By 12 oclock on 18 February I decided to ignore God and the Universal Being altogether for the truth of the so-called realisation was that I had no proof of what I had written to Professor Robert Winston, and so that it too could be entirely delusional. I started applying for a job with Kent Police for Community Support Officer that Rashmi had got details of from the Internet. Rashmi and I realised that we had to tackle the medical check issue at the beginning so as not to waste our time going through a futile process of an application form and interview so that I drafted a letter not looking up to the Divine as I used to do with endless speculations on what it may mean from Him or for Him. Rashmi made alterations, such as replacing my reference to the Chief Constables Office and commitment to the United Kingdom, adding others like my motivation as justification for my application: The letter was: I am applying for the vacancies for Police Community Support Officers with the attached application form, but also wish to point out my earlier application to you for the position of Public Enquiry Officer at Rochester Police Station so that it may be given due consideration along with my suitability in terms of qualifications and experience for the present post.
Your records concerning my earlier application may be held by the Personnel Office at the Headquarters. It will show that I had successfully passed the interview stage of the Police Enquiry Officer post and was initially offered the position pending your security and medical checks on applicants. I was disappointed that I was considered unsuitable for that post for a medical reason which was based on a lengthy, irrelevant and ignorant report by the Consultant Psychiatrist who examined my case file at the time. This doctor was subsequently replaced and a new Consultant Psychiatrist, Dr P Shobha, has assessed me a few times since, and her decision has been to discharge me from requiring any form of medical care.
I have also been working for 6 months in a quite demanding Customer Service job but at the same time feel that my talents, knowledge and experience, motivation and commitment should be brought to better use in a demanding role and a better paid job. Having faith in the system in operation, I have therefore decided to apply again to Kent Police for the present post or for any other suitable vacancies that exist now or may appear in the future.
As I filled in the Application Form itself I was struggling again not to focus on the Divine and to start wondering if it was God's work again, what it may lead to in terms of the saga and the Universal Being, but I had to. I had found out on Saturday gone that there was a simple explanation for why World Society for Protection of Animals had not replied to my emailed job application for it had responded to my reminder with the comment that they had had a large number of applications so were still considering these.
I went for a brisk long walk determined to improve my general state of health for the challenges ahead. On return, as I prepared the chicken for cooking, Rashmi read out her daily horoscope with joy as well as telling me what her birth sign meant. I asked her if she had ever had her birth chart read to tell her about her future. She said No, she did not believe in that but did believe in general birth sign characteristics of a person. I listened reflecting on how our birth charts had been matched before marriage could take place for it had indicated a perfect match, but there was uncertainty as she also reminded me of how my father had called her a 'Astamangali', and one destined to bring the misery to her husband that I had ended up with. My father had studied astrology for years to add to his research in Botany, and had also told me that as a young boy people had said that he was going to become a sadhu in life. He did not but read the Gita throughout his adult life and chanted religious slokas and songs to us, which had influenced me greatly. But this afternoon, I prepared the chicken saying to myself 'Oh No, I am not going down that path now, nor am I listening to the Universal Being, if He exists, to do so: back to the visible and audible reality only. I considered that I had struggled to re-establish some kind of employment record and was not going to put this in jeopardy for without a good reference one could not get a job, and so I went to work for my evening shift.
During the work, acts were no longer made with the mind focused on God in devotion, or as an offering to Him. I started shrugging the mind off the focus. I still ended up saying good things to some customers including saying 'Thank you son' to a young lad behaving very well so that attitude to life and how to behave had not changed, but there was now no consideration of evil, or divine in the mind's framework. For I had no proof of these. Had I and my family been truly protected by God through these years? If so, I argued that I would soon see if things start to go wrong by my abondoning devotion. And even if they did go wrong I would not revert back to the devotional mode. I reflected on a moment of madness or whatever some weeks previously when I had called the Power above 'a dog', and thought later that He had forgiven me for that thought; but Dog was the opposite of God, incidentally, so had I been communicating with the Evil dimension, eg Satan, of the Universal Being?). I revisited incidents taking place in and around Orissa Bhavan, Kolkata between Rashmi and me when there was much aggro stemming from cockroaches in the hotel room that Rashmi hated and my attitude of trying to stop her shopping in the crowded unknown streets that I felt we would get lost in, and with her constantly pointing out to me how clever and unafraid her brother Muna was in having come to fetch us from and to Kolkata: spiritual forces of good and evil were locked in a game perhaps. But no response from Professor Robert Winston and lack of a decent life for me meant that I was still in darkness about the whole thing. By detaching myself from devotional mode I was putting into effect a new framework which should lead to the truth about these matters, that is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I would take care of everything as stated in the email to Professor Winston but not in devotion to God, or attributing my actions to the Universal Being. I was not going to see the beauty of the divine as Vishwaroopa in the faces and behaviour of every customer coming into the shop, ignoring that thought and the experience as being delusional. The other day I had said to a customer when sorting out £5.00 notes that I placed all with the Queen's Head facing one way out of respect to the Queen, and had wondered if the Universal Being was indicating that she believed in God: I was not going to make any such interpretatons any more. Similarly, I would not read anything into why Muna, Rashmi's brother, got robbed from his hotel room of his money and other possessions and why luckily we in another room with considerably more money and important travelling documents had not been robbed.
I reflected that Rashmi had told me that we had not had sex for 2 years during my mental illness when I tried Viagra but I had recovered from that impotence and had now done it two nights running: was devotion to God necessary for a good sex life, for example? Why had I studied subjects like Economics, Livestock Development, and Environmental Science and had found them rivetting and almost perfect explanations at the time, but had now ended up in my present state of mind and fate? It dawned momentarily, that it had all been a game of a sort.
As I scribbled these notes on a piece of paper to record the incidents and my thoughts I suddenly saw that incidents might be happening to confuse me into making a mistake at work, for example, a customer put a handed me a £10 note and said it was a £20 that he had given me. For another lady, her Chip and Pin card operation malfunctioned and she said 'it (meaning the machine) does not want to play': I tried to hold my poise and put it through the alternative Card Swipe and Sign system, saying if it does not want to play this way it must play that way, and it worked. For I considered that if I had understood the Universal Being correctly, It must be protecting this system in the west, and UK, so that it was in It's interest that the work I was engaged in went smoothly even without my being in the devotional mode so that I had nothing to gain from remaining in a devotional mode: I simply had to do my present job and work to the best of my ability without any thought of the Divine, Its love, love for It, etc. For as things stood, not only had I not won back my job at the University of Greenwich, as a so-called gyana yogi, I had ended up with an analysis that Professor Robert Winston had not bothered to reply to perhaps thinking to himself that a lunatic had sent him a stupid email, and not feeling, as I had initially assumed, that he had received a slap on his face for his ignorance over the matter as the leading world authority in the medical sciences; as perhaps others who had received letters from me during the last 10 years must also have thought about me. Actual events therefore showed that I had been stupid in chasing a dreamy delusion all these years.
Even with such thoughts going on in the mind while I served customers, I found myself utterring 'Oh my God' when something happened to confuse me momentarily, but I decided to ignore that spontaneous reaction of mine as perhaps being simply a result of a habit that I had formed over the years, rather than being a checking expression uttered to the Divine, as I had earlier assumed such utterances to be through advaita. I felt that now I knew why I had said to Jhuna, Rashmi's disabled sister, not to tell anyone what I had said to her, that I had seen God, in response to her question to me: I simply had no proof of it. And technically, the University of Greenwich could object to my writing scientific papers without it's permission on the grounds that these would be based on research conducted while I was at the Natural Resources Institute, so that I should also ignore the presumed meaning of last night's dream about writing these papers in my spare time.
I had also realised that one could not tell from a person's appearance, behaviour or words precisely what was going on through his or her mind at any given time. Suddenly as I worked on at Shell Wigmore it dawned on me that the notes I was scribbling could be proof if it fell into wrong hands that I had relapsed into a mental disorder illness that needed further pschiatric treatment. I therefore decided that I must stop writing. Much happened with new dreams and incidents, with Rashmi reacting badly when she accidentally saw my latest notes, so writing to me: 'Nothing matters to a sick person'. 'Persistent delusion showing its true and ugly form once again, 'delusion kills!! it kills you and kills people around you', and then saying to me: 'Be careful. You are still under my care'. I was therefore unable to pen down anything more.
During 19 February's morning shift, I found myself mulling over the significance of a rather 'dirty' saying that I had picked up during my childhood in India which now surfaced to the mind:
Babaji baithe pahad pur, aapan lund latkaye
Jeka jetan chaihiye, kat kat le jaye
(The knowledgeable guru is sat at the top of a hill, with his penis hanging down the slope: whoever wants as much of it may visit him and cut and take away as much of it as he or she liked. It signified that God has made religious ideas available in abundance: people of different characters may take from this whatever suited their particular fancy depending on their genetic and environmental make-up. It was of no consequence to the Universal Being what an individual adopted for his or her conduct in life).
By the night of 19 February the mind was in total disarray. I had watched the news on television and reflected on the death of more American soldiers in Iraq, and the bombing of train between India and Pakistan: why did these happen? I could not now make head or tail of anything about my experiences and theories either. Rupa had developed a dry wrinkly skin condition on her hands seemingly as an allergic reaction to the mehndi she had put on during the visit to India and we were in distress about it. And during the night I had dreams to escape from which I got out of bed thinking we were perhaps being punished by the wrath of God or the Universal Being over my loss of devotion to God and for now disregarding the 'knowledge' that I had apparently gained through this saga. So I did pranam to God and returned to a better sleep through the rest of the night. However, the following morning I decided to ignore that pranam as well as ignoring Rashmi's anger over the renewed delusional state that I appeared to her to be in, and updated my memoirs.
God: a mental delusion or reality? I decided that I could not answer and must go into elective mutism mode about the ultimate question for mankind. That was the truth of this unfortunate saga which I recorded but would not make this full latest version generally available unless I was prompted into doing so. Although a December 2005 version was with Dorrance Publishing, and Dr Shobha had the November 2006 update (and an even earlier version I had sent to Mr David Robson of the Daily Express) I now had no interest in publishing it for the benefit of mankind, as it were. I therefore went to the library and sent emails to Dorrance and Trafford Publishing that I would not be publishing the memoirs after all. There I also found that I had not been selected for interview even for the job at the World Society for the Protection of Animals. I cleaned up my mail box to remove all emails that referred to my condition in order to make a fresh start.