u/Surkhab1313

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I tried something new by marinating tofu in vegan yogurt, spices, Sriracha, and primo squeeze (whatever I had in hand) and fried it in air fryer. It came out to be verh delicious.

I actually had 2 samosas to begin with, so did this tofu experiment and added 3 lettuce leafs because plate was looking empty without veggies especially green ones.

Have you tried such last minute hacks?

This video contains a very important message.

All you need to do is give your attention for 3 minutes.

If you skip it or shut it down, you will miss it.

If you got no message, you probably haven't watched every second of the video.

Good luck 👍

Most of us can relate to this. But I am very positive that there are very few of us who have seriously thought about why this happens.

Let’s take a dive into it.

What can be seen at first glance?

Lack of self-knowledge.

I don’t know about myself, about this entity that sits within and claims, “I am,” and that too in the sense of separation from the rest of the world.

I don’t know about the objects in my life either. How do they operate? What is the cause-and-effect chain behind them? How are they being created?

And most importantly, I don’t know the relationship between the two.

There are several objects in my life. There are several principles I hold, several beliefs I hold. But why are they even present there? Where did they come from? What sustains them?

Vagueness arrives as an answer.

And from here arises the second half of the statement: telling others that everything will be fine.

But how do I actually know this?

Because I was told the same thing by someone else. In fact, I am still being told the same thing by the people around me.

It’s like clouds floating on the surface of the Earth’s troposphere, never having the curiosity to visit the depths of the atmosphere. Information keeps floating from one person to another, but nobody stops to enquire into its depth.

And what happens when these clouds decide to come down?

They lose their current form.

What once appeared as a cloud starts revealing its true form, water, as it reaches the depths. And what is not water never actually reaches down to form another cloud. It is destined to remain on the surface.

Similarly, when this ignorant person decides to know himself and understand his relationship with the objects of the world, this future assurance drops automatically.

The future is seen for what it actually is: mere imagination built on the grounds of the past.

Just one decision: questioning in the inward direction.

And slowly, all the missed pieces start coming back into their place, while the unnecessary ones get filtered out automatically.

I have shared my interpretation of this meme. Now it’s your turn.

Let’s see what kind of environment different minds create in the comments section.

​

I had sung our National Anthem for almost fifteen years of my life as a daily routine. But when I sat with it a few days ago, I realized that many of the words that lived in my memory were hollow, and the rest were merely repeated without understanding.

My journey towards the Anthem itself is beautiful.

A few days earlier, I had watched Acharya Prashant’s session on Poem 34 of Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore. There, I discovered the depth and subtlety of Tagore’s writing. It immediately struck me: how do I know Rabindranath Tagore at all? And at once, the answer appeared before me: our National Anthem.

This beautiful coincidence brought me back to the Anthem during this week of patriotism.

As I began exploring its meanings and translations, I discovered how beautifully the poet expresses the people of the nation and the unity that exists amidst immense diversity. Beginning from Punjab, moving along Sindh, accompanied by Gujarat and Maharashtra, Tagore draws a circle that embraces us all as a nation, as a shared identity. He reaches Bengal, and then speaks through the language of nature itself: the Vindhyas, the Himalayas, the Yamuna, and the Ganga.

But one question struck me deeply and stayed with me for days:

Who is the one being addressed here?

The poet calls Him Adhinayak (Leader) and Bhagya Vidhata (the Dispenser of Destiny) in the opening lines, and Mangaldayak (the Auspicious One) in the closing verses. Every Indian wakes in His name, prays to Him, and sings His glory:

Jaya he, Jaya he, Jaya he.

I was curious, but also restless.

This uncertainty kept pinching me. Something that I had sung all my life, something that formed a part of my identity, and yet, when I tried to understand it, I could not even identify the central entity to whom it was addressed.

I wanted to wrap it in a familiar face.

"Is it the nation?"

"No, it cannot be, because the poet explicitly says that this is the Bhagya Vidhata of Bharat. It seems to point beyond Bharat itself."

Then came another interpretation: "perhaps it is Chetna (Consciousness), the collective consciousness of Indians. Perhaps it is the Ātman or Brahman of Vedanta."

High-sounding words, certainly.

But even these turned out to be borrowed concepts that I had gathered from various interpretations. The moment I questioned them deeply, I found myself blank again.

"Who is this "tav" then?"

A few discussions with AP Mirror, and the question itself began to dissolve.

I realized that I was trying to cage that which the poet had deliberately left open. Something within me is deeply afraid of uncertainty and wants to cover it with familiar and secure names.

And this revealed to me the beauty of the poet, and perhaps the beauty of the nation itself.

Tagore bows before that which he leaves unnamed.

Something deliberately left open, left free from rotten words and rigid definitions. Like a finger pointing towards that which lies beyond words.

What else is freedom?

What else is liberation?

What else is independence?

And perhaps that is why the Indian nation recognized the importance of these words and adopted them as its National Anthem.

I am beginning to understand what India stands for.

At its roots lie Self-knowledge and Vedanta. And perhaps these roots find expression in our very structures, whether in the National Anthem or in the spirit behind our Constitution.

So, what is Independence Day for me?

Not merely a historical event that freed us from foreign rule, but the very spirit of freedom itself; the call of consciousness that is destined to soar into the open sky.

And I feel grateful to belong to a land where the inquiry into consciousness has reached such profound heights.

I salute the spirit of independence. 🇮🇳 🫡

I am curious to know who else have overlooked the deep message within our National Anthem. How do we see INDIA as? What is INDIA for us?

Our freedom-era leaders had their flaws, but many sacrificed power, wealth and comfort for the country. Today, politics often feels more about power, publicity and elections than public service.

Happy Independence Day🇮🇳

We all carry certain goals in our lives. Certain expectations, certain hopes, placed on people, on psychological objects like money and prestige. And most of us take these as an obvious fact about ourselves: "I am like this", "this is who I am", "this is what I want to become in my life". The stories we hold about ourselves are mistaken for something innate, something real, as though they were the truth of who we are rather than claims about us.

And what actually happens?

These claims are left untested and taken at face value.

Our stories have a certain limitation. We are able to name the object of our desire, and then we keep meditating on its name. We think it is the object we are chasing. Some of us die in this delusion, handing utter authority to the object and grieving over never obtaining it. Others are ambitious enough to do the hard work and finally conquer the object of their desire.

Does the chase stop there?

They discover that the moment they own that object, it loses its charm, its pull. Now it is nothing more than another object in their surroundings. All of us have felt this sabotage at some point in life. Buying a new smartphone, or a new car. Ordering your favourite dish on the menu, or buying new clothes. The first few months of a relationship versus the chaos that follows. The same object we once used to dream about is now lying on our bed, or in our life.

What does this tell us about the nature of our desires?

We are not really chasing the objects of our desire but the promise they bring with them. And this points us to the root condition of all mankind: the incompleteness within. Every object that lures us is in fact promising to give us the existential fulfillment we are truly seeking. And this promise is never kept.

The void is psychological, and no physical object is capable of filling it. No object can. It lies beyond their scope.

And here comes the catch. All our efforts, all our actions, all our hopes and desires, they serve our instinct of self-preservation. Preserving the stories we hold about ourselves, preserving this search for fulfillment through the pursuit of objects, hopping from one object to another, sometimes facing defeat, yet still the hopping continues.

And not testing these stories is no coincidence.

These stories have hollow foundations underneath them. They can only survive in darkness, in ignorance. The moment they are inquired into honestly, the moment some light is shed on them, their falseness becomes visible and they collapse.

For us, fulfillment is like a distant point on the axis of self-preservation, and by chasing objects we believe we will reach it one day in the distant future.

If one sits with himself and asks, honestly:

Will these objects give me fulfillment? Will I ever be complete on the path of my life as I live it?

If this question touches the honesty within, the answer would be no.

Deep down, we are aware that our goals won't give us what we are truly seeking. And yet we keep moving further. Why? Because that is what everyone is doing. Knowing that I am going the wrong way, and that I am not alone but with the majority of the world, gives a sense of security. Along with that, it brings the comfort of not facing the mirror, which, if faced, would raise a large question mark over our concepts of life. So it is relieving to deceive oneself, even while knowing the truth, that self-preservation could ever lead to fulfillment.

What the author is really drawing is a barricade between fulfillment and preservation. Self-preservation yields only deception, suffering, and a deeper sense of incompleteness. The entity being preserved is incomplete by definition.

How can I be fulfilled while remaining the one who is incomplete?

It is an oxymoron.

If preservation itself is incompleteness, and I long for fulfillment, what way leads out?

Dissolution.

The one who is incomplete by his very existence needs to be dissolved. Fulfillment is not about accumulation, it is about reduction. The reduction of the one who claims to get fulfilled. If there is no one left to cry about being incomplete, would that not be called fulfillment?

That is why those who have known have called this sense of incompleteness an illusion, a Maya. It appears to be, but actually isn't.

Our stories of fulfillment must be questioned with ruthless honesty. Truth must be acknowledged.

What has been seen should not be made unseen.

Preservation cannot serve fulfillment. Dissolution does.

I would rather be fulfilled than preserved.

──────────────────────────────────

A question from the readers:

How often you choose self-preservation in your life? 🙃 Is the self worth preserving? 🤔

The comments section is open.

A recent dialogue between philosopher Acharya Prashant and Prof. Nachiketa Singh on “Conflict Resolution and Human Security” explored a different way of looking at conflict.

Acharya Prashant argued that the roots of conflict are not merely found in borders, institutions, or geopolitics, but within the individual. He connected this inner conflict to the ego and highlighted the need for education that goes beyond the external world to include self-observation and understanding of oneself.

The discussion also touched upon how family conditioning, career choices, education, and even our relationship with the environment are connected to the quality of our inner life.

A thought-provoking perspective on why lasting peace may require us to first understand the conflict within ourselves.

Do you think education that helps us understand ourselves can actually play a role in reducing conflict in society? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

Setting the Ground: The Poem as a Doorway, Not a Prelude

The engagement with Gitanjali poem 34 is not a recitation for its own sake. It is a deliberate, sustained interpretation that treats the poem as the very ground upon which an entire inquiry is built. The poem is not placed at the beginning as a decorative overture or a separate prelude meant to set a mood. It is the foundation itself. The hope is that the interpretation leaves the listener more informed, more alert, and more honest in the questions they bring to their own self-inquiry.

Each line of the poem is treated not as a literary ornament but as a demonstration of a principle. The principle concerns what may be called the living one: the one who experiences, the one who knows, the one who suffers. The poem becomes a mirror in which the listener is invited to see not Tagore's psychology, but their own.

Why the Person Is Not Merely Matter: The Distinction Between the Object and the One Who Experiences

Acharya Ji begins the interpretation by drawing a clear and decisive line between the material and the personal. Consider any material object: a stone, a vessel, a lump of clay. Its response to physical conditions is entirely consistent and predictable. If two objects of equal mass are placed upon the same surface under the same conditions, the surface reacts identically to both. It does not matter whether one object contains water and the other tea, whether one carries organic material and the other something far more valuable, whether one is beautiful and the other plain. The physical world does not discriminate in its responses. Equal mass and equal contact conditions produce the same reaction. This is the nature of matter.

The human being, however, does not function this way. A person carries within themselves a sense of self, an inner center of experience that interprets, evaluates, and responds not merely according to physical laws but according to meaning. A mother holds her own six-kilogram baby in her arms, and her response is categorically different from what it would be if she held another baby of the same weight, or a doll of the same weight. The mass is identical, the physical conditions are identical, yet the response is utterly transformed by the fact that this is her child. Similarly, if an object is thrown toward a person by a stranger, the reaction is one of alarm or irritation. If the same object is thrown by someone deeply beloved, the reaction is entirely different. The physical event is the same. What changes is the one who receives it.

The body itself, Acharya Ji acknowledges, is a remarkable and self-sufficient organism. It thinks through its nervous system, feels through its sensations, remembers through its memory, and acts through its biological processes. It is a marvel of material organization. And yet, the framework insists that the body is not the whole story. There is within the human being an inner entity, called by various names across traditions: the self, the ego, the ahankar, the I-amness. This is the one who thinks, plans, desires, loves, hates, and suffers. This inner entity is not reducible to the body's biological processes, however intimately it may be associated with them.

Acharya Ji offers a simple but penetrating observation to illuminate this distinction. When a person falls asleep, the body may still be in physical pain. An injury does not vanish merely because consciousness has withdrawn. And yet, the psychological suffering that accompanied that pain while awake has temporarily ceased. The sufferer is absent, though the body and its pain remain. This suggests that the one who suffers, the experiencer, the knower, is not identical with the body alone. There is a center of experience that can be present to suffering or absent from it, even while the body continues its material existence.

The Ego's Foundational Falsehood and Its Expanding Mass of Stories

Having established the distinction between the person and mere matter, Acharya Ji turns to the nature of this inner entity, the ego, the I-amness, and examines it with unflinching precision.

The ego, by its very constitution, places itself at the center of its own universe. Every statement, even those that appear to be about others, begins from "I." When a person says "I love you," the subject of the sentence is not the beloved but the one who loves. When a person says "I respect you," the emphasis falls upon the one who respects. The ego cannot help but make itself the reference point, the axis around which everything else revolves. This is not a moral failing. It is the structural nature of the ego itself.

What is more, most people experience this central "I" not as a point of stillness and completeness, but as restless, incomplete, perpetually dissatisfied, continuously in need of something from outside itself. The ego reaches outward: toward achievements, possessions, relationships, recognition, stimulation, entertainment. It believes that the next acquisition, the next experience, the next relationship will finally silence the background hum of incompleteness. And yet, the AP framework holds that no combination of external attainments can fully quiet this inner condition. The incompleteness is not caused by the absence of something outside. It is structural to the ego itself. It is the natural consequence of the ego's foundational claim, the claim that "I am real, I am necessary, I am the center."

This foundational claim, Acharya Ji states plainly, is false. The ego's assertion of its own absolute reality and necessity is the original untruth from which all subsequent distortion flows. And because the original claim is false, the ego cannot rest upon it alone. It must continuously generate supporting narratives to shore up the structure, to justify its central position, to explain away the persistent unease that accompanies its existence. These supporting narratives take many forms: beliefs and opinions that give the ego a sense of identity and rightness; desires, fears, and threat perceptions that keep it engaged and mobilized; distorted definitions and selectively edited views of the world that confirm its assumptions; borrowed goals and interpretations shaped by family, culture, religion, education, and the accumulated conditioning of a lifetime.

The larger this accumulated mass of narratives, the greater the "bulk" of the ego, the greater the delusion, the deeper the incompleteness, the more acute the misery. A person with a heavy ego does not merely suffer more. They see less. The thickness of their self-constructed stories filters out reality and replaces it with projections. They live, without knowing it, inside an enclosure of their own making.

"Let Only That Little Be Left of Me": The Prayer for Maximum Minimization

With this groundwork laid, Acharya Ji turns to the opening line of Gitanjali poem 34: "Let only that little be left of me whereby I may name thee my all."

This is interpreted not as a conventional prayer to an external deity, but as a precise and radical internal operation. The aim is not to accumulate more: more identity, more ambitions, more expectations, more fears, more stories, more spiritual experiences. The aim is the opposite. To become inwardly lighter, less burdened, less weighed down by the accumulated mass of the ego's self-narratives. The prayer asks that only that minimal residue be left, just enough of the "me" to remain functional, to remain capable of relating to something beyond itself.

Crucially, Acharya Ji rejects the notion of complete ego-elimination as dishonest or impossible while the body remains alive. A living person still thinks, still breathes, still acts in the world. To claim that the ego has been entirely annihilated, to declare "I am enlightened" or "the ego has completely disappeared," is treated within the AP framework as a sophisticated and particularly dangerous form of ego inflation. The ego does not disappear by declaring its own disappearance. It merely puts on a new costume. The realistic, honest aim is not elimination but maximum minimization: the reduction of the ego to its purest, most functional minimum, the least that is required for life to continue without the ego claiming more space than it needs.

The word "thee" in the poem is approached through the via negativa, the way of negation. "Thee" is not a supernatural entity sitting outside the self, dispensing grace from a distant throne. "Thee" is understood as "not me," that which lies beyond the ego's projections, beyond the stories, beyond the self-referential enclosure. To name "thee" as one's all is to acknowledge that personal narratives, one's thoughts, one's dreams, one's interpretations of events, are not automatically the truth, are not the center of reality. The center shifts from the ego's self-serving accounts to something that the ego cannot possess or control.

Liberation, in this reading, is therefore described as freedom from oneself. Not freedom from external constraints. Not freedom to pursue one's desires without obstruction. But freedom from the tyranny of one's own projections. It is the recognition that the thoughts that arise in consciousness are not necessarily true simply because they arise, that the interpretations one constructs are not necessarily accurate simply because one has constructed them. The ego is not the author of truth. It is, more often than not, the distorter of it.

Prayer, then, is not directed toward an external being who will listen and grant fulfillment. Prayer, in the AP framework's reading, is the ego's recognition, rare and costly, that it must stop taking its own projections seriously. It is the moment when the projector admits that the images on the screen are its own, that the screen is its own, that the audience is its own, and that the entire show has been a self-referential loop with no contact with anything beyond itself.

Willpower Versus Love: The Question of How One Acts in the World

Acharya Ji draws a sharp and illuminating distinction between willpower and love, a distinction that lies at the heart of how the AP framework understands action and transformation.

Willpower, in the framework's analysis, operates from the assumption that one's desires are true and legitimate, and that the task is to overcome the world in order to fulfill them. Willpower is the ego marshalling its forces, girding itself for battle against obstacles, pushing through resistance to achieve what it has decided it wants. The emphasis on willpower in popular spiritual and self-help discourse is criticized not because effort is contemptible, but because the goals toward which willpower is directed are rarely examined. Where did the desire come from? Did it arise from a clear seeing of what is, or did it emerge from society, from the body's conditioning, from hormones, from the accident of one's birthplace, from random events, from the accumulated weight of a lifetime of borrowed interpretations? Desires and thoughts arise in consciousness before any conscious approval is granted. The ego claims ownership of them only after they have already appeared, as if a passenger in a car were to claim credit for the destination after arriving there.

"My desire" is therefore fundamentally questioned. The desire did not ask permission before it arose. It did not present itself for review before taking hold. The ego, encountering an already-arisen desire, slaps its own label on it and calls it "mine." Freedom from will, which the framework distinguishes from laziness or passivity, means seeing the causes and conditioning behind one's desires rather than automatically honoring them. It means tracing the desire backward to its source, examining the roots rather than merely acting on the fruit.

Love, by contrast, is presented as something categorically different from willpower. Love does not attempt to overcome the world from the standpoint that one's desires are true. Love requires confronting one's own dishonesty, one's own self-preservation, one's own false claims. Where willpower fights the external world, love turns inward and faces the one who is fighting. Love is the ego's willingness to see itself clearly, to see its distortions, its escapes, its mechanisms of self-protection, without immediately defending them. This is far more demanding than any act of willpower, because willpower can be performed while the ego remains intact, whereas love begins with the ego's willingness to be exposed.

The Ego as Projector, Screen, Projection, and Experiencer

Acharya Ji uses a precise metaphor to describe the ego's mode of operation. The ego is simultaneously the projector, the screen, the projection, and the experiencer of the projection. It generates the images, it provides the surface on which they are cast, it is the images themselves, and it is the one who watches them, all at once. This creates a self-referential enclosure, an echo chamber in which everything the ego encounters is already shaped by the ego before it is perceived. The ego never meets reality directly. It meets its own edited version of reality and mistakes the editing for the original.

This is why, Acharya Ji observes, every person experiences a differently edited version of the same event. Two people witness the same scene, hear the same words, are present at the same moment, and yet each carries away a version shaped by their own fears, desires, self-image, and conditioning. Neither version is simply "what happened." Each is a construction, a projection overlaid upon the facts, edited for the preservation of the projector. The ego reshapes facts according to its convenience and its need for self-preservation. It does not do this maliciously or consciously. It does it structurally, the way a lens bends light, not by intention but by nature.

The phrase from the poem, "feeling thee on every side," is not interpreted as a mystical perception or a supernatural experience. It is understood as contact with facts beyond the ego's projections. To feel "thee" on every side is to encounter what is actually there rather than what the ego has constructed. This requires that the projector be seen for what it is, that the mechanism of projection itself be exposed and understood, before any genuine contact with reality becomes possible.

Distraction, in this context, is identified as the ego's primary strategy for avoiding this exposure. Constant entertainment, compulsive shopping, social media, gossip, relentless work, social custom, even spiritual activity performed as escape, all can function as means of not looking at oneself. The ego is endlessly resourceful in its search for ways to remain busy without ever confronting its own operations. Even religious texts and spiritual practices, Acharya Ji warns, can be appropriated by the ego for self-preservation rather than self-dissolution. The ego can chant scriptures, perform rituals, wear the garb of spirituality, and speak the language of wisdom, all while remaining structurally intact, all while using these very activities to avoid the seeing that would threaten its dominance. Spirituality, when appropriated by the ego, becomes another costume, another projection on the screen.

Truthful Bondage: Freedom as Discernment, Not Abstraction

The poem's reference to "fetters" is given a precise and counterintuitive interpretation. These are not ordinary entanglements, not the everyday web of obligations, relationships, and social roles that people typically associate with being "bound." The fetters spoken of here are understood as a chosen relationship with truth. This is a paradox only on the surface. Freedom, within the AP framework, does not mean the absence of all relationship, all commitment, all bond. Absolute freedom, the idea that one is bound to nothing, attached to nothing, responsible to nothing, is rejected as an abstraction with no real content. An honest person remains related to something. The question is not whether one is bound, but to what.

Freedom, then, is the exercise of conscious discernment: the capacity to unchoose the associations and desires that were adopted not through clear seeing but through conditioning, intoxication, fear, social pressure, or the sheer momentum of habit. Most of what a person carries, in terms of beliefs, desires, self-definitions, and goals, was never deliberately chosen. It was absorbed, inherited, imposed. Freedom begins with the recognition that these are not truly "mine," and the subsequent work of disentangling oneself from them.

But this process of disentanglement is not an end in itself. The honest person, having loosened the false bonds, does not float in a vacuum. They choose, deliberately and consciously, the most truthful relationship available to them. They remain bound, but their bondage is to truth rather than to conditioning. Their fetters are the fetters of love in the poem's sense, not sentimental attachment, but the commitment to remain in contact with what is real, what is beyond the ego's projections, even when that contact is uncomfortable.

This process is described by Acharya Ji as filtering, as distillation, as the cleaning of a mirror. The mirror does not create the image. It only reveals what is already there. When the mirror is clouded with the dust of accumulated narratives, projections, and self-serving interpretations, what it reflects is distorted. The work is not to produce beauty but to remove what obscures it, so that what is already beautiful, what is already true, can become visible. The ego is not destroyed in this process. It is refined, reduced to its purest and most functional minimum.

The Minimal Ego: Fearless, Loving, Constructive Action Without Ownership

The minimal ego that results from this process is not a diminished or weakened thing. On the contrary, Acharya Ji portrays it as capable of fearless, loving, and constructive action in a way that the heavy, story-laden ego can never be. The minimal ego does not need to constantly protect a sprawling self-image, defend a vast inventory of beliefs, or shore up a fragile sense of identity. It is light enough to act without the burden of self-preservation weighing on every movement.

Crucially, the minimal ego acts without claiming ownership of the results. This is the framework's articulation of the Gita's nishkama karma: action without desire as its initiating cause and without anticipated fruit as its orientation. The action arises from I-amness, from the simple fact of being present and alive, and completes itself in the doing. It does not depend on a future result for its meaning or its justification. The one who acts does not look backward to a desire that initiated the action, nor forward to a reward that will complete it. The action is its own completion.

"Thy will," in the poem, is interpreted with characteristic precision. It means simply "not my will." It is not an excuse to impose personal desires while attributing them to God, not a way of dressing up one's own preferences in the language of divine sanction. "Thy will" is the ego's acknowledgment that its own will, driven by conditioning, desire, and self-preservation, is not a reliable guide. To say "thy will be done" is to say: let the action arise not from the ego's projections but from a clearer seeing of what is.

Action, Acharya Ji points out, can occur without forceful agency, just as listening can happen without deliberate willpower or self-assertion. One does not need to strain to listen. Listening happens when the noise subsides. Similarly, right action happens through a person when the ego's interference subsides, not as passivity, but as the natural unfolding of clear seeing expressed in movement. The person becomes the instrument through which understanding acts, rather than the agent who claims the action as a personal achievement.

Truth as the Primary Relationship

Truth becomes the primary relationship in this framework. Not truth as an abstract concept. Not truth as a set of propositions to be believed. But truth as the ongoing commitment to see what is, prior to the ego's commentary and interpretation. This commitment takes precedence over all other relationships, not because other relationships are contemptible, but because without the primacy of truth, all other relationships become distorted by the ego's projections.

Relationships with other people can remain deeply meaningful, Acharya Ji emphasizes, when they support rather than compete with this primary commitment. A relationship rooted in truth is one in which both persons are engaged in the work of seeing, not using each other for validation, not projecting their needs onto each other, not building mutual enclosures of shared delusion, but supporting each other in the difficult and often uncomfortable task of remaining honest. Such relationships are not lesser because truth comes first. They are enriched, because they are no longer built on the shifting sand of egoic need.

The Joyful Life: Beautiful Actions Without a Claimant

The vision of a joyful life that emerges from this interpretation is not one of constant pleasure, unbroken happiness, or the fulfillment of all desires. It is portrayed as a life in which beautiful actions happen through a person, not as personal achievements to be claimed and displayed, but as expressions of a clarity that the person did not produce and does not own. The joy is not in the claiming. It is in the happening. The person is the medium, not the maker. The action is beautiful not because it is grand or spectacular, but because it is free, free from the backward linkage of desire and the forward linkage of anticipated fruit, free from the ego's need to make of every action a testament to its own importance.

This is the life that the poem's prayer points toward: a life in which only that little is left of the ego, just enough to be present, to act, to love, and in which the vast machinery of self-narrative, self-protection, and self-projection has been stilled. Not eliminated, for the body remains and life continues. But reduced, refined, distilled to its purest minimum. In that reduction, what was always there, truth, beauty, the factual, becomes visible, not because it has been created, but because what obscured it has been gently, honestly, persistently removed.

Sometimes, it is very peaceful to hum Bhajans in solitude especially Kabir Saheb.

I don't know if the peace causes me to sing bhajans or the bhajans bring up the peace. Or maybe it's not two consecutive movements in time but a single movement.

Things go smooth until I decide to open up the camera.

With camera come all those voices that want validation from others, that judge themselves from others' perspectives. I start fixing my voice and act a certain way. Now the audience is in my mind and I start experiencing the topic addressed in Chapter 1 of Truth Without Apology: You Exist in Their Eyes.

This video is recorded during my 15 minute break at my work that's usually around 8 p.m. and I spend this time under open sky to take some fresh air and leave my stories in the four walls of the building. There is a bench that's mostly used for cigarette smoking purposes but around 8 p.m. daily, it becomes my bed for 15 minutes and the open sky as my TV screen and Bhajans as my audio playback.

I was successful at dodging those voices that open up with camera. But then I heard some footsteps around me. They were people passing by. My self-consciousness can be clearly seen in the video, immediately followed by the expressions of realization that I am back.

I kept singing anyways, and placed camera in position again.

I hate this uncomfort when I am surrounded by people as I feel a heavy load of draped up identities. That's why I enjoy solitude nowadays. It keeps me comparatively lighter and I don't have to "act".

Curious to know if someone relates to my situation. 🙂

Today, I planned a cheat meal. I had tofu sauted with olive oil, and air-fried 3 samosas.

But then the plate looked awkward and empty to me. I was missing vegetables.

So, I added my savior of the night, Mr. Romaine.

Now I am happy. 😃

Is democracy weakened more by bad politicians or by citizens who stop questioning?

One mostly relates to songs in two ways.

First, there are those who listen to songs because music makes the body move, the beats are catchy, the lyrics easily float on the tongue, and certain physical and chemical reactions begin within seconds, giving an overwhelming experience.

Such a person can often tell you the whole song and its musical rhythm without even knowing the meaning of the lyrics, sometimes without consciously paying attention to the lyrics at all.

This unconscious listening is not harmless.

One claims that he listens to songs just to relax and enjoy the beats, while unconsciously getting conditioned by those very songs. If asked about the toxic lyrics, he simply replies, “I don’t even take the lyrics seriously.”

But then comes an honest question:

If something really doesn’t align with our mindset, can we ever afford to listen to it on loop?

If we repeatedly listen to something, enjoy it, sing it, and allow it to become part of our inner world, can we really say that it has nothing to do with us?

Definitely, there is some dark corner within that aligns with what we consciously claim does not.

Then come those who listen to songs because they find their own situations and conditions expressed in the lyrics.

They are aware of the lyrics and relate to them very well. In a sad mood, they listen to sad songs to feel even more sad. The same happens during heartbreaks, romantic relationships, loneliness, longing, and so on.

They find the songs as their own voice.

The problem I see here is that songs are being used to validate one’s stories and narrations. The mind is not open to doubt. Listening to one’s own voice through songs on loop only makes one’s belief in those stories stronger.

The possibility of testing those stories, questioning them, and looking at oneself honestly never really opens.

And then come the songs sung by sages.

These songs are either expressions of their being, the self that is enjoying and singing while seeing itself getting dissolved in love, or their replies to the questions of seekers, or their direct work to help seekers.

One thing is for sure here:

The lyrics carry layers of depth.

One must not simply trust one’s first intuition about what they mean. One has to enter into them.

In a way, these songs act like a mirror.

One either listens to the autobiography of a thinned-down self and witnesses his own higher possibility, or one directly encounters the mirrors held by the sages.

The right approach to these songs must not be either of the first two.

One approach simply ignores the meanings. The other fits himself into the song and bends its meaning according to his own beliefs, emotions, and stories.

What is the right approach then?

Two words:

Honesty and intent.

Honesty towards one’s own lived facts of life, and intent to negate the false.

These two words actually submerge into each other. If there is honesty, there has to be an intent to see what is false. And if there is a genuine intent to negate the false, one cannot escape honesty.

If possible, find a teacher who can communicate the meanings verbally and demonstrate them through his own life.

This kind of teacher can help reveal the true essence of what the sages meant to say. Not just by explaining the words, but by drawing the bridge between the songs and our own life.

Then only, these songs begin to become one’s life.

One has that intellectual understanding now. He knows what those lines mean and wants to diminish the separation between himself and the sages.

What’s next?

Singing.

Again singing the next day.

And the next day.

And the next one.

And the next too.

Singing, not merely in hollow sentimentalism that, “I am singing some divine songs.”

Singing to remember the meanings that one has already gone through.

This kind of singing becomes insight.

One comes closer every next time to what was actually being said.

The singing in the attached video is an attempt to remember the possibility that Baba Bulleh Shah is pointing towards:

“Who recognises me? I have become something else.”

Becoming, not in the direction of accumulating new identities, but in the direction of ego-thinning.

Before this singing, there was a discussion about the meaning of the lyrics. And while performing, the words were not uttered in hollowness or merely because they sounded beautiful or divine.

They were being used as strong pointers, constantly taking one back to Baba Bulleh Shah throughout the song.

And that made it a wonderful experience.

It was not merely singing a song.

It was an attempt to remember a possibility that Baba Bulleh Shah was pointing towards.

I would love to know what kind of listeners we have in our comments section. And also, what's your approach towards songs of saints and sages?

See you down there. 😃

Just witnessed this!

My local bookstall team has been doing bookstalls on a regular basis and I had been missing most of them while attending a few of them partially due to practical reasons. This time I was a step ahead and removed all physical constrains (definitely after the inner clutter got settled down) and was able to be a part of a 6 hours long book stall from beginning to wrap up.

I was pretty excited because I wanted to spread the teachings as far as possible. Probably I wanted to be a part of this revolution lead by Acharya Prashant and being a part of the bookstall team would give me a sense of achievement of something worth doing. But life is ruthless. All our plans, assumptions, and imaginations are wiped away by its spontaneous unfolding. Same I would call this day: a spontaneous day wiping my stories out.

Most people think that bookstalls are some sort of advertisement or preaching of the author. But the one I was part of isn’t about the other siting outside of me. It was mostly about me, about showing me the mirror where I stand. It is very easy to sit at home, attending classes virtually and claim that I have good understanding of the concepts. And our very mental structure helps us to build such beliefs where we start deceiving ourselves that we have become some realized ones. Bookstalls are a big slap on the right cheek of the ego. I am deliberately using the word “right”, because that’s what one claims itself to be. That notion of being right is demolished by the slap.

Now, there is a big difference between nodding yes to the teacher and actually letting the teachings enter through the ego’s defensive walls. And when asked about changes in our life, we usually convince ourselves that teachings have translated into our actions. Bookstalls challenge this claim. They leave no room to lie, no place to hide. Before the other person one is talking to, one sees his own trembling voice, his anxious mind, the inner resistance, the mental clutter. There is still a possibility that the person outside misses the state of the speaker, but if one is honest, he gets to know what words are borrowed from outside, and what carry the weight of one’s existence.

The IC Engine that runs on desires and stops running when desires aren’t fulfilled shows itself up very clearly. The initial few conversations are backed by expectations of people taking books away home with them, and when the expectations aren’t met, fuel starts running down, the energy levels and number of people approached see a retardation.

At this moment, what one calls the passion for bookstalls and contribution towards the mission, start showing up their real name: an egoic project.

At this moment, the only deciding factor that determines the direction of one in the remaining hours is intent. One could either choose to give up and start lying to himself, or bow his head down to the mirror and starts his return journey by moving out of the way.

And then comes the most beautiful part: book reading.

The table is there, decorated with books of all kinds, and the reader too is there. The wait is over. The wall itself has decided to step aside.

What else?

The union becomes inevitable, and one deeply meditates into the book that catches his attention.

The readiness of the reader makes the book sacred.

The smile on my face while typing this piece expresses that what I am failing to do in my writing.

Now I know, bookstalls are a crucial part of this teaching ecosystem which I had been missing from a long time. One gets to know where he stands, how much he understands, how much is borrowed, and how much isn’t there at all.

These bookstalls act as a bridge between theoretical philosophy and our daily lived life and participation in them provides exponential momentum to one’s inner journey.

I would love to know your bookstall experiences and takeaways from other in-person activities within this ecosystem.

The comments section is open for all. See you down there.😊