Vipul Agarwal, Delhi, October 20, 2025
The human brain is a wonderful machine. It interprets every experience we undergo. As if it is desperate to make some meaning that suits its framework. If it is not able to find logic, it will create logic. The logic that will go beyond time and space. It will believe in the existence of life after death. It will believe in rebirth. It will believe in the law of Karma. Every bad thing in life will be justified in the name of past Karma. No doubt, such beliefs are quite soothing. It’s difficult to face reality. Why did it happen to me? Why did my near and dear one die? Why did I have to suffer the break-up? It’s difficult to stay with questions, and we do not have the capacity to find answers. We have so many thick layers of beliefs that we carry since childhood. It’s not possible to know reality without dropping these layers and layers. That’s why the easier thing is to believe. If you believe what the majority says or some religion or spiritual organisation says, such beliefs get validated, and it’s easy to sustain these beliefs.
It requires sheer madness to know reality. Kathopnishad is a story of Nachiketa. His father gets angry with him because he makes an unpleasant remark. Nachiketa goes to meet Yama to honour the words of his father. Yama offers him all types of greed, but Nachiketa is not ready to settle for anything less than the truth. He would deny even heaven to know the truth. How many of us are ready to give away even basic comforts to know the truth? How many of us even have that question in our minds? How many of us take even a single step to search for the truth? Most of us want to listen to what is comforting to us. We go to the Guru who will tell us the way to make our life wealthier and will not mind giving away some commission to the Godman. Some will go to the Guru to tell them how to reach heaven after death. Some will go to the Guru to get to know the formula for accumulating good Karma because they have heard a lot of stories about good and bad Karma.
The path to reality is not easy. That’s what Krishna is trying to tell Arjuna. One can know reality only when one stops playing with all the ideas and beliefs. When one understands that everything takes birth from the same consciousness and merges back into the consciousness. When all divisions cease to exist. When there is no fear. That requires dropping the whole of the conditioning. But, on the contrary, human brain is busy making new beliefs almost every minute. Arjuna wants to run away from the battlefield. He would have fought against the people who are not relatives, but can’t fight against his own family members. When challenged by Krishna, Arjuna listened to Krishna. He could have rejected Krishna rather than being so uncomfortable. That’s the beauty of the Mahabharata, and probably that’s the message Ved Vyasa wanted to give to humanity. When we make a choice for truth, nothing matters. Greed disappears, the division between right and wrong fades away, and there is no ambition for the present world or the world after death. What remains is complete surrender to the divine, and all our actions are offered to Him.
Even that duality between the divine and the self will disappear at some stage. “I” am the consciousness and therefore “I” have the capacity to manifest whatever “I” want. An electron has the capacity to manifest both as a wave and a particle. However, our brains have been conditioned since childhood to operate in divisions. I and “You”, “My family” and “your family”, “my religion” and “your religion”. We have a very strong drive to protect and promote “me” and “mine”. But we never try to make efforts as to “who I am”. The festivals like Deepawali are a reminder of the victory of “light” over “darkness”. Ravana was so knowledgeable and powerful, and yet was so ignorant that he could not understand that all the powers and knowledge he accumulated to make his “I” strong would become the reason for his death. We all like “light” naturally because our whole existence has its genesis from “light”. Yet, we embrace darkness. However, one ray of light can destroy the entire darkness. I wish this Diwali, we will say goodbye to the divisive world created by ignorance. Light is one. It is not divided. Ram, Bharat, Hanuman, Sugriva, and Vibhishana are not separated, unlike Ravana. An aware self is always united to the whole of the world unless some egoist person disconnects himself. Wish everybody a Diwali that makes us drop ignorance so that “light” is the guiding force behind our lives.
