The Yoga of Max's Discontent Read Online Free PDF

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 from last night that he’d heard Viveka’s words before, somewhere within the depths of his heart. He tried to dismiss all doubt and tore through the web pages as though scrutinizing a prospective acquisition’s noisy balance sheet, deciding whether to invest in the company 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 led her to India. It seemedyou 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 one guru or another, all of whom eventually demanded money, gifts, and sometimes even sex. Disappointed, she had given up on her search for a teacher and had begun 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 before. 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 this man. Once a successful doctor in Brazil, he had left everything behind to become a yogi in the Himalayas. Some said he was twenty-five. Others said that he looked twenty-five but was actually more than a hundred years old. That he had penetrated the mysteries of consciousness and the material body and had 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 to 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 mumbo-jumbo. And yet he felt compelled to find out exactly where the Brazilian yogi lived.
    An Australian blogger had last seen him in a cave high up in the Garhwal Himalayas. Max emailed him, the German lawyer,and the other bloggers who had mentioned the Brazilian, asking to call or meet them to discuss the doctor and their own journeys. He didn’t know where they would meet. They were German, Israeli, Slovenian, Indian, from everywhere, and they seemed like seekers, never still, always on the move. They could be anywhere. Well, so could he.
    A shadow appeared on his laptop.
    Max looked up, startled.
    â€œAre you done?” said Sarah.
    Max shook his head.
    She frowned. “Can I see where you are?”
    Max pulled up the Excel file. He turned the screen toward her and walked her through his half-baked analysis.
    Sarah’s face dropped. “This isn’t enough. We need more for Tom.”
    Max saw the concern rise in her pale face. His pulse quickened. She hadn’t watched over her shoulder all her life in fear that a stray bullet would paralyze her, nor had she worried each day that the junkies sleeping under the dark stairwell of her apartment building would rape her little sister. His questions could never be hers. He couldn’t live her life anymore.
    â€œYou’re usually . . . can we please get the fuck on it now?” she said. “We have to get it together by noon.”
    Max shook his head. “I can’t. I have to leave,” he said.

5.
    T ime waste. You must not have come now,” said the man sitting next to Max on the floor of the train’s open doorway.
    Max smiled. This was the hundredth time he’d heard that in the last