Most people unknowingly inherit the momentum of their history and act according to what has been already done a thousand times before. The endless looping only delays the birth of a sincere soul. The commitment most have to that blind repetition is the karmic chain the forest yogis choose to break. But to do that, they had to migrate away from the village, away from their family, and eventually away from themselves.
Sarup’s encounter with the forest yogi had at this point happened 11 years ago and he was now a young man of 19 years. Sarup was happy that his mother had stopped him from following that yogi into the wilderness and over time he learned to doubt the validity of that man’s magic as the village taught him the beauty of following in the footsteps of the past. Perhaps it was a way of protecting himself from regret. The fantasy of ice caves, magic powers, fire gods, and holy rivers was replaced with the responsibilities of the home. But home leads to the prospect of a simple and happy future with the people he loves most in all the universe.
Since that day Sarup had assumed his duty and carried the chains of his karma willingly, even joyously. He grew into the routine and had enough intelligence in him to love the working rhythms of village life.
Every morning the cows came home from the meadows to be fed and milked. The millet was ground to make the days flat-breads. Chai tea was served after the early morning work was done and before the sun was at its zenith the fields were tended. The days ended as early as they began and every day was the same. It was a peaceful, happy living.
Ever so often the sky would call Sarup, or a bee would fly in a certain way to remind him of that forbidden hope; Yoga. Following intuition, he would go to the village shrine and light a stick of incense to honor the divine who took the form of that bee or that cloud. The village taught him that God was everywhere and the mystery of life still existed in the familiar dirt paths of his home. None of them had to leave to be close to God. There was no need to seek the mystery.
So life inched forward and Sarup’s roots reached deeper into the fields, his family, and the village. The villagers called that other way of life, the yogi’s way, extraordinary. They weren’t jaded enough to deny its splendor but they saw the fanatical pursuit of Atman - the soul -as selfish and even worse, some saw the pursuit of the universe’s secrets as futile. Life was better lived than understood, better embraced than harnessed.
The yogis' have a different perspective. They believe all humans crave the unknown and yearn to sit as close to the truth as they can but few can handle that level of energy. They believe truth is the womb of creation. It crashes into reality with destructive force, shattering what is old to give birth to something new. The human body has to be trained for the encounter. That takes time and devotion. Most, give up along the way and then their mind rationalizes that truth is everywhere when in reality it isn’t. The truth is specific and unique. It can only exist far beyond ourselves and even further away from our own perspectives at the center of all things.
In time the seed of happiness swelled within Sarup to the point that he could no longer restrain his smile and laughter. He sang as he walked with the cows and goats back from their distant pastures, he raced the birds, and sang to the world as he worked. Everything was bliss. Preparing meals, eating meals, and cleaning up after was heaven. There was no element of his simple life that did not fill him with gratitude. The village started to believe the yogi had blessed Sarup that day, even his mother. They believed that through his eyes the yogi transmitted a fragment of truth and because of that Sarup could now sense God.
Sarup didn’t know. He didn’t care. All he knew was life was the most precious thing and now that he knew it, it’s origin was irrelevant. All that mattered was never forgetting.
His energy was contagious. Kal Ganv, Tomorrow Village, became a village of joy.
Sarup did think of that man, of course. We often remember the people that change us. Without their choosing, we build monuments to them in our hearts to remind us of their lessons. He also thought, from time to time, most often when he closed his eyes for sleep, what might’ve happened if he had followed him.
That realized yogi, covered in ash, speckled with heaven and earth, had unhinged himself long ago from his karma. His mind was dust and his soul was free. Without the walls of identity and its attachments to constrain him, he became vast with emptiness and Sarup remembered clearly the impact his presence had. It’s one thing to imagine encountering a man of perfect emptiness but it is another to stand in front of one.
He was the infinity of the night sky. He was the density of the forest. He was the wonder in unblinking eyes. But all was within a thin and dusty body that was less remembered than the emptiness within it.
There were few like him, the empty man. Uniqueness was rare itself and he, a realized yogi, was even rarer.
Everyone in the village, however, was the same. The scope of their hearts was the same, even though their hearts were now a bit more joyous than they were years ago. Despite that bursting joy, the depths of their thoughts were as they had always been. Even their minds with all its creativity only rippled with the familiarity of what was normal. Each thought was the rebirth of the routine. With no voice from the fringe to whisper something new and different they simply forgot there were deeper realms and more exciting perspectives out there.
Sarup had encountered a point of contrast that defied his views and remembered begging to be taken into that man’s liberation. He had enough courage to stand in its trajectory, which is more than what most would do. The reward was the expansion that led to his now famous joy. There was a gravity to the yogi’s peace that none in his village would ever know. He knew that if his mother had not come, that gravity would’ve pulled him in and never let him go. He thought, if his mother were there in his place, without Sarup, standing as a woman, as an individual, not as a mother, would she have gone into that empty peace, too?
The night was cool. Sarup’s belly was full of boiled lentils and potatoes. His mouth still tingled from the heat of the chutney. He drank a glass of water and prayed for the continued happiness of his family, village, and world. The winter winds were coming from further North, sliding down from the Himalaya. The cold was good for restful nights.
In his woven bed Sarup let the cool air blanket him. He fell deeper into sleep. He smiled because he was Ananda to the village, the blissful one. The barking dogs were a thousand miles away. His body was heavy. His muscles relaxed. His mind sunk below its own thoughts. But that night, just like every night, at the edge of consciousness, the nameless yogi stood with burning eyes just as confidently as he did years ago. As a soul that only loosely wore the formality of skin, he waited for Sarup and Sarup felt sorrow for not being with him. Sarup was left with the emptiness of regret and every day he tried to fill it with his duties and his happiness but it could never be filled. He would smile more, sing louder, and love greater but no matter what, it would be there reminding Sarup there is more to life than the routine. There is more to experience than the physical senses. There is a more potent success than happiness. There is a void that is meant to swallow us and only the yogis are brave enough to enter it willingly.
That night Sarup called out in his dreams. Happiness was no longer enough.
“He lives in an enchanting reality, I will not lie, Sarup. You are my son but that extraordinary world is for the animals, the beasts, the demons, and the gods. The heavenly realms are no place for any of us. Our place is with each other. A yogi doesn’t know their place in the world so they wander endlessly. They have no family,” Sarup’s mother told Sarup as they walked away from that man so long ago. “They sit and play with truths and learn magic to trick villagers away from what matters most to join them in their loneliness. They sacrifice their arms, their breath, and their voices and give them to a God that does not need them. It is all to prove their strength to themselves. So often they either come back to the village yearning for the bonds they broke or they sit stubbornly in their caves convincing themselves that the pilgrimage into the enchanting world beyond their sanity was worth the sacrifice of family.”
The yogi was serious when he told Sarup he’d return. It was a promise. A sankalpa. He would take Sarup to the mountain top’s of Shiva, to the ocean of dreams with Vishnu, to the multi-headed snake god of fear and wisdom, and to the lotus of creation when Sarup was ready – if he was ever.
It was high noon, a time of day when Kal Ganv rested to escape the Sun. Sarup found himself again at the edge of his village. His sleep that night was filled with dreams of suppressed emotions too true for waking hours. He didn’t remember the confession he made to himself but he still was unnerved. So often the feeling of hollowness that precedes growth is misperceived and then numbed. The tingle of discomfort is actually the tingle of a new truth shattering the unnecessary paradigms of an evolving persona. The yogis know that buzz as prana – the energy of truth. They live for it. They are sustained by it. They are propelled by it.
With butterflies in his stomach and prana zipping through his nerves Sarup wandered back to the outskirts of the village. His fingers were numb as if they had already been sacrificed to the emptiness of freedom. This is where the bravest children and most curious adults would go to confront a tiny aspect of that wild extraordinary world. The southern forests were right there, standing as a wall and a door.
Again, from the forest, emerged that man with ember eyes and again Sarup was reminded of his own sincere soul.
The yogi approached Sarup as if no time had passed at all, as if Sarup was not a decade older, a decade more rooted in his own life. He told him that it was time.
“Atha,” the yogi grumbled. Smoke flowed out his mouth. It carried the scent of incense.
“Now begins your instruction.”
Sarup stepped back in refusal and confusion. It was the same moment. It was the same opportunity. Sarup glanced backward. His mother was nowhere. It was only he and the God-man.
Sarup did not know that it was the same moment, the exact one. Reality is built on a wheel. This wheel is the wheel of purpose or the wheel of Dharma. As life spins along its circumference, orbiting the unknowable origin, all things are thrust back into the lessons they are meant to learn and haven’t.
“Nehin,” Sarup said weakly.
“I have duties. My father and mother are growing old. They rely on me now. My sisters have been married. I am the eldest son. Our cows are pregnant. The fields need to be seeded. There is much to do and many who depend on me.”
A voice can say what it says, a mind can think what it thinks, but a soul can look in an entirely different direction and speak very different truths.
“I am happy in Kal Ganv.”
“Happiness is not enough,” the yogi said. “Purpose is greater than joy. The whole of the universe spins upon the wheel of purpose. Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva alike are tethered to it. Happiness is only a spoke.”
The yogi’s chest swelled in 6 directions. Into the future and past, inwardly and outwardly, and towards God and the inner self!
Sarup was hypnotized. Then the yogi stopped and seemed to hold the whole sky in his swollen chest. His eyes were clear glass and behind them was the void that haunted Sarup with its invitations. The yogi knew the symmetry of the world and that what happens in the body is a reflection of the mind. When the breath is still. The mind is still. When the mind is still the world is seen accurately. And when the world is seen accurately it bows to the emptiness at the center.
The yogi held the world in stillness and then came its silence, as it always does.
In the vacuum, Sarup made his choice.
That is the beauty of silence. It only leads to truth.
In that quiet Sarup knew, he would not follow. He was no longer a cub. He had grown up into a man that was ensnared in identity and bound by attachments. He grew away from the freedom of the world as all the villagers of Kal Ganv grew.
The canopy of the jungle started moving as if the trees themselves were releasing the yogi’s breath. The gale reached them and splashed its winds into the yogi’s back throwing the ash off his grey skin, into Sarup’s eyes and face. Ash is the purest form of matter. Purified by fire. It was a blessing. It was disapproval.
Sarup flinched as the ash clung to his cornea. His eyes protected themselves and the drizzle of tears rolled down his cheeks. The yogi was still growing taller and larger. He still held his breath and still collected his power. Sarup trembled in fear, too confused and amazed to grasp that this was all impossible. The magic of yoga is not literal. Yogis are not devas. They are not gods. They are only men of unique wisdom and taste.
Another gale forced Sarup to shut his eyes. In the darkness, he too towered over the trees. The village was a point below them, and the rivers running deep into the jungle were blue veins on the face of the earth. The stars were in reach and the Sun was a candle in a small dark room.
Sarup could see a herd of elephants making their way through the forest. He could see the rocky regions of the rainbow caves. He saw the kites of village children soaring. He saw the curve of the horizon. The edge of the wheel and how small it all was. There is nothing to fear when the soul is allowed to sit in its authority. The most distant point is only a journey away.
“What is this?” Sarup asked.
It was the power of independence. It was the perspective of higher vision.
“Siddhi,” the yogi said. He knew Sarup needed evidence. This was it, the flash of ancient magic to spark a soul weighed down by its own debt.
It was still not enough.
“Come back once my brothers are older, once they can support my parents. Then I will begin and follow my soul into the extraordinary world.”
“There is no coming back,” the yogi said. “This seed has sprouted and will continue to grow in you. It is already done. You are already gone. The first petal unfolded the night you learned happiness was only a game.”
Spiritual journeys always begin with the realization of suffering and the willingness to admit the truth of pain. The final epiphany of yoga is the realization that the very pain that started our journey was the blessing.
“It may take lifetimes but the chains of your karma are crumbling. Now, the wheel of Dharma will spin faster and faster. It will force you to dig into your core. The world, your village, and your family will provide no shelter from the reality that you are being called to grow.”
