My father was seven years old when he crossed the border during the Partition of India and Pakistan.

Before they could board the train for India, a group of men stopped my grandparents and the entire extended family. One of them looked at my father and asked if he was Hindu. “I am Hindu,” my father replied. The man, a Muslim, forced my father’s neck down and positioned his sword, ready to slit his throat.

I imagine my father, seven years old, standing there with his neck bent, feeling the pain and the fear of losing his life. I asked him once if he was scared. “I was only seven. Why wouldn’t I have been scared?”

Then, another man stepped forward from the crowd. He looked at the man holding the sword and said, “This boy calls me Abbu. He calls my wife Ammi. Before you kill him, you will have to bring your sword down on the necks of the seven of us, your Muslim brothers, who have come to see this family off safely to India.” Because of that intervention, my grandfather, his brothers, and the entire family were allowed to board. The train left Pakistan for India.

My father never tires of telling us the fragments he still remembers from that childhood. He remembers Abbu’s wife, his Ammi, feeding him whenever he went to their home, which was often. He remembers how the two families, one Hindu and one Muslim, celebrated Eid and Diwali together. Today, we might label it an “interfaith gathering.” Back then, they didn’t need a name for their bond.

He still visualizes their home in Lakki, Pakistan, near Chhota Bazaar. There was a well. A hand pump. An arch. These images have remained locked in his mind all these years.

After my father’s family fled, Abbu went to inspect what was left behind in my grandfather’s abandoned home. He found a matka (earthen pot) buried in the ground filled with cash and gold. He wrote to my grandfather, asking him to see him at the Wagah border so he could return their life savings.

Letters travelled back and forth. My grandfather refused to take anything, but Abbu insisted. More letters were sent back and forth. Finally, Abbu wrote something that in effect meant: “Do brothers ever charge each other for brotherhood?”

Eventually, Abbu was forced to keep the money and gold—despite how earnestly he had wanted my grandfather to have it to rebuild his life from scratch.

Partition drew a harsh line across a map. It divided homes, villages, families and lives. But there were people who absolutely refused to let that line enter their hearts.

My father crossed the border that day with his biological family, but also with the permanent memory of an Ammi who fed him, and an Abbu who shielded him.

What defines us is who we are when nobody is watching. What defines us is what we choose to do when we are standing inside a mob, when everyone around us has decided that the person in front of us is the enemy.

Brotherhood is not what we say about our own community. It is what we do for another human being when his community is not ours.

My father, who is now in his 80s, crossed the border into India because a man he called Abbu chose his Hindu son. He chose brotherhood. He chose humanity.

This is what the bamboo farmer’s struggle and growth look like after he plants his seeds:

In the first year, no sign in his field tells him that the bamboo will grow. The second year brings the same barren patch of land, void of bamboo and devoid of hope. To make matters worse, passers-by think he is wasting his time, dropping their unsolicited wisdom in his ears. But the farmer keeps tending to the field.

In the third year, even those who silently doubted the farmer’s sanity now voice their skepticism through laughter. His relatives tell him to stop. His neighbors ask why he is wasting his life on a plantation that will never sprout. Now, their words stung, because they echoed the same doubts he had been trying so hard to ignore.

The fourth year tests his patience and his trust in himself. On some days, he wonders if the seeds have died. Did the soil absorb all that water for nothing? Did he make a mistake? But he goes back to his field. He trusts that neither the seeds, nor his efforts, nor his hopes have been wasted.

Then, after five years, the bamboo finally breaks through the soil. It bursts into life. Within weeks, it rises far above the field.

We are all tending to something. For some, it might be a career that has been stuck for years. For others, a relationship, a dream, or a persistent inner struggle. Mine is an internal one. I grapple with anger, fear, and distraction. Through it all, I want to grow into a love unburdened by expectations, a love that does not choose whom to include and whom to leave out.

How impossible it feels. My mind tells me that it will take too long. “Bamboo takes five years,” it says. “You may take fifty thousand lifetimes.”

Indeed. We move forward, only to fall back. We learn a truth, then forget it the moment life becomes difficult. But this is precisely what the human journey is all about.

I love this line from Richard Bach’s Illusions: “What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.”

The bamboo farmer reminds me to:

• Do the work. Nishkama karma.

• Not let other people’s doubts become my own.

• Look fear in the eye when it raises its hood, and keep moving forward.

And when nothing appears to be happening, do not be so quick to assume that nothing is growing.

The other evening, I stepped onto the balcony for a few moments of solitude, and sat looking toward the trees. But my eyes closed, and attention turned inward. Then began what happens naturally: a few moments of focus on my breath, then the trail of thoughts breaking into the rhythm of each in-breath and out-breath.

Then came to the fore fragments of a story about crows I had read a couple of years ago while writing about my own fears of crows. It was a tale that had once kept me imprisoned in fear for hours. The fragments of that story replayed: two dead, hollow crows hanging from bamboo in a field. A farmer being chased by revengeful crows every day. The farmer walking down the road, crows pecking at his tonsured head. Then, during the farmer’s last rites, the crows pecking at his son’s tonsured head. The family moved houses to escape, but the crows didn’t stop. The mind has been generating reels and shorts for as long as humanity has existed.

Dreams of dead crows used to visit me every other day in my late twenties. Then, after a healer intervened, I had one final dream: hundreds of crows hanging from a tree, crows instead of leaves. On the pavement below, there were one or two more, but I managed to make my way through without touching them with my feet. It was as though the dreams that might have visited me for years had all arrived at once.

I opened my physical eyes to find, just two feet away on the balcony railing, on the other side of the protective mesh, a crow with a curved beak. A crow appeared when these fragments floated through my mind. “Synchronicity,” I thought to myself. Not a mere coincidence, but a genuine synchronicity, not only because of the striking timing, but also because crows are rare visitors in our vicinity. While pigeons are all around us, often very aggressive, crows are scarce. In the fifteen years I have lived in this apartment, I have seen one only four or five times.

I was not frightened of the crow. The mesh gave me a sense of safety. So, in that state of calm, what took place was quite spontaneous. Without planning the words, I softly said in Hindi:

“Babu, maaf kar do, bhool jao, please chale jao.” (Dear one, forgive me, forget it, please leave.)

The words came out naturally, completely unforced and unrehearsed. The moment I said “chale jao” (please leave), the crow immediately flew away. A few minutes later, I looked around to see if it had settled on a nearby balcony, but it was gone.

The experience reminded me of one of Carl Jung’s best-known accounts of synchronicity. Jung described a therapy session where a patient was recounting a dream about receiving a golden scarab. At that very moment, he heard a tapping at the window. When he opened it, a rose chafer beetle, which was the closest local equivalent to a golden scarab, flew into the room. Jung regarded it as a meaningful coincidence in which an inner psychological event and an unexpected external event mirrored one another without any causal connection.

My experience belongs to that same family of synchronicities, in which an inward movement of the mind is unexpectedly mirrored by the outer world.

More than just the memory of the event, the words I spoke and how the bird instantly responded are what matter to me. When it flew off, I heard these words in my mind: “It seems the debt is over. I am forgiven, even if I do not remember for what.”

I had been there a few times before and normally the man who owned the shop served me. But on my second-last visit his wife was behind the counter. I asked her casually if she could give me the discount husband sometimes gave me. She refused, so I told her to check with him before letting down a regular customer.

She looked me right in the eye and asked when was the last time I bought anything from her husband.

Her husband had died three months ago of a cerebral haemorrhage.

I was stunned not only by the news but by the dignity and acceptance with which she spoke of his passing. That could have been the end of our conversation, but it went on for several minutes. When I was going out, she suddenly asked, “Do you know what the number 66 means?

The question baffled me. It was the first time we met. Neither she nor her late husband had any idea of my interest in mystical experiences.

Around the time of her husband’s illness and just after his death, she said 66 had become an uninvited guest. It was everywhere she saw it, in the hospital, and even on the road to Haridwar, where she had gone to immerse his ashes in the Ganga. I had no answer to that, and I told her to ask her numerologist. I didn’t give it much thought at the time.

We moved to Delhi in the first week of April 2011. About two weeks after the move, someone close to me said he was feeling some discomfort on the right side of his abdomen. Soon after tests began and in May he had surgery for an extremely rare and serious cancer.

It was also in this same time frame of May and June that 66 started showing up in my own life over and over again.

I saw it on license plates, t-shirts and jeans. 66 had entered my life via a woman who linked it to her husband’s death and sickness so I was frightened of its reappearance. I was afraid of what it might mean.

I discouraged a child in the family from buying clothes with 66 on them. I stopped him twice from buying such things. Then one day, he came home with a T-shirt that had the number 66 on its pocket and told his mother about my resistance to the number. The more I tried to avoid 66, the more it stalked me. I told myself that it was my fear playing games with me and that I needed to trust Krishna.

In September 2011, a series of incidents began that would completely change the meaning of 66 for me.

I felt a strong desire to visit the veteran astrologer Shri K. N. Rao. I wanted to seek his blessings. He gave me an appointment for the first week of October.

I was meeting him after a gap of three years. As he always did, he opened my horoscope on his computer. Looking at my chart, he said, “You are very intellectual. Life will become difficult if you do not take the path of bhakti.” Those words etched themselves into my memory as soon as they left his mouth. He advised me to read Chapter 12 of the Bhagavad Gita every night before going to sleep for two months.

A few days later, an old colleague visited me at my office. We were meeting after a gap of twelve years, although we had unexpectedly run into each other two years earlier in the lobby of the Radisson in Noida.

When he learned about my spiritual inclinations, he told me how the Gita had changed his life. I told him that, on Shri K. N. Rao’s advice, I had recently started reading Chapter 12 every night and that my connection with Krishna was returning after three difficult years.

My colleague then spoke of the teaching he loved most in the Gita: the verse in which Krishna asks Arjuna to let go of everything and come to Him alone. Just love Him. What he did not tell me was which verse it was.

On a Saturday night, after finishing my daily reading of Chapter 12, I picked up another copy of the Gita. It was Geoffrey Parrinder’s translation. I opened it at random.

Random! I no longer believe in that word.

The page that opened had verse 66 of Chapter 18 right at the top:

“Come to me alone for refuge,
abandoning all things of law,
and have no fear, from every ill
I shall release you even more.”

Do not fear.

I had become anxious because of the recurring appearance of 66. My mind was showing me the worst. I say this because it was no longer about a number. Someone close to me had gone through a serious illness and surgery. Now the same number that had filled me with fear had led me to Krishna’s words: Do not fear. Come to Me alone for refuge.

My fear evaporated. By God’s grace, the person close to me recovered and has remained in good health ever since.

The very next day, I was window-shopping in Connaught Place when I noticed Robert E. Svoboda’s Aghora III: The Law of Karma at a bookstall. I had already read another of his books and could not resist this title. I bought it and started reading it later that night. On page 35, there it was again. Bhagavad Gita 18.66:

“Abandon all other duties, and come to me alone for refuge. Be not sorrowful, for I shall give you liberation from all sins.”

Only later, while telling a friend about this extraordinary series of events, did I realize that the verse my old colleague had spoken about before these two events was also 18.66. The same teaching had come to me through three different doors: first through my old colleague, though I did not know the reference; then through the Gita that opened at random; and the next day, through Svoboda’s book.

The number had entered my life through someone I had never met before, with fear attached to it. But it had led me directly to one of Krishna’s most important instructions: Come to Me alone for refuge. Do not fear.

The first time I read the Bhagavad Gita was in 2002. Over the next nine years, I immersed myself in many paths: astrology, tarot, past-life regression, Pranic healing, quantum healing, crystal healing, and more. I spent a few months with each. Astrology became a companion for years. Then He pulled a few strings of His own. Number 66 turned out to be the strongest of them.

In February 2012, only a few months after the events of 18.66, He pulled another string. I was sitting on a friend’s lawn in Faridabad with her sister-in-law, a woman I had met only two or three times before. During our conversation, she casually mentioned a book someone had given her in Lucknow. It was called Yogi Sri Krishna Prem. It contained letters exchanged between Dilip Kumar Roy and Sri Krishna Prem.

The moment she said the name Sri Krishna Prem, a powerful sense of déjà vu passed through me. I told her, “I know this person.” Of course, I did not know him. I had never met him. I had no memory of him from this life. Sri Krishna Prem had left his body long before I was born. The feeling that I knew him from before was too strong to brush aside as a passing feeling.

She told me she was planning to read the book and offered to send me a photocopy after she and her husband moved to Salem, Tamil Nadu, where he had been transferred. Four or five months later, the photocopy reached me through my friend.

Tears streamed down my face as I read the book. It was the first time in my life that I had felt such a strong connection with a spiritual person. I tried hard to locate Sri Krishna Prem’s ashram, but I could find no website, contact number, or other way of reaching it. Eventually, the search died a natural death, or so I thought then.

A few months later, on October 7, 2012, another nudge came my way. In The Speaking Tree supplement, which I rarely read, the forecast for Leo said:

“Bhakti, or devotion, is your shortcut to God or salvation. Otherwise, you will have to take the long and painful route. The choice is yours.”

I had received essentially the same advice from Shri K. N. Rao exactly one year earlier.

Later that same day, I noticed a poster near my home announcing that ISKCON would be celebrating Vishv Harinam Diwas nearby. How could I not see His hand here too? I was excited. I visited the land where the temple was to be built and learned about the Sunday Love Feast program held there every week. In November 2012, I attended my first Sunday Love Feast.

I needed satsang to help me become grounded in bhakti. That’s exactly what Krishna had arranged.

I spent the next five or six years with ISKCON. Those years gave me what I needed. I learned discipline. I started waking early, chanting regularly, eating sattvic food, and studying the scriptures in depth. ISKCON gave me a strong foundation in Krishna bhakti for which I remain grateful.

Sri Krishna Prem remained in my heart and in my memory through those years, although I was not yet connected with him or his ashram in any direct way. I even spoke about him to my shiksha guru at ISKCON. When I discovered that Yogi Sri Krishna Prem had been published by Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, I went to their bookshop, bought an original copy, and gifted it to my shiksha guru.

After five or six years, however, certain events in my life brought questions to the surface that I could no longer ignore. I had received discipline, scriptural grounding, and a strong foundation through ISKCON, but my inner life needed more than it was being fed.

Yogi Sri Krishna Prem kept returning to my mind. I stopped avoiding it and picked it up again. I was surprised by how directly the book spoke to the doubts and concerns I had at the time. Questions that had been troubling me were being answered in its pages. It gave a name to what I had been seeking. The second reading made it clear where I should be looking. I knew I had to find Sri Krishna Prem’s ashram.

I resumed my suspended search. I was back on the internet. I sighed. I kept finding the same sparse material I had found six years earlier. I did, however, find books by Sri Krishna Prem that had not been available to me before, and I ordered them. But I could still find no way of contacting the ashram.

On the fourth day, I was on the brink of giving up the search. But one last glimmer of hope made me pray to Lord Krishna and Radha Rani for help. So I prayed and entered the same search terms again.

The fourth search result was a website about Mirtola, Sri Krishna Prem’s ashram. The URL, www.classichygiene.in, seemed like an unlikely address for an ashram website. But I opened it. The website was under construction. There was almost nothing on it. In the footer, however, I found the name of the web designer who was developing the site, but no contact information.

I traced the web designer’s phone number and called him. He was shocked to hear from me. When I told him how I had found the site, he was even more surprised.

“That’s impossible,” he said. “The site isn’t live. It’s still under construction, and we haven’t even registered the URL.”

I was looking at the website on my screen, grace disguised as a website.

I asked him to connect me with the person who was having the website made. His first reaction was hesitation. I prayed silently in my heart, and he changed his mind and put us on a conference call.

There was no looking back after that. Six years after first reading Yogi Sri Krishna Prem, and with my years in ISKCON having given me the discipline and foundation I needed, Sri Krishna Prem’s grace brought me to his shelter.

Now let me take you directly to his ashram, to the temple of Sri Sri Radhika Mohan. What I saw took my breath away. On my first visit to Sri Krishna Prem’s ashram, my eyes fell on the words engraved in gold above the temple doors:

सर्वधर्मान्परित्यज्य मामेकं शरणं व्रज।
अहं त्वां सर्वपापेभ्यो मोक्षयिष्यामि मा शुचः॥

Bhagavad Gita 18.66.

The same verse to which the number 66 had led me years earlier was engraved above the entrance to the temple at Sri Krishna Prem’s ashram.

I find it difficult to put into words what that means to me. The repeated appearance of 66 that had first scared me out of my wits was actually the number that had led me to Krishna’s words: “Do not fear. Take refuge in Me alone.” After all that had happened in between, I had now arrived at the place that would transform my inner spiritual life, and the same verse was blessing me from above the temple doors.

Since finding Sri Krishna Prem, my devotion has become more internal. The emphasis has shifted from outer practice alone to what is happening within me, to self-observation, to the vrittis of the mind, to sincerity, and to seeing myself more truthfully. My relationship with Krishna has become more inward and more intimate.

Sri Krishna Prem opened the door to an inner spiritual life I had been looking for without fully knowing how to name it.

The journey that started with a number led me back to Krishna.

Some people seem to get away with everything. They can be deliberately hurtful, dishonest, or selfish, yet life treats them kindly. It casually waves away their ulterior motives as trivial things. Then there are those of us who can’t seem to get away with anything. Our smallest missteps are instantly dragged into the open. If we overlook one minor detail at work, it blows up into a major issue, while a colleague makes a massive blunder and everyone just shrugs it off. If we act even slightly out of self-interest, we are immediately pushed into the loneliest corner of the world. Even something as simple as eating purely to indulge our taste buds causes our entire inner system to react. It reprimands us instantly.

It used to feel incredibly unfair. But over time, I was given the insight to see these immediate corrections for what they really are. These sharp dents to our ego, and even the bodily dis-eases that feel like punishments or instant karma, are actually a severe sort of mercy.

If we sincerely ask God to remove whatever stands between Him and us, should we really be shocked when He actually answers? He starts with the smallest things because those are the exact corners where the ego loves to hide and thrive. That doesn’t make the process pleasant. Far from it.

There are days I still wonder why someone else’s harshness goes entirely unnoticed, while my own annoyance is instantly called out, even if it is through a sharp remark from someone around me reminding me of my path. When this happens, the blow to the ego temporarily blinds us. The light of intellect, our buddhi, is obscured by our own defensiveness. In that moment, it becomes impossible to see that these very insults are the ripe opportunities we need to break through the crust of our ego.

Whenever I begin to feel like the connection between the Lord and me is being severed by these struggles, I remember a question a disciple once asked Radhanath Swami about why small mistakes are noticed and amplified so quickly while others get away with so much more.

Radhanath Swami’s reply was enlightening and assuring. He explained that Krishna is simply interested in you and wants to purify you sooner than you expect, whereas those who seem to be left alone may just not be ready for those lessons yet.

A few days ago, in a fit of annoyance, I muttered, “I don’t ever want to see that electrician again.” The moment those words were out, I paused and saw exactly what had come out of my mouth and why. I recognized it as my ego’s reaction to the electrician’s demeanor over the past months. Within a few days, we required his services again. My room’s ceiling fan broke down, and then the bathroom light went out. Only he could fix them. None of it was a quick DIY job.

I couldn’t help but smile when these divine disruptions happened. In my mind, I just looked up and said, “All right, Lord. I get it.”

It was a swift, silent reminder: Your personal likes and dislikes only strengthen the crust of your ego. So, I’ll put you in situations that help you transcend them.

In a moment of irritation, I had tried to dictate that I didn’t want to have anything to do with this person so soon again because of his unreasonable behavior. I wanted my mind to settle down. I thought it better be several months before I would need his services again.

But the Lord showed me that He decides whose help I need and when, as well as whom I am meant to serve, whether it suits my preferences or not. This time, the electrician was His instrument to reinforce this truth. This little “I” that thinks, especially in times of anger, that she is in control of her life, is actually nothing but another one of His instruments.

Some of us aren’t allowed to get away with much because the crust of the ego is being broken. It is the only way to shatter the wall between the divine and the spark that we are. I don’t say this out of pride. If anything, it comes with the humbling, exhausting ache of being constantly corrected.

May I never mistake His pruning for His absence. It is likely the most tender cut that He hasn’t forsaken me.

This period of seeing 444 lasted throughout the 18 months I lived in Bangalore. When I moved back to Delhi, the synchronicity stopped.

It wasn’t an occasional occurrence that I noticed because I was looking for it. It happened so often, and sometimes in such unlikely ways, that I began to wonder whether I was being given a message.

One incident resurfaced in my memory recently. I was travelling by auto-rickshaw when the auto suddenly broke down. When I looked to one side, there was a house with the number 444. On the other side was a large hoarding, and the contact numbers displayed on it ended in 444.

By then, I was intrigued enough to start searching for answers. I was already reading about synchronicity—books by Jung and his student, Marie-Louise von Franz. During my search, I came across a book called Synchronicity, Signs and Symbols by Patricia Rose Upczak. I waited about a month for it to arrive.

When the book finally arrived, I opened it with excitement. The first page it opened to, seemingly by itself, was in the introduction, where the author herself was talking about 444.

Years later, when I met the well-known astrologer Sanjay Rath and told him about my experiences with numbers, he looked at my horoscope and said that it showed that mysteries would be communicated to me through numbers. And indeed, 444 was not the only number that appeared repeatedly in my life. There was 66, which eventually led me to Krishna bhakti in a more systematic way, and much later, 88 and 888 appeared around another major turning point in my life. But those are stories for another time.

I don’t know whether numbers have one fixed, universal meaning. But looking back, I find it striking that the meanings I came across in my searches often corresponded closely with what was happening in my life.

I had moved away from home for the first and only time in my life and was going through one of the most emotionally difficult periods I had ever known. The job that had taken me to Bangalore would become the longest and last job of my career. I stayed with the same company for almost eighteen years, until I took early retirement in 2023.

Looking back now, nearly twenty years later, I feel that 444 was a form of reassurance: Krishna was letting me know, in some mysterious way, that I was not alone.

I cannot prove that. Nor do I need to. Some experiences lose something of their mystery when we try too hard to explain them. I only know that during a time when I was far from home and finding life extremely difficult, the same number kept appearing before me again and again, sometimes in ways that were almost impossible to ignore.

And then, when I went looking for an answer, a book travelled all the way from the United States, took a month to reach me, and opened to the very number I had been searching for.

Twenty years later, I still remember, and that, too, is part of the answer.

Our initial instinct is to treat love as a house we must build and fill to keep the cold of loneliness away. We choose with care those whose minds are built in the same way as ours, whose preferences mirror our own, and who affirm the fragile sense of who we think we are. We seek the safety of proximity through a meeting of minds. This closeness allows us to fill our hours with the warm resonance of shared feelings, thoughts, and activities. We build homes, create families, and meticulously arrange curtains and lighting. We convince ourselves along the way that if we can control the outward setup of our lives, the spirit of the universe will finally make its home in the spaces we have prepared. But life is the ultimate architect. It alters the design of our minds without our permission. This process dents, redesigns, and ultimately remakes the rooms of our hearts.

The microscopic frictions of daily life are the inevitable result of two human lives rubbing against each other in the same space. Those with whom we built our worlds become the source of our compulsive irritations. They speak in tones we despise. They trespass into the delicate territory of our autonomy with every interaction. They tell us how to dress, how to eat, how to breathe. Deep down, we experience every attempt to manage us as an erasure of who we are, and so we react. We spend half a lifetime trapped in this defensive loop before we look closer. We look closer and find a humbling truth: what they have been doing to us, we, too, have been doing to them.

We do not react to a single comment about a plate of food or the position of a window pane. Instead, we react to the cumulative burden of years of feeling that who we are has never been fully accepted. We build defensive walls out of rudeness to protect the tenderness buried beneath that hurt. We snap, we push back, and we claim our territory with acid comments. We resort to the invisible wall of cold indifference when this open combat becomes too exhausting to sustain. We reduce our interactions to the bare logistics of survival. We keep the household running and we share the same spaces, but we withdraw our essence. We freeze into ice in an attempt to protect our fire. This is our great, aching human paradox. Our world would be irreparably dented if those people fell sick or died. We would be completely unmoored in their absence. Yet, we find it a living torture to share the same room with them while they are here.

The first true glimpse of love begins to break through only after the slow, agonizing erosion of these rigid patterns. It does not arrive as a grand, emotional climax. Rather, it arrives as a disillusionment with our own defenses. We look at our lives and realize with honesty that much of what we have called love has been conditional. We have treated it like a scarce currency. We invest it only where we expect a return of compliance, respect, or comfort. We have been operating like a spotlight, choosing where to shine. We illuminate one preferred object while leaving the rest of our immediate universe in darkness. We experience the agonizing friction of trying to relocate the beam when that object changes its position, or when it refuses to reflect our light correctly.

True love is the force that holds the cosmos together irrespective of its chemical components. It is not a transitive verb. It is not something we do to someone else. It is a climate of affection inside our own hearts. It is a lamp, not a spotlight. A lamp does not negotiate with the dark. It does not evaluate the worthiness of a room before it agrees to glow. It illuminates the saint and the critic with the exact same affection. It simply shines through its radiant nature. But this does not mean that love has no boundaries. We must not resign ourselves to cruelty, control, or harm. A lamp does not cease to be a lamp because it is moved away from a place where it cannot safely burn. Love can say no. It can create distance in moments of need. It can refuse an action without closing the heart against the person.

To realize what love is means recognizing that although the actions of others can hurt us, much of our continuing suffering comes from our internal resistance to what is. This resistance shows up as the demand that the past should not have happened, that another person should be different, or that the present moment should conform to our wishes before we agree to meet it. We rip ourselves away from our true nature every time we say a silent, bitter “No” to the present moment, to the chronic irritation of a family member, to the relentless repetition of their anxiety, or to the structure of the day.

Our true nature has not disappeared. We have distanced ourselves from it. Its dharma is love. Being love. Think of water. It does not possess an ego to defend. The flowing water does not look at a rough rock in the riverbed and feel insulted by its presence. It does not wait for permission to fulfill its purpose. It flows, quenching the incessant thirst of the world by the sheer necessity of its existence, entirely unaware of its own virtue. We use our reflective minds to step away from this effortless flow. We demand that life explain itself, that our people change, and that our environments conform, before we finally agree to live with an open heart.

The transition into love is the willingness to drop our hands. It is the realization that our peace of mind is ours to preserve. Making our peace dependent on another person’s behavior leaves us a permanent hostage to it. It means sitting across the breakfast table from the person who knows exactly how to push our buttons, witnessing the physical spike of fear in our own chest, and choosing to hold it with tenderness rather than feeding it. We stop waiting for them to see us as independent adults. We stop trying to fix the broken record of their anxiety. We no longer give every comment the power to pull us into the same old conflict. We may answer simply, change the subject, remain silent, or state a boundary without anger. And we continue to exist. Unbroken, spacious, and warm. Right in front of them.

When we finally recognize our defensive walls for the cages they are, the world opens wide. We see that love is not limited to the people we cherish. It is present in our relationship with the entire universe. We find it in the unforced moments when the mind stops wanting to be anywhere else but exactly where it is. It is washing the dishes without the frantic desire to be finished with the chore. We walk past a blade of grass and give it our undivided attention, not to romanticize it, but simply to witness its shared life force. It is hearing a construction drill shatter the afternoon peace. We open our internal windows rather than tightening our jaws, letting the coarse energy of the sound pass completely through us without hitting a wall.

The long history of our failures, our loneliness, our insensitivity, and our desperate attempts to protect ourselves eventually brings us to our knees before the simplicity of what is left over. Our ego becomes too tired to fight. The need to be right, respected, or left alone finally dissolves, and the spirit of the universe rushes into the empty space. We realize we do not need to learn how to love. We only need to stop doing the things that interrupt it. We become like water, fluid, free, and undefended. Our past wounds are no longer walls. They become the canals through which love flows toward whatever the world is to us, and straight back to the source from which it comes.

At first the answer seems obvious. We point to our body, our thoughts, our memories, our personality. Yet with careful observation, we notice that all of these are constantly changing. The body ages, thoughts come and go, emotions rise and fall, and even our sense of identity changes over time. In fact, if we were to meet our ten-years-younger selves at a party, we would likely find our old wardrobe choices questionable, our past opinions naive, and our cellular makeup entirely different. Yet, we stubbornly use the exact same first-person pronoun for both versions of us.

This presents a strange cosmic riddle: we are fiercely attached to an “I” that cannot stay still for a single consecutive second.

The sages of the Upanishads explored this riddle with incredible precision. Although the doctrine of the three bodies (śarīra-traya) is not presented as a single teaching in any one Upanishad, it is a classical Vedāntic framework distilled from insights found across several Upanishads, especially the Māṇḍūkya, Bṛhadāraṇyaka, Chāndogya, and Praśna Upaniṣads. Later works such as the Vedāntasāra, Pañcadaśī, and Vivekacūḍāmaṇi organized these insights into the elegant model that is studied today. To make this architecture even more precise, later masters mapped these three bodies onto the five kośas, or sheaths, showing how the infinite Self is seemingly veiled by layers ranging from the densest matter to the subtlest bliss.

According to this tradition, what we ordinarily call “I” can be understood through three bodies: the gross body, the subtle body, and the causal body. These are not three different selves. They are three layers through which experience plays out, much like a light bulb encased in three concentric shades of varying density. Or, for the modern seeker, a smartphone operating simultaneously via its hardware, its software, and its cloud-based code.

1. The Gross Body (Sthūla Śarīra)

The gross body (sthūla śarīra) is the physical body, the one we can see and touch. It is born, grows, changes, ages, and eventually dies. It is nourished by food and belongs entirely to the material world, which is why Vedānta maps it directly to the Annamaya Kośa, the sheath made of food. It is composed of the five gross elements (mahābhūtas): earth, water, fire, air, and space. This is the body we usually identify with when we say, “I am tired,” “I am old,” or “I am ill.”

Yet this body has been changing from the moment we were born. The body of childhood is gone, the body of adolescence has disappeared, and even the body we had ten years ago no longer exists. Every change has been witnessed. If the body is constantly changing and those changes are known, can the observer truly be identical with the body? Just as we do not claim to be the house we live in simply because we occupy it, Vedānta invites us to sit with that question rather than answer it too quickly.

2. The Subtle Body (Sūkṣma Śarīra)

Beyond the physical body lies the subtle body (liṅga or sūkṣma śarīra). Though invisible to the eye, it is the instrument through which we experience our inner world. It spans three distinct sheaths: the Prāṇamaya Kośa (the vital energy sheath), the Manomaya Kośa (the mental sheath), and the Vijñānamaya Kośa (the intellectual sheath). Structurally, it is comprised of nineteen components: it includes the mind (manas), the intellect (buddhi), the ego (ahaṃkāra), memory (citta), the five organs of perception (jñānendriyas), the five organs of action (karmendriyas), and the five vital energies (prāṇas).

Every thought we think, every emotion we feel, every memory we recall, every desire we pursue, every fear we experience, and every dream we have belongs to the subtle body. Most of us identify with it just as completely as we identify with the physical body. We say, “I am anxious,” “I am happy,” or “I am confused,” as though these passing states define who we are.

But the mind is as changeable as the body. Thoughts arise and disappear. Opinions evolve. Emotions pass like weather across the sky. Even our personality changes over the course of a lifetime. These, too, are observed.

According to Vedānta, the subtle body does not perish with the physical body. While the gross body returns to the earth, the subtle body continues from one birth to another, serving as the vehicle through which the deeper tendencies carried within us find expression as thoughts, emotions, decisions, and actions. It is the traveler in the cycle of saṃsāra.

3. The Causal Body (Kāraṇa Śarīra)

The third is the causal body (kāraṇa śarīra), the most subtle and perhaps the most difficult to understand. It is called the causal body because it is the seed from which both the subtle and gross bodies arise. It is not a body in the ordinary sense, but the undifferentiated condition in which our latent tendencies remain unmanifest. It corresponds to the Ānandamaya Kośa, the sheath of relative bliss experienced when the restless mind falls away. It is also associated with avidyā, our fundamental forgetfulness of who we really are.

One might think of the causal body as the seedbed of our saṃskāras and vāsanās. Saṃskāras are the subtle impressions left by our experiences and actions, while vāsanās are the deeper tendencies or inclinations that arise from those impressions. They remain latent, much like seeds lying beneath the soil, waiting for the right conditions to sprout. If the subtle body is a film reel playing our life’s movie, the causal body is the unexposed blueprint containing the very script of our destiny.

Strictly speaking, Vedānta does not say that karma itself is stored in the causal body. Rather, the potential results of karma are preserved as these latent impressions and tendencies. When circumstances are favourable, they begin to bear fruit. They first express themselves through the subtle body as thoughts, desires, emotions, impulses, talents, fears, and habits, and then through the gross body as actions and life experiences.

This is why the causal body is called the “causal” body. It is the hidden source from which our inner and outer life continually springs.

Our closest everyday experience of the causal body is deep, dreamless sleep (suṣupti). In that state there is no awareness of the world, no thoughts, no desires, and no sense of being a separate individual. Yet on waking we naturally say, “I slept well; I knew nothing.” Think about the contradiction: to say “I knew nothing” means there was a witness present to register that very absence of thought. The mind had temporarily subsided, returning to its uncarved, causal state, but the latent potential for experience remained. Vedānta points to this dormant condition as a glimpse of the causal body.

The Knower Beyond the Three Layers

It is important to remember that the purpose of this teaching is not to give us a more elaborate picture of ourselves. The sages were not interested in multiplying concepts or constructing a spiritual anatomy for its own sake.

The teaching of the three bodies is a practical tool for Neti, Neti (not this, not this), a systematic process of self-inquiry.

• The body is known.

• The mind is known.

• Even the absence of thought in deep sleep is later known.

If all these are known, then who is the knower?

The three bodies help us systematically detach our identity from these changing parts of life, directing attention toward what never changes. They do not reveal the Self as an object among other objects. Rather, they strip away our mistaken identifications, revealing the ever-present witness—the Sākṣī Chaitanya—the unchanging awareness in whose light the body, the mind, and even the causal state are all known. This witness is Ātman, which is ultimately recognized as non-different from Brahman, the infinite reality.

The map is not the destination. The three bodies are simply one of the beautiful maps that Vedānta offers to guide us toward the timeless question: Who am I, really?

I remember stopping for a long time when I came across those lines.

I was reading Shree Shree Sadguru Sanga, more than a century-old diary of Kuladananda Brahmachari, a close disciple of Bijoy Krishna Goswami. In it, he recorded an account of a devoted woman disciple who would mentally transform her thoughts into lotus flowers and offer them at the feet of the Lord.

A profound sense of gratitude and joy washed over me. How could someone, separated from me by more than a century, have arrived at almost the exact same way of offering her thoughts? I had never encountered this book before, nor had I ever discussed my own practices with anyone. I took it as a direct confirmation that the heart has its own language, and sincere seekers, though separated by time and place, sometimes learn to speak it in remarkably similar ways.

To understand how I arrived at that identical prayer, I have to go back to the 2020 lockdown.

The Fire in the Mind

During the COVID lockdown in 2020, I came across a striking passage in the Teachings of Madame H. P. Blavatsky. Her advice was precise: students must rigorously guard their thoughts, as a single unworthy wave of mind can undo years of inner work. To counter this, she suggested establishing an internal “fireplace” in the mind, systematically casting every negative or unworthy thought into this inner fire to be consumed.

The idea of having a fireplace within oneself immediately appealed to me. It reminded me of a verse from the Bhagavad Gita in which Sri Krishna says that, just as a blazing fire reduces firewood to ashes, so does the fire of knowledge reduce all karma to ashes.

Inspired by that imagery, I began my own small practice. While walking, I would imagine a fire burning within and mentally cast every disturbing thought into it. I stayed with this practice for quite some time.

Fire Transforming into White Jasmine Flowers

After a few years, the practice changed of its own accord.

The change arose entirely from within. I sometimes wonder whether the awareness that there was already enough fire in my nature—my Ayurvedic constitution being predominantly pitta-vata, and even astrologically there being no shortage of fiery influences—subtly prepared the ground for that change.

Instead of throwing difficult thoughts into an inner fire, I began turning them into white jasmine flowers and offering them at the feet of Sri Sri Radhika Mohan, the beloved deities in whom I had taken refuge. In my mind, I would gather the flowers in my palms and offer them at Their feet in the temple of the heart.

I simply trusted that this change was being guided from within my heart. Many months later, that trust was answered when I opened the pages of Shree Shree Sadguru Sanga and found the account of the woman offering her own mental lotuses.

Several Ways to Understand Such an Experience

There are several ways of understanding such an experience. A psychologist might speak of Jung’s collective unconscious, where similar symbols and patterns arise independently in different minds. A student of Vedanta may go a step further and say that consciousness itself is one, appearing as many through different bodies and minds. If that is so, it is not surprising that similar forms of practice may emerge in people separated by time, geography, and tradition, without any direct contact.

Whether one prefers the psychological explanation or the spiritual one, the experience remains genuinely reassuring. For me, it felt like grace saying, “Trust the direction in which your heart has led you.”

This experience also taught me that we rightly value scripture, teachers, and tradition. They protect us from imagination masquerading as wisdom. Yet there are moments when devotion discovers a form of expression uniquely suited to the devotee.

Not every inner impulse deserves to be followed, but neither should every authentic movement of the heart be dismissed simply because it is absent from our reading. If it leads us towards greater sincerity, humility, devotion, and love, life has a creative way of sending its own confirmation—sometimes through a teacher, and sometimes through the unexpected recognition, in the pages of a disciple’s diary, that another seeker, long before us, had arrived at the very same prayer.

An Invitation: Have you ever felt drawn to a specific inner practice or way of seeing, only to find it validated by a book, a teacher, or a synchronicity much later? I would love to hear your experiences in the comments below.

A couple of years ago, a friend shared an incident with me. The other day, it came to mind again.

A classical musician dreamt that Ramana Maharishi appeared before him and taught him a nuance of music. The experience was vivid and left a deep impression. What made it remarkable was that the musician had never heard of Ramana Maharishi. After waking, he searched online for Indian saints and immediately recognized the face he had seen in the dream. Only then did he remember having seen the same photograph earlier in the home of my friend, to whom he later recounted the dream.

Stories like this invite different ways of seeing.

Some would say that the Guru is ultimately one. The outer guru is a doorway through which the inner guru, the Chaitya Guru dwelling in the heart, makes itself known. If so, the form of Ramana Maharishi may simply have been the means through which that inner wisdom reached the musician.

A psychologist might say the musician had unknowingly absorbed Ramana’s image when he saw the photograph. The subconscious often stores impressions that escape conscious notice. During the dream, the mind may have drawn upon its own hidden storehouse, using the image of a sage to reveal an insight about music. Psychology may explain the process, but not the experience.

Many spiritual traditions offer another way of looking at such incidents. They hold that the relationship between a guru and a disciple is not always confined to a single lifetime. From that perspective, an encounter like this need not be explained entirely by memory or coincidence. It may point to a bond whose roots lie beyond this life.

These are different ways of understanding the same experience.

As for me, I believe Ramana Maharishi showered his grace on the musician. Grace is not governed by the ordinary laws of cause and effect, yet it need not be without relationship. I believe it arose from a bond whose roots lay in lives behind this one.

It reminds me of Emily Dickinson’s beautiful lines:

This World is not Conclusion.
A Species stands beyond —
Invisible, as Music —
But positive, as Sound —

Music cannot be seen, yet no one doubts its reality. We cannot point to the music itself, only to the vibrations that carry it. Maybe some experiences belong to that unseen world Emily Dickinson speaks of.

Dickinson goes on to write:

It beckons, and it baffles —
Philosophy, don’t know —
And through a Riddle, at the last —
Sagacity, must go —

Not every mystery has to be solved.

The musician’s dream may be one such experience. Each of us will understand it according to our own way of seeing.

Years ago, a simple security breach caught me entirely off guard. I had opened the browser on my computer to check an account used for confidential information, only to find that the password had been changed. My mind immediately raced in all directions to return with the most likely possibility: the account had been compromised. Ordinarily, my mind would have rushed ahead, imagining financial loss, stolen data, and a cascade of problems that might follow.

But what followed was a state that I still remember vividly. Instead of anxiety, which is my usual response to a crisis, I found myself in a calm alertness. I took the required steps and eventually recovered my account, but my movements were entirely free of panic. The mind didn’t churn out spiraling stories. There was no inner agitation, only a clear awareness of what needed to be done next. But the recovered account isn’t why I am writing this.

What surprised me was how wholly this alertness took hold. It didn’t just come and go. No. It stayed for what I recall to be five or six hours. Usually, I become aware of mental narratives soon enough. This time, I didn’t see any of those crescendos on the screen of the mind. The alertness remained hours after the problem had been resolved.

Looking back, the incident of the account password itself is unremarkable. It’s the peace that settled over me that makes the day memorable.

Why was there no anxiety?

One explanation is straightforward. The shock triggered a different state in the nervous system. Instead of scattering energy into worry and imagined futures, the mind became sharply attentive to the task at hand. Maybe that is exactly what happened. Yet that explanation does not fully satisfy me. If the alertness was simply a response to the shock, why did it remain long after the situation had been resolved? Why did it feel not only alert, but peaceful?

I do not know.

Over the years, I have encountered accounts of people describing something similar. A crisis, a near accident, or some other intense event is followed by an unusual clarity. Thought falls silent. Action becomes precise. Time itself can seem to slow down. Whether these accounts arise from the nervous system, grace, or some combination of the two, they suggest that our habitual reactions may not be the only possibilities available to us.

What has remained with me all these years is the memory of those few hours. The absence of mental noise. The sense that life could be met directly, without the usual stream of commentary about what might happen next.

I have no conclusion to offer; only an observation that something happened that day that did not fit my usual patterns. Only the memory of a state that arrived uninvited, stayed for hours, and has never returned in quite the same way.

I have experienced the impersonal responding personally to me.

I call it impersonal because my deity is yet to reveal His face to me. I have not seen Krishna. I have not heard His voice. I have received no revelation that would allow me to say with certainty, “It is He.” Yet, for all I know, it may be He who has been acting through the impersonal all along.

Whenever my search was sincere and innocent, answers arrived through books, conversations, dreams, chance encounters, and unexpected turns of circumstance. The source remained hidden, yet the response was personal, as though it knew precisely what I needed and when I needed it.

I remember one such time in 2006—one of the most difficult chapters of my life. For months I tried everything I knew. I visited temples, read self-help books, attended workshops, sought blessings, performed rituals, and experimented with various methods that promised relief.

Nothing worked.

The more I struggled, the more depleted I became.

Ten days before Diwali, standing before a small temple in the paying guest bungalow where I was staying, I broke. I prayed that if my problem was not resolved by Diwali evening, I would lose not only faith but hope itself.

Diwali morning came, and nothing had changed.

Then, in a room that had been closed for hours, a sudden fragrance appeared. I took it as a sign, though I could not have said of what. In that silence, I remembered Krishna’s words from the Bhagavad Gita: “I am the pure fragrance of the earth.”

By that evening, the crisis that had consumed me for months dissolved in a way I could never have arranged myself.

Whenever I thought it was all over, a way appeared and the direction of my life changed.

And whenever I took pride in overcoming a particular inner enemy, that very enemy bound me to its whims, leaving me a helpless slave. Periods of prolonged suffering followed, and effort seemed useless. Tears of helplessness replaced confidence. What I imagined I had mastered became the means by which I was humbled.

Yet it was often there, when all my methods had failed, that an opening appeared. The impersonal personalized the way out just as it had personalized the suffering.

The remedy seemed fashioned with the same precision as the wound.

I do not know what stands behind these interventions.

I only know that whenever I have come to the end of myself, something has answered. And whenever I have imagined myself to be the author of my own victories, life has painfully reminded me otherwise.

Why does reality sometimes appear indifferent and yet, at certain moments, seem intimately concerned with our growth? Why do the wound and the remedy so often seem fashioned by the same hand?

Whether that something is God, grace, destiny, or a mystery beyond all names, I cannot say. Maybe it is Krishna working from behind a veil I cannot yet see through.

I do not know.

But the footprints are everywhere.

I do not know why I seek You.
I do not know who You are.
Still there is a certainty
That You are.

Words no longer tether me to You.

Only Your remembrances,
Scattered through the day,
Sometimes a Name,
Sometimes a fragrance,
Sometimes nothing I can name,
Calling me back from forgetfulness
Whenever I stray.

I have no revelation to speak of.

Form or formless,
Or Truth, as some say,

All arguments are spent.

That all of this
Sprang from
The Big Bang.

That God is an archetype
Of the collective unconscious.

That God is an idea,
A borrowed one.

That You are merely
What I inherited.

Oh, the self-proclaimed messiahs,

The megalomaniacs,
And those reciting
What they never tasted.

Yet I follow footprints in the sky,
Not mistaking the finger
For the moon.

I do not know why I seek You.
I do not know who You are.

Still,
There is a certainty
That You are.

I found this statement quite intriguing in I Am That by Nisargadatta Maharaj:

“The stronger the personality, the brighter the light when it burns.”

At first hearing, the sentence sounded disturbing to me. My immediate focus went to the burning. Does a person with strong attachments, convictions, ambitions, relationships, and identities have more to lose if they are seeking Truth?

If a strong personality produces a brighter light, does it also endure a greater fire? Quite likely. The more we hold, the more is taken away from us. I am reminded of a Buddhist story that illustrates this.

A woman would visit the Buddha year after year with good news. Another child had been born. She would arrive smiling, carrying sweets, grateful for her growing family. The Buddha would bless her, and she would return home content.

Many years later she came again, inconsolable. Some of her children had died. Through tears she asked, “Why has this happened to me?”

The Buddha reminded her that the same life that had brought these children into her arms had not promised to keep them there forever. Every birth carried within it the possibility of loss. Every meeting carried within it a parting. What had once been the source of her greatest joy had become the source of her deepest sorrow.

We welcome the pleasant visitor and assume it has come to stay. We build our happiness around it. Yet life moves on. What arrives departs. What is given is eventually taken back. While this story illustrates the universal pain of worldly attachment, a strong personality acts as a massive concentration of these attachments—meaning the fire of its dissolution will burn even more intensely.

But the statement “The stronger the personality, the brighter the light when it burns” contains two distinct sides that are easy to overlook. There is the burning itself, and there is the light that appears through the burning. Let me consider both to understand Nisargadatta’s statement.

The burning is a gradual dissolution of what we take ourselves to be. A personality is not merely a collection of habits. It is an entire structure of identification. It consists of our stories, achievements, wounds, opinions, roles, attachments, and images of ourselves. At some point on the spiritual path, these identifications begin to depart from us. Sometimes this happens through inquiry. Sometimes through devotion. Sometimes through the unavoidable events of life. A relationship ends. Health changes. Certainties collapse. Plans fail. The future becomes uncertain. Life has a remarkable ability to find whatever we are holding most tightly.

For this reason, spiritual traditions often speak of purification, surrender, renunciation, or the death of the ego. Different languages are used, but the underlying truth is identical. Something that once seemed essential is gradually revealed to be nonessential. From the perspective of the personality, this process can be painful and feel like loss. This is why the metaphor of fire is so powerful. Fire does not politely rearrange things. It transforms them.

Yet Nisargadatta does not stop with the fire. He immediately speaks of light. This suggests that the burning is not merely destructive. It is revelatory of what we truly are. The purpose of the fire is to bring the light to the fore.

Many spiritual seekers spend years contemplating the first half of the process while giving little attention to the second. Understandably so. The possibility of suffering is easier to imagine than the possibility of freedom. But if we look at the lives of saints and sages, what we remember is usually not the burning. We remember the light.

Consider the life of Saint John of the Cross. His spiritual journey involved profound suffering. He endured imprisonment, isolation, misunderstanding, and periods of deep inner darkness. The writings that came forth from these experiences became famous as descriptions of the “Dark Night.” In his life, the fire came first. The burning involved loss, uncertainty, and purification. Yet what resulted from that process was extraordinary wisdom and love. His later writings are luminous. The story that began with suffering became part of the preparation for realization. The fire revealed the light.

Now compare this with the life of Ramana Maharshi. At the age of sixteen, Ramana experienced an overwhelming fear of death. Instead of fleeing from it, he turned directly toward the experience and investigated what it was that actually died. The result was an immediate awakening.

What is striking about this event is that it was not preceded by years of external loss. He had not lost his family, wealth, health, or social standing. There was no prolonged period of worldly suffering leading up to realization. The light appeared first. Only afterward did the rest of life reorganize itself around that discovery. In Ramana’s case, the light itself became the fire. Once the highest reality was seen, old identifications gradually lost their hold.

This points to two very different spiritual patterns.

In one, the fire produces the light.

In the other, the light produces the fire.

Both appear throughout spiritual history.

A similar dynamic can be seen in the life of Sri Ramakrishna. He represents yet another possibility: not the fire of worldly loss, nor the fire that follows awakening, but the fire of longing itself. His path was marked not by worldly losses, but by an intense longing for the Divine. The burning was primarily inward. It was the agony of separation from God. When realization came, it came with extraordinary force and transformed every aspect of his life. In his life, the emphasis lay on absolute spiritual intensity.

While there is no single formula for transformation, some are purified by life, some are transformed by inquiry, and some are consumed by love. Yet Nisargadatta’s statement seems broad enough to encompass all of them. The stronger the personality, the greater the fuel.

A weak personality contains little energy. A strong personality contains enormous energy. That energy can become attachment, ambition, pride, and suffering. But it can also become devotion, inquiry, surrender, compassion, and illumination. Perhaps this is what Nisargadatta is pointing toward. The very force that builds a powerful personality can later become the force that carries one beyond it. The same energy that creates identification can become the energy of surrender. The greater the fuel, the greater the possibility of illumination.

This observation brings to mind a psychological insight from Carl Jung, who suggested that the first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, while the second half is about going inward and letting go of it. In that sense, a strong personality is a necessary stage of development. But eventually the house we have spent years constructing becomes too small for us. For many seekers, the more we acquire, develop, and become attached to, the more intense the burning eventually becomes.

The result of that burning is that the personality is not destroyed, but rendered transparent, freed from the heavy conditioning of acquired ideas and possessions. It stops being influenced by them or identified with them.

This leads to the most important question of all. Why does the prospect of burning frighten us so much?

The answer is simple. We hear the word “burning” and imagine suffering. We imagine losing people we love, health we depend upon, security we cherish, and identities that give meaning to our lives. And there is truth in that concern. Spiritual transformation is rarely comfortable. Yet if the saints teach anything, it is that suffering alone is not the point.

The goal is freedom. For those of us with personalities that hold too much, pain may be the premise of that freedom, but it is not the destination. The goal is not the dismantling of the personality for its own sake. The goal is a love that can shine without obstruction. This is why so many realized beings, despite their different teachings and temperaments, radiate a similar quality. Whether they speak the language of devotion or inquiry, they often appear remarkably loving.

This may be the deeper implication of Nisargadatta’s statement: the fire is not the final reality. The light is.

The personality experiences the process as loss. The heart experiences it as purification. The sage experiences it as transparency. What remains is a freedom through which love, wisdom, and compassion can shine without obstruction.

The stronger the personality, the brighter the light when it burns. The statement sounds frightening until one notices where it ends.

With the light

.

Among the many profound ideas in the Bhagavad Gita, few are as frequently quoted and as frequently misunderstood as svabhāva (inherent nature) and svadharma (one’s own duty or calling). These two Sanskrit terms are connected at the root, yet they point to different dimensions of human life.

Many of us sense that we have a certain nature and a certain calling. The Gita provides a framework for understanding both. It teaches that to live well, we must first understand our nature and then act in harmony with it. Yet the distinction between them is often overlooked.

In conversations about the Bhagavad Gita, svabhāva and svadharma are often used interchangeably, as though they mean the same thing. Yet Krishna treats them as distinct ideas. Understanding the difference is essential if we want to understand his teachings on purpose, action, and spiritual growth.

But what exactly is the difference between svabhāva and svadharma? How do they work together? And is it true that svabhāva can change while svadharma remains constant throughout a lifetime?

What Is Svabhāva?

The Sanskrit word svabhāva literally means “one’s inherent nature.”

It refers to the tendencies, capacities, dispositions, and psychological structure through which an individual engages with life. In the Gita, svabhāva is closely associated with the three guṇas: sattva (clarity), rajas (activity), and tamas (inertia). Every person embodies these qualities in different proportions. This is why each one of us has a unique temperament and orientation toward life.

Some people naturally seek wisdom and understanding. Others instinctively step forward when leadership, protection, or responsibility is required. Some excel at organization, commerce, and resource management, while others find fulfillment in service, craftsmanship, or practical work.

These natural inclinations arise from svabhāva.

In Chapter 18 of the Gita, Krishna describes the traditional varṇas in terms of qualities and actions arising from one’s nature. This is quite different from the way caste is often understood in modern India. The emphasis is not on social identity, but on the inner qualities and tendencies that express themselves through action.

In simple terms, svabhāva refers to what we naturally incline toward in thought, action, and temperament. It is the pattern through which life expresses itself through us.

What Is Svadharma?

If svabhāva concerns our nature, svadharma concerns how that nature is lived.

The word svadharma means “one’s own dharma.” Here, dharma does not simply mean religion, morality, or social duty. It refers to the right way of living, acting, and participating in the order of existence according to one’s nature.

The Bhagavad Gita repeatedly emphasizes the importance of svadharma:

Better one’s own dharma, though imperfectly performed, than another’s dharma perfectly performed.

This teaching appears in slightly different forms in Chapters 3 and 18.

Krishna does not tell us to follow every passing desire or preference. Rather, he encourages us to understand our inherent nature and live in alignment with it.

A simple metaphor helps clarify the distinction. A mango seed possesses the svabhāva of a mango tree. Its svadharma is to grow into a mango tree and bear mangoes. The seed’s nature is one thing; the fulfillment of that nature is another.

How Svabhāva and Svadharma Work Together

The Gita presents a clear relationship between these two principles:

Svabhāva → Svadharma → Karma

Nature gives rise to duty, and duty expresses itself through action.

A person with a contemplative nature may discover that their svadharma involves teaching, studying, researching, mentoring, or pursuing wisdom. A person whose nature is courageous and protective may discover a svadharma related to leadership, justice, governance, defense, or social responsibility.

When actions arise from svadharma, there is often a sense of inner alignment. The work may still be difficult, but it feels meaningful and authentic. When actions consistently oppose our inherent nature, there is often friction, exhaustion, dissatisfaction, and inner conflict.

This is precisely the dilemma faced by Arjuna in the Gita.

At the beginning of the battle, Arjuna is overwhelmed by grief and compassion. These feelings are genuine. Yet Krishna points out that Arjuna’s momentary emotional state does not erase his inherent nature and responsibility. His immediate feelings pull him in one direction, but his inherent nature and corresponding svadharma require him to act differently.

The Gita therefore teaches us to distinguish between temporary emotions and enduring nature.

The Difference Between Svabhāva and Svadharma

While closely related, the two concepts are not identical. Svabhāva describes what we are naturally inclined toward, whereas svadharma concerns the duties and responsibilities that follow from that nature.

A person may clearly possess a particular svabhāva and yet fail to live their svadharma. Someone may have the nature of a teacher but spend their life chasing status in a profession completely disconnected from their inherent gifts. Their nature remains what it is, but their duty remains unfulfilled.

A person may spend years ignoring their svadharma without ever escaping their svabhāva.

Can Svabhāva Change?

This question requires a nuanced answer. From the ordinary psychological perspective, the answer is yes. People change, habits change, and the relative influence of the three guṇas alters over time. A highly restless and ambitious person (rajas) may become more reflective and balanced (sattva) through life experience.

In fact, the entire spiritual path assumes that transformation is possible through sādhana (intentional spiritual practice), which actively purifies our nature by sublimating tamas and rajas into sattva. However, the tradition distinguishes between two levels of svabhāva.

The Surface Level: Personality, conditioning, habits, preferences, and acquired patterns. This layer changes dramatically.

The Inherent Level: The fundamental tendency through which the individual expresses itself in a particular lifetime. This layer tends to remain relatively stable.

The outer layers may change considerably, but the inherent pattern often remains recognizable throughout life.

Does Svadharma Remain the Same Throughout Life?

The Gita suggests that because svadharma arises from our inherent nature, it possesses immense continuity. However, its external expression evolves significantly across different stages of life (āśramas).

Consider a person whose essential dharma is teaching. At twenty, they may teach children. At forty, they may teach at a university. At seventy, they may guide spiritual seekers. The external role changes, but the underlying dharma remains the same.

Thus, the core of svadharma tends to remain constant throughout a lifetime, while its outer forms and expressions adapt.

To deepen this understanding, later Vedantic traditions often distinguish between two levels of dharma:

Aparā Dharma (Relative Duty): Our worldly svadharma, arising from our psychological makeup, responsibilities, and stage of life.

Parā Dharma (Ultimate Duty): The universal calling shared by all living beings—to transcend material nature, realize the Divine, and attain liberation.

The Upanishadic Perspective

The Upanishads introduce an even broader perspective. While the Gita spends considerable time discussing nature, duty, and action within the relative world, the Upanishads point our attention toward the ground of being itself. They invite us to look beyond personality, role, talent, and even individual nature. What remains is the Ātman, the unchanging Self that underlies all experience.

From this perspective:

• Svabhāva belongs to prakṛti (nature).

• Svadharma belongs to life within prakṛti.

• Ātman transcends both.

Krishna’s genius lies in showing how these perspectives complement one another. He does not tell Arjuna:

“You are the Self, therefore your duties do not matter.”

Instead, he outlines a path that integrates inner understanding, right action, and spiritual realization.

Understand our nature (Svabhāva): We begin by honestly examining our qualities, strengths, and tendencies.

Perform our dharma (Svadharma): We take up the responsibilities that arise from that nature rather than avoiding them.

Offer the fruits of action to the Divine (Karma Yoga): We act wholeheartedly while letting go of attachment to outcomes.

Realize the Self (Ātman): Through this process, the mind is gradually purified, making Self-realization possible.

Spiritual realization does not change our svadharma as much as it changes the consciousness with which we perform it.

Nature, Duty, and the Self

Viewed together, these teachings reveal a coherent vision of human life. Svabhāva is our psychophysical nature. Svadharma concerns how we live in accordance with that nature.

The surface layers of svabhāva may change through experience, maturity, and spiritual practice, but the inherent pattern of one’s nature often remains surprisingly consistent. Because svadharma is rooted in that inherent pattern, its essential continuity remains intact even as its outer forms evolve.

Beyond both lies the teaching of the Upanishads: that our ultimate identity is neither our nature nor our role, but the eternal Ātman itself.

The wisdom of the Gita is that we need not choose between these truths. We can realize the Self while faithfully expressing our inherent nature in the world.

The real challenge is understanding ourselves well enough to recognize what life is already asking of us.

When I began my spiritual life, I chose devotion. Looking back, I can see that two distinct impulses were already present within me: the longing for God, and the desire to understand for myself. When the time came to choose a path, devotion won.

For years I immersed myself in a structured devotional life. There were practices, scriptures, chanting, spiritual discipline, and the company of fellow seekers. I learned a great deal during those years, and I remain grateful for them. Yet the desire to understand for myself never went away. Alongside devotion was a wish to observe, to understand the workings of my own mind, and to see rather than merely believe.

Then, a series of events forced me to look more honestly at where I was. It was a difficult phase, and a long one. It was during that period that I found myself returning to Sri Krishna Prem. I had encountered his writings years earlier, and from the beginning, they spoke to questions that I had carried for a long time. Even though I knew he was no longer in the body, there was a part of me that wanted to find him and meet him. His words had touched something in me that very few spiritual books ever had. At that point, though, I felt I needed guidance, companionship, practice, and satsang, so I devoted myself to that structured path. Yet Sri Krishna Prem remained with me.

Years later, after life had broken through some of my neatly arranged assumptions, I returned to his writings. This was not a return to a forgotten author. By then, I had lived through experiences that I did not have when I first encountered him, and I returned with questions that had followed me for years.

Once again, I was struck by the same thing that had attracted me from the start. Many of the doubts I harbored had either gone unanswered or received answers that did not satisfy me. Yet when I read Sri Krishna Prem, I discovered that he had wrestled with many of those same questions himself.

What amazed me was the clarity with which he addressed them. I did not feel that he was speaking from borrowed knowledge or repeating a doctrine. I felt that he had lived the questions and worked through them. Perhaps that is why his words carried such weight for me.

Sri Aurobindo once described him as possessing Pashyanti Buddhi, a seeing intelligence. Whether or not one uses that term, I often felt that he was looking directly at the heart of a problem rather than circling around it. At the same time, there was warmth in his writing. He understood the struggles, contradictions, aspirations, and blind spots of ordinary seekers. More than once, I felt that he understood the problem before I did. I did not feel that I was being asked to choose between inquiry and devotion, understanding and love.

There was something else as well. For all the importance of ideas, questions, and understanding, none of those alone can sustain a relationship between teacher and student. What I felt for Sri Krishna Prem was not merely admiration; there was affection, trust, and a sense of kinship that is difficult to explain.

Without that, I do not think any lasting relationship between teacher and student is possible. One may respect a scholar, admire a thinker, or learn from a writer, but something more is needed before a person becomes a guide. Whatever the reason, I felt that connection from the beginning, and years later, I feel no less connected to him than I did then.

Gradually, it became clear to me that devotion and inquiry were not enemies. I did not have to choose one at the expense of the other. The conflict was not between devotion and inquiry; the conflict was in the way I had been thinking about them.

That realization also brought me back to the question of the guru.

I understood why people insisted on the need for one. We are not nearly as objective as we think we are. When people say, “The truth is already within you,” I do not disagree. But what is also within us are layers of conditioning, desire, fear, pride, and habit—some of which feel older than this lifetime. Whether one speaks of past lives or simply years of conditioning hardly matters; they shape the way we see. The problem is not that truth is absent, but that we rarely see it without distortion.

It also led me to question a distinction that many people take for granted. We speak of living gurus and gurus who are no longer in the body as though the difference is absolute. But is it always?

Today, a teacher may have tens of thousands of disciples. Most of them will never sit privately with that teacher. Their guidance comes through books, recordings, online talks, public discourses, and occasional visits. There is nothing wrong with this, and many people have benefited enormously from such teachings.

But I keep coming back to a question: If a disciple receives most of his guidance through books, lectures, recordings, and reflection, then what exactly makes that relationship fundamentally different from the relationship someone may have with a teacher who is no longer physically present?

I am not arguing against living gurus. Physical presence has value, and there is something special about being in the company of a person who lives what they teach. I am only suggesting that the matter may be more complicated than we often admit. For me, Sri Krishna Prem has been more important than many living teachers.

Looking back, I saw in Sri Krishna Prem something I was struggling to reconcile within myself. I could never rest comfortably in devotion alone, nor could I rest comfortably in inquiry alone. In him, I found both.

I do not fit comfortably among people whose spiritual life revolves around rituals, observances, fasting, and constant religious activity. I respect these things and have spent years around them, but they simply do not come naturally to me.

My own devotion is much simpler. I say a prayer before cooking. I do some japa. I remember the Lord during the day. Sometimes I complain to Him. Sometimes I thank Him. Sometimes I ask questions and hear nothing in return. That is more or less the extent of it.

At the same time, I do not fit comfortably among those who speak only of awareness, consciousness, and the Self. I have tried forcing myself into that mold, and it never worked. I have never been able to relate to talk of the True Self in the direct way that others seem to. What seems more doable to me is offering my little self, that is, the personality, to the divine. The attempt to watch the mind while searching for the watcher has never felt natural either. I can appreciate these approaches and see why they help many people, but they simply do not describe my own experience.

And that is what I admire most about Sri Krishna Prem. In his writings, I found someone who could love without abandoning inquiry and intelligence, and question without losing reverence.

There is also a love that runs through his writings. I cannot quite define it, but I have never been able to miss it. It is one of the reasons his words continue to mean so much to me.

I am far from where I would like to be. Most days I feel as though I am still wrestling with old habits and mental impressions. But knowing that such a balance is possible has mattered more to me than I can easily express.

For a long time, I assumed that something was wrong with me because I could not settle comfortably into either camp. Perhaps there are more of us in this position than we realize.

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This is about “many selves,” or rather, many ways of seeing, as Sri Krishna Prem wrote to Dilip Roy. This understanding came to me from one of his letters in which he cautioned against seeing the self as something fixed and singular. Instead, he wrote of different ways of seeing.

“There are as many ‘selves’ as there are ways of seeing. When we see things in one way that is one of our ‘selves’ and when in another that is a second one. These ‘selves’ are not separate beings like so many chemical boxes nor are they a hierarchy of bureaucrats that one can overrule the other...”

For convenience, I named these ways of seeing as if they were different selves. Not because they are separate personalities, but because naming them made them easier to recognize.

So, one night, these many ways of seeing, these many selves, came to the surface. Long ago, I had categorized them and even named them so I could recognize them more easily when they became active. This naming was inspired by reading Maurice Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Volumes 1 and 2. I do not recall Nicoll recommending such a practice. The idea was an offshoot of my own mind, which had taken a liking to his way of teaching.

Honestly, I do not remember the names I originally gave to these ways of seeing that take turns sitting on the throne. As I write this piece, I find myself calling them Dreamer, Catastrophizer, Pilgrim-Mystic, Communicator, and the Weary One.

There is one self that dreams of living in a scenic place close to nature. A small but cozy house. A garden. Sunrises worth waking up for and sunsets worth sitting still for. The sound of flowing water. The songs of birds. This self imagines a different kind of life from the one I currently have.

Then there is another self, one I know all too well. The Catastrophizer. Give it a small concern, an uncertain prediction, an unfavorable astrological indication, and it will immediately construct the worst possible future. It does not merely anticipate trouble. It magnifies it.

Another self is captivated by mystery. It wants to know what lies beyond the visible world, in subtle realms and hidden realities. It wants to astral travel to places it cannot easily visit, including my guru’s ashram. It longs for darshan of my gurus, who may now exist in subtler or etheric forms. This is the Pilgrim-Mystic.

Then there is the Communicator. This self wants to write well, speak well, contribute something meaningful, and be appreciated for the work it does. It also wants to earn an honest living through that work and create the kind of life the Dreamer imagines. For this self, understanding naturally seeks expression.

And somewhere among them sits the Weary One. This self occasionally loses patience with life altogether. It looks at the endless cycle of problems, responsibilities, and uncertainties and asks, “Is this really all there is?”

These are not separate personalities. They are not different people living inside me. They are ways of seeing. A collection of tendencies, desires, fears, hopes, and habits that take turns sitting on the throne.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was not an entirely new observation. More than a decade ago, while walking alone, I was caught in one of those imaginary conversations that the mind likes to create. Various people appeared in the story that was being woven inside my head. Each had a role to play. One was saying this. Another was doing that.

Then, quite suddenly, something became obvious. Those people were not really those people. My mind had borrowed their faces, but the drama itself belonged entirely to me. Every character in the story was serving a purpose within my own psychology. The critic, the supporter, the opponent, the misunderstood one. The mind had cast itself in every role and was carrying on a conversation with itself.

The insight changed the way I look at my thoughts.

Years later, walking through my housing society, a strange experience occurred quite suddenly. I felt, with startling clarity, that my mind was separate from me. I do not mean this as a philosophical statement. I mean it as a direct experience.

For a brief period there was a sense of inner space. Thoughts were present, but they no longer felt welded to my identity. It was as though there was distance between the observer and the mental activity being observed. The experience vanished as suddenly as it appeared. I have never been able to reproduce it.

Looking back, I see a common thread running through all these experiences. A story became visible as a story. A thought became visible as a thought. The mind became visible as mind.

And one night, these various selves became visible as what they really were: different ways of seeing.

I do not know what any of this ultimately means. I am not sure who, exactly, is doing the observing. Is it simply a more reflective part of the mind? Or is there something in me that can observe even that? I do not know.

What I do know is that when a self is seen, it begins to lose its hold on me, inch by inch.

The Catastrophizer loses some of its authority when it is recognized as the Catastrophizer. The Pilgrim-Mystic loses some of its fascination with distant horizons and remembers the mystery already present within, the Kingdom of Heaven, the cave of the heart. The Communicator loses some of its need for approval and returns to the simple act of communicating. The Weary One no longer speaks for the whole of me when it is recognized as only one way of seeing among many.

This is the beginning of the journey. It is not the discovery of the real Self.

But each time one of these selves is seen for what it is, the grip of identification weakens a little. Not that it can be measured. There is no scale for it, not that I know of, other than the change in heart, which too is very subtle. Not obvious enough to seep through the person that I am.

Not yet.

My day room connects directly to the bathroom. This is where I am parked during the hours of daylight, where my laptop desk sits, and where I can sit up in bed for brief windows. The layers of cotton mattresses covering the orthopedic mattress, combined with specialized back support, are arranged specifically to let me sit as if on a couch for twenty to twenty-five minutes at a stretch. I cannot do this in my bedroom. Because of my chronic lower back pain, sitting in that bed is impossible.

As I entered the day room, after waking up less than a minute ago, I switched on the light and flipped the switch for the ceiling fan.

The fan did not respond.

On a June summer morning in Delhi, this is exactly the trigger that an anxious mind waits for. For decades, my reaction to small inconveniences or negative news feeds has followed a predictable, exhausting script. Instantly, my mind pulled up the oppressive summer heat, my lumbar spondylitis, and the evening shift of the electrician. It constructed an elaborate story of a distress that would last for at least two days: The electrician will visit late, he will diagnose the issue late, and he will have to return with the replacement part tomorrow. The living room, which is one of the warmest parts of the home in summer, has no air conditioning because we rarely use that part of the home. So that room can’t be a suitable alternative. And here in the day room, an AC alone without a fan to circulate the air simply cannot tame the fierce June heat. Within seconds, the mind had woven a story designed to cause distress.

Then, completely unexpectedly, and rather surprisingly, an inner voice spoke. It was not the frantic voice of another fragment of my little self, which always sounds exactly like my physical voice, but something else entirely. This voice was like a revelation worded into the language I understand.

It did not just speak the words; it helped me ‘see’ the truth and grace of the message: “You are fine, you are safe.”

Immediately, a silent comparison was drawn between the breaking down of a fan and the breaking down of health. It was not a visual thought, nor a complex mental calculation. It was sudden, a spark of realization of just how small an issue a broken fan is to manage, even when living an inconvenient life for a day or two.

Just like that, the catastrophizing anxiety evaporated into the ether. And so far, I have managed perfectly well without the fan.

The town I grew up in felt very different from today’s India. There was no internet, no mobile phone, no Google. Residential telephone lines had not yet reached our town. In our entire neighborhood, there was just one car, a Maruti 800. The roads belonged to bicycles, cycle rickshaws, handcarts, stray dogs, and children. Afternoons felt endless.

Somewhere in those afternoons, I developed a strange habit.

Behind our house was a wide road. Near a cycle puncture shop stood a raised mud platform made of packed earth. For reasons I could never explain, I was drawn to it. I would climb onto it, sit cross-legged, close my eyes, and try to stay there. I never managed it for long. Within minutes, I would become restless and get up. Yet for a while I kept going back. Then, as children do, I must have lost interest and moved on to something else.

The habit died a natural death. The feeling never left me.

Around that same period, I came across a comic book about mystics living in a cave and performing strange, mysterious feats. I found the first volume and was completely absorbed by it, but I never found the second. For months, I kept asking at the comic shop. Every time I went there, I hoped it had arrived. I wanted to know what happened to them. I wanted to know where all those mysterious events were leading. I wanted the story to continue.

The second volume never turned up.

A year or two later, another thing happened. I remember realizing that my body was changing, but something in me was not. The body was growing. My thoughts were changing. Yet the one who noticed the changes remained exactly the same.

I had no language for it then. It was simply an observation.

Now, at fifty, I find myself wondering if these memories were pointing in the same direction all along: the little girl sitting on a mud platform with closed eyes, the little girl searching for the missing volume of a story about mystics, and the little girl realizing that something remained unchanged while the body changed.

Looking back, what strikes me most is this: that little girl did not turn spirituality into a project.

She simply wanted to discover something.

My feeds are full of declarations: all is One, there is only the Self, there are no others, you are already what you seek.

These statements are true, at least as pointers

But where are the seekers?

Where are the people talking about the difficult, often unglamorous work of the path? The days of clarity followed by weeks of confusion. The old fears that return. The attachments that refuse to leave. The moments when one takes a step forward and then seems to slide two steps back.

Many of the great spiritual figures did not walk a straight line. They wrestled with doubt, loneliness, temptation, despair, and periods of profound dryness. Even those we now regard as saints and sages lived through seasons when certainty was absent.

Yet online, realization is often presented as if it were a conclusion rather than a living process.

There are those who say no discipline is needed, no practice is required, no inner work is necessary because we are already what we seek. There may be wisdom in that. But there is also a danger in mistaking an idea for a realization.

Talking about nonduality is not the same as realization. Quoting a sage is not the same as wisdom. Knowing the language of awakening is not the same as awakening.

I am reminded of a story a seeker once told me.

A sadhu was traveling on a train and spent much of the journey explaining that the world is an illusion. Nothing was ultimately real, he said, and one should not be attached to appearances.

After a long discussion, he suddenly stood up and announced that he needed to use the toilet.

A few fellow monks blocked his way.

“Why are you stopping me?” he asked.

“Because your bladder is an illusion,” they replied. “The urge is an illusion. The toilet is an illusion. Why trouble yourself over something that isn’t real?”

The sadhu insisted on getting through.

The story stayed with me for years because it points to something important. It is one thing to understand a teaching. It is another thing to embody it. It is one thing to speak of truth. It is another thing to live it.

The heart is not transformed by concepts alone. It must confront its own greed, fear, envy, ambition, vanity, and longing. It must see clearly what it has spent years avoiding.

No one becomes a musician by talking about music. No one becomes a Christian by sitting in a church. No one becomes a seer by repeating spiritual phrases, however beautiful they may sound.

There is so much information available today that anyone can wear the appearance of wisdom. Living wisdom is something else entirely.

That is why I find myself looking for fellow travelers rather than teachers. People who are honest about the journey. People who can speak about both insight and struggle. People who are still learning, still stumbling, still discovering.

I am interested in hearing from those who have wrestled with doubt, disappointment, confusion, and the long stretches where nothing seems to happen. I am interested in the reality of the path, not only its conclusions.

If you are one of those seekers, I would love to hear from you.

Are there any seekers out there?

Hello?