Most Indians believe in reincarnation. Many Indians also venture out into the outer world in search of Gurus who we believe will guide us to a final destination where this piece of life that I call 'Me' merges or unifies with the Divine in a way that this 'Me' has everything I can possibly wish to have. For instance, having merged with the Divine, I'll have all the knowledge of the whole Universe that Physics could ever find out; I'll have all the knowledge of all Mathematical structures of thought that somehow seems to pervade the fabric of the Universe; I'll have total knowledge of all the machinations that have gone on in the mind of every man and woman since the origin of Man (and of course, the good things too!); I'll have a knowledge of how life originated, its purpose and so on. And if my needs to unify with the Divine were only restricted to knowledge - I would find that very limiting. I would also love to have the experience of the totality of humanity - what it means to intensely crave for caviar, and of course the experience of how a person shapes and cultivates his mind to like caviar or cockroaches or dogs or rats or anything for that matter. I'd like to have the TOTAL HUMAN EXPERIENCE! But then why restrict it to humans only? Why not have the the total experience of tapeworms and fleas and mosquitoes too!? And the birch, the elms and rose plant? Surely the Divine has all of these and He also has an experience of what it feels to be God. Now all these I desire. And in the pursuit of this I've ventured out in search of a Guru who promises to give us enlightenment.
In this pursuit, I've found the teachings of Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev very promising. Yet I have a basic question that is nagging me. Sadhguru was born in 1959 at Mysore in the Karnataka state of India. Say in the year 2125 A.D., Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev is reborn say in Sangli, Maharashtra in India and is christened Jayanth Kaakodkar. Let us say he is given just an average Hindu religious upbringing that is not too spiritual but is weakly god-fearing as most of us have been given. Say in the course of his early life he is a very poor student and is frequently thrashed by his parents and is humiliated in front of his relatives. Let us assume that his yearning to come first in the class intensify to an extent that he regularly prays to god for blessing him with the first rank. Let us assume that despite his best prayers he comes in the bottom 5% of his class though he sincerely wishes that he be able to study with all his best efforts but just cannot do it because he can scarcely comprehend what is going on in the class. Let us say that this sort of thing has happened because he has been made to jump four grades and with the consequent lack of a good foundation, he just cannot grasp what is going on in class. So when he finds that despite all his prayers and his best intentions to do well at studies, let us say he continues to suffer humiliation till he grows up to be a teenager of 16 or 17 years.
And let us say around this time (2152 AD) Jayanth Kaakodkar gets to be influenced by writers like Bertrand Russell and Karl Marx and all the thinkers who foster his agnosticism initially and others like Camus and the like who promote his atheism at a later stage. His own experiences too have largely convinced him that his most ardent prayers are largely unanswered and as a consequence he has profound doubts whether God exists. Let us say Jayanth turns a strong atheist.
Assume Jayanth Kaakodkar has worse experiences as an atheist and he feels that his bad experiences as a lukewarm believer was much better than his experiences as an atheist! And let us say that in addition he has some mystical experiences that convinces him that the "phenomena in the world are too strange for our simple philosophies". Let us say Jayanth Kaakodkar around the year 2160 AD (i.e. when he is around 35 years old) turns a 'seeker' rather than a 'believer'. And assume around the year 2165 AD (when Jayanth Kaakodkar is around 45 years) he comes across the teachings of a certain Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev who was born almost 200 years ago and he is ravished by his teachings.
Let us say, since most of his friends are atheists, he very cautiously and very warily breaks it out to them saying "Hey guys! You know what? I came across these writings of a certain Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev and I find his writings very attractive and I'm thoroughly impressed !!"
Could Jayanth Kaakodkar in 2165 who was Jaggi Vasudev in 1999 be advertising his own works unconsciously?
Which reminds me how a friend of mine who was a fledging dentist in Bangalore in the 1970s used to operate ... (see next post)
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