African Mountains- 2 Spiritual Experiences

African Mountains

At the end of 1966 I had my first real significant encounter with someone who helped show me my path. It shook me up considerably  and set me irrevocably on the road to an adventuring life. He was Martin Rasini, an Englishman who had travelled overland from Egypt to South Africa. In those days it was possible to travel fairly safely by land in Africa as long as you didn’t hold a South African passport. Meeting Martin and his fellow travellers blew my mind. They lived a communal life in a rented house in Avondale road in Sydenham Johannesburg.

Martin turned me on to Marijuana, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, the Kabbalah, the Bagavad Gita, the 1812 Overture when stoned etc, and most significantly, to esoteric concepts based on idea that we have at least two selves: an inner self which he called the essence which is eternal, and a personality which I form to maintain my physical self. These selves he called the Essence and the Ideal, and identified 24 types of people by symbolically combining the esoteric meanings of the four elements: water, air, earth and fire. This was my first encounter with an esoteric system  in a systematic form, which attempts to define the inner self separately from the personality and the body.

My meeting with these free spirited adventurers shattered forever the false and safe Johannesburg suburban middle class world I was living in. I was confused, enthused, and dazzled. I grappled to understand this avalanche from my narrow materialistic ‘white’ viewpoint. I couldn’t. But I knew that I had  received a great gift and that I had to  start a journey and that living at home, getting a degree and settling down to a career was not part of it. My first step was to leave home, which I did. I moved to a university hostel called Knockando on the top of Parktown Ridge in the older part of the city, where I made two good friends: Terry Volbrecht and Willem van der Walt.

I still continued at University, but the restlessness that had by now irrevocably gripped by soul made me drop out before finishing my BA. So a the end of 1969 I decided to join Terry, Willem and Alison (Terry’s wife) in a rented house which they had taken after graduating in Landsdowne Road in Cape Town. This was the first time I had left home permanently, so I suppose I can count it as the beginning of a continuous ‘adventuring’ life which took me to unfamiliar places and which was to continue for another 20 years. I remember telling my mother of my decision to leave my home town of Johannesburg when I visited her in a nursing home where she was recovering from a hysterectomy. She had had a bad time as she was anaemic and had bled. She gave me her blessing.

But before leaving for Cape Town I had had the following two mind blowing (the reader can judge) experiences.

View from the Top of Northcliff Hill

                                                             Northcliff Hill

I had been reading Aldous Huxley’s essay ‘The Doors of Perception’. One part in particular resonated. After taking mescaline Huxley recalls how he walked to the bottom of the garden, and saw the flowers as if for the first time. I wondered if it would be possible to induce such a state of wonder without drugs. Then I had the following experience (From a blue note book I kept at the time):

‘There is a peculiar thing about Johannesburg weather in August. By day the wind blows warm and strong and dry and people talk of spring. But at night there is only a great stillness, unmoved by frost or wind or humidity, a flat nothingness. A state of no weather.

It was on a night such as this in 1967 that Terry, Willem and I decided to go walking on Northcliff Hill, a quartzite promontory looming 200-300 metres above the North Western suburbs of Johannesburg and which forms part of the Witwatersrand Ridge. It is Johannesburg’s highest point at 1800 metres.

I don’t know why I wanted to go there that night. Perhaps consciously to see a different view of Johannesburg than what I was used to from my room in the College of Education hostel on Parktown Ridge. We parked the car and walked along the top of the hill, talking, jabbering and kidding each other in our youthful exuberance. There are no bushes on top of the hill, just short tufts of grass interspersing large white quartz boulders. We wandered aimlessly around for a while and then decided to follow a dirt track across the top, drawn like all men are to ‘the other side of the mountain'.

On the north side, the view was slightly different. The boulders were bigger, the plain below more distant and emptier with fewer lights. At this point something came over us. We stopped chattering and sat down in silence on the big white rocks. As time passed I realised that to break the silence would have been a sort of desecration. But of what? I didn’t know then if the others were having the same kind of experience. I tried to reach out into the darkness, but only sensed vague frustration.

Then Huxley’s observation came back to me. I started gazing at a boulder in front of me, shining whitely in the full moon. An idea came. ‘Try to forget all the concepts you have created to contain this object, to make it ‘safe’, I told myself. ‘Try to see it as if for the first time’. So I start repeating over and over again the words, ‘rock’ ‘hard’, ‘shiny’, ‘white’, ‘quartz’ until after a while, as what happens after constant repetition ,they lost their meaning. But if the labels, the comfortable labels we attach to keep the external world under control had disappeared, the boulder, the object was still there. I realised I was seeing ‘it,’ ‘something’, for the first time.

The ‘rock’ started vibrating before my eyes, as if it was alive. I was overwhelmed by a sense of primeval menace, and also of supreme indifference as I was to experience in the Lesotho Mountains five months later( see the next story ‘No Knife no Matches’). Then not only the rock, but the whole mountain and the plain below me started shimmering. I realised that I was seeing it all ‘for the first time’. And it was very different. But this was too much to sustain. I felt really scared, so I started to hastily reconstruct everything with my conscious mind. ‘This is just a quartz boulder, I am on Northcliff Hill. Those are house lights below’ etc. Then when I felt more ‘normal’ I got up and the other two mutely followed me to the car.

If we communicated with each other on the journey home, it was not by word, yet I had a feeling of unity with all life that I dimly recalled having with the world as a child. So we drove the ten or so kilometres back to the residence in silence. It was only when we were getting out the car in the familiar parking lot and Willem said ‘I wonder if one should have such an experience often’, that we jerked back into our usual confused excitable voluble 19 year old selves.

Strangely, although we usually shared everything that happened to us, we never spoke to each other of our experiences on Northcliff Hill. It was as if we each realised that in order to preserve something important to each of us, we had to keep our silence.’

Postscript

42 years later I read Jill Bolte Taylor’s book ‘My Stroke of Insight'. Dr Taylor, had had a stroke which temporarily totally incapacitated her left brain function. Her description of how she perceived the world around her is identical to how I perceived the rock: ‘I perceived people (doctors and nurses) as concentrated packages of energy’ (My Stroke of Insight- Jill Bolte Taylor -Hodder and Stoughton 2008). I am convinced that by repeating over and over the ‘labels’ I knew to define the rock, I temporarily suspended my left brain function by making its categories meaningless, and therefore ‘saw' with the right brain.

Five months later I had the following adventure in the mountains of Lesotho which taught me several life lessons, some of which I understood immediately.

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Lesotho Highlands . Typical Landscape I Hiked Through on the First part of my Journey 

                                   No Knife, No Matches

‘There are times in your life when you know you must cast yourself into the unknown with nothing in your hands and let destiny take care of you. You will always learn something valuable and unexpected.’ (Kenedal)

‘When fear is present one cannot communicate. It blinds, smothers expression of all other emotions and thoughts. To cut behind that veil, and softly touch the stranger’s mind, to share its joys and sorrows…’ (Softly Touch the Stranger’s Mind -Amalia Andujar, published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Oct 1978.)

This account is only from memory. I was twenty when it happened and not yet of an age where I felt the need to record at the time what was happening to me, or to reflect on its meaning. I only recently realized the significance of this trip when I recounted the story 40 years later in 2008 to Shaheed Ndongeni, who persuaded me to write it down.

It was mid January 1968, the height of the summer. I was on vacation during my first abortive attempt to get a University degree. I was relishing those warm almost hot days on the Highveld (high plains of Eastern South Africa) with their clear blue skies above the green trees and lawns of Northern Johannesburg. It is a time when the city was at its most beautiful, and the streets quietest, when its wealthier white inhabitants had left for their summer holidays for the less fine humid tropical summer weather of coastal Natal, or hot dry windy Cape Town, and the black proletariat who served them, for their ‘homes’ in bush areas unknown and unimagined to most whites. It is an electric time when one waits for the almost inevitable build up of vast white fluffy clouds and the increasing humidity presaging the afternoon thunderstorm.

Justin, a university friend, had secured a holiday job at a diamond mine in the Lesotho highlands, 300 kms to the south, and invited me to accompany him there for a week’s break. The mine is called L’tseng Terai. It is in the middle of the Lesotho highlands. I remember little of it, but much of what happened after. We drove there in a Land Rover in pouring rain through the rolling green grasslands and maize fields of the North Eastern Free State, and then ascended a bad dirt road through the Maluti Mountains onto the mis-nomered Lesotho Plateau. Mis-nomered because it isn’t flat at all, but consists of steep slopes and deeply incised valleys. I remember mud and mist everywhere, and being cold at almost 3000 metres, sleeping on a foam mattress in a bunk in a small building on the mine, with the rain drumming steadily on the zinc roof. I stayed a few days.  And then was told that the relentless rain had rendered the road impassable and that I couldn’t get back to Johannesburg by mine vehicle the next day as planned.

I had told myself that the reason I had to return was to get back to Johannesburg to register for university. But I believe that the rain came (or I came to the rain), to give me the opportunity to have a consciousness raising experience, one of those critical happenings that stand out like beacons in our lives and enable us thereafter to dimly trace our own spiritual evolution if we are open to them.

Justin and I then decided that if I couldn’t drive north to Leribe, the way we had come by Land Rover, I could walk northeast and over the Drakensberg Mountains into Natal, the shortest way back into South Africa. This meant hiking across an uninhabited landscape of breathtaking steep heights and valleys with no roads and few tracks. After two days walk, I would be at the mountaineer’s hut beside Mont aux Sources, the highest mountain in South Africa from where one looks out over a sheer 1500m drop known as the Amphitheatre onto the lush plains of Natal. The Tugela is one of the major rivers of South Africa which has its source at Mount Aux Sources, leaping the almost sheer drop into Natal in a series of cascades known as the Tugela Falls. Another major river which has its source on the west slope of the mountain is the Orange, known as the Sinqu in Lesotho. In the next couple of days I was to experience these two rivers as little streams, as I drank from them, straddled them, and stepped back and forth across them. Then from the mountain hut I would take the trail down, a 22km hike around the north side of the amphitheatre, doubling back into the Royal Natal National Park, from where I would try to hitchhike back to Johannesburg.

That was the plan. The next day the weather cleared but the road was still impassable. Justin gave me a 1:50 000 map and I was confident I would be able to steer my way across its uninhabited face by tracing my course on the watersheds. He lent me his back pack, and with optimistic faith in my youthful immortality, for a three day hike I only took a sleeping bag, a packet of rusks (dry coffee biscuits) and three small cans of tomato juice. No knife, no matches.

And so I set out. I was immediately assailed by the vast emptiness of the landscape. There was no sign of human habitation. The steep slopes were covered by green tuft grass; there were innumerable sponges or small bogs becoming streams. The sky was vast and blue, the breeze cool almost chilly. And there were no sounds apart from it. Not even birds. I found myself talking to myself, puzzling things out. And after a few hours I realized I was talking aloud and answering myself, to shut out what I realised was loneliness. I had never before been so long out of reach of human references. I felt a bit desperate I think, and started noticing the mountains. Mystics say that when you drop the labels from objects or landscapes, they start to live, to vibrate. Well this happened unconsciously to me. Suddenly the mountains around were alive, but in a serenely uncaring inhuman way, as if they were saying: ‘We’ve been here hundreds  of millions of years. What are you to us, a mere flea crawling across our bosom?’ This was frightening to me. I tried to sing to myself, hum tunes, anything to keep their mocking presence at bay.

This went on all day. That night I slept under an outcrop and woke up shivering in the morning, my sleeping bag sodden with dew. But I had to go on. The landscape was getting steeper, and I found the trail that would take me to Mont Aux Sources. I stumbled on in anticipation. I realized I had taken far too little food with me. I had drunk one tomato juice and three rusks the day before (after a good breakfast). Today? Another tomato juice and three rusks, after no breakfast, was all I had to eat. And tomorrow would be the same.

All morning the clouds had been building. I identified the Orange River on the map as a small stream flowing towards me, and the trail seemed to follow it towards its source. I remember resting on its bank, woefully eating my rusk ration and sipping handfuls of water, when suddenly the mist came down the mountains and enveloped me.

Lesotho man like Thomas as I remember him

Now I had been warned not to ever go wandering around in the mist in the mountains, and this time I obeyed the warning. I sat shivering on a rock, wondering when it was going to lift and feeling so lonely and alienated, I thought I was losing my mind. Then I saw a shape coming towards me through the mist. It was a dark triangular shadow, and was drifting slowly some feet above the ground. I stared at it in fear and wonder. Had I perhaps wandered off the path, fallen off a cliff and was now in some sort of purgatory, seeing wraiths and ghosts? Or was I still alive, but mortally injured and was this the angel of death approaching? The shape drifted closer, and I saw it resembled a man on a pony. A man dressed in traditional Basotho garb, a blanket over his shoulders and a pointed wide conical woven straw hat on his head. He stopped before me and in a deep voice asked me in English if I believed in the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

So this was it, I thought. I was dead and this was an angel come to test me.

Then I noticed that he wore dirty sandals and had withdrawn a tattered bible from under his blanket, and with it a half eaten loaf of bread. ‘Strange Angel!’ I thought. He repeated his question, and offering me a handful of bread, told me his name was Thomas. I realized that I was hungry. So that meant I wasn’t dead?

Thomas told me that he had heard about the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth from the Jehovah Witnesses when he worked on a mine near Johannesburg. He took my back pack onto his pony and  we walked together up the trail; two men, a human island surrounded by mist and mountain, drifting up the west slope of Mount Aux Sources discussing God and destiny and utopia. When we got to the top, the trail divided. He took the left fork to go to his brothers who were herding their sheep nearby; I took the right fork which descended gently to the mountain hut, a roughly built one room building with a mud floor covered in dirty straw, where I was to spend the night. From there it is only about 200m to the edge of the amphitheatre. It was late afternoon. I left my backpack in the hut and went outside.

The mist had cleared and the sun shone behind me as I walked towards the amphitheatre rim hoping to sight the famous view. I stepped over a small stream, (the Tugela River), and approached the edge.

But there was no view. Only a wall of mist welling up from below.

And then for the second time that day I saw a grey triangular shape; this time it was imprinted on the wall of mist. It had a small round ‘head’ on top, and above the head was a rainbow coloured arc.

I stood gaping in amazement. Again I thought that perhaps I had fallen over the edge, and here was a much more plausible angel; it had at least half a halo. But when I looked back, I could see the hut behind me. So I concluded that I must be alive .When I turned around again it had gone, and so had the sun, and the hut and I was enveloped in mist, a few metres from the edge of the amphitheatre edge.

The figure I had seen was my own shadow on the mist, the sun being behind me. I have since heard mountaineers tell of this phenomenon, a rare and beautiful sight. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but I desperately wanted to see it again. So I started walking around in the mist, forgetting all the advice I had been given. I don’t know how long I wandered, probably only a few minutes, then the mist cleared, and I saw I was heading for the edge, two steps from oblivion. Heart pounding ,I turned around and sighting the hut made for it with all speed, (jumping again unthinking over the Tugela) as if a thousand angels or devils were at my heels. ‘Enough shocks for one day’, I thought, and wrapping myself in my sleeping bag on the dirty straw floor, tried to go to sleep. But I was due for one more experience, which was to signal what was to happen the next day.

Suddenly I woke up. There had been the sound of rustling. I shook with fear. Had Thomas perhaps come with his brothers to rob me or murder me? The rustling stopped immediately. I lay still and dozed off. More rustling. I jumped out of the bag and went out into the starlit night. I called out .But there was only wind and stars and the dim outline of the peak of Mount Aux Sources. I got back into my sleeping bag. Then I heard more rustling and something scurried across me .A rat! It was after the rusks! With a sigh of relief I lay back. A rat! Another living creature keeping me company! And so I went to sleep.

The next morning was bright and sunny. The rat had left me two rusks, I still had a can of tomato juice, and the trail down the mountain to the hutted camp in the royal Natal National Park led invitingly away to my left.

As It Was when I Started the Descent

I descended a rope ladder which had been put up over a wall of basalt by the Natal mountain club, and then descended on the trail. It was easier going, the sun was warm, there was no wind and I was descending. But I was very hungry and starting to feel weak, and there were no streams for water. I looked carefully at the map. I was walking east parallel to the northern spur of the amphitheatre that rose perhaps 40 metres above me on my right. If I continued with the trail, I would eventually get to the Royal Natal National Park hotel. But it was still 20 kms away, and the path would go around the spur and double back west into the park, an unnecessary added distance I thought. However if I climbed onto the spur and slid down the steep face of the amphitheatre, I would only have a few kilometers at the most to go.

I decided to risk it.

I climbed up onto the spur and found the beginning of a depression on the other side, the wall of the amphitheatre. Far below me I could see Ntendele, the camping site of the National Park. I scrambled and slid down the depression. It was of course steeper than I had anticipated, so after a few minutes, tearing the seat of my jeans as I slid, I realized there was no going back. Gradually the depression turned into a gully with a trickle of water. But the walls of the Drakensberg are not of uniform hardness. At intervals the basalt is traversed by parallel bands of harder more silicacious rock. My little stream would then drop over the ledge so formed making a small waterfall. I then had to climb up the side, and go down the spur between it and the next little stream gully, and rejoin my stream below the waterfall. I did this a couple of times. The third time I was confident enough to throw my pack over the ledge to make my climb around the waterfall easier.

Just as I was pulling myself up the side of the gully, I heard a loud bark. An enormous male bull baboon with long yellow fangs was standing on the edge of the waterfall just below me. I was balanced halfway up the stream’s bank three metres away clutching a shrub for support. I froze, and we stared at each other silently. But I couldn’t hold my position long. Slowly I tried to edge up the slope. Each time I moved he snarled and his bark echoed through the mountains. Any moment he would spring and that could be the end of me. No knife, no matches, I reminded myself dolefully.

Then without at first realizing, I found myself talking to him. In a soft almost musical unthreatening tone I told him what a big beautiful chap he was, and what a fine job he was doing guarding the troop. On and on went my voice and he sat down, and stared up at me, as if he understood what I was saying, His hair no longer bristled, his expression had lost its aggression, and he began looking around, relaxed. Cautiously I started to move up the slope keeping up my monologue. He followed me with his eyes, but did not bark or snarl. I got to the top of the spur and saw another baboon in the next stream bed. He was sitting on his haunches also watching me with a bemused gaze. I descended the spur beyond the waterfall and climbed back into my stream bed, continuing my descent.

The two baboons followed me down the mountainside, occasionally barking as if telling each other how I was doing. I felt I was being escorted, not chased, and felt a deep empathy with them, strangely not unlike that which I had had with the rusk- eating rat of the night before. I knew I was not alone.

That day I learned how to relate to animals in this special way; by using my voice, since then  I have often been  able to break through the barrier separating our species. It has given me great joy. This and learning of the illusory nature of fear, aloneness, and hunger were the legacy of this journey through the Lesotho mountains.

When I got near the bottom, the baboons left me, and shortly after I found myself staring at the back of a notice pinned to a barbed wire fence. I climbed through the fence and read:

ROYAL NATAL NATIONAL PARK.

ENTRY BEYOND THIS POINT FORBIDDEN.

DANGER: LEOPARDS AND BABOONS.

But this was the way I had come! And two of these ‘dangerous’ animals had accompanied me! I suddenly understood then that danger when it exists is always self created. All depends on one's attitude.

THERE IS NO DANGER EXCEPT THAT WHICH OUR FEAR CREATES

Is the notice I wanted to put up on that fence.

View From the Royal Natal National Park  of the Mountain face I had scrambled down .

I walked through the park and finally hit a dirt road that took me to the Hotel. It was Sunday afternoon and tea was being served to elderly people on the immaculate lawn in front of the reception building. I was by now very weak from hunger as I staggered through them .They must have stared at this unshaven, dishevelled dirty young man, torn jeans spattered with mud. The woman at reception hid her surprise, and after I gave her my name, she asked me where I had come from. I thrust out my arm, and pointed through the window at the mountains.

‘From Lesotho, I have walked.’

She nodded politely without comprehending, and gave me a room with a bath. I ordered some food, undressed and got into the bath and instantly passed out. I woke up still in the empty bath hours later and ate the cold food. Then I crept into bed. The next morning I phoned my girlfriend in Johannesburg. But she refused to believe it was me talking. I got myself a lift back to Johannesburg with one of the hotel guests later that day and duly re registered for University.