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Close Encounters of the Advaita Kind The Euphoric Nihilism of Ramesh Balsekar by Chris Parish
EPILOGUE
As I stumbled past the doorman and out into the bustling Bombay streets, my mind was reeling. How could it be, I asked myself as I made my way through the crowd, that an intelligent, educated man like Ramesh Balsekar could really believe that everything is predestined, that before we are even born, our fate is already etched in a kind of ethereal granite? Could he really be serious in his insistence that our entire life, with its seemingly endless stream of choices and decisions, of precarious opportunities to set our own course for better or for worse, is actually, from the first breath, a fait accompli? While I traversed the sidewalk in search of a café in which to find respite from the chaos, the difficult turns of our brief dialogue swirled in my head. Yes, "Thy will be done" is the essence of at least most religions, I thought to myself, but for the great mystics and sages who have made such utterances throughout history, surrender to the will of God has meant far more than simply accepting that there is nothing anyone can do to affect the circumstances of their life. Surely what has been traditionally referred to as "God's will" is that which one discovers when one has absolutely given up the ego, when all self-centered motives have been extinguished, leaving one utterly surrendered to doing God's will, whatever it may be! For Jesus or Ramakrishna or Ramana Maharshi to say he was surrendered to God's will was one thing. But to say that this is true of everyone seemed at that moment to reflect a peculiar and even dangerous form of madness—and one which could be used to justify the most extreme forms of behavior. Balsekar's statement, "What you think you should do in any situation . . . is precisely what God wants you to think you should do," means that to him the enlightened Buddha is no more doing the will of God than the serial killer who is attacking his next victim. I had come into the interview expecting some disagreement, but somehow even Balsekar's books—in which all of these ideas are clearly and repeatedly expressed—had not prepared me for my encounter with the man himself. How had he come up with them? I wondered. And why? Around and around my thoughts went, recalling everything from his chilling claim that even when we hurt someone, we need not feel guilty, for we are not responsible for our actions—that even "Hitler was merely the instrument through which the horrible events that had to take place, took place"—to his assertion, defying all common sense, that we have no power to control our behavior or even to influence the behavior of others. And all of this in the context of his science-fiction description of each of us as "body/mind organisms" acting out our "programming." Suddenly the welcome sight of a tea shop appeared through the smog, and as I made my way inside, I was relieved to find the kind of quiet oasis for which I had hoped. It was there, at one of the many empty tables, as the first sip of sickly sweet milk tea passed across my lips that, in a flash, it hit me. I was not drinking the tea! I was not sitting at the table! In fact, I was not the one who had entered the tea shop. And I was not the one who had just been tormented for an hour in discussion with a man who at that moment was beginning to seem like the sane one. In fact, it had never been me doing anything. It was as if a burden I had been carrying for my entire life was suddenly lifted into the sky by a hot air balloon, whisked away, never to return again. All those years I had struggled to be a better, more honest and generous human being—all that effort I had made to renounce my tendencies toward superiority, selfishness and aggression—had all been a folly, all foolishly, needlessly based on the self-important idea that I had some control over my own destiny, and the petty presumption that what I did to "others" ever mattered anyway. How could I have been so misguided? But wait, it wasn't even me who was misguided! As if through parting clouds, clearly now I could suddenly see that what I had thought of as "my life" had in fact been only a mechanical process. The person I had thought I was was just a machine. And the world in which I thought I had been living was not, as I had assumed, a world of human complexity, but one of mechanistic simplicity, of perfect order, a mathematical playing out of programs in motion since the beginning of time. As the clinical perfection of God's scientific plan started to open up before me, the ecstatic thrill of absolute freedom—from worry, from care, from obligation, from guilt—began to rush through my veins like a torrent of undammed rivers. And with it came an enveloping, resounding peace, an absolute cessation of tension, in the recognition that no matter what apparent ambiguity or uncertainty I might encounter thereafter, no matter what seemingly difficult decisions I might face, I could always rest assured that whatever choice I made was exactly the choice God wanted me to make. The mysterious sense of an Unknown that had tugged at me for so long had evaporated. The others in the café turned their heads as I laughed out loud, a long belly laugh, and mused to myself what a fantastical game life would be if everyone understood how it all really works, if everyone could at least get a glimpse of how free we could be, if we all lived on Planet Advaita. 
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Fall–Winter 1998
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