Anuraag.xyz

Category: I

My own interior, personal and purely subjective world.

  • What if this life is a gift, and we are just supposed to learn how to say thank you?

    What if our primary task as human beings is to learn how to express the deepest gratitude for the unmerited gift of awareness? Our very existence is owed to it, an eternal mystery of unconditional love—or, as some might perceive it, an eternal ‘debt.’ This perspective re-frames the pervasive guilt we often carry: the relentless drive to maximize potential, the self-criticism for perceived shortcomings, the persistent feeling of being ‘not-good-enough-yet.’ Could this negativity stem not from our failings, but from a fundamental misunderstanding—the misplaced notion that we must somehow earn this gift, rather than simply accept it wholeheartedly?

    If so, the path to truly deserving this gift lies not in relentless effort driven by a sense of cosmic debt, but paradoxically, in first learning to fully accept it. This means embracing the existence that is you—your body, your mind, and all your unique ways of being and acting. Such self-love becomes the primal act of receiving, the key to unlocking unbounded gratitude. Instead of striving to repay a debt, assuming we will feel worthy only after sufficient toil, we can choose to first learn how to genuinely say ‘thank you.’ This cultivates a kinder, purer, and more gentle relationship with ourselves, an inner alignment from which authentic goodness and impactful actions naturally flow into the world.

    Transforming our relationship with ourselves is a vital, yet often forgotten, lesson. It’s as if, somewhere in our evolutionary journey, the emergence of a ‘separate self’ created an enduring sense of separation—a deviation from an inherent perfection into a state of guilt and shame. This self, driven by a primal need to establish its worthiness and fearing its precarious position, strives endlessly, sometimes through prideful dominion, to earn its place and assert control.

    Yet, moving beyond this struggle of the separate self, I have come to see that the true ‘task’ a Higher Being, or the universe itself, ‘gives’ us is simpler and more profound: to experience and create love. This, I believe, is the whole point. Perhaps there is a cosmic interplay, not a war in the traditional sense, but a dynamic tension between this inherent drive towards love and the self-asserting dominion that has forgotten its source. Our journey, then, is to return to love. That, in essence, is the core ‘technology’ of the cosmos—the fundamental operating principle that gratitude and self-acceptance unlock within us, allowing love to remember its source and guide our way.

  • Hero’s Journey

    I realized today that I have misunderstood the notion of the hero’s journey. It’s not ‘a’ hero’s journey; it’s a motif for ‘every’ individual’s journey.

    What does it mean to be heroic? It is not solely about external validation, though widespread recognition for the journey is undeniably part of the experience. Heroism is about a profoundly personal internal battle with Fear: understanding its roots within us, then charging headfirst against that darkness to slay the dragons therein and emerge victorious.

    One can keep refusing the call—saying ‘no thanks,’ or ‘not yet’—but this refusal tends to keep the individual stuck, chained in a single place. No real progress occurs as long as a person remains subjugated by their fears.

    So, what are these fears? Why do they exist in the first place?
    To state the obvious, fear initially serves self-preservation, an animal instinct crucial for survival. In humans, however, this same instinctual capability has been weaponized for social situations, where public embarrassment or ridicule, for instance, can feel like a form of death.

    In other words, the socially constructed self can feel the fear of annihilation or injury, much like the physical substrate that supports it.

    In an ideal hero’s journey, the socially constructed self awakens to the reality of its non-essential nature—not meaning it gets annihilated, but rather that it becomes free from these socially constructed fears. This liberation allows one to operate with a kind of freedom previously unthinkable, unimaginable, while simultaneously allowing the body’s instinct for self-preservation to function, preventing reckless physical risks.

    I can maintain prudent physical behaviors and safeguard my health while attaining a sort of ‘immortality shield’ in approaching societal problems and challenges that previously instilled fear. Think of public speaking, expressing one’s mind freely, choosing friends and community unapologetically, and dealing with so-called ‘personal attacks’ in words from others.

    Will this necessarily make someone an inconsiderate, megalomaniacal narcissist, indifferent to how they make others feel? This is yet another social fear. One must trust that a higher form of morality will manifest once an individual begins speaking their truth, free from the anxiety of inadvertently hurting others. (This last part I still need to understand more deeply.)

  • Mono no aware

    I

    Witness it All

    The remembrance and The forgetting

    Of the fact That

    I

    Witness it all

  • Being what is

    “Appearances do not exist in themselves but only relatively to the subject in which, so far as it has senses, they inhere.”

    – Immanual Kant

    I first heard of Joscha Bach when YouTube suggested that I watch his discussion with Lex Fridman. I thought I’m in for a deep discussion on just AGI, but the talk was nothing short of spiritual for me. There were a lot of amazing things that Joscha said on the podcast, and I’ll probably write a detailed post on that someday. For this post, one specific thing that he mentioned is relevant. This was in context of what is the ‘true’ nature of reality vs what we perceive it to be. Joscha in his trademark calm demeanor quips that “there is no color or sound in the Real world”.

    We of course know this, but it’s easily forgotten in our daily experience. Kant discussed this quite eloquently in his classic work, ‘Critique of pure reason’ where he differentiated between Phenomenal and Noumenal ‘things’. Color perceptions are entirely phenomenal. It’s a conscious experience that would not exist in itself if there were no conscious mind to have those experiences in the first place. In addition, the same ‘color’ (i.e., wavelength of light that is reflected vs absorbed) is perceived differently by different people, though they all might agree to call the different perceptions by the same name (for example, there is a lot of strong evidence that color perception varies across gender).

    In contrast, Kant defined Noumenal as something whose existence does not depend upon being perceived by some mind. These ‘things’ exist independently of us and our sensibilities. (Joscha calls this the ‘quantum graph’ in the podcast)

    In his notion of ‘transcendental idealism’, Kant went on to propose that:

    it is possible to demonstrate the empirical reality of space and time, that is to say, the objective validity of all spatial and temporal properties in mathematics and physics, but this empirical reality involves transcendental ideality. Space and time are forms of human intuition, and they can only be proved valid for things as they appear to us and not for things as they are in themselves.

    In general, Kant’s investigations in the ‘Transcendental Logic’ lead him to conclude that:

    understanding and reason can only legitimately be applied to things as they appear phenomenally to us in experience. What things are in themselves as being noumenal, independent of our cognition, remains limited by what is known through phenomenal experience.

    This brings us to the title of this post. To begin to talk about ‘Being what is’, we need to first clearly define ‘Being’ and ‘What is’ to the best of our ability. I give the Kantian context above because I think that it’s a clear way of wrapping one’s mind around ‘what-is’:

    ‘What-is’ is Kant’s ultimate Noumena.

    ****

    “Whereever you look, you see what you are looking for.”

    – RamDass

    Trying to observe what-is is a key initial teaching for anyone exploring meditation. A lot of guided meditations start with the instruction of bringing awareness to the breath. Every thought and sensation is allowed to appear as it is. The only other instruction is to observe what is happening without trying to change or engage with it in any other way.

    The challenge of course is that the very act of observation (Phenomenal) changes what-is (Noumena) and mixes it up with our mind’s what-ought-to-be. Our conditioning will always color the way we observe and interpret the information from our senses, and this sensory information is itself a model of the Noumenal Reality. The simple act of noticing the sensations arising in consciousness carries with it a ‘concept’ map of the body in which it is apparently located. The apparent act of observation also creates the observer (the ‘me’) who is seemingly acting on objects.

    So how can one really observe what-is if the act of observation will change it? Well, you cannot. The only possibility is being what is.

    ****

    This subject-object perception is a by-product of our brain’s basic nature of information processing and discrimination (most of this happens in the neocortex).

    The emergent mind manufactures various preferences, likes, goals, desires, needs and wants that fracture what-is into multitude of opposites: Good-bad, right-wrong, pain-pleasure, happy-sad, true-false. Fear is a key underpinning knob of this system, and the dial is adjusted via an interplay of a variety of conditioned patterns. Some of these patterns go back thousands of years in our evolutionary history and they manifest as instinctive fight or flight responses.

    For most of us now, our basic survival is not under threat on most occasions, and we don’t know what to ‘do’ with this default evolutionary survival toolkit that we ship with. Since it doesn’t really need to be used to ensure survival against a harsh environment, we use it in our everyday life. This large hammer of survival instincts creates an existential nail out of every life situation. A work situation makes our anxiety and stress go up to the same degree as if we are going to be attacked by a wild animal. A small financial setback floods our body with cortisol, as if our food security is under threat.

    Instead of letting this toolkit run our day to day life, we should try to transcend it. It is simply not required in most life situations. And in an unforeseen situation that poses an actual threat to your survival, trust that your default toolkit will come to your aid automatically.

    This transcendence of the toolkit requires you to practice abandoning the use of your mind when it is not really needed. Just like your tongue is not actively trying to taste when there is nothing in your mouth, we should learn how to switch off our discriminating minds when there is no real problem to solve.

    Meditation is the practice of switching off your mind’s default activity – trying to solve so-called problems by discriminating what-is into what-ought-to-be. The resulting state of such a meditation is called ‘Being’ – a state of complete non-discrimination.

    Being is a state of complete acceptance and surrender by your mind, where there is a momentary cessation of its entire activity. And in this state of complete non-discrimination, there is an opportunity to be what-is, not by observation, but by complete dissolution of any subject and object.

    It’s impossible to describe this state in words. The various pointers that sages have left us over the years can cause this collapse of the mind to happen, but there are no rules to this. It’s a causeless happening. The beingness is not due to or dependent upon any sort of intellectual understanding. It is our essential nature that cannot ever be recognized by the mind ; the empty set that contains everything.

    Any attempt by the mind to cause this will necessarily lead to illusions that can get quite tricky to see through. An extremely common one is the fact that once your mind understands the above intellectually, it tries to objectify its non-discriminating state itself. 1

    ****

    One practical ‘method’ that I’m trying out to get around this trickery is the ‘fractal object collapse’ meditation. In a nutshell, it’s a state of recursive observation that collapses the process of observation completely.

    Start by doing the only thing you can ‘do’ – observe your mind’s discrimination process by the automatic stream of thoughts that come up to the surface. When you initially begin, the act of such an observation will become an object in itself. Instead of resting your mind here, continue to follow the process of observing-objectification ad infinitum. As you continue to observe recursively, you will feel a sense of going deeper and deeper into a bottomless pool of pure awareness. The effort can feel excruciatingly frustrating since there will be a sense of the process always being one step ahead of your ability to catch it via observation. Observation -> Objectification -> Observation….

    Eventually, there would be a complete cessation of this observation process and hence any objectification. No one can say how ‘long’ this will last, but you’ll notice a complete rest and relaxation of the observing-objectification loop. The energy being spent on this process will subside and along with it your mind will come to a sudden pause; a glimpse of the great silence and peace of the void that lies at the core of your being.

    And That is pure ‘being what is’.

    Root:

    1 – In some sense calling it a state causes this to happen. It should be called ‘state-less’ state to begin with.

    [This post originally appeared on my substack]

  • Recognizing the ‘I thought’

    “Mind is only a collection of thoughts and the thinker who thinks them. The thinker is the ‘I’-thought, the primal thought which rises from the Self before all others, which identifies with all other thoughts and says, ‘I am this body’. When you have eradicated all thoughts except for the thinker himself by ceaseless enquiry or by refusing to give them any attention, the ‘I’-thought sinks into the Heart and surrenders, leaving behind it only an awareness of consciousness. This surrender will only take place when the ‘I’-thought has ceased to identify with rising thoughts. While there are still stray thoughts which attract or evade your attention, the ‘I’-thought will always be directing its attention outwards rather than inwards. The purpose of self-enquiry is to make the ‘I’-thought move inwards, towards the Self. This will happen automatically as soon as you cease to be interested in any of your rising thoughts.” – Annamalai Swami

  • Motivation is hard

    It’s quite likely that my internal mindset is painting over my world view on this topic, but lately it appears to me that a lot of people in my generation are struggling with motivation. Everyone I speak to on this topic starts off with a list of projects that they feel passionate about, an outcome that they do desire to achieve, but in the same breath they drop hints around the lack of sufficient drive and motivation to actually work towards these goals meaningfully.

    I think sometimes our ability to visualize and imagine the end goal in high fidelity is a cause for lower motivation instead of generating it. It feels like the mind is sufficiently satisfied by the imaginary achievement of the goal, and the value of achieving the outcome in reality holds lower meaning in the light of this fiction. Yes, it is a form of existential crisis where the value of achieving anything in particular is put under a sweep of the ‘so what?’ inquiry.

    The only solution that I have come up with (besides abandoning the pursuit of the goal all together, which is a non-solution) is to consciously stop over visualization of what it would feel like to have achieved the goal. I do this by catching myself daydreaming incessantly about the outcome, reminding myself that this is a form of compulsive and addictive behavior, and then turning my mind towards contemplating the act of working towards the goal. Yup, it’s the good old ‘enjoy the journey without worrying about the outcome’ that does the trick.

    The need for motivation reduces significantly in this approach, since you only need enough to get started. And guess what, if you have good discipline built around getting started, a lot of motivation comes along for the ride while you are on the journey.

  • Empty Set

    A root ‘why’ question that you can infinitely regress to is ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’

    One of the most widely accepted ‘answer’ to this question is the Anthropic principle , which in simple terms can be stated as: There is something rather than nothing because only when there is something this question can be asked in the first place. This something has given rise to an intelligence in the universe that can pose such a question. Another way to put this is: we see this something and the so called ‘fine-tuning’ of the universe because life as we know it could not have evolved in any other set of circumstances.

    A lot of philosophers and physicists balk at this answer, since it eradicates any need for further inquiry into the question. Nonduality is also assumed to be, by the mind, a similar ‘cop out’ on trying to really answer the question. I have personally witnessed a lot of people frown when the conversation reaches a point where someone utters:

    ‘Things just are.’

    ‘I am’.

    ‘It all is just a happening.’

    In this post, I’ll try and use a logical structure to basically say the same thing, but hopefully present a more ‘satisfying’ answer to the mind.

    ****

    First up, let’s understand a term called ‘primitive notion’ that is key to the whole body of mathematics. Here is how Wikipedia defines the term:

    A primitive notion is a concept that is not defined in terms of previously-defined concepts. It is often motivated informally, usually by an appeal to intuition and everyday experience.

    For example, in contemporary geometry, point, line, and contains are some primitive notions. Instead of attempting to define them, their interplay is ruled (in Hilbert’s axiom system) by axioms like “For every two points there exists a line that contains them both.

    And here are two key examples of primitive notion that are relevant to the analogy that I’ll be building below:

    Set theory: The concept of the set is an example of a primitive notion. As Mary Tiles writes: [The] ‘definition’ of ‘set’ is less a definition than an attempt at explication of something which is being given the status of a primitive, undefined, term. As evidence, she quotes Felix Hausdorff: “A set is formed by the grouping together of single objects into a whole. A set is a plurality thought of as a unit.”

    Naive set theory: The empty set is a primitive notion. To assert that it exists would be an implicit axiom.

    Now let’s consider a set S of all possible Objects, Processes and Concepts defined as follows:

    S ε  {O, P, C}

    where:

    Objects: Whatever your mind labels as it perceives via the sensory apparatus of the five senses and thought. O ε {sights, sounds, smells, touches, tastes, thoughts and the infinite combination of these internal and external perceptions}

    Processes: State changes that appear to be an event in time. P ε  {Bodily and mental functions, aging, sunrise, …}

    Concepts: Laws, theories, explanations, definitions, language, logic. C ε {Laws of thermodynamics and energy conversation, general relativity, evolution, natural selection, Choice, Desire, set and number theory, axioms, primitive notions….}

    Note the inter-relatedness of these three elements of S. Some Concepts are set of Processes that talk about Objects. Some Processes are set of Objects that change and are explained via a Concept. And since both Concepts and Processes have names, and are perceived, labelled and categorised by your mind, they are all Objects as well.

    This inter-relatedness makes the differentiation almost trivial , but the point of defining such a set is to point you to this subtle fact: Your whole experience of consciousness is basically S ε {O,P,C}, whereas consciousness itself  is the raw awareness that contains these. 

    Symbolically, consciousness is the brackets { } that contain everything that can be talked or thought about. These curly brackets of Awareness contain and enable everything that we perceive.

    This empty set of pure Awareness is a primitive notion of everything that is. To assert that it just is, is an implicit axiom of reality.

    Primitive notions are bedrock to all rational and scientific thought. If you believe in mathematics and if you have ‘faith’ in the truth of its primitive notions, how can the primitive notion of consciousness be treated differently?

    ****

    When the bomb of nonduality was first detonated in my mind around a decade ago, the fallout was wide. It look a long time to pick up the pieces and try and see the whole. One of the natural questions that the mind throws up in this journey is:

    “So what should I ‘do’ with this deep realization?”

    Imagine for a moment that ‘you’ have a choice between picking being identified with S ε {O,P, C} OR the the empty set {}. What would you choose?

    The Concept of choice and an individual who is making the choice is of course contained in ‘C’ itself to begin with, so what we are really asking is : Can an element of set ever become aware of the set in which it is contained? To be even more precise – Can a part ever realise the whole that contains it?

    This question is behind the entire enterprise of illusory spiritual seeking that has goals such as enlightenment. The thing that is doing the seeking (the person/mind) is necessarily going to be caught in this act forever.  To be what the seeking is trying to be, it needs to paradoxically stop seeking in the first place.

    Osho talks about the same things from the perspective of effort. He says that in the initial stages of spiritual seeking, a lot of effort will be put by an individual, and it is very much required. Think of it as laying the ground work and foundation for the eventual giving up of all effort. A point will come when no more effort will be required, because the empty set will make itself known when all effort drops away. (We all are this empty set every night during deep sleep, but there is no memory of it for our minds to refer to. Remember, memory is also something that is within the set ‘P’ of Processes).

    So how can one ‘choose’ to be the empty set? By dropping all effort and seeking. Let the entire process of cosmic evolution that is burning like a fire within you reveal itself to your Awareness as an undeniable evidence of your true nature – a cosmic process that is happening on its own.

    Our minds have made us deeply believe that choosing {O,P,C} is the ‘right’ or natural way of being. Of course the mind will choose something that ensures its own survival. It is after all a product of arguably the most complex natural selection process know to itself.

    Falling back to the source, this Great nothingness, is our eventual destiny anyway. The second law of thermodynamics guarantees this state of high disorder and randomness where complex ordered life form will have to expend an energy that is greater than all the available energy to continue existing. That is when the process of evolution comes to a definite end. If you do not like this line of argument, just look at your own life. You will die one day and your body-mind implementation will come to an end. You return to the nothingness and become the empty set. So why not touch it time to time while you are within the set?

    ****

    [This post originally appeared on my substack]

  • Truce

    Intuition:

    Thought is the movement of mind that hijacks awareness. It’s an evolutionary tool that helped human species get to where it is in Nature. Our collective ego assumes that we are the most advanced species on the planet because of our ego driven human centricity. There is no objective way to prove that humans are really the most ‘advanced’ form of consciousness on the planet. We see the entire universe via the lens of our thought, and paint a projection that is in tune with what our thoughts can process.

    Quieting the mind gets rid of this core human centric ego thinking, which can be called the collective ‘I’. Applied individually, this can result in shedding of egoic layers to our personality, which in turn is nothing more than an intricately layered structure of thoughts. Each event in our lives, from early childhood , adds a thin layer of this egoic ‘I’ sense that gets thick over the years, like the bark of an old tree.

    There is a very simple practice that Papaji talked about which can help chip away at these egoic thought layers that we call ‘I’/ ‘Me’. [The following is what my intuition feels he is trying to communicate]

    Step 1: Catch yourself thinking a thought. Let’s call it thought ‘A’.

    Step 2: Just watch the automatic process of thought ‘A’ grabbing your awareness and taking hold of it. No need to push the thought away or fight this process from happening.

    Step 3: The thought , as if getting embarrassed of being put in the spotlight by your Awareness, slowly melts away into nothingness.

    Step 4: There is this brief moment of quiet, this gap, before the next thought ‘B’ emerges automatically to fill that gap and the cycle starts all over again as you persist with this method.

    Now, this might seem like a futile attempt to break your addiction to thought, but with enough repetitions, this methodology can start increasing the gap of ‘quietude’ between Step 3 and 4. As this gap increases in your sense of time and space, there is an opportunity for your Awareness to put the next layer of ‘I’ness up for enquiry , the root of all your thoughts:

    Step 5: Use the following thought to fill the gap , instead of waiting for the next thought to emerge on its own – “Is there any real difference between the ‘sense’ of ‘I’ or ‘Me’ AND any other thought that your mind automatically generates?”

    The hollow silence of the gap will echo back a resounding ‘No’ as an experiential Understanding instead of a thought based in language or logic. A feeling that is generated when one touches their true Being.

    Over time, one can instantaneously access step 5, put forth the enquiry and touch the freedom. As you dip your feet in this ocean of freedom again and again, your mind gets weakened to a degree where it becomes like any other useful tool or organ in your body. Something your Awareness calls for use when the natural need arises, just like you naturally put your legs to use to stand up and walk when you need to, or when your stomach swings into action natually after it’s filled with some food.

    This ‘Truce’ between your mind and your Awareness, where your Awareness can again shine through the thought clouds that have kept it blocked, is probably the most ‘practical’ way of being at peace.

    Root: