Since early childhood, a deep sense of grief would engulf me every now and then, the trigger for which would be people engrossed in some amusements – playing games, or chatting their time away, or enjoying themselves in some kind of gathering such as marriage functions. I would experience great sorrow and cry profusely, as if some tragedy has struck. The earliest instance of this that I remember is from when I was four-five years old, standing in a corner with wet cheeks looking at all the elder children of the neighbourhood immersed in playing cricket. One of the neighbours thought I was sad as I was too young to play with them, but the anguish was not for any such reasons. It was not personal. It was a fundamental sense of hopelessness. The same inexplicable feeling recurred several times, especially while attending family functions, and as I grew up, I could no longer cry out in the open, as a teenager cannot get away that easily with red eyes and shabby face. But while the child could not articulate the reason in words—it was just felt as some unknown pain—it gradually got articulated along with the developing brain. One of the later instances of this that I remember going through is when I was in class twelve, and was attending a marriage function.
I was experiencing angst not because people are enjoying, but because I could not digest how we can settle for such tidbits of life and not seek any further. How can we be content with merely making a living, as if that is all we are here for and there is nothing more to life? When wounds are festering within, when suffering is inevitable sooner or later, how can we satisfy ourselves with some decorative paintjob and pretense? I am saying ‘we’ because apart from those episodes of grief which occurred once in a few weeks, rest of the times I was also just the same, engrossed in some silly thing. Thus, desperation and frustration would accumulate over time, and erupt periodically like this, either stimulated by some trigger or by itself. I was crying for everyone, myself included. For I did not know what to do either. I only knew this cannot be it, but did not know what more it should be. Or is there anything more at all? It was like getting pressed into a corner, a dead end; it was suffocation; an intense ‘?’.
After my 12th, on the very same day that I finished the last competitive exam, I picked up Bhagavadgita and began reading it. It was a Kannada translation, and it is part of a Mahabharata series of thirty-two volumes. These were at home since my childhood, and I had a strange hunch that I will find some respite in them for my plight. The translation and commentary in these books are well done, in the sense, it does not get into religious mode and fancy stuff. For the first time in life, I heard the words atmajnana (self-realization) and moksha (liberation), and read stories of people who came to realize their true nature. Reading all this put me into a daze for a couple of months, but acquiring new words did not fool me into assuming that now I know something. The reading of the text only assured me that there is indeed some substance to my bouts of despair, that there is definitely something more to life which can be realized right here (and not after your death in some other world), and facilitated the innate longing.
Thereafter I joined the engineering course at NITK, Surathkal (KREC at that time), and during my first year in 2001-02, someone referred to me the famous book Autobiography of a Yogi written by Paramahamsa Yogananda (Kannada version). The book did grip me and inspire me, and I read it dozens of times, but at the same time, I must say, it made me much more miserable. Because, the details presented there are too mystical, filled with yogic superpowers and extraordinary occurrences, and I wrongly assumed that progress in spirituality necessarily means acquiring superpowers. That, in turn, created a feeling of difficulty, or almost of impossibility. So, the plight intensified.
The first spark of light in this gloom, the first explicit and definitive taste of 'spirituality' happened in the final year of my engineering in 2004 when I attended a ten-day yoga camp at Prashanti Kutiram. It is a Yoga university (SVYASA) situated in the outskirts of Bangalore,
and in those days, it was more of an ashram. The government of India, under the visionary leadership of the then prime minister AB Vajpayee, had launched some programs towards development of youth, and in that regard UGC had made arrangements for interuniversity yoga camps at certain locations in the country. And I was one of the two students representing my college (which was deemed to be university) who happened to attend the camp conducted at Bangalore. So, my first exposure to an ashram, to spirituality as an experiential phenomenon, happened because of sponsorship from the government as it used to happen in the ancient times.
How I happened to attend this camp is a funny story. Actually, I was not the original candidate, but an accidental substitute. Here is what happened.
As I said, it was the final year of my engineering, and I was already 'placed' in an IT firm. So, we were all just casually ambling our way through the final year of the course. One night, as we were preparing to go out and have some booz, I saw that my gang was engaged in some discussion in their room. Apparently, one of our friends (Siddu) had fallen sick, and he was supposed to travel the next week to attend the Yoga camp. They were wondering what to do now, and the other friend (Yogish) who had enrolled for the camp, looked at me and asked "Will you come?". I said, "Alright". Ten days exemption from college! Free travel and stay in some Yoga center in Bangalore! Maybe there will also be many girls to flirt with! What is there to lose? So, I enrolled, and went. But I ended up having a flirt not with girls, but with the core essence of Life.
Those ten days had a vey deep impact. There was something about the place itself which stirred and stilled me at the same time. Perhaps the place had acquired a certain propensity because of the many committed seekers who had stayed there over the years. The daily routine that was being followed in the camp, and the practice of yogic techniques, added to that impact. So, for the first time, there was something affirmatively spiritual. At that time, I had not related it to Sattva, but that is what it was – a heightened state of aliveness.
When the camp was over, I reluctantly left the ashram, and resolved to come back after my degree is completed. I did make an attempt in 2005 once college was over, but in vain. One reason was that I had to repay my education loan, but actually, even otherwise there wasn’t enough courage to take that step. Moreover, I already had gotten a job in a software firm and it was alluring enough. So, I joined the company, again resolving to come back to Prashanti within two years. But within two years, there was an opportunity to travel to the US, and then three more years flew by.
During my college days and IT days, if I looked at aged people sitting on wheelchairs in front of their big houses, that would make me terribly miserable, and I would realize my helplessness in dealing with this matter – that no amount of wealth and planning can address suffering and death (after all, it does not take any genius to see that). Sometimes people have asked me, “Don’t spiritual seekers who do not pursue worldly accomplishments feel insecure about their life?” That’s actually an ironical question. Spiritual seekers would have experienced the insecurity of being a tiny individual in this world so much more intensely and profoundly than others, that they would have realized the hopelessness of attempting to address this insecurity through money and few more individuals who are also insecure! So, it is not that they would feel insecure because they are not pursuing worldly accomplishments, but it is because they are terribly insecure that they don’t pursue worldly accomplishments. They are looking, not for mere patch up job, but to settle the insecurity for good.
So, as I went on with the ritual of earning money, side by side, my sense of despair also went on intensifying. Angst turned into anger and then even into remorse that years are rolling by and I am not doing anything concrete in my spiritual pursuit. The periodical bursts of grief continued as before. Eventually, it became too intolerable to go on with life like this, and the aching to do something decisive took over. In January 2011, I quit the job and came to Prashanti Kutiram as a student of M.Sc. (Yoga). The degree was a pretext, and I just wanted to spend time in this campus following a certain routine.
My calculation was that if ten days could do that much to me, then what could two years do! But alas, for whatever reasons, things did not go linearly like that. There was some kind of recurrence of the tinge of Sattva which I had tasted many years ago, but it wasn’t intense enough, nor was the intensity continuous. And this is a bigger problem. See, when your experience of life is mediocre, it feels miserable, but once you see a high and then crash back into mediocrity, you will be even more miserable.
During the M.Sc. course, I attended wonderful lectures from some of the acharyas, read more scriptures, practiced yogasana (yes, it is me in the photo!), pranayama, and meditation techniques. Sometimes there would be a flash of that breathtaking stillness, especially while
intently listening to some of the talks on Upanishads, but then the force of mind to remain in its rut was overwhelming. So, my sense of desperation continued, and now with much more intensity and vividity. Thankfully, learning spiritual concepts, staying in an ashram, following a certain routine – none of it relieved me.
It would have been easy to find some solace in all the spiritual efforts I had put and all the spiritual knowledge I had gathered. After all, I had quit my job and was staying in an ashram, dedicating all my time for spirituality. And after completing the course, I could continue my life that way as a yoga teacher or lecturer or something like that. But the very same thing made me more desperate that nothing is happening despite doing all that. It pricked me even more and intensified the longing further. Fortunately, there was the integrity not to assume knowledgeability with words, and I did not settle into anything. No matter how many spiritual texts and concepts were learnt, I still knew very clearly, and very painfully, that I am still empty inside. I remained unsettled. All the knowledge that had been acquired—scientific, scriptural, or any kind—only became an added resource to hit the dead-end of thought (which I had earlier come to intuitively) even more vigorously. Knowledge became a powerful impetus for a more vivid recognition of ignorance, and not a fuel to bolster #igknowrance.
I am saying ‘thankfully’ and ‘fortunately’, because it is this intensity of desperation and the stubbornness to not yield to concepts that was central to what followed (which I have shared in the video below). It provided both the inner energy and the integrity to consciously and sharply engage in the process of inquiry. Without that desperation and relentlessness, I would have just ended up as a professor, or a scholar.
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