abhijit1981's Blog

Category: Self-Inquiry & Spirituality

  • Two Hills, One Flame

    Three nights at Skanda Vale https://www.skandavale.org/

    The last four miles are one lane wide. Hedgerows lean in from both sides and you slow down — not out of caution, but out of something closer to consent. Somewhere between Carmarthen and Llanpumsaint, the road stops being a road and becomes an approach.

    We had been here once before. A day visit — arrive with a thermos, leave before the light goes. This time we stayed. Two days, three nights: Juri, Abhiroop and I in a small room in the valley. I remember thinking we had brought far too much luggage for a place that would ask us to put things down.

    There is a difference between visiting a temple and living inside its rhythm. A visit is something you do. A residence is something done to you.

    Five in the morning

    The day begins at an hour that has no arguments in it. The Murugan puja starts at five, and five does not negotiate — you rise or you don’t, and either way the puja happens. That indifference is its own teaching. The valley is not waiting for me to be ready.

    Then, at dusk, up the hill: Maha Shakti.

    Water on stone. Milk on stone. The bell, the conch, smoke lifting into cold Welsh air, and the murti standing absolutely still while everything else moved around Her. At some point during the abhishekam I stopped watching the ritual and the ritual began watching me. No vision. No light. Nothing I can hand you as evidence — only a plain certainty that arrived without argument and left no receipt: I was not in a building in Wales. Or rather, I was, and it made no difference at all.

    Murugan in the dark. Mother at nightfall. By the second day I had stopped trying to tell them apart.

    Abhiroop stood beside me through most of it. I explained very little. Children don’t learn devotion from explanation; they learn it from proximity — from watching what their parents go quiet in front of. Juri needed no explanation at all. She simply folded into the place, as she does.

    What I recognised

    Some time ago I sat at Badrika Ashram, in the Himalayan foothills. Standing in Carmarthenshire — an ocean and an entirely different mountain range away — I felt the same energy. Not a similar one. The same.

    The two places share almost nothing on the surface. Different lineages, languages, landscapes, founders; Guru Sri Subramanium walked these Welsh fields from 1973 and lies in samadhi on the hillside now. Yet what pervades both is identical in texture — an absolute seriousness about the divine, held together with an absolute absence of self-importance about it. Nobody performing. Nobody selling. The work simply done, day after day, whether or not anyone is watching.

    Ekaṁ sad viprā bahudhā vadanti. Truth is one; the wise call it by many names. I have quoted that line for years. Here I understood it is not a statement about tolerance. It is a statement about plumbing — about where the water actually comes from, whichever tap you happen to be standing at.

    The ladle

    On both days, I served food.

    Weekends bring five hundred, sometimes a thousand people through this valley. Everyone is fed. Nobody pays. I stood at the counter and put food onto the plates of more than a hundred people at a stretch, and by the end of it my back ached and my mind had gone quiet in a way no cushion has ever managed.

    Annaṁ brahmeti vyajānāt — he knew food to be Brahman. Not a metaphor. Rice is Brahman when it reaches the person who is hungry.

    The swamis and the volunteers who have fed this valley for decades, without a line of credit to their name — they were the real darshan. The Toltec would call it impeccability: not perfection, but the refusal to do a half-hearted thing in front of God, even when the thing is a spoonful of rice for a stranger whose name you will never learn.

    Coming down

    We drove east on Monday. The lane widened into a road, the road into a motorway, and by Bracknell the whole thing had the texture of something that might not have happened.

    I did not come home with answers. I came home with a suspicion — that the line I have quietly kept all my life between the sacred hours and the ordinary ones is not a real line, and never was. That seva is not what you do after the puja. It is the second half of the puja.

    If something in this stirs you, go. Not for a day. Stay. Rise at five. Take a ladle.

    See what the hills tell you. They have been saying it a long time.

  • Mā Gṛdhaḥ (मा गृधः)— Do Not Covet:

    What the waters of Upper Assam are asking of us

    There is an order to how Assam floods, and everyone raised near the Brahmaputra knows it in their body. The great river swells first, slowly, over days. There is a rhythm to it — even a terrible kind of courtesy.

    This July, the water did not observe the courtesy.

    Extraordinary rain fell over the hills of Mon in Nagaland — 137 millimetres in nine hours. It poured down into the south-bank tributaries, the Dikhow, the Disang, the Jhanji, and they rose in hours rather than days. They arrived in the plains before the Brahmaputra had reached its own peak, and so the Brahmaputra, still filling, would not take them. The water had nowhere to go but sideways, into the towns.

    Sivasagar. Charaideo. Jorhat. Nazira. Amguri. These are not names from the flood map. These are the places that do not flood, the high ground, the old Ahom heartland. They have now seen their worst inundation in sixty years. Nine hundred villages under water. Ninety-eight dead, and the counting unfinished.

    I keep returning to that inversion — the tributary arriving before the river. It feels less like a hydrological accident than a sentence spoken in a language I am only beginning to understand. The consequence arrived before we were ready for the cause.

    The arithmetic of an unequal harm

    Rain has been falling on those hills for as long as there have been hills. What has changed is what the hills can hold.

    For two decades the upper catchments have been cut, quarried and mined. Hillsides levelled for stone, forest cleared for coal, slopes opened for aggregate. Each operation is, on its own accounting sheet, profitable. Each has an owner, a margin, a buyer. And each converts a hillside that absorbed water into a surface that sheds it, and fills the riverbed downstream with silt until the channel can no longer carry what it once carried.

    So the water that killed people in Sivasagar was manufactured, in part, in a quarry in Mon, Nagaland.

    And the men who made the money in Mon are not the families who lost their homes in Nazira. That is the moral centre of this disaster, and of the larger one it sits inside. The one who profits and the one who drowns are never the same person. They are rarely in the same district. Increasingly they are not in the same country.

    Widen the lens and the pattern repeats at every scale. Assam’s per-capita emissions are a fraction of India’s, which are a fraction of Britain’s. The Eastern Himalaya is warming faster than the global average. The people of Charaideo contributed almost nothing to the physics now intensifying their monsoon, and they will pay for it first, and with everything they have.

    In supply chains we have a name for this. We call it an externality — a cost that is real, that someone certainly pays, but that never appears on the invoice of the person who caused it. We built a global economy on the quiet assumption that the invoice would never arrive.

    It arrived in Sivasagar in July.

    The physics, stated honestly

    No one can say that climate change caused this flood. That is not how the science works, and pretending otherwise hands ammunition to those who would rather nothing were said at all. This flood had a local, largely governance-shaped cause: extreme rain over a degraded catchment on a bad hydrological schedule.

    But this can be said. We have moved atmospheric carbon dioxide from 280 parts per million to well past 420. These molecules are transparent to incoming sunlight and opaque to the heat the Earth tries to send back out. That is the whole mechanism — nineteenth-century physics, never seriously in doubt. The Earth has warmed some 1.3 to 1.5 degrees; 2024 was the first calendar year to breach 1.5. That number was never a cliff edge. It was a line drawn by people who understood that beyond it, certain processes stop being things we do to the planet and start being things the planet does to itself.

    And there is one relation that matters most for Assam. For every degree of warming, the atmosphere holds roughly seven per cent more water vapour. This does not make it rain more often. It makes it rain harder when it rains — shifting precipitation out of the steady soak a hillside can absorb, into the violent burst it can only shed.

    A hundred and thirty-seven millimetres in nine hours is precisely the shape of rain a warmer atmosphere makes more of.

    So: climate change did not cause this flood. It is loading the dice, and we will roll them every monsoon for the rest of my son’s life and his children’s, because the carbon already aloft will still be shaping the climate a thousand years from now. That is what irreversible means. Not that the world ends. That there is no going back to the world we were given.

    Lobha ( Greed) — the flood before the flood

    Our tradition has a precise name for the upstream event.

    The ariṣaḍvarga, (अरिषड्वर्ग) – the six enemies, are :  craving, anger, greed, delusion, arrogance and envy. What the tradition insists upon — and what modern environmentalism keeps forgetting — is that these are inner phenomena with outer consequences. The hillside is not cut because of an economic model. The model exists because of lobha, and it is only ever as strong as the appetite that funds it.

    The flood in Sivasagar had a flood upstream of it, and that flood was in the human heart. This is not metaphor. It is a causal chain, and every link is visible.

    The Īśa Upaniṣad says in one verse what I have spent this whole essay circling:

    īśāvāsyam idaṃ sarvaṃ… tena tyaktena bhuñjīthā, mā gṛdhaḥ kasya svid dhanam : ईशा वास्यम् इदं सर्वं यत्किञ्च जगत्यां जगत्।
    तेन त्यक्तेन भुञ्जीथा मा गृधः कस्य स्विद्धनम्॥

    All this is pervaded by the Divine. Enjoy it, therefore, through relinquishment. Do not covet — for whose is wealth?

    Notice: it does not say do not enjoy. Bhuñjīthā — enjoy — but tena tyaktena, by way of letting go. Take, but not as an owner. The world is on loan, not on title. Our civilisation read the first half of that sentence and tore out the second.

    The Gītā then makes the same thought hydrological: beings arise from food, food from rain, rain from yajña (3.14). Yajña is badly translated as sacrifice, which in English became a word about loss. It is not about loss. It is reciprocity — that whatever you draw from a system must be answered by something returned. Krishna’s next verse is blunt: one who takes from this circulation and gives nothing back is a thief.

    We took the carbon and returned nothing. We took the hillside and returned nothing. We broke the yajña, and the rain answered exactly as the verse said it would.

    Let me be careful here. There is a crude version of karma abroad that would say Sivasagar somehow earned this. That is not karma; it is cruelty wearing a Sanskrit word. Karma is causality, not retribution — and our tradition distinguishes the individual’s from the collective’s. The tragedy of collective karma is precisely that it does not ripen where it was sown. A civilisation acts; a village pays. That is not justice. It is simply the shape of the thing, and knowing the shape is where action begins.

    What, then, does one person do

    I have no ending that resolves this, and I distrust essays that do. But I have three things.

    Give now. Philosophy is not what a family in a relief camp in Amguri needs this week. They need rice, tarpaulin, clean water, cash. Give money first and think about cosmology afterwards; reversing that order is a species of spiritual vanity, and I include myself in the warning.

    Aparigraha. Non-hoarding — the personal-scale form of mā gṛdhaḥ. Not asceticism, just the unglamorous daily interrogation of appetite: do I need this, or have I merely been taught to want it? It changes nothing in the atmosphere. It changes everything in the person — and people are what atmospheres are made of.

    Dharma in the work. Whatever your trade, ask what the world needs from precisely what you already know how to do. Expertise built inside a misaligned system is not disqualified from changing it. It may be the only real qualification there is.

    The Dikhow has begun to fall. The silt lies a foot deep in houses where children were doing their homework three weeks ago. Somewhere in the hills above, a quarry is reopening.

    Mā gṛdhaḥ kasya svid dhanam.

    Do not covet. Whose, after all, is the wealth?

  • The 2nd Agreement- DO NOT Take Anything Personally !

    Refer to my previous blog (3 blogs down the thread) — I had started writing about the Four Agreements of life inspired by Toltec wisdom, where I wrote about the 1st agreement: “Be impeccable with your word.” I was recently not at my best of writing, and hence delayed by several months. Here goes the 2nd wisdom: “Don’t take anything personally.” Interestingly, this also ties beautifully into my earlier post “Is This Worth My Roar??” — both, in their own way, ask us to step back before reacting to the world’s noise.

    Of all four agreements, this one might be the most liberating — and the hardest to actually live by. The idea is simple: whatever someone says or does is a reflection of their inner world, their wounds, their fears, their agreements with life — not a statement of truth about you. And yet, almost everything in how we’re raised teaches us the opposite. We’re trained to believe that other people’s reactions to us mean something about who we are.

    Let’s take a hypothetical exmaple through my own lens…. 🙂  Imagine you’ve recently made a significant life decision — perhaps stepping away from a stable, well-paying path to pursue something that feels more aligned with who you are. A close relative hears about it and says, with quiet disappointment, “I just don’t understand why you’d give up something so secure. After everything you worked for.” The words land heavily. You might feel a wave of doubt creep in — maybe I am being reckless, maybe I really am throwing something away.

    But pause for a moment and look at where that comment is coming from. That relative may have grown up in a time or circumstance where security was everything — where stability wasn’t a choice but a survival necessity. Their reaction isn’t really about your life or your path; it’s about their relationship with fear, shaped by their own history and the agreements they made with life decades ago. When they look at your decision, they’re not seeing you clearly — they’re seeing it through the lens of their own unresolved anxieties. It’s their movie, their script, their fears playing out — you simply happened to be the screen they projected it onto.

    This is where the depth of the second agreement really lives — in recognizing that everyone is dreaming their own dream, living inside their own mind, shaped by their own domestication. When someone reacts to you, they are reacting through the lens of every agreement they’ve ever made about how the world works. Their words are a mirror of their beliefs — not a window into your truth.

    Here’s another hypothetical: a close friend forgets to check in during a time when you needed support. The old reflex says, they don’t care about me, I must not matter to them. But what if, instead, you considered that they’re going through something overwhelming in their own life right now — and their absence is about their own bandwidth, not your value to them? This doesn’t mean you ignore patterns or stop having honest conversations. It simply means you stop manufacturing suffering out of someone else’s distraction.

    What’s beautiful about this agreement is that it applies just as much to compliments as criticism. If someone praises a decision you’ve made — “you’re so brave for doing this” — that, too, is their perception, their dream. You don’t need it to feel whole. And if someone doubts you, you don’t need to crumble or justify yourself endlessly. Either way, your sense of self stays rooted in something steadier than other people’s opinions.

    When you genuinely practice this, something shifts. You stop bracing for impact in conversations, especially with family. You stop replaying things people said years ago, wondering if they were right about you. You become less reactive, more spacious — able to love people without needing them to validate your path, and able to hear hard truths without losing your footing.

    Next time, I’ll continue with the 3rd agreement — “Don’t make assumptions” — which builds naturally on this one.  Until then, may you walk through your relationships a little lighter, carrying only what’s truly yours. 🙂Share

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  • The First Agreement: Be Impeccable with Your Word

    In my previous blog,( https://abhijit1981.wordpress.com/2025/07/30/the-smokey-mirror-understanding-the-mind-through-toltec-wisdom/)  I mentioned that I would be exploring the Four Agreements of Life inspired by Toltec wisdom. Today, I begin with the very first — and perhaps the most powerful — agreement: Be impeccable with your words.

    There is one agreement that can transform your entire life: be impeccable with your word. It sounds simple, but it’s one of the hardest habits to master.

    Words are not just sounds; they are seeds. When planted in the mind, they grow into beliefs and shape reality. A careless word can shatter confidence. An encouraging word can spark a lifetime of courage.

    I learned this the hard way. As a child, I loved to sing. I sang around the house with joy, filling every room with my voice. One evening, my father came home exhausted after a long day. With a pounding headache, he snapped: “Stop it! Your voice is terrible.”

    He didn’t mean it — he was simply tired. But I believed him. From that moment, I stopped singing. I avoided music classes, I refused to sing at school, and even speaking in front of people became difficult. One sentence planted a seed of fear that grew for years.

    That’s the power of words misused. They cast spells we carry long into adulthood.

    But words can also heal. Years later,  a teacher encouraged me: “You have a strong voice — you just need to use it.” Those words broke the old agreement I had made with myself. Slowly, I began speaking up again. Confidence returned, all because someone chose words of truth and kindness. Now my freinds and realtives know my singing talent 🙂 

    Being impeccable with your word means speaking with love and honesty — to others and to yourself. It means breaking the habit of self-criticism. Instead of “I’m not good enough,” choose “I am learning. I am capable. I am enough.”

    It also means being mindful of how we speak to others. Gossip, lies, and harsh criticism poison relationships. But encouragement, gratitude, and honesty create connection and love. Every word either builds or destroys.

    This agreement isn’t easy. Our world is full of negativity, and we’ve been trained to speak carelessly. But each time we choose words of love instead of fear, we plant better seeds — seeds that grow into peace, confidence, and joy.

    Imagine a world where children grew up hearing, “You are strong. You are loved. You are enough.” Imagine relationships grounded in encouragement rather than criticism. Imagine the self-belief that would blossom in each of us.

    That vision begins with one choice: to be impeccable with your word.

    Today, I choose to use my words to heal, not to wound. To encourage, not to destroy. And when I stumble, I’ll try again.

    Because this one agreement has the power to change everything.

  • The Smokey Mirror — Understanding the Mind through Toltec Wisdom

    There’s a saying that if you dedicate your energy to a selfless cause, the Universe will align to support your intention and ensure it thrives. With that belief, I’ve decided to revive this long-inactive blog to share positivity and purpose. Last week, I published a post exploring the Nature of the Mind, Post editor: Preview illustrated through the example of the grass-eating lion, drawing from Sanatan/Indian philosophy.

    In what felt like a universal connection—or beautiful coincidence—my respected Guru, Prof. Dr. Arun Tiwari Sir, ( Arun Tiwari – Wikipedia) introduced me to a short yet profound e-book titled The Four Agreements. Written by Don Miguel Ruiz, a Mexican author born in 1952, the book distills ancient Toltec teachings into a path for spiritual awakening and personal freedom.

    Dr. Tiwari Sir encouraged me to absorb this wisdom and summarize it here through my blog.

    The Four Agreements are simple yet deeply transformative principles from Toltec wisdom—an ancient Mexican tradition that emphasizes self-mastery, inner peace, and living in harmony with truth and love:

    1. Be Impeccable with Your Word – Speak with honesty and intention. Avoid using language to harm yourself or others.
    2. Don’t Take Anything Personally – What others say or do reflects their own reality, not yours.
    3. Don’t Make Assumptions – Communicate clearly and ask questions to avoid misunderstanding.
    4. Always Do Your Best – Your best varies day to day; doing it helps you live without regret or self-judgment.

    Before I reflect on these four agreements individually, I feel compelled to share how Toltec wisdom views the nature of the mind —a perspective that echoes our own spiritual heritage. As we say, Truth is universal.

    At the heart of Toltec thought is the idea that the mind is always dreaming—whether we’re awake or asleep. In our waking state, we interpret life through filters shaped by societal conditioning, beliefs, and expectations. This collective filter is what the Toltecs call the dream of the planet. We’re born into this dream and are gradually “domesticated” into it—trained to behave through a system of praise and punishment, much like animals.

    Over time, we internalize this dream. We develop a Judge—an inner voice that evaluates everything we do—and a Victim, the part of us that feels unworthy, ashamed, or guilty. These voices are formed by agreements we never consciously made, yet they shape our lives.

    Toltec wisdom explains that this mental state is like a fog or mitote—a swirl of conflicting thoughts and beliefs. In Indian philosophy, we refer to it as maya—illusion. It prevents us from seeing our true self, which the Toltecs describe as pure light and love.

    This insight was beautifully illustrated through a story: a man, thousands of years ago, dreamed he saw himself sleeping. Under a star-filled sky, he realized, I am made of light. He named the stars tonal (the material world), the space between them nagual (the spiritual essence), and the binding force Life or Intent. He called himself the Smokey Mirror, understanding that while all matter reflects divine truth, our beliefs—the smoke—obscure it.

    So why do we suffer? Because we try to be what we are not. We chase images of perfection shaped by others, and when we inevitably fall short, we reject ourselves. The more we pretend to be something else, the more distant we grow from who we really are.

    But there’s a way out.

    Since our suffering stems from unconscious agreements, we can reclaim our freedom by breaking those rooted in fear. This frees up the personal power we’ve used to maintain them. And with that power, we can begin to dream a new dream—one grounded in self-acceptance, joy, and authenticity.

    The first step is awareness: to see the dream for what it is and question the beliefs that run our lives. Who told you you’re not enough? Whose ideal are you trying to fulfill?

    You are already complete. You are a mirror of divine light. The smoke may cloud your reflection, but the light has never left.

    As Don Miguel Ruiz wisely says:
    “You are the creator of your story. You can dream heaven or you can dream hell. The choice is yours.”

    Over the next four blog posts, I’ll explore the core principles and timeless wisdom of  “The Four Agreements.”

  • Nature of the Mind

    I am reminded of a story I read in childhood about a lion cub raised among goats. Orphaned at birth, he was adopted by a young girl who fed him goat’s milk and raised him alongside her herd. Over time, the lion cub began behaving like a goat—eating grass, feeling fearful, and never realizing his true nature.

    One day, he got lost in the jungle and instinctively ran in fear when he  saw a wolf. But to his surprise, the animals fled from him. This unfamiliar experience sparked a subtle awareness within. As he wandered deeper into the forest, he noticed the same reaction from other animals. Eventually, he encountered a pride of lions feasting on a kill. Something awakened inside him—a primal desire. Acting on it, he hunted a calf and, for the first time, felt the exhilaration of being what he truly was. From that moment on, the goat-like lion transformed into the king of the jungle.

    This story echoes our own journey. Like the lion, we are born fearless and whole. Yet, from early childhood, society conditions us—instilling beliefs about who we are, what we should be, and how we should behave. Over time, we learn to seek validation from others, shaping our identity through approval and comparison. This deep conditioning clouds our true nature, replacing inner confidence with doubt. The voice of our soul grows faint, and we begin to act more like the goats around us—fearful, uncertain, seeking acceptance.

    The external world we perceive is only a reflection of our inner state. When our inner world is in chaos, the world around us feels threatening. Our thoughts and emotions ripple like waves on a lake, disturbing the stillness within. As Confucius said, the human mind is more unpredictable than nature itself.

    To return to our true nature—the fearless lion within—we must still the mind. Through awareness and meditation, we can observe the restless flow of thoughts and emotions, and gradually reconnect with the deep peace and clarity that lies beneath. A calm mind, like a tranquil lake, reflects reality clearly and completely. If you able to observe the anatomy of the mind, and observe the flow of thoughts you will realize that how our mind is like constantly under the wave/ripples of emotions. You will realize that mediation is the only remedy to bring a still mind

    Meditation is not an escape; it is the only way to rediscover the self we’ve forgotten.

  • Eternal Bliss…I — “The Soul”

    I am a living entity—distinct from the body I inhabit. Just as a person uses a telephone to speak or listen but is not the telephone itself, I, too, use the body as an instrument. I am not the body, but the one who sees through the eyes, hears with the ears, speaks through the mouth, and feels, thinks, and acts. These faculties are tools—I am their master.

    I am the soul (Atma), eternal and immortal. The body is perishable, a temporary vessel given to me for performing actions and experiencing their consequences. I am both the doer and the one who undergoes the outcomes of those deeds.

    Like a driver controls a carriage, I—the soul—am in charge of the body, which serves as my vehicle. The soul is like a diamond; the body, its casket. When the soul departs, the body is declared dead. People say, “The light has gone,” meaning the living essence has left, and the drama has come to an end.

    The mind is the soul’s thinking faculty. It imagines, creates thoughts, and forms ideas. Thoughts give rise to emotions, desires, and sensations. In a moment, the mind can revisit the past, project itself into the future, or reach distant places. It is the mind that navigates moods and internal experiences.

    The intellect is the faculty that evaluates thoughts. It is the center of understanding, judgment, and decision-making—arguably the most vital of all. A refined intellect allows for clarity, deep realization, and sound reasoning. It is through the intellect that we remember, discern, judge, and exercise willpower.