The Price of Enlightenment
I once called myself a version of ‘Roadrunner’ given so much of my life has been spent travelling in one way or another, usually in pursuit some academic goal or another, and I have fairly accumulated archaeological and anthropological projects, most in South America. But probably and more covertly, all this journeying has ultimately been about the same life purpose anyway, which is to say the highest spiritual goal it eventually became formalised into in 2019, to now. Each life stage and the journeys made in them came to evolve me as a person further, perhaps in the way that a caterpillar sheds its skin on its way to becoming a butterfly. Travelling this way always puts you in touch with your deeper self, and that in part is what Pilgrimage is all about.
A Facebook friend once commented, not in any critical way, that I lead an enviable life and I suppose to outside observers it must seem that way. I would check in at whatever airport I was starting my journey from together with the ultimate destination, generating those impressive trans global arcs. Another friend once said he always associated me with these immense arcs from one side of the world to the other.
Yet this high profile travelling to distant exotic locations hides an important truth. It has come at the cost of what most people count as a normal life, more especially since 2019, when I gave up all pretensions to keeping a home and associated possessions, or aspirations to a continuing career.
Do I ever regret any of this, and the sacrifice of what most people do value as important in life? Mostly not. Mostly! There are perhaps understandably times when the full force of all that has been given up comes back to test one. For that reason, the goal must always be higher than that sacrificed, it must be worth the cost and it must be true. By this I mean that ‘grand gestures’ or actions undertaken for anything other than that highest cause will never be able to sustain the duress of the test. Your humanity will undermine you. What I gave up for this was actually a worthwhile life and all the things that go into that: home, friends, family, career, nice possessions, a partner even; all those things that are counted as making a good, certainly a normal life. To the outside world I realise that I might seem crazy, maladjusted, obsessive, mainly perhaps just ‘weird’. And there are usually people you know who, with grim satisfaction laced with a certain schadenfreude, sharply remind you in those susceptible human moments, when the value of all you have let go of comes back to haunt you, that, well, was your choice! Or “you’ve only got yourself to blame!”
I don’t think I have ever sought sympathy, perhaps even understanding for these life choices that must seem so stark and quasi suicidal even to the outside world. It is the path of the renunciate after all, which is not in any way fashionable in our modern world with all its consumer imperatives. In countries like India it is something long understood, embedded in spiritual tradition as part of the pathway of Sanatana Dharma, although now, with the inexorable advance of modern global culture, it is less sought and less respected perhaps than once.
In these travel blog posts I have generally avoided specific mention or discussion of my beliefs because I accept that many people reading them do so for interest, for the adventures, the zany narratives and astute, sometimes humorous life observations that go with these. They do not necessarily want any accounts about my spiritual experiences, or the framework of interpretation that I employ to understand these. In our secular materialistic world, many people eschew discussion of what is generally still understood as ‘religion’, oft dismissed and despised by the educated rational modern mind as the cause of the world’s problems and better consigned to the irrational and irrelevant recycle bin of history.
Yet not to own one’s deeper and real reasons for living as one does and making the life choices one has is also a form of dishonesty, encouraging, as it does, a false view of that life which, however apparently exotic and entertaining, is also too readily dismissed as hedonism, or irresponsible escapism. If those of us who have different beliefs and life objectives don’t own up to them, what sort of example are we setting? I have never been an evangelist in anyway, seeking to convert unbelievers to my views, yet in life all of us depend to some degree or another upon inspiration or example. God knows, legion are those that promote worldly notions of the estimable, you cannot avoid them. From birth through childhood and onwards our perceptions are shaped by the images that the commercial world directs at us. By the time we have reached adulthood we are all effective addicts. And now the very concept of what is sacred has been parasitised to serve this world and its value system.
This is what this journey of renunciation is all about. It deconditions you and puts you back in touch with those timeless truths. You might be in the world, but that world no longer has any power over you, to define who, how or what you should be. That is moksha, the path of liberation, freedom. But, as I have sometimes stressed, real freedom of this kind is the most expensive thing you will ever have. Because you will pay for it with everything you have!
(A longer version of this post called ‘Roadrunner. Before the Road to Salvation’ was first published in In the Spirit 07/06/22)
