What is the most shocking thing that can happen to one? Well, perhaps not the most shocking and not even the second most shocking but certainly one near the top of the panoply of atrocious things that can happen to one. What is it then?

Loosing most if not all one’s photos taken in the last ten years! Of course, now loosing photos doesn’t mean misplacing that photo album yet again. No for in our digitalised age it means that the hard disk on which the photos are stored suddenly refuses to work! Sure, the computer recognizes the fact that there is an external hard disk attached to the computer but it declines to open and read its contents. Why are the photos anyway stored on an external disk? Simply because one has run out of storage space on one’s laptop’s C drive. Why then did not one make a back-up of the external hard disk?

I searched all my media. There was a one-Terabyte hard disk which managed to save something but only last year’s. The bulk of the photos taken during the two thousand and tens had vanished. I did manage to find a couple of extra years of photos but they were only in re-sized form suitable for sending as email attachments.

Horror of horrors! My helpful computer man in Fornoli did his best to try to read the disk with his own equipment. So many corrupt technical errors were signalled though! Impossible to do anything. Give the damn thing a couple of days rest to perhaps reform its character and make it behave better? No good. The hard disk will have to be sent to specialists in a major Italian city to take it apart and see what can be saved. How much will it cost? Anything up to a few hundred perhaps? But then irreplaceable visual memories of days and years past, lost in the murky mists of time are without value, without price!

In these months apart, my wife and I have been keeping in touch with WhatsApp and Skype. Sometimes we keep Skype running for hours even hearing our snores during the night. I wake up in the morning to catch Sandra saying to me ‘what’s happening today?’ I reach out for her only to realise than she has been condensed into a tablet picture somewhat like that Genie trapped in a bottle.  At least, however, I have that. In previous more credulous ages this would have been taken as a miracle. I thought of the story of Saint Clare who one morning was too ill to attend Mass celebrated by her soul-mate Saint Francis. In her disappointment she suddenly saw Francis appear, projected on a wall in her convent cell in full technicolour with stereo sound too! No wonder Saint Clare has since been appointed as patron saint of television and, indeed, all manner of telecommunication including, of course, the internet.

Yesterday morning I too had a vision. Not of Saint Francis but it could have been sent by him or indeed any great saint or sage. One of our morning rituals on Skype is to read a chapter from a book. We’ve gone through ‘Little Women’ and ‘Siddhartha’ among others these months. There’s no particular guide as to why we choose one book rather than another; they somehow fall into our hands from my library. We are now reaching the end of a tome which was the only book Steve Jobs kept on his IPad: ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ by Paramahansa Yogananda. It is both a charming and an impressive volume describing the great Yogi’s yearning to find a guru and seek spiritual knowledge from an early age when, as a teenager, he and his school chum caught a train to get to the Himalayas where prodigious sadhus spent their time in holy nudity in the icy receptacle of a mountain cave.  Unfortunately he didn’t get there that time since the local school informed the station master of their plans and he sent them back home.

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Yogananda eventually found his guru in the form of the superlative Yuktesvarji and the autobiography remains a celebration of this life-changing meeting. On his last visit to India Paramahansa mourns the death of his spiritual master and cries with despair. All of a sudden Yuktesvar appears to him in a blaze of golden light, astrally travelled from the cosmic realms of the universe. The chapter on Yogananda’s master’s resurrection is awesome and Yuktesvar goes on quite a bit to explain the nature of the astral body and how once achieved it can surmount the sad duality of this world, overcoming good versus evil, day versus night, earthly love and earthly hate to enter into a supreme world of celestial bliss.

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 I too had a vision. It seemed to me that Paramahansa Yoganandaji appeared to me in a blaze of golden light with his ochre robe and his flowing locks pointing me to my library. ‘You will find the answer to your search there. Look towards the island where Ram went to save Sita from the evil Ravana.’

I got out of bed and headed towards my library. Where could I find the island of Sri Lanka there? Travel was clearly out of the question. I was locked down in the same way that poor Sita was all those millennia ago. Suddenly it dawned upon me: the Ramayana! I took from the shelves the first of my three volumes of the Shanti Sadan translation of this marvellous epic and, lo and behold, behind the books there they were! I had truly forgotten that I had made backup of all photographs up to 2017 on five hard disks! Unbelievable but true. How could I have forgotten? How could I have lost my memory regarding this fact?

On this occasion I found my memory twice over. Suddenly remembering where I had stored my backups. Suddenly finding those photographs though lost for ever! Two memories found in one…. beyond duality into the cosmic ether of astral consciousness  and eternal joy!