Working successfully on a mentally taxing job, planning the visit to India and finalising this book with the preface and closing chapters signalled the end to my personal saga of God-search through an examination of humanity. I told Rashmi that I wished to do my job at Shell Wigmore well. I had been congratulated by my boss for being intelligent, and for not needing to be told more than once if some task had to be done. Had the evil that I had faced finally left me alone? And what had I learnt?
Rashmi and I remained married with a sixteen year old daughter to care for and I was now earning a living again. We still lived comfortably in a good house and ate the tastiest foods for Rashmi was a great cook and placed a great deal of attention to our well being in all sorts of ways. My greatest pleasure was sleeping for then the mind could rest. I found that I could still get aroused by the sight of nude women in magazines that were sold by the store and I did not restrain myself with my wife if she was ready to make love. I had recovered much of my mental stability and concluded that it was highly unlikely that I had ever suffered from schizophrenia. For one reason I had never heard voices in my head. However, I could not disagree with the psychiatrist's diagnosis of persistent delusional disorder and was aware that my theory on religion and on the nature of evil may also be a delusional fantasy.
Whether or not I was born with a divine mission in life to fight the British system a fight did take place which provided me with the opportunity of studying the University of Greenwich and the unhelpful state system in which no one I approached would come to my assistance. I did not consider myself as having led a pious or saintly life and could not say that I was always free of wrongdoings so that it was quite possible that I deserved my fate of proceeding from earning a good income with a highly desirable scientist's life one day to working as a cleaner in order to make ends meet a few years later. I had character faults and bad habits especially in my youth, when I smoked cigarettes and drank alcohol which got me into trouble with the police. I gave up both these habits and now considered them to have been part of my learning process. I did not always practice ahimsa (non-violence) having killed hundreds of experimental animals during the course of my animal science research at the Natural Resources Institute. For my wrongdoings I believed in quiet repentence, for which the rest of my life must be lived sin-free and in truth.
I had concluded that I set about trying to seek knowledge at any cost and had virtually abandoned my scientific career at the University by fighting the evil that I faced there in responding to the harassment with biting words, thereby giving them sufficient grounds for dismissing me from my job. I had already published 35 original scientific papers and therefore did not consider myself to have been an utter failure in the material world. Nor did I consider myself as being an unfortunate person because the process of fighting the University and taking the matter through tribunals and courts had taught me much about the nature of good and evil, and after all the intense delusional search the presence of God remained a powerful feeling within me. I was not giving up this belief by starting to live life like a machine: life was an individual mission to be lived according to personal circumstances and ones thoughts and ideas on morality and conscience.
I was very concerned about the danger of blaspheming during the initial stages of my search for God but was also conscious that blasphemy only applied to uttering and writing untruths, and did not mean that one could not criticise established religions in any way if these did not provide good and consistent answers to the questions about life. Among the main world religions I had given due regard to but had finally unfearingly concluded that I could not practice the worship of Jesus Christ although I read the Bible in parts and Christianity too had something good to contribute to the debate on God. I had engaged in discussions about God and Satan with Jehovah Witnesses who used to come to our house during the early part of my struggle. I could not worship Allah either like the Muslims do, five times a day, at set times facing Mecca. Nor could I believe in the Old Testament and Judaism. And I did not wish to practice Buddhism because it did not focus on God as the Creator and Preserver. Christianity in particular was brought into western countries to make people behave uniformly in order to make it easier for the rulers and later the colonialists and imperialists to control the population and exploit the resources of a country and of the colonised world. Even the Chinese State, with its evil one child per family law, subjugators of the people of Tibet, and attacker of India not long after its independence, was now promoting Christianity among its citizens having seen how the West used it to advantage to further its material objectives. I did not believe in communal religious worship and especially not in the idea that the entire world should be ordered in any particular model of development, such as any of the western democracies. Countries should be left alone to get on with developing their own ideas on religion, society and government. Even though I agreed with some sayings of the Muslim faith, like Inshallah, the possible Islamisation of the world to live according to sharia law was as abhorrent to me as was the unwanted imposition of western civilisation on the rest of humanity. I had also learnt from Zoroastrianism and the Kabbalah systems of understanding but whilst existing religions provided some clues to God they did not answer all the questions that had arisen in my life.
I came to the belief that there was an fathomable God who created man with the karmic plan of dharma to abide by in fulfilling his or her individual plan and in facing up to the challenges of life. During my fight I was initially led into following whom I saw as being the Saviour God and was almost in a trance at times worshipping Him as Vishnu. He appeared to me in a dream dressed in white at the height of my struggle. Subsequently however I realised that the real purpose of life was to merge with this harmonising Power by seeking out the truth at every turn and avoiding evil; this was also what was needed to achieve the full absolution at the end of life if one was not to be born again in this testing, torturous and unjust world. I had become a Vaishnava devotee as I celebrated the wondrous creation but at the same time I was practising Brahmanism. Merging with the Divine Power had taken my fight for justice to a new level and had resulted in my quarrelling with and resisting evil generally by raising truth to the surface. I believed in Sri Krishna as the personal Supreme God, and had praise for many of the life paths charted in the Mahabharatta and the Ramayana. I was a Hindu.
Above all, I could not dispel the notion that I had had a transient experience of God through advaita, or commuications with Him through the soul. Truth was the discipline to follow but it proved to be a tough life path. The path of truth had led me to my liberty as I had cornered the University of Greenwich in arguments morally even though I did not receive a judgement in my favour from a court of law. Truth had liberated my mind free of material attachments and I abandoned the publication of the 30 or so scientific papers that I still had data for and was not going to submit my MSc dissertation to Wye College, University of London, for more material glory. These were no longer a priority in my life as the mind was occupied with other matters such as sorting my mind out and earning a living. I considered that I had been 'freed by Om' so that I was to continue to live in truth with my independence of thought. I needed to know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth but truth turned out to be infinite so that it was going to be a life-time discipline of observation and practice as the wheel of life moved on inexorably. I saw that truth simply floated into my mind. At times it came in a trickle and at others it would come as an avalanche such that the mind could not cope. There were naturally instances when I had not acted hundred percent in truth as the mind was not sharp enough to judge the precise action to be taken on each occasion instantly. Sometimes it took a few additional moments for the true situation to emerge by which time a reactive action had already been taken. At other times it would take weeks if not months for the true situation to emerge when one had to put things in writing. In such situations one regretted the mistakes one made but moved on. I learnt that one must wait for the truth and patience was indeed a virtue.
From my early teens I had been enamoured by the Hindu saying 'Satyamev Jayate' as it sounded a phrase of some importance that many of the coins in India had written on. This saying summed up the process of an experience of free life in search of truth, in being at one with the truth, and in serving Truth. Truth must be out in the open for which reason this book had to be written. Rashmi was however unhappy to see it published because of the negative effect it would have on Rupa's future in view of the diagnosis of my mental illness and because of the references that I have made to Rashmi. This meant that the time was not ripe for the book to be published because perhaps it was not ready and I asked her if she would publish this book after my death.
Living life in faith of the presence of God as the Creator, Preserver and Destroyer and realising that union with this Spiritual Power was an end worth craving for had also made the material injustices in my life bearable. Truth also gave hope. My brother-in-law Mihir Praharaj had once written on the back of a letter to my wife that Truth was God, which I took seriously. It was another reinforcing idea that had come my way. God had left man to get on with his own devices so that He might appear to be a delusion to athiests like Professor Richard Dawkins. But man was unlike any other social animal that displayed kindness and generosity towards others. He lived life for his own ends and these are either material or spiritual in nature. Man had the choice of living like a mindless instinctive animal or as a higher being that he had the capacity for through his soul.
States had different objectives and some like the UK did not even have a written constitution to serve the people. Man's laws were arrived at by a democratic process, imposition by a ruler, or by religious prescription such as sharia law in Islamic states. Laws were enacted to govern people and compel citizens to behave in particular ways. These varied from time to time and were not always in accordance with the natural law of what is morally right or wrong. It was therefore futile to regard mankind as having certain common purposes and objectives which a body such as the United Nations might be relied upon to administer to the whole of humanity thorough resolutions in the Security Council and the processes of its other bodies. How an individual conducted his life was naturally affected by the common laws of the State that he lived in but whether the citizen would play a full and active part in that society would be dependent on his own perception of whether or not he took any directions from God.
Who ended up living in which country was predestined as was human fate. I had once been a patriot towards the United Kingdom and had even joined the Territorial Army briefly. To an even greater degree I was patriotic towards India, the country where I was born and which had sustained me in early life. Was one not in reality being patriotic or otherwise to a particular ruler's vision of the country and the world and these changed in the course of time? Britain had changed into a multicultural society and was continuing that trend with its open door immigration policies for people from the new Accessions countries of Europe. However, did one not have a duty to serve the State that one lived in regardless of whether one agreed or disagreed with its policies like its foreign policy because in doing so one was establishing the status quo which was being at one with the truth? This would then be the same as serving God so that one could indeed serve one's country and God at the same time. I therefore concluded that I wished to play my full part in British society as and when the opportunities presented themselves.
I still wore the janeo or sacred thread that is given to a Brahmin as he entered brahmacharya in a ceremony (Upanayan) at a young age, and was glad that I never took it off like many persecuted Brahmins did, even in India. I shaved and took a bath each day to remain clean and pure in front of God. But I did not say prayers or do puja to worship God any longer for I knew that I could not influence God and that things would take their pre-destined course. I lived on the assumption that God could read my mind and knew what was going through it so that there was no point in praying or worshipping. However, frequently I would utter the words, 'Hey Prabhu' which seemed just to be my acknowledgement that there was God in control regardless of His intents and purposes which no one knew for certain even though there were prophecies made like those in the Christian literature and Nostradamus' ancient writings. I believed in respect for all faiths including the rights of non-believers to express their views. I argued against proselytising religions but did not support the banning of religious symbols either in society or on a person because diversity in thought and belief represented the natural state of human affairs in the world. This diversity also explained the chaotic state of knowledge and the delusional state of man's convictions at the beginning of the twenty-first century, for which the pursuit of scientific discoveries would always lead to yet more questions. It was no wonder that Hinduism had also considered life to be maya, or illusion. But there was a certain order within the apparent disorder of the universe and I theorised a possible explanation of that order in the affairs of human beings by focusing on the nature of evil. The noted Indian philosopher Dr S. Radhakrishnan wrote in 'The Creative Life': the Absolute Reality is something which is incomprehensible in its character; and human definitions are faltering descriptions of that Reality and our attitude to the Supreme must be one of piety or adoration, not of knowledge or comprehension. He must have been referring to the Brahman as the Absolute Reality for it was unlikely that Sri Krishna, the personal Supreme God, was unknowable and human beings only need concern themselves with the personal God in order to survive this life. I had not studied Sanskrit and so was unable to decipher the writings of the Vedas and the Upanishads unless an English translation was provided. But from the readings that I had made I could finally understand the complexities of religion from my own studies and experiences. After all the science, economics, agriculture, examination of the justice system, researching into mental health, religion-quest, there still remained God for me to be ponder over on awaiting Fate.