The path should also choose you

Spiritual path has been called the path of light and fire by Swami Rama; light denoting the wisdom that you gain and the fire denoting the difficulty in walking the path. For me, the journey is more important than the destination. Most of us spend a lot of time trying to choose a path, a Guru, weigh the advantages; judge our experiences and results. All these activities lose their significance the moment we realize that we are not the center of the universe. Among the grand scheme of things played by the Creator we are just a speck of dust. The moment we understand this and accept this, the question “Have I chosen the right path?” magically turns around to “Has the path chosen me?”
There are millions of paths. Some lead to God; some lead to Hell; some lead to nowhere; some are just intermittent paths. A Sadhak walks on a combination of these paths and that is why each Sadhak’s journey is unique and different. If you are walking on the Satvik path, you have to be a Satvik person. Your thoughts and actions should be Satvik. Your values, believes and philosophy have to match the path. You must be strong enough to walk on the path and endure all the pains. Only then will the path accept you. If not, it will mercilessly throw you out; you will land somewhere; you will have to recover and find a new path that matches your temperament. Just claiming that you are walking on Satvik path is of no avail. If you are walking on the yogic path then you have to accept that there will be no miracles. Miracles are against the rules of nature and yogic path is the acceptance of the rules of nature and quickening your evolution by the power of Sadhana. I do not know if miracles happen or not but if you seek them yogic path will only lead you to disappointment.
As the journey proceeds, you will see the results of progress yourself. On a Satvik path, you will see that your inner Self is becoming better gradually. On the outside your health; wealth will keep fluctuating based on the Karmic laws, but in the inside you will be achieving more peace and distributing it all around you. Yogic path will not make your pains and miseries go away but will make you strong enough to endure them. Maturity is nothing but the ability to accept all the joys and sorrows on the path and not trying to avoid them. When maturity grows fully in the inside of your persona, you will be able to accept death with little fear or protest, more so welcome it with total joy…
A recent incident exposed my immaturity and humbled my pride. My journey took me on a path in the remote mountain peaks of the Himalayas. I was caught alone on a narrow cliff connecting two mountain ranges when fear incarnated on me. I had accented half the cliff and seen that the steep precipice below was at least a couple of kilometers. A hundred steps were needed to cross or to return. Each foot hold was a couple of feet higher vertically and the ground was loose. The grass was slippery and wet and my legs were shaking out of control. There were no markings and I did not know if I was on the right path to make the crossing. If not I had to backtrack and navigate through another branch of the maze. The descent was the real scary part. I had effortlessly run down steeper paths in the past but today I was on all my fours. In the waking state I had bragged that I was fearless and death was not the worst thing that could happen to you. But today my scramble made me suspect my own sincerity. I had done many more dangerous daredevil stunts but today fear had made me an animal. I found a ledge with some solid ground to sit. I took off my backpack and tried to relax. For twenty minutes I tried all the yogic tricks that I had learnt in the past fifteen years to calm my mind but nothing worked.
“Don’t worry I am there” said atman.
“You are there and I am here, and that exactly is the problem”, said the mind.
“There is no you and me. It is just me everywhere”.
“True, but when it hurts, I have to bear all the pain”.
“Nobody is going to get hurt. Just calm down and you will be able to proceed”.
“That is what I have been doing for the past twenty minutes but my legs are not stopping to shake”.
“You know that you had been on worse cliffs and worse situations”.
“Yes but today my only gear is a pair of shoes and the soles of each of them are held in place by one single nail. If I slip, not even a helicopter rescue mission would be able to find my bone powder. More likely it might be a couple of years before another human strays into these lands. Nobody even knows that we are here. It was a complete secret mission to seek God, remember?”
“In that case you will die but that is not the end of things and what more better way to die than seeking truth in the Himalayas”.
“True, but what if I don’t die and I am just stuck hanging in between. It is starting to drizzle and I have neither the food nor the clothes to spend the night”.
“These things affect just the body. There is more to you than meets the eye. Prepare to meditate till the end of time”.
“The past fifteen minutes I have not managed to meditate for a single second and you just said that this is the peak of physical conditions till the end of time that I would come to know”.
“We are now covered by the clouds and you cannot see anything other than one step down. This is a boon in disguise. So descend one step at a time and you will be able to make it back”.
“Yes, I will try but I can see the valley below even with my eyes closed and even my limbs know how deep below it is”.
“Focus; live in the present! The next step is your present. Do not think further”.
“Yes, but after 10 steps down what if I realize that I had sidetracked and there is no step down”.
As this conversation went on for millions of years, Swami Dayanand Giriji’s words made new sense to me. Samadhi is the state of union with God. Every living being gets to meet God in deep sleep indiscriminately. What distinguishes real yogis is their ability to meet God at will. For meditation to be really useful, one should be able to meditate at any given time, at any given place, in the presence or absence of any person or object. Only then will meditation become and useful tool. I laughed down upon myself in this situation and felt what Karna went through his final battle. The only time he needed all those things that he had accomplished in his life, nothing would come forth to his memory. I suddenly felt humbled that all my accomplishments were so trite. What dawned cannot be put into words nor expressed. But I understood that the yogic path is all about disciplining the mind. There will be many a time a thin glass wall between you and your goal; you and Him; between wakefulness and Samadhi; whatever you call it. It seems that you have almost reached it but when the final moment arrives all your preparations seem to be in vain. The yogic path is all about training the mind, training yourself so that your meditation does not fail when that moment arrives. Till that happens you have to keep training.
As a kid when I had heard our damsel in distress, Draupadi call out to Krishna for a Saree, I had exclaimed, “What a fool she is! If she could call God and He would grant her wish, why ask a Saree when she clearly knew that Moksha was the real thing”. Now even if I succeeded in my secret mission, I was not sure what I would ask as I was so caught up in the moment. I laughed down again at my vanity realizing that I was no better than anybody. Very humbling but true! The physical connotation of these things had a deep meaning in my spiritual journey and this is how I learnt something about “My Path”.