u/No-Singer-2128

Ever experienced the state where you're so immersed in something that you totally forget yourself? That you simply lose the track of time? That state where one forgets oneself is beautiful. The sense of self, which is called "I-am"ness or the ego is the one who suffers. When the ego is at its minimal state, then there's no one left to experience suffering. True Bhakti means loving that state. The state of dissolution of the self, the ego. It cannot be called a state because it's never final, there's a continuous journey of the dissolution of the ego, and the ego which loves this journey is called Bhakt.

I fell in love with my own absence is Bhakti

It's been a very common misconception among the masses that Brahm is something which is "metaphysical" and has to be attained. And rational atheists use this disinformation to discard entire teachings of Advait Vedant. Brahm is neither material nor metaphysical. Brahm has to do more with psychology because Advait Vedant is there to eliminate suffering and this suffering too is psychological.

For instance, I say that "I am nervous about my upcoming exam". Who is nervous here? Is it the body? Is it the hands, legs, small-intestine? No, it's the one who says "I am", is nervous. "I am" is the sense of self. This sense of self is psychological. And that's why everything related to this psychological thing is also psychological. The brain can prepare for the exam and also give the exam without needing this "sense of self". Instead this sense of self creates hurdles in the natural flow of the brain. The dissolution of this sense of self is Brahm. Brahm is just a direction where the continuous dissolution of this sense of self takes place, but the complete dissolution never happens because this sense of self arises from the bodily configuration. So Brahm is just a direction of self-dissolution, when the self keeps on continuously dissolving, right and beautiful actions happen on their own, the body is capable of that.

In this day and age AI is a term which is largely associated with the chatbots available which are termed as Large Language Models (LLMs). Anthropomorphization (attributing human-like traits) of an LLM has become the norm because the replies given by it seem so perfect. However, the difference between a human and an LLM is that, humans can think, LLMs cannot. LLMs convert natural language words to tokens and can thus predict which token could come after the preceding token. It cannot make sense of the sentence (sequence of tokens) it has formed. Humans on the other hand can make sense of the word they're using and also interpret in very different ways. For an LLM the word is just a number and it just finds other numbers from the "feature space" available to it. Humans also have the ability to reflect upon what they said and why, an LLM cannot, because it doesn't understand anything. It just has an "attention mechanism" that allows it to retain a large sequence of tokens. Not to mention the amount of Earth's resources which have been put just to keep it running. Do you think it's worth to hype this technology to this extent that it's eating up resources extensively on our limited planet? And what's the hype behind all of this? That we have discovered a technology which could go sentient.

The biggest gift you can give yourself is to see that you don't exist. The moment you see your inexistence your hands, legs, heart, brain, basically the entire body comes in congruence with nature. The body is a part of nature and you distort that. Your presence distorts the natural movement of the body. See, contemplate when you're so immersed into something that you forget about yourself and those are the moments where whatever you do is the best. You reach heights you weren't capable of otherwise. Who are you? You're this tingling sense which says "I am". You not only say that you claim as the owner of the body. Yes the configuration of the body is such that this sense of "I am" ness takes birth with the body and though it's there in other animals as well but not to the extent as it's found in human being. That's because of the body's configuration. It's this sense of "I am" ness which feels incomplete and restless. The body feels hunger which can be satiated by food, the hunger of "I am" ness is psychological and hence has no end. That's why no matter how much you feed it, it never ends, and this is what termed as suffering in Advait.

Advait is not a doctrine rather just an enquiry in this sense of incompleteness called "I am". The ones who went deep into the enquiry figured out that this sense of "I am" is hollow, it's a lie, it doesn't exist. The one saying "I am" doesn't exist. And they called it as Brahm. Brahm is neither material nor metaphysical. Brahm simply means your inexistence. This psychological restlessness called "I am" when is absent, that's what Brahm is. Brahm doesn't mean that this "I am" is replaced by some godly entity, Brahm is just the non-existence of your sense of self. You're at your best in your inexistence. This state of your non-existence is called joy.

And in your inexistence, the body which is a part of nature will interact with nature in the most beautiful way. Nature interacting and playing with nature. And one part of nature can never harm nature as a whole. This is how we beat climate change. The solution to climate change is presence of the body with your absence

As per Charvaka philosophy pleasure is the ultimate goal of life. Pleasure which can be related to happiness is possible only if you consume more. The more you consume, the happier you are.

Advait on the other hand, just gets into this inquiry as to who's the one who wants to consume? This inquiry gets even more deeper which then explores the "ego self", which by its nature is incomplete. Therefore, to complete itself it jumps from one object to the other in the external world, but to no avail. It never reaches completion or fulfillment it was seeking. Advait therefore questions whether this incompleteness is even real? Advait is not against consumption, it just questions the hunger. Questioning is important because this movement from one object to the other is not merely a metaphor but the very pattern of our lives, our entire lifetime is spent in seeking this fulfillment.

This philosophy that happiness is the religion and consumption is the ritual is harming our planet as well, as consumption is carbon. This consumption, done for fulfillment is never ending. Some would argue that it's never about fulfillment rather the temporary comfort but is the hunger even real? It has to be questioned because the result of this untested psychological hunger is the present climate crisis.

I read about inclusive fitness which says that the "love" we have for our family members is nothing but genes wanting to propagate themselves. It doesn't matter to them whose body it is, the goal is just to survive. For instance, if a mother gives birth to two babies and for the babies to survive the mother must die, then the genes will ensure that this happens. Because two bodies are always better than one since chances of survival increase.

From a spiritual perspective this could be understood in a way that the I, the ego, who's the claimant, will claim that this entire biological process is my love. Science says otherwise

It's a physical process where there's no choice available at least for other animals, but for humans there always exists a choice where they can see what's exactly happening. Isn't it funny that everything we do is just that those tiny genes want to survive? And the programming by nature is so strong that we become serious about this game, and nature doesn't care in which body do the genes survive.

Science indeed could help to see things clearly!

Before coming in contact with Acharya Ji's teachings, for me Krishna was a person with certain attributes like the one with the peacock feather who plays a flute. But after learning true meaning of Krishna from Acharya ji I was just amazed how practical the Gita is.

Krishna means my withdrawal. Why is my withdrawal auspicious? I am restless, feel incomplete all the time because that's what my nature is. No object in the world can help me get rid of this restlessness, the only way out is to dissolve the one who's restless. Krishna is not a person rather a principle! My dissolution is Krishna.

Thank you Acharya ji!

I am currently pursuing a second degree and I always wonder what could I do which I didn't do in my previous degree? I don't want to repeat the same mistakes I did but the people around me make the environment such that I start running behind grades and recognition. I don't think people are the problem here, it's me who has given weightage to grades and stuff. It tells me more about me. I guess being a student means that you're exploring what you like, taking what the university has to offer, learning as much as you can. And this attitude should be for the rest of the life as well, isn't it?