In Search........

It was during my recent visit on the eve of New Year to the Aurobindo Ashram that, I got nostalgic about the days when I was in search of the ultimate - I need to correct myself here - The Ultimate. This is how one of the many guru's I had met corrected me - to always begin the ultimate with the upper case, as it is considered to be a proper noun! Shall I call it(?) a supreme noun? Whatever! Let's make it a rule to spell the following correctly with upper case - The Ultimate, The Omnipresent, The Omnipotent, The Omniscient, The Brahman and so on.

As soon as I reached home, I started searching my mails that are atleast 5 years old, as that was the period when I was involed in the search - a search from nowhere to nowhere to find nothing. Here are the excerpts from those good old mails, just to share my experiences on the pursuit for something I was not really prepared, destined and divinely called for. This is also an effort to satiate my longings and apetite for the past that lives only in my dreams.

Hinduism being my family religion, offered more freedom in terms of the religious practices because of which, I participated in religion only during the vacations. My school being a military based one, thankfully didn't profess any sought of religion. There was freedom, atleast in religious practice. Freedom is good, for it gives complete control of ourselves and absolute authority over our thoughts that make us innovative to identify and discover innumerable choices. This presence of choice reassures our freedom, but leaves us with perpetual conflicts with ourselves, leaving us more confused than ever. Now, shall I say that Freedom is bad, because it leads to conflicting mind and confused state? In the absence of Freedom, we don’t have options to choose from and hence, there is no conflict and confusion. I had the whole range of practices like Monoism (Advaita), Dualism (Dvaita), Tantra and any other religon under the sun to choose from. The first choice was dualism as I was used to it.

Taking-up the dualistic point (God being the creator and all else being the created) was not fulfilling as God seemed potential when there's no creativity and kinetic when God was creating, which means God is mutable. Anything mutable is a compund and can undergo destruction and hence, this idea seemed absurd to me. Then I took the stance of a monoist and hence, from being external I turned internal turning my prayers to concentration and meditation. Now, I was convinced that God is within and it was just to relate God to this world that he/she has been objectified to various forms.

Even my limited practice of meditation revealed that the intensification of concentration upon myself was the understanding of the power within - the Divine within and this resulted in intense self-love. This self-love frequently falsified my rationality and lead to thousand kind of injustices, which, though often small, were nevertheless dangerous. Most of my misery and suffereing could be attributed to the irrationality that resulted out of my narcissistice orientation, as the only reality that existed was within me, failing to see an objective view of the world outside. I was torn between the extremities of my thoughts and practices.

The crisis of my perception was basically due to partial experience and fragmentary knowledge of my search through various methods and practices including concentration, meditation, pilgrimage, discussion, literature that resulted in this state of psychic conditioning. Finally, the idea that God exists seemed to be a simple joke. Frederick Nietzsche was wrong in saying that God is dead, as there never existed a God to die. The God cannot exist as whatever that exists will cease to exist. May be, God is not to be seen as a person as it is the very presence. God is not to be seen externally, in the temples, chruches, mosques as it is always within you. Your body is the greatest temple of God and your soul is the God. God cannot understand our shoutings and lamentations in the name of prayers, as the language of prayer is silence.With this understanding, I decide to stop further search in the name of God.