1. Understand myself..

March 2020. The GATE examination results had been announced and I was very satisfied with the outcome. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do something if I put my mind to it. And I was glad that I could, after I saw the result I never thought I could achieve. A day later and I was still brimming with euphoria, knowing that I now have the chance to learn a lot more in one of India's finest institutes. At that very moment..a particular thought crept up to me..."now what ?". Well I knew I was going to spend the next few years learning at the institute, probably try to land a job after. But something seemed off. The achievement felt empty.

A couple of days later, I was in the middle of dinner with my laptop in front of me and YouTube open on it. There was a recommendation which caught my eye called 'Swami Sarvapriyananda at IITK - "Who Am I?" according to Mandukya Upanishad', not because it sounded interesting or was related to the institute I was looking forward to but because it was recommended a LOT of times before...probably the universes way of telling me to watch the video :P. Sure, why not ! (clicked the video thumbnail). The video was divided into two parts which together had about three hours of view time. I was curious for what was to come. Had I known I had been missing out on so much, I would have seen the video a lot sooner. The video asked a simple question...'who are you ?'. At the back of my mind, as I was about to answer the question with my name it felt as though I had been revealed a great truth. My heart dropped as I truly started to question who I was. Who was the person experiencing every sense of touch, smell, sound even though my eyes were closed ? Why did it feel as though I were sitting inside a ship (the human body) and were manoeuvring it from inside, telling my hands, feet, eyes, legs what to and what not to do. The video further made compelling arguments. How could this human body be me ? Every cell in my body the day I was born has been replaced by new cells. So if I were my body, how could I still exist even though my body which was created at birth does not ? To quench my thirst for the answer to this frightening yet fascinating question Swami Sarvapriyananda spoke of the tale of a king and a wise sage or brahmin. A king frightened by the sights of his dream in which he lost his entire kingdom and was driven to starvation started to ponder about whether his dream was real or whether the life he knew as reality was real. The sage that stumbled across the kings problem gave him the answer we ALL we're searching for...the dream wasn't real...neither what he knew as reality !...but then, what was real ? The sage told the king, YOU ARE REAL. Here forward, the discussion snowballed into this enlightening mass of knowledge over consciousness. To sum it up, we could say that the world we experience physically is analogous to the projection of a movie onto a white screen. The state of 'Turiya' (from what I can recollect), the state we physically feel our presence (waking), our dreams (dreaming) and also the state of darkness we experience while asleep (deep sleep). All of it was so profound, it felt impossible for me to think that this could be fictitious. The three hours felt short and before I knew it, the video was over. The video quenched this aching heart to know more..but not for long.

Before I knew it, I was in search for more answers. The video had sparked even MORE questions in me..who are we ? why are we on this planet and not any other ? What is the purpose of life ? and so much more..until I was given a present. Something to guide me on this quest for knowledge. Something I see as grace. All around me were stories of events, religious texts to be precise, which talked about the questions I had and ultimately about god...that's when I realised that I have to find out the answers to these questions gnawing at me at the back of my mind and hopefully..understand myself..