Spirituality, Seekers and Truth

Spirituality is just a name for a deep thirst for truth...to find it, experience it and become it. That’s what spirituality really is and that’s what drives seekers on a path, sometimes delirious, sometimes ecstatic and sometimes downright crazy.

Many, in their thirst for ‘truth’, forget their hunger for all those things that once used to be the central focus of their lives, their raison d’etre! The search, the thirst and the desire to seek out that which fuels all desire, to identify it, catch it and then exorcise it like priests do demons in churches and shamans in their dark, mysterious caves, consumes seekers to an extent that they willingly lay aside all that used to comfort them. They came to the realization at some critical point in their lives that comforts were really not comforting at all, that living a ‘good’ life somehow felt like living a lie and that it really did not enrich their lives in any significant way. If anything, it made them poorer, much poorer, not in their bank accounts but in some unseen account deep inside their beings. And, once a human being looks within and catches a glimpse of an inner eldorado, how can he waste his life searching for that which itself has no real basis? Seekers are often adventurers who set out in their dinghies, looking for the new, the real promised land, a land that no one else promised would be a land of opportunities, but one that they identified somehow, deep within. Once a seeker sets out in search for truth, there’s no saying how long he will be out on the dusty road, unkempt, disheveled, unfed, cold, lost and thirsty. Indeed, it’s the very thirst that fuels them for once the thirst is slaked seeking might come to a dead-end! And, it does happen to many seekers. They do chance upon an oasis in their search and delirious as they would have likely been, settled for the rewards of the oasis in a desert they’ve long wandered lost and dejected. Truth does not present itself on a platter for the weak of heart and resolve. In fact, truth has a way of slipping out of the very hands of even those who believe they have found it because when one does find it, it doesn’t identify itself as the ‘real thing’. It could be so humble, so unassuming that the finder might not even consider it anything at all. But there are those that are not easily shaken off. If at all they do chance upon an oasis, they may stop to take a drink, fill their canteens with a generous supply of the drink of Gods and continue on their way, knowing what they found was nothing more than an oasis. As one continues along the path of spirituality, the genuine and true seeker will find that he is not the same person that set out on a journey somewhere some long time ago in the past. He’s changed, he’s transformed. And, the transformation happened not because he discovered ‘truth’ but because he did develop an uncanny ability to recognize those things that might masquerade as truth or, at least a relative truth but they are not truth. This knowing is what transforms them because earlier he had lived life considering only lies as truth. As the seeker plods on or sails on, all those little things that used to matter a great deal to him, stop mattering at all...And then, suddenly, out of the blue, he begins to see...and he sees his own truth. His search may then end but life goes on...and the seeker of truth, the one on the spiritual path, lives...like the Buddha deep in his heart! - rajyogi (Rajesh Kanoi)