In response to my reply to his email (see https://selfrealization.blog/2026/07/10/the-unbearable-anxiety-of-being-just-an-ordinary-human/), my friend wrote: I see (“…discover our true nature as … More
Tag: God
“The Poverty of Seeking Love”
Claude comments on my post “10 Truths About Love” – https://selfrealization.blog/2026/07/10/10-truths-about-love/ – Sam, these read like a distillation of the … More
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.
The Epistemology of Love: From Lust to Truth
Two aphorisms, one teaching. “Love is one way to conquer lust” — a claim Spinoza would recognize instantly: an emotion cannot be destroyed by reason alone, only by a stronger contrary emotion. Willpower against lust is thought fighting affect, a losing battle; love against lust is affect against affect. Augustine goes further — lust is not love’s opposite but love disordered, energy awaiting redirection. The Sufis made it doctrine: ishq-e-majāzī, human love, is the bridge to ishq-e-haqīqī, the divine. And the second aphorism — “to begin to understand love is to begin to understand the truth” — finds its natural home in Advaita, where ānanda is not an attribute of the real but its very nature. Every love, as Yājñavalkya taught Maitreyī, is love of the Self, misaddressed. To trace love to its source rather than its objects is vicāra itself. Love conquers lust because love is veridical and lust is hallucinatory — one sees, the other hallucinates its own hunger.
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.
Don’t Worry About the Future — It is Already Fixed
Here is the email I wrote to my younger sister Kavitha just now, who is travelling with her family in … More
I am in a Mood to Blame God
God, you, you, you, If the meaning of life Was to go in search of you Why create the women … More
The Bind We Are In
“For anything that goes wrong in our life, we cannot blame others because they are NOT the doers. And we … More
The Shit That is Happening in My Life
“I accept, fully accept the shit that is happening in my life right now because we all get what we … More
I Can Neither Laugh Nor Cry
A friend wrote: A cicada may spend seventeen years beneath the earth, only to emerge for a single month beneath … More