The Quarrel with the Present: Human Love, Pleasure, and the Flight from Being Merely Human


Does human love — the love one person feels for another, sometimes unreturned — help or hinder liberation? This dialogue begins there and refuses the usual escape routes: no sublimating the beloved into the Beloved, no dissolving the particular person into metaphysics. It stays with the scandalously particular: this laugh, this handwriting, this way of falling silent mid-sentence. Along the way it separates the two strands entangled in every love — the ego-dismantling that cracks our solipsism, and the pleasure-seeking that certifies our lack — and examines the precise mechanics by which seeking rains on the parade to liberation: the misattributed ananda, the rented ego-death of sex, the anxiety of separateness managed rather than investigated. Krishnamurti’s “understanding is the action” and Ramana’s summa iru frame the inquiry, but the conversation turns its own weapon on itself at the end: isn’t liberation-seeking the final quarrel with the present? Why flee the human that Brahman itself created? Zorba the Greek enters, dancing on the beach after the mine collapses — and the dialogue discovers that the end-state looks embarrassingly like ordinary life fully inhabited, with one difference: no proprietor left behind experience, filing claims against it.

Quit


“Life is not a battle worth fighting. Quit.” The word is a deliberate stumbling block. What is to be given up is not the body or the life, but the fighter — the ego whose founding myth is that life is a war to be won. Camus answered the question of life’s worth with revolt; Advaita takes the path he never considered: neither suicide nor defiance, but the dissolution of the one who asks. Quit the way a fist quits clenching. The battle is optional because the soldier is fictional. What remains is life itself — neither fought nor fled.

When Feelings Turn into Strangers: Purity, Compassion, and the Loosening of Worldly Bonds


In isolation, even once-intense emotions can begin to feel like strangers seeking attention — a sign, if genuine, that one’s bonds with the world are loosening. But this loosening is not an end in itself: its authenticity is tested by what remains. Where being is pure, feelings coalesce into compassion alone; where the ego persists, they remain self-serving, whatever else they resemble. Drawing on the Bhagavad Gita’s vision of the sage who sees a Brahmin, a cow, and an outcaste with equal eyes, this piece explores why true compassion is never particular — and how to tell purity apart from mere numbness.

Summa Iru: Formal Renunciation for The Dissolution of the False Self


All my life I have been ending ignorance — reading, thinking, writing, seeking. Now the loose ends are nearly tied. Come July 16, my 62nd birthday, it will be summa iru: not a thing I choose, but what happens when the false self, strung together from my relationships, finally dissolves. The more I carve out this “Me Time,” the more I begin to disappear. Nothing defines me; nothing tells me who I am. And so the old question arises almost naturally — “Who am I?” — a question one can sit with, alone, and stand a very good chance of answering.

My Latest Book Available Now on Amazon — The Mind Itself Is a Digression: Poems, Reflections, and Dialogues of a Restless Seeker


Kindle eBook In India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/B0H4X9NFMB In USA: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H4X9NFMB Paperback In USA: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H58FG4VK The mind itself is a digression — or … More