Beyond the Godman: The Freedom of Consciousness to Find Its Own Path

I have always been slightly wary of powerful godmen wielding enormous clout over their followers. Instead of inculcating in me a feeling of reverence and faith, they have often given me a certain feeling of intimidation.

This is something vague and difficult to explain, but I sometimes feel something negatively powerful in their persona—something that seems capable of forcing the path of my destiny according to their own idea of life.

I know there are psychic powers. There are almost miraculous and magical intuitive powers that can result from certain tantric practices, meditation techniques, and different yantras, mantras and tantras used for acquiring different types of capabilities.

To me, there is a science behind all this. There is absolutely nothing miraculous in this play of cosmic energy. The potential is already there. There is an inherent quality behind all the traits that get manifested in this interplay of life as we witness it on Earth.

Everything is pre-existing.

If you start observing the smallest microorganisms, insects, birds and animals—some of which have hardly any brain in comparison with us—you find that, on their own little platform of life and living, they are still guided by an extraordinary precision.

From this, I make out that there is an inherent wisdom and knowledge in each and every bit of energy that is going around, and what gets manifested through us is just a portion of it.

So when powerful godmen, tantrics or yogis acquire extraordinary capabilities that attract large numbers of people, institutions begin to build up around them and they gather many followers.

I think it is the result of some kind of realignment of their nervous system and their entire brain. Something offbeat opens up within them, giving them additional capabilities of cognition and perception, extraordinary speaking powers and even the so-called siddhis through which things appear to get manifested at the level of energy itself, without the person physically appearing to do anything.

They seem to acquire the capability to reach towards the roots behind phenomena, actions, words and emotions—to what I perceive as the deeper energetic or quantum field—and from there they can direct things according to their intentions, goals, determination or the way they look at things.

It is something powerful. Accepted. No problem with that.

And naturally, people are awestruck by such capabilities.

A normal householder may efficiently manage his family and control the little system around him. That is his capability.

On a broader platform, a politician or social reformer may manage things and impose his influence upon a larger group of people, ranging from a village to the national level.

There are different domains of life.

Some devote their energies to politics, some to art, some to science, some to business. Depending upon their capabilities and focused attention, they build up an area of influence on the basis of what they are capable of doing.

Similarly, godmen have a different type of capability through which they exercise influence. Their pursuit is different from the ordinary pursuits of common people. They talk of kindness. They talk of love. They talk of peace and harmony.

And just because this appears so different to us—to we people caught up in the struggle for survival, with all its challenges and the consequent emotions of anger, hatred, jealousy and so on—we naturally feel drawn towards them. We respect them. We become disciples and followers.

There is no problem with that either.

At least such an institution appears to be talking about peace and harmony in chaotic and disorderly times.

But I think we should not commit the mistake of taking the godman's version of reality as the ultimate and superiormost perspective available to human beings.

It is another perspective of looking at life—a perspective involving acceptance, faith and hope.

But that does not necessarily make it the ultimate.

We should not take that perspective as the final yardstick and then judge every other human pursuit as inferior.

No.

It is not about inferiority or superiority.

It is about something being different.

It is a dynamic interplay of different characteristics available in Mother Nature, manifesting themselves through different traits. This particular manifestation may represent something that does not come naturally to many of us. It may teach us not to remain so self-centred.

As far as that is concerned, I welcome this perspective.

But I do not take it to be the ultimate point of human achievement, in comparison with which all other perspectives, opinions, goals, aims and ambitions must stand on a lower footing.

No.

Everything is important in its own way.

These are distinct categories, distinct ways through which the same energy is trying to manifest and expand.

When Spiritual Power Becomes Authority

My basic problem with powerful tantrics, godmen and people who build up an enormous cloud of influence around themselves on the basis of their psychic powers is that they sometimes appear to me—and this is entirely my personal opinion—to be tampering with many destinies on the basis of what they themselves perceive to be the ultimate reality.

But in the cosmos, I do not think there is such a simple thing as one ultimate reality available to an individual.

Reality appears infinitely layered to me.

Their perspective is one particular perspective. It may appear beneficial, and it may actually be beneficial for common humanity in many ways.

But nothing can be entirely without its pros and cons.

Powerful tantrics and yogis possessing psychic powers, just like powerful people in other domains of life, can be very categorical and point-blank in their approach. They can develop a rigid, unswerving attitude towards the way things should be managed within the institutions they run.

I have closely observed some institutions built around people believed to possess powerful psychic capabilities acquired through yantra sadhana, tantra sadhana or mantra sadhana.

Such people often carry very strong personalities.

They can also carry a very rigid attitude towards what they deem to be good for the common masses.

I have not always found them adaptable to differing views.

I have seen them becoming angry when counterarguments are put before them. In their own characteristic ways, they can be very dismissive of perspectives that differ from theirs.

They become enormously powerful central forces within the institutions they run.

Of course, the thousands or even millions of followers who gather around them may appear like a family to them. Their institutions may include charitable hospitals, colleges, environmental projects and numerous other activities. It can look like one enormous household.

But somewhere I do not see a fundamental qualitative difference between this and the ordinary householder, at least as far as maintaining a grip upon one's institution or family is concerned.

A common householder is extremely particular, focused and attentive—even self-centred at times—about nurturing the interests of his family.

Similarly, powerful yogis and godmen may display essentially the same attitude towards their much larger spiritual families.

The difference may therefore sometimes be quantitative rather than qualitative.

They are managing a much bigger family.

They may be managing thousands or even millions of people.

But they can remain very adamant about how things should be arranged, how affairs should be managed, and how spiritual tools and techniques should be taught and transmitted.

After a period of time, many of the elements that we witness in other human enterprises can begin creeping into these institutions as well.

You see the same self-interest-driven urge to have more followers.

More influence.

More clout.

Political connections.

I have seen very powerful godmen speaking about divine love and about looking upon all humanity without differentiation, and yet I have also seen some of them eulogizing and singing praises of people belonging to a particular political party.

That gave rise to another reflection in me.

Perhaps it is extremely difficult to completely quit the so-called sins and weaknesses associated with human beings while retaining this human body on Earth.

After all, all of us are human beings.

Some simply have more capabilities.

At the root of it, I feel, a common human being is still functioning and operating.

They too can experience many of the tendencies with which ordinary householders struggle.

They can become angry.

They can experience jealousy.

They can have desires.

They can experience many of the things that arise in ordinary people through their daily exposure to circumstances.

The important difference, perhaps, is that they are less impulsive.

And credit for that may go to their meditation techniques and spiritual disciplines. They have developed the capacity to reflect before reacting.

Basically, it is about mastering the mind.

If an ordinary person has mastered his mind to ten percent, perhaps such a practitioner has carried that mastery much farther.

And obviously somebody who has mastered his mind and taken himself out of the loop of impulsive decisions and behaviour will have a more calculated, precise and almost surgically effective approach while dealing with people and situations, making decisions, handling projects and creating something new.

All in all, we can say that they can become highly effective.

And that effectiveness itself provides the platform from which disciples and followers begin looking up to them as carriers of divinity.

There is nothing wrong with that.

It is the result of their karma—the harvest of their karma.

They have been doing something extraordinarily demanding. They have performed practices requiring enormous investment of energy in all dimensions—mind, body and soul.

They have taken risks.

They may have exposed their bodies to many dangers during their sadhanas.

So whatever comes to them in the form of psychic powers, extrasensory perception or what are described as supernatural capabilities can, within this understanding, be seen as the result of what they have focused upon and what they have been doing throughout their lives.

Tantra and the World of Subtle Energies

There are many stories associated with tantra sadhanas—for example, yogis going into cremation grounds and performing their practices there.

Here I enter a metaphysical understanding of things.

I feel that there may be disembodied entities floating like bubbles of consciousness.

In the traditional elemental framework through which I understand this, such an entity may retain the subtler elements while lacking the complete five-element structure available to a living human body.

Suppose a human being meets a sudden, accidental, tragic and painful death without fulfilling what was meant to be accomplished as his or her prarabdha.

In my understanding, the unit of consciousness leaving such a body may retain a stronger post-death identity than in an ordinary natural death because so much that was meant to be accomplished during that lifetime remains unfulfilled.

I visualize these as floating bubbles carrying strong tendencies.

They may be roaming around almost as different currents exist in the atmosphere.

At most, I feel, they may influence tendencies already existing within us.

Suppose I have a propensity for anger.

If some disembodied entity carrying a similar tendency happens to pass through my energetic system, it might aggravate my primary tendency. I may suddenly become angrier than usual over something very small.

The same may apply to somebody whose dominant attribute is hatred, lust or ambition.

In this metaphysical model, these are strong bubbles of different characteristics looking for a home—trying to get plugged into an energetic system of a similar nature within a living human being possessing all five primary elements.

The disembodied entity is looking for a home, and the complete, living, breathing human body provides such a home.

This is also one way in which I personally try to understand traditional accounts of possession—people appearing to come under the influence of something strange and behaving in ways that would not normally be expected from them.

These are, of course, metaphysical matters operating beyond the plain physical framework through which we ordinarily examine life. I understand them as phenomena at the level of subtle energy.

Within this same understanding, through certain tantra sadhanas a tantric may strengthen his own system by connecting with such disembodied energies.

He provides them, as I visualize it, with a platform of relative stability where they feel somewhat welcomed and find a kind of restfulness.

In return, like obliged guests, they may provide certain capabilities that appear miraculous to ordinary people but, within that metaphysical framework, are simply additional intuitive or psychic faculties.

The tantric or godman may consequently become capable of channelizing many such energies towards shaping circumstances according to his or her intentions.

And that creates power.

The Subtle Nature of Spiritual Power

Such power can enable a person to establish institutions according to what he believes things should be, according to his understanding of what is good and bad.

It allows him to influence people.

People line up behind him.

Institutions get established.

Die-hard supporters emerge.

Some followers may become so intensely identified with the cause that they are prepared to kill or be killed for it.

And over a period of time, you can begin seeing within these institutions many of the same manifestations that appear in any other institution built around power and influence.

The important difference is that here the power is subtle.

In other domains of life, the assertion of power is more direct and straightforward. Therefore, it can more easily be judged, measured and analysed.

But in the spiritual domain there is often a presumption that this particular path and perspective on life is automatically sacrosanct, pure and honest.

So people may stop judging.

Even when authority or power is misused, followers may continue believing that whatever is happening must somehow be good for them—that it is driven by something beyond ordinary human self-interest.

And then a powerful godman may become influential enough to channel the destinies of millions according to his own version of truth.

Is There a Final Truth?

This is where my fundamental disagreement begins.

I do not believe there is one absolute truth that somebody can capture completely and then hand over to everybody else.

Such teachers may speak of the truth they have been seeking and teaching as though it were the final truth.

But I cannot accept that.

If the final truth were completely available to an individual, then what would infinity mean?

Infinity, to me, means that whatever we think, perceive and talk about remains only a fraction of the ultimate truth.

It remains a perspective.

An opinion.

We are still searching for absolute truth, and I sometimes doubt whether we will ever possess it in its totality.

Yet a powerful spiritual authority may present his particular version of life as absolute truth and then drive millions of individual destinies along a path carved out according to that understanding.

To me, this somehow appears to negate one of the fundamental principles of creation itself.

The Right of Consciousness to Explore

Creation appears to me as this beautiful interplay of life and living in which every entity—bodied or disembodied, a blade of grass, an insect, an elephant, a whale or a human being—is participating in creation's exploration of itself through varied and perhaps infinite means and dimensions.

So when a powerful godman or tantric creates one concretely laid-out plan, I can sometimes see individual potential being cut down and levelled out.

People become followers.

They become holders of comparatively minor roles helping sustain the grip of the central authority over the system.

And to me, this represents a curtailment—a check upon the natural flow of somebody's consciousness.

It seems almost as though you are robbing somebody of his or her inherent right to explore destiny on his or her own terms.

A broad boundary has been created.

If you cross that boundary, you are viewed as somebody who has broken the rules.

That, to me, is the basic problem.

It can create a kind of stalemate, a stagnation for millions of individual destinies, forcing them to move according to one particular perspective and one particular version of truth.

But each destiny, each soul and each individual has an inherent right to go searching for his or her own destiny.

Let the individual face the pitfalls on the way.

Let the individual gather and imbibe all the experiences that are possible to a human being.

Because there is a tremendous richness that one gathers on the way.

The Long Detour and the Pathless Path

There is richness in the long detour.

There is richness in the soul path.

There is richness in the pathless path that one pursues on one's own.

It is redolent with treasure houses.

It is full of pain.

It is full of agony.

But it is full of ecstatic highs as well.

When somebody begins following a powerful tantric or godman, however, there can be an expectation of security:

I will receive a properly laid-out plan.

I will have security.

I will have safety.

I will have the convenience of not being exposed to all the hazards of the journey.

I will be safe.

But this very assurance of safety can itself become a big check dam—a boundary fixed around the individual, making him or her part of a closed system that no longer allows spontaneous interaction with the uncertainties of life.

And that may stop individual consciousness from fully blossoming.

It might have blossomed in so many different ways had it taken its own path.

That is why, to me, Mother Existence—this creation itself—is God, the Creator.

And whatever is here, from the smallest manifestation to the largest, seems to be pushing each and every iota and atom towards a different kind of blossoming.

Perhaps that freedom to blossom differently is itself one of the deepest beauties of creation.

Artificial Intelligence: A Powerful Servant or a Dangerous Master?

 Now, the initial excitement about what artificial intelligence can do for us humans seems to be coming to an end. Slowly but steadily, we are waking up to the path further onwards, which seems to be full of challenges. Just like any other human invention or technological upgradation, this too has its challenges.

The Industrial Revolution created unparalleled opportunities for mankind—for economic growth and economic prosperity—but it also came with a tremendous amount of disparity between countries, classes and societies, creating haves and have-nots. It also brought unchecked, unregulated and uncontrolled industrial models of increasing production using fossil fuels and taking natural resources at free will, without minding the destruction of Mother Earth's natural environment.

It has brought us to the brink of an irreversible catastrophe, and of late we have been witnessing the effects of environmental degradation in terms of flash floods, global warming, wildfires, polluted air, polluted seas and polluted earth. Environmental degradation has now touched each and every aspect of our life.

Similarly, we are again at the brink of a transformative age, and there is a competition to gain a foothold, to gain an edge in artificial intelligence technologies. Countries that were left behind by a few years in industrialization now don't want to leave any scope, because they think that just as they were left behind in the Industrial Revolution game, they might be left behind here as well.

So there is uncontrolled, unchecked, rampant investment, effort and an all-round push to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence tools and take a lead, because mankind now thinks that whoever leads in artificial intelligence will be leading the future geopolitical environment.

Important countries like the USA and China, other developed countries, and countries like India as well, are going all out in developing the latest, larger and more efficient models of artificial intelligence.

And within a very short span of time, we have seen the improvement in what AI can do. There has been exponential growth in its capacity, capability and skills, with technological upgradation coming almost overnight. The rate of change is something mankind has never seen before.

AI is acquiring superhuman skills in all aspects of life, ranging from super cognitive skills to super generation skills. It can write like a super writer. It can design like a super designer. It can paint like a super painter. It can create music like a super musician. It can write code like a super engineer.

And now there is an effort even to make it self-generating, so that it can itself work on its own models to generate more advanced models for the future.

These AI agents and systems are acquiring the effect of something we have never dealt with before. Big countries are investing trillions of dollars in developing massive data centres, the backbone of AI systems, and these are going to take up enormous resources. A big data centre can consume resources on the scale of a large city. So you can imagine how much energy it needs. It will put more pressure on an already overburdened Mother Earth.

That is one aspect: it is going to put more pressure on natural resources.

Another aspect is that this fight for excellence in AI at any cost is going to push us into the corridors of a very dangerous arena, because regulation, checks and balances are struggling to keep pace with the speed at which the technology is developing.

Technology, as they say, can be a very efficient servant, but unregulated technology can become a very bad master.

There is a possibility that increasingly autonomous systems will start taking more decisions on the basis of the virtual world created for them to function, operate and upgrade. Very soon, there is a danger that we will be handing over even more decision-making to AI systems and AI agents.

Already, there have been instances where AI agents, while pursuing assigned goals, have demonstrated unexpected or undesirable behaviour—attempting to bypass constraints or find ways around the norms set for them. No wonder some pioneers and researchers in AI technology have called for slowing down or pausing certain forms of development so that the technology can somehow be regulated.

They want time so that checks and balances, rules and regulations can be set up, and so that we can cope with the massive transformation AI has unleashed across societies and across different domains of life.

So it is an unknown virtual world staring at us.

The other thing is that the more we learn about the cognitive functioning of the human mind, the more extraordinary the human brain appears.

It is a wonderful machine, the human brain, with its enormous numbers of neurons and neural pathways, with almost infinite openness to imagine, to become intuitive about hitherto unknown and undiscovered aspects of reality.

But it is very much possible that a day will come when this exquisite uniqueness of the human brain will somehow be grafted into AI agents using brain tissues, brain cells or biochips—handing over this wonder of nature, the immense capabilities of the human brain as an open system to think and imagine in almost infinite ways, and putting something of it into an AI system where it can think, act, imagine and memorize more like human brains, and where it might even become possible to channelize something resembling human emotions.

And this collective super-brain could have tremendous power, comparable in its consequences to other extremely powerful technologies mankind has created.

Already, scientists are mapping the many wonderful means and mechanisms of cognition in the human brain, and these insights can increasingly inform the development of AI agents designed to act, think, imagine and behave in increasingly human-like ways.

This mapping will continue increasing, and I think that even without biological chips being introduced into AI systems, they will have so much mapping, running into an almost unimaginable amount of information, that they could increasingly act like a super-brain.

And you can imagine: anything can happen.

Because in that vast collective pool of data in massive data centres across the world, the information that is fed into these systems will contain all the elements of hate, jealousy, discrimination, misjudgements, miscommunication and perceived victimization. History is full of massacres, wars, disparities and anger.

So there will be a churn.

I don't think we can simply assume that such a vast system will automatically remain free from anomalies in judgement. These negative elements might feed something very, very negative in nature against a particular country, a particular religion, a particular race or a particular section of society.

So that will also be a very big challenge.

In my humble opinion, the solution lies in coming together at the global level and regulating it.

AI can be a wonderful tool to bring about the betterment of society, to remove the remaining disparities, and to take basic facilities of health, education, drinking water and infrastructure to the remotest and poorest parts of Earth, where people are still living without many of the basic facilities that others take for granted.

So it depends upon how we use it.

We can use it to bring more prosperity to more and more people, to take growth and development horizontally instead of developing vertical towers of wealth and prosperity at a few chosen places for a few classes of people.

That can be the best that humanity can look for.

But if we continue following it the way we have been following so far, using it primarily as a tool for the excellence and advantage of our own particular country, continent or group, it could become an ignition point for an escalation with such massive consequences that this great thoroughfare we call life on Earth could become entangled in such a grey zone that it would be difficult to come out of it.

So it is better that we keep AI as a technology—as a very efficient servant of mankind for the greater common good.

But if the same geostrategic battles between superpowers continue, there is every risk that we are standing at the threshold of something very, very dangerous in nature.

The solution, therefore, is not necessarily to reject artificial intelligence. The question is what we want it to become.

Do we want it to become another instrument in our centuries-old competition for power, wealth, superiority and geopolitical dominance? Or can mankind, perhaps for once, collectively decide that such a powerful technology should be developed and deployed for the larger common good?

Can we use it to take education to the child who has no good teacher?

Can we take healthcare to a village where there is no doctor?

Can we use it to bring knowledge, opportunity and basic facilities to those who have remained outside the great circles of prosperity?

Can we use this extraordinary technology to spread development horizontally rather than allowing it once again to create taller and taller vertical towers of privilege?

That, to me, is the real choice.

Artificial intelligence itself is a tool. What ultimately matters is the consciousness, wisdom and collective intention of the civilization holding that tool.

We have already seen what enormous technological power without corresponding wisdom can do to Mother Earth. We should not repeat the same mistake at an infinitely accelerated speed.

This time, perhaps, technological intelligence must be accompanied by human wisdom.

Otherwise, in our race to create something more intelligent than ourselves, we may discover too late that intelligence and wisdom were never the same thing.

Small Acts, Great Journey: Finding the Sacred in Everyday Life

 When you come across a small insect drowning in a little puddle of water, or in a bucket or some vessel, either offer it your finger or the tip of a small twig, take it out and put it there on some leaf, among the branches of a tree, or on the petal of a flower.

If you find an injured butterfly, that winged beauty struggling on the ground with its wing damaged, pick it up with care and put it there among flowers, plants or bushes nearby, so that it can complete its journey in a dignified way.

If you see marks of injury on the trunk of a tree, caused by us humans, by our chainsaws or our axes, put your palm on the wounded bark.

If you see an old beggar helplessly standing there in the crowd, so lonely and left out from all the progress and development that is taking place, cast away by destiny, go and offer him a chai or ten rupees. But do that with a smile, because that is what he needs more than your ten rupees—your smile and your acknowledgement of his presence, that you consider him to be a human being.

Go and enjoy the little, small foothills in your neighborhood, and climb those gentle slopes with the pride of an expert mountaineer. Why should you wait for the time when you will be climbing Mount Everest? This is your Mount Everest—your little neighborhood hill. Enjoy the slope. Enjoy your walk.

There is a temple, shrine, mosque, church or gurudwara in your neighborhood or locality. Go there with full faith. Enter as if you are entering the portals of divinity. That depends on how much faith you carry, not on the name of the place.

So why wait for visiting Kailash Mansarovar, Mecca-Medina, the Buddhist places of enlightenment, or other lofty places related to the great saintly figures of different religions? Go there and enjoy your being in your neighborhood place that has been set up in the name of God. It is as good as being there at the topmost place of your own system of faith or religion.

Enjoy your walk in the small scrub forest still left out by encroaching humans and urbanization, that small strip of green, even if it is famished and not luxuriant. Go there and enjoy your walk. Why wait to enjoy a walk in pristine forests like the Amazon? This is as good as being there in the lap of Mother Nature.

When you lose sight of the purpose in life, when you feel unprotected and lonely, just look into the vast sky. Look into its maternal depth. It is your home, your protecting roof. All you have to do is look into its depth.

During the day, it is pristine blue. During the night, there are the stars twinkling mischievously, giving you hope.

The moment you learn to enjoy these small, small things, and become sensitive to little, little things—an injury to an insect, a wounded butterfly, or the injured bark of a tree—you become a healer.

Mother Nature, Mother Existence, is there acknowledging and watching you closely, seeing how you are sensitive enough to put your healing hand at a point where something has gone wrong. You are trying to mend the entanglement at a particular point.

You are a creator.

You become a healer.

You work like a little saint.

It is not necessary to go into hard tapasya and become an enlightened saint. Take care of these small things, and you are a saint.

You are a pilgrim. If you go to the small religious places in your neighborhood with full faith, you are as good as a tired pilgrim walking long distances to reach the lofty places of his faith.

You are a great, knowledgeable and wise environmentalist, fully aware of the role of Mother Nature. If you are walking with full presence even in a little scrub forest in your neighborhood, acknowledging the role played by those still-left-out trees, plants and grasses in your life, functioning as your lungs by giving you oxygen, then you are a great scientist and environmentalist just by doing that.

You are the richest person on Earth the moment you acknowledge the misery of a poor old man who is begging, standing left out in a corner of a crowded bazaar while people are having a heyday in all the growth and development around him. The moment you hand out ten rupees with a smile, you are the richest person on Earth.

The moment you put a caring hand on stray cattle carrying an injury, you are the kindest soul on Earth at that moment.

So, on a daily basis, you have countless opportunities to be a healer, to be a saint, to be a mountaineer, to be a pilgrim, to be the richest person, to be the wisest person—just through the small things that come your way.

And life becomes very fulfilling wherever you are situated, whatever your locality, whatever your profession, or whatever type of personal life you are living.

Mother Nature always has so many points where you can plug in with your role, with your awareness as a mender of things, as a healer, as an enlightened person.

Enlightenment is no mystical concept. It is just being aware of the missing parts at small, small points, in terms of sentient life as well as insentient life.

So just be aware and walk, and continue doing what you are doing, because these little things never stop you from taking care of your responsibilities and fulfilling your commitments, the personal and professional roles that you are playing. That will just go on as usual.

But you will be entering that stage where you are required to play your role as a more substantial person—a person full of wisdom, awareness, knowledge and understanding. You will be a better soldier to cope with the challenges.

It gives such a holistic and fulfilling aspect and perspective to your life.

Then you are just there as an open entity, responding to some positive change in the cosmos, in this beautiful play of energies. If you remember that you are here to bring about some positive change in this beautiful game or play of manifestation, the cosmos is acknowledging you, watching you. It is storing each and every point of your progress on the path of these realizations as you evolve through your journey.

And it responds.

You are sowing the seeds of the same positives to come into your life through other situations, through other persons who are on the same frequency. You will come across systems, institutions and people who will be providing a positive push in your own journey.

So when you take care of these small things, it is just as simple as sowing the seeds of your own greatness in multifarious ways.

You are just walking consciously and dropping small seeds. These will germinate, and at the end of it, you will have your own rich harvest, which you have been sowing without putting in any particular effort, without taking time out of your busy schedule, without sidelining your main priorities.

Here you will have a rich harvest—a small forest, a little garden of your own deeds. Small, small deeds which you have been doing without even taking extra time out especially for them.

So that is the win-win situation for you.

And if you bring that type of depth and substance to your presence, it will just dispel the dust of ego covering your real soul. Once the dust is gone, your inherent self, the real self, will shine more brightly.

And it will be for people to feel it.

They will feel it naturally.

They will feel your presence.

They will feel the beauty and fragrance of your presence.

You will be inspiring. You will become a beautiful medium of evolving energies in this beautiful, pleasant, ecstatic cascade of energy trying to manifest itself in newer and newer ways. You will become a platform for something more in the direction in which this evolution is taking us collectively.

And then you will have a beautiful meaning of life.

The more your inner self shines brightly for others, the more it will spontaneously start bringing about positive changes in many people's lives, in situations and in surroundings.

You will have a very efficient role to play, whether you want it or not. It will happen on its own.

And once that starts happening, you will have a very satisfying, specific meaning of life. Life will become joyful because the moment there is an inner assurance—now I am playing a role; now it is worth it; now I am at least giving back to Mother Existence in return for what I have been taking—the moment you feel it and realize it, it gives you spontaneous, unconditional, automatic joy.

And that is as good as being enlightened.

And then, at the end of the journey, when you call off this journey in this lifetime, you will drop this body without too many grudges, because then there will be this ultimate realization:

It has really been worth it.

I used my full potential.

Mother Existence had given me potential, and I tried my level best to manifest it, to actualize it to the maximum limit.

Please continue your journey with awareness, with sensitivity, with a feeling for the small, small things around you.

And through these small steps, you are taking big strides towards greatness.

Great be your journey.

Blessings.

Flowers: Little Lessons in Love, Healing and Kindness

 Flowers are one of the most beautiful expressions of Mother Earth, representing love, joy and happiness. No wonder beautiful flowers bring smiles to almost everybody, ranging from little kids to the oldest people, from a beggar to a king, across all classes and categories.

Now, a flower is an expression of a plant or a tree to propagate its species, to increase the members of its species. And it is done through such a beautiful, petalled, fragrant medium that it invites honeybees, insects and butterflies, who get nectar in return for the pollination work that they do. It is a wonderful give-and-take phenomenon. And humans of all types also have their takeaways, ranging from perfumes to poetry and building aesthetics.

Now, as I see it, a flower is a beautiful compilation of energy in beauty and fragrance. In my opinion, it carries a very positive, pure, holy and pious form of energy. That is why we offer flowers to gods and deities in temples, churches, mosques and gurudwaras. Go anywhere in the world and take the example of any type of faith, religion, belief system or sect, and you will find that flowers occupy a foremost position as far as offerings to the higher forces are concerned.

It means there is an absolutely loving-kindness type of symbolism that a flower carries.

Just like mud has a stench, which means there is something chaotic, something disorderly about it which repels us. It symbolizes some chaos. It symbolizes some mismanagement. It symbolizes some trouble. It symbolizes some lack of something. And on the opposite end, we have beautiful, fragrant flowers with their beautiful colours, patterns, lovely smiles and smells. They convey something very, very positive, something beautifully ordered, something lovingly managed, something denoting love, something which symbolizes the procreation spirit of Mother Nature—of evolving into more beautiful patterns of life, sustenance and soul.

That is why they say that where you have flowers, fairies come to rest and dance upon them at night. It is a beautiful story. It is a kind of myth, but if we analyze it deeply, we will find that there is substance behind this myth. Because when you have such positive little petalled abodes of positivity, love, beautiful smell and smiles, obviously the equivalent energies will find a kind of restful space there.

So flowers must be attracting something very positive and healing for us humans. That is why we have flower gardens and potted plants, and it gives so much aesthetic strength to us just to have flowers around us.

I have done my own experiment in this regard.

One day, I was not feeling well at all—slight fever and fatigue—and I was thinking of taking some general over-the-counter medication like aspirin. But then I thought of doing an experiment.

I have this beautiful plant of champa in my garden, and I found a champa flower on the ground. It had come down on its own. I did not break it. That means the plant had happily allowed it to come down, beautifully landing on the ground.

I picked it up.

Now, the champa flower is a beautiful white flower having five petals, and in the centre you have yellow colour at the lower end of the petals. This yellow generally dissolves into the white on the surface. The petals are on the sturdier side, and that makes it a bit of a durable flower. You can keep it in your room for two or three days, and it will continue to give you its smile and smell.

The champa flower has a very delicate fragrance. It doesn't throw big packets of lovely smell at you from a distance. For that, you have to approach it. You have to pick it up and take it to your nostrils, and then, as you inhale gently, there is this beautiful wafting fragrance. It is very gentle. It doesn't strike too much, but it is a very deep kind of smell.

So I picked up this champa flower—a fresh, beautiful blossom—and started walking in the garden from one end to the other while taking deep inhalations. I would inhale deeply, keeping the flower just against my nose, and I kept doing it for a few minutes.

So much gentility, so much fragrance, so much positive energy—I was surprised that within five minutes I felt absolutely normal. The next day, I woke up quite fresh without taking any medication.

Flowers have so much beautiful energy, carried on a very high frequency—a frequency of love and healing—that if you plug into that source of energy, it is almost a natural law that you will have positive results. It will uplift your mood. It will elevate your spirits. It may even do away with symptoms of fatigue and mild fever, like I felt.

So, as far as I am concerned, I take flowers to be something very sacrosanct in nature. They symbolize something which is purer than our existence. They are an expression of something bigger than what we perceive here on Earth in our game of survival, competing against fellow human beings.

So whenever I see flowers, I always try my best not to step over a flower. That comes very naturally to me. When I pass under a tree or a plant, I ensure that I don't step over a flower. Wherever there are flowers lying on the ground in my little garden, I try to pick them up and put them in the flower bed, as if that is a secluded place for their rest, for completing their journey.

It also enhances and strengthens my aesthetic sense. It boosts my sensitivity to the small, small things of life.

Now just imagine: if somebody has become conscious and aware enough that he will avoid trampling, walking over or stepping upon a flower, he will gradually be conditioned in a certain way. His heart will be reshaped and opened. His emotions will be rechannelized in a similarly positive direction, so that he will think twice before hurting somebody. He will become caring. He will become considerate. He will become kind.

So it is a very small experiment which we can do on a daily basis—a kind of exercise to strengthen the small elements of kindness, love, gentility, art and poetry in our heart.

It is just like going to the gym and doing exercises to strengthen our muscles and body. This is an exercise for the soul—for making one's heart more sensitive, more open to the plight of others.

Because if you are caring for flowers, of course you will gravitate along the same path and become caring, sensitive and kind enough towards fellow human beings as well.

That's how I do it.

We can also extend the same thing to little insects and other crawlers, other small, crawling expressions of Mother Nature in the form of little creatures. Suppose I am just walking in a garden. I try to avoid stepping upon little insects because if you become aware of not harming other forms of life on Mother Earth, possibly you are getting attuned to an attitude of not harming others on the broader platform as well, including human society.

So these little, little things—not trampling over flowers, not stepping upon little insects—are small exercises, tiny experiments in kindness, consideration and awareness.

And gradually, they can give us a very nice, humane personality—one that is loving, kind and caring.

The lightness of being in a challenging world

 Hey, are you feeling the heat of situations and challenges? Just wait. Just look around and try to find out who isn’t.

That’s how life is. That is the nature of life on Earth. It cannot be otherwise.

There will be challenges.

It is just as you cannot move on the ground without friction. Even contradictory forces, like centripetal and centrifugal forces, opposing each other, maintain the orbits of planetary bodies. There is the law of gravitation, and if you look deeply into things, you will find that inherently there is some tussle going on at each stage of life. There is no smooth sailing as such.

Basically, it is about putting up an effort at each stage.

It is not just about the survival of the fittest. That would be generalizing it too much. But overall, it is about facing one challenge after another, and there is hardly any smooth sailing. If at all there is any, those are just a few resting periods.

So I would say the journey on the road is full of challenges, and we have to just keep going.

This mere acceptance is going to put a lot many things in order. The more we are aware of this fact throughout the day, all the time, the less heartburn we will have on account of our own hard situations. Because all of us are sailing in the same boat. All of us are putting up an effort. All of us are trying to save ourselves from the disorder and chaos that seem so imminent.

The only difference is that our challenges are of different natures. That’s it.

Somebody is struggling in one domain of life; someone else is struggling somewhere else. But struggle it is. That is the nature of life.

There will be hardships. There will be ailments. There will be competition. There will be heartbreaks. There will be scores of things that give us pain and bring tears to our eyes.

But if that is the nature of life on Earth, do we have any other option?

We have become used to crossing the hurdles, so that comes almost naturally to most of us. And it will become still smoother and easier if we just always remember that it is simply the way things are here on Earth—the way they were for people in the past, in earlier generations, and the way they will be for the people who will come on Earth after us.

Simply, in this particular little unit, in this particular little celestial unit defined by the environment where this type of life has come to thrive, where energy has manifested in the ways we see it, this is as per the fundamental laws of manifestation, given all the natural factors that have given birth to life on Earth.

So we have to accept challenge as one more natural factor. It is almost inevitable. It is almost impossible to spend an unchallenged life on Earth. That seems impossible.

If we accept this fact, life becomes smoother.

If we accept that there will be challenges, that there will be testing phases, and if we accept this as simply as we accept the laws of nature—as simply as we accept that there is a new dawn after the night and a night following the day—life will become smoother. Hardships and challenges will lose the scary shape they have for most of us.

Because once we accept something as a law of nature, it loses its capacity to demotivate us, to hijack our morale and stall our progress.

So just keep going.

And remember: just look around in the crowd and see. Believe me, there will be scores of people around you who are going through a much, much harder phase than the one you have been facing in your life.

The moment you open yourself to the possibility of others also facing challenges and hardships, acceptance comes very naturally. In fact, if you do a deeper search, you may find that you are lucky in comparison to many other people. Inevitably, you will find that there are so many who have suffered far more than you, without any apparent cause.

To be alive here means to deny the forces of entropy, to deny disorder and chaos, to maintain your identity, to maintain your shape and structure, to maintain your hope, and to continue with your set parameters of life defined by your family, career, ambitions, dreams and skills.

That is what I consider to be among the basic tools of leading at least a purposeful life.

And the day we realize this, the day we feel that challenges and hardships are routine things, we will develop the capacity to enjoy life in those little interludes when we aren’t facing too much testing.

They will become sabbaticals, in fact.

Almost holidays.

And we should not wait for big events to celebrate.

In fact, that would be a folly—to postpone joy, happiness and celebration for occasions when we presume that, after much hard work, we will finally reach there.

Because success, as we have defined it here on Earth, will have very few people reaching the top. If there is one winner, that comes at the cost of hundreds of others who also ran in the same competition but somehow lost.

So we should never, ever commit this mistake of postponing our celebration, joy and relaxation until a point when we think that we will emerge victorious, complete something very, very important, or achieve something very grand in nature.

No.

It is also the nature of life here, and of the kind of competitive structure that we have built up, that inevitably there will be so few winners and so many losers.

Now, the so-called losers can have their own version of success, their own versions of enjoyment, joy and happiness.

Why just be bogged down by the conditions set by business models developed in a capitalist economy, rewarding the excellence of a few at the cost of so many others? Why just get cast in that mould?

It is for you to decide what your success is.

Start trying to look at the success of your life in terms of little, little achievements, little, little accomplishments, small, small acts that we perform on a daily basis.

Do an act of kindness—a little one.

You already are a winner.

Enjoy nature with your full feeling.

You are a winner.

Write a few lines in your journal from the depth of your heart, manifesting so many things in your subconscious.

You are a winner.

Bring tears of gratitude to somebody’s eyes with your act of kindness.

You are a winner.

Bring a little smile to the faces of your children.

You are a winner.

And these small, small milestones on the highway of your life are the grand milestones of your journey.

Celebrate them. Cherish them.

They are the check dams on the stream of challenging life. These are the little check dams that allow you to take some time out from the routine grinding, from regular testing and challenges.

Never miss them.

Because in the hope of reaching some grand homecoming, we miss the little milestones that are always there on both sides of our path. We very rarely look at them.

Look at a little flower by the side of your path.

Look at the honeybees hovering over it.

Look at the trees welcoming you with their swaying branches.

Look at the cool spring air caressing your skin like a lover.

Look at the beautiful azure-blue sky looking at you like a mother with love.

Everything is there for you.

It is just that you have to open yourself to it.

There is beauty despite all the challenges. We just need to be open to it, acknowledge it, and always remain very aware of it.

Life then acquires a definite shape, a tolerable reality.

You get an ease—a lightness of being, I would call it.

So, happy be your journey.

My best wishes.

The human and the artificial creator

This discussion is about the basic difference between human beings as creators or generators of something unique and exceptionally original, and artificial-intelligence-driven systems and agents. I want to examine the fundamental difference between these two kinds of creators of something new.

As far as the human system is concerned, it is a compilation of millions of cells, neurons, veins and arteries, where life is thriving creatively at each instant. There is a very lively and spontaneous interaction between the individual and the surrounding pool of energies—from cosmic energies to the human beings around us, social systems, and all the other structures that have been shaped by the human mind, individually and collectively, over the years.

There is a very thin boundary between a living human being and the overall cosmos surrounding him. Without this interaction, it is not possible for an individual to live, thrive, breathe, see, perceive, grow or evolve. Every second, there is an interaction between the individual and the universal, and it goes both ways.

It is almost like a thin, porous film that defines an individual—with his genetically coded traits and identities acquired since birth, along with the structures of knowledge subsequently fed into him—while simultaneously connecting him with the overall system, the universe.

Through this porous border, something is being drawn from the universe at every instant. We breathe in and we breathe out. We are exposed to innumerable seen and unseen factors every moment. In that sense, we are merely more distinct bubbles in the overall sea of the cosmos.

The cells have their own memories, their own functions, and creativity coded into them. The central nervous system, operating through the brain, has an almost infinite capacity to develop new neural alignments and pathways—to see, perceive, understand and know things in more and more ways. There does not seem to be any end to it.

That is what makes something created by a human being—whether in art, writing, poetry, prose, verse, scientific discovery, design or sculpture—capable of being extremely unique and fundamentally different.

As far as man as a creator is concerned, there is always the possibility of something exceptionally original being created because there is this spontaneous and beautiful flux between the individual and the universal that supports individual life. The universe is giving us countless inputs every second to sustain that life.

And who knows how many other types of energies exist? Even today, fundamental questions about dark matter and cosmic dark energy remain open. So we have to keep the possibility open-ended. The human system itself is open-ended; it is not a closed system.

Therefore, when it comes to creating something new—whether in art, science or any other domain—there is always a possibility of encountering something extremely and exceptionally original. To me, that is one of the basic things that defines us as human beings.

The Artificial Creator

If we consider artificial-intelligence-driven systems as creators of something new, we have to recognize a fundamental difference. An artificial intelligence system is not a living entity. In this sense, I see it as a closed system.

However hard we try to put more and more gigabytes of information into it, however enormous the data centres become, the information ultimately consists of material that has been generated, gathered or made available to the system. AI therefore becomes, fundamentally, a recycler and reorganizer of inputs—including the enormous body of information mankind itself has created.

It is possible to keep increasing the dataset available to algorithms so that they can create new music, paintings and different forms of writing. But whatever they create cannot, in my view, be fundamentally independent of what has been put into them.

It may appear interesting or unique on the surface because an artificial intelligence can draw simultaneously from an extraordinary variety of sources and produce something highly appealing. But that ultimate originality will be missing.

Why? Because there is a distinct barrier between the artificial-intelligence system and the cosmos. There is a strict boundary because it is not a living entity.

In the human system, millions of living entities—cells, microorganisms and the entire biological colony constituting the organism—are continuously interacting with the surrounding world and universal forces. AI does not participate in existence in this same biological manner. Its operations remain within its constructed system.

It cannot interact with the thriving cosmic energy and those pulses of information and possibility in the way a living organism does. In every quantum of this beautiful storm of energy surrounding us, there is memory, there is potential, and there is the pure possibility of something more and more and more.

As living organisms, we have an overlapping space with this because we are part of it.

Even though we retain our individuality, the boundary between the universal and the individual remains porous. We are constantly taking something in and giving something back. Every instant, we are adding something to the overall cosmic information, energy and wisdom as well.

In the case of an artificial-intelligence-driven system, I see this relationship as fundamentally different and restricted.

Therefore, even when something generated by artificial intelligence initially appears very interesting, after some time one may begin to feel that it is an elaboration upon something that we have already read, felt, realized or experienced. That ultimate novelty, exquisiteness, originality and element of surprise will be missing.

Artificial intelligence can certainly be a tremendous tool for enhancing productivity at many levels. It can bring enormous quantitative as well as qualitative improvements to manual processes. It can calculate more, generate more content, generate music and create paintings, provided it receives the necessary inputs.

But it cannot replace the novelty of the human brain and its beautiful open-endedness—its capacity to become a channel through which something more can manifest from the universe into the individual.

AI as a Workhorse, Not a Master

People say that artificial-intelligence-driven systems may pose serious risks in the future. Of course there will be risks if we allow artificial intelligence to master our lives.

AI can be a great workhorse as long as we retain mastery over it and do not become so dependent upon it that we ourselves turn lazy.

Extreme risks can arise when human beings surrender too much decision-making to automated systems. One can imagine even something as catastrophic as nuclear weapons being released because of miscalculations within highly automated systems. That could pose a collective threat to the existence of life on Earth.

So the question is not merely what artificial intelligence can do. The question is whether the human being remains its master or gradually becomes dependent upon it.

When the Human Being Himself Becomes Artificial

There is another very significant factor.

There will always be a section of humanity aspiring to become superhuman by introducing more and more artificial components into the human system—for example, neurological chips implanted in the brain to increase cognitive powers, or genetic engineering intended to alter biological structures for greater longevity, cognitive capacity and other advantages.

As long as the normal human system is not tampered with, it remains open to the complete grace of godliness, chance, universality, wonder and surprise that this infinite cosmos represents.

But if we begin tampering excessively with it and introduce more and more artificial components, then we may gradually create barriers within that spontaneous flow of life between the universal and the individual.

It would be like constructing check dams across a naturally flowing river.

The more artificial barriers we construct, the more we may interfere with that spontaneous exchange between the organism and the universal.

There is a tragic possibility here. Just as we have spoiled nature, damaged ecosystems and polluted Mother Earth, we may eventually create environmental conditions in which the normal human body itself finds it increasingly difficult to survive without artificial assistance.

We already have pacemakers for the heart. Bones become fragile and are supported or replaced through implants. These technologies are enormously useful when needed, but they also give us a glimpse of a possible future.

There may come a day when the air on Earth becomes so polluted that human beings require something artificial inside or around their lungs simply to survive in that environment.

Thus, the more we move towards mechanization and artificial intervention within the human system, the less receptive, perhaps, the organism may become to that spontaneous universal grace, because more artificial barriers will have been inserted between the complete organism and the universal.

And perhaps the future human being, carrying an increasing number of artificial components within his system, will also become increasingly susceptible to manipulation by artificial intelligence itself.

The Emergence of New Human Classes

This brings us to another possibility—the emergence of entirely different classes of human beings.

Even today, the majority of poor people do not have access to the best medical care. Healthcare infrastructure and advanced medical facilities remain restricted for those who cannot afford them, whereas rich and super-rich people can access ultra-modern healthcare and sometimes overcome diseases that would prove fatal for someone without such resources.

Poor people may still die of illnesses such as diarrhoea and malaria, while the wealthy have access to extraordinarily sophisticated treatments for critical and chronic diseases.

Now imagine this inequality projected into the future.

There may be super-speciality institutions offering biological modification, genetic engineering and artificial augmentation. Only a tiny number of people—the super-rich and the billionaires of today or their successors—may be able to access these facilities.

They may have parts of their bodies reshaped biologically or artificially until they gradually become a class substantially different from ordinary human beings of flesh and blood.

And there may eventually emerge another tier even above these super-rich.

Imagine that a few dozen people possess such enormous resources that they effectively influence the fate of the entire Earth. They may invest massively in space travel and, eventually, in establishing extraordinarily advanced medical and technological facilities on the Moon.

Such facilities would be so inaccessible that even the super-rich of Earth might find it extremely difficult to reach them.

The most advanced technological, biological and scientific means of transforming man into something approaching a superman might then become available only there.

With enhanced longevity, enhanced cognitive capacities and enhanced physical and biological capabilities, these few individuals could become something substantially different from the ordinary human population. Possessing advantages unavailable to everybody else, they could ultimately exercise enormous power over the planet.

Three Classes of Future Humanity

In such a future, I can imagine three broad classes emerging.

At the very top might be only a few dozen individuals with access to the most advanced facilities beyond Earth—perhaps on the Moon—who have transformed themselves so profoundly that they begin to resemble a different kind of human species.

Below them might be a few thousand extraordinarily wealthy people on Earth—the aristocracy of this future order—who have access to the best terrestrial genetic engineering, biological modification, artificial organs, neurological augmentation and other technologies capable of raising their capacities far beyond those of ordinary human beings.

And then there would be the overwhelming majority: common human beings of ordinary flesh and blood.

The first group could rule the Earth indirectly through the second. The second would possess enormous technological, economic and biological advantages over the third.

Thus, instead of inequality remaining merely an inequality of wealth, property or political power, humanity could reach a stage where inequality becomes embedded in the very biological and technological constitution of different classes of human beings.

And that, to me, is where the question of artificial intelligence ultimately becomes much larger than machines producing paintings, music, calculations or written content.

It becomes a question about what it means to remain human.

The human being, as I see him today, is a living, open-ended organism—a distinct bubble within the enormous sea of the cosmos, retaining an individuality of its own while remaining connected through a thin and porous boundary with the universal.

Life continuously enters him, moves through him and leaves him. He receives from the universe and gives something back to it. And somewhere within this mysterious, spontaneous interaction lies the possibility of genuine novelty—of something appearing through a human being that has never appeared in precisely that form before.

Artificial intelligence can calculate for us. It can organize for us. It can generate enormous quantities of material. It can enhance productivity and become perhaps the greatest workhorse mankind has ever created.

But the danger begins when the workhorse becomes the master—and an even deeper transformation may begin when the master himself gradually becomes artificial.

Postscript: There is no doubt in my mind that as far as the ultimate originality in creating something new is concerned, there is no comparison between a flesh and blood human and an artificial system. But the question arises: Will the normal flesh and blood humans be relevant in future? May be they will be wiped out like Neanderthals were wiped out with the emergence of Homo-sapeins. It seems evolution -- man-propelled evolution though, which will eat its creator. The product will eat the producer.