13 November 2006
The job at Shell Wigmore dealing with thousands of customers also provided a good training ground for me to fine-tune my search for the truth at one with the truth. Each tiny action had to be reflected on. I had to do my job as my employer wished me to do but I also needed to ask what I would gain from an action materially. If there was something to to be gained, the action was not to be performed. Even greater discipline was now needed to stay on the path of truth.
During my struggle at the University of Greenwich Professor Barry Blake had once written to me that my professional reputation had not been maligned by Dr Richard Mathewman by his accusation of false pretences on my part to which I had responded with a letter that 'a man has only one reputation that one keeps with one wherever one goes, during life and after life'. It was another one of the early clues that not only was I in the process of receiving divine guidance through advaita, I would be visiting the question of 'after life' through this saga.
I considered that God manifested Himself in various ways and was always in the process of manifesting. Rama was an incarnation of Sri Krishna, and since the Ramayana predated the Mahabharatta the last full incarnation of God was said to be Sri Krishna as Himself. I was also led to believe that Shirdi Sai Baba of the nineteenth century, 9 in numerology, was an incarnation of Lord Shiva. During the height of my struggle at the Littlebrook Mental hospital in Dartford an Indian person handed me a picture of Sai Krishna which I checked against the clock and got the answer that Sri Satya Sai Baba, 9 in numerology, was an incarnation of God. However, I became puzzled that I had not come across his views on the nature of evil which made me think that an avatar or incarnation could not be seen as Almighty God in total. How could the Infinite be represented in the finite?. There must be limits to which aspect of Himself the Almighty was demonstrating in an avatar, who is after all a human being with a fixed biology, a limited mind to consider and judge matters and limited time and space in life to do things. The avatar could not be a perfect vehicle for God to display all of Himself.
Sri Ramakrishna Paramhansa who lived the life of a saint was only a seeker of the truth worshipping Kali (another name for Durga) but was nonetheless worshipped like a god and his pictures were still everywhere in Bengal in India. I did not believe that the person known to history as the Buddha was an incarnation of God: Lord Brahma and Lord Vishnu were supposed to have appeared to him to persuade him away from his search. Leaving his family and State duties to seek enlightenment appeared to me to be selfish and adharmic thing to do, for I felt that one could seek enlightenment within the family life.
The main purpose of an incarnation at the Supreme God or the Trimurti level was to create a tidal wave of spirituality for all of humanity to note, so that dharma is reestablished on Earth on a wide scale. I felt that the masses needed to see God in person. However, my karmic plan allowed the return of souls of the semi-divine (Number 8) or even divine (Number 9) categories into society and into family life. Throughout history there have been numerous examples of divine human beings and some of them were assigned the title of having been a saint (The Roman Catholic church was not interested in the beatification of non-Christians). Divine souls distinct themselves in society in their own lifetime, and are destined to live as minor gods after life in the spirit world. This was why in Hinduism there are millions of gods. These ascended gods could be pathways to the Supreme God, Sri Krishna, and in India gurus were also respected as forming a pathway to God. I did not have a guru in real life and my knowledge came directly or indirectly from God. With Sri Krishna being the Trimurti I only developed piety and adoration towards Brahma and his consort, Saraswati, Vishnu and his consort, Lakshmi, and Shiva and his consort, Parvati. Additionally, I regarded Durga, whose name adds to 7 according to the Chaldean-Hebrew Kabala Numerical Alphabet, as Sri Krishna's Shakti-consort, the female Goddess Supreme on the basis that God did not discriminate between males and females, and the concept of marriage being God's ordained path of life for all of humanity to follow. However, throughout all societies and families there lived individuals who effectively hold families and societies together by their goodness, actions and great wisdom. They command the respect of others in society. This was the reason that life somehow reaches harmony inspite of calamitous events and family tragedies. Somalia, which was supposed to be a failed state by many, was still thriving by developing new systems of law and order and business systems. The Big Brother of UK, that is by Mr Tony Blair, might be turning the UK into a nation of morons by design or ignorance but there were still voices like those of Mr Harold Pinter and Mr John Pilger to make people stop and think carefully about their actions and policies. Such people appeared to me to be blessed with divine souls and guidance.
Theories aside, the reason I retained the belief that departed souls exist in space is that I had a visit from my mother, Mrs Shantilata Panigrahi, on the eve of our departure to India in 1997, just a few days after I sent my email to Mr David Jackson during my struggle at the University of Greenwich. We had embraced in enjoyment and engaged in a conversation. I used her as a source of information too by asking her, 'As a soul you must have travelled the length and breadth of this universe, tell me is there any other place out there like the Earth with living beings as we see here?' She had replied, 'There is no other place like the Earth anywhere my dear.' Western medicine may classify my mother as mentally ill for she had taken her own life using a knife and had simultaneously unsuccessfully tried to take my younger baby sister life. But she had turned to this act out of desperation to prevent my sister's tuberculosis spreading to the rest of the family as she saw it and she therefore had some good intentions at heart. She was highly talented and had been a classical Indian dancer in her childhood receiving medals and certificates from noted bodies and a Certificate of her excellence from Ustad Allaudin Khan, the Indian maestro. She had also studied in Shantiniketan, Rabindranath Tagore's School. She was no ordinary human being and her visit to me from the spiritual world at the crucial time that I had sent a suicidal hard-hitting email to my employers must be seen as significant for she had obviously come to support me in my struggle and the struggle to come.
My stepmother was Mrs Sarojini Panigrahi (Tara Waman Kelkar before marriage), a Professor of Botany who had married my father in her late forties and saw us through our
teenage years into adulthood. She was a dramatist and a poet in her spare time and was also regarded as divine after her death in Kolkata where as a Maharashtrian she had endeared herself to the community with her goodness. In March 1993 she passed away and I had an amazing experience when at very short notice I managed somehow to get on the last Flight out of London by Air India when the company was involved in a trades union dispute to attend her funeral in Kolkata. I then somehow got on a connecting flight at New Delhi to arrive at the ritual ceremony on the 13 day, just in time to complete my duties as a son at the ceremony itself and then to immerse the ritual remains in the Ganga river (biswarjan). It was at this point that I had seen boat loads of straw arriving into Kolkata, evidence of which being precisely what I had needed for my work at the Natural Resources Institute to show my competence and attention to the new interest on ruminant livestock that I was being marginalised out of. I took slide pictures of the straws and milk production in Kolkata and showed at an important Meeting of policy makers of the Department of International Development. I believe that these fortuitious incidents in which I fulfilled my duties as a son to his parents for funeral rites and the work-related developments were the result of divine interventions. Both my mothers then visited me together inside Dr Rao's Surgery at BUPA, Walderslade, during my first appointment with this consultant psychiatrist. Again, this visit was significant in that they were lending me spiritual and moral support in my fight against the University of Greenwich. This is also why I believe that I was spiritually blessed for my struggle which in the end simply turned out to be a struggle for true knowledge.
People also believe that there are evil souls who can make their presence in the material world as ghosts. I had not had any experience of individual evil spirits but had encountered a real life one in Professor Maggie Gill, a very powerful figure at the University of Greenwich, for which I had called it the University of the Green Witch. I believed therefore that witches and demons existed in real life. Many people, Christians included, exorcised evil spirits, including Satan, away from their lives. Hindus perform shraddha ceremonies for departed souls in respect for them if they lived divine lives and to put their souls at rest.