Seeing Through the Lens of Vedanta
NEW Vedanta in Plain English, Book 1: Who Am I, Really. Now available in paperback and eBook
DHARMA SERIES
The Dharma of a Disordered Age
Ancient Wisdom for a World on Fire
In a time when clarity feels rare and meaning is under siege, these nine essays explore the ancient concept of dharma as both diagnosis and prescription for our modern malaise. Drawing from Vedanta and mythology, each piece offers a lens through which to understand our turbulent world—not as a random mess, but as a lawful unfolding shaped by deep patterns. From cultural collapse and corrupted archetypes to our daily media habits and personal path, these essays trace the arc from confusion to clarity, and from reactive despair to purposeful living.
I. The World as It Is: A Vedantic View on Change, Chaos, and the Nature of Duality
This foundational essay introduces the three gunas—sattva, rajas, and tamas—as the underlying forces of nature and mind. It explains how history, culture, and individual psychology are all shaped by their interplay. Rather than judging the world’s chaos as a failure, it invites the reader to see it as the natural expression of prakriti. True freedom, it argues, comes not from fixing the world, but from understanding it and disidentifying from its shifting states.
II. The Last Philosophers of the Republic
The Founding Fathers were not administrators of power but philosophers of the human soul. Formed by hardship, classical education, and a moral seriousness that now feels ancient, they saw government as an expression of inner order. Today, politics has become a marketing enterprise—leadership, a performance of appetite. The Last Philosophers of the Republic explores the cultural and metaphysical unraveling of virtue in America and the eternal truth that freedom, without self-mastery, collapses into bondage.
III. America's Kali Yuga: How a Society Loses Its Soul
Framing modern America through the mythic lens of Kali Yuga, the age of spiritual decline, this essay shows how the loss of dharma manifests as institutional decay, performative politics, consumerist spirituality, and moral confusion. Yet it also reminds us that dark times can be spiritually potent. By practicing apaddharma—dharma adapted for crisis—we can uphold truth, humility, and service even when the world appears upside-down.
IV. Asuras, Rakshasas, and Billionaire Lying Sociopaths
This essay explores ancient archetypes of asuras and rakshasas—symbolic forces of ego, manipulation, and destruction—and compares them to contemporary figures of unchecked power. Drawing on the Bhagavad Gita’s insights, it shows how these characters are not just external threats but dormant tendencies within all of us. The essay calls for discernment, reminding readers that true strength lies not in dominance but in clarity, compassion, and responsibility.
V. Is Trump the Duryodhana of Our Time?
Is Trump a modern-day Duryodhana? This Vedantic analysis examines how ego, delusion, and the collapse of discernment shape both ancient epics and current events—revealing not just a political figure, but a collective spiritual crisis.
VI. The Dharma of Information Consumption: Escaping the Firehose of 24/7 News
In an era of constant crisis and distraction, this essay reflects on our compulsive relationship with media. Comparing modern news addiction to Arjuna’s overwhelming vision in the Bhagavad Gita, it proposes a “dharma of information consumption”—a disciplined, conscious approach rooted in ancient virtues like yukta (balance), satya (truthfulness), and tyaga (detachment). It offers practical principles to avoid being consumed by the very world we seek to understand.
VII. Svadharma and the Myth of Self-Made Success
This essay reclaims the idea of svadharma—one’s personal, natural role—as an antidote to the modern obsession with reinvention and performance. Drawing from Vedanta and modern psychology, it critiques the self-help culture’s glorification of disruption and ambition. Instead, it proposes that peace comes not from becoming something new, but from aligning with who we already are. Svadharma is presented as a compass for authentic action, psychological integration, and spiritual growth.
VIII. Dharma, Roles and Why It Matters
A society without roles is like a forest where the bees forget to pollinate and the trees forget to root. Life does not vanish all at once, but the harmony dissolves. Roles are not prisons; they are stabilizers. They hold the fabric of society together and ease the restless mind. When lived as svadharma, they prepare both the culture and the individual for higher knowledge. To throw them away is not liberation but confusion.
IX. Dharma and the Stages of Life
We have forgotten how to live. Not merely how to extend life or fill it with activity, but how to inhabit it with grace. The ancient āśrama system offered a map: studenthood, householder, withdrawal, renunciation. Today, each stage has collapsed, leaving us with children rushed into adulthood, adults clinging to youth, and elders refusing to step aside. To remember life’s stages is to remember how to live.
Karma is not a cosmic police force ensuring that every wrongdoer is punished and every saint rewarded. It is the impersonal law of cause and effect woven into Ishvara's order. Adharma leaves scars that outlast the doer; dharma plants seeds that blossom long after the planter is gone. This is the inheritance of karma: burdens and blessings passed forward, shaping generations.
This essay explores the condition of civilizational amnesia — what humanity has forgotten across history, civic life, values, truth, and the sacred. From the fading lessons of fascism to the erosion of civic responsibility, from the loss of restraint and shared values to the corrosion of truth in public life, the argument is simple yet urgent: forgetting is never neutral. Drawing on history, philosophy, and Vedanta, What We’ve Forgotten shows that all lesser amnesias stem from the deepest one — the forgetting of the Self. To survive, to live truly, we must remember.
XII. What if the Next Ghandi is a Machine?
We live in an age of helplessness, where the problems are too vast and the forces too entrenched for human wisdom to prevail. In earlier times, people dreamed of prophets and messiahs to restore order. Today, we imagine a savior not from heaven, but from code — a “machine Gandhi,” incorruptible where we are corruptible. Whether such a being could ever exist matters less than the fact that we can dream it at all. That longing alone reveals both our despair and our stubborn hope that dharma might re-establish itself, even if not through us.