The Seeker Read Online Free PDF Page A

up.
    “Tom’s real hot on consolidating the production network,” she said. “Can they operate with three plants instead of four? What’s the trade-off between transshipment and site costs?”
    “I’ll dig into it,” said Max.
    “You haven’t gotten to the supply chain yet?”
    Max shook his head.
    A wave of irritation swept over her face. “If you’re not up for it today . . . ”
    “I’m on it.”
    Sarah left his office.
    Max opened the Excel file. Again, his stomach tightened. Even his kid sister had had the courage to do her own thing. Sophia hadn’t fit in with the girl cliques in the projects so she’d learnt to rely on herself. Defying their mother, who’d wanted her to get a well-paying job, she was counseling teen junkies in a Brooklyn treatment facility. Andre was studying criminal behavior at John Jay to help kids get out of the same gangs that had crippled him. Who had Max become?
    So if there is birth, age, suffering, sorrow and death, then there must be something that is unborn, un-aging, un-ailing, sorrow-less and deathless, immortal as it were.
    He understood now why Viveka’s description of yogis on the top of the mountain had struck him. They had stripped their life down to its barest essence to find the same insight about suffering he’d felt close to uncovering years ago. Without his mother’s hospital bills to pay, without her voice in his head urging him to become someone, nothing stopped him from seeking the same insight. Did the yogis find any answers? After a moment’s hesitation, Max switched over from Excel to Chrome and began searching for Himalayan yogis on the Internet.
    He skimmed through story after story of young Westerners traveling to India to seek spiritual enlightenment. A shadow of doubt arose in him. Was he unraveling after his mother’s death, becoming just another privileged white fucker with rich people’s problems? Max remembered the strange feeling he’d had last night that he’d heard Viveka’s words before, sometime, somewhere within the depths of his heart. He tried to dismiss all doubt and tore through the web pages as though scrutinizing a prospect company’s noisy balance sheet, deciding whether to invest in it or not.
    A German lawyer’s blog caught his attention. She had survived unscathed a car crash that had killed her husband and three children. Her quest for life’s answers had led her to India. It seemed you didn’t even have to throw a stone to find a spiritual teacher in India. Just bending to pick up one would make you collide into some guru or the other, all of whom eventually demanded money, gifts, and sometimes even sex. Disappointed, she had given up on her search for a teacher and began studying ancient Eastern doctrines in solitude when she ran into a South American man high up in a guesthouse in the Himalayas. The man’s teachings gave her journey the focus it lacked until then. Her calm, unblinking account was a welcome departure from the breathless, wide-eyed ‘Dude, I found some enlightenment in India’ stories he’d come across. Max searched for more information about the South American.
    Slowly, a picture emerged from the handful of blogs that mentioned him. Once a successful doctor in Brazil, he had left everything to become a yogi in the Himalayas. Some said he was twenty-five. Others said he looked twenty-five but was actually more than one hundred years old. That he had penetrated the mysteries of consciousness and the material body and reversed the process of aging. The Brazilian taught a method of yoga and meditation that allowed one to go deep within the recesses of one’s own mind and reach a perfect condition beyond good and evil, birth and death, the end of suffering as it were. Max’s heart stirred. Again, the words sounded strangely familiar, as if he’d heard them before. But when? He barely knew anything about yoga and meditation. The rational part of him still didn’t know what to make of this mystical