It’s also a challenging environment to live in: again, both inwardly and outwardly. The instruction was, ‘It’s not good to be too comfortable.’ Or sometimes, quite matter-of-factly, to the mainly citified later generation of residents: ‘You can have all the amenities you want, provided you build them yourself.’

So a typical early morning might vary from being taught the temple puja – in spring and summer all roses and songbirds at dawn, in winter snow and numb fingers and toes – to making breakfast for visitors on a wood stove, or milking cows. Days could include helping with the harvest, weeding and watering the kitchen garden, checking the water supply (from that wonderful Victorian invention, the hydraulic ram), cleaning chimneys, and indeed all the myriad maintenance jobs that living on a farm entails.

The aim, so easy to forget, is to try and do everything with ‘self-observation’, to see the friction points as pointing to a weakness in oneself rather than someone else; the outcome, most poignantly, was to glimpse one’s teacher’s sadness as one forgets repeatedly. G.I. Gurdjieff’s pointed phrases ‘negative emotions’ and ‘chief feature’ transform from being interesting concepts into mirrors that fill one with self-loathing. Chilblains and cracked heels are outside sores; what proves hard is to observe the inside sores, yet not ‘identify’. Detachment is not so simple amid the friction of egos.

Evenings in the ‘tea verandah’, sitting together with one’s teacher and friends, were everything one could expect of a discussion that centred round the to-and-fro of real questioning, not discourses. Then, sometimes, a healthy fatigue could allow the body to go quiet more easily, as a precursor to a deeper meditation.

The terraced fields that supplied basic needs were gradually extended under the guidance of Sri Madhava Ashish and Sri Dev Ashish. Wheat, barley, oats, rye, maize and potatoes were grown, the vegetable garden was expanded, and a small orchard of apple, apricot and peach trees was planted. Low-cost rainwater harvesting tanks for irrigation and residential needs, along with improved cultivation methods, had a positive demonstration effect on the surrounding villages, as did a small dairy farm for milk, butter and ghee, using cross-bred cows instead of the low-yield local cattle. Controlled grazing, with cattle stall feeding, showed how severely eroded over-grazed land could be saved, and the forest land was similarly benefited so that the ashram estate remains even today a jewel of green in the sadly denuded surroundings. For this work on educating the population about the importance of sustainable hill agriculture and forestry, Sri Madhava Ashish was awarded the Padma Shri by the government of India in 1992. But as an obituary, ‘The Last English Saint’ observed, this was ironic, for his most important crop was people. To know more about Sri Madhava Ashish's environmental initiatives, click here.

Readers of G.I. Gurdjieff may recognize how ashram life reflects his ‘Fourth Way’ teaching of harmonizing the physical, emotional and mental centres of man. Readers of Jung may recognize the attempt at integration of the whole person about an unchanging centre. Those attracted to the path of devotion in worship would respond to the total surrender that is the aim. Those who are magnetized by the truth glowing secretly in the writings, and the being, of mystics, regardless of religious tradition, are those who the ashram magnetizes.

Life at Mirtola ashram with one’s guru was both joyous and a painful challenge. For some of us it takes years to realize that the even greater challenge is to live ‘the Mirtola way’ wherever one is, Delhi or Dunwich, Mumbai or Miami, for as Sri Madhava Ashish wrote, ‘Mirtola is a state of heart and mind’.