Chap. 9

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 the period & 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 seventeen. I went on the overland trail as a “Hippy” beatnik, smoked lots of “hashish” and spent a year getting to India. I had no income at all!

(See my book about this period:  English-Man, Beggar-Man, Holy-Man).

My years in India were spent as a sadhu, a Hindu holy man, a monk, & travelling yogi. I spent several years in several different places in India. I had a first 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 Puri, (literally – the town of Ganesh, an Indian God). I stayed ten months in that large ashram, where Swami Muktananda 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 sannyasin, (renunciate), 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 & 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 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 & 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 wrist watch. I just spent days & months mulling 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.

At the age of twenty eight, this return to my starting point in London was a big shock to my parents.

I summarise here what has been intoduced already.

I left home alone in 1965. I was seventeen, 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. It was a period 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 ten plus 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 & 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 café! 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 externally. 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).

Then 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, & sundry matters. I had also been lucky to have had the great fortune to experience life in some other fascinating countries & places. Now I add another thirty years plus on to this “saga”. (With these writings, and perhaps more?)

The title of this part of the book: 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 yogic 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 when I moved away from India I didn’t think then about tigers for quite a few years. My life was not connected like it had been with India and tigers, & my worship of the Goddess. (Now I am very different and the tiger is a core part of my life).