Hey dear Being!

Here is a description of the story that can be labelled as my life over the years.

I was born (1989)  and brought up in North India and have been residing in Saskatchewan, Canada for the past 10 years. Presently, life is allowing me to visit different parts of the world, more so in Tiruvannamalai, India and Ubud, Bali.

Looking back at my childhood, it was quite evident that the seed of self-inquiry was already blooming. One of my earliest memories as a 4 year old child is standing in front of the mirror with eye contact with myself for hours wondering, “Who is looking from behind these eyes? What looks?”

As expected in any regular family system, these questions when asked by the little girl, were laughed off at and not really looked into.

However, there always remained a conviction that the life I seemed to be living is much bigger than what it is taken to be.

There was also a phase as a child, where I would pretend to have fallen asleep on the couch, actually when I would practise mental chanting until the breathing stopped and I would have an out of body experience. It really became a game as a child- inducing out of body experience 🙂.

Being raised in a Sikh(religion) household, Guru Nanak’s message of Ek Onkar(Only One-ness and no two to it) and non-doeship (all is Hukam- Cosmic Law) was deeply inculcated in my psyche, more as an intellectual understanding in the early years.

As the understanding deepened later, it is now appreciated how crucial a role this intellectual understanding played in streamlining the seeking process from the get go.

As Gurleen, life developed my system to be a people-pleaser with a low sense of self-worth, where to feel worthy I was designed to manipulate myself, the other and the circumstance with validation from out there as the goal. This mechanism unravelled as the deepest rooted shame(unworthiness) that happens to be the core of the false psychological self, the cause of suffering.

The first stable glimpse of the Silence entered the stage of conscious experience, in the form of an endless void, at the time of my father’s demise. The loss of the familiar triggered the Emptiness in everything experientially. It wasn’t desirable or even pleasant in the face of the grief and shock that accompanied the dawning of the “What-IS”.

This was followed by a few years of choicelessly escaping the Emptiness that was right here– using work(even social work), socialising, partying, alcohol among other things.

Inevitably and gratefully, all the above measures were proven to be futile and a giving up happened, that took on the form of conscious seeking for happiness.

Having achieved enough pleasures and material gains, it became obvious that suffering is still the strongest element of life’s experience and no pleasures plus stimulation from out there were helping relieve it.

There is a deep gratitude for the Grace, that is Life itself, to bring about the peak of suffering intensely enough, that it had to be dropped.

From then on, life has really been a process, a fruit of choiceless surrender.

Questions appeared, and answers also came– sometimes out there in the form of the teachers and their teachings and other times, as a result of a contemplation or letting go inwardly.

The seeming seeking journey has been a roller coaster full of Grace. Grace appeared in the form of Satsang (the wisdom path) that held the deeply suffering entity in the understanding’s deep embrace, softened the rigid psychological structure, facilitated catharsis and undoing of the limiting beliefs and mechanisms that were falsely put in place.

Roger Castillo (my beloved Guru) puts it beautifully, “Life puts suffering in place and life undoes it.”

The seeking mechanism that has been seen through to be a need for What-IS to be different for me to be happy, to be ok, to be fulfilled. It has been made clear that the seeking is an error (not based in the truth) stemming out of a deep seated sense of lack that feels real because I, as this person, has felt to be a separate entity from the cosmic flux called Life.

This sense of separation is inevitable as a part of human development. However, life itself triggers certain movements, circumstances, interpretations, suffering, seeking ‘within’ the flow of life, that leads to the unveiling of Being-ness that we really are beyond the content of experience that seems to be all there is until  the recognition of infinite Being-ness happens.

It is choicelessly recognized that there is no other, but THIS. Call THIS whatever you may. All names point to THIS, and yet THIS is name-less.

Now that What-Is is experienced without the lens of what-should-or-shouldn’t-be, even the deep-seated suffering can be allowed and experienced as What-Is, as it arises in any given moment, along with the pleasures and pains of the flow of life.

None of it has to be taken personally. Taking it personally has been seen to be the error that caused suffering in the first place.

Bowing down to Life, to the Guru principle and to the human form of Guru that comes down to meet the seeking entity and cuts through the false within, bringing what already IS to light of perception!

It cannot have happened at all from an intention or decision or doing, only through life happening impersonally.

There is no cause of THIS. Nothing leads to, starts at or can end THIS. THIS is all there IS, already– nothing is separate.