It is only after awakening to falsehood and shunning the untruth, that one can truly Romance the Truth.

The essence of Love is the same, be it the love of Truth, or the love of the beloved. I sought the Truth with the intensity and passion of a lover, and explored various philosophies and scriptures, honestly, courageously, and rationally, avoiding the trap of religious dogmas, mumbo-jumbo quick fixes, and popular meditation practices.

People find it difficult to keep their minds focused during meditation and ask how many hours I meditate. They wonder how to keep the mind fixed on the seeking. I, on the other hand, wonder how to withdraw my mind from the seeking. When one is in love, does one ask how to keep the mind fixed on the beloved? Rather, it’s difficult to withdraw one’s mind from those thoughts. The desire to know the truth was alive 24×7, even while fulfilling my role as husband, father and as an eye-surgeon. I had graduated, got married, done post-graduation, and joined my father’s hospital, but my mind and heart were constantly thinking of the beloved Truth which I yearned for.

The intelligent and honest seeker starts romancing the Truth by collecting nuggets of gold. He finds the fragments of truth at every step, but the accumulated fragments jingle and clink and create a noise. The intellect, fired by the desperation to find coherence and clarity, fuses and melts the fragments to produce a gold brick. The words of wisdom now sound coherent and beautiful, but the seeker is still in the dark, for the light of truth still doesn’t pass through the brick.

A chance event offered me the opportunity to shift from one of India’s most livable cities, to a small hill town nearby. I seized the opportunity with alacrity, and gladly left behind the roaring eye-practice, confident that I could earn my living anywhere. I was thankful that I was leaving behind the rat-race, to devote my time fully to the RAT quest.

My father’s unexpected death a year after I had opened my own small hospital forced me to manage both hospitals till my brother finished his studies in Ophthalmology. I spent half a week in the bigger hospital and the other half in my own. And from this I learnt that my patients would patiently wait for me till I returned. So, the moment my brother took over the bigger hospital, I started keeping a five day week at my hospital – and a eleven month year, taking a full month off in the winters to spend time with my wife and two lovely daughters.

To make the gold brick mirror the truth, I started polishing it by writing a novel – a quest novel. I felt that through writing fiction, I could make my characters live their lives according to the different philosophies as they quested for the truth, and could then judge which philosophy worked best. For six years I wrote the story of a woman’s quest to logically understand the meaning of life and her resolve to commit suicide if a meaning is not found. The novel was titled: Journey in a Pathless Land. Through writing, my ‘I’ was seeking the Truth on the path logic and knowledge, striving to reach the Thunderous Aha moment. At the same time, my ‘Me’ was on the path of Wonder and Surrender. The I and Me worked in sync as knowledge increased my awe and sensitivity which in turn increased my thirst for knowledge. I did not realize that through this process, I was getting ready to be SWATted into enlightenment.

Read on to know how the moment of enlightenment comes unexpectedly.