Harriet Devine's Blog

A Trip Beyond Imagination by Tony Butcher

There's a part of my life that I rarely write about on here. I've been practicing meditation for more than forty years and have a great interest in all things spiritual, which has taken me many times to India. People who know me personally know all this of course, though somehow I've always felt it was appropriate to keep it all separate from my bookish life. But the other day I got the offer of a review copy of this newly published e-book and  enjoyed it so much I thought I'd tell you about it.

'I'm just an ordinary old man', Tony Butcher says in this book, and it's true in many ways, though not in others. He's a retired schoolteacher, happily married since he was 21, has a passion for cricket. Many years ago he learned the practice of transcendental meditation and it evidently filled some kind of gap for him, bringing many benefits to his everyday life. He became a keen attender on various advanced and residence courses, and it was on one of these in early 2001 that he heard of a forthcoming tour of the sacred sites of north India and felt what he describes as a calling to go. The limit of his travel experience had been family holidays in Spain and Greece, but he was soon down at the travel agent booking a flight to Delhi, much to his own and his wife's surprise.

Luckily - though in Tony's view nothing is really just up to luck - he started keeping a diary and it is this that he has edited for the e-book. For anyone who loves or longs to go to India, this will certainly feed the flames. We hear about the flight:

 It always occurs to me that setting off on an aircraft journey replicates what happens when we die. First of all we are relieved of our possessions. Next we are separated from our family and friends and herded into a waiting area. Lastly, we are whisked off to another place where life is very different.

We hear about the fabulous Imperial Hotel in Delhi, where the tour party spends their first few nights, and about his first impressions of that glorious, mad, perplexing, loveable country. But we also hear about the ideas that lie behind the tour itself - the company than ran it is dedicated to taking people to visit the most revered spiritual sites in India, places where, whatever their belief system (Hindu, Buddhist, Tibetan etc), devotees have spent their lives looking inwards, turning away from the distractions of the world of the senses. Tony loves every minute of it - from the start it clearly fulfils some deep spiritual need, but he also loves the people, the hotels, the food, the train journeys, the boat rides on the Ganges and much much more, and writes about them with great warmth and enthusiasm. But then, on a visit to a temple dedicated to the monkey god Hanuman, things take an unexpected turn, as he finds himself in front of a shrine dedicated to the goddess Durga:

 One look was all it took! It was love at first sight! At the time I didn’t even know that it was a representation of Durga. I began to chant spontaneously. Lots of chants came from deep inside me that I had never heard before. I felt a deep feeling of reverence for her and spontaneously prostrated myself at her feet.

So, in this completely innocent and spontaneous way, Tony's life shot off in a direction he had never anticipated and did not fully understand. As he goes on to explain in the book, from this point on, every time he saw a representation of Durga, whether in a temple, or even just as a cheap statue or painting, this spontaneous chanting would automatically begin. The chants were in the ancient Sanskrit language, and he had no idea what he was saying, but numerous temple priests and sanskrit scholars verified that they were completely authentic. From that day forward,, Tony became an ardent devotee of the goddess, and this continues today.

For a non-Hindu, this all sounds probably very puzzling and inexplicable. Evidently the phenomenon of spontaneous chanting is well-known in India, but occurrences of it are rare today. The explanation he has been given and that he fully accepts is that he must have been a devotee of Durga in a previous incarnation and that the memory of his previous practices has just been brought to the surface. I'm happy with that myself, but it would be interesting to hear an explanation from someone who is totally sceptical about all such matters.

The book is quite short and I read it in a sitting, with huge enjoyment. If you think it might interest you, you can find in Amazon by clicking here. Fascinating stuff.

 

Eat Pray Love

Here's a bookI never thought I'd be reading. I have in fact done my fair share of all these things during the course of my life, which is why I went to see the film when it first came out a few years ago. But I didn't like it, and it completely put me off reading the book. I picked it up just a few days ago when a friend who'd been staying with me left it in the house. And I found I liked it very much indeed.

Before I get into reviewing it, a little preamble. I have always tended to compartmentalise my life, which has been rather long and very varied. As a result, I have numerous friends, but they fall into different groups. So I have my theatre friends, some of whom I've known since my childhood because my parents were in the theatre. Then there are my academic friends, met during my thirty or so years in various universities, my blogging friends, most of whom I've never met but feel I know anyway, and people I've just got to know because we lived close by or were friends of friends. And then there are my meditating friends, many of whom I first met forty years ago when I learned to meditate and fairly soon afterwards became a teacher. Though I wouldn't say these groups never overlap, I've learned over the years that many of the non-meditators are not in the least bit interested in what I can only call the spiritual side of my life. It's fine if you tell them about the practical effects of meditation -- relaxation, clarity of thought etc -- but mention God and they all look very sour and scornful. 

So for me, reading this memoir was a rare treat. There can be few people who don't know about Elizabeth Gilbert's decision, after a messy divorce and a failed love affair, to spend a year doing three things on her own and just for herself. That meant Rome, to learn Italian and eat delicious food, India to meditate in an Ashram, and Bali to meet up with an ancient healer and of course finally, though not part of the plan, to meet a gorgeous Brazilian who she would eventually marry.

Liz Gilbert is a professional writer and journalist, and she writes in a delightfully readable way. But what I liked most about the book was her honesty -- about her own failings, her moments of unrealistic fantasy, her self doubt, her struggles to understand herself and to overcome the grief and rage that was a legacy of the unhappy past few years. If this sounds as if it might be grim, I can assure you it's not. It's often very funny, but also often very wise. Liz never pretends she has any answers, but she recounts her struggles to find them and the solutions that have worked for her without any attempt to preach. 

Obviously with my own background I was particularly interested by the middle section in which she stays in the ashram of an Indian female guru. Having done the same thing myself quite a few times -- though in a different ashram of a different guru -- this was bound to grab me. And having practised meditation for so many years it was fascinating to read of Liz's downs and ups in her attempts to get a grip on it all, the miseries of feeling like a failure at it, the agonies of dealing with all the stuff that got stirred up, and the rare but astonishingly wonderful moments where suddenly everything worked and the experiences were -- well, beyond words, really, though she manages to find some pretty adequate ones. 

It was interesting to read, on wikipedia, extracts from some of the early reviews of the book. Most critics seems to have been bemused and turned off by the ashram section ( "narcissistic New Age reading", "this silliness") but that's par for the course -- if you don't relate to that sort of thing, you're bound to feel like that. And yes, of course, as other critics pointed out, Liz was able to make this journey because she had a considerable amount of financial backing  -- one reviewer felt that it offered "no real solutions for the astronomically high tariffs—both financial and social—that exclude all but the most fortunate among us from participating". Well yes, but I suppose you could say that about any travel book, and that's really what this is, though some of the journeys are being taken internally rather than externally. 

Anyway, I loved every minute of it, and it made me long to go to Rome, India and Bali, all of which I've been lucky enough to visit, though I'd hope not to gain 22 pounds from eating pasta, as Liz did,  and I doubt if I'd be coming back with a Brazilian husband. 

Anybody out there read it? What did you think?