Category: Upanishads

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.

Summa Iru: On Desire, Ignorance, and the Vicious Cycle That Isn’t — What I Wrote to My Kalyana Mitra and Claude’s Critique of It


What is Vedanta’s final instruction, once the four yogas, the scriptures, and the practices are stripped away? Summa iru — be still. But if stillness is the goal, why does the mind refuse it? This letter traces a four-link chain — ignorance, desire, thought, action — to argue that the “obstacles” of Buddhist Abhidharma’s kleshas are symptoms of desire, and desire itself is a symptom of the deeper ignorance that we are body-mind alone. A companion critique examines the circularity this seems to create, and asks whether stillness must be achieved through effort, or simply uncovered by inquiry.

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.

The “I” That is Seeking Liberation is Unreal: “All Are Appearances in and of Awareness” — Advaita, Gaudapada & the Seeker Who Never Was


What does it truly mean that “all are appearances in and of awareness”? This deceptively simple statement — echoing the clay-and-pot analogy of Advaita Vedanta — contains the entirety of the spiritual journey within it. And yet, as Matsuo Basho reminds us, sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes and the grass grows by itself. The real obstacle to Self-realization is the very seeker seeking it — for the “I” that strives to attain liberation is itself an appearance in awareness, nothing more. Gaudapada’s Mandukya Karika 2.32 states this with uncompromising clarity: there is no creation, no destruction, no bondage, no seeker, and no liberated one. This is the Absolute Truth — paramārthatā. Ashtavakra Gita and Sankaracharya’s Nirvana Shatakam echo the same. The knowledge is already here. The only thing left is to stop looking for it.

Beyond the Golden Veil: Transcending Sattva, Para Vidya, and the Final Frontier of Self-Knowledge in Advaita


Of the three gunas that constitute all of manifest existence, Sattva — the quality of luminosity, harmony, and knowledge — is the most seductive bondage. Unlike Tamas, which crushes, or Rajas, which burns, Sattva seduces with bliss, ethical refinement, and the pleasures of understanding. Ramakrishna’s parable of the three robbers captures this with surgical precision: the sattvic robber alone unties the traveller and shows him the path home — but does not take him there. The finest veil is still a veil.
The Mundaka Upanishad’s distinction between Apara Vidya — all systematized human knowledge, from the sciences to the humanities — and Para Vidya, the knowledge by which the Imperishable is realized, frames this predicament with extraordinary clarity. No accumulation of apara vidya, however refined and sattvic, can answer the question the Upanishad’s Shaunaka poses at the outset: by knowing what does everything become known? That question dissolves the knower, and no object of knowledge can accomplish that.
Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, and J. Krishnamurti — approaching from different angles — converge on a single insight: the final obstacle to liberation is not ignorance or desire, but the subtle, luminous, deeply respectable self that knows.

Psychiatrists Are Now Teaching What Ancient India Knew 3,000 Years Ago—and It Could End Your Suffering (The Non-Issue of Body-Mind)


There is a question so deceptively simple that most of us never think to ask it: when pain arises in the body or sorrow rises in the mind, who is it that is aware of the pain? Who is watching the sorrow?

We are so habituated to collapsing the observer into the observed — to saying “I am sad” instead of “sadness is arising” — that the distinction seems merely grammatical. But this small grammatical shift conceals one of the most profound insights ever articulated by human civilization, and it is an insight that has now been independently arrived at by the ancient wisdom traditions of India and by cutting-edge clinical psychiatry and psychology in the West.

The central claim is this: you are not your body-mind and its fluctuating states. You are the Consciousness that is aware of those states. And learning to rest in that awareness — to become the witness rather than the sufferer — is the gateway to the deepest peace available to a human being.

Modern psychiatry calls it the “observing self.” Advaita Vedanta calls it sakshi-chaitanya. The Stoics called it prosoche. They are all pointing at the same truth — and that truth could change everything.