The Purpose of Life

We are launching dhee.app on the 29th of July. Guru Purnima. I picked the date because it felt right for an app built for helping humanity grow towards enlightenment.

And with that launch comes the realisation that I’ve not really finished the code. And so, last night I didn't sleep. Worked straight through. Till 5:20 AM.

And all through yesterday, every time one of my kids came into the room, or some unrelated task landed on me, something in me went tight and short. I snapped at them. I could feel it happening and I kept doing it, because at the time it looked entirely reasonable. I had four days. They were interrupting.

One part of me knew that I’m feeling agitated. And the other part was, well, agitated. Why am I stuck on 29th? It’s a deadline that I’ve set myself. Why am I undergoing so much frustration.

So.. I did what I nowadays do in these situations. I asked Subhash bhai. (I would have asked dhee.app, but I was still building it. :-P)

He asked me a question: "Where is this issue actually? Outside or inside? Did the situation cause it, or is something inside you causing it?"

It took me sometime to register the question. I was like, “I know that there is some loop stuck within me. I just don’t know what it is.”

Every solution I had ready was an outside answer. The deadline is tight. The house is noisy. There is too much to do and one of me. And every fix I had in mind was an outside fix: push the date, get up earlier, tell the family to leave me alone until Wednesday. And I was hoping he would address in this frame.

He changed the frame.

I sat with it, and the answer was clear enough. It was inside. I wasn't seeing things right.

What I was actually holding

The frustration was coming from somewhere specific. I couldn't see the purpose, and I don't mean the roadmap or the feature list. I mean what the whole thing is for.

So I looked at what I was holding as the purpose, and it was small. At a good day it was "dhee.app will support my own enlightenment." On a worse day, and there were worse days, it was "dhee.app will give me fame." While having a shower, I would see people saying to me - “Waah Achal bhai, brilliant work”

Ouch.

Subhash bhai said the thing that reorganised the rest of the conversation. Frame change. Dimension change. 2D -> 3D. There can only be one purpose. Akhand samaj, sarvabhaum vyavastha.

Those two phrases carry a lot in Madhyasth Darshan, so let me unpack them. Akhand samaj is an undivided human society: one where the divisions we currently treat as permanent, of nation, of community, of belief, are simply absent, because nobody has any use for them. The divisions are illusory as we are all humans. So creating a society based on these illusory divisions leads to issues. Realising every human being is, well, a human being, leads to an undivided society.

Sarvabhaum vyavastha is universal order. The material world, the plant world and the animal world already work in harmony. The same harmony working at every scale, including human beings, beginning with a family and ending with the family of the world.

That is the destination. And Madhyasth Darshan is specific about what purposefulness means for one person inside it. It defines it as taking part in that order on your own initiative. Not assigned to it. Participating, because you can see what it is. So purpose, in this framework, is never a private ambition. It cannot be. There is no version of it that terminates in me.

Watch what happens once the boundary is drawn small. My children walk in. A client calls. My wife wants ten minutes. A friend sends a message. Every one of them is now outside the circle, and every one arrives as an intrusion into the thing I am guarding.

Madhyasth Darshan has an exact word for the reaction that follows: aavesh. The lexicon defines it as motion produced in reaction to trespass or attack.

That is what I was doing. I had classified my own children as trespassers. Not consciously, obviously. But the classification was made somewhere in me before the irritation arrived, and the irritation was only the output.

Now widen the circle to its real size. The same people, the same phone call, the same ten minutes. None of them is crossing anything, because there is no longer a line there for them to cross. The launch is still inside. It is one item among the others rather than the wall.

The work was never the problem

This is where I would have gone wrong if I had not seen the whole picture. The obvious conclusion without seeing the whole context is this: slow down. Move the date. Ship in August.

That would have been the wrong repair, and I would have felt virtuous doing it.

The work is fine. dhee.app is for people. It is a small piece of the same order I just described. The deadline is fine too. Nothing about the doing needed to change.

What needed to change sits one layer above the doing, and one layer below the purpose.

It is not what I am doing. It is the logic I am using about what I am doing.

Nearly every self-improvement instinct we generally have or what self-help books suggest is aimed at the bottom layer. Work harder. Work less. Wake up earlier. Block the calendar. Delete the app. All of it is repair on the work layer, and the work layer isn’t the driver. Which is why none of that repair ever holds for longer than about a week.

Five levels, and where the fault sat

Madhyasth Darshan describes a person as running on five levels. Roughly, in English: mana, what appeals to me and what I pick; vritti, weighing and comparing; chitta, the picture I hold of things; buddhi, what has actually settled as understanding; and atma, where experience of co-existence happens.

They are not floors in a building where you live on one at a time. All five are running, always, and the current can flow in either direction.

Bhram usually gets translated as illusion, which makes it sound grand and slightly mystical. The real definition is far more mechanical. It is the imaging activity that goes on in chitta when the truth of a thing is not understood. Or, put even more plainly in the lexicon: any assumption that differs from the way things are.

An assumption that differs from the way things are. That was what I had been running on all week. Work was fine. How I was seeing it was the problem.

And notice the distance between where the symptom appeared and where the defect was. I felt it at mana, as irritation. The bad part was sitting two levels down, at chitta and vritti. This is why "control your temper" is such useless advice. We are wiping the display and calling it a repair.

Three ways to get a valuation wrong

Madhyasth Darshan goes one step finer and names the three defects that any bhram is built out of. All three are errors of valuation.

I could find all three in a single day of mine.

The launch got ativyapti. I held it as more than it is. A first version of a small app became the thing my worth depends on.

My children got anavyapti. I held them as less than they are. For sometime, they became an interruption to my important work.

And the work itself got avyapti. I held it as other than it is. Dhee is not mine in the way I was holding it. It is for people I will never meet. It is being made in co-existence, for co-existence, by co-existence. I had quietly converted a piece of shared work into a personal project, and then got upset when the world would not respect a boundary I had invented.

Why this is called a vikalp

A. Nagraj, whom students call Babaji, offered Madhyasth Darshan as a vikalp. The lexicon defines vikalp as solution in the place of the problem, and then, more usefully: what moves an incomplete conception toward completeness.

The word doing the work in that definition is incomplete, not absent.

Because here is what I think is true, and my week is one small piece of evidence for it. Human beings have always been living in co-existence. There has never been a moment when we weren't. A family is co-existence. Language is. Trade is. A crop grows because soil and water and air and seed are together, and not one of them is doing it alone. Nobody had to arrange any of this. It is how things already are.

And human beings have always felt it. Nearly every tradition I know of carries some version of "this is all one thing," and the feeling is neither new nor rare.

What was missing was the third piece. An understanding able to hold the living and the feeling together, in a form you could actually examine, argue with, and check against what is in front of you. The view was there, the feeling was there, the manual was missing.

Madhyasth Darshan's reading of the last few centuries is that we tried twice, and both attempts took one part of existence for the whole. Materialism took the visible part. Idealism took the other one. Each then built an enormous literature on top of its half, thick enough that almost nobody can work back to the root and check, so most people simply pick a side. Neither reached across, because neither had the whole thing in view.

So the fault was never in existence. Existence is co-existence whether or not anybody has noticed, and we have been inside it the whole time. Our living is a different matter. Without the understanding, the living goes wrong in every direction it can, and that wrongness has a name in Madhyasth Darshan too: avyavastha, disorder. But it is downstream. The fault sits in the concept, the unsettled understanding, which is precisely the thing Madhyasth Darshan puts on the table for study.

Which is what makes my week an interesting case study. I was already working in co-existence: collaborating with Subhash bhai, building on tools that thousands of strangers wrote and gave away for nothing, writing for people I will never meet, inside a house that stays standing because my family is in it. It was not the arrangement that was causing me the pain. My reading of it was. And everything I got wrong that day came out of the reading.

Whenever a person is in pain, they are in pain because of their own misunderstanding of disorder. Not the disorder. The misunderstanding of it.

The factory with no supplier log

Subhash bhai gave me the best picture of how to see this and what to do about this. (I wanted to say this example as it is, but that's something which isn't really going to happen without a photographic, or phonographic? memory. I am going to garble his words, but let me try it anyway)

There is a huge factory inside me and I want to run it. It was assembled over many years out of parts I did not choose and mostly did not notice arriving. A lot of them are defective. And there is no log. No record of which part came from where, who supplied it, what year it went in, or what it was supposed to do.

So there is no way to audit it in advance. You cannot sit down with a list and work through it - which part is high-quality and which one came out of a factory doing ghost shifts. The only way to find a defective part is to run my factory and watch for smoke.

When a part smokes, that is not the failure. That is the diagnostic. The part was already defective. It was defective all last month, silently. The smoke is the first useful information you have had about it.

Then you replace it with the right part. Assumption out, understanding in. One part at a time, for as long as it takes.

That replacement, done deliberately and repeatedly, is what is adhyayan-abhyas. And this happens with real people and real situations. You can't meditate alone in a cave and solve it. You cannot eat an ice-cream while watching YouTube on TV and assume that because you forgot it, it's gone. Adhyayan and Abhyas.

That reframes the whole bad week. Snapping at my kids was not a lapse in an otherwise sound system. It was smoke from a part that was already wrong, and it is the reason I now know which part. Without it I would have kept running with the defect and blaming the deadline. Thus, situations are actually opportunities. They enrich you. They move you towards the goal.

The one that will take longer

The last thing Subhash bhai said is the one I am still sitting with, and need to work on.

The same fault shows up in the way I collaborate with other people.

Extending the above factory example, let's say the parts are all people. The Earth is a factory and it's working towards Undivided Society and Universal Order. And everyone is doing their part. Now the logic and communication here is the wiring that connects the parts. My wiring has issues.

When I find somebody difficult to work with, or when I feel someone is questioning my authority, or they are claiming authority over me (well, that's the real burning one), when a team starts to feel heavy, when I catch myself waiting for a meeting to end, the wiring producing that reading is mine, and it's on fire. The smoke is telling me - I'm not seeing the person correctly.

Collaboration is co-existence, but my logic and assumptions are getting in the way of me seeing it. It is not a compromise, and it is not a tax on getting things done. If I am not enjoying it, I am not seeing it for what it is. That is the whole diagnosis, and it gives me an indicator that outside is co-existence, what I'm going to ultimately experience within me is co-existence, and this is the set of faulty logic and assumptions that need to be corrected.

Meanwhile the deadline stands. Dhee.app ships on the 29th, on Guru Purnima, which is a day for acknowledging whoever removed some piece of your not-seeing. Subhash bhai removed a piece of mine this week. So did my children.

There will be more of these situations by next Sunday, and I would rather have the smoke than a factory that is quiet because nothing in it is running.

Terms and definitions here are drawn from A. Nagraj Ji's Madhyasth Darshan: the Paribhasha Sanhita for aavesh, bhram, vikalp, avdharana, adhyayan and akhand samaj; Manav Vyavahar Darshan for the five levels and the two directions of flow; and Samadhanatmak Bhautikvad for the reading of materialism and idealism, and for the line about pain and the understanding of disorder.