I came across the phrase “that which matters” when I read a quote by Goethe, which was: “things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” And it straight struck a chord in me, and I wanted to write about things that mattered most to me. And I figured if I did that, then perhaps there might be some people who read this blog and also find resonance with what I had to write.

If I were to look at the arc over three years, I would say that there is both a commonality to the kinds of things I’ve written as well as there is a difference. So, the kinds of things that mattered to me most three years ago were a processing of the kind of life transitions that I was going through post-divorce. And you would find that a lot of my writing there is fairly raw, emotional, and trying to come to grips with the changes and also trying to find my voice. It was the time when I was starting to write the blog; it was a time when I was starting to write after a long time when my writing had dried up. So, one sees that kind of urgency in the writing at that point in time, and that comes through of wanting to make sense, wanting to make meaning, find my ground.

And a lot of that was also accompanied by a lot of crying. I—it was a fairly emotional time for me, and it was accompanied by therapy, ballroom dancing, journaling—just trying to get on with daily life when there was this enormous emotional weight that needed processing.

At this point in time, three years later, I think there is a far greater integration at a very spiritual level, and the latter posts indicate that kind of integration that has happened. And I think I speak from a far greater calm now than I did then. There’s this understanding that whatever else might happen in life, there is a certain ground that I am in touch with which is quite unbreakable.

Oh my, that’s a hard one to talk about. Hmm. Well, I didn’t write about this in my blog I think, but what really happened was that I was standing on that rooftop that morning, having just written a ten-page letter to someone, and I was deeply upset, and I felt that I really couldn’t carry on any further. And so as I stood at that edge—it was a rainy day, and I was crying—and I stood at the edge, and as I looked down, my daughter crossed the field in front of me. And I could just see her walking right across.

And it was almost as if the universe sent her along at that moment in time to remind me of what I had to live for. My children were my most precious relationships that I had, that I continue to have, of course. And I think just seeing her there at that moment and seeing her walk right across—it took a few seconds—and I just followed her through. And something in me said, ‘don’t do this, Arvind, just don’t do this.’ And I took a step back.

And thinking back on it, I don’t know what might have happened if she had not crossed the field, but I think that being on the edge and stepping back was critical to what was to follow later in terms of me choosing—saying yes to life. And I think unconsciously that’s what I would say I did at that point in time. And subsequently, I think as I wrote my blog, I have come back to using that phrase again: ‘yes to life.’ And I’ve written two posts based on that, and those were really conscious, deliberate choices that regardless of however much life might collapse around me, I choose life. Yes to it, again and again.

[00:00:00] All right, INFJ. Hmm. So these are four letters that have come to mean a lot to me over the last 10 years, and I’ve done a deep dive into it. In fact, there’s so much that I can talk about it, I’ll what I can say, and we’ll see where it goes.

[00:00:26] Right from childhood I’ve had a desire to understand myself and it’s come through various kinds of lens I’ve used over a period of time. The earliest kind of lens I used was Sun Signs—Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs—and I think a lot of people have read that, and to try and… I am November born, Sagittarius, and that would be my way of trying to understand myself.

[00:00:54] I think much later on I have done a bunch of things like inner child workshop and, transactional analysis, some counseling psychology kind of workshops that have helped me to understand myself. When I did come across MBTI, which is this Myers-Briggs test which has been built on top of Carl Jung’s works on archetypes, I had an instant recognition of, the description that was there for INFJ that came through.

[00:01:31] I had—I could see straight away how that description was me. And I was like, “Oh my goodness, how on earth did somebody write about me without me being able to write about me in this particular way?” If that makes sense.

[00:01:46] And, the fact that it was the rarest personality was not something that really made much of an impact on me, except perhaps it may help me to understand why I felt misunderstood so much through my early years, and how I struggled to find people who could understand me.

[00:02:11] Now, I have to say that at the outset, that personality is really the most superficial layer of our being. And when one begins to start doing, deeper spiritual work like Advaita that I have done, then one sees that personality is quite irrelevant in many ways.

[00:02:35] Having said that, the personality is what comes to the fore when you interact with people. That’s really the first meeting point with another. Ideally you go beyond it and you see the being in them and you see that the being in them is no different than the being in you. But that’s two steps ahead, right? If we—we usually just, stay at the level of the personality.

[00:03:02] Now, MBTI and INFJ actually gave me a framework to understand this topmost layer, and it made it a wee bit deeper than the other kind of understanding that I had of, of interpersonal relationships until that point in time.

[00:03:22] For instance, it helped me understand how do we conserve energy? Do we conserve it when we are by ourselves or in the presence of other people? How do we, communicate? How do we make decisions? What is it—how do we understand the, world around us? How do we take it in?

[00:03:46] So INFJ, for instance, takes it in as the big picture and patterns that exist over there. And this is an unconscious process that’s—happens for INFJs. Whereas other people are very detail-oriented. So understanding these differences actually brings a level of non-judgment into both towards oneself and to other people.

[00:04:13] And used in this slightly more enlightened way, I think the MBTI framework or INFJ personality type helps to become kinder to oneself. You begin to say, “Ah, okay, so this is where it’s coming from,” and it doesn’t become a problem, to be solved.

[00:04:36] You also begin to see what your—stresses you out. For instance, cooking stresses me out, whereas it’s a form of meditation for a lot of people. But the level of, multitasking and detail-oriented that goes into cooking actually, is a hugely stressful activity for me.

[00:04:59] Actually, I’ve started cooking again, and I have found a way to make it work for me. But knowing that it’s a stressful activity means that I’m able to pro—put boundaries around it. Similarly to interactions with people in the world.

[00:05:15] I conserve energy or I gain energy by spending a lot of time in solitude. And if my life structure is such that I am constantly amongst people and I’m interacting all the time, then there’s a massive leakage of energy. And that’s a huge stress upon me.

[00:05:37] And as somebody who’s—well, to use the word empath, in some sense, it—I would easily absorb people’s emotions. And I had very poor boundaries, and hence other people’s emotions and my emotions would get fairly confused, all mixed up, and it would lead to a massive overwhelm.

[00:06:02] Now coming to understand the personality type helped me to begin to start doing things like drawing boundaries, taking personal time to conserve my energy, entering into tasks that don’t stress me out.

[00:06:21] While at the same time understanding that this process of individuation that, Carl Jung spoke of is an important one, which is that you develop your shadow functions—that you don’t just rely on your dominant functions and say “this is who I am.” There is a, more holistic process involved here.

[00:06:45] And, but beginning from the description of the MBTI and looking not so much at the four letters, but what’s called the function stack—which are your primary ways of being in the world and acting, thinking, feeling—one can grow in one’s ability to function in this world.

[00:07:08] And that, for an INFJ, is a massive challenge. Lots of people do it very easily, but for INFJs it’s a massive challenge. So to recognize why it’s a massive challenge and what you can do about it is hugely liberating.

[00:07:23] So I wouldn’t say it’s a cage at all. It is in fact been one of the most liberating lenses that I’ve brought to an understanding of myself, even though it is at a very superficial level, which is the topmost level of who we are as beings on this earth.

Typically, if we look at our lives, they seem to be filled with problems: health problems, job problems, relationship problems, and it seems to be one long process of problem-solving. My connect with Krishnamurti’s teachings and the study of it helped me to understand that rather than try and solve each of these problems one by one, if one can understand the problem-making machinery, which is really thought, then one can get to the root of it and uproot it, or dissolve it, and there can be a transformation in one’s life. And this understanding helped to some extent in terms of the quality of one’s life, in terms of the relationships, and so on and so forth. But the central core remained. The root was completely untouched by this; maybe a little bit of dressing happened or a little bit of shaving here or there or whatever, but the core remained completely and totally intact. There was no shift in that at all for me.

Fast forward a bit to 2023, and after my brother died, my life felt like it had bottomed out. I had faced other crises before, but this one was particularly hard on me, and I lost strength. It was like the- it had just got flushed out, woosh, and I didn’t feel I could meet the challenges of life anymore. It’s not a lack of- loss of will to live, that never came up because I’d already met that earlier standing up on that roof. I’ve spoken about it in my previous response. So I’d been to the brink and back, and that was never something that came up again. But there was a sense of, “I can’t do this.” And I was still going about my daily life, but and from the external view, it might have seemed like everything was okay, but internally something had just got flushed out.

And that’s where “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo” came, and it did its magic. That’s what I would call it. I don’t know how it did it, but it created this energetic shift and I moved from somebody who said, “I don’t want to have any more problems in my life, I can’t deal with it,” to saying, “It’s okay if there are these problems and I have the courage to meet it.” So it brought resilience into my life, and having problems was not a problem anymore.

So that was the big shift that the chanting did. Shortly after that I met Rupert Spira’s teachings, I came across them, and there was instant connect with it. And the Direct Path, which is a non-dual teaching. And the big shift that happened with Rupert Spira’s teachings was an understanding that there is- the world as we experience it is not the reality. That the real essence of who we are is awareness, and within this awareness there are these various experiences that we have. And as one- as I did those yoga meditations and an understanding of the non-dual teachings, I came in touch with this silence. And this silence, it was very clear, was untouched by anything and it was not a thing. So that which is untouched and not a thing, how can it be breakable?

Well today’s Friday, not Tuesday. So, it makes a big difference because the weekend is around the corner and I love my weekends, because I get to do a lot of nothing during my weekends.

Having said that, my life is full. I exercise, I meditate, I journal. These are the three pillars of my life and I do them daily. I also take additional classes, so that sometimes takes up some of my time during the weekends.

Besides that, I go out for concerts, or I read, I watch TV. It’s just a normal basic life. It’s nothing fancy or it’s not a life of ecstasy and everything, all the colors look brighter or anything like that. There’s no such thing happening. And so I’m not enlightened and, you know, having these ecstatic experiences or anything like that.

It’s just that there’s a shift that’s happened. And the shift is really that of a loss of this existential anxiety that used to be there as a constant presence earlier. It’s just simply not there. And there is not a yearning for some meaning, some purpose, or to shape this life in any particular way. So, things happen and I try and do my best as they happen. And of course there’s planning, you know, and daily life that needs to happen – cooking, shopping, finances, and all of those.

In terms of fears, I would say there are two fears. One is a loss of a job and the second is some serious illness. And I think both of these I would hope are things that won’t happen in the near future. I really like the stability that I experience at this point of time in my life and these two are really the things that provide that stability for me. And either one of them getting impacted would be a real pain in the neck more than anything else. Obviously, recoverable, but still, I would prefer if they didn’t happen.

Other than that, I can’t think of any major fear that I have. It’s just daily life that progresses and when conflicts happen, usually it takes lesser time now for it to resolve, for the inner space to resolve. Let me say that. And I find that within 24 hours I have a total reset. Good sleep does the job.

And more recently I’ve found myself more interested in AI and the capacities that it brings and the tools that it offers. So that’s an exciting new thing for me to learn and to incorporate into my life.