About the author
I joined the merchant navy at eighteen. I had never seen the ocean. I had a certificate, a duffel bag, and a calculation that passed for a plan. One night, three weeks out of port, two officers brought me onto the bridge and pointed at the sky. Find the North Star, they said. I couldn’t. The sky was too large and too indifferent to my intentions. One of them asked a question I have been living inside ever since: If you cannot find the stars, how will you find your way home?
I stayed on ships for six years. I learned the stars, the weather, the water. I watched a man stand outside a locked door every day with food and songs for a stowaway the rest of us had been told to ignore. I watched Hindu pump men show up for their meditation practice in storms, in waves large enough that everyone else on deck was quietly reconsidering their life choices. I watched a Muslim friend pray on the bridge wings facing open water. Something in those years planted a question I couldn’t name yet.
When I left the ships I went back to school. Then back again. An undergraduate degree in a single year, two master’s degrees, a doctorate. I paid for it cleaning cafeteria floors, walking miles in snow, borrowing every book I read. I ended up in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom, building mathematical models for airline routing and hotel allocation. I was good at the work. And the ache underneath everything had not moved.
Meditation arrived not because I was drawn to it but because I had run out of other things to try. A colleague, a Yale dropout who had spent years in an Indian ashram, introduced me to sitting. I brought the same approach I brought to everything: set a goal, work hard, measure progress. I was, without knowing it, trying to win at sitting still. I kept a copy of Nisargadatta’s I Am That on my nightstand and opened it almost at random before sitting each morning. More than forty years later I still do.
My twenties were what I’d now call a retreat-and-nothing pattern. I’d go on a retreat, have some kind of opening, come home, and lose it within a week. The daily practice finally took hold somewhere around thirty-two or thirty-three. Not because I had a breakthrough, but because I stopped waiting for one. I just sat every morning, whether it felt like anything or not.
In my thirties I got serious about the classical Vedāntic texts, particularly Śaṅkara. I read the Vivekacūḍāmaṇi, the Upadeśasāhasrī, and eventually the Brahmasūtra commentaries. Self-inquiry became the center of my practice. I also sampled other lineages: Zen, Vipassana, Christian contemplatives, Sufi shrines I passed through in cities I can’t quite place anymore. I was searching, though I would have said I was being thorough.
Two traditions
Dzogchen came in my thirties too. By then it had been gaining attention around the world, and I kept seeing the books in the Silicon Valley bookstores where I spent my weekends. I went to a retreat expecting something close to what I already knew from Vedānta. In a way it was. In another way it wasn’t at all. Vedānta works by negation: you strip away what you’re not until what’s left is undeniable. Dzogchen skips the stripping. It points directly at the nature of awareness and asks you to recognize what’s already there.
I sat with both. I didn’t try to merge them. They just coexisted, the way your left hand and right hand coexist. Some mornings the practice felt more like inquiry. Other mornings it felt more like resting in what was already obvious. Eventually I stopped keeping track of which was which.
What practice actually looks like
Most mornings I sit for about forty-five minutes, sometimes longer. Maybe one in five of those sittings has real clarity. The rest are ordinary. I stopped using a timer in my forties because I found I was watching the clock instead of watching the mind.
I have a wife, a life, the usual responsibilities. There was a period in my late thirties when my wife told me I seemed absent, like I was physically present but somewhere else. She was right. I had confused withdrawal with depth. My daughter, who was five at the time, put it more precisely than my wife did: “Why do you always look so far away?” That question landed harder than any teaching I’d received. She was right too.
The practice now is quieter than it used to be. Less effortful. I don’t chase states anymore, which took about twenty years of chasing states to learn. Sometimes the most honest description of my morning sit is that I just sat there. It took me a long time to believe that was fine.
The book
Nothing in the Way grew from an encounter with Śaṅkara’s Aparokṣānubhūti, a short Vedāntic text on direct experience. I found it in my late forties, and unlike a lot of the texts I’d read by then, it didn’t feel like something I needed to study. It felt like a description of something I already knew but hadn’t been able to articulate. I started writing notes in the margins. The notes became essays. The essays became a memoir.
The book pairs the first ten verses of the Aparokṣānubhūti with forty years of practice across both traditions: the ships, the degrees, the searching, the kitchen where a kettle clicked off on an ordinary afternoon and something that had been moving for thirty years went still. It’s not a how-to. It’s one person’s account of what a contemplative life actually looks like when you remove the parts that make for good spiritual marketing.
This site
The Balanced Path is where I write about practice, occasionally about the texts that have shaped it, and sometimes about the places where Vedānta and Dzogchen overlap in ways I didn’t expect. I publish when I have something to say, which is not on a schedule.
Stay in touch
Subscribe for occasional reflections on practice, plus the preface of Nothing in the Way as a free PDF.
For questions or to get in touch: rbhaskar2@gmail.com