In the landscape of my life I found contradictions that brought unhappiness. I studied to become an engineer, destiny offered profession of a salesman and then a contractor but in the deep recesses of my mind I was a philosopher. Not only I messed up with my job but my frustration grew working for Crompton Greaves as a sales engineer. Is this what I wanted to do? This is when I came across Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and learnt Meditation, Siddhi Techniques and explored the deeper depths of my mind. I was twenty six and I quit my job and joined him full time....Three years, penniless, I wandered in Rishikesh, Tirumala, Kathmandu and Switzerland. But my mind saw the vastness of the blue sky, scattered with voluptuous clouds. It saw a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. I wanted money, glamour and glitz. I wanted wine, women and a song. Maharishi had told a group my colleagues and me “You have Gurudev’s (Shankaracharaya of Jyotir Muth) blessings”.I did not understand then but I understand it now. I left him and I started a business. It grew and spanned the entire country. It employed about two thousand technicians, supervisors, managers and directors. Yes, I got it all, the wine, the women and a song that was slightly jarring in my heart. Is this what I wanted? I got the pot of gold but the dew drops on which hung the rainbow evaporated and with that the rainbow. Frustration of an unsavoury work grew in my heart and so I sold one company, shut down the other and made a lot of money. Scriptures and Maharishi gave me courage to be free, taught me to be happy, instilled in me inner calm when the tornadoes were trying to destroy everything that I built over years. But most of all it gave me the ability to smile when the chips were down. This was the Cherry on the cake. I read and reread “The Bhagavad Gita”. I found that Krishna was an unsurpassed scientist and likewise, Newton, Albert Einstein, Heisenberg and many others were Maharishis of the modern world. But none could match Krishna for he enumerated the Laws of Thermodynamics, The Laws of Quantum Mechanics, Newton’s laws of motion, laws that deal with Bose-Einstein condensate and numerous other laws of classical and quantum physics that govern life. Upanishads and The Gita taught that “The Matter Principle” and “Conscious Principles” are intertwined with each other. Though we are conscious but we do not understand “Consciousness”. To explain “The Conscious Principle” I have written the first book “Soul Descends” and am soon publishing the second book “Manas”. I write, lecture and conduct various courses in Vedic thought but with a scientific twist. My wife Rashmi is a home maker; my daughter Shruti is working for a company in Noida and son Siddhant has joined me to propagate the philosophy of “The Conscious Principle”. I guess now I have the rainbow and the pot of gold.

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Ravindra Shrivastav