The Seeker (19 page)

Max didn’t understand.

The man repeated the gesture with both hands.

“No, no, no photograph,” said Max in Hindi. The man had likely confused him for a tourist because of his T-shirt and khakis. “Not tourist. I want to be a yogi.”

The man’s gaunt face softened. He turned around and went into a cave on the other end, easily pushing away the snow that blocked its mouth. Unlike Max’s cave, his cave was covered by fresh snowfall, not packed ice. Reassured by the presence of another yogi nearby, no matter how taciturn, Max cleared his cave with renewed vigor.

The man appeared next to him again. He gave Max a piece of paper. Max looked at it in the moonlight. It had one sentence written in many different languages:

‘I have taken a twelve-year vow of silence. Baba Ramdas.’

Max touched his heart to convey that he would respect his wishes.

Baba Ramdas gave Max a fifteen-inch-tall black stick. Max sniffed magnesium. Yes, this would work better than the matchsticks. Max held it vertical and struck his knife against it.

Baba Ramdas nodded.

Max struck again and again until he got the angle right. He was rewarded with a crackling flame. Max thrust it against the wood. It still wouldn’t light.

Baba Ramdas went back to his cave and brought four pieces of dry tree bark and a handful of pine needles.

Max followed his direction and made a platform with the tree bark. He placed the branches on it so that the ice wouldn’t wet them. Once the branches were stable, he scattered pine needles on them and ignited a spark with the magnesium stick. The wood caught fire immediately. Max threw more pine needles in and the fire rose higher. The snow melted quickly.

Max folded his hands and thanked Baba Ramdas. He tried to return the magnesium stick but Baba Ramdas wouldn’t take it. Max thanked him again.

Max stooped into the musty cave using a burning branch for light. The bats screeched their welcome. The cave was fifteen feet wide, eight feet deep, just tall enough enough for him to stand comfortably upright in. He was pleasantly surprised by how warm it was inside. Rocks jutted from the floor at odd angles but he found a flat stretch at the back. A scorpion scuttled away when he spread his sheet on the packed wet mud. His bed. His home. Max doused the burning stick and lay down on the sheet. He tried to meditate but his weary eyes closed.

In the days that followed, Max adapted slowly to the silent, inhospitable Himalayan terrain. Observing Baba Ramdas quietly from a distance, he learnt to walk over the frozen stream without falling in by pausing every few meters and exhaling sharply the air that inevitably collected in his torso. On the opposite bank, he would strip bark and needles from the pine tree and pull out from the ground the mushroom-like root he’d seen on the first day. Back in his cave, he melted large quantities of fresh snow in his stove to collect just a small trickle of water, barely enough for cooking the roots and beans. With time, he observed that the intricately shaped snowflakes trapped air in them, making snow a good insulator. Piling too much caused just the bottom of the pan to burn without melting the snow so he added just an inch at a time. He began to get more water sooner. Even so, it would be mid-day by the time he ate his first meal.

In the afternoon, he practiced pranayama, now no longer a slow, meditative breathing exercise but a frenzied grab for the oxygen he had lost foraging and walking across the stream in the thin air. Evenings were spent in performing samyama on his navel to lower his metabolism so that his heart could supply blood to his body’s extremities. Next, he focused on the
Anahata Chakra
, his heart center, reducing his heart rate so it didn’t pump irregularly in the low air pressure. Too depleted to perform samyama again, he dealt with the ever-increasing supply of spiders and scorpions by sweeping them outside the cave with a broom he’d fashioned from the pine tree. Once done, he would sit to meditate but his body felt tough and rigid like a mass of steel from the day’s exertions and sleep overcame him immediately.

Two months passed, then three. He no longer had a watch or a calendar, but somewhere in the back of his mind he always knew exactly what day it was. The winters didn’t ease. The stream remained frozen, the vegetation sparse. Max’s heart was silent like the mountains around him. He went through the day, foraging for food, making a fire, melting snow, collecting water, practicing pranayama, feeling a quiet detachment from his body and its needs yet expending effort all day to keep it fit and functioning.

When it continued to snow in April, Max contemplated going back to the plains so he could spend more time in meditation. But Baba Ramdas’s silent, majestic form held him back. What will, what concentration, he must have built in thriving alone in the mountain for twelve years. His face betrayed no strain of effort, his eyes never asked for companionship; he was alone, complete, in silent communion with the divine, the goal Max sought but which seemed to be slipping away from his grasp.

Late one night in May, Max opened his eyes after his meditation to find the cave plunged in darkness. No moonlight danced on the entrance, no cliffs shimmered in the distance. It must be later than he thought, way past midnight. His heart lifted. He had meditated through the night. Max hadn’t experienced such complete suspension of time in a while. Elated, he lay down to sleep when he smelled a strange odor—a mix of damp cloth and burning rubber. Max went to the front of the cave to investigate. His feet touched something soft, bristly, and wet. He tried to pick it up. A grunt broke the silence.

A bear.

Max froze.

The six-foot-tall bear took several hulking steps away from the front of the cave. Moonlight flooded in. It wasn’t as late as he had thought. Max stepped back, his eyes fixed on the silhouette of the bear in the soft white light.

The bear looked around with its black, beady eyes, shaking its head.

Max stood still.

The bear grunted again. Its eyes met Max’s. It came closer, thrusting its black nose, its confused face forward. Foul breath washed over Max.

Max inched backward, maintaining eye contact. His back touched the cave wall. He slid down, groping for the magnesium stick. He couldn’t find it.

The bear didn’t seem interested in Max. It crouched down and began retreating slowly when its back hit the small cave entrance. Yelping, it charged forward.

“Stop,” yelled Max, standing up and raising his hand.

The bear paused three inches away from Max. It shook its fur, spraying Max with ice flakes.

Max’s heart thudded. He breathed slowly.

The bear lifted its front legs.

Max crouched down and thrashed around for the stick.

The bear raised itself higher.

Max’s hands shook. He upturned the stones frantically.

The bear’s head collided with the top of the cave.

A roar shattered the night.

It bent down and charged Max.

Max stopped looking for the stick. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the bear, the air between them, the consciousness connecting them both.

Tat Twam Asi
.

I am That.

One consciousness. One universal energy.

A wisp of cool air enveloped him.

Shuffling steps. A shower of ice.

Max increased the intensity of his samyama
,
drowning out all sounds and sensations, just concentrating on an image of the furry face, wide eyes, and black nose in his mind.

I am Him.

We are one.

An eternity passed. Or a minute. When he opened his eyes, the bear was crouching at the mouth of the cave.

Max stood up, drowned in a wave of compassion for the scared, confused life in front of him. He picked up the magnesium stick lying at his feet and the knife beside it. He struck a flare and walked gently to the front of the cave.

The bear turned around.

Max stepped outside with him.

The bear ran toward the stream.

The chiseled cliff face shimmered like a ring in the moonlight. The boulder sparkled, dripping with snow.

The bear disappeared into the night.

Max’s eyes swept over the moon-like landscape, the ancient rocks eroded by centuries of glaciers, tall, still yet breathing and alive. Not a whisper for miles. Max turned around and walked inside the cave. He didn’t know if it was good karma or samyama that had made the bear leave. But he knew now why he had struggled with his meditation thus far. He had lost the life and death urgency that had brought him to the Himalayas. His hiking trip was over now. It was time to get back to work.

From then on, Max focused less and less on the mundane business of living. When he couldn’t collect pine needles and build a fire, he fasted. If he ran out of water, he ate snow directly without worrying if he was eating enough to be fully hydrated. Spiders and scorpions stopped bothering him when he left them in peace. If rainwater seeped into his cave and wet his bed sheet, he accepted it for what it was and didn’t build a fire to dry it. He stopped his routine of washing clothes every three days. Instead, he spent more and more of his time immersed in meditation. Early in the morning, he sat outside the cave and performed samyama on the sun, flowing his entire living, breathing energy into it. His skin blazed and he became one with it and the stars, planets, and galaxies that surrounded it.

In the beginning, there was no space, no time, just a shimmering, vibrating energy, the sum of everything, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, right and wrong, active and dormant, containing millions of possible universes within it. The energy fluctuated, helpless with its desire to experience itself, and out of the hundreds of possible outcomes, the universe we lived in came to be. The energy now lived both within and without the universe. The elements in the manifested universe burst, exploded, contracted, evolved, forming combinations, then rejecting them, forming them again, powered by the intelligence of this consciousness and governed by the singular law of cause and effect, action and reaction. Hot lava gushed within him and the sun, the moon, the entire visible universe emerged from tiny, radiating elements and billions of years later, life sprang out of molecular mass. From single cell to multi-cell organisms to animals and man himself, all were made of the same substratum, each linked by the same vibrating, intelligent energy, separated by their sense of “I”, governed by the same law. Every effect had a cause, every cause an effect.

Max studied man’s cause and understood it was the same as that of all animate and inanimate cells—the original desire of consciousness to manifest itself. He saw the desire, a burst of light, manufacturing a body to find an expression. The body with its five senses interacted with the world, creating more desire and the desire individuated itself in another body when the old body was worn out. And so the cycle went on. The human paradox was now clear to him. The nature of life was desire and the nature of desire was its infiniteness and its inability to be satisfied. Earlier, it had been necessary to further evolution, to allow consciousness to express its full potential. Now when man had reached the peak of self-awareness, it was just an infinite circling loop. As long as it lasted, man would never be satisfied and would always be subject to the cycle of suffering. Again and again, Max would be born, again and again he would live, want, suffer, and die.

Max arose from such samyamas, shaking, his body ablaze with energy, too exhausted to even walk up to the stream to collect fresh snow. He would recover after a few days of rest and practice samyama on the people who had found their way out of the cycle; Jesus, the Buddha, Mohammad. And when he merged with them in meditation, the answers emerged, simple, logical, and decisive.

The way out of the cycle was to sublimate the “I” principle, relinquish all individual desire, to restrain the naturally outgoing mind fueled by the senses and turn it inward. Once it focused within, the mind saw its real nature of pure consciousness and rejected the individual desires and thoughts surrounding it. Jesus had sublimated his desire with helpless compassion for his fellow beings; the Buddha had silenced his craving with intense meditation and the practice of yoga; Mohammad had done it by losing himself in complete devotion to his God. They had all become vessels of pure consciousness without any thought of their own individuality. Different paths but they all converged. All fingers pointing to the same moon.

Max walked out of his cave when such meditations ended, tired, dizzy yet elated. The universe was revealing its most fundamental truths to him. The truth about suffering was clear. The way out of it was even clearer. He was walking on the path of the sages now, feeling lighter, bathed in bliss and certitude. One energy vibrated everywhere, within and around him. The trees sprouting leaves with the arrival of spring, the blooming flowers, the melting snow, the clear, blue stream, the mountains in front of him, the pristine Ganges below him, the warmth of spring, the cold of winter, the bear that tried to maul him, the spiders and scorpions that slept in his cave, and he, Max, beneath the surface distinctions of name and form, they were all made of the same substratum—the one eternal consciousness.

At times during his meditation, he would feel the consciousness rise up inside him with an overwhelming physical force and cry for a release. Without thought, he would pick up a stone and carve images on the walls of the cave, stopping only when his palms bled. Later, he’d look at the pictures by the light of the fire. Trees enveloped in a calm, cooling wind, stick figures locked in an embrace, fantastical figures flying toward the sun, huge stormy waves in a sea, men and women in the throes of pain or in sexual ecstasy, he was drawing man and nature in all its glory and wretchedness. He had never been any kind of an artist before yet an entire universe seemed to be alive and craving expression within him.

With spring came more animals—first, the wolves, then the snow leopards. Max fetched water from the stream when the ice melted, sometimes careful to avoid dusk when the animals congregated there, sometimes too ecstatic after his meditation to care. The leopards would stare at him, ears cocked, eyes ablaze, their thick, coarse fur standing erect on their backs. Max no longer practiced samyama on the single energy connecting them. Perhaps they sensed it in him though, because they never approached him. Whenever he appeared, they would appraise him quickly, then return to drinking their water. Sometimes a young cub would nuzzle up to him but the mother never objected when Max petted or played with him. He gave them names from his past. The leopard who drank alone was Ramakrishna; the serious, thoughtful cub was Andre; the melancholic leopardess older than her years was Sophia. But eventually his deepening meditation put an end to that practice as well. For the instinctual desire to separate and hold on to individual identities was the root of suffering.

Leopards gave way to occasional tourists in summers, coughing and sputtering as they hiked up from Gomukh, the source glacier of the Ganges. They stopped dead in their tracks when they saw him, their mouths falling open in surprise.

“Who are you?” they would ask. “A saint? Some god?”

Max obliged for photographs but never spoke. The world wanted identification, separation, and categorization, everything he was trying to eliminate. Despite having spent nine months in complete seclusion, he was still far from losing his sense of self, from slipping into blissful union with consciousness. During his meditation, he wasn’t Max. He was the sum of all existence and knowledge, the singular energy he sought to become. However, this association ended when his meditation ended. When he arose, he was the same Max, lighter, more at peace, but his mind was still active, still
pursuing
the goal rather than having
become
the goal. Surely this couldn’t be the final state. The union with consciousness couldn’t be conditional on closing the eyes and concentrating. It should exist in himself naturally. He should feel its awareness in every moment, not a trancelike, self-induced state brought on by meditation.

Something was holding him back. Worse, this failure felt familiar. His bones were heavy with the knowledge of similar tantalizing glimpses in innumerable past lives but he had never been able to tear the veil apart. Of what use were trivial accomplishments like walking on water and levitating? With the right discipline, anyone could concentrate on the
udana
, the upward-flowing prana, making the body so light that walking on air became easier than planting a firm foot in the snow. And the hundred-year-old yogis who looked twenty-five did nothing more than trap their prana with bandhas to make the body a closed system that never decayed or aged. All this was easy. Simple perambulations of the body. This wasn’t his goal. Something had shifted inside him after the drought in the village. He didn’t crave peace for himself anymore. He wanted to reach the other side so he could bring back answers for everyone. This time, he wouldn’t let his body, his life slip away until he reached his goal. Max cut down on food and pranayama, and meditated with more concentration than ever before.