theseekingspirit

  On gagan ghaṭā ghahrānī , of Kabir It is a Sunday morning in Sydney, overcast, and a drizzle of rain has just begun. The grey light takes me back to my childhood in Bangalore, to the overcast days of the monsoon. And then a strain of Kabir’s song floats into my awareness: gagan ghaṭā ghahrānī , “Gagan ghata”, clouds gathering in the sky. I had not gone looking for it. Like the clouds in the song, it simply arrived, and I wanted to follow it to see what it was saying. Clouds gather and darken in the sky, O sādhu, the clouds gather and darken. From the east a cloud has risen, and the rain falls soft, rim-jhim. Mend each your own dam: this water is running away. (For the full version in both the original and translation, go to the end of the blog.) Turning the mundane metaphysical Imagine the hour before a monsoon breaks. The air thickens, the light turns the colour of slate, and a cloud climbs out of the east. The first drops are soft, then the whole sky is falling, rim-jhim, rim-j...

Somewhere in my teens, I came across a coffee table book on the most beautiful places on earth, and Milford Sound featured in it. I was fascinated by the photographs. The water serene, the mountains majestic in scale. That image stayed with me, filed away for years in some subconscious bucket list. Travel to New Zealand was a distant dream then, but it moved closer once we relocated to Sydney in 2021. New Zealand was suddenly a few hours away, and Milford Sound was beckoning. We made a short trip to Queenstown in 2023, but bad weather kept us from getting there. In 2025 we tried again, this time planning a longer stay in Queenstown with Milford Sound built into the itinerary from the start. As we descended into Queenstown, there was once again a sense of anticipation. The Remarkables rose jagged on one side of the plane as we came in to land. The February sun was out in full, and the drive from the airport into town did its usual trick: Lake Wakatipu on the left, houses scattered u...

I recently attended a talk by Swami Sarvapriyananda in Sydney titled "Oneness in a Divided World." He covered a remarkable amount of ground — consciousness studies, neuroscience, references to philosophers like Karl Popper and David Chalmers — before finally arriving at the Advaita Vedantic view of oneness. It was a fascinating talk, and it left me thinking about the parallels between Advaita Vedānta and Yoga, and how each tradition arrives at its own view of oneness. Every contemplative tradition, it turns out, eventually arrives at the same question: who is doing the looking? Advaita Vedānta and Yoga both begin here, in the space between the seer and everything that is seen. But they arrive at different destinations — and understanding exactly where and why they part ways turns out to matter more for practice than for philosophy. The Advaita Vedantic Vision of Oneness Advaita Vedānta's method for approaching this question is called dṛg-dṛśya-viveka — discriminatio...

Four days on the Whitsundays - July3-6 2026 We saw it before we landed - a cloud-covered island floating on a sheet of emerald water, the Whitsundays scattered around it like something out of a dream too green to be real, ringed by water that kept changing shades depending on which cloud happened to be passing  Arrival and First Light Our room opened straight onto the Catseye beach and the hills beyond. Within the hour we were on our first buggy ride, the unofficial vehicle of the island, breathing in the wind and with no real plan except to look around. Late afternoon we ended up at One Tree Hill as the sun began its long slide toward evening, palms swaying overhead in a light breeze, and there, of all things, a solitary cork tree standing sentinel over the view. The evening sun laid down a long path of light across the water, and as it dipped lower the guitar player broke into a rendition of “Hallelujah” - the kind of moment that makes you stop mid-sentence and just watch. Later ...

  In January 2025, I set out to read 25 books in 2025 (It had a a good ring to it!). Now in December, after having read the last page of book number 25, I feel a elated. Reading is not an easy endeavor in 2025. You have to resist the call of YouTube, Streaming channels, Cinema halls, Sports and Social engagements to stay the course.  From a humble book from a Zen Monk in January, to a humbling one on the the Cosmos, my reading journey was interesting.  I have shared summaries for each of the 25 books (they are also in chronological order). I have tried to capture the 'big idea' of the book and why is it worth your time.  I have also added a Netflix style 3 point summary, for those who want to grab and go... Book readers are a dying breed, and I am not sure how long we will be reading in the age of AI. If any of these inspire you to pick up a book in 2026 (and not let AI summarize it for you), please leave a comment below. Alternatively if you have read something tran...

“Soak In Ecstasy of Enlightenment” was a day-long program with Sadhguru, held on 20th Jan 2024 at ICC Sydney. It was a  attended by over 6000 people.  This is a personal account of my experiences during the event. Photo Courtesy - Isha Australia Sadhguru’s event in Sydney was a roller coaster of emotions that can hardly be put into words. How can one describe silence, stillness, emptiness and bliss? Yet, the heart says, write it all down! So, here I am, recounting the sequence of events that led up to some amazing and inexpressible moments. I write with the hope that the reader will get a glimpse of what I experienced, and in the process re-living it all over again! The Walkabout Sadhguru’s much anticipated event in Sydney was announced over 8 months ago, and I had booked early to secure a spot close to the dais. On the day of the event, I woke up early and reached the venue at 8:30 AM. I felt 'light as air', having subsisted mostly on the recommended diet o...