An episode dedicated to God – what the word actually means. 

Absorbing the content here should give you a whole lot of clarity about these burning questions we all have about God:

Is there a creator?
What are the atheists missing?
What does the word God really mean?
Where do most religions converge in their teachings?
What is the real answer to that age-old question “Who am I”?

In the information age, it’s downright unfortunate that the majority of us still don’t even have a hint of this understanding. It will take time to grasp the profundity of the entire thing, but the first step to any of that would be to become aware that there IS something to grasp!

If you’re here, take this opportunity and dive right in.
It’ll be worth your time. I promise.

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I want to start this episode with a thought experiment. Consider that you have a pot of ink in your hands. Consider that there is an empty wall in front of you and you have been permitted by the owner of that wall to smear the ink all over it. Consider that you actually do it – you smash the inkpot on the wall and now, ignoring the bits of glass, there is ink all over the place. 

Now, I want you to consider that drop of ink in that far off corner of the wall. Looked at in isolation, that drop is just a tiny drop of ink. And you’re right, it is one drop in a million-billion others. But what I want you to acknowledge is the fact that it is THE ink. It is as much THE ink as any other ink there is or ever was in that original inkpot. It is THE ink. Its real nature is that it is THE INK.

Now, if that drop of ink was to become conscious of its existence, to stretch the example a bit more, I’d say that the drop would not even realise that it is a drop of ink, a drop of THE ink. I say it would be consumed with the drama surrounding its limited field of view – the lizard and the ants coming over and stamping all over it, the drops next to it being hard to get along with, the fear of the darkness when the lights are turned off in the room, the beauty of the bright sunlight when the curtains are open, the shame of being a bad drop in its heart, the fear of being miserable in the future – all of this immediate drama would completely consume the everyday life of the conscious drop.

This is the human condition. Each and every one of us is just like that drop of ink – consumed by the drama of our everyday lives which shields our very true, very basic nature. We are THE ink that did all the dance on the wall and is continuing on with the dance as we speak. We are the ink, we are the dance. Each of us. I sincerely hope you are able to draw the parallels I’m trying to make here.

In the previous episode, we covered the idea of one’s ego, one’s sense of self, one’s sense of ‘I’. And we discovered that the real nature of the “I” gets lost in identification with the illusion produced by the myriad different thoughts, feelings, sensations and emotions going through our organism all the livelong day!

What is the real nature of this ‘I’? I just told you above. Do you remember the separation fallacy episode, which was the second episode of this show? If not, I would highly recommend you going through that. We covered in that episode how connected we are to the universe, to everything there is.

Let me build on this a bit more. 

So let’s assume you’re a 24 year old girl named Ria working as a lawyer in some company in some city in India. Let’s ask Ria who she really is. She gives us the common answer – I’m Ria, I studied at so and so and now I work as a so and so… <you get the picture>. But ohh we’re smarter than that, so we ask her that that’s just a bunch of things she’s done in the past and plans on doing in the near future, but what is ‘she’ really, fundamentally? You see if she would’ve chosen a different career, or a different career would’ve been chosen for her, would ‘she’ be someone or something else? Or would that just have been another role the real ‘she’ would’ve taken up, like the numerous she already plays – daughter, friend, partner, lawyer, Indian, etc? Who is this constant ‘she’ really? If we could get to that, maybe we could get to the bottom of the seemingly bottomless pit after all. Let’s try further. 

So, she is playing the role of a 24 year-old lawyer right now, maybe sufficient backtracking would help us uncover the constant ‘she’ who’s been behind it all this while. So what was she a few years ago? A student somewhere perhaps. And before that? A little girl playing in the school yard maybe. And before that? A new-born baby maybe. And before that? This is where it gets interesting doesn’t it? Because before that, it’s almost as if she was asleep and doesn’t remember the dream she was dreaming. 

You may question that did she even exist before being born. And it’s a valid question, because in our day-to-day life experience, we experience ourselves in our bodies. We identify with the body, and it’ll be a very normal thing to say that ‘I am nothing but my body, and my idea of my self is also a part of my body.’ If you take that deeper, you’d hit upon the idea that you started in a maternity ward somewhere and will end up in a crematorium somewhere or be burned up, basis what suits those that survive you. And that your life is just something that happens between those two events. I don’t deny this idea, but the right adjective I have for it is that it is incomplete. 

You see if you are nothing but your body, you are an accumulation. Because that’s what your body is, isn’t it? You were a little baby just a few years ago, and you’ve accumulated so much since. But you see if that was true, and you were nothing but an accumulation, you’d have to start out of something, right? An accumulation has to start somewhere. So where and when did ‘your’ accumulation start? At the time of your birth? No, you know you existed before that too, when you spent that time in your mother’s comfortable womb, sleeping with not a worry in the world. So when did YOU start?

We’re back where we left, aren’t we? The question of what you were before you were born. I think the most reasonable answer to that is that you existed in some form in your parents. Call this form genes, call this form chromosomes, call it what you want, provided you don’t confuse the word for the thing. You existed in some form in your parents before you were born. Right, so where does that lead us?

If you existed in some form in your parents before you were born, the same applies to your parents too. They existed in some form in your grandparents, which essentially means that you existed in some form in your grandparents. So, you keep taking this recursion back, as far back as you can. When I say as far back as you can, I mean take it all the way back to the very origin of everything, call it the Big Bang if you will. And where that leads you is to a visualisation that every one or rather every “thing” came from and in fact IS the same “thing”.

Now relate this to the example of the ink pot we talked about in the very beginning of this episode. This “thing” we just reached, which is what every other “thing” IS at its very core, is THE ink. And every drop of that ink, though separated from the whole collection of ink, is nonetheless THE ink, no matter how overwhelmed it is by its everyday drama.

And this “thing” is the real, incorruptible, (well, as incorruptible as I can manage in words right now in this narration) definition of the word “God”. And we are each IT. Each of us. It’s not out there somewhere way up in the sky or way down in the future. It is HERE, each moment in the present – NOW. If only we would unlearn the attachments to the drama of our everyday lives, we would see this as probably the most important objective truth of our lives.

The Advaita Vedanta, which is often considered as the pinnacle of wisdom in all of eastern philosophy and religion, has this as the central message. Advaita means non-dual. And non-dual literally means that which has no other. That which excludes nothing, that which includes everything, that which is one with everything. That which is the ink we just talked about, that which is the “thing” we just talked about. That is what God is. And that is what you are. That is what I am. Or rather, that is what each of our “I’s” actually is. Again, “I” as in the letter “I” and not the organ “eye”.

In our everyday lives, our “I” is completely consumed by the whirlpool of thoughts, feelings, sensations and emotions. And we identify with this whirlpool all the time. This whirlpool is our usual everyday ego. Our usual everyday sense of who I am, what it means to be me, etc. 

And it is an important part of our lives. This “I” is how we navigate through the world, how we find out what’s important for us and what isn’t. It is the lens through which we see the world in and around us. It is our consciousness.

But like every lens, it has its limitations. It has its blindspots. It can only let a limited amount of the light in. And what we are talking about here, is the deepest blindspot our lenses have.

You see, human consciousness, while it is a beautiful process that allows the human organism to make sense of its environment, is also a limiting process. It is in its very nature to ignore certain aspects of reality out of the picture. And what we are talking about here, is the deepest aspect that is left out by everyday human consciousness.

Just like that inkdrop, if conscious, would not see much else apart from its own everyday drama, the human organism doesn’t see much else apart from its own everyday ego and the story built in its head around it.

— — —

If you tuned in to the third episode of this podcast, I was dispelling a very common misinterpretation in that talk. I was talking about how for most people, the word God equals creator. This is a misinterpretation, but it’s also funny how seriously close it is to the truth too. I mean look at it from the lens of the talk we just had right now. That thing we just talked about, that ink, that non-dual thing, is God. And that thing is also the creator of every other thing. In that sense, we’re right to say that God is the creator.

But where the common interpretation diverges from the truth is that we separate the creator from the created. We imagine that the creator is someone out there somewhere, who has created all of this and is now very far away from everything he has created. Which is simply not true. So, more than understanding God as the creator, I’d say that it is better to understand God as the creative principle, the creative process which is abundantly present every time everywhere. In fact, that is all there is.

To give you an example, you create all the time. You grow your hair, you grow your nails, most of us can create more human beings like us. The plants around us create leaves, create flowers, create more plants, etc etc.

We are all the creator, and at the same time, are also the created. 

— — —

Whatever I’m sharing here is not an argument from authority. I’m not asking you to believe any of it. This is merely an invitation to contemplate on it. That is how all of this came to me too. It’s not my truth. It is an objective truth. It is what man’s search for completeness and freedom and liberation has always been about. It is what religions have always been about. 

Well, I will not be so naive as to say this for all religions, because I haven’t studied all religions. No one has. 

But deep down, almost all the religions have this as the very heart of their teachings.

The Hindus, when they said, “Tat twam asi” quite literally meant “You are IT.”

When they said, “Aham Brahmasmi”, it quite literally meant “I am Brahma”, or “I am God.”

When the Sikhs said, “Ik oangkar, sat nam”, they meant, “That one thing created everything, and its name is the Truth.”

When the Buddhists said, “Be one with everything”, this is what they meant.

Yoga literally means Union – union of the little self, the little “I” with the supreme self, the universal consciousness.

When the Jains talk about the liberation of the soul, or rather when all the eastern religions talk about liberation of the soul or moksha or enlightenment or Nirvana, they refer to this realisation. 

The Atma is equal to the Paramatma. The small self, our little ego, our “I” is actually the supreme Self. Is actually the universal consciousness. Is actually God.

And I haven’t studied many western religions, but I am given to understand by many philosophers who have, that this oneness is also at the core of the teaching of Jesus Christ and also Prophet Mohammed. 

— — —

But alas, the core of the human condition is that we can translate whatever we hear into our own familiar language, and it doesn’t take much effort for us to start believing that our translation is what was said in the first place. You can see that translation happening in you if you are very silent. If you have never come across what I just talked about in this episode, chances are that your brain is right now trying to appropriate my words into a narrative that fits the one it already has – about your God, about your religion, etc. 

Catch it in this action. You cannot stop it, you can never stop it. But you can become aware of it. And once you become aware of it, you know not to act on the thoughts, feelings, sensations, emotions powered by the false narratives. This is what I have always meant by unlearning. Slowly, but surely, in this manner, the truth appears to you. Just like you have no control over the false thoughts popping up in your head, you cannot force yourself to see the truth. You can only see your ego in action when you fear facing the truth, and when you translate it into “nothing new”.

As that poet David Whyte said, “Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but rather in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are.”

If all of what I talked about here was your first time hearing it, make sure you listen to it again. I would recommend coupling it with episodes 2,3 and 4 of the show as well. And then contemplate on them. And then re-listen. And then contemplate again. No matter how long it takes. Because THIS IS important.

For the bigger picture to rise in you, the smaller one must be unlearnt. And the awareness that there is a bigger picture, is sometimes enough for that job. You now know that there is a bigger picture.

One of the most potent advice you can give someone is to ask them to go within, or to know themselves.

We have all heard the old sayings from eastern philosophy.
“Go within.”
“Know thyself.”

I try in this episode to throw some light on these beautiful sayings. Join me as I walk you through a basic introduction to what it means to go within, what is the ego, what is the self and what are some illusions surrounding them.

Jiddu Krishnamurti, or Uncle JK as I fondly call him, used to say, “When I understand myself, I understand you. And out of that understanding comes love.” The man was right!

This surely will be worth your time, I promise.
I wouldn’t be doing this if I thought otherwise.

Tune in!

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In the previous episode, we talked about the word “God” and how it is usually misinterpreted to mean “The Creator” by almost all of us. A natural follow-up to that episode should be me talking about what the word actually means then. I concede to that, and that is what I’m going to try to get towards in this episode.

The important words in this sentence were “try to get towards”.

You see, in the olden days in the Indian tradition, it is said that people (both saints and otherwise) used to meditate for years altogether and would then finally get a glimpse of what the divine really is. Now, when I say they got a glimpse of the divine, I do not mean that a deity descended from the sky to greet them. That is a good idea for a TV show, and possibly one of the only ways to dramatically depict the idea, but it is not the truth. By getting a glimpse of the divine, I mean the understanding of what it’s all about, finally dawned on them.

What could be more divine, than understanding? One of the deepest, if not the deepest prayers we hold sacred in our hearts after all, is to get an understanding of what the hell is really going on? Out there! In here! Everywhere! And to have that understanding, is surely divine.

It is said that this understanding used to take years of earnest meditation to get to, and in the Indian tradition, people used to dedicate the later half of their lives trying to get to it. But we live in the information age now, where everything is available to us at the click of a button. And that too in a summarised format. So why would we wait an entire lifetime to get to it? Give me a brief overview of it and I’m all set.

Alas, this approach cannot work to reach the degree of understanding we’re talking about. You may gather all the words that summarise the understanding, but to really grasp what is being meant by those words, there is some work that has to be done. One has to unlearn a lot of what one thinks he/she already knows, one has to shine light on one’s own hidden beliefs and idiosyncrasies, etc etc. But more than anything, one has to really be willing to understand, and that means being willing to accept being wrong. Not wrong in the past, but wrong in the present moment. 

So, consider listening to these episodes as the work that you’re doing to get a glimpse of that understanding. Of course, these episodes are like a finger pointing to the moon. They are not to be mistaken for the moon itself. We’ll try to reach it, slowly but surely.

Now then, what I wanted to cover in this episode is the idea of the ego. It is one of the key pieces to the jigsaw puzzle of Life, the universe and everything really. And this is another word which I had to unlearn a great chunk about. The word ego is usually confused with pride and arrogance, so if I was to say to you “You have an ego”, you would normally retort and get back to me saying, well let’s just say “not something too nice!”

But you do have an ego. All of us do. It just doesn’t mean being arrogant or being proud. Let me walk you through this.

Ego is actually the Latin word for ‘I’, and that is what it really means – a person’s sense of ‘I’.  ‘I’ as in the letter ‘I’ not the organ ‘eye’. With my thick English accent, maybe it’s better to get that out of the way before you need to rewind to figure out what the hell this Indian dude was on about!

So, back to it. Your ego means quite literally your ‘I’. I am so-and-so, I feel so-and-so, I think so-and-so; we all say these sentences all the time. Whenever you’re saying or thinking in terms of ‘I’, it is the ego. And we all do that. So, we all have an ego. I hope you’d not be too mad if I said so now.

To have an ego barely means to have a sense of self, to have a sense of ‘I’. It doesn’t mean being proud or arrogant, etc. Of course, in everyday language, you can refer to pride in terms of ego with some adjectives. For eg: someone with excessive self-pride can be referred to as having an inflated ego. But whenever you encounter the word ‘ego’ in a philosophical text, or in this podcast, unlearn that previously learnt meaning. Know that ego refers to one’s sense of self. One’s idea of all of what comes underneath the word ‘I’.

And why is that important in the context of Life? In the context of God? In the context of understanding God?

Because your existence, after all, is maybe the first thing you can be absolutely sure of. I repeat myself – The fact that you exist, is maybe the first thing you can be absolutely sure of. Even if this entire world is a dream, you exist in that dream. Even if it’s a simulation, you exist in the simulation. So, it’s pretty obvious that any enquiry you do about the nature of the world around you should start with exploring yourself. This is what going within means. All of those old Buddhist and Hindu sayings you hear – “Go within!”, “Know yourself” – this is why they are saying all of that. The answers to our deepest questions lie hidden where we tend not to look – within.

You, your ‘I’, your ego – is the gateway to understanding Life, is the gateway to understanding God. And that is why the ego is important. Again, when I say ego, I do not mean your pride and self importance and arrogance. I mean your ‘I’.

Ok, so how do we go about exploring this ego? Well, for one, as is the case with any exploration, we’d have to observe it. Which is a tricky business really, observing yourself. But that is one of the beauties of our minds, we can do that. We can use our cognition, our thinking capabilities to turn its back and think about itself. In other words, we can go within. So let’s try and do just that.

What is this ‘I’ really? If you think about it, this ‘I’ is something that is consistently with us right from the time we’re born until we die. At all points in our waking state, and even in our dreams, we have a sense of ‘I’ – a consistent sense that there is a fixed entity that is behind all of this experience that we’re having. You know, a watcher behind all the sights that are getting registered, a hearer behind the sounds – an observer behind the observations. This is our ‘I’, we identify ourselves with this sensation – a fixed center somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears.

Now, one of the biggest illusions surrounding this ‘I’ is that it is a fixed entity. That is how we live our lives isn’t it? I will identify this constant entity ‘I’, which my parents got to name ‘Chetan Narang’, and I then go about telling everyone this is who I am, this is what I do, etc etc. In reality though, this ‘I’ is not a fixed entity, it cannot be. I mean, look at it from a little distance. The Chetan Narang who is speaking to you today cannot be the same Chetan Narang who was a rebellious teenager a few years ago; cannot be the same Chetan Narang who was a little toddler just trying his best to play some cricket a few years before that; would not be the same Chetan Narang who would maybe be recording episode 200 of this podcast some day. 

But our own personal experience says otherwise. We experience this constant ‘I’ in the background always, and we feel that there is an element of everlasting experience in this ‘I’. Don’t you feel this way? I’m sure you do. You feel that there is something that has stayed the same in you right from your birth till this moment and you feel that that something would last till you die. Well, at least till you die. 

This constant ‘I’ is an illusion. Not an illusion in the sense that it doesn’t exist, as is normally misinterpreted by a lot of “spiritual” people these days. It is an illusion in the sense that it is different from what it seems to be. Just like a mirage – when you see down a long road on a hot day and there seems to be water way down the road – that is an illusion, The road exists, the light, the heat, everything exists – but they together give the illusion of there being water.

In much the same way, we think a thousand different thoughts every day. We have been, ever since we came “out” of this world –

You see what I did there right? I hinted back at the last-but-one-episode of this show The separation fallacy. We do not come into this world, we come out of it.

Anyway, we think a thousand different thoughts and it is an endless process, and out of these thoughts also emerges the illusion of there being a constant entity behind these thoughts. Picture it in this manner – You light a stick of wood at one end or both ends, hold it in the middle and then swirl it around. If you get enough sticks to do this with, it will end up giving you the illusion of there being a constant ring of fire. Is there really a ring of fire? Of course not. It is an illusion generated by the movement of the sticks. Much in the same way as looking at a bunch of fishes swimming together in clear water can give you the illusion of there being one single big creature that’s swimming and not a thousand small fishes.

Such is the illusion surrounding our constant ‘I’ too. The real nature of our ‘I’ gets lost in identification with this constant nature of the illusion created by all of our thoughts and feelings and emotions and sensations., much like the ring of fire illusion created by all of those fast-moving, multiple fired-up sticks.

To put it in more poetic terms, this ‘I’, that me and you live under, is more a verb than a noun. It is constantly changing, ever evolving and is never as fixed as the illusion makes it to be. 

But then, isn’t the next obvious question – what is the true nature of this ‘I’? What is the right, wholesome way of looking at the ego, at our own ‘I’? 

Both very real, courageous questions. But I think we need to pause here. This episode has already gone on for longer than I had initially thought. And that’s fine really. We covered something quite fundamental today, fundamental to a whole bunch of other things we would be talking about in this show ahead. 

For now, I’ll pause here and let you trip on all that this episode covered for some time. 

As a short, sweet recap, I want to point out three key takeaways for you from this episode:

1. In this show, or rather in the philosophical context, ego does not mean self-pride or arrogance. Rather, ego refers to a person’s sense of self, their sense of ‘I’.
2. One of the biggest illusions surrounding this ‘I’ is that it is a fixed entity. It isn’t. Remember the ring of fire illusion. That is how our ‘I’ gets lost in identification with thoughts, feelings, sensations.
3. Last but not the least, do not expect to get in a few minutes or hours what used to take years of dedicated meditations for the saints of yesteryears. Do the work. The results will flow, as they always do.

For the very curious listener, if you marry this episode with The Separation Fallacy episode, which was the second episode of this show, you’d pretty much already have a quite clear idea about what the next episode will be about. 

Ohh that’s going to be an interesting one! For the somewhat less curious listener, I hope what I just said helped incite at least a little more curiosity than before. If not, I sure hope you turn up in the next episode anyhow. 

Because after all, you do not know what you do not know.

Ironically, one of the most important words that mankind ever came up with is also one of the most misinterpreted words of all time. That word is “God”.

And that word also forms the bedrock of some of the most potent questions a human being can ask:

Is there a God?
Is there a Creator?
Are the atheists right?
Do you believe in a God?
What is the creator fallacy?
Is there some truth about God?
What must we unlearn about God?

As with most important things in Life, it is not learning new things that takes us closer to the Truth but rather unlearning what we already believe to be true. God is one topic that requires a great deal of unlearning to really understand.

Join me as I walk you through one of the biggest things I had to unlearn about God in my journey.

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We interpret everything, that is the way we navigate the world. And every now and then, we come across things we misinterpreted in the past – could be something as trivial as a joke or a segment of a movie or a tv show, or could be something supremely crucial. I wish that by the end of this episode, you place the word ‘God’ in the latter category.

Yes, we’ll dedicate this episode to God. That came out more religious than I wanted it to, but let’s go with it. We’ll dedicate this episode to God, and in understanding what that word really means. Or rather, doesn’t really mean. Let’s see how it goes. 

Up until a few years ago, I can say that, to me, God meant Creator. And that is the popular view almost all of us hold – God as the creator and manager of the creation, as someone out there somewhere, outside of the creation as we experience it, who created everything and subsequently also governs everything. If I’m honest, this is the image of God which I was brought up with, and so were all my closest friends around me, and so were my parents and their parents and theirs before them. 

The images, names, prayers, rituals associated with this creator may differ for all us, mostly based on our upbringing, but all of us deep down hold this idea sacred to our hearts that the word ‘God’, whenever referred to, refers to the creator, who has created all of this world and everything that exists within it.

This image of God is a misinterpretation, but funnily so, it is actually so close to the real meaning that we get super lost in all the muddiness. I’m gonna try to dissolve the mud slowly. It will definitely take more than this episode, but every journey of a thousand steps starts with the first one. Let’s take that first step today.

Firstly, let’s talk about the creator, shall we? Is there a creator really? Let’s answer in the affirmative and say there is. Let’s say there is a creator who created everything. Whatever we see around us, including us, is the creator’s creation. Isn’t the next obvious question – “Then who created the creator?”. You may answer that in the affirmative too, but then the next question would be – “Who created the creator’s creator?” You may answer that with a Yes too, but I think you get the picture. At some point in this recursion, you’d have to step out and say – “This just exists.” 

The idea of there being a creator away from the creation will definitely lead you to finally accept that “something” can exist without there being a “creator” apart from the thing itself. Just in that sense, there is no ultimate creator. So, the answer to the question of there being a creator is a firm No.

You see, the idea of someone creating everything is based on the way we humans make sense of the world. When a potter picks up some mud and very skilfully creates a pot out of it, we say the potter created the pot, which he did. In a similar manner, the world around us is full of so many “things”, so many beautiful and mysterious “things”, and it makes sense to us that someone would have created all of this at some point and has now left them for us to play with, of course having created us too in the meantime and all the while creating more and more “things” for ever and ever…

But it is just an idea, not the truth. And I just explained why above. 

Now, this episode is not an endorsement for atheism, believe me. Because, all I am saying here is that the popular ideas we hold about the word God are themselves wrong, they are based on misinterpretations and beliefs. The problem with atheism is that it stops here. Just because you proved a misinterpretation to be wrong, doesn’t mean you now know the truth about the original thing. There is some work left to be done. I understood this very late myself. I was an atheist in my teenage years and my early twenties too, because I had blocked myself from even trying to understand God. For me, as is the case with a lot of people in my generation, God was something old and lost people dealt with and prayed to. But I was wrong. Or rather, to put it more precisely, I was incomplete.

I remember that a few years ago, I was watching a video on youtube in which someone asked Osho – “Do you believe in God?”. And Osho’s reply, which staggered me at the time was, “I do not believe in believing.” I have since then stolen this line and made it my own. And I wish that all of you would do the same. Adapt this attitude in your life about everything. Try and understand, not believe. Well, if not everything, at least about the important stuff. And this is important. Almost everything else will flow naturally if you align yourself correctly here. But it takes time, it takes effort, it takes earnestness. And I hope you’re ready for it. Because if not now, when? If not you, who? 

A week or so before I started recording this episode, a very close friend of mine shared with me a quote from a book he was reading at the time. And it gelled so well with all I wanted to say here, and also the general theme of this podcast overall that I told him I’m going to definitely quote it. It’s from a book called “LSD and the Mind of the Universe. Diamonds from Heaven – by one Chris Bache”, and it goes like this:

“All forms, even the glistening splendour of archetypal forms are intermediaries to that which lies beyond form.  As the author of the 14th century Christian mystical treatise The ‘Cloud of Unknowing’ reminds us: “if we ever hope to glimpse the true nature of the divine, we must unlearn everything we have been taught about god.””

Let me stress that last part again, “If we ever hope to glimpse the true nature of the divine, we must unlearn everything we have been taught about god.”

I shared, in this episode, the biggest thing I had to unlearn about God. I hope it inspires the same unlearning in you too. To avoid misinterpreting it as an endorsement for atheism, please listen to the episode again.

If anyone asks me what is the one thing everyone should realise but doesn’t, I would send them this episode of mine. There is of course a lot of unlearning that needs to happen to really enable absorbing all of it and let it change the way you perceive the world, and that is exactly what The Unlearning Playground is all about.

The separation fallacy is one of the most fundamental ways in which the truth evades us, but it is so hardwired into the way we lead our lives that it is almost impossible to see that it is indeed a fallacy. An important fallacy, no doubt, but like all fallacies, it comes back to bite us when we forget its true nature.

I talk about what the ancient Hindu, Zen and Buddhist saints (and also modern ones like The Dalai Lama) meant when they said, “Be one with everything”, and what we need to unlearn to really understand that.

I talk about what Alan Watts meant when he said, “You do not come into this world, you come out of it.”

Hope I did a good job. Only one honest way to find out and tell me. Dig in.

If this episode resonates with you, and makes you ripe for more unlearnings,  would recommend going through the next series of The Unlearning Playground episodes too right away.

Let’s play the game the better way.
I’ll see you in the playground.

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I wanted to dedicate this episode to a fallacy that underlies so much of our lives that we hardly even notice it. For the purpose of putting forward the idea, I’m calling it The separation fallacy.

There are various ways to talk about it, none of them perfect, but a lot of them are good enough to get the point across. Let’s try one here.

I was born in the year 1992, and it’s very commonplace for me to say that I came into this world in 1992 and if we were having a conversation and I said so, no one would bat an eye and we would keep going on with our lives.

But if we were to just take a little backseat, and observe what I just said, we would be surprised at how incorrect that statement really is. Look at it – I just said that I came into this world in 1992. Well, from where did I come into this world? As if I was before in some other place outside of this world and 1992 was the year when I was put into this one. Of course, that isn’t true.

So then what is the right way to say it instead? The philosopher Alan Watts used to say that You do not come into this world, but rather you come out of it, like an apple on an apple tree. And I do think that this is the right way of putting it. We do not come into this world, we come out of it! That is how un-separated from it we really are. We are one with it.

Let me propose a train of thought to get this point across better. I call it The Interconnectedness thought train. Here you go.

The next time you see an infant, realise that just a few moments ago, it was a part of its mother. It was connected to its mother, in the most intimate way possible.
Then proceed to realise that in exactly the same manner, the mother was connected to her mother just a few moments ago, and again, in the most intimate way possible.

And then, if you must, take this train of thought all the way back, all the way back to the very “beginning”, and realise that all of us, each and every ‘one’ of us, each and every ‘thing’ around us, is connected. And again, in the most intimate way possible.

This interconnectedness is the point I’m trying to make. Our separation as individual beings is true, but only from one perspective, and a limited one at that. Another perspective, which is what I put forward a few moments ago, is that all of us are already as connected as we could be, we just don’t realise it.

Picture this.

You are standing in front of an ocean, and you can see waves forming, rising all the way to their max and then falling down and merging back into the ocean. 

This visual is almost exactly the correct analogy to what I’m sharing here. From the point of view of every wave, it is a separate entity and has its own existence. But from your point of view, the point of view of the observer who is watching the dance happen from the outside, there is only the ocean and the waves are just symptoms of the ocean – they are not separate from the ocean – they never were.

In one manner of speaking, this is what the Buddhists meant when they said, “Be one with everything.” You already are, you just don’t see it.

In the same way, this is what the Hindus meant when they said, “Tat twam asi” or “You are it.” or even “Aham Brahmasmi” or “I am Brahma”.

You see, most of us haven’t been exposed to this perspective of the world ever, because by default, we live in our heads, as a separate me – a separate ‘I’. The only connectedness we feel with others, is with the people next to us, and that too, on most occasions, till the time it benefits us in some way, which only serves the purpose of strengthening the illusion of the separation anyway.

So then, is what I am talking about merely a romantic idea? A whimsy which is nothing but impractical. Not at all. But I can totally understand if you’re feeling this way right now, because that is where I was when I first came across all of this. I’ve been there, believe me. 

But you see, things like these, or rather, truths like these hit us at the very core of all we think we know about the world and how we go about living our lives. And that is why they are usually treated this way. We call them impractical, we call them useless.

And instead of really understanding them,  we try to find ways around them to keep continuing with the same old stories in our heads without really letting these truths take hold of our reality.

That is exactly why most ‘religious’ people almost always know the words written in their sacred books by heart, they know how to celebrate all the festivals and perform all the rituals, but almost none of them really embody those words and those rituals and the messages behind those festivals in their everyday lives.

Because nobody ever spent the time to really understand the depths of all these things, let alone teach them to others. And now we are at a point where all of it is basically just Incomplete people teaching incomplete misinterpretations of incomplete words to other incomplete people.

Someone really needs to break this chain.

Buddha was enlightened, they say. And what does enlightenment mean? They say it is when you become one with God or rather one with everything.

And I hope that rings a bell with you now.

One man whom I really respect and admire and whose books I would recommend everyone to read is Jiddu Krshnamurti, or JK as people fondly refer to him. I have always called him Uncle JK, because I always felt like he was like the wise, old uncle I never really had.

Anyway, I’m not quite sure, but I think Uncle JK has been quoted to have said something like – No one listened to the Buddha, and that is why we have Buddhism.

Whoever said this, whether JK or not, couldn’t have been more right, and yeah, Buddha and Buddhism are just placeholders here in this sentence – it’s true for a host of other religions and belief systems we hold.

We follow our favourite organised religions not because we well and truly understand them, but because we identify with them, they’ve become a part of our identity, a part of our separate ‘I’.

Now then, back to what we were talking about. I do not want your key takeaway from this episode to be how you should tell people your year of birth. The semantics are none of my concern, and neither should they be yours. What I want you to take away from this episode is to realise that the separation that we live under, is only one way of looking at the world. And that when you look at this perspective objectively, you realise that it leads to so many destructive actions that one can do nothing but just stare at it all in amazement. 

If the idea of separation takes root in one’s psyche, which is the default for us, we tend to look at life with the lens of one-upping it. The world is suddenly an alien world, which has to be conquered – my surroundings have to be put under my command or I lose – and that makes us do all sorts of things in a manner which would make any objective observer come around and say, “Why are you fighting it so much boy? You know, relax.”

And this relaxation is a natural side-effect of absorbing and embodying the truth that I just talked about in this episode.

Well I guess that’s it for this episode for now. If you think it has been a bit too much too soon or too useless too soon, please give it a listen again whenever you can. I’m sure you’ll feel differently if you give it an objective ear.

The chief idea covered here is one of the main unlearnings I‘m trying to share via this show. Of course, how it manifests in each of our specific lives would always be tailored to our specific situations, which is the beauty of it.

More on that in the future episodes. Until then, peace out!