#retirmeent — Public Fediverse posts

Wanna Stop Writing After This

“For a long time now, the role of the Brahmin has been outsourced to other countries, particularly Europe and the US. Why? Because we Indians have stopped thinking many centuries back.”

Neruda, I Feel Sadder Than You Tonight

No reason Neruda that I feel sad

You at least had your girl to blame

I have nothing and no one to blame

For how I feel now, just life itself

Galls me to no end, where I feel mocked

By life itself which demands it be understood

Am I supposed to love life and not the woman

But I do not know what life is nor how to live

Shall I just drink a Coke and open happiness

But Coke’s fizz lasts less time than morning dew

The sun is hot but it’s supposedly life-giver

But when I step out in the aft’noon it’s killing

So, I cannot trust the very so-called life-giver

Nothing in nature seems benign, not even society

And when night comes, cocooned here in my flat

I can’t see the stars, and moon interests me not

All I can look forward to now is slow deterioration

One by one the powers will desert me, from the teeth

To the knees to the memory to the interest

Time cares not to show anyone any compassion

The philosophy I know is even more problematic

In a way it gives me relief from these thoughts

And in a way it doubles the pain by showing

This whole life was a waste of time, no study

Nor emotion nor smile nor understanding

Takes you where you want to be, and these days

I am not even sure where I want to be, not even to be

I cannot even go back to where I came from

Nor can I know where I have to go, nor whether

Any journey is worth it at all, as now I understand

This flight from myself is the cause of all problems

And, when I look into myself, I find only wisdom

And that wisdom tells me I do not understand at all

Neither Truth nor Love, for wisdom tells me

If you think you understand Truth and Love

Why are you still undertaking many a journey.

“Everything in this world has a cause. And every effect becomes in turn a cause. Where there are causes and effects, there is change underway. Where there is change how can Truth be. And where there is no Truth how can love be.”

“Definition of a perfect love story: Going from aroused to erased.”

“Most human love arises out of fear, is sustained by fear, and ends a quiet death due to fear.”

“Life is a Russian roulette.”

“Perfect recipe for dissatisfaction in life: Wanting to be happy always all the time no matter what.”

“Some say God is Truth. Some say God is Love. Both are wrong. God is. Period.”

“Love is not an add-on to the other things in your life. Love is the life.”

“Love is the ultimate soporific which dullens the pain of existence.”

“We think there is life. That is the death of us.”

“We are all lost in our desires. Desires take us to the future. Inhabiting the future, we fail to live because life is happening in the present.”

Jagat (Sanskrit: जगत्) primarily means the world, universe, or earth. It is derived from the root gacchati (“that which moves”), signifying that the universe is in constant motion, ever-changing, and ephemeral.

Core Meanings & Contexts:

•  The Moving World: It refers to all that is moving, animate, living, and changing, encompassing the entire material universe.

•  Vedanta Philosophy: It is often described as mithya (dependent reality/illusion) in comparison to the absolute reality of Brahman, often referring to the subjective experience of the material world.

•  Spiritual/Non-dualism: In some contexts, it is interpreted as the manifestation or “body” of the divine, completely dependent on the Supreme for existence.

•  Common Usage: In Hindi and other Indian languages, it is used for “world” or “universe,” and sometimes implies a specific field or community (e.g., Nari Jagat – world of women).

Common Compound Words:

•  Jagadish/Jagannath: Lord of the Universe (Vishnu or Shiva).

•  Jagatmata: Mother of the World (Durga).

Jagat is also a common Indian name for boys, signifying the universe.

“Don’t wait for retirement or for that smile; be happy today, nay, right now.”

“Dare to be who you are.”

Give me some deeply philosophical quotes of Arthur Rimbaud.

Claude responded: Here are some deeply philosophical quotes from Arthur Rimbaud:

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On the Self & Identity

“I is another.” — Letter to Georges Izambard, 1871

One of his most famous lines, suggesting the self is not a fixed entity but something foreign, observed from the outside — a radical idea that anticipated modern theories of subjectivity.

________________________________________

On Disorder & Vision

“The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses.” — Letter to Paul Demeny (Lettre du Voyant), 1871

Rimbaud’s manifesto for poetry: to reach true vision, the poet must shatter ordinary perception and embrace suffering as a path to illumination.

________________________________________

On Life & the Absolute

“Real life is absent. We are not in the world.” — A Season in Hell

A haunting declaration of alienation — the sense that authentic existence lies forever beyond reach, and the world we inhabit is a kind of unreality.

________________________________________

On Suffering & Knowledge

“One must be absolutely modern.” — A Season in Hell

Deceptively simple, this is Rimbaud’s demand to break entirely with tradition — to find truth not in the past but in the raw, uncharted present.

________________________________________

On Love & Hell

“I have swallowed a famous mouthful of poison. Thrice blessed be the counsel that came to me! My bowels are on fire. The violence of the venom twists my limbs, deforms me, lays me low.” — A Season in Hell

A visceral metaphor for the self-destruction that comes with absolute passion — love, ambition, and vision as simultaneously poison and revelation.

________________________________________

On Eternity

“It has been found again. What? Eternity. It is the sea mixed with the sun.” — Eternity

A mystical fragment — eternity not as abstraction but as a sensory, almost pantheist fusion of natural forces.

________________________________________

On Freedom

“Only divine love bestows the keys of knowledge.” — A Season in Hell

Rimbaud suggests that rational intellect alone cannot unlock the deepest truths — only a surrender to something greater can.

________________________________________

Rimbaud’s philosophy is essentially one of radical becoming — the self must be destroyed, perception unhinged, and comfort abandoned in order to glimpse something true. He abandoned poetry entirely at 19, which many see as the ultimate philosophical act: refusing to be captured even by his own genius.

“Vivekananda, when he was young, really young, went around asking everyone, ‘Have you seen God’. And when he posed the same question to Ramakrishna Paramahansa, RP replied, ‘Yes, only more clearly than I see you now.’ Now, the question that can be asked is was RP, like J. Krishnamurti always said he does, ‘Answering the questioner rather than the question.’ Otherwise, the correct answer is, ‘What a stupid question, Naren, all you have been seeing all your life is ONLY God but you have been thinking you are seeing the world’.”

Buddha’s Mistake

Sam’s First Noble Truth

I agree with Buddha’s First Noble Truth that “Life is suffering”.

Sam’s Second Noble Truth

I do not agree with Buddha’s Second Noble Truth that “Desire is the cause of suffering.”

My point is that once you have understood that “Life is suffering”, you should also understand the simple logic that “No life, no suffering.”

So, do not bother about desires and all such nonsense.

Do not get caught in such traps, traps which arise only if you are living.

Just end life and you are done.

Or, rather realise you were never born.

No Sex, No Salvation, No Sam

I do not want to get caught

In the vortex of these Fie-loss-oafers

And whatever theories they spin

About this world, existing only in imagination;

When I talk about myself Sam

Or about Sex and Salvation, I do so

Under Erasure, as that Algerian Jew would have it

Who set afire many an academic department in the US

And, I note with pleasure his association in 1966

With my alma mater Johns Hopkins, kickstarting

That peculiar school of philosophy, poststructuralism,

But, why dabble and grapple even dilettantishly

With these games that minds of philosophers play

I who have understood Kena Upanishad’s admonition

That if you think Truth is there for the taking by the mind

You poor thing how little you understand

And where is the mind but in this world

Or is the world in the mind

Now, now don’t confuse me

I refuse to play this game with these words

For I know too well that if I renounce words

Which is the only true Vairagya that is there

And not so-called Vairagya of Kamini-Kanchana

Then in that silence all doubts are quelled

All truths stand revealed, and I know

Whatever I knew till now was wrong

And I learn to let go of not only Socrates and Sartre

But also of Maharshi and Maharaj

For where do they all exist

Except in my fertile imagination

As do Sex, Salvation and Sam.

“The tree has to bend to every wind, but it cannot know why the wind is blowing.”

“In the autumn, it is foolish for the tree to try to hold on to the leaves.”

“There is no spot in the pot where there is no clay.”

“In every love story, there is something more than biology at play.”

“My Call”

Yes, Michael, it always was your call

To go solo or to go with the family

And also your call to spread love and light

To this world through your moves.

Music, moods, musings, and murmurings

And did you change the world?

Who knows? Maybe a few and here and there

When you were alive, and a few more might change

Long after you are gone as long as your music lives on

Surely, though, you yourself must have escaped

The suffering that the blind strivings of the Will

Imposes on one, if Schopenhauer is to be believed,

With your Dionysian spirit that Nietzsche championed.

Yet how I despair Michael, my call

Is that this world is condemned to its duality

Of light and darkness, good and bad, virtue and vice

Socrates, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Jesus could not fix the world

So, Michael, you are forgiven, too, for failing

Though your critics would point out your own failings.

—

Maya (the cosmic creative/illusory power) is constituted by the three gunas — Sattva (clarity, harmony), Rajas (activity, passion, restlessness), and Tamas (inertia, darkness, ignorance). As long as manifestation exists — as long as anything is appearing — all three gunas are present in varying proportions. You can’t have Maya with only Sattva, because pure undifferentiated Sattva would dissolve back into Brahman. The tension and dynamism of Rajas and Tamas are what keep the world-appearance going.

So yes, suffering and evil are structurally baked into manifestation itself. Tamas produces ignorance, delusion, and stagnation; Rajas produces craving, conflict, and agitation — both are inexhaustible engines of suffering at the cosmic level.

This creates an important asymmetry:

At the individual level, liberation is possible — you can step out of identification with the gunas entirely, which is what Nisargadatta and Ramana point to. The Self is not a product of the gunas.

At the collective or historical level, you might get periods of greater Sattva, but Rajas and Tamas always reassert themselves — civilizations rise and fall in cycles (the yuga framework reflects exactly this).

At the cosmic/natural level, as long as Maya is operating, the interplay of gunas never ceases. Suffering doesn’t “end” — it’s part of the texture of manifestation.

This is also why Advaita doesn’t promise the world will get better or that evil will be eliminated — it says the world as such is the wrong level to seek resolution. The resolution is recognition of that which was never in the gunas to begin with. Nisargadatta’s typical move is precisely this — he doesn’t ask you to fix the dream, he asks you to wake up from it.

Universal liberation of the cosmos is a category error within this framework. The most Maya can do is oscillate; it cannot transcend its own constituents.

Two Ways to Retire Early

1. Earn as much as is 100% sufficient for your wants.

2. Pare down your wants (but NOT to the bare minimum) so that you can retire earlier than you can under Scenario 1.

I chose the latter option by becoming sort of a minimalist because I realized that happiness does not come from accumulating more and more, be it wealth or any other damn thing.

When did more and more wealth ever make anyone more and more happy.

And, if you need more and more money to become more and more happy, know that you are not going about it the right way.

Money cannot buy almost anything worthwhile.

Anyway, the best things in life are either damn cheap or totally free.

Don’t think so?

Well, my friend, good luck with that happiness you are chasing.

No, I forget, you are chasing money not happiness.

Let me know when you shift your rat race from pursuing money to pursuing happiness, then as Paul Simon sang, “I can be your long-lost pal.”

What about the work that needs to be done in this world that might suffer if you retire early?

Ha, ha, ha, as if you are working FOR the world. Get real.

Besides, there are enough unemployed people out there to fill the space that you vacate.

And, besides, if people thought like I am suggesting, then believe you me, far less work will be needed to be done in this world so that the world can get along by just fine.

Ha, ha, ha…how bad people are at thinking!!!

Well, well, I guess God knows what he is up to.

Homo Duplex

Homo duplex (“the double human”) is a theory by sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) proposing that humans possess a dual nature: part biological organism driven by selfish individual desires (“profane”), and part social being guided by morality, collective consciousness, and social constraints (“sacred”).

Key Components of Homo Duplex:

•  The Profane (Individual): This side consists of personal appetites, instincts, selfishness, and bodily sensations.

•  The Sacred (Social): This side comprises moral forces, social solidarity, shared values, and altruism, which are cultivated through societal interaction and collective rituals.

•  The Tension: Durkheim argued that society requires a balance between these two sides to prevent individualism from leading to unhappiness, greed, or excessive anomie (social instability).

•  Societal Role: Socialization, education, and religion play crucial roles in regulating the individual’s “animalistic” nature and nurturing their “moral” or “social” side.

This concept underscores the idea that humans find their highest potential not in isolation, but by participating in a larger social whole.

What Durkheim Was Really Saying

At its core, Homo Duplex is Durkheim’s answer to one of philosophy’s oldest

questions: what kind of creature is a human being? His answer was deliberately

paradoxical — we are simultaneously two things at once, and that tension is not a

flaw to be resolved, but the very engine of social and moral life.

This was a bold move in the late 19th century. Darwinian biology was pushing toward

the view that humans were essentially animals with sophisticated brains.

Enlightenment liberalism, on the other hand, celebrated the sovereign individual.

Durkheim rejected both as incomplete. He insisted you cannot understand a human

being by looking only at their biology or their individual rational mind — you must

look at what society does to and inside them.

Unpacking the Two Sides

The Profane (the animal self)

The word “profane” here doesn’t mean vulgar in the everyday sense — it means

outside the sacred, ordinary, earthly, bodily. This is the self that:

 Hungers, lusts, fears, and competes

 Acts in its own interest without reference to others

 Exists in time and space as a finite, mortal organism

Durkheim didn’t moralize this side as evil — he saw it as simply pre-social. It is what

we are before society gets hold of us. Left entirely to this nature, humans would be,

in Hobbes’ famous phrase, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

The Sacred (the social self)

The “sacred” is what society implants into the individual. This is a profound and

somewhat unsettling idea: your moral conscience, your sense of duty, your empathy,

your values — these are not naturally yours. They were installed by the collective.

This side includes:

 The capacity for self-sacrifice

 Loyalty to groups, nations, ideals

 Moral disgust and reverence

 The ability to feel that something is bigger than yourself

Crucially, Durkheim believed this sacred dimension is genuinely real and genuinely

powerful — but its source is social, not divine or innate. When you feel moral awe,

you are, in his view, feeling the weight of society pressing on your consciousness.

The Tension: Why the Conflict is Necessary

Durkheim didn’t want the tension resolved — he wanted it managed. Here’s why:

 Too much profane (pure individualism) leads to anomie — a condition where

social norms collapse, individuals feel unmoored, and rates of depression,

crime, and even suicide rise. His famous study Suicide (1897) showed that

societies with weak social bonds had higher suicide rates — a radical,

counterintuitive argument.

 Too much sacred (total collective absorption) leads to fatalistic overregulation

— where individuals are crushed under the weight of social duty,

also producing misery and, paradoxically, suicide of a different kind (what he

called altruistic suicide, dying for the group).

The sweet spot is a productive friction — society strong enough to give life meaning

and structure, but not so totalizing that it erases the individual.

Socialization as the Civilizing Mechanism

When Durkheim says education, religion, and socialization regulate the individual’s

animalistic nature, he means something very specific: they transfer the sacred into

the individual so thoroughly that it feels like their own conscience. This is the

machinery of moral internalization.

Think of how a child is taught not to steal. At first, it’s external — “don’t do that or

you’ll be punished.” Eventually, the prohibition becomes internal — “I don’t want to

steal, it feels wrong.” For Durkheim, that feeling of wrongness is society speaking

through you. You have been successfully socialized. The collective has colonized

your inner life — and this is not manipulation, in his view; it is what makes you fully

human.

Religion, in particular, fascinated him because its rituals (collective gatherings, shared

symbols, emotional ceremonies) were the most powerful mechanisms for recharging

the social self — reminding individuals viscerally that they belong to something

beyond themselves.

Where Homo Duplex Connects to Bigger Ideas

Concept Connection to Homo Duplex

Freud’s Id/Superego

Strikingly parallel — the id (drives) vs. the superego

(internalized social rules). Both emerged around the same

era, independently.

Rousseau’s Noble

Savage

Durkheim inverts Rousseau — society doesn’t corrupt

natural goodness; it creates moral goodness in the first

place.

Nietzsche’s critique of

herd morality

Nietzsche saw society suppressing the individual as a

tragedy. Durkheim saw it as a necessity — even a gift.

Modern psychology

Jonathan Haidt’s social intuitionist model echoes Homo

Duplex — moral feelings are social products, not individual

reason.

A Critical Perspective

Homo Duplex is elegant, but not without its critics:

 It’s overly binary. Human nature resists clean splits into “animal vs. social.”

Much of what Durkheim calls “profane” (love, curiosity, creativity) is not

straightforwardly selfish.

 It romanticizes the collective. Durkheim’s framework can justify social

conformity too easily. History shows that the “sacred social” can endorse

racism, nationalism, and genocide just as easily as altruism.

 It underestimates individual agency. Humans don’t just receive society

passively — they also reshape it. The individual isn’t merely a battleground

between animal drives and social imprinting.

The Bottom Line

Homo Duplex is a powerful lens for understanding why humans are so

contradictory — capable of extraordinary selfishness and extraordinary sacrifice,

often in the same person, sometimes within the same hour. Durkheim’s lasting

insight is that this is not hypocrisy or moral failure. It is the structure of what we are:

biological creatures who can only realize their deepest potential by surrendering part

of themselves to something collective and larger. We are, as he saw it, always living

on the border between the animal and the social — and civilization is the ongoing,

never-finished negotiation between those two halves.

Kids? Just say no

You don’t have to dislike children to see the harms done by having them. There is a moral case against procreation

https://aeon.co/essays/having-children-is-not-life-affirming-its-immoral

No Words To Say What I Want To Say

Strange how sometimes you are at a loss for words

When you realize the words you used have not been understood

And using more words would only complicate the picture

Because the words have to go through the sieve

Of other minds and hearts, though  mine they have navigated,

And this is not just my problem, just the human condition

And until we understand silence we cannot understand each other

But unfortunately, until then we have to keep using words

And thereby keep encountering battlefields of various sorts.

“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will” is a famous quote from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Act 5, Scene 2). Spoken by Hamlet, it means that a divine power or fate determines the ultimate outcome of our lives, regardless of how clumsily we plan them.

Key Details and Context:

Context in Play: Hamlet says this to Horatio while explaining how he survived

a plot to kill him, suggesting he has accepted fate.

Meaning: “Rough-hew” refers to shaping a rough block of wood. It suggests

humans make rough plans (“rough-hew”), but God or destiny refines the final

outcome (“shapes our ends”).

Theme: This reflects a shift in Hamlet from indecision to a fatalistic acceptance

of whatever happens, including the “special providence in the fall of a

sparrow”.

It shows a shift from a belief that mortals control their destiny to a belief that higher

forces are in control.

“There’s a Divinity That Shapes Our Ends” — Through the Lens of Advaita

Vedānta

And the Self Reveals Itself to Whom She Chooses

I. The Two Voices Speaking the Same Truth

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, standing at the threshold of death with a curious calm, utters

something that no purely Western philosophical framework can fully contain. He is

not simply expressing fatalism. He is not surrendering to an external God the way a

theist might. Something deeper is trembling in those words — something that

Advaita Vedānta, the non-dual philosophy of Śaṅkarācārya, can illuminate with

remarkable precision.

Advaita means not-two. Its central revelation is that Brahman — the infinite,

undivided, self-luminous Consciousness — is the only reality. What we call the

“individual self,” the jīva, is not a separate entity that Brahman controls from outside.

The jīva is Brahman, appearing individuated through the veil of avidyā (ignorance).

The drama of human life — the planning, the struggling, the winning and losing — is

līlā, the cosmic play of Consciousness with itself.

With this as our foundation, Hamlet’s line ceases to be merely about fate and

becomes a window into the nature of Reality itself.

II. “Rough-Hewing” — The Activity of the Ego-Self

“Rough-hew them how we will…”

In Advaita, the one who “rough-hews” is the ahaṃkāra — the ego, the sense of

being a separate, autonomous “I” that plans, decides, and acts. This ego-self believes

itself to be the kartā (the doer). It picks up the chisel, surveys the raw wood of

circumstance, and begins to hack away according to its desires, fears, and

calculations.

Hamlet spent four acts doing precisely this. He rough-hewed furiously:

• He devised the play-within-a-play to trap Claudius
• He calculated when to strike and when to hesitate
• He philosophized endlessly about whether to act at all

And what did all this rough-hewing produce? Chaos. Mistaken killing. Broken

relationships. Near-annihilation.

The Advaitic teaching here is precise: the ego is real as appearance but not as

substance. It is like a wave that believes it is generating the ocean’s movement. It

hews and carves, but its cuts are always rough — approximate, distorted, limited by

its own ignorance of the whole. The jīva cannot see the totality because it is the act

of pretending to be separate from the totality. You cannot see the whole painting

while believing yourself to be only one brushstroke.

This is not a moral failure. It is the nature of individuation itself. The Kaṭha Upaniṣad

says: “The Self is not attained by the weak.” The weakness referred to is not physical

— it is the weakness of clinging to the ego’s rough-hewing as if it were the final

word on reality.

III. “The Divinity That Shapes” — Brahman as the Immanent Sculptor

“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends…”

Now we arrive at the heart of the Advaitic mystery. What is this “divinity” that

shapes?

It is not an external God standing above creation, adjusting outcomes like a cosmic

bureaucrat. That would be dvaita — duality, two-ness. In Advaita, the Divinity that

shapes is Brahman itself, operating as the innermost reality of everything that

appears to happen. It is not separate from the rough-hewing. It is the very ground

within which the rough-hewing occurs — and it is simultaneously the one who knows

that rough-hewing is never the final act.

Śaṅkara would say: Brahman is both the material cause and the efficient cause of the

universe. Like gold that becomes ornaments without ceasing to be gold — the

ornaments appear different, but gold alone is real. Every “end” that is shaped —

every outcome, every death, every transformation — is Brahman alone, crystallizing

into form from its own infinite freedom.

This is why the shaping is so effortless and inevitable. It does not struggle against the

rough-hewing. It uses it. Every awkward cut the ego makes, every miscalculation,

every tragedy — Brahman absorbs it and shapes it into exactly what was needed for

the whole. The sculptor does not fight the chisel marks. She works with the grain of

the wood, which she herself laid down before the carpenter arrived.

IV. The Self Reveals Herself to Whom She Chooses — Ātman Prasāda

Here we arrive at the most luminous, and most humbling, dimension of this teaching.

The Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad declares:

“Nāyam ātmā pravacanena labhyo na medhayā na bahunā śrutena। Yam evaiṣa

vṛṇute tena labhyas tasyaiṣa ātmā vivṛṇute tanūṃ svām॥”

“This Self is not attained by instruction, nor by intellect, nor by much hearing. It is

attained only by the one whom the Self chooses — to that one, the Self reveals its own

nature.”

This is perhaps the most radical statement in all of Vedāntic philosophy. And it

reframes Hamlet’s entire journey.

Hamlet spent the whole play trying to know — trying to verify the Ghost’s truth,

trying to understand his duty, trying to calculate the right moment. He brought great

intellect, great sensitivity, great moral seriousness. And none of it worked in the way

he intended. The knowledge he needed did not come through his efforts. It came

through a sea voyage, a near-death encounter, a pirate attack — through

circumstances entirely outside his planning.

And then, at the beginning of Act 5, he simply knows. A calm descends. He speaks of

providence with the ease of one who has stopped arguing with reality. He is ready.

The Self has chosen him.

From the Advaitic lens, what happened? The jīva Hamlet had exhausted its roughhewing.

The ego’s strategies had all collapsed. And in that exhaustion, in that

surrender — not as a strategy, but as a genuine letting-go — avidyā thinned. The veil

grew transparent. Brahman, which had always been Hamlet’s own deepest nature,

turned toward itself through the instrument of Hamlet’s readied consciousness.

The Self does not reveal itself as a reward for correct behavior. It reveals itself when

the ego becomes sufficiently transparent. Grace — prasāda — is not earned. It is

received. And the receiving is only possible when the clenched fist of the ego-self

relaxes its grip on rough-hewing.

V. Why “She Chooses” — The Feminine Ground of Being

To speak of the Self as She is to invoke Śakti — the dynamic, creative power of

Consciousness. In the non-dual Śākta interpretation of Advaita, Brahman’s power of

self-revelation is understood as intrinsically feminine — not in the gendered human

sense, but in the sense of that which receives, gestates, and births reality from within

itself.

Māyā — the power that veils Brahman — is feminine. And Anugraha Śakti — the

power that removes the veil — is also feminine. The same divine Mother who wraps

the world in the dream of separateness is the one who, in her grace, tears the veil

away.

This means the Self’s self-concealment and self-revelation are not opposites. They

are two movements of the same creative freedom. Brahman chooses to hide in order

that the joy of rediscovery can be complete. The rough-hewing is part of the plan.

The chaos is choreographed. The tragedy is embraced.

The “divinity that shapes our ends” is not a cold determinism. She is a Mother who

allows her children to wander, to build, to destroy, to suffer — because she knows

what they are, even when they have forgotten. She shapes the ends not by

preventing the rough-hewing but by ensuring that every rough mark ultimately

reveals the beauty of the finished form.

VI. Hamlet’s Enlightenment — The Shift into Sākṣī

Hamlet’s final equanimity — “the readiness is all” — is, in Advaitic terms, a

spontaneous shift from identifying as the kartā (doer) to resting as the sākṣī

(witness). He no longer needs the outcome to be controlled. He no longer needs

certainty. He acts when action is called, rests when rest is called, and accepts death

when death arrives — without any of it disturbing the stillness beneath.

This is not stoic resignation. The Stoic still believes the ego is real and chooses nobly

to endure. Hamlet’s shift is subtler and deeper: the ego has become transparent to

itself. He sees through the rough-hewing to the shaping beneath. He does not

become passive — he kills Claudius, he orchestrates the final scene — but he does so

without the contracted, desperate quality of his earlier scheming. He acts as an

instrument of the Whole.

In Advaita, this is called Jīvanmukti — liberation while still living. The body-mind

continues to function. The drama of life continues. But the one who believed they

were only the rough-hewer has recognized themselves as also the Divinity that

shapes. Subject and sculptor are one.

VII. The Final Integration

Shakespeare could not have known Advaita Vedānta. And yet he wrote this line, and

it carries the full weight of the tradition as though it were distilled from it. This is not

coincidence. It is evidence that certain recognitions are not cultural — they are

structural. They arise whenever human consciousness is pressed to its limit and

breaks open into something larger than itself.

The Divinity that shapes our ends is not other than us. It is the deepest stratum of

what we are — the Ātman, Brahman, the Self — appearing as destiny from outside,

because we forgot that we are inside it.

And She reveals Herself not when we have perfected our rough-hewing, but when we

love Her more than our own plans.

When the chisel drops — She speaks.

The Drama of Desire

A friend wrote, “Desire…

I realised drama we are all living in”,

Really, my friend, really you “realised?”,

But to realise is to realise that

There is no “We”.

Do you know where you’re going to?

Do you like the things that life is showing you?

Where are you going to?

Do you know?

Do you get what you’re hoping for?

When you look behind you, there’s no open doors

What are you hoping for?

Do you know?

Now, looking back at all we’ve passed

We let so many dreams just slip through our hands

Why must we wait so long before we see

How sad the answers to those questions can be?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuMBl1peAlo

This Dream, This Life

Aw, shucks, this dream

This life, oh so unnecessary

Yet we keep dreaming

We keep living

As if we have no choice

Do we have a choice,

And is the choice only death

Some say the choice is immortality

But if it indeed is immortality

Immortality can have no beginning

So, right now it surely must be the case

That I am indeed already immortal

And being immortal

‘Tis strange that a mere dream

A mere life

Bugs me to no end.

“This unreality, oh this unreality…where neither love is true, nor the truth is true…oh this unreality.”

“Ah, to disappear, be submerged…”

The Passion and the Intezaar

When passion for you

Is no longer a passion

When passion for you

Is no longer in fashion

Know that

The wait is almost over.

Lekin intezaar bhi kahi baar

Bahut meetha hota hai

Intezaar may dard bhi kyu na ho

Aur tumhaari zindagi may

Ye ittefaq bhi ho sakti hai

Ye taqdeer bhi ho sakti hai

Jis pal pe tumhari zindagi hai

Aakar rukhi hai, tehri hai

Ab tum aur kuch lumhe

Sirf intezaar may bitana hai

Aur iss ittefaq ko, iss taqdeer ko

Galay lagaanay ke siva

Aur koi raasta nahi hai

Aur agar koi waisa raasta hai

Tumhari taqdeer may nahi hai

Ki tum uss raastay pe chal sakogay.

“When I read some poets, I feel like it is high time I stopped writing poetry, and left that job to the poets.”

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down.’

“Mending Wall” (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-wall) is

one of Frost’s most celebrated poems, and these lines are among the most analyzed

in American poetry. Here’s a deep commentary from multiple angles.

The Lines in Context

These lines come near the end of the poem, spoken by the narrator as a

counterpoint to his neighbor’s repeated mantra: “Good fences make good neighbors.”

The narrator is the questioner, the skeptic, the one who wonders why the wall exists

at all.

Line by Line

“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out”

This is the poem’s central philosophical provocation. Frost draws on a binary that

cuts in two directions simultaneously:

 Walling in — keeping something of yours contained, protected, defined.

Territory, identity, privacy, culture.

 Walling out — excluding something foreign, threatening, or simply other.

The genius of phrasing it as a question is that the narrator admits he doesn’t always

know which is which. A wall built for protection can become a cage. A wall built for

exclusion can become a statement of fear. The act of building precedes the

understanding of the act — and Frost is warning against that.

There’s also a quiet confession here: the narrator says “I’d ask to know,” not “I’d

know.” He’s humble. He’s not claiming wisdom, only the willingness to pause and

question before acting.

“And to whom I was like to give offense”

This line introduces an ethical and social dimension. Walls don’t just affect the person

who builds them — they mean something to others. A wall is a message. It says: I

don’t trust you. You are not welcome here. This far, and no further.

The word “offense” is carefully chosen. It suggests that walls can wound — not

physically, but relationally and psychically. They can communicate contempt,

suspicion, or rejection without a word being spoken. Frost is nudging the reader to

think about walls not just as practical structures but as acts of communication, and

sometimes, acts of aggression.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, / That wants it down.”

This is the poem’s most famous line, and it opens and echoes throughout the poem

like a refrain. Notice Frost refuses to name what that “something” is — and that

refusal is deliberate and profound.

Nature? Earlier in the poem, frozen groundswell heaves the boulders apart every

winter. Nature literally dismantles the wall year after year, as if the earth itself resists

the partition.

Human nature? There’s a deep instinct toward connection, curiosity, and openness

in people — children especially. We are social animals. Something in us chafes at

barriers.

The cosmic or spiritual? Some readers hear in “something” a quasi-divine force — a

universe that tends toward unity, entropy, dissolution of artificial categories.

The unconscious? The vagueness of “something” is psychologically astute. We often

can’t name the part of ourselves that resists conformity, convention, or inherited

thinking — but it’s there, eroding our certainties.

By ending with “That wants it down,” Frost gives the force a kind of desire — almost

personifying it. The wall isn’t just falling apart; something wants it gone. This is

subversive and tender at once.

Thematic Angles

The Paradox of Community

The poem never actually argues that walls are bad. The narrator helps rebuild the

wall every spring! He participates in the very ritual he questions. This is Frost’s

honesty: we simultaneously crave connection and separation. The wall-mending is

itself a form of connection — the two men meet, work together, talk. The wall

enables the relationship in a strange way. So the lines aren’t a simple anti-wall

polemic; they’re an admission of complexity.

Individual vs. Inherited Tradition

The neighbor repeats his father’s saying: “Good fences make good neighbors.” He

thinks in proverbs; he doesn’t question. The narrator questions everything. These five

lines are essentially the voice of the Enlightenment — don’t build anything you can’t

justify rationally and ethically. The neighbor, by contrast, represents tradition,

continuity, inherited wisdom. Frost doesn’t entirely mock either. Both impulses are

human. Both have costs.

Political and Social Reading

Frost wrote this in 1914, but its political resonance never ages. Every era has its wall

debates — literal (border walls, ghetto walls, apartheid walls, the Berlin Wall) and

figurative (class walls, racial walls, cultural walls). The question “What I was walling in

or walling out?” is a haunting one for any nation or community grappling with

immigration, identity, or belonging. Who do we include? Who do we shut out? And

do we even know what we’re doing when we do it?

The Epistemological Angle

These lines are deeply concerned with knowledge before action — a Socratic impulse.

Don’t act on habit, tradition, or fear. Know what you’re doing and why. The narrator

doesn’t say walls are always wrong; he says building them without asking these

questions is reckless. This is a poem about the ethics of unreflective behaviour.

Frost’s Tone: Wry, Not Preachy

Crucially, Frost never lets the narrator become a moralist. He’s mischievous, a little

playful — he considers telling the neighbor that elves knocked the wall down, then

thinks better of it. The narrator’s wisdom is offered quietly, almost to himself. This

makes these lines feel like thinking aloud rather than lecturing, which is far more

persuasive and far more true to how genuine insight actually arrives.

In short, these five lines compress a whole philosophy: think before you divide,

consider who you hurt, and know that something in the world — in nature, in us — will

always push back against walls that exist without justification. That “something” is

never fully named because Frost understood that the best questions outlast their

answers.

“To attain Nirvana, now I need to do some juGod.”

“The very restlessness and attempting to become perfect is the imperfection.”

The Discovery

I have discovered the recipe for happiness

No, it is not owning the oil fields in Kuwait

Nor is it winning the John Bates Clark Medal

Nor the Merc parked in your driveway

Nor your byline in Sunday NYT

Simpler, far, far simpler than that

Just an evening at Roastery Coffee House in Banjara Hills

Sipping Cranberry Coffee and eating lasagna

What would double the happiness though

Is if a certain someone is in the opposite chair

Or we both in some other place

Else, it is just perfect, perfect.

“I have reached an age where if a girl smiles at me, I cannot read too many meanings in it.”

“Spending time with and understanding our children will make us understand philosophy faster than by reading any religious texts.”

“Love at first sight is a killing concept. But then dislike at first sight is a different kind of killing.”

“Just because you suspect you are wise; it does not mean your wisdom will be of a helluva lot useful when it comes to interpreting all the meanings in a smile. And, God’s photos and statues depict a smile on the face of the deity. Damn. It is hard enough interpreting the smile of a girl, now God is also smiling at us. Shit, we are screwed. No way we can know what life is all about.”

Think About These Things

One of the very few virtues that Ramana Maharshi extols is humility.

He says in his short book “Who Am I?”:

“To the extent we behave with humility, to that extent there will result good.”

Meanwhile, Nisargadatta Maharaj in his book “I Am That”, keeps saying repeatedly that the most important virtue is “earnestness”.

“When the mind is silent, any amount of speech and action do not vitiate that silence. Mind cannot be silent when there are desires in our being. Find out how to deal with desires.”

Betwixt Wise and Otherwise

Today’s morning comes

Like any other morning

It does not seem that different

Until I start thinking, feeling

Then, too, it does not seem that different

Unless I resist, protest, regret, wish for,

And why do I resists, protest, regret, wish for?

That seems to be the way things are

That seems to be our lot here on earth

Some may come and say things can be otherwise

Between this wise and otherwise I live my life.

“Sometimes, to be wise is to accept defeat. Why flow against the current of life?”

Suicidal Impulse

Today morning

I told a friend

“Come, let us go and commit suicide.”

“No,” the friend protested,

“I want to live and enjoy life.”

Now, I have to gather

The courage and wisdom

To travel alone

The journey cannot be given up

Just because

One’s companions want to rest.

“Duniya paison ke peeche baag rahi hai. Mai fursat ke peeche baag raha hoon. Paise bahut mushkil hai milna, mahnat karni padti hai. Fursat toh yoohee mil jaati hai, bina kuch kiye…kuch muth karo aur fursat pao…samjha karo kyunki ismay ek raaz chupi hai…lekin mai galat bhi ho sakta hoo…zindagi toh jua hai…aur judai bhi….”

“Truth divorced from love is no truth. Love divorced from truth is no love.”

“Don’t be an archaeologist. Don’t dig up the ruins of your past, otherwise you will be ruined.”

The Itch

The itch is

inside my heart.

But I am scratching the paper

with my pen.

“It was daffodils that flashed upon the inward eye of Wordsworth. On my inward eye, it is she who flashes.”

“To love someone truly is to give them the freedom to walk  away from you without any guilt or regret should they want to.”

“Someone sang, the whole night your memory troubled me. My problem is far worse. Even the whole day her memory is troubling me.”

“Sitting here alone in this coffee shop, I am lost in thought, wondering what Donne meant.”

“Something shifted in me that day when she gave me that look and said, ‘Sam, I don’t see you nowadays’. Life is full of loose ends and some knots live on inside us.”

“I told her ye death ke baraay may zyada buk buk muth karo. Hum sab har raat aath ghante ke liye mar jaatay hai.”

“There seem to be different kinds of love. Oh, oh…just when thought you can stop going to the library.”

Cutting Out the Social Self

Sartre wrote, “Hell is other people.”

But, also at the level at which Sartre is speaking, it is also true that “Heaven is other people.”

But, at this social-self level, one gets stuck in a certain level of living where the dialogue “chal daaroo peeyingay” plays out in its various shades and nuances.

And that daaroo is not the wine that Sufis would have us drink.

And, it is this social self that makes you earn more money than we need, etc.

From this social self, you need to reach inside to find your true self.

The moment you leave your social self behind, then your thinking and emotions also are less in play because most of them are in service of our social self.

“No, Kirshna, I will wage war with my love and not with bows and arrows. Jesus knew something you did not. Besides, it is not my job to wage war against injustice with bows and arrows. Isn’t that your job as the creator of this universe, which you anyway you say you are. Remember what you said about being the creator of the four castes. Then, why you are passing the buck to me. Besides, you yourself say, ‘sambhavami yuge yuge’. Deal with it, Krishna, deal with it. After all, this world is your baby. Don’t instruct me. Leave me alone to me and my love.”

“Zindagi koi jung nahi. Sirf junglee loga waisay sonchthe hai. Mai pyaar ko itna samajh chuka hoon ki pata lag gaya hai ki jung sirf woh mushkilay kada karthi hai jo pahlay nahi the, aur jo mushkilay pahlay the unka hul teek say nahi kar paatha.”

“Ye kya jung jung kahthay phir rahay ho. Mai zindagi ko tukhratha hoo, kyunki mujhe woh zindagi nahi chahiyay jahaan mujhe jung may haasil hona padtha. Jung nahi ladnay say zyada se zyada sirf meri zindagi mujhse cheen jaayegi. Cheen lo jitna chahiya utna ye meri zindagi. Mai todi poocha pehale naa ab pooch raha hoo mujhe paida karo aur zinda rakho.”

“The mind says, ‘Look, look, there are so many problems, stay focused and awake.’ Heart says, ‘Chill, I have the solution to every problem’.”

The Darkness in My Soul

For too long I have seen

The sun in me eclipsed

By something or the other that comes,

Some emotion, some yearning, some dreaming,

Between me and the truth that be

That light, that love, that beauty

Slowly I begin to see far too clearly

This flight outward that gnaws at my soul

That waits for the right consonance, right season

Waits and waits but waits in vain

Thwarted by some destiny that I cannot control

I learn to let go, knowing I can control

Neither my destiny nor that of others.

I thought I had left them all behind

That some emotion, some yearning, some dreaming

Back in the stormy days of my confused youth

Why are they coming back again to me

As if I am still accountable for I know not what.

Who was Arjuna?

Arjuna is anyone in this world who is NOT content to just keep the body alive but also seeks to keep the mind and heart alive.

Such a one finds himself having to fight many a battle on many a Kurukshetra.

Hence also such a one will keep needing the counsel of a Kirshna.

But the Arjuna who is content to keep just the body alive and lets go of the mind and heart, has no battles to fight nor has any need for any Krishna.

Understand this and not any other Gita, be that Gita of Kirshna or Ashtavakra.

👍🏼 just the B and when the pot breaks you are one with the rest of the only consciousness.

Yes.

Even before the pot (B) breaks, what keeps the illusion that you are NOT right now one with the rest of the only consciousness is ONLY the mind and heart.

When the mind and heart are NOT in play, then the illusion of separation also does NOT exist.

Like in deep sleep

Yes.

Perfectly said.

That is why, Ramana Maharshi said, “What happened in sleep is your real nature.” (Talk 304)

In many places in his Talks book, the Maharshi says something to the effect of deep sleep is NOT ignorance but reality itself.

That is why he says, one has to be in the state of wakeful sleep or jagrat sushupti.

Wanna Stop Writing After This

“For a long time now, the role of the Brahmin has been outsourced to other countries, particularly Europe and the US. Why? Because we Indians have stopped thinking many centuries back.”

Neruda, I Feel Sadder Than You Tonight

No reason Neruda that I feel sad

You at least had your girl to blame

I have nothing and no one to blame

For how I feel now, just life itself

Galls me to no end, where I feel mocked

By life itself which demands it be understood

Am I supposed to love life and not the woman

But I do not know what life is nor how to live

Shall I just drink a Coke and open happiness

But Coke’s fizz lasts less time than morning dew

The sun is hot but it’s supposedly life-giver

But when I step out in the aft’noon it’s killing

So, I cannot trust the very so-called life-giver

Nothing in nature seems benign, not even society

And when night comes, cocooned here in my flat

I can’t see the stars, and moon interests me not

All I can look forward to now is slow deterioration

One by one the powers will desert me, from the teeth

To the knees to the memory to the interest

Time cares not to show anyone any compassion

The philosophy I know is even more problematic

In a way it gives me relief from these thoughts

And in a way it doubles the pain by showing

This whole life was a waste of time, no study

Nor emotion nor smile nor understanding

Takes you where you want to be, and these days

I am not even sure where I want to be, not even to be

I cannot even go back to where I came from

Nor can I know where I have to go, nor whether

Any journey is worth it at all, as now I understand

This flight from myself is the cause of all problems

And, when I look into myself, I find only wisdom

And that wisdom tells me I do not understand at all

Neither Truth nor Love, for wisdom tells me

If you think you understand Truth and Love

Why are you still undertaking many a journey.

“Everything in this world has a cause. And every effect becomes in turn a cause. Where there are causes and effects, there is change underway. Where there is change how can Truth be. And where there is no Truth how can love be.”

“Definition of a perfect love story: Going from aroused to erased.”

“Most human love arises out of fear, is sustained by fear, and ends a quiet death due to fear.”

“Life is a Russian roulette.”

“Perfect recipe for dissatisfaction in life: Wanting to be happy always all the time no matter what.”

“Some say God is Truth. Some say God is Love. Both are wrong. God is. Period.”

“Love is not an add-on to the other things in your life. Love is the life.”

“Love is the ultimate soporific which dullens the pain of existence.”

“We think there is life. That is the death of us.”

“We are all lost in our desires. Desires take us to the future. Inhabiting the future, we fail to live because life is happening in the present.”

Jagat (Sanskrit: जगत्) primarily means the world, universe, or earth. It is derived from the root gacchati (“that which moves”), signifying that the universe is in constant motion, ever-changing, and ephemeral.

Core Meanings & Contexts:

•  The Moving World: It refers to all that is moving, animate, living, and changing, encompassing the entire material universe.

•  Vedanta Philosophy: It is often described as mithya (dependent reality/illusion) in comparison to the absolute reality of Brahman, often referring to the subjective experience of the material world.

•  Spiritual/Non-dualism: In some contexts, it is interpreted as the manifestation or “body” of the divine, completely dependent on the Supreme for existence.

•  Common Usage: In Hindi and other Indian languages, it is used for “world” or “universe,” and sometimes implies a specific field or community (e.g., Nari Jagat – world of women).

Common Compound Words:

•  Jagadish/Jagannath: Lord of the Universe (Vishnu or Shiva).

•  Jagatmata: Mother of the World (Durga).

Jagat is also a common Indian name for boys, signifying the universe.

“Don’t wait for retirement or for that smile; be happy today, nay, right now.”

“Dare to be who you are.”

Give me some deeply philosophical quotes of Arthur Rimbaud.

Claude responded: Here are some deeply philosophical quotes from Arthur Rimbaud:

________________________________________

On the Self & Identity

“I is another.” — Letter to Georges Izambard, 1871

One of his most famous lines, suggesting the self is not a fixed entity but something foreign, observed from the outside — a radical idea that anticipated modern theories of subjectivity.

________________________________________

On Disorder & Vision

“The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses.” — Letter to Paul Demeny (Lettre du Voyant), 1871

Rimbaud’s manifesto for poetry: to reach true vision, the poet must shatter ordinary perception and embrace suffering as a path to illumination.

________________________________________

On Life & the Absolute

“Real life is absent. We are not in the world.” — A Season in Hell

A haunting declaration of alienation — the sense that authentic existence lies forever beyond reach, and the world we inhabit is a kind of unreality.

________________________________________

On Suffering & Knowledge

“One must be absolutely modern.” — A Season in Hell

Deceptively simple, this is Rimbaud’s demand to break entirely with tradition — to find truth not in the past but in the raw, uncharted present.

________________________________________

On Love & Hell

“I have swallowed a famous mouthful of poison. Thrice blessed be the counsel that came to me! My bowels are on fire. The violence of the venom twists my limbs, deforms me, lays me low.” — A Season in Hell

A visceral metaphor for the self-destruction that comes with absolute passion — love, ambition, and vision as simultaneously poison and revelation.

________________________________________

On Eternity

“It has been found again. What? Eternity. It is the sea mixed with the sun.” — Eternity

A mystical fragment — eternity not as abstraction but as a sensory, almost pantheist fusion of natural forces.

________________________________________

On Freedom

“Only divine love bestows the keys of knowledge.” — A Season in Hell

Rimbaud suggests that rational intellect alone cannot unlock the deepest truths — only a surrender to something greater can.

________________________________________

Rimbaud’s philosophy is essentially one of radical becoming — the self must be destroyed, perception unhinged, and comfort abandoned in order to glimpse something true. He abandoned poetry entirely at 19, which many see as the ultimate philosophical act: refusing to be captured even by his own genius.

“Vivekananda, when he was young, really young, went around asking everyone, ‘Have you seen God’. And when he posed the same question to Ramakrishna Paramahansa, RP replied, ‘Yes, only more clearly than I see you now.’ Now, the question that can be asked is was RP, like J. Krishnamurti always said he does, ‘Answering the questioner rather than the question.’ Otherwise, the correct answer is, ‘What a stupid question, Naren, all you have been seeing all your life is ONLY God but you have been thinking you are seeing the world’.”

Buddha’s Mistake

Sam’s First Noble Truth

I agree with Buddha’s First Noble Truth that “Life is suffering”.

Sam’s Second Noble Truth

I do not agree with Buddha’s Second Noble Truth that “Desire is the cause of suffering.”

My point is that once you have understood that “Life is suffering”, you should also understand the simple logic that “No life, no suffering.”

So, do not bother about desires and all such nonsense.

Do not get caught in such traps, traps which arise only if you are living.

Just end life and you are done.

Or, rather realise you were never born.

No Sex, No Salvation, No Sam

I do not want to get caught

In the vortex of these Fie-loss-oafers

And whatever theories they spin

About this world, existing only in imagination;

When I talk about myself Sam

Or about Sex and Salvation, I do so

Under Erasure, as that Algerian Jew would have it

Who set afire many an academic department in the US

And, I note with pleasure his association in 1966

With my alma mater Johns Hopkins, kickstarting

That peculiar school of philosophy, poststructuralism,

But, why dabble and grapple even dilettantishly

With these games that minds of philosophers play

I who have understood Kena Upanishad’s admonition

That if you think Truth is there for the taking by the mind

You poor thing how little you understand

And where is the mind but in this world

Or is the world in the mind

Now, now don’t confuse me

I refuse to play this game with these words

For I know too well that if I renounce words

Which is the only true Vairagya that is there

And not so-called Vairagya of Kamini-Kanchana

Then in that silence all doubts are quelled

All truths stand revealed, and I know

Whatever I knew till now was wrong

And I learn to let go of not only Socrates and Sartre

But also of Maharshi and Maharaj

For where do they all exist

Except in my fertile imagination

As do Sex, Salvation and Sam.

“The tree has to bend to every wind, but it cannot know why the wind is blowing.”

“In the autumn, it is foolish for the tree to try to hold on to the leaves.”

“There is no spot in the pot where there is no clay.”

“In every love story, there is something more than biology at play.”

“My Call”

Yes, Michael, it always was your call

To go solo or to go with the family

And also your call to spread love and light

To this world through your moves.

Music, moods, musings, and murmurings

And did you change the world?

Who knows? Maybe a few and here and there

When you were alive, and a few more might change

Long after you are gone as long as your music lives on

Surely, though, you yourself must have escaped

The suffering that the blind strivings of the Will

Imposes on one, if Schopenhauer is to be believed,

With your Dionysian spirit that Nietzsche championed.

Yet how I despair Michael, my call

Is that this world is condemned to its duality

Of light and darkness, good and bad, virtue and vice

Socrates, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Jesus could not fix the world

So, Michael, you are forgiven, too, for failing

Though your critics would point out your own failings.

—

Maya (the cosmic creative/illusory power) is constituted by the three gunas — Sattva (clarity, harmony), Rajas (activity, passion, restlessness), and Tamas (inertia, darkness, ignorance). As long as manifestation exists — as long as anything is appearing — all three gunas are present in varying proportions. You can’t have Maya with only Sattva, because pure undifferentiated Sattva would dissolve back into Brahman. The tension and dynamism of Rajas and Tamas are what keep the world-appearance going.

So yes, suffering and evil are structurally baked into manifestation itself. Tamas produces ignorance, delusion, and stagnation; Rajas produces craving, conflict, and agitation — both are inexhaustible engines of suffering at the cosmic level.

This creates an important asymmetry:

At the individual level, liberation is possible — you can step out of identification with the gunas entirely, which is what Nisargadatta and Ramana point to. The Self is not a product of the gunas.

At the collective or historical level, you might get periods of greater Sattva, but Rajas and Tamas always reassert themselves — civilizations rise and fall in cycles (the yuga framework reflects exactly this).

At the cosmic/natural level, as long as Maya is operating, the interplay of gunas never ceases. Suffering doesn’t “end” — it’s part of the texture of manifestation.

This is also why Advaita doesn’t promise the world will get better or that evil will be eliminated — it says the world as such is the wrong level to seek resolution. The resolution is recognition of that which was never in the gunas to begin with. Nisargadatta’s typical move is precisely this — he doesn’t ask you to fix the dream, he asks you to wake up from it.

Universal liberation of the cosmos is a category error within this framework. The most Maya can do is oscillate; it cannot transcend its own constituents.

Two Ways to Retire Early

1. Earn as much as is 100% sufficient for your wants.

2. Pare down your wants (but NOT to the bare minimum) so that you can retire earlier than you can under Scenario 1.

I chose the latter option by becoming sort of a minimalist because I realized that happiness does not come from accumulating more and more, be it wealth or any other damn thing.

When did more and more wealth ever make anyone more and more happy.

And, if you need more and more money to become more and more happy, know that you are not going about it the right way.

Money cannot buy almost anything worthwhile.

Anyway, the best things in life are either damn cheap or totally free.

Don’t think so?

Well, my friend, good luck with that happiness you are chasing.

No, I forget, you are chasing money not happiness.

Let me know when you shift your rat race from pursuing money to pursuing happiness, then as Paul Simon sang, “I can be your long-lost pal.”

What about the work that needs to be done in this world that might suffer if you retire early?

Ha, ha, ha, as if you are working FOR the world. Get real.

Besides, there are enough unemployed people out there to fill the space that you vacate.

And, besides, if people thought like I am suggesting, then believe you me, far less work will be needed to be done in this world so that the world can get along by just fine.

Ha, ha, ha…how bad people are at thinking!!!

Well, well, I guess God knows what he is up to.

Homo Duplex

Homo duplex (“the double human”) is a theory by sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) proposing that humans possess a dual nature: part biological organism driven by selfish individual desires (“profane”), and part social being guided by morality, collective consciousness, and social constraints (“sacred”).

Key Components of Homo Duplex:

•  The Profane (Individual): This side consists of personal appetites, instincts, selfishness, and bodily sensations.

•  The Sacred (Social): This side comprises moral forces, social solidarity, shared values, and altruism, which are cultivated through societal interaction and collective rituals.

•  The Tension: Durkheim argued that society requires a balance between these two sides to prevent individualism from leading to unhappiness, greed, or excessive anomie (social instability).

•  Societal Role: Socialization, education, and religion play crucial roles in regulating the individual’s “animalistic” nature and nurturing their “moral” or “social” side.

This concept underscores the idea that humans find their highest potential not in isolation, but by participating in a larger social whole.

What Durkheim Was Really Saying

At its core, Homo Duplex is Durkheim’s answer to one of philosophy’s oldest

questions: what kind of creature is a human being? His answer was deliberately

paradoxical — we are simultaneously two things at once, and that tension is not a

flaw to be resolved, but the very engine of social and moral life.

This was a bold move in the late 19th century. Darwinian biology was pushing toward

the view that humans were essentially animals with sophisticated brains.

Enlightenment liberalism, on the other hand, celebrated the sovereign individual.

Durkheim rejected both as incomplete. He insisted you cannot understand a human

being by looking only at their biology or their individual rational mind — you must

look at what society does to and inside them.

Unpacking the Two Sides

The Profane (the animal self)

The word “profane” here doesn’t mean vulgar in the everyday sense — it means

outside the sacred, ordinary, earthly, bodily. This is the self that:

 Hungers, lusts, fears, and competes

 Acts in its own interest without reference to others

 Exists in time and space as a finite, mortal organism

Durkheim didn’t moralize this side as evil — he saw it as simply pre-social. It is what

we are before society gets hold of us. Left entirely to this nature, humans would be,

in Hobbes’ famous phrase, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

The Sacred (the social self)

The “sacred” is what society implants into the individual. This is a profound and

somewhat unsettling idea: your moral conscience, your sense of duty, your empathy,

your values — these are not naturally yours. They were installed by the collective.

This side includes:

 The capacity for self-sacrifice

 Loyalty to groups, nations, ideals

 Moral disgust and reverence

 The ability to feel that something is bigger than yourself

Crucially, Durkheim believed this sacred dimension is genuinely real and genuinely

powerful — but its source is social, not divine or innate. When you feel moral awe,

you are, in his view, feeling the weight of society pressing on your consciousness.

The Tension: Why the Conflict is Necessary

Durkheim didn’t want the tension resolved — he wanted it managed. Here’s why:

 Too much profane (pure individualism) leads to anomie — a condition where

social norms collapse, individuals feel unmoored, and rates of depression,

crime, and even suicide rise. His famous study Suicide (1897) showed that

societies with weak social bonds had higher suicide rates — a radical,

counterintuitive argument.

 Too much sacred (total collective absorption) leads to fatalistic overregulation

— where individuals are crushed under the weight of social duty,

also producing misery and, paradoxically, suicide of a different kind (what he

called altruistic suicide, dying for the group).

The sweet spot is a productive friction — society strong enough to give life meaning

and structure, but not so totalizing that it erases the individual.

Socialization as the Civilizing Mechanism

When Durkheim says education, religion, and socialization regulate the individual’s

animalistic nature, he means something very specific: they transfer the sacred into

the individual so thoroughly that it feels like their own conscience. This is the

machinery of moral internalization.

Think of how a child is taught not to steal. At first, it’s external — “don’t do that or

you’ll be punished.” Eventually, the prohibition becomes internal — “I don’t want to

steal, it feels wrong.” For Durkheim, that feeling of wrongness is society speaking

through you. You have been successfully socialized. The collective has colonized

your inner life — and this is not manipulation, in his view; it is what makes you fully

human.

Religion, in particular, fascinated him because its rituals (collective gatherings, shared

symbols, emotional ceremonies) were the most powerful mechanisms for recharging

the social self — reminding individuals viscerally that they belong to something

beyond themselves.

Where Homo Duplex Connects to Bigger Ideas

Concept Connection to Homo Duplex

Freud’s Id/Superego

Strikingly parallel — the id (drives) vs. the superego

(internalized social rules). Both emerged around the same

era, independently.

Rousseau’s Noble

Savage

Durkheim inverts Rousseau — society doesn’t corrupt

natural goodness; it creates moral goodness in the first

place.

Nietzsche’s critique of

herd morality

Nietzsche saw society suppressing the individual as a

tragedy. Durkheim saw it as a necessity — even a gift.

Modern psychology

Jonathan Haidt’s social intuitionist model echoes Homo

Duplex — moral feelings are social products, not individual

reason.

A Critical Perspective

Homo Duplex is elegant, but not without its critics:

 It’s overly binary. Human nature resists clean splits into “animal vs. social.”

Much of what Durkheim calls “profane” (love, curiosity, creativity) is not

straightforwardly selfish.

 It romanticizes the collective. Durkheim’s framework can justify social

conformity too easily. History shows that the “sacred social” can endorse

racism, nationalism, and genocide just as easily as altruism.

 It underestimates individual agency. Humans don’t just receive society

passively — they also reshape it. The individual isn’t merely a battleground

between animal drives and social imprinting.

The Bottom Line

Homo Duplex is a powerful lens for understanding why humans are so

contradictory — capable of extraordinary selfishness and extraordinary sacrifice,

often in the same person, sometimes within the same hour. Durkheim’s lasting

insight is that this is not hypocrisy or moral failure. It is the structure of what we are:

biological creatures who can only realize their deepest potential by surrendering part

of themselves to something collective and larger. We are, as he saw it, always living

on the border between the animal and the social — and civilization is the ongoing,

never-finished negotiation between those two halves.

Kids? Just say no

You don’t have to dislike children to see the harms done by having them. There is a moral case against procreation

https://aeon.co/essays/having-children-is-not-life-affirming-its-immoral

No Words To Say What I Want To Say

Strange how sometimes you are at a loss for words

When you realize the words you used have not been understood

And using more words would only complicate the picture

Because the words have to go through the sieve

Of other minds and hearts, though  mine they have navigated,

And this is not just my problem, just the human condition

And until we understand silence we cannot understand each other

But unfortunately, until then we have to keep using words

And thereby keep encountering battlefields of various sorts.

“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will” is a famous quote from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Act 5, Scene 2). Spoken by Hamlet, it means that a divine power or fate determines the ultimate outcome of our lives, regardless of how clumsily we plan them.

Key Details and Context:

Context in Play: Hamlet says this to Horatio while explaining how he survived

a plot to kill him, suggesting he has accepted fate.

Meaning: “Rough-hew” refers to shaping a rough block of wood. It suggests

humans make rough plans (“rough-hew”), but God or destiny refines the final

outcome (“shapes our ends”).

Theme: This reflects a shift in Hamlet from indecision to a fatalistic acceptance

of whatever happens, including the “special providence in the fall of a

sparrow”.

It shows a shift from a belief that mortals control their destiny to a belief that higher

forces are in control.

“There’s a Divinity That Shapes Our Ends” — Through the Lens of Advaita

Vedānta

And the Self Reveals Itself to Whom She Chooses

I. The Two Voices Speaking the Same Truth

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, standing at the threshold of death with a curious calm, utters

something that no purely Western philosophical framework can fully contain. He is

not simply expressing fatalism. He is not surrendering to an external God the way a

theist might. Something deeper is trembling in those words — something that

Advaita Vedānta, the non-dual philosophy of Śaṅkarācārya, can illuminate with

remarkable precision.

Advaita means not-two. Its central revelation is that Brahman — the infinite,

undivided, self-luminous Consciousness — is the only reality. What we call the

“individual self,” the jīva, is not a separate entity that Brahman controls from outside.

The jīva is Brahman, appearing individuated through the veil of avidyā (ignorance).

The drama of human life — the planning, the struggling, the winning and losing — is

līlā, the cosmic play of Consciousness with itself.

With this as our foundation, Hamlet’s line ceases to be merely about fate and

becomes a window into the nature of Reality itself.

II. “Rough-Hewing” — The Activity of the Ego-Self

“Rough-hew them how we will…”

In Advaita, the one who “rough-hews” is the ahaṃkāra — the ego, the sense of

being a separate, autonomous “I” that plans, decides, and acts. This ego-self believes

itself to be the kartā (the doer). It picks up the chisel, surveys the raw wood of

circumstance, and begins to hack away according to its desires, fears, and

calculations.

Hamlet spent four acts doing precisely this. He rough-hewed furiously:

• He devised the play-within-a-play to trap Claudius
• He calculated when to strike and when to hesitate
• He philosophized endlessly about whether to act at all

And what did all this rough-hewing produce? Chaos. Mistaken killing. Broken

relationships. Near-annihilation.

The Advaitic teaching here is precise: the ego is real as appearance but not as

substance. It is like a wave that believes it is generating the ocean’s movement. It

hews and carves, but its cuts are always rough — approximate, distorted, limited by

its own ignorance of the whole. The jīva cannot see the totality because it is the act

of pretending to be separate from the totality. You cannot see the whole painting

while believing yourself to be only one brushstroke.

This is not a moral failure. It is the nature of individuation itself. The Kaṭha Upaniṣad

says: “The Self is not attained by the weak.” The weakness referred to is not physical

— it is the weakness of clinging to the ego’s rough-hewing as if it were the final

word on reality.

III. “The Divinity That Shapes” — Brahman as the Immanent Sculptor

“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends…”

Now we arrive at the heart of the Advaitic mystery. What is this “divinity” that

shapes?

It is not an external God standing above creation, adjusting outcomes like a cosmic

bureaucrat. That would be dvaita — duality, two-ness. In Advaita, the Divinity that

shapes is Brahman itself, operating as the innermost reality of everything that

appears to happen. It is not separate from the rough-hewing. It is the very ground

within which the rough-hewing occurs — and it is simultaneously the one who knows

that rough-hewing is never the final act.

Śaṅkara would say: Brahman is both the material cause and the efficient cause of the

universe. Like gold that becomes ornaments without ceasing to be gold — the

ornaments appear different, but gold alone is real. Every “end” that is shaped —

every outcome, every death, every transformation — is Brahman alone, crystallizing

into form from its own infinite freedom.

This is why the shaping is so effortless and inevitable. It does not struggle against the

rough-hewing. It uses it. Every awkward cut the ego makes, every miscalculation,

every tragedy — Brahman absorbs it and shapes it into exactly what was needed for

the whole. The sculptor does not fight the chisel marks. She works with the grain of

the wood, which she herself laid down before the carpenter arrived.

IV. The Self Reveals Herself to Whom She Chooses — Ātman Prasāda

Here we arrive at the most luminous, and most humbling, dimension of this teaching.

The Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad declares:

“Nāyam ātmā pravacanena labhyo na medhayā na bahunā śrutena। Yam evaiṣa

vṛṇute tena labhyas tasyaiṣa ātmā vivṛṇute tanūṃ svām॥”

“This Self is not attained by instruction, nor by intellect, nor by much hearing. It is

attained only by the one whom the Self chooses — to that one, the Self reveals its own

nature.”

This is perhaps the most radical statement in all of Vedāntic philosophy. And it

reframes Hamlet’s entire journey.

Hamlet spent the whole play trying to know — trying to verify the Ghost’s truth,

trying to understand his duty, trying to calculate the right moment. He brought great

intellect, great sensitivity, great moral seriousness. And none of it worked in the way

he intended. The knowledge he needed did not come through his efforts. It came

through a sea voyage, a near-death encounter, a pirate attack — through

circumstances entirely outside his planning.

And then, at the beginning of Act 5, he simply knows. A calm descends. He speaks of

providence with the ease of one who has stopped arguing with reality. He is ready.

The Self has chosen him.

From the Advaitic lens, what happened? The jīva Hamlet had exhausted its roughhewing.

The ego’s strategies had all collapsed. And in that exhaustion, in that

surrender — not as a strategy, but as a genuine letting-go — avidyā thinned. The veil

grew transparent. Brahman, which had always been Hamlet’s own deepest nature,

turned toward itself through the instrument of Hamlet’s readied consciousness.

The Self does not reveal itself as a reward for correct behavior. It reveals itself when

the ego becomes sufficiently transparent. Grace — prasāda — is not earned. It is

received. And the receiving is only possible when the clenched fist of the ego-self

relaxes its grip on rough-hewing.

V. Why “She Chooses” — The Feminine Ground of Being

To speak of the Self as She is to invoke Śakti — the dynamic, creative power of

Consciousness. In the non-dual Śākta interpretation of Advaita, Brahman’s power of

self-revelation is understood as intrinsically feminine — not in the gendered human

sense, but in the sense of that which receives, gestates, and births reality from within

itself.

Māyā — the power that veils Brahman — is feminine. And Anugraha Śakti — the

power that removes the veil — is also feminine. The same divine Mother who wraps

the world in the dream of separateness is the one who, in her grace, tears the veil

away.

This means the Self’s self-concealment and self-revelation are not opposites. They

are two movements of the same creative freedom. Brahman chooses to hide in order

that the joy of rediscovery can be complete. The rough-hewing is part of the plan.

The chaos is choreographed. The tragedy is embraced.

The “divinity that shapes our ends” is not a cold determinism. She is a Mother who

allows her children to wander, to build, to destroy, to suffer — because she knows

what they are, even when they have forgotten. She shapes the ends not by

preventing the rough-hewing but by ensuring that every rough mark ultimately

reveals the beauty of the finished form.

VI. Hamlet’s Enlightenment — The Shift into Sākṣī

Hamlet’s final equanimity — “the readiness is all” — is, in Advaitic terms, a

spontaneous shift from identifying as the kartā (doer) to resting as the sākṣī

(witness). He no longer needs the outcome to be controlled. He no longer needs

certainty. He acts when action is called, rests when rest is called, and accepts death

when death arrives — without any of it disturbing the stillness beneath.

This is not stoic resignation. The Stoic still believes the ego is real and chooses nobly

to endure. Hamlet’s shift is subtler and deeper: the ego has become transparent to

itself. He sees through the rough-hewing to the shaping beneath. He does not

become passive — he kills Claudius, he orchestrates the final scene — but he does so

without the contracted, desperate quality of his earlier scheming. He acts as an

instrument of the Whole.

In Advaita, this is called Jīvanmukti — liberation while still living. The body-mind

continues to function. The drama of life continues. But the one who believed they

were only the rough-hewer has recognized themselves as also the Divinity that

shapes. Subject and sculptor are one.

VII. The Final Integration

Shakespeare could not have known Advaita Vedānta. And yet he wrote this line, and

it carries the full weight of the tradition as though it were distilled from it. This is not

coincidence. It is evidence that certain recognitions are not cultural — they are

structural. They arise whenever human consciousness is pressed to its limit and

breaks open into something larger than itself.

The Divinity that shapes our ends is not other than us. It is the deepest stratum of

what we are — the Ātman, Brahman, the Self — appearing as destiny from outside,

because we forgot that we are inside it.

And She reveals Herself not when we have perfected our rough-hewing, but when we

love Her more than our own plans.

When the chisel drops — She speaks.

The Drama of Desire

A friend wrote, “Desire…

I realised drama we are all living in”,

Really, my friend, really you “realised?”,

But to realise is to realise that

There is no “We”.

Do you know where you’re going to?

Do you like the things that life is showing you?

Where are you going to?

Do you know?

Do you get what you’re hoping for?

When you look behind you, there’s no open doors

What are you hoping for?

Do you know?

Now, looking back at all we’ve passed

We let so many dreams just slip through our hands

Why must we wait so long before we see

How sad the answers to those questions can be?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuMBl1peAlo

This Dream, This Life

Aw, shucks, this dream

This life, oh so unnecessary

Yet we keep dreaming

We keep living

As if we have no choice

Do we have a choice,

And is the choice only death

Some say the choice is immortality

But if it indeed is immortality

Immortality can have no beginning

So, right now it surely must be the case

That I am indeed already immortal

And being immortal

‘Tis strange that a mere dream

A mere life

Bugs me to no end.

“This unreality, oh this unreality…where neither love is true, nor the truth is true…oh this unreality.”

“Ah, to disappear, be submerged…”

The Passion and the Intezaar

When passion for you

Is no longer a passion

When passion for you

Is no longer in fashion

Know that

The wait is almost over.

Lekin intezaar bhi kahi baar

Bahut meetha hota hai

Intezaar may dard bhi kyu na ho

Aur tumhaari zindagi may

Ye ittefaq bhi ho sakti hai

Ye taqdeer bhi ho sakti hai

Jis pal pe tumhari zindagi hai

Aakar rukhi hai, tehri hai

Ab tum aur kuch lumhe

Sirf intezaar may bitana hai

Aur iss ittefaq ko, iss taqdeer ko

Galay lagaanay ke siva

Aur koi raasta nahi hai

Aur agar koi waisa raasta hai

Tumhari taqdeer may nahi hai

Ki tum uss raastay pe chal sakogay.

“When I read some poets, I feel like it is high time I stopped writing poetry, and left that job to the poets.”

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down.’

“Mending Wall” (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-wall) is

one of Frost’s most celebrated poems, and these lines are among the most analyzed

in American poetry. Here’s a deep commentary from multiple angles.

The Lines in Context

These lines come near the end of the poem, spoken by the narrator as a

counterpoint to his neighbor’s repeated mantra: “Good fences make good neighbors.”

The narrator is the questioner, the skeptic, the one who wonders why the wall exists

at all.

Line by Line

“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out”

This is the poem’s central philosophical provocation. Frost draws on a binary that

cuts in two directions simultaneously:

 Walling in — keeping something of yours contained, protected, defined.

Territory, identity, privacy, culture.

 Walling out — excluding something foreign, threatening, or simply other.

The genius of phrasing it as a question is that the narrator admits he doesn’t always

know which is which. A wall built for protection can become a cage. A wall built for

exclusion can become a statement of fear. The act of building precedes the

understanding of the act — and Frost is warning against that.

There’s also a quiet confession here: the narrator says “I’d ask to know,” not “I’d

know.” He’s humble. He’s not claiming wisdom, only the willingness to pause and

question before acting.

“And to whom I was like to give offense”

This line introduces an ethical and social dimension. Walls don’t just affect the person

who builds them — they mean something to others. A wall is a message. It says: I

don’t trust you. You are not welcome here. This far, and no further.

The word “offense” is carefully chosen. It suggests that walls can wound — not

physically, but relationally and psychically. They can communicate contempt,

suspicion, or rejection without a word being spoken. Frost is nudging the reader to

think about walls not just as practical structures but as acts of communication, and

sometimes, acts of aggression.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, / That wants it down.”

This is the poem’s most famous line, and it opens and echoes throughout the poem

like a refrain. Notice Frost refuses to name what that “something” is — and that

refusal is deliberate and profound.

Nature? Earlier in the poem, frozen groundswell heaves the boulders apart every

winter. Nature literally dismantles the wall year after year, as if the earth itself resists

the partition.

Human nature? There’s a deep instinct toward connection, curiosity, and openness

in people — children especially. We are social animals. Something in us chafes at

barriers.

The cosmic or spiritual? Some readers hear in “something” a quasi-divine force — a

universe that tends toward unity, entropy, dissolution of artificial categories.

The unconscious? The vagueness of “something” is psychologically astute. We often

can’t name the part of ourselves that resists conformity, convention, or inherited

thinking — but it’s there, eroding our certainties.

By ending with “That wants it down,” Frost gives the force a kind of desire — almost

personifying it. The wall isn’t just falling apart; something wants it gone. This is

subversive and tender at once.

Thematic Angles

The Paradox of Community

The poem never actually argues that walls are bad. The narrator helps rebuild the

wall every spring! He participates in the very ritual he questions. This is Frost’s

honesty: we simultaneously crave connection and separation. The wall-mending is

itself a form of connection — the two men meet, work together, talk. The wall

enables the relationship in a strange way. So the lines aren’t a simple anti-wall

polemic; they’re an admission of complexity.

Individual vs. Inherited Tradition

The neighbor repeats his father’s saying: “Good fences make good neighbors.” He

thinks in proverbs; he doesn’t question. The narrator questions everything. These five

lines are essentially the voice of the Enlightenment — don’t build anything you can’t

justify rationally and ethically. The neighbor, by contrast, represents tradition,

continuity, inherited wisdom. Frost doesn’t entirely mock either. Both impulses are

human. Both have costs.

Political and Social Reading

Frost wrote this in 1914, but its political resonance never ages. Every era has its wall

debates — literal (border walls, ghetto walls, apartheid walls, the Berlin Wall) and

figurative (class walls, racial walls, cultural walls). The question “What I was walling in

or walling out?” is a haunting one for any nation or community grappling with

immigration, identity, or belonging. Who do we include? Who do we shut out? And

do we even know what we’re doing when we do it?

The Epistemological Angle

These lines are deeply concerned with knowledge before action — a Socratic impulse.

Don’t act on habit, tradition, or fear. Know what you’re doing and why. The narrator

doesn’t say walls are always wrong; he says building them without asking these

questions is reckless. This is a poem about the ethics of unreflective behaviour.

Frost’s Tone: Wry, Not Preachy

Crucially, Frost never lets the narrator become a moralist. He’s mischievous, a little

playful — he considers telling the neighbor that elves knocked the wall down, then

thinks better of it. The narrator’s wisdom is offered quietly, almost to himself. This

makes these lines feel like thinking aloud rather than lecturing, which is far more

persuasive and far more true to how genuine insight actually arrives.

In short, these five lines compress a whole philosophy: think before you divide,

consider who you hurt, and know that something in the world — in nature, in us — will

always push back against walls that exist without justification. That “something” is

never fully named because Frost understood that the best questions outlast their

answers.

“To attain Nirvana, now I need to do some juGod.”

“The very restlessness and attempting to become perfect is the imperfection.”

The Discovery

I have discovered the recipe for happiness

No, it is not owning the oil fields in Kuwait

Nor is it winning the John Bates Clark Medal

Nor the Merc parked in your driveway

Nor your byline in Sunday NYT

Simpler, far, far simpler than that

Just an evening at Roastery Coffee House in Banjara Hills

Sipping Cranberry Coffee and eating lasagna

What would double the happiness though

Is if a certain someone is in the opposite chair

Or we both in some other place

Else, it is just perfect, perfect.

“I have reached an age where if a girl smiles at me, I cannot read too many meanings in it.”

“Spending time with and understanding our children will make us understand philosophy faster than by reading any religious texts.”

“Love at first sight is a killing concept. But then dislike at first sight is a different kind of killing.”

“Just because you suspect you are wise; it does not mean your wisdom will be of a helluva lot useful when it comes to interpreting all the meanings in a smile. And, God’s photos and statues depict a smile on the face of the deity. Damn. It is hard enough interpreting the smile of a girl, now God is also smiling at us. Shit, we are screwed. No way we can know what life is all about.”

Think About These Things

One of the very few virtues that Ramana Maharshi extols is humility.

He says in his short book “Who Am I?”:

“To the extent we behave with humility, to that extent there will result good.”

Meanwhile, Nisargadatta Maharaj in his book “I Am That”, keeps saying repeatedly that the most important virtue is “earnestness”.

“When the mind is silent, any amount of speech and action do not vitiate that silence. Mind cannot be silent when there are desires in our being. Find out how to deal with desires.”

Betwixt Wise and Otherwise

Today’s morning comes

Like any other morning

It does not seem that different

Until I start thinking, feeling

Then, too, it does not seem that different

Unless I resist, protest, regret, wish for,

And why do I resists, protest, regret, wish for?

That seems to be the way things are

That seems to be our lot here on earth

Some may come and say things can be otherwise

Between this wise and otherwise I live my life.

“Sometimes, to be wise is to accept defeat. Why flow against the current of life?”

Suicidal Impulse

Today morning

I told a friend

“Come, let us go and commit suicide.”

“No,” the friend protested,

“I want to live and enjoy life.”

Now, I have to gather

The courage and wisdom

To travel alone

The journey cannot be given up

Just because

One’s companions want to rest.

“Duniya paison ke peeche baag rahi hai. Mai fursat ke peeche baag raha hoon. Paise bahut mushkil hai milna, mahnat karni padti hai. Fursat toh yoohee mil jaati hai, bina kuch kiye…kuch muth karo aur fursat pao…samjha karo kyunki ismay ek raaz chupi hai…lekin mai galat bhi ho sakta hoo…zindagi toh jua hai…aur judai bhi….”

“Truth divorced from love is no truth. Love divorced from truth is no love.”

“Don’t be an archaeologist. Don’t dig up the ruins of your past, otherwise you will be ruined.”

The Itch

The itch is

inside my heart.

But I am scratching the paper

with my pen.

“It was daffodils that flashed upon the inward eye of Wordsworth. On my inward eye, it is she who flashes.”

“To love someone truly is to give them the freedom to walk  away from you without any guilt or regret should they want to.”

“Someone sang, the whole night your memory troubled me. My problem is far worse. Even the whole day her memory is troubling me.”

“Sitting here alone in this coffee shop, I am lost in thought, wondering what Donne meant.”

“Something shifted in me that day when she gave me that look and said, ‘Sam, I don’t see you nowadays’. Life is full of loose ends and some knots live on inside us.”

“I told her ye death ke baraay may zyada buk buk muth karo. Hum sab har raat aath ghante ke liye mar jaatay hai.”

“There seem to be different kinds of love. Oh, oh…just when thought you can stop going to the library.”

Cutting Out the Social Self

Sartre wrote, “Hell is other people.”

But, also at the level at which Sartre is speaking, it is also true that “Heaven is other people.”

But, at this social-self level, one gets stuck in a certain level of living where the dialogue “chal daaroo peeyingay” plays out in its various shades and nuances.

And that daaroo is not the wine that Sufis would have us drink.

And, it is this social self that makes you earn more money than we need, etc.

From this social self, you need to reach inside to find your true self.

The moment you leave your social self behind, then your thinking and emotions also are less in play because most of them are in service of our social self.

“No, Kirshna, I will wage war with my love and not with bows and arrows. Jesus knew something you did not. Besides, it is not my job to wage war against injustice with bows and arrows. Isn’t that your job as the creator of this universe, which you anyway you say you are. Remember what you said about being the creator of the four castes. Then, why you are passing the buck to me. Besides, you yourself say, ‘sambhavami yuge yuge’. Deal with it, Krishna, deal with it. After all, this world is your baby. Don’t instruct me. Leave me alone to me and my love.”

“Zindagi koi jung nahi. Sirf junglee loga waisay sonchthe hai. Mai pyaar ko itna samajh chuka hoon ki pata lag gaya hai ki jung sirf woh mushkilay kada karthi hai jo pahlay nahi the, aur jo mushkilay pahlay the unka hul teek say nahi kar paatha.”

“Ye kya jung jung kahthay phir rahay ho. Mai zindagi ko tukhratha hoo, kyunki mujhe woh zindagi nahi chahiyay jahaan mujhe jung may haasil hona padtha. Jung nahi ladnay say zyada se zyada sirf meri zindagi mujhse cheen jaayegi. Cheen lo jitna chahiya utna ye meri zindagi. Mai todi poocha pehale naa ab pooch raha hoo mujhe paida karo aur zinda rakho.”

“The mind says, ‘Look, look, there are so many problems, stay focused and awake.’ Heart says, ‘Chill, I have the solution to every problem’.”

The Darkness in My Soul

For too long I have seen

The sun in me eclipsed

By something or the other that comes,

Some emotion, some yearning, some dreaming,

Between me and the truth that be

That light, that love, that beauty

Slowly I begin to see far too clearly

This flight outward that gnaws at my soul

That waits for the right consonance, right season

Waits and waits but waits in vain

Thwarted by some destiny that I cannot control

I learn to let go, knowing I can control

Neither my destiny nor that of others.

I thought I had left them all behind

That some emotion, some yearning, some dreaming

Back in the stormy days of my confused youth

Why are they coming back again to me

As if I am still accountable for I know not what.

Who was Arjuna?

Arjuna is anyone in this world who is NOT content to just keep the body alive but also seeks to keep the mind and heart alive.

Such a one finds himself having to fight many a battle on many a Kurukshetra.

Hence also such a one will keep needing the counsel of a Kirshna.

But the Arjuna who is content to keep just the body alive and lets go of the mind and heart, has no battles to fight nor has any need for any Krishna.

Understand this and not any other Gita, be that Gita of Kirshna or Ashtavakra.

👍🏼 just the B and when the pot breaks you are one with the rest of the only consciousness.

Yes.

Even before the pot (B) breaks, what keeps the illusion that you are NOT right now one with the rest of the only consciousness is ONLY the mind and heart.

When the mind and heart are NOT in play, then the illusion of separation also does NOT exist.

Like in deep sleep

Yes.

Perfectly said.

That is why, Ramana Maharshi said, “What happened in sleep is your real nature.” (Talk 304)

In many places in his Talks book, the Maharshi says something to the effect of deep sleep is NOT ignorance but reality itself.

That is why he says, one has to be in the state of wakeful sleep or jagrat sushupti.