Tag Archives: Dadaji

Mad Mike investigates state of Nath sampradaya consciousness

I HAD a couple of communications this week from people I still know about a controversial London geezer.

The first was from a woman who seems to have something of the investigative journalist about her. You can find that here.

The second bit I also saw this week, and from a woman,  was actually published 10 years ago but I’ve only just seen it, and you can find that here.

Both pieces are about some old geezer who used to live in a little town called Mehmadabad, not far from Ahmedabad. According to the old geezer, when  I visited in 1978, Mehmadabad was ruled by a younger brother of Ahmed.  But what I would I know about that?  It was a dusty little town when I visited it all those years ago, even though Mr Lawrence Amos Miles tried to convince me that when the Muslims conquered Gujarat, it was full of gardens and fountains. ♦

 

Kenneth Grant: Aossic Aiwass, memories are made of this

I have very fond memories of Kenneth Grant – very fond memories indeed. Unlike quite a few of my friends, I never got expelled from his Typhonian OTO, I resigned and he was gracious enough to allow me to exit, gracefully. I was a member of his Sovereign Sanctuary.

It all came about because of this. I wasn’t interested in Indian traditions at all, until 1974 or so, when a vivid dream woke me up to stuff.  Kenneth, actually, was very knowledgeable about tha tantrik traditions. Apart from spending a great deal of time in India in the 1950s, he also contributed many articles about Hinduism to Man, Myth and Magic.

He was very sympathetic to me when in 1978  threw up a good job to visit Mahendranath (Dadaji) in Old Mehmadabad. I had corresponded with Dadaji for well over a year – I sought tantrik initiation.

In a very sympathetic conversation I had with Aossic Aiwass,  the then OHO of the Typhonian OTO, I had spelled out my vivid dream to him, and I asked him for tantrik initiation. He said he had never had tantrik initiation. Shortly after this, I got a letter from Dadaji – he had had articles published in John Spiers’ magazine Values, and John Spiers and I had exchanged adverts with each other – me in my first magazine Azoth. Dadaji asked me to send him copies of Azoth and latterly SOTHiS magazine – Jan Bailey,  David Hall and myself had just started this organ.

I felt I had to go to India and seek initiation into a tradition that suddenly appeared to be in my mind and in my heart and in my body.  Kenneth conferred a VII degree honorary initiation on Mahendranath, never to my knowledge rescinded.

I continue to have the utmost regard for Kenneth Grant – his knowledge was deep, practical and full of wisdom. He knew Dylan Thomas in the early 1950s – his books of poetry show that Sarasvati sat on his tongue. He told me, when he was writing his first Typhonian Trilogy, that these books were also informed by poetry. He said that it was important, after you had digested wisdom, that you published it and made it available. He said that when you died, and began to get back to the Light, you would read stuff in books and it would remind you who you were before.

Digestion, he said, involved excretion too, and these were books. If you failed to write what you had learned, or felt, it was the equivalent of mental constipation.

He was devoted to the goddess in all of her guises.


This picture is of Kenneth and me in 1978 in our flat in Golders Green, just round the corner from where he lived. I am missing him. He was a master of wisdom.  I venerate his memory.

Space: It’s the final frontier

WENT to an Intel gig last night at the Bloomsbury Ballroom – covered it in TechEye yesterday.

The biggest problem any journalist have was not solved by Albert Einstein. If there’s an infinite amount of space to fill, do you have the time? The Tantrarajatantra is quite illuminating about this, if you’ve the time to read it.

After ducking out of the Intel conference because we were feeling a bit peckish, we proceeded in an easterly direction to Lamb’s Conduit Passage, there to the Dolphin to quaff a few ales with our old mate Tony Dennis.

Opposite the Dolphin is The Enterprise, on Red Lion Street. On Red Lion Street is Conway Hall, an emblem of the ethical society, free thinking and humanism. The last time I was in the Dolphin it was with David Tibet and Dadaji. David Hall might have been there too… The former had a skeletal hand on his belt and a Tibetan thighbone trumpet, and many a piercing around his ears. Dadaji  was dressed in full ceremonial Nath regalia. Dave Tibet said to me quietly: “It’s a bit embarrassing being in a pub with a man dressed like a sadhu.”

How we laughed. ♥

The Enterprise