Like many living on this green tropical island on the equator, Paul took scuba diving as one of his past-times. There was always some risk in this type of sport and while we had dived together, he was not one of my regular diving partners. Many of the best dives were on World War Two wrecks and often deep so as to need decompression. There were nearly always sharks present which added to the excitement. But it was not this activity that troubled him. Like many people, he took the risk of getting married. His relationship was a rocky one made worse by the hot climate and casual way of living. Affairs between married couples were common. He was a geologist from Europe and had been on the Island a few years. Bougainville was mountainous and the copper and gold mine in the centre of the island was at an elevation of some seven hundred metres but other parts of the island were over two kilometres in height. There was an active volcano near the mine that was always smoking and lava flowing down the side which glowed red at night. From one of these high points near the mine there was a walk down to the coast and an offshoot on this path lead to a waterfall of about fifty metres. Several of us once tried abseiling down this waterfall but the risk was too great as once one person got caught in the torrent of water and was upside down for a time and nearly washed off the rope. There were jagged rocks at the base of the waterfall. But at the top there was a nice pool right next to the edge and we often swam there.
Paul was in the process of separating from his wife and was moody and depressed and we hoped that this walk to the waterfall would cheer him up. The tropical climate made even short walks difficult. But as the pool at the top flowed immediately over the edge of the waterfall and a strong stream ran through it, there was a risk swimming there. The water was clear but not too cold and looking down on the jungle and into the distance some twenty kilometres away, you could see the sea. The path to the waterfall was overgrown and as the people living on the island were of a practical turn, they rarely came here. A machete was necessary to clear the path as the jungle grew quickly. When we swam there, there was an imaginary line that we all respected and we knew that if we went over this line, regardless of one’s swimming ability, the current was too strong to make it back to the top half of the pool. We were surprised to see Paul swimming close to this line and we put it down to his depression. He was careful not to go too far. I suppose by taking these types of risks he was advertising his depression. What ideas existed in Paul´s mind to lead to this type of behaviour?
If you believe in evolution, as I do, then you will know that fish were our ancestors. Back further there must have been animals with no brains at all and these animals would have been run entirely by genes. Today most scientists take genetic/cultural influences on our actions as about fifty/fifty. What thoughts were going through Paul’s mind as he swam around? Was it suicide? We will never know. Evolution is meant to be about survival and reproduction, but sometimes humans behave in a way that is difficult to understand.
After university my first employment was with Conzinc Rio Tinto and I found myself on the 32 floor of the Collins street towers in Melbourne. A year later, being young and restless, I went to the employment officer and asked what was available. Rio Tinto was a huge company with mines all over the world. The employment officer looked on his sheet and said that there were jobs available in Hamersley Iron in Western Australia and Bougainville Copper in New Guinea. Of course New Guinea sounded much more exotic than the desert and so I took that. I also knew that there was good diving in the tropics and so there must be ample opportunity for this sport. On arrival on the island I found that there were clubs for everything and new arrivals usually joined all those that took their interest. It was 1980 and television had not yet arrived in this corner of the world. People had to look to their own entertainment.
I had made friends in my short stay in Conzinc Rio Tinto head office in Melbourne and one friend, Peter, who was still stuck there and desperate for something exciting was coming up to Bougainville for a visit. He said he wanted adventure and I understood his need. Somehow he had got a company trip for a week to Bougainville to see the operation of the mine. By chance, his trip coincided with two public holidays in PNG. So we had four days out of the seven to do something and so I asked around and there was a tramp ship going to some of the smaller outer islands to collect the copra. It went every couple of months. This was the main income for these smaller islands and, as every island was covered with coconut trees, it was just a matter of husking and breaking the coconuts and putting the copra in hessian sacks. A small crane on the ship then hoisted these sacks into the hull.
Copra collecting produced only slim profits so the ships used were often near the end of their working life. On this rusty ship we were to sleep for four nights. There were several other local passengers as this was the main form of transport between islands. We put our gear in the two-bed cabin and the captain looked with a smile at the box of food we had brought but said nothing. No meals were served and you had to look after yourself. Transporting copra has its disadvantages in that the population of cockroaches on these ships was always enormous. As the ship had been empty for more than a week now, they were all starving. It was hot and humid below decks, the beds were uncomfortable and ship rolled excessively so we slept badly. As well, there was a type of rustling that we couldn’t quite place. In the morning we found that the plastic bags holding bread and spaghetti and other foods were no obstacle to the cockroaches and all was gone except for the canned food. Fortunately, we did not feel like eating.
Our first stop was the Tasman Islands (now called Nukumanu Islands) where we arrived in the morning. We were to land on the main island and the captain found the gap in the reef that surrounded it and anchored. The island was a typical coral island with white beaches with an inner lagoon kept calm by the surrounding reef. There was always the roar of the crashing surf on this reef. The island was covered in coconut trees and all the huts were made from the thatched leaves of this tree. There were lesser islands like a string of pearls in a half circle. While the loading of copra was going on we were free to roam. The Tasman islanders were of Polynesian origin and their language was close to the Samoan language. We were told there were about a thousand people living there. The arrival of the ship was the reason for a dance to which we were invited. This was the adventure that Peter was hoping for and he was enjoying every minute. However, as dusk fell and the dancing started the men and women were separated. Peter and I were led to where the men were. There was an islander here who worked at the mine and although I did not know him this connection brought us together. I asked why the separation of dancers and was told that the worst thing that that can happen to a young man was to see the menstruation blood of his sister. I told him that we wanted to see both dances and that I had no sisters here. Later we had a lengthy discussion about the religious beliefs of the Tasman Islanders. Of course Christianity came to the Pacific and while they called themselves Christian, they still kept most of their old beliefs.
Next was the Mortlock Islands (now called Takuu atoll). It had only half the number of people as the Tasman Islands. There was an anthropologist living there, a long time resident, who was working on their language and habits. I think he was from New Zealand. We had a chat and he was desperate for any newspapers. We had been told before leaving to take some for him and with these he seemed delighted. He had had no outside news for months so he was keen to bury himself in them.
We wandered around and the girls and young women of the island took a great interest in us as visitors were rare. They wore only a short grass skirt and some seemed to get shorter as the day went on. We were both twenty six years old. Like the Tasman islanders, these Mortlock islanders were also of Polynesian origin. Their wood carvings reminded me of similar ones I had seen in New Zealand. There were no toilets on the island but of the many beaches one was nominated as a toilet and people just wandered out and squatted in a few centimetres of water and used the same water for washing rather than toilet paper. I suppose that when you have a tiny population in a vast ocean, pollution does not matter.
We stayed two days here and were shown seven ways to cook the flesh of the coconut. One unusual method was to allow the bud of the coconut to grow and all the white flesh is absorbed and the shell now contained a soft spongy ball filling the whole coconut. This was then dried and ground into flour. The other part of their diet was fish, which were abundant. They also grew a few vegetables including paw paws which were used as a vegetable when green and a fruit when ripe. With the money they got from selling coconuts they bought other foods, mainly rice.
The ship was now full of copra and so it was time to return to Bougainville. This was about two hundred kilometres away and would take the whole night. We tried to get some sleep but in the middle of the night the boat slowed and there were people running about on deck. We went upstairs to investigate. We had gone over a “long line” and were entangled. These lines were kilometres long and this method of fishing was illegal. The captain, a weathered New Guinean, said after looking at the line and baits, that it was a Taiwanese ship. As no light could be seen in any direction I suppose the captain decided that it was an opportunity to make some money. As it was only a few hours to Bougainville any fish caught would still be in good condition when we arrived and could be sold. The captain cut the line and the crew started hauling one of the halves. Every twenty metres there was a hook and on some were large tuna. Three tuna were soon landed and one must have been over a hundred kilos. It took four crew with gaffs to get it in.
Then all of a sudden a large searchlight came on a kilometre away. It seems the tables were turned and the Taiwanese ship had its lights off stalking us whereas our ship was brilliantly lit. The captain panicked. He knew these illegal fishing ships carried guns and could fire upon him. Now we turned off all the ship’s lights and steered by the white crests of the waves. The searchlight was going in all directions trying to find us. I admired the skill of the captain who seemed to be able to take the ship along the troughs of the waves and I so wondered if he had done this before. In the early morning light as we approached Bougainville I asked why he had not contacted a New Guinea navy gunboat but he said that the nearest was in Lae some thousand kilometres away and others were being repaired. He said that in these vast oceans you are on your own.
The next day when I saw Peter off at the airport he told me that he had had enough adventure for a while and would be looking forward to Melbourne.
Bougainville was an Island of about one hundred and twenty kilometres long and eighty wide. It is mountainous and covered with tropical jungle. Driving around the coast one came to white beaches and then black beaches. The white ones were from ground coral and the black from rivers that flowed through the island´s volcanic soils. The main beach where mine workers swam and snorkelled was Loloho Beach and was a fine white ground coral. It could be any beach on any Pacific island. The mine had put a moored raft some twenty metres out for swimmers to rest on and here the water was very deep. There were the usual coral reefs left and right with myriads of coloured fish and the water was calm as more reefs further out, with their crashing waves, protected the bay. Around the beach was an old coconut plantation. This made Loloho a perfect place for gatherings of mine workers and for visitors to have their first snorkel. Near Loloho Beach was the Arawa Aquatic club with a balcony on poles projecting out to the sea. Here we often played bridge and had gin and tonics late into the night. On the side of this clubhouse was a small shed with a compressor where club members could fill their tanks themselves. Up to five tanks could be filled simultaneously and the facility was maintained by the mine. We (no one ever dived alone) sometimes did three or four dives per week and nearly always at night. Diving was popular and to join the dive club there was a small fee. Overseas mine staff were mostly from Australia but also from other parts of the world and to relocate them to New Guinea was expensive. The mine worked on the principle that if they keep their workers happy, they would stay longer, so all the various clubs were subsidised by the mine.
Between the outer coral reefs there were strong currents. One channel was called shark alley and as the sides of the reefs were steep and with nowhere to anchor a drift dive was necessary. Here a heavy white marker was lowered from a boat and both boat and diver travelled at the same speed as the current. The idea was not to get too far from the marker otherwise you would be washed out to sea and when you surfaced there would be no boat in sight. All that was necessary was to sit in the water at about ten or twenty metres, keep an eye on the marker, and enjoy the half hour or so that we had marked for this adventure. There is a certain exhilaration of being whisked along by a strong current. Sometimes you might see a sailfish or a school of tuna and, as well, the local sharks often used the alley. If a shark swims towards you front on it looks like a round disc that gets larger and larger. It’s not attacking but curious and you can be sure that when it is close it will suddenly turn side on and you see its full length. This can be a bit disconcerting at first but as we had all done many dives we were acclimatised to underwater life in the tropics.
The mine occasionally had visitors from overseas and that weekend we had Steve from England who was keen to do some diving. We were going out for a drift dive so we said come along. On the boat out he told us that he had done countless dives and considered himself an expert. He talked about using a “dry” wetsuit where water does not get onto the body and that it was necessary for the cold European conditions. As Australians, we had never needed to use one. We listened to his stories. Maybe he was educating the colonials. As we got near the channel we started to talk of the dive plan. We said that anyone is free to return to the boat if they feel unwell. It was hard to get a word in. In frustration we told him just to follow us. We slipped over the side to the white marker hanging from the boat. The five of us were about ten metres ahead and after a few minutes I turned around to see where Steve was only to see him hauling himself back into the boat. We had forgotten to tell him about the sharks. We were all grinning on the boat trip back and Steve seemed unusually silent. “That was a short dive Steve!” “I had a headache” he replied.
Over the years I settled into life in New Guinea. I was living in Panguna in the mountains next to the mine where temperatures were much milder than the coast which was nearly always hot and steamy. The couples and married people were in Arawa down on the coast and these two towns were about twenty kilometres apart. Malaria was everywhere and we made a big effort to avoid being bitten by mosquitoes. Of course there were prophylactics but these had side effects and couldn’t be used for long periods. There were many local people working in the mine and some came from the various villages up and down the coast. Now and again we were invited to stay and we would go for the weekend usually staying only the Saturday night. We used creams during the day and mosquito nets at night. The huts were on poles and the walls were woven coconut palm leaves. Sometimes we went with them fishing in their dugout canoes.
In Arawa it was steamy year around and I know of a family who had their air-conditioner running continuously for their entire eight year stay. I actually stayed in this house for a few weeks once as it was customary to get a single person from the Panguna mine to “look after” a house in the town of Arawa if the residents went away. This was for security as no house could be left vacant as theft was common. They warned me to “never turn off the air-conditioner”. They had a hairy dog and carpets and when two friends from Panguna joined me in the house for a few days they slept in the lounge. They turned off the air-conditioner and the temperature went up about ten degrees. Years of accumulated flea eggs simultaneously hatched and we were so bitten that we had to turn the air-conditioner back on even colder than before to suppress them.
The weekends were free and were spent on the coast and there was always some adventure planed. Usually this involved diving and there were many smaller islands and reefs to explore. I remember one trip to Myer’s reef some four kilometres offshore with four friends. It was a true reef but did not break the surface as even at high tide it was two meters below the waves. And waves there were aplenty as the reef interrupted the natural flow of water causing chop. Indeed, that was the method of finding the reef; look for the disturbance. The currents were strong and the reef was the top of an underwater mountain that fell away precipitously for hundreds of metres into the black depths. The reef was attractive because animals had to swim around or over it and by sitting on the edge, two or three meters down, holding on to chunks of coral, one could observe all the large fish coming up from the depths. Being so close to the surface, little air was used so we could stay for hours. The water temperature was twenty-eight degrees, and it was getting dark. We knew that the small aluminium boat would be straining at the anchor and I could see the face of Sven, who had made this dive before, and through his mask even he looked worried. The boat was not where we had left it. The anchor had shifted but luckily had caught on another piece of coral at the edge of the reef. What would we have done had the boat had not been there I have no idea. A four kilometre swim in a sea full of sharks at night was not an attractive option. Mobile phones were yet to be invented and there was no rescue service anyway. But were young and so I suppose we were more prone to taking risks.
Another night dive with strong currents was at Robo where there was a constriction between the mainland and a small island and the currents were strong. It was possible to start deep and travel with a current in one direction for twenty or thirty minutes and then for decompression come up to a different current and ride it all the way back at a shallower level. When underwater at night there is no horizon so if you get disorientated there was the risk of being swept out to sea. There was no backup if anything went wrong so we took underwater compasses to guard against this disorientation. It was two o’clock in the morning and with no moon it was very dark and still. Leaving the landcruiser next to the ocean unattended for an hour or more was an invitation to theft and as security was poor in New Guinea it was necessary to take a guard for protection. Joseph was almost retired and worked in security at the mine and he was always willing to come with us. He sat in the car while we dived. He was from mainland New Guinea from the highland province to and he carried a machete. During the drive we often quizzed him about highland life. He told us of the different tribes, their conflicts and their spiritual beliefs. He was born around nineteen twenty and it was now nineteen eighty two he must have been over sixty. The last case of cannibalism was in about 1970 but as a child he had tasted humans. When there was warfare any enemies speared were eaten, why would you waste the meat? I could see sense in his arguments. Joseph watched us disappear quietly into the black sea. Decades later at a party in Australia I overheard some disparaging remarks about cannibalism and without thinking I interjected with “but some of my best friends were cannibals”. Everyone laughed and of course no one believed me. As I am writing this account in 2025, Joseph would be long dead by now, but his memory lives on in me today.
As a mathematician working in mine engineering, I was involved in most aspects of the mine operation. The job wasn’t special and similar work existed in every mine. It was the location that was special. This was my first long trip overseas and as I came from the Mediterranean climate of Adelaide (the same climate as Athens) to the tropical jungle, the contrast was great. All weekends were free so we spent the working week planning next adventure. There were other smaller islands near Bougainville and one was Buka Luma. This small island sat in a channel between big Buka and little Buka and the three constituted Bougainville. The channel between the two Bukas is narrow and the old colonial hotel on Buka Luma has in the front a long green lawn which sloped away giving a fine view over the channel. On the grounds sits a zero, the Japanese fighter plane. This hotel has at various times been the administrative centre of Bougainville. Around its walls hang pictures of the original German colonists, then the British administrators that followed, then the Japanese, followed by the Americans, then the Australians, and lastly it was a province of Papua and New Guinea. The people who live there belong ethnically to the Solomon Islands and Bougainville, the northern most island of the Solomons, should have been part of that island group and not part of New Guinea.
I went to stay at this hotel on Buka Luma with three friends. We hired a boat and snorkelled on some of the zeros that were in shallow water around the island. Both Islands, Big Buka and Little Buka, still had metal armoured tanks rusting on the sides of roads, triangular piles of ammunition, overgrown bunkers, crashed planes, etc, all left over from the Second World War. After snorkelling, we dived in the channel where the currents were quite strong. The direction of the current was dependent on the tides. We had a boat follow us as it is a poor dive plan that requires swimming against a current and no one wants to be washed out to sea. After a couple of days on Buka Luma we went on to little Buka, an island of about fifty kilometres by twenty. There was a Catholic Mission where it was possible to stay and we could use the phone at the hotel to tell of our comming. A small car ferry connected the islands. Just as we left the hotel on Buka Luma, we received the news that the priest was looking forward to our visit. We were a little worried as none of us were Christians and we hoped that the priest was not looking for converts. The roads were rough and often corrugated and there were frequent deep river crossings so travelling was hard on the landcruiser. For some of the deeper rivers we had to take the bungs out of the floor so the car wouldn’t float away. The roads needed regular clearing as the tropical vegetation would soon reclaim them if there wasn’t some maintenance. But when we arrived at the Mission, the grounds were immaculate. Well kept lawns separated the buildings. Here nature was tamed.
The jovial priest rushed towards us and beckoned us to the veranda of his house. Here we sat on comfortable lounge chairs made more comfortable after a few bottles of beer were produced. We spent a pleasant day there, leaving the next morning. We talked about politics, history and almost everything except religion. The priest was the only European there and what he really wanted from us was good conversation. It made us realise how difficult it must be to go to these far outposts where the way of life was so different from one’s upbringing. I got the feeling that he saw his life slipping away.
A new member to the mine was Harry, an engineer. Collecting is a natural desire and I suppose in our evolutionary past storing food against hard times increased the chance of survival. So a popular pastime for divers was to make a collection of shells. This was an example of redirected collecting as none of the shells was for food. At first almost any shell was collected but the common shells came quickly and after a few months these were ignored and it was only the rare and hard to find shells that were sought. The two main groups of shells were cowries and cones with some ninety-two different species of cowries and one hundred and fifty-six different cones shells. Years went by and Harry had amassed a reasonable collection. He was missing a rare cone shell and Harry asked me if I had seen it. It was a rather small brown shell of about two centimetres long. Few people would look twice at this uninteresting shell but when needed to complete a set it was an object of great interest. He was desperate to add it to his collection. I told him I had got some in an underwater valley between two islands but it was thirty metres deep and that if we dived there we would only have ten minutes because of the necessary decompression. This decompression consisted of another thirty minutes going up a sandy slope to the shore. He agreed and so we set off at midnight on a moonless night. We had large torches and the water was fairly clear. When we arrived we began to search in earnest. There were some beautiful shells of other species, much nicer than the cone shell we sought. Just as the ten minutes finished we found the cone shell we were looking for. I did not need to look at Paul to know how excited he was. While we were looking for the shell we realised that we had company. A large shark, about twice our length, seemed to be taking a great interest in us. It was about three metres away and circling. In our obsession to find the cone shell we had completely forgotten to keep a look out. It was the strangest thing I had ever seen. It had a bell shaped head but it was not a hammerhead because the large eye was on the body and not the stalk. This eye was going around and around examining us. We must also have looked very strange to it, especially with strong lights going in all directions, and particularly in its direction. It was probably just curious. We thought it should be curious somewhere else and slowly went up the sand bank in the direction of the shore. We kept looking behind us and it followed for a short distance but then turned and disappeared into the depths. When we got to the shore we were both still shaking a little. “Well, at least you found your shell” I said to Paul. “Shell?” he replied. He had completely forgotten about it. After searching his pockets he realised that it must have been dropped when the shark arrived. Despite searching countless books on sharks we never found the species we observed that night.
Bougainville is on a fault line and has about four hundred earthquakes a year. Most of these are small but there is the occasional large one. The buildings at the mine are all made to withstand them. Next to the mine is a volcano that emits smoke and sometimes erupts. As the operations of the mine could be affected, a seismologist was permanently employed and part of his job included the processing of data from several recording stations. To check these stations it was necessary to visit and read the data. The mine had its own four-seater helicopter but only one technician was needed to collect the measurements and, after a seat for the pilot, two seats were left free and there was always a scramble by mine staff to fill these seats. Eventually it was my turn. Of particular demand was a trip to a small island that was almost entirely covered with coconut trees where there was a seismological recording device producing lots of data. On this island the old colonial house, originally German, was set next to the sea and the background noise was only the quite lapping of waves. The tropical gardens that surrounded it were filled with colourful hibiscus and the presence of these flowers meant that butterflies were plentiful. A large veranda on the second floor overlooked the garden and sea. The now Australian owner, living by himself, enjoyed these visits from the mine and I suppose he was always wondering which passengers would be the next. The pilot led us up the stairs to the comfortable lounge chairs on the veranda. It was handshakes all round and then we were invited to afternoon tea. The owner explained that his cook had left and that he had employed a new one. As we were pouring the tea a large chocolate cake was brought out by a young Bougainvillian woman and placed on the low table in front of us. Her youth and beauty together with the warm and moist cake turned a simple afternoon tea into a highlight. For a brief moment in time I was removed from everything that was happening at the mine. Life was pleasant indeed. Two hours later I was back at the busy office sweating over mathematical calculations. Single events of such contrast often lead to much reflection.
Nearby the active volcano (Mt. Balbi) was an extinct volcano with a lake (Lake Billy Mitchell) in its crater. Three of us decided that this would make a great long weekend trip. We took the mine helicopter and after circling Mt Balbi went on to the extinct volcano. There was nowhere to land and so we had to jump a few metres near the lake´s edge. Then the first thing to do was to cut a landing to be picked up for the return journey. We planned to camp for a few days. We had brought an inflatable boat for rowing across the lake to measure its width and take its depth. We found it was about two kilometres across and about 80 meters at its deepest. The year was 1984 and we may have been the first to do this survey. We put tents up and made a campfire. Usually when you make these types of trips something unusual always happens. We collected dead wood from the trees and bushes around and all burned well except the wood from one species of tree. Despite a large fire, it was still unburnt in the morning. I never found out the name of this species as I am sure this type of wood would have had many uses.
Although the mineralisation of Bougainville is essentially volcanic, there are large areas in the north west of calcium carbonate where enormous caves have formed. We intended to visit one of the largest caves that is nearly half a kilometre long and almost two hundred metres high in places. This cave, named Benua, was virtually unknown when we visited but is now listed as the seventh largest in the world. The entrance was one hundred metres high. To get there we took a light plane from the airport at Aropa to the catholic mission at Torokina and then still had to walk for several hours. There was about twelve of us. A person newly arrived on Bougainville had an enormous backpack and about halfway he sat down and couldn’t go on. The hot and steamy hundred percent humidity had taken its toll. Fortunately several men from Torokina had accompanied us to show us the way and the heavy backpack was offloaded on to one of these. We intended to sleep in the cave and had brought sandwiches. Later that night when we were unpacking, out of this heavy pack came a large cast iron frying-pan! What he intended doing with it no one knew as we had brought nothing to cook. The only animals were the many bats of the cave. At the back of the cave was an enormous stalagmite. A river flows into the cave and disappeared underground at the back. We dared not swim too close to the back part for fear of disappearing into this dark tunnel. No one knew where the river re-emerged, if it ever did. Shining a light into this river at night showed lots of red eyes from the shrimps that lived there. Lumps of rock half the size of cars had fallen from the cave roof at various times so we put our sleeping bags under the white patches on the roof on the basis that fresh falls were less likely in these spots. We were all glad that we were only staying one night.
The highest point on this tiny island of Bougainville is Mount Balbi at 2700 metres, nearly 500 metres higher than the highest mountain of Australia, Mount Kosciuszko. It consists of seven craters, some with fumaroles spewing toxic fumes, others with lakes. Five of us made the trip to this lunar landscape. There were some villages at the base who told us that small people lived near the top and these would throw rocks at us should we try and climb the mountain. This story seems to have been passed down orally for countless generations. There are pygmies in other part of New Guinea so maybe they once lived here as well. Despite this story, we eventually found some locals who had climbed part of the mountain and who were willing to come with us. The normal temperature of Bougainville was thirty degrees or greater and humidity was usually close to one hundred percent. But as we climbed this mountain the vegetation changed from rainforest, to a stunted form of rainforest, then to bamboo, then to a forest of stunted trees covered in moss, and finally clumps of grasses. The trip would have been a botanist’s dream. Nearing the fumaroles at the top there was nothing as the toxic gases had killed all the plant life. It was a real moonscape of fissures hissing out fumes. We had to be downwind of these to survive. About 30 people from the village started with us but they fell away as we went up and eventually only the two guides remained. The temperature towards night fell towards ten degrees. We had brought tents but the guides had nothing. To stop freezing a large fire was kept going all night. After conversations with these guides we found out that they had no word for “jumper” in their local language. Neither of the guides had ever been to the top of the mountain. We spent the next day exploring the extraordinary landscape, so different to the rest of Bougainville. I still have a large fifteen centimetre cube of pure yellow sulphur that I broke off from the side of a fumarole in my study. The surface around these fumaroles can collapse under a person’s weight and to disappear into a fumarole would not be pleasant.
Early in my life I was interested in philosophy and the process of evolution. But I realised that getting a job in this area was impossible so, as my grandfather was a geologist and my uncle a mining engineer, I thought this was an area worth looking at. I had some talent for mathematics and so I did engineering mathematics at university hoping to work as a mining engineer later. This plan worked out and now I was in New Guinea doing exactly that. But the desire to understand the world and my interest in philosophy remained. My flat at Panguna was supplied and maintained by the company and there was a mess offering four meals a day. Here was breakfast, lunch and dinner and a late dinner at nine pm for socialising and also for some miners who were on shift work. All the “expats” (people from overseas) ate here and so the opportunity for socialising was great. Work finished about five and so there was another six hours to use up before we slept. Each table seated six people, so, more or less, everyone talked to everyone eventually. There were geologists, engineers, mineralogists, chemists, accountants, computer programmers, and so on. In order to continue my philosophy I had fun with the question “why do we exist”. Many people led busy lives and so are not so interested in this type of question. Others had given up and thought along the lines “we will never work it out”. It is natural to gravitate towards people with whom you have good conversations and as there was a core of people in the mess who saw fun in this question and so we had some lively debates over the years.
Eventually I decided to enrol in correspondence courses in two Australian universities, RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) and later at Deakin University and did subjects in philosophy, psychology and theology. It would also give me another interest other than mining. In theology there was a research component and I chose the religions of the Dinka and Nuer, two African tribes in northern Kenya. I was curious to see what people believed and why they believed it. So week nights I studied and talked at the mess and weekends I had diving and exploring adventures so overall I was very busy. It was in these mess conservations that I had to opportunity to test my ideas. But not all these conversations were interesting. There was one man, Jonathon, who was religious and for some reason, often chose to sit at the same table, despite my trying to avoid him. He seemed almost eager to single me out. Maybe he had me flagged for conversion. He had a particular smile which I could only describe as an “all knowing smile” which I will never forget. I had a few conversations with him, but whatever logic you used fell on deaf ears and he just waited for me to stop and then continued with his own dogma. He thought that everyone had to have the same ideas as he. At one time I was reading the last book of Freud “Moses and Monotheism”. Here Freud suggests that Moses was an Egyptian and that Christianity originated as the religion of the Pharaoh, Akhetaton. Whether Freud is right or not I have no idea and I certainly didn’t have the background to make a judgement. But I found the idea interesting. Jonathon always wanted me to read his pamphlets written by his own sect that “proved” such things like carbon dating were incorrect. This sect even had its own scientists and its own publishing arm. I suggested he read this book by Freud. No, he would not read Freud and it seemed that he would only read books that supported his own ideas. As well he kept referring to evolution as a “theory”. I learnt two things from Jonathon. First, he adopted a set of beliefs that were so solid that he feared being challenged, and secondly, he was unprepared to check the veracity of his beliefs. He tried the “fear of death” argument with me with “what will happen to you after you die”. Here I was meant to be afraid of going to hell by not believing. But after some my diving experiences there was not much fear of death left.
I told Jonathon that “there are billions of years of fossils in the ground, what more proof of evolution do you want?” I told him that religion is just smoke and mirrors. If God made the world, and assuming God is still part of it, then God made himself. But these sorts of contradictions meant nothing to Jonathon and I felt sorry for him because of his lack of curiosity. I lived for finding out new things. He lived for pushing a narrow set of beliefs onto others. After only a few conversations I had to ask Jonathon not to sit with me in the mess as his arguments were repetitive and his mind closed to anything new.
There were often more than a hundred people in the mess and so better conversation was to be had elsewhere. Ruben, a geologist and evolutionist, and I formed the idea that there must be some sort of “elixir” that could be obtained by thought alone. The elixir would be a “sweet spot” in thinking that upgrades our level of happiness and understanding. We developed an analogy using the idea of a lottery win. Imagine you bought a lottery ticket and won a large sum of money. For the next few days you are on a high working out what to do with the money. You are much happier than before. A small amount of information, “you’ve won”, has entered the brain and led to an immense increase of pleasure. Now why can’t you reach the same state without the lottery win? Why can’t you rearrange certain elements of your thinking so that you can access this happy state at will? We thought an elixir could be this rearrangement ideas without the lottery win.
Ruben and I took delight in finding all the logical flaws in religion. Only a small amount of logic is necessary to demonstrate these flaws. Let’s say there is a judgement upon death where people go to heaven or hell. A person getting 49.9 in the judgement gets toasted for eternity while a person getting 50.1 lives in luxury forever. No thinking person could imagine such a system could be thought up by a loving God. Humans (Homo sapiens) are meant have been around for some three hundred thousand years before the last species break, so ninety nine percent of humans existed before religions were even invented. These humans had never heard of religion so was heaven or hell their destiny? What about chimpanzees? Countless similar examples show the shallowness of the religious argument. People who grow up with religions or join religions in later life have faith (blind belief) that what they are told is true. They are discouraged from questioning those beliefs. For anyone who questions the logic of religion the cover-all explanation I have often heard is along the lines of “God works in mystical ways”. Which is the same as saying “just believe, don´t try to understand it”. The flaws are endless and so many people look the other way in order to believe. These are the sorts of things that Ruben and I wasted our time upon until near midnight when we walked the hundred metres to our flats.
Ruben and I took the elixir to be a particular thought pattern that produces a satisfying life. This pattern is not the same as happiness but something more like being at peace. Actually we didn´t really know what it was however we still set out to find it. As we are evolved animals we should look to the process of evolution to find the elixir. Central to evolution is reproduction. Not only is it the main theme, but it is probably the only theme. Brains evolved to provide flexibility of actions. The genes give happiness if a person goes towards reproduction and sadness (or pain) if one goes away from reproduction. This is best demonstrated by example. Finding shelter, keeping warm, producing a family, and so on, all increase your happiness. Love evolved to keep couples together and compassion and empathy to make sure children are cared for. The genes use a “reward and punishment” approach to direct the actions of the body towards survival and so eventually reproduction. Genes guide us towards reproduction by pleasure and pain. Seeking happiness and avoiding pain is the method of all animals with developed brains. Hormones that produce happiness include dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins.
Another aspect of evolution is that children are all different. I remember the idea of the bell curve being introduced at school with people´s heights as the example. Just as people vary on the outside in their height they must also vary on the inside. Genetic characteristics such as fear, ambition, love, hate, envy, jealousy, curiosity, and sociability must also vary between people as per bell curve. This theme I came to understand better later in life. In the mean time I was earning money and having the excitement of exploring another country.
And then a telegraph pole was blown up and the electricity from the coast to the mine was cut. Someone had stolen explosives from the mine site and stopped the electricity supply. A civil war was imminent over the resources from the mine. As one miner said to me, “leave or die”. Of the 300,000 inhabitants of Bougainville more than 20,000 were killed over the next few years. That’s about seven percent of the population, a greater percentage than each of our World Wars. All the machinery and buildings of the mine were destroyed and remain destroyed to this day. Panguna and Arawa were vandalised and many of the houses burnt. At the time, revenue from the mine provided about one third of New Guinea’s income and all was lost.
Bougainville is the top most island of the Solomon Islands and should have gone back to this country after the First World War. But Bougainville, being a colony of Germany, came under the administration of New Guinea, also a colony of Germany. After the First World War, when Papua (under British administration) and New Guinea were combined Bougainville was included as part of Papua and New Guinea which was a mistake. They are really ethnically Solomon Islanders and have a different origin from the people from Papua New Guinea. The Bougainvillians wanted to separate from Papua New Guinea as they saw their resources being stolen by them. They wanted a greater share of the mine’s profits. In the end, no-one got the profits and today it is probably too expensive to restart the mine.
Living in another country for an extended period allowed me to see my first country, Australia, in another light. Travel is always enlightening. I was in New Guinea for eight years. As nearly every weekend we had some adventure, you can imagine the experiences I had.
After New Guinea I travelled in Europe and Asia but eventually decided to find a new home in Australia. I had left my few possessions in boxes at my mother’s home in Adelaide. In contrast to tropical New Guinea I decided to move to temperate Tasmania, a vastly different climate. But what to do? It was now 1989 and I needed a job. I was interested in alternative building and so went to visit a friend, John, building a mud brick house near Hobart. He was working as a teacher and said his school was looking for a temporary maths teacher for one semester to replace a woman on maternity leave. Well, I will try anything so I rang and arranged an interview. The conversation with the headmistress went something like this: “are you religious”, “no, I believe in evolution”, “have you ever had experience teaching mathematics”, “never”, “what are your qualifications”, “I have a degree in mathematics and have worked in engineering”, and so on. She said the position was temporary but it could lead to permanent employment. After the interview I thought the headmistress would never employ a non religious person without a teaching background and so I was surprised to find a job offer in the mail. And so I became a teacher at Mt. Carmel catholic girls´ school and was suddenly in front of many classes of eager students. I was teaching children aged fifteen to seventeen years old. Not all the teachers were Christians and but even so it was unusual to have so many religious people around. In contrast, at the high school I attended in Adelaide, not a single one of my friends was religious. In New Guinea I only knew one religious person. The headmistress wore a gold ring and I asked if she was married but she only said “married to God”. This unsettled me somewhat.
After a few days I had a chance to talk to John again and boasted of my interview skills. “What, you were terrible in the interview and you only got the job because you were the only applicant. The school had been looking for another maths teacher for ages and the last one only had one year at university and was making mistakes in teaching”. My pay at Mount Carmel was about one quarter that of an engineer in New Guinea. It was at subsistence level and all the teachers shared one room with a pay phone on the wall. How anyone survived this treatment was a mystery to me. I realised why the school failed to attract quality staff. And then there was the marking. I was told I could do this in my “spare time”. This spare time was not calculated in my hours of work. And then there was yard duty, detention duty, and even supervising sport on some weekends. I was being loaded up with extra work that was not in my original contract and never mentioned in my interview.
I clashed with the head maths teacher who told me “just get them to learn the formulas by heart” whereas I was trying to explain everything. She was the “I know best” type. Some dominate people operate by trying to get new people “under the thumb”. I remember in psychology the idea of three types of conversation: child to child, adult to adult, and adult to child. When she engaged in adult to child conversation with me, she lost all credibility. I wanted an adult to adult conversation about teaching. I wanted a real conversation. Many of the maths teachers at the school did not have a good grasp of the fundamentals of mathematics which is probably why I was given the final year students to teach. These teachers were not confident to do it themselves. But I still made some good friends at the school. I soon realised teaching was not for me and at the end of the semester I left. It was time to move on.
This school was not my first experience with looking after children. I went to Blackwood High school in the Adelaide hills and after finishing many of us went on to university. Most of us were penniless and while university was still free and we got a small allowance from the government, we had to take side jobs to make ends meet. I got a position at Scotch College, a Church of England school, as a “live in” tutor. This school had extensive out-buildings on the grounds and one was the music house where music lessons were given in the day time and where all the musical instruments were kept. I had a nice room in the house and after five pm had the place to myself. I suppose having someone living there prevented any vandalism or theft after hours. The school had many boarders mainly from outlying rural farms in the countryside of South Australia. I had to look after the eleven year old boys for two nights a week and one weekend in three in exchange for free board and meals. I really enjoyed this time as the “looking after” only meant being present and I could do my university studies as well. Sometimes I helped them with their homework and as well I took them on weekend trips.
After teaching at Mt. Carmel I got a job as a scientist in a government organisation (CSIRO) doing mathematical models of ocean currents. In New Guinea, as part of mine engineering, I was doing mathematical models of how ore bodies moved through the ground so my new job wasn’t too different. It was work I was familiar with and so was easy for me. There was joint project between Australia and Japan to re-seed Tasmania’s bays with baby scallops. These baby scallops, called spat, had a free swimming larval stage of about thirty days before settling to grow into shellfish. As the waters around Tasmania fell away quickly, release points had to be found such that the spat were not washed out into the depths where they couldn’t develop. Models of ocean currents were needed so release points could be selected.
After a year on this project I was offered tenure (permanent employment) which was a really nice compliment to my work ethic but I knew that I had to move on. There was a genetic flaw in me that kept me searching but for what I did not know. My mind kept returning to the idea of an elixir, or way of thinking, a pattern of ideas that stopped the restlessness. I wanted to understand the mind. With this elixir the mystery of the world would fall away. So there was only one thing to do and that was to continue the studies started in New Guinea. During my first degree in engineering mathematics I did some zoology and also some subjects in mathematical biology. I had over the years, already read everything I could find on evolution. My logic was that as we are evolved animals we should look to the evolutionary process to understand thought. Taking the elixir as a pattern of ideas in the mind, evolution must have had some role in its formation. So I enrolled at the University of Tasmania whereby I had to write a thesis and I took the title “the Evolution of Knowledge”. I enrolled part time with the intention of taking four or five years to complete it. This approach gave me lots of time for travel and lots of contact with the university. I had originally bought a house at Kingston near Hobart where I was living comfortably, but I soon became restless in this conventional house so I sold it and bought five acres of land on the sea at Egg and Bacon bay, near Cygnet. This was a bush block containing an open forest of shrubs with a few larger gum trees. The soil was mostly clay. It gradually sloped towards the sea ending in rocks where the waves lapped softly and this music could be heard at night. The first step was to put up a shed and so I built a weatherboard construction out of “Tasmanian oak” but this was really two types of gum tree, mainly the “stringy bark” and “blue gum” varieties. Cygnet was a small town where I shopped and the university was about an hour´s drive away but it was alright as I only intended to travel there twice a week.
I proposed in my thesis that there were two types of knowledge: genetic knowledge and cultural knowledge. Units of this knowledge were genetic and cultural ideas. This term “genetic knowledge” upset some in the philosophy department but I told them that their idea of “knowledge” was set in the past and there could be other interpretations. The new philosophy is not Greek but biology, genetics and the big bang. We are evolved beings and so we have look to evolution to understand life. There is no point looking back thousands of years when biology and the other sciences were in their infancy. Bacteria and genes were unknown. This new use of “knowledge” is best explained by example. Say a person says “I am hungry”. Hormones are sent from the nervous system around the stomach to the brain and thoughts of eating arise. The genetic idea “I am hungry” becomes present in the brain. The “I am hungry” part is genetic knowledge and the location of the kitchen and recipe for cooking is the “cultural part”. This genetic idea of hunger exists before birth and the cultural ideas on what to do when hungry are learnt after birth. The genetic and cultural parts of “I am hungry” interact in the brain and through this interaction a meal is cooked and hunger is satisfied. Here “I am hungry” starts as genetic but soon combines with cultural ideas as to where to get food and prepare it for eating.
New genetic ideas come by mutation and gene shuffling on chromosomes and how they are stored is well known from genetic studies. The genes inherited by children from their parents are different from either parent. All the genes are made of atoms and all the genes together could be thought of as a pattern of atoms unique to that person. With cultural ideas it is not so clear. Whether new cultural ideas are stored in the connections of neurons or stored as chemicals in the neurons themselves, I don´t think anyone really knows. However it is safe to say that when a person learns something new, ideas are stored in the mind and these ideas can later be recalled. As the mind is made of atoms, a person´s cultural ideas are also patterns of atoms unique to each person.
Genetic ideas are inherited in varying strengths through the mating process. Ideas such as skill in sport, ability for science, learning languages, drawing and other crafts, and so on, all vary in a child. As mentioned earlier, for each skill you can imagine a bell curve with an individual child´s skill being somewhere on this curve. All these abilities make each child unique and affect the careers they choose when growing up. I like to think that this pattern is more than the atoms themselves.
Cultural ideas are inherited from the parents and society in which the child grows through conversation, reading and other media. These two types of ideas interact in the mind in the process of thinking and sometimes these thoughts result in actions. These genetic and cultural patterns are our experience of self. Proof is that if someone suffers concussion or has some mental disease these patterns are disrupted and the person might no longer be the same.
I was very interested in the idea of building and particularly buildings that left a “low carbon footprint”. There was a magazine, the “Owner Builder”, which had stories from people who had built their own houses. I thought I would build two houses on the same block at Egg and Bacon Bay. I still had quite a lot of money saved from my New Guinea days so finance was not a problem. With my engineering background I became both engineer and architect and drew up plans for a stone house and a mud-brick house and they were passed by the council. While I was working at CSIRO I took a courses in welding, carpentry, and organic gardening as I intended to do everything myself. Over the next five years, while doing my thesis part time and travelling, I finished both these houses each taking only about six months in total. Both were two storied. I lived in one and rented the other out.
While building at Egg and Bacon Bay I could not give up my love for diving so I joined the Hobart diving club. Diving in Tasmania was completely different from New Guinea. The water temperature was more like fifteen degrees than the thirty degrees of the tropics. So I had to get a one centimetre thick wetsuit with hood and boots. I did some beautiful dives with the club, especially in kelp forests. These long strands of algae can be up to thirty metres and wonderful to swim through. On these dives you always saw abalone and crayfish, and no one could resist bringing back a few. Like New Guinea we always dived in pairs. It was an established rule with the idea that one diver could help the other if one got into trouble. After about a year with the club I left. It never really felt the same as New Guinea. I had stopped logging my dives long ago. In Egg and Bacon Bay my property had about 50 metres of sea frontage and went down to rocks and kelp. I started diving alone and only when I got visitors where I would go and get some abalone and crayfish for lunch.
While I was getting settled in Tasmania, travel for me it was still an addiction. My first travel was at the end of high school. Two school friends of mine, realising that we had not yet been out of Australia, decided on a trip New Zealand. We were all seventeen. This was a close country and an easy introduction to travel and in those days we only needed our driver’s licence as identification at the airport. As the driving age in South Australia was sixteen we all had had our driver´s licences for over a year so we felt like adults. I mention this experience here because I think it is important to visit a place more than once because then you can see the changes that have occurred. And these changes can be as important as the place itself.
Having little money we travelled by hitch-hiking and despite being three people more or less stepped from one car to another. People in New Zealand were very friendly and it was rare that anyone drove past. For accommodation we used backpackers’ and youth hostels and as a backup we took a tent. We landed in Auckland and left from Christchurch. New Zealand was not too different from Australia until we got to Rotorua where steam issued from the cracks in footpaths. It is a town sitting on geothermal activity and we went to a part that had bubbling mud pools and a geyser at one end that erupted every few minutes. There were also many pools of water and in some the water was boiling. Other pools didn’t seem so hot so we tested them with the intention of going for a swim. The pools further from the geyser were cooler and there was one that seemed alright and so we had a very pleasant swim.
Almost a decade later I was again in Rotorua and while anyone could walk up to the geyser for a small fee, the pools had large signs saying “extreme danger”. I was looking rather forlorn at my pool when a ranger approached and assured me that if anyone fell in, there would be no chance of survival. I told him that I had already swum in it and he was surprised. A nice hotel had been built on a hill overlooking the geyser where you could have tea and scones. Again, a further fifteen years later I was in Rotorua. Now for a larger fee you could visit the geyser and all the surrounding pools. The signs had been removed and fences were in their place. Rather than pay fee I went to the hotel.
On my last and sixth trip to New Zealand, I again was in Rotorua and I found that, where nothing had existed before, an “authentic” Maori village called “Whakarewarewa” had been built at the entrance to the geyser and through this village and its countless souvenir shops you had to pass before getting to the geyser. The company that built the village charged an entry fee of forty five dollars per person. This was exorbitant for what was, after all, a natural phenomenon which should be free for all. So I drove up to the hotel but it was closed. “Ok, let’s walk around the back, we can see the geyser from there.” But at exactly the spot between the hotel and the geyser a large fence had been built so nothing could be seen. Some company was making sure that no one could see anything without paying.
I suppose if some natural feature of the Earth attracts enough people it will draw the attention of some “enterprising” person. Most likely this enterprising person will join the local council, gain influence, fence off the attraction and enrich him or herself through entry fees and selling souvenirs. Some people may call this progress but for me this way of thinking erodes human freedom and one wonders what the purpose of life is. So while travelling overseas I always kept in my mind that the experience you are having is a window in a certain period of time and that a different experience might be had in the exact location a few years down the track.
Still reading a lot, I thought of going to read the philosophy books of the University of California at Los Angles (UCLA). As my thesis was “the evolution of knowledge” this probably sat under the “philosophy of biology” banner. It was really just an excuse to combine travel with my thesis. When I got to UCLA I soon realised that the books at this library were no different from any other Australian university. I was surprised that UCLA had its own armed police system, with a police member at each entrance. A lecturer in architecture had rooms for students in a sort of boarding house so I stayed there. I did the usual tourist things like swimming at Malibu, walking on Hollywood Boulevard, and so on, but there are always certain incidents that stand out. It is these unusual experiences that most affect your thinking.
I was walking up a small side street and in front of me was a tall lanky person carrying a large bag. I hardly noticed him a few paces ahead but then, as I found out later, in his own mind he was certain I was about to mug him. It seemed that people are very conscious of getting attacked here. He decided to act first and so turned around and simultaneously made the most enormous karate kick to my head. I ducked saying “what are you doing, I’m just an Australian tourist walking along”. With my accent he no doubt realised I was not a threat at all and in frustration threw his bag through the adjacent shop window and started to run up the street. Glass went everywhere. By this stage the shop owner had appeared and had just called the police. I explained to him that a man had just thrown the bag trough his window and looking up the street we saw him disappearing around the corner. This was lucky for me otherwise he could have blamed me. Soon the police arrived and asked me to help them search for him from the back of their police car. We went around a few blocks but couldn’t find him. This was the type of adventure I didn´t need.
The architect who rented the rooms was called Jorge and he was from Mexico city. He was close to retirement age and his children were long gone and so his interest was the students who stayed with him. He had a Volkswagen Combi van and as it was the University end of year holidays and he was driving down to Mexico City, several of us staying with him decided to share petrol costs and go with him. There was a New Zealander, a Britisher, another Mexican, also called Jorge, and myself. So all five piled in the van and drove down through Phoenix, staying in Mexico in places like Chihuahua and Zacatecas where Jorge had relatives. He was proud of his country and made an effort to show us everything of interest along the way. There is nothing more luxurious than travelling with a native of the country. I didn’t Speak Spanish, had no idea of the roads, hadn’t planned any accommodation, but all this was taken care of by Jorge. In fact we stayed with his relatives and friends for free. In the small towns I was amazed at how one could turn off a dusty lane into a courtyard of several houses with peace and tranquillity where several members of the same family lived. In all cases we were completely accepted and included as part of the social group.
In one small town we went to the central square for lunch and Mexican musicians in large Sombreros came to play at our table (probably because we were looked like tourists, which we were). I asked the others to order a meat dish for me and here the two Jorges tried a trick. The “meat dish” turned out to be bull’s testicles which I had only partially eaten before their large grins gave the trick away. Eventually we arrived at Mexico City which was very crowded and the most interesting thing we did there was climb the Sun Pyramid and lesser Pyramids just north of the city. This trip took about five weeks and we went back through the Tijuana border crossing to Los Angles. It was one of the most interesting trips I have ever done.
On a later trip with Continental Airlines returning from Europe, I stopped in the Hawaiian Islands. Because the distance between Australia and Europe is so large, all the airlines had to stop for refuelling at least once. A stopover usually did not incur extra costs so it was a good way of breaking the journey as well as doing something interesting on the way. I went to the islands of Oahu and Kaua’i and was amazed at the size of the canyon on Kaua’i. But there were no special incidents worth mentioning here. Utilising the stopover rule on another trip with Japan Airlines I was able to stop in Alaska on thw way over and Japan on the way back. I got a visa to America from the embassy in Melbourne in preparation for Alaska. At the Anchorage backpackers I met an American (Mat) who, by coincidence, happened to be the exact same consular official in Melbourne who stamped the visa into my passport some weeks earlier. We agreed to hire a car together and set off. The trip was more than a thousand kilometres in total but we saw only a tiny part of this vast, mainly uninhabited, country. Caribou and moose regularly crossed the road. We stopped at the Matanuska glacier on our way to Tok. It had nice ice caves but it was closed to the public. A fence surrounded it but in one place it was pushed down a bit where many people had climbed over. A big sign warned people of the dangers of walking on the ice. But this type of sign is common in Australia and is really only for insurance purposes. If anything happens the government will deny liability. I climbed over but Mat would not. I said, “give me an hour and I will be back”. It was summer and I was wearing thongs but most glaciers have stones embedded in the ice so it is more like walking on gravel road than slippery ice. I walked on the glacier and also went into some amazing caves below the glacial sheet. Back at the hostel in Anchorage a few days later Mat, becoming philosophical, said to me “it was a great trip, but I regret not climbing on the glacier, I may never have another chance.” Life is short and we must take the opportunities that are presented to us. We never met again.
Once on the way back from Europe I stayed in Japan. It was only for a few weeks and in Tokyo I thought I would visit the zoo. I had just walked through the gate and there was a group of people on my right, all with large white tags attached. One man split off and joined me and said that he was “assigned” to me. This group of retired Japanese was learning English. What better way than to attach to an English speaking person and spend a few hours in conversation? I told him that I had expected to wander the zoo in peace and contemplation and that he should choose someone else. I said something about consent. Here I ran into my first problem. His English was so bad that he did not appear to understand me. Well alright, I’ll just wander off and he won’t last long. Past the giraffes and then the bison, we came to the crocodile enclosure. All the time, one question after another. What work did I do, where did I live, was I married, and so on? He had a clipboard with a sheet of paper and pen so I assume that they were given a list of questions to help them in their conversation. The crocodile enclosure was made like a Swiss cheese of eight triangular divisions. Each enclosure held one crocodile. There were a couple of small crocodiles, then a caiman from Paraguay, and then… what! The whole triangle was filled with a giant Australian saltwater crocodile. It must have been over five metres long and it could not lie fully stretched and could turn around only with difficulty. No doubt it was put in there when small and had grown and grown. Now, I have no warm feelings towards these animals but it was a bad look for the zoo all the same. I suggested to my companion that it was time for a new enclosure as some people might see a small pen for a large animal as cruel. He looked from the crocodile to me and back again several times. I could see from his expression that he had no idea what I was talking about. I had just spent the most frustrating 30 minutes of my life and had another three hours to go. Several “go aways” with hand gestures had no effect. A person has rights. Now at school I was good at running and a hundred meter burst did the trick. I looked back and saw his small figure still rooted to the same spot next to the crocodile pen. Now, I actually felt guilty, and that I was the cruel person! It is incidents like these that really make you question what cultural ideas are resident in people´s minds. We were from different cultures and thought differently.
I visited all the Asian countries and some many times. A favourite was Malaysia because it has two official languages, Malay and English. The Asians are inclined to spirit and ancestor worship and so it was possible to ask questions like “why do we exist” to an eighty year old Chinese man in a temple and end up having quite a good discussion. On one trip travelling down the Mekong river in Laos with my partner, two monks in saffron robes with large smiles and beaming faces sat opposite me. One was about middle age and the other, the leader of the two, maybe ten years older. The long narrow boat rocked gently on the Mekong and the green jungle formed a wall on either side. Every ten kilometres or so a small village cut out of the jungle would break the monotony with women carrying goods on heads, tethered buffaloes grazing the thick grass and occasionally children splashing on the river’s bank. In such a setting I couldn’t resist any longer. Luang Prabang was several hours away so what an opportunity for a long conversation. I wonder if they spoke English? They did, the older better than the younger.
They seemed as happy for conversation as I. After some casual conversation on where we were going and from where we had come, I asked why there seemed so many young Buddhist monks in Laos? They explained that only monks could go to heaven and so young boys became monks for a year or so and then left to go about their normal lives. This gave them entry into heaven. What about women then? They didn’t go to heaven but possibly could if they were reincarnated as males, but they were not sure on this point. As I plied them with questions both monks, and the older monk in particular, came easily with their answers saying that the main thing in Buddhism was fate, destiny or karma. You are born and then a reincarnated non-material soul enters your body, you die, and the soul moves on to some other body, not necessarily human. Fair enough, I understood that, but then where does evolution come in? I loved this type of question because I rarely found a religious person that understood the principals of evolution. Surely there is some conflict here as evolution tells a different story, I said. Both grinned widely. I could see that their confidence in their beliefs was so deep that it was pointless to go on. Enjoy the moment. I asked if I could take their picture. We parted best of friends with even an invitation to visit their monastery.
For the Buddhist monks above, who grew up with this religion, evolution is the newcomer. It is not their tradition. They understand a different order of things. To change, whole lives would have to be overturned and new lives started. The emotional cost would be too great so it is rare for people heavily indoctrinated in one set of ideas to change to another.
Another time I was in Chiang Mai where the Buddhists were having an open day where foreigners could ask any questions they wanted. Monks of all ages looked splendid in their rich yellow robes. The grounds were freshly swept. The colourful flags were flying. The temples that dotted the large grounds, many hundreds of years old, had an air of authority. Great wisdom had been accumulated. The mechanism of the world was known. I was desperate to be part of it. I asked several about evolution and while they said that didn’t know much about it, they all pointed me to their resident expert who had, they said, written a book about evolution. I sought him out but the conversation was not enlightening. The monks love the idea of karma. While evolution is “the differential survival of variations” with karma the “differential survival” is not so differential. What happens is bound to happen, more like the idea of determinism in western philosophy. I was reminded of my first week at university when I was handed a questionnaire. One question was “Would you rather be less happy and know the truth, or much happier and not know the truth?” I found out later that most students would rather be less happy and know the truth.
I decided to visit the Philippines. Manila was built on a swamp and is hot, humid and sinking and after a high tide and combined with rain the backpacker´s hostel I was staying at was surrounded by fifteen centimetres of water. The hostel had put boards elevated on bricks so you didn’t have to walk through the water. Unfortunately the boards were not very wide and a few less agile backpackers lost their footing. In order to escape the heat and water I went to Baguio about two hundred kilometres north of Manila at an elevation of fifteen hundred metres. It was much cooler and had wonderful colonial buildings and parklands. This type of hill station can be found all over Asia and shows the lengths that colonial administrative staff went to escape the summer heat. There was a nice backpacker´s where a dorm room was almost nothing and local food was cheap. In the hostel I met a long thin man with a crusty mop of blond hair who said he was from Finland. He was sitting very relaxed in a window alcove and reading. Next to him was a pile of books. I asked him about the books and he said that he had come for three months and had enough to read for the whole period. He told me he was working. “Working” I said, “how did you get a work visa?” “I haven’t got one” was the reply. It turns out that he had bought his ticket cheaply well in advance and that the whole three month trip was less than his heating bill for the Finnish winter. As he saved money, he considered this work. A similar incident happened in the Cameroon highlands, another hill station Malaysia, also with colonial buildings, and an almost a perfect climate all year. The gentle rolling hills in these highlands are covered by a sea of tea bushes. I met an older man who moved slowly and he said that long ago he had an industrial accident. He was living in a rented caravan in the Netherlands and was on a disability pension. With a wry smile he said that this forced him to “work” in Malaysia for three months a year and the difference in cost allowed him to survive at home.
A friend of mine got a job teaching English in Tiensin in China for a year. He was lonely for some western companionship so I went over. Unfortunately I could only get a visa for one month which was far too short. I would have liked three months at least. At the local museum there was beautiful display of the evolution of Chinese writing. It started out as pictures but gradually became more stylised into the writing of today. We made trip to Beijing and the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, and the Great Wall. There are nine Great Walls, the first few being of mud brick but later ones made of bricks. I also took the train to Shanghai on the train that did the 1500 kilometres in five hours at 300 kmh. This type of railway is very expensive as it must be raised three metres off the ground the entire way. You can’t have a level crossing as a car driver would look each way and not see the train. I talked to a few local people but there was always a mask that you could not see behind. Even good English speakers were guarded in what they said. It was clear that they were afraid of persecution should they say something out of turn. Fear is one of the most basic genetic ideas, it is innate, inborn, it is something that does not need to be learned. Fear keeps us alive but also makes us cautious. In contrast, when speaking to a Chinese people in Malaysia, I had great conversations about religion, politics, and all manner of things. There was no fear. The travel book, The Lonely Planet, is banned in China so frightened is the government of any ideas of freedom or democracy spreading. The country is a fiefdom ruled by a privileged few.
I joined the YHA (youth hostel association) as a life member at the age of sixteen. I loved this style of travelling because hostels always had kitchens where you could cook meals and refrigerators where you could store your food. Also, with bunk beds they were the cheapest accommodation available. My first trip to Africa was to Zimbabwe. I woman at the university where I was studying was going there to mind a house owned by a lecturer of English who was on holiday. Did I want to visit? What a question! Of course I said yes and soon found myself in Harare in a gated community. I was surprised of the level of security of the houses with their high fences and electric gates. When I arrived, she was working at a riding school exercising the horses of rich Hararians who were away on holidays. The lecturer’s house had a resident cook and gardener living in another building on the same property. I too went to the farm to exercise and jump the horses. I met some of her friends and went to some parties but after a while I wanted to leave the capital and see something of the country. I caught the bus to Bulawayo and went straight to the YHA. After checking the notice board I took a riding tour in the nearby Motobo National Park on horseback. In theory the horses could run away should any rhinoceroses be encountered. In practice one of the horses with an inexperienced rider bolted for no apparent reason and it was left to me to retrieve her and the horse. She fell off and injured her arm and the next morning at breakfast in the hostel her arm was in a sling.
The best thing with most hostels is that you soon meet everyone and get good information as to the best places to go and which ones to avoid. There were two English people travelling separately and a South African man. We all teamed up. He had the car and we shared petrol costs. We went to the ruins of the city of Zimbabwe and Cecil Rhodes grave, also in Motobo National Park. Next was Hwange National park where we saw a variety of African wildlife. Then to Victoria Falls and then across the country to Mutare where we walked into the mountains to the border of Mozambique. Then onto the beautiful Vumba botanical reserve and then further to Chimanimani where we stayed at a hostel run by an Australian man. In the hostel I was sleeping on a mattress next to the window and in the morning I took the warmth on my head as the sunlight coming through but it was actually a monkey that was sitting on my head. I found out later that it was the owner’s monkey and that it was a regular habit of the monkey to wake the backpackers. I was surprised at how friendly monkeys could be particularly ones brought up by humans.
On a different African trip I worked as a volunteer to Pat Cavendish O’Neill on her farm in Somerset West, near Cape Town. Pat was a real lover of animals. She was re-habilitating Baboons and taking in any other unwanted monkeys. They were a pest on some farms and they were often shot leaving orphaned babies. As well there were road accidents which also killed the mothers leaving even more orphans. At the time I was there she had about thirty baboons, more than fifty vervet monkeys and one chimpanzee. She had many dogs as well so the place was more like a zoo than a residence. One of the vervet monkeys had been the pet of an old gentleman who had died. This monkey took a great liking to me and often went through my hair looking for lice. It gave me great attention and I was sorry to leave it. The baboons though were of different temperament and so only some of the cages could be entered. Pat was now about seventy but when she was younger had the baboons in a group which she was able to take for a walk. Many were now too old and it was too risky to let them out of the cages. They have enormous front teeth and one keeper was once attacked in one of the cages. She once lived with a Lion in Kenya and wrote a book called “A lion in my bedroom”. I was never a smoker but apes love smoking and this was also true of the resident chimpanzee. So I took up smoking temporarily to keep it company. If you gave it a second cigarette before it had finished the first, it lit the second from the butt of the first. Pat told me that this chimpanzee had once taken a child from two visiting parents up a tree and the fire brigade had to be called to get the child down. So I had to be cautious as they are incredibly strong. There was also a monkey zoo next door and the owner being friends with Pat meant I could go over at any time. There were nice lemurs with stripy tails and I could enter the cage and they would rush to sit on my lap and be fed sultanas. The orphan baboons brought to Pat were distributed to other farms in South Africa and it was my job to make these long journeys. I usually travelled with Morgan, another South African volunteer, who had the unusual characteristic of one blue eye and one brown. He had never learnt to drive but the orphaned baboons thought he was their father so while he controlled the baboons, I drove. On these trips I met all sorts of other people involved with animal rehabilitation.
I usually flew to Johannesburg and then by bus to Pretoria where there was a nice backpackers. Once, catching the overnight two storied bus to Windhoek in Namibia at about two in the morning we collided with a horse. The bus was destroyed and we waited for a replacement in the cold morning on the side of the road with not a house in sight. It is amazing how friendly people suddenly become after a situation like this. This is also related to fear. People who had snubbed each other at the beginning of the trip were now suddenly in conversation. Windhoek (windy corner) is a German colonial city that still had many of the original buildings. There are still local papers in the German language. I often passed through it on the way to other parts of Namibia. A fascinating town is Luderitz. Like Rotorua in New Zealand I visited Luderitz four times each about five years apart. There is a nice backpackers there with a bakery over the road. There is also a beautiful Lutheran church at one end of the town and this had become a focus for tourists. It was locked but a member, Peter, would come and open it for a few hours around midday. It was always the same man as was there ten or fifteen years before. Even though I had spoken to him a number of times it was unlikely he remember me, probably because of the many tourists he encountered. I always stayed back after the tourists and chatted with him. He was the sort of man who was born there and would never leave. He was a real character. Whereas I rushed to see everything in the world, he was happy staying in one place. There is a certain sureness of routine that brings complacency. His jokes were always the same. There is an island just off the coast with penguins and the cold and strong currents make it impossible to swim there. But I always made the joke that I was swimming over to see the penguins and he always replied something about losing the family jewels.
None of the buildings in Luderitz have gutters as it never rains. There are no weeds along the streets as it is all dust and rocks. The rain falls in the central mountains and comes to Luderitz by pipe. I once asked Peter about the rain and he became defensive and started “Of course it rains here, I remember five years ago ……”. Apparently it had once rained and this was such an event he has never forgotten it. There was once a railway to this town but drifting sand has now covered the tracks and keeping the lines open is too expensive. The abandoned diamond mining town of Kolmanskop, with its magnificent colonial buildings, is a few kilometres inland. Another interesting town is Swapkopmund, also with beautiful colonial buildings, just north of Ludertiz. A German carpenter went there and started building an island of wood about four hectares just fifty metres off the coast. The wood must have been imported as there is little in Namibia. People thought he had lost his senses. But the sea birds thought otherwise and soon came to roost on his platform no doubt after being sick of constant predation from the local hyenas. He made a fortune from guano that he harvested in the off season and took to the mainland by a cable and pulley apparatus. He retired to Germany a rich man. Last time I was there this industry was revived and still in operation. Seafood was abundant and cheap and could be cooked in the kitchen of the hostel. Characters from all over the world stayed in these hostels and great conversations were had. The serious traveller should never book holidays other than the initial plane flights. Go to the country, book in a hostel, talk to people, read the notice board, and travel with people with whom you develop friendships. Five of us got together from the Windhoek hostel, hired a four wheel drive car, and drove along the skeleton coast to see the ship wrecks and seal colonies and then onto Opuwa and Epupa falls on the Angola border. The beauty of this sort of travel is the uncertainty of what the next adventure is. My grandfather, who crossed the Simpson Desert in Australia on camels, once said that “if you go on a journey and have an adventure, then you didn´t plan it well”. There is some truth in this but the corollary could be that if you want an adventure it is better not to over plan your trip.
Some years later, after hiring a car in Windhoek, I was drove to Gobabis in the Kalahari Desert to stay with some of the original German descendents of Namibia. Just as Afrikaans is old Dutch, there is an old German spoken by the original Colonists. If you tried to use this German in Germany today, few people would understand. These old colonial farms in the desert, lived in by countless generations, with their thick walls and worn floorboards, are wonder in themselves. There are always numerous out buildings for the domestic animals. Hitch-hiking is quite common in Africa as transport outside the major cities is difficult or non-existent and so almost any car acts as a taxi and there are standard prices well known to locals. On the way to Gobabis picked up a family of bushmen and the two adults and two children fitted easily across the back seat. During the journey it was a delight to hear the clicking sounds they made in their own conversation. When we arrived they attempted to pay for the lift but were surprised when I declined.
On another trip, I hired a car in Cape Town from a nice business orientated woman and when I got to the Namibian border the police officer said “there is only one problem about crossing the border, the car isn’t registered”. The hire company was “Europcar” and I had booked the car for a month. I rang them and they apologised and said that I could pick up the new registration in Windhoek the following day. Luckily the passport control let me continue. I hadn’t planned to be in Windhoek for two weeks so I had to completely change my route. When I got there, there was still no registration certificate. Even worse the Windhoek Europcar told me that they were a franchise and had nothing to do with the South African branch. So I drove the car for the next month on the basis that there was some registration sticker somewhere but I didn’t have it. When I got back to Cape Town I found that the car was still not registered and no sticker was ever sent. The friendly woman at the Cape Town branch now looked as hard as nails and said “what are you worried about, nothing happened”. But there are frequent police check points in Namibia and I held my breath every time they looked at the windscreen registration sticker. It is emotionally draining driving not knowing the registration status. I knew that as soon as I returned the car that the full amount would be charged so I cancelled the credit card. Later when I returned the car, sure enough, she had attempted to charge the full amount which was declined by the bank, so I had the trip for free. Another form of transport I often used in South Africa was the “BAZ bus”. This was started by a couple of young entrepreneurs and was mainly a service for people at backpackers hostels and it used small minivans to go from one hostel to another. It was a great service and allowed you to avoid catching buses late at night in down town bus stations. South Africa had a high crime rate and it was necessary to take precautions. I used this service quite often.
I knew two brothers from Blackwood school whose parents moved to Port Elizabeth in South Africa because of work. His parents split up and one stayed in South Africa and one returned to Australia. One son also returned to Australia and the other stayed in Port Elizabeth. I stayed a few times with him and we made some trips together. These stays were important because normally I was mixing with tourists and so it was always good to get a South African view of the country.
I usually sought out situations where I could talk to people about what they believed. When I go to an art gallery I usually only remember the best and worst pictures. The mediocre are forgotten. There are some very unusual belief systems so in Lusaka, Zambia, I stayed at a religious centre run by an Indian. We had some great discussions but did not agree on much. He was a strong believer in the soul and transmigration. When a person dies the soul somehow floats around and then enters the body of a newborn. Soul transmigration is popular in Indian belief systems. I asked about the population increase as we are now billions and so new souls should be being made every day. “Today it should be more about soul creation than transmigration”, I told him. But he had an extensive set of diagrams and charts and he pulled out one after the other for each argument. One showed a big reservoir of souls from other animals that were “moving up” into the human domain. He said the soul was immaterial but when I asked how the material and immaterial could interact he saw no difficulty in this contradiction. I told him of my genetic/cultural model where there were two types of ideas and both involve patterns of atoms. I said that the genes are patterns of atoms in the body and the cultural ideas are patterns of atoms in the brain. In one sense these patterns are made from atoms, in another sense, these patterns are so intricate and complex, that they are more than the atoms themselves. As organisms started evolving about four billion years ago and nervous systems about a billion years ago, these patterns are not trivial. I said to him “why don´t we call these patterns souls? You still have your transmigration with DNA going from the parents to the children and cultural ideas transmigrating in the teaching of children. I told him with this logic maybe there are even two souls. What! He was having none of it! But I could see that he loved argument. I suppose he doesn´t get much of a chance with his followers. Ok then, I will change tactics. “Imagine a tray of coloured balls” I said. “You can rearrange the balls to make a message or idea but the exact same atoms exist before and after the change. There has been no material change yet there is something more that was not there before”. I teased him a bit and said that the tray with the new pattern now had a soul. But this was too much for him. He had based his life around a particular belief system and refused to entertain other possibilities. He was fixed in his ideas. I got the impression that he was waiting for me to stop so he could continue with his own ideology.
A friend of mine was giving a paper at an International Peace through Tourism conference in Kampala, Uganda. As she was allowed a companion I joined in the line and became a peace delegate. This included listening to many presentations and participating in several trips. I had discussions with people from all over the world. I went on two trips, one to Entebbe on Lake Victoria, and one to Jinja, the source of the Nile. Being a government sponsored conference we travelled in police vehicles with sirens and the road emptied before us. This type of travel was a new experience for me. We were staying in a brick bungalow on the outskirts of Kampala and one morning the huge overhanging avocado tree dropped some fruit and tiles were broken. The fertility of the soil is amazing in Uganda and the avocado trees were over twenty metres and fruit over two kilos. A Ugandan introduced me to a method of eating them which was to cut them in half and fill the hole left by the seed with salad dressing. You then spooned out the contents mixing in a little dressing as you ate.
After Uganda, I went to Kenya and a number of wildlife parks including the Maasai Mara and others. In Nairobi I met a journalist from the Netherlands and I accompanied him a couple of times to see how he operated. We had some good times together. I also had an interest in meeting some Nuer and Turkana from northern Kenya which I succeeded in doing. When I studied theology while living in New Guinea I took the religions of these two tribes as my elective so it was good to meet the people in real life. Knowing someone of a country before arriving makes a huge difference in trying to understand it.
Next stop was Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and after a short stay caught the ferry to see Stone Town, the old quarter of Zanzibar city. In the exploration of Africa many expeditions started from this island. I have read many books by Speke, Burton, Baker, Stanley and so on, and always had an interest in Africa from a young age. After a few days I met at the hostel a Dutchman who proposed hiring a car and driving around the island. As the island is only 85 kilometres long a day was ample for this. He intended to stop at all the little towns along the way and have a nice lunch at a restaurant he had heard about at the top end. He needed four people to cover the cost of the car but had only three. There was an Englishman who wanted to come but he seemed like a difficult character and so we looked for someone more relaxed. Finding no one and desperate we asked him to join us. We made our trip and on the way back was a police checkpoint. These checkpoints are all over Africa and normal procedure and in all my travels I have never a problem. They check passports to see who is going where. But for the Englishman this was his first trip overseas and he was convinced that the purpose of the stop was to collect “baksheesh”, that is, a bribe. As the young police officer looked through the passports and was just about to give them back and waive us through, he half rose from the back seat and said to us “I suppose he wants baksheesh” and started to open his wallet. Unfortunately, this was loud enough to be overheard by the policeman. He held on to the passports and told us to pull over on the side of the road. The idea of a bribe had never occurred to the policeman but now he was suspicious. He was probably wondering what we were hiding. As we pulled over, we all in unison, told the Englishman to shut up and stop panicking. What stories he had read about Africa before he came I have no idea. I got out of the car and walked back and had a chat to the policeman and after some explanation retrieved the passports. This is an example of fear for planted in the Englishman´s mind was the cultural idea that corruption is rife in Africa. In Africa the corruption is more at the top than at the level of the ordinary person and in all my travels I never encountered it. Back in Stone Town we realised that the three of us should have travelled alone even if it did cost a bit more in the car rental. Over the years I made nine trips to Africa mostly starting in South Africa and radiating out to other countries. I have mentioned a few of the adventures here because these types of experiences really open your mind to how others think and what they believe. I had other adventures in countries like Mozambique, Morocco and Egypt. In all, when added up, I spent about three years travelling in this vast and interesting continent.
In my early twenties I was interested in Indian religions and a friend of mine took me along to films of Krishnamurti speaking at the local Theosophical Society in Adelaide. I have never been religious myself but curiosity about what other people believe and why they believe it has led me down many different paths. Jiddu Kristnamurti was one of two brothers “discovered” by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater walking on a beach in Chennai. Annie was leader of the Theosophical Society at the time and was impressed with the brothers and saw in Jiddu something special. Jiddu was sent to England to attend university. On his return, they set him up as leader of the “Order of the Star in the East” and he gave talks around the world. There was even a temple built at Mossman, Sydney in 1923 that seated two thousand people. But he himself saw that the beliefs of the Theosophical Society were devoid of substance and disbanded the Order of the Star and went off on his own. He wrote some fifty books. His writings are similar to Bertrand Russell, with a very matter-of-fact, no-nonsense approach. He said that life is a “pathless path” and that each person must come to his own realisation through his own thoughts and not rely on the teaching of others. He was spiritual but not religious.
Decades later I found myself staying at the Krishnamurti Centre in Chennai. It had a large central hall on park-like grounds. The hall had a library upstairs with many books on Indian religions. Surrounding the hall were satellite buildings set up with guest rooms. It was a beautiful place. On the other side of the hall was the kitchen and all the meals were vegetarian and quite tasty. It was free to stay there but you could make donations. Some thirty people from all over the world were staying when I was there the first time (I stay on three different occasions). This type of environment led to many interesting conversations on religion, reality and existence. In my conversations I always tried not only to understand what someone believed but why they believed it. What thought-path led them to those particular beliefs? Many the westerners visiting had Christianity in their early life but had long since abandoned this belief system and were looking for a less faith-based belief system. They were trying to understand the world.
The next stop was the Theosophical Society, also in Chennai a short distance away on much bigger grounds, which included kilometres of sea frontage. Here I read the works of Blavatsky, Besant, Leadbeater, and so on. Their philosophy was to recognise all religions and they had in their grounds various temples, a church and a mosque. For this society all religions pointed to a spiritual life. Recognising that there was something spiritual was main theme. How you got there didn´t seem to matter. But this society is in decline. Its wealth came from the past. The world has moved on and it is now a shadow of its former self. There was little interest to be found here. Today it struggles for new members.
Next I next went to the Sri Aurobindo and the Mother´s ashram, called “Auroville”, just outside Pondicherry on even bigger grounds. Sri Aurobinda was an Indian yogi who studied in England and after some involvement in politics retired to Pondicherry to set up a Yoga school. The “Mother” was Aurobindo’s partner and she was of Egyptian origin. This community was so big that it contained its own villages and you needed to hire a motorcycle to get around. There was even one village called evolution. There were some four thousand devotees living there when I stayed with more than half being French (Pondicherry was a French enclave), then German, then a mix of other European nationalities as well as Indians. There was a huge ball twenty nine metres high called the “Matrimandir” covered by gold discs that was still being constructed when I was there. Up the top was suspended another ball which was used as a meditation centre. I once tried to meditate there but gave up as I was bitten by too many mosquitoes. I also gave up on the written works of Sri Aurobindo as I found them indecipherable. I spoke to many people but I found few had read Sri Aurobindo’s works, or if they had started, not lasted long. But the community is a success. It is growing. It started as twenty square kilometres of degraded farming land and its rehabilitation included planting with cashew trees and these now line many of the community’s dusty roads.
There is an interesting restaurant in Auroville called the “solar kitchen”. Here I met an academic Malaysian Muslim who was wandering the world. He told me that the Kaaba was an earlier shrine to various gods and goddesses such as Hubal and al-Lat and was made of bricks without a roof and contained in its walls a meteorite. It had nothing to do with Islam as this religion had not yet been invented. Muhammad later pulled it down and rebuilt it with a roof. He said that the word “Allah” is a play on “al-Lat”, a previous goddess. As I had read a little Islamic history we had some good conversations. I asked him if his travel could lead to his changing his mind and adopting new ideas. He said that regardless of what he chose to believe, he would be rejected by his community if he went back with different ideas. He grew up with Islam, it was his habit, and it was too difficult to change this late in life, whether true or not. And if he did change his ideas, he could never admit it.
I next took the overnight train back to Delhi and then up to Shimla. This hill town is where the people from Delhi would go during the heat of the summer. It is similar to the Cameron highlands in Malaysia. These hill towns were more like English villages when they were colonies. Over time Shimla has taken on more of an Indian culture. The old hotels are kept the same as the Indians know that is what the tourists want to see. There are still the high teas in the afternoon and extensive green well manicured lawns with cane chairs. They were all well outside my budget so I stayed in the ubiquitous hostel. While these towns are interesting my real goal was Rishikesh. It is a small town high up on the Ganges, India’s holiest river. Just south of the town on the opposite side of the river was the ashram of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi which was made famous when the Beatles stayed there. Just north of Rishikesh, in the upper part of the town is Laxman Jhula which straddles the river and is joined by a footbridge. If you cross this bridge and walk downstream you get to the abandoned ashram of the Yogi. It is now managed by the Indian forest service and visitors were not allowed but for a small fee a guard will unlock a small gate and you can wander at leisure through the ruins of the ashram. It consisted of several office blocks, a main hall, sleeping quarters in the form of beehive huts, and so on, and all was in decay having largely been reclaimed by the forest. In one of the administration offices, thousands of papers lay around in piles on the floor. As the windows had long since broken, rain had caused these piles to rot. I picked up some of these and dried them out and include them at the end of this text. I believe the ashram is now being restored as a tourist attraction.
The Maharishi´s transcendental meditation included “levitation”. Here you go through meditative exercises and you have the sensation that you are lifting off the ground. I only know of one other cult that does this and that is Eckankar, although there are probably others. Twice I met people who practiced it. Eckankar also uses meditative practices to give you the feeling of having an “out of body” experience. But this phenomenon has been studied scientifically and I have two books on the subject that explain the experience and give you exercises to be able to achieve it without having to join any expensive religions. These types of experiences are common when oxygen levels in the brain are low, such as in accidents.
On the east side of Laxman Jhula, over the bridge, are a series of ashrams offering meditation courses run by dubious gurus. Overlooking the bridge is a coffee shop frequented by westerners and where you can meet people doing courses with the gurus. Some wore lockets around their necks in which were the various gurus’ pictures. These people had come on spiritual discovery tours in search of new ideas. They were escaping the western world. I had many great conversations at this coffee shop. Many people felt that the religions (mainly Christianity) that they were exposed to as a child left them unsatisfied. They were seeking something more. They were in the “I will try anything” mindset. Meditation exercises given by a guru may include stopping the random thoughts that continually enter the mind by concentrating on breathing or some object. People also came to relieve their worries from problems at home.
The western mind-set of “more is better” leaves many people over accumulating goods when they really would be happier with a simpler life. We are taught to look up to financially successful people and try and achieve this goal ourselves. As there can only a few rich, most people have fairly unrewarding lives and retire from decades of hard work often when they are in ill health. Their dream retirement has evaporated. The gurus know all this and so the first step they use to counter worry is to try and get the disciple to not think about the past or future. By restricting some cultural ideas, like artefact accumulation, and overriding some existing genetic ideas, such as excessive ambition, many of the causes of unhappiness can be overcome. When control of the mind is gained it can be redirected.
In theory the guru´s methods work, at least for the short term. While we might recognise deficiencies in our lifestyle we are reluctant to change and jump into the unknown. We have developed habits that are hard to break. We fear change. The Guru’s first task is to use meditation to take you to a place you have not been before. The Guru guides you in your jump into the unknown. By stopping the expression of some ideas, habit can be broken. Other methods in breaking habits can include different clothes, new names and a vegetarian diet, a method used by different groups such as the Hare Krishnas. Also, waking at five in the morning breaks many habits. If all ideas are pushed out of the mind temporarily (during meditation) so as to make it empty, a person cannot be unhappy. There are no active ideas left to cause unhappiness. There is no longer a self to experience unhappiness. Such unusual states produce entirely new mental experiences that seem fantastic to the novice. People are surprised. Unfortunately, the Guru may link these new experiences with the supposed truth of his accompanying dogma. Having new experiences does not mean that there are seven transcendent states leading to Nirvana. New experiences do not prove the transmigration of souls. These different states from meditation are all natural properties of the body that can be produced without any reference to spiritualism or religion. An increase in happiness of the student does not necessarily imply that the Guru should receive a large financial donation. The Guru’s methods are not new but variations of general themes already existing in Indian philosophy.
But we can learn from this method? By abandoning more and more cultural ideas and overriding some genetic ideas you can take control of the self. But this is not easy. Parents may impose a religion on you without choice. Or else they may push you into a profession in which you have no interest. Poverty, caste or gender might stop you from getting the education you want. You might fall in love with a person of the wrong religion. Many people with a genetic will pointing in one direction can be pushed by cultural circumstance in a different direction. If the original genetic will is poorly addressed by this new direction, happiness will suffer. In contrast, expressions such as “discover the child in you” recognise this idea-shedding process. Children, particularly very young children, are minimally influenced by cultural ideas. They have not yet had time to take on an intricate set of ideas. They have not yet learned guilt. They can laugh endlessly at the most simple things. Their happiness is from the heart, that is, their happiness comes from the genes. Generally this method works. For a person seeking an increase in happiness, by reducing cultural ideas, and hopefully those restrictive ones causing unhappiness, happiness has a high probability of increasing. Cultural ideas like language or how to drive a car obviously do not need to be reduced. But other ideas such as the number of artefacts one needs, appearance, pride, ambition, status and competitive desire, could all be candidates for reduction or change. Now we get back to the idea of the elixir. If the elixir is certain set of ideas that leads to a satisfactory and contented life then finding this set should be possible.
Leaving the gurus of Luxman Julia, I went to Mcleod Ganj. Here is a temple which is the residence of the Dali Lama. I had the chance to see him in person once as he took his walk. There are really nice walks in the surrounding mountains. With all the tourists the place has a holiday feel to it. The town is in the foot hills of the Himalayas and I stayed at a backpackers in a dorm room for only a few euros. Over the road was a Japanese restaurant that had meals also for a few euros. Going to these spiritual spaces is always rewarding as you meet people who are asking similar questions about life. Their curiosity leads them easily into conversations. Also, I knew there was a large Tibetan library just south at Dharamshala. After a few days I visited this library. One old historic book that seemed a few hundred years old was on medicine and in Sanskrit so I couldn´t read it but it had some drawings and in one chapter had pictures of births and what could go wrong; the baby coming legs first, the breach position etc. This chapter seemed to be quite modern and informative. But in another chapter on mental health the diagrams showed demons entering the mind. This is a common theme of many religions and most have rituals for exercising these demons. This metaphor for mental illness is only to be expected as without microscopes bacteria and genetics were unknown. What other explanation could there be? You realize then how flawed some parts of early religions are.
I got talking with an Indian, Mukesh, in the library and asked him the difference between Buddhism and Hinduism. He waved his hands around with the explanation “what do you mean, he was one of our many gods?” In his mind all the many Hindu gods, including Buddha, point in one direction and that is to spiritual liberation through a succession of rebirths and eventually Nirvana. He took Buddha to be one of these Gods. Mukesh believed in souls and that the soul is immaterial. What better opportunity now to try out my model of genetic and cultural ideas. I told him that genes are patterns of atoms in cells and the cultural ideas are also stored as patterns of atoms in the brain. You could call these patterns souls as part of these souls, through mating and conversation, also pass to offspring and so there is no need to invoke anything “immaterial”. “You are just a materialist then” he replied. I said that light, energy, magnetism, and so on, were also all materials. Tell me something that is a non-material. Other than souls, he couldn´t name any other “non-materials”. Now I replied “if you take the patterns of atoms as more than the atoms themselves then this idea of “soul” at least does not contradict science”. There would then be two patterns, a genetic one and a mental one so there must be two souls, a genetic and a cultural one. In one sense souls are made of materials, in another sense the pattern of atoms is more than the materials themselves.
But Mukesh insisted that the soul is “immaterial”. So I said “I don´t know what immaterial means?” He couldn´t explain it either. It´s a contradiction that material and immaterial can interact. It does not make sense. If the soul is really immaterial how could it reside in a material brain and interact with that brain? I think the word “immaterial” is a bit like the word “God”. Everyone uses these types of words but no one explains them. I have tried countless times to get priests to say what “God” is but to no avail. God is omnipresent, omniscient, all powerful, made the world etc, etc, but this tell us nothing as it is part of the definition of God. When you ask a real question like “where did God come from?” they can only produce that all knowing smile which means that they have no idea. I said to Mukesh that I grew up with science and I would need evidence to accept immaterialism. I suppose adding gods and immaterialism to your religion gives it depth and mystery. These additions then become endless riddles that can never be mastered which is probably what priests want. Nothing is more vague than having undefined words in an ideology.
I then asked Mukesh “where do souls start”? As we evolved we had fish as our ancestors, did these animals have souls? Or did souls start somewhere else along the evolutionary line. Is there a case where a parent is without a soul and child with a soul? Having souls as patterns of chemicals fits in with the evolutionary theme and it is clear that these patterns increase in intricacy as evolution proceeds. The soul changes and evolves which should be expected as all people are different. But this conservation soon ended as Mukesh was not sure exactly what evolution was. Having these types of conversations can be difficult with non-scientists. But I have met other Buddhists who are very flexible on what soul was. Some think that even a rock has some sort of soul. Here the “soul” is more akin to the chemical momentum or direction of an object. A rock interacts with its environment as it rolls down a hill and so its path is not random. Similarly, when you put chemicals into a beaker there is direction in how the reactions proceed. The chemicals do not interact randomly. You expect to see the same reaction again if you mix the same chemicals as before. Therefore, as a person is made from chemicals, these patterns have direction in their interactions with the environment. It was time to leave Dharamshala and walk the four kilometres back up the hill to Mcleod Ganj.
It was hard to leave Mcleod Ganj as you soon get comfortable in these types of places but I had to move on. Next I went to Varanasi. Above the ghats of Varanasi is the old part of the town where there is a labyrinth of small alleys that seem to wind their way around almost randomly. Eventually you find your backpackers where you have chosen to stay. The electricity supply is unreliable and is certain to go off just as you are writing your longest email. The accommodation and shops are all shabby and as you enter your room and look around you wonder why you did not spend a bit more and go to a hotel. But this is where the character of Varanasi is, and the fact that all the backpackers are full of foreign tourists is reassuring. It was a cold early morning and I was already thinking of a place for lunch. Some backpackers recommended a fish restaurant close by that was very popular with tourists but first I thought of having a walk along the ghats. I went past the restaurant, which had a good view over the Ganges, then took some steps down to the river where a few people were bathing and where fires were still smouldering from yesterday’s burning of bodies. A little further on I met a fisherman who seemed to be catching a grey type of fish that looked to me like a catfish. He told me that not all people are burned as it is an expensive process. It is highly regulated with only a certain caste being allowed to do the burning and another separate caste to cut the wood. Those who can’t afford it tie rocks to the body and slip it into the river. Turtles and fish devour the bodies with the remains washed eventually out to the ocean at Calcutta some seven hundred kilometres away. I asked him why he eats them. He was surprised and replied: “What, I don’t eat them, I’m vegetarian”, and with a motion of his head continued “I sell them to the restaurant up there”, indicating the fish restaurant where I had been contemplating lunch. I decided on a different place for lunch. In the afternoon I again went to the ghats. These steps down to the river are where the bodies are cremated. After the bodies are turned into ashes they go into the river. It is hard to describe the site of burning and there is always something unusual that happens. In my case it was a very tall man whose legs would not fit in the pile of wood and half way through these fell off and someone went to pick them up and return them to the burning pile. If ever there was a place to contemplate the cycle of life and death it was here.
A year later I was in Delhi again and caught the overnight sleeper train across the country to Darjeeling. You can´t go there directly but have to stop in Jalpaiguri. People then fill up taxis which, when they reach capacity, drive the remaining eighty kilometres. Darjeeling is at an altitude of two thousand metres and in the foothills of the Himalayas. There is a small train that goes to Darjeeling called the “toy train” but it was so popular it was impossible to make a booking. The town itself is built on a ridge and on the surrounding slopes are many tea plantations. As Shimla was a hill station for Delhi, Darjeeling was a hill station for Calcutta for the British administrators in the hot season. There are great views of the snow capped Himalayan mountains in the distance. Here I met two Lamas who lived in Gangtok some distance further north. They showed me pictures of their monastery. We had a long discussion about the soul and how it transmigrates upon death. I´m never confrontational in these circumstances and I am usually more interested in their thoughts that they are in mine. We agreed that the transmigration of souls in Buddhism is a better system than the Semitic idea of a heaven. What point is it for a two year old accidently killed or an old person with illness or dementia to go to heaven. Who would teach the two year old as it grew into an adult or treat the illness of the dementia patient? But in Buddhism this is not a problem as the soul of the two year old goes into a newborn or the soul of the dementia person (I assume after some repair) goes into another newborn. Here I gave them my model of genetic and cultural ideas that are patterns of chemicals with each pattern being a soul. I told them that in this system the two souls are transferred during a person´s life rather than at the end and so this was a better than either the Semitic or Buddhist system. The ubiquitous all knowing smiles came over them. I could read their thoughts. “Ah, these simple Westerners, what do they know of spirituality?” They asked me to visit their monastery where they were offering courses in Tibetan meditation for a fee but I thought of the gurus of Lakshman Jhula and declined their offer.
Nearby Darjeeling is the Singalila national park and this straddles the Nepalese border. Five of us went on a three day trip with a guide and we paid our own expenses along the way. We took a car the first fifty kilometres and walked along this border. Sometimes we were a few kilometres into Nepal but no one seemed to mind and the border guards looked the other way. The scenery was spectacular and this prompted me to think of going to Nepal. There is a small airport on the Nepalese side and so I flew to Kathmandu. After a few days seeing this city and its temples I went to Pokhara to start a two week walk called the “Annapurna circuit”. Pokhara has a beautiful lake and rowers take you on a trip for a small fee. To do the walk from Pokhara you take a taxi to Nayapul where you start walking with your backpack. There were hot springs along the way in Tatopania. These springs were easier to enter than to leave. In a guesthouse in Jomsom there were Tibetan lamas staying and at four in the morning they started their meditation with a deep resonant chanting that kept me awake. Initially I didn´t mind but it seemed to go on forever. I didn´t think this behaviour was reasonable, in a monastery yes, but not in a guesthouse full of tourists. My respect for Tibetan lamas suffered. Recent snowfalls in Muktinath, approximately halfway on the circuit, made continuing difficult and so many of the walkers, including myself, returned to Pokhara the same way. Here I met a woman from Australia who was running an orphanage for homeless children. I visited the orphanage several times and learnt something of how it was run. After a while I got used to Pokhara and thought it could be a place for a longer stay, but I reluctantly returned to Kathmandu.
Like Africa I went to India seven times and spent about three years there in all. I had countless adventures there, a few of which I have mentioned above. I went back to the Krishnamurti centre three times and even thought of staying there permanently (the centre offered to get the necessary visa). I also went again to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Over all, I visited most parts of India. There is a saying that “there is never a dull day in India”. To a degree it is true. Walk down any crowded street and you will have an adventure. Travel two days on a sleeper train and at the end everyone in your carriage is your best friend. India is often chaotic but you quickly adapt to this.
At this stage I was a hopeless drifter and was moving regularly. I left Australia in 1980 and even though I returned to Australia regularly and built houses in Tasmania and Queensland as bases in which to keep my possessions, I was no sooner back than I was planning my next overseas holiday. As it is now 2025 as I am writing, of this forty five years about thirty were spent travelling overseas. About fifteen years were in Australia.
I lived in many European countries and the longest was Italy where I was, off and on, for about nine years. This small town in the dolomites was very Catholic. The local church bell told of the passing hours and called the people to mass on Sundays. My partner, being the music teacher, played the organ in this church. As she was of the adventurous type and had a car and regular school holidays, we managed to see most parts of Italy. Sometimes we would take the ferry to the Peloponnese or go to the islands in Croatia. After this I lived in France for a while, then Latvia and then for eight years, off and on, in Berlin. Now I am living again in South Australia.
On all these travels I was always eager for any conversation and interested to see what people believed and why they believed it. For example, in a church in Brugge, in Belgium, they had a senior priest who claimed to have philosophy as one of his interests and he was willing to answer any questions. We had a conversation for over two hours. He said that he was once a monk. A component of any religion is faith and the usual definition of faith is “blind belief”. I do not believe a person can understand the world fully if part of their mind contains blind beliefs. If finding the elixir is all about understanding the world then faith is a hindrance. If the elixir is about increasing happiness then I am sure joining a religion works for some as it provides closure. It removes the mystery of the world. While the religious person may not be able to understand the world, God does. So for some, being religious is a form of closure in trying to explain the world. The priest was a good listener but when I tried my genetic/cultural model of pattern of ideas and the idea of two souls I could see that he was losing interest. Generally I have found religious people overconfident in their beliefs. They have taken on a set of beliefs that has become habit. Habits once formed can be impossible to reverse. I asked the priest if he believed in an afterlife. He did. I´m always surprised when a person thinks that he or she is so special that there is perpetual joy awaiting them in some heaven upon death. I was disappointed by his claim to have an understanding of philosophy.
So I will now try to collect my ideas. Humans are animals and their main difference from other animals is the volume of cultural ideas they have. Their difference is not in the genetic ideas as these are very similar to other animals, particularly other apes, but it is in their cultural ideas. The genetic will is survival and eventually reproduction. The genes use a system of reward and punishment to align the genetic and cultural wills so reproduction and care of offspring is the end result. The cultural will is therefore happiness. Plenty of animals pass down cultural ideas to offspring but it is usually only for a few generations. For example, elephants might pass the location of water holes and this information may last some time. The difference is that we systematically accumulate cultural ideas through language and writing and we have begun passing down this information for many generations. Take a car for example. We have seen its rapid evolution in the last hundred years or so. Thousands of small ideas by many people are added one upon the other to produce a car. Many people use a car with little idea of how it works. People live in houses, use mobile phones, fly to other countries and go to hospitals if they are sick, all using the ideas from the past. It is these accumulated ideas that give us the lifestyle we have today. Without these ideas from the past we would be in the jungle like any chimpanzee. Animals such as apes and elephants have to start from scratch nearly every generation. I´m sure that it is this massive amount of cultural ideas that gives people an inflated view of themselves and the feeling that they are so special in regard to the other animals. We went beyond the brain and stored our cultural ideas externally. Other species are yet to achieve this. For animals such as whales, regardless of their intelligence, living in a watery environment and without hands, I can´t see any method by which they could store vast quantities of cultural ideas. Storage of ideas is necessary for advancement.
But things have changed with this increase of cultural knowledge. For unsophisticated humans and other animals the genetic and cultural wills point in the same direction but as the volume of cultural ideas increased these two wills started to diverge. This is best explained by examples. Mating is a pleasurable act and the consequence is meant to be children but the use of cultural ideas such as the “rhythm method”, condoms and other contraceptives, allows the genetic pleasure without the genetic consequence. Here cultural ideas are beginning to cheat the genes. Today many people are intentionally reducing the size of their families or even choosing no family at all. This is a disaster from the genes´ point of view. Another example could be travel. The genetic idea of legs combined with curiosity is to allow new areas to be explored for necessaries such as prey, shelter and water. This search is meant to enhance survival but now people travel just for the pleasure with no effect on survival (I am guilty of this). A whole travel industry has evolved where we go to the opposite ends of the earth just to see how other people live and the differences in landscapes. If the extra cost involved in this travel causes us to limit the size of our family or even have no children at all, then we are choosing pleasure over reproduction. Genetic curiosity can also be very strong in some people and so a life of research may be chosen rather having a family. Subjects like science, philosophy or music can be exciting so why not dedicate yourself to one of these? Many now see raising a family as hard work. While a family might have its rewards, other activities might have even greater rewards.
Food is another example. All the food eaten by a chimpanzee is raw. Cooking was a novel idea and a form of pre-digestion. New tastier foods could now be eaten. Some tasty foods can be eaten all year if imported from other countries. The food we eat today is much more sophisticated than earlier times and far in excess than that which is needed for survival. To produce this quality food requires more effort and therefore more expense and that might mean less money for extra children. So greedy are we for the pleasures of eating that artificial sweeteners and other chemicals have been found that increase the reward but not the weight gain. Caffeine in tea and coffee has no nutritional value but most people enjoy the stimulus. If we spend more on food at the expense of a larger family then these cultural ideas are also thwarting the genetic will. The genetic and cultural will are diverging. And so in some parts of the world the reproduction rate has fallen considerably. As cultural ideas grow in volume, we appear to be moving away from reproduction as the main goal in life.
Pleasure can become addictive. Those most desperate for pleasure bypass the genes altogether and take opiates or other drugs that directly mimic the natural happiness hormones in the brain.
Another thing we may be moving away from is genetic aggression and so we get to the topic of “altruism”. Religions did not understand genetics when they were invented so basic genetic properties linked to survival, like jealousy, envy, hate, cruelty, and so on, could only be talked about in metaphors and in the Christian religion this metaphor was “original sin”. Altruism counters these many of these original sins. There are four main types. The first type of type is genetic altruism where parents feel empathy for their children. They can have empathy for their relations as well although probably not as strong. It is their genetic will to support their children. The second type is reciprocal altruism where people form a village, community or tribe, and pool their efforts. Here they may fight as a group even though many are not related. This type of altruism is of the type “you scratch my back and I´ll scratch yours” and is also genetically beneficial. The third type is redirected altruism. The genetic nurturing urge can be very strong in some people. Here a couple might adopt a child if for some medical reason they cannot have their own. They might get immense happiness from this, similar to that had the child been their own. Others may set up charities to help non-related people. We can see these three types of altruism in all societies today.
But there has been great debate by philosophers over whether a forth type of altruism, “pure altruism” exists. Here people help others without any return. From an evolutionary view there is no genetic advantage to pure altruism as you are helping others without benefit. Any genes for pure altruism that did arise should soon die out. This seems logical for most of our evolution but over the last few thousand years we have evolved a broader form of empathy that has never existed before called welfare. For a little more in tax it seems like a sort of insurance to vote for welfare programs should anything go wrong in our lives. If you are ill today you are rushed to a hospital. Here it is not survival of the fittest but nearly everyone survives. Any person born with genes for pure altruism should now have a greater chance of survival. I suspect that this is already happening and so it is possible that over time and new type of human is evolving. Any genes for pure altruism should spread.
Where is the elixir? From birth we accumulate an enormous amount of cultural knowledge. It starts with knowing the appearance of your parents, learning the language, tastes of food, knowing your residence and surrounds, other family members, school friends and the culture in which you live. All these cultural ideas are not the elixir. The elixir is more than this and is ideas on how to live life; those ideas that can make a life worth living. I know of embittered people who can´t let go of past injustices or others who struggle with ambitions that will never be met. They are captured by genetic and cultural ideas that can never be satisfied. They are burdened by “more is better” and so slaves to their very large house or lavish lifestyle. Or they might be captured by demanding and expensive religions. Is it possible to override these cultural ideas and improve your outlook of the world? The Indian gurus tried this by getting their devotees to forget the past and not think of the future. This seems to work to some extent. Like winning the lottery mentioned in the beginning, you are immediately happy but when you find out that your ticket numbers are wrong, can you remain happy? Or are our ideas so strong that we can´t control them. At certain times in our lives, particularly when older and financially secure and the children have left home, we might find ourselves “at peace”. The genetic and cultural ideas no longer dominate. The key is to examine all these ideas and expel or override those unwanted.
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