During his first visit to India in 1962, Dr Roles asked the interpreter what the Shankaracharya’s religion was and was told ‘Sanatan’. He immediately followed this up by questioning H.H. closely, and was told that Sanatan means ‘the body of Eternal religion’ and Sanatan Dharma is the practice of Eternal religion – the religion of the Atman, the divine Self. In response to further questions he was told. ‘Every religion contains Sanatan Dharma ….it is the basis of all religions and their centre. There is no need for anybody to change his present religion.’ This must have come as something of a relief to the doctor who held the religion of his childhood in deep affection. He quoted Christ’s commandment ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind,’ adding, ‘That is the real Sanatan Dharma.’

Dr Roles saw Unity as the ultimate aim, not just unity within a person, but unity between the individual and the Universal Self. He wrote in 1968, ‘Our business is with Unity itself,’ quoting the words of Krishna from the Bhagavad Gita, ‘…he who serves Me and only Me, with unfaltering devotion, shall become One with the Eternal.’ Following up the theme of devotion, he explained that the Fourth Way (the Way of the Householder) encompasses the three traditional paths of Action, Love and Knowledge, as described in the Gita, and commented, ‘But the final union with Ultimate Truth takes place in the Heavenly Heart – the emotional part of the mind.’ (The expression ‘the Heavenly Heart’ is of course, drawn from the ancient Chinese text The Secret of the Golden Flower.)

He illustrated the vision of unity from various sources such as the neo-platonist philosopher Plotinus who wrote: ‘And the splendour is infinite…There each part always proceeds from the whole…by him whose sight is acute, it will be seen as a whole,’ and Porphyry, who said of Plotinus that the one end of his life was to enter into Union with ‘the God who has neither shape nor form’. He quoted from The Crest Jewel of Wisdom: ‘Liberation cannot be achieved except by the direct experience of the identity of the individual with the Universal Mind.’

The reference to direct experience is significant here, as something the doctor valued far above theoretical knowledge. In pursuing, non-dualism or Advaita, which he absorbed from the Shankaracharya, Dr Roles wrote, ‘there is no other self than the Atman, no other reality.’ He referred to the symbol of the wedding in the parables of Jesus and quoted from the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas on the need for unity. In reply to the disciples’ question about entering the Kingdom Jesus answered, ‘When you can make the two one, and when you shall make the inner as the outer…then shall you enter.’ This concept of the unity between inner and outer lies behind the doctor’s interpretation of the Old Testament commandment, ‘Thou shall not make unto thyself any graven image’ as follows: ‘Don’t mistake the magnificent scenery of the Drama of Creation for the real thing…which is for the individual to understand and unite with the Mind of the Creator.’

This is just one instance of his ability to shed light on a familiar text by his own completely fresh interpretation. Another basic truth Dr Roles dwelt on was that embodied in Christ’s words, ‘The Kingdom of God is within you.’ He insisted that the true Self, the Atman lives in each one of us and all we have to do is uncover or discover it. He quoted the 1st century Stoic Epictetus as saying: ‘You are a distinct atom of the essence of God; and contain part of Him in yourself….You carry a God about with you, poor wretch and know nothing of I.’ Again and again he quoted from the Upanishads, ‘Your own Self lives in the hearts of all,’ and once more in a delightful image, ‘Like the butter hidden in milk, pure consciousness resides in every being.’ He passed on the Shankaracharya’s words on the nature of the Self: ‘Regard the unchanging Self as different from the changing body,’ and related this to the words of Nicodemus: ‘What is born of the flesh is flesh and what is born of Spirit is Spirit.’

For Dr Roles the way to the unchanging Self lay through the meditation which he envisaged on a universal scale. When the Shankaracharya said to him, ‘The Absolute brought the universe into being by means of a word or mantra,’ the doctor immediately quoted the opening lines of St. John’s Gospel, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’. H.H. nodded and smiled.Dr Roles often related the experience of meditation to some of the gospel parables. For example, he referred to the experience of the Prodigal Son as one we have all shared many times, even within a single half hour, it is only when we are at the end of our tether that we arise and go to the Father – and unexpectedly receive help. The parable of the Sower describes what happens from week to week in one’s own experience: ‘Sometimes one is by the wayside, sometimes a rock, sometimes among thorns, and sometimes one is quite definitely on good ground.’ In the short parables on the Kingdom of Heaven is like a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls; who when he has found a pearl of great price goes and sells all that he has and buys that pearl.’ The doctor’s explanation was that ‘we have to give up everything else’ for short periods during every day.’ All these examples show how vividly Dr Roles could interpret familiar Gospel texts to illuminate our daily experience of meditation.

The parables of Jesus were always close to his heart. He explained the true meaning of the Resurrection as ‘a great possibility to be realised by anybody who wants it enough or for long enough.’ Once at a meeting just before Easter he recalled how he used to join his first teacher, the Russian philosopher P.D. Ouspensky in the Russian Orthodox celebrations. He then asked everyone to stand and shout the Easter greeting ‘Christ is Risen!’ Anyone who was present that day will remember the deep emotion generated in the room.

In his meetings Dr Roles returned again and again to the Lord’s Prayer, which contains no reference to ‘I’. ‘Our Father’ is ‘pure Consciousness, unmanifested, unthinkable, indefinable.’ We are praying that the Unmanifested should manifest on our small earth, since truth can express itself only through human beings. The Name must constantly be made holy, then the Kingdom of love and truth and happiness will manifest and His Will be done in this world as it so clearly is in the world of the spiral nebulae. The middle section of the prayer moves on to the smaller scale of physical, subtle and causal worlds. Of course bread is not only on the physical level; in the Latin it is supersubstantial or super-sensory bread, the essential food of higher impressions which we are asking for this day, now, in the present moment. To forgive debts is to purify emotions, turn negative into positive, better still get rid of the causes of negative emotion and do it now, in this lifetime. Temptation refers to the attachment or identification which we pray to avoid; the evil from which we ask to be delivered is the ego’s way of stealing everything for itself. The end of the prayer returns to the threefold beginning with the use of the present tense (‘Thine is the Kingdom) making clear the eternal unchanging nature of the Father. This is a very brief summary of the doctor’s reflections on the prayer over many years.

Dr Roles quoted Lao-Tze on meditation leading to stillness, quiet and rest, and quite clearly he had meditation in mind in his frequent references to the anonymous 14th century devotional book The Cloud of Unknowing: ‘This work asks no long time…for it is the shortest work of all that men may imagine,’ and ‘Why pierceth it heaven, this little short prayer of one syllable?’ He was also fond of the 16th century mystic Jacob Boehme: ‘If you can cease from all your thinking and willing then you will hear the unspeakable words of God,’ to which he added the commentary, ‘we cannot hear ‘the Voice of the Silence, the soundless sound’ of the Self unless we stop thinking and talking so much.’ He quoted from The Crest Jewel of Wisdom, ‘There is no more excellent source of Joy than silence free from mind-images drinking in the joyful essence of the Self.’ and equated Sat-Chit-Ananda with the words of the psalmist, ‘Be still and know that I am God,’ adding ‘for in that lies the only true happiness.’ He related true happiness to the ‘well of water springing up into Everlasting Life’ of which Jesus spoke to the woman of Samaria at the well.

Dr Roles loved The Alchemy of Happiness by the Sufi mystic Al-Ghazzali, showing that the process of transforming the volatile mercury into silver refers to the stilling of the mind, while the melting of the silver means the melting of the heart. In the last meeting paper he wrote he referred to the Mandukya Upanishad (Mandukya meaning frog) which explains that in three jumps the frog scorched by the desert sun can reach the cool and quiet depths of the Self within. Practical as always, he said we could all start by making three little jumps – attentive actions, good thoughts and decrease in bad thoughts.

Attentive actions – Dr Roles constantly urged the practice of attention or wakefulness, citing Christ’s reproach to his sleeping disciples in the garden of Gethsemane. He spoke of the direct experience of Thomas a Kempis who wrote, ‘In everything attend to thyself, what thou art doing and what thou art saying; that thou mayest please Me alone.’ He quoted from the Buddihst Dhammapada, ‘Wakeful amid the heedless, keenly vigilant among those who are asleep, the wise man forges ahead,’ and on the subject of wakefulness he also cited the Mathnawi of Rumi, ‘Even so this world…is the sleeper’s dream; the sleeper fancies that it is really enduring.’ And he must have had the Mevlevi Turning in mind when he wrote, ‘Before we can do we must ‘Wake up and be’ whenever possible.’

On the same theme he turned again and again to the Philokalia (a collection of early writings of the Eastern Church) with its detailed analysis of neepsis, translated as wakefulness, vigilance or attentiveness. The 5th century saint Hesychius called attention the ‘unbroken silence of the heart, free from every thought,’ St Nicephorus wrote in the 8th century, ‘through attention, God comes close and reveals Himself to the mind,’ and two centuries later St Simeon describes the mind entering Divine Light where is ‘loses all thought of itself.’ Referring to extreme hardships undergone over the years to perfect the practice of continuous internal prayer, the doctor added, ‘We have a simpler method.’ Similarly he commented on one of his favourite Sufi stories, Attar’s Conference of the Birds, that though the journey to Self realisation should not be underrated, we now have the means of getting there without losing all our feathers in the process!

This is typical of the humour Dr Roles employed so brilliantly. He loved Zen stories for their economy and their penetrating insight but also because they are often so funny. A particular favourite of his was The Muddy Road:

“Two novices were travelling together along a muddy road in the pouring rain. Coming round a bend they came upon a lovely girl in a silk kimono unable to get across what was now a muddy stream. At once one said ‘Come on, girl,’ as, lifting her in his arms, he carried her over. The other did not speak again until that night when they reached the temple where they lodged. Then he could no longer restrain himself. ‘We monks don’t go near females,’ he said, ‘especially young and lovely ones. It’s dangerous. How could you?’ ‘I left the girl there,’ said his companion. ‘Are you still carrying her?”

Unquestionably, Dr Roles saw all real knowledge as one, whatever its source. When the Shankaracharya told the story of the man with the lantern in the dark night, the doctor added Christ’s words: ‘I am the Light of the world, he that followeth Me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the Light of Life.’ He related the Trinity to Sat-Chit-Ananda, while at the same time insisting on its unity and its mysterious nature, (‘not three incomprehensibles but one incomprehensible’). Whenever expounding the theory of triads he would turn to St Patrick’s prayer: ‘I bind myself today to a strong strength, to a calling on the Trinity. I believe in a Threeness with confession of a Oneness in the Creator of the world,’ and he suggested that we might use this prayer to remind ourselves ‘constantly of this wonderful Law of Three.’ And at the last Sunday meeting, looking at a reproduction of Rublev’s icon of the Old Testament Trinity, he remarked that the three figures are the three gunas, the central one being sattva. Here, as throughout his teaching life, Dr Roles had the insight to bring together concepts from different religious traditions and reveal them as one.

LSD, ecstatic sunny summer concerts, Woodstock, young girls in beautiful flowing Indian dresses, love in the air, the contraceptive pill and the beginning of a sexual revolution with old taboos challenged and ignored; the fashion hub of the King’s Road in Chelsea, Carnaby Street in the West End, Hippies galore, flowers in your hair, Germaine Greer’s Female Eunuch, Che Guevara T-shirts, models Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy and working class photographer made good, David Bailey. Such an exciting time if you were young, full of hope and wild expectation.

The rather dismal black and white post-war world seemed to be cracking up into a kaleidoscope of colour with a youth revolution challenging old certainties. Even the then Editor of the very traditional Times newspaper, William Rees-Mogg, was to be found on TV in lively and acrimonious debate with the pouting Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones (between the latter’s prison visits for drug-related episodes) and writing editorial leaders about him and the icono- clastic generation he represented.

Of course that ‘summer of love’ could not be sustained and, as the money men moved in, cynicism and disappointment began to prevail. The original spirit of hope, light, life and joyful expectation of a new era of peace and love that had sparked the wave in the first place, fast began to dim. Amidst this euphoric atmosphere of 1967 the unknown Leonard Cohen’s first album “Songs of Leonard Cohen” appeared, with the tanned face of a dark haired handsome man with piercing eyes, pronounced nose, in his mid thirties, staring out directly at you – with a hint of melancholy. Unlike his contemporaries, he looked smart, there was no long hair down to his shoulders, and the cover itself was framed in black and white – no sign of the wild Technicolor, transcendental brightness of the times.

When you first listened to his deep and somewhat limited register monotonal voice, you were very aware this was something different. Above all, unlike much of the contemporary scene, the words were rich, the poetry sometimes startlingly beautiful and the images conjured up unforgettable, the musical rhythms haunting. Religious themes, intertwined with sexual imagery and a deep reverence and love ran through it all. Yes it was melancholic and the reputation his work gained for being the perfect companion for “bedsit depressives” and “music to slit your wrists to” was at least superficially understandable! However Cohen himself described his work as “the life of the heart” and that description far better reflects the power of his music to move the heart, albeit much of the time from a base of deep sadness, lightened by a dry wit and wisdom.

When he died, aged 82, I was moved to write a small ‘philosophical’ piece based on four lines from one of his songs to friends within the Study Society and elsewhere:

Ring the bells that still can ring,
Forget your perfect offering;
There is a crack in everything,
That’s how the light gets in.

The search for perfection and completeness is natural. But our True Nature as pure presence is perfect and complete and neither comes nor goes. The ‘searcher’ emerges out of the apparent chaos of circumstances that make up the story of ‘my life’. But imperfection and incompleteness as experienced by the body/mind or ‘person’, the flaws, the mistakes, the misjudgements, the irrational desires, the frustrations, the anger, the criticism, the feeling of separation, the love turning to hate, the sense of despair, the tears within or without, the regrets, and so on and so on, are all expressions of the same Life force and limitless Being that I Am.

The unchanging embraces the changing, dances with it invisibly into eternity. There are many colours and tones but only one Light. The ‘cracks’ are perfect. In infinite Grace the ugliness, the pain, the terror, the anguish, the violence and the folly of the world drama we live out day to day can be experienced anew as doorways into the Heart. The Light always gets in whatever we may think. Nothing needs to change and all resistance and attempts at control interrupt the exquisite brush stroke of every sacred moment. We do not have to struggle to come up with a perfect offering and suffer the inevitable feelings of failure, of always falling short. The “falling short” is just another dream. Struggling against the current just reinforces the dream and the sheer immediacy of the Light is lost. The bells are ringing always. The cracks in the bells make the sound all the sweeter. Everything calls us Home.”

Cohen was no stranger to the advaita or non-dual perspective. In 1999 he travelled to India to meet a well-known non-dual teacher, Ramesh Balsekar. Cohen spent around a year in Bombay going almost daily to sit at Ramesh’s feet. There are transcriptions of some of their conversations where Cohen talks of the difficulties in his life, his writing and the “chattering of the mind” that afflicted him, “sometimes in degrees of intensity that make one gasp or cry out for help”. He says that what he seeks most of all is “peace”.

As music journalist Mick Brown commented soon after his death: “It is Cohen’s misfortune that he goes to his grave as ‘the godfather of gloom’. But the question he was constantly asking in his songs, poetry and fiction was ‘Who is this I?’ and what is this ‘I’ supposed to be doing here, in this mess of dashed hopes, broken hearts and certain mortality”.

As it happens, Cohen came from a distinguished family of Montreal Jews and his grandfather was a respected rabbi. As Brown pointed out, the legacy of Jewish teaching, lore – and melancholia – infused his work in ways that might not always have been obvious. During his life however, Cohen stretched his wings way beyond his strict, narrow Jewish roots. He experimented with LSD when he was quite young and living on the small Greek island of Hydra with his long term girlfriend and muse Marianne Ihlen after whom his famed song “So Long Marianne”, was named. “I took trip after trip”, he recalled, “sitting on my terrace in Greece, waiting to see God. Generally I ended up with a bad hangover”.

He also looked to Catholicism and even Scientology for answers. But by far the major influ- ence on him was Zen Buddhism. For 30 years he associated with a Zen monastery in California and for almost six years in the 1990s lived there on and off as an ordained monk, under the tutelage of a Japanese Roshi, or distinguished teacher, named Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, rising at 2.30am each morning to perform his daily duties and to meditate.

He later said his years there: “provided a space for me to kind of dance with the Lord that I couldn’t find in a lot of the other places I went to”. In his later years his search very much continued – he read deeply into the Zohar – the principal text of Jewish mysticism, Hindu philosophy and Buddhist texts. One of his most famous songs is “Hallelujah” which in Hebrew means “praise God”. He saw this as an affirmation of his faith in life “with enthusiasm, with emotion” rather than in any specific religious context. He stated about it:

“The only moment that you can live here comfortably in these absolutely irreconcilable conflicts is in this moment when you embrace it all and you say; “Look, I don’t understand a f—— thing at all – ‘Hallelujah’! That’s the only moment we live here fully as human beings.”

His financial fortunes veered up and down – “I’ve never sold widely enough to be able to relax about money, he said, “I had two kids and their mother to support and my own life”. In later life he discovered that his long time manager had badly mismanaged his affairs resulting in the loss of millions of dollars from his retirement fund. This forced him for the first time in 15 years to launch a world tour in 2008 which along with other sell-outs that followed introduced him to a whole new generation of fans. Three new studio albums in 2012, 2014 and, just at the time of his death, in 2016 followed.

According to Brown, Cohen once wrote: “a man or woman lays their work at the foot of their beloved – we do everything for love.”The overarching theme of all of his work could be seen as love in disorder. Sexual passion and love intertwined often giving his songs the air of a confessional: “I have one single plank in my platform”, he stated in 1970, “women will set us free. Just keep on repeating that.” Song, women and wine had a “sacramental connection” for him and his old world charm, gravelly voice and well cut suits often topped in later years with a slanted 1940s gangster-type hat were a magnetic draw for his many female fans. His voice just got deeper and deeper – the decay in his voice actually suited him.

What was his effect on those of us who followed his career through 50 plus years? One music critic, Neil McCormick, summed it up well: “He was a musical spirit guide through the biggest issues of existence, singing about love, sex, family, mortality, the impossible questions of how to live a moral life in a seemingly indifferent and uncaring universe. He made music to nourish the soul. You listened to Cohen sing and you knew he was in the struggle with you.”

In terms of his private meetings with Cohen, McCormick added: “Small and dapper, he comported himself with humility, treating everyone in his path with kindness and respect, the waitress bringing tea or the journalist probing him with questions. There was a consistent twinkle behind his eyes, qualities of sensitivity and humour that added up to a lively engagement with the moment. When you had his attention, you felt his complete presence. And when he spoke, he weighed his words with all the care you might expect. He came over like a cross between a sage Old Testament prophet and a wry comedian.”

Cohen was certainly no saint and would have laughed at the very idea. But he did come across as a man of deep compassion who had journeyed into the very depths of darkness within and come back out with a kind of gloomy joy and dry wit that he communicated in many ways. On hearing of his record company’s delight that his song ‘First we take Manhattan’ had outsold all his others put together, he commented: “I’ve always been touched by the modesty of their interest in my work”.

There were many deep cracks in Cohen’s heart and mind, much pain and despair, but they did let the light in for many thousands of his fans. Each of us can point to similar cracks within. Embracing them rather than denying them or hiding from them seems to allow the radiance of our true being to come to the fore, bathing and healing all past hurt and disappointment in the indestructible and unmoving presence that sets anyone free.

Cohen would have appreciated the words of the French author and Nobel prize winner Albert Camus: “In the midst of winter, I found there was within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me there is something stronger – something better pushing right back.”

“I’m ready my Lord”, Cohen sang on the title track of what turned out to be his final album, You want it darker. Just before his own passing his own great love and muse Marianne Ihlen was on her death bed and he sent her a letter saying: “Well Marianne, it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.”

The mark of the man was a courageous surrender. Out of his darkness came a shining light. Hallelujah!

Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.
– Mahatma Gandhi

LSD, ecstatic sunny summer concerts, Woodstock, young girls in beautiful flowing Indian dresses, love in the air, the contraceptive pill and the beginning of a sexual revolution with old taboos challenged and ignored; the fashion hub of the King’s Road in Chelsea, Carnaby Street in the West End, Hippies galore, flowers in your hair, Germaine Greer’s Female Eunuch, Che Guevara T-shirts, models Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy and working class photographer made good, David Bailey. Such an exciting time if you were young, full of hope and wild expectation.

The rather dismal black and white post-war world seemed to be cracking up into a kaleidoscope of colour with a youth revolution challenging old certainties. Even the then Editor of the very traditional Times newspaper, William Rees-Mogg, was to be found on TV in lively and acrimonious debate with the pouting Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones (between the latter’s prison visits for drug-related episodes) and writing editorial leaders about him and the icono- clastic generation he represented.

Of course that ‘summer of love’ could not be sustained and, as the money men moved in, cynicism and disappointment began to prevail. The original spirit of hope, light, life and joyful expectation of a new era of peace and love that had sparked the wave in the first place, fast began to dim. Amidst this euphoric atmosphere of 1967 the unknown Leonard Cohen’s first album “Songs of Leonard Cohen” appeared, with the tanned face of a dark haired handsome man with piercing eyes, pronounced nose, in his mid thirties, staring out directly at you – with a hint of melancholy. Unlike his contemporaries, he looked smart, there was no long hair down to his shoulders, and the cover itself was framed in black and white – no sign of the wild Technicolor, transcendental brightness of the times.

When you first listened to his deep and somewhat limited register monotonal voice, you were very aware this was something different. Above all, unlike much of the contemporary scene, the words were rich, the poetry sometimes startlingly beautiful and the images conjured up unforgettable, the musical rhythms haunting. Religious themes, intertwined with sexual imagery and a deep reverence and love ran through it all. Yes it was melancholic and the reputation his work gained for being the perfect companion for “bedsit depressives” and “music to slit your wrists to” was at least superficially understandable! However Cohen himself described his work as “the life of the heart” and that description far better reflects the power of his music to move the heart, albeit much of the time from a base of deep sadness, lightened by a dry wit and wisdom.

When he died, aged 82, I was moved to write a small ‘philosophical’ piece based on four lines from one of his songs to friends within the Study Society and elsewhere:

Ring the bells that still can ring,
Forget your perfect offering;
There is a crack in everything,
That’s how the light gets in.

The search for perfection and completeness is natural. But our True Nature as pure presence is perfect and complete and neither comes nor goes. The ‘searcher’ emerges out of the apparent chaos of circumstances that make up the story of ‘my life’. But imperfection and incompleteness as experienced by the body/mind or ‘person’, the flaws, the mistakes, the misjudgements, the irrational desires, the frustrations, the anger, the criticism, the feeling of separation, the love turning to hate, the sense of despair, the tears within or without, the regrets, and so on and so on, are all expressions of the same Life force and limitless Being that I Am.

The unchanging embraces the changing, dances with it invisibly into eternity. There are many colours and tones but only one Light. The ‘cracks’ are perfect. In infinite Grace the ugliness, the pain, the terror, the anguish, the violence and the folly of the world drama we live out day to day can be experienced anew as doorways into the Heart. The Light always gets in whatever we may think. Nothing needs to change and all resistance and attempts at control interrupt the exquisite brush stroke of every sacred moment. We do not have to struggle to come up with a perfect offering and suffer the inevitable feelings of failure, of always falling short. The “falling short” is just another dream. Struggling against the current just reinforces the dream and the sheer immediacy of the Light is lost. The bells are ringing always. The cracks in the bells make the sound all the sweeter. Everything calls us Home.”

Cohen was no stranger to the advaita or non-dual perspective. In 1999 he travelled to India to meet a well-known non-dual teacher, Ramesh Balsekar. Cohen spent around a year in Bombay going almost daily to sit at Ramesh’s feet. There are transcriptions of some of their conversations where Cohen talks of the difficulties in his life, his writing and the “chattering of the mind” that afflicted him, “sometimes in degrees of intensity that make one gasp or cry out for help”. He says that what he seeks most of all is “peace”.

As music journalist Mick Brown commented soon after his death: “It is Cohen’s misfortune that he goes to his grave as ‘the godfather of gloom’. But the question he was constantly asking in his songs, poetry and fiction was ‘Who is this I?’ and what is this ‘I’ supposed to be doing here, in this mess of dashed hopes, broken hearts and certain mortality”.

As it happens, Cohen came from a distinguished family of Montreal Jews and his grandfather was a respected rabbi. As Brown pointed out, the legacy of Jewish teaching, lore – and melancholia – infused his work in ways that might not always have been obvious. During his life however, Cohen stretched his wings way beyond his strict, narrow Jewish roots. He experimented with LSD when he was quite young and living on the small Greek island of Hydra with his long term girlfriend and muse Marianne Ihlen after whom his famed song “So Long Marianne”, was named. “I took trip after trip”, he recalled, “sitting on my terrace in Greece, waiting to see God. Generally I ended up with a bad hangover”.

He also looked to Catholicism and even Scientology for answers. But by far the major influ- ence on him was Zen Buddhism. For 30 years he associated with a Zen monastery in California and for almost six years in the 1990s lived there on and off as an ordained monk, under the tutelage of a Japanese Roshi, or distinguished teacher, named Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, rising at 2.30am each morning to perform his daily duties and to meditate.

He later said his years there: “provided a space for me to kind of dance with the Lord that I couldn’t find in a lot of the other places I went to”. In his later years his search very much continued – he read deeply into the Zohar – the principal text of Jewish mysticism, Hindu philosophy and Buddhist texts. One of his most famous songs is “Hallelujah” which in Hebrew means “praise God”. He saw this as an affirmation of his faith in life “with enthusiasm, with emotion” rather than in any specific religious context. He stated about it:

“The only moment that you can live here comfortably in these absolutely irreconcilable conflicts is in this moment when you embrace it all and you say; “Look, I don’t understand a f—— thing at all – ‘Hallelujah’! That’s the only moment we live here fully as human beings.”

His financial fortunes veered up and down – “I’ve never sold widely enough to be able to relax about money, he said, “I had two kids and their mother to support and my own life”. In later life he discovered that his long time manager had badly mismanaged his affairs resulting in the loss of millions of dollars from his retirement fund. This forced him for the first time in 15 years to launch a world tour in 2008 which along with other sell-outs that followed introduced him to a whole new generation of fans. Three new studio albums in 2012, 2014 and, just at the time of his death, in 2016 followed.

According to Brown, Cohen once wrote: “a man or woman lays their work at the foot of their beloved – we do everything for love.”The overarching theme of all of his work could be seen as love in disorder. Sexual passion and love intertwined often giving his songs the air of a confessional: “I have one single plank in my platform”, he stated in 1970, “women will set us free. Just keep on repeating that.” Song, women and wine had a “sacramental connection” for him and his old world charm, gravelly voice and well cut suits often topped in later years with a slanted 1940s gangster-type hat were a magnetic draw for his many female fans. His voice just got deeper and deeper – the decay in his voice actually suited him.

What was his effect on those of us who followed his career through 50 plus years? One music critic, Neil McCormick, summed it up well: “He was a musical spirit guide through the biggest issues of existence, singing about love, sex, family, mortality, the impossible questions of how to live a moral life in a seemingly indifferent and uncaring universe. He made music to nourish the soul. You listened to Cohen sing and you knew he was in the struggle with you.”

In terms of his private meetings with Cohen, McCormick added: “Small and dapper, he comported himself with humility, treating everyone in his path with kindness and respect, the waitress bringing tea or the journalist probing him with questions. There was a consistent twinkle behind his eyes, qualities of sensitivity and humour that added up to a lively engagement with the moment. When you had his attention, you felt his complete presence. And when he spoke, he weighed his words with all the care you might expect. He came over like a cross between a sage Old Testament prophet and a wry comedian.”

Cohen was certainly no saint and would have laughed at the very idea. But he did come across as a man of deep compassion who had journeyed into the very depths of darkness within and come back out with a kind of gloomy joy and dry wit that he communicated in many ways. On hearing of his record company’s delight that his song ‘First we take Manhattan’ had outsold all his others put together, he commented: “I’ve always been touched by the modesty of their interest in my work”.

There were many deep cracks in Cohen’s heart and mind, much pain and despair, but they did let the light in for many thousands of his fans. Each of us can point to similar cracks within. Embracing them rather than denying them or hiding from them seems to allow the radiance of our true being to come to the fore, bathing and healing all past hurt and disappointment in the indestructible and unmoving presence that sets anyone free.

Cohen would have appreciated the words of the French author and Nobel prize winner Albert Camus: “In the midst of winter, I found there was within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me there is something stronger – something better pushing right back.”

“I’m ready my Lord”, Cohen sang on the title track of what turned out to be his final album, You want it darker. Just before his own passing his own great love and muse Marianne Ihlen was on her death bed and he sent her a letter saying: “Well Marianne, it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.”

The mark of the man was a courageous surrender. Out of his darkness came a shining light. Hallelujah!

Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.
– Mahatma Gandhi

The first time I visited the Glastonbury Festival two decades ago I arrived after the sun had set and my initial impression was that it was much less a festival and more a fantastic, magical city sprung up in the midst of the Somerset countryside. As we approached my first glimpse was of a sea of lights in a darkened valley. The sound of countless bass lines from the site’s sound-system’s subwoofers blended seamlessly as they drifted out onto the night-time air and infused the darkness with a palpable presence of energy and possibility.

Over 200,000 people, including staff and performers, descend on the Eavis’s modest dairy farm for the festival. Over five days they will consume more than enough food to feed Coxey’s army. There are 514 food stalls on site, and 900 shops, over 40,000 bins, 5,000 toilets; and an astonishing 3,000,000 gallons of water get used. At roughly 30 megawatts of electricity, Glastonbury consumes more or less the same amount of energy as the city of Bath. It’s not your average campsite.

Glastonbury Festival has always stood out from every other music or arts festival the world over and it’s interesting to consider why, despite countless emulations, nearly 50 years on this remains the case. An obvious place to start is by looking at the line-up on the main stages. Despite paying artist fees significantly lower than those offered by other venues and festivals Glastonbury consistently attracts the crème-de-la-crème of performers both contemporary and legendary. Many of the acts to have appeared over the years are notable for being truly original, avant-garde, innovative: the sort of artists who upon first appearing strike an audience as being so fresh, so idiosyncratic, that they represent growth, development, evolution, change; artists exhibiting such a strong individuality that they spawn countless imitations, few of whom tend to achieve similar levels of success, being recognised as imitators rather than originators by a discerning public. One can argue contrarily about the progress of music and how every new development can be traced back along a lineage to uncover roots in what has come before, but every so often an individual, or group, comes along and somehow shatters the mould of what has been.

Over the years headline acts have included David Bowie, Dolly Parton, Peter Gabriel, Suzanne Vega, Rod Stewart, The Rolling Stones, Joan Baez, T Rex, Beyoncé, Paul McCartney… the list goes on: a veritable roll call of the biggest, most influential, and individual, acts of all time. This year particularly authentic acts included Lorde, Radiohead, The Jacksons, Dua Lipa, Stormzy, all of whom can be said to have broken new ground in individuality.

In many ways the festival is a site of consumerist frenzy and it is easy to feel a disheartening sense of the amplification of social ills when meandering around and taking in the waste and litter, bad behaviour, excess and general self-indulgent foolishness of it all. It’s a question of perspective though. If you start to look you’ll notice other things: myriad little sacrifices and kindnesses, people, in large numbers, paying attention to each other and to what’s around them, and, significantly, to themselves. Don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of opportunity to observe people stuck in their unconscious default sleepwalking rat-race mode, plodding from one stage to another, meeting their immediate needs and just drifting by on autopilot, perhaps drinking too much and falling out with friends or wandering lost and lonely as a cloud, but there is also a consistent high amount of care, shared amongst strangers, which care begins to look like the sort of freedom that is hard to obtain in daily life.

Dance, when you’re broken open. Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free.

– Rumi

A curious detail that you gradually notice about the festival is that the only advertising to be found on-site, aside from that for a handful of recognised charities, is on the attendees and performers themselves: There is no corporate advertising, no huge branded stages or areas or shops. The litany of logos littering most other open-air type events are conspicuous by their absence; a seemingly small detail, but compared with the systematic linking of the images splayed around us to the worlds we inhabit, in the self referentially neurotic way we have all become comfortably numb to, Kate Moss strutting around in her Hunters as a lone vector of corporate advertising is actually something of a relief to see. This absence of late capitalism’s intrusive imagery is another marker of Glastonbury.

The festival offers an incredible range of experiential diversity – there really is something for everyone: a vast variety of different music stages and tents, theatre and dance and gymnastics, comedy and poetry, art installations and opportunities to participate in any number of creative activities, cinemas and clubs and bars and restaurants, the kid’s fields, the healing fields and their numerous practices and offerings, the green fields and their crafts.

In terms of the sheer number of people gathered with unity of purpose, the festival – whilst not on the same scale as papal visits or religious pilgrimages – does share some of the devotional fanaticism that drives people together in vast numbers, and Glastonbury offers spiritual support from a number of quarters. There’s a church for Christian worship and reflection, Buddhist meditation groups, Hindu groups, Taoist groups and a number of pagan groups. The Iona Community offer conversation and counselling as well as a space for Christian worship. The Hari Krishnas are on-site offering food and welfare to one and all. Then there’s the yoga, kirtan, meditation, acupuncture, mindfulness, gong baths, tarot, laughter workshops, healings … I could go on.

At a festival this size it’s no surprise that everywhere you go there are maps of the site with a red dot or large arrow and the caption: YOU ARE HERE. Though there are many here among us who will be feeling either orientationally challenged or in need of reassurance of a more fundamental, existential sort, I can’t help but feel that this motif neatly encapsulates what for a lot of people the festival is really about. Life in a post-industrialist late-capitalist society, especially if you live and work in a large city, often resembles a cage of sorts with bars built of work, commuting, paying bills, watching box sets, too much screen-time and inane social-media-babble. There are endlessly frustrating and exhausting petty demands interspersed with precious too little time or energy for friends and family and the things we all intuitively just know are actually the most fundamentally important bits of any life.

There’s no scarcity of research showing that as our living standards increase so do levels of depression and mental health problems. The amount of undistracted time we have for our Selves, to just Be, decreases. It may be a dull platitude but this classic inverse correlation is abundantly, manifestly present. Glastonbury, for many, offers an escape from the daily grind and it is in this space of escape that an opportunity to return to the Self, it seems to me, arises.

In 2016 I was at the festival, with my wife and six-year old daughter, working as a photographer for the charity I ran at that time – Small Steps Project. We would go to the festival each year and persuade performers to donate a pair of shoes they’d worn that we could then auction off to raise funds to provide humanitarian aid to children on inhabited rubbish dumps around the world. Over the course of the long weekend I covered the better part of 50 miles on foot criss-crossing the site from stage to stage to take photographs and collect shoes through verifiably the wettest and muddiest conditions on record. The experience was, surprisingly, a profoundly meditative one. I had to walk slowly – trudge would be an appropriate verb – head down, concentrating on the few feet of muddy earth ahead of me in order to keep my balance and avoid slipping, or worse still, becoming literally stuck-in-the-mud. It was an experience of intense and private concentration, but was also the kind of repetitive activity that allows your mind to quieten and obtain a sort of state of serene stillness not unlike that of the mindfulness of a long distance runner.

In devotional practices from prayer to meditation to turning to yoga the devotee is at one and the same time at a remove from reality and yet also closer. This is exactly the experience of many of the revellers at Glastonbury Festival who feel that they are escaping the “reality” of their lives and at the same time becoming much more connected with what “reality” is. The Self they experience at the festival is felt as truer than that which they experience in their daily lives.

Doctrines of advaita or non-duality are all well and good whilst functioning within an intellectual or spiritual framework, with aphoristic or allegorical glimpses of ultimate objective truth always simmering tantalisingly close to the surface. Practices such as meditation, retreats, or satsang and group work, offer a more practical route from without to within, but if you want to talk about actual literal embodiment of oneness – of feeling like some essential part of the self is connected with everything it apprehends; with all the beauty and horror of the world; with all those other energies and ‘other’ selves, then Glastonbury Festival is a pretty good place to encounter and interrogate those sorts of feelings.

If you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars – compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true: The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship…

– David Foster Wallace

Ultimately, the benefits of the teaching of non-duality are that the tenets are eminently deployable in any given environment. It is certainly possible, easy even, to experience a high level of spirituality at Glastonbury, a spirituality present in the music and the crowds, in the noise and the dirt, in the surge of energy and outpouring of raw emotion, in the care of strangers, in the atmosphere in the campsites and all around, in the people and in the earth itself; perhaps all those ley lines really do have an impact. It is helped by a knowledge of the teaching but it is present in the very fabric of the festival because the festival represents a location in space and time where we can return to our Self and arrive at a place of Being, or pure experience, in which love and unity can be felt to be overwhelmingly present.