Author: vj

People who are not familiar with Singapore cannot understand how well governed it is. It’s not merely another first-world country where roads are smooth and pollution is low. It’s a whole different level of predictability and control. And this has a strange effect on its residents, which, as a student of vedanta, I find uniquely…

In the world of spiritual seekers and their journeys, I encounter a lot of “timepass”. (For those who don’t know the word, it’s Bombay lingo for useless activities one does to pass the time.) Spiritual entertainment People encounter spiritual teachers and love listening to their talks. And then some of the students take off on…

I had reached a point by late 2021 where various disturbing thoughts and ideas had fallen into a new pattern, and a lot of older ideas had been let go. I had the strong urge to write these thoughts down, which resulted in “the book”. But one piece was unfinished. Why act? I could not…

This word is very common in Indian folklore and fairy tales, not to mention religious texts. The commonest depiction is of a devotee praying to a god, and the god, pleased with all this devotion, raises his or her hand, palm forward, and says “tathaastu”. We’ve all heard these stories from our childhood. Translated to…

I feel that three quarters of the first shloka of the Isha Upanishad is enough for someone to see what I have seen. Shlokas are usually written in two lines of text. Here is the first shloka: Line 1: first half: Ishavasyamidam sarvam There are many ways to understand this. I understand this to mean…

Once I understand that all Prakriti is one manifest universe, the rock and the dog and the human are all shapes in this one reality. Therefore, when a mass of molecules gets energised by something called “life”, some autogenous reactions are started within that mass. And this allows those molecules to form structures (tissues), extract…

There is this big western idea that meditation is a calming exercise. If done right, it always calms the mind, gives the practitioner inner peace. So, just like doctors prescribe antacids to calm a troubled digestive system, various teachers and experts prescribe meditation for calming troubled minds.Then, when it doesn’t give the expected results, scholarly…