not something that I pursued. I Had the opportunity to be in the Rockies, to be in the Andes, and to me,? As foolish as it seems, the Himalayas were just Okay.
Another set of mountains, right? It was, it was just, okay. Another set of mountains.
When I came, I wasn't looking to find another peak to climb or another mountain to conquer. And I remember seeing the poster for Kailash 2009. And I saw the poster for Kailash and there was no interest, zero.
I even had a friend in summer of 2009, call me up and he's, let's go, let's go this year. No, he was like, nah, man, I'll pay for you. And I even was just said, I was like, I just, I'm not interested.
Right? Like that's how uninterested I was in going there. And then 2016 there were a couple upheavals in my life and I decided to do Hatha yoga school.
So I applied. I got turned down. For reasons I thought were silly, but I look back and I understand the reasonings they made.
But I had this five months that I had taken off, or that I had tried to take off. I had a certain amount of money saved up to go to the Hatha school. And my friend calls me and he says, well, we can go on this trip to Kailash.
And I was like, okay, I'll do that instead. And that's literally how I approached it. I said, all right, well, I'm not able to do the thing I really want.
Why not go on this vacation slash trip? And it was a trip with Sadhguru. It was one of the small group.
I think there were 60 people in it. And so we go and I, like I said, I didn't have any expectations and I think that's. A key is that if you approach things without expectations, if you approach things without wanting something from it, then you, maybe you're open in a different way.
But we go, we went to Nepal. We hiked for five or six days through the Kalapani region in Nepal. Absolutely beautiful.
It's remote. It's, there's nobody around. This is the first time when I realized how big of a deal Sadhguru was because at this point for about three or four years, I was still doing my practices, but I had stepped back from Isha as an organization.
Not for any particular reason. I just got busy in life stuff. I would maybe show up to volunteer here or there, but I really wasn't involved in the way that I was early on.
So it was, it was wonderful trekking. It was wonderful getting to sit with Satsang with him. All these things were, were beautiful, but they weren't necessarily, I can only compare them to what came next.
And so we fly into Lhasa, which is in Tibet. It's at about 11, 000 feet. We took about a day and a half to get acclimated.
And then we were supposed to hop on a flight and fly to Ali and then drive four hours to get to Kailash and Manasarova, but what happened was. The Chinese government, the Lhasa airport decided to get shut down. I'm going to stay away from any, any sort of I was going to say something and then I realized it would come out in the negative.
The Lhasa airport had to be shut down for a few reasons. And so we got on a bus and we drove and it was wake up at 6 AM, hop on a bus, drive for six hours, stop for lunch on another, or back on the bus, another six, seven hours. We get in at seven or eight, get a quick dinner, get to bed, then do it again.
On the bus, we had a certain sadhana we were doing, and, in my mind, we were supposed to be. At Kailasha full moon, we'll put a moon passes and we're on some highway in the middle of Tibet. And I'm just looking up at the moon and just a little bit, I don't say despondent, but a little disappointed that this wasn't going exactly how I structured it.
And, okay, this is in my mind what's happening. So we finally get to the edge of the lake and we get off the bus and it's been a long three days and, you're tired. And.
Food hasn't been that great and all these things these are very first world problems. But we get to the lake and step off the bus and, if you've seen the pictures, Tibet is this, the mountains are dirt. The mountains are not, the mountains are basically these dirt mounds.
They're not granite. They're not these high, it's not like the Himalayan peaks. Maybe Tibet is technically in the Himalayas, I think it is.
But since it's at 4, 000 feet, it just seems like these small, the mountains, I mean it's a beautiful area, but they're not, it's not like sitting there and looking up at Kedarnath or looking up at the Matterhorn or any of these things. But you go, you look at, I looked across the landscape and I thought Kailash and it's hard to put into words, but everything just Turned shimmery. And I had this Almost just this transcendental experience.
And it was the first time in my life that I've actually just bowed down to something. Something immense, something that I did not expect. I had no, no buildup for it.
It wasn't like we walk off the bus and someone says, there's Kailash. I just looked and I saw it and I knew and I didn't talk. I saw, I just stopped talking and it was about four or five days.
that I had no words. And the Sacred Walks people at Isha are quite incredible, how they put these programs together. It's organized how they make things easy for you, how they make these inaccessible places accessible for people who, I'm semi adventurous, but I'm not someone who's going to go and find Kailash by myself.
Like, that's, I'll be 100 percent honest, that's not me. And so they just put these programs together and make, the Southern Sojourn. All these things are just incredible and accessible to people who probably wouldn't experience these places.
And it was, I'm the type who I would always know my heart rate. I would know my everything, I have everything planned and, they say to be back in 15 minutes on the bus. I'm back at about 13 minutes.
I'm seated these sorts of things ready to go, but I would be sitting there just looking up at it. tears to tap me on the shoulder. I know it's time to go.
And this was how I spent the next couple of days. And just the idea that, the idea, just the experience. You can't put it into words.
And I think that's where you get into some of these. And people are like all the sharing sounds the same, all this, all that. And it's, it's, it's impossible to put into words and I'll, I'll try and fail, but still try.
So we go and we spent a couple of days I think it was Two nights on the edge of a lake. Sadhguru says there was some process that we were supposed to wake up at 2 a. m.
If we woke up, it's some of the things are just unbelievable to tell because you sit there and you're, you're in your room and the rain's pouring. And I remember I woke up, he said, don't set an alarm. Just if you wake up, wake up.
So I woke up and at first I looked at my watch and I thought it's 1. 45am . You only get five hours of sleep.
Like, why are you awake? And it took me about. A minute to a minute and a half to remember he had said that there'd be some process happening at this time.
And so I got up and I did the process and facing the lake and there's, there's this haziness and there were things going on and seeing things. And in my mind, I'm thinking, am I, am I insane? One thing is clear here, this we are hundred percent sure, is there's a tremendous amount of activity in the lake.
And this activity is, the nature of the activity is such that it has nothing to do with anything that we know as life on this planet. It's something totally different. It's life, but not the way we know it.
Life from somewhere has chosen this. Every time I look at Kailash, it's just like this overpouring of something that just overwhelms me. I, not, there's no logical explanation for it.
There's no, even now, if I focus, it's, it's alive. It's, it's there, right? Like, it's not something that's, that I wasn't experiencing.
It's come and gone. It's, it's something that's there. And I don't know how to, logically.
You. You can't. Whatever you cannot understand is mysterious to every understanding is a misunderstanding because life can never be understood.
It can be lived, it can be experienced. You can reverberate with it. You now ever will understand it.
Understanding means you have found a meaning. Meaning is essentially. a psychological requirement.
Existentially, there is no meaning anywhere. What is the meaning of these pebbles? What is the meaning of the lake?
What is the meaning of the mountain? What is the meaning of the vastness of the sky? Tell the ducks about the meaning that you found in Manasarovar.
They'll quack, quack, quack. So, at least the next few days, Manasarovar, Kailash, don't assume anything. Oh, Shiva is God Mahadeva.
You don't know who the hell he is, let's see. The only thing that matters now is, the life that you are, is it full on or not, that's all. That's all you have to do.
Tomorrow the lake will do that to you. And then. .
We get to the day where we're gonna hike up, and I always, I think I said it before, like I'm just a fool who happens to stumble into these things because these two girls go off ahead and The teacher comes to me and says, Josh, can you catch up with them? Make sure they're okay. He knows that I was one thing about being an endurance athlete is you have a pretty good awareness of how, what your limits are, right?
I knew how far, how fast I could push myself and the signs that I was pushing too hard, which is good when you're at 17. 000 feet. So he just asked me to catch up with them and they were about a quarter mile ahead in about over about, Probably five or six miles.
I just slowly caught up with them. Turns out it was two of the teachers who were going to meet Sadhguru at halfway. So I got to walk in a group with just The four or five of us and him, and I said, you get into these things.
He facilitated the process for me. He could, there are some things where I was having this huge experience and I don't even know how to explain this. All this stuff sounds so strange.
Was that still at the lake or was that? This was walking up towards Kailash. It's about 11 miles.
That's 16 kilometers. So it's this long, slow incline that you walk up to get to the base where you see the pictures of Kailash, as we, can't remember which face it is, but it's one of the faces that especially within Isha, that's how we think of Kailash. So we get up, we get up to the top and there's like five or six of us and i'm just I we sit there and I stare at the mountain palms open eyes closed just kind of gaze at it and then I'll just share this one piece because it doesn't seem quite as personal, but like, I start seeing these geometric things happening.
And it's like these Fibonacci sequences and these other patterns and all these patterns and it seems to align in certain parts of my body and I just close my eyes and I'm sitting there with it and then I get this like sense of this triangle. And like sitting in it's, it's weird because I know geometry, I understand geometry, but the idea I've seen Sadhguru talk about geometry. And one of the, one of the things that you might be picking up is even through all of this, I retain a healthy skepticism, right?
Like even through all of this stuff, I, I don't know, I don't know that it's right. I don't know that it's wrong, but I'm not going to speak confidently and be like, there are these geometric patterns and it was this triangle and me and the mountain and this person, that person, that this is what it seemed to me. And that's all I can present.
And in the end of the day, like that's all it is. Like it used to mess with me. Cause you look at the world and you think, how do we know that we actually exist?
It's like. Well, we don't, right? We don't know what life is.
You look at a rock and you look at a plant, what's the difference? You look at a plant and you look at us, is there a difference? In some intuitive way we seem to know that there is, but we don't know what life is.
So I had this experience and it's just this, this overwhelming experience. It's kind of like you see the matrix and then I come back and it's, you Something like an hour and a half has passed, and I just kind of look at my watch, and I look around, and there's more people there, and Sadhguru gone off to do something. And he says that that place is a, is a mystic library.
He says that that place is a repository of knowing, and all these other things, and it's All I know is it's something beyond what I'm capable of understanding. And we went through initiation process. An interesting thing about the initiation process is by this point I had had, I think it was five days, These overwhelming experiences.
And it's one of those things where I was just like, my fuse was blown. I was tired. I was getting resistant.
I was like, okay, kind of a time to go back to normal. But then it was initiation day. And I was like, am I going to miss initiation day?
Like we came up for this. And at this point I'm resistant and I'm tired and kind of want to just. Sit by the pool and read a book for a day, right?
Like I just kind of want to take a break. I want a break from it all but you're in the mountains of Tibet. There's no there's no breaks to be had So the initiation process was just something that was You can't even talk about that.
Like how do you how do you talk about i'll just tell my experience maybe What is the nation initiation into? As far as I understand, I don't know, you, you go through a process and yeah, I mean, Sunaina, I think she told me that Sadhguru is not necessarily it's more initiation into Kailash for you to be receptive to the energies of Kailash. That makes sense.
Yeah. In terms of what exactly it is he does something I'll tell the after effects because. I remember, like I told you how I came into that.
I was very resistant. I was very much kind of, I could feel it. I could feel the resistance building.
I could feel that I was not open or receptive if it happened two days later when I was having these big experiences, it probably, I would have stepped in and just been like, okay, go. But he made things happen for me. And then I'm walking down and it was.
The wind was blowing through the grass, right? And I was the wind blowing through the grass. The grass was swaying in the wind, and I was the grass swaying in the wind.
The river was flowing, and I was the river. And it wasn't like me separate from these things. It was just this sense that I am these things.
There is this sense that whatever, for a period, whatever boundaries I was, or the definition of me, like whatever this definition of me, maybe it didn't dissolve completely, but became very thin. And it gave me that sense of this feeling of my life that, I'm me. Those are the things outside me.
Right? Very clear distinction. Even say in a relationship, it was, yes, you can enjoy the person, but there was, people talk about merging, people talk about this, people talk about that.
And so there, there's very clear distinctions between this is me, That's not me. This is my thought. That's their thought.
And it just, it dissolved in some way for me walking down there. And for me, that was a huge turning point because up until that point, yes, I had done practices. Yes.
I had done different things. Yes. I had been with Sadhguru.
These sorts of things I had sat in front of other people. I'd been to different places, but it was always me having this experience. And this was, it was, God, that was eight years ago.
Speaking back to that, it was eight years ago, but it really has in many ways, been a, been kind of a left turn.
