Subject: Re: The Royal Path
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Mon Jan 31 2000 - 05:26:28 EST
'... raja yoga ... arasma ... brahmacharya ... garhasthya ...
vanaprasthya ... sannyasin bhakti ... karma ... jnana yoga ...'
The eyes grow glassy & I edge away as appalled & embarassed
as any visitor to Calcutta facing a forest of outstretched hands.
Yet there was a time when those words slid quite unapologetically
off my own tongue. Almost exactly fifty years ago, I was
to be found lounging around the sordid flats (& occasional
gracious drawing room) of literary Dublin, gin-&-orange
in hand, rattling off: Gerald Heard, Sri Ramakrishna,
The Perennial Philosophy, Huxley,Isherwood & Company
& so on & so on - along with the best of them.
And the best really were rather impressive: highly intelligent,
sceptical chaps & girls with an experience & sophistication
away beyond the usual undergraduate range. No army of
Egyptian slaves could have dragged them down the road
to the catholic Pro-Cathedral or up the road to the protestant
St Patrick's - in either of which buildings their true spiritual
heritage could be found. Yet no one burst out laughing
or even cracked at smile at the recital of these more exotic
terms & concepts.
I've kept myself remotely informed of my old friends' subsequent
progress. None has wound up in any kind of monastery: either
eastern or western. Many are dead - & many of these prematurely
from the excessive use of tobacco & alcohol. Those that survive
seem, most of them, now to be driving around Dublin in their Mercs;
or smiling sleekly from the gossip pages of the Irish Tatler.
I think yogic philosophy must obey the same sort of rule as faith
in socialism. Anyone failing to respond to it at twenty has
no imagination. Anyone still stuck with it at forty has gone mad.
Scottie B.
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