He brought for lunch a set of toasted bread with garlic chutney, which was not a common thing to find in the remote town where we used to live and go to school. And the reason I felt that way was because I could smell the amazing aroma coming from those garlic-infused toasts, and I would look on lustily as he ate them.

I think that was the first time I registered garlic as an independent entity, purely because of its aromatic pull. The result was me getting deeply attracted to whatever that herb/thing was.

The aroma of garlic would fill the whole bus we used to sit together-in while coming back from summer school. Summer school used to finish earlier than regular classes, so it would be around noon as we were coming back, and all of us would open our lunch boxes. But nothing ever matched the aroma of those toasts that Sarthak used to bring.

Very appropriately, I prodded my parents with this new discovery, and they eventually had to give in to my constant clamoring. Within a few weeks, I managed to get hold of the secret ingredients and started getting them in my lunch box too.

And that is how I actively participated, for the first time, in building my relationship with garlic.

Next, when I was in 7th grade, in a different school in a different city, I was enjoying my lunch when a friend looked at me and remarked, “Dude, is something wrong with you? For I am seeing a garlic addict for the first time!”

I couldn’t really register what he meant until I realized that I had not touched any part of my lunch except the mango pickle that my mom used to provide on the side. And within that too, I was specifically plucking out all the whole garlic pieces and swallowing them like you would eat peanuts.

He was not wrong.

I loved taking a whole jar of pickle at home and eating just the garlic pieces from it. And it was only then that I realized this love affair with garlic was perhaps not entirely normal, for not everyone seemed to share it.

Over the years, I started noticing that I would like a simple dish only if, at the end, it got infused with garlic. The best example is Indian dal. There’s a version of it which, when infused with garlic at the end, becomes an absolute beast of a meal, which I could drink like one would drink any other liquid.

Noticing that many people swore by this garlic-infused dal, colloquially called tadka, I breathed a sigh of relief. It was not just me who was crazy about something as specific as garlic. It was a shared experience, for otherwise this garlic dal recipe wouldn’t have become a staple food for so many people across India.

As time passed, I discovered garlic naan and garlic bread, both essentially garlic mixed with some form of bread, and the flavours were deeply satisfying.

This obsession recently culminated in its climax when, much later in my life, I discovered garlic bagels in NYC.

To me, a garlic bagel is the epitome of human creation, for when it is eaten with jalapeño cream cheese, it breaks my inner guardrails to the point that I lose all connection to tangible reality and start swimming in the garlic-reality, which eventually brings inspiration to my heart and a twinkling to my eyes.

People fight over whether pineapple belongs on pizza or not, but that, to me, is an irrelevant question. It should have been all about garlic.

Beyond that, why are we not building garlic-flavored ice creams or garlic-infused protein powder?

I believe once we figure out how to add garlic to all the recipes known to humans, we will finally reach our post-modern enlightenment era, which has been due for far too long.

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This reversal of weather was confusing for me for two primary reasons. The first being that I landed in a new country immediately after my undergrad, so I was not equipped with much worldly-wise knowledge. And secondly, I had mainly been exposed to North Indian food and bits of South Indian cuisine.

So everything came as a shock to me.

New people in a new country.
New weather.
New food.

I genuinely am a sucker for adventure, so I happily was enjoying everything until one fateful day, when I had an encounter with a Mediterranean restaurant on campus, where I had gone after mustering a lot of courage to try whatever “Mediterranean food” means.

The guy had something like a shawarma going for the day and was about to close, but I managed to sneak in just in time and demanded the only thing I felt I knew back then, which, when I think about it now, got blurted out as:

“I want chicken falafel.”

The owner, already exhausted for the day, looked puzzled and annoyed at my request. For reasons that I now clearly understand, but to make sure he wasn’t hearing it incorrectly, he asked me gruffly to repeat what I wanted.

This time, realizing that the owner might have sniffed my ignorance, my artificial confidence took a blow, and I quickly repeated the same thing. I didn’t know anything other than “falafel” that people from the Mediterranean ate, and since I wanted chicken-filled falafel, I blurted out the same thing again, though much more timidly and with a lower-confidence voice.

But the owner, who had asked me this to make sure he had heard me right, now had his confirmation. His puzzled annoyance actually turned into anger, and he started shouting:

“What do you mean by chicken falafel?!!!”

By that time, I was already feeling the pressure of being ignorant and not knowing exactly what I wanted in the first place. And on top of being in a new country, in new weather, all the strength I had mustered had completely vanished, and I ran out of the shop, not knowing any better how to deal with the situation.

It was only later that I learned that falafel is itself made from chickpeas. There was no such thing as the “chicken falafel” I had been so confidently demanding.

And that is how some days of my early life in the States used to unfold.

This was a weird state to be in, to be honest. I could clearly see that no one around me had suddenly felt a loss of things to look forward to, especially since I was 23, and at that time, when I looked around, I saw that my friends had way too many things they wanted to try out. So this question of there being nothing to get excited about wasn’t popular at the outset.

The bigger question that I couldn’t move past was this: If, in the end, we are going to die, what is the point of doing anything worthwhile anyway? And I am not posing this question rhetorically. Rather, my whole being got stuck on this question with such immense gravity that I genuinely felt that if it was not properly answered, it would lead me to existential nihilism.

All that I knew at that point in time pushed me towards the above question, and I could also neatly observe that there was a grain of authenticity in probing this way. For isn’t this the truest fact: that we will die at some point, and that everything around us is temporary?

This sort of enquiry is hard to curtail unless you really find a proper solution to it. And this forced me to begin my own search, or what is called spiritual seeking in more pop-lingo.

Now, nine years later, after getting a chance to thoroughly immerse myself in the tradition of Advaita Vedanta, when I look back in hindsight and see the same question, I can see all the fallacies I was making. And I can see that if I had not met a teacher and a well-revered tradition, I would have gone crazy one way or another.

The reason I say this is because I can now clearly see that the very statement, “I will die,” which paralyzed me with extreme fear, is itself wrong or incomplete.

“I can’t die” is the right statement here.

Or, another way to say this more emphatically is:

“It is impossible for ‘I’ to die because ‘I’ is the subject in which the whole world, mind, and bodies are created and perish.”

I was stuck on my initial question for a good year, and it took me eight years to reach the above conclusion. And in the process, I got my existential peace back.

What a heck of a journey!

Because of this cultural backdrop, a major misconception has emerged around the ancient Indian philosophy of Advaita Vedanta.

When people first encounter Vedanta- especially its teachings on absolute bliss and inner peace- they often categorize it as just another positive thinking system. They view it as a spiritual coping mechanism, a philosophical playlist you can tune into when the world gets a bit too heavy.

I cannot wholly disagree with the observation that Vedanta makes you happier, but equating it to mere positive thinking is not just an incomplete statement; it is a fundamental misunderstanding of what Vedanta actually does.

If you are a sincere seeker and listener of Vedanta, if you have self-studied it and formed your own deep convictions, you absolutely will be overflowing with joy. But that joy is not the result of hyping yourself up. The practice of listening to Vedanta (Sravana), reflecting upon it (Manana), and deeply meditating upon it (Nididhyasana) is not about thinking happy thoughts. Rather, it is about waking up to reality.

To understand why calling Vedanta “positive thinking” is a profound caricature, we have to look at the exact mechanism of this philosophy.

At its core, Vedanta is an ontological wrecking ball. Its primary job is to dissociate you from the unnecessary, apparent identities you have assumed for yourself, and then associate you with your real, absolute identity.

This happens in two distinct phases: the dissociation and the association.

The Architecture of the False Self

To understand the first phase: dissociation, we have to look at the stories we tell ourselves.

Close your eyes and ask yourself: Who am I?

Immediately, your mind will start generating a resume of labels. All of us carry around a heavy, invisible backpack stuffed with various stories we have woven about who we are.

1. “I am a millennial.”

2. “I am a Gen Z.”

3. “I am a baby boomer.”

4. “I am an anxious person.”

5. “I am 5’10”.”

6. “I am a mediocre artist.”

7. “I am a brilliant software developer.”

8. “I am a good dancer.”

9. “I am not a very outdoorsy person.”

10. “I am deeply introverted.”

The list is completely endless. Every time we meet someone, we introduce ourselves using one of these stories. We define ourselves by our generational cohort, job titles, body shapes, bank accounts, mental health diagnoses, and hobbies. This is the story of everyone. We all have one version or another of this avatar we have built.

You can have a very negative story about yourself (”I am a failure”), or you can have a very positive story about yourself (”I am a highly successful entrepreneur”). But irrespective of the polarity of the story, you have still boxed yourself into a narrative based entirely on temporary traits. You are identifying with your physical body, your shifting mental states, your habits, and the arbitrary achievements you have accumulated in this brief lifespan.

From a pure Advaita Vedanta perspective, every single one of these labels is an Upadhi, a limiting adjunct. They are assumed identities. They are not actually who you are.

Positive thinking looks at a negative label (“I am a mediocre artist”) and tries to replace it with a positive one (”I am a growing artist who is getting better every day”). Positive thinking tries to decorate what Vedanta calls “your prison cell.”

Vedanta, on the other hand, does not shy away from telling you the uncompromising truth: the cell is an illusion, and the identity you are trying to improve is entirely assumed. It is not real.

Phase One: The Art of Dissociation

This brings us to Vedanta's first functional mechanism: dissociation. In traditional texts, this is known as the methodology of Neti, Neti—“Not this, not this.”

Vedanta systematically guides you to investigate your experience. It asks you to look at your body. Your body is an object that you are aware of. It changes constantly; the body you had at age five is completely gone, replaced by new cells today. Because you are the knower of the body, you cannot be the body. You are the subject; the body is an object. Therefore, you are not your physical traits. Neti, Neti.

Then, Vedanta points you to your mind. You are aware of your thoughts. Sometimes you are happy, sometimes you are sad. Sometimes you feel like a confident software developer, and sometimes you feel like an imposter. Because these mental states fluctuate, and because you are the silent witness observing these thoughts come and go, you cannot be the mind. Neti, Neti.

This process cuts through all the assumed identities. It systematically strips away every story, every label, and every biographical detail you have used to define yourself. It forces you to drop generational tags, career anxieties, and personality quirks.

This is not a depressing exercise in nihilism. You are not destroying yourself; you are simply taking off a heavy costume you forgot you were wearing. You are dissociating from the temporary.

Phase Two: The Truth of Association

If Vedanta stopped at dissociation, it would leave you in a void. But it doesn’t. Once the false identities are cleared away, what remains is the truth. This is the second phase: association with your real nature.

When you stop identifying as a 20-something, anxious, struggling student or a wealthy, aging executive, what is left? You are the pure, witnessing consciousness that was aware of all those changing states.

Vedanta positively reinforces you with a mathematically precise, brilliantly consistent definition of your true Self (Atman). It declares that your true identity is Sat-Chit-Ananda: Existence, Knowledge, and Bliss Absolute.

Let’s break that down:

1. Sat (Existence Absolute): You do not just exist; you are Existence itself. You are not bound by time, space, or causality. Bodies are born and die, but the consciousness that you are is eternal and immortal.

2. Chit (Knowledge/Consciousness Absolute): You are pure awareness. You are the light that illuminates your thoughts, your dreams, and the physical world around you.

3. Ananda (Bliss Absolute): Your real nature is intrinsically filled with joy.

This is the great paradigm shift of Advaita Vedanta. Bliss, or Ananda, is not an emotion you achieve by thinking happy thoughts. It is not a dopamine hit you get from buying a new car or getting a promotion. Ananda is your very substance.

When you mistakenly identify with your body and mind, you feel small, limited, and mortal. Because you feel limited, you feel a sense of lack, and you suffer. But when Vedanta associates you with your true nature, which is infinite, unbounded, and immortal, then that sense of lack vanishes. What remains is a profound, unshakeable joy. You become a beacon of strength because you realize there is nothing in the universe that can actually harm you. Weapons cannot cut this true Self, fire cannot burn it, water cannot wet it, and wind cannot dry it —> This is how the most revered text of practical Vedanta, the Bhagavad Gita, talks about this truth.

The Vedantin in the Modern World

The reason Advaita Vedanta is so highly revered, and the reason it is categorized as a living, breathing religious/spiritual philosophy, is because you can actually live this in the real world. This isn’t just armchair philosophy; it is psychological and spiritual armor.

We live in a world defined by shifting sands. Look at the reality of the 21st century surrounding us today:

1. The toxic, deeply polarized politics of the country.

2. Economic downturns, inflation, and the crushing cost of living.

3. The terrifying loss of the job market and creative industries due to the rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence.

4. The looming threat of another epidemic, pandemic, or global health crisis.

5. The constant barrage of news about another war breaking out somewhere in the middle of the earth.

If you believe you are your body, your bank account, and your career, all of these external events are perfectly valid reasons to feel utterly distressed. If your identity is “I am a copywriter,” and AI takes your job, your very sense of self is annihilated. If your identity is tied to the economy's stability, a recession feels like literal death. The person who relies on “positive thinking” will eventually break under the weight of this reality, because no amount of manifesting can stop a global recession or a war.

But this external chaos never touches a true Vedantin.

The reason is beautifully simple.

The Vedantin is first and foremost situated in their real nature. Through meticulous study and meditation, they have built an ironclad conviction that they are pure, infinite consciousness.

The secondary identity - the name, the job, the societal role is viewed merely as a role they are playing in the grand play of life (Leela).

When the stock market crashes, or AI disrupts an industry, the Vedantin does not fall apart. They understand that these problems belong to the realm of Vyavaharika (transactional reality). They deal with these issues practically, with a clear mind and a steady hand, but they never let the chaos penetrate their inner sanctum.

They know that in the realm of Paramarthika (absolute reality), they are entirely untouched. They are the screen upon which the tragic movie of the world is playing; the fire in the movie cannot burn the screen.

Even when immense problems arise in their external life, they do not fundamentally affect them. They remain entirely unruffled by the shifting sands of the world because their anchor is dropped in the infinite.

The Ultimate Optimism

This brings us back to our original point. Calling Advaita Vedanta “just positive thinking” is a severe misnomer. It is a surface-level understanding that misses the philosophy's majesty entirely.

Positive thinking is fragile. It requires you to spend mental energy convincing yourself that things are okay when your senses tell you they are not. It forces you to play tug-of-war with your own mind, desperately trying to pull your identity toward the light.

Vedanta does something much more radical: it tells you to drop the rope entirely.

It cuts through the delusions of the assumed ego. It dismantles the petty, fragile stories we tell ourselves about our limitations. It systematically deconstructs the false and, in doing so, reveals the breathtaking truth of what has always been there.

From this dual process of dissociation from the false and association with the real, you derive Ananda. This joy of your true being is not a fleeting mood; it is the fundamental hum of the universe. It is the peace that passes all understanding.

To equate this profound awakening to mere positive thinking is to mistake the vast, roaring ocean for a puddle in the street. Vedanta does not teach you how to paint a smiling face onto your ego. It teaches you how to transcend the ego entirely and claim your birthright as the infinite.

And once you realize that you are the immortal, unbroken, blissful reality behind the entire cosmos, you will find the greatest possible reason to be optimistic about life.

Instantly, the oxygen leaves the room. You see twenty people who are smarter, faster, and ten years ahead of you. They’ve already built the tool, written the definitive essay, or solved the problem. Your brain runs a quick, brutal calculation: This territory is taken. The world doesn’t need my amateur version of this.

So, you close the laptop.

If you are in your twenties trying to build a career, launch a project, or just find your own voice, this is the exact psychological trap that will quietly kill your potential before you even start.

A manager of mine with 15 years of experience in the software industry recently pointed out how this happens in something as mundane as a shared Google Doc. If he opens a proposal at work and sees the margins already stuffed with other people's comments, his motivation flatlines. It’s not that he has nothing to add. It’s the heavy illusion that because so many smart people have already weighed in, his own thoughts must be completely redundant.

He knows this is just a mental glitch, but it still paralyzes him.

His fix? He forces himself to open the document early, before anyone else has touched it.

You have to do the exact same thing with your work. You are currently living in a heavily commented Google Doc. The internet guarantees you will always see the absolute best, most polished work in the world within three clicks. If you evaluate your own messy starting point against a crowded market of finished masterpieces, you will always convince yourself not to try.

But this assumes the world only needs one perfect, objective answer. It doesn’t. A crowded field isn’t an exhausted one. People don’t just want the absolute truth; they want your specific translation of it. They want the perspective only you can provide, shaped by your unique friction, your generation, and your experiences.

To survive this, aggressively implement a pre-comparison phase.

When you get an idea, do not research the competition. Do not read the expert consensus. Give yourself a window of total, unapologetic isolation. Write the messy draft. Build the ugly prototype. Figure out what you actually think before the world tells you what you are supposed to think.

If you expose a fragile new idea to the masters on day one, you will inevitably ask yourself, Why am I even bothering?

But if you spend just a little time wrestling with the problem in private first, the dynamic completely flips. You look at that same master and instead ask, That’s clever—what exactly are they doing that I missed?

You have to protect the beginning. Give your ideas enough silence to breathe and take shape. There will be plenty of time to let the rest of the world in later.

What is one idea you have been keeping on the sidelines because the space felt too crowded to even try?

We are taught that every ounce of security, every scrap of happiness, and every fleeting moment of peace must be earned through grinding effort. If you drop the ball, the sky falls.

But there is a profound, almost rebellious counter-narrative to this modern anxiety, and it is found in the essence of true devotion. One of the most liberating reasons to practice Bhakti is the internal, undeniable realization that you are fundamentally borrowing your existence from an entity that is vastly bigger, infinitely better, and eternally more blissful than you are.

When you truly internalize this, the paradigm of your life shifts. It means recognizing that there is a divine presence whose actual, cosmic job is to keep us alive, to keep us fed, to keep us happy, and to keep us intelligent.

We walk around carrying the crushing weight of the world on our shoulders be it job stress, financial panic, relationship friction, and the endless, mundane anxieties of simply being human. We hoard this stress in our minds as if worrying is the fuel that keeps the universe running.

But if you have genuine Bhakti, you realize that all of this mental and emotional baggage can be directly transferred to the source of your existence.

You are not the original source of your own life. You are a localized expression of it. The divinity that sparked the cosmos is the exact same divinity that has lent you your existence, lent you your knowledge, and lent you your capacity for joy. In the traditions of Vedanta, this ultimate reality is described as Sat-Chit-Ananda: absolute Existence, absolute Consciousness, and absolute Bliss.

Because we are inextricably plugged into this source, we have the ultimate safety net. Whenever you find yourself thoroughly lost, overwhelmed, or super confused by the labyrinth of life, you can radically depend upon that entity.

This is arguably the most practical, grounded use of Bhakti and Vedanta. It strips away the esoteric mystery and leaves you with something highly functional: you are no longer alone.

Through devotion, the divine becomes a multi-tool for the soul. You always have a friend to walk with you through the dark. You always have a teacher to provide sudden clarity when the path splits. And, perhaps most comfortingly, you always have a cosmic trashcan into which you can throw all your burdens, doubts, and the mental garbage that relentlessly accumulates in your mind. You are allowed to say, "I cannot carry this anymore; you take it."

Of course, this level of absolute surrender is not a switch you can simply flick on. It is the most precious thing a person can possess, but it must be fiercely cultivated. The human ego is stubborn. We want to be in control, and we will fight to maintain the illusion that we are managing our own universe. Usually, it is only after immense effort, after trying to fix everything ourselves, and after becoming utterly exhausted, that the ego finally cracks. It is in that profound exhaustion that a person generates a genuine, internal agreement. You finally concede that there is a real, spiritual reality functioning beneath the surface of things. You realize that this divinity is not just an external concept, but our very true nature.

Reaching this point of surrender is a quiet revolution. You stop treating the divine as a vending machine for your desires and start treating it as the foundation of your being.

While it is a lifeline in times of crisis, its utility does not end when the storm passes. Even when the waters are calm, this connection remains the ultimate source of pure bliss. It is an inexhaustible well of joy that does not depend on external circumstances, promotions, or perfect relationships. It is happiness for the sake of happiness.

Cultivating this deep, abiding trust -allowing yourself to be held by the very force that breathed you into existence - is the ultimate antidote to the modern human condition, and the single greatest reason to walk the path of devotion.

Happiness comes from the world.

From getting what we want. From things going our way. From the right combination of money, relationships, recognition, fitness, and experiences. This belief is so deeply wired into us that it rarely gets questioned.

It also seems to be confirmed by experience.

You want something. You get it. You feel good.

Case closed.

But there is a section in Panchadasi (Ch-11) that asks us to look again, more carefully, and test this assumption as a hypothesis rather than accept it as truth. The hypothesis it proposes is counterintuitive, almost uncomfortable:

Happiness does not come from objects.

Objects only end the disturbance created by desire.

When that disturbance ends, what is already present shines through as happiness.

This feels wrong at first glance. So instead of asking you to believe it, let’s walk through it step by step.

Step 1: Observe the Pattern You Already Live

Take something recent.

You were waiting for a message. Or chasing a deadline. Or trying to hit a number at the gym. Or waiting to hear back after an interview.

Notice what happens in that state.

The mind is not quiet. It leans forward. It loops. It keeps checking, thinking, anticipating. There is a subtle contraction in your attention, a sense that something is incomplete right now.

Then the thing happens.

The message comes. The number is hit. The result arrives.

And immediately, there is relief.

Not dramatic joy. Just a quiet sense of “okay.”

But it doesn’t last. Soon enough, something else replaces it.

Another loop begins.

Another “if only this happens…”

If you look honestly, this cycle repeats everywhere in your life. The objects change; the structure doesn’t.

Step 2: Identify What Actually Changed

Now we slow the process down.

Before fulfillment, there is desire. After fulfillment, the desire is gone.

What else changed?

The text captures this precisely:

कामः संकल्पजः प्रोक्तः संकल्पो विषयात्मकः ।

तस्मिन् सति कुतः शान्तिरतः शान्तौ सुखं भवेत् ॥

kāmaḥ saṅkalpajaḥ proktaḥ saṅkalpo viṣayātmakaḥ

tasmin sati kuto śāntir ataḥ śāntau sukhaṃ bhavet

Desire is born of mental projection, and that projection is of objects. As long as it persists, how can there be peace? Therefore, only when it subsides does happiness arise.

This is almost mechanical.

Desire is not just a thought. It is a disturbance. As long as that disturbance is active, the mind cannot rest.

When the desire ends, the disturbance ends.

And in that moment, you feel good.

So, we ask again: what caused the happiness? The object, or the ending of the disturbance?

Step 3: Test the Object as the Cause

Let’s apply a simple test.

If objects truly produce happiness, they should do so reliably.

The same object should give you the same happiness every time.

But that’s not how your life works.

The same achievement that once thrilled you now feels normal. The same person who once excited you now sometimes irritates you. The same food that once satisfied you now feels repetitive.

The text puts it cleanly:

यदि स्याद्विषयात्सौख्यं सर्वदा स्यात्तदा नृणाम् ।

न चैवं दृश्यते लोके तस्मान्न विषयात्सुखम् ॥

yadi syād viṣayāt saukhyaṃ sarvadā syāt tadā nṛṇām

na caivam dṛśyate loke tasmān na viṣayāt sukham

If happiness came from objects, it should be present always. But this is not observed; therefore, happiness does not come from objects.

Rather than calling this a philosophy, isn’t it more like just an observation?

Objects are inconsistent. Therefore, they cannot be a stable source of happiness.

Step 4: Locate the Real Source

If the object is not the cause, then what is?

The text answers:

न विषयात्सुखं किञ्चित् तत्र दुःखस्य दर्शनात् ।

शान्तौ तु स्वात्मनि प्राप्तौ सुखमित्यवगम्यते ॥

na viṣayāt sukhaṃ kiñcit tatra duḥkhasya darśanāt

śāntau tu svātmani prāptau sukham ity avagamyate

No happiness comes from objects. Rather, when the mind becomes quiet and rests in the Self, happiness is understood to be there.

This is the turning point.

Happiness is not something that comes into you from outside. It becomes visible when the mind stops agitating.

The object did not deposit happiness into you.

It removed the disturbance.

Step 5: Understand the Mechanism Clearly

The next verse sharpens this further:

मनोवृत्तौ निवृत्तायां शान्ते स्वात्मनि तिष्ठति ।

आनन्दः स्फुरति स्वात्मा नित्यसिद्धो निरन्तरः ॥

mano vṛttau nivṛttāyāṃ śānte svātmani tiṣṭhati

ānandaḥ sphurati svātmā nityasiddho nirantaraḥ

When the mental movement subsides, the mind rests in the Self. Then bliss shines forth—ever-present, continuous.

The keyword here is sphurati—it shines forth.

This is not production. This is a revelation.

Think of it like this.

When water is disturbed, the reflection is broken. When the water becomes still, the reflection appears clearly. The stillness did not create the reflection. It allowed it.

In the same way, the quiet mind does not create happiness. It reveals it.

Step 6: Verify Through Deep Sleep

At this point, a doubt remains.

Maybe objects are not everything, but surely, they still matter?

The text now introduces something you cannot argue with: your own deep sleep. In deep sleep, there are no objects. No achievements. No thoughts. No striving. And yet, when you wake up, you say, “I slept well.”

The verse states:

सुषुप्तौ निर्विषयेऽपि सुखमस्मीति भावनात् ।

अनुभूतं हि तत्सुखं स्मर्यते जाग्रता पुनः ॥

suṣuptau nirviṣaye’pi sukham asmīti bhāvanāt

anubhūtaṃ hi tat sukhaṃ smaryate jāgratā punaḥ

Even without objects in deep sleep, one later recalls, “I was happy.” That happiness must have been experienced, since it is remembered.

This leads to a stronger statement:

न तत्र विषयः नापि वृत्तिर्नापि च चेतनम् ।

तथापि सुखमित्युक्तमतो स्वात्मा सुखं स्वयम् ॥

na tatra viṣayo nāpi vṛttir nāpi ca cetanam

tathāpi sukham ity uktam ataḥ svātmā sukhaṃ svayam

There is no object, no mental activity, no active knowing—yet happiness is affirmed. Therefore, the Self itself is happiness.

This is decisive.

Happiness exists without objects. Therefore, it cannot depend on them.

Step 7: Why Happiness Seems to Come and Go

If happiness is always present, why does it feel unstable?

The text answers through a simple analogy:

यथा दर्पणसंस्थेऽपि रूपं भाति न दर्पणात् ।

तथा बुद्ध्यावभासेन भाति आनन्द आत्मनि ॥

yathā darpaṇasaṃsthe’pi rūpaṃ bhāti na darpaṇāt

tathā buddhyāvabhāsena bhāti ānanda ātmani

Just as a mirror reflects a form but does not produce it, the mind reflects happiness but does not create it.

When the mind is restless, the reflection is unclear. When the mind is quiet, the reflection is clear.

The source does not change. The condition of the mind does.

So, what you call “more happiness” or “less happiness” is simply the mind being more or less disturbed.

Step 8: The Reorientation of Life

If this remains an idea, nothing changes.

You will agree with it, appreciate it, and then go back to living exactly as before, chasing the next object, expecting it to finally settle you.

But if you begin to observe this directly in your own life, something shifts.

You still pursue things. You still work, build, train, write, love, and engage fully with life. That doesn’t go away.

What begins to dissolve is the quiet assumption that something outside will complete you.

You start noticing the mind more than the object it is chasing. You see how restlessness forms, how it sustains itself, and how it drops.

And when it drops, even briefly, you begin to recognize something that was not created in that moment, only uncovered.

This recognition changes the texture of action.

Effort remains, but strain reduces. You still care about outcomes, but they no longer carry the weight of your inner state. You act fully, but without leaning on results to stabilize you.

Over time, the central question of your life shifts.

• It is no longer, “What do I need next to feel okay?”

• It becomes, “What disturbance am I adding right now that prevents me from seeing what is already here?”

The mature life is not a life without desire or effort. It is a life where desire is seen clearly, effort is made fully, and neither is mistaken for the source of happiness. What remains is not something new. It is simply a mind that interferes a little less. And in that, what was always present need not be sought again.

But that’s not what happens.

Money changes your life. It gives you options. It removes certain constraints. But it does not, by itself, create a sense of ease. If anything, as things improve on the outside, you start noticing something more subtle on the inside.

The baseline shifts.

I’ve started to notice this in small ways. You get your first real paycheck, and for a while, it feels like relief. Then slowly, it becomes normal. You begin to look sideways—what are others making, where are they living, how fast are they moving? You upgrade one thing, then another. Nothing is wrong, but something is no longer at rest.

Ancient Indian thought looked at this problem with a surprising level of precision. It did not reject wealth. It did not ask you to step away from the world. It simply made a distinction that we have almost completely lost—the distinction between Lakṣmī and Śrī.

“श्रीश्च ते लक्ष्मीश्च पत्न्यौ”

Śrī and Lakṣmī are both your companions.

(Yajurveda, Vedic hymn)

Lakṣmī is what you can measure. It is your salary, your savings, your lifestyle, your ability to move through the world with fewer constraints. It is visible, trackable, and easy to compare.

Śrī is harder to see. It is how you stand inside your life. It is clarity, restraint, and a certain steadiness in how you relate to what you have. It is the ability to enjoy something without immediately wanting more of it. It is knowing when enough has already arrived.

Most of us are trained, almost by default, to build Lakṣmī. You learn how to perform, how to compete, how to get ahead. You figure out how to convert effort into results. There is a clear path, and you can feel yourself progressing along it.

But very little in that process teaches you how to build Śrī.

No one tells you what to do when things start going well. No one teaches you how to remain steady when your options expand. And so, when Lakṣmī grows without Śrī, the imbalance shows up quietly.

It does not feel like failure. It feels like restlessness.

You see it in your own habits. You reach for your phone without thinking. You scroll longer than you meant to. You finish something you were looking forward to, and instead of sitting with it, you move on to the next thing. Even on a good day, there is a faint sense of pressure, as if something is still unresolved.

You also begin to see it in others. People who are doing well by every external measure, but do not seem at ease. They are always moving, always optimizing, always leaning forward. They have more than enough, but they do not know where to stop.

Two people can be in the same position—earning similar salaries, living similar lives—and yet feel very different inside. One feels stretched, pulled by everything he has built. The other moves through the same life with a sense of center. The difference is not in what they have. It is in how they hold it.

This is where the distinction becomes sharp. Without Śrī, Lakṣmī does not remain neutral. It begins to distort. What could have brought ease starts creating pressure. What should have expanded your life begins to demand more from it.

There is a common belief that knowledge and wealth do not go together—that if you pursue one, you lose the other. It sounds convincing, but it misses the point. The older view did not accept this separation. It asked for both. Wealth without clarity becomes crude. Clarity without engagement becomes disconnected. A meaningful life requires their integration. I would dare say that this misconception was the root cause of India's downfall over the past thousand years. It completely disregarded Lakshmi while making a purist claim of knowledge.

Modern life, however, is heavily tilted in the opposite direction. Everything around you is designed to help you build Lakṣmī. You are encouraged to grow, to scale, to accumulate. But almost nothing is designed to help you build Śrī. The inner side of life is left to chance.

And so the gap grows.

Externally, things improve. Internally, something feels slightly off. You start needing more stimulation to feel engaged. Rest becomes harder. You enjoy less of what you once worked for. It is not dramatic, but it is persistent.

The older thinkers described life as having two sides:

1. The outer world of action and achievement, and

2. The inner world of awareness and understanding.

A complete life requires both to develop together. If one grows much faster than the other, the imbalance eventually shows up in how life is experienced.

The solution is neither to step away from ambition nor to chase it blindly. It is to deliberately grow both sides. You need clarity to see what you are doing, energy to act, and resources to build. When these come together, life feels coherent. When they do not, even success carries weight.

This reframes what it means to do well. It is not just about moving forward. It is about becoming capable of living well with what you are building. That capacity is not automatic. It has to be developed alongside everything else.

So the question changes.

It is no longer just: How do I grow faster?

It becomes: Am I becoming someone who can hold this growth without being unsettled by it?

Because if you are not, then at some point, the very things you worked for will begin to feel heavier than they should.

The old insight puts it simply: Śrī and Lakṣmī belong together. Not in conflict, but in balance. Not as ideals, but as requirements.

And maybe the real work of this phase of life is just this—to make sure that as your life expands on the outside, something within you is also becoming steady enough to hold it.

Decisions are the singular mechanism by which we bifurcate our lives into parallel realities. The moment a choice is made, the timeline splits. You step forward to inhabit the reality you have chosen, while the unmapped alternative - the life you could have led, the path you almost walked - slowly fades into the shadows. For some decisions, you only have to live with the consequences for a few fleeting minutes. For others, the consequences stretch out to encompass the entirety of your life, and perhaps even the lives of those who come after you.

Every morning, when I rush out the door for my commute to Manhattan, I face a micro-bifurcation. I have to decide whether to transit from Jersey City to New York via the WTC line or the 33rd St line.

I am invariably in a hurry, moving with that specific, anxious momentum unique to the morning rush. My only goal is to reach the office as fast as humanly possible. Yet, there are countless instances where I end up standing on the platform of my chosen line, only to find myself lustily watching the trains of the other line quickly whizz by.

As they pass, a familiar, irrational monologue loops in my head: Why didn’t I choose the other line?

Even though I know the stakes are incredibly low, it frustrates me. The actual consequence is minimal—a ten, perhaps a maximum of fifteen-minute difference in reaching the office. But the chafing and irritation I feel are entirely real. It is not rational to feel abrasive over a fifteen-minute delay, but the human mind rarely consults rationality when it feels it has made the “wrong” choice.

This commute is the ultimate low-stakes gamble. But it serves as a daily rehearsal for the macro-decisions of life that we all have to choose, namely:

1. Where do you live?

2. With whom do you live?

3. What do you dedicate your life’s work towards?

Consciously choosing a path for these questions could dictate the lived experience for the vast majority of your time on this earth. The stakes are undeniably high, for the simple reason that you will have to live within the architecture of these choices for a very long period.

Rationally speaking, the time taken to answer a question should be proportional to the stakes involved. You should take significantly more time to decide on a question that carries decades of consequences. We all intuitively feel this. We all desire a thought-through, value-maximizing framework in which, if we have clarity on our values, we can extract the maximum possible yield from our choices.

But that assumes we act rationally. And the truth is, we rarely do.

We navigate the world through a tangled web of social assumptions, raw emotions, and complex psychology. The rational decision-making framework remains a theoretical ideal, one that falls short the moment it is tested in the messy reality of human life.

Because we fear the weight of high-stakes consequences, we often succumb to analysis paralysis. Society is quick to label this delay as procrastination, but I disagree. When you are staring down a choice that will alter the trajectory of your life, pausing to understand the best-case and worst-case scenarios isn’t paralysis; rather, it is vital information-gathering.

Interestingly, I find the real reason we feel paralyzed about a high-stakes decision actually stems from a more fundamental misunderstanding of how decisions actually work.

We tend to treat the decision-making process as a singular, finite “event.” We view it as a guillotine blade dropping—a moment in time where a choice is locked in. The terrifying assumption embedded in this framework is that once the decision is made, the person loses all agency. They become a mere spectator, forced to either passively enjoy or helplessly suffer the consequences of that choice as it unfurls.

If the morning train commute is the floor of decision-making stakes, history provides us with the absolute ceiling.

Consider the 1947 Partition of British India into India and Pakistan. It is hard to overstate the staggering gravity of this event. Practically overnight, millions of people had to choose between two countries. The stakes were absolute. This was not a decision about a fifteen-minute delay; this was a decision that dictated geographical roots, cultural identity, physical safety, and the geopolitical reality of entire bloodlines for generations to come.

It is easy to look at an event of that magnitude and view the crossing of the newly drawn border as the final, absolute “decision event.” But even in a scenario with the highest stakes imaginable, viewing the choice as the end of personal agency is incomplete.

The initial decision was to choose the country whose ideals most closely matched your own. But the agency did not dissolve the moment a family set foot on new soil. The true work—the heavier, more profound expression of agency—was what came next. Once established in either nation, the people had to continually work to improve their own lives and those of their chosen country.

This reveals the liberating truth about how we navigate the world: your agency does not end when a decision is made. You have agency before the choice, and crucially, you have agency after it.

• If I am standing on the subway platform and see two trains whizz past on the other track, I am not helpless. I can check my phone, verify which line is moving faster, and undo my previous choice by simply walking over to the other platform.

• If you decide to sign a lease in a specific neighborhood and realize two months later that it was a mistake, you are not a prisoner to that choice. You have the ongoing agency to either break the lease and find a new apartment, leveraging the new information about what didn’t work, or to bear the remaining months while actively plotting a better choice for next year.

No matter how high the stakes feel, a decision never diminishes your continuous ability to iteratively improve your reality. Looked at through this lens, decision-making is not a single event, but a two-part process:

1. First, you exercise your choice from the given list of options.

2. Second, you actively participate in life afterwards to make that decision right.

This, to me, is the only complete way to approach a fork in the road. When making a decision, you must reach a state of conviction where you can comfortably choose one option over the others. But more importantly, you must feel deeply convinced from within that you possess the resilience to participate in the life that follows.

If a decision is made without conviction in your ability to deal with the consequences of both the best-case and worst-case scenarios of that option, then it means true conviction has not been reached. In that scenario, taking more time through the decision-making process to gather more information is perfectly alright.

A life of agency flows like a river. It is a continuous current of choices made, followed by actions taken to support and refine them. A life where personal agency is blocked is like a stagnating pond, suffering from the unwanted overgrowth of mushrooming thought-clouds.

When you accept that your agency doesn’t end the moment a choice is finalized, the pressure of the “perfect” decision begins to lift.

You are no longer trying to predict a flawless future.

You are simply choosing a path, trusting that whatever reality unfolds, you retain the power to shape it.

I have long meant to summarize the personal philosophy that I work with. It comes directly from the ancient Indian philosophy, and I felt I could do it justice only by articulating it in Hindi.

I would truly appreciate engaging with your comments if this article speaks to you.

भारतीय दर्शन में काम (इच्छा, वासना, आकर्षण) को कभी पाप नहीं कहा गया। यह मनुष्य के चार पुरुषार्थों में से एक है। धर्म, अर्थ, काम और मोक्ष - ये जीवन के चार स्तंभ हैं, और ये परस्पर विरोधी नहीं, बल्कि पूरक हैं। इसलिए काम का निषेध नहीं है; उसका नियमन है। समस्या तब जन्म लेती है जब काम धर्म से ऊपर उठकर मनुष्य का स्वामी बन जाता है। जब इच्छा साधन होती है, वह जीवन को आगे बढ़ाती है; जब वह स्वामी बनती है, वह जीवन को नीचे खींच ले जाती है।

हिंदू परंपरा ने भोग का अंधा उत्सव नहीं मनाया। उसने मनुष्य को संयम, स्वामित्व और आत्म-नियंत्रण का मार्ग दिखाया। वह जानती थी कि मनुष्य का मन स्वभावतः चंचल है और इंद्रियाँ स्वभावतः आकर्षण की ओर दौड़ती हैं। इसलिए उसने कहा - इंद्रियों को मारो मत, उन्हें साधो; इच्छा को दबाओ मत, उसे दिशा दो; काम को त्यागो मत, उसे धर्म के अधीन रखो। काम के धर्म के अधीन होना ही संतुलन है। जब काम धर्म पर शासन करने लगता है, पतन आरंभ होता है।

यह पतन अचानक नहीं आता। वह किसी एक बड़े अपराध से नहीं शुरू होता। वह धीरे-धीरे, दृष्टि से शुरू होकर मन तक फैलता है। मनुष्य जिस पर बार-बार दृष्टि डालता है, वही भीतर संरचना बनाता है।

इसलिए कहा गया: दृष्टि की रक्षा करो, क्योंकि पतन का द्वार आँखों से खुलता है।

ब्रह्मचर्य: देह का नहीं, चेतना का अनुशासन

हमारे समय में ब्रह्मचर्य को अक्सर गलत समझा जाता है। इसे केवल देहिक संयम या यौन-निषेध के रूप में देखा जाता है। परंतु शास्त्रों में इसका अर्थ कहीं अधिक व्यापक है - ब्रह्म में स्थित होकर चलना, अर्थात् जीवन को उच्चतम सत्य की दिशा में मोड़ देना। यह केवल शरीर का अनुशासन नहीं है; यह चेतना का अनुशासन है।

ब्रह्मचर्य शक्ति है। पर यह शक्ति दमन से नहीं आती; यह ऊर्जा के संरक्षण से आती है। जब मनुष्य अपनी जीवन-शक्ति को व्यर्थ के भोगों में बिखेरता नहीं, तब वही ऊर्जा ओज बनती है। ओज से तेज उत्पन्न होता है, और तेज से ज्ञान। यह केवल काव्यात्मक क्रम नहीं है; यह अनुभव का क्रम है। केंद्रित ऊर्जा स्पष्ट दृष्टि देती है। बिखरी हुई ऊर्जा भ्रम पैदा करती है।

इसलिए ब्रह्मचर्य “क्या नहीं करना है” की सूची नहीं है। यह “मैं किस दिशा में जी रहा हूँ” का प्रश्न है। यह जीवन को एक उच्चतर ध्येय की ओर मोड़ने की कला है।

अनुशासन: वासना का प्रतिरोध नहीं, उसका रूपांतरण

वासना का मूल स्रोत मन है। मन का मूल स्रोत इंद्रियाँ हैं। और इंद्रियों का मूल स्रोत आदतें हैं। यदि आदतें असावधान हैं, तो मन अस्थिर होगा। यदि मन अस्थिर है, तो इच्छा दिशाहीन होगी। इसलिए परंपरा ने आदतों पर काम किया—जीवन को अनुशासन में ढालने की बात की।

ब्रह्ममुहूर्त में उठना केवल धार्मिक आग्रह नहीं है; यह दिन की दिशा निर्धारित करने का उपाय है। रात्रि का आलस्य वासना को पोषित करता है, क्योंकि असावधान मन अधिक प्रतिक्रियाशील होता है। प्रातः का अनुशासन चेतना को जाग्रत करता है।

नित्य जप या स्मरण मन को केंद्र देता है। यह अवचेतन की दिशा तय करता है।

तप और परिश्रम शरीर को स्थिर बनाते हैं। एक आलसी शरीर प्रायः स्थिर मन नहीं दे सकता।

ये सभी अभ्यास वासना को दबाते नहीं; वे उसे ऊर्जा में रूपांतरित करते हैं। मनुष्य का मन कभी रिक्त नहीं रहता। या तो वह वासना से भरा होगा, या साधना से। प्रश्न यह नहीं कि ऊर्जा होगी या नहीं; प्रश्न यह है कि वह किस रूप में प्रकट होगी।

स्त्री: शक्ति का रूप, वस्तु नहीं

भारतीय परंपरा में स्त्री को शक्ति कहा गया—दुर्गा, लक्ष्मी, सरस्वती। यह केवल प्रतीकात्मक सम्मान नहीं है; यह दृष्टि का प्रशिक्षण है। जब किसी मनुष्य को केवल भोग की वस्तु के रूप में देखा जाता है, तो देखने वाले की चेतना संकुचित होती है। जब उसी मनुष्य को शक्ति, चेतना और गरिमा के साथ देखा जाता है, तो दृष्टि विस्तृत होती है।

यह विषय केवल स्त्री या पुरुष तक सीमित नहीं है। वस्तुकरण किसी भी दिशा में चेतना को नीचे ले जाता है। सम्मान सामाजिक औपचारिकता नहीं है; यह आध्यात्मिक परिपक्वता का संकेत है।

जीवन का उद्देश्य: सुख नहीं, सत्य

मनुष्य सुख भोगने के लिए नहीं जन्मा। सुख आवश्यक हो सकता है, पर वह पर्याप्त नहीं है। सुख क्षणिक है—आता है, जाता है, और पीछे एक रिक्तता छोड़ सकता है। सत्य स्थायी है। सत्य मनुष्य को भीतर से पूर्ण करता है।

वासना पर विजय नैतिक प्रदर्शन नहीं है; यह तेज की वृद्धि है। संयम सामाजिक नियम का पालन मात्र नहीं है; यह आत्म-राजत्व है। जब मनुष्य अपनी इंद्रियों पर शासन करता है, तब वह स्वयं का राजा बन जाता है। जब इंद्रियाँ मनुष्य पर शासन करती हैं, तब वह स्वयं का दास बन जाता है।

हम सबके भीतर एक अग्नि है: इच्छा की अग्नि, सृजन की अग्नि, जीवन की अग्नि। यदि वह अनियंत्रित हो जाए, तो वह जलाती है। यदि वह संरक्षित और निर्देशित हो, तो वही प्रकाश देती है।

अग्नि को सुरक्षित रखना: यही साधना है!

यही पुरुषार्थ है!

और यही मोक्ष का मार्ग है!

1. My parents find this idea of mine traumatic, for in their view, I should have found the girl of my dreams yesterday, had kids today, and be working toward retirement starting tomorrow.

2. Unfortunately, my friends have fallen into this as well and are hurriedly going through the motions of marriage and parenthood — constantly juggling the demands of it while maintaining their work pressures. I can see the responsibility cracking them up.

3. Similarly, the workplace is always moving at a rapid pace, striving to meet aspirational sales goals to make the product a success. There is more to achieve to meet a never-ending performance loop.

4. And the news-cycle says the world is in perpetual self-destruct mode, combined with pollution, climate crisis, countries warring against each other, and that we are going to bomb ourselves into destruction tomorrow.

These are a few of the pressures I feel, and I am pretty sure I am not alone.

I have taken a stand: I will not be in a hurry in my life. And whatever needs to be done through me will be done through this state of mind.

When I say “without hurry,” don’t mistake me: I am not saying to be lethargic at all. It simply means I am not multitasking endlessly. It means I have no interest in taking on more responsibilities or things for the sake of it. And I question why you don’t think this way.

I don’t agree with the idea that if one does not hurry, one will miss the bus. There is no bus to miss. This is a deep belief I have learned over the years of studying Vedanta. The fact that the source of joy is within us is the greatest evidence of this.

My argument is that one should care more about the quality of life than the quantity of achievements pursued under social pressure.

The moment you start questioning why you are fundamentally pursuing something, you will realize, one way or another, that the source of that pursuit often comes from social pressure. It brings a sense of belonging among friends, and that belonging provides reassurance that one is doing what one is “supposed” to do at a certain age. But this is where one must fight the battle, find the deeper center of motivation, and truly rely on that ground.

For me, I don’t want to be in a hurry in life. And anything where I feel I must hurry to get something done generally does not find my heart or mind open to it.

What this means practically is building strong muscles to feel comfortable being uncomfortable in social situations where others are going through their own motions. This is where one needs a strong spiritual practice in private life and must bank upon it when there seems to be no strength left to hold one’s own fort as the world rushes past.

This indecent hurry that one seems to be pulled into is reason enough to lose all the qualitative vitality of life. Why? If basic needs are unmet, of course, one ought to work to address them. But beyond that, I find these hurried movements to be wasteful leakages of one’s greatness.

I would rather believe in having one goal in life and living completely in surrender to that goal. Nothing else. Nothing more. If this mindset eventually leads to worldly success or worldly failure, that is immaterial.

Can you live a life like this? Do you think you can amass willpower to this extent and live day in and day out for a single dream? If you can, then I say you have lived a life of qualitative greatness, and you do not need anyone to declare whether it is great or not.

A life surrendered to a single-pointed goal is, in my mind, the recipe for greatness. A life of managing hundreds of goals may suit the temperament of the society we live in, but to me, it feels like a qualitative failure.

The world would go on hurrying. It always had. Trains would be caught and missed. Deadlines would neatly stack in inboxes. Invitations would arrive with expectations attached. People would measure their lives in milestones, mortgage plans, and birthday candles.

But I have discovered something the world could not take from me. There was no bell ringing somewhere that I had failed to hear. No invisible conductor waving the last train away from the platform.

The sky would not collapse if I walked slowly. And so I would walk. Not defiantly. Not lazily. But deliberately.

If there was magic in life, it was not in arriving early, but rather in arriving whole. And that, I decided, was reason enough to take my time.

This place has to be sacred. The word “sacred” here is not decorative. Sacred is that which has the capacity to absorb sorrow without reacting to it.

Life accumulates. It collects both the good and the bad: success, insult, ambition, fear, and hope. Without a place where these accumulated emotions can find a “sink,” it becomes very difficult to carry too much for too long.

The Electrical Logic of Devotion

In an electrical circuit board, we have a “ground.” This is where excess electricity is discharged so the system can continue to function smoothly. One requires a similar sacred altar in life, where multifarious excess energies (both positive and negative) can find resolution. Without grounding, the circuit burns. With grounding, it flows.

In Chapter 7 of the Bhagavad Gita, Sri Krishna speaks of four kinds of people who turn toward the Divine:

• The distressed (ārtaḥ)

• The seeker of gain (arthārthī)

• The inquirer (jijñāsuḥ)

• The wise (jñānī)

What is remarkable is that Krishna does not judge any of them. He calls them all noble.

1. The Distressed: The Divine as Refuge

The first kind is the distressed. This is the person whose mind hangs heavy with tiredness and mental fatigue. Something in life has overwhelmed them. It may be a failure, a loss, or simply the weight of responsibility. They come to the altar not out of philosophy, but out of exhaustion.

For them, God is a refuge. An altar where sorrow dissolves without retaliation. This is devotion born of necessity. It is the first great benefit of cultivating spirituality in daily life, for it provides a “sink” during times of crisis. There is a simple phrase that captures this well: there are no atheists in foxholes. This need is universal.

2. The Seeker of Gain: The Divine as Partner

The second kind is the seeker of gain, the arthārthī. This person is not broken; they are alive with aspiration! They want to build, explore the unknown, amass wealth, and carve out a respectable position in society.

The seeker of gain may pray before making a bold decision. They might fold their hands before an interview, a launch, or a journey. They understand that life is complex and that pushing ahead with effort alone might not be enough. Timing, circumstance, and unseen alignments all play their part.

Krishna includes them among the virtuous. This is profound. It means that ambition, when placed consciously at the altar, becomes a form of devotion. The seeker acknowledges they are not the sole author of their destiny. That humility, subtle as it may be, is sacred.

3. The Inquirer: The Divine as Truth

The third kind is the inquirer, the jijñāsuḥ. This is a different restlessness altogether. The inquirer is not primarily concerned with wealth or relief. Rather, they are unsettled by existence itself. They ask how it is that we are here for a brief moment and then gone. They wonder about the “Consciousness” by which they know the world.

This person is driven by an intellectual and existential seriousness. They have begun to see that ordinary explanations do not suffice in explaining the mystery of life and death.

They clearly see that worldly success can never be final, for it doesn’t answer death. Similarly, achievement does not address the fear of mortality that every human being must face.

And thus they turn toward the sacred, and their turning is not to negotiate outcomes but to understand the structure of reality itself. The hope is that through this effort, they can attain fearlessness in this life that is otherwise haunted by hundreds of fears, primarily the fear of death and some sort of total ruin.

Inquiry is a sacred restlessness. It is the stage where we stop trying to fix the world and start trying to understand Reality as it is.

4. The Wise: The Divine as Self

As long as one is an inquirer, there is still a subtle distance. There is the “I” who asks and the “Truth” that is sought. The circuit is active, humming with the tension of unanswered questions.

Eventually, this inquiry reaches a breaking point. You realize you cannot think your way into ultimate reality because the mind itself is part of the machinery you are examining. You cannot use a flashlight to find the battery that powers it.

Through the guidance of sages, alongside steady spiritual practice and self-study of the Upanishads, enriched by meticulous, self-effacing work, an inquirer matures into the jñānī.

If the distressed person uses the Divine as a refuge and the seeker uses the Divine as a partner, the jñānī has moved beyond the logic of use altogether. They have realized, in a direct and unmistakable way, that the Divine is not a distant helper. They see that the consciousness by which one knows the world is itself the sacred ground.

In previous stages, the “ground” is a place where you can pour out excess energy. But for the jñānī, the entire metaphor shifts. They no longer look for a place to ground themselves. They have realized that they are the ground.

When you recognize that your true nature is identical to the Sacred Ground, there is no longer a build-up of excess tension. Success and failure, heat and cold, or praise and blame are no longer external shocks to the system. They are simply movements within the Self.

This is why Sri Krishna declares that the jñānī is His very Self (ātmā eva). The search for a sacred space ends when the jñānī becomes a living expression of that sacredness.

The Spectrum of the Heart

It is tempting to look at these four categories as a ladder where one must stop being the “distressed” to become the “wise.” But in the architecture of the Gita, these are not just types of people; they are the various seasons of the human heart.

On a Monday morning, we may be the arthārthī, full of ambition and drive, seeking the Divine’s partnership in our latest venture. By Tuesday evening, under the weight of a personal setback, we might revert to the ārtaḥ, simply needing a place to pour out our exhaustion!

The beauty of Krishna’s perspective lies in the absence of hierarchy in His affection. By calling even the distressed and the ambitious “noble,” he validates the entirety of our human experience.

He suggests that the act of “turning toward”—of recognizing that we need a ground larger than our own ego—is the only thing that truly matters.

We do not need to wait until we are fully realized jñānīs to benefit from the Sacred Ground. The ground is already beneath us. Whether we use it as a refuge, a partner, or a field of inquiry, we are already participating in that divine circuit.

The goal of a reflective life is not to force ourselves into the final stage, but to become increasingly aware of the “sink” that is always available. Whether you come with a heavy heart or a restless mind, the altar is open. We simply have to stop trying to carry the weight alone.

It says reality is something you already are. Not metaphorically. Not philosophically. Literally.

“I” is not the person who wakes up, brushes his teeth, and goes to work. “I” is the light in which that person appears.

That light does not reflect reality. It creates it.

This is not mystical poetry. It is an observable fact.

Every night, you close your eyes and enter a world with no raw material. No sun. No matter. No physics textbook. Yet entire cities appear. Conversations happen. Fear grips you. Love moves you. You run. You fail. You wake up sweating.

The dream world is not borrowed from anywhere. It rises fully formed from you.

Which means the power to generate a lived reality already exists within Consciousness itself. The only difference between dream and waking is scale and continuity. The principle is the same.

That alone should unsettle you. But Advaita goes further.

It asks you to examine the one experience everyone trusts without question: deep sleep.

In deep sleep, there is no identity. No ambition. No memory. No story. Yet on waking, we say, without hesitation, “I slept happily.”

No object produced that happiness. No achievement earned it. No relationship supplied it. Bliss was present without content.

Which means bliss is not an experience you get. It is what remains when experience disappears. This is the most radical psychological claim ever made! Happiness is not downstream of success. It is upstream of existence.

That is why waking up feels hard. Individuality has returned. Desire has returned. Time has returned. The weight of becoming presses back down. Sleep feels like relief because it is the temporary dissolution of lack.

From this simple analysis, two unshakeable truths emerge.

1. First: Consciousness has the capacity to create worlds.

2. Second: Consciousness does not depend on those worlds for joy.

This combination is explosive.

1. If bliss is intrinsic, you no longer need life to cooperate in order to be at peace.

2. If creation is inherent, you no longer need permission to act.

You have found the golden treasure!

• You can work without desperation.

• You can risk without fear.

• You can fail without collapse.

Because the empire of joy was never external. It was never up for negotiation.

This is where most spiritual paths retreat. They discover bliss and turn away from the world. They mistake freedom for withdrawal.

Advaita does not. And this is where Vivekananda stands alone.

• He did not ask people to abandon life. He asked them to stop being afraid of it.

• He took the deepest metaphysical truth — you are already free — and welded it to action.

Work. Build. Serve. Dare.

Not to earn salvation. But because you are not bound.

He understood something rare:

• Only a person who knows joy is indestructible can work without anxiety.

• Only a person who knows the Self is whole can act without clinging to outcomes.

This is not optimism. It is structural fearlessness.

You are not told to imagine a better world. You are told to recognize that the world already appears in you.

You are not promised happiness later. You are shown that happiness has never left.

That is why Advaita is not escapism. It is the most grounded worldview possible. You sleep every night. You dream every night. The evidence is experiential, not theological.

And once you truly see this, something changes.

1. Ambition becomes cleaner.

2. Effort becomes lighter.

3. Failure loses its teeth.

You still act. You still care. You still build.

But!

1. You no longer bleed internally for outcomes.

2. You stop trying to extract joy from the world.

3. You start expressing what is already complete.

That is the quiet revolution Advaita offers.

1. Not transcendence of life. But intimacy with it.

2. Not a denial of work. But work without fear.

And that is why Vivekananda mattered. He did not merely explain reality.

He lived as if it were already secure.

That is pure Advaita.

We are all in search of a human ideal, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Why, you may ask?

For we constantly need a bright torchlight that illuminates our future. In the absence of that, the questions and doubts around meaninglessness and guilt for wasting one’s precious life would otherwise gnaw us from the inside out.

I wonder if someone doesn’t feel this way, for if that is really the case, then I would argue that — that person has not even started to contemplate their own morality, the limited time and bandwidth we get to experience this life, the preciousness of the time that is otherwise dripping away moment by moment towards an impending doom for this bodily existence.

The starting point of inquiry, whether in art, science, or religion, is, in one way or another, this fear of the limitedness of our existence and the impending doom.

What an ideal does is, it blasts an effulgent light of clarity through this fear. If you are someone whose personal disposition is that of an artist, then this fear of death should drive you to become a Leonardo Da Vinci. If you have a personal disposition of a musician, then this fear of death should force a Beethoven(or an A.R.Rahman - you get to choose!) out of you. If you have a personal taste of scientific rigor, then this fear of death should stimulate an Einstein(or Nikola Tesla!) out of you.

The point I am trying to home in on is the same. A human ideal is a strong antidote to fear.

What is going on behind the scenes? Why does a human ideal uproot us out of our deep, dark, negative selves?

I believe it is so because when we contrast the lives of these people against the default ticking of time, the slow approach of the impending doom that our life is approaching, that contrast is so overpowering that the ideal analogy generates a tremendous uplift, without which life would seem impossible to live. And hence, ideals are deeply attractive to the human mind.

You might accuse me of painting a rather gloomy picture to explain to you the need for ideals in our lives. But let us also take a positive outlook on it.

A human ideal performs a precise function. It plants a possibility in the mind. It expands what feels attainable. Life, which under daily routine can begin to feel like mere repetition, suddenly acquires an optimistic charge. Without such an ideal, the mind slowly contracts.

What happens if you don’t consciously choose your ideal? Based on what I’ve outlined above, it might seem that without an ideal, we’d become suicidal, with the fear of death eating away at us. But interestingly, while my earlier point might suggest that, in reality, when our lives aren’t grounded in an ideal, they often get taken over by its distant and less noble cousin - peer pressure.

Peer pressure is essentially how our aspirational energy gets trapped, without our choice of direction. We see people around us buying homes, getting married, getting promoted, and an unexamined urgency builds up to follow the same trajectory. Peer pressure is a distant cousin of following a personal ideal. It borrows the energy of aspiration but strips it of direction. It pushes without meaning.

Following an ideal and submitting to peer pressure may look similar on the surface, but they are opposites in effect.

• In following an ideal, one taps into individual capability and personal ambition.

• Under peer pressure, one is forced into actions that have not been consciously chosen.

The result is a vague but persistent burden.

If someone struggles with peer pressure, choosing an ideal can free up enormous cognitive bandwidth. The same aspirational energy that was previously scattered in comparison and anxiety becomes focused. Without a consciously chosen ideal, that energy often leaks into imitation.

With one, it gains direction. Effort feels cleaner. Life feels less noisy. Without such direction, one does not merely feel stressed but also vaguely misplaced.

Why Childhood Ideals Endure

Among all ideals we accept, the strongest ones are often those encountered in childhood.

Childhood impressions last because nothing questioned them. What entered the mind early entered without resistance.

This is why childhood memories endure. The world itself has not changed dramatically, but our way of grasping has gone through revolutionary change in the meantime.

As adults, everything that reaches us passes through layers of judgment built slowly through experience. This filtering is necessary. It allows us to function responsibly in society. But as children, we were free of this burden. An ideal could captivate us completely, without negotiation. I would also like to contend that such ideals endure not solely because of their nostalgic essence, but also because they do not require the constant convincing and justification to which our adult brains are accustomed to.

Interstices

This is the story of one such ideal that entered my mind early and has quietly shaped my life since then.

I still remember being in my eleventh grade, reading an interview with Umberto Eco in our English coursebook. He was introduced as a university professor who had also achieved durable recognition as a writer of fiction, especially through The Name of the Rose. The chapter explored how someone embedded in academic life managed to write layered, demanding novels that were yet widely read.

The interviewer was puzzled by this contradiction. How does someone with the obligations of teaching, administration, and scholarly work manage to produce serious fiction?

Eco answered calmly:

“Maybe I give the impression of doing many things. But in the end, I am convinced I am always doing the same thing.”

The question interested me then. It interests me more now, because it describes the condition most of us live in.

We build a day job over years of effort. It pays our bills, provides social standing, and creates stability. I am fully in favor of maintaining such a structure and taking it seriously, unless it begins to erode one’s mental peace. In the best case, one even comes to enjoy the work itself.

But whether one enjoys it or not, another question remains. What if one wants to express oneself creatively, purely out of inner disposition, without reference to money, status, or security?

This kind of expression at this point in my life feels like a necessity to fight the repetitiveness that the modern daily job brings out of its nature. This is the same need, I contend, that Umberto Eco must have felt, which put him on the novel-writing path, knowing fully well that he had a satisfactory, or rather a prestigious, job in hand.

So the question the interviewer asked Eco, which is relevant to us, is this:

For all of us who have a daily job to maintain but also want to express ourselves creatively, how can we do so continuously and sustainably?

This is the precise question that was answered for me in that interview seventeen years back. Even though I was a kid back then, I knew this mental model would come in handy in the future, and thus I have carried the answer with me ever since.

I have applied it repeatedly, often without consciously noticing it. The results are pretty solid:

• For this blog that you are reading wouldn’t exist had I not applied that answer to my life.

• Similarly, my engagement with meditation, philosophy, and spiritual inquiry has been sustained because of it.

• I have learned and refined skills across very different domains using the same understanding, be it from storytelling to skiing, from sailing to squash, because of that answer.

So! What mental model am I talking about?

When the interviewer asked how he could reconcile the contradictory demands of his day job with what is necessary for writing serious fiction, Eco readily submitted his secret.

“And then I have a secret.”

“Did you know what will happen if you eliminate the empty spaces from the universe, eliminate the empty spaces in all the atoms? The universe will become as big as my fist. Similarly, we have a lot of empty spaces in our lives. I call them interstices.”

“Say you are coming over to my place. You are in an elevator, and while you are coming up, I am waiting for you. This is an interstice, an empty space. I work in empty spaces. While waiting for your elevator to come up from the first to the third floor, I have already written an article! (Laughs).”

He gave an example. Suppose you are coming to visit him. You are in an elevator, moving upward. He is waiting for you. That interval is an interstice.

Most people experience it as nothing. He did not. While the elevator moved from the first floor to the third, he said, he had already written an article!

What Using Empty Spaces Changed

I must have read that interview only once, but it has stayed with me for seventeen years.

The reason is clear to me now. The person speaking had already reached a state I still aspire to. He had written work that others wanted to read without reducing its intellectual, psychological, or philosophical depth. He had done so while maintaining the structure of his professional life. This is precisely the goal that currently motivates me, and Eco serves as a human ideal for me, someone I want to learn from.

Because of him, I do not see my day job as an obstacle as of today. I see it as form. It gives shape to the day. Without form, effort disperses.

Because of him, my life has quietly organized itself around this idea of empty spaces, of interstices.

• An interstice is the walk from my apartment to the station in the morning. The door has closed behind me. The phone is still in my pocket. The day has not yet begun. One sentence forms there, usually incomplete but clear enough to return to later.

• Another interstice is the platform while waiting for the train. Nothing can be done to hurry it. Most people fill that time immediately with doom scrolling. By this time, I have come across an interesting insight into what could be the main theme of my next blog post.

• There is a third interstice between exiting the station and entering the office building. The mind is alert. The workday has not yet taken hold. A paragraph is revised there, without writing a word. By the time I sit down, the introduction and the article's theme are ready!

None of this feels deliberate while it is happening. It feels like waiting. It feels like moving through the day as usual. And yet, these insights accumulate. A piece of writing takes shape. A line of inquiry deepens. A skill stops feeling borrowed and begins to feel owned.

From the outside, it may look like discipline. From the inside, it feels like nothing extra was added. Only the empty spaces were used.

I notice them now. I return to them. I leave something small there. I make a note of it in my ever-expanding Google Doc of ideas and concepts that interest and intrigue me. And then I continue on.

Outside of writing, and more generally, the interstices present a philosophy and a technique for accommodating the seemingly contrasting demands that a modern man faces every day. And because of this, the next time someone says, I can’t find time to do something important, tell them the power of empty spaces, the power of interstices, and see how their face blooms with excitement, for they have found a fix for the ever-burdening disease of too-much-to-do-but-not-enough-time-whataboutry.

The realization came yesterday, while listening to an AI narration of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in a calm, aristocratic British voice (I know, right?). An hour passed without effort. I wasn’t multitasking. I wasn’t trying to extract lessons. I was simply transported. With that transport came a warmth that felt familiar, almost physical. Childhood returned as continuity.

That was when it struck me: whenever life had been discontinuous, fiction had stepped in to provide structure.

I grew up moving constantly. My dad’s job required frequent transfers, and by the time I reached undergrad, I had attended eight different schools. Each move meant starting over. New classrooms. New faces. New rules of belonging. Friendships were always temporary, however intense they felt in the moment. I learned early that external continuity was unreliable.

Fiction filled that gap.

Harry Potter was the first world that stayed put while everything else moved. I encountered it first through films, then through PC games, and eventually through the books themselves. What mattered most was the timing of seeing Harry grow up, as he was growing up just as I was. His fears matured as mine did. His world expanded just as mine kept resetting. I didn’t merely read those books. I inhabited them. They gave me a sense of narrative continuity when real life refused to. This is something many 90s kids can relate to, as Harry Potter became the shared narrative we all lived through.

I wasn’t alone in this. My elder brother and cousin sister were already deep into reading. They served as informal conduits of stories for me before I could access the books myself. At night, my brother would narrate entire sections of parts five and six. Those narrations were intimate, almost ritualistic. Listening to stories in the dark, letting imagination do the heavy lifting, trained something fundamental in me long before I knew what it was.

When the seventh book finally came out, the hunger for it was overwhelming. My brother managed to get a copy from a friend. He read it in two days, then handed it to me. I took weeks to savor it slowly. Around that time, an aunt who lived below our apartment asked me casually why one should read such a series at all. I remember freezing. I didn’t have an answer ready. It was the first time I realized that something central to my inner life might be completely invisible to others. That realization was dizzying.

Soon after ninth grade, I was introduced to Naruto. The seriousness of its writing surprised me. This wasn’t casual entertainment that people generally associate anime with. It was disciplined storytelling, moral struggle, loyalty, loss, and perseverance rendered with care. My brother would send CDs by post, and I would wait with anticipation for them. Those stories stayed with me through my late teens, quietly shaping my sense of effort and endurance.

The first year of my undergrad marked another shift. That was when I discovered Stieg Larsson’s three-part series, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. That was a revelation for me, not just because of the story, but because of how it completely seized my attention. I remember reading those books with almost bated breath.

I read them everywhere. While walking to class. While coming back from lectures. Sitting behind the classroom, the book was hidden just enough to escape notice. Walking through the dorm corridors. During vacations, whenever I could find a quiet corner to sit, think, and continue. Every space became a place to read. Time itself began to organize around the act of reading.

I was deeply drawn to Lisbeth Salander. The character stayed with me in a way few others had. There was something uncompromising about her presence and about the world she inhabited. The writing was sharp, precise, and relentless. It did not offer comfort or easy resolutions. It demanded attention and rewarded it with intensity.

What struck me most was the quality of the writing itself. It trusted the reader. It stayed with difficult material without diluting it. There was a seriousness to it that I had not encountered before, and it changed the way I related to fiction. Reading was no longer just a refuge. It became absorption. A state in which the outside world receded and something sharper, more demanding took its place.

By the time I finished the trilogy, something in me had shifted quietly. I found myself less interested in stories that were merely soothing. I wanted narratives that could hold complexity, darkness, and intelligence together without flinching.

By the second year of undergrad, fiction became immersive rather than episodic. A friend lent me his Kindle, and I downloaded all the volumes of Game of Thrones. I read obsessively. Day and night. The world was brutal, intricate, and morally ambiguous. It demanded attention. This was no longer a refuge in the sense of a place of shelter. It was a refuge through complexity. The real world was pressing in with questions about career, competence, and future. Fiction offered a place where I could engage with difficulty on my own terms.

Then something interesting happened. Fiction changed form.

In my later undergrad years and through grad school, I drifted away from novels almost entirely. Instead, I took refuge in research papers. Computer vision. Machine learning. Mathematical abstractions. To an outsider, this might look like a departure from imagination. To me, it felt like continuity. Papers were worlds. Models were characters. Assumptions were the laws of physics. Elegant solutions delivered the same quiet satisfaction that a well-resolved chapter once had.

After moving to New York in 2017, fresh out of grad school, that world collapsed too. Professional life began in earnest, and with it came a strange hollowness. The fictional universes I had relied on for years no longer seemed accessible. I remember feeling disturbed, as though something essential had gone missing.

That was when I encountered the world of Swami Vivekananda and Sri Ramakrishna, largely through the extempore lectures on Advaita Vedanta by Swami Sarvapriyananda at the Vedanta Society of New York. I did not approach this as a belief or conversion. I approached it the way I had always approached new worlds: with curiosity and seriousness. Vedanta unfolded like a living universe. Concepts replaced characters. Inquiry replaced plot. Thought itself became inhabitable.

Looking back, I see that each phase of my life demanded a different kind of fiction. Childhood needed shelter. Adolescence needed intensity. Early adulthood needed immersion. Intellectual years needed abstraction. Migration demanded a philosophical world spacious enough to hold uncertainty without panic.

This is why I no longer find the distinction between fiction and non-fiction particularly meaningful. Psychologically potent fiction does not oppose truth rather it prepares one to receive it.

The Mahabharata contains the Gita. Is it fiction or non-fiction?

The question itself dissolves on inspection. Fiction is the sweetness through which highly metaphorical knowledge systems can be passed down through generations without any dilution. It taps into the power of stories to completely rewire one’s internal experience of life. It makes truth livable and maybe even relishable.

In a world where reading has become fragmented and attention scarce, I find myself returning to listening. AI narrations. Audiobooks. Lectures. Voices that carry these fictional worlds into my daily movement. It still works. Perhaps it always will. It still has the power to suck in the poison that the daily life in its course inevitably generates.

When I honestly trace my life, I do not see these fictional-episodes as a series of escapes. Rather I see them as training grounds where each imagined world prepared me for a reality I had not yet reached. Each refuge quietly expanded my capacity to endure change.

And that, more than anything, makes me grateful.

What a fabulous life this is.

In the film F1, the camera finds a girl in the pit crew. She is unnamed, a soldier in the background, battling the wheel of a great machine. She was losing. You could see the panic rising in her like a fever. She fumbled the heavy gun. She dropped the steel nut. In the brutal game of racing, she was bleeding seconds, and seconds are the only currency that matters. She was hurrying, and the hurry was killing her.

Then Sonny Hayes stepped in. He did not shout. He looked at her with the eyes of a man who has seen the wall and lived. He spoke a sentence that sounded less like advice and more like an Old Tongue spell:

“Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.”

It was a paradox. In a world of fire and speed, he asked for slowness. But as she listened, the trembling stopped. Her hands remembered their work. She moved with a strange, heavy grace. She stopped fighting the machine and began to dance with it. The clumsiness vanished, and suddenly, she was fast.

The Boy on the Stage

Watching her, I felt a ghost pass through me. I was six years old again.

I stood at the front of a first-grade classroom. The teacher had called my name for an “extempore,” a surprise trial by combat where a child must weave a story from thin air. I was flummoxed. I was petrified. The silence of the room felt heavy, like a wool blanket.

In my terror, I snatched at the only weapon I had: the story of the Rabbit and the Tortoise.

I told it badly. I spoke in a frenzy, the words tumbling over each other, tripping and falling. I was the Rabbit, terrified and arrogant, sprinting toward the end just to make the silence stop. I finished with the only sentence I could remember, the moral drilled into every child:

“Slow and steady wins the race.”

The class clapped. It was the customary applause, the polite lie we tell children to make them feel brave. But I knew the truth. I had preached the virtue of “Slow and Steady,” but I had run the race of the Rabbit. I knew the words, but I did not know the magic.

The Echo Across the River

It is said that stories, like swords, have lineages.

Years later, reading the nine heavy volumes of Vivekananda, I found the forge where this story was hammered out. I stumbled upon a lecture titled “India’s Gift to the World.”

As I read the transcript, I realized the geography of this wisdom was closer than I imagined. Vivekananda delivered this lecture in Brooklyn, just a stone’s throw from where I exist today.

I live in Jersey City and work in Midtown Manhattan. My life is a daily commute through the “City that Never Sleeps”, the global temple of the Rabbit. Midtown is a canyon of glass and steel built on Hurry, where everyone is running, frantic to beat the clock.

But just across the East River, in the quiet history of Brooklyn, Vivekananda pulled back the curtain:

“India has given to the world the fables of Aesop, which were copied by Aesop from an old Sanskrit book... yes, even the story of Cinderella and the Bean Stalks.”

The contrast struck me hard. I spend my days in the frantic rush of the city, fighting the urge to be erratic. Yet, the antidote to that chaos was spoken over a century ago, just across the water. The story I blurted out in First Grade was a fragment of the Panchatantra. It travelled from the banks of the Ganges to the boroughs of New York, waiting for me to finally hear it over the noise of the commute.

The Law of Motion

And this is where the two worlds collide.

The F1 mantra and the Ancient Moral are not two different ideas. They are the same equation written in different languages.

• The F1 Driver says: “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”

• The Sanskrit Sage says: “Slow and steady wins the race.”

They are both fighting the same enemy. And the enemy is not “slowness.” The enemy is Erraticity.

The Rabbit runs with fury, but he creates a jagged line. He sprints, he stops, he sleeps. The panicked mechanic moves with fury, but she creates jagged lines. She rushes, she drops, she resets. The commuter in Midtown rushes, but he burns out.

In the harsh mathematics of reality, inconsistency is the killer.

The Tortoise wins because he is the Unbroken Line. He never halts. He never resets. The ancient masters understood what the modern driver knows: Hurry creates holes in your momentum.

To be “smooth” is to fill those holes. It is to trade the manic burst of energy for the unbreakable power of rhythm.

We spend our lives trying to be fast. We rush our art, our work, our lives. We are Rabbits running in circles, exhausted by our own inconsistent bursts. But the secret of the old magic is simple.

Be the Tortoise. Be the smooth hand on the wheel gun.

Do not stop. Do not be jagged. Just flow. The speed will find you.

If a pillar were to believe that it alone was supporting the temple tower, it would imagine a burden that was never its own. It would tire itself unnecessarily, assuming responsibility for something that is in fact upheld by a far deeper and stronger support.

The exhaustion would not arise from the work itself, but from ignorance of the ground on which it stands.

Ramana used this image to point toward a fundamental error in human consciousness. Man imagines himself to be the doer. He believes that the weight of the world rests on his shoulders. He assumes authorship of the action, ownership of the results, and responsibility for outcomes that are ultimately not his to bear. This mistaken assumption is the true source of inner fatigue.

Real spirituality begins precisely here. It must result in transformation, and transformation is only possible when a truth is practical enough to be lived moment by moment.

At the center of the problem lies the egotistical sense of “I.” This is the “I” that claims ownership over action and says, “I act, I decide, I achieve.” This sense of doership belongs to a mind that has not yet found rest. It lives in fear, confusion, and effort because it is still searching for an anchor. Until such an anchor is found, life unfolds as a repeated cycle of striving followed by exhaustion.

What is required is not the abandonment of action, but the gradual renunciation of this false sense of agentship. This is the renunciation spoken of in the Bhagavad Gita. It is an inner renunciation, a relinquishing of ownership rather than a withdrawal from life. When this egoistical “I” discovers that it is not autonomous, that it is merely a reflection arising from a deeper Reality, something essential shifts.

At that point, one comes face-to-face with an intuition of the “Real I”. This “Real I” is spoken of as Atman, Brahman, the Self. The recognition of this Reality is called Brahmajnana, Self-realization, or enlightenment. The language varies, but the experience is singular. The individual no longer feels like an isolated agent struggling against the world. There arises a quiet certainty that one is an instrument through which a higher power operates.

Once this anchoring takes place, suffering loses its foundation. The struggles that arise from ignorance dissolve because the burden of doership is no longer assumed. Just as the pillar no longer tires itself once it knows it is supported by the earth, the individual ceases to exhaust themselves once they recognize the ground of their being.

There is another way through which this anchoring can be established, and it is equally profound. This is the path of daily devotion. Through rituals, prayer, repetition, and songs, the mind is slowly trained to relinquish its claim to independence. In devotion, one repeatedly affirms that one is not the master, but the child of God, the servant of God, or the friend of God.

This shift in language is not incidental. Bhakti works by patiently impressing this truth upon the mind. It does not shock the ego into surrender. It dissolves it through familiarity and love. Over days, months, and years, this steady remembrance achieves the same end as the path of knowledge. The difference lies only in temperament. The Jnana path can be swift and uncompromising. Bhakti unfolds gently, but with equal certainty.

In both cases, the result is the same. The egotistical “I” finds its resting place in the “Real I”, and with that, the inner turbulence comes to an end.

The ideal state that emerges from this understanding is one in which a person lives continuously with the sense of being an instrument of the Divine. Action still happens. Work continues. Decisions are made. But they arise from a different center. The joy of the realized person lies not in achievement, but in abidance in the Self. Action flows from attunement rather than anxiety.

When work arises from this inner alignment, it naturally expresses righteousness. There is no inner competition, no constant comparison, no restless ambition. What remains is a quiet contentment and a relaxed strength that does not depend on outcomes.

Different teachers have spoken of this truth using different languages. Sri Ramakrishna would say that the Divine Mother has become all cosmic principles and that She herself has become the world. Ramana Maharishi would state that Brahman alone is real and that the world is Brahman. These expressions appear different, but they resolve the same inner conflict. In both cases, the egoistical “I” finds its anchor, whether in the neuter Brahman or the feminine Divine Mother.

Living the Paradox Daily: Vivekananda’s Practical Resolution

Swami Vivekananda once expressed this entire understanding in a manner that was at once humorous, compassionate, and deeply practical. He suggested that when one is well and strong, one should know that one is backed by the Real I and live with intention, courage, and strength. And when one is unwell or weak, one should depend entirely on the Divine Mother.

This is not a contradiction but a mature application of spiritual insight to the uneven rhythms of daily life. Strengths and weaknesses are both inevitable. What matters is how one relates to them. When strength arises, it is an opportunity to act firmly from knowledge, without arrogance or fear. When weakness arises, it is an opportunity to surrender without resistance or self-condemnation.

This ability to move freely between standing in knowledge and resting in surrender is what makes spirituality livable. It allows one to remain rooted in Truth without becoming rigid, and devoted without becoming dependent. The paradox is not to be resolved intellectually, but to be inhabited consciously.

For a modern spiritual seeker, this offers a complete way of life. To know oneself as grounded in the Self when strength is available, and to lean wholly on the Divine when it is not, is to live without unnecessary strain. It is to function like the pillar that knows it is supported by the earth, performing its role fully while never imagining that the weight of the temple rests upon it.

If this image of the gopuram resonates, it is worth sitting with it quietly. To notice where, in daily life, you still assume the weight of what you were never meant to carry.

If this reflection opens something genuine, I would be glad to hear how it unfolds for you.

The rest of us—my dad, my brother, my grandad, and myself—are off living directed, solitary lives. Each of us is absorbed in some mission, some purpose, some private line of thought or ambition. We all love each other, of course, but my mom is the one who keeps the emotional current flowing between us. Without her, we would probably drift into our separate orbits, waving occasionally from a distance.

It’s almost comical when I think about it. The house often feels like four men on parallel journeys who occasionally cross paths in the kitchen, and one woman quietly keeping the constellation from spinning apart.

The Relational Energy

There is a kind of intelligence that operates beneath words - a sensitivity to mood, timing, and the small shifts in people’s energy. My mother has that in abundance. It isn’t something you can learn from a book or acquire through logic; it’s more ecological, like a tree sensing changes in the wind.

She can tell when someone is withdrawn before they have realized it themselves. She knows how to bring warmth without intrusion, and when to let someone sit in silence without feeling abandoned. It is an emotional craftsmanship, the skill of maintaining coherence in the field between people.

What she does looks effortless, but it is a form of active intelligence. She is the one tuning the frequencies so the rest of us can go off chasing our own signals.

The Solitary Energy

The men in my family, by contrast, are happiest in solitude. Not loneliness, but solitude. We each come alive in our own private rhythm: my father in his work, my brother in his craft, my grandfather in his memories, and me in my thoughts. There is a clarity that comes from being alone, a kind of inner architecture that needs silence to form.

That solitude, I think, is its own kind of love. It is a way of making sense of the world so we can bring something back to the people who matter. But it is also a different mode of being - linear, goal-oriented, often blind to the emotional texture around us.

While my mom’s energy pulls inward, weaving connections, ours pushes outward, carving paths. Centripetal and centrifugal. Relation and direction.

The Family as a Living Balance

Every functioning family is a small ecology of these two forces: connection and direction, relation and solitude. One gives warmth and coherence; the other gives structure and movement.

Without my mother’s emotional intelligence, our lives would be efficient but fragmented, a collection of ambitions sharing a roof. Without our directional drive, her relational field might never stretch outward into new possibilities.

When these two energies balance, something beautiful happens. Relation gives meaning to purpose, and purpose gives form to relation. The home becomes a living dialogue between stillness and motion.

The Archetype Beneath It

Philosophers and mystics have tried to capture this polarity for centuries. In Indian thought, it is Shakti and Shiva—energy and stillness, creation and awareness. In Taoism, it is yin and yang, the receptive and the active.

Everywhere you look, life is built on this conversation between the one who holds and the one who moves.

Maybe that is why my family works. My mother is the field of Shakti, dynamic, relational, harmonizing. The men, in our quieter way, carry the energy of Shiva, directed and purposeful. Neither is superior; both are necessary. Together they form a whole.

The Quiet Heroism of Holding

I used to think families survived because people did their duties—paid bills, showed up, stayed loyal. Now I think they survive because someone chooses to hold, to maintain the invisible threads that make duty worth doing.

That person, often a mother, sometimes a father, occasionally a friend, is the reason the whole structure does not collapse into parallel lives. They are the quiet hero of coherence.

And maybe that is what real love looks like. Not grand gestures or endless harmony, but the ongoing labor of someone who keeps the emotional center warm enough for everyone to keep returning to.

Every family needs someone who holds the invisible thread. And everyone who lives a solitary, directed life needs to remember that their strength still draws meaning from that hidden center of relation.

When it works, the home is the meeting point of two sacred energies: the one who holds, and the ones who go.

It’s somewhat crazy to think that something people consider trivial was so hard for me. Looking back, I see it happened because of two things: the ecosystem I grew up in, and of course, my own stubborn share of blame. I can’t just throw everything on society, even though all of us love doing that. 🙂

An added twist is that I’m the first person in my family to have an “active” driving license. That story begins with my grandad, who, while working outside India in the 1970s, had such a severe accident that it left shockwaves across the family. He recovered after six months of care, but with the limited communication of that era, my family back home endured months of silence and fear. That trauma turned into a ripple effect: driving became synonymous with danger.

Even my dad wasn’t spared. As a civil engineer, he once got a motorbike from his firm. After a minor fall, he gave it up completely. The irony? He’s led more than 20 national highway projects across India, but doesn’t drive a single vehicle himself.

And then there was me. Because of his job, we always had an SUV and a driver. For much of my childhood, I enjoyed what was essentially a personal chauffeur. I can still name each driver on my fingers because I grew up knowing them so well. Naturally, I never felt the pinch of learning to drive myself.

But that easy arrangement disappeared when I moved to the US for my studies. Suddenly, I was on my own. Living on the East Coast, in Manhattan and Jersey City, I still managed without driving because public transport was so good. Long-haul buses and trains got me far, and for the occasional trip, generous friends would take the wheel.

So that’s the backdrop, the reasons I never felt urgency. But that doesn’t mean I never tried. Over the years, I made several attempts, each with its own twists.

The Attempts

2015: Kota, India.
I signed up for formal driving lessons during my last year of undergrad. I remember driving around the industrial zone for hours with my instructor, but for reasons I can’t recall, it never culminated in a road test.

2017: Allahabad, India.
On a vacation home during my spring break from grad school in the US, I practiced with a local driver who knew my dad. I even got a learner’s license by passing the knowledge test, but the actual road test was scheduled a month later, and my vacation was shorter than that. So the effort fizzled.

2017–2019: New York and New Jersey, USA.
Determined to fix it, I tried again in NYC. But visa documentation issues had me running in circles between multiple New Jersey DMVs, and I gave up, exhausted. By late 2019, I registered at a Queens driving school, cleared the knowledge test, and took several lessons. Then Covid hit, the learning permit expired, and the cycle ended again.

2023: Jersey City.
I gave it another go, this time in the New Jersey’s DMV. My first knowledge test attempt failed by a single question. Frustrated, I ditched the apps and read the NJ driver’s manual cover-to-cover. That worked, I passed and got my learner’s permit. I took classes, built some confidence, and went for the road test. I failed. Twice. Once for doing a K-turn in five moves instead of three, and another time for not using hand-over-hand steering. To make matters worse, the same examiner failed me both times.

It was disheartening, but I kept pushing. Friends like Shubham, Hardik, Abhijit, and Jayant helped me practice, and for the first time I felt real confidence behind the wheel. Driving with Jayant especially was a breakthrough. His patience allowed me to relax and become aware of my own mistakes. That was when I realized I wasn’t just following rules anymore. I was actually aware of what I was doing, and that’s the moment when practice turns into real skill.

Still, scheduling the actual test was another hurdle. That’s when I wrote a small Python script to alert me if cancelled DMV slots opened up, saving me from endless refreshing. It worked, and I finally got a slot.

This time, I asked for Blanco, the Guatemalan instructor I trusted most from my driving school for the road test. On the way to the DMV, he handed me the wheel, and that simple gesture gave me the same ease I had found driving with Jayant. When the test began, everything clicked. I moved through the maneuvers like clockwork, and when the examiner smiled and said, “It’s a pass,” Blanco hugged me and said, “Congratulations.”

Reflections

Looking back, I realize my biggest flaw was waiting until necessity forced me into action. That habit has cost me opportunities beyond driving. For a long time, I treated effort as binary, either 0 or 1. But life is really a gradient. You can dial it up slowly, patiently, and let part-effort mix with the entropy of life and that way you can actually surf the wave somewhat easily.

I also learned that friends and teachers play different roles. Friends give you space to grow; teachers give you sharp corrections. Both matter, but in different stages of learning.

Most importantly, I saw how every skill moves from rule-following to self-awareness. That’s when you know you’ve crossed the bridge from fumbling to mastery.

And so, after years of attempts, detours, bureaucratic loops, countless instructors, and the help of friends, I finally got my driver’s license. Maybe this is me growing up after all!

A Personal Story

Placement season in my undergrad at IIT BHU was a strange kind of ritual. It was my fourth year, and the whole campus carried a nervous energy that was hard to escape. Everyone knew, with the exception of those in computer science, that their careers were going to land in software regardless of what they had studied. Mechanical, civil, electrical—it did not matter. The funnel always ended in code. And the weight of this reality was heavy, because if you missed the placement season you were told you were staring into a future full of uncertainty.

This was 2015 and at the time I had already half-convinced myself that I wanted to pursue research in the United States. That meant I was not fully consumed by the placement race, but I could still feel the tension radiating through the halls. What made the whole season unnecessarily difficult was the way information was handled. Our Training and Placement Office functioned like a slow and outdated bureaucracy. When a company came to campus, the announcement was a single sheet of paper pinned on the notice board inside their office. That was it. Whether you learned about it or not depended entirely on luck and timing. Many of us found out about opportunities only after they had passed, which meant you could miss the chance to even sit for the first round of tests.

It was frustrating, because the problem was not a lack of jobs or a lack of talent. It was that crucial information was stuck on a wall. Then one of my close friends built something that seemed simple at the time but felt extraordinary. He wrote a Python application, deployed it on AWS, and connected it with Pushbullet notifications. Placement coordinators could now feed announcements into the app directly, and every student with an Android phone received an instant alert whenever a new company arrived.

The effect was immediate. What once felt like a lottery suddenly felt manageable. The Training and Placement Office had not changed its nature, but the entire experience of students had changed because information began flowing freely.

That was the first time I truly understood the power of technology. It was not about inventing jobs or companies. It was about distributing information in a way that mattered.

A Modern Parallel

Today in 2025, which is exactly ten years since I graduated, I found myself in Jersey City, facing a remarkably similar problem. This time the setting was the DMV. I needed a road test slot, and the website showed nothing available for months. But if you kept refreshing, sometimes a cancellation would appear for a much closer date. The trouble was that unless you happened to refresh at exactly the right time, those slots were gone before you could click. It was a system that demanded endless refreshing, with missed opportunities being the norm.

The déjà vu was unmistakable. This was the same problem I had seen back at IIT BHU. So, I turned to the same type of solution. With the easy guidance of ChatGPT I wrote a Python script and set it up to run on GitHub Actions. Every five minutes the script checked for open slots and notified me instantly if one appeared. Suddenly, I did not need to sit there refreshing endlessly. The frustration dissolved into a steady flow of information.

It was such a small hack, but it reminded me of that earlier moment when I first realized what distribution can do. The difference between before and after was not more information but better distribution of it. The pain of missed chances disappeared once the flow became automatic.

The Distribution Lens

This is when a larger realization began to crystallize. What we often call “techification” is, at its heart, about solving distribution problems. The internet provides a kind of highway for information exchange between those who supply and those who demand. Without it, most solutions look like narrow sidewalks, small and unreliable. With it, we suddenly have scale, speed, and fairness.

We like to think of technology as sleek apps, smart algorithms, or eye-catching designs. But beneath all of that is something more fundamental. Technology works when it allows information, goods, or opportunities to flow without friction. It is not about the “coolness” of the tech itself. It is about the way distribution changes the lived reality of people on either side of the exchange.

Breakthroughs and Limits

Once you see technology through the lens of distribution, many examples fall into place. Amazon became what it is by solving the distribution of goods at scale. Uber connected idle cars with riders in a way that created entirely new patterns of movement in cities. YouTube and Instagram made it possible for a creator in a small town to find an audience across the world. Even dating apps are nothing more, and nothing less, than distribution systems that connect profiles into matches.

On the other hand, failures also look clearer in this light. WeWork, for example, helped make coworking spaces more discoverable. But it could not change the underlying supply constraint of real estate. Discovery was improved, yes, but distribution was still tethered to the hard limits of physical space.

A Historical Analogy

This pattern is not new. Human progress has always depended on distribution revolutions.

• Sea-going vessels carrying goods across continents fueled the vast fortunes of the British Empire throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, turning trade routes into arteries of power and wealth.

• Electrical wires carried energy into homes and factories, unlocking modern industry and reshaping the very rhythms of daily life.

• The internet spreads information across the globe at lightning speed, unleashing modern technology and transforming how societies connect, learn, and create.

Each of these leaps solved the distribution problem, be it for physical goods, energy or information.

Streams of Distribution

Seen this way, the internet has opened up rivers of distribution in many directions. It has reshaped how content and attention flow, through platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Substack. It has made trust and reputation portable through reviews, GitHub repositories, and LinkedIn profiles. It has reorganized relationships and communities through dating apps and Discord. It has redistributed capital and opportunity through Kickstarter campaigns and remote job platforms.

All of these are different expressions of the same underlying principle. Distribution is the quiet engine that runs beneath them.

Closing Reflection

I was listening to a cinema conference where actors and distributors were in conversation, and one remark stayed with me: “Content is King, but Distribution is God.” The speaker’s point was that no matter how good your content is, it won’t find the fame or money it deserves unless the right distribution channels carry it forward to the right audience. And those who control distribution platforms hold the real leverage — with the greatest potential to become wealthy, not by being unfair, but simply by being the indispensable bridge between creators and audiences.

And it is in this distribution-channel theme where the true breeding ground of innovation exists. Consider Netflix: it didn’t start by producing films, but by reimagining digital distribution, it redefined how the world consumes cinema. Or Spotify, which disrupted music not by creating songs but by transforming how they reached listeners. Similarly, Apple’s App Store and YouTube built massive ecosystems by becoming distribution hubs for apps and videos rather than by making all the content themselves.

This pattern holds beyond the media. Visa, for instance, doesn’t create money or issue credit — but by operating the rails through which payments flow, it became one of the most valuable companies in the world. Stripe followed a similar path in the digital age: it didn’t reinvent money, but by building developer-friendly APIs, it democratized access to payment infrastructure and became the invisible backbone of countless startups. And on a global scale, the Suez Canal shows the same principle in the physical world: it doesn’t manufacture a single good, yet by serving as a vital artery for global trade, it commands immense economic and geopolitical influence.

In every domain, distribution channels aren’t just middlemen rather they are often the deepest sources of leverage and the spark for transformative innovation.