Making it up: a paean
Morphic resonance concerns memories that are transmitted over space and time, based on similarity (Rupert Sheldrake sometime after meeting Father Bede Griffith (later Swami Dayananda: ‘bliss of compassion’))[1]. The flatworm is trained under certain conditions of light, and so when it regenerates a lost head it remembers that lost head’s memories. Twin souls: you win, I win; we all win. This conundrum has local poet James K Baxter (later guru Hemi)[2] appear as Bede’s doppelganger seer twin.
Both find inspiration through visiting the Elephanta Caves near Mumbai, one early in the 1950s the other near their close. Seeing ‘Shiva with three faces’ invites transmogrification, a sense of mission:
Accordion and sweet brisk drum
Waken a lounging passion…
Bede’s ‘experiment in common living’ in the
Cotswolds with a couple of alumni chums from Oxford[3] sees him eventually head to India, ‘to discover the other half of my soul’: he has landed. Similarly, from the moment of his arrival in the subcontinent, James’s wife proclaims, ‘he saw everything with new eyes’. ‘The road from India led to Jerusalem’, she continues, revealing a loss of her own.[4] A few days into their UNESCO-funded visit, our future Hemi returns to their room ashen-faced: I now realise what living as an exuviated minority entails, he confides.[5] Pity the internally displaced, traumatised tangatawhenua, of whom Jacquie is one. To their communal realisations our two sanyasis infuse a mutual esteem for Carl Jung: Bede after an initial encounter with acolyte Toni Sussman (‘The whole Eastern world opened up for me’, he remarks) and James via a celebration of Jung’s communality in his essay in The Man on the Horse, written almost thirty years later when he was Burns Fellow in Dunedin.[6]
Beyond a shared affection for such esoteric mysticism, each man frequently utters conversational markers like ‘you see’ & ‘you know’,[7] akin to a tilakaspot on the forehead. Our holy men come to identify the outside of life with the inside, their lives are lived inside out, including material deprivation and failures in community formation and
matrimony. Theirs is a life lived elsewhere: metaphor is truth’s veil. Hemi, following a vision, leaves mundane life to settle at Hiruharama on the Whanganui River, transmuting into our Māori prophet of justice.[8] Fay Dowker compares such transformation to sending ‘a massive particle from one to the other’, whereby causal and chronological structures are undone, whatever distinctions may remain. In the teleology of Jung championed by pre-Socratic mystic Peter Kingsley, our two men are designated iatromantis (Gk), healer-prophets.[9] It all comes together, a naught spun in the tilaka void. Bede and Hemi practice renunciation and adopt their lay retinues. Bede founds Oblate communities modelled on his own Benedictine tradition: ‘I think that Greco-Roman European culture has reached its end’. And Hemi espouses sacred manuhiritanga, extending unquestioned embrace and shelter to the dispossessed young. Together they court redemption in the reimagined: ‘Beyond words, beyond images… where we have to meet [in the] cave of the heart’, says Bede, and Hemi, ‘Wahi Ngaro, the gap from which our prayers / Fall back like toe toe’. We, too, are turned from outside to inside, inside to outside, whether we like it or not. The spirit of Parmenides hovers overhead.[10] Bede’s Hemi, Hemi’s Bede, and we many who constitute a third: together we breathe the same air. These sentences, theirs and mine, declare a want for rejuvenation, like brown leaves snapped off in preparation of the new green.
And Shiva like a business uncle watches
The village girls with cans to fill
File through the temple to a covered cistern. (‘Elephanta’)
before the Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, absorbed. I flew with the angels.
St Isaac of Nineveh: ‘Put the lover of legality to shame by your compassion’.
Kaore te taima, kaore te moni, kaore nga pukapuka
Vocatus atques non vocatus, Deus[13]
notes
[1] 1906-93, ordained 1940, died at 86. His sanyasi name was conferred in the Syriac Rite in the late 1950s.
[2] 1926-72, died at 46, two months prior to Bede’s turning 66. Founder of Hiruharama community at Jerusalem on the Whanganui River.
[3] This might be understood as a precursor to Baxter’s ‘Theology of Communality’, outlined in Jerusalem Daybook, 1970.
[4] Peter Olds captures the moment, ‘’’God told me in a dream to go to Jerusalem, he said / … and grow vegetables and start a new life”’ (‘The special’).
[5] The opening sequences in the The Road to Jerusalem TVNZ documentary and [Bede’s talk] carry the background sound of the sitar. Jacquie knew at their first separation that James’s heart occupied a secretive place, despite his incapacity for duplicity. She explains: ‘He was pale; he was agitated; and he walked in and he stood in front of me, and he said, “Now I know what life's been like for you. I now know what it feels like to belong to a minority”’. Despite suffering from amoebic dysentery throughout, James wouldn’t eat well, and couldn’t help but give the little cash he had to the needy. Already self-deprivation ruled.
[6] Toni Sussmann, erudite practitioner and psychotherapist, arrived in London in 1940 and remained relatively unknown outside Jungian circles. ‘When Baxter moved to Christchurch in 1947, it was primarily in order to undergo analysis with a “Jungian psychiatrist” named Mrs Christeller’, reports Kai Jensen, in ‘The Drunkard and the Hag: James K. Baxter’s Use of Jung’, JNZL 13 (1995, 211-234.)
[7] Such phrases are also called acknowledgement markers, opening a space for meeting as a third.
[8] Jacquie never joined Hemi at Hiruharama, though he longed for this: ‘all that makes it less than good, Te Kare, / Is that you are not beside me’.
[9] According to Peter Kingsley, iatromantis figures belonged to a wider Greek and Asian shamanic tradition with its origins in Central Asia. Kingsley connects the same Parmenides figure to Jung’s account of agonised personal transformation published posthumously as Liber Novus (Red Book).
[10] Kingsley is himself summarised: ‘The fragments of their [pre-Socratic] writings that are left… read like poetry… like ritual incantations… related to shamanism, to ritual magic… to the idea of reconnecting humans with the very source of consciousness’ (Jeffrey Mishlove: ‘Carl Jung and the End of Humanity: Reflections on Peter Kingsley's Catafalque’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aHdeNUinYU).
[11] ‘Mystically [if we see it through the eyes of those we love] we do become members of [a religion other than our own], without betrayal of any doctrine or principle of our own’ (Jerusalem Daybook, 27).
[12] Later in the 1960s, Abhishiktananda (formerly Henri de Saus, Benedictine-Advaitian: ‘Beyond, always beyond’ and ‘… it was the unique Sage of eternal India that appeared to me... it was a call that pierced through everything, rent it in pieces, and opened a mighty abyss’) commenced regular pilgrimages to Northern India and in 1968 he left Shantivanam forever having passed it to Bede Griffiths OSB Cam (1906–1993) for the ongoing development of the ashram. Says Bede: ‘The west needs to learn from the east the sense of the holy of a transcendent mystery which is imminent in everything and which gives an ultimate meaning to life. Waving lights in front of the sacrament, you have this flame and you ring the bell and you wave the light and it's extremely moving this is a way of worship and using Hindu forms for the adoration of the sacrament’.
[13] ‘No time, no money, no books’ / ‘Called, or not called, God is there’.