Looking for the Tiger

No tigers here

I left India after ten continuous years of living there. I had not been home at all in that period, and I had not contacted my parents or anyone outside India. Until that is, I wrote to my parents in London, and as a result received a ticket to fly Bombay to London. I returned home in 1976 having left London in 1965 at the tender age of 17.

I have written a book about this period called: English-Man, Beggar-Man, Holy-Man.

(Amazon paperback and Kindle).

My years in India were spent as a saddhu, a Hindu holy man, a monk, and travelling yogi.  I spent several years in several different places in India. I had at first a guru that I ran away from after four years, never to make contact again. Later after seven years in India I met Swami Muktananda, in a place called Genesh Purl. Literally – the town of Ganesh, an Indian God). I stayed ten months in his large ashram, where he had large numbers of his overseas followers. Americans, British, Australian & others were flocking to become his disciples. I stayed, and had my name changed to Ganesh Giri, a monk’s name. However, I never took any formal initiation into the holy orders, and indeed was told that I was first and foremost an English man, and would always be so. I never considered myself at the time, a full disciple of Swami Muktananda in the mould of the rest of his Western and Indian flock. I preferred to hang around in the background and take things a bit more cautiously. I left his ashram, because I wanted to see my inner a guru as well as an outer one. I wanted self-realisation for myself within myself. After all that was what Swami Muktananda taught – that the guru and the Divine was within.

I spent my last three years in India living in the backwoods of Gujarat State, in a hut, thinking about little in particular, and wondering what my role in life was. I had no books, or reading material, or watch. I just sat in silence. Also I mulled over my experiences to date with all the guru’s and yogis I had met in India. I came to the conclusion eventually that I had a different type of life to experience awaiting me in England, and that the time was not yet right to plunge into a lifetime of living in India as a recluse or sannyasin.

Aged 28, this return to my starting point in London was a big shock to my parents. 

As mentioned I left home alone and in 1965. I was 17, and had at that time being restless to wander off and explore the world. The flames of rebellion burned within me. Rebellion from society, from parents, from the straitjacket of convention. I was not alone – the 60s were a time of foment, with the new pop culture leading, as espoused by the life, (and music of course), by the likes of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and delineated through the birth of a youthful revolution, that was to overturn the cultural norms of society at that time. The anti-establishment new generation wanted to explore new dimensions of experience, to grow long hair, wear outrageous clothes, and to experience hitherto unexplored depths of the mind, with cannabis and LSD.

Influenced by my own generation, I ended up on the India trail – the overland trip to Kathmandu and Nepal.  I preceded a mass migration by several years, as by the time Westerners were flocking to India to guru is in large numbers, I had been ensconced there for about five years

After 10 months on the hippy trail, I reached India. The culture, like a magnet sucked me in and did not for a while spit me out. During my ten years’ continuous stay in India, I met a variety of gurus, yogis, holy men and holy women. I travelled the length of the country, and at times my bed was bare concrete, and my stomach was empty. Increasingly I was feted, garlanded, and dined in splendour by prostrating devotees, who revered all holy men, (as I had become). At the end of it all I returned to England almost following a spur of the moment decision. I ceased overnight to speak & think and dream in Hindi. Similarly my wraparound cloths became trousers and shirts, and I became a conventional working Englishman.

On return to England I had little to say on the subject of my Hindu monk’s life. It was a role with which I had completely identified during my stay in India, and now I was finished with it and wanted no more of it. I wanted to be the Englishman again and take on that role, but not now as a dropout hippy. I wanted to work, buy a car, drink in pubs, watch the telly, and construct a social life for myself that was not in any way religious.

I decided on being a social worker, but found that I was not wanted due to my lack of work experience. It was difficult explaining just how I passed my ten idle years in India. I found it hard once even to get a job cleaning down tables in a cafe.  By chance or circumstances I came to apply for a position as a student psychiatric nurse.

In many ways I became the average man in the street, or the ordinary guy in the pub.  I more or less forgot about my role in India to the extent even of feeling vaguely embarrassed by it all.  I immigrated to New Zealand after three years and travelled around between working as a psychiatric nurse.  I did think about my yoga occasionally and from time to time remembered my mantras – the sacred words that I had been initiated into in India. Occasionally I would have periods where my inner meditations would be quite profound, although externally I carried on my routine of whatever I was into that time. The spiritual side of me did pop up a few times internally.

Eventually, I began to think again of the spiritual aspects of my life, although I did nothing much about it until 1985. It was whilst living in Andorra that I wrote my book about my ten years in India.  In 1987 I was back in New Zealand after a sojourn in various parts of Europe. (France, Monte Carlo Andorra and Spain, as well as in Wales).

Ten years had gone by in the West, in the materialistic net. I thought I was back at the beginning of a new phase that promised much more ahead. I had had ten years learning about mental illness, relationships, the way of the world, and sundry matters. I had also been lucky to have had the great fortune to experience life in some other fascinating countries and places.

The title of this chapter – No tigers here – means what?

When I was a child in London, I used to dream about tigers a lot, and think they were wandering outside the block of flats that I lived in. I used to read a lot of books about hunting man eating tigers, and leopards, and lions. After living in India, I came to believe that I’d lived there before, and that all my childhood processes had been regurgitating aspects of a previous life in India. I saw myself as having been a hunter of tigers, who then became a non-violent devotee of tigers. In dreams in India, I saw myself meeting a yogi sage outside a cave, and being admonished, and turned away from my hunting, to become a respectful devotee of the tiger. That dream was about my previous birth: not the current one.  I may have been part of the British Raj in India: possibly a collector or some official living upcountry. In India tigers were often a part of my life: certainly spiritually, as the tiger is considered to be the vehicle of the goddess Durga. However I moved away from India and didn’t think then about tigers. My life was not connected like it had been with India and tigers, and my worship of the Goddess.

Finding the Tiger

In 1989 I married & over the next years I became a family man and remain so to this day. I extended my career to a satisfactory position as a senior educator within mental health. I studied and received further qualifications and worked within a variety of interesting areas.

However one key element for me over this time to the present has been my struggle to deal with a seemingly ingrained experience of Dysthymic Depression. (Chronic low grade depression), with some severe episodes.  I have also experienced s use issues, (dependant mostly on the depression).

There is a huge paradox. Now I have attained a place where I feel that I am really engaged as a spiritual soul, to the maximum depth that I could ever wish.  I have found my self-realisation and my perfection, (or in Sanskrit, my Siddhi), on the spiritual plane. Yet it has come to be connected integrally with my experience of struggle with depression.

Interestingly, I find that as I relate now to the personality that I left in India as the Hindu monk, I see that my time of ten years in India was probably about sitting in the same space where I am can sit now. (Without the need for a cave!). Also I can look back at myself in India and make a diagnosis of depressive episodes, interspersed with the mild-to-moderate chronic depression that is called dysthymia. I am fascinated now by this paradoxical connection of intense deep spiritual experience and depression.

This for me is finding the Tiger. The tiger is my soul animal – similar to favourite animal, but not quite! The tiger represents me as being a complete whole person. Powerful in that I have my spiritual plane again, but also powerful in that I am a complete human being. I am human with my experience of the depths of despair and depression whilst at the same time have become able to deal with, and cope with, this part of my life. This adds to my power. I can experience the totality of being a “dysfunctional” human, and I am happy about this, because I don’t see it as bad. However I also can be a functional health professional, family man, and “healthy human” – all this alongside the choice of continuing my practice of spiritual awareness. This is about finding the Tiger – the tiger memories that drove me when I was a child to go to India, and to head off to end up as a monk. This metaphor for life has driven me now to look at the issue of spirituality, and religion, and depression in some depth. (See my book: Spirituality goes with Depression and Addiction).

Taming the Tiger

Not a popular path! Spiritual endeavour.

You may find few who are willing or interested in listening to your politics and religion. Your personal growth and spirituality may be in a similar vein. You then find you need to talk to specific people who are clearly interested or committed in some form of growth. Personally interested people who are willing to discuss spiritual topics. However when this topic is broached, it may be that interested parties will then talk about, or even try to sell, their particular brand of spirituality, which may well be connected with a specific religion.  Even in company of spiritual practitioners we can find difficulties dealing with fixed rigid views, and even angrily hostile perspectives. This may be why many are put off even by the whole topic of religion especially. It may seem like a can of worms.

On the whole most of society seems to be quite happy engaging in the material consumer world, except for when it bites back, and they find that suffering rather than enjoying becomes the experience. Then may arise desire for something else. The truly selfless person though, the true soul seeker, does not want anything. There is a spiritual goal and transformation of purpose, but that is also selfless: it’s not like a dog finding a bone and running off.

We find these painful experiences about life, as we go through our years. Being somewhat protected as children, we may seek again more security as we get a bit older. In our hearts we may want to develop and grow in a holistic spiritual manner, and believe our path of spiritual growth will enable us to sit back, and be protected or safe. However, we may find that there are dangers in exploring and trying to move forward on a spiritual path. We may even hold “magical thoughts” about how “wonderful” it will all be! There is some research that shows evidence of spiritual endeavour increasing mental health problems like depression.  Addictions, compulsions or other psychological snakes may rear their heads, almost as if the ego fears it’s “death” and wants to strike back.

Conversely it may seem that if one does all this practice with no sense of reward or desire, the goal may seems like some kind of hollow empty state – wilderness or a desert. Without actually tasting the nectar, the bliss of the Supreme Divine Grace, it is easy to feel emptiness, (especially if one has given up lots of habits). Hence we may live for a while with only trust and hope, when we follow our chosen teachings, believing perhaps that a higher power or Divinity will, “sort our lives out”.

Religion can be based around desires to prosper, to flourish, to have a good place in society, or to get to heaven. We then will maintain belief and trust that God will help us to get all the things we want, and help us to do the right things. The spiritual journey though, (and this is where the difference really sits), is about transcending all of this.

It’s about becoming selfless, transforming a humanness into “saintliness”.  There is nothing wrong with being human, wanting or achieving, or seeking. Human experience itself will show the way, for when a goal is reached, this can lead to dissatisfaction and a need to go deeper.  The bliss of money, food and sex, will never ultimately be a permanent satisfaction or consolation. Seeking on the higher levels is where we want to have some taste of the Divine Grace nectar – we want to overcome some of the pains or sadness, or general feelings of malaise about the world. We might start to feel this spiritual centre more, especially as we dig deeper into the spiritual world, and start to overhaul our materialistic striving. Choice will always remain the individual’s, and that choice will always be to go forwards or backwards, or just stay in the same place. Probably not many choose to follow the path of spirituality to its deepest depths, nor many would want to become priests, monks, recluses or swamis, but they are not all the potential “advanced” options. True “monastic” status essentially is an inner one, in these modern times.Monasticism is something that was representative of spiritual or religious leaning more commonly in older times. The modern world doesn’t leave much space around us to pursue that option. We have to do a lot of it on the internal plane, by making our own divine connections, and meeting in spaces where like-minded people can gather to do this work, without necessarily wearing certain clothes or performing certain rituals.

The biggest obstacle of all is the part of us that doesn’t want to die, and yet possibly gives us most grief, and that is our ego. That is, when we seek to move into higher levels or planes, the ego feels a threat, and may well set up its own conflicts and diversions to distract us for a long time. It is like a cat being removed from the warm fire to be put out into the cold – total reluctance! The human choice of life is to be very comfortable, thank you very much. The way of the renunciate is not universally, commonly, or popularly cherished.