And a Heaven in a Wild Flower” Auguries of Innocence by William Blake

While cleaning my back garden for new planting, I found remnants of beans I had planted last year but had never fully cleared away. One pod had survived the severe winter. It was shrivelled and seemingly lifeless. Yet when I cracked it open, inside were five seeds. I have kept them for planting this year.

Beans flourish under my care in a way that other vegetables do not. With tomatoes, I sometimes succeed; with potatoes, more often; but beans and I have an understanding. Brassica flourishes as well, but the cabbage leaf butterfly and its writhing green caterpillars defeat me each year with their sheer numbers and insatiable appetites.

The five seeds sit in a jar along with bulbs I plan to plant this year. I am waiting for the ground to thaw, for warmth to return, so I can clear the soil in which I will plant them.

Every time I see the jar, I wonder what is alive inside that bean. Something is, for sure. But what? Is the living happening or is living a possibility awaiting the right conditions to emerge? If it is a mere possibility, how can it be called alive in any sense? I can boil and eat them as well. I can make a veggie burger with them. Or I could fill the jar with water, and magically, life will appear as a sprout.

Where was that life hiding? And is that hidden entity a living thing or the promise of one? What does it even mean to be a ‘promise’ of a living thing?

I could feel clever by declaring that life is an emergent property, when a mixture of certain chemicals combines under the ‘right conditions’, temperature and moisture. Or I could try another turn of phrase. Life is not a discrete event; it is a continuum.

I am indulging in sophistry. Emergence, continua, and probabilities do not explain the magic. Merely changing the labels does not reveal what is inside the tin.

A ‘not-yet’ life

As I type this, another clever-sounding phrase worms its way into my head. A seed is life, but not yet. I remain uncertain. Is life inside the seed, or is life something that happens to the seed?

Another thought. Life is a promise between something that exists and something that allows existence. But that simply moves the mystery one step back. Like who made God, and then who made the maker of God, and so on ad absurdum.

I cannot explain this mystery. I suspect that if someone asked me to clearly articulate the mystery for which I seek an explanation, I would struggle to be clear.

Watching the jar reminds me of a protest I once saw in Boston, USA. I frequently travel to the United States for psychiatric conferences. Outside the venues, there are often protesters, most commonly Scientologists critical of psychiatry, carrying signs warning against psychiatry’s perceived harm. They are usually peaceful and part of the background hum of public discourse.

On this occasion in Boston, an entirely separate demonstration unfolded nearby: pro-life and pro-abortion protesters locked in a screaming match. Their presence was not directly related to the conference; however, the energy of confrontation lingered in my mind. What struck me was not merely the intensity of belief but the curious constellations of ethical positions: those identifying as pro-life often also supported gun rights and the death penalty; those identifying as pro-choice opposed both. It seems that both sides require complex intellectual balancing to maintain internally coherent narratives.

Legality requires strict boundaries: when are you old enough to be an adult, vote, drive, etc.? There is a joke about a young couple sitting in a car late at night in a remote location. A policeman approaches the couple and asks them what they are doing so late in the wilderness. The boy says: we are waiting for midnight? The policeman asks why? “We both turn 18 then” replies the beaming boy.

The debate around abortion is also about a strict boundary: when does life begin in the foetus? We demand a border for a miracle, which is an unfolding. We argue over rights and independence, yet we forget that nothing, not a foetus, not a bean, and certainly not a human being, is ever truly independent. The seed offers an honest mirror. It doesn’t ask when it becomes “legal.” It asks when it is ready. It reminds us that life is not a switch that flips from ‘off’ to ‘on’. Yet if we wanted a time that determines ‘readiness’, it would be arbitrary.

Humans want boundaries.

Life exists in gradients.

Life as a continuity

In the East, life does not begin. It changes costume. In Hindu and Sikh traditions, the soul does not “start”; it flows from one form to another. The soul (atman) is part of the universal consciousness that is the fundamental reality, and it moves to another form of being after the death of its previous physical form. Reincarnation is the continuity of the life force rather than life starting from nothing.

Buddhism does not believe in a soul but does believe in reincarnation. Therefore, if there is no permanent soul, what is being reincarnated? The popular energy is that in Buddhism, reincarnation is not like water being poured from one bucket to another but like a lit candle lighting another. No soul is needed.

From this perspective, we can change the question from when does life begin, to how does life manifest through changing forms?

Perhaps, the seed is life holding its breath. It is an embryo with genetic instructions, a reserve of nutrition for when it needs to come alive, and triggers that turn dormancy into awakening. It is life suspended. To return to Buddhism, the term antarbhava means an in-between state of death and life; a transition from one life to another. A seed is a perfect example of antarbhava.

Eating plants

We believe that plants are passive. They do not move, so they are not ‘animated’. However, we now know that plants communicate through microbial networks in the soil. They are engineers who calculate the angle of the sun. They are survivors; they remember the drought of years ago and prepare for the next one. They faithfully follow the calendar and change form with the changing seasons. They are life manifesting in a continuous transition. I have come to believe that plants are conscious and sentient, so I talk to them.

Why do we feel a pang of guilt at the slaughter of a cow but not at the harvest of a carrot? Perhaps because the cows look back at us. However, the plant is doing something equally radical; it is turning light into matter. It is a miracle we have learned to ignore because it occurs in the dirt. Animals resemble us. Plants do not, but they are alive, and through their lives, they sustain us.

To the best of our knowledge, plants do not experience pain. However, they respond to physical damage and environmental stressors. Many plants have sophisticated systems for detecting touch, light, danger, and if one is to believe experiments on the Venus flytrap, they can count too. Plants can’t vocalise. They reproduce in abundance and sometimes thrive when cut and drop their fruit on ripening. Eating plants does not feel the same as eating animals.

The Gospel of Matthew speaks of the mustard seed, a tiny speck that dreams of becoming a forest. And Wendell Berry, that patron saint of the furrow, reminds us that “The soil is the great connector of lives.” Seeds are the bridge between life and death. You can keep it in a jar for years, but it has a plan to come alive when the conditions are right.

Pick up a seed, any seed. A sunflower, lentil, or stray bean from a winter garden.

Hold it in your palm and feel its weight. It feels like a stone, but it is actually an antarbhava. Within this small mineral-like thing lies the possibility of a green explosion, which will produce many more copies of itself and continue as life as long as it meets the right conditions. Henry David Thoreau wrote, “What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” Seeds remind us that existence is relational; they do not live alone but rather in dialogue with soil, fungi, sunlight, and water.

Every day, we walk over millions of these “not-yets.” We live in a world that is constantly trying to change. The miracle is not just that the seed grows; the miracle is that it waits. It knows how to remain still until the world is ready for it.

Look at the seed again. It isn’t a thing. In a world full of endings, a seed is a promise of another beginning. The five beans are in my jar. They look like stones. But somewhere inside them a spring is already rehearsing.

All pics by the author

Ruins announce that here once stood something mighty.

I cannot find a single, authoritative published source for this widely cited line, probably from an Urdu sheyr (couplet), but it is a well-known quotation. I first heard it when I was about 15 years old from an old man who was forlornly remembering his robust youth.

In this essay, I reflect on three kinds of perishing: that of individual lives, those that result from human violence, and the ones that are nature’s slow but inevitable erasure of everything. I wonder what, if anything, survives: stones, books, memories, or the meanings we lay over them.

What does it mean to perish?

To perish is not just to die. It is to disappear slowly, to lose form, function, legibility, existence, and then to be lost to all memory. In the short story Metamorphosis, David Eagleman expresses this idea beautifully. There are three deaths. The first is when a person dies. The next death is when everyone who knows the person dies. The final death is when anyone who has ever heard of the person dies. That is the final erasure of the human being who once lived and loved.

Individuals die, cities perish, and mighty civilisations disappear.

There are two great philosophical questions that remain unanswered. Why is there something rather than nothing? Who created the universe? Both assume that something must exist. In Abrahamic religions, it is an external God; in Hinduism, it is Brahman (consciousness as the fundamental reality that created empirical reality). For Christians, the word was the beginning. In Hinduism and Sikhism, the beginning was Anhada Naad (unstruck sound).

Buddha said that there is no first cause, captured in the concept of anamatagga (without a first moment). He considered existence to have two basic attributes: annicca and paticca-samuppaada. Anicca means impermanence. Everything is in constant flux, arising, changing, and passing. Paticca-samuppaada is usually translated as dependent origination. It means that nothing exists independently. Everything arises from a prior condition. When a condition ceases, the object ceases to exist. The Buddhist formulation is: Imasmiṃ sati idaṃ hoti; Imasmiṃ asati idaṃ na hoti (When this is, that comes to be; When this is not, that does not come to be).

Stephen Hawking has asserted that “the laws of science seem to predict that the universe had a beginning”. Scientists now conceptualise a cosmos with a beginning and, therefore, at least in principle, a cosmos that could have an end, but the nature of its ending is uncertain. Some scenarios imagine continued expansion and a long “heat death”, while others entertain the possibility of a future re-collapse, a “big crunch”.

In Hinduism, existence is not an object but a rhythm described in three terms: leela, laya, and pralaya. Leela is the universe as divine play; consciousness (Brahman) revealing itself. Laya is when the individual form dissolves into this universal source. Pralaya is when the entire cosmic cycle dissolves back into the source, Brahman. As I have written before, the Creator in the Hindu view is the creation itself. It is a dance rather than a painting. Brahman’s leela starts the dance, laya is each step returning to stillness, and pralaya is the end of the performance. The curtain falls, and the stage goes dark.

I do not know which answer is correct. However, the Hindu view resonates with me. Some quantum physicists also consider consciousness to be the underlying reality from which existence emerges. But who knows?

Whatever the truth of the origin of the universe, perishing is not a local tragedy. It is written into the grain of reality itself.

Ephesus: a city that guided strangers by stone

When I went to Ephesus, what struck me first was not only the grandeur but also the intelligence with which the city had been designed to meet human needs. There is a famous stone carving where sailors arriving at night could find directions by putting their feet into the carving. One toe points to a brothel, another to a place to eat or drink, and another to a place to rest. A sailor arriving for the first time in pitch darkness would not have to disturb anyone; his toes could lead him to whatever the city offered.

After navigating the city with your toes as a guide, you arrive at the Library of Celsus, an extraordinary structure. Its proportions, as guessed by the columns that remain standing, are astonishing. Only the dramatic facades have withstood the ravages of time. The library once housed an estimated 12000 scrolls, an enormous collection of human wisdom. Imagination struggles to recreate what the library might have been in its full splendour.

Ephesus collapsed into ruin for reasons that are, in the end, almost banal: geology and ecology doing what they do. The Cayster River silted up the harbour, and the city that lived by maritime trade found itself increasingly landlocked. The resulting marshy conditions contributed to diseases, including malaria, driving the decline and relocation of the population. Earthquakes and shifting political fortunes did the rest. Nature, in its usual indifference, allowed geological forces to take their course.

The Celsus library remains as a photo opportunity. I have lost all my photographs of Ephesus, including the negatives during various house moves. Another loss of the legibility of experience. Another reminder of impermanence and ways memories perish.

Nalanda: learning burned, and then silence

I have never been to Nalanda. In school history lessons, when I did not care about history, we were taught about Nalanda and Taxila, along with the Indus Valley civilisation. History was for other people. I did not have a long enough past to respect history.

Founded in the early centuries of the first millennium and flourishing for hundreds of years, Nalanda was one of the world’s great residential centres of scholarship: a vast monastic-university complex drawing students from across Asia. UNESCO’s description of the archaeological site captures what the ruins reveal: this was not a single building, but an entire ecosystem of monasteries, temples, classrooms, and courtyards; an entire architecture devoted to learning. Chinese travellers came to study, and their records confirm the importance of Nalanda as the world’s first, most renowned, and largest residential university.

Then came fire and conquest. In the late 12^th Century Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khilji conducted raids across monasteries in Bihar, including Nalanda, Vikramshila, and Odantapuri. Monks were tortured and killed, libraries were burned, and monastic complexes were destroyed. If you Google Nalanda, you will find varying accounts of why Khilji destroyed Nalanda, depending on the tribal loyalties of the narrator. Regardless of Khilji’s intentions, the fact that he initiated the destruction of Nalanda is not in doubt.

Libraries as monuments to wisdom

Ephesus and Nalanda are monuments to the idea that knowledge is a form of immortality. That if we collect, teach, copy, and preserve, we can outlast our own brief lifetimes.

And yet both vanished.

One by natural forces and the other by human wickedness. In the final accounting, the mechanism is irrelevant. Everything perishes. Even the pyramids, those seemingly defiant geometries, are slowly being eroded by wind, sand, pollution, time, and tourism. When I first saw the Pyramids in early 1990, you had to travel some distance from Cairo to see them in the desert emptiness. You can now have a McDonald’s or KFC within a short distance of the Great Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops).

To understand impermanence is not to despair. It is to see clearly what permanence has always been: a story we tell ourselves because we are temporary creatures who long for immortality. Libraries, museums, sarcophagi, names of lovers carved on a tree trunk, palaces, paintings, statues, and writing this blog are all desperate defences against death and perishing.

Even the Himalayas are temporary

I am from Kashmir. I am drawn to mountains. There is a deep calling which must be evolutionary. My ancestors originated from the mountains. I feel genetically programmed to love mountains. As a medical student in Jammu, I travelled regularly across the mountains of Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh, as often as my meagre resources permitted. In 1980 I hitchhiked to Ladakh to visit the Hemis Monastery, and then walked from Leh to Kargil without any trekking equipment and without knowing the local language for over three weeks (134 miles, 215 km). I stayed overnight with villagers who provided unwavering hospitality, without expecting anything in return.

Before that in 1978, I had spent two weeks in Dharmsala, where I met the Dalai Lama. He gave me a piece of slate with carvings. Everyone had brought an offering as he walked through the crowd, giving his blessings. I apologised for not bringing an offering and explained that I was a medical student visiting McLeod Ganj for the first time. He beamed and gave me a slate carved into which was carved Om Mani Padme Hum (Hail to the Jewel in the Lotus). It is the only thing I have carried from my past. He was not a celebrity at the time. Hollywood had not discovered him. I, a callow youth, was not mature enough to ask him the questions that I would now ask him. Even then though, I sensed that I was in the presence of an advanced soul.

I had no camera then. I have no picture of a youthful me standing next to a beaming Dalai Lama. But does it matter? It was a moment in time. Impermanent. It happened to me. It lives in my memory. It will perish with me. So will this slate, although it is likely to outlast both the Dalai Lama and me.

The mighty Himalayas will not last forever. These mountains rose from the collision of tectonic plates, with the Indian Plate pushing into the Eurasian Plate beginning roughly 50 million years ago, a collision that continues to shape the range today. They are being eroded relentlessly. I last returned to Kashmir in 2023. My clan’s houses in Srinagar are occupied by others; all my relatives were forcibly driven out at gunpoint. The rivers, forests, and glaciers I knew in Gulmarg, Pahalgam, Sonmarg, and Anantnag have all but disappeared. Mountains have been denuded by rapacious timber merchants. The Sufi Islam that coexisted peacefully with Kashmiri Vaishnavism has been replaced by brutal totalitarianism. The Kashmir of my memory has vanished.

The grand unmaking

Is perishing personal or cosmic? I have written elsewhere about the tragedy of Kashmir? Why should I mourn my clan’s cleansing from their land? The cosmos is full of unmaking. The Moon is drifting away from Earth at approximately 3.8 centimetres per year, roughly 3.8 meters per century. The Sun will not burn forever. NASA has noted that the Sun will become a red giant in approximately 5 billion years.

What do these numbers even mean? Not just mathematically, but to me, perceptually? I can only imagine my existence two generations on either side. My clan was driven out of Kashmir in the early 1990s. It hurts us. It will mean nothing to my great-grandchildren.

My life is finite, as is my capacity for love. I can only extend it to my imagined grandchildren, who are not yet born but already loved. Beyond that, who knows? I try to detach myself from present suffering by meditating and immersing myself in spirituality. My personal griefs and anguishes seems both intensely immediate and insignificantly small in the grand cycle of creation and destruction that operates in the universe.

The cosmos ceases on vast timescales. Galaxies merge, stars collapse, civilisations perish, cities get wiped out and all personal memories disappear when a being dies. Everything will eventually cease to exist. If you compare the enormity of the universe with the infinitesimally small scale of human life, it does something odd to your heart. Time widens until personal pain feels both intimate and small.

A ruined mansion near home

Not far from our house, there are ruins of an old mansion: just a few bricks and a fragment of a tiled mosaic that somehow survived the vandalism of weather and neglect.

I stand there and wonder about the lives lived inside. Love-making and child-rearing, fighting and forgiving, the small rituals of food and fatigue, the long arguments that end with doors being slammed or laughter, the private heroism of caring for someone sick, the soft cruelty of impatience, the ordinary miracle of waking up and trying again.

All of it is now compressed into a rectangle of broken tiles.

Should we grieve perishing?

Why shouldn’t we grieve? Grief is love that encounters the finitude of our existence. How can we not grieve our own perishing and that of those we love?

But I am beginning to wonder whether grief is the only possible response to impermanence. There is another way of dealing with the reality of impermanence: awe, reverence, and gratitude for here and now. If everything perishes, including us and those we love, then perhaps the right response is astonishment at not that things end, but that anything exists at all; that there is something rather than nothing, and that we, improbably, participate in it.

The immensity of the cosmos could make us feel insignificant. Or the fact that we now know so much about it can make us proud. I feel a mixture of awe at the world, pride at humanity’s achievements, and personal gratitude that I have been allowed to take part in this strange, brief, luminous experience of being alive.

My children live through me. Their existence is also impermanent. But they are likely to have children, who will have children. Perhaps knowing that is enough. To have lived and loved, to remain in a few people’s memory after my own perishing, and to hope that the gift of memory and recall will keep me alive for little longer than I breathe, two generations on either side, is enough.

खंडर बता रहे हैं की इमारत बुलंद थी

Ruins announce that here once stood something mighty.

Ruins celebrate existence. We cannot defeat perishing. We can only but try to remain legible to one another while we still can.

When Silence Creeps In

A few years ago, my family started complaining that I was ignoring them. They would call me or ask me to pay attention to something, and I would not respond. Initially, they attributed it to my usual absent-mindedness or the hyperfocus that overtakes me when I am reading, writing, or immersed in music. Eventually, they decided that it was deliberate and that I was choosing to ignore them.

When their complaints became sufficiently vociferous, I tried to explain that I was not ignoring anyone; I genuinely had not heard them. The realisation arrived slowly for the family, and for me, I was going deaf. If a penny had literally dropped, I would not have heard it.

Diagnosis and Retrospection

I underwent a hearing test and was told that I had severe deafness in my left ear and moderate to severe in my right, particularly affecting high frequencies. The cause was partly aging and partly the consequence of listening to very loud music in my youth.

Growing up, we did not have CDs or modern digital music. I owned a small tape recorder. There was a flourishing underground economy of transferring vinyl records onto cassette tapes for a small fee. Western music arrived years after becoming established hits in the West, and the selection was limited. When I stumbled upon rock and blues at around 14, it was love at first hearing.

Hard rock and heavy metal became my staple diet: Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, and Pink Floyd shaped my auditory imagination. Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen brought poetry and politics, while Jethro Tull transported me to a British countryside populated by elves and goblins. Music has never been a background for me. It is essential to my identity and existence. The music of my youth was a way of inhabiting emotions I could not articulate, and inhabiting lands and cultures that seemed forever forbidden and beyond reach.

The sound quality was poor and lyrics difficult to discern. In Purple Haze, I heard Jimi Hendrix confessing to being gay: “excuse me, while I kiss this guy!” What I lacked in auditory acuity, I compensated for in volume. Once I entered medical school, escaping domestic constraints and sibling complaints about my musical tastes, the volume knob moved permanently to the max. Whenever I was not in lectures, I was listening to music loudly and continuously, even while studying. During the rare live performances available to me, I stood as close to the speakers as possible.

After arriving in the UK, I revisited many of the bands that had shaped my youth: reunions of Deep Purple, Nazareth, remnants of Uriah Heep, Bad Company, or tribute bands. With the arrival of headphones, my listening experience became even more intimate and intense. My musical tastes expanded to jazz, blues, and classical music, but loudness remained integral to the experience.

I was warned that I would damage my hearing. However, youth brings its own recklessness and absence of foresight. Even now, when I can, I listen as loudly as possible, with sound leaking through noise-cancelling headphones so that anyone nearby can hear it.

The Gift of Restoration

Once I acquired hearing aids, the first thing I noticed during my daily dog walks was the birdsong. I had not realised how completely I had lost the astonishing variety of sounds that fill the morning air. There was so much joyous sound all around me, where there had previously been silence. I attempted to count the number of bird calls I could distinguish, but I could not total them. Occasionally, just one would chirp or whistle, but when they all sang together, the soundscape was so full and luscious that I could identify neither individual components nor its contributors.

The greatest gift of my hearing aids has been the return of subtlety: the shimmer of cymbals in live performances, the delicate clarity of high notes, and the nuanced texture of spoken words in the theatre. What the audiologist had described as “high frequencies” was a galaxy of musical notes, each with its own signature imprint. This is how the early users of telescopes might have felt when a dark sky revealed its hidden luminosities in depth and breadth. Each new bird song was like another musical galaxy revealing itself to me.

A sudden loss is acutely felt, as I did when I fell, and my temporarily paralysed leg revealed the full force of gravity, as I have described here. When things are taken away very slowly, you do not miss them. Muscle mass fades. Memory shifts. Aging advances incrementally. Hearing loss belongs to this slow erosion.

Why Birds Sing

Hearing birdsong again made me curious not just about its beauty but also its purpose. I read that birdsong is not merely decorative background music; it is a biological necessity that has been shaped by evolution. Many birds sing to establish their territory. Songs allow individuals to signal ownership and deter rivals without physical confrontation. Birdsong is also a crucial element of mate attraction. In many species, females prefer more elaborate or precise songs, which may indicate neurological development and genetic quality. The complexity, endurance, and clarity of songs often function as signals of health and fitness. Juvenile birds sometimes learn songs from adult tutors, blending instinct with culture.

These explanations, as scientifically valid as they may be, do not satisfy. What Are birds saying to each other? Is it music or might it be poetry, ‘birdwords’ set to music? Might they be conversing about the banal? Have the chicks been fed? Whose turn is it to get the worm today? Is your mother visiting our tree again? Why have you not fixed that leak in the nest?

Who knows, except the birds? And does it matter? Beauty is beauty, regardless of its purpose.

The birds in my garden

My ordinary English garden hosts an orchestra. I cannot tell them apart from their sounds, except for doves, ravens, and magpies, which have unusual sounds, none of which are high frequency. I googled the birds I could see in my garden and then heard them individually on YouTube. Over time, I came to recognise some songs. I learned that the delicate and melancholic phrases belonged to Robin. Rich flute-like melodies were delivered by the great tit, while the chaffinch produced energetic trills that ended with a flourish. I loved the song thrush with its repeated musical motif. The bassline of the wood pigeon had always been audible to me, and now several other sections of the orchestra had started playing too.

Competing with the City

Once I started listening carefully, especially when comparing bird songs across the various countries I travel to, I noticed how the environment shapes sound. Birdsong adapts to habitat. Forest species often use lower frequencies that travel through vegetation, whereas urban birds sing louder or at higher pitches to overcome traffic noise, which is an evolutionary adjustment. In India, particularly in Delhi and Mumbai, cities I visit frequently, the morning soundscape is cacophonous. Birds compete with relentless noise of traffic, construction, and dense urban lifestyle.

Studies suggest that many urban birds increase both their vocal volume and pitch to remain audible above anthropogenic noise. The pigeon outside my brother’s apartment in Bombay coos so loudly that it penetrates the soundproof windows. One cannot help but feel pity for the birds. How long will they be able to increase their vocal output to compete with the ever-growing sounds of human civilisation?

Our modern marvels

Hearing restoration is a modern marvel that would have seemed miraculous a few generations ago. I had not missed birdsong in my deaf state, but what if my livelihood depended on it? I was suddenly struck by what it might have meant for Beethoven, whose entire being overflowed with music. What is it like to lose the ability that defines you?

Ludwig van Beethoven’s progressive deafness is a poignant and painful reminder of how previous generations, with no access to modern technology suffered without hope. My deafness is partial, whereas his was total. Even during periods of increasing silence, he composed some of the most revolutionary works in Western music. By the premiere of his Ninth Symphony in 1824, he was completely deaf. While conducting the performance, he continued to beat time even after the music ended, unaware that the audience was applauding wildly, until a performer turned him around to witness the ovation he could not hear.

Music as a Unique Event

Every morning, I hear similar sounds, but never the same. The Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache believed that every musical performance is an unrepeatable event. For this reason, he resisted commercial recordings, arguing that they could never capture the living, spatial, and temporal reality of sound unfolding in real time.

For Celibidache, music was not an object but an experience that exists only in the moment between performers, acoustics, and listener. Watch Celibedache conducting Ravel’s Bolero on YouTube. If God were a composer, he would be Celibidache. Listen and judge for yourself.

Celibidache would recognise the uniqueness of every dawn chorus, magical and magnificent, never to be repeated.

Every morning, birds provide us with a free musical performance, each one a unique event, each one a special performance, never to be reproduced again in the history of the universe. We often forget the music freely offered by the natural world, a living orchestra performing without tickets or announcements.

There are countless recordings of birdsong online, but these recordings cannot replicate the subtle interplay of weather, light, and presence that shapes each dawn chorus. I would rather listen to the unrepeatable harmony that unfolds outside my door each morning.

I thank my audiologist, my hearing aids, and my family for discovering my deafness and the unexpected gift of hearing restored. I cannot imagine what Beethoven must have felt as sound retreated from him.

“In each and every heart the Divine sings its song; some hear it, and blossom”. Sri Guru Granth Sahib, Sikh Holy book.

When I hear birdsong in the morning now, it is not just sound; it is attention asserting its presence. Hearing loss has taught me how to listen.

All photographs by the author (except my mother, pic taken by my brother)

Inheritance

Long before I had heard the word sustainability, I was taught about it by a woman who would not waste a grain of rice– my mother.

She woke at 4 a.m. to prepare for my father’s needs before his two-hour daily meditation session. By the time my sibling and I began stirring at 6 a.m., she had already completed hours of invisible work. She ate at the end of the day after feeding everyone else: family members, pets, and anyone who happened to arrive at our door, including stray dogs and cows.

After she died, we sat together and tried to remember her favourite food. None of us could. I am sure she had preferences, but she belonged to a generation shaped by duty more than self-expression–married at thirteen, mother at fifteen, grandmother by thirty-five. She was part of a silent era of women who met cultural obligations without complaint and often without articulating their needs.

I remember two things she truly disliked: spilled salt and leftover rice.

If salt fell, she would warn me that in another life I would have to pick it up with the inside of my eyelid, a vivid enough image to make me careful. If I left rice on my plate, she would say, You do not know how much effort went into producing this. It is a gift from God. Do not waste it.

If food remained, she ate it instead of discarding it or fed it to the birds and stray animals. She cooked only what we needed, except for a few extra chapatis each day for the passing stray cows.

These were not simply habits of thrift. They were gestures of attention, acknowledgements that every grain carries labour, weather, soil, and grace.

The Mountain Economy

My mother was born in the mountainous region of Bagh, now in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Life there was harsh and self-sufficient. I have not been to Bagh, but I have visited that part of the region within the Indian borders. The air is cold and thin, almost metallic, in its impact on the lungs. Putting one’s hand in a stream is an ice-cold shock. During holidays in these regions, as children, we would dare to see how long we could keep our hands immersed in the water. Under such elemental conditions, families grew what they consumed and consumed what they grew. Journeys down the mountains were infrequent and purposeful, to obtain what could not be produced locally: salt, sugar, oil, and, occasionally, clothes.

For her, each grain of salt or rice held a value that modern generations might associate with digital wealth, except that its worth was not abstract. It was survival, effort, and gratitude that were made visible.

Scarcity did not induce anxiety. It produced reverence.

Confrontation: Abundance Without Memory

I have everything I need.

I tell my children that we eat better than many kings and queens of the past. Today, we command nature’s bounty outside natural rhythms: strawberries in winter and seasonal vegetables year-round. We send probes to Mars and track human-made objects that leave the solar system.

Yet, each day, we discard what earlier generations would have guarded carefully.

My work in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia has shown me landscapes where plastic accumulates like geological sediment: in the slums of Nigeria and Dhaka, the gutters of Kolkata and Delhi, and the remote streams of Indonesia and Cambodia. Rivers choke, wildlife suffers, and materials designed for convenience become permanent residents of the ecosystems.

My mother counted grains of rice. Entire economies now count surplus as a problem to be managed. Agricultural systems produce paradoxes: food is destroyed to maintain prices and policies that stabilise prosperity in one region while quietly undermining farmers in another.

Inequality is not a new phenomenon. What is new is the universality of disposability. Even the poorest communities now participate in cycles of buying and discarding.

In many regions, I am warned not to drink tap water, so each day, I buy disposable plastic bottles, which creates a small personal contradiction between safety and sustainability. I am handed bottles of water wherever I go. During my recent trip to Nigeria, I used 5-6 small plastic water bottles every day. I have to perform mental gymnastics. I cannot afford to be ill. During long road trips, there is no access to clean toilet facilities. I could carry my own metal bottle, but it would still have been filled with water from plastic bottles.

During our family stay at Rancho Margot in Costa Rica, I glimpsed another possibility: an attempt to align production with consumption, producing only what was needed and consuming only what was produced. It felt less like austerity and more like a coherent approach. It remains my family’s favourite holiday experience.

Lessons That Return

As a child, I found many of my father’s habits irritating, especially his insistence on switching off lights in empty rooms. If he found a light left on, he would say, “Ah, the spice box must have an important exam tomorrow. That’s why it needs a light to study.”

We laughed but also felt mildly embarrassed by what we interpreted to be stinginess.

Now, I walk through my own house switching off the lights. I do not make sarcastic remarks, but I secretly hope my children notice. I do not want to sermonise; I hope the lessons arrive quietly, absorbed by osmosis.

Scale and Perspective

The world has become increasingly disposable. Objects, experiences, and sometimes even relationships feel temporary.

And yet, when viewed across deep time, individual human lives have always been brief. Estimates suggest that approximately 110–120 billion humans have lived and died since the emergence of modern humans, while more than 8 billion are alive today, a historically unprecedented population sustained by advances in science and medicine.

These advances have transformed survival. Here is a brief table of what we have achieved in the last two millennia in just one area of human existence, but a profoundly impactful one: the death of a child. Behind these numbers lie humanity’s extraordinary achievement- how many children now grow into adulthood.

I deeply admire human ingenuity. Our ability to alleviate suffering, extend life, and explore the cosmos reflects our extraordinary intelligence and cooperation. As we transitioned from a world where every grain was a gift to one where every object is a commodity, our physical reach expanded to the stars, yet our spiritual attention to what lies right in front of us began to shrink.

But mastery without restraint risks becoming excess.

Integration: Learning to Tread Lightly

We human beings rule supreme on this planet. All the more reason to rule wisely.

We do not need everything we buy. I do not need any more clothes for the rest of my life. Yet, I still throw away disposable pens, even as I try to return to a fountain pen.

We need to tread lightly on this earth. Not as an act of deprivation, but as an act of attention.

We need to leave memories of love and laughter rather than landfills filled with impulse purchases. To fill lives with meaning rather than fill spaces with things.

I wish I had learned this sooner. Perhaps wisdom arrives only with age or with the slow accumulation of contradictions that force us to reconsider what matters. Maturity cannot come prematurely.

I do not expect everyone to arrive at this realisation at the same time. I only hope that some may arrive sooner than I.

“The Earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it.” (Psalm 24:1)
“Air is the Guru, Water the Father, and Earth the Great Mother of all.” (Guru Granth Sahib, Sikh Holy Book)
“Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” (Mary Oliver)

“Only when the last tree has been cut down, the last river poisoned, and the last fish caught, will we realize that we cannot eat money” (saying attributed to Cree Native Americans)

The river remembers

Often watching the Extinction Rebellion and other climate protests in London and elsewhere, I am reminded not of carbon targets and slogans, but of a river in Karnataka.

In April 2019, I decided to go fishing on the Kabini River in Nagarhole National Park, Karnataka. The rest of my family were elsewhere occupied- reading, scrolling the internet, or Snapchatting. Ajaya, a local fisherman, was my guide and boatman. We set off with a rod and line, a mixture of bait (offal, dough, corn, and worms), and some cold beers to try our luck.

The Kabini River, also known as Kapila, meanders between Kerala and Karnataka, a region rich in biodiversity. One of the few places in the world where you might see the rare Black Panther or the Melanistic Leopard, also known as the ‘ghost of the forest’. It is home to a number of endangered and rare species, such as the Indian leopard, Gaur (Indian Bison), mugger or marsh crocodile, sloth bear, pangolins, and the Indian Rock Python. There are large populations of sambhar, cheetal (spotted) and barking deer, monkeys, elephants, striped hyenas, wild boars, Ussuri dhole, mongooses, civets, Indian flying giant squirrels, porcupines, slender loris, and jungle and leopard cats.

There are over 250 species of birds, with threatened species including the white Ibis, darters, and red-headed vulture, and endemic species such as the blue-winged parakeet, Malabar Grey Hornbill, Malabar Lark, Malabar Tragon, and the white-bellied Treepie, perhaps the most beautiful bird of the crow family. Flocks of spoonbills frolic on the riverside. Spread over 55 acres, this part of the forest used to be a royal lodge, a venue for Maharajas and Viceroys to indulge in their hunting passions.

The riches of rivers

Kabini once teemed with life. Here, you can find the giant humpbacked Mahseer, which can grow up to 1.5 meters in length and is considered one of the 20 megafish in the world. The red-tipped halfbeak, mrigal, Waynad Mahseer, Kohri, Nilgiri, Bhavani, and Cauvery barbs,ande Nilgiri Mystu, were all once endemicton the rive, and now face extinction. The giant Mahseer population has declined by 90% in recent years. The fish Nemacheilus pulchellus lives in these waters and is so rare that it does not have a common name. In June 2016, scientists from the Kerala University of Fisheries and Ocean Studies discovered a previously unidentified species of fish with a blue iridescence along its dorsal and ventral fins in a secluded stream draining into the Kabini River. DNA analyses confirmed that it is part of the Badis family and was named Dario neela (neela is blue in many Indian languages). Smooth-coated otters feast on the river’s many fish and invertebrates, but like the fish, the otters are also under threat.

The earth is my mother, and I am her son (Atharva Veda, Bhumi Sukta)

I threw bait into the river. The sky was dotted with Brahmani kites (also known as the red-backed eagle), a magnificent raptor that also scavenges, beautiful in its chestnut-red plumage and sharply contrasting white head and chest. One was particularly adventurous and fearless. As soon as I cast the line, it would swoop majestically on the bait, often catching it in midair. I tried to throw some bait on the other side, away from my cast, but the less intrepid kites covered that area. I feared the kite swallowing the hook or tearing its talons on it, and having been defeated by its persistence and accuracy, I decided to drop the line just by the side of the boat rather than casting it far.

The hook was stuck in something hard. Much tugging revealed remnants of a plastic net. As I pulled in the net, more of it was revealed until I ended up hauling several meters of netting, tangled with deadwood, weeds, and human detritus. Ajaya informed me that every evening, fishermen lined the riverbed with these nets and removed them at dawn, along with the trapped fish. Each day, a large amount of netting was left in the river by the fishermen. He said that the net also often caught juvenile fish, and everyone realised that the fish stock was dwindling. But what option did he have? He barely made a living and had to look after a family of six, including his elderly mother and a newborn baby. When I expressed my horror, he did the Indian head wiggle; equal parts agreement, obsequiousness, and a shrug of helplessness.

The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it (Psalm 24:1)

I decided to remove as much plastic netting as possible that afternoon. It was hard and pitiless work in hot and humid conditions. After approximately three hours, the boat was full, and we decided to take the netting on shore. As we reached the riverbank, fishermen were bringing in sacksful of nets for that night’s fishing. I offered Ajaya some extra money to dispose of the netting we had collected. He wiggled his head and thanked me in response.

The geography of anger

As Extinction Rebellion blocks traffic in London and other big cities, I understand what drives them. I sense their need to do good, to feel good, to do the right thing, and to feel righteous. I felt virtuous after three hours of fishing for plastic. It may not have made any difference; Ajaya may have tipped the plastic back into the river. However, it made me feel good momentarily.

Extinction Rebellion is driven by the same need. I do not doubt their sincerity; I doubt the geography of their anger.

I am unsure what blocking traffic in London achieves. We in Britain can reduce our use of plastic. Our beaches are also littered with plastic. We can stop exporting our filth to other nations. However, our contribution, both good and bad, is meager. I cannot imagine Extinction Rebellion protesting outside the Indian High Commission in London. It does not fit into their image of the ‘baddies’. Meanwhile, Ajaya is trying to survive. He is aware of the damage done to the source of his livelihood. However, he can plan only until the next few meals and, at best, the next few months. Carbon or plastic reduction targets set at the International Summit in exotic locations are as meaningless to him as his life is to the London protestors. Ajaya knows that the river is dying, and that hunger does not wait for environmental recovery.

Blaming or solving?

I wish I had an answer. The answer for Ajaya and his fishing community, for fired-up protesters at Extinction Rebellion, for those of us who worry about the state of the planet. My children want to save the planet; I want them to clean their rooms and study hard. I think the discipline of tidying is better than anarchic protests. Studying science and engineering may offer them greater opportunities to do good than waving placards with meaningless platitudes.

Or perhaps I too am part of the problem, wanting order, discipline, and solutions while living inside the very structures that unmake the natural world. I can only remind myself of the saying attributed to another Native American, Chief Seattle: “Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it”.

To move beyond the momentary feeling of virtue, we must bridge the gap between global awareness and the Kabini’s local reality. By channelling human wisdom and ingenuity into targeted, site-specific solutions, we can empower communities like Ajaya’s to protect their environment without sacrificing their survival and well-being.

Real change requires that we move past mere protests and displays of anger, far away from the source of the damage. Instead, we must offer tangible support and scientific innovation directly to those living on the front lines of ecological collapse, ensuring that the “web of life” remains unbroken for all.

An earlier version of this essay first appeared on kitaab.org. Reproduced with permission

“Who waits for you out there, O traveller, where will your wandering lead”

“दम ले ले घड़ी भर, ये छैंयाँ पाएगा कहाँ”

“Breathe some restful moments here, where else will you find such shade”

Opening lines of the song “Wahan Kaun hai Teraa” from the 1965 film Guide, based on a novel by R.K. Narayan. Lyrics by Shailendra, music by S.D. Burman. A YouTube video link with English translation is provided at the end of the article.

All photographs by the author

Every time I feel myself pulled toward the allure of ‘there’, this song calls me back. I am not arguing against ambition or self-improvement. I am only noticing that the peace we chase in the future often sits beside us here and now, revealed not by reaching the next milestone but by pausing after a long and restless search.

The Indian write R. K. Narayan (1906-2001) is best known in the West for his stories set in the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi. His writing style, a detailed and exquisite analysis of everyday life, observed with compassion and gentle humour, and captured in compressed prose, has been compared to Faulkner, Chekhov, Gogol and Guy de Maupassant. His novel, The Guide, published in 1958, is also set in Malgudi and was made into a wonderful film, considered one of the greats of Bollywood cinema. It is a story of a flawed man’s egoic ascent, decline, shattering, and possibility of redemption. ‘Possibility’, because the ending is deliberately ambiguous.

The Guide

The protagonist, Raju, is a street-smart tourist guide who uses his charisma, energy, and exuberance to get along in a world that does not fully satisfy. He guides people but does not know where he wants to go. He falls in love with Rosie, a dancer in a stifling marriage with a dour and unsupportive husband, from whom she eventually splits. Raju encourages Rosie to follow her passion for dancing and becomes her manager, guiding her to stardom. Their relationship collapses under the weight of ego, suspicion, the corrosive impact of fame, and Raju’s forgery of Rosie’s jewels. He is sentenced to two years imprisonment and the couple split.

Emerging from jail as a diminished man, he wanders into a drought-stricken village, where he is mistaken for a holy man capable of miracles. This is where the song finds him (and us).

After initially resisting the role of a holy man, Raju finds purpose in guiding innocent and desperate villagers out of their drought-stricken misery. Under pressure of the villagers’ belief in his divine powers, Raju undertakes a ritual fast for rain. In the film’s haunting final movement, an emaciated Raju walks into the river as thunder rumbles in the distance. It is unclear whether Raju drowns or whether it rains. The story now becomes a parable of transformation, where a flawed man’s accidental sainthood reveals an ambiguous boundary between deception and redemption.

The seductive call of ‘there’

The song’s opening line poses a profound question. We spend our lives searching for ‘there’. Out there is our perfect lover, a successful career, a fulfilling life and a legacy. The song asks us, Where is that place? Who is there for you? What are you running from? Who are you running to? Is resting in the shade here now not preferable to the imagined perfection of the future?

Raju becomes a ‘saint’ not through study, intent, or awakening, but through sheer physical, mental, and egoic exhaustion. The song reminds him that existence is ephemeral, like water waves. Existence is as transient as writing on water waves. We do not have a permanent home or residence. In this life, we are tourists seeking a destination and a guide to help us get there. However, the guide lies within. We only find it when we stop searching for it.

Rain basera (literally a rain shelter)

Life, in an old Indian metaphor, is a rain basera, a shelter you slip beneath while the storm passes by. Nothing is meant to be kept; it is only meant to be witnessed. The roof leaks a little, the wind hums through the bamboo, and it still offers a moment of peace. In this view, the wandering mind that chases distant horizons forgets the quiet gift of the present moment. Resting in this temporary refuge, here and now, is an act of wisdom. The world keeps moving, but you do not have to chase every cloud. Sometimes, the truest path is simply to sit, breathe, and let the rain fall where it will.

The song concludes with a metaphor of the hans (swan). In Indian mythic symbolism, swans represent noble souls. Swans have unique properties. They subsist on pearls. Given milk mixed with water, a swan can drink only milk and leave the water; that is, it can discern the eternal from the ephemeral. Eventually, like a swan, we must all fly alone. There is no ‘there’ to reach. The destination is an internal journey in which the “I” disappears.

Raju finds peace when he is no longer a guide, lover, prisoner, or saint. He is simply a witness (Sakshi).

Lessons for contemporary life

In our hyper-connected age, with its superabundance of possibilities to fulfil all our cravings, we believe that the next destination, whether in love, career, profit, advancement, or success, is just a bit further away. There, we will finally rest. The song reminds us that we can rest in now. Our bodies will decay. Our possessions perish or pass on to others. The house we call home will be inhabited by others. There is no peace out there. Rest in the now.

It has taken me a lifetime to discover that there is no perfect destination hidden beyond the horizon of the future. There is only this brief shelter, this breath, and this stillness.

Youtube link to the song here

“Every animal lives in its own perceptual world, rich with meaning, even if that is inaccessible to us.” From An Immense World by Ed Yong.

This is a story about animals giving gifts.

About Socks

Socks is our tiny, extremely cute, and very anxious cat. Like all our cats, Socks is also a rescue. Socks will not go near anyone or let anyone touch her, pat her, or carry her except my middle daughter, Emilia.

Emilia is the animal whisperer of the house. She can bond with any animal anywhere and under any circumstances. Once we were deep in the forests of Costa Rica and she stopped by a bush and said, “Dad, there is something here.” I tried very hard, but I could not see anything. My daughter lifted a leaf, and underneath it was a glass frog.

Glass frogs are miniature marvels of nature. They have transparent muscles and skin, and their internal organs are contained within a mirror-like sac that reflects light.
My daughter has a sense of animal presence in her vicinity that I cannot fathom. In the middle of Bandhavgarh Forest in Central India some years back, we had stopped for a rest. Suddenly, scores of beautiful yellow butterflies descended upon her, as if she were a nectar-laden bloom.

She can gently hold fireflies, lizards, slugs, and snails, creatures small and large. They are drawn to her. I have dreaded lizards since childhood. The Punjabi word for lizard is kordkilli. Kord also means leprosy. Once, when I was a child, a lizard fell on my hand and shed its tail. For months, I feared that I would contract leprosy. Emilia taught me not only how to handle lizards but also to see the magic in their reptilian bodies.

My older daughter has the same animal sense and empathy. She grew up largely with her mother, and I only recognised her abilities when she was older and spending more time with us. My mother and maternal grandmother were equally attuned with animals around them. Perhaps it runs in families, not just from shared nurture but also as a shared nature.

Socks bearing gifts
Socks spends all her time on my daughter’s bed or in her lap. Mostly she is out.

Every few days, Socks brings a kill to the house. It is usually a vole. She doesn’t eat them. I do not know how she kills them, but she leaves them outside our bedroom doors. I do not think she leaves them in any particular arrangement. But of the three occupied bedrooms, she leaves one at the door of each one, Emilia being the biggest recipient of her gifts.

My wife and I feed her in the morning, but she has not allowed us to get near her. She watches from a distance while we put the food down and scuttles away if we approach. Thus, the gift cannot be in return for food, for we feed her, but Emilia gets the largest share of gifts.

Socks sometimes meows softly outside the bedroom door, announcing her arrival with a gift. Only Emilia is awake during those hours, and Emilia tells us that Socks is her friendliest and most playful when she is found with her gift. She seems delighted.

Perhaps Socks delights in giving gifts and witnessing them being received.

Why do Cats bring gifts?

The gift may be bonding behaviour rather than being merely transactional. Socks may think she is our mummy and is teaching us how to kill. Or Socks may think that we are not competent enough hunters and may not be able to provide enough food, so is replenishing the family store of food. Whatever the explanation, Socks must feel like she is part of our family. Even though she will not let me near her.

There is a significant gap between the Socks’ intent and my interpretation of it. Perhaps that gap will remain unbridgeable until Socks starts speaking English or Punjabi, or I start speaking ‘Catese’.

Animals and gifts

I read recently that squirrels will adopt orphaned relatives if they lose their mothers. Research shows that red squirrels only adopt pups that are closely related to them, such as siblings, nieces, nephews, or grandchildren. Male squirrels are well known for bringing gifts to females.

I have spent many years making my bird feeders squirrel-proof. From my window, I can watch a squirrel get up on its hind legs and examine each new impediment or obstacle I have put in place for it to not reach the bird food. It rubs its front paws. I can feel the force of the squirrel’s intense focus and thought. It is thinking. I know it in my bones that the squirrel is thinking, just as I know I think. The squirrel consistently defeats me and gets the food.

I, a professor at one of the UK’s top universities, am regularly defeated in a test of intelligence by the humble squirrel.

I have stopped placing obstacles. If you cannot beat them, invite them to the table. Currently, both birds and squirrels feed from the same source.

Ravens bring ‘treasures’ such as shiny pebbles or bottle tops to humans who feed them. Male penguins propose by offering the smoothest pebble to the female. Some male nursery web spiders wrap their prey in silk as a ‘wedding gift’ for their mates. Many other species, such as wolves, dolphins, and ants bear gifts. Hyenas will regurgitate food to a superior as a sign of submission, like paying taxes to a king.

Does each species have the same intention?

What is a gift?

A gift is love made palpable; an offering that carries the warmth of one hand into another. Perhaps it began when our ancestors shared food or fire–a spark of trust in a dangerous world requiring group protection. The gift turns me into we. The practice endures because it feeds what is finest in us: the wish to be seen, to belong, to weave gratitude and care into everyone’s story. Gifts can express hierarchy, love, reciprocity or represent what words cannot articulate. If gifts are social signals, then giving and receiving a gift requires not just instinct, but an embodiment of the relational aspects of being.

Finding Highway on a highway

We get our rescue cats from Argos sanctuary in Cyprus, where a group of dedicated, mainly English women look after stray cats. We found a cat there called Highway.

Highway was so called because he had been found near dead next to a main road. Somebody had shot him, and some pellets were still lodged near his spine, so he walked with a funny gait, but he was a truly loving cat. The moment we saw him at the sanctuary, we all fell in love with him.

My son, the youngest in the family, was against bringing Highway home to England because of the effect on Socks. In a democratic vote, he lost three to one, and we got Highway airlifted to our house.

Our son turned out to be right. Socks vanished, refusing to return for several months, while Highway stole our attention and affection.

Highway was a lovely, curious, and affectionate creature. He is the only cat who made me love cats. I am a dog person. I like my affection to be reciprocated. I want the dog to tell me that he knows I am Daddy. Cats don’t do that. They are too proud, snooty, and indifferent for my liking.

Till I met Highway. He forced me to carry him and insisted that he sit on my lap and that I stroke his head or body. I realised that cats love humans too and both give and seek affection, but differently from dogs.

Highway died while exploring the road outside and was run over. We were heartbroken. One of the reasons we’ve had animals since our kids were born is that we think it’s important for children to have pets, understand the roles and rules of caring for others, witness the cycle of life and death and learn how to grieve and let go.

Miraculously, Socks reappeared a few weeks after Highway died

Animal communication

How did Socks know that Highway was gone? We have discussed this as a family many times. We have no explanation.

There was no sign that Socks was coming furtively to the house to check for the presence of Highway. Might there be a cat gossip group or a cat WhatsApp group? If cats have a gossip group, Socks would certainly not be part of it. She is too skittish to be near another cat.

So how did she sense it? Telepathically? I don’t know. Smell? Or another sense we know nothing about.

And I don’t think we can know.

We can see the love of a dog in the dog’s eyes. It feels like human love. This is not anthropomorphisation. Anyone who thinks it is, does not understand the nature of love. Love is a quality of emotion, not a quantifiable object that can be dissected atom by atom to prove its existence or its equivalence between humans and other species.

Why we fail?
We are too blind to the natural world. Our definitions of intelligence, sentience, and consciousness are too narrow. Our intelligence is far too limited to understand animal intelligence.

Everybody I know loved the documentary My Octopus Teacher. But you don’t have to go deep into the ocean to find animal intelligence. It is in the ants crawling on your windowsill. In the Robin that is right now at my bird feeder. In the vole that is sometimes alive when Socks brings it in. Socks releases it from her jaws and the vole scurries to hides in the tiniest space it can find beyond her reach. We lock Socks in another room and gather around the terrified vole, attempting to capture it for release. The tiny vole, almost dead with dread, still ususally manages to beat the four of us. There is intelligence in the smallest creatures you can see, and even smaller ones. Under the slide, you can see the single-celled amoeba avoiding toxins. They not only move away from harmful substances but are also known to possess sophisticated biological mechanisms for detoxifying their environment. Intelligence does not require size, only the force of life. It exists from the smallest living thing to the mightiest one you might encounter in a jungle or in the ocean.

Animals as gifts

We need to look at animals with awe and reverence. Perhaps animals, too, are gifts from nature’s benevolent hand, living reminders that the sacred wears many forms. Somewhere along the way, we placed ourselves on a throne above them, citing divine dominion and mistaking stewardship for superiority. In our quest to get closer to God, we have drifted away from the breathing tapestry of life around us. Other, older ways of knowing, such as those of my grandmother, saw things differently. She spoke to beasts and thanked trees, knowing that all life hummed with the same spark. We share the same breath, and no creature has a greater right to being than another.

The Isah Upanishad of Hinduism tells us that “the wise sees the Self in all beings and all beings in the self”(verse 6).

Let us be wise. Let us cherish these gifts. Love, protect and provide for them all, not just our pets.

Nothing to lose or gain?

I was 16 when I first heard this line in Janis Joplin’s hauntingly beautiful voice. I was young enough to feel confined and old enough to feel restless. I grew up in a world saturated with religious, cultural, and moral certainty. My family were devout Sikhs. Family rules were strict, and schools were even stricter.

My father had famously produced a poster of 32 rules for living a Good Sikh life, each rule composed of 32 letters in the Punjabi script. Life should be hard work, religious devotion, service to the community, and avoidance of all fripperies. Everything had a prescribed place. To my adolescent mind, freedom lived somewhere else. In the West. In Woodstock, the film I had seen for five consecutive days during its seven-day screening at a local cinema. Bob Dylan was a prophet, Jimi Hendrix a wizard, and Crosby, Stills Nash and Young reminders that I was “billion-years old stardust”. I knew that such freedom existed, but it was elsewhere, too remote for me to reach, let alone live in.

Back then, that song line felt like a revelation. To have ‘nothing left to lose’ meant that nothing could be taken from you. You would be beyond family and societal pressures. Beyond leverage. Beyond fear. Life, as I lived it then, was a long drill in accumulating marks, exams, approvals, failures, and trying again. Success always receded slightly ahead and was of a kind I did not really want anyway. Freedom, as the song suggested, must lie at the far end of an exhausting road, when there is nothing left to lose. You would have no rules, responsibilities, or obligations. You would be free.

What did I desire then?

Now, in my seventh decade, the same line sounds different and less true.

If I were to rewrite it, I would say: freedom is just another word for nothing left to gain.

With time and a modest measure of worldly success, I see a different pattern in the unfolding of my life. My adolescence was characterised by striving for what seemed unattainable. The restless wanting was for a forbidden fruit. I wanted to be free from rules and free to fulfil my primaeval desires. Unbeknownst to myself, in my search for freedom, I bound myself to craving. I was chasing expressions of erotic desire, freedom from rules, roles, and responsibilities, and the freedom to be ‘authentic’.

I did not know myself, let alone what authenticity meant. William Blake said that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. I wanted excess more than I wanted to reach the palace of wisdom. I had none of the Woodstock generation’s freedoms, let alone excess. I craved them and sought freedom from obligations. I was not seeking freedom. I was entrapped by my desires.

What is desire?

Looking back, I realise that my youthful restlessness was not just a personal rebellion, but my first encounter with a fundamental human tension that the world’s great spiritual traditions have sought to decode for millennia. This realisation eventually shifted my perspective from a search for external escape to an enquiry into the nature of wanting itself.

Most religious traditions, despite their surface differences, converge on a surprisingly similar insight: desire is not the enemy. What causes suffering is not wanting but misdirected wanting.

Buddhism is the most explicit. The Buddha taught that craving (tanhā, literally thirst) lies at the root of suffering, not because pleasure is evil but because craving grasps at what is impermanent. When desire clings to what cannot last, it destabilises the mind. Peace does not come from satisfying desire but from loosening its grip.

Other traditions arrive at similar conclusions through different routes. Hinduism recognises desire (kāma) as a legitimate aim of life, but only when it is balanced by discernment and ethical grounding. Desire becomes destructive when it overrides judgment and turns compulsive. Christianity similarly distinguishes between disordered desire (epithymia) and rightly ordered love (agape). It is not longing itself that leads us astray, but longing aimed at the wrong objects. Augustine called this ordo amoris: the proper ordering of love.

Islam frames the struggle in terms of the nafs, the desiring self that can incline either toward ego or toward God. Desire is not to be eliminated but rather disciplined through inner effort and remembrance. Judaism, too, treats desire as double-edged: without it, there would be no creativity, intimacy, or continuity of life; yet, left unchecked, it can dominate moral awareness.

Even Taoism, which avoids moral language altogether, sees desire as something that narrows one’s perception. When desire dominates, we see only fragments; when it quietens, reality reveals itself more fully.

A shared pattern emerges across these traditions. Desire is not condemned as immoral but is understood as absorptive. It captures attention, distorts perception, and shrinks the field of awareness. In this sense, desire is less a moral failure than a thief of attention.

Freedom, then, is not found in the multiplication of wants but in recovering the capacity to see clearly.

The cage of craving

I did not understand any of this during my youth. I thought freedom meant the expansion of desire: more choice, more pleasure, more possibility. What I see now is that desire itself is the trap. Even the desire for comfort can become a form of captivity.

The modern world is very good at feeding this type of hunger.

It is less effective at noticing when hunger becomes endless.

For most of my adult life, I have craved. Whether it is good food, luxuries, fame, a higher h-index, more citations, or greater applause from the audience at a conference, it is all an effort to fill the void within. The more I sought, the larger the void became. Egoic comparisons with others are endless and endlessly enhance desire.

In my seventh decade, I have finally understood that freedom and desire are inversely related, whereas gratitude and a sense of abundance are positively related to freedom.

Freedom’s silent arrival

Although there are nuanced and subtle differences in the nature of desire across religious traditions and how to deal with it, there are also striking similarities. The Upanishads tell us that: “When all the desires that dwell in the heart fall away, then the mortal becomes immortal, and attains Brahman.”

Moksha or freedom is not an escape into something but a release from the tyranny of wanting. Christianity frames freedom in the same paradoxical way. Jesus said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” Paul went further: “I am free, yet I make myself a servant of all.”

Freedom is not about having nothing left to lose. It was always about having nothing left to gain.

Such freedom has come to me late and almost unnoticed. Not through wanting and getting more, but through giving. The more I give to my patients, students, those who ask for guidance, or those who simply need to be heard and understood, the lighter I feel. I no longer need the world to complete me. Something in me feels full and flows outwards. That old song has not changed. I have. Somewhere along the way, Kristofferson’s line has been turned inside out.

The abundance of being abundant

This is not emptiness. It is abundance. Not the absence of loss but the absence of craving.

In another blog, I will return to the question that quietly remains: do we truly overcome desire, or is the deeper task to tame it rather than eradicate it? Perhaps desire is not an enemy to be destroyed but a wild horse to be restrained, the same image as I wrote about in an earlier blog. Some fences restrain. Some also guide. Whether true freedom lies in conquering desire, restraining it, or retraining it is something I am still waiting to discover.

Leopold Mozart to his son, February 26,1778

The Lonely Stage

In the recent television drama series Amadeus, Mozart stands alone in a vast opera house, hearing in his head the full force of a symphony that he has not yet written. Rows of empty seats stretch away from him. There is no pre-opening bustle, no whispered voices, and no clandestine clearing of throats before the performance begins. Only one face is visible. Leopold Mozart, his father, standing in splendid clothes, clapping slowly, not to praise but in judgment.

The hall is not empty. It is saturated with scorn. The slow clapping is Mozart’s worst emotional nightmare.

Fathers and sons

Leopold Mozart, for all his devotion to and nurturing of his son’s talent, was cruel enough for the modern era to have initiated a multi-agency safeguarding meeting involving the school, social services and family therapists. In the Amadeus scene, Leopold does not merely criticise Wolfgang’s work; he questions the legitimacy of his very being. In a dinner scene when Leopold first meets Mozart’s wife Constanza, she watches the father-son interaction. An outsider can often clearly see the layered contours of emotional conflicts that are hidden from those engaged in it. Constanza tells Mozart that she agrees with Leopold on certain matters; Mozart risks squandering his talent and losing his family along the way. In response, Mozart sets fire to his early compositions and the pianoforte on which he played them.

In contemporary language, one might say that Mozart has “daddy issues”.

Is the hall ever empty?

As most men know, fathers never disappear, even when they die. The hall is never empty. Your father watches, judges, and may send you reminders of what you failed to become. Your father’s judgment doesn’t eliminate you entirely; it lives to see that you did not meet what he expected and needed from you.

Long after my father was gone, his voice remained in my head. I have tried to make my peace with him, apologising internally for the ways I failed him, by not marrying according to his wishes, not following his faith, not settling down close enough to be his support in his fading years. But there is one central failing for which I cannot be forgiven and never will be. I cut my hair. Every other aspect of my being is negated by his fundamental conviction that a Sikh must not cut his hair. When I imagine him applauding me amongst the audience after one of my lectures, I have to visualise myself in a turban. Even in a fantasy I cannot face him without a turban, underneath which are my unshorn hair.

The Power of Judgement

My father is gone; his judgement remains. I am torn between our two opposing ideas of authenticity.

My father was extremely devout, so I spent my youth being a devout atheist. My wife and I, from different religious traditions, have allowed our children to let their spiritual imaginations flourish in their own unique ways. My son will one day defy me. He will seek his identity by not being me. I hope though that if my son ever practices in an empty hall, I he will not imagine me slow-clapping.

As a clinical academic, our research outputs are subject to peer review. Peer review by expert sceptics is one of the great strengths of scientific advance. But each negative peer review can feel like a piercing dagger. You spend years testing a hypothesis and presenting the results in the best possible way. An anonymous reviewer can demolish your work by sometimes finding genuinely serious flaws in your work, but occasionally by asking only partially relevant questions or minimising what you found and maximising what you missed. There is an asymmetry here, for a fool can ask a question that the wisest person may not be able to answer. A hatchet in the hands of a hostile reviewer can destroy a career.

Who Shows Up, and Who Does Not

Every creative act seems to involve this triangle: an urge to make, the hope of being received, and the dread of being not good enough.

As I began writing for Substack, I imagined the gaze of the vast world outside and the terror within, trepidation and excitement in equal measure. When I launched the blog, I did what most of us I assume do. I wrote to friends, colleagues, and family, announcing this new venture with a mixture of excitement and quiet pleading. I assumed, without quite admitting it to myself, that those who knew me best would naturally be the first to come along.

What followed was strangely tender and oddly painful. For the first week of starting at Substack, I witnessed my inner emotions to the responses of others. Some people I love never replied. Others, whom I barely knew from distant and forgotten corners of my life subscribed, wrote long emails, and told me what I had written had powerfully resonated with them. Each new subscriber brought a small lift of pride. Each silence where I had hoped for warmth landed as a small narcissistic bruise. My self-esteem began to rise and fall on a tiny measure of numbers and notifications. I was left unsure which was more emotionally potent: the absence of approval from those I had expected, or the warmth of distant acquaintances and some complete strangers.

The Stoics warned about this two thousand years ago. Epictetus wrote that if you place your happiness in what is not in your control, you will always be at the mercy of others. Every like and dislike on social media can become another link in the chain of craving.

At some point I had to ask myself an uncomfortable question. Was I writing because I wanted approval, or because I felt something wanted to be written through me? And if it was the latter, was that simply another way of insisting that I mattered?

Create and release

After my first few blogs, I noticed that the deepest pleasure was not in the response but in the act of writing itself. I asked myself: would I write if no one ever read it? To my own surprise the inner answer was a resounding YES. The process of writing is a marvel. An idea arrives, as if received rather than invented, as if something is thinking through me. I watch it give birth to other ideas. I shape them into sentences, fact-checking dates, correcting spelling mistakes, googling for additional information, silently building arguments against the harshest critics whose admiration I most desire; letting something fluid slowly become solid enough to carry its own weight

The finished pieces don’t feel like a trophy I have made. It is more a process I have only participated in. As the Tao Te Ching puts it, “The sage does not act, yet nothing remains undone.” I am no sage, but I know when an article is complete when an involuntary sigh of relief escapes me. Nothing remains undone.

Rangoli at a doorstep

In Indian households one often sees rangoli during certain festival seasons, an intricate pattern made of coloured powders at a doorstep. Someone has knelt there at dawn, patiently shaping beauty out of dust. If passers-by admire it, that is a gift. If no one notices, the act is still complete. The making itself is the offering.

This is how I am beginning to think of Substack writing. Not as performance, but as practice. Not as a plea for applause, but as a small act of devotion.

Perhaps it is like lighting a candle in a quiet church. Not to be seen. Not to be admired. But because something in you wishes to honour the sacred.

An Offering, not a Performance

I will never be an objective judge of my own work. I am still learning to loosen my grip on numbers and validation. But I am beginning to trust something quieter: that bringing something into the world, carefully and honestly, is enough.

The hall may be empty.
The father’s voice may echo.

But the music will still come.

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

Is my destroyer.

And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

(Dylan Thomas)

As a child, I spent my summers at my maternal grandparent’s farm in Jammu, on the banks of the River Tawi, in the foothills of the mighty Himalayas. On rare days when the sky was crystalline and the air so pure it hurt to breathe, one could sometimes see the outline of the majestic Pir Panchal range across which lay the Kashmir Valley. My ancestors were originally from the mountains beyond the Kashmir Valley in the Poonch region, through which runs the Line of Control (LOC) that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan. My family settled in Indian Kashmir after the 1947 division. During my childhood, much of my clan still lived in Kashmir, only to be exiled again in 1991. My maternal grandfather had settled in Jammu after serving in the British army, so Jammu was more of a home than Kashmir.

Unlike plants, humans can be uprooted. In my family story, roots is a metaphor for a place we can no longer reach.

A small stream ran through the farm, fed by water drawn by a kuhl. It is an ancient mechanical device made from a garland of buckets attached to a metal loop that scoops water from a well as it rotates, driven by a horizontal wheel turned by two bullocks who go round in circles, their eyes partly shaded with leather covers, so they can only see a few steps straight ahead. They were freed from the yoke to feed, rest, and drink water from the stream where my grandmother washed clothes and milked cows. My abiding memory is waking up and running towards my grandmother as she emptied the udders into a clay pot. When I was close enough, she would point an udder at me, rarely failing to hit my open mouth with a spray of warm milk. I never tired of the game, though she, burdened by the sheer weight of the chores ahead, indulged me with only a few squeezes of the swollen udders.

One evening, I remember plucking a flower, a jasmine, I think. It was dusk, and all life was settling down. My grandmother, an uneducated woman who lived entirely by intuition and tradition, gently shushed me: “Don’t, they are sleeping”.

At that time, I viewed her caution as mere superstition, unaware that a brilliant Bengali polymath named JC Bose had already begun to bridge the gap between ancient tradition and modern science. Though I would later learn of his work by rote, the connection between his experiments and my grandmother’s ‘sleeping’ plants was a seed that took years to truly take root. JC Bose (1858-1937) was a brilliant Bengali polymath who was a pioneer in microwave optics, semiconductors, solid-state diode detectors, metal fatigue, and many other scientific advances that were never fully recognised in his lifetime. Bose should be considered the father of what is now called plant neurobiology, as he demonstrated that plants generate electrical signals, integrate information, and show forms of memory and learning, even without neurones or brains. It would be years before science provided a vocabulary for the silence my grandmother respected.

My mother had ‘green fingers’. Everything she nurtured flourished under her care. Uneducated like my grandmother, she instinctively knew what it took me a lifetime to learn: that sentience and awareness are not confined to human beings. She whispered to her plants while tending them.

The language of the cynic

There is a shared animating principle, a life force or spirit, that connects us to the botanical world. For a long time, acknowledging this shared force outside poetry invited ridicule. King Charles has been famously lampooned for years for admitting he speaks to his plants. In our scientific age, where all reality is nothing but matter, such behaviour is viewed by the cynical as naive at best, or foolishly anthropomorphic at worst.

When I speak about such matters with my more hard-nosed logical positivist friends, the most condescending phrase they use is that I am ‘anthropomorphising’. I am projecting human feelings onto unfeeling matter. They would be right if I were projecting my emotions onto inanimate matter. They would also be correct if they thought I was arguing that plants understand human speech. As far as they are concerned, plants grow but do not act. Plants react but do not respond meaningfully. Plants cannot participate in the world teleologically - in a goal-directed manner. Plants may be living, but they are not living beings.

What I think they miss is that sentience may not be a single human-shaped thing. Recent scientific studies suggest that “plant talkers” may be closer to the truth than cynics. Plants are far from passive, inert objects.

The Science of Sentience

There is a measurable goal-directedness in all life. We now know that growing vines do not just flail randomly; time-lapse photography shows that they actively seek support. The Venus flytrap exhibits a form of memory, essentially “counting” the number of times a trigger hair is touched before snapping shut, ensuring that it does not waste energy on a false alarm. Does this mean that a Venus flytrap will ever solve a calculus equation? Of course not. But it does mean that counting is not uniquely human, or there may be ways of ‘counting’ of which we know nothing.

Trees look after each other. They must stay put, unlike my ancestors who had to navigate a Line of Control. Trees are the ultimate citizens of their soil beneath which they build effective communication channels. There is a “wood-wide-web” beneath our feet, a network of mycorrhizal fungi that allow trees to communicate with each other through their root systems, share resources, support weaker kin members, and older “mother trees” nurture younger saplings. Plants under attack by insects can warn neighbouring plants by emitting chemical signals which allow the recipient to secrete a chemical defence.

To me, this appears a goal-directed activity, adaptive in the evolutionary sense, but also with a flexibility that suggests purpose.

My delinquent orchids

Not everyone agrees. A hard-nosed and scientifically rigorous critique from 2023 argued that the claims of a “wood-wide-web” had captured popular fancy and that its assertions were outpacing evidence. It is easy to see how public sentimentality can simplify careful scientific debates where each claim must be rigorously supported.

Hence, it is important to make a crucial distinction. Plants may have a ‘plant-like sentience’ of which we are unaware. But they may be able to communicate with each other. That is not proof that they respond to human speech, much less understand it. I look after several orchids. I pay equal attention to all of them, and if I speak to them, it is never to praise one and admonish another. Yet three of them refuse to flower. Unless I attribute personal animosity to three non-flowering ones, I must accept that I am not meeting some biological need in them with my clumsy rearing, rather than my words or tone upsetting them.

If they cannot understand us, why talk to them?

The sacrament of trees

Talking to plants is not about them listening to us. For me, it is a recognition of the common vitality that suffuses us, along with all other living things. It is a tacit acknowledgement of the shared need to grow, thrive, survive, and multiply. Everything that is alive is awe-inspiring, mysterious, miraculous, and humming with aliveness. Mary Oliver captures this sense of reverence gloriously in her poem “When I Am Among the Trees”

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine”.

Talking to my plants may not make them grow better, as the three orchids on my windowsill prove. But it makes me glad to have them in my life. Whispering to them is my tribute to their aliveness.

If one day, one of the orchids starts talking back to me in a human voice, I will see a psychiatrist. Till then I am willing to communicate with them for my own sake rather than theirs. Their hints of gladness save me too. And daily.

The Witnessing Space is a weekly sanctuary where neuroscience meets ancient contemplative wisdom. I write for those ready to move from reductionism to the vastness of Pure Awareness.mmThese essays are not instructions or solutions. They are explorations; my attempts to look carefully at what it means to be human.

I will release a post at 5 AM every Sunday. My attempt is to move from the clatter of the mind to the still clarity of lake of awareness.

If you are new here, start here

https://substack.com/@thewitnessingspace/p-181421352

Gravity’s calling

A tilted lotus. Photograph by the author

I had been sitting in the lotus position for about 45 minutes, doing a chakra meditation. My right ankle is damaged, so I make a slightly bent and tilted lotus, as if only one side of it has been fed. As I tried to get up, realising my left leg had gone numb, I took support from a sofa armrest.

I collapsed. My leg was not just numb; it was momentarily paralysed. The crashing sound woke my wife and she rushed down. I felt shame at how I imagined I looked to her. A heap of an old man, not the strong muscular man she had married.

We live under the illusion of weightlessness. Gravity is invisible, even as it holds the universe and all within it in place. We move through the world supported by unknown working of our musculature. But as I rose from the stillness of the lotus, that illusion shattered.

The pins and needles were expected. But the complete motor silence felt a betrayal. As I tried to stand up, my leg seemed absent from where it should have been, missing without permission, revealing not the absence of my will but my leg’s refusal to obey it - the full force of gravity disclosed. The earth had claimed my mass, and I could not deny its claim. It was a frightening reminder that I am a physical object first, a conscious being second.

From Thought to Gesture

We take our control over our muscles as a given, only to realise it when it is taken away. And we rarely pay attention to the sheer ‘amazingness’ of what is involved in even the most trivial of movements

A human hand has 34 muscles. Photograph by the author

Consider the staggering complexity involved in pointing a finger towards an object.

An intangible volition arises in the motor cortex of the brain. A remarkable series of experiments by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s showed that the brain prepares for an action a few hundred milliseconds before a person is consciously aware of an intention to move. Who within you decided to move before you are consciously aware is a matter of intense debate between neuroscientists and philosophers and I will skip it here, since it requires its own exploration in a separate blog.

Once you/the brain has decided to take an action (point a finger in this instance) an electric signal is initiated in a brain cell, a neurone. Each neurone is a miracle of anatomy and physiology. It has one axon, a wire-like structure that carries messages from it to other neurones, and a forest of dendrites, shorter wires that carry messages to it from other neurones. When you decide to move a finger, an action potential is generated in a neurone. An action potential is the neurone firing off a signal. When the signal reaches the end of the line, it hits a synaptic cleft which is a microscopic (20-50 nm) space between the nerve and the muscle. Here, electricity ends and chemistry begins. Tiny vesicles filled with fluids (neurotransmitters) flood the space with this fluid, which then locks on to receptors on the muscle cell membrane. Neurotransmitters and their receptors are precise and unique combination of locks and keys. The receptors activate a cascade of activity which leads to muscle fibres pulling and pushing - outgoing signals from the brain tell the muscles to act, inbound sensations feedback signals to the brain, and specialised receptors, proprioceptors, tell the brain exactly where your finger and all the muscles involved in the action are located. Biological gates open and close, electric impulses rush to and fro. Position, movement, force, coordination and balance all occur outside of your awareness; a magical dance of physics, chemistry, biology and whatever it is that constitutes our life force.

The Molecular Fuel: ATP

Zoom into an individual synapse and deeper mysteries unfold. All our cells contain mitochondria. Mitochondria are miniature entities that seem to have a life of their own; they certainly have their own DNA which we inherit almost entirely from our mothers. Mitochondria change very little across generations, hence their study has been crucial in scientific discoveries related to human migration. Mitochondrial DNA has contributed to evidence for an “Out of Africa” origin for modern humans, and to the idea that all living humans share a common direct maternal ancestor, sometimes called “Mitochondrial Eve”.

A burst of energy. Photograph by the author

Inside the mitochondria is a special chemical called ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate). ATP is the fuel that drives muscle activity. Think of it as a rechargeable battery. Mitochondria use the food we consume (breakdown of sugars and fats) and convert these into ATP. To move that finger, trillions of ATP molecules must simultaneously “snap”, releasing a tiny, violent burst of energy by shedding a phosphate group. This chemical energy is what allows the proteins in your muscles (actin and myosin) to crawl over one another, shortening the muscle and defying gravity. At any given second, sextillions of these molecular events are happening in perfect, rhythmic synchronization. It is a material process of pumps, gradients, and explosions, yet the sheer scale of the coordination is enough to evoke a sense of holy awe.

The Quantum Ghost: A Dance of Emptiness

If we zoom in further past the molecules to the atoms, and past the atoms to the subatomic realm, our “normal” sense of the world fails us entirely.

We feel solid, but scientists tell us that an atom is 99.9999% empty space. If the nucleus were a marble in the centre of a stadium, the electrons would be like dust motes floating about. Zoom in further and you meet no objects, just quarks, spin, probabilities and collapse of the wave function, concepts so abstract that they defy language. Particles act as waves, may exist in multiple states at once (“superposition”), and can get “entangled” so that changing one will change another instantaneously, even if they are millions of miles apart. Particles exist as probabilities, and collapse into an actuality only when observed. What we perceive as “solid” leg or “hard” floor is merely the electromagnetic repulsion between these clouds of probability. The pain from my twisted ankle did not seem to me to arise from my observation; I was forced into observing it by its intensity and severity. But then the subatomic world’s dance is too far removed from my limited understanding of reality and its perception of reality through my crude five senses.

Yet this is all happening. All the time. All around and within me. Including when I collapse under the irresistible force of gravity

The Mundane and the Miraculous

I fell. It hurt. I started thinking about the process involved. The more I thought, the less I understood. I could only wonder. Is everything just a blind roll of the cosmic dice? Or might there be an internal logic to the unfolding of the universe towards a goal? Is a painful effort worth the additional headache of trying to work this out?

Our bodies are so effortlessly and unknowingly miraculous that we are blind to their mysteries. In the mundane act of standing up, feeling pins and needles, falling down and standing up again, something amazing is going on at whichever level I choose to observe it-from the sensation of pain, the love of my wife, the wiring my bodily organs to inner machinery of my cells right down to the spinning quarks.

Living a life full of awe and wonder may not require witnessing amazing and unusual things and events. Falling down and standing up are also miracles. Once you pay attention to even the trivial, you find that nothing is trivial.

Beyond what is visible. Photograph by the author

“Gaps, by default in the mind of the creationist, are filled by God”. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006, p. 154).

“Charles A. Coulson … damned it with the telling phrase ‘the God of the gaps.’…. it was a foolish move and was increasingly abandoned in the twentieth century”. Alister McGrath & Joanna McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion?(London: SPCK, 2007, p. 29).

Science, Spirituality, and the Stories We Tell About Reality

Richard Dawkins has argued that the idea of God is used by creationists to fill in gaps in our scientific knowledge – hence the God of the Gaps. The McGraths assert that God is not evoked by theists to explain what science cannot currently explain, but as the explanation for why anything exists at all. Both Dawkins and McGrath are rejecting the same intellectual move: using God as a placeholder for ignorance. Where they differ is not so much what they reject, but what they think follows once it is rejected.

In this blog I will try to capture this tension by deliberately polarising the discussion as one between Nothing-Butteryand What-About-tery.

A major problem with the debate is that both sides argue predominantly or exclusively within Christian theology and the wider Abrahamic traditions. Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great could be framed as a direct rebuke not only to Christianity but also to Islam, implicitly echoing Allahu Akbar as a claim about divine greatness competing with secular reason.

The Abrahamic View

Abrahamic religions are followed by almost half of the world’s population (3.8 billion as per Wikipedia’s Major Religious Groups”). That still leaves around half of the world’s population whose views and perspectives are simply not included in the discussion above. This necessarily reduces the argument to a narrow conception of God.

Given that all believers of Abrahamic religions stress that their group alone has the handle on the truth, that their God is the only true god, and their book is the only or last revealed word of God, no wonder that there has been plenty of bloodshed in European and Middle Eastern history between adherents of these religions. If you are the chosen people, the other group is non-chosen and hence excluded. You can justify your actions by treating the excluded ones like ignorant children who need educating or recalcitrant ones who need punishing if they do not mend their ways.

There is an unspoken assumption that this is the only conception of God worth arguing about. As if metaphysical reflections, philosophies, and belief systems elsewhere do not count. As if, to paraphrase Macaulay, a single shelf of a European library still outweighs the rest of the world.

Spirit, rather than God

I am not here to defend or attack the Abrahamic God. I am concerned with something more elusive which I will call Spirit, an animating principle that suffuses the universe and whose existence does not require a special deity, a prophet, a messenger or a son, or a special scripture. I am simply inviting readers to pause, reflect, wonder and marvel at the mysteries of existence without dogma, superstition, arrogance or certainty. There are no conclusions to be drawn here nor definitive answers provided. My aim is to simply invite readers to shift perspective if they are willing, shed dogma if they are able, and remove fundamentalism in discussions about science and spirituality.

Learning humility from Jainism

The Indian religion Jainism has a core principle called anekāntavāda, literally ‘the variousness of reality’. Jains are required by their religion to accept that since reality is complex and multifaceted, and no single viewpoint can capture the whole truth. All perspectives may be partly true, and hence a combination of nayavādas (individual perspectives) is likely to be closer to the truth.

Adherents of Jainism are required by their religion therefore to avoid dogmatism, be open-minded, avoid conflicts and promote harmony. Interestingly, Jainism explicitly denies the existence of a creator God.

Clarifying definitions

Nothing-Buttery can be defined as the mindset that explains reality by collapsing it into its smallest measurable components. All of reality is nothing but matter, chemicals, laws of physics and probability. It is all chance; there is no intrinsic purpose.

Nothing-Buttery often presents itself as rigorous, hard-nosed, and intellectually honest. In practice, it tends toward absolute physicalism and hard determinism masquerading as clarity. It assumes that questions of metaphysics, values, and qualia are either meaningless or irrelevant. It also represents its critics, sometimes subtly and often crudely, as either people who are not clever enough to understand science or are too dogmatic to try. All questions of meaning are considered empirically non-falsifiable, hence unscientific, and therefore not worth asking.

I am aware that critics might accuse me of doing exactly what I am arguing against: reducing the other person’s argument to a caricature. I therefore will clarify here the difference between methodological naturalism from ontological naturalism.

Methodological naturalism is a scientific principle that science should only look for natural causes without the need for God or Spirit or non-material explanations. This is the method by which science seeks explanations for reality. How to do science. Ontological naturalism is a philosophical idea about what exists. It claims that only natural things exist, there is no supernatural realm. It is a world view. Atheist scientist often slip in the latter to bolster the former, but these are distinct ideas, not equivalent or mutually transferable.

One can be a methodological naturalist i.e. do science as a method, without being an ontological naturalist. Blaise Pascal, like Isaac Newton, was a mathematician and a physicist, but deeply spiritual (see my blog).

What-About-ery is what Dawkins describes as the ‘God of the Gaps’. Instead of engaging with the scientific discipline, including burden of proof, cautious scepticism, peer review and rigorous methodological discipline, in discussions about God it points elsewhere. In its evasive form, it says, “Aha, but sceince can’t explain X, therefore God exists”. In its integrative form it says, “what about meaning, experience, qualia and consciousness?”

A scientist could legitimately argue that the burden of proof lies on those who assert the existence of God, rather than the other side having to disprove it.

Non-overlapping Magisteria?

This tension between these two positions was famously articulated by Stephen Jay Gould in his idea of non-Overlapping Magisteria. In his words, “science gets the empirical realm: what the Universe is made of (fact) and why it works this way (theory). Religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral values. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for starters, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty)”. In this perspective, science addresses facts and mechanisms, religion addresses meaning and values.

Irreducible beauty. Photograph by the author

Perhaps the two magisteria really do not overlap. Or perhaps we lack the language to describe the overlap. Might the overlap be beyond language and in the realm of subjective experience that cannot be articulated? The Tao that cannot be described?

Science Without Reductionism

In my earlier piece Here Be Dragons I argued that neuroscience cannot map every terrain of the psyche, and that maps should not be confused with territories.

Imagine a thought experiment. Suppose we could map the brain in extraordinary detail. Every firing neuron, every synaptic chemical exchange, every feedback loop and forward firing pattern could be described in detail, along with the underlying biology, physics and chemistry. Now imagine an individual, wired up to this intricate apparatus to objectively measure all their mental activity. The individual is shown a picture of someone they love: a partner, a child, a pet. The apparatus tells us everything about activation patterns in specific parts of the brain, neurochemical changes down to the molecular level, and autonomic responses from heart rate to ion exchanges between membranes.

Nowhere in this vast collection of data and observations do we find love itself. Even if we catalogue every physiological accompaniment of love, love itself remains absent from anatomy and physiology.

We can repeat this in a comedy club with the audience all wired up to the apparatus. When they laugh at a joke, nowhere will we find humour as a physical entity.

We find correlates of mental states, never the experience.

I understand grief and loss when I talk to my patients. I do not need to see their brain scans. So where are grief, love and humour to be found?

This does not diminish neuroscience. On the contrary, it honours its achievements while recognising an epistemic limit.

Lived experience is, by definition, lived from within. It does not fully lend itself to external objectification.

Spirituality Without Escapism

Spirituality, like love or humour or grief, is experiential. There are serious scientific attempts to study mystical and transcendental states without mystification. I had the privilege of having a paper on a personal inexplicable ‘mystical’ experience accepted in a scientific journal. I did it trepidatiously, expecting to be mocked, but was heartened by the response. It resonated with many people. Several studies now show how meditation and other contemplative practices are associated with brain changes, regardless of the religious belief of the practitioner.

And yet, subjective experience alone is not truth. As a psychiatrist I know this every time I meet someone suffering from a psychotic illness. Psychosis is, by definition an altered experience of reality. A person with psychosis genuinely hears voices in the absence of an external stimulus and sincerely believes their delusions. All subjective alterations of reality are not revelations.

RD Laing and other anti-psychiatrists once suggested schizophrenia might represent an enhanced or evolved state of consciousness. Those who live with schizophrenia, care for someone with it, or treat it know how devastating that idea is. The illness can strip individuals of dignity, agency, and humanity. Subjective claims, therefore, cannot be taken at face value, whether mystical or pathological.

Touching a numinous moon

Last year, at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, I touched a piece of moon rock that is on display. You can stick your finger through a plastic screen and rest your finger directly on the surface of the moon. It was low season, and there was no one behind me in a queue. I stood there transfixed. I felt something through my fingers, a sense of awe, mysterious and celestial. I did not suddenly start hearing the moon speak to me, nor did a moon god or goddess enter my soul. It was something preverbal, ancient and primeval.

Last night I saw a near full moon glow over the freshly fallen snow. I suddenly thought, I have touched you. The same primitive and ancient awe arose in me. Again, I was transfixed. I could sense something emanating from the moon that I received. The closest I can come to describe it is numinosity: a deep and profound evocation of something mysterious, ancient, deeper than words, prior to being, almost holy, not needing a religious belief.

‘Just a bit of temporal lobe malfunction’

Medical literature is rich with studies of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy or damage to the temporal lobe who report mystical visions, sense of awe, and auras of blissful certainty. Temporal lobe is part of the brain connected to the limbic system which is crucial for emotions and memory. Some have even suggested the presence of a “God Centre” in the temporal lobe which specifically evokes religious experiences or sense of the divine. Others have argued that such a neural system has evolved to promote communal religious feelings, altruism and social bonding.

The Radio Analogy: Function is not Origin

Someone unfamiliar with how a radio produces sound may reasonably assume that sound is a function of the radio itself, and that when the sound ceases the radio has malfunctioned. The inference is understandable but incomplete. A radio does not generate music; it receives, tunes, and transduces signals that already exist as electromagnetic frequencies. One may dismantle the radio entirely, trace every circuit and analyse every component, and still never discover the broadcast itself. Studying the radio explains how sound is modulated, not where it originates. The critical error is to confuse dependence with origin. Damage to the antenna, breakdown of a circuit, or loss of power all disrupts access to the signal, but do not imply the signal itself has ceased to exist.

This analogy does not prove the brain receives consciousness; it only shows that correlation does not logically entail production. Experience may not be entirely collapsible into its biological substrate.

Language as the Hidden Battlefield

The deepest conflict between science and spirituality is not empirical, it is linguistic. Debates are framed as binaries: true/false; real/unreal; scientific/pseudoscience. Absolutist language that is ironically frowned upon in science re-emerges in scientific dogmatism. Words like just, only, nothing but do immense hidden work. Often the terms of debate are never agreed upon in advance. Strawmen are fought, victories declared, and the deeper question remains untouched.

The numinous, partly revealed. Photograph by the author.

The Tao Way

A Zen koan reminds us: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” The point is not the answer. It is the collapse of the question itself. Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism wrote that the divine (spirit) cannot be captured in words. And as the Tao Te Ching famously opens “The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao.”

Language fails, not because reality is irrational, but because reality is richer than our categories.

What one feels when gazing into the eyes of one’s dog, or watching a sunset, requires no dogma, be it scientific or spiritual.

Some, as I do, will marvel and speak of spirit. Others will explain it as blind forces of evolution producing awe as a survival mechanism.

To each their explanation. Just as to each their experience.

Both sides need to respect doubt and shed dogmatic certainty. The Hymn of Creation in the Hindu Scripture Rig Veda(10:129) captures this uncertainty beautifully.

Whence all creation had its origin,
the creator, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not,
the creator, who surveys it all from highest heaven,
he knows - or maybe even he does not know.

Perhaps we could all do with a dose of Jain anekāntavāda, an acceptance of ‘the variousness of reality’. Perhaps the universe is suffused with spirit. Or perhaps spirit is the name we give to what refuses categorisation.

Explained, yet full of mystery. Photograph by the author

And the Days are Not Full Enough - Ezra Pound

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass.

The poem is neither about speed nor idleness. It points instead to a failure of inhabiting time. Days pass, nights pass, and yet something essential feels missed. Life slips by, without disturbance, without imprint.

What Pound gestures toward is not a problem of time itself, but of our relationship to it. The days are not lacking in duration; they are lacking in presence. This essay is an exploration of a quieter form of time travel. Not moving across time but learning to move more slowly within it.

Time travel

When my son was about ten, he went through a period of intense fascination with aliens, spacecraft and time travel. One morning, while walking our dog, he asked me whether it might be possible for him one day to travel back in time to see dinosaurs. I said it was a difficult question, and I could only share what little I knew. My understanding was that while Newton’s laws did not depend on the arrow of time, the second law of thermodynamics made time irreversible. Heat can only move from hot to cold, not the other way around. I had read that this might make time travel impossible.

We walked on in silence for a while. Then he said, “You’re wrong. Time travel is possible.”

I asked him how.

He replied, “We just travelled forward in time from when I asked the question.”

His answer felt as if we had crossed an invisible threshold from explanation to insight.

When I look at the photographs of my children as babies, I long for even a fraction of a moment when I could revisit the time the photograph was taken, to gaze at their loveliness just a little longer. I feel myself standing on a threshold – aware that I cannot go back, yet unable to stop looking.

Time will not stop.

At secondary school we studied the poem Time you Old Gypsy Man. It imagines time as a wandering presence, forever passing, never settling.

Time, You Old Gypsy Man – Ralph Hodgson

Time, you old gipsy man,

Will you not stay,

Put up your caravan

Just for one day?

All things I’ll give you,

Will you be my guest?

Bells for your jennet,

A flag for your chest,

Why do you steal away,

So unkindly,

All that you can carry

Off from me?

Time, you old gipsy man,

Will you not stay,

Put up your caravan

Just for one day?

We had a marvellous English teacher who allowed our imaginations to flourish. He showed us how the poem captures time as untameable. We bargain with it, plead with it, offer it gifts, yet it continues its way. I thought jennet was a woman companion. He explained that it was a term for a female donkey, a jenny. I was delighted at the image of time accompanied by a small, patient donkey. But I don’t think I understood the poignancy of the poem’s message.

Learning to Love History

For most of my school, I hated history. We jumped from Vedas to Mauryan Empire to Mughal Invasion to British Colonisation to Independence. The vastness of India’s past still eludes me. At that age it felt full of dead people, disconnected, irrelevant. I think I now understand why.

I had no past then.

Or rather, I had no way of seeing myself within a past. History was something that happened to other people. I hadn’t lived long enough to have acquired a history. Now I love it. As I grow older, I can see my own story beginning to take shape. And as my time inevitably moves toward my end, I find myself wanting to know where I began; not only personally, but collectively. I want to trace the story backwards: my family history, my clan history, Sikhs from Kashmir, the story of India, the story of humanity, the emergence of life, and the origins of the cosmos itself.

History became meaningful when I crossed a threshold - when I could locate myself within it. Before then, there wasn’t enough of me to look back upon. I needed a past long enough and distant enough to lend perspective to my recall.

I came late to the recognition that we are not separate from history, but expressions of it.

Candles and the Shape of Time

Which brings me to Cavafy.

Candles - Constantine Cavafy

The days of the future stand in front of us
Like a line of candles all alight -
Golden and warm and lively little candles.
The days that are past are left behind,
A mournful row of candles that are out;
The nearer ones are still smoking,
Candles cold, and melted, candles bent.
I don’t want to see them; their shapes hurt me,
It hurts me to remember the light of them at first.
I look before me at my lighted candles,
I don’t want to turn around and see with horror
How quickly the dark line is lengthening,
How quickly the candles multiply that have been put out.

Cavafy’s poem offers a powerful visual metaphor. As time moves forward, the line of darkness behind us grows, while the remaining row ahead is getting shorter. We are invited to look steadily at what is already lost, and at what remains. Darkness behind, eventually darkness ahead.

But the candle of NOW is right by me. The present moment where life is happening.

Life is a movement from this now to the next now. We inhabit time, carried along by it, unable to step outside its flow. Time does not stop at each now, but our relationship to it can change. We cannot hold a moment still, but we can enter it more fully. Being attuned to a moment does not extend it in any objective sense, yet it alters how it is lived. The moment becomes richer, denser, more textured.

Sipping coffee in the now

I have started practising this deliberately. Whether it is the dawn chorus or the low, persistent hum of traffic, when I detach my attention from its habitual inner commentary and allow it to rest with what is present, this now feels different. It seems more alive. It hums with sensations that were always there, patiently arriving through the senses, but previously excluded from awareness. Sound acquires layers. Light has temperature. Even stillness reveals movement.

This now too shall pass. I cannot prevent its passage. Nothing I do will slow the clock. But I can resist the habit of inattention; the reflex that lets life slide by while the mind is elsewhere, rehearsing the past or anticipating the future. Life need not pass unnoticed.

When I pay attention in this way, time seems to thicken. It is not that there is more time, but that there is more in the time that is already here. The day feels longer, not because it has been extended, but because it has been inhabited. Perhaps this is self-deception, or an unconscious defence against mortality. Perhaps it is simply the mind rediscovering its capacity to receive experience rather than skim over it. Either way, it works for me.

A cup of coffee, sipped attentively, becomes an example. Not a means to an end, not fuel to be consumed on the way to something else, but a small pilgrimage without destination. The warmth of the cup against the palm. The faint bitterness before sweetness arrives. The aroma rising before the taste. The sound of the cup returning to the saucer. None of this is new. What is new is my availability to it. Attention gathers what was previously dispersed.

In such moments, time does not stop, but it ceases to feel thin. It becomes something one can walk alongside, rather than be dragged through. I can choose to walk with the gypsy and the jenny, rather than let them travel another path whose existence I might never notice. Paying attention does not defeat time. Time will not wait for my attention, nor seek it. My attention simply allows me to meet time, moment by moment anew, while it inevitably passes.

Opening Doors

Every time we open a door, we step into something new. A new room, a new setting, a train carriage, a new conversation or a new task. A new now.

Each door is a threshold in time, a moment of transition from one now to another. We can sense both the excitement of the new and continuity of the moment simultaneously. Each open door can become an invitation to a new now, stepping into a new moment.

The Youngest You Will Ever Be

There is a quiet truth that is easy to miss. At each moment, at every now, you are as young as you will ever be.

Instead of worrying about getting old, perhaps we could feel gratitude for continually being our youngest self, right now, in this moment. Time may be moving on, but youth, in this sense, is always available in the present.

For the Anniversary of My Death - W. S. Merwin

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveller
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

The most striking line in the poem is I “bow, not knowing to what.”

I read this poem at each New Year’s midnight. For the previous year, I have passed the date of my death anniversary. My death is certain; its date may well already be written in fate or kismet or karma. Death is the final threshold, certain, unavoidable and unknowable. But this now, at the start of this new year, I can bow in humility before existence itself. The bowing is not subservience. It is an act of gratitude and appreciation of each moment, and of all the nows that I still might inhabit as the gypsy wanders on.

Perhaps this is how we should open doors - not rushing, not distracted, but with an inward bow. A small acknowledgment of the mystery of being here at all. A recognition that each end also carries a beginning.

Every door we open is a threshold, a step into a new now. Perhaps we can step slowly, deliberately, and attentively into 2026.

A very happy new year to you all.

Heart versus Head

Blaise Pascal, a contemporary of Descartes, was a scientist and a brilliant mathematician. His famous quote is often misunderstood as Pascal asserting that feelings supersede reason, and that our emotions can be so powerful that they ignore rationality. Pascal was committed to rigorous reasoning, but he also understood, as meant in this quote, that pure rationalism could not account for some deep human truths. Reason is powerful but finite in its applications. Reason itself cannot prove or disprove the existence of God; hence Pascal’s famous wager that believing in God could lead to infinite gain if God exists, but limited loss if God does not. However, if God existed and human beings did not believe, it would be an infinite loss for very limited gain. From a rational cost-benefit perspective, belief has greater advantages than disbelief. Pascal was not trying to prove God’s existence. Pascal was pointing to the limits of pure rationality in determining metaphysical truths.

The common misunderstanding of Pascal’s quote is best seen in the most basic of human dilemmas: should I listen to my head or my heart? This deceptively simple dichotomy assumes that we are driven by two distinct and clearly defined voices inside us competing for authority and driving our actions. This metaphor has persisted across cultures and time.

During the Mahabharata War (dated 1500–1000 BC, perhaps older), the Indian warrior Arjuna was torn between knowing that war was necessary but frozen from action from grief at the killing involved. In the Greek tragedy Medea (by Euripides, 431 BCE), Medea says, “I know what evil I am about to do, but anger is the master of my plans”. In the Analects (compiled 475-221 BCE), Confucius asserts that raw emotions must be cultivated into wisdom through effort. Stoicism (early 3^rd century BCE) was the firmest in its conviction of emotion as erroneous judgement and passion as reason gone wrong. The stoic ideal for mental peace was apatheia, or freedom from passion.

Psyche as a rider

Sigmund Freud gave this heart-mind conflict it’s modern psychological formulation. A rider metaphor appears in a lecture later published as New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933). In Lecture 31: “The Dissection of the Psychical Personality”, Freud describes the relation between ego and id using a striking image: “The ego is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider seeks to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces.”

For Freud, the horse represented instinctual drives (id - appetites, impulses, sexual and aggressive drives), while the rider represented the ego, attempting to guide these forces. The ego is only in control as long as the id cooperates. In later writings, Freud introduced the concept of the superego, an internalised law and a voice of prohibition, shame, guilt, and ideals imposed by parents and society. Freud’s argument is unsettling. We are not the masters of our own mental spaces. Reason must govern by negotiation or defend itself from shame and guilt. Ego has no inherent sovereignty. Civilised behaviour is a precarious compromise between competing drives.

Freud was a widely read scholar. Although he did not attribute his image to any earlier writer, he was most likely aware that the metaphor of the rider appears in Plato’s Phaedrus (370 BCE), although Plato’s metaphor too was a reworking of older Greek poetic and religious imagery. According to Plato, reason (logos) is a charioteer pulled by two horses: a white (noble) horse, thymos, and an unruly black horse, epithymia. The noble horse represents moral emotions such as pride, justice, and righteous anger, has the capacity for loyalty and self-sacrifice, and is aligned with ideals such as honour. It obeys the rider willingly. The black horse represents bodily passions and desires that seek immediate satisfaction. The black horse is unruly; it tries to defy the rider and responds only to force and discipline. In Plato’s conception, the soul is tripartite - a combination of logos, thymos, and epithymia. The chariot is not inside the soul. Instead, the soul is the chariot in motion. The soul’s task is to maintain balance by skilfully guiding competing inner forces. Plato’s imagery is considered one of the earliest fully articulated models of internal psychic conflict in Western thought.

An even older chariot

The Hindu scripture Katha Upanishad (6^th century BCE) offers the most detailed version of this imagery.

“Know the Self as the lord of the chariot, the body as the chariot, the intellect (buddhi) as the charioteer, and the mind (manas) as the reins. The senses, they say, are the horses; the objects of sense the paths they range over. When the Self is united with the body, the senses, and the mind, then wise people call Him the Enjoyer. He who has no understanding, whose mind is unrestrained, his senses are uncontrolled, like the vicious horses of a charioteer” Katha Upanishad, 1.3.3–1.3.4

The verse describes the human being as a chariot: the body is the vehicle, the senses are the horses, the mind (manas) the reins, and the intellect (buddhi) is the charioteer. But here the metaphor goes one step further. The true rider is not the intellect at all, but Atman - pure awareness.

There is a crucial distinction here. In the Greek and Freudian models, reason occupies the highest position. In the Upanishadic model, reason is indispensable but subordinate. It is an instrument, not the inner self. Awareness is placed prior to thought, prior to judgement, prior to agency. This is not to argue that Hinduism has privileged access to the truth. The recurrence of the same intuition across cultures suggests the opposite: that the dilemma is universal. Different traditions give it different names, but they are gesturing toward the same recognition.

In the Katha Upanishad, the rider, pure awareness, is called the Atman. Christianity speaks of the soul. Sikhism speaks of the divine light (Jyot) within. Islam speaks of the Ruh, a spirit whose nature ultimately escapes definition. Jewish mysticism refers to Neshama, something breathed into human beings, not constructed by them. These traditions may profoundly disagree on theology and practice yet converge on a unitary truth. There is something within us that knows, and that knowing is not reducible to thought.

Psychiatry and psyche

Psychiatrists distinguish disorders of intellect, such as learning disabilities, from disorders of the mind, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, in which intelligence usually remains intact. While exploring the inner state of a patient, psychiatrists conduct a “mental state examination” in which a patient’s speech, thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and cognitive functions (a term used for memory, intelligence, judgement, and abstraction) are assessed. All of these are collectively considered to be functions of the mind. A person can be intellectually normal but still experience terrible mental suffering. This division into learning disabilities and mental illnesses maps closely onto the ancient Indian distinction between manas (mind) and buddhi (intellect). The mind moves, reacts, associates, and fluctuates. Intellect discerns, evaluates, and judges.

Awareness is that within which both appear.

One need not hold any religious beliefs to verify this. Thoughts can be subjectively examined and objectively expressed in speech. Intellect can be tested, as we do all the time in school exams. Awareness cannot be objectified in the same manner. Awareness can only be experienced as subjective consciousness. It is not something that we possess. It is what we are aware with.

Seen in this light, the chariot metaphor is not about moral instruction or spiritual hierarchy. Instead, it describes the structural tension of being human: powerful instincts, a reasoning faculty tasked with navigation, and a conscious awareness that silently witnesses both.

Consciousness in physics

Many prominent physicists have argued that consciousness is fundamental to reality. The clearest statement about this came from Max Planck (1858-1947), one of the founders of quantum mechanics: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.” Planck was not referring to consciousness in the sense of individual psychology. Instead, he considered consciousness as the ontological ground on which matter appears.

Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961), another key figure in quantum mechanics said: “Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental.” Like Planck, Schrödinger was not talking about individual experiences but consciousness as a singular entity, an underlying fabric of the universe.

Eugene Wigner (1902-1995) formulated a thought experiment popularly known as “Wigner’s friend” in a 1961 article “Remarks on the Mind-Body Question”. He argued that nature is not fundamentally deterministic. It is not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent manner without reference to consciousness. For Wigner, measurement requires awareness, not just the interaction between an observer and the observed.

A common misunderstanding of these statements by quantum physicists is that consciousness creates reality. Reality instead is participatory and observer dependent, an idea articulated thus by John Archibald Wheeler: “No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.”

Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958) believed that there was a deeper psycho-physical unity, beyond merely the physical. During a period of personal crisis, he underwent psychoanalysis with Carl Jung (1875-1961). Their exchange resulted in a two-essay publication titled The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche (1952). Pauli was not a mystical idealist. He believed that physics was incomplete without consciousness. He stated that an observer is not outside an experiment, but an essential way in which nature manifests itself. Jung did not believe that consciousness was a collective (in the social sense) but as trans-personal, even though experienced as localised in an individual. Together, they believed that our picture of reality was incomplete and that we had to consider the possibility of an underlying universal field. This is a remarkable anticipation of the current problem: can AI become conscious?

It is striking that when studying the nature of matter, quantum physicists, like Indian rishis, do not find more matter within, but something that is irreducibly further. One does not need religious dogma to reach the same conclusion through a deeper enquiry into one’s own inner self.

AI and Consciousness

Consciousness is neither a structure nor a function that can be isolated or tested. As technology progresses, AI may increasingly replicate intelligence, judgement, and even self-awareness in the narrow sense of being able to report its internal state. If a system can reliably report on its internal states, correct errors about itself, anticipate its own future behaviour, and revise its self-model, we may reasonably call it self-aware. Such a system may pass every behavioural test. Consciousness, as I am using the term here, refers to subjective presence; the fact that there is something it is like to be that system. This is not a behavioural property but an experiential one. It cannot be accessed from the outside because it is not an object among objects.

AI may build better chariots. But the rider - awareness- is not something that can be added. This is not a failure of technology, but, at least for me, a reminder of its limits. Some things can only be known by being.

Consciousness may be the one thing that can only be lived but never proven.

“There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms”. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 1896

A dragon-like lizard: ancient, watchful, neither hostile nor tame. Photograph by the author

Maps and dragons

Every age has its maps, depending on what has been explored and what is left uncharted.

I have always liked maps. Maps reassure us. They suggest orientation, location, progress, mastery. They imply that with sufficient patience and precision, the unknown can be rendered knowable. As a psychiatrist, I have spent most of my working life listening to people describe inner landscapes that do not easily lend themselves to measurement or diagrams.

Early cartographers drew fantastical creatures and mythological beings on maps for decorative purposes, but sometimes as warnings of potential dangers in uncharted areas. The phrase Here be dragons (Latin: Hic Sunt Dracones) appears in two early 16^th century globes depicting the world map: the Hunt-Lenox Globe and the Ostrich Egg Globe. Variations of the warning have appeared on maps before and after, sometimes based on the known presence of beasts and serpents, and other times from the fertile imaginations of returning seafarers, embellished further by illustrators. In modern times, Firefox 3, the web browser used it as a warning before users could alter advanced internal settings. “Here be dragons” did not necessarily mean that dragons existed. It meant that we do not know what lies beyond this point.

Mapping the brain

A misted lake: what is visible rests upon what cannot yet be seen. Photograph by the author.

The brain is full of uncharted territories. The subcortex, the area beneath the cortex (outermost layer), was often described as “terra Incognita” (literally unchartered land). The deepest structures of the brain remain largely unknown, and at the microscopic level, mapping all possible connections between 86 billion brain cells – often estimated to be up to a quadrillion (1,000 trillion, or 1 followed by 15 zeros; some estimates are lower, 100 trillion) - is beyond current technological ability.

I was at the start of my surgical training when CT scanners were first introduced in India. It was revolutionary. Living brains could be studied in a non-invasive manner, replacing the earlier crude, painful and potentially lethal procedures. When I switched to psychiatry three years later, we convinced ourselves that we would finally see mental disorders as brain conditions and discover structural brain changes for conditions such as schizophrenia. That we would no longer be the butt of jokes of our surgical and medical colleagues. We would become ‘proper doctors’ rather than the oddities who ask their patients about incestuous desires in infancy (the Freudian Oedipal Complex). It would be the end of cruel jokes- “what is the difference between a psychiatrist and his patient? The psychiatrist has the keys”.

The heady intoxication of those days, anticipating easy answers, has passed in psychiatry. However, the promise has not been fulfilled as expected. Advances in brain imaging have not led to commensurate advances in our understanding of the causes of mental disorders or in increasing our therapeutic armamentarium. There have been modest gains, but no fundamental breakthroughs and certainly no paradigm shifts.

For imaging neuroscientists, it has been a period of enormous funding boost and prolific output of research papers. Beautiful high-resolution pictures, marvels of medicine and photography, litter the best journals. We now observe the living brain in extraordinary detail. We explore minute structures, watch neurones fire, networks organise, and regions activate and deactivate from moment to moment within a living brain. These are real achievements that have changed clinical practice in several brain conditions, from epilepsy to tumours.

Consciousness (un)explained

However, a central question remains unanswered: how does the brain produce experience? The more precisely we observe the brain, the more consciousness retreats from explanation.

Daniel Dennett, a leading neurocognitive scientist and philosopher, argues in his book Consciousness Explained (1991) that all mental states, including consciousness, are nothing but material (physical) processes. There is no body-mind split and no central observer; rather, what we call experience is a post-hoc narrative to explain parallel competing processes in the brain. He states: “consciousness is not a thing in the brain, but a process - or rather, many processes without a centre”. He completely dismisses the concept of qualia - a term used in philosophy to refer to subjective conscious experience - as a confused, incoherent, and contradictory idea that serves no useful scientific purpose.

Dennett explains consciousness by explaining it away.

Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) rejected the idea of mind as an entity. He argued that there was no “ghost in the machine”. To look for the mind was like looking for the “team spirit” in a game of cricket. In Ryle’s view, the concept of mind was a “category fallacy”. He considered philosophy to be akin to “conceptual cartography”. A villager may know his village (the mind) intimately and yet struggle to map it as an abstraction. Philosophers were cartographers creating maps, charting the territory of abstract concepts rather than studying mental objects.

Like Dennett, Ryle redescribed experience but did not explain it. He told us what consciousness is not, but not what it is.

The exclusion of consciousness from our inner world found its extreme position in B F Skinner’s behaviourism. In his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) he considered all inner experience as irrelevant. Humans are machines that respond to contingencies (punishments and rewards) and are conditioned by reinforcement schedules. Mental states are inherently unscientific because they are unobservable. He wrote: “what we call intention, feeling or thought, adds nothing to the prediction of behaviour”. Skinner’s model was efficient in explaining habits, addictions, and simple learning which are all forms of stimulus-response conditioning. But it completely bypassed meaning, suffering, creativity, and above all, experience and awareness.

Skinner treated the mind as irrelevant.

The limits of explanation

Each of these positions redraws the map. None of them enters the territory.

How does matter give rise to experience? Does observing neuronal activity when someone sees a red object explain the source of the subjective redness of the red object? We can map the electrical signals that result in pain, but does that tell us what it is like to feel pain? Love, grief, and joy cannot be dismissed as post-hoc narratives, fallacious categories, or predetermined responses of a programmed machine.

Materialistic explanations of the mind and consciousness take a constrained and limited approach. They use examples of easy problems of consciousness with clearly laid-out visual tracks to explain visual perception or standardised tests to explain memory. They map what can be mapped and describe functions and mechanisms. They are like a man looking for his lost ring in the garden. He knows that he left it on the side table in his bedroom. But his bedroom is dark. He is looking where it is bright. Neuroscientists go where the light is, not in the black box that is consciousness, perhaps where enlightenment resides.

Phenomenal consciousness, that is, subjective experience or qualia, remains unexplained. This is the “hard problem of consciousness” a term popularised by David Chalmers in his book The Conscious Mind (1996). In his 1995 paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, he stated, “the hard problem… is the hard problem of consciousness. When we think and perceive, there is a whirl of information processing, but there is also a subjective aspect…Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information processing, we have visual and auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all”?

Thomas Nagel’s short essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” remains one of the clearest statements of the problem. Nagel’s point is simple yet devastating. An organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism. No amount of objective knowledge about bat brains, bat behaviour, or bat echolocation will tell us what it is like to be a bat. The subjective character of experience is not missing information. It is information of a different kind.

This is not a failure of neuroscience or philosophy. It is built into the limits of explanation.

Wilderness seen, rather than conquered. Photograph by the author

Gungey ka Gud (a mute tasting jaggery)

The Indian phrase Gungey ka Gud (a mute tasting jaggery) is a fitting metaphor for the hard problem of consciousness. Someone who has never tasted jaggery cannot imagine it, derive its taste from knowing its chemical composition, or grasp it through analogy. A mute person who has tasted it knows it completely but cannot express it. Even if the mute person could suddenly speak, he would still struggle to convey its sweetness or the experience of its crumbliness in words. Words are not the limitation here. It is the limits of what can be described in words.

Contemplative traditions go even further, often refusing to provide explanations altogether. In Zen, when asked about enlightenment, a teacher does not explain. He may raise a finger, hold up a flower, pour tea, or remain silent. In one well-known story, the Buddha holds up a flower before a silent assembly. Nothing is said. Something is transmitted.

The Upanishads speak in the same register: “That which cannot be seen by the eye, but by which the eye sees. Know that alone to be Brahman.” Master Eckhart said in one of his sermons, “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one, one seeing, one knowing, one love”.

Awareness is not an object we can point to. It is that by which pointing is possible at all.

This is where the map must end. Neuroscience can tell us endlessly more about the conditions under which experience arises. It can and should continue doing so. However, awareness itself is not waiting to be discovered inside the brain, like a hidden organ. It is not something that we possess. It is something we are.

To insist on explaining it as an object is to commit a category mistake: to search for the dragon by dissecting the map. Some things can only be met, not explained. Music must be heard. Sweetness must be tasted. Awareness must be lived.

At the edge of every neuroscientific map, honestly drawn, there should be a familiar inscription: Here be dragons.

A leopard half-concealed: what may be seen only when we stop hunting. Photograph by the author.

“For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate”. Paul the Apostle, Romans 7:15

“We are unknown to ourselves, the knowers”. Friedrich Nietzsche (from the preface of On the Genealogy of Morality)

A child’s question

In the first blog I wrote about the need to see clearly. Now I begin with my then eight-year-old daughter asking me a question: “Dad, does a cat know that it is a cat?” I tried hard to answer in a way that an eight-year-old could understand, only to realise that my struggle to answer was not because I did not have the vocabulary for an eight-year-old, but because I did not know the answer. I did not even understand the question. Was the cat aware of its ‘cat-ness’? Was the cat aware of its selfhood? Was the cat aware of its uniqueness? I can turn the question around. How aware am I? I am aware that I am a human being, part of a species; belonging to a nation, a tribe, a clan; a holder of multiple roles as a healer, a father, a son, a husband, a provider; and a unique combination of atoms and molecules that has never existed before and will eventually perish. But can I truly say that I understand the selfhood of being me? Who am I that is pondering these thoughts? I am not my body, I am not my roles, I am not my chemical composition, and I am not the thinker. Thinking happens, but where? Who remains? My is-ness seems simultaneously self-evident and yet beyond description.

As far as we can tell, no other creature studies itself as obsessively as we humans do. A hungry animal seeking food must sense hunger as its own. However, this is not the kind of self that we talk about when we talk about ourselves. Who resides in the recesses of our innermost being?

Self as illusion

The famous inscription “Know thyself” at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi was made central by Socrates in his statement: “the unexamined life is not worth living”. The original Greek maxim is commonly understood as a warning for mortals to know their limits and avoid thinking that they could be Gods. Socrates considered self-knowledge as a prerequisite for a virtuous life that requires wisdom from rational examination of one’s thoughts, beliefs, and actions. In the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud popularised the concept of the unconscious, a part of the psyche that operates outside awareness. Like an iceberg, conscious awareness, or the ego, is a small, visible tip that hides a vast, inaccessible unconscious, within which primitive drives (the id, including sexual and aggressive drives) rage in conflict with the superego, a rigid moral compass imposed by parents and societal norms. The unconscious is hidden from awareness by repression and defence mechanisms, and its secrets can only be revealed through psychoanalysis.

Critics have argued that psychoanalytic concepts are so broad that they cannot be disproven. The analyst suggests that the patient is unconsciously sexually attracted to his mother. Denial of this assertion is considered suppression or a defence mechanism. The patient’s disagreement with the analyst is further proof of reaction formation or projection. Psychoanalysis has an armour so complete that criticism or doubt cannot pierce it. Others argued against the possibility that an outsider could discern what was hidden and invisible inside another person. Psychoanalysis might be ‘insightful’, but it fails empirical falsification because it cannot be externally verified. It interprets from inside. Yet Freudian theories, for all their limitations, have profoundly impacted most aspects of contemporary society from psychology and psychiatry to art, literature, and everyday language.

Many influential neuroscientists consider the idea of a unified self to be an illusion. There is no single entity that can be called a self. Instead, we all have a dynamic, fluid, emergent narrative woven together in networks from internal and external brain signals into a mental entity we call the self. The self is not a mental substance or psychic structure but often framed as an information processing device.

Complexity beyond comprehension

In this blog, I argue that the problem of understanding the mind is two-fold. The first is the technological problem of studying the subjective as an object. The second is the personal difficulty of searching within oneself without understanding the nature of the inside. The first is a structural difficulty (technological inquiry), and the second is a spiritual one (internal inquiry).

Science strives for objectivity by eliminating emotions, bias, and subjective interpretations. Randomised controlled trials are designed so that in all stages, from framing a hypothesis, selecting a sample, collecting data, analysing it, and drawing conclusions, subjectivity is eliminated or at least minimised. However, the mind cannot treat itself objectively: the observer and the observed are the same. We cannot step outside of consciousness or hold our minds at arm’s length. The mind observing itself is like trying to lift the chair you are sitting on - impossible without external support. We have no external vantage point; we are always sitting on the chair. We must be outside the chair, using external and separate mechanisms to lift it.

Another way to think about it is to look at a photograph of the Milky Way. In reality, no one has ever photographed the Milky Way from outside it. All images show partial internal perspectives. To truly photograph the Milky Way, we would need to leave it. A foetus filming the womb might believe that it can see its mother, but it can only see parts of the mother that are accessible to its insider view. Likewise, we cannot see the whole of consciousness from within consciousness.

The second problem in understanding the mind is the distinction between complicated and complex entities. Complicated systems, such as jet engines, can have millions of parts, but each is governed by deterministic Newtonian predictability; understanding the parts explains the whole. Complex systems have feedback loops, nonlinear interactions, and emergent and changing behaviours. There is no static starting point or outcome that does not influence the starting conditions. Everything is in a constant flux. We know all the laws that determine the weather in precise detail, yet we cannot predict the weather precisely. Weather systems are complex rather than complicated, as are the human body, living beings, and societies. The mind is not only complex; it is internally entangled. Thought, emotion, sensation, memory, imagination, and narrative cannot be cleanly separated.

The necessity of illusion

The mind is complex, self-referential, and therefore opaque. We are instruments trying to measure ourselves with no fixed calibration, no external standard, and no way to step outside the apparatus itself. Even with a technical blueprint, complexity and subjectivity prevent full understanding.

Although we cannot know ourselves objectively, we need to believe in a sense of a unified self. This is not a shortcoming but rather a survival mechanism. Without such a belief in continuity, agency, identity, and coherence, the mind would collapse under uncertainty. Our tragedy is mistaking these illusions for the truth, and our necessity is needing them. Across cultures and in different time spans, mystics, meditators, and contemplatives have taught us about loosening identification with the narrative and witness the mind without merging with it. They have experienced a self beyond the mind. They do not entirely escape the Milky Way but rather glimpse its shape. They do not lift the chair but stop believing that it is their only support.

Conclusion

We are opaque to ourselves because we are inside the system we attempt to observe. The mind is complex, self-referential, and lacks an external vantage point. Illusions of self-knowledge make life more bearable. Partial clarity arises not from escaping consciousness but from gently witnessing it from within. Therein lies the truth, freedom, and contentment.

We suffer far less from what happens to us than from what our minds make of it.

This is not a new insight. Epictetus, the freed slave and Stoic philosopher, said it two thousand years ago; the Upanishads described it millennia earlier; Buddha taught it with precision; Nietzsche and Viktor Frankl wove it in their philosophies. Yet we continue to mistake our thoughts for truth and the stories we tell ourselves for reality. We worry about the future long before it arrives and relive the past long after it has passed. These habits are so universal that we rarely stop to question them.

Witnessing suffering up close

My work as a psychiatrist has brought me into close contact with deep suffering. Every day I meet people who are distressed, dysfunctional, and damaged. I see the harm people do to each other, what society does to people, what parents do to children and children to parents, and what we do to ourselves. Suffering can take many forms. An abused, suicidal adolescent who no longer feels loved. A man who feels himself a failure and has lost all hope. A woman who destroys all she had in an episode of manic grandiosity. A lonely individual who believes that he is being controlled through a chip in his brain. A sixteen-year-old from a broken home who, having started smoking cannabis at the age of ten, now constantly hears voices telling him he is worthless and should kill himself.

Suffering is real. I see it very clearly. My role requires me to examine it dispassionately while holding the pain of the sufferer with compassion. In over 35 years of sitting with the suffering of others, I have come to recognise my own afflictions and their sources.

What science explains- and what it cannot

Modern neuroscience and psychiatry have given us extraordinary tools: we can map the brain with remarkable precision, watch neurones fire in real time, and catalogue the chemical orchestration behind thought and emotion. Yet when it comes to the lived experience of grief, shame, love, fear, guilt, or despair, we still ask the same old questions: Who is the “I” that thinks, feels, and suffers? What is the mind? Why does understanding not always liberate us?

Neuroscience studies the brain as an object. Ancient contemplative traditions attempted to understand the mind from within. Psychiatry occupies both worlds: the mind as a suffering object and the conscious awareness of the individual seeking relief. My work has also taught me that human suffering is rarely caused by the world alone. It arises instead from the way mind meets experience. While the mind can observe the world with extraordinary intelligence and in exquisite detail, it can remain strangely blind to itself.

Why this blog exists: an invitation

This blog sits at the intersection of the brain, mind, self and suffering. It is not a memoir, nor a manifesto for self-improvement. It is more like a diary of field observations - an attempt to think about these in public, slowly, carefully, and without theatrics or scratching at humanity’s wounds. Some reflections will be clinical, some philosophical, some spiritual and some cultural. Clarity requires multiple perspectives, and we rarely arrive at it all at once.

The blog is an invitation to pause long enough to notice how experience is organised moment by moment. How the mind shapes meaning and attributes it to experience. How suffering often arises not from events but from our entanglement with the stories we attach to them. Science has provided us with astonishing new facts but precious few wisdoms. I make no promises of enlightenment, offer no recipes for happiness, and provide no certainty to the baffling, enigmatic, and profoundly mysterious nature of what it is to be human. When it comes to the self, clarity often comes from subtracting rather than adding. Something falls away, and what remains is simple awareness, unburdened by narrative. It is an invitation to see clearly. To be aware of awareness.

You do not need to become more.

You need to be less encumbered.

You don’t need to work harder.

You need to stop strengthening the worker.

You don’t need to climb higher.

You need to step off the ladder.

A space for dialogue, not agreement

You do not need to agree with everything I write. Agreement is not the point. I am interested in whether a sentence makes you stop, look again, or recognise something you had not articulated before. Or disagree and make me look at my assumptions with fresh eyes.

In this series, I will write about the construction of self, the nature of suffering, agency and freedom, consciousness and awareness, and what it means to live with clarity in an uncertain world. I write not to persuade but to witness ideas as they reveal themselves.

If this kind of seeing interests you, you are in the right place.