Tenzin Priyadarshi - Running Toward Mystery: The Adventure of an Unconventional Life

The India where I was born, three decades after Independence, was a country struggling to navigate a path into modernity. It was a society where religion still played a crucial role from cradle to grave. My own family included both believers and nonbelievers, but every one of them was alarmed by the choice I made to leave behind a comfortable and privileged existence in pursuit of a contemplative life. But what they saw as running away, in defiance of all expectations that society had laid on me, I felt instead as running toward something that pulled me, mysteriously but irresistibly.

My decision to set out from home into something profoundly unknown sparked a long and painful discord with my family, but it also led to encounters both serendipitous and meaningful with individuals who helped to shape how I see the world. They were willing to engage with me, even as a child, because I came to them with an open heart and mind, and they became beacons to me, lighting my way. A journey that began by defying my familys expectations has also defied other predictable paths, crossing the boundaries of different traditions. The monastery where I live now and where I turn for moments of solitude is within the heart and mind; the whole world is my cloister.

Many of the events and individuals that Ive encountered on this journey have been profoundly and inexplicably mysterious. The modern mind is ill at ease with uncanny events that defy rational explanation. We tend to look for psychological or cultural explanations, as if only what escapes those filters can truly be called mysterious. But not all experience fits into the binary categories of rational or irrational, and mystery is not merely what fails the test of reason. There is a realm of the mind where the experience of mystery is valid on its own terms. Understanding it may lie beyond the scope of language, but it is not outside the realm of human capacities. And sometimes, like a prism revealing the colors contained within a beam of white light, mystery serves as a portal to deeper questions and answers than our rational minds can perceive.

I believe that all humans are contemplative by nature; we all share the potential for contemplative exploration that beckoned to me. Whatever we think of religion, however we are culturally shaped, we are all drawn to deeper questions about the meaning and purpose of our lives. This capacity for embracing the mystery of what it means to be alive is available to all of us, our human birthright. We can choose to ignore it, but I would invite you instead to explore it.

Any reluctance we might feel at the doorway is likely rooted in fear, though our faintheartedness is not truly fear of the unknown. Our fear is more precisely the fear of abandoning the known, the comfort zone of the familiar, with its false sense of certainty and complacent promises. It is this self-created echo chamber that constrains our growth and makes the unknown territory of our deeper potential seem distantly strange and mysterious. The first step on a journey beyond these self-imposed borders is to hear the invitation that beckons from a place of mystery.

I was ten years old when this story begins.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

J. KRISHNAMURTI

It was two-thirty by the clock when I woke up in the semidarkness of the dormitory, the dream still vivid and present. That man was back again, as familiar as an old friend. He had been visiting my dreams for four years now and still I had no idea who he was, where he had come from, or what he wanted from me. His eyes stared right at me with an open, forthright look, and his wide lips were pressed into what might or might not have been a smile. The expression was neutralI couldnt say that he was happy or sad, friendly or not, but he was radiant, glowing with an intense energy. He was silent this time. He had only spoken once before, in a language I didnt understand.

The last time he appeared I wasnt even asleep. It was on the train just a few months earlier, when my family was moving, yet again, from Ahmadabad to Kolkata. Draw a line all the way across India at its widest and you can imagine how long a train trip that was. No kid could sleep the whole way, let alone one with my energy. I was in the top bunk, staring at the grimy ceiling and still perfectly conscious even as the metal rhythm was lulling me. Then out of nowhere, there he was. The dome of his shaved head was so vivid I could have reached out and touched the stubble. His eyes glimmered under fuzzy eyebrows that were as white as his crisp, white shirt. He wore a yellow cloth over it, fastened at one shoulder. It was all so intensely clear and bright, nothing sleepy about it at all.

I was six years old in 1985, when the dreams and visions had started. The very first time too, there was no question that I was wide awake. I was with a friend who lived in the same compound, at Evelyn Lodge, where our bungalow was. I had gone to his apartment to ask him to play and we were walking toward the cricket field when I saw what looked at first like streaks and patches of orange in the sky. Was it sunset already? That would mean it was time to go home, but it couldnt be. We hadnt even started playing. Then the colors resolved into shapes and their outlines became clear. Men in robes of that saffron sunset color, with shaved heads, were milling about. There was a deer and a small hut. Some of the men went into the hut and came out again. It was as vivid as if I were watching a scene from life.

Do you see that?

My friend followed my gaze, squinting into the sky. See what? He swung the bat at nothing. I pinched myself. That was what you were supposed to do if you thought you were dreaming. It made no difference. Slowly, as we continued to walk, the scene faded into the sky and disappeared. Later, when I got home, I told my parents, but they said I must have imagined it.