The Ground of Reality

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 10:30:00 +0000

The most common picture of God goes something like this: before the universe existed, there was nothing. Then God, existing somehow outside of nothing, decided to make something. The universe is his handiwork. He is the potter. We are the pots.

This picture has problems.

The first is logical. If the universe requires an explanation, something to account for why it exists rather than not, then God requires the same explanation. You haven’t solved the problem of existence, you’ve just pushed it one level up, behind a curtain labelled transcendent. A creator God who simply exists, needing no further explanation, is no more satisfying than a universe that simply exists, needing no further explanation. The regress stops arbitrarily.

The second is empirical. The universe doesn’t look like it was assembled by a craftsman following a blueprint. It looks like it tumbled into its current complexity through billions of years of undirected process. Stars exploding to seed heavier elements, planets cooling, chemistry bootstrapping into biology, species branching and dying and branching again. Evolution isn’t a problem for spirituality, but it is a problem for the specific image of God as designer-of-parts.

As a teenager I found both of these arguments fairly convincing, and for some years I called myself an atheist. I was arguing against a particular, and I think inadequate, idea of the divine. The demolition was real. What I hadn’t yet looked at was whether something else stood after the rubble cleared.

Gold and Water

There is a different way to approach the question. Not divine as a creator standing outside the universe and setting it into motion, but as the ground on which everything stands. Not the potter, but the clay.

Take a gold necklace. It has a name, shape, function. You can melt the necklace and pour it into the mould of a bracelet. The necklace is gone, the bracelet appears. new name, shape and function. But through all of that, what never changed? The gold. The gold is not one of the objects. It is the underlying reality of which both necklace and bracelet are temporary expressions.

This is a better and logically coherent analogy for the relationship between ultimate reality and the world of apparent names and forms, which are superimpositions on top of the underlying one is-ness. Just like a bracelet or a necklace “borrow” their existence from the underlying gold. Or a wave “borrows” its existence from the underlying water. Arising and subsiding. So does everything else in the universe - borrowing being from the underlying is-ness.

This moves the question from who made the world to what is the world made of. It avoids imagining an external agent, and instead investigating the nature of reality itself.

You might argue that this too is an infinite regress. Why stop arbitrarily and call the bottom of reality “God”? Doesn’t the same logic apply?

Well, not really. A potter can create a pot and then disappear. But you no longer have a Bracelet if the Gold itself disappears. It must be present in every moment of the bracelet’s existence. In fact all that a bracelet is, is the Gold itself. What we call a bracelet is just a superimposition on top. Everywhere you look in the bracelt, what you fill find is the Gold itself. We can say the Gold is “immanent” in the bracelet.

Similarly the bracelet may be melted down, but the Gold will still remain. From the bracelet’s perspective, the Gold is the timeless ground of its reality. It is truly “transcendent”.

PS: Alex O’Connor makes a similar argument in this video if you’re interested.

Demotion of the Creator

Puranic-era scriptures encode this understanding in a story I find extraordinarily precise.

Once, the Creator (Brahma) and the Sustainer (Vishnu) fell into an argument about who was supreme. To settle it, Shiva appeared between them as an infinite pillar of light, a Jyotirlinga, blazing and boundless in both directions. He set them a challenge: whoever finds an end of this pillar will be declared supreme.

Vishnu took the form of a boar and dove downward into the depths. Brahma became a swan and flew upward through the heavens. They searched for thousands of years. Neither found an end. The light had no beginning and no limit.

Vishnu returned and admitted it. This pillar is truly infinite. I could not find its bottom.

Brahma lied. He claimed he had found the top, and produced a flower as false witness.

Shiva appeared in his full form, furious at the deception. He cursed Brahma: you are the creator, and so you will be. But you will not be worshipped.

That curse holds to this day. There is essentially one temple to Brahma in all of India, in Pushkar, Rajasthan. Meanwhile Vishnu and Shiva temples are everywhere, tens of thousands of them.

The mythological logic is transparent once you see it. The creator function, the idea that the divine is primarily the one who made things, is demoted a notch. Not because creation is unimportant, but because identifying the divine as mainly a creator is dishonest, like Brahma’s lie. It claims to have reached the top of something that has no top. The idea of a Creator God may seem to explain existence, when in truth it only shifts the question one step away.

Vishnu, who admitted the infinite could not be circumscribed, becomes the primary form of worship. The divine as sustainer, as the one who holds everything in existence, not the one who built it once and stepped back.

Thus Brahma is visualized as seated on the lotus that emerged from Vishnu’s navel. The symbolism is clear. Who holds the creator? The sustainer.

The Ground of Being

Uday Bhawalkar’s dhrupad rendition in Raga Multani has the lyrics:

धर बंसीधर, पिनाकधर, गिरिधर, गंगाधर, मुकुटधर, जटाधर, चक्रधर, शूलधर, नरहर शिवशंकर

Dhar bansi: the one who holds the flute, Krishna. Dhar pinaka: the one who holds the bow, Shiva. Giridhar: the lifter of the mountain. Gangadhar: the one who holds the Ganga in his matted locks. Mukuta dhar, jata dhar, chakra dhar, shoola dhar. One wearing the crown, one bearing the tangled hair, one holding the discus, one carrying the trident.

The word Dhar is used repeatedly. It comes from the root sound of धृ. It means the one who holds, who bears, who sustains. The composition moves through a litany of things sustained or held by Krishna and Shiva, unifying the two images as the non-dual underlying reality called Harihara.

Different forms, different attributes, different stories. The same principle: the divine as the bearer of reality.

Ustad Moinuddin and Aminuddin Dagar’s Raga Bhairava dhrupad rendition adds to this idea, with the following lyrics:

शिव आदि, मध, अंत

Shiva is the beginning, the middle, and the end.

नाभि के कमल ते, तीन मूरत भई भिन्न जाने, सोही नरक भोगी

From the lotus of the navel, three forms arose. Whoever considers them separate, that one experiences hell.

The three aspects of divinity, Brahma (creator), Vishnu (sustainer), Shiva (dissolver), emerge from the same source, and thus are the same. They are aspects of a single, non-dual ultimate reality. The dhrupad singers call it Shiva or Narayana or Harihara. You may call it something else.

The mythologies in the Puranas may be devotional symbolisms. The classical compositions of Dhrupads may be songs of Bhakti. But they are also much more than that. They are the ripened fruits of the seeds of philosophical understanding planted by the Vedas and Upanishads.

The Witness Does Not Die

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 11:30:00 +0000

The following is an excerpt from Guru Granth Sahib Ang. 152-153 (Raag Dakhni Gauri):

पउणै पाणी अगनी का मेलु

Air, water and fire come together.

चंचल चपल बुधि का खेलु

A play of restless child-like intellect.

नउ दरवाजे दसवा दुआरु

Nine doors (of the body) and the tenth gate (through which the Light shines).

बुझु रे गिआनी एहु बीचारु

O wise one, reflect on this thought.

कथता बकता सुनता सोई

The speaker and the listener are all the same One.

आपु बीचारे सु गिआनी होई

Whoever examines the Self, becomes wise.

देही माटी बोलै पउणु

Body is clay that (walks and) talks.

बुझु रे गिआनी मूआ है कउणु

O wise one, understand what really dies.

मूई सुरति बादु अहंकारु

What dies is the individual - the divided ego.

ओहु न मूआ जो देखणहारु

The witness of all, does not die.

जै कारणि तटि तीरथ जाही
रतन पदारथ घट ही माही

Why do you go on pilgrimage for, when the jewel is right here?

पड़ि पड़ि पंडितु बादु वखाणै
भीतरि होदी वसतु न जाणै

Reading again and again scholars debate and argue, while not knowing the thing within.

हउ न मूआ मेरी मुई बलाइ

(After knowing this) I did not die, my misfortune died.

ओहु न मूआ जो रहिआ समाइ

That which pervades all does not die.

कहु नानक गुरि ब्रहमु दिखाइआ

Nanak says, the Guru shows that Brahman -

मरता जाता नदरि न आइआ

- (after seeing which) you don’t see any death or departure.

Body is elements. Mind is movement. Ego is mistaken identity. The witness is undying. Real pilgrimage is the inward turn.

ओहु न मूआ जो देखणहारु

The witness does not die. Know that to be the real Self. Not the temporary clump of matter and preferences.

Gu-ru literally means the dispeller of darkness; shining light on the Name of the all-pervasive Reality.

Showing the Gold, not just the ornaments formed out of Gold. Showing the water, not just the waves that come and go on the water.

सुणि सुणि बूझै मानै नाउ

Listening (to that Guru) again and again, I understand and accept the Name.

ता कै सद बलिहारै जाउ

To you, I forever surrender myself in devotion.

आपि भुलाए ठउर न ठाउ

Forgetting the Self, there was no refuge or stablity.

तूं समझावहि मेलि मिलाउ

You revealed and reconciled.

नामु मिलै चलै मै नालि

Once I got it, the Name walks alongside me.

बिनु नावै बाधी सभ कालि

Without it, everything seemed bound by Time.

खेती वणजु नावै की ओट

Farming and trade (worldly action) take the Name’s support.

पापु पुंनु बीज की पोट

Sin and merit are a bundle of seeds (what you sow, you shall reap).

कामु क्रोधु जीअ महि चोट

Desire and anger wound the being.

नामु विसारि चले मनि खोट

Forgetting the Name, the mind becomes selfish and weak.

साचे गुर की साची सीख

True teaching of the true Guru.

तनु मनु सीतलु साचु परीख

When assayed and realized makes the body-mind calm.

जल पुराइनि रस कमल परीख

Like the leaf protects the Lotus (from testy waters).

सबदि रते मीठे रस ईख

The nectar of the (divine) Word, dyes you sweet.

हुकमि संजोगी गड़ि दस दुआर

The (divine) Will constructs this ten-doored fort.

पंच वसहि मिलि जोति अपार

Where the five (elements) dwell, united in the boundless Light.

आपि तुलै आपे वणजार

The Self is measuring and trading with The Self.

नानक नामि सवारणहार

Nanak says, Naam is the one adorning it.

Hear, understand and stabilize. Once you get it, it stays. How to assess if you got it? If doubts are vanishing. If you see water rather than waves. If your body, mind and speech become calm, pure and sweet.

आपि तुलै आपे वणजार

Ultimately, there is only one trading with itself. There is no independent individual. One reality, both experiencer and experienced.

जातो जाइ कहा ते आवै

Where does one go? Where does one come from?

कह उपजै कह जाइ समावै

Out of what is one born? In what is one dissolved?

किउ बाधिओ किउ मुकती पावै

How is one bound? How is one freed?

किउ अबिनासी सहजि समावै

How does one effortlessly merge in the imperishable?

नामु रिदै अम्रितु मुखि नामु

Keep the elixir of the Name in your heart and in your speech.

नरहर नामु नरहर निहकामु

The Name takes away troubles and selfish desires.

सहजे आवै सहजे जाइ

Comes effortlessly, goes effortlessly.

मन ते उपजै मन माहि समाइ

Arises out of mind, dissolves back in mind.

गुरमुखि मुकतो बंधु न पाइ

Guru-orientation frees, you find no bondage.

सबदु बीचारि छुटै हरि नाइ

Contemplating on the Word and the divine Name, releases you.

तरवर पंखी बहु निसि बासु

Like birds rest on a tree for a night.

सुख दुखीआ मनि मोह विणासु

(Such is) happiness and suffering, attachment and loss.

साझ बिहाग तकहि आगासु

At the first light of dawn, they look skyward.

दह दिसि धावहि करमि लिखिआसु

Scattering away in ten directions, as Karma dictates.

नाम संजोगी गोइलि थाटु

Uniting with the Name gives a pure structure.

काम क्रोध फूटै बिखु माटु

The poisonous mud of desire and anger is blown apart.

बिनु वखर सूनो घरु हाटु

Without true merchandise the home shop is locked and desolate.

गुर मिलि खोले बजर कपाट

The Guru, on meeting, opens the heavy gate.

साधु मिलै पूरब संजोग
सचि रहसे पूरे हरि लोग

Past connections reunite you with Holiness, with Saints who live immersed in the Truth.

मनु तनु दे लै सहजि सुभाइ

Surrendering their mind and body, in natural ease.

नानक तिन कै लागउ पाइ

Nanak says, I fall at their feet.

Holiness is in effortless and natural ease. Not in a forceful trance.

सहजे आवै सहजे जाइ

It comes naturally, goes naturally.

Sahaj implies abidance with what one already is. The Name is a pointer. Like hearing someone’s name you instantly recognise who is being talked about.

।। ੴ सति नामु श्री वाहेगुरु ।।

The Veil over Unity

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

(or the physics of Non-locality & Non-duality)

Let’s start with something we think we understand: light. That’s where we left off in our last article about Light, Space and Time.

You know from high school that light behaves like a wave. When you shine light through two narrow slits, you don’t get two bright lines on the screen behind them. Instead, you get an interference pattern. Bright and dark bands, spreading out from where you’d expect just two spots. This happens because light from the two slits interferes with itself, just like water waves do when they pass through two openings in a barrier.

The bright bands appear where the waves from both slits arrive in phase, reinforcing each other. The dark bands appear where they arrive out of phase, canceling each other out. Wave behavior, pure and simple.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. Do the same experiment with electrons. Fire them one by one at two slits. What happens?

You might think: electrons are particles, little balls with charge. They should go through one slit or the other, and you should get two clumps on the screen, one behind each slit. But that’s not what happens.

Fire one electron. It hits the screen. Mark where it landed. Fire another. Mark that spot too. Keep going. Fire thousands of electrons, one at a time, waiting between each one so there’s never more than a single electron in the apparatus at once.

Slowly, gradually, an interference pattern emerges. The same bright and dark bands you get with light. Each individual electron hits at one definite spot, like a particle. But collectively, the pattern they form is exactly what you’d expect from a wave passing through both slits and interfering with itself.

This is deeply weird. Each electron is alone in the apparatus. It can’t be interfering with other electrons. So what’s interfering with what?

You might say, “Well, light does this too.” And you’d be right. But here’s the thing: we understand light as a wave. It makes sense that a wave would create an interference pattern. But electrons? We think of them as particles. How can a single particle create a wave pattern?

The answer gets even stranger when you make the light dim enough. You can set up the double-slit experiment with such weak light that only one photon passes through at a time. And just like electrons, you see them arrive one by one, each hitting at a single spot. But build up enough detections, and the interference pattern appears. You can watch Looking Glass Universe’s video on this topic, and read about the single-photon experiment in this paper.

So light and electrons behave exactly the same way. Each arrives as a localized “chunk” at one spot. But the pattern they collectively form is a wave pattern, requiring interference from both slits.

This is what physicists mean by wave-particle duality. We say quantum objects “travel as waves but exchange energy as particles.” The wave describes where they can go, giving probabilities for different locations. But when they arrive, when they interact with a detector or screen, they do so at one definite spot, transferring a quantized chunk of energy.

Wave-particle duality is real. Quantum objects, whether photons or electrons, exhibit both wave-like propagation (creating interference patterns) and particle-like detection (arriving at definite locations). They “travel as a wave” through space, but “exchange energy as a packet” when measured. Whatever that means.

When Separation Breaks Down

So we have wave-particle duality. Strange, but maybe we can live with it. Electrons and photons are tiny. Maybe the rules are just different down there. Maybe they’re some kind of fuzzy wave-particle hybrid. We can still think of them as individual things, separate from each other, just with weird properties.

But that comfortable picture breaks down completely when we look at entanglement.

Here’s the setup. Create two electrons that have interacted in a special way. Send one to Earth, the other to Mars. They’re now separated by hundreds of millions of kilometers. Now measure a property of the Earth electron, say its spin along some axis. You get a result: up or down.

Immediately, without any delay, the Mars electron’s spin becomes correlated with your measurement. If you measure the Earth electron’s spin along the same axis, you’ll find the Mars electron has the opposite value. Every single time.

You might say: “So what? They decided their spins when they were created. The Earth electron was always going to be spin-up, and the Mars electron was always going to be spin-down. We just didn’t know it yet.”

That was Einstein’s hope. He thought there must be “hidden variables,” properties the electrons carry with them that determine what result you’ll get when you measure. Like a pair of gloves in separate boxes. Open one box, find a left glove, and you instantly know the other box contains a right glove. No mystery. No faster-than-light communication. Just pre-existing properties.

But in 1964, John Bell proved that’s impossible. He showed that if hidden variables existed, measurements at different angles would have to obey certain statistical limits, what we now call Bell inequalities. Then he showed that quantum mechanics predicts violations of these limits. The correlations are too strong to be explained by any pre-existing local properties.

The experiments have been done. Over and over, with increasing precision. The results are clear: Bell inequalities are violated. The electrons don’t have definite spins until you measure them. And when you measure one, the other “knows” instantly, regardless of the distance between them. Watch Veritasium and Mithuna’s video on entanglement to understand this better.

This isn’t communication. You can’t send information this way. The person on Mars sees random results until they compare notes with you. But the correlations are real and instantaneous. Stronger than anything local hidden variables could produce.

Here’s another way to see that reality is non-local. It’s called the Aharonov-Bohm effect, and I think it’s even more striking.

Take an infinitely long coil of wire and run a current through it. A magnetic field will be generated inside it, with none present outside. Sealed off from the outside world.

Now split an electron beam and send it around this wire, through the region where there’s no field. What happens? If fields are what affect particles, and the field is zero where the electron travels, nothing should happen. The electron should behave exactly as if the coil wasn’t there.

But that’s not what you observe. The electron’s path is affected. It accumulates a phase shift. Not because it’s passing through a magnetic field (it isn’t), but because of something called the magnetic vector potential that exists in the space around the coiled column.

You could say the potential is “more real” than the field. But there’s a different way to understand this. The electron doesn’t take a single path. It explores every possible path simultaneously. All of them contribute to the final result. The electron is non-locally spread out over all possible trajectories at once.

This is what Richard Feynman’s path integral formulation of quantum mechanics tells us. The electron doesn’t go “here” or “there.” It goes everywhere it could possibly go, all at once. The different paths interfere with each other, just like in the double-slit experiment. Some paths go through the magnetic field too, changing the interference pattern.

You can see a beautiful explanation of this in Veritasium’s recent video on the Aharonov-Bohm effect, which goes into detail about the advanced experiments done to rule out leaking magnetific fields by generating magnetic fields inside a torus.

Both of these experiments, Bell’s and Aharonov-Bohm’s, are telling us the same thing. The picture of reality as made of separate, localized particles, each with definite properties, existing in definite places, is wrong. At the fundamental level, quantum objects are non-local. They can’t be thought of as separate “things” with independent existence.

When two electrons are entangled, they’re not two separate particles that happen to have correlated properties. They’re a single quantum state, a unified whole. Measuring one “here” and finding a result tells you about what you’ll find “there” not because information traveled between them, but because there’s only one quantum state spanning both locations.

The electron going around the coil isn’t a localized particle following one path. It’s a quantum field exploring all paths simultaneously and instantaneously. The interference between these paths is what determines where the electron ends up.

Reality at the quantum level is non-local, hence non-dual. What we think of as “separate particles” is a misleading picture. The fundamental description is a unitary quantum field, with correlations and interference patterns that span across space. The universe, at its deepest level, is one.

How the One Becomes Many

So if reality is fundamentally non-dual and non-local, why does the world appear so definitively dual and local? Why do I see separate objects in definite places? Why does my chair stay over there, and not quantum tunnel through the floor? How does the unified quantum field give rise to the classical world of distinct, separate things?

The answer lies in a process called decoherence.

Let me show you with a puzzle that bothered physicists in the early days of quantum mechanics. It’s called Mott’s problem, and it beautifully illustrates how duality emerges from non-duality.

When a radioactive atom decays, it spits out an alpha particle (a helium nucleus). According to quantum mechanics, this alpha particle emerges as a spherical wave, spreading out equally in all directions from the nucleus. It has no definite direction of travel. It’s equally likely to go left, right, up, down, or anywhere in between.

Now place this radioactive source inside a cloud chamber, a device filled with supersaturated vapor. When a charged particle passes through, it ionizes atoms along its path, and tiny droplets condense around these ions, making the particle’s track visible.

Here’s the puzzle: if the alpha particle is a spherical wave with no definite direction, why do we see a single, perfectly straight track in the cloud chamber? Shouldn’t the wave randomly ionize atoms throughout the entire chamber, creating a fuzzy cloud rather than a line?

This bothered Einstein and other physicists deeply. In 1929, Nevill Mott solved it, and his solution is considered the first example of decoherence theory.

The key insight: you can’t think about just the alpha particle alone. You have to consider the alpha particle plus all the atoms in the cloud chamber as one unified quantum system.

When Mott did the calculation, he found something remarkable. Yes, the alpha particle starts as a spherical wave. But as soon as it ionizes the first atom, the quantum state of the entire system (particle plus that atom) becomes entangled. This entanglement makes it overwhelmingly more probable that the next ionization will happen nearby, along a straight line from the first one.

Each successive ionization reinforces this pattern. Not because the alpha particle is “really” traveling in a straight line, but because the entanglement between the particle and the environment (the cloud chamber atoms) causes the different possible directions to decohere. They stop interfering with each other.

The spherical wave doesn’t collapse into one direction. It evolves into a superposition of many different straight-line possibilities, but these possibilities no longer interfere.

You can explore this in detail in this excellent video by Action Lab on Mott’s problem and decoherence.

This is how the classical world emerges from quantum mechanics. Large objects are constantly bombarded by photons, air molecules, and countless other particles. Each interaction entangles the object with its environment. This entanglement washes out the quantum interference effects that would reveal the object’s wave nature. What remains looks classical. Definite. Localized.

Your chair doesn’t quantum tunnel through the floor not because it’s “too big” for quantum mechanics, but because it’s constantly decohering due to interactions with the environment. The different possible positions it could tunnel to stop interfering with each other almost immediately.

Decoherence explains why things clump into stable, non-interfering chunks. Why we see definite outcomes rather than fuzzy superpositions. It’s the bridge between the non-dual quantum world and the dual classical world we experience.

But here’s what decoherence doesn’t explain: why this particular outcome?

In the cloud chamber, decoherence explains why we see a straight track rather than a fuzzy cloud. But it doesn’t tell us why the track goes in this direction rather than that one. The spherical wave contained all possible directions. Decoherence separates these possibilities into non-interfering branches. But which branch do we experience?

That’s where the Born rule comes in. The Born rule says the probability of observing a particular outcome is given by the square of the wave function’s amplitude. Where the wave is strong, you’re more likely to see that outcome. Where it’s weak, you’re less likely.

But the Born rule only gives probabilities. It doesn’t tell us which specific outcome will occur. That appears to be fundamentally random. Not random because we lack information (Bell’s theorem ruled out hidden variables, remember). But random in a deeper sense.

The universe doesn’t “decide” which outcome will happen until it happens. The selection of one particular track direction out of all possible directions is not determined by anything. It just happens. Probabilistically.

This is the deepest mystery. We can describe with perfect precision how the non-dual quantum field evolves. We can calculate exactly how it decoheres into separate, non-interfering branches when it interacts with an environment. We can predict the probabilities for different outcomes with stunning accuracy.

But why one particular outcome manifests out of the many possibilities, we cannot say. That transition, from the superposition of all possibilities to the actuality of one, remains fundamentally mysterious.

Decoherence explains how the unified quantum field appears as separate, classical objects through interaction with the environment. But the selection of which particular outcome we observe, from among all the quantum possibilities, follows only probabilistic rules (Born’s rule). Why this randomness exists, why one specific outcome manifests rather than another, is not explained by the theory. This is the bridge between non-duality and duality, and it remains deeply mysterious.

The Veil of Maya

If you’ve studied Advaitic philosophies like Vedanta or Trika, what I’ve just described might sound strangely familiar. The ultimate reality is seen as Brahman or Shiva. The Vast. The Infinite. A-dvaita literally translates to Not-two. So this vast universe is not really separable, as we see when we go down to the smallest “particles”.

What we perceive as the world of separate objects, distinct identities, individual locations, all of this is Maya. Not illusion exactly, but a kind of appearance, a superimposition on the non-dual ground of being.

In Advaita, the question “why does the One appear as many?” is considered ultimately unanswerable. It’s the nature of Maya to veil the non-dual reality and project the appearance of multiplicity. How this happens, why it happens, cannot be fully explained. It’s the inexplicable power of Brahman to appear as the world.

In quantum mechanics, the question “why does measurement select one particular outcome from the superposition?” is also unanswerable. It’s the nature of quantum measurement, described by the Born rule, to produce definite results from indefinite possibilities. The randomness is fundamental, not a placeholder for hidden ignorance. Why the probabilities “collapse” the way they do remains a mystery.

Trika sees the underlying reality of Shiva as vibrating with Shakti (energy). Just like the particles we perceive as separate are wave-like vibrations of the underlying field, a chunk of minimum viable quanta of energy.

🪷 All is Unfolding 🪷

The multiplicity, the separation, the definite positions of distinct objects, all arise within the underlying One. How they arise, why one possibility manifests rather than another, why this thought appears now, why that electron hit this spot instead of that one, these questions may have answers but they are veiled from us.

But we can face the veil. Not by explaining it away, but by recognizing its nature as that non duality. By not binding our self-identification to the mere particles that make up our body and mind. By aligning ourselves with the universe’s flow. Because ultimately, You are That.

Here’s a verse from Japji Sahib to close this up:

हुकमी हुकम चलाइ राहु ।
नानक विगसै वेपरवाहु ।।

Hukami Hukam Chalaye Rahu,
Nanak Vigasai Veparvahu

The willer is willing,
(Nanak says) blossoming, without care.

Light, Space and Time

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 09:30:00 +0000

(or the physics of Duality & Causality)

From high-school physics we know that Light is special. It travels through space and time at an insanely high speed (~300 million meters per second). Unlike sound, it is a wave that can propagate in a vacuum. If you were attentive in school, you might even remember how the forces of Electricity and Magnetism together reinforce each other in Maxwell’s equations to create a propagating wave, which we call Light.

But let’s try to understand the deeper mysteries behind this simple phenomena. I would call this essay a success if at the end of it you understand, at a fundamental level, how light behaves in our universe. How Einstein tied it together with space and time in his Special Theory of Relativity. And what it reveals about the underlying structure of our universe, and which rules that we intuitively imagine are fungible and which ones are sacrosanct.

Travels in what?

If you have ever run across magnets as a kid, I’m sure you would remember how fascinating they are. They can attract and repel each other across “nothing”. You can try to force two north poles together and feel this force pushing against you, with no physical object in between. One might think they are just “pushing” the air around them, like we use leaf blowers to move leaves without touching them. But if you were to take these same magnets in a vacuum with no air, no medium, they would still behave the same way.

We also know that electricity and magnetism are inter-related. A moving electric charge (electric current) leads to a magnetic force, and a moving magnet can induce an electric current. Almost all the electricity we use comes through moving magnets around, using flowing water, wind, or steam generated by burning fuel (be it coal, diesel or uranium).

We say that these magnetic (or electric) forces travel through a “Magnetic Field”, that can be visualized by throwing tiny iron fillings around a magnet. But the idea of a Field is just an abstraction; a mathematical model that we have to describe “what the force would be at this particular point if we place some object here”. And it gets complicated if that object is moving, because it is then suspect to the forces of two separate fields.

The actual mechanics are described well by Maxwell’s equations on why oscillating an electric current to-and-fro leads to fluctuations in both the electric field and magnetic field. These fluctuations are sustained through long distances. This is what we see as visible light. This is what leads to microwaves, radio, X-rays and so on all depending on how many oscillations happen in a second.

Now, every wave we know from everyday experience needs a medium. If you’ve ever seen a boat moving across a lake, you know it leaves ripples behind. The water itself doesn’t travel, it just bobs up and down as the wave of energy passes through. Similarly, when you speak, air molecules bunch up and spread apart, carrying sound to someone’s ear.

So it seemed perfectly reasonable to think that light or EM waves must also travel through some medium. Scientists in the 19th century called this hypothetical substance the “luminiferous aether”. They imagined it as an invisible, transparent substance pervading all of space, through which light waves could ripple just as sound ripples through air. After all, if light is waving, something must be doing the waving, right?

But here’s where reality surprised us. In 1887, Michelson and Morley conducted an experiment to detect this aether. The idea was simple: Earth is hurtling through space at tremendous speed as it orbits the Sun. If there’s an aether filling space, Earth must be moving through it, like a boat cutting through water. Stick your hand out of a moving car window and you feel wind rushing past your face. Similarly, if we’re moving through an aether, we should detect some kind of “aether wind” when we measure the speed of light in the direction of earth’s motion versus in the direction perpendicular to it.

They built an incredibly sensitive apparatus to measure the difference. The result? Nothing. No difference whatsoever. No matter which direction they measured, light traveled at exactly the same speed. It was as if Earth wasn’t moving through any medium at all.

This was deeply puzzling. Other experiments confirmed the same result. The conclusion was unavoidable: there is no luminiferous aether. Light truly travels through nothing. Through empty space. Through vacuum.

In my opinion, it feels intuitive to think of a medium for Light and electricity and magnetism, even if that medium is “transparent”, but reality has responded to us saying no. But having an aether would have violated other intuitions we have too.

Imagine you’re conducting experiments inside a train moving at constant speed. You toss a ball up and catch it. You watch how magnets attract each other. You shine a flashlight. Everything behaves exactly as it would if the train were sitting still at the station. You can’t tell, from inside the train with the curtains drawn, whether you’re moving or stationary.

This makes intuitive sense. Motion is relative. When we say Earth is moving at 30 kilometers per second around the Sun, we mean it’s moving relative to the Sun. But from Earth’s perspective, we could just as well say the Sun is moving around us. There’s no privileged “rest frame”—no special stationary point in the universe against which all motion should be measured.

But if an aether existed, it would create exactly such a privileged frame. The aether would be “at rest”, and everything else would be moving through it. You could, in principle, measure your absolute velocity by checking how fast you’re moving through the aether. This feels wrong. Why should the universe pick out one special reference frame and make it fundamentally different from all others?

So in a way, the absence of aether preserves something beautiful: the idea that all constant motion is relative, that there’s no absolute stationary reference point in the universe. Physics should look the same whether you’re standing still or moving at a constant velocity. The magnets in your hand should attract each other the same way on a moving train as they do on the platform. Light should behave the same way too.

But if light doesn’t travel through a medium, and if there’s no special rest frame, then we’re left with a puzzle: how does light work? And more importantly, what does its speed even mean if there’s no fixed reference point to measure it against?

Who is measuring it?

So light travels through nothing, and there’s no special rest frame in the universe. But here’s where things get really interesting.

You’re standing on a platform, and I’m on a train moving past you at half the speed of light. I shine a flashlight forward. You measure the light traveling at 300 million meters per second. I measure it at exactly the same speed. 300 million meters per second.

This makes perfect sense when you remember what we just established. There is no aether. When I throw a ball forward on the train, you see it moving faster than I do because the ball is moving through air, and velocities through a medium add up. But light isn’t moving through anything. It’s propagating through the electromagnetic field itself, through vacuum.

The speed of light isn’t arbitrary. It falls directly out of Maxwell’s equations. It depends on two fundamental properties of empty space: electric permittivity and magnetic permeability. These are constants of the vacuum itself. They don’t change whether you’re moving or standing still, because there’s no medium to be moving through.

So of course we both measure the same speed. The universe has physical properties, written into the fabric of vacuum itself, that determine how fast electromagnetic waves propagate. This speed doesn’t depend on who’s measuring it or how fast they’re moving.

But wait. If we’re moving relative to each other, and we both measure light at the same speed, something has to give. When you’re on that train and I’m on the platform, we can’t both be right about distances and time intervals and also agree on the speed of light unless we’re measuring different distances and different time intervals.

And that’s exactly what happens. Your rulers measure different lengths than mine. Your clocks tick at a different rate than mine. Space and time themselves are not absolute. They’re flexible, adjustable, whatever it takes to preserve this one sacred rule: the speed of light is the same for everyone.

The universe picked its fundamental constants. Electric permittivity. Magnetic permeability. These determine the speed of light. And once that’s fixed, everything else, space and time themselves, have to bend to accommodate it.

Everything moves at Speed of Light

Here’s something that will sound crazy at first: you are traveling at the speed of light right now. You’ve been doing it your whole life. You just don’t notice it because you’re moving through time instead of through space.

Let me explain. We usually think of space and time as separate things. There are three dimensions of space (left-right, forward-backward, up-down) and one dimension of time (past-future). But Einstein showed they’re not separate at all. They’re woven together into a single four-dimensional fabric called spacetime.

Every object in the universe, including you, is always moving through this four-dimensional spacetime at exactly the speed of light. Not approximately. Not close to it. Exactly at the speed of light. This is a fixed speed limit for existence itself.

Right now, as you sit reading this, you’re hurtling through spacetime at 300 million meters per second. But your velocity is aimed almost entirely in the time direction. You’re moving through time at nearly the full speed of light, which is why you experience time passing at the rate you do. One second per second, as we say.

When you start moving through space (say, you get up and walk), you’re redirecting some of your velocity from the time direction into a space direction. You’re still moving at the speed of light through spacetime, but now less of it is pointed toward time and more is pointed toward space. This is why time slows down for moving objects. They’re using up some of their “speed budget” to move through space, leaving less for movement through time. Of course, this is only noticeable for objects like GPS satellites, which are moving fast enough that we have to be careful when thinking about their time versus our time.

Let me show you a simple picture to make this concrete:

Here’s the diagram. On the left, the plane is at rest, with all its velocity pointing through time. On the right, it’s moving through space, so its velocity arrow tilts. The arrow length stays the same (speed of light through spacetime), but now it’s split between space and time directions. The dashed lines show how its spatial extent appears contracted when you project it onto the space axis.

This tilting of the velocity arrow is what causes all the weird effects. Less velocity in the time direction means time passes slower for the moving object. The spatial projection being shorter is length contraction. This isn’t just theory. That phone in your pocket has to accommodate for these effects every time you use Google Maps to check where in space time you are relative to a bunch of satellites hurtling in earth’s orbit at insane speeds, sending you packets of information as invisible light.

Light is different from us in a fascinating way. It too of course travels at the speed of light but it’s pointing all its velocity in the 3 directions we see as space. But this doesn’t mean photons don’t experience time or causality. For light, the direction of its travel is what unfolds as “time” for it. Cause and effect still happen along its path. It can be emitted, travel, interact with matter, get absorbed, all in a sequence of events that make sense. It’s just that this sequence unfolds along its direction of motion.

All of the above is beautifully explained in this video which I highly recommend watching to solidify your intuition.

Objects with mass (what we call “inertial mass”) can never redirect all their velocity into spatial directions, as that requires infinite energy. They always keep some velocity pointed toward time, which is why they always experience time passing and why they can never reach the speed of light through space. Light is special. It is free to pick its direction, so all energy you put into it goes towards whichever spatial direction you choose. It has no “inertia” to stick to one direction, thus no inertial mass.

Cause -> Effect

Here’s something that might worry you: if space and time are flexible, if different observers disagree about when things happen, if simultaneity is relative, then surely the universe must be chaos? How can anything make sense if we can’t even agree on the order of events?

But here’s the beautiful part. We can disagree about simultaneity, but we can never disagree about causality.

Let me explain with an example. You’re standing on a platform. I’m on a train moving past you. A light bulb on the train flashes, and then, a moment later, a bell on the train rings. From my perspective on the train, the flash happened first, then the bell. From your perspective on the platform, accounting for your motion relative to me, you might measure different time intervals between these events. You might even measure different distances between where they occurred. But you will never, ever see the bell ring before the flash. The order of cause and effect is preserved.

This is because of that speed limit we discussed. Information, influence, causality itself, cannot travel faster than light. When the light bulb flashes, that event creates a “light cone” expanding outward at the speed of light. Only events inside this cone can be causally connected to the flash. The bell ringing is inside that cone. So no matter how you’re moving, no matter how much your space and time are squished or stretched, you’ll always see the flash happen before the bell.

Think of it like ripples in a pond. You drop a stone, and ripples spread outward. A leaf floating nearby will bob up and down after the ripples reach it, never before. You can watch this from the shore, or from a boat moving across the pond, or from a helicopter above. You might measure different speeds for the ripples depending on your motion, but you’ll never see the leaf bob before the stone hits the water.

In our universe, causality propagates at the speed of light. Every effect had a prior cause. How much prior, and where exactly in space, can change depending on who is looking and how they’re traveling through this four-dimensional spacetime. But the causal order, the sequence of cause preceding effect, remains inviolable.

So yes, we have to let go of some intuitions. Space is not an empty, unchangeable container. Time is not exact like clockwork, ticking away the same for everyone. But what we keep, what the universe preserves at all costs, is causality. Events still unfold one after another. The past influences the future, never the reverse. This is the deeper structure, the more fundamental rule that reality refuses to violate.

Locality

This speed limit on causality has profound implications. It means that nothing can affect something else instantaneously across a distance. Everything is local. Objects influence each other in their neighborhood, not across the cosmos in zero time.

When you push a book across a table, you’re not reaching through empty space to move it. The atoms in your hand get close to the atoms in the book, close enough that electromagnetic forces (which propagate at light speed) can push those atoms, which push the next atoms, and so on. The influence travels through the material at some finite speed, ultimately limited by light.

When the Sun suddenly disappeared (hypothetically), we wouldn’t know for about eight minutes. Earth would continue orbiting the spot where the Sun used to be for eight minutes before the gravitational influence of its absence reached us. Light and gravity both travel at the same cosmic speed limit.

This locality is what shaped our universe. After the Big Bang, everything was pushed outward at speeds approaching light. But not everything moved in exactly the same direction. Tiny quantum fluctuations, small differences in velocity and direction, meant that some regions of space had slightly more matter than others. These regions, through gravity, pulled on their neighbors. But only their neighbors. Only the matter close enough that gravitational influence could reach it before everything spread too far apart.

This is why matter clumped together into galaxies, stars, planets, instead of spreading uniformly through space. Locality. Causality. The speed limit says you can only affect what’s near you, and only after enough time has passed for that influence to reach them.

This is also why we have multiplicity instead of unity. Why the universe is full of separate things rather than remaining as one undifferentiated point. If influences could travel instantaneously across any distance, if causality had no speed limit, everything would still be connected as it was at the moment of the Big Bang. There would be no separation, no locality, no distinct objects. Just one eternal moment of everything happening everywhere at once.

But we don’t live in that universe. We live in one where locality reigns. Where cause must precede effect. Where influence takes time to travel. This is what creates the structure we see. Galaxies separated by vast distances. Stars burning their fuel over billions of years. Planets forming and evolving. You, sitting here, reading this, as a distinct entity separate from the screen, separate from the room around you.

🪷 All is Unfolding 🪷

The whole universe doesn’t go from the Big Bang to cold death in a single instant. It unfolds. Things happen here, then there. Now, then later. This locality and causality is what gives rise to the duality in our world. Not a philosophical duality, but a physical one. The separation between subject and object. Between here and there. Between now and then.

Without the speed limit of light, without locality, without the constraint that everything hurtles through spacetime at this fixed cosmic speed, there would be no structure. No stars. No planets. No evolution. No life. Just an undifferentiated ball of energy, existing everywhere and nowhere, in no time and all time, with no cause, no effect, no story to tell.

The speed of light is not just a speed limit. It’s the speed of the totality unfolding and flowing. It is the constraint that makes this pluralistic existence possible. And dare I say, it is beautiful.

The alternative that humanity imagined was the mechanistic Newtonian world with a luminferous aether. Where light was not special. Where we could define absolute rest. Where time was a guardian separate from our space and went tick-tock, the same for everyone. This universe of absolutes might sound “proper”, but it also feels like we are puny playthings under the watchful eye of the grand laws of Time and Space.

I personally, am glad that we find ourselves in a universe where causality (or Karma) is the only fundamental, and everything else is a natural Unfolding. And as we will hopefully see in the next article, this Duality is illusory too.

Subtle Planes of Reality

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 11:30:00 +0000

Do numbers exist? I can count three mangoes, or four pebbles. They’re right there, I can pick them up, I can touch them with my hands. But where is this number called 3 or 4?

Well, you might say that the mangoes may rot and the pebbles may get lost, but there is something eternal, a unique value behind the multiple mangoes, called the number 3. Similarly the number 4 is the representation of the four-ness of pebbles. If the pebbles themselves are lost, the four-ness persists, across other things that are found together in groups of 4. So yes, numbers exist.

You might also convince me by saying that these numbers help us keep count and settle transactions. You may lend 3 x 100 rupee notes to someone, and they might give you 6 x 50 rupee notes back, and you understand that even though they’re giving back different physical items, they’re returning to you the same abstract value of 300.

But do you see, the first time somebody proposed the idea of 0, or of negative numbers, some people may have reacted in the same way as I did for natural numbers. “Have you ever seen -3 cows?”. “Why do you say there are 0 cows when there is nothing, why even talk about cows? Are you mad?”. “Negative numbers are not found anywhere in nature”. And so on.

And similar reasoning can help us understand their existence and utility. Negative numbers balance our accounts. We can count one direction (of taking money) as positive, and the other direction (of giving money) as negative, and balance them up to find how much total money we have left. The physical reality exists indifferent from the existence of these numbers. They’re just abstract concepts that help us, the physically real beings, in manipulating and managing our physically real things. We could do things the harder way too. You could maintain two different accounts for giving and taking instead of introducing the negative sign and using a single account. You could even not have names and sounds corresponding to numbers, and point to actual physical 3 cows. But doing that is so much harder, isn’t it?

Similarly, the first time somebody said that we could use √-1, it seemed crazy. You can’t multiply two numbers to get a negative number, so where does this √-1 come from? Why talk about it or use it? Well these imaginary numbers help us immensely with vector multiplication. Representation and calculations in signal processing and quantum mechanics would be unnecessarily complicated if we stick to real numbers, as real numbers are one dimensional, on a number-line. But complex numbers can naturally represent 2 dimensions if you see i = √-1 as perpendicular to the number line. Thus any multiplication of -1 on the number line can be seen as one 180° rotation, which can be broken down into two 90° rotations with i. And we could use combinations of real and imaginary numbers for rotating any arbitrary amount of degrees, representing it in very tidy exponential notation. So instead of relying on complicated 2D vector representation using real numbers, we could use a single complex number, and the multiplicative math all checks out much cleaner.

So, do these imaginary numbers really exist? Or are these just tools that help us? Ask your neighbouring physicist or engineer if they would like to give them up. If we loosen up or stretch the rules in this abstract space of mathematics, we stumble upon concepts that are quite handy. Who are we to claim one of these concepts is less real than the other, when ultimately they all help us navigate the real world?

Now, moving beyond just numbers, we know that summing together an infinite number of numbers in a series can sometimes converge on a single point, like 1 + ½ + ¼ … = 2. But for other series like 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + 1 … the sum doesn’t converge. It fluctuates between 1 and 0 depending on where you stop. So, it may be a stretch, but we can say the sum is “=” ½ in some sense of “=” equality, which is looser than the one we used for convergent series. Using just this one loosening, we can derive that 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 .. “=” -1/12. A divergent series, which surely approaches infinity under conventional addition, can be said to be equal to -1/12 in some sense of the word “equal”.

“This is a cheap trick” one might say. It is surely nonsense and not “real”. But well it does make sense to loosen the definition of equality, as long as we maintain some constraints, see 3B1B’s chapter on analytic continuation for more. And ultimately, it makes it easier for us to understand real, physical phenomena (more on that later, I promise).

Modern mathematics is mostly playing around with these abstract ideas that have no real utility, until they do. There are many examples where math has preceded real physical discoveries. For example, non-Euclidean geometry might seem like nonsense at first glance, as it can have weird behaviours like sum of angles in a triangle not summing to 180°. “Surely you can’t draw or find me a triangle like that in the real world” you might say. But these non-Euclidian geometries are what preceded Einstein’s theory of relativity with space-time curving due to mass. The theory that explained measurements that Newton’s idea of a gravitational force couldn’t. It even predicted black holes and gravitational waves, which are real physical phenomena that were confirmed by experiments much later.

Similarly, Paul Dirac sought a relativistic wave equation for the electron. The equation he came up with produced solutions for both positive and negative energy states, which was problematic, as how can something have negative energy? Instead of rejecting the math, he proposed that it could be possible that there may exist particles with opposite charge but same mass as electrons (positrons). Nobody had ever seen any such anti-particle before, but lo and behold, ~4 years later Carl Anderson discovered it accidentally during his experiments with cosmic rays.

Let’s take a small detour, and talk about nothing for a moment. I promise this is related to the divergent series before. So what exists inside nothing? Let me be more precise and ask, what exists in a vacuum in deep space? Far, far away from any galaxy, where there is no trace of thermal energy (0 Kelvin). One would assume it is nothing. One would also assume it is static. In fact, such a physical location is the best way to solidify the abstract concepts of “static” and “nothing”.

But let’s think deeper for a moment. Based on the science we already know from high school we say a magnet can attract other metallic objects from a distance, and it happens without a medium. Same for the forces between electrical charges. If we have two charges in empty space at absolute zero, there is nothing between them, and yet they are pushed together or pulled apart. Similarly, we say that light travels as an electro-magnetic wave in nothing. There was a big search for a material medium or “ether” for light, like we have water or air for waves and sound, but ultimately all observations pointed to the fact that light is indeed waving in nothing.

Well, it may be physically empty, but we do represent the underlying medium as a Field, which is a mathematical abstraction. The idea is that every point in space, denoted by some coordinate system, has some value (be it scalar, vector or tensor). With this idea, we no longer have to deal with each particle influencing each other particle, and can simply use the underlying Field for book-keeping the total aggregate forces acting at any point in space. Even if this “Field” is not a physical medium made up of matter, it is as real as the numbers we use to measure the physical forces.

But does this field really exist in deep space, with no charged particles, where the value at every point is surely 0? Well yes, just like I can point to my empty stable and say I have x horses, where x = 0. A trickier question to answer intuitively is whether the values of this field remain static in absence of any charged particles. And also, are particles born out of this field, or is the field just a made-up abstraction to represent the behaviour of real particles. The answer to these depends on whom you ask, or how you look at it. A great example is the Casimir Effect proposed in 1948, as explained below.

If you take two neutrally charged sheets of metal, in empty space, at 0 Kelvin, and place them very very close (microns apart), they are attracted to each other. This is counter-intuitive if you ask me, as I would have thought in absence of any external force or thermal energy, matter should just be wherever it is. Static and unmoving. But reality says no, and we can even calculate the exact force of attraction using two ways:

The first, and easier way (in my humble opinion) is to look at it macroscopically, which involves an assumption that there are fluctuations in the EM field even in a perfect vacuum, known as the Vacuum Energy. This implies that reality, even when empty of everything, is not static but vibrating. It is vibrating with all possible frequencies. So when we bring two sheets of conductive metal really close together, we constrain the EM waves present in the space between these two sheets. These are 3 dimensional standing waves, but they can be understood analogous to the 1 dimensional standing waves that happen when a guitar string vibrates.

In the guitar’s case, the string is constrained at two points. The main pitch of what we hear comes from the vibration of the whole string. But what we hear is not just a single wavelength, which if you listen using a sine-wave generator sounds very bare. Instead, the physical string is free to move every which way between those two points, so we get smaller and smaller waves layered on top of the main one. These higher pitched vibrations happen at integer ratios of the string, also known as harmonics (so the wavelength is 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 … and so on) and gives the guitar its fuller sound.

Similarly, in empty space we have all possible frequencies of EM waves, but constrained by two sheets we have only the limited harmonics in the region enclosed by them. This creates a force that pushes the sheets closer together. If we try to calculate this difference, even with a toy 1D model, at one point we have to sum up the energy of all the harmonic standing waves. Energy is proportional to frequency, so we add up integer multiples of the base frequency (so 1x, 2x, 3x …), which is a divergent sum. There is a boundless infinity of waves pushing the sheets from the outside, and a constrained infinity pushing them from inside. But we know there are no infinite energies in physical reality, so we know that these two infinities should “cancel out” to give us a finite, inward pushing force on these sheets. And if we just plug in 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 … = -1/12 as we derived before, the math “works out”, giving us negative energy in the interior region, pulling them closer. Sorry for the lack of rigour in my explanation, but I hope you got a rough idea.

Experimental validation for this effect was done much later (in 1997) to measure the exact force, and it gave the same value as predicted by these calculations, within a few percent of error. So, does this mean that 1 + 2 + 3 … is equal to -1/12 in a real sense? And that empty space is really vibrating with all possible frequencies?

Well, there is a second way to understand and calculate this force, by looking at it microscopically. The metal has so many molecules, all influenced by London Dispersion forces which act even at 0 Kelvin. These forces mean that electrons are never static, so various atoms in one sheet can sometimes instantaneously align, leading to a momentary polarization, which induces the same polarization across space on the other sheet of the metal. The two sheets then act like very weak magnets, enough to attract each other. This gives us the same numerical values with a different theoretical understanding. But even in this case we have to make some unintuitive assumptions, like electrons not being static at 0 thermal energy.

Both of these theories are weird, but ultimately these are just mathematical models of our underlying physical reality. The sheets are attracted to each other with some force irrespective of the abstractions we use to understand it. Reality is weird, so our abstractions have to match the weirdness. The microscopic abstraction at the electron level leads to clunkier calculations, while the macroscopic abstraction at the EM field level requires us to renormalize divergent sums, and using the -1/12 result. Both of these require us to believe in vibrations even at absolute zero. Temperature or heat is understood as a macroscopic measurement of kinetic energy of microscopic particles. But here we either have to believe that the electrons can never be made completely still, or see it as fluctuations in the underlying electric field. Beyond the edge of my current understanding are more modern theories like Quantum Electrodynamics that unify electromagnetism, special relativity and quantum mechanics under a single Field.

Let’s come back to Dirac’s equations predicting the existence of anti-particles. Did the positron pop into existence because of his search for a beautiful equation that combines Einstein’s relativity and Schrödinger’s wave functions? Of course not. The positron was always there, just like gravity was bending light, and light was shining, way before we came up with the mathematical models for them. This abstract plane of mathematics cannot directly affect our material plane. But I want to make a bold claim here, that the mathematical plane is also “real” in a sense, in the same exact sense of the word “real” as various other planes that philosophers and poets have sung about since millenia.

Many people, when first asked to explain what mathematics or physics is, give an explanation that is something like a “Map of reality”, where ultimately the Map is Not The Territory. For example, the place called New Delhi is where I am living, but pointing it on a map of India is not that same place. The location on the Map is a location on a piece of paper. It is just a concept or abstraction of the real territory of New Delhi, but it helps us understand and navigate real territory.

But there is something missing in this idea. A map maker has to survey the territory before creating the map. In a sense, he is bound by his experiences of the territory. On the other hand, Math is tangibly more powerful. It can shine light upon unknown territories, and even shepherd us beyond the horizon like it did with Dirac. It is not a mere map of reality that we have already explored, but another plane of reality, with its own rules and structure, its own independent reality. Exploring this plane, searching for a beautiful equation, Dirac peeked outside the boundaries of what we knew about the territory of our physical reality. From the point of view of a human who has not developed the “faculties” to interact with this mathematical plane directly, a slab of glass that helps you talk to your friend face-to-face from across the planet is not so different from magic.

In various ancient eastern philosophies we hear about the existence of other planes or Lokas of reality. Schools like Vajrayana Buddhism and Trika Shaivism are explicit in stating that the other Lokas are not at a separate physical location, as is often imagined by people who point at the sky. Instead, they are metaphorical pointers, or abstractions of complicated mechanisms, and connected to the physical reality or Bhu Loka through our thoughts and actions.

Like the plane of mathematics cannot directly cause things on our material plane, the abstract deities of light (Devas and Devis) from these other Lokas can’t hurl stones at us. Our physical reality is still shaped through the physical actions of physical beings. For example, through people who are exploring these realms, trying to connect with these deities, be it through Mantra meditation, or esoteric rituals, or drawing abstract connections between different sounds, symbols, images and forces of nature. These beings of abstract realms are similar to how Mathematical Platonism posits that numerical entities like Pi are eternal, waiting for humans to tap into their mysteries by exploring the abstract, structured landscape of mathematics. How every imperfect circle found in nature is the entry point to explore the perfect circle on this other plane of platonic ideals.

Traditions that practice Tantra emphasize the reality of these other realms or planes. These esoteric and secretive traditions understand deities to be eternally present, who can reveal themselves to humans as Mantras (sounds), their corresponding Yantras (patterns), or visual human and animal like forms, holding different objects, performing various Mudras (hand-poses). Just like numbers are more than just a tool, so are these sounds and symbols. They’re eternally present in these other planes for us to access, understand and help us discover new territories on this physical plane.

Some practices involve chanting a particular deity’s mantra, while concentrating on their corresponding yantra, visualizing the deity in their anthropomorphic form, or placing different sounds corresponding to these deities at different parts of your own body. This is believed to transform the practitioner’s reality from the ground up, metaphorically speaking. That is, transforming the subtlest aspects of their consciousness, the ingrained mental patterns and so on, until this transformation boils up, and fructifies, in the physical reality of their neurons and cells.

The plane of these deities is structured with psychic and symbolical patterns, it is understood using myths and archetypes, and explored using ritual and devotion. Analogous to the plane of Mathematics and Physics that is structured with formal patterns and understood using logic and reasoning. To an outsider, this might seem like magical thinking, but that is similar to how a time traveller from the 16th century will see magic and sorcery in inventions like GPS, made possible only through highly abstract Math and Physics.

A great example to tie this all together is Ramanujan, the famous mathematician from the early 20th century, who pushed the boundaries for summation of divergent series, and had the idea that 1 + 2 + 3 + … while divergent and unbounded, could also be seen as equal to -1/12 in some sense. He was well regarded by his peers, like GH Hardy, for his exceptional intuition. He filled many notebooks with formulas and results, often arriving at them directly, while the rigorous proofs for the results were derived by him or others later on.

Whenever he was asked how he arrived at the results without step-by-step reasoning, or whenever he was awarded or credited for his exceptional work, he would attribute all of it to Devi Namagiri and her consort Narasimha, who he said communicated with him through dreams. Rather than dismissing it as mere humility, I feel we should respect his wishes, and credit Devi Namagiri for his work. Because Ramanujan’s Devi is at least as real as the mathematics that was enlightened by her, through him.

In many eastern traditions, physical reality is understood as being pervaded by subtler planes of existence. Planes of logic and reasoning, of symbols, of potential, going subtler and subtler till you reach the pure Self (Atman), the Vast (Brahman) or Emptiness (Shunyata). The etymology and boundaries of these planes might depend upon the tradition, but the overall structure is very similar.

Ramanujan got his insights through what we can understand as the subtle plane where his Devi resides. He even mentions seeing flowing blood (linking it to Narasimha), and other symbolic references in his dreams. He had this unique ability to receive insights in a language compatible with symbols of both the planes of Devas and formal Math. And of course, he was well trained in logical reasoning, to establish and solidify some of these insights as formal proofs (while also leaving many unproven in his Lost Notebook).

In the present day we have even managed to connect some of his ideas to phenomena in our physical reality. We saw one example above. To claim that just the mathematical structure is real but the spiritual structures are not, is in my opinion a grave mistake. Same as claiming natural numbers are real while imaginary numbers are nonsense.

You might object that the idea of planes might make philosophical sense, but practically speaking Science and Math have given us tangible results. The modern scientific era and the industrial revolution have given the world undeniable material progress. While symbolic thinking and dogmatic beliefs had led to countless wars, famines and diseases before.

But maybe we should take our heads out of the narrow hole of recent Western European history, and look at other civilizations in the world, across wider timespans. So many parallels exist between the language, beliefs and practices of Europe, Iran and India if we go back far enough. There has been a continuous exchange of ideas across the globe, right from the time of Bronze Age civilizations, if not before. So I urge you to pick a system that navigates these subtler realities, one that is well established, has a mostly unbroken lineage of teachers and teachings, and start exploring this other plane of symbols and rituals for yourself. Practice it, same as we practice Mathematics or Science.

For example, you could pick Vajrayana Buddhism, spend a few years understanding their philosophical lens to view reality, but more importantly doing the prescribed practice(s). If it gives you tangible results and experiences, invest more time and energy. If not, move on to some other system. One can stick to the Scientific Method and use their own subjective experience as evidence, discarding what seems like dogma in these traditions. But as a first step, one has to drop the dogma that outright dismisses ideas subtler than physical reality.

A word of caution here - the result of these practices is naturally going to be what the tradition claims as its goal. Some traditions aim towards material success and stop there, some aim towards enlightenment or freedom from suffering, through the renunciation of material world. While others are all encompassing, claiming material success, fulfillment of worldly desire, inner peace are all valid stepping stones towards ultimate freedom. So spend some time exploring the landscape before choosing your destination and charting your path.

You may dismiss Tai Chi as just glorified breath work and stretching exercises, but there are so many results published since 2020 that show that Tai Chi is significantly better at treating hypertension, anxiety and depression, better at increasing lean mass, when done in controlled trials against “non-mindful” forms of simple stretching or breathing. So why do we dismiss the reality of Qi or Prana, which are analogous to the Math behind the Engineering of Tai Chi or Yoga? You might not find physical correlates of Qi or Prana or Chakras if you dissect a body, but belief in these ideas, exploring them in their own plane of existence, has led to practices that give tangibly better results than what 20th century understanding of physiology could. Thus, I claim that Prana or Chakras are as real as Calculus or Number Theory. Just like Mathematics, these are not mere conceptual maps of our physical reality, but more powerful, as they too can lead our understanding beyond the horizons.

The decision is ultimately up to the individual. An engineer can either use complex numbers and make his life easy, or stay a purist and go about the same calculation the hard way. Similarly, I can either explore these subtler planes, or dismiss anything that is not physically real or immediately intuitive.

Let’s come back, once again, to the concept of the vibration of “nothingness” we were discussing before in the context of Casimir’s experiment. You can debate that Fields are not a real thing but just empty space, and what is really real is matter. Or you can view the Field as the emptiness that is the essence of reality, where all sub-atomic particles of matter are just energy values of this field, quantized in particle-like chunks, existing in an abstract complex plane as a cloud of probability, entangling with each other to produce this tangible-ness. As Alan Watts puts it, it is a cosmic dance, with no nouns, only verbs. In my humble opinion, both of these ways of looking at things are equally “real”.

In Trika Shaivism reality is conceived as the non-dual Shiva, the underlying conscious void beneath reality. This void is static, but it is also dynamic. It is vibrating with Shakti (translated as energy or power). This vibration of nothingness is known as Spanda. If I blur my eyes just enough, I can see how this view of reality eerily rhymes with the fluctuations of EM fields in empty space.

Reality is vast and incomprehensible. It can be seen using different lenses, that is, through different abstract structures. Just as the force in Casimir Effect could be calculated with different models, one where we posit that nothing likes to vibrate, and in another we see the same nothingness as a static container, for matter that is never at rest. I am not saying that because reality is weird, we should accept any weird theory. Quite the opposite. We should accept only self-consistent theories that explain the weird phenomena of our reality.

Some traditions like Nyaya and Advaita Vedanta stuck to logic, and extensively debated scholars from other schools. While other traditions may focus on looser, symbolic reasoning, with greater emphasis on ritualistic practice or devotion. But ultimately the reality is vast, and human brains are limited, so there are necessarily going to be multiple self-consistent view points (like blind men describing an elephant).

This idea goes back quite far. Here’s a verse from Isha Upanishad (Yajur Veda Ch. 40 Verse 5), which was originally orally transmitted, with strict intonation and meter to avoid corruption, and is at least 2500+ years old:

तदेजति तन्नैजति तद्दूरे तद्वन्तिके ।
तदन्तरस्य सर्वस्य तदु सर्वस्यास्य बाह्यतः ॥ ५ ॥

That moves (tad ejati) and That moves not (tan naijati), That is far (tad dūre) and the same is near (tadvantike). That is within all this (tad antarasya sarvasya) and That also is outside all this (tadu sarvasyāsya bāhyataḥ).

The verse may seem contradictory, but later philosophers like Shankara (c. 800 CE) wrote detailed commentaries on cryptic verses from Vedantic texts to establish well-structured theories like Advaita (Non-duality). If you are intrigued by the parallels these ideas from ancient spiritual traditions have with descriptions of reality of modern physics, you are not alone, and this is not a mere coincidence. Many of the scientists that established the foundation of modern physics, like Bohr, Schrödinger, Oppenheimer and Einstein were avid readers of Vedantic texts like the Upanishads (where the above verse is from) and the Bhagavad Gita. It was Bohr in fact, who suggested the idea of zero-point energy to Hendrik Casimir of the Casimir effect.

Similar to how Tai Chi is born from the understanding of Qi, we should pay attention to the philosophies of Vedanta, Trika or Buddhism that rhyme so well across different planes of reality. Many of these traditions see reality as a fluid, interdependent non-duality. They rhyme well with our best understanding of our material universe, even if they approach it through the opposite end, by flipping around a core dogma of modern thinking right on its head. The dogma that objective reality of matter is real, but subjective reality of first-person experience is just an epi-phenomena – something to be explained away – as mere excitations in neurons.

These traditions instead claim that the subjective first-person awareness, that is indisputably real to every living being, is the ever-present dynamic static at the base of all reality. This subject is not separate from the multiplicity of shapes, forms and experiences of objects observed and illumined by it. A practitioner of these traditions is empowered to experience this Non-Duality in their own first-person awareness, by simply listening, logically reasoning, and meditating upon these teachings. Because really, You are That.

🌺
क्षमस्वापराधं महागुप्तभावं
मया लोकमध्ये प्रकाशिकृतं यत् ।
तव ध्यानपूतेन चापल्यभावात्
स्वरूपं त्वदीयं न विन्दन्ति देवाः ॥७॥

The Only Thing That Provably Exists

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If you allow me, I want to demonstrate how there is only one thing that provably exists.

That is a big claim, you might say. There is a multitude of things. Just look around. Trees, rivers, people going about their day, so many non-living objects, countless grains of sand. Are you mad, you ask.

I hope I am not. When you look around, you do see a multitude. Things with clear boundaries. But notice that statement: “When you look around, you do see a multitude”. If I doubt your claim that there is a multitude, you will try to point me towards it. Eventually hoping that I see it too.

The only objective way to prove something is to provide hard, objective evidence for it. But there is a catch. There is always an implicit requirement for a subject who needs convincing, and is eventually convinced.

Most people accept claims on the basis of authority. The scientific community for a particular area may ask the hard questions for them, collect data, reach a consensus, and declare that a particular theory is the best one they have for now.

This means that much of what you believe to be true or proven rests on shaky ground. Scientific consensus changes with time, because new data begets new theories.

There are also things you believe because of your own subjective experience. You might say that most plants are green. You are sure about this because, throughout your life, you have always seen most plants appear of that colour, and someone told you very early on that the colour is called green.

As you grew up, you heard the more rigourous explanations that matched your experience. For example, that light is reflected off plants in such a way that most frequencies are absorbed and the green frequency is not, due to the chlorophyll in the leaves. But I want to stress that your subjective experience of the greenness of leaves is the primary evidence. Knowing about chlorophyll did not change the colour of the leaf, it just added a new label to it.

First there was light in your perception. Much later came the theory of light, which says that light is an electromagnetic wave, travels into your eyes, hits the retina, and is converted by various cells into electrical signals that lead to your perception of green.

I am not saying this to dismiss scientific theories, which are indeed very useful if you want to manipulate this seeming multitude. But I am trying to point to the primacy of subjectivity, which is implicitly presupposed by all objective or scientific theories of reality. Everything relies on you, the perceiver and the believer.

In a dream too you experience a multitude. The dreaming mind even has all the necessary beliefs to explain away the multitude that you perceive in the dream. Even if we later laugh at the absurdity or inconsistency of it once we wake up.

If I am skeptical enough, I can deny the reality of all experiences in a similar way. What if I am dreaming right now? What if I am a brain in a vat? I have no way to prove that what I perceive has some real, physical existence. But there is one thing that neither I nor you nor anyone else can deny. That is our own existence. There is something that is doing the perceiving. Something that is present, that illuminates all other experiences. Cogito, ergo sum.

You may now say that there must also be a second thing, an object to be perceived. I then ask you a simple question. Where and how do you draw the line between the multitude of your experiences and the experiencer who has them? For the curious, this is where Sankhya ends and Advaita begins.

Everything you have ever experienced has been inside your awareness. You cannot step outside of it. Let us take the example of dreaming again. In your dream you see a multitude, but you wake up and realize it was all inside your mind. All the people, the grains of sand, the smells and sounds. All generated by one mind. Some neuroscience student may put an EEG on your head, and tell you that your brain was waving in a pattern that was different from how it waves when you’re awake. But that is just chlorophyll to the green.

After waking up from the dream, you still try to find explanations and words. Trying to find an answer within the multitude. But the whole dream was in your mind. In you. For that is the only thing that provably exists.

There is no second. Only a single flame. Self effulgent. Ceaselessly illuminating. Self-reflecting. Vibrating. An ocean of infinite awareness, that trembles with energy and casts thousands of ripples that you count and name. You call them many. But there is only water. Other times the ocean falls silent. You try to count the ripples and come up empty. You say there is nothing. But there is only still water. Kinetic turned into potential.

So I say again: only one thing can be proven to exist. Call it the Self or the Tao. Call it God or call it Him. Call it Her or call it That.

And That is You.

iPhone 13 vs Digicam

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Here is a close-up photo of a flower taken using an iPhone 13:

The smudginess in the out-of-focus areas—especially the stem and the base of the flower—is very jarring to look at.

Recently, whenever I’ve tried to take an image with even a modest digital zoom of 1.5x-2x—whether it’s of a bird, natural scenery, or a concert where I’m some distance from the stage—I see a similar heavily post-processed, smudged-out mess of pixels. And this isn’t just Apple; it’s true across similar mid-range Android phones as well (I’ve tried Google and OnePlus).

For contrast, here is a similar photo taken using a relatively cheap digicam (Kodak PixPro FZ45) that is still available to buy in the market:

The realness/rawness of this image is very apparent (to me, at least) compared to the mess you see in the first image.

The market for digicams has been very quiet for the last 5–10 years, except for a few models like this Kodak that are targeted towards Gen-Z TikTok trends glorifying 2000s “retro” aesthetics (I am admittedly Gen-Z too). And this is by no means a good digital camera. I remember using much better ones a decade ago that cost a similar amount.

I was never into photography as a hobby. I take a bare minimum number of pictures while travelling, just to serve as a checkpoint that “hey, I was here once.” Sadly, given the absolute garbage that a mid-range (~₹30k–50k) smartphone captures today, I’m considering carrying a dedicated digicam for my next trip.

Congrats, we’ve come full circle. There are no small-sized (4–5 inch) phones available that have the bare minimum features needed to navigate the world in 2025—things like a 4G/5G connection and a basic smartphone OS to support apps for maps, UPI/banking, cab hailing, and countless other tasks that make a smartphone mandatory (like a constantly changing QR code for a concert ticket).

Anything that should last you more than a year is a big ~6-7 inch slab that barely fits in your pocket and costs north of ₹30k. And it can’t even take a decent picture. So you must carry a second device for that, just like in the old days.

Anyway, apologies for the rant. I’ll go back to my day job… which, ironically, involves writing Linux drivers for cameras.

Difference between Truth (Sat) vs truth (Satya)

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve often been confused when reading religious or spiritual texts that talk about Truth (with a capital T). What do they mean by it, and why the strange capitalization? The confusion usually arises because what these texts are pointing to is often conflated (due to poor translations) with the general, everyday use of the word “truth.”

In daily life we use “truth” mainly in an ethical or moral sense: not telling lies, describing things as they are, being true to your nature by speaking your mind instead of holding back, and so on.

A good way to understand the difference is to look at how these words are used in Sanskrit (and derived languages). There is Satya (सत्य) or Sach (सच), used in day-to-day life for the general, “moral” sense of the word. And then there is Sat (सत्), found mostly in scriptures, pointing to the grander Truth (with a capital T), which is more metaphysical or ontological in nature.

To understand the distinction, we can first look at the usage of these terms in different scriptures. The Sikhi Mūl Mantar is a great example, as it uses both of these variations.

The first usage is often translated as:

`ikk ōaṅkār sat-nām`

→ There is one Om, and Its name is Sat (Truth / Existence / Reality).

Later in the same mantra we have:

`ād sach, jugād sach, hai bhī sach`

→ True (sach) since the beginning, true through the ages (yugās), and still true now.

Similarly, in Vedanta, the all-pervading ultimate reality known as Brahman is described as Sat-chit-ānanda.

In both these cases, Sat means existence or being, which is the base of reality. But what do we mean by the “base of reality”? For example, a wave depends on water for its existence. Without water, there is nothing to wave. So we say water is the base of the wave’s reality. Similarly, every single thing in the universe (right down to elementary particles and forces) depends on this field of reality/existence itself.

I am not saying that you must imagine a second entity, apart from the object that exists, called Sat, which allows (in its infinite kindness) for that object to exist. That would be foolish—just as it would be to say that water is a second thing separate from the wave, or that gold is something separate from a gold necklace.

Just as a wave is simply water waving—a verb form of water—any elementary particle is existence or Sat itself, “vibing” in a way that causes it to interact as an elementary particle with other parts of this same Sat, and so on. And according to both the Mūl Mantar and Advaita Vedanta, this reality is one, or non-dual. Nothing exists separate from existence itself. Nothing is outside of the underlying is-ness.

Finally, we can also look at the etymology of these ancient Proto-Indo-European sounds. From the root of Sat is derived Satya. In my limited understanding, Satya means “that which is based in Sat,” i.e., based in reality. Hence, if someone speaks something grounded in reality, we call it Satya, and lies are Asatya. But when we point to the underlying nature of reality itself, the word we use is Sat.

Where do thoughts come from?

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I have been pondering this question for a long time, and I’m sure many others before me have too. Often, when I’m stuck on a problem or going through a particularly mundane phase of life where nothing seems interesting, suddenly there is light. And by light, I mean a new idea; a potential solution, or a topic that makes me feel giddy with excitement again.

So where did this thought come from? Did it pop out of nothingness? Or was it always there, bubbling in the sea of potential that is my brain, waiting for the right time and temperature to manifest into form?

We say, “I am thinking”, but really, the agency we have in that process is fairly limited. I can surely recall memories on will, but I cannot come up with new thoughts or ideas. Instead, they come to me.

I think it is more accurate to say that I provide the medium, i.e. my brain, for the thought to arise. When I say “I am thinking” it is more that I am setting an intention, sending out an invitation, and creating space for a thought to come through. It is somewhat like growing a plant, if you know what I mean.

Well one day I was particularly paranoid due to self-inflicted herb abuse, and as I finally made it to bed that paranoia turned into a general bombardment of thoughts. Somehow, in that torrent of emotions, I started mapping each intrusive thought that was hitting me with one of my grandparents and their personalities.

Each one of my thoughts felt so obviously alike to one of them. Over the next few days, as the turbulence subsided, this insight remained. Even the mundane thoughts seemed to match their personalities.

As the weeks went by, I started to come up with rational explanations for this. Of course, genetics influences our personalities, and our personalities influence our thoughts. But I felt that did not capture the full story. Veneration of the dead is found in so many ancient cultures, which are otherwise diverse in their beliefs and their geographies. It seems like a natural human instinct.

On the non-woo side of things, there is still some debate on whether trauma is transmitted through generations and, if yes, how. The leading theory is epigenetics, which makes me wonder if the same is true for non-traumatic events and general personality traits. Do I inherit traits of my ancestors that were more nurture rather than nature? Is it a good approximation to say their spirits guide me?

Many of these philosophical questions used to bother me, ever since I was old enough to be bothered by such things. Now I am starting to get bothered less and less by this particular question of where thoughts come from. I feel old saying this, but sometimes you experience certain events, and one of life’s mysteries stops being a mystery. Even if you do not have a scientifically valid explanation, the urge to keep gnawing at the question goes away.

Shakti

Sun, 08 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

(or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Power)

Throughout high school, and later during undergrad, I struggled with finding motivation to work. It was weird because before high school I had it easy, at least academically. I was able to learn new subjects with minimal effort, and there wasn’t a lot of boring homework I had to do. Anyhow, there were little consequences for not doing something, or doing it at the very last moment.

I never had a fixed routine for my day - I tried to start it a few times but it never really worked out. But semi-regularly inspiration would strike me, and it would happily align with one of the chapters I had to study, or with an assignment I had to do, or a new concept I had to learn, and things would work out.

But this reliance on inspiration alone became troublesome in high school, as stakes got higher. My organizational skills were severely under-developed, and now there were a ton of boring, repetitive assignments or exercises that I had to do - for which no amount of luck and inspiration would be enough. Some days it was so bad that if I knew the whole day was filled with boring classes and work, nothing could even get me out of bed - not even my mother throwing a cold mug of water on my face. I would fake some illness or throw a tantrum but simply refuse to get up and go to school.

Of course I wasn’t this self-aware back then, but now that I look back on it, despite all the struggle I managed to do fine in high school. What helped was the voice in my head (which made me wanna do stuff) was still somewhat aligned with the goals I had set. For example, even if I loathed doing repetitive problem sets, or preparing for a low-stakes exam - I enjoyed reading my textbooks thoroughly, or understanding some new concept in Physics or Math, or messing around with computers and programming. And all of that was good enough to land me in the institution and field of my choice for my undergrad (after some inevitable trauma as due of course).

Ah, but then started my undergrad, and it got significantly worse. I had too much freedom paired with almost no oversight; anyway I had always hated the typical desi parents’ oversight, phew. But who would’ve thunk that all of it combined was a recipe for disaster? The freedom had rendered me unhinged - I had no long term goals anymore, no motivation to get out of bed, no mood to put effort into anything that had a delayed reward. And what made it all worse was that I was in the institute I always aimed for, in a field that used to be my escape from boredom in high school, I had picked projects in the specific area I was interested in - and yet here I was, lying motionless, completely useless.

Now computers and programming had become the new boring. The new escapes I found were all passive, addictive and bad for the soul. After binging on a sitcom all day, I wouldn’t go to bed happy of course. Instead I would curse myself for being such a failure.

In some sense I was cursing the power in my head which makes me go “This is EXCITING! Let’s do more of this”. That same entity once gave me success, but now was betraying me and our dynamics had become quite toxic. The more I would curse it, the more it would punish me by pushing me towards the lowest hanging fruit, which was addictive and bordered on self-abuse - and so on - the vicious cycle was set into motion.

Despite all the toxicity, I managed to eke out a half-decent result by landing a solid job offer. It was certainly below the bar I had implicitly set for myself, but I couldn’t really complain much as I had stopped striving for it anyway.

Since the safety net was in place though, I started to slowly notice my own patterns. If I did whatever the (often screaming) voice in my head commanded me to do, I would get some sweet feel-good chemicals. But it wasn’t that simple or healthy - that voice would often push me towards junkie loops like “one more episode of the tv show”. So what exactly was going on?

I realized that if I started out by putting the highest possible goal on the table - and slowly tried to negotiate down instead of cursing or belittling the power, I would get a decent result. For example -

I need to find some full-time job that aligns with my field of interest X.
Eh sure but I feel like having biryani.
Ok lol, maybe we can order biryani. But can we also find some lecture or talk on youtube around field of interest X and watch it while having the biryani?
Umm sure, but let’s crack open a cold one first though! ^_^
Ok I guess -_-

Slowly and steadily the negotiations became constructive and friendlier. Lowly suggestions like compulsive eating or cracking-open-a-cold-one became rarer. When I would be at my peak of a healthy relation with the power, it would even guide me and provide advice that I couldn’t possibly come up on my own. But whenever I lost attentiveness, and made the mistake of belittling or cursing the power (even subsconsicously) for making me do something which was “a waste of time” - it would punish me back hard by stopping negotiations all together.

In conclusion, I have now learned to always treat the Power (or Shakti) within me with respect and reverence. Because I have zero control on outcomes when it goes vengeful, and I have zero control on outcomes when it showers me with motivation, and makes me reach the heights of my potential. All I can do is aim for the highest ideal, and thank the power for picking whatever route it sees fit.

Even if I end up binge watching hours of philosophy youtube, or going into an intense wikipedia or interwebz crawl - I thank the power for giving me the motivation to explore new perspectives and push boundaries of my knowledge. Even if I end up watching some sitcom - I thank the power for subconsciouslly teaching me how to be better at inter-personal relationships through the sitcom drama. I thank the power rather than cursing it for not making me do something more “productive”.

And guess what? Now that I revere the power, she does not punish me or send me into addictive vicious loops. I go with the flow and the cards seem to fall into place. I do what the power wants and the fruits come to me in their own time.