The Question That Started Everything
It started on a random sleepy afternoon. Overthinking, as I tend to do. Watching YouTube videos on spirituality, contemplating the nature of reality, watching the ceiling fan go round. I had no desire for more than what was in front of me. I thought I was on the path. I thought I was close to something, enlightenment, moksha, nirvana, whatever you want to call it.
I was miserable.
Not the dramatic, poetic misery that spiritual books romanticize. Just plain, boring, restless misery. The kind where you've done everything the traditions told you to do, renounced desire, embraced simplicity, studied the ancient texts, and you still feel like something is fundamentally off.
So I started questioning. Not politely. Not academically. I started questioning the way a person questions when they've invested years of their life into something and suspect they've been sold a lie.
What I found changed everything.
The Contradiction at the Heart of Non-Dualism
Advaita Vedanta, the non-dual tradition, makes the most radical claim in all of philosophy: you are already free. You are Brahman. You were never bound. There is no bondage, no liberation, no journey to complete. You are already what you seek.
Beautiful. Radical. Liberating.
And then the same tradition says: now spend 40 years purifying your mind, find a guru, receive initiation, practice intensely, meditate for decades, and maybe, maybe, you'll achieve liberation.
Wait. What?
If I'm already free, what am I achieving? If there's no bondage, what am I liberating myself from? If knowing is being, as the tradition claims, then why do I need decades of practice after knowing?
I watched a prominent Vedanta teacher, someone with millions of YouTube followers, spend the first twenty minutes explaining that knowing is being, that the lion doesn't need to do anything to become a lion, that the prince doesn't need training to become a prince. Just knowing is enough.
Then he spent the next forty minutes explaining why knowing is actually NOT enough, that you also need mental purification, deep absorption, and years of intense practice.
He never acknowledged the contradiction. The audience never caught it.
Either knowing is being, and the moment you see, it's done. Or knowing is NOT being, and the lion story is misleading because the lion actually does need years of lion training after discovering it's a lion.
The tradition wants it both ways because having it both ways serves the institution. "You're already free" attracts seekers. "But you need our guidance for decades" retains them.
The Consolation Prize
In the same talk, this teacher cited a revered spiritual figure who reportedly told a disciple: "Don't worry. You've received initiation from me. At the time of your death, the master will come for you. Your liberation is guaranteed."
Read that again.
A human being guaranteed another human being freedom from the cycle of birth and death, based on a ritual initiation. No proof. No verification. No way to confirm. Just a promise about what happens after death, made by someone who, like all of us, has never been dead and come back to check.
And if the initiate wanted joy in this life? Well, that requires practice. The guarantee only covers the afterlife. For actual experienced freedom while living, you still need to put in the work, within the institution, under the guidance of the lineage.
The Franchise Model
Replace the spiritual vocabulary with commercial vocabulary and what do you have? A subscription service with a basic tier and a premium tier.
"Sign up with us, your afterlife is covered. Premium experience in this life costs extra."
This is franchise language. It's a retention strategy dressed in sacred clothing.
When Gurus Step Outside Their Lane
Then there are the gurus who can't resist having opinions on everything.
I followed one who was genuinely sharp, critical, scientific in approach, no tolerance for woolly thinking. I respected him. Then I watched him argue that human civilization has no inherent value and should be reduced to zero for the earth's benefit. He compared humanity's presence on earth to badly constructed buildings that should be demolished.
He used Buddhist philosophy, the concept of śūnyatā (emptiness), to justify antinatalism. "Let it all be reduced to zero and then you will see something magnificently beautiful."
Two problems.
First: śūnyatā has absolutely nothing to do with reducing the human population. It's an epistemological insight about the nature of phenomena, not a demographic prescription. The Buddha created a community of thousands and spent 45 years engaging with human civilization. He wasn't advocating its demolition.
Beautiful for whom? If you eliminate all humans, who experiences the beauty? It's like destroying all eyes to make the sunset more beautiful. The sunset doesn't care. The beauty existed only in the eye.
I looked at the comments under that video. "Humans suck, void is best, non-existence is best." "I am not happy to be alive." "END OF THE WORLD? GREAT!!!!!!"
These weren't enlightened beings celebrating a philosophical insight. These were people in pain who had just found a famous person to validate their pain as wisdom.
And the guru himself? He sat in an air-conditioned studio, used electricity generated by fossil fuels, operated cameras and internet infrastructure, all products of the civilization he said has no value. He was using every tool of human civilization to argue for its end.
I thought: if you genuinely believe human existence is net negative, the most sincere and consistent action is to start the reduction with the one human you have full authority over.
None of them ever do.
The Seminar Circuit Economy
Another guru, huge following, bestselling books, global celebrity status, criticized a tech entrepreneur for trying to make humanity multi-planetary. The guru's position: stick to building cars, stop thinking about colonizing Mars.
Why? Is this guru a physicist? An aerospace engineer? A planetary scientist? No. He's a man who sits and talks about inner experience. The tech entrepreneur, whatever his flaws, has actually sent hardware to space. On the specific question of whether life can exist on other planets, one of them has literal rockets and the other has opinions.
The engineer himself says "it might fail, there's a 50% chance, we don't know, let's try." The scientist is uncertain. The mystic is certain.
That inversion should tell you everything.
But "I don't know" doesn't fill seminar halls. "I don't know" doesn't get you invited to the World Economic Forum. "I don't know" doesn't sell books or generate viral clips. What fills seats is the appearance of omniscience, a person who has confident spiritual answers to every question, from consciousness to cryptocurrency to climate change to Mars colonization.
The business model of the modern guru requires opinions on everything. Staying within your genuine domain of insight is boring for the market. "I had a deep experience of awareness and here's what I can honestly share about the nature of consciousness", that's one talk. Maybe two. You can't build a global brand on that.
So the genuine mystic becomes a spiritual commentator. And the original insight gets buried under an avalanche of content.
The Temple Test
I'm a Jain. I've been visiting Jain temples since I was born.
Here's what actually happens there: people stand before the image of Mahavir, a man who pulled his own hair out, walked naked, starved himself, renounced every possession he ever had, and ask him for a new car.
They chant mantras whose meaning they don't know. They perform rituals whose purpose they've never questioned. They go through the motions because their parents did, and their parents' parents did, and somewhere in that chain the actual meaning was lost so thoroughly that no one notices it's missing.
This is not unique to Jainism.
Visit Vrindavan, the place Krishna devotees call the holiest land on earth. It's drowning in garbage and filth. If you truly believed God walked on that soil, wouldn't you keep it cleaner than your own bedroom? The fact that they don't tells you the belief is performative. Emotion without consequence. Feeling without action.
Mahavir's teaching: radical non-violence and non-attachment.
His followers: asking his statue for material possessions.
Krishna's teaching: act without attachment to results.
His followers: performing elaborate rituals specifically to get results.
Buddha's teaching: end suffering through direct seeing.
His followers: building hierarchies of spiritual achievement that create new forms of suffering.
Every religion preserves the form and loses the substance. Keeps the mantra, forgets the meaning. Maintains the temple, ignores the teaching.
The Moksha Question
Every major Indian spiritual tradition, Vedanta, Buddhism, Jainism, points to the same ultimate goal: freedom from the cycle of birth and death. Moksha. Nirvana. Kaivalya. Different words, same destination.
But has anyone ever verified this destination exists?
No one has died, confirmed they escaped the cycle, and come back to report. Every claim about rebirth and liberation is based on faith, personal experience of saints, and philosophical reasoning. Not evidence. Not verification.
The goal of life is to escape life. We exist to end existence. We're born to end birth. This is a game whose only winning move is to stop playing.
If the soul is originally pure and free, how did it get trapped in the first place? If God created the system, why? If maya caused the bondage, where did maya come from? Every tradition, when pushed far enough, hits a wall of "just trust us."
And historically, the karma-rebirth-moksha framework has been extraordinarily useful for social control. You're poor and suffering? Past-life karma, accept it. A king is powerful? He earned it through previous births. The promise of moksha in a future you can't verify keeps people obedient in a present that benefits the powerful.
What Moksha Probably Actually Is
The deepest thinkers within these traditions knew this. Nagarjuna said nirvana and samsara are not two different things. Ashtavakra said you are already free and there's no bondage to escape from. Kabir mocked both Hindu pandits and Muslim clerics for promising things they'd never experienced themselves.
The popular version of moksha, escaping to some other realm after death, is almost certainly a misunderstanding. What's probably actually being described is freedom from psychological suffering right now. Freedom from the constant cycle of craving, temporary satisfaction, and fresh craving that the mind goes through every day.
Understood this way, no afterlife verification needed. No guru's guarantee needed. No institution's blessing needed.
The Pattern Behind Every Guru
After watching, reading, and following multiple spiritual teachers across traditions, a pattern emerged. It's the same pattern every time:
Step 1: Genuine insight. Every teacher starts with something real, an actual observation about consciousness, suffering, or the nature of mind. This genuine kernel attracts intelligent seekers.
Step 2: Expansion beyond domain. The teacher starts having opinions on topics outside their expertise. Because staying within your genuine domain of insight doesn't generate enough content for a global brand.
Step 3: Institutional capture. An organization forms. Revenue streams develop. The teacher's livelihood becomes dependent on maintaining certainty and relevance. "I don't know" becomes financially dangerous.
Step 4: Audience capture. Followers stop questioning. Dissent gets suppressed or explained away. The comment sections become echo chambers.
Step 5: Self-reinforcement. The guru believes their own hype. Surrounded by yes-men and devoted followers, they lose the capacity for self-correction. The genuine insight that started everything gets buried under layers of performance.
The honest spiritual teacher, the one who says "I don't know, this is just my perspective", would never build a platform. Because the spiritual marketplace doesn't reward honesty. It rewards the performance of omniscience.
What I Actually Know
After years of seeking, studying, following, and being disappointed, I arrived at exactly one insight I'm certain about:
The world exists because I exist.
Not as a philosophical position. Not as something I read in a book. Just as a plain observation.
Before I was born, there was no sun, no moon, no earth, not for me. When I die, the world dies with me, for me. Everything I call "reality" is what I experience through my senses and consciousness. It's entirely subjective. Like a shadow that exists only because I exist.
This is all I know with certainty. Everything else, karma, rebirth, moksha, Brahman, God, sin, merit, is a story layered on top of this raw experience.
I didn't learn this from a guru. No teacher told me to think this way. I arrived at it by systematically questioning every framework until none were left standing, and then noticing what remained.
What Remained
What remained was just awareness. Experiencing. Being. Without labels, without a cosmic narrative, without a salvation plan.
And here's what's funny, this is essentially what every tradition was trying to say underneath all the institutional packaging. But the saying of it created institutions, and the institutions buried it, and seekers spend lifetimes trying to find what was always already here.
The Freedom on the Other Side
Here's where I ended up, and it's not where I expected.
I don't have to feel guilty for pursuing material success, as long as I'm not harming anyone. Money is not anti-spiritual. Earning well is not a sign of ignorance. Ambition is not a disease.
I don't have to feel guilty for living simply either. If two meals and a quiet life feel right, that's not failure. That's choice.
I don't need anyone's permission to design my life. Not a guru's. Not a scripture's. Not a tradition's. Not an astrologer's. Every person offering to tell me how to live is themselves just performing, figuring it out as they go, like everyone else.
There is no right and wrong way to live. There is only you, making choices, experiencing consequences, adjusting course.
There is no cosmic scoreboard. No karmic bank account. No divine judge tallying your merit and demerit. Or if there is, no one has ever produced evidence of it, and I'm no longer willing to organize my life around unverified claims.
This isn't nihilism. Nihilism says nothing matters. I'm saying everything matters, but only to you. Your life, your experience, your choices, they matter because you're the one living them. Not because a cosmic system assigns them meaning. Not because a guru validates them. Because they're yours.
The Unlikely Role Model
After dismantling every spiritual figure I'd ever followed, I realized the people I actually admire aren't spiritual teachers at all.
They're builders. Entrepreneurs. Scientists. Artists. People who create things that exist in the real world, that can be tested, that can fail publicly.
Consider the tech entrepreneurs who bet their entire fortunes on ideas that might not work. Their rockets explode on the launchpad in front of millions. They go bankrupt. They get sued. They get divorced. They say stupid things publicly. They make terrible mistakes.
And they keep going.
No spiritual teacher faces that level of real-world testing. A guru can claim "I have transcended suffering" and no one can disprove it. But when an engineer says "this rocket will reach orbit", reality itself delivers the verdict. In public. On camera. No hiding behind "I am the witness consciousness."
The builder makes no claims of perfection. No pretense of omniscience. No promises about the afterlife. Just: "Here's what I'm trying to do. It might fail. Let's find out."
That's more honest than any satsang I've ever attended.
And it aligns more closely with what the scriptures actually teach than what the gurus practice. The Gita doesn't say sit and contemplate. It says act. Do your work. Give everything. Don't be paralyzed by fear of failure. The result is not in your hands, but the action is.
The builders live this. The gurus just talk about it.
What I'd Tell My Earlier Self
Stop seeking. Not stop thinking, stop seeking. The seeking itself is the trap. Every new guru, every new book, every new video restarts the same cycle: hope, resonance, disappointment, rejection, search for the next one.
The exit from the cycle isn't finding the right teacher. It's realizing you don't need one.
Read widely, but follow no one. Extract insights, but sign up for no program. Learn from everyone, but surrender to no one. If a teacher says something that resonates, take it. If they say something stupid, leave it. You don't owe them consistency. You don't owe them loyalty. You definitely don't owe them your sovereignty.
Just Live
Eat food that tastes good. Learn skills that interest you. Build things with your hands. Help someone who needs it, not as seva, just as basic human decency. Walk outside and notice things. Make money if you want. Give it away if you want. Love someone if it happens. Be alone if it doesn't.
None of it needs a cosmic framework. None of it needs a guru's blessing. None of it needs to be justified by ancient scripture.
You are the only authority over your own life. Everyone else, every guru, every priest, every philosopher, every tradition, is just another human being figuring it out as they go.
The sooner you see that, the sooner you stop suffering over the gap between what they promised and what they delivered.
Because the gap was never between you and enlightenment. The gap was between their claims and reality.
Close that gap, not by achieving their promises, but by dropping the need for promises altogether, and you're free.
Not free in the way they described it. Not cosmic, eternal, transcendent freedom.
Just regular, ordinary, unglamorous freedom.
The freedom to live without permission. That's enough. That's everything.