Title : From behind my eyes

Have you seen God?

Silence

Can you show me God?

Silence

What is the price? I will offer you life-long servitude.

Long Silence

“God is not an object. He is the subject. He cannot be seen. He is the seer. Find out who is the seer”.

These words of Bhagwan Ramana Maharshi brought an end to the life-long, passionate search of Harilal Poonja for God. The one who wandered the length and breadth of the country in search for an answer, found the culmination of his search within himself.  The thirst was finally quenched. The journey from Man to God for Papaji was accomplished in an instant.

Searching? What?

The history of mankind has many stories of people who searched for something and dedicated their lives to that search. Some, like Siddhartha, walked out from the comforts of the world, embraced abject poverty, and went on an outer and inner search that would consume the rest of their lives. Siddhartha was not the only one, there were many like him, and most never made it to the history books, for which they least cared anyway. In their passion for what they were seeking, they exhibited total disregard for what the rest of the world coveted. They treated wealth and fame like trash and burnt their minds, bodies and souls in the search. From the accounts of great masters, we know that they seem to have finally found something that gave them total liberation from the miseries of human life and transformed them into Gods.

The question is : What were they searching and what did they find?

Having said that, I look at the beautiful stone statue of Gautama, the Buddha, in my living room and wonder how many have used him as a decoration without even understanding what made him the Buddha or even contemplating on what made him reject the very riches we run after. It is indeed ironic that the One who gave up an entire kingdom to embrace poverty was making my drawing room look more opulent.

We are what we look at

It just so happens that what is an unfathomable mystery for one , is a mundane, everyday stuff, for another. A blade of grass may forever elude someone’s attention and yet may strike someone else as an awesome work of creation. A new father may flaunt his new child as his own, without even realising the great magic that turned a couple of fused cells into the human in his palms.

What grabs our attention,  draws us towards itself and creates our reality. Whatever is beyond our perception or field of vision, for all practical purposes, does not exist at all. Our human existence is just a play of our attention and focus, nothing else.

And then our design makes us look outwards, take in stimuli, process the collected data, and react back. Our total focus and energies are directed towards the world that lies outside of us. It is the world that constantly challenges us into engagement and draws our attention back every time we look away. It throws at us it’s temptations, traps us into desires and involves us fully till we are dead and buried. We may take birth, live a life and pass away without ever wondering at the incredible mystery of our being. 

Speaking of our attention, I cannot even recall the last time I stared at the sky and enjoyed the view of infinity. It has been a while since I lied flat on my back and lost myself in the immenseness of what was above and around. It is of relief to know that in this sheer vastness, we – or our worldly worries, failures or successes – don’t really matter. We are but a speck of dust, too insignificant to be worried about, in this overall scheme of things. Masters say that it is from this feeling of being nothing that the great realisation of being everything emerges. But that is what the masters say, and for the time being, till that realisation comes, it is great to be nothing. The Sky is a testament of how we live under the roof of awesomeness and are yet bored with our lives and it’s daily chores because we spend most of it looking down. Because in the final analysis, we are what we look at.

But we are on the God Path

But look closely – every effort, by the sinner or a saint, always strives for an expansion – physical, material, mental or spiritual. Man, in its incredible story so far, has expressed nothing but an unconscious desire to expand into something larger than himself. Continuous improvement and a journey towards perfection is the essential underlying backdrop of this story. Man has always, deep within, experienced an existence larger than his physical body and the limits of his intellect and mind. Every invention made by man, and every poem written by him, and in each of his achievements, he has expressed nothing but his essential spiritual nature which manifests in him as an intention to be perfect. 

But what is this in us that drives us to this perfection? And then, what do we finally become? God?

Forget the answer, the Question itself eludes most

But for most of humanity, life is a daily ritual from sunrise to sunset, from breakfast to dinner, and is just a process of continuous breathing, and a obsessive engagement with survival, power, wealth or something earthly. Millions, no trillions, since our birth as a specie have come and gone without sparing a thought for the great mystery of life. The modern man has fared no better. He has found a thousand ways to engage his mind into pursuits of every kind. He has taken strides in science and has progressed exponentially in material terms. Having conquered the land and oceans, he set his sight on space and reached out to the stars. He created magic and laid out networks of imperceptible waves that connect us instantaneously and challenged space and time itself. Mankind has pushed the limits of the impossible. But when it comes to the explanation of his being, his coveted science fails him. It leaves him uncomfortable. This is why even the greatest psychologists, like Freud, mortally avoided the mention of consciousness because they did not even know where to begin experimenting. They reached some distance in explaining the physicality of existence, but when it came to the “who is staring out?” question, they shuddered and avoided it like plague because it did not fit their physical paradigm. 

And again, we have been so absorbed in names and forms that we often think that naming something is explaining it. For instance, mostly to a question like “How does a goat come out of a goat?”, the usual answer is – Nature. But the word “nature” just names this phenomena and does not explain it at all. 

Have you ever thought that there is this strange likeness of a man to a automobile. Both are explainable by the physical sciences as entities made of clustered atoms. We are machines, just like our cars, nobody disputes that. The car runs on fuel, just like we consume food to energize ourselves. We turn the ignition of the car to get it going, and that is our contribution in its getting into action. But then, who turned our ignition?

But some are impatient

While most trudge towards perfection, some are impatient and they ,drawn towards their own expansive nature, setout to find the mystery of everything. Mankind may evolve to Godhood, but for a man, this search is extremely personal and totally his own. Such men are the Siddharths in the search of Godhood. And they are in a hurry !

To them, life is a mystery which begs explanation. It stares at their face without revealing itself. Questions beget more questions and in the struggle for answers, one question mocks their very identity – Who am I? The intellect strains, works its way through the physical evidence, and then fails and gives up. The science that gave us so much and promised an explanation to our deepest secrets, falls lamely flat on its face. They say that the seeker lives a pitiable life – excruciatingly painful and full of doubts and counter doubts. But seek they must, without rest. Because that is the way they are and they cannot help. For them, the quest is worth dying for, and for most others, it doesn’t matter at all.

What is Life after all?

We understood , very early in our existence, that we were similar, but not the same as rocks and stones. They were very predictable and simply conformed to the laws of physics without any questions. For instance, it was possible to calculate with precision the trajectory of a rock when we threw it with a particular force and knew the strength of all the forces working on it. But not so with living things. Living things react. We, unlike rocks, have something in us that allows us the freedom to decide and go this way or the other.  In the words of Jay Lakhani , “Life is not in compliance with the physical forces,but is in defiance of it”. There is something in us that challenges nature and acts against it. A simple act of raising our hand is a decision to move and then apply the correct pressure to go against gravity. But then, who decided and who moved the hand?

The Sages found it

This is what drove ancient sages, much much before the apple fell and woke up Newton, into a search within. They dug deep into their own consciousness and tried to figure out the most fundamental thing, for want of a better word, that defined us. They realised that we were not our bodies, nor our minds, but something else that stood apart from all these. They peeled off layers and layers of gross matter to try to arrive at that enlivening factor that made us totally different from rocks and stones. The great masters, in whichever way they could, finally touched the very source that was the fountainhead of their life and awareness. And in that moment of great discovery they found which was always there – The Self – the underlying factor, the seer, the only One and the cause that pulled and stretched us towards Goodhood in our human existence.

How far is “I” from “You”?

Ramana revealed the greatest secret that we were Gods in the garb of Man. The one who looked out from within us was the seer, the only subject. All our sadhanas and search was the result of our ignorance of who we were. His disciple, Papaji, even goes as far to say – Call off the search. Afterall, what is there to search? If I am the seer Himself, how far do I have to travel from Me to I? I am That already. Where is the need for a search of Godhood when I am God Myself? I am free here and now. 

The lonely path

Strange is the spiritual path that if somebody told you the deepest secret, you still got to find it yourself, because unlike plain knowledge, realisation is experiential. So the great task ahead is that, whatever the great masters say, we can only take their hint and move ahead ourselves till we burn our fingers to realise heat. The journey from Man to God, if there is one at all, will have to be undertaken alone.  In spite of the Master’s proclamation, that distance from Me to I will have to be covered.

My dear friend, I walk my own way towards Godhood to try to discover the God that I already am. And I hope so do you. And I pray that one day we meet somewhere in the road only to realise that you and me were just one.