Oh, I wouldn’t say there is any one person chosen as a special one for transformation. I think every single one of our lives is a transformative journey. In LOTR itself, you can see there’s Sam for instance, an unassuming gardener who gets chosen on an errand that was not of his choosing, and he turns out to be the hero of the story in many ways. At the foothills of Mount Doom, he says “I cannot carry the ring for you, but I’ll carry you!” Or his fierce sense of loyalty brings him back up the stairs to save Frodo from the spider, despite being turned back. Or Gandalf, who goes from being Gandalf the Grey to Gandalf the White. Or Faramir, who makes the choice of letting the hobbits go free, but in the process forfeiting his life.

So at one level, we can see did these people make these choices, or was there a grander plan at work in some sense? Is there something called destiny, for instance? The Buddhists have this idea that everything is interconnected, there is no one single action happening in isolation; that everything that happens, the cause of it is the entire universe, not a singular cause as we have grown to believe.

In my own life, I feel that a lot of my critical decisions have been made for me in some sense. There have been synchronicities, there have been serendipity that have really made me move in one direction rather than the other. I have often said that I would try to look left and I end up going right. Whether it is studying at Delhi college, though that was not my first choice, or never going back to teach at Rishi Valley, though that was my plan all along. Or like I mentioned in one of my posts, “The Bricklayer’s Song” of my boss saying rubbish to me asking for time to support my mother’s health at that time, being a catalyst for me leaving Chennai and coming to Mumbai and moving away from the entire Krishnamurti structure that was there in my life at that point in time. Or even an more extreme case, the death of my brother; obviously tragic, but if it weren’t for that, I would not have gotten into spirituality as deeply as I did, would have discovered what I have discovered if it weren’t for the heartbreaking grief of his passing away.

Which is why I think the power of almost now is interesting, because you have no idea what the next moment is going to hold for us, and that uncertainty of living in not knowing is an exciting place to be—I wouldn’t say exciting, but it’s a delightful place to be because it allows for the unexpected to come and there is an acceptance that whatever appears is unexpected, even if sometimes it’s familiar.

I will end with this scene from Lord of the Rings where they’re sitting in the Caves of Moria, and I think Frodo tells Gandalf, “I wish this ring had never come to me.” And Gandalf replies to him saying, “So do all of us who live through these times, but that’s not our decision to make. All we have to decide is what we do with the time that’s given to us.” And I thought that’s such an amazing line, because it’s not just what we do with the time that’s given to us, but what do we do with the experience that is presented to us? How do we respond to that? And I think that’s the unfolding of our life from one experience to the next.

And as a side note, I have a total sucker for the Hero’s Journey and for grand old men like Gandalf who represent wisdom. Dumbledore is the other one.

Ah, I think that’s the paradox of a spiritual life. Um, on the one hand, you’ve seen something which you cannot unsee. On the other hand, you continue to have a sense of being a separate person which seems to continue to live in this world and do the various things that are happening

So it’s not something that has been resolved fully. I guess there are enlightened people for whom it’s a full-blown realization. But what happens to an ordinary person who awakens somewhat and continues to live an ordinary life? And that’s the situation I find myself in.

There is a certain dreamlike quality to life, but obviously my stomach hurts or I stub my toe or, you know, someone says something to me and I get hurt.

So one kind of straddles two worlds at the same time and it’s just that I think the emphasis has shifted. The inner world becomes more important, meditation becomes more important, you spend more time sitting quiet.

And your outer life becomes a little simpler in some sense because you’re not getting emotionally entangled. You’re not making stories out of things that happen. There’s a certain impersonality to one’s experiences. They’re not entirely mine, you’re not creating an identity out of it.

And what is a paradox is not necessarily contradictory. The paradox can be two ends of a single thing. For instance, the North and the South Pole of a magnet or feeling that one is in the world but not entirely of it.

So you’re not doing self-development, for instance. You’re not trying to become a better person. You’re trying to be anchored in silence and allowing that silence to seep into all parts of your life. That’s an entirely different approach than trying to be a better person in this world.

And you continue to do the things that you’ve always done, but you see them more as a role rather than as your identity. And I think that’s the big shift.

And ultimately you really don’t mind if something doesn’t go your way, and that’s okay.

Ooh, Matrix. I, uh, simply love the movie. I, it’s completely mind-blowing. I, there’s no way that I could have figured out what would happen once Neo takes the red pill. It’s just completely unimaginable. But like Morpheus says that I only promise to show you the truth and nothing more.

But I think the comparison kind of ends there. I, I don’t think the Wachowski brothers’ interpretation of what reality is, is what reality is. It’s obviously made for an action movie where the machines have taken over the world and human beings are subjugated, but that’s not reality. I don’t think we are living in a simulation that is generated from a machine.

So no, the reality doesn’t feel like a desert at all, so I, I, so that part of your question I would say is, is an assumption that doesn’t hold.

But the other part of the question is interesting. Would you recommend it? And there is this scene where, where Cypher is eating this steak and he says that you know, I’m putting this juicy steak in my mouth and I know it’s not real, but I still want to continue to live in this illusion.

And I think that’s the nature of this illusion, right? That it is so attractive in some ways that one continues to believe in its reality even if one suspects that it may not be so, or even for someone who maybe has had a glimpse of something, that one can lapse back into living as if this illusion is reality.

But I think I should clarify what I mean by illusion. It doesn’t mean that the world doesn’t exist, it just means that it doesn’t exist in the way that we think that it exists, that as an independent entity within which there is human beings who have brains, which has the mind, which has awareness that comes and goes. That’s the illusion.

So would one recommend it? Well, I think again, I’m not sure there’s much of a choice. It seems to me, I may be wrong, but it seems to me that life in a sense creates situations that make us turn the other way around to search for this sense of happiness that’s, seems elusive.

And if we continue to overlook that and look for happiness again in the world, then life creates another crisis for you to start looking the other way around. And so that process happens until you kind of pay heed and say, ‘Okay, now this time around I’ll look around’.

And this reality is not a desert, it’s if anything it is the source of peace and happiness. And in any case, I’m not a spiritual teacher and I cannot say what someone should or should not do. I just live from whatever understanding that I have gained through my direct experience.

Morpheus tells Neo that there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. And in the non-dual teachings, there is this use of this metaphor to illustrate the nature of this illusion, which is that you think of a rope as a snake and you get afraid of it until you see that it is a rope, and then the fear just completely disappears. You don’t have to fight the rope anymore, thinking it’s a snake. And, but the key is that you have to see it. Somebody telling you that it’s a snake doesn’t work. The seeing has to be your own.

Oh, the answer lies in your question itself. Um, it’s not so much that sadness is required, but it’s the recognition that there is sadness that is required. Uh, so often when we suppress our feelings, particularly sadness, then joy cannot express itself. And so when one says that I feel flat or I feel numb or I don’t feel anything during a process of grieving for instance, when you’ve had a loss or when you’ve obviously gone through some kind of a traumatic experience, it’s often indicative that you’re suppressing a feeling. It’s not that you’re not sad. It’s just that you’re not allowing the sadness to be felt or expressed. And this movie brings that out really well. That the moment sadness is touched, felt, acknowledged, and expressed, then joy comes back.

So personally for me, I think that was something that I could relate with straight away. I went through a phase where it was, I found it very hard to articulate what I was feeling. And I remember that I tried to lock myself in a room and to cry and nothing would come out. I just wouldn’t be able to cry. And but there was an interesting attempt because it slowly, as I tried to do that more and more, it started flowing. And I remember reading this book, maybe you should talk to someone, much later, about three years ago, and it kind of opened up the floodgates for me.

And I wrote about it in a blog to say that how I grew up watching my mother cry and I used to be ashamed of her crying, even a bit angry which is, you know, I couldn’t have a conversation with her without her dissolving into tears and it would be impossible to have a rational conversation, so to speak. But I think there was some intelligence to those tears, you know, when I look back to it, and I recognize that as it happened to me as well. Which is simply that this enormous emotional burden that one’s carrying needs venting, it needs to be removed, it needs to be expressed in some way or the other.

And journaling therefore became my vent. I mean, the fact that I’ve written upwards of half a million words is just, when I say it like that it feels like it’s nuts, you know, how much can one write and what would one write about, but that’s what I did. And it’s kind of like a personal excavation of the inside that happened. And when I met a friend last year, and I was telling her about my, you know, the whole thing with my brother and the my spiritual journey after that and I said, ‘Hey, I’m feeling quite contented in life.’ And perceptive that she was, she immediately said, ‘Hey, but I don’t see any joy here at all.’ And that has stayed with me and I would say that continues to be the case, that there isn’t an expression of joy yet. There is a sense of peace but not an expression of joy. So I sit with it and acknowledge that is there something, I don’t think I am consciously suppressing something, but I see that there isn’t an expression of joy yet. So we’ll wait and see what emerges.

Oh my god, I don’t think I can answer that question without choking up. So I’m just going to say that the ocean is calling for surrender.