u/ConcernHungry2999

This is a part of qawwali by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan based on Saint Amir Khusrau's poetry.

"It was the blessed night of union, I stayed awake in company of my beloved."

Light, sight, being awake are used in order to explain the truth. Because it's not really that something new has entered, just darkness has faded away.

"The body is mine but the mind belongs to the beloved."

Though self-preservation is my instinct, still how can I claim my dissolution to be my own doing? It's impossible. It's not done by me. I couldn't have been so brave, so it is grace, the higher possibility of mine.

The one who chose you is you.

It also suggests as long as there is body, this instinct would be there. And also the choice to dissolve.

"The two are of the same color."

When I saw myself honestly, I found out that my stories and narratives are false. With this seeing, my falseness started shedding away, and I started dissolving, until I got dissolved to my beloved. The beloved is nothing but the removal of my falseness. In a sense, me and my beloved became one.

"Love is the river whose current follows the other way."

Usual actions come out of self-preservation. This is not love. Love is when this instinct itself is rejected. Therefore all the social and cultural conventions based on the same instinct also meet the same fate.

"Whoever enters this river is drowned, the one who surrendered and sank, reached the other shore."

Only the one who showed enough courage to get into the stream, could reach the other shore. This is something that you can get only by drowning, by losing yourself.

"Having fashioned an image of myself, I went to my beloved. But when I saw the beloved's image, I forgot my own."

I had preserved myself when I went to him, I was such a miser. But when I willingly gave up myself, it was mystical. Beloved is not an image at all, he is the name of my own disappearance only. I got to know that I was my own bondage.

"You have taken away my identity, every mark of who I was, just by meeting my eyes."

I think the same thread is running in each sentence. This is a song that fits the ego that enjoys its own dissolution. Ego loving its dissolution means basically all the objects it possessed it is losing grip on those things that made it up. It's seeing its own falseness with pleasure that can be seen in the hymn itself.

Ego is 'I am X'. It is an incompleteness, that continuously identifies with xyz objects. On its own it is nothing. It can't say I am. Falling of ego is joy, because ego itself was suffering. This isn't absence pain, it's the absence of one suffering and therefore suffering.

I was also able to relate one quote to the song:

The highest thing in man is not his god. It's that in him which knows the REVERENCE due a god. ~Ayn Rand

This love itself is the highest thing in a man. It's that in him that loves his own dissolution. That is respectable. The dissolution of falseness, identity, and ignorance. A self that was likely to love preservation keeps giving up itself continuously.

Share your perspectives in the comments section below.

Sources:

AP Framework: https://acharyaprashant.org/en/ap-framework?did=d8f3ca08-f603-4882-9ef6-0180d51aeea0

I have always equated freedom with having options.
More careers, more people to date, more places to live, things to buy, lifestyles to explore.
Growing up, this sounded like THE DREAM!

I mean my parents didn't have many of these options, so surely I should feel more free, more privileged no?

But then reality hit. This should-ness doesn't really seem to land or translate into a feeling of freedom. Presence of too many options sometimes feels crippling instead. I have been trying to understand why.

This video made something that was already there within me surface.
Not that having options is bad. Ofc, having choices that the previous generations didn't have can be freeing. But there's this a gap I'm trying to make sense of: why doesn't the presence of more choices necessarily translate into the experience of greater freedom?

Why does almost every decision remain provisional because there might alwayss be something better? Another job, another relationship, city, lifestyle, another version of ourselves.
Am I ever completely here then with the choice I've made?
Or am I already comparing it with the possibility of something else?

If every option is an opportunity, but nothing ever feels sufficient, am I actually experiencing freedom?

Some anchor seems to be missing, a certain center / a north star within that knows. And hence is not pulled in so many directions, even in the presence of options. Thoughts?

Watch full video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bRKiifwwKY&t=198s

Today's question is regarding Arctic permafrost and the organic carbon stored within it.

📄 Facts:

Arctic permafrost is any ground comprising soil, sediment, gravel, and organic matter that remains completely frozen at or below 0°C (32°F) for at least two consecutive years. It covers roughly 15% to 22% of the land surface in the Northern Hemisphere.

Carbon Storage Capacity:

Permafrost acts as a massive global carbon sink. This is because over tens of thousands of years, dead plant and animal matter accumulated without fully decomposing due to extreme cold and oxygen-starved conditions, which leads to locking of the organic carbon inside the permafrost.

Climate Change Consequences:

As global temperatures rise with the Arctic warming nearly four times faster than the global average, the permafrost thawing creates a self-reinforcing climate feedback loop:

Warming temperatures ➡️ Permafrost thaws ➡️ Microbial decomposition ➡️ Gas emission ➡️ Accelerated global warming ➡️ repeat!

🪞 Reflection:

We know the permafrost carbon feedback loop, we know its far reaching consequences on humanity in the near future, and we all very well know that all of it is anthropogenic, we promise big things in our climate summits, and yet no real change has been brought in this direction. Our world leaders are sitting back and doing nothing, as if nothing can stop the horrors of climate catastrophe from happening.

Now this belief in the inevitability of climate change is what I find interesting, it has its roots in the same ego, which refuses to take the responsibility even in the smallest matters.

Ego is so stubborn that it is declaring that it cannot change its ways, it cannot drop its false beliefs of the fulfillment from consumption, even at the cost of putting whole humanity in danger. That's the ego's typical behaviour: Self preservation over everything else!

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It's important to know the facts related to climate change like the one asked in question today, share your insights from today's question and its relation to ego's unending need for consumption.

Drop your answers in the comment section below, there can be multiple answers too ⬇️

Today upon seeing several posts on Bhagat Singh on his birth anniversary, thought to begin a new read.. that is making me understand Bhagat Singh not just as a revolutionary, but as a reader. At just 23, Bhagat Singh had read remarkably widely.. Marx, Lenin, Rousseau, Bakunin, Dostoevsky, Bertrand Russell, and many others. His prison notebook contains excerpts and reflections drawn from a remarkably diverse range of writers. His writings such as Why I Am an Atheist, Letter to Young Political Workers, and his jail writings show that he was not merely a man of action, but a young thinker constantly questioning, reading, and examining his own ideas!

Someone also suggested the book Kranti by Acharya Prashant to me, to look at revolution beyond political change. What if it also means breaking the inner structures that keep a human mind afraid, conditioned, and obedient? Kranti has chapters specifically exploring Bhagat Singh, his atheism, and what made him revolutionary.

Bhagat Singh's books are worth revisiting not merely to remember what he fought against, but to understand what kind of a human he was trying to become. On Bhagat Singh's Jayanti, maybe the best tribute is to pick up one of his writings, and read.

A video recently went viral of a mum in a store comparing shorts for 18-month-old boys and girls.

Her question was rather simple:
Why are clothes for children of the same age designed so differently?

The boys’ shorts were longer. Girls’ were shorter.
It wasn’t just the color or style - the cut, fabric, and amount of body covered were different too.

More pertinent question here is:
Why do ideas about what a “girl” and a “boy” should look like begin so early?

Psychology calls one part of this process Gender Schema Theory.
Children gradually learn categories like “for boys” and “for girls” through clothes, toys, advertisements, stories, parents, and the people around them.

By around as little as 2-3, gender stereotypes can already begin appearing, and by 5-7, some of these beliefs can become quite rigid!

So a child doesn’t just learn, that hey these are girls’ clothes.
Over time, these associations become:
”This is what a girl looks like.”
”This is what a girl or a boy SHOULD look like.”
”This is how a girl or boy .. SHOULD present themselves.”

And when an identity is repeated enough, it begins to feel like natural, like mine.
I’m a girl, I should look attractive, looking attractive is important for me!

The markets seem to have cracked the code.
First, make an identity important. Then create a need to preserve it. Then sell that need back as a personal choice.

Maybe treat this post as a nudge to look at small things around you.
Where have we created separate standards for genders, and where have we absorbed these standards so deeply, that we no longer experience them as something imposed, but simply as normal, simply as “yea, this is how it is! 🤷🏻‍♀️”

Ocyceros birostris

WB, India

September, 2026

Shot by me

I think this quote is touching something uncomfortable.

Yes, from the outside, other people lie to us, manipulate, hide, all the time.
But the question here is: what lies at the core of us allowing ourselves to be deceived?

An external lie is just noise until we accept it.
When we do, we stop being passive victims of deception and start to become active participants in it.

Others might do whatever... but the final choice of how it enters our internal domain and affects us is ours.

So why do we open the gate?

Because the truth feels like a threat!
Beneath every accepted lie is a hidden bargain: we choose the comfort of a manageable illusion over the chaos of painful reality.

We deceive ourselves to preserve a familiar story.. to protect our fragile sense of identity.. to avoid the terrifying burden of having to act on what we actually see.

In the end, others may hand us the script, but we are the ones who agree to read the lines.

Ahh, that stung.

Somewhere in the very lap of nature :)