The Wanderer of Gardens

The Wanderer of Gardens

For some reason I admire people who have chosen to devote their entire lives to religion: monks, yogis, priests and other types of renunciates. These are people who have decided to take up the ultimate challenge--the pursuit of spiritual realisation. To embrace this noble path takes courage, willpower and a great sense of destiny.

Of course, there are also a lot charlatans and fakes among people from this community. Some even seek it as an easy way to escape from the world and to live off the generous charity of the flock. For some, it is not even a conscious choice--just a convenient way of life that they were introduced to at an early stage of their lives and one that could even have its own peculiar comforts.

But those who bravely chose this path out of a calling from deep within become the light of the community. They are like blooms in a forest full of desolation. Swami Vivekananda paid tribute to the renunciate (sanyasin) in his poem Song of the Sanyasin ("Know thou art That, Sannyasin bold! ").

Karen Armstrong, whose books I admire, was a Catholic nun. Today she is one of the leading proponents of inter-faith understanding. I've also enjoyed Thomas Merton's autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. He, chose to become a Trappist monk--one of the strictest of religious orders--after going through experiences in life not unlike that of St Augustine's.

Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi is also very enlightening. I read it in KL in 1995, and reread it again when I was working in Singapore couple of years back. And during my student days, I spent hours in the library sampling the wisdom of Sri Aurobindo. Many of his thoughts and writings still echo in my head until now.

In Merging with Siva, the late Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami wrote that there are only two valid paths to spiritual enlightment: the path of the householder and the path of the sanyasin (the renunciate). To be a monk, one needs a controlled environment as the demands are strict and the expectations high. It is like becoming a professional sportsman--a spiritual athlete, if you will.

On the other hand it does not mean that the householder, embroiled daily in his "worldly" pursuits of providing for his family and building a home, is any less closer to God. There is as much spirituality in a harmonious household as there is in any house of worship.

The true householder, in bringing up a family, creates and nurtures a beautiful garden of love--one that sprouts from the seeds of self-sacrifice and nourished by the soil of solicitude. A family is a groupsoul--a conglomeration of like souls-- that has chosen to evolve together along the path of enlightenment.

And where do I stand between these two paths? I don't know. Perhaps I am not a spiritual person: I am just an ordinary bloke who drowns himself with a six-pack every night in front of the TV, watching professional sportsmen display their skills; a Lajang Parasit who finds contentment wandering like an intruder into other people's gardens, to admire the beauty of their blooms.