For some years, my sister Gita and I have been attending the brilliant lectures on the Upanishads given by Swami Tadatmananda at the Arsha Bodha Center, New Jersey. One morning, Gita raised the question as to whether there was some accessible way to impart these profound teachings to a wider audience—from busy millennials to baby boomers confronting their own mortality—and point them towards freedom from suffering which is the promise of Advaita Vedanta. She suggested the popular and entertaining form of a novel. I arrogantly took up the challenge and this was the genesis of MOKSHA.
I am a scribbler of sorts. One of my earliest memories is that of opening a dictionary to a random page and thinking that if I could only read I would know everything. Words, phrases, sentences, have since danced around me, plagued me, obsessed me. At some point I became an architect but the scribbling of words on scraps of paper, napkins, backs of envelopes, continued. Now came the exposure to non-duality—Consciousness with no qualities, that Supreme Reality that cannot be described in words.
The sages of ancient India, the rishis, conveyed their astonishing discoveries using words. But regarding the methodologies of non-duality, Advaita Vedanta, the lament in the Taittiriya Upanishad is“…having failed to reach that lofty Truth, our words fall back.” Then how to proceed? Through a process of negation, neti neti, that is only valid in seeking one’s True Nature, one’s True Self. Stories and metaphors are used liberally, but even so the writings and utterances are cryptic and require years of study and guidance from an enlightened teacher.
Needless to say, in MOKSHA, my words “fall back”, fall short, but the sincere hope is that a whisper, a faint imprint, a glimmer, lingers, and that the reader is intrigued enough to continue to pursue the path to freedom from suffering and enlightenment.
As T.S. Eliot, paraphrasing the Bhagavad Gita, succinctly puts it: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
