What Held at 3,900 Metres

Feltham, England, September 1972. I was seven years old, in a detention centre, and that is where I first came across bedrock: the layer that has never moved and cannot be eroded or displaced by anything above it. Every formation rests on it, however solid the strata above it look.

The Advaita Vedanta teaching I have practised for thirty years, rooted in the lineage of Shirdi Sai Baba and Sathya Sai Baba, is at its simplest the recognition of this bedrock in human experience. The individual self, with its ambitions, fears, strategies and identities, is real. But it is not the deepest thing you are. It is real the way a wave is real: it has shape, force and consequence, but no existence separate from the ocean it briefly is.

I did not first find it in a temple or a philosophy text, or in the practice, though the practice gave it language and method. I found it in Feltham, at seven.