I will now relate an incident which had no trace of irruption into consciousness about it, but seemed ordinary, albeit puzzling, at the time.

There were several women on the ashram at this time, mostly Americans. One of them was exceptionally beautiful, tall, blond, slim but when she walked she did so with a profound limp that was almost a genuflexion. The shock of this affront to her beauty was so great it was like a punch in the stomach. Her stern dignity was a reproach to pity. I shall call her Jennifer as that preserves the chime her true name had with one from Arthurian legend. Jennifer\Guinevere. I was attracted to her but there then was neither the time nor the place for secular love. A group of us had decided to go to the village after darshan to buy milk in the dairy. She would be among the party. How would I handle this? When I was coming across the compound she was standing there dressed in a sari. For a blink of an eye I saw her in a blue gown with a wimple, tall conical hat and a white scarf, her favour, flowing from its point. Very well I said, Jennifer/Guinevere when we go out today it will be as a quest. The sense I had was of the courtly love of the troubadours and their awareness of the diaphane of spiritual beauty that lay over the equivocal preying on weakness of lust. My talisman was effective.

We got to the dairy just at milking time. There were 4 or 5 cows in their stalls in the large hut open at the sides. It was very clean. A man and his wife were milking the cows and they filled our tin billy cans. We paid them. As though prepared for a festival, the place was spotless and so too were its owners. When we went to go they detained us to give us some milk to drink. Their daughter came out, a girl of about 15 dressed in a long jupe and shirt top. I was handed a chalice of milk. It had a foot to it and bosses like the Ardagh chalice only it was lower and broader. It was dull brass coloured and not that heavy. I had to drink from it carefully as the normal tip you would give to a cup would have sent it splashing all over my face. I took a drink of the warm sweet milk and I was going to offer some to the others who were over beside the stalls. The man said - They have theirs, this is for you.

They were drinking from a tumbler which was set with stones, bright flashy gems of varying hue, a czar's treasure of a thing. I remember feeling envious of their bejewelled cup and wanting to drink from it. When we were finished we gave the namaz salute to the family and we went back to the ashram. On the way in through the back gate Jennifer turned to me and said:

- All today I couldn't stop thinking of you as a knight of the round table.

This adventure was experienced in normal consciousness and part of me sought explanation in theories like family treasure, glass baubles or booty from war. It was a puzzle and it had a theatrical feel to it. The cup was going to be there and the mental gauze of quest was tacked on to a prevision of it to make a sort of Grail story. I didn't think to talk to any of the others about it at the time to find out if it was a shared perception. But why should I, it was palpably, potably real.

To what plane of existence does this experience belong? It was a teasing mystery until I read a book by Harold Bloom called 'Omens of Millennium'. He places it precisely using the categories which the scholar of the Iranian Sh'ite sufis Henry Corbin elucidates. In their world there is the interpenetration of the mundane by the Imaginal. In a sense there is a continuum and we can pass from one sphere to the other without noticing it.

"Our confrontation with the angel is neither empirical nor transcendental; instead it takes place in a middle world that Henry Corbin calls 'imaginal', which is neither imaginary nor what we generally call 'imaginative', in the Western aesthetic sense." Omens pg.156

This world has also affinities with the world of formation of Kabbalah. It is next door to the world of 'action', the normal empirical domain. Introducing a passage from the Talmudists Adam Steinsaltz's 'The Thirteen Petalled Rose' H.B. remarks: Steinsaltz charmingly emphasizes, as does Corbin in his account of the Sufi imaginal world, that our perception of angels can be quite as ordinary as if such messengers dwelt entirely in the world of action:

(Steinsaltz) "Similarly, the angel who is sent to us from another world does not always have a significance or impact beyond the normal laws of physical nature. Indeed, it often happens that the angel precisely reveals itself in nature, in the ordinary common-sense world of causality, and only a prophetic insight or divination can show when, and to what extent, it is the work of higher forces. For man by his very nature is bound to the system of higher worlds, even though ordinarily this system is not revealed and known to him. As a result, this system of higher worlds seems to him to be natural, just as the whole of his two-sided existence, including both matter and spirit, seems self-evident to him. Man does not wonder at all about those passages he goes through all the time in the world of action, from the realm of material existence to the realm of spiritual existence. What is more, the rest of the other worlds that also penetrate our world may appear to us as part of something quite natural." pg. 168 Omens.

Be it understood that when the word 'angel' is used in the text I am not assimilating my condition to the translation of Elijah or Enoch, it is to the world of formation that I refer. In the system of the Kabbalah there are four worlds - emanation, creation, formation and action. The Sufis that Corbin treats of conflate the first two into a realm of Pure Intelligences. The Hindus have lokas - Brahma Loka, pitri loka, rishi loka, Deva Loka etc.. Kailasa is the abode of Shiva and deathless yogis meditate in caves in the hill of Arunachala which is hollow and the centre of the world. Did I read once of a sadhu who went to Brindivan and was woken in the morning by the sound of a flute? When he went to his window and looked out there was Krishna driving his cattle down to the Yamuna. Krishna Loka.

When you arrive in one of those lokas you will know it, the Kabbalah's imaginal world is one into which you may drift by grace and not know it. Even the subsequent pondering of mysterious aspects of your experience leave you uncertain whether you were there or not which is just as it should be. There will be less in it to tempt us to the vanity of supposed attainment.