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journey
Letting go, letting God
As originally published in India’s premiere spiritual magazine ‘Life Positive’ (June 2016 Issue)
Letting go is not easy. Each of us holds on to certainty, to security, to convenience, to the sphere of the ‘known’. I had a similar issue. All my life. Until I did an experiment that my master had exhorted many of us to do. My master, the late Guruji Rishi Prabhakar (founder of SSY), regularly undertook a padyatra, a lone voyage, by and large on foot, as a mendicant. This is actually an ancient practice favoured by Adi Shankara, Buddha, Mahavira and Swami Vivekanand among others.
He gave a definite purpose to it: The purpose was to see God in whoever you meet, make yourself useful wherever you go, and to find security in the middle of the manifest insecurity.
Nothing to get, nowhere to go
There is no ladder, there is no wall
There is no need to purify your soul
There is no journey, there is no way
How can you come back when you have never been away?
Why don’t you go out and just have a stroll?
After all, you have always been in your goal
Any path you take, can only take you away
There was nowhere to go, you will realise one day!
Why open an avenue where there is none
Why get in to a journey that never begun?
If you start a chapter, it shall never end
Whatever be your ways, you will have to mend
What else is Maya if not the need to strive
To behave as if there is somewhere to arrive!
You already are all that you want to be
It is just a fact that you need to see!
A journey to where you already are
Guruji often says that a problem lies in identifying a life situation as a problem. Once you have identified it as a problem, there is nothing you can do about it. On the contrary, if you do anything about it, you will only mess it up further. Let us draw a parallel of this with one another Eastern mystic culture – Zen Buddhism.
In the Zen culture, when a new seeker comes in and asks the master – ‘Oh master, I seek to be enlightened, please guide me’, the master takes a baton and gives the fellow a hard knock on the head. The seeker more often than not gets the point and walks away. By itself, the master’s action defies our understanding. But hidden beneath is a very sound logic.