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 really understand what it meant to act in the presence of my understanding. Read “the book”, see what I mean by my understanding, and then tell me: why does one need to act? This had troubled me even while writing “the book”, as you can see in this chapter. I thought I had penned my thoughts down, therefore I had pinned down my understanding. But I hadn’t. They had remained at the level of words.
There is, unfortunately, a big gulf between visceral understanding and understanding of the mind. Understanding of the mind works for some subjects, but doesn’t work in stuff we are talking about on this website. Here, unless your understanding modifies how you live and act, the understanding is useless. The understanding has to seep into the “muscle memory of your mind”.1
So, I began to struggle with the “acting” part. The why-act ideas were not powerful enough to make me put my heart into actions. This went on for a couple of years. It takes time to understand that one’s understanding is weak.
As always, my master stepped in, in his slimy, invisible manner. He conducted a retreat in 2025 where he spoke about the Yoga Vashistha in great detail. I wasn’t there, but his talks go on YouTube anyway, the Great Big Library In The Sky. So I heard his talks.
Yoga Vashistha
The Yoga Vashistha is a fun book, when explained by someone like my master. Every third remark from him is with tongue firmly in cheek. I think this placement of his tongue is to help him fight the boredom of addressing large collections of sombre visages. I’ve suspected for some time now that he’s bored to death by his retreats.
In Yoga Vashistha, Rama asks assembled sages exactly this question: why act? And the sages launch into really long meandering stories with stories-within-stories like Russian dolls, to explain to Rama that acting is not an option. It’s not just acting, but acting with all your heart and soul.
After listening to a few of these videos, things began to fall into place in my blood and bones. I now have a three-bullet-point summary of how to live:
- You are not the doer. Ma is the only doer.
- Knowing this, you still must act. Vigorously. As if your life depended on it.
- You have no control over the outcome of your actions.
This self-contradictory and confused set of three points makes perfect sense now. I have to act. And the keyword is “vigorously”. Basically, each day of each of our lives is Arjun in the battlefield.
By 2021, I had known points 1 and 3; Point 2 was the new and confusing bit. And I didn’t arrive at this through any intellectual analysis. It’s just Yoga Vashistha, injected into my consciousness by my master, which made the pieces fall into place. I can’t help you reach there, I don’t know how he did it. But I now know, at a depth I never knew before, that I need to act. This acting is illogical, as is very apparent from points 1 and 3 above. But act one must. And acting is not enough — one must act vigorously. As if everything depended on it.
What has changed
The changes are deep, and I can see them now.
I can now see that there was a very deeeep passivity in me. Only those who have seen me very closely in action for a decade or so would have seen this. I have no idea where it came from. I am quite certain that a psychiatrist can pin down various causal forces in my upbringing if he gets to spend a lot of time analysing me. Maybe I should discuss my passivity with a psychiatrist.
From what I can see, with no psychiatric training, I have a deep need for approval and a deep instinctive desire to avoid conflict. And I’m a bit of a confused mess — I need approval, but I hate being judged. I just drop out of situations where I will get into conflict with people close to me. I fall silent. And somewhere, these forces have worked to create knots within me which make me disinclined to take action, disinclined take matters into my own hand, if I can avoid acting.
This is not simple laziness. I have no problem working hard at all if it is in an area where there is no approval needed, no conflict to avoid. I’ve worked very hard through various phases of my life. This is some sort of very deeeep passivity quite different from laziness.
My master’s intervention started loosening these knots. I now am almost never as passive as I used to be.
The earlier me would sit through meetings where others would lead the discussion into areas which made no sense to me. The new me walks out of meetings when the meeting stops making sense to me. Alternately, the new me says “I am not paying attention because the meeting is not making sense to me, but please continue. I’ll step in when you guys have finished, and I’ll lead the discussion into the areas I am unclear about.” And I do exactly that, once the others have run their course.
The earlier me would relax when there was an interlude between work phases. I now look at my task list. It’s as if the car is stationary, but the motor is running — I’m not switched off. I have been asked once or twice if I’m distracted or I’m worried about something — I say there’s nothing wrong. But the new state of mind is becoming visible to my team — they can see that I’m never really sitting back and going with the flow. I can put the car into gear in an instant and I’ll start moving.
You may think that I’ve become some sort of alpha male, dominating all proceedings, making my voice heard above the din everywhere, but it’s not the case. I don’t need to outshout anyone, I just find myself making sure that I get the movement I want to get.
I now know that I have to act, and I am not going to wait for anyone to trigger an action. I may be wrong in my choice of action, but I’ll figure out a way to fix the mistake afterwards.
This change is hard to explain. It is like a ground-up rewiring of my machinery. My master did it — you can blame him. Needless to say, a simple reading of Yoga Vashistha doesn’t make this happen — it’s his doing.
And the three-point formula of how to live is now the intellectual framework of my paarthiv existence.
The next subsection of this chapter will be to see if this change helps me break old habits and become regular with my routines. Can I now create routines and maintain them? Will I be able to stick to my routines of diet and exercise?
- There, I’ve invented a new phrase. Probably because I’m inarticulate. But you’ve got to admit, it’s a pretty cool phrase. ↩︎