The Gift Of Emptiness

Is there such a thing as a spiritual journey? Do students of Krishnaji’s teachings feel that there is a journey from ignorance to wisdom, from slavery to freedom? In the sense in which K uses the word, there is no journey at all. Since I first heard K (and fortunately or unfortunately for me, it was also the last time), I honestly feel that there has been no inner progress. I have learnt new ways of expressing myself, can write more copiously, and can talk about the teachings, their deeper implications with ease and confidence. But that’s all. More than this, I have not understood.

K rightly says that the first step is the last step. I am afraid I have not taken even the first step yet. The first step is a step out of the stream of ignorance or unfathomable darkness and then there is light. It doesn’t matter how far one has travelled in the realm of darkness, for how many years, how seriously and how passionately. Similarly, it doesn’t matter how freely and for how long has one been residing in the domain of freedom. Darkness and freedom are not related. Are they? They aren’t. At least this is what K says.

Now let me talk a little about the mundane aspects of the journey. I did hear K live in Kolkata when he visited that wonderful city in 1982. That was his first and last visit to the city of joy. While returning from the venue of the talk, I boarded the wrong bus that took me further away from where I had to go. So, in fact I lost my way. Both literally and metaphorically after listening to this strange person. As a teenager, I sat amidst a curious crowd of baffled seekers and could hear a loud voice coming from the skies above. I could hear K’s voice coming from all directions, and it was not because of some weird public address system.

One thing that immediately came to my imaginative mind was that this man knows about God and that he is talking about Him, so in a way, I am listening to God Himself or Herself. It was a strange thought, but it did take root in my mind as I read more and more of his books. Like a God, he did leave a lasting impact on the young mind, threatened to change the course of what one considered to be one’s life, one’s career goals, one’s priorities, one’s relationships, within the family and outside of it.

Like a powerful, ruthless God K was also a disturber of sleep. Engagement with the teachings led to serious upheavals and eventual insomnia. The teachings turn you into a rebel, though not as aggressive a rebel as K himself was, but one does begin to revolt selectively against things and people one doesn’t agree with. The teachings can also make one very clever at several things. One begins to watch one’s mind, one’s thoughts and one begins to harbor the illusion that one knows oneself. All this doesn’t happen because there is an intrinsic flaw in the teaching itself, it happens because without comprehending the devious ways of the mind completely, we introduce another element in it, that of K’s teachings and the result is often disastrous.

One may have to undergo tremendous conflict between what he says and what one is living on a day to day basis, the kind of relationships that one grows with, the values that the society imposes on you and the ease with which they are accepted by us without raising any questions. The teachings, if one doesn’t have the courage and the willingness to go the whole hog, may create a storm in the psyche that will never subside. Once one has embarked on the journey, one cannot go back to the same psychological state from where one began, and if one doesn’t continue to walk, one becomes like a spiritual Trishanku, who can neither rise up to heaven, nor fall on the solid earth and begin to live the usual mundane life.

The teachings give us the gift of our naked ignorance and heartless emptiness. They tell us to live without any psychological crutches; in a world where there is a constant emphasis on being something, the teachings declare, most emphatically that ‘happy is the man who is nothing’. It makes one question everything, everything that the mind has put a great store by, everything that the so-called soul has craved for and has found delight in, every pursuit that one has been involved in. It turns your whole life into an enormous question mark that stares you in the face wherever you go. The teachings may turn one into a perpetual outsider of Albert Camus’s novel.

K’s absolutist views often frustrate. He is too exacting, the demands he makes on the human consciousness are too extraordinary, but it is because as he rightly puts it, ‘our challenges too are extraordinary.’ If one goes deeper, the teachings also hold out strong hope. Deep down, one begins to feel that at the end of this seemingly endlessly messy and dark tunnel, there is the proverbial light. One must continue on this journey that cannot end now. One had better. One’s head is now stuck in a tiger’s jaw and one cannot pull it out. It’s now up to the tiger whether he decides to keep the head in that state till eternity, or it suddenly snaps the jaws and the head, both literally and metaphorically, is cut off, ending an egoistic life, bringing about a death which heralds a new life— a life without the stubborn presence of a heartless, egoistic head, because the jaws of life and perennial wisdom have already bitten it off.

K teaches me how to observe, how to listen, why it is important not to think too much, the importance of relationships as a mirror for learning about oneself. K teaches everything that one needs to learn. He is too different. And therefore, perhaps, too difficult for many. For those who find him easy to understand, he is difficult to live.

The teachings are an opportunity to see how the mind is full of all kinds of impediments, all kinds of cobwebs. And how they stop LIFE from entering what we so firmly believe to be our lives.