Existence Is Modular

This article was inspired by a post by Subhash Bhai on CoSeeker , where he shared a simple diagram of puzzle pieces and asked: can anyone help me verify that existence is coexistence? I cannot claim that verification. What I can offer is the map as I currently read it, as a student of Madhyasth Darshan, a philosophy propounded by Nagraj Ji. If any of this pulls you in, madhyasth.org is where the original work lives.

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Software taught me to think in modules. A module is a unit that holds its own state, does something, and connects to other modules through defined interfaces. Good systems are built this way. No module is the whole program, and no module survives alone. When I began studying Madhyasth Darshan, I kept noticing that it describes existence in terms my engineering mind could relate to. This article is my attempt to lay out that reading. Do note that I'm a student who's still under study - so this is my current understanding and can change. I'm open to discussions - especially ones where you can suggest me how I can improve on this reasoning. Let's begin.

Every unit has state and behaviour

Begin with the smallest observation. Every unit in existence is something, and it does something with others. A stone, a neem tree, a sparrow, my daughters. The philosophy uses two words for this pair: sthiti, the state a unit is in, and gati, its activity with others. State and behaviour, held together in one unit, with no gap between them.

Here is the first claim we need to examine: a unit's reality is proven only in its gati. What something is gets demonstrated by what it does in relationship, and there is nowhere else it can be demonstrated. A medicine proves itself by healing. A teacher proves herself in the student's understanding. A battery proves itself in the circuit. I have tested this claim against every counterexample I could think of, and I keep failing to find a unit whose reality could be established in a vacuum, because a vacuum offers nothing to respond to. So far the claim holds, at the level of reasoning I am capable of today.

The substrate everything runs on

Every module in software runs on shared infrastructure it did not build. The philosophy points at something similar in existence, and this speaks directly to the part of Subhash bhai's post about energy and organisation we do not yet understand.

The proposal is this: all units are submerged in one all-pervading reality, called satta. You can think of it as the omnipresent space or medium in which everything is soaked. No unit carries its own power supply. Each one is energised simply by being in satta, the way a fish is wet simply by being in water, without any pipe delivering the wetness. (Take this example with lots of salt. Examples can only get you so far.)

If this proposal is true, it explains why no unit can be studied as if it stood alone, and why the connectedness we intuit between things does not need a mechanism to carry it. The units were never separate to begin with. Coexistence is the architecture, and everything else is detail. I find this to be the most fundamental claim to hold, and I think everything else that we see, can be derived from this single claim.

Four classes of module

Within this architecture, the philosophy classifies every unit in existence into four abstractions or orders, and the classification works like interface inheritance. Each order implements everything the previous order does, and adds one capability of its own.

A rock participates by simply existing and forming structures. A plant does that and also nourishes. An animal does both and adds the will to live. And the human being carries all three and adds a fourth drive that nothing below us has: the need for happiness. Existence is backward compatible all the way down. Each higher order contains the lower ones fully, which is why our body obeys the rules of matter and biology even while we sit there wanting something no molecule in my body ever wanted.

What strikes me as a student is how clean the classification is. Four orders, no fifth, no half-orders, every unit I can point at falling into exactly one of them. Whether the classification is exhaustive in reality is exactly the kind of thing the philosophy expects me to keep checking rather than accept, and so far I have not found the exception. But do tell me, if you find one.

Incompleteness is the design, sort of.

If we look at any unit in isolation, the unit is incomplete, and its incompleteness is the point. An incomplete unit has needs, and needs are connection points. A module with no unmet need would have no ports, and a module with no ports composes with nothing. The soil is completed by the tree, the tree by the sparrow, the sparrow by the sky. Rain completes the field, the field completes the farmer, the farmer completes the town. This mutual completing is called poorakta, complementarity, and the philosophy claims it runs through all four orders without exception.

You look at just one unit - it feels incomplete. If you want to complete the puzzle, you have to see co-existence.

Look at the puzzle pieces in Subhash bhai's diagram again. The notches are not defects in the pieces. The notches are how the picture becomes possible. I used to experience my own lack as a private embarrassment. This framing suggests my lack is the shape of my connection points, and I can say that even as a proposal that I'm yet to completely realise, this one has already changed how I sit in a room with other people.

Values as ports

For the human module, I have started thinking of values as those ports. The philosophy names nine values that flow between humans in relationship: trust, respect, affection, care, guidance, reverence, glory, gratitude, and love. Nine defined interfaces through which one human serves another.

This is where the study gets demanding, because it stops being about diagrams and starts being about my dinner table. A port I have merely heard about is a port I cannot serve on. I can define the word respect, write an article containing the word respect, and still fail to connect with my father in an ordinary conversation, because the value is documented in my memory and dead in my conduct. I know this from direct observation of myself, which is the one laboratory I always have access to. A value becomes operational only to the depth it is understood, and my current depth is exactly what my relationships keep revealing to me.

The depth of understanding

Understanding itself has levels, and the philosophy is precise about them. At the shallow end I have heard of a thing. Deeper, I can repeat it accurately. Deeper still, I can reason about it, defend it, connect it to other things I know. Then, I'm able to see some things by myself - as my own. And at the very end sits anubhav, direct experiential realisation, where the understanding is no longer information I hold but reality I have seen for myself, covering the whole of existence.

By this measure I should locate myself honestly: most of what this article contains lives at the third level for me. I can reason about it, and the reasoning convinces me. That conviction is useful fuel for study and it is still not anubhav.

Madhyasth Darshan presents itself as a proposal, to be examined and verified in each student's own understanding, never to be believed on authority. Subhash bhai's question, "can anyone help me verify," is exactly the posture the philosophy demands of every student. The verification cannot be outsourced, not even to Nagraj Ji.

Two destinations

This gives precise meaning to the two milestones the philosophy sets for a human being.

Kriyapoornata is inner completion: all the faculties of consciousness awake, understanding whole in anubhav, nothing dormant, nothing running on borrowed assumptions. But the philosophy refuses to stop there, because a module that is perfect in isolation has proven nothing in an existence where nothing is isolated. So there is a second milestone.

Aacharanpoornata is that complete understanding evidenced in living: every value flowing in every relationship, conduct matching understanding, the unit now a dependable part of the larger order, from family outward to the whole human family - undivided society and universal order. First the labour of understanding comes to rest. Then the movement of living reaches its destination.

The standing invitation

And this is what I find most moving about being in the human order. The other three orders ship at spec and run at spec, which is why a mango tree never needs a workshop on being a mango tree. We alone boot up confused, below our own declared interface, and we alone hold the freedom of action to close that gap. The other orders participate in the larger order automatically. We are the one module that must first understand the whole system to take our place in it.

So, Subhash bhai, here is my honest answer to your question. I cannot verify that existence is coexistence, not yet, not in the sense the philosophy means by verification. What I can say is that the claim has survived every logical test I have been able to design till now, that it organises more of my observations with fewer assumptions than any framework I held before, and that a complete description of it exists, written down, studyable. I am somewhere in the early middle of that study, checking the map against the territory one relationship at a time.

Even though I haven’t finished the puzzle yet, the picture on the puzzle box does feel right to me. It cannot be any other way.