Tag: Nisargadatta Maharaj

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.

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.

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.

“You Cannot Save a World You’re Still Trapped In” — Nisargadatta Maharaj on Desire, Help, and Liberation


What does it truly mean to help the world? In this piercing dialogue from I Am That, Nisargadatta Maharaj dismantles our noblest intentions — revealing that the urge to save others is itself rooted in the same ignorance that creates suffering. Desire builds worlds; worlds breed pain; and the one who wishes to help is often the one most in need of waking up. From the nature of creation to the limits of avatars and saviours, Maharaj offers something more radical than solutions: a mirror. “Get out of the picture,” he says, “and see whether there is anything left to save.”