Tag: Know Thyself

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.

How AI Helped Me Make Peace with Science: A Journey Through Psychology, Medicine, and the Humanities


Why would anyone turn to AI to work through a psychological aversion to the natural sciences — or to process complicated feelings about medical school classmates they’d rather not see? The answer, it turns out, is stranger and more revealing than the question itself.
In this post, I reflect on an unexpected journey: using AI conversations to untangle a deep-seated psychological distaste — not just for medicine and biology, but for the whole constellation of natural sciences, from chemistry and physics to geology and astronomy. What began as an oddly specific inquiry into whether doctors are boring slowly became something far more personal: a reckoning with how our inner landscape distorts our perception of the outer world.
Perhaps the most unsettling insight is this — we don’t see fields of knowledge as they are; we see them as we are. Our psyche, in its quiet wisdom or its quiet woundedness, nudges us toward certain domains and away from others, not always by rational design but by emotional necessity. For those of us who needed the humanities and social sciences to feel whole, that detour wasn’t a failure of intellect. It was a form of healing.

Are doctors a tad boring?


What happens when a doctor defects to economics and the humanities — and then asks an AI whether doctors are a tad boring? The answers, from both Claude and Google AI, reveal something deeper than professional stereotypes. Claude argues that medical training, by design, rewards convergent thinking — getting the right diagnosis — over the exploratory, question-generating mind that the humanities cultivate. Years spent in a closed intellectual world produce a certain narrowness, though brilliant exceptions like Oliver Sacks and Atul Gawande remind us it is medical culture, not doctors as people, that deserves the critique. Google AI, characteristically, opts for balance: doctors are not boring, merely exhausted. But perhaps the most honest insight lies in the afterthought the questioner himself appends — that his intense dislike of medicine may be colouring his perception of those who stayed. Self-knowledge, as ever, is the beginning of wisdom.