I've been on "the path" for more than two decades now. When I first started, I was reeling from the death of my father, who passed away in the most unexpected manner, literally like a bolt from the blue. That hit my sister, mother, and I in the most devastating way possible. I was 21 years of age at that time.

After the initial shock wore off, we went through the cycle of different stages of grief, and it took a long time. For the first few years, with the loss of the breadwinner in the family, it was a huge struggle, with our middle-class background and lifestyle and not much in terms of income, and the huge cost of education for both myself and my sister -- both my sister and I had one more year of college left to complete. Education in India is not like in the US, and it is not an option to take a break before finishing up school.

So by the time we finished school, we had almost exhausted what meager savings we had. I was moonlighting as a musician to make ends meet at that time while attending classes at the same time. But I wasn't that good a musician to get gigs at regular intervals for it to be considered a livelihood.

To make a long and sordid tale short, it took about three years from the time of my father's untimely demise, to have some stability in our lives

  • I had a regular job that didn't pay too well, but it was enough to cover our apartment rent, utilities, etc. Until that point, we didn't have time to even move beyond the shock and disbelief stage. Those years went by like I was in a waking dream (or rather, a nightmare).

It was then, the remaining stages of the "seven stages of grief" started manifesting. And I found the spiritual path as a way to deal with that process.

Over those initial years since I turned to the path for succor, I found myself being inadvertently pulled progressively deeper down the proverbial rabbit hole until I couldn't think of a life without the path.

But as spiritual maturation happened, I found the personal ambition declining almost proportional to the level of clarity in the mind. What started off as a battle for survival, and then progressed into an ambition to get bigger/better/more, ended up becoming something that I have to do in order to fulfill my responsibilities.

The higher the level of clarity grew, the more the dropping of personal ambition. And in a householder's life, that can be a dangerous thing!

My Yoga Guru used to say, in any household, both the husband and the wife (or partners) should be developing and interested in the spiritual path. If one is too spiritual and the other doesn't understand or subscribe to that lifestyle, it leads to great turmoil.

There was a reason that in Ancient India, there were clearly defined four stages of life. The life of the student (brahmacharya), the life of the householder (grihastha), the life of the forest-dweller (vanaprastha), and the life of the renunciant (Sanyasa).

These four stages were considered part and parcel of the dharma. Anyone who lived by the dharma would naturally follow this path. So by the time, one's familial duties were completed -- children were educated, and they entered the world of householders (essentially worldly life), the parents would retire to a forest area, simplifying their lives, living amidst nature, meditating, preparing for the final push towards liberation (moksha) -- which they would pursue by eventually renouncing their personal identity and becoming mendicants. The process of renunciation even involved one performing one's own last rites, so they can completely give up their personal identity.

That is hard (almost impossible) to do in today's society. People work till they are in their late 60s, even 70s, and before you know it, life is over.

What, if there is one, is the way out of this monumental quagmire?