I was raised in the Catholic faith; my childhood memories of church alternate between the Polish church in Hammersmith, Św. Andrzeja Boboli, and the local Catholic church, Our Lady and St. Joseph's Church in Hanwell. The latter was almost as Irish as Boboli was Polish; a modernist shrine to pre-war Poland. St Joseph's stood in contrast (until its demolition in 1963 and replacement with an entirely new structure) dark and traditional. Candles in racks (of two lengths, 3d and 6d) lit the interior. Statues of the saints, a larger one of Jesus exposing His bleeding heart; life-like crucifixes and paintings of the martyrs spoke to this child of tortures and pain. Boboli had been acquired by the Polish community in the early 1960s, it too had a strong element of martyrology – not of the saints of ecclesiastical history, but of my parents' and grandparents' generation in Katyń and Gulags and labour camps of the USSR. At this time, I attended a state primary school in Hanwell, on Oaklands Road. The hymns and prayers at school assembly were Church of England; a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II hung in the assembly hall. Though by the mid-1960s, a third of my class were migrants or children of migrants, the school offered one flavour of faith, the established one.
So the religious context into which I was raised was a mixture of various strands of Christianity. Common to all was the figure of Jesus Christ, the Holy Family, the Bible, the Ten Commandments, the notion of heaven and hell, and the promise of life everlasting at the right hand of God for those who had led a righteous life.
Notions of other religions in my childhood worldview included Judaism (through the Old Testament and my parents' occasional mentions of Jews in pre-war Poland, and the Holocaust), a vague awareness of Islam and – most exotic, Hinduism. I had a friend at primary school, Ashok, whom I'd visit to stick together Airfix kits. In his parents' house on Melbourne Road, there would be postcards of blue-skinned Hindu deities – elephant-headed gods, that sort of thing. Off the scale of weirdness to me as a seven-year old. Buddhism, however, did not figure in my worldview, it was not something I'd encountered other than in geography textbooks.
I first became aware of Oriental mysticism via the Beatles. Though never a fan of their music, the Beatles provided a significant chunk of the soundtrack to my childhood, bracketing my early memories of their tunes sung in the infants' playground through to the band falling apart as I started secondary school and my family's move from Hanwell to West Ealing. When the Beatles travelled to India to study meditation in early 1968, the media coverage in Britain was huge. It was a first unveiling – and explanation – of Hindu mysticism to the British mainstream. The sound of the sitar and tabla began to osmose into Western pop music. And words such as karma, mantra, guru and yoga entered the everyday English language.
East and West had hitherto been at a cultural distance, despite the British Empire; in America, the contact was also largely a post-war phenomenon. The occupation of Japan and the Korean War introduced many young American servicemen to a world utterly different to the one in which they had been raised. A decade or so before the hippie counterculture took off, the beatniks had been taking their cues from Zen Buddhism, learned about from popularisers such as Alan Watts. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, popular on Western campuses in the 1960s and '70s, written in 1922, served to open up to a mass audience across the West the lives and beliefs of Hindus after its first translation into English in 1951.
Watts spoke about 'Beat Zen' and 'Square Zen', reflecting the approach of the beatniks (Kerouac's Dharma Bums, for example) to the more highbrow adaptations by American academics.
Since those post-war years, globalisation, the movement of people and ideas around the world, has made the tenets of oriental religions available to all those who want to learn. The innate belief in the superiority of one's own culture – an important foundation of the British Empire – has given way to a broader set of generally accepted notions, imported from beyond the Christian tradition.
Woven into the New Age movement, Eastern mysticism and Native American shamanic traditions today sit more easily in the Western mainstream as it appropriates, blends and goes global, in search of common ground and interconnectedness among all humans.
Tomorrow I shall dip into New Age thinking and its various strands, and how that has influenced spiritual understanding.
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