Deepika and I tend to have long conversations. We don’t always agree. In fact, we have disagreed so vehemently that I once thought we’d be thrown out or at least shushed in the coffee shop of the Taj Mahal Palace & hotel. But they’re trained to be very polite so they let us argue without so much as a raised eyebrow; just bringing us more tea. And we talk about religion, spirituality, the path and the practice. You know…. the things they tell us it is not polite to argue about.
We all do, those of us on the spiritual circuit. There’s a standing joke that you know if yoga is a cult if every conversation leads back to asana, and it invariably does, no matter how mundane the subject, movies, relationships, food… it will end in a practice question. It is our lens, our breath, our driving force, it is how we perceive. Practice and the path become our way of being and moving through the world.
These conversations flow, sometimes over meals, across hours, days, years and decades on the off-chance meetings, with friends and strangers, mentors and teachers, from Varanasi to Bodh Gaya to Mysuru to Dharamshala and Bir, on the banks of the Narmada at Amarkantak, of the Kaveri at Srirangapatna, the Ganges at Hrishikesh, in Arunachala, Sringeri, Sikkim and Kerala. With Israelis, Germans, Americans, Koreans, the Japanese, Brazilians, Indians of course from all walks of life… the conversations about life, the experience of it, and the mystical paths of seeking flow like the invisible rivers of this land.
I have a secret to share: this is God’s Own Country. It doesn’t matter which God, what philosophy. It doesn’t even matter if you were born here and where and how, and of what status. We are a blessed land.
We are a land of seekers.
Know the Seeker by their humility to the path, to the knowledge, to the guru, to the teaching. There are no experts here, there is questioning, yearning, following and practicing without end. This is not knowledge with a degree or certificate tagged to the end of it, sometimes no one will show up to tell you you did well or that you’re on the right path. You will take wrong turns. You carry on regardless. That unnameable quest often carves the road for you out of the darkness. A Teacher will find you. The Learning will be difficult and confusing. Sometimes, we don’t know where it all leads but we trust that we must follow it.
My maternal great-grandfather who was once posted with the British Oil Company in Ahwaz, returned from across the oceans and disappeared to Kashi to become a yogi when he was not very old, (and questionably, leaving my great-grandmother to handle the samsara of things). I, who still have his passport, have often thought about him when wandering Varanasi and the Dhauladhars. I wonder if any of the old yogis there ever met or knew of him, what he changed his name to, which cave he meditated in, which sangha he joined. I hope he found what he was seeking anyway. There is no passport to the yogi, the world of knowledge is the arena for seeking.
A friend of mine who runs a set of cottages in the Dhauladhars tells of a yogi who sought room to die in a hut on his estate and requested him not to dispose of the body for 14 days. So he didn’t. I was sitting next to an MP on a flight once. He was on his way to make a temple offering and told me of this underwater lingam in a forest you had to hold your breath and dive to visit that he believed could cure him of what he had. There is something about a young 6 foot 4” German who has been travelling to the backroads of dusty Bihar since he was 19, at a time when there were no hotels or delicate food, in a socio-political era when you and I, fellow Indian, wouldn’t have taken a vacation there. Every seeker has a plethora of ‘experiences’ as we like to call them. But we also know that these are fabrications that we do not cling to, indicators, signposts, and we meet them where they are and move forward on the path.
However, these points of intersection, where we do meet, offer spectacular nuggets of insight and wisdom. We each carry something someone once told us that resonates in the tough times. And seeking is a tough path.
It doesn’t matter if God exists or doesn’t. Which -ism tops. Or what the Truth is, the content of it. What matters is what is your Truth. How it moves you. And what insight you gain from it. You rationalists are always saying God is a crutch. My only question is: well, has he helped you walk better?
Occasionally, we cross each other’s paths. In that crossing often comes a moment of recognition, of ourselves, our own journeys, our own seeking, in others. And thus, we realise we may be travelling alone, but we travel alone together.
This is the basis of the sangha. As my Brazillian friend Cairo Murillo, a student of Swami Dayananda Saraswati and a yogi, whom you will meet in Episode 2 [still editing, one-woman show here, hang on] says: “When the guru is gone, the sangha becomes the guru”.
Perhaps because genuine seekers are humble, keen, a bit worn down by years and decades of seeking, for them, it’s no artifice to want to know what you think or what you have seen or heard. It’s a probable door. Everything is a probable path. Every voice is the voice of the guru. Every encounter is a destined encounter with a deity. Openness is seeking.
In this podcast, we’re looking at the ways in which people pursue a spiritual practice, what it means to practice, this process of seeking, what it is we are each seeking, and how far we have come, not in terms of progress, but in terms of journeys we have made, we’re looking back to see how we began, where we began, what our expectations or lack of them were like, what influenced us, what helped us, what protected us, and what showed us the way, what are our fears and what are our comforts, what do we give up or gain? Where we find home in the shalas, ashramas, monasteries dhams of India, where we meet our guides, masters, gurus and sanghas.
As we traverse these uncertain grounds, we see a light in someone, we recognise a doubt that we have harboured, and find an answer someone else has left for us. In these episodes, we will recognize, acknowledge and learn from each other’s journeys.
My first guest today is Deepika Ahlawat, a fellow seeker. On this path, who we are, where we come from and what we carry in material terms drops away. We are just our seeking. So, though you may know or think you know the people you meet on here, I invite you to listen anew to who they are once the samsaric veil has been dropped. I invite you to suspend judgment, evaluation, and arguments, and simply meet the Seeker in their seeking.
You can sign up to participate in The Seekers by sending us an email with some details of your seeking journey on our website here:
Watch this episode of The Seekers on YouTube below
Tara Das is an author, poet, and mind-body-spirit therapist.
Sky Gazing is a channel by Shamah | शम:
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