Belief and Beyond : Adventures in Consciousness from the Upanishads to Modern Times

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On the first day as a student of the intermediate course at the then reputed National College in Bengaluru, I discovered Sri Ramakrishna Ashram, a ten-minute walk down an avenue from our campus. The street was aflame with flowers, the Gul Mohur trees were in full bloom. It was June 1970. I was seventeen then; a phase in life when the world looks infinite with immense possibilities. But I took a path, rather I found myself on the path that was not so much worldly as spiritual; I chose adhyatma or spirituality. When I had no classes, sometimes even bunking them, I would go and sit in the meditation hall for a while and then spend several hours in the ashram library, reading books on the lives of spiritual masters and their teachings.

Thus started my spiritual journey, which took me into unknown realms of consciousness-there was more to life than what I saw on the surface. I needed to go deeper, both inwardly and outwardly. It was at once a simultaneous and unitary process, the quest. And yet, the propensity to see life, our living, in terms of religious, political and secular, in terms of spiritual and material only divided it up into almost irreconcilable binaries; a hopeless duality, the falsity of which had to be seen through. Once I was able to see through this falsity, life, rather one's living and the world, turned into a seamless whole, no longer solid, tangible and measurable. It freed me from the ideological narratives and boundaries which fixed the meaning and purpose of human existence.

In other words, it was a quest, rather an adventure in consciousness that put me on the telling yet deceptive road of Advaitic philosophy and then eventually led me into the backstreets of subversive political and religious schools of thought. I quit my family and studies to join an ashram to pursue my sadhana, spiritual discipline. This was a blunder, for I soon realized that a genuine search for truth could not be transacted within the ashram's already established pattern of life, study and sadhana. What one witnessed there was not the agony of search, but only a trained confirmation of answers to all questions already given by traditions.

After a month at the ashram I returned home, completed my studies and turned into a college teacher. Then came love, marriage, and children, agonies and ecstasies, joys and sorrows, rather telling and disquieting discoveries and transformative experiences. During these years, inevitably as it seemed then, I poured out my insights not discounting my many doubts and questions and prayers and authored philosophical works as well as works of fiction, biographies and plays. Perhaps it would not be out of place to share here a few baffling yet revealing experiences that I went through during this long period of gestation, resolution, creative thinking and writing.

One fine day in the early period of this long journey, when still a college student, I was overcome by a terrible fear of death. Everything around me blanked out and I felt engulfed by a great, palpable darkness. I began to descend into a dark, moving bottomless pit. How I came out of it remains a blur to this day. Days later, I started to feel a burning sensation throughout my body and my head went missing. That sensation lasted for quite some days.

During another episode (years later), driving back home from my sister's house, I saw a white car in a roadside ditch surrounded by a small crowd of bystanders. The car I was driving was a similar model, and white. I drove on, but was seized by a trembling thought that I was dead, that it was I who was lying dead inside the car that had tumbled into the ditch. I reached home but this inexplicable feeling persisted. For about a week or so I felt light and bright, like a spirit, rather like a witness to the happenings around me and my own being. Weeks later, I was overcome with bhava, emotion, an overwhelming feeling of love flowing towards others and a great urge to hug and kiss people, which of course I did not. At all hours of the day, on roads, at shops and restaurants, everywhere the sight of children, men and women and beggars, moved me to tears.

Then, in 2010, shortly before my wife and I moved to live on a farm outside Bengaluru, a tremendous silence opened up one day as I lay under a huge mango tree taking in the leaves gently swaying in the breeze and the blue emptiness beyond. The great silence seemed to me like the cosmic womb in which everything played around and rested.

I have recounted these experiences briefly, deliberately avoiding words loaded with spiritual meanings. And I have chosen these experiences (from among many over the years), to make a point. That is, these have changed me in many ways but not fundamentally. I have not kept a record of my experiences nor tried to probe their spiritual significance, for there is no need to mystify them or attribute great spiritual values to them. These experiences happen now and then, indicating the transient nature of our separateness and giving us a glimpse of the oneness of reality. And they happen differently to different people, perhaps more intensely and frequently than in my case. However, what is more important is to let go these experiences, as they can be imprisoning rather than liberating if we cling to them. It is important to be attentive to the tremendous flow and interconnectedness of all things in the universe and to understand that our sense of separation is false, that it is only a historical-cum-psychological fiction put together over centuries.

**Contents and Sample Pages**