After two to three years at Tiruvannamalai it became necessary to earn an income again and I took a job as an assistant editor of a newspaper in Madras, the nearest large town. Thus my destiny took the shape that Bhagavan approved for his followers — a period of intensive training followed by the practise of Self-enquiry in the life of the world.
“From the standpoint of the path of Knowledge, it is the supreme state of the Self. It is different from the ego, which you call your self.”
I told him, “think of Infinity as God and x as yourself. Now go and think it over and come tomorrow and tell me what you make of it.”
‘There is no god but God’; and according to Islamic tradition this has been used with full understanding, as a weapon for fighting the ‘greater holy war’, from the beginning. It is the same as that tremendous sentence from the Bhagavad Gita: “There is no existence of the unreal and no non-existence of the Real.”
It was in 1936, my thirtieth year, that the change of course set in. It was high time, because the ship of my life, drifting uncharted, had got into the shallows and almost run aground.
My marriage was the first wise thing i ever did. Even materially it marked the end of the descent and the beginning of the upward swing, for soon after it was agreed i received an offer of a post as english master at a government college for training ships’ officers and engineers in the new port of gdynia. They were looking for a suitable person and someone had mentioned my name.