I’m enrolled in at an intensive course for business executives at Sri Bhagavan’s Oneness University located in Varadaiahpalem, a village in Chittoor district in the state of Andhra Pradesh in southern India.
In class a few days ago, we watched a video where Bhagavan said that enlightenment is a neurobiological shift that causes your inner world to change. It can happen at any moment. One moment you can be unenlightened and then the next, you are. It happens in an instant. Your perception changes and then poof—you are gone.
While I have not yet entered permanent enlightenment, I did experience my “self” dissolving at the airport in Chennai. Apparently, I had read my ticket wrong. My return flight was scheduled for four o’clock. However the way international time reads, that means four in the morning. Coming from the U.S.A., I mistakenly thought it was four in the afternoon. Thus, I missed my flight and was frantically trying to book another at the Travel Desk in the airport.
Experiencing a myriad of details that stressed me out, including losing a day due to travel and the added cost of the new airline ticket, as well as sweating in the humid heat of the Indian sun for hours—suddenly I found myself sitting on a stone bench in complete stillness and peace. All the anxiety dissipated from my body. I stared out in front of me in a timeless gaze, breathing quietly in and out. Nothing mattered anymore.
I had somehow stopped in the midst of this rush and hub-bub. Somehow, I had sat down on this bench and fell into stillness. I don’t know how, as cars were swerving into and out of the curb at an alarming rate. Muslims, Hindus and foreigners were gabbing away, crowded, hot, tired and trying to get from Point A to Point B. There was so much commotion around me and all at once, it became quiet inside my head.
I remember thinking, “Well, it’s only money (for a new plane ticket).” Money did not matter. Time did not matter. The heat did not matter. Losing a day of travel did not matter. My brain scanned my life. It recalled all the scenarios in my life when every detail needed to happen perfectly in order for me to assure myself that I was “blessed,” favored or had good karma. Every event was a fortuitous sign that I was a good person and good things happen to me. I believed I was protected by God or angels. Although that may be true, the most minute occurrence whether it was positive or negative was always logged into the database of my mind like a coin in a piggybank, proving to myself that I was either in alignment with the Universe or not.
But here I was, terribly out of alignment with my flight plans, or so it seemed outwardly. “What was I thinking?” I asked myself as I looked back on my life. I felt so lost in my youth. I felt lonely and I needed the details of my life to work out perfectly or else panic would set in that I was somehow not right with God. There was an underlying insecurity in all of it. The two categories I put every detail of my life and my “self” into was “perfect” and “not perfect.” When any event was “not perfect,” I analyzed why and worked to improve it until it was at least 98%, which I figured was close enough to perfect to finally let it go. I consistently gave myself a hall pass at the 98% mark. That’s when I felt the most relaxed in my life—whenever I ranked in the top 1-2% of anything, including getting a full scholarship to Harvard.
I thought about, “What if this peace had not overcome me from out of the blue?” The peace was like a pigeon which randomly decided to land on my head. It had no rhyme or reason. I did not concoct nor create it. It simply was. Normally, I’d be internally scouring how I had messed up reading my airline ticket and how I would ask for help next time from the Indian taxi driver who scheduled the ride with me two days prior. I was “fixing” my problem so that it would never repeat itself. I was analyzing the shit out of it and “perfecting” it, over and over, incessantly, obsessively.
Suddenly, I realized, here I am sitting in the hot sun with all my luggage on a stone bench in the hustle and bustle of Chennai traffic honking all around me like a mad swarm of geese and I was staying with the “What Is.” I felt fine.
Then, the big realization came. “What if…” I asked myself, “God had asked me to miss my flight and take this later flight?” What if God said, “Vicky, do you mind taking this later flight, paying more money, losing a day due to travel, sitting in the hot sun for twelve hours—just because I asked you to?”
I never thought that the imperfection in my life could possibly be a request from God. If God had asked me to go through such inconvenience, so much so that it felt like I was a refugee wandering aimlessly from place to place—of course I’d do it. Just like he asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, and without questions, Abraham went ahead and prepared for the trek up the mountain to kill his only son. Just because God asked.
If I thought of all accidents, mistakes and unplanned incidents as God asking me to take a less-than-perfect path, even one of suffering—then, suddenly, all experiences became tolerable.
The moment I thought that, I saw the single reason underneath why I had felt so lost and insecure during my youth. I did not put my life in the Lord’s hands. Like a movie playing in fast forward, I zipped from scene to scene, seeing every time I had finally failed or admitted defeat—that was a pivotal moment. That was the time I should’ve put my life in the Lord’s hands.
Just like missing my flight. Instead of whipping out my laptop to connect to the wifi or finding the nearest ticket counter agent, I should have just said, “God, my life is in your hands. Do whatever you will do with it. Command my life to take a certain path and I will go.” If I had just done that simple little step, my whole life would have turned out differently.
Here was my golden key to all of life’s foibles: Put my life in the Lord’s hands. If I had just taken myself out of the picture and seen it as God’s picture, then—poof. I’d be gone. There would not be a “me.” Three would only be God fashioning a destiny out of my life. If I didn’t interfere with my own life, God could have and would have done wonders with it, I’m sure.
Just like the disciples who could not accept a less-than-perfect messiah whom they expected to be crowned king, I blocked the miracles in my life. But Mary who let God perform all the mistakes he wanted to with her son’s life—she was the one who saw the resurrected Christ, healed from his wounds, risen from the dead and who became her living miracle. As a woman, she was definitely not in the top 1-2% of her time. She was just willing, to put her life in the Lord’s hands. 
