown up around, and prove myself to myself. I felt in those days that proving oneself was only properly possible when one was dumped in a different place and culture, knowing no one, and unsupported by pieces of paper collected from previous work places or educational institutions, with only one’s wits to help one get by. When the next trekking season came after several months in Ecuador, therefore, I went back to Huaraz. I managed to get work as a porter, interpreter and guide on treks around the Cordilleras Blanca and Huayhuash. Fortunately, studying languages for so many years enabled me to learn Spanish quite quickly.

I had some of the times of my life that summer and the next in Huaraz and the ranges beyond. There were some exhilarating moments, though I did not really enjoy myself so much simply because I had stopped really enjoying myself while in France a few years before. I was, however, very aware that I was on the right path, which made up for it somewhat. What, then, would the path lead to if not enjoyment in one’s worldly pursuits?

By the end of September, the tourists had gone, and the weather closed in. I left for Chile to get a teaching job. Chile was an affluent country for South America and seemed like the Promised Land. I rolled into Arica to find a job, but found that because it was the southern hemisphere’s summer season, the southern hemisphere having its own academic year, no jobs were for the taking. I went to Bolivia and eventually found myself rolling into Rurrenabaque, a village on the edge of the Amazon. I ended up working as an interpreter on jungle treks and tours to the pampa.

Patagonia

After a couple of months, I left Rurrenabaque and headed for Chile again as I was short of funds. I hitch-hiked with all my things from near the Bolivian frontier down to Santiago de Chile. Unfortunately, as it was still the summer holiday, it was still the wrong time to get jobs, and I could not get one which seemed worth having. When this was clear, I decided to hitch-hike to Puerto Madryn to try to get work, interpreting on whale-watching tours on the Valdés Peninsular. I really did not feel like going, was a bit fed up, and was going out of a sense of duty. Fun and the romance of the road were no longer factors any more when I set off travelling. I could have remained in Santiago, trying to get a job, but I felt that, having been so far too useless to get a job, I did not really deserve to live indoors, doing nothing useful that would either develop me or at least put me in a position to develop myself by earning some money. My heart told me that I should go, as it would be a good opportunity to learn more about life.

I left my luggage in my hostel in Santiago, then took five days to hitch-hike to Puerto Madryn on Argentina’s Atlantic coast just to find that it was neither the foreign tourist season nor the whale-watching season, which naturally rendered it impossible for me to get jobs interpreting on whale-watching tours. I was hanging around by the beach, wondering what to do, when I got talking with someone working at a hot dog stand. He said he could definitely get me a job washing dishes, which would tide me over for a bit. I, however, preferred to be penniless and homeless than do a humdrum job like that, so I left Madryn that very night en route to Tierra del Fuego, the uttermost part of the world, according to one explorer, with the intention of stopping at every town with tourists in it to try to get a job.

The hitch-hiking was long and hard. Distances across the seemingly never-ending pampa were vast, there was little traffic, and when it did roll up, the pick-up rate was very low. It was not difficult to imagine getting stuck in a place for days. The important thing was to keep your eyes on the road. Although there was nothing in particular to look at, and nothing obvious to do except keep my eyes on the road, it still required concentration. I recognised that my mind was inclined to wander and ponder about life, as I stalked slowly up and down, looking at the road at my feet or gazing at some spot in the distance, crosswise to the road or even in the opposite direction altogether. Signalling cars too late could be costly in that environment, and it was extremely annoying to make unforced errors, though having to wait hours on end simply because that was the decree of fate did not generally bother me. I ended up with my eyes glued on the horizon for hours, always concentrated. I seldom felt particularly hungry while on the road, though would feel ravenous whenever I was in a town. 

Unlike Europe, Patagonia in summer has quite reliable weather, until the latitude around Río Gallegos at least, so sleeping rough for what turned out to be five weeks was not a problem. It was also not hot, so one does not sweat, and not having a shower or clean clothes for a month was not really troublesome either for someone with a thick skin. I was in Ushuaia for three nights, and slept the first night under the raised wooden floor of a bus stop and the next two under the overhanging roof of a supermarket in the high street. In that season, it got dark long before it was time to sleep. I used to sit around in contemplation in a small shopping mall. There was a friendly guard there who gave me things to eat and drink, and tried to get to know me. He asked me why I was wandering about, sleeping rough. I answered, truthfully, that I was doing an experiment in being poor. I then said that I would later do an experiment in being rich. In spite of our hilarity, one year later, I was indeed doing something like that. 

My mind is taken back to late one day in the middle of the pampa on the Argentine side of Patagonia. It had taken a whole day to hitch-hike all of about eleven kilometres out of a village called El Chaltén, a short trek from the Fitzroy Range. I had spent most of the day stood in the rain under dark clouds that always seemed to gather around the cordillera. Ultimately, a truck took me out of the village to some building site eleven kilometres away on the pampa. I climbed out there and continued walking along the road. The building site was quickly hidden behind the rolling hillocks, and I was soon alone with the road in the pampa. I stopped at a bridge where the road went over a stream. It was perfect for sleeping out. A stream to provide drinking and washing water, and a bridge to sleep under in case it should rain, though I laid my sleeping bag somewhat away from the bridge so that I would be under the stars and would have plenty of space around so that I could feel the expansion of my being. I sat on the sleeping bag and ate a simple dinner of bread and ham. There was just pampa all around up to the horizon, except for one side which had the Cordillera Fitzroy in the distance. The dirt road was deserted, the stream trickled along not far away, and the sky seemed huge. In Patagonia for some reason, everything seemed to be on a grander scale. The sky for example somehow looked twenty per cent bigger, distances between places were vast, and the horizon seemed more distant than usual. It was one of the best meals I ever had; the simplest always were. Eating cold food every day for a month was not really deprivation in any way at the time. It merely seems like that when dwelt on beforehand and afterwards.     

I eventually found myself in Puerto Natales, near the bottom of Chile. It was chilly at that latitude, and I had caught a cold. By this time I had realised long before that the vibration of the mind could be strengthened when necessary to adjust to tough conditions outside. This meant that if I caught a cold on a trip, I would strengthen the vibration of the mind, and the cold would not affect me too badly. When in my sleeping bag in tough conditions, I would stop thinking to conserve energy, interiorise and develop my will to keep the body strong. I would seemingly turn into a whole battery of will. I even got out of my sleeping bag after a cold night sometimes to find that I was not worse, or was even better than when I had turned in. When I arrived back at home, however, my mind would relax, and that was naturally often followed by the cold getting worse. Particularly as a child, I was, unfortunately, somewhat prone to catching colds, and also getting nosebleeds when my body was under stress from sickness. The nosebleeds became rare, but my nose started bleeding again when I was looking for jobs and sitting around nursing my cold in the town square in Puerto Natales, which was rather inconvenient. I braced my mind, which had the desired effect of controlling the constantly pending nosebleeds. Unfortunately, however, I found that whenever I went into a nice warm shop to escape from the cold for a bit, my body and mind would immediately start relaxing, and after a few minutes the nosebleed would inevitably restart, sending me hurrying outside again. It seemed a bit unfair, but there was nothing for it but to brave the elements until I simply got better.

I eventually lost all interest in getting a job in Chile, and hitch-hiked back up to Peru, where I got work again as a trekking guide, and started working on mountaineering expeditions. I would have remained in South America for years, but my father died suddenly, and so I had to return to the United Kingdom. It was heart-wrenching to leave Huaraz. It seemed far closer to a home to me than the UK had ever been, not because of the close friends and stacks of acquaintances I had or the awesome mountains where I used to roam about, allegedly working, but because it was a place that enabled me to advance towards what I felt was my destiny. The UK on the other hand had always been strange to me.

Indonesia

After my father died, I felt somewhat at a loose end. In South America, matters had seemed fairly straightforward. I would wander about, finding new hustles to try, and was always learning. If my father had not died, I would have remained in South America for another two or three years. Back in the UK, however, it seemed that, as my time in South America had come to an end, it would not feel right to go back again at that stage of my development. I needed some time to work out my next move and thought I needed to make some money, so I got a job teaching English in Central Java and acted out a professional life for a year. 
I got hold of a book about meditation while there. I did not know much at all about meditation, and had never really meditated before apart from a few minutes a few times in Chile with no idea if I was doing anything right. The book said the meditator should make his mind blank, so I did so. After a few tries, I experienced a violent vibration along my spine. Although my body was definitely not moving, I felt I was being shaken inside to an amazing degree with the spine acting like a hinge. When it started, it would continue until I opened my eyes. I know now that this was the awakening of the kundalini, which can manifest in different ways in different people, and is the beginning of one’s spiritual development. It sometimes got so violent that I would even begin to feel a bit sick. Someone had once told me that some forms of meditation can be dangerous without proper guidance, and these experiences seemed extreme to say the least, so I stopped meditating and filed the experiences away to be investigated properly later. You just sit down and shut your eyes, and all that happens inside you. What doctor could have explained these happenings? Many and marvellous may be the fascinating mysteries in the outer world, but they pale into insignificance compared to the those of the inner world, the questions about one’s own self. Towards the end of my stay in Indonesia, it was becoming clearer to me that the next step would be to go to India to investigate spirituality and find what there was to be found, if anything. Thither I indeed went after a few months more.