I was driving on the Confederation Bridge in New Brunswick, Canada, at around 5:30 in the morning, singing this bhajan that I just absolutely love, and I started recording it. The Confederation Bridge of Canada connects Prince Edward Island to New Brunswick and is 12.9 km long. Just so you know, below it’s all ocean!

I came across this bhajan through the Indian philosopher Acharya Prashant, whose interpretation really attracted me to this bhajan. I think I am still trying to grasp what exactly Kabir Sahab is trying to convey, but this is simply my personal take on it.

The lines I am singing in the video are:

“जुगन-जुगन समझावत हारा, कहा न मानत कोई रे।
तू तो रंगी फिरै बिहंगी, सब धन डारा खोई रे।”

“For ages, I have been trying to explain it; yet no one listens. You, like a bird, keep wandering coloured by the world, and in doing so, you lose all your real wealth.”

What I understood:

My understanding of these phrases of Kabir Sahab is that the truth has been spoken and reiterated over and over, but the mind is not willing to listen. It only seeks to keep moving along the path of seeking in colors, pleasures, possessions, achievements, etc., hoping that the next thing it will grasp will complete it.
He seems to be speaking to the ego: wherever the ego goes, like a chameleon, it takes on the colors of everything it encounters, be it consumerism, materialism, objects, or desires. In trying to fill its own emptiness, the ego keeps stuffing itself with more things that, sooner or later, it becomes burdened by.

However, whatever the ego takes on is not permanent. Objects, desires, relationships, even our dreams and worries, are all temporary. And in chasing after fleeting things to fill a void within ourselves, the ego has lost sight of what truly matters inside. Kabir Sahab’s metaphor of the mind as a bird, colored by the world and flitting from place to place, is what I think is trying to capture that sense of longing to fill this inner emptiness.
My personal reflection

What I feel is that this has been exactly the same with me in life. Five years ago, I was a completely different person; the things I desired, feared, and thought about don't really concern me much today. However, many new desires and fears have emerged in their place. What I thought was real and what I was fixated on is gone. I feel that today, I am worried about completely different things than I used to be.

This makes me ask myself: if my internal desires, ideas, and dreams can change so drastically, how can any of these things that are ‘mine’ be considered permanent? Isn’t everything that concerns me in life just like the mind changing from one color to another, from one desire to another, and confusing those to be permanent while wasting time and life doing so?

I don’t have an answer, but this bhajan makes me reflect on what I am chasing and what it is that I am really looking for. If there’s a stop to this endless running around, I would love to hear your personal take on these lines, and also to know if this interpretation is close to what you think Kabir Sahab could have meant here.

Full bhajan:

तेरा मेरा मनुआ कैसे एक होई रे।
मैं कहता हूँ आँखन देखी, तू कहता कागद की लेखी।
मैं कहता सुरझावनहारी, तू राख्यो उरझाई रे॥
मैं कहता तू जागत रहियो, तू जाता है सोई रे।
मैं कहता निरमोही रहियो, तू जाता है मोहि रे॥
जुगन-जुगन समझावत हारा, कहा न मानत कोई रे।
तू तो रंगी फिरै बिहंगी, सब धन डारा खोई रे॥
सतगुरु धारा निर्मल बहै, बामे काया धोई रे।
कहत कबीर सुनो भाई साधो, तब ही वैसा होई रे॥

Youtube vedio: https://youtu.be/08zoPSOtV6w?si=EzNUs7AXbBfavlAq

If you use a tank to kill a mosquito, the problem may not be the tank

Imagine someone hands you a massive tank.

It has a powerful engine, heavy armour, and the capacity to strike from long range.

But what is your job?

To kill a mosquito.

You drive the tank, take aim, and finally manage to kill the mosquito.

Job done.

But the question is: did you really need a tank for this?

Our situation with AI today is very similar.

Frontier and large AI models are not just chatbots that answer questions. They can process long documents and large datasets, perform multi-step reasoning on complex problems, analyse images and other files, and assist with difficult coding tasks.

You can get a sense of their capability from some benchmarks. In OpenAI’s published benchmark table, one GPT‑5.6 configuration scored 92.3% on GPQA Diamond and 78.4% on MMMU Pro—benchmarks intended to evaluate graduate-level scientific reasoning and multimodal understanding.

In coding too, these models can handle multi-step work. In one OpenAI experiment, GPT‑5.3‑Codex ran continuously for about 25 hours, generating roughly 30,000 lines of code, running tests, and fixing errors. This was an experiment, not a guarantee that the model will reliably perform every long-running task.

So what we have in our hands is not just a fast calculator, but a tool capable of assisting with many kinds of complex work.

Now the real question is: what are we using it for?

Are we using this vast capacity to understand our inner and outer condition more clearly?

Or, even with such a powerful machine in our hands, are we still using it only for small, repetitive tasks that do not necessarily deepen our understanding?

This is where one idea I encountered in Acharya Prashant’s work became relevant to me: the challenge is not only the availability of powerful resources, but also the quality of their use.

To make proper use of powerful tools, our motives and attention need to be examined.

The problem may not lie in the objects themselves, but in the assumptions and desires of the person using them.

Before asking what AI can do, perhaps we should also ask:

What is the user trying to do with all this power?

Source https://developers.openai.com/blog/run-long-horizon-tasks-with-codex

​

6. Philosophical Anthropology: What Is a Human Being? 🧍

- A human being, in this framework, is an ego-body complex, a biological organism (with evolutionary history, neural architecture, and physical separateness) that has organized its experience around a felt sense of bounded selfhood.

- The ego is not added to the body from outside; it arises from the body's own structure, particularly the skin boundary that establishes physical separateness.

-The human being is distinguished from other animals not by the presence of an ego (animals have rudimentary egoic structures) but by the complexity, narrativity, and reflexive capacity of the human ego.

-The human ego can examine itself, which is both the source of the problem (the ego can elaborate its own distortions indefinitely) and the source of the solution (the ego can, in principle, see through them).

The same body that generates the ego is also, when the ego steps aside, the universe's instrument. Brain and body, freed from egoic commandeering, operate with a natural intelligence that exceeds anything the ego can deliberately engineer.

The highest human possibility is not the ego's triumph over the body but the ego's sufficient thinning to allow the body's natural intelligence to express itself freely.

__________________________________________________

🌸7. Aesthetics 🌸

The framework's aesthetics follow directly from its "via negativa axiology"

Beauty is defined as the absence of egoic distortion, and art, accordingly, is great when it is produced in the ego's absence. This does not require the artist to be a realized person in every dimension of life; it requires the artist to have access, in the moment of creation, to states of genuine ego-absence.

- Sustained creative work involves oscillation: moments of ego-absence in which something genuinely beautiful is made, and the ego's return, which produces the work that connects those moments.

-The practised artist learns, in editing, to distinguish between what was made in the ego's absence and what was made in its presence, and has the honesty to honour that distinction.

The reception of art is also ego-determined. Two people may weep at the same music; one is having their ego confirmed and enlarged, the other is having their ego loosened. The external behaviour is identical; the inner direction is opposite.

The framework holds that what is called "taste" is, in large part, the ego's preference for art that serves its own project.

Animals also have ego but why aren't they violent as human beings? What do you think about this ?

What's the difference between negativa axiology and positive axiology?

I don't know when the sky became my beloved, but I know I keep longing for it. I don't fully understand this longing, but I don't want it to disappear either.

I am such a tiny human, yet my eyes want the sky. Why am I so inclined to love the infinite?

Have you ever thought about what your relationship with the sky is? Have you ever wondered how you and the sky are linked? Why can't my love for the sky just die? 

I am so desperate to be one with the sky. I can't touch it, but I want to be touched by it.

Do I need to try to become one with the sky? What is it that makes me separate from the love of the sky?

I just don't want to listen when someone says it is impossible. Let me try to move towards the sky, to be one with existence. Let the movement persist forever, by dissolving the one that separates me from my beloved.

Sometimes, it makes me feel as if I am the one who becomes the resistance by wanting to become the sky. I never realize that the one who wants to become something is already creating a distance from the very thing he is trying to become.

Love for infinity makes me realize that perhaps loving and understanding it is itself my love for the infinite. Getting out of my pettiness, my comfort, and my desires, I want to take the flight of love towards the sky. 

I want my feathers to realise: my love is the sky. 

There is a dark emptiness in my heart that seeks to be filled by the love of the sky. The craving for my beloved needs to be understood. Without understanding the darkness within, how can I understand what resists me from reaching towards my beloved? 

My beloved seems to ask me: Before you reach out to me, understand the resistance that keeps you away from me.

The more I deviate, the more the subtle pain becomes intensified. And perhaps that pain is also asking me to look within.

Maybe the sky was never asking me to become it. Maybe it was asking me to understand what keeps me from seeing that I was never separate from it.

In 1865, German chemist August Kekulé was trying to understand the structure of benzene. Its chemical formula was known, but it was not clear how its carbon atoms were connected to one another.

At that time, straight-chain or branched structures were the more natural way to think about molecules. But for benzene, the idea of a ring of six carbon atoms was a completely new possibility.

Kekulé later described a dream in which he saw just such a circular arrangement of atoms. This experience is often linked to the origin of the idea of benzene’s ring structure.

 But seeing a possibility and proving it are two different things.

Almost six decades later, in 1929, Kathleen Lonsdale studied the crystal structure of hexamethylbenzene using X‑ray crystallography. 

Her work played a crucial role in providing decisive evidence in support of benzene’s hexagonal, planar structure.

So imagination revealed a possibility, but the scientific process subjected that possibility to the test of evidence.

 The question here is not only about the scientific outlook.

Within us, our assumptions do not remain just assumptions. They gradually form a picture of who we are and how we see the world.

“This is just how I am.”

“This is just how the world is.”

“There is no way this could be otherwise.”

Slowly, this picture becomes part of our identity. When a new possibility appears, we do not look at it simply to see whether it is true or false. Somewhere inside, we also look to see whether it protects the picture we have built or threatens it.

This is where the structure of the ego becomes visible.

A belief is formed.

From that belief, an inner picture of ourselves takes shape.

Identity becomes tied to that picture.

Then arises the need to preserve it.

Whatever fits that picture feels easy to accept. Whatever challenges it begins to make us uncomfortable.

The scientific outlook works differently. It does not accept a new possibility just because it is appealing, and it does not reject it simply because it does not fit the existing picture. It brings every possibility before evidence.

Do I do the same with my assumptions?

Do I reject something because evidence is against it, or because it disturbs the picture I have built of myself and the world?

Do I accept something only because it agrees with my pre‑existing beliefs?

Has defending my assumptions quietly become my way of avoiding real examination?

Source

Hackaday Kathleen Lonsdale Saw Through The Structure Of Benzene

https://hackaday.com/2021/06/29/kathleen-lonsdale-saw-through-the-structure-of-benzene/

I think the interesting thing about some movies is that you start watching one story and somewhere along the way, another story starts playing in your own head. Kinda surreal! That happened to me while watching “Seven Years in Tibet”.

I watched it few years back also and it was absolutely about brad pitt..Lol. This time i started watching it, expecting a film about Tibet, mountains and the extraordinary circumstances that bring Harrer (the protagonist) into the life of the young Dalai Lama. But somewhere along the way, I found myself thinking less about Tibet and more about Harrer himself. He travels thousands of kilometres, crosses mountains, escapes a war and enters a completely different world, yet what he slowly comes to see is something that was with him from the beginning. His need to achieve, to prove himself, to be somebody, to win. And that made me think about how often we do the same thing.

That is probably why I would recommend this movie. Not because Tibet has some magical answer, or because the movie tells us to "withdraw" from ordinary life. In fact, I found the opposite more interesting. Tibet is only the setting!! The real journey is seeing what drives Harrer and, through him, perhaps seeing something about ourselves. He thinks he is going there to conquer mountains, but slowly we see the deeper need behind that conquest. And the person he thinks he is teaching ends up changing him in ways he could not have imagined. By the end, he doesn't become some perfect or enlightened man. He simply begins to see his life more honestly and takes responsibility for what he had neglected.

For me, that is what makes the movie worth watching. We can travel very far looking for a different life, but if we don't look at the mind that is seeking it, we simply carry the same mind to a different place. Are you still reading this? Go, watch the movie!

Credits: (automovilismo_argento)

My career as an economics professional has had its ups and downs, and there have been times when I’ve struggled with what I actually want from my work. My approach for a long time was quite simple… find a well-paying profession and keep going. But somewhere along the way, I realized that we often confuse what we are passionate about with what pays more, and the two don’t always go together. This book by philosopher Acharya Prashant has been a bit of a North Star for me in that sense. It has helped me look at my career and my idea of success a little differently. Sharing it here because I felt it might resonate with people on this sub too. Would love to know what others think, has your idea of success changed as you’ve grown?

We were filming a little promo video for our puppet theater performance, and somehow this happened. 😂

No choreography. No explanation. Just vibes.
Japanese string puppetry meets… whatever this dance is. 🤣

Something about the way we talk about the climate crisis feels strange. We know that burning fossil fuels keeps adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, yet so much attention goes toward finding technological ways around the consequences. Ideas like using huge fleets of satellites to reflect sunlight may sound futuristic, but they don't remove the carbon we continue putting into the atmosphere. They simply raise another question: are we trying to solve the problem, or make it possible to continue living exactly as we do?

This thought was triggered by a discussion I came across recently on the climate crisis and our fascination with technological escape routes. Sharing the video here for context: https://youtu.be/loyH5RkeJCg?si=FGugkutAB69-rHd8

There is something uncomfortable about damaging your own home and then searching for a technological trick that lets you continue doing it. Perhaps our biggest problem isn't a lack of clever ideas, but our unwillingness to question the lifestyle behind the damage. We want more consumption, more convenience and more growth, while hoping technology will somehow absorb the consequences. And when someone promises a miraculous solution, we are often eager to believe it because it means we don't have to change.

That is why the climate crisis is also a human problem. Technology can change what we are capable of doing, but it cannot decide what we should want. Unless we learn to question our endless demand for more, every new invention can simply become another way of consuming more resources.

Space exploration is fascinating, and there is nothing wrong with dreaming about other worlds. But Earth isn't a stepping stone to somewhere else. It is the home we already have.

And perhaps this is where the conversation becomes uncomfortable: what if our greatest technological achievements are being used to help us avoid a much simpler question that “are we willing to change the way we live?..”

Glaciers are collapsing, lakes are bursting, and rivers are changing, yet we keep hearing the same solutions:solar panels, electric cars, tree plantations, another summit. After decades of summits, emissions continue to rise.

So an uncomfortable question comes up: Are we treating the disease, or only the fever? We often treat climate change as a technical problem, too much carbon, so reduce carbon. But where does the carbon come from? Consumption. And why do we keep consuming more? Perhaps there is an emptiness within us that we rarely stop to examine, and we are taught to fill it with things: a bigger house, a better car, another holiday, the next upgrade. 

But the emptiness never seems to disappear, so the next thing is always needed. The emptiness within is bottomless. The Earth is not. That is where the collision begins.

Banning CFCs was relatively straightforward, but carbon is woven into almost everything we love, the tea we drink, the cars we drive, the flights we take, the homes we build. Consumption is emission. Technology can make consumption more efficient, but efficiency doesn't necessarily end it, a better engine can simply allow us to drive more. 

Perhaps the deeper crisis is not only in the atmosphere, but in the human mind that keeps demanding more. Before asking how to save the planet, perhaps we need to ask: who is consuming it? Maybe self-observation is where another kind of environmentalism begins, when we understand ourselves well enough that consumption becomes less compulsive. First know the one who is heating it.

One of the deeper points from the session stayed with me: the ego does not merely want to possess. It loves to become.

I meditate so that I become peaceful. I study so that I become knowledgeable. I practice spirituality so that I become enlightened.

None of these things sounds wrong on the surface. But then came the uncomfortable question: Who is this becoming for?

If the purpose of an activity is still centred around preserving, improving, or strengthening the "me," then even something like meditation can become another project of the ego. The activity may look spiritual, but the centre of it hasn't really changed.

That made me look differently at the idea of liberation. Mukti cannot simply mean becoming a better version of myself. If the same self remains at the centre, then perhaps I have only changed its qualities without ever questioning its existence.

Maybe mukti is not a destination to reach, but a continuous movement of one's own dissolution.

There is no fixed path toward an endpoint called freedom. Even the destination itself can become another possession of the ego: I have arrived. I am enlightened. I have become spiritual.

The ego loves becoming because becoming always gives it something to preserve. The deeper movement seems to be different.

Not "How can I become more?"

But: "What can I stop making myself into?"

That question also changed the way I think about education. If education only makes the ego more efficient, more knowledgeable, more capable, and more powerful, then it may simply strengthen the very centre that needs to be questioned.

So perhaps the purpose of education cannot be merely the accumulation of knowledge. It must also help us see through the darkness of the one who uses that knowledge.

The same principle applies to institutions.

Going to an institution is not inherently good or bad. What matters is the direction of the movement. If I enter an institution simply to strengthen my ego, I may come out as a more sophisticated version of what I already am. But if I enter it with the intention of seeing through my own darkness, the same institution can serve a completely different purpose.

This is where the distinction between self-preservation and self-dissolution becomes important.

Every activity can move in either direction. One strengthens the centre. The other questions it. And perhaps our lives reveal which direction we are actually moving in.

A machine becoming more efficient is not necessarily a good thing. The more efficient a machine becomes, the more widely it can be used. Efficiency amplifies whatever purpose the machine already serves.

Perhaps the same is true of us. If knowledge, technology, education, or intelligence makes the ego more efficient, then our capacity for misuse also increases.

Power without self-knowledge becomes dangerous. That is why the real question is not merely: "How capable have I become?" 

It is: "What is this capability serving?"

Every leaf of a tree reflects its root. Perhaps our actions are like that too. An action may look different on the surface, but it eventually reveals the centre from which it arises.

So perhaps the question is not whether I am active or inactive, worldly or spiritual, educated or uneducated. The question is much more fundamental:

Am I moving toward self-preservation, or toward the dissolution of the one who keeps trying to preserve itself?

That is the question I am still sitting with.

I've been thinking about our rivers lately. We often take them for granted, but a significant part of northern India's river systems depend on glaciers, and those glaciers are shrinking. 

A 2025 study reported that the Gangotri Glacier is retreating by around 22.3 metres per year. 22.3 metres every year. I find that number difficult to even picture. But when I think about what it means for the rivers and the millions of people who depend on them, it becomes much harder to ignore. 

What is unsettling is that the first stage may not even look like a water shortage. As glaciers retreat and melt increases, rivers can initially carry more water, increasing the risk of flooding and putting adjoining plains and communities at greater risk. But as the glaciers continue to shrink, the longer-term concern is far more serious: less reliable water flow when we need it most.

And this is where I struggle to understand our response.

What troubles me even more is the sheer number of people who could be affected. India is likely to be among the countries facing the greatest impact. And yet, the level of public concern often feels strangely low. 

Talk to people around us about climate change and you will often hear, "It doesn't really affect us." Sometimes, even, "It's a hoax." 

I don't think this indifference comes from people being bad or uncaring. Perhaps the problem is that climate change feels too distant. A glacier somewhere in the Himalayas doesn't look connected to the water coming out of our taps, the crops growing in our fields, or the cities where we live.

But it is connected.

For more than two decades, Acharya Prashant has been warning people to take climate change seriously and to wake up to what is happening around us. What worries me is not only that the glaciers are retreating.

It is that we are becoming comfortable with knowing and still not acting.

At some point, climate change stops being a question of whether we believe in it. The mountains, glaciers, rivers and changing weather patterns don't need our belief.

They are simply responding to what we are doing. And perhaps the real question is not "Will climate change affect us?"

How much more evidence do we need before knowing ourselves teaches us the wisdom to care?

I had some free time to kill, and picked this up on Blinkit.

What does the sub think about this book?

45 days ago, a 70 kg bench press, 160 kg leg press, and 140 kg rack pull felt far away. Today, those numbers are here. The physical progress feels good, of course, but somewhere along the way, the questions became more interesting than the numbers.

What does it actually mean to become stronger? Is strength only about what the body can lift, or can it also be about becoming more conscious of the choices that shape our lives?

That questioning gradually changed the way I looked at food. Veganism wasn't something I arrived at simply because of a diet plan. It came from looking a little more carefully at what I consume, why I consume it, and what my choices mean for another living being.

There was also an assumption I had to question: that physical strength must somehow come at the cost of another life. These 45 days haven't given me all the answers, but they have shown me that the two don't necessarily have to be in conflict.

The numbers are encouraging, but they are not really the point. What matters more is the shift in attention, from simply asking "What can I gain?" to asking "What kind of person do I want to become through my choices?"

I'm still learning. But perhaps becoming stronger doesn't only mean adding more weight to the bar. Perhaps it can also mean becoming a little more aware of what we consume, what we support, and the life around us.

For me, that has been the more meaningful part of these 45 days.

And somewhere in the background of this journey, Acharya Prashant's teachings gave me the questions that made me look at these ordinary choices differently.

The prominent thing which differentiates human beings from animals is that they ‘suffer’. From the very first moment of humans’ birth, they start feeling restlessness.. and this restlessness makes them to thrive consumption. Because they couldn’t understand this suffering, they start reaching out to each and every outer object whichever comes to their radar in order to fulfil their thriving and to get rid of this core suffering.

It’s been said that during his journey towards understanding human suffering, Gautam Buddha once sat beneath a bodhi tree and received the below four aphorisms famously known as “The Four Noble Truths” during his meditation.

The Four Noble Truths are the core teachings of Buddhism. They explain why humans suffer and how one can get rid of this suffering forever.

The Four Truths were:
Dukkha: Life is suffering.
Samudaya: Desire is the root cause of this suffering.
Nirodha: Suffering can end through understanding one’s desires.
Magga: The Noble Eightfold Path leads to the understanding of desire. 

If we analyse the whole world holistically today, we would be able to clearly see this fact that “consumption” has become the root cause of earth’s climate and ecological collapse. Humans have started eating up this earth blindly without even questioning themselves ‘what for’ they are consuming so much! Every other human being today needs a whole new set of clothing or gadgets to suffice himself. And this hunger is not only restricted to clothing or gadgets, but it reflects on everything which we consume.. starting from food varieties to relationship partner varieties, these craving for varieties has become infinite.

Maybe that's the beauty of these philosophical aphorisms, that they portray us a “timeless” phenomenon. The problem of “desire” which Gautam Buddha is trying to refer to so many years ago via his principles of Noble Truths is exactly expressing the same “root cause” which we witness even today. The root reason why humans consume so much is exactly this same “desire”. We don’t want to know why we consume, and who is the one within who is craving these demands? We know nothing.. and never bother to enquire! It is this desire which even pushes today’s modern human being towards consumption.

So, maybe that's why the results are also similar! As human consumption is increasing endlessly, human suffering is also increasing equally at a similar pace. According to the World Health Organisation’s report, Mental illnesses now rank as a leading cause of disability worldwide, costing the global economy roughly $1 trillion each year in lost productivity - World Health Organization (WHO).

This can’t be a mere coincidence for sure. Perhaps what Gautam Buddha wanted to convey is true ie., the desire is actually the root cause of human suffering. And unless we understand this desire, our restlessness and suffering also won’t end. 

But irrespective of knowing the facts, we still don’t want to question our desires.. maybe now it’s the time to question ourselves: “Why we don’t want to question our desires?”