AVANTIKUMAR

“Ugliness is a both a learned concept and skin deep,” said Khambatta, one of my teachers while I grew up in London.

I’d reached the ripe age of eleven and had started writing on a typewriter as yet another milestone of being serious about the writing vice.

Admittedly, I started off with the idea of wanting to be a writer from an old UK TV series called Jason King. Now clearly seen as a wild fantasy of the writer’s luxurious lifestyle.

Writers who wanted their work to be seriously-considered were told to focus on the grit in life.

“Yes, the grit is there but so is the beauty within the grit. Grit, after all, is a creation of the divine. Crap is what man reduces creation to,” said Khambatta. He even ended with a preposition just show how ugly prose can be.

Khambatta continued, “Beauty is the essence behind all things because it derives from the creative principle…call it God, Divine Mother or a trillion other names used in the galaxies.”

Wow, I said. Come back to planet Earth.

“True. The word “god” is dynamite enough for the meagre levels at which we think,” he said.

At the time of course like most kids I shared this view of humankind.

I saw things in black and white with greater confidence, back then.

Greatness, expertly hidden

“Much as that may be true on many levels, humanity has greatness hidden expertly away in millenia of laziness, and selfishness. Selfishness is laziness,” Khambatta told me.

His phrases had a way of infiltrating themselves into my brain cells.

He continued, “If everything that exists is from the creator - then everything is beautiful. From where did the idea of ugliness come?

“From the idea that there is separation. Beauty is oneness. We are vitally connected to every manifest and unmanifest aspect of everything that is, ever was, every will be.”

Ugliness is a lie

But when I see someone maimed from an accident, when I see someone with his brains living outside his skull from birth - I have to say my mind thinks - yuck! But I of course never voice this.

With that attitude, it naturally took me a while to realise that interesting writing needed to be bold and honest.

“It is your perception that is at fault. Whether you see a leprous face or an insect who wants to bite you: it is beautiful.”

Even if the bite of a cobra kills you? I said.

He laughed, “Lets not get carried away. Yes - in theory - all is beautiful but it depends on the level you choose to operate. If confronted by a cobra, you may choose to come down a few levels and run - or kill.”

But…

“But that is the joy of dilemma!” said Khambatta. “Horseshit helps to make flowers.”

Obssession with dilemmas

“Humankind loves dilemma. Daily, they invent it, They see only dilemma. If they do not see something to fight about - they have no choice but to clearly see reality,” he said.

What is reality? This was a question I asked him daily, until he told me to shut up and to address such questions to the only person that matters. He tapped me on the chest.

“In any case. No words will describe reality. It is many levels above speech. Oneness is a word which comes fairly close to the fruitful path.”

So is there an answer to whether ugliness exists? said I.

Khambatta repeated: “Ugliness exists only as a perception. But there are beings in the cosmos who would easily meet your definition of ugliness.

So I am in a bind.

“On one level, the eternal viewpoint: there is no ugliness. On the temporary level: yes, there is…but hopefully it will not be perceived as ugliness forever: transmutation of all things is an inevitable force towards evolution…” he ended the talk as darkness had fallen and he was needed elsewhere.

Often I felt that Khambatta lives on levels unrelated to gritty tube trains, traffic jams, drug addicts lying around on streets, but then again he may have a point.

As a writer, I want to see deeply as possible to the living essence within all life. I fail many times to reach the level of experiencing the beauty, most especially when I look at myself.

…But then Khambatta would say I am not looking deeply enough!

- Kuala Lumpur, 8th May 2008

“Spirit is deep within you,” so said Khambatta, a teacher I had the good fortune to have in my boyhood days in London. “But politics - and religion - is made by humans. No argument. It is external. Both lead to divisive ends.”

So what you mean, I asked, is that politics and religion should be ignored by those who are truly “spiritual”?

“Not at all. Being ’spiritual’ is a misnomer. All are beings of perfect spirit. You do not have to ‘aspire’ to be something you already are! What I am saying,” he continued, “is that if you choose to drop to the levels of physical politics and religion you must retain your link to spirit - the essence of which is oneness. Otherwise you are doomed to replay your mistakes.

“If a nation of group chooses to enwrap itself into politics or religion — and there is absolutely no difference between the twain — then tough lessons will always follow. Karma is not fooled. Karma’s mills grinds exactly and always at the right moment. Karma’s eventual purpose is to show you the unified spirit and nothing less.”

Wish I had Khambatta’s turn of phrase. Whenever I contemplate his words, I always receive a fresh stream of visuals and intuitions that build slowly into understanding; the foundation of wisdom, which is defined as ‘knowledge that has been passed through the heart’.

As I sit today in my beloved Malaysia - a British foreigner of Asian roots, with a second home here - I am troubled - as I see so many of my Malaysian friends dive unheeding into the sticky morass of religion-laden politics.

Yet, I have seen spirit shine in all of my dear Malaysian friends. So I help - however I can and I observe - as a correspondent - the continued birthing pains of a country whose efforts may spell the future of the world as a whole.

- Kuala Lumpur, 15 December 2007.

“You’re in hell already, mate,” John Barstow told me one April evening in 1998.
It was in Victoria Station, London; we’d met for a quick drink before boarding Friday evening trains for the weekend.

“Let’s say that heaven and hell do not exist,” I mumbled. “Except as - metaphors.”

“Crap,” he said wisely.

This was some years ago - and I had been a full time writer of plays since university; then something happened. My emotional life exploded, while my creative urge imploded. I wanted to have nothing to do with feelings and with the writing of such.

Barstow said, “You’ve just committed suicide. And that’s a mortal sin, mate.”

I just been through three years of emotional hell - this won’t be any worse; in fact, it might pull me back to life. I told him, Inwardly - I feel divorced.

“You can change your mind,” he said.

However, to write or not to write was no longer my question.

Meanings of hell
When I was a boy in London, one of my philosophy teachers, old Mr Khambatta did try and teach me some practical sense.

Khambatta said, “Hell is created on many levels but is energised by fear. Fear and its opposite - love - are at the bottom of our actions; and reactions. Fear feeds competition.”

His approach and language was calculated to keep the attention of a boy in his teens.

“Don’t give me the crap about competition building strong vibrant souls,” Khambatta continued.

“Systems of competition in school breed psychosis, build empires based on slavery and exaggerate a misguided sense of separation.”

As I insisted on learning lessons the hard way, it was much, much later, that I realised these things:

Truth is there is no one special on this planet, save the one spirit behind it all.

Anyone being “special” or doing anything “special” is channeling the one spirit behind it all. This is why enlightened souls have such humility: they just know the truth; they did not do anything except realise they were vessels. The one life is infinitely creative, limited only be the clarity of each vessel through which it has to come.

Specialness is a form of mental sickness, stemming again from fear.

The power of love - and I’m not necessarily talking about romantic codswallap - though even part of that relationship has its apparently pleasant phases - is quite simple built on the reality of oneness: there is one life illuminating every thing, whether animate or apparently inanimate.
And where do such thoughts come from?

Fear stops writing. Love powers it. Writing Down the Bones is a must-read for those writers who have lost their way and slipped into sterility.

Resurrection in writing

It was a hot day in November, 1999, some years later, when hell started to disintegrate.

On Langkawi, an island off Malaysia, a whole series of scenes suddenly leapt into my inner vision. It had been so many years since I experienced this part of the mind working that I thought I had gone temporarily insane.

On that humid beach, sitting under palm trees with the high pitched whine of insects, something had returned to life.

While writing unfortunately does not stop wars; harnessing the right stream of thoughts at the right time in the right place brings miracles.

“Writing is survival,” said Ray Bradbury, in his insightful preface to Zen in the Art of Writing: another must-read for whatever kind of writer you want to be.

If you are here to write, and you don’t, you will die a kind of death. But once you resume writing, well: resurrection abounds.

Put another way: you must stay drunk on writing so that every day life does not destroy you.

- Letter from Malaysia, writing from in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

“Failure is an essential aspect of success,” said Khambatta, a teacher during my teen years in London. Often with a mischievous glint in his eye, he transferred knowledge with what we now call tough love.

At that time of my life I believed in my own possibilities to the extreme level enabled by youth. I allowed for nothing but success in every thing I did. When I failed to get A+ or 100 per cent, my confidence took a little bruising.

Thought is the real action. The material ritual enacts what you have formed in your mind. Have pride in what is within your direct responsibility. Then he delivered his secret:

Success is when you detach from the action, and surrender it upwards in good faith to your god or ideal.

That is the difference between real success and fake success. The power of detaching from the results is what makes what you do great. The size of the thing is unimportant: whether it is to form a country, save a world or make a two course meal. The size and impact of an action is outside of your direct responsibility, so says the one law.

Khambatta said things which live on in my consciousness. He said, Detachment is a deep secret of the law of cause and effect. When done effectively with pure intent detachment activates love; things take on a life of their own and live on effortlessly, multiplying.

It is one of the requirements for true abundance or feeding, say, five thousand people with a small amount of food.

A colleague asked me the above question yesterday. A quick response:

Motivation is a result of energy you choose to switch on inside yourself. No one can motivate anyone else - that would usurp natural laws of will. What we call great motivators or leaders are people who inspire others to press their own internal switches.

You inspire others while inspiring yourself. For perfect balance, inspiration is a shared ritual.

Inspiration comes before motivation. Creativity is inspiration or intuition. All three words describe the activity of the third brain within you.

The left brain and right brain are the other well-known tags used in popular psychology. To explain InnerSpace Science practices, I use three aspects of the human brain, as a working metaphor.