Why I Got Interested in Consciousness
I don't remember the exact age, seventeen, maybe eighteen. I was studying for JEE, COVID had just set in, and something I'd been carrying for a while quietly got worse.
My depression had actually started long before COVID, small, repeated moments of sadness and frustration, several times a day, easy to explain away individually. That's one of the more wicked properties of depression: it feels normal right up until it doesn't.
What I noticed most, during that period, wasn't sadness in any dramatic sense. It was emptiness. A specific, persistent hollowness that sadness doesn't quite capture. I'd been reading a lot of nonfiction by then, and I'd already half-worked-out, on my own, that money, fame, other people, none of it produces happiness that actually holds. Some of that conclusion was mine; some of it I'd absorbed from what I was reading. Either way, once the depression set in, this emptiness became its center of gravity. It stopped being a mood and started being a question.
So I did what you'd expect: motivational content, books, music, every trick that looked like it might work. None of it touched the actual question underneath. And at some point I realized something almost embarrassing in hindsight, I had never seriously engaged with religion or philosophy. Not never heard of it, I'd read Nietzsche, Kant, Meditations, and they're genuinely great, but I'd never sat with any of it at the depth it demands, partly because that depth is hard work. I wasn't religious, and I'm still not, in the conventional sense. Ironically, as a kid I used to attend a class where they taught us to recite verses from the Bhagavad Gita, and I fell asleep during one of the sessions.
When motivation, science, and the philosophy I'd sampled all failed to answer the actual question, I turned to religion, but deliberately not through devotion. Devotion requires belief, and belief means outsourcing the answer to someone else. What I found instead was that the path of knowledge, Jnana Yoga1 in the Hindu tradition, fit how I actually think. I have an analytical temperament; inquiry suits me better than faith does. So I started reading translated scriptures and watching Sandeep Maheshwari's talks on spirituality. Of everything I came across, nothing reshaped how I saw the world more than Advaita Vedanta2.
The claim at the center of Advaita is radical enough that it gave my emptiness a new shape entirely, not "why do I feel empty" but "what actually is consciousness, why does it exist at all, how does it show up in a physical world, and can any of this be settled by science, or is it permanently first-person?"3 Around the same time, two more threads started to feel like they might be pointing at the same thing. Sandeep Maheshwari talks about Anahata Nada4, an internal, unstruck ringing sound that a number of people report hearing, myself included, as something significant. And physics has its own long-running search for a single unifying framework, sometimes called, half-jokingly, the "God equation"5. Spirituality's search for one substrate underlying all experience, and physics' search for one equation underlying all forces, I don't know if these are the same question in different languages, or just two very different questions that happen to sound similar when you squint. Possibly neither. That's exactly the kind of thing I want to work out here rather than assume.
This blog is where I plan to go deeper into each of these threads, in the open, for as long as it takes, years, probably, maybe the rest of my life. I don't think that's an overstatement of the problem. I believe getting to the bottom of what experience actually is will resolve the emptiness I started with, and possibly speak to other people who've thought about their own life at this depth and landed in the same place.
One clarification, because it matters: none of this is meant to be mystical. It isn't. I'm interested in experience and reasoning, and I want this whole project to be judged on those terms.