Beautiful minds

We have created a kind of monstrous society which has almost completely severed its connections to the spiritual roots of all being

Graham Hancock

I had long missed the boat that was to take me back to the world outside of Iona's monastic fortress, battered by gale force winds for the two days I was there. The rental car I had picked up at Edinburgh airport was still on the neighbouring island of Mull, waiting for its pilgrim to return. Driving across Mull was always a deeply savoured experience for me, one of being graced by the wild Scottish landscape with its naked hills and scattered, bleating sheep in a largely untouched and lowly populated wilderness. It is solitude personified in heather and granite.

I was in a hurry, in a rush actually which is definitely not the way a pilgrim moves best through any landscape. I did not stop at the church at Dervaig on Mull's other end from Iona with that controversial paining of a pregnant Mary Magdalene and Jesus cradling her because I knew by now as a researcher that we will never actually know the truth about that historical drama, no matter how many 'pieces of evidence' we claim to possess. History, as a pursuit of objective fact finding was now literally behind me, as it should be for any pilgrim. You do not find truth in the past, though you certainly find visions that light the way on your current journey through this world. Those visions, like the ones from Egypt always come through individuals who we have personally immortalised. Now, we really need to immortalise ourselves.But how?

The road in front of me was what counted. Actually it was being right here on Mull that counted but I had already lost myself. It was too late. The world had gobbled me again. Though I knew where I was going, I was already lost in an impossible schedule to meet beautiful minds.

It was here crossing Mull that you must drive a one track road with lay bys at the right or left every 500 metres so that you, or the car coming towards you, could stop long enough for the other to pass. It is quite stressful if you drive fast, and I was. You had to mentally guess whether you should pull over and wait or if the other should, and with some drivers it is like the old car race game of chicken...who would yield first? I had to get on that ferry to Oban on the mainland. I had already lost a hotel booking and one flight to London and both Graham Hancock and Satish Kumar had set aside valuable time for pivotal interviews I could not miss. And yet I was in my better moments a pilgrim and had fully accepted the delay on Iona, the lack of hot food and the poor quality of filming I had done there alone. I had to get my priorities straight. Yes I was on a mission to document on film about what a pilgrimage is and therefore I really had to be one. I had to belong to an ancient world of step by step progress, the archetypal pilgrim's progress. But at the same time I also had to keep up with email communication, flight schedules and car hires. The result was often highly frustrating but I resisted the strong temptation to indulge in feeling a victim. It was my chosen journey after all. As Ken Wilber, the American philosopher once very adroitly put it, "The Buddha couldn't drive a jeep or work a computer". What he meant of course is that we live far more complex lives than the spiritual heroes of our past. To pray at 100 kph bumping over a rough road trying to catch a ferry is a kind of pilgrimage the Buddha and Jesus could scarcely have imagined. We have in our face temptations and distractions far more hallucinatory in their power over the mind than surely even Mara had cooked up for Gautama.

Being a pilgrim now really is a super heroic journey, even if it is just for a few miles through any modern city landscape as our senses are assaulted with hundreds of good reasons to give up the inner quest and spiritually sell out for an erection, a salary raise, a new biped transportation device or a totally amazing taste experience. Jesus had his challenges to be sure, but in our world one second of concentration lapse on this road just a bit wider than my car and I would end up potentially with my head lodged up a sheep's ass, with a broken neck. Would my prayer hold as I slow motioned my painful way through the windscreen and into the huddle of quiet quadrupeds ahead? Could we really be pilgrims when there is no escape, even here, from the relentless barrage of data flow through the brain? It is easily sparked for example by a poster for a Sunday newspaper, its half naked bimbo drooling at me, as I slow down to get through the village in the middle of Mull. We are tough people, we really are heroic when you realise we are already in hell. It is a done deal. Not in the afterlife, but here and now. To remember one's spiritual identity in the 21st century is as hard as an amnesiac trying to find his way back from the hospital to the house he lived in when he was a child, in a different country with new street names. How badly would he have to want to get home for that to succeed? Buddha and Jesus had temptations in a machineless and close to imageless world when time flowed far, far slower than now and the air was much, much sweeter.

Snow had fallen in the pass that must be navigated on the main road from Oban to Edinburgh, creating more delays for me by a road diversion. I was driving now dangerously fast on a much smaller road to make up the lost distance to Edinburgh airport. I had completely lost the balance I had temporarily regained during some magical moments on Iona and was now back in the infamous matrix. Time and adrelanin rules here. But thanks to a security alert at Edinburgh airport my London flight was delayed over an hour and I arrived at Heathrow close to 8 p.m. Exhausted already from the whole nerve wracking ride I had to rent another car to drive down to Bath, where lives Graham and his wife Santha. Disgusted by the poor service at the car rental agency and clearly expressing my anger and displeasure to the staff I had a brief return to balance as I spoke about Hindu philosophy with the Indian bus driver taking me from the terminal to the car pickup point. I thought it strange that there is perhaps now more living culture in the UK thanks to immigration than with the low consciousness white consumers whose only interest is themselves.

The Heathrow environment is a dark and dirty world like many airport zones. High tension, noise and highway junctions all over. Grimy, gritty streets and fearful people abounding. On the M25 motorway I suddenly realised looking at my speedometer that the average speed of drivers there is 140 kph. I was doing 160. The Brits drive very, very fast. No wonder. This was a stress infested culture for sure and I was by now completely engulfed in its force of presence, mentally timing my arrival at Graham's house at 10 p.m. minimum. Sirius shone brightly in the cool English night. That was my sole spiritual consolation. On entering Bath city, an ancient Roman town that did once have a spa unrivalled in the UK anywhere, I realised how much of a police state, a violent country this had become. Just as I navigated the small roads to get to the Hancock residence the pubs were spewing out their human contents on to the streets at closing time. Many of the people were completely and riotously drunk, and a menacing air pervaded the night. Police were on patrol because of course they know what happens when people get outside, especially young men. They look for anybody to attack, without any reason other than to vent their innate rage at having to live a life devoid of any underlying meaning at all. Serious assaults are common. Deaths are increasing. A young man walks into a shop drunk, pulls out a knife and viciously slams it into the teenage body of a boy he does not know. Later, he will confess he did not know what he was doing. Of course he didn't. He was out of his mind at the time. And yet the holy nation state, with all its highly trained psychology professionals never thinks to connect an ever growing dependence on alcohol as the national stress relief treatment, with the unbridled violence of its nights. Britain of course is no different from anywhere else in the pathetically named developed world. We are drunken monkeys by night and caged animals by day with no sense of connection to the land or to the other people who share it with us.

My nerves by now completely frazzled, I hugged Graham and his wife Santha at their front door close to 11 p.m. A respite at last. I was with people who were beyond the matrix, people with big hearts and open minds. We had not seen each other for more than a year and it was time to catch up. The filmed interview could happen tomorrow. Still vibrating from the effects of driving in two different countries, flying in an aluminium pipe with wings and leaving the profoundly peaceful sanctuary of the holy island to then arrive in an air conditioned nightmare of freedom and democracy, merry pubs and terminal angst I was ready to put the pilgrim into a deep and healing sleep before I could interview my shamanic ally Graham with any measure of intelligence. Sleep, as the Dalai Lama has said, is really the best meditation.