A seeker's Dolano story
​
Hope you have an idea about Dolano and her satsangs now, Here we share the personal story of a seeker who came to know Dolano and participated in the last satsang ( intensive) .
I heard about Dolano in 2006. In Pune, India, I met a bright young English guy called Dmitri. I liked him a lot. Dmitri told me of a master who specialized in the end of the path. According to Dmitri, that master said that she knew the tricks seekers play with themselves, the tricks that keep them on the path forever. She said she took seekers who were ready and pushed them off the cliff over a month-long process called "Intensive Satsang" or "the Last Satsang". If you felt ready, you wrote to the master (who was called Dolano), and if she thought you were ready, she accepted you. Dmitri lived in a compound called Out of Africa. A neighbour of his was doing the Last Satsang. I saw him walking around with a walkman. Dolano wanted you to listen to her tapes in between meetings. I was impressed with the seriousness of the process, though I didn't know what to think of it.
I wrote down "Dolano" in my notebook and resolved to check her out later. I was in the midst of a "checking out phase": I wasn't ready for the end of the path, I knew that. I wanted to play awhile in the spiritual supermarket. I needed to see the colorful packages on the shelves and tick off the boxes—"retarded", "fun to do but obvious dead-end", "not for me". In the next two years I was committed to the path, turning over every rock on five continents in search of a true teaching that would bring results.
I met all colors of preachers who wanted me to believe stories that would make Santa Claus laugh. I quickly bypassed. I heard teachers who wanted me to accept ten-step formulas or systems of concepts built on even more concepts, as though truth could come out of a recipe book. I bypassed too.
I read books that kept bringing me to the edge of something. But I loved the Muslim proverb, "A donkey with a load of books is still a donkey". I didn't want to become a scholar who knew every scripture but still didn't KNOW. I learned techniques that had powerful healing effects on my mind. But I knew the parable where the monks abandon the boat after crossing the river because they won't need it again. I didn't want to become a technique-bound self-healer who works on himself his whole life but never heals.
I found communities of seekers congregating in tribes where I could lose myself in song, love, friendship, drumming, dance, life. I didn't want to be lost but found, so I left.
I found meditation practices that brought about amazing moments of clarity, understanding, dissolution. But the moments never stayed, leaving me more frustrated than before as I now longed to find the way back to doors I had once pushed. And I didn't want to become an old seeker stuck on the same technique, trying to always go deeper, deeper, but not really getting anywhere.
During that time, I stayed aware of Dolano but still didn't "check her out" as I knew I was still moving on the path. But I was traveling at high speed and could see that my highway was fast running out of exits. One day, I booked another ticket to India. A few days later, I downloaded all of Dolano's videos and watched them that night. She talked about all the problems I had run into on the path. She pointed to the reasons I was stuck. Just listening to her, I knew that she was speaking truth, because I could recognize what she pointed to in myself. I could see that she was "scientific", which may sound strange, and I trusted her. So, as Dolano would say, I heard the ringing bells. Straight away, going to her became the most important thing in my life. I spent the next day writing to her, asking if she would take me for "the last satsang" four months later.
These were four long months. I traveled from Australia to Thailand then to
the North of India, closing the last doors on the path, getting more quiet,
preparing for Dolano. Then I attended the last satsang and the quest ended—to
my own surprise, in a sense, because I had been so demanding that I hadn't
really believed that anything anyone could share would ever satisfy my mind.
The process started with coming to know "who am I". I had thought I knew before, but whatever I had "known" was knowledge of which I had to remind myself; so I didn't really know. As Dolano points out, you don't have to remind yourself that the earth is round to know that the earth is round. Whether or not you're thinking about it right this second, you just know. This is how it is for me now with knowing all the things I came to know with Dolano. With this knowing, the mind has been liberated of impossible tasks that it had set for itself. That's why I'm no longer on the path. The search is over.
I don't say that "the drop has dropped", but curiously that doesn't matter at all. There is one faint question lingering somewhere: "What would it mean to say that the drop has dropped? Would anything be different?" But the question is not a quest, it does not cause trouble; it is a fun and faraway tickle, a curiosity. I am curious about it because Dolano says that for her it took a little time between the moment she came to know "who am I" and the moment the drop dropped. In the meantime, as Dolano might say, I am "out of the mess". Everything is so fine, I don't know what more I could want: even to write that barely makes sense. The search is truly over.
In fact, nowadays I find myself almost unable to read a page from a spiritual book! Not that I even want to try... It is the strangest thing, because that used to be my life. My life after intensive is amazing, and at the same time it is not amazing in the way I would have imagined.