I came across Sruti for the first time in one of the interviews on BATGAP website (Buddha at the Gas Pump), which is an expanding collection of video interviews with spiritually awakened people. Ten minutes into the video, I knew that I had to get her book The Hidden Value of Not Knowing, if I want to know anything at all about what she has to offer, because every sentence she uttered in her interview was loaded with profound directness and existential simplicity that was challenging for my pretzel mind to keep up with. The book itself was an awe-inspiring read that had me highlighting one thing or the other on every page that after a point I had to throw the pencil down and declare the entire book as one big highlight.
Sruti writes about her journey inward that started with her painful episodes from a debilitating illness called Interstitial Cystitis that has no cause, no cure, and no escape. She says that it was during one such episode when she was writhing in agony on the floor with knife-like pain spreading through her insides and her consciousness fading that she became aware of the silence that rested beneath all of that chaos. The immediacy of her pain erased layers of thoughts, beliefs, and reason, all of that she thought made her who she was, and pointed her to the unconditional quiet which remained as the true reality underneath everything she knew. And it was from this viewpoint she realized that she was still here even when everything she knew left her and from this ground of not knowing, she found the calmness that never leaves and she knew that she was not alone.
I would only be insulting Sruti if I were to compare my experiences of pain with hers but from my transient and trivial face-offs with pain in the form of cuts and burns, I can say for a fact that pain has the ability to zero in our attention to the immediate. Maybe it is just a part of our biological design for survival, but not all of us get to transform this instinct for survival into something existential like Sruti did.
A great part of Sruti’s offering reminds me of Ramana Maharshi’s teachings. But sometimes trying to comprehending what the great master says is a little bit like grabbing a bead of mercury that has spilled from a broken thermometer – one moment the meaning is tangible between your fingertips and then the next moment, it slips away. For that reason, I find Sruti’s work to be some kind of a pictorial representation to Ramana Maharshi’s teachings. In places where I feel that the master illuminates the whole diamond of its brilliance, this student focuses on a single facet of that diamond, like pain, in order to arrive at the same brilliance. And the manner in which she arrives through some of the most rudimentary wonderment about herself is what I find fascinating in her writing.
Sruti regards pain as God’s tool even in the throes of her illness because it is this intense pain, which is capable to making one lose consciousness, that showed her what leaves and what truly remains. She says that when she was in extreme pain, she watched how layers of herself vanished – firstly, she found herself rolling on the floor in pain, which she refers to as ‘paralyzed but in continuous motion’ and her body that she thought she had control on, that she thought was she, was no longer there. She was aware in her body as she lost control of it and realized she was still there when the body was lost. Next went her thinking, the layer which is a continuous stream of conscious and unconscious thoughts that she knew was she and it left her in the moment of pain as she was approaching the door of unconsciousness. Along with thoughts, feelings that are attached to it like fear, doubt, sadness or happiness left her and the silence that took their place was a felt silence. She was amazed at how all of these ordinary layers of her experience can leave her in an instant and she can still remain. And as the pain got much more intense, as she experienced the unconsciousness moving in, she watched the end of her awareness and wondered how she is able to describe these things, if the things she thought of as she have already left her and she is still here to know these things, here to simply see the edges of the bubble of her whole life.
This facet that Sruti’s narrates is an elaboration on Ramana Maharshi’s ‘Who am I?’ and I am dumbfounded by the sheer simplicity of it.
I am starting to feel that this is going to be one of those books, along with her BATGAP video, that I would often spiral back to for newer perspectives. It has come at the right time just as I am wallowing in my subterranean maze for the spiritually disoriented where I have been questioning God. This I say because in another chapter in the book Sruti hits home for me when she points out that God is waiting in the silence, in the absence of understanding.
She explains in her BATGAP interview that we unconsciously assume we have a continuous understanding of God. And our questioning is part of a knowing tendency to understand God, to understand life. But understanding can never be continuous because when we come to the edge of consciousness, our understanding also leaves. So then what is deeper that still remains and that really is continuous? It is that which is beyond any understanding.
“God is waiting in the silence when our sense of all knowing is dropped and discarded. In the not-knowing perspective we look out through God’s unseen eyes, and move with God’s immovable grace.”
Sruti
Sruti’s offering doesn’t say yay or nay to the numerous questions that still linger in my head, but it sure makes me think that my understanding of God has been wrong all this time.
