The Life and Death of A Canadian Mystic by Dave Jaffe. Part Two.
Don Graves, like many other young Canadians of his generation, went to hippie enclaves, took L.S.D. and met many women. A tall, blonde, good looking youngster, Don attracted many females. Yet his parents, Matt and Lillian, weren't too happy about Don's new friends. They wanted their younger son to follow his elder brother Edward's path.
Ed was now studying at the University of Toronto, and was enrolled in mostly biology courses. Meanwhile Don kept bringing home teenage boys and girls who were as Don said, "Just far out." "I'm worried about my son," Lillian confessed to her friends. "He's really into being a hippie. And I'm sure he's taking drugs."
Yet soon Don tired of drugs. He was turned on by texts on Buddhism and Eastern religions by one of the many self-styled gurus he met in the streets of Yorkville. He read Aldous Huxley's 'The Perennial Philosophy' and books by Alan Watts about Buddhism. Drugs, he realized, weren't what he was looking for. Enlightenment was. Then he met Felicia, a more conventional woman and they had a daughter called Teresa. They got married and Don left the hippie scene. They moved to Vancouver and Don got a job in a factory that made pipes. Felicia took a job in a bank.
Overtly Don looked like he'd settled down. Yet soon he became restless. He kept on reading books on eastern religions and told one of his workmates, "I must go to India and Pakistan." At one time Don got involved with a group of people who were trying to save Kitsilano from developers. At one time he canvassed door to door for the group. Yet in the end, he said, "Politics isn't my trip."
Meditation was. After work and on weekends, Don would sit in his and Felicia's bedroom and meditate for hours. He found great joy in doing this, and sometimes experienced blissful moments..
Tensions surfaced between Don and Felicia. He started to put money away in a private bank account. Then one day he told his wife, "I'm off to India. I want to leave you." His wife and he now lived in a Vancouver housing co-op. He turned his co-op shares over to his wife, along with two thousand dollars. He was on his way to south Asia.
In 1985 he flew to India. He saw before him in this huge subcontinent worlds of pain, poverty and starvation. Yet he also saw in this country of nearly 900 million people many inspiring religious shrines. He went into caves where 60 years ago, the British writer E.M. Forster had set part of his novel called 'A Passage To India'. He bathed in the Ganges River along with thousands of Indians. The Ganges river is over 2,000 kilometres long. It is sacred to many Indians who believe that it is the goddess Ganga brought down from the Milky Way.
It is also terribly polluted. "The Ganges," writes George Black, "absorbs more than a billion gallons of waste each day." Three quarters of the waste, Black points out is raw sewage and the rest is effluent from industry. "It is one of the ten most polluted rivers in the world," Black says. It also stinks to high heaven. Anyway Don bathed in the river and caught no diseases from doing this, except catching at one time a mild flu. He moved through massive crowds and ended up in north east India. He even slept in the streets of Calcutta and no one bothered him.
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