Chapter 3
In my opinion, a spiritual pilgrimage is more like a spiritual bootcamp. Nearly every morning we would wake up knackered just before sunrise, bathe from a bucket of water, silently slip to our community room to drink chai, meditate, and engage in our first Satsang—a spiritual discourse of the day. We traveled from city to town to village to visit temples, climb mountains, and sing the kirtan. If you haven’t heard of kirtan before, it is undeniably one of my favorite practices in the Hindu tradition. It is a call and response, chanting in the language of Sanskrit to thank the gods. It is usually accompanied by an instrument called the harmonium, which is a combination of a small lap piano and an accordion.
The thing about kirtan that makes it different from any gospel choir is that it’s not about the sound of your voice (good or bad) but the feeling of your voice in your body. The vibrations of the sounds moving through your chest and up to your lips. If singing brings you to the present, kirtan nearly demands it of you. There is no place that I touch this God word more. And I want to be clear, or as clear as I can be, about what I mean when I use the word God. God to me is a feeling more than it is any benevolent entity in the sky. It is a swelling of the chest, an emotional cry of both delight and despair from the deepest parts of oneself. It feels like love—Love with a capital L.
Perhaps that is why I came to India. To suspend my disbelief. To find a way to integrate my scientific logic with a spirituality that seems so integral to my personal well-being. Perhaps we are here to embrace that big ole love. The unconditional kind. The one that holds you in its embrace and bestows upon you kiss after kiss in the most tender moments. This God, this feeling, takes you out of the trance of “you and me” and becomes something so much more than that. Something interconnected and massive like the big soft quilt your grandmother made, encompassing everything we have ever known. This God could also be described as an evolution of consciousness.
No comments