There are some memories so deeply scored into you that time does nothing to them. They don’t fade. They don’t soften at the edges. Whenever you shine your attention on them, the original sensation returns — sharp, exact, undiminished. Twenty-two years is apparently not enough.
I was in class nine at a boarding school. I was academically good, which meant I had earned a small and specific privilege — I was occasionally called to the teachers’ staff room for casual conversation. To a hostel kid, this was serious currency. I reveled in it. It made me feel elevated among my peers.
But I had a problem. In trying to sound interesting, I would forget who was sitting across from me. When the audience was a person of authority, I almost always tried to project myself as a beacon of light in a world of darkness. I wanted to be the smart one, the observant one, the one who had noticed things others hadn’t. If the teacher gave me the right response — a raised eyebrow, a word of acknowledgement — I felt like I had achieved something large.
One afternoon, my English teacher called me to her room. She was the class teacher of the 10th NIOS batch — a middle-aged woman with a graceful face and an elegant way of speaking. I beamed at the invitation. She greeted me with a warm smile and offered me something to eat. You have to understand what outside food means to a boarding school student. The moment you cross the hostel gate, anything homemade begins to taste like it was made specifically for you.
We began talking on easy ground — my English, how I was settling in, how the other students were behaving. I do not remember the exact moment or why, but driven by that familiar need to be interesting, I told her that several students — specifically from class 10th — were using the washrooms to smoke. Her eyes widened. I felt that I had achieved something big. She casually asked if I had seen anyone in particular. Trying to sound credible, I named a boy.
She absorbed the information, changed the topic smoothly, and within a minute we were exchanging goodbyes. I walked out of her room feeling good about myself. I had no idea what I had just done.
When I returned to my dormitory that evening, a group of six or seven guys, led by the very boy I had named, came looking for me. It took me a moment to understand what was happening. When I did, it hit like a physical stab. How could a teacher — someone so warm, so graceful — do this?
They asked me by name if I was the boy they were looking for. I nodded. They told me to come with them.
I walked alongside them, my legs turning to lead. They took me to a secluded spot near the car park, just inside the main school entrance. One of them stepped forward and took my glasses off my face. In a completely misplaced display of priorities, I begged him not to break them.
Then came the question: “Why did you take my name?”
I had no answer. I still don’t have one, not really. We had never spoken before that day. I knew him only as a face in the crowd. The only reason I can reconstruct is that I had seen him smoking a day or two earlier, and that image happened to be sitting at the top of my mind when the teacher asked.
Slap. My face turned in the opposite direction.
I was paralyzed. I couldn’t defend myself. I couldn’t raise my hands.
For reasons I will never fully understand, one of the boys in the group felt sorry for me. He stepped in. He told the attacker to stop, got my glasses returned, announced to everyone that I was sorry and wouldn’t repeat this, and told me to leave. As I turned to go, the main attacker grabbed me from behind and dropped his voice: “If you ever tell anyone about this, I will not only break your glasses but make you blind.”
I ran. I never told anyone.
The months that followed were a kind of psychological sentence. The physical sting faded in hours. The rest didn’t. I lived in a constant low hum of fear, terrified of crossing paths with those boys, stopping myself from speaking in class, isolating from everyone around me. My nights were bad. It took nearly four months of grieving in complete silence before I could begin to feel something like normal again. But something had shifted permanently. I was no longer a boy who could easily trust the world. My courage to stand up for what I felt was right had been broken at a specific joint, and it never quite healed the same way.
I could not process one particular thing — how a teacher could hand a student over like that, without a second thought.
What I didn’t know at fourteen, and wouldn’t understand for a long time after, was that I had just collided with one of the oldest and most consistent features of human behaviour. Not a rare event. Not a personal tragedy unique to my boarding school in some particular year. A pattern so old that one of the most extraordinary minds in Indian philosophical history had already mapped it — thousands of years before I was born, on the same subcontinent, in a far more violent version.
That mind belonged to Maharishi Vasishtha.
Vasishtha is among the most significant figures in the entire body of Indian thought. He is the primary author of the Seventh Mandala of the Rigveda, the preceptor of the Ikshvaku dynasty — the lineage of Rama — and the philosophical architect behind one of the most psychologically sophisticated texts ever written, the Yoga Vasishtha. But before we get to that, the principle that explains what happened to me in that car park begins with a simpler concept from Vasishtha’s worldview.
Rita.
The word translates roughly as cosmic order — the underlying, frictionless rhythm of reality. Vasishtha’s framework posited that the universe is not a random field of chaos. It is a structured system governed by a deep alignment with truth. When you operate from this alignment, there is no friction. You do not force outcomes. You do not extract validation from people above you. You exist from a place of quiet sufficiency.
Deviation from Rita — what various traditions have called sin, or wrong action — in Vasishtha’s understanding, is not about offending a deity. It is simply this: when the ego begins to drive. When you try to possess things that are not yours, manipulate your environment for approval, or assert yourself over others by force. The moment you do this, you are swimming against the current of reality. The friction this generates manifests as anxiety, as compulsive behaviour, as the peculiar violence of insecure people.
In that teacher’s room, my need to be the beacon of light was an ego-driven deviation. I wasn’t speaking truth. I was performing it. The senior who slapped me was also operating entirely from ego — defending a fragile image in front of his group. We were both, in our different ways, swimming against the current. The difference was that he had the physical power to push his friction outward. I had to absorb mine.
The defining story of Vasishtha’s life encodes this exact dynamic in a way that no amount of abstract philosophy could.
Vasishtha lived in a quiet forest hermitage. He had nothing of material value — no army, no treasury, no political power. Yet he was completely fulfilled. This fulfilment was symbolised by his possession of Kamadhenu, a divine cow who provided endless abundance to the hermitage. One day, King Vishwamitra — a man who possessed everything that constitutes worldly power, armies, land, wealth, absolute authority — visited the hermitage. Vasishtha, with nothing, effortlessly fed the king and his entire army.
Vishwamitra looked at the cow and made a fatal error in reasoning. He saw Vasishtha’s inner peace and assumed it was an external asset. He thought: if I possess that cow, I possess that peace. I will be truly powerful then.
He demanded the cow. Vasishtha explained, with complete calm, that it could not be given — because inner peace is not a transferable object. It cannot be seized. Vishwamitra did what all insecure people in power do when they hit a refusal they cannot process. He resorted to brute force.
He came back with weapons, with armies, and eventually — after brutal austerities to acquire them — with the most devastating celestial weapons available to him. He unleashed everything he had on Vasishtha’s peaceful hermitage.
Vasishtha’s response is the part worth sitting with.
He did not summon weapons of his own. He did not build a fortress or launch a counter-attack. He picked up his Brahmadanda — his wooden walking staff — and planted it in the ground in front of him. As Vishwamitra’s weapons struck it, they were absorbed. They vanished. Vishwamitra exhausted his entire arsenal against a piece of dead wood and was left empty-handed, defeated, and eventually, transformed.
This is not a story about a magic stick. It is a precise description of a psychological principle.
The Brahmadanda is dead wood. It has no ego. It has no ambition, no need to win, no fragile image to protect. Vishwamitra’s weapons were powered entirely by ego, rage, and the compulsion to dominate. But here is the governing mechanic: ego requires friction to do damage. An attack needs a target that flinches, defends, retaliates. It needs something to push against. Vasishtha offered nothing of the kind — only immovable, unbothered reality. The external force had nothing to engage and collapsed into itself.
When I look back at that parking lot, I understand precisely what I was missing. I didn’t just face violence. I had nowhere inside me to place it. I had no internal anchor. My mind met external chaos with internal panic — projecting forward, replaying, seeking an escape. Because there was no stillness inside, the rage outside poured in and stayed there for months. I was fighting on the external world’s terms, using the only tool I had — my own fragile ego — and it was no match for any of it.
A grounded center would not have prevented the slap. Vasishtha’s philosophy offers no guarantee of physical immunity. But it would have changed everything that came after. With genuine internal mass, I would have seen the senior’s violence for what it was — a frightened boy trying to protect something insubstantial. I would have seen the teacher’s betrayal as carelessness, not a permanent verdict on the trustworthiness of the world. The intimidation would have struck something immovable and dissipated.
The distinction that matters is this: true stillness is not passivity. The Brahmadanda did not run, did not apologise, did not crumble. It simply refused to become the friction that the attack required. That refusal was the most devastating response available.
We spend enormous energy trying to manage the external world — performing for the right people, appeasing the bullies, curating our image to keep ourselves safe. It is an exhausting and unwinnable project. The only real ground is internal.
Vasishtha mastered the physics of external conflict. He proved that no king, no army, and no weapon can disturb a mind anchored in Rita. Vishwamitra came back again and again — across many lifetimes of legend — and each time, the pattern held.
But here is what the legend also tells us: eventually, Vishwamitra stopped coming with weapons. Something in him broke open. He turned the same ferocious will that he had pointed at Vasishtha inward, and he became one of the greatest sages in the tradition — a Brahmarishi, the highest order of wisdom.
That, too, is part of Vasishtha’s teaching. The attacker carries within him the possibility of transformation. The violence is not the final word. This is not an argument for passivity — the ocean has waves. But the waves do not disturb the floor. The depth is what Vasishtha was protecting. It is the only thing worth protecting.
Decades later, Vasishtha would face a completely different order of problem. The external enemy was gone. But a young prince named Rama — born into every advantage of dynasty, wealth, and power — sat in a state of complete paralysis. He had looked too clearly at the world, seen through every illusion it offered, and found nothing underneath worth living for. His despair was not weakness. It was the despair of an unusually awake mind that had arrived at the edge of meaning and found it empty.
No Brahmadanda could solve that. To reach Rama, Vasishtha would have to go somewhere else entirely — into the nature of reality itself, into the question of whether the world we fight so hard to survive is, in any final sense, real at all.
That conversation is the Yoga Vasishtha.
And it dismantles reality itself.
The slap ended in seconds.
What stayed was the absence of something I didn’t know how to build.
Not courage. Not strength.
An anchor.
The world doesn’t stop throwing force at you.
It just waits to see if you have somewhere for it to die.
An ocean without depth is just a puddle.
Just think over it.
Maharishi Badarayana_Bramhasutras (2)
Maharishi Gautam (Nyay Philosophy)
Maharishi Kapil (Samkhya Philosophy)
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