Arthur Osborne - Adventures on the Path #2

[Guest guest]

 

 

ADVENTURES ON THE PATH

.....................

 

 

At that time, however, I, like the others of our group, took

Guenon’s verdict unquestioning and simply presumed that it was

necessary to abandon Christianity and seek farther afield. I could

not avoid a feeling of regret that, whereas the others were all free

to go to the East in search of a guru, being unmarried and for the

most part, sufficiently well-to-do, I had no prospect of leaving

Europe. However, as it turned out, within a year I was in the East

while many or most of them were still in the West.

 

A person’s destiny is not an accident. It is not something

extraneous to him. From one point of view it is the outcome of

his thoughts and actions, an inevitable, automatic system of

repercussions which can be called reward and retribution, and

from another point of view the milieu necessary for his

development. What obscures this from sight is the wrong habit

of considering worldly happiness or prosperity the purpose of

life, whereas it may often happen that the reverse is what a

man’s development needs. It is understandable, therefore, that

once a man has recognized Self-realization as his conscious goal

and turned in that direction, his destiny should become more

recognizably beneficent and meaningful, even though it may

involve hardship.

 

After four years at the Maritime College I left Poland for

Bangkok where I took up the post of lecturer in English at the

Chulalongkorn University. Having taken a degree in one subject

and drifted into teaching of another created difficulties in my

academic career. This proved a blessing in disguise in our case

as it prevented us from being caught up by the Nazis in Poland

a few years later or by the Communists in Lithuania. In one

way or another all the members of our little group were brought

safely through the war. The lower reality of events does not

condition but subserves the higher reality of the quest. That

does not mean that no one who has dedicated himself to the

quest can die before its conclusion but that his worldly success

or failure, prosperity or privation, even life or death, will be

such as his progress on the quest demands.

 

I liked Siam, as I had liked Oxford. I liked the Siamese — a

cheerful, easy-going, friendly people; and yet Siam was the

second great wave of disappointment to me, as Oxford had

been the first. I had built up a dream-picture of Oxford which

the reality could not substantiate; I had come to Siam imbued

with Guenon’s descriptions of the traditional East, where

political and social conditions subserve the spiritual discipline,

where authority rests, openly or secretly, with the guardians

of tradition, where the quest of Realization is recognized as

the goal and the purpose of life; and instead I found a nation

tumbling over itself to acquire the materialist civilization which

I was trying to discard, and flinging away with both hands

that to which I had dedicated my life, turning their back on

it, trying to forget that it had ever existed. I had already known

one Siamese, Seni Pramoj, a great-nephew of King

Chulalongkorn, after whom the university was called, who

was Siamese Minister in Washington during the Second World

War and Prime Minister after the war; he had been Denzil

Batchelor’s room-mate at Oxford. He was a dapper, practical

little man whose great interest in life was tennis and he thought

Denzil and I mad for our preoccupation with poetry and ideas.

He was typical of his people.

........................