The Emperor Who Fell Asleep

Stop dreaming you are a beggar. Wake up, emperor.

When I was 16, I thought my life goal was to buy a Rolls Royce. I was young and immature and I forgive myself for being so stupid when I was young. There is still a good chance that I might buy a Rolls Royce sometime in the future, but that’s definitely not on the list of my primary life goals right now.

The way I look at money has changed. I no longer want the money to display my status. The new purpose of money is to give me stability and security so that I can do creative work.

The purpose is to have the power to say No and walk away from situations you do not like. You need the freedom to work on what you want to. You should not work because you HAVE to pay the bills. If money gives you freedom, it has achieved its purpose.

Just like vitamins in your body need not be beyond a specific level, money also needs to be in a range. Excess money is just like excess vitamins in your body. If you keep taking, let’s say B12 supplements, the body will just wash it away with water.

Meaningful Wealth That Gives Freedom

When you have wealth, you will have the power to say no to employment, clients, and even customers. The customers should need you more than you need customers and you can be in that position - only when you do not “need” that income to maintain the standard of living that you have right now.

You are infinitely wealthy, if you have the time and freedom to focus on creative work. You just need enough money to keep a roof over your head and feed yourself and your family.

You are a slave, if you need to keep working to keep making more money to pay the bills and maintain your status in society. No matter how much your income is, it will never be enough.

You can achieve a standard of living that you feel is fair. You move to the city that you feel you deserve. You buy the car that you feel is safe and fun to drive around. You rent a house that is comfortable for you. There is nothing wrong with spending on these things. What’s wrong is spending money so that you can feel better than others. Do not spend money on a big housewarming party. Just invite a few close friends who will be happy about your new house, not the relatives and friends who will feel jealous of you.

Don’t compare yourself with other people (friends, colleagues, relatives) and feel “better” that you have better (actually more stupid) stuff than them. You are not getting ahead anywhere. It’s like a bunch of frogs croaking in a well without any idea about the reality outside the well. You will not win this game inside the well. The only way to win is to opt out of this competition.

Maybe when I was young, it was all about that status. That need for status probably came from comparing myself to others and feeling bad are others are far ahead of me in terms of wealth and quality of life. I wanted to be better than them. I wanted to prove them wrong. And only recently I realized that if you play stupid games, you will win stupid prizes.

Owning a Rolls Royce is such a waste of resources and the kind of “I’ve made it” feeling that you get by having such a status symbol will not last for more than a few weeks. The stupid prize is that you get to feel better than them for a short period. After a while, you leave your “old competition” and bring into your life “new people to compare yourself with”.

This is a never-ending chase. If you get a Honda Private Jet, you might feel less than the guy who has an Airbus 320 for a private jet with bedrooms and bathrooms. I am not saying that it’s wrong to acquire these things, it can have a utility. Especially if you are someone like Elon Musk running multiple billion-dollar companies, but buying it for the sake of show-off is immature and childish.

Most people are not going to get to the extreme wealth side. By default, the top 1% will be the top 1%. The top 10% cannot become top 1%. It’s always a game of comparison, a zero-sum game where there are winners and losers.

Even someone who is in the top 20% of the wealth scale in the economy, they are 1000x richer than a king who lived in the 15th century. We have better entertainment and healthcare than 500 years back.

Creation is God's Mode. Consumption is Human Mode.

When you have enough wealth, to maintain your standard of living, it gives stability so that you can have the time to create. When you create, you are meditating. The creativity flows through you and you are just a channel.

So there goes my dream of owning a Rolls Royce. But thankfully I did not waste 10 years of my life chasing that and then realizing it too late. Money is only a tool for storing value so that you can create deep value for others while your basic needs are being taken care of.

When you are ready, the creation will appear. Be the channel through which creativity flows. Doing work of art is the goal. You will be celebrated eventually, whether you want it or not. But becoming a celebrity is not the goal.

You want to be a creator, not a consumer. You will get far more satisfaction building things than buying things. It scares the sh*t out of people to be just like everyone else, so everyone wants to show off themselves as unique individuals.

Uniqueness is artificial when it is created through consumer choices (like red Ferrari or Gucci shoes), it will be unsatisfying. That’s why people keep buying new stuff. But rather than trying to make yourself unique through superficial choices in consumption, one can get a better kick from creating art. You can sing, play instruments, make videos, paint, write, and speak. A creator is by default unique through the channel of his creation.

Buying Status with Money is Wasteful

Money should enable creativity. People who “invest” money in status are dumb and have thick identities. Only death will do them and their identity apart. They will never shed that skin themselves. Think politicians. They have the thickest skins around. Else one cannot handle the toxicity in politics. All they want is money and power (status). They want to show others that they are better. That’s why they need titles. Big car. Bunch of folks running around them. They are inherently inferior and that’s why they seek material superiority.

You can still be an enlightened leader who wants to bring change. We have had a few such people in our history. But the very nature of politics attracts the most insecure and inferior people that most meditators will stay away from the game of dirty politics. That’s why countries are getting worse over time. They divide the stupid people and they are the leader of the stupid group. Anyone who attaches an identity to themselves, including nationality, religion, race, and status symbols is blind. You have the one-eyed king ruling over the blind.

Don’t compare yourself to others. Even thinking that you are a “lesser person” than Elon Musk because you have achieved less than them and have less money than them is childish and immature. I wouldn’t put myself anything less than Elon Musk and that’s not because I am arrogant, but I truly, deeply, not just think, but KNOW that we both are humans experiencing this earth (just a rock floating in vast space) and we both will be dust 100 years later.

This kind of realization is not a result of reading a lot of books or having been born a humble fellow who is so down to earth. Every child is the same. There is no such thing as a spiritual child. Though certain children will be in a better position to walk this path. For most of us, this realization is a result of the hardest job in the world: MEDITATION.

Dissolution of Ego, Status & Fame

As an adult, the best thing I have done in the past few years is to get deeper and deeper into meditation. It has helped with my health, my finances, and my relationships. But you might wonder: how on earth can meditation help with ego dissolution.

You will be reborn, only when you are ready to shed your old skin. It’s scary but liberating. The cost of liberation is overcoming the fear of letting go of the fictional KNOWN. The known is in the past. Much water has flown down the bridge.

The ego is a fiction. It’s an idea about the idea that people have about you. You see yourself as a reflection of the way others look at you. Every person that you know around you is a mirror. You see yourself the way they see you. Unfortunately, every person that you know has a different opinion of you, and you are confused about who you are because each mirror reflects a different image.

We have developed thick egos because right from our childhood we are forced to compare ourselves with others. That guy is Rank 1, I am only Rank 2. He is better than me. I am lesser. This is what we call an “ego” or self-image. You have an idea about how others have an idea about you, and that idea is what you (are dumb enough) to think is actually you.

This ego, a thick skin around your identity, which originally had a certain function of survival and protection from other humans, can be dissolved with only one solution: meditation. You can be a seed, protected by a hard shell. A seed is safe. But if you want to become a flower, you have to make yourself vulnerable, by shedding the skin. A flower can be destroyed, but being ok with that is what makes you evolve into a flower. Most people remain seeds their whole life because they are too afraid to shed that shell.

Ego dissolution is not something that you read and learn about. It’s something that you experience for yourself. And the cost of that experience is very high. It’s the discipline to meditate.

After my Vipassana experience, my life has turned around a lot. I struggle to meditate regularly, but I did have the taste of egolessness and now I am addicted to it. I want to go back to it. Life flows like a river once you shed that skin.

You are an individual, and you don’t have a personality. People give you a personality. You don’t make one for yourself, because you cannot control what others think of you. If you chase fame, shame will also chase you. Let people think what they want. You are totally centered in your experience of this reality.

The more you meditate, the less of an identity you will have as a perception of yourself. Surprisingly, it makes you “lighter” and the right people are automatically drawn towards you.

But what’s the science behind meditation? How does it dissolve the shell, the identity, the ego that’s clouding your life?

How meditation purifies you from your ego

Dissolving your ego cannot be done through knowledge, reading, education, or mentorship. Just like no one can make you experience the feeling of sex unless you get laid yourself, no one can teach you how to dissolve your ego by giving you information.

Ego is like clouds, you are the sky. You cannot see the sky through the clouds. The sky reveals itself in the absence of clouds. Just like darkness goes away in the presence of light. Meditating on the moment will make the clouds of ego and identity disappear.

Your life is like a river, it is never the same in any two moments. Always changing, always in flux. The truth is that you have no identity, so let of of the idea of “you” and just be YOU.

The secret lies in living in the moment because the ego is made of the past and future. In this moment, the ego cannot survive. There is no singer, there is only singing. There is no dancer, there is only dancing. A person who is 100% into singing or dancing, in the act, they don’t think of themselves as the “singer”. The “singer” is the identity that others give you. You are only singing. That’s the point of ego dissolution.

Living moment to moment like that for as much as possible, throughout your life is what enlightenment is about. It’s not a goal, it’s a way of life. One could be enlightened for a while and then fall back into the usual ways of the ego.

Many people who have spiritual experiences, boast about their experience, which makes their identity stronger and lose their spiritual touch. Because spiritual experiences come to you when you dissolve your ego. It goes away once you become proud that “I had that experience, others didn’t.” Now the “I” is back, the '“you” is gone. Read that again. It’s not easy to grasp. It’s so nuanced.

Only “You” Exist, there are no “others”.

The best life you can live is to live without the concept of “others”. The only thing you know for sure is that you exist. The world might be an illusion. But for whom?

The existence of the world can be doubted. But the existence of the doubter cannot be doubted because, without the doubter, the doubt cannot exist. Centering yourself in this truth of your own existence is enlightenment. Getting here and staying here makes you an emperor of the moment.

The world might be a dream, but the dreamer is real. That I am sure of 100%. The only thing I am confident about is my own existence. My search for truth starts from inspecting the nature of my existence.

Don’t feed the ego. Starve the ego. Because the ego is like a shadow stalking you. The moment you turn back, it disappears. The realization of the truth that there was no real thing called your ego or identity is the moment of light. The light drives out the dark, and you feel bliss.

This moment of spiritual awakening happens from time to time with certain situations in everyone’s life. It could be the death of a close one, a health scare for yourself, or a freak accident of a known person. You will also have the same experience with sex, mind-altering drugs, and dangerous activities like riding a bike at 180 kmph (I have been there and done that).

You also get that experience of egolessness in extreme suffering. For a fleeting moment, you get this sudden realization about the temporary nature of everything and it clicks. That’s why sex, drugs, and adventures are addictive. You are in the moment without carrying the baggage of the idea of “you” and your identity. An external force is making to stay in the moment. The only way to stay in the moment all the time is through practice.

Once you reach that state, you are in a state of “high” all the time without any need for substances. Doing drugs shouldn’t be called “substance abuse”. It should be called “self-abuse”. You are not abusing the substance. The substance doesn’t care. You are abusing yourself.

Unless someone meditates regularly, the chances of living in the moment all the timeas a way of life are extremely slim. If you meditate regularly, every moment is an orgasm. You will be overwhelmed by what you see around you. You will see a flower, and get a dopamine rush. And that’s the goal. To be in the moment, all the time.

It’s a daily job to clean your soul

This dissolution of identity is not a goal to reach. It’s a way of life. Meditation needs be be done regularly because unless you are living in a forest and have no concept of “others”, you still have to keep interacting with “organisms from the same species” and you will invariably end up comparing yourself to them. And you will become miserable.

This is like some dirt that is on your skin which you have to wash off with a bath at the end of the day. The ego is nothing but mental impurity. Your mental health depends on your meditation habit.

Meditation in the morning is the bath for your soul which washes of the previous day’s ego accumulated through interaction with other humans. That’s why just like taking a bath every day, you need to meditate every day.

If you don’t meditate for a while (even for a few weeks), you will see that the ego creeps up like a dark cloud over your soul and you start forgetting who you truly are: the flame on the candle, but not the candle itself. You will be more reactive, have more anger, and slip into a way of the miserable.

Even if you have painful experiences, the body only experiences the pain. Suffering is created by the mind.

What you are reading here is me pointing to the moon. You are looking at the finger still. Start looking at the moon and get to the moon. That vehicle is only meditation.

You can read words like this a 1000s times and you will still have a thick ego. You are getting a hint that there is more to life than the way you are living life right now. But you are looking at a map that is pointing to the destination. So don’t think you can grow by reading more stuff like this. There are plenty. You can only learn to swim by jumping into the water.

You are at a good place to start. You have made it this far into the article because there is a part of you that’s connecting to the truth. It looks like a light at the end of the tunnel. You need to take this moment seriously and decide to progress in your journey of meditation.

The Emperor wakes up

The lesser your ego and identity, the better your quality of life will be. Your quality of life is not going to get better with more money, more names, and more fame. Most people think that’s the way to improve the quality of life.

You become rich through creation, not consumption.

Someone could buy a fancy car for a crore and he pays that much because he thinks it’s of THAT much value. After all, it gives him a sense of pride among his peers. But you know what’s costlier, harder to achieve, and more elusive than a fancy car? The realization that you are unique and there is no point trying to play status games.

The price to pay to get that realization of the missing ego and living life moment to moment - is not money. It’s focus, discipline, and energy invested into meditation, the hardest thing in the world.

Meditation is not chanting. It’s not focusing on one thing. It’s removing the lens. Being raw. Letting any thought that comes to your mind come and watching it go away. And you keep clearing the clouds until a point, just like a calm lake with no ripples, your mind will be of no thoughts.

At this moment, time will pause, and you will be feeling a sense of timelessness. No future, no past, just this moment. It will feel like an eternity and a split second at the same time. You started at 3pm to meditate, felt like a minute and now it’s 30 minutes past. Don’t die without experiencing this. It’s not easy to achieve, it cannot be bought, you have to earn it.

Mental “Inbox Zero”

The mind becomes calmer with time and practice. Every time you meditate, you are processing a few “emails”. If you haven’t meditated for a long time and starting new, it will feel extra anxiety-inducing at first because it’s like logging into an email inbox with 1000s of unread emails. You know that even if you process through 100 emails, you will still have 90% more to go. It’s not very motivating because the results of zero inbox and the calmness it gives are too far.

Cleaning the house for the first time, after years of accumulation of crap, will be a daunting task. But if you have a habit of cleaning every day, you can keep it clean forever.

But if you clean your entire inbox once with focused effort, then you only need to process the new emails. If you keep clearing them regularly, you will be able to achieve inbox zero consistently. However, if you don’t read emails for a week, then it becomes hard to clear it up again because you are anxious to put effort into clearing up the backlog.

Our mind is an inbox. Everything that’s happening around us is an incoming email. Meditation is the process of going through these emails and discarding the ones we don’t need. This also gives a crystal clear idea about the decisions we should make and we become better decision-makers. If we don’t meditate regularly, we end up lagging behind and there is no motivation to catch up to inbox zero, the state of thoughtlessness.

The 10-day Vipassana Course

That’s why the Vipassana course is a 10-day one for beginners. Once you do the 10-day course, you can do 3-day courses and even 1-day courses. But you have to start with 10 days. It’s because it would take at least 100 hours of meditation to experience the feeling of “mental inbox zero”. That’s 10 hours per day for 10 days. If you meditate for 1 hour a day, it will take you 3 months (or more) to even come near the same effect.

Meditation is the “proof-of-work” algorithm that mines the truth, moment by moment.

Considering we have a lot happening in our lives (kids, pets, parents, business, spouse, vacations, and so on), even an hour of meditation daily wouldn’t be enough because it would be like clearing 100 emails every day and 100 new emails are hitting the inbox every day. The backlog is never cleared and is giving you constant anxiety. The best way to get to inbox zero is to sit one day and clear all the backlog. Vipassana meditation is that streak of clearing up your mental inbox.

Every unresolved issue you have been mulling in your mind is a mail that is adding baggage to your life. You are carrying it around. You can only shed it when you process that mail (thought) and observe it without generating further feelings about it.

Then the feeling-induced memory is converted to data-based memory. Once you have no feelings about the past, the mind will forget about it. That forgetting is letting go of your emotional baggage.

You will feel lighter and you will be naturally more creative. You can only make art on a blank canvas. The price of art is clearing out your old canvas. Once you become an intense creator, you will feel like a river.

Your own identity is in a constant state of flux. No one can figure out who you are. You will become a mystique. To float around like a lightweight feather without the burden of identity weighing you down is the highest level of luxury in the world. Not big houses, fancy cars, and overpriced clothes.

Status games were played in small playgrounds (streets, villages, small towns), but today Instagram is the global playground of status games. Everyone is so worried about how the world will see them, they project a certain image and they don’t feel good when they see other people’s photos that are better than them. That’s a dangerous path to go down. You are getting pulled into the whirlpool of comparisons and egos.

You will get it when you don’t chase it

Ironically, the creative work of people with non-existent egos connects with other people so well that the creator ends up getting fame, wealth, and status anyway. Think of the world’s best artists and musicians. They did it for the sake of doing it, not for the results of it.

The creator knows that the achievement was a result of doing work that he loved, moment to moment, and not because he chased that end goal. The egoistic people will never understand what happened. Focus on becoming the king of the kingdom, the right queen will come. When the king chases the queen, he loses his kingdom.

Stupid people will try hard, but they cannot become noteworthy unless they are ready to become a no-one first. If the worm doesn’t shed the cocoon, the butterfly will not emerge. The cost of being able to have everything that this world can offer is to be ready to become nothing.

The price to pay for having EVERYTHING is to be ok with NOTHING.

Only an empty cup can be filled. With time, you will realize that what’s priceless is the cup, not what’s in the cup. The contents of the cup are temporary, the cup is permanent.

As a meditator, you will be a net positive asset to this world. You will realize that you are wealthier than your wildest dreams. You are an emperor (of this moment). It’s your universe. There is nothing more exciting than just being alive and just existing.

You were dreaming that you were a beggar. It’s time to wake up and realize that you are already the emperor. We have been asleep long enough. If you don’t wake up in this lifetime, you have to wake up in the next life. Otherwise, you will not escape the cycle of birth and death. At some point, you have to do the work. That work is meditation.

If you had the patience to read this line, I salute you. You wouldn’t have made it this far unless you felt that this article reeks of truth.

Now kindle that fire. Go deeper into yourself. Experience what I have experienced. This is a never-ending journey and a way of life. Welcome to the club of love and creativity. Let’s ignore the politicians, power seekers, and status seekers. Let’s unleash a brave new world.

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Cheers,
Deepak Kanakaraju