Yesterday, I was not feeling too well due to a medical test that will require a couple of days to recover from.
My meditation session after the test took me from feeling rough to a state of absolute peace and silence. Stillness. And in that stillness, a few things crystallized with absolute clarity.
I am no longer a seeker.
Because I have nothing to seek.
All those years of work—of chasing accomplishment to fit into constructed identities: dutiful son, husband, father, family man, entrepreneur, architect, systems and process designer, spiritual aspirant, and many others—were necessary to get me to where I stand today.
I have nothing to prove, because who am I proving anything to?
I have nothing to compete in, because who am I competing with?
I have no desire to chase wealth or fame, because I learned viscerally on that day in December 2023 that when the chips are down, all that falls away.
And in that falling, meaning becomes clear.
I understand that my life henceforth is not one of acquisition, but subtraction.
Subtraction of all that is extraneous to the journey—the unnecessary baggage I have been carrying.
I need no Guru, because the silence/stillness is the only Guru that matters.
I need no study of spiritual literature for the purpose of becoming more enlightened—if there is even such a thing. I can study the classics simply because I enjoy them. Period.
Having had the privilege of growing up around a few people who elevated pain, suffering, martyrdom, and drama to an art form of Dalíesque proportion, I understand clearly and viscerally now that happiness is a choice.
It is not found externally.
It is found in choosing to be happy, and in understanding the central role the mind plays in all unhappiness and suffering.
To be human, to be embodied, is—by definition—to live with the inevitability of physical pain.
Pain is inevitable.
Suffering, however, is entirely optional.
This is what has enabled great men and women to endure unimaginable pain and deprivation in concentration camps and still endure—because enduring, too, is a choice. Not an easy one. Not a trivial one. But a choice nonetheless.
I understand the nature of death with clarity. It is a state that all who are born will pass through—yet another inevitable stage in the journey.
Through this acquaintance with death, I understand the nature of fear. I see clearly now that all fear is ultimately the fear of loss and death. Accepting this is a vaccine against fear.
I understand that I do not need to chase enlightenment, whatever that means. I do not need to chase “states of consciousness” or superpower siddhis. Why would I?
Enlightenment, if the word is to mean anything at all, is found in silence and stillness that are accessible on demand. That silence, in that moment, is it. Nothing else needs to be chased.
In the language of mathematics, enlightenment—for me—is not a Dirac delta¹ at some arbitrary point in time. It is a continuous integration: a summation of all the discrete moments spent abiding in silence and stillness.
No need for an ever-growing collection of dikshas², initiations, or accumulated spiritual certifications. All of it, I’ve found, is absent in silence and stillness—and therefore meaningless.
This I know.
I also know that there will be days when the mind will attempt to assert its tyranny through a litany of terrors—what-ifs, desires, imagined futures. And I know that returning to silence and stillness is the antidote.
Nothing to chase.
Nothing to acquire.
Nothing to gain that isn't already here.
Nothing to fear.
Yes, I know that saying “nothing to fear” is easy. The point is not to banish fear permanently. It is to recognize, in this moment, its nature. And return to this recognition in every moment henceforth, through awareness.
Fear is the monster under the bed.
It disappears when one looks for it.
Looking back at life, I see that it has always “worked out.” And I see now that even that phrase—worked out—is itself a construction of the mind, a mental model.
All models are provisionally useful, within narrow domains. Extrapolating them beyond those domains is a reliable source of frustration and unnecessary suffering.
The model is not the thing being modeled.
The map is not the territory.
All that is necessary is to remember this, and to keep putting one foot forward at a time—letting the future take care of itself.
This is a note to my future self, more than anything else. A reminder that the trains³ headed for destinations of disappointment, frustration, anger will still arrive. Boarding them or not is a choice, an exercise of free will.
And yes, the inevitable unconscious boarding of some of these trains will occur.
It is part of being human.
But it is also possible to cultivate awareness that enables me to recognize the train I've boarded and to exit at the next station, without journeying to that particular destination.
The journey continues...
Footnotes:
¹ A Dirac delta is an idealized mathematical function that is zero everywhere except at a single point, where it becomes infinite—an infinitely tall, infinitely thin spike. I use it here as a metaphor for enlightenment conceived as a single dramatic event, in contrast to a continuous process unfolding over time.
² Diksha is a Sanskrit term commonly used to denote formal spiritual initiation or transmission from a teacher to a student.
³ See my essay https://www.raajshinde.net/the-platform-and-the-trains-a-rational-case-for-meditation/
With quiet thanks to Chris Barbalis on Unsplash for the image.
