About the site
The site contains some notes, some thoughts, from my journey as a student of vedanta.
At one point in late 2022, I put down a lot of thoughts in a coherent structure and a ToC. I refer to that as “the book”, and for want of a title, I called it “Learnings from Vedanta”. This site contains the entire content of that book.
In addition, there are isolated, random thoughts which keep popping up.
This site is not about religion in the conventional sense.
I reserve the right to edit anything I’ve posted here earlier, to (a) correct errors, (b) improve the wording or add an example, or (c) reflect my changed understanding of the idea. For the section I call “The book”, I will avoid reason (c), but for the blog posts, all three reasons will apply.
About me
I intend to remain anonymous. I am well past my prime in years. I have a day job which has nothing to do with vedanta, and I have the usual family and friends like everyone else. That’s all I intend to put on record here about myself.
I am not, and never will be, a spiritual guide or teacher or guru, or conference speaker, or TED talker on spirituality, for the following reasons:
- I am not capable of being one. I have seen my master closely, and I know just enough about the difference between him and ordinary folks like me to know that a real guru is almost not human.
- I am not interested. There is an innate desire to share any joy you find in anything, and this website is an outcome of that desire. This is where it will stop.
- I have seen my master’s life, and I don’t envy him. I do not envy the lives of any of the genuine masters I have seen. Self-realised people are supposed to be living in eternal bliss and are supposed to envied. But those who take on the role of teaching others, nurturing disciples, have a crazy life. My master himself sometimes refers to his own public life disparagingly, and talks longingly of his quiet early life before he became a spiritual guide.
- Even if the first three reasons were not there, I cannot be a guru or teacher because my master has not said I should be one.
About my master
I will not disclose my master’s identity. This is because I do not want any stupid reader to read my thoughts here and then accuse my master of teaching stupid things to his disciples. If I have stupid thoughts, if I am ignorant, you can blame me and discredit me, post rabid criticisms of my site on social media, etc, etc. Don’t bring him into it.
My master is “a French colony”. (Ramakrishna Paramahamsa used this term to describe himself sometimes, apparently.) Just bowing to him may be enough to free you.
I am not responsible for introducing the reader of this site to my master. My master is a public figure with a big Internet presence. If it is your destiny to meet him, I am 100% sure that you will. I have seen the most unbelievable coincidences bring complete strangers into contact with my master. I have also heard a few such stories about other seekers meeting their masters. So I do not have to play any role in this.
About my thoughts
- Any of my thoughts could be totally wrong. I have seen that everything and its polar opposite exist in Prakriti, and they could both be “true” or “correct” simultaneously, in the appropriate contexts. I know only that whatever I’ve written here makes perfect sense to me, now, and have a coherence which has stood the test of time since they formed in my head.
- My thoughts are an account of just one person’s journey. I have seen enough to know that every journey is different, because each of us has a different body-mind apparatus. Therefore my writings may be totally inapplicable and inappropriate to you. Don’t fret if you feel that way — just find your own answers.
- My thoughts may not be easy to understand for someone who is totally unfamiliar with vedanta. Even a superficial reading of the Bhagavat Gita may not be sufficient sometimes. I had a choice — dumb down my thoughts and make the site into a tutorial for beginners, or leave them as they are and risk losing the beginner audience. I looked around at beginners, looked at my own age, and made an instant decision.
- I may change my mind about what I have understood and written about here, and change my views. New realisations can replace old ones, make the old ones appear incorrect to me.
Basically, the right way to treat the matter on this site is like a set of photographs of various scenes, by one photographer through his very individual travels. If, in his collection of photos, you see one which has the image of a young man standing before a big palace, you cannot infer that:
- the palace exists. It may have been broken down soon after the photo was taken.
- the young man is still standing in front of that palace. How ridiculous is that?
- all young men look like that image in that photo.
- all palaces look like the image of the palace in that photo.
- if you go to the exact same site now, and the same young man and palace are there, you will see the scene exactly as the photographer saw it. Light changes, weathering will have its effect, creepers will have grown, the lawn will have been mowed, the young man will have put on weight, Russia will have invaded the country where the palace stood, and so on. And of course, there could have been dirt and fungus on the photographer’s lens.
- if you go to the place where the photographer went, you will be able to see the same scene.
In spite of all this, it can still be true that the photographer actually saw all the scenes which his camera recorded. They were true, at a specific time and place, for one traveller using one camera and lens.
My plans for this site
This site is not intended to “create awareness”, or “share ideas” in the sense in which social media thrives today. I am not seeking any feedback, engagement or interaction at all, and I am not interested in building a community of readers and fans. My thoughts are not specially valuable or rare — there are excellent books and YouTube videos which cover probably everything I’m writing in far better style.
The only reason I created this site is to allow some strangers to get some confirmation of their own thoughts and questions in case their thoughts lean the same way mine do. Who these strangers are and how they will find these pages is of no concern to me.
For those who understand the technology behind websites:
- This site is hosted as a purely static site. There is no software running behind this site, tracking clicks, generating cookies, or observing anything about the visitors who may visit. It’s just a bunch of HTML, CSS, and Javascript files.
- The site therefore has zero tracking of you, and generates no cookies, logs no information of any kind.
- I have not added Google Analytics or any other third-party tracking or analytics software, and I don’t intend to.
- I don’t check site access statistics to see how readership is growing or shrinking, not even the rudimentary figures the hosting service gives me. I occasionally glance at them just to ensure that the site is operational and error-free.
- In case you haven’t figured it out already: this site will never have any facility for posting reader comments or subscribing. If you want to check for new content, you will need to re-visit the site.