In response to my poem “The Sun is Always in the Sky” (https://selfrealization.blog/2026/02/15/the-sun-is-always-in-the-sky/), my clinical psychologist friend replied, “Next stop Vedanta…To answer these questions of emptiness”.
And she is almost spot on in one way because even Ramana Maharshi said, “Where psychology ends, there philosophy begins.”
Why do I think my psychology has ended? Because I did write in the poem:
“I know not what to do
I seem to have laid bare
All the thoghts and feelings
With nothing left to discover
Nothing left to look forward to.“
But, here’s the twist.
My tryst with philosophy/spirituality began very, very early on when I began to attend the speeches by Swami Chinmayananda right from when I was just around 13 years. I still remember looking around the audience at the Exhibition Grounds in Nampally where he would deliver the lectures those days that I was the only child there, and the rest of the folk were middle-aged or older. And I would be taken there by my elder sister and aunt or uncle, and sometimes I would go on my own.
Seeing the Swamiji in ochre robes would thrill me inside having already been exposed to the rishis of the yore through imagination from hearing the stories of Mahabharata and Ramayana in early childhood and also reading such stories and the Amar Chitra Katha comics. And, the urge to find the truth through renunciation was already forming in me through these encounters, so much so that as a 15-year-old I sort of decided that unlike Bhishma who took a vow to remain an ajanma brahmachari I would remain ajanma-janama brahmachari, that is never ever marry no matter how many births it took me to get out of the samsaric cycle of birth and death and rebirth.
Then, my spiritual journey took me to the works of various gurus in the Indian spiritual tradition, and also alongside to the works of Western philosophers, the Sufi saints, and the social scientists.
But even as late as 2017, though I knew a great deal, the jigsaw puzzle was not falling into place. The big picture was not emerging.
As luck would have it, once my Bipolar Disorder became a thing of the past from November 2017 onwards, in early 2018, suddenly the whole picture emereged in front of me, thanks to my understanding of the name-and-form analogy of pot and clay, through which I could make sense of every theory, doctrine and viewpoint in philosophy and spirituality of all kinds in general and Advaita in particular.
That was as far as intellectual undersatanding of the truth is concerned. You could say my sravana and manana were complete and almost perfect. Sureshvaracharya (aka Mandana Mishra), the direct disciple of Sankaracharya, wrote that, “Once manana is done perfectly, then Nididhyasana happens automatically. Nididhyasana (Deep Contemplation/Assimilation) is the continuous, effortless, and unwavering abiding in the truth already understood through Shravana and Manana. It is for the removal of habitual misconceptions (vasanas) and the assimilation of the knowledge.
It does seem as if Nididhyasana is happening all the time after 2018 realization because I keep writing, discussing, explaining, clarifying, debating, etc., the truth understood through Manana.
Yet, why do I feel dissatisfied as I expressed in the poem?
That is the million dollar question because I seem to following an inverted process, where my philosophical quest has ended, and the psychological process seems to have come to the forefront, where I seem to be bothering about Samarender, whereas earlier I had ignored him in my pursuit of the truth in a manner of speaking.
Wherein is the mistake?
Maybe the dissatisfaction is arising from the wrong belief that there is some ideal way to live during Nididhyasna, and I keep encountering and tripping over Samarender and his personality and psychology.
Am I avoiding life?
Maybe not because what is life anyway apart from howsoever we “choose” to live it? “Avoiding life” is then one way of living it.
Moreover, I seem to be ready to follow my own dictum of “Just keep the body alive and ignore the mind and heart”, and I seem to be thwarted in that attempt by some of social and occupational obligations.
Maybe the way forward is to understand that I am NOT Samarender since he is just my own dream character, so what does it matter what he does or does not do.
Let the dream end when it will, without fearing like Hamlet, “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come.”
Know Thyself 