The sage who showed me the path

I wrote my personal experience in my previous article “You don’t’ die”, which was just the beginning of a great transformation into my life. When I witnessed my own image in the mirror for a split of a second, it was my rebirth. I must say I was born again. What really happened was a total annihilation of my personality and I looked at my own image with so much indifference in that brief moment. That was the moment of transformation. Suddenly I realized that it was my body that reflected on the mirror and yet I lost a sense of ‘me or I’ for a short moment and witnessed the image, as if it belonged to somebody else. That sense of witnessing continues till today and it transformed me and the world around me completely. I am absolutely convinced that I am not the body but something else. What is that ‘something’ is a question that is nagging me constantly till I delved deeply into my conscience? When you believe that you are not the body and start witnessing your body and its behavior, then you go through whole new experiences in your life and you change forever. Imagine your body commits a crime then you become a witness and when you body has to go through a punishment, you may feel compassionate but you agree that the body should be punished. The witnessing voice becomes powerful. There is no sense of attachment or ego. You judge your body with detachment. Like Jesus said, if one part of your body commits a sin, then cut off that part. It is better to live without that part which committed the sin rather than live with that part. In Sanskrit, it is called ‘Vairagya’, a dispassionate attitude towards life. You live in a society but never mix with the society like a ‘lotus leaves, which are permanently floating on the water, yet it never get wet’. I was not born as a Christian but I used to read bible occasionally and many times wondered about the ‘parables’ and ‘preaching’ of Jesus. Some of them never made sense to me then. I clearly remember few of them: Jesus once told his disciples “To tell you the truth, you will not be able to see the kingdom of God if you are not born again”. In another incident he quotes “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” On another occasion Jesus said to a man,”Follow me”. But the man replied, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God”. He clearly implied through these sayings that you are not just a body but a spirit. If you don’t realize that you are not the body then you are just a carcass. Most of us live and die as carcass without questioning ourselves ‘Who am I?” even once in our entire life time. This is an important question and you need to seek an answer to this question with great earnestness and integrity. We all live with family, friends and colleagues in a society and we take many things for granted. We claim to be scientifically advanced and we believe we can solve all our worldly problems with wealth and richness. We donate few thousand dollars to charity and feel good about it. Do all these things make any sense? Bhagwad Gita says “You were not in this world before you were born and you will not be here after death. How can the one who lived briefly in this world can be eternal?”

If we carefully think about human life on earth, it makes absolutely no sense, if we are to die and never be born again. What is the purpose of this life then? Hinduism clearly says that “every beginning has an end and every end has a new beginning”. Death is only a transition but not a termination. Gita says that ‘Death is like getting rid of an old dress’ and ‘rebirth is like wearing a new dress’. Will anybody cry to get rid of an old dress and wear a new dress? Death is a constant reminder that we have to get rid of this old dress one day but you need not wear a new dress, if you are not going to be born into a new body of flesh and bones. You can become a spirit and become one with God into an eternity, your original form. It is called ‘returning to your source’.