IN QUEST OF THE TRUTH
In our journey to find God, the most important challenge is to overcome ignorance and to realize the truth. For 46 years, I thought I knew the truth. What was there to know beyond what I already knew? We human beings are ignorant, but there is a bigger problem. We are ignorant of our ignorance.
Our ego makes us think we know everything. 'I know who I am and why I am here. I have goals and I want to be happy and successful. I have educated myself from the best university and I have all the knowledge.' This claim of our ego, most unfortunately, makes us remain in darkness. All the bookish knowledge in this world doesn't help us realize the truth because our Ego along with our Mind becomes the very ME that stops us from the truth.
One day my Spiritual Master, my Guru in reply to one of my questions said that I was an idiot, an ignoramus. I knew nothing about the reality of life. Because I deeply loved Dada, my life coach, I followed his advice and went in quest of the truth.
It took me 2 years in solitary retreats in the mountains to find answers to these questions. One day, I experienced my moment of spiritual 'aha!' and it looked like the pieces of my spiritual jigsaw puzzle fell into place.
Like anybody else, I too wanted to be happy. I was a successful businessman for 25 years and thought that I was the happiest man in the world. Actually, I was! But something was missing. My Master provoked me and asked if I knew what the purpose of my life was. Would I just live and die? Little did I know that I knew nothing.
The questions that formed my quest for the search for truth, made me study every possible religion. I read every scripture, followed Spiritual Masters and philosophers. I even studied the life of the Buddha and read ancient scriptures like the Upanishads.
Most of us don't realize that we seek everlasting happiness while we experience happiness only in cycles. There is pleasure and pain, just as there is loss and gain. We pass both success and failure on the highway of our life and ultimately, one day, we die. We earn and earn, only for others to burn what we earn. While we know death is certain, we don't stop to understand the truth about it. What will happen after death? Where will we go? Where did we come from? Why were we born as a male or female, an Indian or an American, to specific parents, in a specific city? We don't contemplate to find the truth. We don't discover who we truly are because we think we already know the truth.
All through life, we pray to a God. We don't know where this God is, but we blindly follow the herd. We dare not ask questions about God because it is considered blasphemy. So we just live and we die. We go to our temple, our mosque, our church, but we don't search. If we really loved our God, we would seek God, want God so much that we wouldn't let anything stop us from realizing God.
Very few of us are lucky. We realize the truth. Most often, a search, a Talaash or quest, leads us to our intuitive realization. The search for truth opens the door to investigate, 'Who am I?' and 'Who is God, where is God and what is God?' It is the quest that reveals the truth about birth and death, about suffering and pain, about rebirth and Karma, about the body-mind-Soul and about Liberation and Enlightenment.
Most of us, about 99% of the people in the world in fact, do not find it necessary to go on a quest. We live, we exist, and we die. We don't realize that the very 'I' who thinks it’s 'me' and believes everything is 'mine' is stopping us from discovering the true purpose of our life. We permit the cosmic illusion to hide the truth as we believe the myth that it projects. Along with the mind, the ego not only fails to discover who we truly are but continues to live in ignorance and we pray to a God that is born from mythology. When we go in quest, not only will we realize the truth about who we are, and experience self-realization, we will also start our journey of discovering God. Once we do, we will experience God-realization as we evolve on the spiritual path.
If we do not go on a quest, we will just die and most of us will think it's 'game over!' Some of us are fortunate. Our quest takes us to a study of death, of rebirth, and how this entire world continues to exist generation after generation. Some of us are fortunate to go on this quest and find answers to the questions, 'Who?' 'What?' 'Why?' The rest of us, just live and die.