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The Pied Piper’s Tune: On Spiritual Gurus, Corporate Leaders, and the Surrender of Our Critical Mind

The Pied Piper’s Tune: On Spiritual Gurus, Corporate Leaders, and the Surrender of Our Critical Mind

by | Dec 12, 2025 | Friendship, Integrity, RElationship, Transformation, Trust

My concerns about the modern “guru”—a title that now stretches from ashrams to boardrooms—are simple and twofold.

First, does the person on the stage actually know what they’re talking about? Have they genuinely walked the path they’re selling, or is it just polished rhetoric? Second, and more dangerously, what do they do with the authority they gather? Too often, the answer points toward the oldest temptations: power, privilege, and personal gratification.

The mechanism for gathering this authority is often the same: the demand for total surrender. It’s a call to “have complete faith in me, my way, and what I say.” It’s the subtle (or not-so-subtle) instruction to park your critical thinking at the door, to keep your questions in abeyance, and to simply follow. This isn’t a relic of medieval spirituality; it’s the bedrock of modern influence.

I saw this play out in real-time recently. A venerated corporate leader was interviewed live by a famous media personality. Before a large, attentive audience, he staked a controversial claim. He leaned in and declared, with absolute conviction, that he was stating a “FACT.” Not an opinion, not a perspective—a fact. The crowd, a sea of people nearly all holding smartphones—literal fact-checking libraries in their pockets—nodded and absorbed it as sacrosanct truth.

A simple check proved his “fact” was wrong. I even shared the details beneath the video later in Linkedin. Yet, the reluctance to accept the correction was palpable. The spell of the moment, the aura of the speaker, was more powerful than a verifiable truth.

And this game doesn’t only play out on spiritual or corporate stages. Think about it: a person in deep distress, seeking a therapist’s help; a coaching client investing in their potential; a young child looking up to their teacher; a fan pouring admiration into a celebrity. In each of these relationships, a natural power differential exists, built on a legitimate need—for healing, growth, knowledge, or belonging. This is precisely where the Piper’s tune finds its most vulnerable listeners. The dynamic can morph, subtly or overtly, from guidance into control, where the healer, coach, teacher, or star becomes the sole, unquestionable source of what the seeker desperately needs.

This is the essence of the Pied Piper’s power. It doesn’t work through logic, but through a magnetism that asks for our trust in exchange for our discernment. As sociologist Paul Heelas observed in studies of modern spirituality, people often reject traditional authority only to surrender to new, charismatic forms of it. We exchange one piper for another.

Mariana Caplan, in her book Halfway Up the Mountain: The Error of Premature Claims to Enlightenment, diagnosed this same malaise in contemporary spirituality. She warned that seekers and teachers alike often mistake charisma, altered states, or partial insights for full realization—and then prematurely claim enlightenment. The danger, she argued, is not only in the teacher’s illusion but in the seeker’s surrender of discernment. When we hand over our authority too quickly, we become vulnerable to fraud, confusion, and exploitation. Caplan’s critique echoes the Pied Piper metaphor: the tune is seductive, but it leads us away from freedom into dependency.

And this is not new. History is littered with such tunes—whether in medieval cults, fascist rallies, or corporate “visionary” speeches. The melody changes, but the mechanism remains: charisma eclipses scrutiny, and authority bias blinds us to fact. Even today, with confirmation at our fingertips, the enchantment of certainty often outweighs the quiet labor of verification. Psychologists call this authority bias: the tendency to accept statements from perceived experts without question. Add confirmation bias—the desire to hear what fits our worldview—and the Piper’s tune becomes nearly irresistible.

The true guide, then, is not the one who demands we stop thinking for our journey. It is the Kalyan Mitra—the “good friend” or fellow traveler—who walks beside us. This is the therapist who empowers your inner authority, the coach who mirrors your own wisdom back to you, the teacher who ignites your curiosity beyond their own knowledge. This guide doesn’t ask for surrender; they empower our scrutiny. They don’t offer a tune to follow blindly, but a mirror to see our own path clearly. Where the Piper plays louder, the friend invites silence. Where the Piper demands obedience, the friend cultivates discernment.

John O’Donohue, in his Celtic meditation Anam Cara, speaks of the soul friend in precisely this way: as one who dissolves masks, who sees you as you truly are, and who walks with you in intimacy and authenticity. The anam cara is not a master but a companion, not a Piper but a mirror. In such friendship, the soul finds recognition and freedom.

The Buddha, too, told Ānanda that spiritual friendship is not half the holy life but the whole of it. In the Samyutta Nikāya (SN 45.2), he declared that with admirable friendship, companionship, and camaraderie, the Noble Eightfold Path unfolds. The radical claim here is that awakening is not built on surrender to authority but on the wonder of camaraderie—walking together, questioning together, supporting each other.

In a world full of Pied Pipers claiming to have the only map, the most radical act is to hold on to your own compass. To listen, but also to verify. To respect, but also to question. Because the tune that leads you to surrender your critical mind never leads to freedom; it only leads to the next cliff edge, with someone else in control of the music.

Freedom is not found in the tune that enchants us, but in the pause that lets us listen. The true guide is not the one who plays louder, but the one who helps us hear our own music. To walk with such a friend—whether as anam cara or kalyāṇamitra—is to keep our compass alive, even in a world of pipers. Better than following a tune is learning to hear the rhythm of your own footsteps. It is my lived experience that, transformative growth happens in the soil of egalitarian, trusting relationship, not in the shadow of unquestioned authority.

The Courtesan and the Cosmos

The Courtesan and the Cosmos

by | Dec 6, 2025 | Meaning, Transformation, Uncategorized, Zen

The Sun is a minor star in a small galaxy, in a universe of billions. And yet, it can make a flower smile. Carl Sagan often reminded us that even in the immensity of the cosmos, the warmth of a single star sustains life and beauty here on Earth. Vastness does not diminish intimacy.

Romain Rolland, in his biography of Swami Vivekananda, recounts a story from the Jaipur palace. After Ramakrishna’s passing, Vivekananda travelled across India and was often hosted by kings and nobles. In Jaipur, the king arranged a dance performance by the most renowned courtesan of his palace. Vivekananda, offended, withdrew to his quarters. The king worried about displeasing him, but it was the courtesan who sent a note that carried the true teaching:

“The Sun does not discriminate. It shines on all — the saint and the sinner, the lotus and the mud. Why then should an enlightened one like you?”

This reminder became a mirror for Vivekananda. Just as the Sun warms every flower without judgment, true wisdom does not exclude. The courtesan’s note revealed that enlightenment is not about separation, but about seeing the divine equally in all beings.

We see the same truth in other traditions. In the Gospels, Jesus did not shun Mary Magdalene despite her social stigma. Instead, he welcomed her as a disciple and allowed her to be the first witness to the resurrection. His openness showed that divine recognition is not bound by categories of “pure” and “impure.” Compassion, like sunlight, embraces all.

Zen offers another wave. Two monks came to a stream where a young woman stood unable to cross. One monk lifted her and carried her across. Hours later, his companion, troubled, asked: “Why did you break your vow by touching a woman?” The elder replied: “I put her down hours ago. Are you still carrying her?” The teaching is clear: true practice is not about clinging to rules or appearances, but about responding with compassion in the moment.

Across Hindu, Christian, and Zen lenses, the lesson converges: enlightenment does not exclude. Social categories — courtesan, sinner, woman, untouchable — are human constructs. The divine light, whether expressed as Sun, Christ, or Dharma, shines impartially. The “unexpected guru” may appear in any form: a courtesan, a stigmatized disciple, or a woman at a stream.

The story turns the telescope around. Sagan used the cosmic view to make us cherish the intimate. The courtesan used the intimate — a beam of sunlight on mud and lotus alike — to reveal a cosmic spiritual truth: consciousness, like sunlight, is fundamentally impartial. Vastness does not diminish intimacy; true vastness of spirit includes all intimacy, all particularity, without judgment.

The cosmos is not cold because it is vast. It is the source of the very warmth that allows for the flower, the saint, the sinner, and the moment of understanding between a weary monk, a wise courtesan, a compassionate Christ, and a Zen elder at a stream. The final teaching is that to be truly “enlightened” is not to flee from the mud, but to recognize that the same light that makes the lotus glow also sleeps within it.

The Dance of Change: Lessons in Transformation, Resonance, and Compassion

The Dance of Change: Lessons in Transformation, Resonance, and Compassion

by | Nov 29, 2025 | Change, Management, Transformation, Zen

The first time I heard the phrase “Change Management,” I wasn’t in a lecture hall or reading a textbook. I was on the 23rd floor of the Renaissance Centre in Detroit, in 2004, looking out at the river below, surrounded by seventeen senior leaders from the tech world’s elite. I was there for the GM Round Table, representing Wipro as the most junior person in the room.

That moment was the beginning of a journey—one that would weave through corporate high-rises, soul-testing commutes, and the quiet of a Zen meditation hall. It was a journey that taught me change is not a process to be managed, but a dance to be learned—a subtle, living art built on resonance, trust, and compassion.

Beginnings: The Mask and the Scaffolding

I felt the weight of that room deeply. My boss, Geoff Phillips, saw my trepidation. He flew in and spent weekends drilling me in the art of consulting, teaching me to put on what I later called the “Monroe Mask”—that layer of outer confidence worn to cover the inner tremors.

Soon, I realized I wasn’t the only one learning to wear a mask. Our client manager enrolled the entire team in a three-day crash course on Change and Transformation Management, led by Booz Allen & Hamilton. That was the first time I heard the term. Those three days were precious.

But in my usual, tenacious way, I couldn’t stop there. I began gathering books—an enormous collection on Change Management. From the British Council’s digital library, I painstakingly downloaded chapter by chapter from nearly fifty books. Over time, those lessons became the scaffolding of my professional life.

That scaffolding was tested to its limit during my KAUST assignment. For months, I endured a daily commute of 260 kilometers—130 km each way from Jeddah to Thuwal and back. The endless desert highway became a grinding ritual that left no space for life itself. It was this physical and mental exhaustion that finally forced my hand; I decided I had to step out of Wipro to reclaim my time and my well-being.

But then, grace intervened. My client, Carsten Svensson, upon hearing my decision, spoke directly to my bosses. He valued the work more than the policy, and carved out a direct contract. He ensured I had a Red Sea-facing apartment on campus, a monthly Emirates ticket home, and a generous raise.

Those two years gave me the freedom to fly away from the 9-to-5 rhythm. The tax-free money helped Thara and me settle all our loans, buy an apartment, and decide to live debt-free.

But this story was never about financial freedom. It was about the lessons I learned in Change Management—through books, through work, through the very grain of lived experience.

The Four Directions of Change

From Detroit to KAUST to Bangalore, the compass of change has revealed itself in four enduring lessons:

  1. Reactance – The Pushback Reflex
    Reactance is the invisible wall that rises when people feel their freedom is being curtailed. It calls to mind the wisdom of Lao Tzu:

“Water is the softest thing, yet it can penetrate mountains and earth. This shows clearly the principle of softness overcoming hardness.”

A consultant who barges in with “best practices” is the hard hammer; the wall only hardens in response. The art is to be like water—to invite rather than impose. Frame change as choice, not command. Create space for ownership, so resistance transforms into curiosity.

  1. Persuasion Radar – The Hidden Antennae
    Every individual and organization has a subtle radar scanning for manipulation. This truth is perfectly captured by an old Arabian proverb:

“He who has a hundred guests cannot seat them all at the same table, but he can offend them all with a single dish of hypocrisy.”

One insincere gesture is all it takes. Authenticity, therefore, is not a soft skill but a strategic imperative. Speak plainly, act transparently. Influence flows not from persuasion, but from resonance.

  1. Overton Window – The Horizon of Acceptability
    The Overton Window is the spectrum of ideas a community currently considers “thinkable.” It is a slow, patient process of expanding the light, much like the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.:

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

You cannot force an unthinkable idea from outside the window; you can only illuminate it from within. Frame new ideas in familiar language. Stretch the window incrementally, so what was once unthinkable becomes inevitable.

  1. Context Matters – The Ecology of Change
    I never get tired of quoting Steve Donahue’s opening from Shifting Sands:
    “How big is the top of Mount Everest?”
    “About the size of a small kitchen table,” he responded.
    “That is amazing,” I said, “You know, when you cross the Sahara Desert, there is no way of knowing where the desert ends. There is no peak, no border, no sign that says, ‘You are Now leaving the Sahara Desert – Have a nice Day!’”

This is the essence of context. There is no universal map. Context is the soil. A banyan tree may scatter thousands of seeds, but it becomes another banyan only when a seed finds the right soil. A goose thrives in a pond; a camel in the desert. Listen to the land. Change is ecological, not mechanical.

The Unlearning: Compassion as the Ground

After I left Wipro, I stepped fully into managing the affairs of our Zen meditation center, Bodhi Sangha.

In my very first week, my teacher, Fr. AMA Samy, gave me a single lesson: “Be compassionate, regardless of the situation. Don’t bring your corporate hat here.”

And then he quoted a Sanskrit sloka:
Bryat satyam, priyam bryat, na bryat apriya satyam.
(Speak the truth, speak it sweetly, but do not speak unpleasant truth.)

Here, I had no title, no salary leverage. My only tools were compassion, trust, and presence. This was the most profound validation of the principles I had studied. The compass was true, even here—especially here.

The Nuance: Honesty is Not Transparency

This journey taught me another vital lesson: Honesty and integrity are the essential blocks of transformation, but honesty is not the same as transparency.

You must be honest in all you convey. Your word must be true. But to believe you must reveal every card in your hand, in a compulsive rush for total transparency, is to invite disaster. It can overwhelm, create unnecessary panic, or be weaponized against the very change you seek.

Nature understands this deeply. Human beings and animals have skin. Trees have bark. These are not walls of deception; they are vital boundaries that protect the delicate life within, allowing for selective exchange with the outside world. They are membranes of wisdom.

You can speak your truth with integrity without revealing the raw, unfinished, and vulnerable core all at once. Timing, dosage, and discernment are everything. This is the lesson from nature: be honest in your being, but wise in your revelation.

The Final Truth: Time is the Essence

And yet, all these principles rest upon one universal, non-negotiable truth: Time is the essence of all change.

We cannot alter this principle, regardless of the compulsions of Wall Street or Dalal Street. One cannot create a baby in two months by enlisting four mothers.

Nature achieves everything—without hurrying, without hastening. This brings to mind the timeless wisdom of Lao Tzu:

“He who stands on tiptoe doesn’t stand firm.
He who rushes ahead doesn’t go far…

If you want to accord with the Tao,
just do your job, then let go.”

The Dance Is the Path

So, this is my synthesis. My learning.

Change is not a formula to be memorized. It is a dance. A flight path constantly being reshaped by winds, horizons, and landscapes.

This philosophy redefines our role as that of a pilgrim—a seeker who walks alert to resistance, attuned to sincerity, patient with horizons, and humble before context.

In a world obsessed with speed and scale, this compass reminds me that true transformation is never about control.

It is always, and only, about resonance. And resonance requires the courage to be honest, the wisdom to be discerning, and the patience to listen to the ancient rhythms of nature itself.

 

The Paradox of Ego, Desire, and the Shifting Self

The Paradox of Ego, Desire, and the Shifting Self

by | Nov 28, 2025 | Life, Transformation, Zen

A few days, happened to write in response to a WordPress prompt: What historical moment fascinates you the most? I said the most historical moment for me was my own birth.

A kind response to that reflection wondered aloud if such a statement was egoistic. That question itself opened another gate for me—into the paradox of ego and desire. Perhaps that concern comes from a certain religious conditioning—that moksha or mukti must mean the annihilation of ego, the killing of all desire. I do not know if that hypothesis is true. What I do know is this: for human beings to live a good, functional, phenomenal life, a healthy ego is a must.

Our existence is paradoxical. We are where infinitude meets finitude, the eternal with the temporal. We can only realize the Self through our own consciousness—through the very ego we are told to erase.

Try this simple experiment: hold your breath for a few moments. The desire to breathe in, to live on, is our most natural desire. Without it, there is no life, no practice, no realization. So one cannot be egoless and desireless.

The real question, then, is not whether ego and desire should be annihilated, but:

  • What is a healthy ego?
  • What is a wholesome desire?

Let us begin with ego…

What we call Self / I / Other / World are not fixed identities. The borderlines between self and other, I and world, keep changing like a shifting sand. In a sense, self-realisation is the dissolving, the sublimation of that line altogether. But as the Zen koans remind us, one cannot function in that place for long. One must return—to this world, to the marketplace, to the ordinary rhythms of living. Modern psychology offers its own language here. Winnicott spoke of the “true self”—a healthy ego that allows spontaneity, play, and authentic living. Jung described individuation—the process of integrating fragments of psyche into wholeness. Both point to the same truth: ego is not to be annihilated but clarified. In Dharma terms, ego is not the enemy but the raft. Without it, we cannot cross the river; with it, we must remember not to cling once the crossing is complete. And this borderline is not a single line at all, but a continuum—stretching from finitude to infinitude. Take a simple example: when I sit on a chair and say my chair, the border is drawn where my body rests on the wood. The chair is the “other.” But when I say my hand or my leg, suddenly that which is outside me is also claimed as mine. The borderline has shifted inward, now lying between me and mine. Follow this chain of logic and you find it is endless in both directions.

Where does the “I” end and the “world” begin? Is the breath I draw in mine or the worlds? Is the food that becomes my body still “other”? Even the thought that says I—is that me, or is it something arising within me?

Advaitins keep referring to Advaita Vedanta’s never-ending refrain of neti-neti— “not this, not that.” Each identity we cling to, each border we draw between self and world, is gently negated. The chair, the hand, the breath, even the thought “I”—all are peeled away until what remains is the unnameable Self, beyond attributes.

 Yet Zen diverges.  Zen insists we return. After the silence of dissolution, we must still sweep the floor, cook the rice, and bow to the neighbour. The paradox is clear—Vedanta dissolves, Zen re-enters. Together they remind us that realization is both transcendence and ordinariness, silence and sound, vastness and marketplace.

Zhuangzi, the Taoist sage, once dreamed he was a butterfly. Upon waking, he wondered: was he a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was a man? This wasn’t just whimsy—it was a radical questioning of the solidity of the self and the world. Zhuangzi constantly shifted perspectives to show that what is “true” depends entirely on one’s standpoint. He didn’t resolve the paradox—he danced with it.

The borders keep moving, like waves on the shore. Sometimes they dissolve altogether, and we glimpse the vastness where self and world are not two. But then, inevitably, the tide returns, and we find ourselves once again in the marketplace—buying vegetables, greeting a neighbour, saying this is mine, that is yours. It is here—in the weighing of tomatoes, in the bargaining for onions, in the smile exchanged with a neighbour—that realization is tested. Not in exalted states, but in ordinariness. The marketplace is the true koan: do we cling to “mine” and “yours,” or do we walk lightly, allowing the world to fill us in?

When one becomes egotist, then for them only they exist, and the other does not. But when we are empty of self, then the world fills us in.

Turning now to desire, and what makes it wholesome…

Buddhism itself makes a subtle distinction here. It speaks of two kinds of desire:

  • Tanhā – craving, thirst, the clinging that binds us to suffering.
  • Chanda – wholesome aspiration, the clear and steady wish that leads toward growth, practice, and liberation.

So, the problem is not desire itself, but the way it is held. When desire hardens into tanhā, it narrows and enslaves. When it opens into Chanda, it becomes a path, a current that carries us toward freedom. In many mainstream interpretations, moksha, mukti, nirvana, swarga, and heaven are precisely conceived as an escape—a final release from the painful, relentless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth (samsara) on this Earth. And many traditions teach the way out of this to kill the ego and discipline the desire. Sometime back, I read a caption on the T-shirt of a young tourist in Kodaikanal. It read: “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die.” I was struck by the absurdity of that quote. Many don’t realise that living here, right now, is heaven.

Religions often seem to have trained us to believe in a heaven “out there”—a distant reward to distract us from our pain here. We’re told to sacrifice our joy, suppress our desires, and endure suffering for a paradise that never arrives. It’s like a carrot hung in front of cattle—always just out of reach. Infact In Mahābhārata, Bhishma Parva urges the warriors that virgins wait in heaven for their valour and death in the battlefield.

In verse 6.11.13, Sanjaya declares to Dhritarashtra:

“Those who die in battle, having fought bravely, attain the regions of the righteous, where celestial nymphs wait upon them.”

The battlefield becomes a portal to heaven, and death becomes passport and visa. But what gets lost is the heaven of this life—the heaven of ordinariness, of compassion, of presence.

By the way this motif isn’t unique to the Mahābhārata. In Norse mythology, warriors who die in battle are promised entry into Valhalla, where they feast and fight eternally under Odin’s gaze. The valour of death becomes the ticket to glory. In Islamic martyrdom traditions, especially in certain militant interpretations, paradise is promised to those who die defending the faith—often described with vivid imagery of gardens, rivers, and companions.

Even in Indian traditions, moksha or mukti is often described as a state of eternal bliss—freedom from rebirth, from the cycle of earthly pain and suffering. In other words, another metaphor for heaven. Swarga, Vaikuntha, Kailasa—each tradition paints its own celestial landscape. But the paradox remains: we long for liberation from this world, even as the teachings whisper that liberation is found in this world.

My reflection, however, leans into a different, though equally ancient, interpretation found within those very same traditions. It’s the voice that questions:

What if the goal is not to escape the world, but to see it correctly?

This is the radical non-dual perspective within Vedanta, the “nirvana is samsara” of Mahayana Buddhism, and the “ordinary mind is the Tao” of Zen.

From this vantage point:

  • Heaven (Swarga) vs. Moksha: In the traditional ladder, swarga is a temporary, pleasant abode—a reward for good deeds, after which one must return to Earth. Moksha is the final release from that very cycle. But we often treat moksha itself as a super-sized, permanent swarga—a “better place” elsewhere. This longing for “elsewhere” blinds us to the sacredness of “here.”
  • The Problem isn’t Earth, it’s Ignorance: The suffering isn’t inherent in the world, but in our avidya—our distorted perception. We suffer because we cling to what is impermanent as if it were permanent and believe the fragile ego to be the whole truth of who we are.
  • Liberation is a Shift in Perception, not Location: When ignorance falls away, the world isn’t negated—it is transfigured. The same marketplace, the same breath, the same neighbour, is seen in its true nature—as luminous, empty, and inseparable from the divine ground of being.

So perhaps the eternal bliss of moksha isn’t the antithesis of earthly life, but its fulfilment. We don’t leave the world to find heaven—we discover heaven by fully, awake-ly, living in the world. The raft (ego) isn’t burned because it’s evil, but because the crossing is complete. One stands on the further shore, only to realize the shore was always right here, and the river was an illusion of perception all along.

So we return, as always, to the paradox of ego and desire. At the beginning, they seemed like obstacles—something to be killed, disciplined, erased. But now they appear as gates. Ego is the raft, desire the wind. Without them, there is no crossing. With them, there is danger of clinging, of craving.

The task is not annihilation, but clarification.

  • Ego clarified becomes openness, a self that is porous, playful, and free.
  • Desire clarified becomes aspiration, a current that carries us toward compassion and ordinariness.

When ego hardens, the world shrinks. When desire distorts, the heart thirsts endlessly. But when ego softens, the world enters us. When desire steadies, the path unfolds beneath our feet. Perhaps this is the paradox: we do not transcend ego and desire by destroying them, but by letting them dissolve into their true nature. Ego as transparency. Desire as aspiration. Both as companions on the way.

And then, as always, we return to the marketplace—smiling, bowing, buying onions. Heaven is not elsewhere. It is here, in the ordinariness of breath, in the neighbour’s greeting, in the stray dog’s eyes. And the other shore is not the shore of Nirvana, but of our present life—this breath, this neighbour, this stray dog, this marketplace. Ego and desire do not vanish; they are clarified, softened, made transparent. They return with us to the ordinariness of living, no longer chains but companions.

The realisation / enlightenment or whatever we name is the understanding that  there is no non-dualism without dualism, no day without night, no life without death and no yin without yang. Realisation is not the erasure of opposites, but the seeing that opposites are inseparable.

 

The Art of Living Well: Rehearsing Failure and Symbolic Death for a Successful Life

The Art of Living Well: Rehearsing Failure and Symbolic Death for a Successful Life

by | Nov 21, 2025 | Harmony, Life, Meaning, Meditation, Transformation, Zen

One of the best ways to set ourselves to success in any endeavour in life, is prepare ourselves the best for a potential failure. While it is true, with respect to skills, strengths and ability, it is better to strengthen our strengths than bridge the endless gap of lack of it. That does not work in the area of mindset and attitude.

How much ever we reframe ourselves with positive thinking and paper over those fears with hope, fear of failure, performance anxiety lies in some distant corner of our mind, like that potassium permanganate capsule. And the moment it gets burst in a beaker of water, it colours the water in no time. The same with that capsule of fear of failure / performance anxiety in the darkest recesses of our mind.

And only way we can purge it out of our system is, putting the 1000 lumens headlight of awareness right into it. All human transformations begin with awareness. In management parlance, there is a cycle of unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence. Unless we bring out what is there in our unconscious mind to the effervescent light of awareness, we will never be able to transform it.

This is where the ancient practices come alive. The way to do it is those Stoic exercises on death or Jesuit memento mori. While I learnt the Stoic exercise from the annual Stoic Week organised by University of Exeter, Fr. AMA taught me about the Jesuit practice of memento mori. Once we visualise what is the worst that can happen in our endeavour and then survive those torrid feelings in our body, it dissolves itself. The nervous system learns it has already “died” and returned. The capsule loses its potency. This is not just a mental reframing but a physiological release — the body itself learns freedom.

Athletes too have discovered this gate. Sports psychologists train competitors to rehearse failure — missed shots, falls, defeats — so that when the real contest arrives, the body does not recoil. The fear has already been faced. And Phil Jackson, the “Zen Master” of the Chicago Bulls, brought this wisdom to Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and their teammates. He taught them meditation, breath awareness, and detachment from outcomes. In his method, the game was not just about winning but about presence. By rehearsing loss, by facing impermanence, the Bulls dissolved their fear and played with freedom.

I have been a student of spirituality and meditation for some 30+ years. And I did read quite a bit (in fact late Dr. Satish Inamdar, KFI Trustee and Director of The Valley School had said to me once, I will find my “way” when I stopped reading!) and did my quota of channel surfing and spiritual shopping in my life. And the search kind of ended while watching an NBA basketball match on TV in West Haven. Seeds of Zen were planted in my mind in the most unlikely of places. West Haven.

During June 1998. That was my first visit to the land of Baseball and Basketball. Both Greek and Latin games for me as a spectator. In the NBA final, Chicago Bulls were playing against Utah Jazz. What got my eye and attention was Chicago Bulls Coach Phil Jackson. There was an article in NYTimes that he used to make players like Dennis Rodman, who was an out and out rebellious, rule-breaking toughie, and Scottie Pippen and the larger-than-life Michael Jordan, all managed by the Zen Coach, Phil Jackson. I would have read and reread his book Sacred Hoops more than once. He was deeply spiritual with Native Indian and Zen philosophy. In fact, Jackson spent a large part of his life studying Buddhism and its principles, from his mentor Shunryu Suzuki. Jackson wrote, “What appealed to me about Zen practice was its inherent simplicity. It didn’t involve chanting mantras or visualizing complex images, as had other practices I’d tried. Zen is pragmatic, down-to-earth, and open to exploration. It doesn’t require you to subscribe to a certain set of principles or take anything on faith.”

Fourteen years later, in 2012, after my own experiments with truth and lies of spirituality, I did a hard landing into Bodhi Zendo and Zen, and real spiritual seeking started.

AMA Samy and Bodhi Zendo were different. I would compare Bodhi Zendo a bit with Esalen of Big Sur, CA. One of the most beautiful places of learning I had visited. It was not as regimented as a Vipassana session. It did allow a good amount of personal space to oneself. Sometimes a good conversation, a good joke and laughter at the dining table along with some yummy food, is as good as anything else in this world towards one’s spiritual seeking.

Secondly, AMA Samy had one of the best collections of books on spirituality, philosophy, theology and psychology I have seen in my life. (AMA seems to have read most of them.) When I was a full-time student of MA Education at APU Bangalore, I had to write a term paper on Phenomenology of Krishnamurti’s teachings as an assignment for Dr. Kaustav Roy. I was searching for a book of Heidegger at the Zendo library one December afternoon. AMA walked in to keep some book and he asked me what I was reading. When I explained to him my struggle with that phenomenology paper, he spent 15–20 minutes to sum it up for me like a précis. I ran back to my room, and jotted down in my notebook whatever I could remember. That assignment is one of the few for which I got an O grade. And getting it from Dr. Kaustav Roy was almost like a Fields Medal. 🙂

Thirdly and most importantly, no one demanded that the camel got to pass through the eye of needle test of Faith first and salvation later. The Kalama Sutta poster on the wall said it so succinctly: “Don’t blindly believe what I say. Don’t believe me because others convince you of my words. Don’t believe anything you see, read, or hear from others, whether of authority, religious teachers or texts.” And AMA Samy did practice it to every dot in the i and j and crosses in the t. Though he had a tough and rough demeanour as a Zen master, there was an endearing quality of integrity and compassion about the man. He took his spirituality and teaching seriously, not himself. That was absolutely refreshing to my tired seeking mind.

Even then, it took me 3 years to seek to be accepted as AMA’s Zen student. As the saying goes, once bitten twice shy and the cat which falls into a hot water tub will stay even from a cold water one. Heidi, a co-student of AMA in Japan with Yamada Roshi and later AMA’s student, spoke to me and asked me to join Bodhi Sangha.

And I did decide to seek to be accepted as a student of AMA Samy, after reading this passage in one of the books written by him:

“The master cannot give you satori; she/he is there to guide, to challenge, to test, to confirm. In truth, all the world is your teacher, the whole life of birth and death is the training field… Zen, therefore, is a teaching by negation, negating everything that the student supposes Zen to be, hoping that the student will realize that by not being any particular thing, s/he is everything; and that by not being any particular self, s/he is selflessly all selves.”

Coming back to our theme of this note: what emerges here is not just resilience, but antifragility — the capacity to grow stronger through stress and shocks. By rehearsing failure, we do not merely withstand adversity; we integrate it, and in doing so, we gain from it. The process unfolds as a living cycle:

Awareness → Acceptance → Integration → Freedom.

We move fear from the unconscious (where it controls us) to the conscious (where we can work with it). By mentally and emotionally surviving the worst-case scenario, we integrate the experience, and the capsule loses its potency. What remains is not naive hope, but a confident, grounded presence.

As the saying goes, hope for the best and prepare for the worst is the best strategy. Not pessimism, but resilience. In Zen terms, it is living with the certainty of impermanence while still planting seeds of joy and trust.

 

The Mist, The Lens, and AI: A Zen Guide to Clarity, Discernment, and Insight…

The Mist, The Lens, and AI: A Zen Guide to Clarity, Discernment, and Insight…

by | Oct 15, 2025 | AI, AI, Technology, Transformation, Zen

When I skipped a Zazen session to catch up on pending tasks, the mists and mountains seemed to come checking in. Instinctively, I tried to take a snap with my iPhone 16e.

“AI (Apple Intelligence) said: “Clean the camera lens.” 😀
AI is quite good. But Nature is a better product designer than humans. Any day, any time. 😀

It’s almost comic, isn’t it — AI urging you to “clean the lens,” while Nature is busy painting with fog, reminding us that clarity isn’t always the point. Sometimes the most truthful image is the one that hides as much as it shows.”

This share drew more responses than usual. One asked me whether Zen is anti‑tech.

I smile at the question. I’ve lived in technology for three decades. From IBM mainframes with TN3270 terminals and 5‑inch floppy diskettes, through Pascal, Fortran, COBOL, PL/1, C, minicomputers, HTML, XML, Java… I’ve seen the whole parade. Later, I spent another dozen years in Business Change Consulting. And if I look back honestly, much of what was called “transformation” was really just technology adoption masquerading as transformation. Tools changed, buzzwords changed, but the deeper work — how people think, decide, and act — was often left untouched.

What people miss is this: beneath every leap of technology, there was tremendous human endeavour. Nothing came out of thin air. Every so‑called revolution was built on the painstaking work of engineers, researchers, and practitioners who sweated through trial and error.

In those days, before CIOs became a fixture in organisations, users were cautious. Especially when it touched critical functions of human life. No beta versions, please. A few pioneers jumped into the cesspool of changes, but most waited for the defects and effects to surface and be rectified before adopting. There was always a gap — a chasm — between pioneers and early adopters.

And here’s another shift I’ve witnessed: in the early days, technology and industry were about designing and building products that lasted. My father wore a Favre Leuba watch for over 40 years. It worked wonderfully. Newspapers carried stories of Toyota Corollas or Mercedes Benz cars clocking 200,000 km with ease. Durability was a mark of pride.

But somewhere along the way, in the greed of economics, the philosophy changed. Planned obsolescence became the model. Phones that slow down after a few years, software that forces upgrades, cars that are more electronics than engines. The cycle of consumption sped up, and with it came the illusion of progress.

And yet, not all change is regress. Some changes are truly good. They add value to us — individually and collectively. The core question is whether those changes are tested, evaluated, and implemented in such a way that they can be called progress for all, rather than just swelling the bank balances of a few.

Later, when I went back to APU for a full‑time postgraduate course in Education, I took a class on Education Technology. A professor from Finland told us how, after the initial euphoria, Nordic countries were returning to more traditional schooling. She reminded us of Steve Jobs’ own words: when asked if his children loved the iPad, he said, “They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.” The paradox is striking: the creator of the iPad preferred his children to rely on books, conversation, and presence. The Nordics, too, discovered that tools are useful, but they cannot replace the atmosphere of learning.

This is not new. Back in 1962, Everett Rogers, a rural sociologist, studied how farmers adopted hybrid corn. He noticed adoption followed a predictable curve: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards. That became the Technology Adoption Life Cycle. Decades later, Geoffrey Moore — once an English professor — reframed it in Crossing the Chasm. He saw that between early adopters and the early majority there is a dangerous gap. Not because people are too skeptical or cautious, but because visionaries and pragmatists live by different values. The chasm is not resistance. It is a threshold.

And now, AI. A wonderful tool, the culmination of work on neural networks since the 1940s. But some of the claims I read today are extraordinary… Many forget that AI is, at its core, another computer program written by humans.

AI can simulate conversation, generate images, even mimic reasoning. But simulation is not embodiment. AI does not live in a body, carry memory in the marrow, or transmit atmosphere through silence. To confuse fluency with wisdom is to mistake the mist for a dirty lens.

We must remember: AI is not born but made. Its “intelligence” is painstakingly sculpted through training, and its wisdom is fundamentally bounded by the quality and scope of that original dataset. This boundedness is by design—a necessary guardrail, as seen with early systems like Tay, to prevent misuse.

This reveals the chasm between artificial training and human nurture. An AI operates as a closed system; its knowledge is a snapshot, frozen in time, with interactions kept in transactional isolation. Human wisdom, in contrast, is an open system, unbounded by life itself. We learn through wilful, integrated synthesis—constantly connecting conversations, emotions, and experiences in a messy, living tapestry of understanding.

This is why AI, for all its power, cannot be truly spiritual or social. These realms require the very integration and embodied context that its architecture prevents.

And hype is not confined to AI. Remember Theranos? Genny Harrison, who worked in Silicon Valley, wrote of how executives around her canonized Elizabeth Holmes while dismissing questions about functionality. “It was faith disguised as innovation,” she wrote. “The black turtleneck became a costume for credibility. The TED Talk tone replaced evidence. It was never about blood testing. It was about belief.”

Holmes knew exactly what she was doing. By donning the black turtleneck, she borrowed the aura of Steve Jobs, hoping to cloak herself in his myth of genius and inevitability. It was a prop, a costume, a calculated illusion. And it worked — until it didn’t.

Theranos collapsed, but the machinery that made it possible never stopped. Every few months another founder emerges with the same manic optimism and the same empty promises, and we fall for it again.

Zen is not anti‑tech. It is anti‑illusion. The mist on the zendo lens is not a flaw but a teaching. The Theranos story is not an exception but a mirror. The chasm is not skepticism — it is the threshold between vision and proof. And AI, too, is not magic. It is a tool, and its claims must be tested, not worshipped. Education reminds us: atmosphere, presence, discernment matter more than devices.

Zen also teaches us to be in touch with reality. The Buddha, in the Kalama Sutta, urged: “Do not go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture… but when you know for yourselves that these things are wholesome and lead to welfare, then you should practice them.” For Zen practitioners, great faith is always balanced by great doubt. Faith without doubt becomes blind belief; doubt without faith becomes cynicism. Together, they keep us alive to reality.

And Zen warns of makyō — the delusions that arise in meditation, dazzling visions that can seduce us away from truth. But makyō is not confined to the cushion. In the tech world, hype cycles, inflated valuations, and charismatic founders are also forms of makyō. They dazzle, but they are not reality.

From Rogers’ cornfields to Moore’s chasm, from mainframes and floppy disks to AI’s extraordinary claims, from Nordic classrooms back to chalkboards, from the black turtleneck of Theranos to the mist‑covered zendo, and from watches and cars built to last to systems endlessly swapped between Oracle and SAP — the real adoption curve is not about technology at all.

It is about learning to see through illusion, to honor the human endeavour beneath every leap, and to return, again and again, to reality.

I am not a tech hater. I appreciate the extraordinary things AI can do. But discernment matters. Not every wave is worth riding. Progress is not measured by the speed of adoption, but by whether it truly serves human well‑being.

In this era of overhype, it is important to be a conscious practitioner and an aware user. When many confuse simulation for substance, caution is not undue fear but wisdom. Asking “how” and “why” before jumping into the cesspool of “what next” is the only antidote to cynicism and hype.

Questioning is not cynicism. It is clarity.

In recent times, many extraordinary claims have been made by persons of repute. But as Carl Sagan wisely reminded us: ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’

AI is neither Frankenstein’s monster, as some fear, nor a divine panacea, as some hope. It is not apocalypse, nor salvation. Like the wheel, fire, or even sliced bread, it is simply another invention — extraordinary, yes, but still human-made. It is a tool — perhaps as consequential as the wheel, fire, or sliced bread — but still a tool, shaped by human hands and human choices. One should never forget the fact that AI is another computer program… Maybe a much better one. Still a computer program.

And the most important founding principle of computers and programs remains unchanged: GIGO — Garbage In, Garbage Out. However advanced the system, it cannot rise above the quality of its inputs. Only the human mind can discern, in the living moment, what is garbage and what is not.

And so, the mist returns. The zendo lens fogged not to obscure, but to remind: clarity is not always the point. Illusion is not always error — sometimes it is teaching. Technology, like mist, can veil or reveal. The task is not to worship the fog or the lens, but to see through both, to discern what truly serves life.

In the end, Zen is not anti‑tech. It is anti‑illusion. The mountains in mist, the black turtleneck of Theranos, the hype cycles of AI — all are invitations to look again. To pause. To test. To return, again and again, to reality.

P.S. I ran this past Copilot, my partner‑in‑crime, and even from an AI perspective my apprehensions seem valid. While it is important to use a tool, it is equally important not to be used by a Tool.

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