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Being-Time and the Logged Second…

Being-Time and the Logged Second…

by | Sep 4, 2026 | Career, Life, Public Policy, STRESS, Technology, Transformation, Trust

Spirituality isn't about the afterlife.

It's about learning to live — and live right — here, while we're here. Fr. AMA used to say it comes down to having a healthy, balanced relationship with Power, Money, and Sex. Often he'd add: it starts from Sex, Power, Money, in that order. I've started adding Time to the list now. The first three, at least conceptually, are easy enough to get a handle on. Time is not.

Just 2 days ago, a friend and erstwhile colleague, in a WhatsApp group posted about binge-watching OTT to kill time, and not remembering any of it the next day — so he said he wasn't the right person to give suggestions.

 I replied: You don't have to kill time. It dies by itself. Time doesn't need our help — it's the ultimate self-destructing entity. Every second we try to "kill" is already a corpse by the time we take aim. 🙂

And thinking about it more — if time is already dead by the time we aim at it, there was no marksman either. Just the aiming-thought arising and passing, like everything else. That's the trick nobody tells you about time. You can hoard money, misuse power, indulge or repress desire — all of these hold still enough to be gripped, negotiated with, renounced. Time was never there to be gripped. It's gone in the reaching.

The great Zen Master Dogen never wrote a book on money or power. He wrote one on time — Uji, being-time — because this is the subtlest of the four. Firewood doesn't become ash, he said. Firewood has its own before and after; ash has its own before and after. The moment doesn't survive into the next moment to be spent or saved or killed. Each moment is already complete, disclosing the whole of being-time in itself.

Which is what made my friend's reply the more interesting koan, more than the binge-watching itself. Not remembering any of it the next day — that's not a confession of failed willpower. It's a fairly precise report of time passing with no witness built around it. No thread laid down. Could be dissociation — going out the back door. Or, minus the noticing, it could be close to what Dogen is pointing at — time occurring with nothing accumulating. Same shape from outside. Not the same from inside. Worth asking him — not as correction, but as a real question — was he absent, or just unaccumulating? Those look identical the next morning. They are not the same door.

And then this morning, a colleague from twenty years ago — we were on the same team once — shares this: Wipro deploys real-time productivity monitoring tool for employees. Wipro. A place I “worked” quite a number of time years, across three separate stints.

TimeScope, they're calling it. Rolled out to 5,000 employees in May, now expanding — fixed-price teams, billable roles, support functions, even people on the bench. It watches login duration, periods of inactivity, time spent inside Word, Excel, Outlook, Chrome. If there's no evidence of login on a working day, leave gets deducted. You can contest it, they say. They also say it isn't tracking keystrokes or screen content — just presence. Just whether you were, provably, there.

I read that and thought: this is the exact inversion of what I wrote to my friend two days ago.

I told him time doesn't need killing — it dies by itself, it's already a corpse by the time you take aim. TimeScope needs the opposite to be true. It needs time to be a substance that can be caught being wasted. It needs the murder weapon and the body, because without evidence of the kill, they dock your leave. It is institutionalising the very delusion my one-liner was trying to dissolve — that time is something you can hoard, spend, or be caught not spending, rather than something already gone in the reaching.

And of course it isn't really about time. It never is. This is Power and Money borrowing Time's clothes — a dashboard is Power, a xxx-basis-point margin drop is Money — dressed up as neutral, technical measurement so it doesn't have to announce itself as what it actually is: surveillance wearing a lab coat. With Sex, Power, Money, you can at least see the greed plainly when someone's caught in it. With Time, the greed gets to disguise itself as efficiency, as data, as fairness — "we're not accusing you, the dashboard is just telling us the truth."

A dashboard on every login gap. Different scale, same species of attention — the gaze that can only trust what it can measure, turned on something that was never suited to being measured that way. Thirty years, three stints — and this is where the place has arrived. Not because anyone there is evil. Because margin pressure, like every hungry ghost, eventually runs out of everything else to extract, and starts extracting your presence itself, second by logged second. By the way the  hungry ghost is a Buddhist legend — beings with tiny mouths and enormous stomachs, never satisfied. That's not demonisation. That's diagnosis.

And that is diagnosing a civilisational confusion.  In my view, we have mistaken the measurable for the real. We have mistaken logged presence for lived presence.

On Marshmallows, Attention, and the Long Walk to Mannarkkad in the Rain…

On Marshmallows, Attention, and the Long Walk to Mannarkkad in the Rain…

by | May 27, 2026 | Joy, Life, Meaning, Peace, RElationship, Transformation, Zen

Good moment, dear reader.

I want to begin slowly today. No grand thesis to prove. No ten-point framework to deliver. Just… a few thoughts that have been sitting with me since last evening — the way certain things stay with you through the night, and are still there in the morning, quiet and patient, waiting to be looked at.

I run a year-long inner work program called Kokoro-Zen-Do in Action. We are six months in. A small, earnest cohort of people who signed up — bravely, I think — to spend a year doing the kind of slow, uncomfortable, unglamorous work that does not fit into a reel or a listicle.

Yesterday morning, I put a reminder in our Sangha community group.

Our planned Sangha Dialogue — 27 May, 8:30 PM. A gentle nudge into the shared stream of our days. I typed it out, pressed send, and went about my morning. Thinking nothing more of it.

Now — I want you to know I am smiling as I write this. More the kind of smile that arises when life arranges itself into an accidental koan. A reminder about presence… that no one noticed.

A message about gathering… that dissolved somewhere into the scroll. Between a forwarded recipe and a motivational quote, most likely.

I thought: well. There is something here worth saying out loud.

So here I am, saying it. Not to my cohort only. But to anyone who might find themselves in it.

Dogen said: To study Zen is to study the self.

I have been living with that sentence for years. It does not get smaller with familiarity. If anything, the longer I sit with it, the more I find it has rooms I had not yet entered.

Because here is what I think Dogen was pointing at — and what I believe is true not only of Zen, but of any genuine inner work:

It is not about what we accumulate.

Not the knowledge. Not the frameworks. Not the vocabulary. Not the certificates on the wall or the books on the shelf or the meditation apps on the phone with the streak counter that quietly judges you every morning.

It is about integration. Shadow integration. The slow, uncomfortable, often unglamorous work of meeting the parts of ourselves we have been managing, performing around, quietly afraid of — and bringing them home. Bit by bit. Season by season.

That work… does not happen quickly.

It cannot be rushed. It cannot be hacked. It cannot be summarised in a bullet point or captured in a ninety-second reel.

And I think — I gently suspect — that this is where many of us are finding it hard.

Let me tell you about a marshmallow.

Back in 1972, a psychologist at Stanford named Walter Mischel ran a simple experiment. He brought children — four years old, five years old — into a small room. On the table in front of them, he placed one marshmallow. Then he made them an offer.

You can eat this now. That is perfectly fine. Or — you can wait. I am going to step out. If the marshmallow is still here when I come back, I will bring you two.

Then he left.

Some children ate the marshmallow almost immediately. Some waited — and the waiting was exquisite to observe. They covered their eyes. They turned away. They sang to themselves. They petted the marshmallow as if it were a small animal. They did everything in their power to hold the discomfort of — not yet.

What I find most moving about this experiment is not the outcome data. It is the image itself.

A small child. A single marshmallow. And the enormous, silent battle between now and later.

Because that battle — dressed in different clothes, playing out on a different stage — is exactly what many of us are navigating in our inner lives right now.

Any genuine inner work asks you to invest in something you cannot yet see. To practice something whose fruits are not immediately measurable. To sit with the discomfort of I am not sure this is working, I am not sure I am doing it right, I am not sure anything is happening at all — and to keep showing up anyway.

That is the marshmallow.

And the gratification… is genuinely far ahead.

Now. About attention.

I want to tell you something first. About who I was as a child. Because I think it matters.

I grew up reading big books. Not summaries. Not excerpts. The full, brick-like, glorious things. Gone with the Wind. The Count of Monte Cristo. Arabian Nights. And Ithihyamala — that magnificent Malayalam collection of temple legends and folk stories that my grandmother kept on the highest shelf, which made it, naturally, the first thing I wanted to reach. I read these not as tasks but as worlds I moved into and lived in for weeks. You did not rush The Count of Monte Cristo. You let it take you. You surrendered to its pace.

And cricket. Five-day Test cricket.

We were living then in Thenkara. A small village — and I mean small in the way that really means something — no electricity, leave alone a television. The world beyond our village arrived slowly, if at all.

But there was Kanna mama. My father’s cousin. He lived in Mannarkkad, in a big ancestral house. And that house was always — always — open. Not just for us. For everyone. For the whole extended, sprawling, uninvited crowd of us who would assemble there for the big game  or simply because there was nowhere else to go and Kanna mama never, not once, made anyone feel like there was anywhere else they should be.

Five full days for a Test match. The host family never once complained. Never once hinted that the crowd was too much. The house was simply… open. Food appeared. Tea appeared. And we watched. Hour after hour. Day after day. The long, slow, meditative rhythm of Test cricket — the building of an innings, the shifting of pressure, the patience required of both batsman and bowler and, crucially, of the watcher.

That is a kind of attention that is very hard to describe to someone who has not felt it. A sustained, willing, wholehearted giving of your time and presence to something unfolding at its own pace, on its own terms, with no guarantee of a dramatic finish.

And then there was the night of 21 June 1986.

Brazil versus France. World Cup quarter-final. Guadalajara, Mexico.

My father decided we would go to Kanna mama’s house to watch. My brother and I didn’t need convincing. And so we walked — from Thenkara to Mannarkkad — in the rain. I don’t remember exactly how far. I remember the rain. I remember my father walking ahead, steady, not complaining. I remember the particular quality of that anticipation — the feeling of moving toward something through discomfort, because the thing was worth it.

We arrived. The house was full and warm and loud. Kanna mama’s house always was.

Brazil lost, as it happens. On penalties. One of the most beautiful and heartbreaking matches in the history of the sport. Zico missed the crucial kick. I can still see it.

After forty years, I can still recall both team lineups. Every name. Every position.

That is what deep attention does to an experience. It burns it in. It makes it yours forever.

Kanna mama passed away three weeks ago.

And here is one of life’s quietly astonishing circles: he left his sprawling ancestral house almost right in the middle  of  Mannarkkad — that very house, the one we walked toward in the rain that June night — to Thenkara. The village we had walked from. The place where we lived in 1986 with no electricity, leave alone a television.

His house came to Thenkara where I started that long walk to watch … a football game ! . All those years later.

I don’t have a neat way to say what that means. I am not sure it needs one. Some circles don’t need explaining. They just need witnessing.

Now I look back at all of this — the big books, the five-day Tests, the walk to Mannarkkad in the rain — and I see something I could not have named then.

We were, without knowing it, practicing the marshmallow.

Every single day.

We were practicing the art of staying. Of not reaching for the easier thing. Of letting something unfold at its own pace and trusting that the unfolding was worth your presence.

And now… I catch myself reaching for my phone four minutes into reading a book I have been meaning to sit with for weeks. Not because anything has arrived. Not because anyone needs me. Simply because the silence of reading has become, in four minutes, slightly uncomfortable. Slightly too slow.

The phone is the marshmallow. And I eat it.

I tell you this not as confession for its own sake. I tell you because I am swimming in the same water as everyone else. The current pulls at me too. Every single day.

We live in an age that has been ingeniously engineered to shorten our attention. Instagram reels. T20 cricket — where an entire story of contest and drama and reversal, that once unfolded over five long contemplative days, is now compressed into three electric hours. Fast food. Micro-learning. The podcast that delivers the key ideas from a book in eleven minutes. The listicle summarising a work that took a human being seven years and great personal suffering to write — delivered brisk and tidy, before your coffee goes cold.

I use these things too. I am not standing apart from any of this.

But I want to name what it does to us. Cumulatively. Quietly. Over time.

It trains us away from dwelling.

It trains us to expect resolution quickly. Insight quickly. Transformation quickly. And when transformation does not arrive on that timeline — when the practice feels dry, when the book doesn’t open, when the sitting produces nothing but a restless leg and a wandering mind — we conclude, almost automatically: something must be wrong.

Nothing is wrong.

You are simply being asked to walk to Mannarkkad in the rain.

To show up for the five-day Test.

To let The Count of Monte Cristo take as long as it takes.

To let something work on you the way a long, slow monsoon works on a hillside — not dramatically, not in a single downpour, but reshaping everything, steadily, over time. The hillside does not announce its transformation. It simply receives the rain.

And one morning — you cannot say exactly when — everything looks different.

I want to say something now that I hope lands gently.

The practice is the returning. The quiet, undramatic act of coming back — half-asleep sometimes, carrying more than you expected sometimes, having eaten the marshmallow sometimes — and being here anyway.

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi said something I have returned to more times than I can count: Each of you is perfect the way you are… and you can use a little improvement. Both things simultaneously true. You are exactly where you need to be. And you are still unfolding. This is not a contradiction. This is the Enso itself — complete, and yet still being drawn.

Let me be honest about one more thing before I close.

When I began my own journey — the longer one, the one that eventually led me to this work — I was deeply uncomfortable with not knowing how it would turn out. I wanted the map. I wanted the guarantee. I wanted someone further along to look at me and say: Yes. If you do this, you will arrive there. And there is worth going.

Nobody said that. Nobody could.

Because the whole point — the irreducible, inalienable, sometimes infuriating point — is that you have to walk into the not-knowing. Through the rain. In the dark. Not knowing if Brazil will win.

What I can offer — not as a promise, but as the quiet testimony of someone who has been walking longer and has fallen more times than he would like to admit — is this:

The walking changes you.

Not in the way you expected. Not on the timeline you planned. But it changes you in the way that lasts — quietly, irrevocably, from somewhere so deep inside that you often don’t notice it happening at all. You only notice it later, looking back, when you realise you responded to something the way you never used to respond. When you find a small spaciousness where there used to be only a wall.

That is the fruit. And it takes its own time to ripen.

It cannot be reminded into existence.

Not even by a WhatsApp message on a Tuesday morning.

So.

Be tender with yourselves.

Be patient with what is quietly ripening in the dark.

Trust the slow monsoon.

Walk to Mannarkkad, even in the rain.

And if, on some days, all you can do is remember that you are on a path — that is enough. That remembering, however fleeting, however sandwiched between a recipe forward and a motivational quote — that is the path. You are on it. Even now.

One question to sit with — no need to answer it anywhere but inside yourself:

Where in my life right now is something asking me to wait… and what would it mean, just for today, to say yes to that waiting?

Sit with it.

No hurry.

In Gassho — Metta and Mudita,

Vishy Sankara

kokorozendo.life

P.S. If something in these pages stirred something in you — Cohort 2 opens September 2026. No hurry. No pressure. Just — you will know if it is for you.

The Koan of the Mindzendo: Writing in the Tunnel Without Light…

The Koan of the Mindzendo: Writing in the Tunnel Without Light…

by | Mar 28, 2026 | Change, Life, Transformation, Zen

There was a time — not that long ago — when the tunnel had no light. Not at the end, not even at the beginning. Just darkness, thick and unyielding. I had lost my job, lost my footing, and with it, the fragile scaffolding of confidence. Depression is not just sadness; it is the absence of horizon. You cannot even imagine the possibility of dawn.

In those days, the only thing I had was a domain name: Mindzendo.coach. A small corner of the digital world, a name I had registered almost absentmindedly, like planting a seed without knowing if the soil would ever hold.

Then something curious happened. On GoDaddy, an unknown bidder kept raising the price for that domain. Ten dollars, a hundred, a thousand. When it touched six thousand, I was tempted to sell. After all, I was penniless. Six thousand dollars could have been oxygen for someone who was drowning in the whirlpool of life.

But then a thought struck me: if someone else sees so much value in this, and I cannot, then the issue is not with the domain — it is with my eyes. To sell it then would have been to sell not just a name, but the possibility of my own seeing. So I declined.

That refusal was not an act of wealth, but of faith. Faith that value is not always measured in currency, and that sometimes the world tests us by showing us our worth through another's eyes.

It was around then that my friend Komal Jain said, "Why don't you monetise your writing?" At that time, even stepping out of the house felt like climbing Everest. To imagine that my words could carry value, that they could be exchanged in the marketplace of human attention, was almost absurd. And yet, it was precisely then that I applied for an online writing programme.

The irony is not lost on me. I had no money, no certificate, no job, no confidence. But I had a domain name, a friend's suggestion, and a stubborn refusal to sell what I did not yet understand. Out of that refusal, a new path opened.

That online writing programme is one of the most reputed in the world, and would have cost me a fortune. But when I wrote to them — explaining that, in the aftermath of Covid, the NGO I worked with had let me go and I was absolutely penniless — they let me join on two conditions: no certificate, and I was not to broadcast their generosity too widely. I have kept both, as best I can.

The writing programme taught me what no certificate could: that the heart of writing is perspective. It is not about technique. And perspective is born not in comfort, but in crucible. It is born when you sit in the tunnel without light and still choose to see. It is born when you decline six thousand dollars because you sense that the real treasure is not in the offer, but in the challenge.

Looking back, I see that Mindzendo was never just a domain. It was a koan. A question posed by life itself: Do you know your own value?

And writing became the answer. Not a final answer, but a living one. Each word, each act of seeing, became a way of reclaiming that value — not in the marketplace, but in the heart.

The tunnel did not end. It transformed. The darkness became ink. The absence of light became the page. And the act of writing became the lamp.

After the lamp came the books. Three of them, in particular, became companions on the writing path. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott — honest, irreverent, a writer telling the truth about the mess of writing without flinching. Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg — spare, surgical, a love letter to the sentence itself. And Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg — which came to me through Fr. AMA Samy, who recommended it when I asked him to write a preface for my first book, Fallen Flower, Fragrant Grass.  ( https://amzn.in/d/02lCskfG ) Goldberg writes about writing the way a Zen teacher writes about sitting — as practice, as presence, as a return to what is already there. I should not have been surprised. The bones, after all, are just another name for the ground.

After living in the Zendo for almost three and a half years, one thing I have learnt: writing is like Zazen. One writes for the sake of writing. One reads for the sake of reading. One sits for the sake of sitting. All of them are complete in themselves. Anything that comes out of them is just a bonus — grace, arriving uninvited.

When the North Star Disappears — Lost Is Where It Begins…

When the North Star Disappears — Lost Is Where It Begins…

by | Mar 10, 2026 | Life, Meaning, Transformation, Zen

Since olden times, people looked outward for direction. Sailors on sea, wanderers in desert, travellers on land—all leaned on North Star and compass. They became symbols of constancy, external lighthouses available at any point of time. They remind us of the human need for validation, for something outside ourselves to say: this is the way.

But as with all symbols, context undoes them.

At the North Pole, Polaris is no longer a guide—it hangs directly overhead, dissolving its function as "north." In Norway's summer months, as a Norwegian friend at the Zendo described, the sun refuses to set—and locals speak of "time-free zones," where the ordinary rhythm of day and night disappears. Near magnetic poles or iron-rich lands, the compass needle falters, pointing in strange directions. In those places, navigators abandon it altogether.

Thomas Kuhn wrote that paradigms change only when experience breaks the programmed frame. These examples show the same truth: guides are not absolute, they are contextual. The North Star and compass are reliable until they are not.

What is harder to name is the in-between. The moment the star disappears but the inner light has not yet steadied. That gap—disorienting, even frightening—is perhaps the most honest place on the journey. Many turn back here, reaching for a familiar guide even when they sense it has begun to mislead them. The known wrong direction feels safer than the unknown right one.

The poet David Whyte, reflecting on Dante's opening lines from the Commedia—"in the middle of the road of my life, I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost"—offers a striking reframe: "How do you know you're on your path? Because it disappears. That's how you know." The loss of the way is not a failure. It is a signal. A threshold.

The Zen tradition calls it don't-know mind. Not ignorance—something subtler. The willingness to stand in open uncertainty without rushing to fill it. To let the question breathe before the answer comes.

Rumi points to the same field: out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. When the compass loses its north, that field opens.

The Tao Te Ching whispers the same: the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. What guides us most deeply resists being fixed, pointed to, written down. The ancient Chinese navigators of the interior did not seek a star to follow—they sought a quality of listening, a receptivity to what the moment itself was asking. Wu wei—not forcing, not grasping. Moving with what is, not against it.

The Salish people of the Pacific Northwest speak to this directly. In a teaching recounted in David Wagoner's poem Lost, young ones ask the elder: what do I do when I am lost in the forest? The answer was not to search harder or move faster. It was to stand still. To stop imposing direction. The forest knows where you are. You must let it find you. Whyte, reflecting on this teaching, draws the Zen parallel himself: the elders of the Northwest and the masters of Zen were pointing at the same truth—that the deepest orientation does not come from our seeking, but from our allowing.

There is a difference between surrender and giving up. Giving up turns away from the journey. Surrender turns toward it—with empty hands. To release a guide is not to abandon the path; it is to trust that the path continues even when the markers disappear. That trust is itself a form of navigation.

In our human journey, external guides—teachers, traditions, communities—can illuminate the way. But there are moments when they fail, when the compass lies or the star disappears. Then the invitation is to turn inward, to cultivate an inner compass, to discern direction from lived experience, silence, and presence.

The North Star and compass are not wrong; they are incomplete. They remind us of our longing for orientation, but also of the wisdom to know when to trust them—and when to let go.

And this is why the Buddha said: Appo deepo bhava—be a light unto yourself.

When the outer lights go dark, we do not become lost. We become ready.

The Mindcar: A Driver’s Manual for Comfortable Journey

The Mindcar: A Driver’s Manual for Comfortable Journey

by | Mar 7, 2026 | RElationship, STRESS, Transformation, Zen

You may remember  this iconic movie scene.

Bus number 2525. A normal day. People going to work, going home, going nowhere special. Then the bomb. Then the call. The villain on the phone telling Keanu Reeves: There is a bomb on that bus. When the bus hits fifty miles per hour, the bomb is armed. If it drops below fifty, it explodes.

Now you may remember the name of the Movie. SPEED.  It was a  big hit in 1994.

Now back to that bus 2525.

And the bus keeps speeding. The driver cannot stop. The passengers do not know. Keanu runs after it but the bus is faster. So he jumps into a car. A normal car. Not a police car. Not a hero car. But a Jaguar. And he chases.

He pulls alongside the bus. He has a poster. A handmade thing. Written in a hurry. Probably with a marker that was lying around. He holds it up to the window. It says something simple. Something that could save everyone.

It says: BOMB on the BUS

But the damn wind.

The wind from the speeding bus, from the speeding car, from the highway rushing past at eighty miles an hour—it catches the poster. Rips it from his hands. The paper flies and twists and tumbles through the air like a thing with no purpose. And then, by some strange grace, it sticks. Right there. On the front mirror of the bus. The driver's mirror. The one place where the driver might see it if she looks.

That poster is stuck. Stuck to the glass. Stuck to the minds of those bewildered passengers, who were on their way to work on a very normal day and Sam, their driver.

And on that poster, written in marker, is the warning that changes everything:

BOMB on the BUS

And then, after that message, our hero manages to get into the bus quite heroically as in any other normal Bollywood/Tolllywood movies.

Somehow. The way heroes do. A leap. A grab. A door that opens at just the right moment. He is inside now. The bus is still speeding. The bomb is still under the floor. The rule is still the same: below fifty, everyone dies.

There is a man driving. A regular driver. Sam. Who seems to know all the regular passengers of that bus 2525. A man who was just doing his job until a stranger jumped in and a poster appeared on his mirror and now his world is upside down. Keanu starts explaining. Starts trying to calm everyone down. Starts telling them about the bomb, about the speed, about what they have to do.

And then it happens.

There is an unruly passenger. Someone who cannot handle the fear. Someone who turns fear into fury. Someone who does not want to listen, does not want to calm down, does not want to cooperate. He pulls out a gun. (Which of course are available in plenty in the land of opportunities!)  And before anyone can stop him, he shoots the driver.

The driver falls. The bus keeps moving. But the wheel is empty.

And then Sandra Bullock takes over.

A passenger. A woman who was just riding the bus. Who had no plan to drive, no desire to drive, no training for this. But the wheel is empty and someone has to hold it. So she holds it. She drives. She learns in seconds what most people take years to learn. She keeps the bus moving. She keeps the speed above fifty. She navigates through traffic and turns and obstacles while behind her, chaos continues.

And Keanu? He is still there. Still managing. Still trying to calm the passengers, deal with the shooter, figure out what comes next. But Sandra is driving now. And that changes everything.

If you are driving a car through a busy Indian road (Let us say Hyderabad) and there are lot of people in the car. Many good, noble and friendly ones. And some loud, pesky, irritable ones. The one who wish that you have never come across in life. Now if you are really determined and focus on shutting up those bad ones or not have them in that car itself, you cant even focus on driving. Now the other fear is those bad pesky ones are allowed to in the car, you wont be able to drive at all. So U may stop on the kerb and fight them to throw them out. But they neve leave. They are all glued to their car seat with Fevicol. There is a middle path.. (The one Buddha and Aristotle taught ). These passengers are your memories. Your pain. Your thoughts. Some about your guilt. Some about your anger. Some about your not so good times.. Etc. That is your own. That is why they are stuck to the car seat glued with Fevicol. Consider you have enough room in those backseats of that CAR above your neck. And Just accept that fact and continue to drive. There may be other passengers who may whine to you about those loud irritable co passengers.. But even they are nothing but a passenger in your Mindcar. The tag phrase is Be comfortable with them all. While you navigate your car of life through those narrow , sometime wide alleys of this world.

This is not just a story. This is a map of the human mind, drawn with the dust of Hyderabad roads and the glue of Fevicol.

the paradox we all live inside:

  • The Trap of Suppression: We try to shut them up. We try to focus only on the good, noble, friendly ones. But the moment we put all your energy into silencing the backseat, our eyes leave the road. The car swerves. We cannot drive while fighting a war behind your own head.
  • The Trap of Engagement: So then we think, "I will stop this car altogether. I will pull over to the kerb, I will turn around, and I will throw them out. I will argue with them until they leave." But they never leave. They are ours. They are stuck with Fevicol to our mind, like that advt.  Every memory, every guilt, every angry thought—it is bonded to the seat of our experience. The more we fight, the more we are just sitting on the kerb, going nowhere, while the world waits.
  • The Middle Path is the Driver's Path: This is where Buddha's wheel meets Aristotle's highway. The middle path is not a compromise between the good passengers and the bad ones. It is a shift in identity. You are not a passenger. We are the driver. The driver's job is not to control the conversation in the back. The driver's job is to keep the vehicle moving. To watch the road. To navigate the narrow alleys and the wide boulevards.

And then we add the most subtle truth: The ones who whine about the pesky passengers—the thoughts that say "Why is this thought still here?" or "I should be over this by now"—they are also just passengers. More noise. More meta-noise. All of them, just faces in the rearview mirror.

After lot of struggles and stumbles, while trying to drive the Mindcar on a Zazen cushion, we find the key to the whole journey:

Be comfortable with them all.

But what does comfortable really mean? Have given the answer inside the word itself. That was a  built  fort with letters.

COMFORTABLE = COME + FORT + ABLE

Let us sit with this. Let us feel the weight of it.

COME: This is the first step, and the bravest one. It is the opposite of running. It is the opposite of covering your ears. It is turning toward the backseat and saying, "I see you. I know you are there. You are loud. You are irritating. You remind me of things I wish I had never done, things I wish had never happened to me. But I see you. I acknowledge you." You stop fighting the fact that they exist. You invite the reality of your own mind to be present. You COME to terms with what is.

FORT: This is the realization of your own strength. You are not a fragile hut that will collapse if a loud thought shouts. You are a FORT. A fort does not exist to keep the weather away. A fort exists to stand firm in the weather. The rain comes. The wind howls. The fort remains. The noise from the backseat—the guilt, the anger, the pesky ones—it can bounce off the walls. It can scream. But the walls do not shake. Because the FORT is built with something deeper than temporary peace. It is built with the knowledge that you are the driver, not the noise. The fort is your own unshakable center.

ABLE: And because we have COME to the noise, and because we sit in our FORT, we are now ABLE. Able to drive. Able to navigate. Able to turn the steering wheel when a cow walks onto the road or a child runs after a ball. The ability does not come from a silent car. It comes from a driver who is at peace with a noisy one. You are ABLE to live your life with your memories, not despite them. The guilt is still in the back. The anger is still muttering. The pain is still there, glued with Fevicol. But you are ABLE. Your hands are on the wheel. Your eyes are on the road. You are moving.

So the final image is this: Close your eyes. And see your mindcar with insight.

You are driving through the busy, chaotic, beautiful, terrifying streets of Hyderabad—which is just another name for life. The car is full. It is loud. Some voices are kind. Some voices make you wish you had never been born. Some voices complain about the other voices.

And you? You are in the driver's seat. You have looked back once, said "I see you all," and turned forward again. You have built your FORT not in some silent mountain far from the noise, but right here in the driver's seat, with the chaos swirling around you. You are COMFORTABLE—not because the noise has stopped, but because you have COME to your FORT and you are now ABLE.

The Fevicol is strong. But so is the fort.

Drive on.

And now let us make things a little more complex.

Often You are not driving on a smooth highway with that Mindcar. This is not a movie set where the road is empty and the only problem is the bomb. This is not a Zendo.  But a market place  This is real life. Let us say that that road is in Old Hyderabad. Or This is anywhere.

On the road too you meet some good people. Some bad. And some really ugly.

Sometimes someone cuts in. No signal. No warning. Just swerves right into your lane because they are late, because they are careless, because they simply do not care about you.

Sometimes someone blares the horn for no reason. Not because you did anything wrong. Not because there is an emergency. Just because they are angry. Just because they have their own bomb inside their own car and they are taking it out on you.

Sometimes there is a truck behind you riding too close. So close you can see the driver's face in your mirror. So close that one tap of your brake would end everything.

Sometimes there is a pedestrian who steps off the kerb without looking. Lost in their own world. Their own thoughts. Their own passengers.

Sometimes there is a cow standing in the middle of the road. Just standing. Because this is India and cows can stand wherever they want.

Sometimes there is a child chasing a ball. Sometimes there is an old man crossing slowly. Sometimes there is a political procession with flags and shouting and drums. Sometimes there is a wedding. Sometimes there is a funeral. Sometimes the road is flooded. Sometimes it is full of potholes. Sometimes it is not even a road, just a dirt path that someone decided to call a road.

And through all of this, you are driving.

Your car is still full. The loud ones are still loud. The pesky ones are still pesky. The irritable ones are still making you wish you had never been born. The Fevicol is still holding them to their seats. The bomb is still under the floor. The rule is still the same: keep moving or explode.

And now there is all of this outside too.

The ones who cut you off. The ones who honk. The ones who drive like maniacs. The ones who walk like they own the road. The ones who do not see you. The ones who see you and do not care.

What do you do?

Do you stop the car to fight the man who cut you off? Do you get out and shout at the one who blared the horn? Do you chase down the pedestrian who stepped in front of you? Do you try to move the cow?

You cannot. The bomb is still there. The speedometer is still ticking. Below fifty and it is over.

So you do what an expert driver of a mindcar does. You acknowledge them. You see the man who cut you off. You hear the horn that means nothing. You notice the cow and the child and the old man. You register them. And then you keep driving.

You adjust. You slow down a little for the cow. You wait for the child to get the ball. You let the maniac pass because letting them pass costs you nothing and fighting them costs everything. You do not return the horn because returning the horn does not move you forward. You do not make eye contact with the angry ones because eye contact is just another kind of stop.

The road is full of people with their own bombs. Their own Fevicol. Their own loud passengers. Their own pain. Their own guilt. Their own anger. Their own not so good times.

They are not your passengers. They are not in your car. They are on the road. And the road is where they belong. The road is where everyone belongs. The good, the bad, the ugly, the maniacs, the lost ones, the ones who cut you off and the ones who let you in.

Your job is not to fix them. Your job is not to fight them. Your job is not to understand why they are the way they are. Your job is to share the road with them. To navigate around them. To keep moving despite them.

Because the bomb is still there. The passengers are still there. The road is still there. And you are still the driver.

Come. Fort. Able.

Come to the chaos outside as you came to the chaos inside. Build your fort so that their horns do not shatter you. Be able to drive through the worst traffic, the worst drivers, the worst roads, without losing your speed.

The world outside is not your passenger. It is just the road. And the road, like the passengers, like the bomb, like the Fevicol—the road just is.

Drive on.

 

 

Kanzeon Zendo Chronicles: Eyes of Wuji … Light Seeking Eyes

Kanzeon Zendo Chronicles: Eyes of Wuji … Light Seeking Eyes

by | Feb 27, 2026 | Harmony, Integrity, Joy, Transformation, Zen

Wuji, the Zen kitten is the youngest inmate at our Zendo. It is Wuji’s practice to sit at my Window and listen through the Coaching conversations. No idea, what the kitten has found it so amusing to listen to coaching calls !  

Eyes are the mirrors into one's heart mind. Almost 25 years ago, after a visit to Aurobindo Ashram, the only "curio" I bought was a small picture of eyes… just the eyes of Mother @ Pondichery. There was something quite mystical about it. I think that small photo is still there… maybe a bit faded. Still those eyes sparkle with light.

The "curio" was never a souvenir. It was transmission. A point of contact with unknowable in this unknown world. As the Zen koan teaches the way is not in knowing or in not knowing.  Those eyes in a photograph are not merely biological—at that point of time, I felt they are darśana, windows into being. And those eyes have more glitter than that gold domed meditation chamber they were building at Auroville.  We still have that laminated photograph of eyes in Manthari.  Thara’s home. The fading of laminated paper only deepens the power. The sparkle of light is still untouched. I can feel it.

Carl Sagan in one of his documentaries, said that sometimes the stars we see in the sky have disappeared long ago… only the light they emitted still travels, looking for eyes to land in. The star is the saint. The Mother's earthly form is memory, history. Yet her gaze still travels. It landed in me 25 years ago, and lands again each time I look.

The eyes are the real telescope. Not just lenses, but mirrors of heartmind, kokoro. Light doesn't stop at the retina—it enters awareness. That photograph is a telescope, not aimed at galaxies, but at a state of grace.

Wuji is the medium. Limitless, primordial, void of infinite potential. The space through which all light travels. Wuji's eyes— Zendo kitten,  c, ordinary, fragile and feline, yet the medium of limitless presence. The Mother's eyes, the starlight, Wuji the small Zen kitten’s eyes—all vessels of the same formless ground.

And then the eyes of Manu and Rishi… My right eye and left eye.  They were small when they pushed me off the meditation mat, claiming it for themselves. Rishi was looking at with some disbelief; how can one waste one’s time without doing anything and Manu had expressions with his eyes closed. Their expression of that living moment  was playful, innocent, yet luminous in their own way. Not faded, not distant, but immediate. Transmission through laughter, through ordinariness. Their then gaze in that photograph, now reminds me that Dharma is not confined to mats or postures—it arrives in the push, the smile, the sparkle of childhood.

The same goes with Krishnamurti's eyes, too, were spoken of as intense, luminous, compassionate. One could not not notice it in those countless videos of his dialogue. And those who were present in person for his talks vouched for that. A gaze that pierced through thought, dissolving the walls of convention. Observers felt his eyes were darśana, a living transmission, selfless and direct.

And then there is Fr. AMA's eyes. My Zen master. His eyes are a bit of a paradox. Kind and stern. Compassionate and matter of fact. Forgiving and correcting at the same time. He taught me that human beings are paradoxical self. Where finitude meets infinitude, eternal with temporal. And his eyes reflect that. They don't choose one side or the other. They hold both. In one gaze, you feel completely accepted as you are. In the same gaze, you know you are being asked to go further. There is no gap between the kindness and the sternness. They are the same thing, looking at you from different angles. His eyes are the teaching. Not just windows into his being, but mirrors showing you your own paradox. That you too are finite and infinite, temporal and eternal, perfectly imperfect and called to awaken all at once.

So the mandala widens:

The Mother's eyes—promise that light never ceases.

The stars' eyes—light traveling across time, seeking witness.

Wuji's eyes—ordinary, yet the medium of limitless presence.

Manu and Rishi's eyes—innocence, ordinariness, playful Dharma.

Krishnamurti's eyes—penetrating, luminous, compassionate, telescopes of awareness.

Fr. AMA's eyes—paradox embodied. Kind and stern. Forgiving and correcting. The gaze that holds both sides of being human.

And then there was my maternal grandfather. He had moved on the rainbow world more than 35 years ago.  While he was alive (and still i think ), he was respected deeply by all those who met him. One who lived and walked on this earth with a lot of wisdom, compassion, kindness and generosity. And what I still recall in my innermind is the way he used to talk to us , his grandchildren. Especially he was in one of those wise sage mood.   Whenever he had to say something very profound to us, his grandchildren, he would close his eyes.

As I said, he was respected deeply by all who met him. Of course. Because respect is not earned by what we project outward, but by what we contain. His closed eyes told us grandchildren: I am not looking at you right now. I am going somewhere else first. I am consulting the darkness. I am listening to the space behind my own eyes. And what I bring back from there—that is what I will give you.

All the other eyes in this mandala are outward facing. Beacons. Light seeking landing places. Transmission through gaze. But my grandfather—he closed his eyes. This is the other half of the teaching. The inward turn. The wisdom that knows: before light can be received, there must be stillness. Before transmission, there must be silence. Before the profound can be spoken, the eyes must stop seeking and simply be.

While my children's eyes pushed me off the meditation mat. My grandfather’s eyes pulled me inward.

Pondichéry Mother's eyes travelled across time to land in my heart. Wuji is the formless ground from which all light emerges. But Wuji is also the darkness behind closed eyelids. The primordial. The unmanifest. The silence before the word. Krishnamurti's gaze pierced through walls. Fr. AMA's gaze holds the paradox of walls and openness, self and no-self. My grandfather's closed eyes dissolved the walls entirely—not by looking through, but by looking away, into the source.

The first six are variations on light seeking eyes. The last is eyes seeking light—not outward, but inward. Into the darkness where all light is born.

When he closed his eyes, he wasn't shutting us out. He was taking us with him. Into the place where words come from. Into the Wuji behind the eyes.

And then he opened them and spoke.

That pause, that closing, that inward descent—that was the transmission. The words were just its echo.

Light seeks eyes. Eyes seek light. What my eyes saw was a promise: that light, whether from a star, a saint, a cat, a child, a sage, a Zen master whose gaze holds all our paradox, or a grandfather closing his eyes to speak truth to his grandchildren, does not cease. It travels. It waits. And it finds us—if we have the eyes to receive it.

My grandfather's gaze, too, still travels. Still lands. Every time I close my own eyes, I complete his journey.

Together, that journey form a complete mandala of seeing light seeking eyes, eyes seeking light, and finally eyes closing to return to the source.

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