Read the opening two chapters free.

Preface.

— ✦ —

About This Book

I am completely aware that things discussed in this book cannot take immediate priority or precedence or even cognizance in the daily din of life.

I am also very well aware that my style and decorum are not smooth, sophisticated, cultured, let alone elite. However, I shall refrain from being politically correct when I address readers; I sincerely believe that in conversations such as these there’s no need for it.

I’m also aware that when I present my genuine uninflated clarity, I may appear to be a bit assertive at times. However I assure the readers that I have no intention of influencing any opinions that readers may have.

I believe strongly that in the modern age of high speed, science, virtuality, wealth, enjoyments and thrills, the only path left to intelligent humans who wish to evolve is questioning, and questioning your own fictitiousness.

These are the days of frivolous and incessant flaunting of ‘knowledge’ of all kinds, and a severe and handicapping deluge of social media. We are madly after self-statements. How much ‘exposure’ of myself to the world is healthy? Where is ‘my space’ truly? Only you can answer that in response to an honest and unequivocal question.

Some of us may be hitting or are past mid-lives. Do we feel we should ask ourselves what we have truly achieved so far, beyond luxuriant foods, homes and clothes? We may have an inkling of the answer, but what other than a ruthless question can ferret it out.

The rise of woman is the order of our times. Can both men and women answer exactly how and for what is this ‘in order’? Woman herself is moving away from feminism towards the appropriate center. What is this appropriate center? Do you seriously think that anything else but a probing question to yourself can answer this?

Finally, there is the harrowing question of identity that has paralyzed us both within and without. Everybody shall agree that despite all our riches and powers, each one of us is experiencing himself or herself merely as a dried leaf flitting about in the winds of change that have been set today. We are in no position to answer the question “Who are you” from within or without. Do you not think we have avoided this question long enough?

This is the background mosaic or framework within which these pertinent questions shall flow.

On Spiritual Jargon

Spiritual jargon and terminology block curiosity and rational thinking. Hence an effort has been made to keep this book free from it. I have taken immense efforts for over 10 years to distill huge understanding into day-to-day language without ever stepping out of the limits of rationality, bringing the secret of the uncommon into common daily lives, all in the spirit of trying to break the barriers of the special and the common.

Secondly, I have not resorted to hypothesis and theory. I am not interested in presenting any new philosophy. We learn from life with the help of purely rational analysis and observation, and then, step by step, put it into practice. A completely self-reliant method.

That is the basis of this book. I am sure, you readers, with your insight and capacity and a grip over fundamental truths, will be able to simplify to a thorough extent the deep complexities of non-conformant living and then present it succinctly without theorizing, as a self-sufficient expression for each question.

Who benefits from this book

This philosophy is not for sofa philosophers. Not for peace peddlers. Not for bliss buyers. Not for silence settlers. Not for hypocrite humanists. Not for convenient conventionalists.

It is for those who are willing to work with their Physical-Vital-Mental (PVM). For those who understand that human progress is not a destination but an endless, joyful, painful, magnificent march into the unknown. For those who are ready to become the Surrendered Warrior.

Introduction.

— ✦ —

How to Address These Questions

Address these questions with just your virgin self. Do not approach them with your accumulated knowledge or learnedness. That shall not resolve the question for you.

The reason being, these questions concern life or truth, and either of these is infinitely nearer or related to you than all accumulated knowledge. All knowledge is nothing but a baggage of impressions or facts collected so as to mould the thinking to constantly seek a return on investment however magnanimous. And as such, these cannot address life.

So address these questions with a sincere and un-impressioned intelligence. That shall actually help you resolve that truth for you, and not merely put forth an argument for its own sake.

Question, Expression, Going Deeper

Each of the 52 inquiries in this book is presented in the same three-part shape, and a word on each part will help you find your rhythm.

The Question is the inquiry itself — almost always more than a single sentence, often a stack of related sub-questions. These are not intellectual puzzles. They are searchlights. The intent is that you sit with the question first, before reading anything else, until something inside you stirs.

The Expression is my own response, set beneath the question. It is not “the answer”. It is the expression that has emerged from my own brush with life over many years. Yours will not be mine — and it should not be. Treat my Expression as one voice in the room, not as the verdict.

Yours is the one that matters.

Going Deeper are the pages that follow some of the Expressions — supporting passages drawn from my longer writing on the Fictitious I, the PVM Structure, and adjacent themes. They are optional. Where two or more questions share common ground, their Going Deeper spread is grouped under a single heading; where the question and the Expression are already sufficient, there is no Going Deeper at all. The absence is intentional, not an omission.

Beyond these inline Going Deeper spreads, this book carries four longer chapters — one each on the PVM-Structure, the Fictitious I, Life and Lifestyle, and Cosmic Will and Intellect. They are available at any point. They deepen the vocabulary of the questions without being prerequisites for any of them.

The Four Words That Carry This Book

A few terms recur in these pages with a precise meaning, slightly different from the way ordinary conversation uses them. Here they are, once, clearly.

The PVM-Structure

What we usually call the Body is, in fact, a Physical-Vital-Mental structure — a PVM-Structure. The Physical is the body in the biological sense. The Vital is the energy that animates it — hunger, drive, desire, the force of living. The Mental is the faculty of thought, memory, and discrimination.

The PVM-Structure is the unit of existence, co-existence and human progress. Everything that is real about a human being is contained in this unit. The “I” is not part of it. The “I” is the fiction layered on top of it.

The Fictitious I

The Fictitious I is the identity that one creates out of imagination, conceptualisation and false perception. It is not a villain. It is not a spiritual obstacle. It is simply not real.

The single most important fact about the Fictitious I is that it does not exist. The PVM is the existing unit. The I is the label that the PVM was trained, from infancy, to use as its self-reference. That label has since taken over.

Life and Lifestyle

These two words are used here with strict meaning. Lifestyle is the interaction of the Fictitious I with the world — work, relationships, ambitions, habits, social performance. Life is the actual functioning of the PVM: its growth, its clarity, its alignment with will and intellect.

Lifestyle is what you can describe over dinner. Life is what is too close to describe. A great many of these 52 questions press exactly on the gap between the two.

Cosmic Will and Intellect

There are two forces acting upon every PVM-Structure: Intellect, the executive force for existence, co-existence and human progress; and Will, the motive and directive force for the same.

We are not their owners. We are their occasional vessels.

The PVM in Its Planes

Depending on the operative Will and Intellect, the PVM-Structure can exist in one or more of three known planes of existence.

The Mineral plane is inertia, inaction, deep sleep, deep ignorance, and the domination of false bliss, false peace, and false truth.

The Animal plane is hunger, insecurity, and procreation fulfilled by educated or uneducated means.

The Human plane is, in fact, very lightly touched by humans. It carries at least the following truths and forces:

• awareness — Realisation of a separate yet unified existence of the PVM within the Universe
• inspiration — diminishing Egoism which allows realisation of vaster and deeper truths
• consciousness — Realisation of intellect and will acting upon the PVM
• ambition — power of the PVM to potentially increase its capacity, capability and competence
• love — realisation of increasing oneness of existence of PVM with other entities
• sexuality — Power to consciously express maleness or femaleness of PVM-Structure
• sensual energy — Power of nullifying sexuality through unification
• learning — increasing sensitivity of the PVM to intellect and will
• transformative power — Power to change the PVM-Structure
• beauty — Power to express harmony of PVM
• peace — Power to properly visualise Creation
• revolution — Power to highly accelerate the transformation of PVM-Structure
• bliss — Power to realize the enormous capacity of PVM
• silence — Power to erase the boundary of a mere unit PVM existence with the larger existence around

A human being moves through all three planes through the day. The mineral plane often appears purely as passivity or numbness. The animal plane as appetite and threat-response. Only moments — and they are moments — are genuinely human.

Rise of the Fictitious I

A genetically provable combination happens in the Mother’s womb and develops into a PVM-Structure usually called the fetus. When the fetus gets fully developed, by the natural laws, it gets delivered from the womb.

Social norms get followed and the fetus gets ‘named’ — let us say, Anant. So far so good. The fetus now gets recognition. As the PVM-Structure grows and begins to talk, it utters words like ‘Anant is happy’, ‘Anant wants a toy’, and so on. The PVM-Structure refers to itself in the third person, which is absolutely as it should be, adhering perfectly to reality.

Suddenly, by the second birthday, the “Anant” PVM-Structure is “trained” to refer to itself as “I”. So “I” now replaces “Anant PVM-Structure”. Slowly, the “I” training becomes deeper and deeper, so much so that instead of it serving as a convenient pronoun, it starts functioning as a full-fledged identity — with preferences, fears, ambitions, and above all, a powerful sense of permanence.

Further and further, this “I” connects itself with a myriad of things, and convinces itself that it is those things. Gradually, this “Anant I” begins protecting all its accumulations because it has perfectly convinced itself that they are “I”. Now, this full-blown “Anant I” feels itself greater, superior, more valuable than other “I”s. It becomes aggressive, possessive, and — since it does not exist — perpetually anxious.

Once this whole chain is correctly analysed, and the exact point of development of the fictitiousness is clearly seen — not intellectually, but in one’s own actual living — the PVM realises its own mistake, and now works to de-reference itself from the “I” reference.

When the Fictitious I is excised from the PVM, equanimity reigns. Birth and death appear as they should be — the continuous transformations of PVM-Structures in agreement with natural law.

This is my entire clarity on what I have come to term as Fictitiousness of I.

The Delusional “Feeling”

One should not rest content with merely what one “feels”, but step out and courageously explore “what is”. “Feeling” is just the various moods and shades of the fictitious I. It shall drag you here and push you there, all the while beguiling you that everything is alright — it is just life’s various shades, all is acceptable.

Do analyse this feeling on which you seem to lay the foundation of understanding. Upon investigation, you shall find that it is prism-like, with three edges: theism, atheism, and agnosticism.

Theism, in this book, is the Fictitious I’s solid belief in existence. Atheism, in this book, is the Fictitious I’s solid disbelief in existence. Agnosticism, in this book, is the Fictitious I’s solid belief in non-existence — not honest hesitation, but a comfortable settlement in uncertainty.

All three are postures. All three are held by the same fictitious holder. That is the trap. Each shall throw in its colours and force you into a state of non-doing, inaction, status quo — the age-old secret behind inertia, captivating the individual right in the middle of the two unshakeable extremes of Belief and Disbelief.

This is termed in classic literature as Delusion. All isms are caused by belief. Belief is a figment of imagination. Imagination is a product of sweet desire. Desire is the result of limitedness. Limitedness is the very nature of ignorance.

Four Small Cautions

Four short framings should be carried into the 52 questions. None of them is a doctrine. Each is a guardrail against a common drift.

1. Do not denounce the PVM for the sake of consciousness. Under an incorrectly processed influence of certain traditions, a reader may arrive at these pages inclined to treat the body, the vital, and the mental as inferior or as obstacles. They are not. They are the unit. Denouncing the PVM is like denouncing the instrument in order to hear the music.
2. Do not try to reject the I. Do not follow the path of annihilation of the Fictitious I. It shall, for the most part, only strengthen it. The aim is clear seeing, not destruction.
3. Do not expect an external person or event to make you realise the Fictitious I. It is impossible for any outside agency to do so. The realisation is entirely internal, and it is the only kind that counts.
4. Do not chase a real I beyond the Fictitious I. One should wake up from the dream that existence echoes with a “real I” hidden behind the fictitious one. There is no deeper I to find. There is only the PVM, acting in the world, subject to will and intellect.

Awareness Plus Clarity During Action Equals Intense Action

The Fictitious I originated from the PVM-Structure for a single reason — the need for self-referencing. That self-referencing has now become so entrenched that the PVM has lost sight of its own functioning. The 52 questions are an attempt to restore that sight.

When the Fictitious I is excised from the PVM, equanimity reigns. Gradually, awareness matures into silence. Gradually, clarity matures into knowledge. Gradually, intense action matures into perfect action.

All isms are caused by belief. None of these maturations is.

A Word Before You Begin

The 52 questions begin on the next page. They are arranged in a sequence — Life and Lifestyle first, then Success, then the Self, then Man, Woman and Love, then Education, Science, Art, Knowledge, Faith, Clarity, Peace, and so on through Joy, Action, Sleep, Awareness, Existence, Evolution and Work. The sequence has been chosen so that a story unfolds. If you read in order, the story will be felt.

If at any point a question’s Expression sends you searching for more depth, four longer pieces are available — the chapters on the PVM-Structure, the Fictitious I, Life and Lifestyle, and Cosmic Will and Intellect. They are not prerequisites. They are companions.