The Fear Hiding Beneath Every Serious Seeker 

“Abandoning family is just a tragedy.” 

There is a fear that quietly haunts almost everyone who becomes serious about enlightenment, a fear rarely spoken aloud because it sounds ungrateful or unspiritual to admit it, and that is the worry that to truly awaken you will have to walk away from the people you love, that the husband or wife or children you are responsible for will somehow become obstacles on the path, casualties of a journey that demands everything, and Vishrant meets this fear head on with a clarity that cuts straight through the romantic mythology of the seeker who renounces the world. 

The question put to him is direct – would he counsel someone preparing for enlightenment to remove the responsibilities and the commitments they carry in life? And his answer is not a sweeping yes or no, it depends entirely on what those responsibilities actually are. 

Most people assume the spiritual path requires subtraction, the stripping away of every attachment until nothing remains, and so they imagine that family must be given up, but Vishrant turns this assumption on its head, because in his understanding the care of a wife or children is not an obstacle to awakening at all. To abandon them would be, in his own blunt words, so unmanly it’s not funny, and he advises everyone, without exception, to take care of their families. What he points to is something far more nuanced and far more liberating, that the things which truly tie a person down and keep them stressed and contracted are not the bonds of love but the burdens that drain the system, and the work is to tell the difference. 

Watch the Satsang excerpt here:

Removing Victim Thinking and Worry at the Root 

“The cause of most suffering of human beings is victim-orientated thinking and worry.” 

Long before Vishrant ever turned toward the spiritual quest, he had already done something that quietly set the foundation for everything that came later, and that was the deliberate removal of victim-orientated thinking and worry from his life, a decision he made at nineteen years old, simply refusing to honour either of them. He says that since he was a teenager he has not suffered a great deal, and he attributes this directly to that early refusal, because in his understanding these two patterns, the habit of casting oneself as a victim and the habit of worry, are the cause of most human suffering, and they run so deep and so unquestioned in ordinary life that almost no one thinks to challenge them. 

This is not positive thinking dressed up as spirituality, it is something more fundamental, a recognition that suffering is generated internally by the stories the mind tells about being wronged, being threatened, being at the mercy of circumstance, and that a person can simply decline to participate in those stories. When someone told him as a young man that he could not do something, he would not absorb it, he would not let it shape his sense of what was possible, he would respond that they were no longer going to be in his life because he only believed that he could, and to a remarkable degree he did do all the things he set out to do, building businesses and a publishing company and a career, living by the conviction that anything the mind of man can conceive and believe, he can achieve. 

The Same Devotion That Built a Business Builds Consciousness 

“The same devotion and discipline I had in business, once I got into consciousness work, the exact same devotion was there also.” 

One of the most encouraging things in this conversation, especially for anyone who has lived an ambitious worldly life and now wonders whether that history disqualifies them from spiritual depth, is the way Vishrant describes the seamless continuity between his years of material success and his later consciousness work. He learned how to succeed in the material world at nineteen and did not take up the spiritual quest until he was twenty-eight, nine years later, and far from those business years being a wasted detour, they turned out to be the perfect training ground, because the very devotion and discipline that made him effective in business transferred directly and naturally into the work of raising consciousness. 

Before spirituality, he threw himself into personal growth in exactly the same way he had thrown himself into business, doing groups every weekend, motivation seminars, the teachings born from books like How to Win Friends and Influence People, anything he could find, because he simply loved it, and that same hunger and dedication carried over without interruption. The lesson here is quietly radical, that the qualities the world admires in a high achiever, focus, commitment, the refusal to be told no, are not opposed to awakening, they can become its preparation, and a life spent building things in the material world can be the very thing that prepares a person to commit just as fully to the inner journey. 

Learning to Die Before You Die 

“The mind has to surrender itself unconditionally to truth.” 

Underneath all of this sits the deepest preparation of all, which Vishrant names without flinching as learning to die, because in his understanding the mind must surrender itself unconditionally to truth, and unconditional surrender is something the ego will not do as long as it believes its survival is at stake. He describes how, almost without realising it at the time, the activities of his life had been training him for exactly this, the diving he did among sharks, where before he would even get into the water he would allow the sharks in his mind to eat him, making himself willing to die so that fear would not keep him from entering the water, and the fourteen years of martial arts in which every time he entered a fight he became willing to die. 

This willingness to die, repeated and deepened over years, is what prepared his mind for the unconditional surrender that enlightenment actually requires, because awakening is not something the self acquires, it is something that occurs when the self has surrendered, and the surrender is total. The person who clings to being a someone, who braces against loss, who must protect and preserve the imagined self at all costs, cannot make this movement, but the person who has practiced, again and again, the small deaths of letting go, who has loosened the grip of self-preservation, finds that the final letting go is not a catastrophe to be feared but a doorway that has been quietly opening the whole time. 

Simplify, and Replace Yourself 

“Success in business is doing nothing, and the only way you can do nothing in business is to replace yourself.” 

So if family is not the thing to remove, what is? Here Vishrant becomes intensely practical, because when the seeker in the conversation admits that he has so many things going on, business and partnerships and consulting, and that it all feels like far too much when enlightenment is the real goal, the advice is simple and immediate. Simplify it, and get someone else to do some of the work. This is not spiritual platitude, it is hard-won business wisdom, because Vishrant describes how he replaced himself from the very first day he opened his own company, having been one of the highest paid salesmen in Australia selling advertising space, and yet never selling advertising space again once he started his own company, handing all the leads and the work to other people right from the start. 

His definition of success in business is almost a koan, that success in business is doing nothing, and that the only way to do nothing is to replace yourself, to build something that runs without requiring your constant presence, which is exactly what freed him to travel the world and do groups in America and Europe without being chained to an office. The principle translates directly to anyone preparing for awakening while carrying a heavy load of worldly responsibility, take the burden off yourself, bring in a few people to help, and reclaim the free time and inner spaciousness that the path requires, because the stress and contraction of being indispensable to your own enterprise is precisely the kind of responsibility worth shedding, while the bonds of love and family are not. 

Why Your Partner Needs to Be on the Same Page 

“She could be talked around, because if she doesn’t support you, it’s going to be hard.” 

Perhaps the most tender and practical thread in this conversation is the recognition that it is difficult to do this alone, because the inner transformation Vishrant describes is genuinely difficult to undergo without someone walking beside you who understands what is happening. He was fortunate, he says, in that once his wife truly grasped what had happened to him, she was willing to support it, and although his awakening changed their lives considerably, suddenly surrounding him with many people, her support made the whole thing possible rather than a source of conflict. 

He is honest that if a partner does not support you it is going to be hard, and that your wife or husband needs to be on the same page about what you really want, while also gently noting that a partner can often be talked around as they begin to see the changes for themselves. This is deeply reassuring for anyone whose family is part of their spiritual life rather than separate from it, because the worry that often lingers in a supportive partner is not about the spirituality itself but about the practical structure, the finances, the organisation, the life arrangements being set up so that there is no anxiety lurking underneath, and Vishrant treats that as a perfectly sensible concern rather than an unspiritual one, even acknowledging that he himself did not know how successful he would be at Satsang, that it took a little time before the people came and the bills were paid. 

The Buddha Field, Not the Words 

“They come back for the buddha field, not for the words.” 

What ultimately draws people, Vishrant explains, is not the cleverness of what is said but the field of energy itself, the buddha field, and he is clear that people return again and again not for the words but for the presence, the felt transmission that does the real work beneath the level of concept. He describes how, after he awakened and started holding Satsang, a community formed around him naturally, without much advertising or marketing, simply because people could feel the presence of the buddha field, and the gathering filled itself through word of mouth. 

This points to something important for anyone wondering how awakening fits into an ordinary life embedded in relationships and community, that enlightenment is not necessarily a private withdrawal from the world but something that naturally radiates and gathers others, that as a person rises in consciousness their very presence begins to affect others around them, drawing people not through persuasion but through the quiet pull of what they have become. Nowadays, he notes, a little advertising is done, particularly for retreats, because there is a genuine wish to get the dharma out and spread the light through the world, it is about being a light so that others can see. 

Karma, Service, and the Love That Comes Back 

“The best thing to do is serve heart, because then you’ve got nothing but love coming back.” 

Drawing the threads together, Vishrant frames the whole question of family and responsibility within his understanding of karma, which he sees not as superstition but as energetic reality, pointing to the words of Jesus, do unto others as you would have others do unto you, and explaining that the unspoken reason behind that instruction is karma itself, that whatever you put into the world comes back to you. He sees it energetically and directly, that whatever he does in the world returns, which is why the best thing anyone can do is serve heart, because when you serve heart there is nothing but love coming back to you. 

This is precisely why abandoning family makes no sense within his teaching, because to walk away from those you are responsible for, to cause that kind of harm in the name of spiritual freedom, would generate exactly the wrong return, while taking loving care of your wife, your children, your community, is itself a form of serving heart that brings love flowing back. He acknowledges that the majority of the West will not understand what such a path is even about, because it lies outside the inherited framework of Western religion, and that pursuing enlightenment at all is rare, as the Buddha observed, rare to even hear of it, rarer still to pursue it, and yet for those who do, the message is steady and clear, you do not have to leave the people you love to find what you are looking for. 

An Invitation to Look Directly 

What Vishrant offers here is not a demand that you dismantle your life, it is an invitation to look honestly at what truly burdens you and what truly nourishes you, to release the stress and the victim thinking and the worry that contract you, while holding close the bonds of love and responsibility that no awakening worth having would ask you to betray. The path is not abandonment, it is simplification, the removal of what drains you so that there is space for what is real, and the willingness, eventually, to surrender the imagined self while remaining a loving presence to everyone around you. 

Sit in Satsang with Vishrant and let what is being pointed to be experienced directly, because in the presence of the buddha field the worry begins to dissolve, the grip of the ego loosens, and it becomes possible to see for yourself that awakening and a life of love are not opposites at all, that you can take care of your family and move toward enlightenment in the same breath, and that the love you give to those around you is the very same love that has always been quietly calling you home.