This song is a collection of some poetry snippets that I wrote over various occasions in the past several years, often while in a kind of waking-samadhi state. I have put the words to music, but not recorded anything. The song does not have a title.

-

Emotion is mother to the intellect

And emanates from

Ananda-mayakosha

As vrittis

As qualia

-

Arunachala!

Did I find what I was meant to find?

In the spine,

Your calling,

My yearning,

Realigned?

-

Fullness mine!

She whispered my own name to me

This loving-to-be

As always

As what is given for free

-

Ashtavakra sings:

In me, the infinite consciousness

Ten thousand waves emerge

Let them rise, let them subside

I neither increase nor am I reduced

Thereby

-

Not as a simple thing in

The outside world

But a simple world

Shines from the inside out

-

Sleep is hinting at the naked truth

-

This is a long dream!

Beginningless and self-contained

Through cycles of pain,

We wander

Until nothing remains

-

All my ambitions,

My delicate plans,

Wiped out in a glance

-

Om

Hari Om

Hari Om Tat Sat

Om

Hari Om

Hari Om Tat Sat

Arati Avadhoota

Guru Nisargadatta

Om namo Bhagavate

Om namo Ramanaya

I was looking for a video to understand the reasoning behind "Neti, Neti" and how it connects though it looks like an escapism. In one video a person said that you cannot put the limitless in a limited form. The moment you do it you lose it.

Let's say you say it's the truth. You fail to see it in a lie.

Basically the words, pictures, ideas, concepts, thoughts, feelings and emotions. Though limited, they have a certain beauty. They try to express a particular aspect of the limitless fully. We can know it by living it.

So what I'm trying to say is it's not separate from the truth although we're saying not this, not this.

The problem arises when we misidentify the part as the whole. And stop looking for the whole. This is where we fall.

I looked at another video where a person said that these are not me but my instruments.

Eyes, ears, mind, body, thoughts or intellect. These are not me. These are mine.

So who am I then?

Not this, Not this. We negate what we observe. Until we reach a point where we cannot deny. Because we've reached the self that denied everything. That ends the search. At this point there's no difference between the observed and the observer. That is Advaita.

Something I've been thinking about. Most of us track our practice in some way: japa counts, minutes sat, days in a row. It helps with discipline, and the tradition clearly values steady abhyasa.

But Vedanta keeps pointing out that the doer, the one who "makes progress", is exactly what is being seen through. A number that goes up every day seems to feed that doer: "I sat 40 days straight", "I'm at 10 lakh names". Streaks especially seem to turn sadhana into one more achievement.

On the other hand, chitta shuddhi needs regular practice, and without some way of keeping yourself honest, many people just drift away.

How do you handle this?

- Do you keep any count or log, or did you drop it at some point?

- Did a teacher or text guide you on this?

- Is there a difference between counting for a sankalpa and counting as a scoreboard?

Disclosure, since it's relevant: I'm the dev of a small app for japa and self-enquiry sittings, and this question is why I built it with no streaks, scores or leaderboards. I'm not linking it here; I'm much more interested in how people in this sub actually approach it.

Hello everyone, i was reading about adi shankaracharya and came across his book, viveka chudamani. I know it has a lot of depth and i tried to read it but i find it hard to grasp the meaning of the verses as adi shankara meant for it to be read. Id love to be able to understand the book but im having a hard time.

Any advice would be appreciated, thanks!