7. Universal truth
Q. What is the ultimate purpose of life?
A. TO BE HAPPY. To realize that, at the core, we are happy and blissful beings and to find our way back to being absolutely happy, like a baby. How we get there can be different, but thats the ultimate purpose. This is enlightenment.
The concept of enlightenment always felt so out of reach for me. Every time I came across it, I immediately distanced myself for 3 primary reasons.
- Coming from an orthodox brahmin family in India, I based my entire adult identity on renouncing religion and all parts of it, including spirituality. It felt like a non-inclusive/elitist status available for a select few that sat on a moral high horse and I wanted nothing to do with it.
- I only remembered images of yogis that meditated for so long that trees/caves grew around them or how the Buddha had to go through multiple life times to finally reach Nirvana. It sounded really extreme. Renouncing everything become a monk and meditate didn’t feel like an option in my quest to heal the planet.
- The Commercialization of spirituality didn’t help either. To scale the usage in the west, they introduced meditation as a way to reduce stress/anxiety etc in daily life; which is true, but on a very superficial level. Even though it helped calm my mind and feel centered momentarily, it didn’t really sound like doing 10minutes of headspace was going to help me reach nirvana anytime soon.
2020 was quite hard for me, like most other people. I spent all day looking at news about how poorly migrant workers in India were treated (videos of people being sprayed by pesticides, people walking for a few hundred kms to get back home etc), the BLM protest walk would pass through my NYC lower east side apartment everyday. I couldn't go back home to India. I’d just broken up with my partner of 1.5years and felt really uprooted. Nothing grounded me, I was struggling to find a reason to live. I contemplated suicide for a few weeks, but deep within, I knew it was not the best option. I took a course on suicide prevention, I knew there was another way. So I took a one way ticket to SF, where my closest friends live. Reaching there helped me realize that I was just lonely. Isolation isn’t easy on extroverts.
After a few weeks, I no longer wanted to kill myself. I felt pretty grounded, but I also knew there was more to life than just doing really well at work, having a good work life balance and being in nature. I never learnt how to be with myself. I didn't really know how to love myself outside of treating myself to good food, great hikes and spa days. Everything i knew was externally facing, I didn’t know what it meant to look and live within myself. I discounted all the eastern ways of living due to my upbringing, but I felt myself looking for a master to help me.
Like they say, ‘When the student is ready, the teacher will appear’. I got an invitation to go to a meditation retreat while was going through the process of deepening my self awareness. I immediately said yes. The retreat was life changing, here’s what stuck with me the most.
According to my guru (and a lot of Vedic texts), there are 3 states of being,
1. A totally blissed out state where you are happy and can be compassionate to all beings.
2. State of just going through daily motions of life without mindfulness
3. State of being consumed by emotions (ego, anger, jealousy, attachment, hatred) that stop you from realizing your true nature aka happy baby.
Enlightenment is nothing but the process of being able to reach ultimate state of happiness, by gradually being able to let go of ego/anger/jealousy/attachment/hatred through daily meditation.
You can move between these states constantly unless you really commit to the practice everyday. It is not easy and may take years to clear out the “impurities”, but at least its not exclusive or unreachable like I believed.
Surrendering to concepts that are not linear or that are yet to be proven by science is hard. But understanding that we all want to be happy at the end of the day sounds about right. So… will you come join me in my quest to be enlightened? :)
