Days are brightened by the sun, but it is the night that haunts people who possess a similar darkness inside them. You need to be incredibly passive if the thought of the meaninglessness of your life has never crossed your mind.

Just think about how the world around you guides your life. When you are young and curious, adults avoid all your questions because they don’t have the answers, and their egos are too large to admit it. I guess having kids is enjoyable only at the very beginning. Then you go to school, where you are told to work hard for a certain number of years to make your whole life enjoyable. You go to college and hear the same dialogue and are fooled again. Then you are expected to earn money so that your parents are burden-free for the first time in their lives since they decided to have you. Then you are told to find yourself a nice partner, get married, and have kids. You help your kids through their lives, and by the time they are adults, you are old. Now you are supposed to wait for death, and then die one day.

This is the summary of human life. Feeling excited?

Now look at the pattern a little more closely. What is presented as the end of one stage is merely the beginning of the next. It is like climbing a mountain with an infinite, invisible peak — when you reach a plateau, your only reward is the realization that you must keep going. If the pointlessness of this journey were exposed to you in its naked brutality, your willingness to take it would collapse entirely.

So the system’s solution is elegant and ruthless: hang a carrot in front of the donkey, and he will just keep moving.

He will never realize in his entire life that the carrot is simply unattainable. To manage his underlying frustration, he will do all kinds of things — pray to God, listen to intellectuals and gurus, read self-help books, and what not. He will absorb every goddamn thing said by anyone, but never trust his own experience. He will never stop to look at the actual problem. He will never question whether the carrot is worth the effort at all.

The frustration never truly subsides through any of the means he has been advised to try. He does feel a little better after following the advice, but that relief has nothing to do with the real problem. The good feeling comes from the completion of the task, from the brief warmth of hope that the advice will work. When it doesn’t, he never questions the advisor — he always questions himself. And if by some random stroke of luck he gets something meaningful out of life, the advisor is immediately elevated to god status. Being an ‘advisor’ is really a zero-negative profession.

The questions crushed in childhood severely hamper the ability to ask questions in adulthood. A questioning person is a headache for people in power, for establishments built to control. So the system is designed to demotivate children from questioning the norms. Compliant kids are good kids. Compliant citizens are good citizens. Follow the cookie-cutter life, and everyone leaves you alone.

Here is the point I am working toward: there is no satisfaction in anything outside of you. No matter what you achieve, there is always more to get, more to aspire to, and a persistent, quiet feeling of inadequacy at your back. No matter how many cups of fresh water you pour into the ocean, it will still be salty. There is no point in continuing to pour when you can simply see the futility of the effort.

The without is merely a projection of the within.

Thousands of years ago — before capitalism, before the self-help industry, before productivity influencers — a fifteen-year-old boy saw through this exact illusion. He felt the same hollow uselessness of achievements and possessions. And the realization did not liberate him. It completely broke him.

That boy was Prince Rama.

The Pathology of Vairagya

Before he was a king, before he was a god, before the epics and the wars, Rama was simply the heir to the greatest empire on the Indian subcontinent. He had been given every advantage — dynasty, wealth, intellect, and access to power. As part of his royal education, he was sent on a grand tour of his future kingdom. He was meant to see his inheritance and return fired up with ambition.

Instead, the tour paralyzed him.

Rama did not just see the gilded palaces and the military might. He saw the mechanical churn underneath all of it. He saw people growing old, their bodies quietly betraying them. He saw disease. He saw the poor suffering in squalor and the rich suffering in paranoia. He saw that the entire human project was a massive spinning wheel, and that his destiny as king was simply to manage a larger, more decorated version of the same wheel.

When Rama returned to the palace, he shut down. He refused food. He stopped attending court. He sat in his chambers, staring at the walls, completely hollowed out by the pointlessness of it all.

His father, King Dasharatha, panicked. To the king, Rama looked clinically broken — perhaps even mad. Dasharatha summoned doctors, priests, and ministers. None could reach him. Rama’s despair was too logically coherent. You cannot argue a man out of a conclusion he has reached through clear observation.

Finally, in desperation, the king summoned Maharishi Vasishtha.

When Vasishtha entered the chamber, he did not offer pity. He did not deliver a motivational speech about duty, legacy, or the power of positive thinking. He did not produce a new, shinier carrot.

He looked at the paralyzed prince, turned to the panicking king, and said something that no doctor, priest, or minister had the philosophical vocabulary to say:

Do not cure this. This is not a sickness.

Vasishtha recognized Rama’s state not as depression, but as Vairagya — supreme, unvarnished dispassion. Rama was not ill. He had become hyper-lucid. He had simply lost the ability to be entertained by the toys of the material world, and the machinery around him had no protocol for that.

In the hardline philosophy of Advaita — non-dualism — this absolute despair is not a tragedy. It is the strict prerequisite for enlightenment. A mind that is perfectly comfortable inside its illusions cannot be taught the truth. A mind must first be broken on the wheel of the world before it is desperate enough to look beyond it.

The darkness, in other words, is the door.

Drishti-Srishti: The Matrix of the Mind

To pull Rama out of this void, Vasishtha could not offer him a new worldly goal. He had to do something far more radical. He had to completely dismantle Rama’s understanding of what reality actually is.

The core doctrine of the Yoga Vasishtha is Drishti-Srishti Vada — the philosophy that perception itself creates the creation. The seen and the seer are not separate. The world does not exist independently and then get observed by you. Your observation is constitutive of the world.

Vasishtha delivers the epistemological strike directly: The world you are so depressed about, Rama? It does not exist the way you think it does.

There is no external universe made of dead matter sitting out there, waiting to be experienced. There is only Brahman — infinite, unconditioned, pure consciousness. When this consciousness stirs, it generates the mind, what the tradition calls Chitta. And it is this mind that projects the physical universe outward, in the same way a projector throws a movie onto a blank screen.

The screen was always empty. The drama was always yours.

Vasishtha uses the analogy of the dream to make this visceral. When you sleep and dream of a mountain, a storm, or a tiger chasing you through a burning forest — that world is one hundred percent physically real while you are inside it. Your heart races. You feel the wind. You feel terror. Yet when you wake up, you realize the entire universe of the dream was generated entirely inside your own skull. The tiger, the mountain, the fire — your consciousness, playing with itself.

Vasishtha tells Rama that the waking world operates by the same mechanism. It is simply a longer, more stable, collectively agreed-upon dream. Space, time, distance, and matter are not objective realities. They are mental constructs — persistent, shared, and extraordinarily convincing, but constructs nonetheless.

Think about it from your own life. The same event — a rejection, a failure, a loss — feels catastrophic to one person and instructive to another. The event is identical. The world that gets projected around it is entirely different. This is not a metaphor. This is the actual mechanics of how experience is constructed. You are not passively receiving a world. You are actively generating one, every moment, based on the quality and the conditioning of your mind.

Rama’s despair was rooted in his belief that he was a fragile body trapped inside a vast, suffering world. Vasishtha inverted the entire architecture:

You are not in the world, Rama. The world is in you.

When the mind is agitated, the world appears fragmented, hostile, and meaningless. When the mind is still, the illusion of a separate, threatening world dissolves. You do not fix the world to find peace. You stop the mind from projecting the chaos in the first place.

The Annihilation of Fate

At this point, the obvious trap opens up. If the world is an illusion, if it is all a projection of the mind, then why do anything at all? Isn’t every effort meaningless? Aren’t we just donkeys on a treadmill — except now we have a philosophical excuse to stop walking?

This is where Vasishtha separates the profound from the cowardly.

The Yoga Vasishtha contains what I consider the most vicious, unrelenting attack on the concept of destiny in the entire history of Indian philosophy. Vasishtha tells Rama that Daiva — fate, destiny, divine will — is an invention of the weak. It is the story the defeated tell themselves so they do not have to feel responsible for their own condition. There is no pre-written script. There is no cosmic architect dictating your suffering. The concept of destiny, as Vasishtha presents it, is simply the ego’s final escape hatch.

The only absolute reality in human experience, he argues, is Purushartha — intense, conscious, self-directed effort in the present moment. Not prayer. Not positive visualization. Not waiting for the universe to align. Effort, now, with full awareness.

And what about karma? What about the weight of past actions that seem to determine present circumstances? Vasishtha’s answer is coldly mathematical. What you call destiny today is simply the accumulated result of your own past effort. It is not mystical. It is not divine. It is momentum — and because it was created by your effort, it can be completely overwritten by superior effort in the present. The past is not a prison. It is just old momentum, and momentum can always be reversed by a greater force.

This completely shifts the weight of the problem. Rama is not a victim of a suffering world. He is the author of his own reality. If the mind projected the prison, the will has the absolute authority to dismantle the walls. Vasishtha strips away every excuse a human being has for remaining in misery — including the most seductive one, which is the excuse of circumstance.

Jivanmukti: Acting in the Void

So if the world is a mental projection, and if free will is absolute, what is Rama supposed to actually do next?

The amateur philosopher assumes the answer is renunciation. Retreat to the Himalayas. Sit in a cave. Stop engaging with the absurd machinery of the world entirely.

Vasishtha categorically rejects this. Physical renunciation is just another illusion wearing spiritual clothing. If you carry a turbulent mind into a cave, the cave becomes a prison. If you carry a perfectly still mind into a warzone, the warzone becomes a sanctuary. The geography is irrelevant. The mind is everything.

What Vasishtha demands instead is Jivanmukti — liberation while fully living.

The Jivanmukta has completely seen through the illusion. He knows, with the clarity of direct experience rather than intellectual belief, that the world is a transient projection, that the self is not the body, and that outcomes are ultimately empty. And yet — here is the paradox that makes this the most demanding philosophical position imaginable — he continues to engage with the world with complete, undivided intensity.

The best analogy is the elite actor. The actor playing Hamlet weeps, fights, and dies on stage with breathtaking conviction. He gives everything to the performance. But internally, his heart rate is steady. He knows he is not Hamlet. He knows the sword is a prop and the poison is water. He is completely detached from the outcome of the play — which paradoxically allows him to perform his role with absolute precision. Attachment creates anxiety. Anxiety degrades performance. Detachment, counterintuitively, produces the finest possible action.

This is what Vasishtha is asking of Rama. Rise. Rule your empire. Not because the empire matters — it is dust, it was always dust — but because that is the role assigned to you in this particular act of the cosmic play. The Jivanmukta does not chase the carrot. He does not renounce the carrot. He sees the carrot for what it is — a projection of his own mind — and continues walking the path with absolute commitment and zero inner friction. He is done with the illusion, but not done with the work.

Because Rama no longer needs the kingdom to validate him, he is the only man qualified to rule it. He will not be corrupted by power, because he knows power is a hallucination. He will not be crushed by defeat, because he knows loss is a shadow. He acts with maximum effort and no internal resistance.

You do not fight the chaos. You stop projecting it. You walk through the burning world, untouched by the flames, playing your part with the absolute calm of someone who knows, at the deepest possible level, that none of it is ultimately real — and that this knowledge does not diminish the work. It perfects it.

The donkey spent his whole life chasing the carrot.

The cave-dweller spent his life running from it.

The Jivanmukta is the one who finally understood what the carrot actually was — and chose to walk anyway, freely, with eyes wide open.

An ocean without depth is just a puddle.

But an ocean that knows its own depth lets the storm pass through its surface.

Just think over it.