My life has been uniquely blessed by the sheer number of narcissists that have entered into it. A narcissist destroys your self-esteem and manipulates you emotionally. If you feel strong, their first tactic is to make you feel weak. Under that weakness, they have a greater chance to gain control over you. By the sheer …
Here’s a meditation: My greatest friend is the intelligence to find the truth, and my greatest enemy is the ego due to which I reject the truth. This post carries forward the discussion of the last one and describes the harmful effects of the ego, which are primarily two: (a) the ego causes our pleasure …
What we colloquially call the “ego” is a very complex covering of the soul in Vedic philosophy. It comprises four components, namely, (a) the idea that I’m a master called Pradhāna, (b) the desire to exercise mastery in a particular way called Prakṛti, (c) the idea that I possess great qualities called Mahattattva due to …
If you lift a ball in your hand while awake, you feel downward pressure. If you ask a physicist why that is the case, then he will say: This pressure is felt because of Newton’s gravitational law – GM1M2/R2 – where G is the Gravitational constant, M1 and M2 are the masses of Earth and …
It is common to think that a person has a body and a mind. But when groups of people act in concerted ways, it seems that they are a singular body controlled by a mind. How is a random collection of people (who act in individual ways) different from one in which they act as …
I have recently received several questions about Sāñkhya. These include the differences between senses and organs, that between inert matter and a living body, how desires influence perception, how Sāñkhya elements could be understood in analogy to motion, and the relation between yoga and the control of senses and the mind. These are not tightly …
As mental illnesses become prominent in today’s world, and science doesn’t believe in the existence of anything that cannot be sensually perceived, the cure of such illnesses suffers from a conceptual poverty inherited from the legacy of the physical sciences. While the understanding of the mind is receiving renewed focus owing to the growth in …
I used to think that happiness is caused by other people, situations, and things. If only they would just behave, I would be happy. As silly as it sounds, it is indeed a deep-seated belief in each one of us. I have now realized that happiness is a cause rather than an effect. When I …
This post offers some practical advice on how to deal with different kinds of people in this world based on some ideas drawn from Vedic philosophy—namely, divine and demonic natures—which are separated into the upper and lower parts of the universe. In the present world, which lies in between the upper and lower extremes, these …
