Resolution of energies that lingered longer than they should have
I was brought into the spiritual realm by a sudden awakening in 2017.
Before that, spiritual reading was a tiny part of my life. After it, it became the soul of what I read and what I expressed.
My awakening was too young and fragile. It fell into the trap of spiritual materialism.
I acquired many notions of what is spiritual and what is not.
I travelled across South India, visited ashrams, and met many so-called enlightened beings.
A few of them are my masters today—because those few slapped my face awake.
Others offered a comforting idea: that there is always a new horizon, no matter how enlightened you are.
The books appeared rich, authoritative, and progressive. Yet they framed enlightenment, which is a contradiction in itself.
Not all enlightened beings are Gautam Buddhas.
I had intellectual admiration for the people I encountered in books.
Silently, I was trying to become what I was not.
The problem with the spiritual ecosystem is not belief—it is performance.
You must walk like this, eat like this, sit like that.
Pretentious, moralistic spirituality.
I believed accumulated knowledge would lead me to the truth.
But the truth was simpler and harsher:
there was nothing and no one I needed to become.
***
I was fascinated by the world I had stepped into.
The masters, the ashrams and monasteries, the myths and stories around them—everything.
I was even more fascinated by the idea that I could now explore parts of human consciousness that remain dormant for most people.
I was intrigued by questions of the mind and the soul.
What is real and what is unreal?
Is life really an illusion?
Do these masters and authors speak from lived experience, or is it poetic abstraction?
What does it truly mean to flourish?
I had reached the destination spontaneously.
But I fell into the trap of defining and acknowledging everything through logic.
The remnants of the mind prevailed, most active just before it disappeared.
It took almost ten years.
The smoke of its cremation occupied more space in me than the mind itself.
My vision was blurred, and I was deceived.
I was the best disciple of my masters—until spirituality itself began to feel plastic.
A castle in the sky.
The “spiritual life” and its rituals felt borrowed.
I brought this up with my master—that the rituals, discipline, and rhythm of the ashram were not natural for me.
“Be in the rhythm of where you are,” he said.
I decided to change my location.
***
Being happy has become a cult.
The progress of life is promoted and advocated as “being happy.”
This is the most depressing thing you can do in life.
The deeper I went in pursuit of happiness, the more fractured my psychology became.
It traps you in a vicious loop of disappointment and sorrow.
You keep expecting happiness, and life takes its own course.
There is no single definition of flourishing or happiness.
Some find it in solitude, some among people.
Some live luxuriously in a tent, others in palaces.
There is nothing spiritual or non-spiritual about anything.
Whatever is served in front of you is your experience of life, and you were destined to experience it.
If the internal state of being is spontaneous, the external circumstances are bound to be unpredictable—and sometimes surprising.
So I embraced life as it is, abandoning the thousand-year-old lineages of Zazen and Mahayana.
Because discipline is not natural.
A tree does not decide it will grow only an inch today. It simply grows.
We try to measure it—how much, how long.
Living otherwise is fantasising about life,
whether materialistic, spiritualistic, or spiritual materialism.
No two thinkers in history have agreed on a single definition of mind, soul, or flourishing.
Everything is reduced, denied, romanticised, or repackaged.
Socrates says flourishing is living a happy life.
Aristotle says it is leading a virtuous life.
Søren Kierkegaard came closest to what I could reconcile:
“Be the self which one truly is.”
***
I remember doing sand art in a Zen ashram, in the stone garden.
A German friend was so moved by it that she gifted me a sketchbook.
I opened the sketchbook she gave me as a gift, and it read:
“Be what you are” (Sei, wer du bist).
Ideas were built on older ideas, not lived truths.
The gift unveiled and peeled many layers.
Like a lotus that opens and falls apart, holding nothing.
Beauty.
That sentence ejected me from the ashram.
Life is where you are, and I was searching for it in thousands of places, travelling miles away from home.
I had wrong ideals of spirituality.
A monk who deliberately lived as a beggar.
A master who resented life among people.
They stayed in the wonderland of spirituality and never returned to the market.
Moreover, I was on a quest to become a person.
The real journey of life is from nobody to nobody.
From death to death, not life to death.
Somewhere in this process, I had missed myself.
I found myself returning to one sentence:
“Be what you are.”
***
I finally got what I wanted.
The phantoms of my mind were gone.
I took off my robe and headed back home—externally and internally.
Becoming the self which one truly is.
Not self-improvement.
Not transcendence.
Not enlightenment.
These are ideas—beliefs that tremble and collapse before life itself.
If you wish to be someone other than yourself, you spend life trying to become someone else.
If you fail, you despise yourself.
If you succeed, you abandon your true self.
Either way, despair follows.
To escape despair, you must accept who you are.
Being who I am is the opposite of despair.
It is a true release from bondage and suffering—physical, mental, and spiritual.
If you are a butcher, be a good one.
If you are an artist, be a good one.
It is that simple.
To be a good one means to be the way you naturally are.
You are the missing part of the equation of this world.
If you try to be someone else, who will become you?
The world will miss you, and you will miss yourself.
You will search for the self in a place where it does not exist—
and wander endlessly.
***
Jiddu Krishnamurti rejected all spiritual authority and systems; he insisted on direct perception without ideology.
George Gurdjieff emphasised conscious labour, work, and effort as essential to awakening.
Being where life is—that is where you find yourself.
When I came back home, I returned to the market.
I sold vada pavs, spent time in the garden, and met people.
I had to confront my own false identity.
I had to let go of the part of the mind that kept asking what this meant.
There is no becoming.
There is only happening.
Whatever is happening will never happen again.
What unfolds in front of you is life—not the one you lived, and not the one you wish to live.
To live is not to hold each breath dearly, but to let life live itself.
Give up the idea of living in a certain way, and let life happen.
You are happening to life; life is not happening to you.
See your reflection without the mind.
Let it be direct—without the veil of conditioning.
Material conditioning and spiritual conditioning are equally dangerous.
Letting go of borrowed wisdom meant losing intellectual safety.
I had to abandon the comfort of appearing “aware.”
***
I returned to life, and to my surprise, there was so much more to be resolved.
Letting go of the false spiritual endeavour opened the gate to stagnant energies waiting to be released.
Acute illness struck me, as if energies of this life and many lives were exiting the body, seeking resolution.
Not through metaphysical escape routes, but through something more real—physical.
Life was embracing me without hiding behind psychology or spirituality.
No philosophising or romanticising anymore.
No sanitisation or pretence of being kind, wise, or pure.
Empty.
***
It took five more years for my bodily illness to completely disappear.
Last week, all my tests came out normal.
I am free from the illness of knowledge of past lives and ancestors.
I am free from the intellectualisation of life and the idea of living a life.
I live as it comes.
I watch, as it goes.
There is nothing sacred or spiritual about it.
There is nothing mundane or boring about it either.
It is what it is.
The pursuit of a happy life is not about trying to be happy.
It is accepting the bliss that springs out of doing nothing.
Don’t do anything.
Just be—that is enough.
Everything else will fall into its own place and happen on its own accord.
Watch.
And let go.
***