Tear down and recreate

In the larger world, large malls and office buildings are owned by their respective owners. Some buildings remain glitzy and well maintained over time, others become musty and dull. It’s in the nature of things — the owners of the respective buildings decide what happens to, and in, them.

Singapore is different. Most buildings are owned by the government and leased to their temporary owners for 15, 30, or 60 years. Builders pick up these leases, build the buildings, and operate them as businesses, precisely calculating the return on their investment over the lease period. This means that most malls and office buildings are being torn down and completely rebuilt every 30 years. Therefore, at any point in time, some significant portion of the city is being recreated.

Residents are constantly invited to this magic show of newness. Today, this mall. Tomorrow, that shopping arcade. Day after, that row of buildings in that business district. Each is new, unfamiliar, and integrated into the changes which have taken place in the intervening years. The building which used to occupy this plot of land was a mixed-use building, with some offices, some warehouses, and two rows of shops. Now it’s a lovely new building with a tube station below and four storeys of shops and restaurants.

Civic infrastructure perfection

Singaporeans can literally walk on pavements with their heads stuck in their cellphones. They can do this because there is not a single paving stone in a single pavement out of place. I have never seen any city anywhere in the world which has pavements, corridors, walkways, as perfect as Singapore. You don’t have to look where you’re going, you will never stumble.

Road repairs and construction projects never eat up half the lanes in any major road and cause traffic bottlenecks — diversions are set up to let traffic swing by a different route and keep moving at full speed.

Singapore doesn’t have bad weather like torrential downpours, snow, ice or other inconvenient things. Rains in Singapore do not clog roads by waterlogging — they are well designed.

Residents begin to take this for granted. If you’ve never found a paving block out of place which will make you stumble in thirty years of your life, you assume that This Is How It Is.

The flawless consistency creates hard expectations. It hardens your attitude towards flaws.

It’s safe

At one level, Singapore minimises accidents to a degree few other countries can. All pedestrian crossings are marked with traffic signals telling pedestrians when to cross. All vehicular traffic is monitored and controlled to the point where drivers do not even think it’s worth the effort to “beat the system”. Crime is next to zero. Bribing of government officials does not happen — or it happens at levels completely out of the reach of average citizens. The shopkeeper will not pass on a special discount to you by avoiding taxes — the incentive structure makes it unattractive for him to try this.

Crime doesn’t happen at the level where citizens are afraid. Petty crime, small violent crime like mugging or robbery, simply doesn’t happen. You can walk on the streets at midnight in almost all parts of the city with zero danger of crime. Motor-cycle-borne police patrols cruise through all areas which may be lonely or scary. The resident doesn’t know to look over his shoulder.

A simple observation emphasizes how Singapore is unique. Traffic lights at various crossings in various cities malfunction occasionally, leaving drivers to their own devices to navigate their crossings. These experiences teach drivers to take matters into their own hands and be “innovative” where they can, and skirt the laws. In Singapore, over several dozen visits and hundreds of days of moving around on the city’s roads, I have never seen a malfunctioning traffic signal left unattended. If it’s malfunctioning, an alternate traffic control detail will be installed and will leave drivers in no doubt about what is expected of them. Flawless consistency. The citizen is never left to his own devices. Therefore, the normal small chaos in traffic pockets doesn’t happen in this city.

Communication

In Singapore, the government is everywhere, in everything, sometimes visible, sometimes below the surface. And they are constantly communicating. They set a very high benchmark for communication, constantly and clearly telling you what you need to feel and think about anything. As you enter a metro station, you see large posters telling you

• that the role of the MRT technician is valuable, and he does a difficult job, and we should be proud of them, and perhaps apply for a job with them
• that the MRT is changing the lives of citizens, constantly reducing travel time, increasing comfort and safety all around, and you should feel grateful and reassured
• that new breakthroughs in construction are making way for new MRT stations, interchanges, and other facilities and you should be impressed

I recently had snacks one evening in Lao Pa Sat, a food court area where the road is barricaded for vehicles after 7 PM and tables are laid out in the open, allowing diners to spread out at the tables and enjoy their dinners. On one side, prominent signs are put up telling visitors that these tables are for free public use, not just for the customers of the eateries. The message of free access is being communicated, preempting any attempt by the eateries to corral the dining area and cause problems for visitors. Ambiguity is bad for governance, hence ambiguity is anticipated and nullified with communication.

Nothing in the communication is left to chance, so to speak. You are clearly told what to think and feel, how to see what is happening, how to respond.

Lessons for a vedanta student

Most spiritual traditions teach us that the universe is capricious, very little under our human control. Things happen. We make our way through these things. Vedanta goes a step further and says that the manifest universe is a mirage, an illusion, as impermanent and unreal as a dream. They use the term maya.

Living life in the rest of the world teaches us to expect the unfortunate and unexpected. It teaches us to accommodate and accept. In a very deep and very down-to-earth way, life teaches us that things are not much under human control.

Singapore takes the resident away from all this. The Singapore resident learns that (a) nothing is permanent, new buildings and railways and entire districts are being created all the time, (b) everything is always carefully curated, controlled and safe, and (c) we are nudged to think and feel in specific ways about specific things. We are never left to our own devices. In some sense, Singapore is far more intense manifestation of maya than the rest of the world. And this maya is the creation of a flawless, consistent, invisible government machinery.

So, Singapore residents become slaves of the “should”. They begin to expect things to happen in certain, systematic and logical ways. They begin to feel that chaos, however small, “should be fixed”. They believe payments “should” come on time, and specifications “should” be complete and consistent, and documents “should” be formatted flawlessly. A sense of entitlement grows in them. They have seen no other way for the universe to function. This gives rise to a certain special type of nastiness in their nature — they become upset when someone fails to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. Non-Singaporeans can tolerate ambiguity, illogical processes, and plain delay more than Singaporeans can. And Singaporeans cannot understand why the rest of the world is broken.

I have felt for a long time that a person’s ability to live in the presence of ambiguity is an indicator of good mental health, at a deeper level. You can see how, in my view, Singapore discourages this development.

I feel that at some deep level, life in Singapore makes it harder for Singaporeans to comprehend the presence of a larger force, let alone surrender. They mistake the nursery which is Singapore to be an accurate representation of the universe.

Spiritual entertainment

People encounter spiritual teachers and love listening to their talks. And then some of the students take off on journeys of entertainment. One year, it’s going to a retreat by one teacher in some temple town, followed by a week-long retreat of yoga, meditation and chanting of shlokas in a hillside ashram in Rishikesh or Wayanad. The next year, there’s a three-day workshop in a luxury hotel in South Bombay in January, and joining a bhajan group in July. This group meets every second Saturday in the home of some society lady or other, in Bandra, Juhu or Cuffe Parade, and some very spiritual sadhvi‘s services are engaged to lead the gathering in soulful renditions of bhajans. Each bhajan session ends with exquisite snacks and rejuvenating tea.

The next year begins with a shift from bhajan singing onto the next new thing. More spiritual teachers and guides. More workshops and retreats and holistic wellness camps. And the journey continues.

I find it heart-breaking that people do this even after finding a master like my master. They attend his retreats in far-off countries, though he shows up for an equal number of retreats in more humdrum places in India. They come out of the retreats and decide to enhance their routine by adding strange rituals which involve ringing of bells, lighting of incense, and other sundry acts.

I can sympathise with spiritual aspirants who have learned rituals from their parents and grandmothers, and faithfully follow those rituals at home — they have encountered no better. I find it heart-breaking that people actually spend three days at a retreat with a genuine self-realised yogi and then go home and feel the need to add rituals to their daily routine, based on stuff they’ve heard from random friends.

I can’t but explain their doings as spiritual entertainment. These devotees or yoga aspirants are all searching for the next new thing. I’m sure these things hold meaning for some seekers. I have no patience for them.

Spiritual socialising

There is a big social angle to this entertainment. I often find that a social circle forms around regular attendees of a teacher’s retreats or workshops. These attendees show some or all of the following signs:

• Some are proud of how long ago they started attending this master’s retreats, and how few they have missed
• Some are proud of how they are part of the master’s inner circle and have their own private “in” practices. One devotee was very proud that he walks past the room where the master is staying early in the morning during every retreat, so that he can greet the master before the crowd has gathered.
• Some are very keen to socialise with other attendees, exchange notes about the lodging and food arrangements at previous retreats, and inquire about each other’s family members. You can see them eagerly gossiping around the morning and afternoon tea canisters.

There are devotees of my master who narrate, with self-conscious pride, how they lick the remnants of my master’s lunch plate clean after my master has had his lunch at a residential retreat. These devotees are so proud of their exceptional show of devotion and piety. Do they honestly believe that these actions have spiritual significance?

Spiritual tourism

This is a variant of spiritual entertainment which adds the additional entertaining aspect of travel to the mix.

• Visiting the cave where Shyamacharan Lahiri meditated
• Doing parikrama (circumnavigation) of the Narmada river
• Visiting all sorts of burial places, ashrams or monasteries where various spiritually advanced souls spent time
• Attending retreats and workshops of your favourite guru in all sorts of remote towns
• Attending retreats by spiritual teachers in places several thousand kilometres from your home town
• Temple hopping: the most common form of this practice. Basically, throw in a temple in your vacation plans, and it becomes a nice cocktail of holy entertainment. Be sure to do justice to the awesome food available in stalls around the temple. Buy some rudraksh garlands from shops nearby. Get some prasad for folks back home. Come back to your home town and narrate stories of how “spiritually charged” that temple was, how it made you feel drawn to it.

No time is spent in reading, or thinking about, what these spiritual teachers actually said.

My master has said publicly, over and over, that he looks forward to the day when a disciple will feel that he (master) is repeating himself at every retreat, and stops coming to more retreats. His public talks with these remarks are available on Youtube. A more explicit discouragement for the practice of blind attendance of retreats is hard to imagine. But the retreat junkies keep going.

Spiritual bypassing

This is the serious stuff. This is a kind of side-stepping of real spiritual growth.

You encounter people who will say, with an air of wisdom, lines like “What cannot be cured must be endured”, or “Oh, it’s all in God’s hands”, or other similar statements. But these people do not really feel this way in their daily little activities. For them, these lines are conversation pieces. Anyone who can really believe that everything in his life is in God’s hands does not need any further spiritual guidance — he’s already seen whatever there is to see.

The problem with these people is that they do not confront their own minds, their own choices, their own desires and fears, in the light of these statements which they quote. They use these statements to side-step the real challenges of spiritual growth.

For instance, take the line, “Everything is God’s will.” Someone who genuinely tries to contemplate this line while seeing a loved one suffer through a painful disease will be put under tremendous psychological stress trying to reconcile God’s will with the evident suffering he sees. He will ask bitter questions about God’s benevolence and kindness, about the unfairness of suffering faced by innocent people, about his own helplessness in the face of God’s stubborn will. This distress is not easy, it can tear us apart psychologically. Spiritual progress only happens when you walk this path. The only way out is through.

Those who can cross over to the other side of these beliefs, and can reconcile the irrationality and caprice of the human experience with a clear view of the Absolute Truth, can genuinely say, with real understanding, “It’s all God’s will.” You don’t need any rituals, any anointment, any holy water or rudraksh beads, to reach that understanding. Either you have it or you don’t.

There are people who will spout lines like “It’s all one.” This is the fundamental perspective of advaita vedanta — the universe, and all shapes and forms in it, are not separate entities, it’s all just one. There are no separate drops, it’s all water. But there is a vast difference between just quoting the line “Everything is one” and realising it and living it in one’s life. There are people who have learned some pieces of the advaita vedanta perspective, who will be passive when someone hurts or cheats them. They will then justify their passivity by saying “It doesn’t matter whether it’s him or me — it’s all one anyway.” They use this line to justify their passivity, sometimes even their cowardice. Someone who has truly realised the core truths of advaita vedanta will not hesitate to act and take on the aggressor or the cheat in the best way needed to bring down their adversary. Those who have realised God do not hesitate to act in their material lives.

It is said by a lot of ancient texts and accounts of masters that God can be known right here and now — there is no need for any practice, any regimen, any hard training and discipline, to see the Absolute Truth. This sort of opinion has become a fertile ground for one class of so-called spiritual seekers to say that they have found The Truth. They do not need to strive, there is no need for any effort. This is the fool’s guide to nirvana. A lot of so-called neo-Advaita groups and teachers seem to be in this camp.

If you’re having problems with your relationships (who isn’t?) and you’ve realised some truths which may be called “awakening” or “self-realisation”, then you may believe that deeper and deeper meditation sessions, spending more and more time in zazen, will send out positive vibes to everyone around you and will make the problems melt away. This is classic spiritual bypassing. You have to sort out all problems at the vyavahaarik level yourself through very mundane vyavahaarik means. If you have relationship problems, you’ll have to talk them through or disengage from the relationships or do something else very material. If you have problems with your debts, you’ll have to fix them by doing something very financial, very material. No spiritual awakening will sort them out on your behalf. Arjun had to wield his sword in the battlefield, his enlightenment before arguably the greatest spiritual master humankind has ever known would not do the fighting for him.

Spiritual bypassing is very insidious. It’s our ego’s defence mechanism to protect itself. Real spiritual progress is (a) very difficult and distressing along the way, and (b) rips apart the ego, leaves no place for it to hide. Half knowledge, intellectual understanding of words, is a fertile ground for the ego to defend itself by spiritual bypassing.

Why act?

I could not really understand what it meant to act in the presence of my understanding. Read “the book”, see what I mean by my understanding, and then tell me: why does one need to act? This had troubled me even while writing “the book”, as you can see in this chapter. I thought I had penned my thoughts down, therefore I had pinned down my understanding. But I hadn’t. They had remained at the level of words.

There is, unfortunately, a big gulf between visceral understanding and understanding of the mind. Understanding of the mind works for some subjects, but doesn’t work in stuff we are talking about on this website. Here, unless your understanding modifies how you live and act, the understanding is useless. The understanding has to seep into the “muscle memory of your mind”.¹

So, I began to struggle with the “acting” part. The why-act ideas were not powerful enough to make me put my heart into actions. This went on for a couple of years. It takes time to understand that one’s understanding is weak.

As always, my master stepped in, in his slimy, invisible manner. He conducted a retreat in 2025 where he spoke about the Yoga Vashistha in great detail. I wasn’t there, but his talks go on YouTube anyway, the Great Big Library In The Sky. So I heard his talks.

Yoga Vashistha

The Yoga Vashistha is a fun book, when explained by someone like my master. Every third remark from him is with tongue firmly in cheek. I think this placement of his tongue is to help him fight the boredom of addressing large collections of sombre visages. I’ve suspected for some time now that he’s bored to death by his retreats.

In Yoga Vashistha, Rama asks assembled sages exactly this question: why act? And the sages launch into really long meandering stories with stories-within-stories like Russian dolls, to explain to Rama that acting is not an option. It’s not just acting, but acting with all your heart and soul.

After listening to a few of these videos, things began to fall into place in my blood and bones. I now have a three-bullet-point summary of how to live:

• You are not the doer. Ma is the only doer.
• Knowing this, you still must act. Vigorously. As if your life depended on it.
• You have no control over the outcome of your actions.

This self-contradictory and confused set of three points makes perfect sense now. I have to act. And the keyword is “vigorously”. Basically, each day of each of our lives is Arjun in the battlefield.

By 2021, I had known points 1 and 3; Point 2 was the new and confusing bit. And I didn’t arrive at this through any intellectual analysis. It’s just Yoga Vashistha, injected into my consciousness by my master, which made the pieces fall into place. I can’t help you reach there, I don’t know how he did it. But I now know, at a depth I never knew before, that I need to act. This acting is illogical, as is very apparent from points 1 and 3 above. But act one must. And acting is not enough — one must act vigorously. As if everything depended on it.

What has changed

The changes are deep, and I can see them now.

I can now see that there was a very deeeep passivity in me. Only those who have seen me very closely in action for a decade or so would have seen this. I have no idea where it came from. I am quite certain that a psychiatrist can pin down various causal forces in my upbringing if he gets to spend a lot of time analysing me. Maybe I should discuss my passivity with a psychiatrist.

From what I can see, with no psychiatric training, I have a deep need for approval and a deep instinctive desire to avoid conflict. And I’m a bit of a confused mess — I need approval, but I hate being judged. I just drop out of situations where I will get into conflict with people close to me. I fall silent. And somewhere, these forces have worked to create knots within me which make me disinclined to take action, disinclined take matters into my own hand, if I can avoid acting.

This is not simple laziness. I have no problem working hard at all if it is in an area where there is no approval needed, no conflict to avoid. I’ve worked very hard through various phases of my life. This is some sort of very deeeep passivity quite different from laziness.

My master’s intervention started loosening these knots. I now am almost never as passive as I used to be.

The earlier me would sit through meetings where others would lead the discussion into areas which made no sense to me. The new me walks out of meetings when the meeting stops making sense to me. Alternately, the new me says “I am not paying attention because the meeting is not making sense to me, but please continue. I’ll step in when you guys have finished, and I’ll lead the discussion into the areas I am unclear about.” And I do exactly that, once the others have run their course.

The earlier me would relax when there was an interlude between work phases. I now look at my task list. It’s as if the car is stationary, but the motor is running — I’m not switched off. I have been asked once or twice if I’m distracted or I’m worried about something — I say there’s nothing wrong. But the new state of mind is becoming visible to my team — they can see that I’m never really sitting back and going with the flow. I can put the car into gear in an instant and I’ll start moving.

You may think that I’ve become some sort of alpha male, dominating all proceedings, making my voice heard above the din everywhere, but it’s not the case. I don’t need to outshout anyone, I just find myself making sure that I get the movement I want to get.

I now know that I have to act, and I am not going to wait for anyone to trigger an action. I may be wrong in my choice of action, but I’ll figure out a way to fix the mistake afterwards.

This change is hard to explain. It is like a ground-up rewiring of my machinery. My master did it — you can blame him. Needless to say, a simple reading of Yoga Vashistha doesn’t make this happen — it’s his doing.

And the three-point formula of how to live is now the intellectual framework of my paarthiv existence.

The next subsection of this chapter will be to see if this change helps me break old habits and become regular with my routines. Can I now create routines and maintain them? Will I be able to stick to my routines of diet and exercise?

1. There, I’ve invented a new phrase. Probably because I’m inarticulate. But you’ve got to admit, it’s a pretty cool phrase. ︎

Translated to English, the word means “so be it”, or something very close. The word can be split into “tat” (meaning “that”) and “astu” (meaning “be” or “is”). Put these together, and you get the drift. The typical context is the devotee praying for a wish to be granted, and the god or goddess grants the wish, saying “so be it”.

After understanding whatever I’ve understood in the last few years, my relationship with this word has changed. It’s been a total role reversal.

I say “tathaastu”

Now, I see the universe as Ma’s doing, and I say “Thy wish is being done”. It’s an unnecessary statement, it’s merely a recognition of what is. The recognition changes nothing.

So, now, Ma plays, and I say “tathaastu”. I don’t raise my hand, palm forward. I just bow and fold my hands.

I feel that this is the only thing a devotee who sees Ma can really say. There is no space for asking for a boon or a blessing. There is only space for an acceptance of Ma in totality, and the word “tathaastu” fits in well, after a fashion. A more strictly accurate phrase from the vedantic tradition may be “tat sat”, which means “that is truth” where “that” refers to the Absolute.

All you can tell your Ma is “so be it”, in case you feel the need to say anything at all.

Shlokas are usually written in two lines of text. Here is the first shloka:

Line 1: first half: Ishavasyamidam sarvam

There are many ways to understand this. I understand this to mean “Isha is the stuff out of which is made everything here and everywhere.”

Line 1: second half: yatkincha jagatyam jagat

This is interpreted in two ways. One says: everything in this universe is in constant motion. I interpret it thus: the universe is the term used to denote everything which is in constant motion. Or: that which is in constant motion is termed the universe. In other words, I see that the very definition of “jagat” or universe is by its characteristic of ceaseless motion.

Line 2: first half: tena tyaktena bhunjitha

“Let go and rejoice.” There are many other choices of words, I guess, but this is how I’ve internalised it from my master. Works for me.

I’ll let the second half of the second line be.

How they fit together

The first half of the first line tells me that Isha is everywhere and is everything. The second half of that line tells me the nature of the universe. By its fundamental definition itself, its ever-changing nature is asserted.

The second line pulls these two together and tells me, as plain as detailed instructions to a clerk, what I need to do. I need to let go and rejoice.

By this time in the shloka, I have been told that the Absolute Reality is everything, and the nature of the material universe is ceaseless change. This means that I cannot hold on to anything in the material universe — everything will emerge and disappear, everything I hold onto will slip from my grasp, and I too am going to undergo ceaseless rise and fall. At the same time, there is nothing to hold on to, since everything is the same internally — everything is the Absolute Reality. No part of the universe is more preferable or less, than any other.

Therefore, not only is holding on impossible, I am being told not to hold on. I am being told, let go and rejoice. This letting go is the most difficult thing to grasp, partly because it is not something to grasp — it is a switch to throw. Throw the switch. Do not analyse it or understand it. All that analysis is grasping. Let go even the need to understand the instruction of letting go. Just let go, and rejoice.

The rejoicing comes from the fact that once everything is let go of, there is literally nothing else to do, nothing to worry about, nothing to achieve, nowhere to reach. Therefore, the rejoicing is the natural side-effect, the only residual effect, of letting go. And once you reach this point, you will understand everything I have understood.

A “living” entity therefore appears to be a special type of machine.

It is commonly believed that “living creatures” have thoughts, feelings, emotions, etc. My learning about Prakriti tells me that those things exist anyway, and they are part of the machinery which is each creature. There is no fundamental or conceptual difference between the “physical” portion of a living machine and the “mental” or “emotional” parts.

The only really living being, if I am forced to use this term, is Prakriti herself. All the so-called mortal or ordinary living beings like dogs or humans or amoeba are just shapes in her. They are a mass of molecules with a certain set of autogenous reactions happening within them — we call them “living” things. When the autogenous reactions get disturbed or decay sufficiently to stop, we call them “dead” things. “Life” as we call it is injected into “dead” matter in billions of shapes at the time of an event we call “birth”, and that same “life” stops being active at other times, which we call “death”.

Therefore, all beings are the same. Some are incidentally “alive” for some time, others, like dead bodies, were once “alive” but are no longer so, and a third category, like bricks and rocks, were never “alive”. This difference is incidental.

Life has no special sanctity. It is a set of reactions in a special set of molecules in some corners of Prakriti. Therefore, life per se is only as precious as a rainbow. In other words, it doesn’t happen everywhere, and when it happens it may look very beautiful, and it can’t be conjured up at will — it comes into being when Ma chooses, and goes away when she chooses.

The way I see life is that Ma got lazy and said that it’s easier to create self-sustaining shapes which can reproduce, find their own energy source, and keep undergoing changes (including the big changes called “birth” and “death”). The game of the ever-changing universe goes on, but “living” shapes imbue some corners of the universe with some more dynamism, richer patterns of change. More fun and colour. Ma got bored of making simpler machines, so she made more complex ones, ones which will have subtle layers like emotions, thoughts, visualisation, desires, and so on. We live our lives, and think of ourselves as big and important doers. Ma watches and laughs.

• “Mindfulness and meditation can worsen depression and anxiety” — New Scientist
• “How too much mindfulness can spike anxiety” — the BBC

This simplistic expectation of so-called inner peace is ridiculous. My only hope is that most people who eagerly follow this advice do not become proficient enough in meditation to see its true effects.

The subconscious mind is constantly trying to let us “operate smoothly” in our vyavahaarik lives. This means that disturbing thoughts, experiences, unanswered questions, fears, are all buried by these blankets. Just like grief is suppressed by the hubbub of our lives. Meditation practices, if done well, tend to rip off the layers of blanketing our subconscious mind has put on its innards to allow us to function smoothly. 

Meditation practices allow us to see all the layers below the covers. What the upper layers of our minds are trying to push down slowly rises to the surface. Sometimes, these revelations and realisations can be traumatic. But only when the come to the surface does the student get a chance to deal with them, then sort them out, then proceed to build a more resilient, healthier psychological foundation.

It may be useful to think of meditation as analogous to a fast car. When everyone in the world is walking on foot, some enlightened people (called “Engineers”) offer people fast cars, claiming that they can reach their destinations faster in cars, saving time. But when people start driving, they realise that fast cars hurtle towards obstacles very fast, and if you lose your nerve, or if you drive faster than your skill permits, you’ll crash. Then scholarly articles begin to get published in New Scientist, BBC and elsewhere, warning people of how fast cars can cause death in 1 out of 12 drivers. And you and I stand on the roadside and wonder: what were they expecting?

Therefore, meditation students need genuine, experienced, and committed guides who can help students cope with the detritus which surfaces. Only if one has the guidance, the courage, and the resilience to go through these revelations, look them in the eye, make one’s peace with them, will some modicum of inner peace emerge. One can start without a teacher — thousands of students do — and develop a first-level proficiency and a habit of practice. Later, a teacher or master is valuable. The Vipassana tradition expects students to go for periodic refresher courses at their meditation centres maybe once a year, or whenever they feel the need for guidance.

I am amazed to see how meditation practices are described. I guess many beginners, at least in the west, expect that all cures are as easy and clean as popping paracetamol. Well, paracetamol can suppress fevers without sorting out underlying causes — it cures nothing.