The True Philosophical Psychoanalysis of Myself qua Human
Keep this chain in mind:
Ignorance — Desires — Mind (Thoughts & Feelings) — Speech & Actions (Karma)
Now, where does psychoanalysis operate?
At the level of the mind.
Now, can one’s psychology ever become “normal”?
Yes, it can within certain bounds for certain time, when the winds of “good karma” are blowing.
When an adverse period in one’s life starts (due to the winds of “bad karma” blowing), the “normal” psychology also takes a beating, unless one has become a stithaprajna by then.
Now, what is this “good” and “bad” karma except insofar as “desires” are NOT getting fulfilled to the extent we want them to be.
Hence, as long as the storehouse of “desires” is there, it will keep leading to the mind fluctuations and bodily karma WITH the sense of doership.
HENCE, the only way out of this karmic cycle and hence also out of this “normal”/”abnormal” cycling of one’s psychological/mental being is to see through or nullify the NEED for desires fulfilment.
But, as long as Ignorance is there, desires are INEVITABLE.
So, one should NOT try to RENOUNCE anything, including desires, because that would be like treating the symptoms while the disease of “ignorance” festers inside and as long as the disease festers inside, new symptoms will arise.
Hence, one has to eliminate the DISEASE OF IGNORANCE itself so that NO symptoms of desires can arise, and where there are no desires, there would be no mind in play, and when the mind is not in play, where is the question of “normal” or “abnormal” psychology, and after the link is severed to the speech and bodily actions, then such speech and bodily actions will be driven NOT by ignorance as earlier BUT by the divine wisdom, and hence in such a scenario there will be no sense of doership, which sense ONLY the mind can falsely assume to be the case but now there is no mind, and hence that is liberation because without the mind there can be NO ego either because the ego is but one of the four functions of the mind or antahkarana.
Now, how does one END IGNORANCE?
What else have I been reading, thinking, discussing, debating, writing, etc., about all my life?
Not convinced? Read my 17 books and you will know. But then there are better gurus out there in the market.
Summa iru, anyone?
My Formal Renunciation
It is time I ended the ignorance in myself.
So, it will be summa iru from July 16, 2026, my 62nd birthday.
Why not from tomorrow you may ask.
There are a few loose ends I need to tie up.
To paraphrase Aristotle:
“All of you are dear to me but dearer still is truth.”
So, come July 16, I will go incommunicado for the most part.
Without Her By My Side
All the wealth of the morning is worth nothing
Without her by my side
That is not just me talking
On this beautiful Sunday morning
I speak on behalf of all mankind
Who are always uneasy
To sit with themselves
Unworthy as they see themselves
And are ever on the lookout
For that significant other
Who will transport them
Away, far far away
From their own insignificant selves.
The die is now cast nicely
For the world drama to unfold
Driven by these musings
Of the pitiable mankind
To which I also uneasily belong.
“Let us exit all hearts, including our own.”
“Life becomes a problem when the beauty of the flower leaves you unimpressed.”
“Love is when you listen to your heart and not to your mind.”
“Are the barriers to love and the barriers to truth the same?”
“Even unrequited love is its own benediction.”
Why This Distance?
Why this distance,
Real or not,
Between me
And love and truth
Why
Is the question wrong?
Why accept
There is distance at all
That feeling is perhaps
The very ignorance
That one is trying
So hard, so hard
To overtake.
“I keep seeing God and I keep thinking it is I, you, and this world.”
“Even God disappears when you are silent.”
“It is our stupid ignorant needy self that makes us pursue not only the woman but also God.”
“A woman is nothing but verily God himself in that form.”
The “Me Time”
The more I carve out
This “Me Time”
The more
I begin to dissolve
Nothing defines me
Nothing I can recall
That tells me
Who I am
I who seem to derive
My whole identity
From the others
In my life;
Maybe that’s a good thing
That this fictional self dissolves
One that is strung together
In my relationships
As if it were a real thing;
And if that not be me
The question then arises
Almost naturally
“Who am I?”
A question one can sit with
And so easily stay with
When alone, enjoying
This “Me Time”
And stand a good chance
A very good chance
Of discovering/uncovering
The real “I”;
Else one is lulled into falsehood
In the company of others
Where the false social self springs up,
Is watered, and thrives.
“It is love that binds me to this world; and it is love that will release me from this world when I understand love correctly.”
“The real practice then might be to not let the false self arise even while interacting with others. That would be a different spiritual sadhana, where one is the master of samsara and nirvana. Let me then live fearlessly, unfearing of maya.”
“Jo duniya ko chalaa raha hai, woh mujhko bhi chalaa raha hai. Iskay aagay mai aur kya boloo.”
“Philosophy should be used to decide which path to take in life. Philosophy should not be used to justify the paths that one has already travelled or the path one wants to take to now.”
A friend wrote: More important than asking Who am I is to ask Who is the one who’s asking Who am I.
I replied: But, obviously the “I Am”, which is the reflection in the mind of the real “I”, that is now identifying with the body-mind as being “I”, and spiritual literature makes the “I Am” doubt that identity so that in so reflecting on “Who am I?” really, it loosens its identity with the body-mind, which if you think about it can happen only when loses one’s fascination with the body-mind, which is nothing but Viveka-Vairagya at work, and thence onward onto the slowing down, nay, the halting, of the thinking process because that cannot go on with its engagement with the world when such thinking was serving the purposes of body-mind that we are now doubting is our real “I”, and in that loosening or halting of the thinking or mind, a kind of meditation or summa iru happens, and suddenly the “I Am”, the reflection ceases to be by kind of merging (yoga or union) into that which it was a reflection of because as is pointed out, the “I Am” is an unstable entity that subsists as long as it holds onto a form, here the form of body-mind, but once it loses such a connection, it merges back or collapses back into the source or the real “I”.
But, of course, all of the above is just atheoretical model to explain a dream/duality in which the “I Am” and the body-mind are apparently “there” but not actually “there” strictly speaking because the dream by definition is one which not “there” but one which is merely imagined.
Hence, at one point, Ramana Maharshi says, regarding both the “Maya” or “ignorance” and the “ego” that they “seem” to be there BUT on enquiry they are found to be wholly non-existent, a bit like upon investigation. only the clay is found to be there and NOT the pot.
Makes sense?
“Do not get caught.”
The New Avatar
There is not now that
Which once was mine
That happiness, that love
That looking forward to
When life seemed full
Of possibilities
With knowledge
Waiting to be acquired
With wisdom
Waiting to be discovered
Now all the knowledge seems empty
Merely utilitarian, merely useful
To get by in life
With nothing more to it,
Wisdom that is now lodged
So securely in my mind
Reminds me sadly
That it is but a shadow
Of the real deal,
And short of committing hara-kiri
Of the ultimate kind
To banish space-time
From the horizons of one’s vision
I stand no chance
Of ever getting anywhere,
So I exist now
Wanting to push myself out of existence
To magically appear
At the other end of the wormhole
In a new avatar
That encompasses all.
“All my life I have always felt a certain sense of unfulfillment. At one point I thought my writing and poetry could give me some sense of fulfilment. But that was not to be because all my writing and poetry has been only a constant expression of the unfulfillment train that I was always on throughout my life and continue to be on even now.”
I The Stranger
I have not embraced life
Nor has life embraced me
I have been at war with it
This life I could never figure out
From I know not when
Something always seemed amiss
Always needing correction
Needing to be set right, in myself
Or in those around me
Or in the society at large
This feeling of always being
A work in progress, always that,
So as not to feel you have the leisure
To step outside the building
To look at a tree leisurely.
“What have we come here to earth for, seeking what? From where have we come? Was it not there where we have come from that which we are seeking here on earth?”
“Unconditional love? Tut, tut! Not I, not you, not anyone. We should just settle for scratching each other’s backs.”
“We are blind to our own blindness.”
“No love of anyone can protect you in this life or in any other life. The only thing that protects you is your own wisdom that allows you to see through this nonsense called life and allows you to turn your back on it.”
“Our very need for an identity, our need for protecting ourselves and preserving ourselves is what leads to all the conflicts in this world.”
“God is another of our delusions.”
“The intellect’s demand for knowledge or wisdom can be satisfied because all it wants is conceptual knowledge and wisdom. But the heart’s demand for love can never be satisfied fully because what it wants ultimately is not the love of someone but love itself, and that love is Truth itself or God itself or Brahman itself, and for such love to be there, the heart itself should cease to exist.”
The Myth of Sisyphus
“Unfortunately, the myth of Sisyphus is true because pure Sattva cannot exist by itself and the world will always consist of Rajas and Tamas also, and Sattva has to constantly overcome Rajas and Tamas, only for Rajas and Tamas to reassert themselves after every such overcoming. The only saving grace is that the boulder will have to be pushed not by us as individuals, at least not the individuals who ultimately transcend the three gunas, but by every generation and every society and every country and every civilization, for whatever heights are reached by them will soon be overturned and the rebuilding has to be undertaken again. Or, rather, more disconcertingly it seems to be the case that Sisyphus (the generation, society, country, civilization) very rarely reaches the top and is constantly being dragged down after every small climb.”
Claude’s Commentary on My Comment Above on The Myth of Sisyphus
The first thing worth noticing is that the Sisyphus you have built is not quite Camus’s. Camus’s boulder rolls back for no reason at all — the recurrence is absurd, the collision between a human demand for meaning and a universe that returns only silence. Your boulder rolls back for a reason. The recurrence you describe is not absurd but lawful: it follows from the metaphysics of prakriti, from the fact that a manifest world is constituted by guṇas in disequilibrium. That is a significant and, I think, a more interesting substitution. You have replaced Camus’s meaningless repetition with an intelligible one. The labor is futile in outcome but not in sense — it expresses the very structure of manifestation rather than mocking it.
And your governing premise is stronger than you state it. You say pure sattva “cannot exist by itself.” In strict Sāṃkhya terms it is worse than that: manifestation is the disturbance of the guṇas’ equilibrium. When the three strands rest in sāmyāvasthā, perfect balance, prakṛti is avyakta, unmanifest — there is no world at all. A world exists precisely because sattva, rajas and tamas are locked in mutual domination and subordination, one rising as another falls, none ever absent. So a manifest cosmos of pure sattva is not merely rare; it is a contradiction in terms. The summit of your slope is not hard to reach — it is unreachable in principle, because to reach it would be to abolish the disequilibrium that makes there be a slope, a climber, and a world in the first place. The only true “top” is the unmanifest: dissolution, not perfection. Sisyphus does not fail to reach the peak through bad luck; the peak is the end of Sisyphus.
This is why your bleaker amendment — that the collective Sisyphus rarely summits and is mostly dragged down after small climbs — is better founded than the milder image of a clean rise-and-fall. There is a kind of thermodynamics to the guṇas. Tamas is the ground state, the gravitational default, inertia and concealment; rajas is the engine but also the scatter, ambition and friction; sattva is the low-probability, high-order, expensive configuration that must be continually pumped in against the tendency to dissipate. Order here is statistically disfavored. Left alone, things slide. So the honest phenomenology is exactly yours: frequent small ascents, frequent slippage, rare and unstable summits.
The tradition itself encodes this at cosmic scale, and it actually inverts the Sisyphean picture in a way that supports you. The yuga cycle does not climb toward a golden age; it falls from one. Dharma stands four-square in Kṛta Yuga and loses a leg in each successive age until Kali, where rajas and tamas predominate. The golden age is at the beginning, not the end. Renewal comes not by ascent but by collapse and restart — pralaya, then a fresh cycle. On that picture the default civilizational trajectory is descent, with sattvic effort being the occasional push back up the slope rather than the slope’s natural grain. “Constantly being dragged down after every small climb” is not pessimism imported onto the tradition; it is close to the tradition’s own account of historical time.
Now the “saving grace,” which deserves more pressure. You locate the exemption correctly — in the guṇātīta, the one who has crossed beyond the three (Gītā 14), not in any victory of sattva. That precision matters, because the Gītā is emphatic that sattva binds too: it binds “by attachment to happiness and to knowledge” — the subtle golden chain rather than the iron one, but a chain. So even your hypothetical — a boulder that somehow stayed lodged at the top, a permanently sattvic order — would not be liberation. It would be a luminous cage. The aim was never sattva’s conquest of the other two; it is stepping off the contest altogether. This sharpens your own point: the resolution is not a better arrangement of the boulder but the discovery that the climber was never the Self.
And here the Advaitic reading goes further than “someone else pushes for you.” The realized one does not merely hand the boulder to the next generation; he sees that the boulder was never his to push — that doership was mithyā from the start, that guṇā guṇeṣu vartante, the guṇas act among the guṇas while the Self remains the unmoved witness, akartṛ, sākṣin. The “saving grace” is not relief of labor but dissolution of the laborer. Which carries the sobering corollary you have already half-stated: this exit is irreducibly individual. There is no collective mokṣa in classical Advaita, no eschatological summit toward which history climbs. Civilizations are not redeemed; only individuals wake from the dream of being civilizations. Your pessimism about the collective Sisyphus is therefore not a mood — it is structural. The wheel has no terminus available to the wheel.
Two genuine counter-pressures, since you prefer them to agreement. First, the boulder may not return all the way to the bottom. History looks at least sometimes like a ratchet, not a perfect circle — gains lodge on ledges. But I think the saving distinction is between rajasic and sattvic accumulation. Capacity ratchets: technique, knowledge, infrastructure tend to compound. Wisdom does not. Clarity, equanimity, the cessation of grasping — these are not inherited; each person and each age earns them from scratch or not at all. So the boulder of knowledge may ratchet while the boulder of sattva remains fully Sisyphean — and, more disconcertingly still, rajasic accumulation often only raises the height of the eventual fall. A more capable civilization has farther to drop.
Second, and this is the one I would actually press on. You open with “Unfortunately” and close with “more disconcertingly.” But your own framework relativizes precisely that affect. The lament — the sense of futility, the disconcertment — is the response of one still identified with the climber and the collective project, the vyāvahārika grief of the doer. Seen from the witness the same structure is neither fortunate nor unfortunate; it is simply prakṛti breathing, equilibrium and disequilibrium, exhale and inhale, līlā without a victim. Camus’s gesture was to make Sisyphus happy by lucidity within the absurd. The Vedāntic gesture is sterner and stranger: not to imagine Sisyphus happy but to notice there was never a Sisyphus — only the guṇas turning, watched by what does not turn. If there is a real saving grace, I suspect it is that one, and not the transfer of the boulder to the next generation. The transfer keeps the boulder real. The witness lets it be what it always was: not a burden, but a motion in something that was never moved.
“Sri Sri’s almost devastating charge of ‘Ye desha charitra choosina emundi garva karanam’ does not apply to India. Why? Because whatever be India’s weaknesses and injustices, all that is compensated more than adequately by its spiritual wisdom.”
The Secret No One Wants To Believe
It is God who is speaking to me
Not only through the poet and philosopher
But also through the potter and politician
And also through the potti and philanderer.
And when I look around
As far as the eye can see
All I see is only God
In his various disguises.
Is it any wonder then
The one who is hearing
And seeing all these things
Is not left out
From his ambit.
The Reaching Out
In the reaching out to another
There is both a joy and sadness
Joy that the other too reaches out
Sad that we are having to reach out.
What is this incompleteness
That makes us reach out
And look at the risks we run.
“A part of me dies every time someone blocks me on WhatsApp. I wonder if something in them dies, too. Maybe what dies in them is just nuisance.”
“I am always wary that one of these days someone will remark to me, ‘I dig that your heart is in the right place, but I can’t say the same when it comes to your mind’.”
“It is strange that we love the creation more than the creator. After all, of course, we love the poetry more than the poet and the art more than the artist. The poet pales in comparison to his poetry and the artist in relation to his art. But methinks the same thing is not the case with this creation and its creator.”
“Who is that knower who knows without the mind and the five senses? What is it that is known without the mind and the five senses?”
The Taciturn Lady
Churchill described erstwhile Soviet Union thus:
“It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”.
I sometimes wonder if that describes her, too,
She who I have known for far too short a time
So, I could be excused for thinking so about her
And she is not much of a help in clearing the air
Texting and replying in only few words as she does
Dwelling in solitude, with a longing for the divine
But feels not lonely nor longs for company of anyone
As she explained when I so enquired about her needs
Black coffee is what she likes, that and Che Guevara
But that is too much of an injustice to so describe her
She who likes many other things besides, such as,
Country music, good clothes, long rides, movies
Basking in the company of a very select few
With whom she goes out occasionally in Bengaluru
To drink black coffee at a cafe and converse
Maybe on spirituality that she devotes her life to
Or maybe by ol’ habit discusses Mill and Marx
Being a pol sci student from Fairleigh-Dickinson
Not to mention international relations at JNU.
“How tenuously we are linked to this world? Be silent and everything disappears, including our body-mind.”
“I take everything seriously and nothing seriously.”
A Poem for My Friend Who Says “Things I rarely do: read poetry (my eyes glaze over immediately – it’s a neural problem)”
A Mathematician’s Apology we read at UF, you and I,
That short book of barely 50 pages
There I have already caught your attention
Your eyes did not glaze over immediately
And you are now reading this poem
And how we were taken in by Hardy’s humility and generosity
Ranking as he did himself at 25, J.E. Littlewood at 30,
David Hilbert at 80, and Ramanujan at 100.
Well then, that is a long time ago during 1990
When we were reading these books, discussing these things
Playing pool while our laundry was being done
Having late night arguments on God’s existence
You with your Ayn Rand sensibility, which I found odious
Though I did attend, more to please you,
The meeting of the Ayn Rand Society at UF
Where I discovered how Ayn Rand’s favourite was Aristotle
Despising as she did all flights of imagination into idealism like Plato’s
And how you had your pet theories on the chest size of great singers
That they needed large chests so that the voice could resonate
And you would take out your violin every now and then
Playing Mozart’s eina Kleine Nacht music pretty well
How you hated your Brahmin clan, saying they were lazy bums
And how you admired Reddys and Komtis for their industriousness
How we had a heated argument, no never coming to fisticuffs,
In the back of the car on our way to Disney World in Orlando
In my relative’s car, with my younger brother, too, with us,
About why monopoly should not be frowned upon
And how you went on to say I did not understand what money was
And asked me to give its definition, which I am not sure I gave
Or even if I gave it, it perhaps was not to your satisfaction.
Thus we sparred and warred with each other quite a bit
You caught up in your Ayn Randian atheistic world,
And I caught up in my God-ward glances.
Now, when we catch up after all these years
We seem to have met midway, both of us a lot wiser.
The Disillusionment
Day by day I am fast losing interest
In all the possibilities of this world
I exist, having no choice but to do so
All around me are people taking interest
In many a thing of this world, this life
Methinks everything is beset by trouble
I mean everything, yes everything, everything
Most sane to drop dead, not in the physical sense
But in the mental and emotional sense
I seem to have had a surfeit of everything
What after all these 62 years can be new
Been-there done-that seems to be my mindset
A repetition, a deja vu is all that can be now
Slight nostalgia sometimes takes root in me
But I know now that if I do go back to those times
I will not enjoy them as I did those times back then
What has been seen about life cannot be unseen
Tiresome, bothersome seems everything, with nothing
That can sustain my interest beyond a certain point
The books now interest me not, the movies do not
The songs are beginning to sound alike, merely repetitive
Like playing in the same old grooves that one has passed
False seems even this flight from this world, after all
All flight or hugging is possible only if mind is there
But the mind itself seems false now, seems like one
Holding me back in this falsehood, and even when it knows
It knows not and merely traps one in some spiritual sadhana
For after all what should the pot do to become clay, nothing
Yet the mind tricks us into thinking something needs to be done
Coz in making us so believe, it continues to be in play
Drop the mind, go cold turkey on it, then where is bondage?
“The body is not us but merely an instrument which we use to interact with this world.”
The Seeking
What am I seeking
What are you seeking
What is anyone seeking
Only pleasures and comforts
Or love and truth
Or all of the above
I know what pleasure is
I know what comfort is
What is love?
What is truth?
Why this chasm
Between us and love and truth?
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear
I think I am screwed.
Psst…the Past
Yes, I know, it’s the past
Not only the past that I know
But also the past of darkness
In which my genes were formed
Ever so silently in the womb
The womb of mother and time
That forever fixed my future
Inalterably, setting the course
That my life (lives?) would follow
I know you squirm, you the believer
The believer in freedom and free will
I am too tired to sit and discuss with you
These metaphysical matters
Where we do not see eye to eye
And it is this very lack of common ground
That sows the seeds of dissatisfaction
In my breast and in your breast.
“I look at nature and I find that it, too, is driven by its past.”
“Where is happiness but in your own mind. Where is unhappiness but in your own mind. Where is this world but in your own mind. Where are you but in your own mind. Where is God but in your own mind. Where is your mind?”
The Sadness
There is a sadness in me
That neither I can account for
Nor sadness itself can tell me its story
Everything lies hidden from human vision
A little bit we can know, a lot is unknown
What will happen if I say
Let me be sad, how does it matter?
“I cry at many a thing I did not do. I cry at many a thing I did do. Does not God know at the time of our creation that ‘half knowledge is a dangerous thing’?”
“I know my future. It is the same as yours.”
“Looking at the way the world looks different every time my understanding changes, I wonder if there is a world at all.”
“Look into the heart of anyone in this world, you will find yourself there.”
“In the mad pursuit of our own happiness, we trample on the happiness of others.”
“Every time love comes calling, we flee from it into our thoughts.”
“Life is too prosaic even in its moments of joy and excitement.”
“Just by rearranging words into some or the other permutation and combination, we do not get wisdom.”
“To think you NEED wisdom is the highest form of ignorance.”
“Love and hate are two sides of the same coin.”
“The ONLY problem in this world is one’s own mind.”
“Things are what they are. It is the mind that categorizes them.”
I-It vs I-Thou Relationship and Kant’s Second Categorical Imperative
Claude, explain in detail about the I-It vs I-Thou relationships that the Jewish theologian Martin Buber talks about and talk about how it relates to Kant’s second categorical imperative, “You must act so that you treat humanity—both in your own person and in the person of any other—always as an end, and never merely as a means to an end.”
Claude:
Buber: the two primary words
Buber’s Ich und Du (1923) opens not with a claim about ethics but with a claim about grammar and being. The world, he says, is twofold according to the two “primary words” (Grundworte) a person can speak. These are not single words but word-pairs: I–Thou (Ich–Du) and I–It (Ich–Es). The decisive move is that there is no bare “I” standing behind these. The I who speaks I–It is a different I from the one who speaks I–Thou. The self is constituted by the stance it takes; I become who I am in the mode of relation I enter.
The I–It is the realm of experience and use (Erfahren und Gebrauchen). Here the other stands before me as an object: bounded, locatable in space and time, comparable to other objects, available to be analyzed, classified, exploited. This is the indispensable mode of science, technology, ordinary transacting life. Buber does not condemn it. “Without It a human being cannot live.” But he adds the warning that is the moral pulse of the book: “whoever lives only with that is not human.” In the I–It, Buber says with a telling phrase, the experience is in me, not between me and the world. I survey the surface of the other and gather data, but I do not touch its being.
The I–Thou is the realm of encounter (Begegnung) and relation (Beziehung). Here I do not experience the other; I meet it. Its marks are immediacy (no concept, image, or purpose interposes between us), presentness (the Thou exists only in the living present, whereas every It is something already-experienced, hence past), mutuality, and wholeness — “the primary word I–Thou can only be spoken with the whole being.” And it cannot be engineered: “The Thou meets me through grace; it is not found by seeking.” His famous summation is Alles wirkliche Leben ist Begegnung — all real living is meeting.
Two further features matter for the comparison with Kant. First, the melancholy of the Thou: every Thou is fated to lapse back into an It. The moment I reflect on the encounter, describe it, take its measure, the presence withdraws into objecthood. Life is therefore a rhythm, an oscillation, It becoming Thou and subsiding into It again. Second, the locus of reality is neither in the I nor in the Thou but in the between (das Zwischen). Buber’s is a dialogical ontology; the real is not inside the subject but in the meeting. (This is also why Buber resisted unitive mysticism — and would resist the Advaitic collapse of duality: for him the sacred requires the preservation of two-ness, the between is holy precisely because it is between.) Beyond all particular encounters stands the eternal Thou, God — the one Thou that by its nature can never decline into an It, glimpsed through every genuine meeting rather than by turning away from the world.
Kant: humanity as an end in itself
Kant’s second formulation, the Formula of Humanity, comes from the Groundwork (1785): act so as to treat humanity, in yourself or any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means. Three words carry the weight.
“Merely” (bloß): Kant does not forbid using others as means — we do so constantly and unavoidably (the shopkeeper, the physician, the driver). What is forbidden is treating someone only as a means, in a way that overrides their rational agency and to which they could not possibly consent.
“At the same time” (zugleich): the using and the respecting are meant to coincide in one act — I may use the shopkeeper while simultaneously honoring him as an end by dealing honestly.
“Humanity” (Menschheit): not the species but rational nature — the capacity for autonomous self-determination, for setting ends. This capacity has dignity (Würde), not price (Preis): things have a price and are exchangeable; persons are beyond price, incomparable. The ground is that rational agents are the source of value — value enters the world through beings who set ends — so to treat such a being as mere means is to contradict the very wellspring of whatever you were pursuing. This opens onto the Kingdom of Ends, a community in which each is at once legislator and subject, each treating all as ends.
How they meet — and where they part
The obvious convergence is real and worth stating plainly. Buber’s I–It pairs experience and use; Kant’s prohibition targets treating-as-mere-means. Both thinkers identify pure instrumentalization as a falsification — not merely a moral lapse but a getting-the-other-wrong, handling something of one ontological status as if it were another. Both locate an inviolable surplus in the human other that resists reduction to object: for Kant, dignity grounded in rational autonomy; for Buber, the Thou that exceeds every It.
But the divergences are deeper than the convergence, and they run along several axes.
The first and most fundamental concerns the ground of the claim — reason versus presence. Kantian respect is conceptually mediated: I respect you because you instantiate the universal property of rational nature. I subsume you under the category “rational being” and honor what is universal in you. Buber would note, with some discomfort, that this is still structurally close to the It — for the I–Thou is precisely unmediated, passing through no concept, no universal, no category. The Thou is met in its sheer, unrepeatable thisness, not as an instance of a kind. So Kant honors what is universal in you (the rational nature you share with all); Buber meets what is singular in you (this one, here, now). Kant respects your dignity; Buber meets you.
This shows up grammatically, which I think is the cleanest way to hold the difference. Kant’s imperative speaks of humanity “in the person of any other” (eines jeden andern) — the third person, anyone-whatever, the generalized other. Buber’s whole concern is the second person, the Du, the You addressed and present. Kant articulates the dignity of the he, she, they, anyone; Buber articulates the presence of the Thou.
A second axis is unilateral duty versus mutual event. Kant’s imperative binds my will regardless of the other — I must respect the scoundrel, the stranger, the unconscious, the absent. It is a duty I can always discharge alone. Buber’s I–Thou is a relation, a between; I can make myself available for it, but it arrives “through grace” and lives in reciprocity. Kantian respect is therefore robust and reliable (it does not depend on the other), where Buberian encounter is a gift that cannot be guaranteed — but in exchange it offers a fullness of meeting that the more austere Kantian respect does not contain.
Third, the part versus the whole. Kant respects specifically the rational nature and is famously wary of inclination and feeling; the person is honored qua noumenal rational agent, somewhat abstracted from the embodied, affective creature. Buber’s Thou is met as a whole being — body, feeling, presence — and “only with the whole being.”
Fourth, a subtle structural point about simultaneity versus rhythm. Kant’s zugleich insists that use and respect occupy the same act at the same time. Buber holds that encounter and use alternate — the moment I objectify, even in order to respect-as-rational-instance, the Thou recedes; life is an oscillation, not a coincidence. Where Kant harmonizes using and honoring in one stroke, Buber separates meeting and using into a tragic rhythm.
Finally, ethics versus ontology. Kant gives a law, a normative “ought,” a decision-procedure for the will. Buber is not, in that sense, giving an ethics at all; he is describing two modes of being, and the I–Thou is something you enter or are graced with, not something you obey. There is an implicit ethic — the readiness for dialogue is the human vocation, and the totalizing of the It is a kind of fallenness — but it is not a rule-ethics.
The most generous synthesis reads them as complementary rather than rival. The Formula of Humanity is the universalizable floor: the principled guarantee that protects every person — the absent, the stranger, the multitude — whether or not I am capable of encountering them as a Thou. The I–Thou is the maximal consummation: the actual lived meeting that Kantian respect gestures toward but cannot itself deliver. Kant secures the dignity of the third person; Buber consummates the presence of the second. One protects everyone; the other meets someone.
If you want to follow the thread further, Levinas is the natural next interlocutor: he found Buber’s reciprocity too symmetrical and comfortable, and reintroduced something closer to a radicalized Kantian heteronomy — the asymmetrical, non-negotiable ethical command issued by the face of the Other, which makes a claim on me before and regardless of any mutuality. That move sits, in a sense, exactly in the gap between Kant’s universal law and Buber’s mutual encounter — which may be why it has proven so hard to dislodge.
“Life is all about risk-taking, and some are more risk averse than others.”
Nothing New Under the Sun
It is the same wine in new bottles
That keeps getting served to us
And we keep getting fooled, always
It is the same embrace or erasure
Depending on what prarabdha decrees
And we keep distinguishing these things
Where actually there are no differences
And yet we think some loves are different
From some other loves we get in our lives
Flit we thus from relationship to relationship
Until we become wiser and realize somehow
More than “being loved”, it is “loving” that matters
And it is only our own loving that sets us free
And not any kind or degree of love from another
Until we ourselves become the love we want
I doubt if we will ever find rest on this earth.
My Reply to the Happy-Go-Lucky Girl
She thinks “it is just what the doctor ordered”
For me, that is, who she sees as being melancholic
She is too “happy-go-lucky” to appreciate
The troubles that life can make one pass through
Which leave their scars on every inch of one’s heart
Troubles not only by the way life has unfolded
But also troubles one has wrought on oneself
Through the wrong choices one has made in life
Through the wrong paths one has trod in one’s life
Where there is no erasing of the past, and memory lives on,
Suffering can be one’s constant buddy through thick and thin
Not that one minds suffering but that one accepts one’s lot
And realizes there are many ways of living one’s life
None totally correct, none totally incorrect, as far as one can tell
And, in this realization one also realizes that there is that
The prarabdha that none can alter, not even Brahma himself
So, while one has not become a victim of the Stockholm syndrome
One realizes that that which has taken over one’s soul
Will not let go of one easily until the wheel of karma turns
But the good news is that in this mood also a light shines
In one’s inner being, that lets one know one is not this
This entity that suffers, but merely a character that one loves
Unfortunately for the time being as oneself, and knows also
Through slow detachment from thoughts, slipping into silence
One can let go slowly, ever so slowly, of this primal illusion
That one indeed is what one is now taking oneself to be.
“Summa iru is not something we can choose to do or be. Summa iru happens when we understand the truth that truth can only be understood through Summa iru.”
A friend wrote: “Enlightenment ever eludes those who discuss it or hanker after it.”
I replied: Mumukshutva is an important drive that takes one to moksha, and mumukshutva to some extent is there due to divine grace.
Do not underestimate it.
Moreover, mumukshutva is there because one has seen through the game of life to a large extent.
So, do not be fooled by the elusiveness of enlightenment.
All good things take time.
Plod on.
Nididhyasana – summa iru; intellectual understanding alone is not enough.
Claude’s Adjudication: Both are right, but not symmetrically, and the asymmetry is the whole matter.
Your friend’s sentence is a true koan and a false proposition. As a koan it points at something real: the “I” that hankers after enlightenment is precisely the knot to be untied, so its wanting tightens what it means to loosen. Discussion can congeal into śabda-jāla, the net of words in which manana never ripens past cleverness. Krishnamurti said it sharpest — the seeking, the becoming, is the conditioning that forbids the seeing. So far, your friend.
But as a flat proposition — “enlightenment ever eludes those who discuss or hanker” — it overreaches and quietly contradicts the tradition it leans on. Mumukṣutva is not a snare the śāstra warns against; it is the fourth qualification it requires. Every jñāni who ever opened his mouth — Śaṅkara prolific, Ramana answering for fifty years, Nisargadatta talking without cease — falsifies “those who discuss it.” Taken literally the aphorism would have to discard the whole jñāna-mārga, which is nothing but discussion calibrated to adhikāra. It is the kind of sentence that is liberating to hear once and disabling to believe.
Your reply is the more complete one, and pastorally the correct one, because it keeps the path legitimate. You’re right that mumukṣā is grace already at work — the wanting is the pull of the Self on the jīva, not the jīva’s vanity — and right that it arises only because the game has been seen through far enough to spoil the smaller appetites. The desire for liberation is the one desire whose fulfilment abolishes the desirer: Ramakrishna’s stick that stirs the pyre and is then thrown in. One does not renounce mumukṣutva; one rides it until it consumes itself.
Where I’d press you: your “do not be fooled by the elusiveness — plod on, all good things take time” answers in the vyāvahārika while your friend was speaking, however clumsily, from the pāramārthika. The elusiveness is not only a test of patience to be outlasted; it is also instruction. It says that what you seek is anterior to the seeker, so no quantity of seeking reaches it the way effort reaches an object in time. Moksha is not a future event that diligence accumulates toward — that framing keeps it forever one step ahead, which is exactly the eluding your friend names. Concede him that much: the wanting must mature from “I will attain That” into a wanting that no longer grasps, or it remains the obstacle he describes.
And here is where the two of you actually meet — in your last line. Nididhyāsana, summa iru. That is not a third option between his “stop” and your “continue.” It is the ripening of seeking into being, the point where śravaṇa and manana fall silent and the desire that drove them has burned down to stillness. Your friend is right that discussion eludes; you are right that one must nonetheless begin in discussion; both are dissolved in summa iru, where there is no longer a discusser, a hankerer, or anything held at a distance to elude.
From the Ajāta height your friend is simply correct — Gauḍapāda’s na baddho na ca sādhakaḥ, na mumukṣur na vai muktaḥ: none bound, none practising, none seeking liberation, none freed; eṣā paramārthatā. The very śruti-register negates the mumukṣu you defend. But Ajāta is the final view, not a method, and to hand it to a sādhaka still standing on the path is mistimed teaching — premature pāramārthika, the Neo-Advaita error that issues paralysis dressed as freedom. The art is adhikāra-bheda. To one who has not yet plodded, “plod on” is grace. To one who has plodded long and now clutches the plodding, “summa iru” is grace. Your friend dispensed the second medicine; you dispensed the first; the patient decides which he is.
So: hold your ground, but grant him his koan. Plod on — toward the day the plodding stops on its own.
“Meanwhile, the dream continues…”
This Dream
This dream
That sometime seems
More like a nightmare
Yet how we are caught
In this sleep we call life
Where all around we see
Change, relentless change
We pretend we can wing it
And somehow secure
A steady nook and corner
Where the winds blow less.
“Since the very real possibility and probability exists that tomorrow could be our last day here on this earth (though today itself or even the next second could be it, strictly speaking), why are we still clinging to everything and everyone in our life? How come that possibility and probability does not seem real to us?”
“Only those who do not mind dying are not reborn again.”
“God created the night so that we could sleep and forget our wife for at least 8 hours.”
“Pay attention to that light inside yourself that ‘sees’ on the outside not only the light but also the darkness.”
Know Thyself 