Spiritual Practice
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Spiritual Practice
The Orientation
Non-dual awareness practice. Not religious performance. Active, embodied inner work. Spirituality as foundation for everything else — how I work, relate, and build.
Core posture: watch the ego's strategies without being captivated by them. Act from presence, not agenda.
Practices
Noting meditation — labeling arising phenomena (thoughts, sensations, emotions) without identification. Systematic, empirical. See meditations for detail.
Contemplative inquiry — investigating the nature of the "I" that seems to be having experiences.
Gratitude practice — structured, expansive. Not just for what's pleasant — gratitude for body, senses, ancestors, anonymous builders of civilization, animals sacrificed, all beings whose labor and life contributed to this moment.
Daily practice — tracking inner state, intentions, reflections.
Dark night group — with Ramya, John, Daryl. Processing intense spiritual/psychological territory. Not bypassing.
The Ego Work
The ego is a construction. It has strategies: self-protection, self-maintenance, needing to feel special, constant self-referencing. The practice is to observe these without believing them.
Key insight: there's a difference between:
- The ego running on autopilot (reactive, defended, performing)
- Consciousness aware of ego-construction in real time
The "enlightened ego trap" — the ego co-opting spiritual identity as another strategy for feeling special. Watch for this.
See ego for extended notes.
Traditions
Non-dual / Advaita — primary framework. Meister Eckhart, Ramana Maharshi lineage. Consciousness as ground, all phenomena arising within it.
Sufi — teaching stories, paradox, the Friend. Ibn al-Arabi's Tarjuman al-Ashwaq (Interpretations of Desire). The annihilation of the self in the Beloved. See sufi.
Islamic heritage — death in Islam explored. Not practicing in traditional form but deep in the lineage.
Buddhist — active, explicit study (not just adjacent). Primary objects of inquiry: anatta (no-self), anicca (impermanence), sunyata (emptiness). Vipassana, noting, jhana, do-nothing meditation. Madhyamaka / Nagarjuna: everything causally, mereologically, conceptually dependent; nothing holds itself up. Bahiya Sutta: "In seeing, only the seen; in touching, only the touched."
Key teachers absorbed:
- Kapil Gupta — primary teacher in the 2023–2024 period. Devotion to truth; sincerity is all you have; the mind is a wanting machine; the self is a lie; relationships bring more pain than pleasure.
- Jed McKenna — spiritual autolysis as method; "I am" as only certainty; truth can only be found now and here.
- Daniel Ingram — "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha"; noting by type (planning, anticipating, worrying); morality/concentration/insight as three tracks.
- Derek Sivers — writing/thinking as practice; business as last resort; "believe whatever is useful right now" (Nagarjuna-adjacent).
Integration with Work
Office politics as spiritual stress test. Using triggers as teachers. Compassion without bypassing. Authentic power vs. positional power.
The accessibility work isn't separate from this — "screw the bloody ROI" is a spiritual position.
Visual Symbol
My profile avatar — a figure in a diver's helmet containing a galaxy — is a visual expression of the non-dual orientation: the cosmos isn't out there, it's within the field of awareness. The Sufi resonance (fana, annihilation of self in the infinite) is also present.
Visual Symbol: Mark of Cain Fire
A second symbolic image — a hand cupping fire in darkness. The Mark of Cain (Genesis) as wound-gift: the thing that marks you as different is the thing that illuminates. Fire as Sufi fana, as ego observation (holding without grasping), as Eckhart's divine spark. Complements the cosmic diver avatar — where the avatar shows the infinite within, this image shows transformation through what burns.
Enoughness as Product Design Principle
The concept of enoughness — central to non-dual and contemplative practice — has been articulated as a SIGNAL product design principle through the philosophical advisor proposal for Shiv Sengupta. Teaching users to act with incomplete information ("this is enough data to choose") vs. promising infinite certainty is the product-level expression of discovering what is enough vs. operating from lack. The ego's insatiable need for certainty parallels the startup world's push for more features, more data, more contexts.