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Why I wrote this

I didn’t set out to write a book. I had been practicing for nearly four decades and had no plans to put any of it on paper. What changed was finding Śaṅkara’s Aparokṣānubhūti in my late forties. It’s a short Vedāntic text, maybe twenty pages, and when I read it I had the strange experience of recognizing what it was describing before I finished understanding the words. It wasn’t new information. It was confirmation of something that had been building through years of sitting.

I started writing notes in the margins. The notes became essays. The essays became this memoir. The book pairs the first ten verses of the Aparokṣānubhūti with forty years of contemplative practice across two traditions: Advaita Vedānta and Nyingma Dzogchen.

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What’s in the book

This is not an introduction to meditation, and it’s not a commentary in the academic sense. It’s one practitioner’s account of what decades of daily practice actually revealed, told alongside a text that articulates it better than I could on my own.

You’ll find the merchant navy at eighteen, and a night on a bridge in the Pacific where two officers pointed at the sky and asked a question I’ve spent the rest of my life answering. You’ll find the degrees earned cleaning cafeteria floors in snow. You’ll find Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom, and the moment the career that should have been enough turned out not to be.

You’ll find a five-year-old daughter who watched me meditating and said, “Why do you always look so far away?” And you’ll find what happened in the decades after that question, when I finally understood that the practice had not yet reached my life.

You’ll find Śaṅkara’s verses treated not as philosophical propositions but as descriptions of lived experience. Each verse is paired with the specific moments in practice where its meaning became clear, sometimes decades after I first read it.

And at the center of the book, a kitchen, an ordinary afternoon, a kettle clicking off, and something that had been moving for thirty years going still.

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Who this is for

If you’ve been practicing for a while and the introductory books have stopped speaking to you, this might land. If you’ve wondered whether Vedānta and Dzogchen are really pointing at the same thing, I’ve spent forty years with that question. If you’re skeptical of spiritual memoir that reads like advertising, I share that skepticism, and I wrote this book partly in response to it.

It’s also for people who aren’t practitioners but are curious about what a long contemplative life actually looks like from the inside. Not the retreat highlights. Not the peak experiences. The whole thing, including the long stretches where nothing seems to be happening.

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What readers have said

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“I Had Never Seen the Ocean” is the essay that opens the memoir. You can read it now, or subscribe below to receive it as a PDF.

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About the author

Rahul Bhaskar joined the merchant navy at eighteen, earned three degrees cleaning cafeteria floors and walking miles in snow, and spent a career in Silicon Valley building mathematical models before the ache underneath all of it led him to a bookshelf and a small Vedāntic text that changed the direction of his life. He has maintained a daily meditation practice for over forty years, working within Advaita Vedānta and Nyingma Dzogchen. The two traditions converged over time into a single practice he can no longer cleanly separate.

Read more about Rahul →