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Thanks everybody for being here.

I’m Jael’s son, and I want to talk to you about Jael for a little bit.

Everybody who’s read Jael’s writing in this recent book “Touched by Truth” pretty much knows his personal history. I’ll go through it quickly. He was born as Leendert Plaisier, a farmer’s son in Holland in 1941, studied agriculture, took over his father’s farm, and made a living farming for the rest of his life, until about eight years ago, when he moved to Oxford. Besides farming he finished an economics degree and was an economics teacher in a secondary school for 10 years. He studied philosophy for a little while, and he was engaged in development cooperation in Africa.

I guess you could say he pretty much lived a normal, ‘happy’ family life until his first wife Elly, my mother, became ill from cancer and died at the age of 48. He himself was 42 years old at the time, Janine was 18, Monique 16 and I was 13 years old. This was unbelievably traumatic, but for Jael it also meant the start of his spiritual quest. In the book he calls it a ‘blessing’.

He had the feeling my mother’s spirit had ‘moved’ in to him, and he wrote a controversial book about his experiences in life so far. Eight years later he had a dream in which Rajiv Gandhi, who had just been murdered, asked him to come to India. He went, and in India he got very ill, and had visions of God speaking to him. He wrote another book - about God’s revelations to him, changed his name to Jael Bharat, and when he came back to Holland he declared to us his happy news. I remember this vividly of course, him arriving at Schiphol airport, having lost a lot of weight, very tanned and all dressed in Indian blue clothing.

After that he got involved in Interfaith organizations, met the other love of his life, Sandy, whom he felt deeply spiritually connected to, and moved to England. He ends his story in the book with his aim in life: self-realization.

Concerning Sandy, we think it was a blessing that they’ve met, and I’ve never seen anybody as devoted as her throughout those last days, sitting with Jael at his deathbed, not leaving him for a second. Also, we were moved by all the hospital visits of friends and the support of so many others. Our gratitude for this is enormous and, I promise, will be eternal; we’ll never forget it.

Regarding his life story, his children weren’t always too happy with everything. He had always been a different kind of man, but after my mother’s death he became more and more eccentric. In our opinion he wasn’t always what he thought he was. There’ve been times when we broke off the relationship with him all together. And you could say that I personally, off and on, spent most part of my life fighting him. At the same time, like every son I guess, I’ve always secretly feared his death. And now that it’s happened, I’ve felt moments of despair.

Undoubtedly, he was, and I’ll move into a different part of my story now, in a sense he was, I can’t deny it, a very wise man. He was also a loving man, a caring person, who meant well. He was also a charismatic man to many people, and very interesting and different from anybody else. He had a great many things combined in himself, which made it all so complicated for us, his children. To me, to say the least, he was one of the most sincere and honest persons I’ve ever met. But maybe I’m being prejudiced, because he was also the man I’ve been most personal and close with. He also suffered a great deal, and he took on himself not only his own suffering, but also the suffering of the entire world. And of course, ultimately, as all of you present here today can probably testify, he was a very spiritual man.

After his first stroke, half a year ago, he changed quite a bit, and many people perceived it as a positive change. His love was more out in the open now. I remember our many phone conversations in the last half year, in which he just talked about his recovery, shopping, visiting people, the garden, all kinds of everyday stuff, and I could hear that he just loved telling me all about that, and it moved me. And I could hear, reading between the lines, that it was just love where all this came from. I’m going to miss those conversations. The sign on his grave is going to say: Jael Bharat - whose true face is love. It was one of his latest insights, and I guess it’s true.

Our last conversation was by e-mail, and it was on my own personal inspiration of the last year or so, the philosopher Schopenhauer. I hope not to bore you with this stuff, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to say a couple of words on the subject. You’ll find out why in a moment.

Jael wanted to know what Schopenhauer was about, and I e-mailed a brief synopsis of the philosophy to him. The world according to Schopenhauer is will and representation. On one hand everything is determined by an unbelievable force, a Will, that just wants to go on and on. Everything wants to be. On the other hand the world is representation, we all see everything through our senses, our eyes, our intellect, our brains etc., we can never see what things properly are for themselves.

Jael wrote me back telling me he didn’t understand the abstract philosophical description, that he wasn’t intelligent enough for it. That was nice of course, he hadn’t always been that modest a person, and I wrote him back that it probably wasn’t intelligence, but just a vocabulary that he was lacking. I started explaining it to him, and he loved it, saw many similarities with his own beliefs, as stated in his own, latest book ‘Mapping the cosmos, an introduction to God’. In the following e-mails however, we started fighting about details, quite typical of both him and me, and we ended the conversation.

Anyway, the Will is the essence of life, the form in which the Will appears is time, space and causality and through these three individualization, according to Schopenhauer. Individuals are just forms therefore, so in a metaphysical (philosophical) sense we’re all one, I am you, you are me, we’re everybody and everything that’s ever been and ever will be. The only way to escape from this is to deny the Will – the will has to deny itself - to get rid of it, and then to go into nothing, which might not be an absolute nothing, but a relative nothing, because individuals that have moved into that nothing in their turn perceive our world as nothing. This has many similarities with Buddhism and Hinduism, and mystical Christianity and Sufism in Islam. But it is metaphysical, philosophical, through reason and not through dogma, which is why I like it so much and discussed it with my father. Schopenhauer bridged religion, mysticism and philosophy.

The point however that I want to make, is this. When Jael passed away, a couple of hours later Sandy, Janine and I witnessed something that was quite extraordinary. Unfortunately Monique wasn’t there at the moment to witness it too. We saw a smile on my father’s face that was, if I have to try and describe it, a smile of equanimity, very serene, very peaceful, divine I would have to say. And it intensified while we were there. Again, there were three of us, we all saw the same thing. It was a smile I’ve never seen before, not on his face, ever, not on anybody’s face. The next day, by the way, it was gone.

It reminded me of Schopenhauer describing the smile of saints, redeemers, holy men, after they passed away, who had been denying that Will, who got rid of all attachment, and moved into nothingness (or nirvana, or God), and who were not going to return.

So, there’s several ways in which you can interpret this smile. Maybe it’s just coincidental muscular contractions. Maybe it’s Jael having peace with his death, maybe it’s Jael giving us a message, saying everything is all right. But the most beautiful and consoling thought to me is that he did fix it after all. That, even though making mistakes while being alive, and sometimes misinterpreting experiences and what he himself was, in the end, in those last few days especially, he worked it out and did actually solve the greatest mystery of all, and finished, for once and for all, his process of self-realization. Maybe the old bastard did it after all.

I can only hope that this is true.

Dad, old man, I’m proud of you. Rest in peace.

Jaap-leen Plaisier, Oxford, 5th December 2006