NEW  Vedanta in Plain English, Book 1: Who Am I, Really.  Now available in paperback and eBook

1

Bavarian Alps, Autumn 1933

He had not spoken aloud in three days, but now, the envelope in his hand demanded a sound. Something—anything. He opened his mouth. Nothing came.

The wax seal was cracked, the paper slightly damp from the climb the boy had made to bring it. A letter. From Leipzig.

He set it beside the cold kettle and stared at it as if it might disappear if he waited long enough.

Outside, the valley held its breath. The larch trees below had begun to yellow, their color faint against the granite sky. Smoke lifted from a dozen homes and curled across the late-afternoon light. Nothing unusual. And yet everything felt off, like a prayer said backward.

He opened the letter.

Dieter—

Forgive me for using that name. I know you’ve left it behind. But I don’t know what else to call you when I write from this world. They are burning books now. University lectures end in silence—not because they’re finished, but because no one dares speak. The streets are full of uniforms. Not just soldiers. Everyone. They watch what you buy. What you read. Who you sit with. I write because I still remember who you were, and because I fear they may not allow such men to exist much longer. Leave, Devananda. Or hide. Just don’t think yourself invisible. The light you carry is not as quiet as you think.

He folded the letter with deliberate care, as if the act of returning it to stillness might still the mind as well. Then he sat with it.

“They are burning books now.”

He remembered a saying passed between mendicants in Rishikesh:

Tamas burns first what it does not understand. Then what it cannot control.

He did not fear for himself—not in the usual way. His body was no longer precious. But the air felt charged with something he hadn’t tasted in years. Restlessness. The mind trying to move ahead of the moment.

Should I leave now?

Would that be wisdom or fear?

And if I stay… what then?

The silence of the hut, which had long comforted him, felt dense now. Like something waiting.

He rose, folded the letter again, and slipped it inside a small pouch tucked into the wall beam. Then he boiled water, though he no longer wanted tea. He dressed in his plain gray robe, wrapped a wool shawl across his shoulders, and stepped outside.

The wind was thin and cold. A crow flapped past him without cawing.

​

2

The trail into the village was steep but familiar. The stones shifted beneath his sandals, reminding him of the body’s impermanence—how easily it might fall, how little it mattered.

He entered the village just as the sun began to withdraw. The baker’s sign creaked faintly in the breeze. A woman, headscarf tight, moved briskly past him without nodding. That was new. Last year, she’d invited him for tea.

A boy was chalking something on the wall near the church. Devananda slowed to read it as he passed.

“Germany Awakened.”

A swastika, uneven but bold, looped beneath it.

The boy looked at him, then at the ground.

At the grocer’s, a new man stood behind the counter—young, neat, blond. He did not greet Devananda, only waited. Devananda selected a few potatoes and a pouch of barley.

The clerk glanced at him, then down at the coins.

“You’re not from here,” he said flatly.

“I’ve lived here for many years,” Devananda replied.

“But not from here.”

Devananda smiled gently. “Does it matter?”

The man didn’t answer. He wrapped the barley and placed it on the counter with more force than needed. Devananda bowed slightly, accepted the bundle, and left.

Outside, he noticed two men standing near the well. They wore no uniforms, but one of them carried a small notebook and occasionally scribbled in it. The other just watched.

As Devananda passed, one of them muttered, “That’s him.”

He kept walking. He didn’t turn.

The walk back was quieter than the descent. The sun had slipped fully behind the ridge, leaving the valley in bluish shadow. He heard only his breath and the clink of stones underfoot.

He arrived at his hut just before full dark. The trees whispered. Something unseen moved in the underbrush. Or perhaps it was nothing.

Inside, he lit a lamp and sat by the window. He closed his eyes to meditate, but the stillness was no longer pure. A tension throbbed beneath it—a question that refused to quiet:

Am I here to witness, or to act?

If it is all the play of the gunas, then who am I to stop it?

But if compassion arises, can I ignore it and still claim to know what I am?

The mind stirred. The breath wavered. And for the first time in many years, Devananda felt himself caught—not between right and wrong, but between clarity and confusion.

He opened his eyes and whispered, “May the truth become clear before the hour is too late.”

Then he blew out the lamp and sat again, not seeking silence, but waiting for the storm to enter it.

​

3

​

Rishikesh, Some Years Earlier

The heat was sharp even in the morning. The ashram courtyard lay in dappled light, shaded by a neem tree that crackled with birdsong and the faint scent of smoke. Dieter—still new to silence, still uncertain of his place—sat cross-legged among the others, waiting for the swami to speak.

He had come to India half out of disillusionment and half out of defiance. His professors had warned him he was wasting his mind. “Mysticism is the opiate of thinkers,” one had sneered. But the more he read of Shankara and the Upanishads, the more he felt the hard angles of Western thought dissolve. Here, nothing was separate. Not even pain.

The swami arrived barefoot, his ochre robe brushing the ground like wind on cloth. He sat on a low platform, his eyes quiet but alert, like someone listening to music only he could hear.

He began without preamble.

“There is no such thing as a good world or a bad world,” he said.

“There are only the gunas—sattva, rajas, tamas. Three strands of one rope. The rope of prakriti, of nature itself. Everything you see, feel, think, even dream—made of these three.”

Dieter shifted slightly on the mat. The other students sat like stone.

The swami looked directly at him.

“You are from Germany, yes? What is your name?”

“Dieter,” he said, then corrected himself. “Devananda.”

The swami nodded. “Ah. Joy of the divine. It fits. But for now, you are still Dieter.”

A few students chuckled. Devananda smiled, faintly.

“Dieter,” the swami said, “do you sometimes feel clear, like everything is light?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“And then sometimes full of energy, craving, passion, motion?”

“Yes.”

“And other times dull, confused, like you’re sinking into mud?”

He hesitated, then nodded.

“These are not your moods,” the swami said. “They are the weather of the mind. They pass through you, but they are not you. Just the gunas—sattva, rajas, tamas. Clarity. Activity. Inertia.”

He picked up a long thread from the floor—three strands twisted together.

“They are always woven. Never one alone. The question is not which one is there. The question is, do you identify with it?”

Dieter leaned forward. “If they are impersonal, then what of cruelty? Or violence?”

“Ah,” the swami said. “Now you are asking with the fire of dharma.”

He stood and walked slowly to the edge of the platform.

“Even cruelty is born of the gunas. When tamas dominates—when there is no light to see the effect of one’s action, and rajas fuels the will to act anyway—then destruction comes. Not because a man is evil, but because he does not know what else he is. He thinks he is his thoughts, his fear, his pride. And so he obeys them.”

“But if he sees—truly sees—that it is not personal, then freedom begins.”

Dieter felt something crack in him, like a window opening inside the chest.

“So there is no one to hate?” he asked.

The swami smiled gently. “Only ignorance to understand.”

That night, Devananda had written in his journal:

There are no monsters. Only clouds blocking the sun. The question is not how to kill the clouds, but how to remember the sky.

He opened his eyes. The memory faded, replaced by the soft hiss of pine needles brushing the side of the hut. Outside, the valley was still and blue with early morning.

He sat alone with the kettle, thinking of the swami, of those words spoken in heat and light. He had believed, then, that understanding was enough. That knowing the gunas would keep him clear forever.

But now…Now the rope pulled at him in ways he could not name. Now he felt the strands twist around the world.