When my elder sister and I were returning today (July 11, 2025) from a visit to my younger sister’s in-laws house in Kondapur, we got talking.
I was telling her how I did not care to exist, how I find life meaningless, how the world itself need not exist.
She was questioning my stance and gently trying to point out the fallacies in my way of thinking, and pointing out how when the mind is silent we find the world to be beautiful, etc.
After some such talk, I told her I feel a sense of dissatisfaction with life in general.
She said, “Then, you must be feeling some lack or a sense of missing something in life.”
I thought for a while and then said, “Intellectually I have a perfect understanding of the truth but it frustrates me that there seems to be a gap between the intellectual understanding and actual understanding or so-called enlightenment. Plus, the fact that I cannot seem to devote enough time to the pursuit of enlightenment due to work and social commitments makes me a bit miffed.”
Thus the conversation proceeded for a little while and then this insight struck me, which I shared with my sister – “The intellectual understanding is the thing. So, if intellectually I have understood that God/Brahman is everything and the world is just names-and-forms that are mere appearances and not real, then who or what is left to bridge the gap, if at all it exists, between so-called intellectual understanding and so-called actual understanding? After all, once the pot understands that it is just a name-and-form of Clay, then what is there left for it to do because there is no gap to fill between it and the clay. Then the pot realizes that it is not its dance but the dance of the clay for it has no independent existence of its own nor any sort of existence except as an imagination and appearance in space-time, which themselves are imagined entities. In a way, all there is left for one to do is surrender to the divine. In a way, even the question of surrender does not arise because who is left to surrender when one is just a name-and-form.”
That is why, Gaudapada, the guru of Sankaracharya’s guru, wrote in Mandukya Karika (Chapter 2, Verse 32), “There is neither dissolution nor creation, none in bondage and none practicing disciplines. There is none seeking Liberation and none liberated. This is the absolute truth.”
Know Thyself 