The Pilgrim Soul: A Path to the Sacred Transcending World Religions

By Ravi Ravindra

“Wandering, one gathers honey,” observes the Aitareya Brahmana. In this spirit Ravi Ravindra, renowned for his integration of physics and comparative religions, explores the heart of Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism to define a universal spiritual path that transcends any tradition. People with a pilgrim soul, he says, are open to a freedom from all that is known. They seek to practice mindfulness in each moment, so that washing the dishes or emptying the garbage becomes a sacred act; they seek to enter the dimension of eternity, realizing that the eternal is always present, right here, right now. Wisdom is the ability to act freshly in time while being anchored in eternity, says Ravindra. This deceptively simple small volume contains a wealth of wisdom for living that way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Quest Books
• Release date: Sep 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9780835631808

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Preface

Na vijānāmi yadivedamasmi niṇyaḥ samnaddho manasā carāmi. I know not whether I am the same as this cosmos: a mystery am I, yet burdened by mind I wander.

—Rig Veda 1.164.37

There are two great mysteries: idam and aham, cosmos and myself. What indeed is the person in this vast cosmos? In all the great traditions there are people, monuments, documents, and ceremonies that can assist searchers. The Rig Veda is among the very earliest documents in which the sages speak of the call of Satyam, Ritam, and Brihat—Truth, Order, and Vastness.

Similar mysteries are spoken of in Psalm 8: When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, / the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; / What is man, that thou art mindful of him?

Throughout my life, I have been struck by the mysteries these quotations articulate. This is perhaps true for each of us; we cannot not be engaged by such questions. The search to understand and to stand under these mysteries is the pilgrimage for every person and within every tradition.

I was born in India and first came to Canada in September 1961, at the age of twenty-three, for post-graduate studies in physics at the University of Toronto on a Commonwealth Scholarship. And with that my life was completely changed. I had many experiences of an unseasoned traveler arriving in a new country with a different cultural background: anxiety about the oncoming cars driving on the wrong side of the road; puzzlement at the bland food people ate; incomprehension of what many people said and heard or understood although they and I both claimed to be speaking English; and inability to decipher the rather forward appearing smiles and gestures of young women, often resulting in fantasy and expectation.

As well, I wished to impress my fellow students and the professors, some of whom were internationally known, with my knowledge of the subject at hand. I felt an enhanced sense of responsibility for projecting the good name of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur—the most prestigious institute in India at that time—from which I had graduated with a master of technology degree; and I had a feeling that my success or failure reflected on the stature of my family back home and on the entire Indian culture.

The year before I had come to Canada, I had experienced an intellectual turmoil about any kind of learning. What is worth knowing? How do I know what the Buddha or any of the other great sages said? I think I know the meaning of the words he used, but I don’t feel I know, because I don’t know who in me knows. Who am I? I spoke to one of my professors about my questions. He listened to me patiently and what he said completely surprised me: What you are asking is how to find God. I had not spoken of God. I had heard that word often, mostly used by people who did not impress me with their intellectual acumen or quality of behavior. However, largely because of my respect for the professor and his patience and care in listening to me, I could no longer dismiss the word, and I continued to wonder, What is God? How can I know God? What is the relationship between what is called God and what is called I? Who am I?

At that time there were not many people of Indian origin in Toronto. Occasionally someone would ask me, Are you a Hindu? What do Hindus believe? I knew I was a Hindu and that it more or less meant I was from India. There wasn’t anything that I had to believe in to be a Hindu. I had known many Hindus in India and they believed in completely different, and often opposite, things. Furthermore, they behaved in very different ways: some were very compassionate and wise people, but some were notorious for criminal activities and selfishness. But they all called themselves, and were called by others, Hindus. So, what is a Hindu? I recalled once reading that Mahatma Gandhi had said that a Hindu is one who is searching for truth. This appealed to me and I wanted to accept this as the definition of a Hindu. But out of the hundreds of Hindus I had met in India, I could not say that most of them were searching for truth. Besides, I could not understand why a search for truth should be the special prerogative of the Hindus. Couldn’t a Muslim or a Christian also be searching for truth?

Within a very few days of my arrival at the university I was befriended by some members of an organization called Varsity Christian Fellowship (VCF). They were very friendly and solicitous and keen to convert me to Christianity. Until coming to Canada I was not aware of having met a Christian. Ironically, there were at that time, and even now, more Christians in India than in Canada. However, they number only about 3 percent of the total population of India. In India I had known Muslims, but the Hindu-Muslim conflict and the resulting carnage in 1947 during the partition of India into India and Pakistan when I was nine years old had left a lasting revulsion in me toward mass religious labels such as Hindus or Muslims. The VCF members would go through much circumlocution, but it was soon obvious to me that they were convinced that if I wanted to have any chance of going to heaven, I had to become a Christian.

I did not stay long with VCF, but I am grateful to them for giving me a copy of the New Testament, which they did while emphatically pointing to the remark of Christ in John 14.6: I AM the Way and the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me. I was very touched by the gospels and in particular by John’s Gospel. I read, pondered over, and reread again and again Christ’s comment to Nicodemus in John 3.3-5: In truth, in very truth I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is begotten from Above…. No one can enter the kingdom of God without being begotten of water and Spirit. I kept wondering, How can I be begotten from above? How can I be begotten of water and Spirit? My VCF friends had said that I had to repent for my sins. But I had not committed any obvious sins, except some minor ones, too small to cause me to have to burn in hell forever and ever. Besides, if anything had been repeatedly said in any Hindu sermons I had been obliged to sit through, it was that deep down I am, as everyone is, of the same substance and nature as Brahman, the highest reality. I did not really understand that, either; it did not seem true as I looked around at my fellow Hindus or at myself in the mirror, but it brought a more positive feeling than thinking of myself as essentially sinful.

I realized that I needed to understand something about Christianity. It was clear to me that the axis of any culture is its main religion. Even at a very ordinary level, in Canada Christmas and Easter, not the birthday of Krishna, were celebrated as holidays. To discover Christianity, I went to one or another Christian church every Sunday and read the Bible from cover to cover, the New Testament more than once, and John’s Gospel several times. I am afraid I was not particularly inspired by what I heard or saw in the churches. By this time I had many acquaintances and friends who called themselves Christian. Some of them were good and decent human beings, but they were no more following the teachings of Christ than the Hindus in India were following the teachings of Krishna. To be a Christian seemed as much merely a label as to be a Hindu. What was striking was the fact that in any religious context, I was always labeled a Hindu, less by myself and more by others. In that role, I was expected to engage in a Hindu-Christian dialogue rather than in a person-to-person exploration of something existentially relevant and meaningful.

At the same time, I was struck by the writings of John of the Cross and Meister Eckhart as well as by anonymous authors’ works such as The Cloud of Unknowing, Theologia Germanica, and The Philokalia. Here I felt in the presence of searchers and pilgrims rather than of believers or missionaries. A little later, in 1963, in connection with another Christian organization—the Student Christian Movement—I helped organize a series of talks about various aspects of religion. Several well-known people who later became even more famous spoke in the series, including the Jewish philosopher and rabbi, Emil Fackenheim; the media philosopher, Marshal McLuhan; and the highly regarded literary critic, Northrop Frye. However, in the large city of Toronto, we could not find anyone willing to speak about mysticism or any of the mystics. (In fact, one Protestant minister told me that mysticism has nothing to do with Christianity; it is a Catholic heresy.) As a result, in the galaxy of luminaries who spoke in that series, I, as a young graduate student of physics, was listed as a speaker on mysticism, the only area that addressed the journey of a pilgrim. In the mid-sixties one could hardly find any book on or by any Christian mystic, even in the Christian bookstores in Toronto, nor likely in other cities, either. By the mid-seventies, there were dozens of books on mysticism or mystics in these bookstores, a change brought about by what is suggested by the title of a book by Harvey Cox called Turning East.

Among the historical figures I most admired as a university student in India, before coming to Canada, were Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, and Albert Einstein. Somehow, they spoke to my heart even more than to my intellect. It’s easy to understand the appreciation a physics student might have for the scientific contributions of Einstein, but I was more impressed by some of his remarks about the nature of human beings, such as his statement that the true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.¹

Then I would wonder, What is the self from which I need to be liberated? What is my self? Is this undesirable self my sole identity? Wouldn’t the liberation from that self mean my death? Later, in Canada, the