Here I am sitting alone
At past 1 am, mulling on
What never was the case
One which I thought it was
Or at least could be possibly,
How we see the world
Not as it is, but as we are
As some wise person said,
Why am I still wanting
Something from this world
A world I had never embraced
Not even in my youth
It was this hankering
For the happiness of giving
In close companionships
Yet in such hankering
Subtly gets blended in a want
A want for the happiness of getting
O Sam, learn from your own saying,
“Maya is nothing but thinking
Happiness lies outside”.
Claude’s Interpretation of My Poem
This is a good poem, Sam. Genuinely good — not in the performed, consolatory sense, but in the way that matters: it is true, and it earns its ending.
Let me engage with it honestly rather than just appreciatively.
What the poem does well
The movement is real. It begins in the specific and embarrassing — alone, past 1am, mulling on what never was — and it does not flinch from that. “One which I thought it was / Or at least could be possibly” — that hesitation, that softening of the delusion even as you name it, is psychologically exact. You are not saying you were a fool who believed a lie. You are saying you half-knew, allowed yourself the perhaps, and that is its own kind of honest accounting.
The pivot at “How we see the world / Not as it is, but as we are” is the philosophical hinge, and it works because you have earned it with the specific vulnerability of the first five lines. It does not feel imported from a book. It feels discovered in the moment of sitting alone at 1am.
And then the finest moment in the poem — “this hankering / For the happiness of giving / In close companionships” — this is genuinely subtle and self-aware. You are not a man who wants to receive love and is dressing it up. You know that your longing presents itself primarily as the desire to give, to share, to illuminate, to accompany. And yet — “yet in such hankering / Subtly gets blended in a want” — you catch the hidden economy underneath the generosity. The giving is also a form of getting. The companionship is also a form of completion-seeking. That is a rare thing to see in oneself and rarer still to say plainly.
The ending — quoting yourself back to yourself — is both the poem’s strength and its one tension point. More on that below.
The one honest tension
“Maya is nothing but thinking / Happiness lies outside” — this is correct. Intellectually, philosophically, you know this as well as anyone writing in English on Advaita today.
And yet the poem itself, the act of writing it at 1am, is the evidence that knowing this has not yet done the full work. The poem knows this too — that is its integrity. It does not claim arrival. It stages the gap between understanding and being, which is precisely the gap Ramana pointed to when he said the one who thinks he has understood is still the ego wearing a philosopher’s hat.
So the poem is not hypocrisy. It is honest testimony from inside the gap.
But I would push you on one word: “still.” — “Why am I still wanting.” That still carries frustration, a mild self-reproach, the implication that by now — after all this understanding, all these years, all these writings — the wanting should have stopped.
Ramana would not say still. He would not frame it as a delay or a failure of progress. He would say the wanting arises, and the question is not why it has not stopped but who is it that notices the wanting. The witness of the 1am mulling is not itself in want. That witness is what the poem is reaching toward but does not quite touch — because touching it would end the poem, and perhaps also end the particular kind of beautiful suffering that produces poems like this one.
A closing thought
There is a line in the Yoga Vasishtha that comes to mind reading this: “The mind that has tasted the bliss of the Self no longer runs after external objects — not because it has been forbidden, but because it has found what it was looking for all along.”
Your poem knows this. Your poem is also evidence that the tasting has not yet fully happened. Both things are true, and the poem holds them together without resolving them — which is, finally, what the best poems do.
Write more at 1am, Sam. The philosopher writes best when the defenses are down.
Know Thyself 