When silence starts to see for you
I am not married.
I never attended college.
I have never had a job.
I have lived my life unconventionally.
This unsettles many of my relatives and friends.
Eyebrows rise when I say I am not going to get married.
One almost leapt off my forehead when I added,
“I am not a celibate either.”
They have been running on the same track since the dawn of time.
From where I stand, I do not know where they are going —
or where it ends.
It is called conventional only because many are running together.
Education, marriage, career —
they offer validation, a safety net, the comfort of not being left out.
They live inside the mind.
For them, spirituality is an abstract luxury —
something discussed by people who have stepped out of real life.
Words like mind, consciousness, awareness, emotion, and subconscious
are used as if they are interchangeable.
But are they?
We trust thinking.
We believe understanding comes from explanation and definition.
We are trained to become mental beings.
Yet I wonder —
does the fact that something cannot be explained
mean it does not exist at all?
What does it mean to live without a template?
***
If I wanted to get married, I would have.
If I want to, I will.
I don’t live by rules —
not my own, not someone else’s.
But I carry a quiet sense
that I should not do certain things
and should definitely move toward others.
It is the urge that rises from direct experience of life
that inspires my creative expression.
The dynamic movement of the mind leaves impressions in my world,
but I feel alive before I understand it.
We secretly want to touch reality directly —
not merely describe it.
This is what I mean by living aware —
a conscious way of being.
What is consciousness?
Is it thinking? Feeling? Awareness?
What is real, and what is unreal?
I was on a journey to understand this.
It carried me into uncomfortable, unknown, uncharted places —
toward a view of life without a borrowed perspective.
A way of seeing and living that is direct.
Without mind. Without thought.
***
My sister was the first doctor in our family.
I am the first to never attend college.
This is not an adopted lifestyle.
It is not a tower built on conditioning.
Feelings, thoughts, perceptions —
they are not clouds in the sky.
They are the sky itself.
They change.
So what is it that never changes?
Moods and emotions are only the surface of the ocean,
yet most of life lives in its depths.
We spend our lives skimming the surface,
afraid of how deep our own being truly is.
We cannot even conceive
that our inner world might be unfathomable.
Living is not in doing,
but in stillness.
At depth, everything becomes quiet.
The mind is busy measuring meaning and purpose,
yet something in us is always watching it.
Thoughts come and go —
but the watcher does not.
What remains
when thinking stops?
***
How long will you continue to think analytically?
You will exhaust yourself, die, and be born again and again.
The analysis never ceases. It continues for many lives.
That is the reason for rebirth.
Logically, the universe is infinite,
and you can keep wandering into it endlessly.
The cycle of birth and death ceases
when you turn inward instead of outward.
When you stop seeking solutions and answers outside yourself,
you discover that you are the solution and the answer.
Everything is inside you.
Thomas Nagel famously asked,
“What is it like to be a bat?”
The question is rhetorical —
and that is the beauty of it.
Anyone casual about life
is avoiding its deepest existential questions,
afraid of losing family, job, and identity
if they truly discover who they are.
Then some are overly serious —
melancholy philosophers.
They have analysed life so deeply
that they have extracted only the mathematics of living —
an equation, not an equilibrium.
They take life out of life.
And yet some people live sincerely.
They wash dishes when they are washing dishes.
It is not a household burden
nor a romantic act of service.
It is simply what it is —
washing dishes.
In such quiet moments,
when only action exists,
when only presence remains,
we touch the fabric of truth.
We glimpse who we are and wonder,
who is the one watching the one who is washing dishes?
Nobody else can do this for you.
Only the bat knows what it is like to be a bat.
Only I can know what it is like to be me.
It is not about observing the world objectively,
but about observing experience subjectively.
So we begin observing —
not the world,
but our own experience.
And we notice what is impressed upon consciousness
when the mind is doing nothing at all.
***
We think we are living a life, but in truth, we are experiencing life.
Life is not happening to us — we are happening in life.
The problem is that we assume whatever we think is real — absolute.
Thinking is a ceaseless activity the mind performs from birth to death.
Some can decide whether to think or not and can stop thoughts completely.
I am blessed with this ability, and this is what I have found:
The more you allow the mind to think, the more it will.
The more you entertain your thoughts, the more they multiply.
Thoughts are clouds between you and the ultimate truth — silence.
The fewer thoughts you have, the more conscious you are.
Thoughts are temporary. They fall as they arise.
Similarly, emotions are felt.
You may not know why you feel the way you feel,
but you know the feeling while it is happening.
Thoughts and emotions go hand in hand.
There is almost always an emotion attached to a thought.
But that does not make thought and emotion the same.
Emotions have strong dynamic components — internally and externally.
They can move us to action, including psychological and physical violence.
Thoughts can recall fearful experiences and trigger fear again.
This is what happens in trauma — a past pain relived.
The mind thinking about an emotion is not the emotion itself.
Thoughts are imagined apprehension and comprehension.
Emotions are felt.
That is why we say reason becomes clouded by emotions.
When reason is separated from emotion, it functions more clearly.
Now the body.
Close your eyes and you are instantly aware of it.
Judging it is another story — but sensing it is immediate.
The body is made of matter.
It has longevity.
Thoughts and emotions fade quickly.
So body, mind, and emotions are different components of our being,
and all of them are impermanent.
Consciousness witnesses all three.
Thoughts change.
Emotions rise and fall.
The body ages.
But the observer remains untouched.
Like the ocean and its waves —
the waves are not the ocean.
***
We lose our old certainty.
We realise:
Knowledge does not reveal reality — it replaces it.
The rainbow becomes wavelengths.
Pain becomes nerve signals.
Life becomes technical.
But qualitative experience —
redness, sweetness, love, fear — cannot be measured.
To see consciousness, the mind must step aside.
This feels like losing control.
Like losing the mind.
***
After enlightenment, there is no enlightenment.
We return to ordinary life — but something is different.
We still think.
We still feel.
We still act.
But we are no longer trapped inside thought.
Thoughts are no longer identity; they are just events.
Emotions are experienced as sensations, not commands.
The body is known directly, without stories attached.
Observations come and go —
the observer stays.
The images on the screen of consciousness
are not consciousness itself.
They are mind formations, not reality.
Consciousness is not for logical deduction.
It is known only through direct experience.
***
Thoughts are clouds.
Emotions are the weather.
The sky remains untouched.
We are not living a life —
life is experiencing itself through us.
To introspect consciousness
is to lose the mind
and finally meet reality.
We no longer think about consciousness.
We live as consciousness.
Life is about living,
and consciousness is about recognising the quality of life —
without measuring anything.
Red is not a frequency — it is an experience.
Pain is not a temperature — it is felt.
Love is not chemistry — it is lived.
Consciousness does not think.
It does not analyse.
It simply is.
We stop seeking answers outside.
We discover.