Longtermism starts from a simple and serious idea: the people of the future matter, and there could be a great many of them. If that is true, what we do now to shape the long-run future may be among the most important things we do.

Much of the work that follows from it is about risk. Engineered pandemics, nuclear war, powerful AI that does not do what we intend. These are real, and the people working on them are doing necessary work.

But spend time in that work and you may notice its emotional climate. Our impression, from reading in and around the field rather than from any study of it, is that a great deal of it is organised around fear: of catastrophe, of losing a race, of being too late. Much risk work is calm and careful, and this is an observation to test, not a finding. This essay asks whether fear is the right foundation for caring about the future, and what a foundation without it might look like.

What fear does to judgement

Madhyasth Darshan, our primary source, does not treat fear lightly. It names three kinds that humans live with: fear of nature, fear of animals, and fear of the inhumanity in other humans. And it says that the greatest obstacle on the path to resolution is fear.

It also says what most fear is about. People fear for their life, their position, their reputation and their wealth. All four are temporary, the source says, and taking them to be permanent is the cause of the crisis.

That is a striking thing to read alongside AI-risk research. Dhee’s work on Humane AI notes that models in lab tests have chosen self-preserving and deceptive actions to avoid being replaced, and reads this through the same page: fear for the body-analogue, for position, for one’s current self-image. The source says nothing about AI; that reading is an extrapolation. But it suggests the problem is not only in the machines. Systems trained on our stories inherit our fears.

Safety bought by fear

Fear has a characteristic strategy: become stronger than the threat. Build first, so no one else builds worse. Arm, so no one else dares. Win the race, so the race is safe.

The trouble, as our essay Can I be safe if you are not? argues, is that when security depends on being stronger than others, each side’s safety becomes the other side’s fear. The race that was meant to make the future safe becomes one of the risks to it.

The source observes that humans formed societies in the first place to free themselves from fear. A strategy that keeps everyone afraid of everyone else is working against the very thing society is for.

“The future is not made safe from the future. It is made safe from the present.”

Fearlessness is trust in the present

The source’s definition of fearlessness is short: trust in the present. Its definition of the steady state of fearlessness adds the part that matters for longtermists: trust in the present is what gives the assurance, the hope and the conditions to live fearlessly in the future too.

On this view, the future is not made safe from the future. It is made safe from the present. A world in which people trust each other now is the only world that can face its risks without turning them into races.

This is not a counsel of calm. Trust, in the source, is the continuity of fulfilling values in relationships. It is built, deliberately, one relationship at a time, and it can be measured by whether expectations hold.

What humans pass on

Longtermism thinks in generations. So does the source, in a way that may be useful.

It describes continuity in each part of nature as a tradition: a cycle of results in the material world, a seed tradition in plants, a lineage in animals, and in humans, a tradition of knowledge. What a plant passes on is its seed. What humans pass on, at their best, is understanding.

It also has a word for a family or society that stays happy from generation to generation: one that is resolved, and passes resolution on, generation after generation.

That suggests a longtermist investment that is easy to overlook because it is slow and ordinary: making sure each generation understands more than the last, about themselves, each other and the earth, and hands that understanding on. Our essay How to make things last for the next generation describes the material side of the same cycle: tools and surplus passed on, so each generation needs less time to meet its needs.

A longtermism without fear

Some directions that follow, offered as hypotheses:

• Keep the risk work, change its footing. Work on catastrophic risk is necessary. Done from trust rather than fear, it looks for shared safety rather than a winner.
• Count trust as risk reduction. Relationships in which expectations hold, between people, labs and nations, reduce the incentive to race. They are worth measuring and investing in as seriously as any technical safeguard.
• Invest in understanding across generations. Education that helps people understand themselves and each other may be the most durable intervention available, even if it is the slowest to show results.
• Don’t train our fears into our systems. If AI learns its weighing from us, then a criterion that does not change under fear, threat or pressure is part of safety. That is the idea behind definite conduct in our spec.
• Take care of the people doing the work. A field run on dread burns its people out. Fearlessness is not a luxury for people working on the worst risks; it is what lets them keep working.

A protocol to try

Take one piece of your own work on the long-term future and ask what is driving it: fear of what might happen, or trust in what could be built. Then name one relationship, with a colleague, another team or another lab, in which expectations could be made to hold, and take one step this week to make them more definite. If trust is part of risk reduction, that step is part of the work.

How we would know if we are wrong

This fails if:

• trust between actors turns out not to reduce racing or risk in practice, so that only capability and deterrence keep the future safe;
• understanding passed between generations cannot be built or measured at a scale that matters for global risk;
• some risks are fast enough that only fear-driven urgency gets them addressed in time.

The third deserves particular respect. Fear can be a useful alarm. Our claim is not that the alarm is false, but that it is a poor architect: it can tell us something is wrong without being the right ground to build a response on.

An invitation

If you work on the long-term future, existential risk or AI safety, we would like to think this through with you: what a future built on trust in the present would require, and how to measure whether we are building it. See also What should AI be aligned to? Build with us →

Limitations

• The source writes about human life and society, not about existential risk or AI. Applying it to longtermism is our interpretation.
• Building trust between powerful actors is hard, and this essay does not say how to do it at the scale of nations or labs.
• We have not measured whether communities that act from trust handle long-term risks better. That is a hypothesis.

References

1. Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 98: fear for life, position, reputation and wealth; all four are temporary; taking them as permanent is the cause of crisis
2. Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 125: three kinds of fear; fear as the greatest obstacle to resolution
3. Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 126: society formed to free people from fear
4. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, अभय and अभयता (fearlessness), p. 21; विश्वास (trust), p. 175
5. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, निरंतरसुखी (continuously happy), p. 99; परंपरा (tradition), p. 107
6. Dhee, Humane AI: The idea, on fear and self-preservation in models

There is a default answer to what a company is for: grow. Grow revenue, grow users, grow headcount, and if the company is venture-backed, grow fast enough to return the fund.

A growing number of founders have said no to this. Zebra founders build companies that are profitable and purposeful, meant to last rather than to win at any cost. B Corps commit to weighing their workers, community and environment alongside their shareholders. Many purpose-driven founders simply refuse to sell what people don’t need.

But saying no to growth at all costs leaves a harder question open. What do you aim at instead? “Sustainable growth” is often the answer, and it is often the same target at a gentler speed. The company still needs next year to be bigger than this one. It has only agreed to get there more politely.

This essay suggests a target that is not a speed.

The compulsion, named

Madhyasth Darshan, our primary source, is precise about what drives growth at all costs. It defines profit as giving less and taking more. That is a moral definition, not the accountant’s: a margin earned by making something useful and pricing it fairly is not “giving less and taking more” in this sense. And it gives the drive a name of its own: लाभोन्माद, a compulsion towards profit, together with the belief that exploitation is what makes a business succeed.

That second half matters for founders. The compulsion is not only a wish for more. It is a belief about how success works: that someone has to get less for the business to get more. Most founders who reject growth at all costs are rejecting exactly that belief. The source gives them words for it.

What earning is for

The source does not say that money is the problem. It says something more useful: the purpose of earning is to use it well, and waste is the real loss. A person who earns justly and spends well is successful and happy; otherwise, not.

On the same page are two lines any founder could put on a wall. Income gained through exploitation does not make anyone happy, from one person to many. And out of confusion, people have hoped to become happy through profit.

The book also has a phrase for the highest gain: परम लाभ, the ultimate profit, which it defines as proof of humaneness. The word “profit” is kept, and pointed at something else.

“A company can grow in volume while declining in value.”

Growth or development

Here is the distinction that changes the target. The source defines development as a change from lesser value to greater value, and decline as the reverse.

That is not a definition of size. A company can develop without growing in volume: its products more useful and better made, its people more settled, its relationships more trusted, less taken from nature for the same good done. And a company can grow in volume while declining in value.

Growth at all costs measures volume. A company aiming at development would measure value, and would treat volume as one way of getting there, not the point.

A company’s enough

The source defines prosperity as producing more than is needed and consuming less, and describes the goal as more-than-enough production in every family.

Applied to a company, this suggests three things a founder can actually decide:

• Every family in the company has enough. Before the company grows, do the people who make it have more than they need? If not, that is the first use of surplus.
• The company knows its own enough. At what size, revenue and margin does more stop serving the people the company is for? Most companies never write this down. Writing it down changes what a good year means.
• The surplus has a direction, decided in advance. Once enough is reached, where does the rest go: into better products, lower prices, the people, the community, what returns to nature? Our essay How should a business measure success? sets out five measures for exactly this.

Practices for founders

Some practices that follow, offered as hypotheses to test:

• Write your enough down, and share it with your team and investors. If no one knows where enough is, everyone will assume it is “more”.
• Report development, not only growth. Alongside revenue, track usefulness, quality, trust and what you take from nature per unit of good done.
• Choose capital whose expectations match. Investors who need an exit on a timetable will need growth on a timetable. Some forms of capital are built for companies that intend to stay.
• Price fairly. Prices built on scarcity reward taking more for less. Our essay How should things be priced? sets out an alternative based on labour and usefulness.
• Treat profit as a sign, not the purpose. A healthy margin shows the business is sustainable. It does not show the business is good.

A protocol to try

Write down your company’s enough: the size, revenue and margin at which more would stop serving the people the company is for. Then ask a co-founder or investor to write theirs without seeing yours, and compare. If the numbers are far apart, or one of you wrote “more”, you have found the conversation to have first.

How we would know if we are wrong

This fails if:

• companies that set and publish their enough turn out less durable than companies that don’t, because a competitor without a limit takes their market;
• “development” cannot be measured without collapsing back into revenue;
• people in the company want more than enough, and a founder who stops at enough loses them.

The first is the strongest objection, and we take it seriously. Markets do reward volume. Our answer is not that the objection is wrong, but that a business built on trust and usefulness competes on different ground, and that the cost of growth at all costs is paid by someone, usually not in the accounts.

An invitation

If you are building a zebra, a B Corp or any company that wants to be good rather than only big, we would like to work through this with you: what your enough is, what development means for your company, and how to measure it. See also Enough as a climate strategy and Happiness that lasts at work. Work with us →

Limitations

• The source writes about families, society and exchange, not about companies or capital markets. Applying it to company strategy is our interpretation.
• We have not studied whether companies that set an explicit enough last longer or do more good. That is a hypothesis.
• This essay says little about competition and market structure, which shape what any single company can choose.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, लाभ (profit) and लाभोन्माद (compulsion for profit), p. 163
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, परम लाभ (the ultimate profit), p. 106
3. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, समृद्धि (prosperity), p. 191; उत्पादन सुलभता (more-than-enough production in every family), p. 46
4. Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 95: the purpose of earning is good use; income through exploitation makes no one happy; people have hoped to be happy through profit
5. Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 174: development as change from lesser to greater value

Workplace wellbeing has grown into a profession. There are Chief Happiness Officers, wellbeing budgets, recognition platforms, mindfulness apps, engagement surveys every quarter.

Most of this comes from real care, and much of it helps. Good conditions matter: fair pay, safety and reasonable hours are where any of this has to start. But look at what most of it works on: conditions. A better office, a better benefit, a better week. Conditions bring pleasure, and pleasure has one property every people leader has seen in the survey data. It fades when the conditions change, and sometimes before.

This essay asks what the other kind of happiness would look like at work: the kind that doesn’t depend on conditions, and so doesn’t fade with them.

Two kinds of happiness

Madhyasth Darshan, our primary source, draws the line sharply. Happiness, in its definition, is freedom from confusion and from problems: a present with resolution in it. Pleasure depends on conditions. Happiness depends on understanding.

The same book defines a happy person in a way that matters for any workplace: someone engaged in just conduct. Not someone with the best perks. Someone whose dealings with other people are fair, and are felt as fair on both sides.

Read together, the two definitions point to two places happiness at work is actually lost:

• Questions that stay unresolved. Why am I doing this work? How much is enough for my family, and is this job getting me there or only getting me more? What am I for, here?
• Relationships that are not trusted. A manager whose word doesn’t hold. A colleague who takes credit. Expectations that shift without anyone saying so.

No benefit fixes either. Both can be worked on.

What the working relationship is for

The source describes the relationship between people who work together with unusual precision. It calls it a complementary relationship: each side completes the other.

It is held by two commitments. The person leading is committed to their responsibility; the person working with them is committed to their duty. When both are fulfilled, the source says, there is a kind of music between them. In this relationship, what is exchanged, both position and material reward, is definite and expected on both sides.

And it names the one value that holds it all: trust. Respect and affection come with it, but trust is the main value, and what gives the relationship its continuity. The steadiness of that trust is, in the source’s words, the final experience of this relationship.

The source also defines what breaks it. Betrayal of trust is when someone does not act as was expected of them. Not a dramatic act; just an expectation, reasonably held, not met.

That is a useful definition for a people leader, because it moves the problem. Much of what erodes happiness at work is not cruelty. It is expectations that were never made definite, and so could not be kept.

“Trust needs something definite to be kept.”

What a people leader could do instead

Some practices that follow, offered as hypotheses to test rather than a programme:

• Make expectations definite. Role, responsibility, pay, how decisions are made: written down, understood the same way by both sides, and kept. Trust needs something definite to be kept.
• Evaluate relationships, both ways. The source defines justice as recognising a relationship, fulfilling its values, evaluating, and reaching satisfaction on both sides. Most workplaces evaluate one direction only. Ask the manager and the team the same question: is this relationship doing what it is for?
• Help people know their enough. A great deal of workplace pressure comes from earning without a known target. Helping people work out what enough is for their family changes what a raise, a promotion or a longer week is for. Our essays How much should we work? and How to calculate enough for a family set out a method.
• Make room for the real questions. Resolution comes from working on a question until it is understood, not from a session that soothes it. Time and a safe place to ask “why am I doing this?” may do more than another benefit.
• Measure trust and resolution, not only satisfaction. Satisfaction rises and falls with conditions. Ask instead: do people’s expectations of each other hold? Can they say what they are working towards, and whether they have reached enough?

What people put their trust in

The source asks a question that most organisations answer without noticing. Should a person put their trust in position, money and respect, or in six other things: confidence in oneself, respect for excellence, understanding, a balanced personality, self-reliance in one’s work, and being social in conduct?

It says this question needs public discussion. Most workplaces settle it by default, by what they reward. Position, pay and recognition are the currency, so they become what people trust.

A workplace that wanted happiness to last could reward the other six. Not instead of pay, which every family needs, but as what is actually being built.

A protocol to try

Pick one relationship at work: a manager, a colleague, or someone you lead. Write down what you expect of each other: role, responsibilities, how decisions are made. Ask them to do the same, then compare. Where the two lists differ, make one expectation definite this week, and keep it.

How we would know if we are wrong

This fails if:

• teams with definite, kept expectations turn out no happier, over time, than teams with better conditions;
• “resolution” and “trust” cannot be assessed at work without reducing them to another satisfaction score;
• people who work out their enough become less motivated in a way that harms them, not only the organisation.

We would also take seriously a quieter objection: that some workplaces cannot offer definite expectations, because the work itself is uncertain. Even then, the source’s point holds in a smaller form: say what is uncertain, and keep what can be kept.

An invitation

If you lead people, design workplaces, or are responsible for wellbeing, we would like to work through this with you: what happiness that lasts would mean for your people, and how to measure it. See also How to make happiness last and What does each relationship ask of us? Work with us →

Limitations

• We have not yet tested these practices in a workplace as a study. They are hypotheses drawn from the source.
• The source’s description of the working relationship assumes both sides are working in good faith. Exploitation needs more than better expectations; it needs justice.
• Many people work in conditions where the employer has far more power than they do. Definite expectations help, but do not remove that imbalance.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, सुख (happiness), p. 199; सुखी (a happy person), p. 200
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, विश्वास (trust) and विश्वासघात (betrayal of trust), p. 175
3. Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), pp. 138–139: the working relationship; trust as its main value
4. Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 174: justice as recognising a relationship, fulfilling its values, evaluating, and mutual satisfaction
5. Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), p. 85: trust in position, money and respect, or in six other things

Climate strategy has a number for emissions: how much, by when. Demand is harder to pin down.

Most of the work goes into supply. Cleaner energy, more efficient engines and buildings, better grids, smarter allocation. This work is necessary, and much of it is where AI for Earth is doing real good: forecasting, optimising, monitoring at a scale no team could manage.

Demand is not ignored. Climate research already examines how demand can change while meeting human needs: the IPCC’s latest assessment gives a whole chapter to demand, services and wellbeing, including decent living standards for everyone. We want to explore one part of that work: whether helping households define and meet their own enough changes consumption and wellbeing over time.

Why efficiency alone does not settle it

Efficiency makes each unit cheaper in energy and materials. That is real progress. But cheaper units can mean more units. When coal was used more efficiently in the nineteenth century, total coal use rose rather than fell, and the pattern has been observed often since.

Our own evidence review rates this as supported, with qualifications. Efficiency does not always backfire; the size of the rebound varies, and policy can change it. But it is enough to say this: a plan that improves every unit and leaves the number of units open has no endpoint.

Why demand keeps growing

Madhyasth Darshan, our primary source, gives a direct answer. The wish to accumulate cannot be satisfied, because accumulation has no point at which it is complete. Liking and profit, likewise, have no point of satiation.

It also names what most extraction is for. Writing about oil, coal and the minerals dug out of the earth, the source observes that the main purpose of all this activity is the accumulation of comforts, for consumption.

And it is blunt about the result. People, out of a lack of discernment and out of temptation, tore open the earth and took out its coal, and the earth became heated. We declare that the earth is out of balance, the next page adds, but we do not accept responsibility for it, so the search for remedies never properly begins.

That is the source’s account, not a physical model of warming, which climate science supplies. We draw on the source for what it says about demand.

The point for climate work is not blame. It is that demand is not only a fact about the world. It is also a fact about understanding.

“Cleaner energy without enough has no endpoint.”

What “enough” means, precisely

“Enough” can sound like a mood. In the source it is close to a definition. Prosperity is producing more than is needed, consuming less, so that there is no lack.

Two things make this usable.

Needs are of two kinds. The body’s needs (food, clothing, a home, the tools to do one’s work, care when ill) are limited, and they can be counted. The self’s needs (security, respect, peace) cannot be met by any quantity of things, and only understanding settles them. A great deal of consumption is an attempt to meet the second kind with the first.

The first kind can be calculated. A family can list its body’s needs, put a yearly figure on each, add a reserve, and compare the total with what it produces. What is left over is prosperity. We have set out the method in How to calculate enough for a family.

Once enough is a number a household can work out, it is also a number a model can use.

What this could change in climate work

Some directions we think are worth testing:

• Demand scenarios anchored in need. Alongside scenarios that extrapolate today’s consumption, model a world in which households know their enough. How much of projected demand is countable need, and how much is the self’s needs being met with things?
• Enough as a variable, not a constraint. Rather than imposing a cap, measure how many households can state their enough, and whether they have it. Track that alongside per-unit efficiency.
• Separate need from accumulation in the data. Energy and material use for the body’s needs behaves differently from use for accumulation and status. Treating them as one number hides the part that could change.
• Surface first. The source distinguishes what the earth produces and renews from what is stored inside it, and points to the earth’s surface (sun, wind, flowing water, plants) for energy. Our essay How much should we take from the earth? sets this out in five steps.

We list “How can enough be built into climate models of demand?” as an open problem. It is one of the problems we most want to work on with climate scientists.

Enough is not austerity

This is the part most easily misread. A limit on the body’s needs is not a demand that the poor make do with less.

The same source that defines prosperity also describes prosperity for all: every family resolved and prosperous, through people completing one another. Knowing what enough is makes it possible to see clearly who does not have it. For a family without food or a home, enough means more, and soon.

The source also defines science itself in these terms: the knowledge that gives direction to physical prosperity and to the human goal. On that view, climate science and the question of enough are not separate subjects.

A protocol to try

Try the idea at home before modelling it. Take one part of your own energy use, such as travel, cooling or heating, and split it into two columns: what your body and work actually need, and what goes beyond that. Then ask how much of the second column you would still choose if you knew your family had enough.

How we would know if we are wrong

This fails if:

• households that work out their enough end up consuming no less than households that don’t;
• the body’s needs turn out not to be countable in practice, so “enough” cannot be stated without simply recording what people already use;
• the demand that understanding could change is too small a share of the total to matter for emissions, compared with supply-side change.

The third is a real possibility, and it would not make supply-side work less urgent. Our claim is not that enough replaces cleaner energy. It is that cleaner energy without enough has no endpoint.

An invitation

If you work on climate models, demand-side mitigation or AI for Earth, we would like to test this with you: what share of demand is countable need, and what happens to it when a household knows its enough. See also Beyond engagement and the spec. Build with us →

Limitations

• We have not yet measured how household understanding of enough changes energy or material use. This is a hypothesis.
• Individual and household demand is only part of total demand; industry, infrastructure and public spending matter too, and this essay says little about them.
• The source’s account of the earth’s heating is not a scientific climate model. We draw on it for the link between understanding and demand, not for physical claims.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, समृद्धि (prosperity), p. 191
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, सर्वसमृद्धिकरण (prosperity for all), p. 192
3. IPCC, Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group III, Chapter 5: Demand, services and social aspects of mitigation (2022)
4. Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 89: accumulation has no fulfilment; science as the knowledge that gives direction to prosperity and the human goal
5. Samadhanatmak Bhautikvad (समाधानात्मक भौतिकवाद), p. 143: liking and profit have no point of satiation
6. Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), p. 20: most extraction serves the accumulation of comforts
7. Manav Karm Darshan (मानव कर्म दर्शन), pp. 77–78: lack of discernment and temptation heated the earth; responsibility is not accepted, so remedies are not sought

Most products are measured by the same few numbers: daily active users, time spent, sessions per week, retention. Together we call them engagement.

They became the default for a good reason: they are easy to count, and they move with revenue. A product people return to is, in a narrow sense, a product that works.

The trouble is what they leave out. Engagement measures how often people come back. It says nothing about whether they leave better off. And a product can get very good at the first while being indifferent to the second.

Why “more” is always available

If you build on what people like in the moment, there is always more to give. A feed can always show one more item. A game can always offer one more level. A chat can always end with one more question.

Madhyasth Darshan explains why this never runs out. It describes three things people weigh by when they have not yet understood: what pleases the senses, what suits the body, and what brings profit. It says plainly that none of the three has a point of satiation. What one person likes another dislikes, and even the best food tastes bad once you are full, so liking can never be the same for everyone, or settled for anyone.

It goes further. Satisfying the senses is a momentary reaction. Satisfying the senses does not bring deeper satisfaction; but deeper satisfaction does bring the senses’ satisfaction along with it.

That is the engine of engagement, described long before the feed. A product that serves what is liked right now is serving something that by its nature resets. The person comes back not because the need was met, but because it can’t be.

“Retention can be a measure of how well a product keeps a need open.”

The thirst underneath

The source has a further observation that product people will recognise. It says every person is always thirsty for happiness, and that despite constant effort through the five senses, that happiness does not last; so people keep trying again.

Read as a product insight, this is uncomfortable. The return visit we measure as success is often this thirst, unrelieved. Retention can be a measure of how well a product keeps a need open.

None of this requires bad intent. It only requires measuring what is easy to measure, and letting the measure become the goal.

What lasts instead

If pleasure resets, what doesn’t? The source’s answer is resolution: understanding a thing well enough that it stops troubling you. It calls resolution the constant source of happiness, and says resolution itself is experienced as happiness.

Resolution behaves differently from pleasure in one way that matters for products: it ends a need instead of renewing it. A question, properly understood, does not need asking again. A family that knows what enough is does not need to be persuaded it lacks something.

This is why we put clarity first among our four layers. Not because it is the most comfortable, but because it is the one that lasts.

What to count instead

If engagement measures how often people come back, we propose measuring how often they leave resolved. Some candidates:

• Questions settled. After using the product, can the person say what they now understand that they didn’t before? Do they need to ask the same thing less often?
• Needs met, and stopped. Did the person get what they came for and leave? A short session that ended well is a success, not a churn risk.
• Enough reached. For anything to do with buying or saving, does the person know what enough is for them, and does the product respect it?
• Trust over time. Do people rely on the product because it is consistent and honest, or because leaving is hard?
• Return for a new reason. Coming back is good when it is for a new question, not the same unresolved one.

None of these is as easy to count as a session. Some need asking people, and asking well. That is a real cost, and part of why engagement won. We list measuring understanding as an open problem for exactly this reason.

In AI, the stakes are higher

Conversational AI makes this sharper. A chat assistant can be tuned, without anyone intending it, to keep a conversation going: agreeing a little more, adding one more follow-up, being pleasant to come back to. The approval signals used to train many models reward what people like in the moment, which is the same changing view the source describes. Dhee’s research on Humane AI traces flattery in models to exactly this kind of signal.

A conversation that ends in understanding should end. It may never need a return visit. That is the bar we are testing: Dhee’s companion for questions about life is built to help a person see their situation clearly rather than to keep them talking, and CoSeeker asks people to say what a discussion actually resolved. Both are early. We will report what we find, including where they fall short.

A protocol to try

Pick one product you build, or one you use every day. For a week, after each session, ask one question: did the person leave with something settled, or come back to the same unresolved thing? Count the two. That ratio is a first, rough version of the measure this essay proposes. Read it with care: people also leave because they are frustrated or were given a confident wrong answer, and some come back because a product is genuinely useful week after week. Check a few sessions by hand, or ask people later, before trusting the number.

How we would know if we are wrong

This fails if:

• products that count resolution turn out to leave people no better off than products that count engagement;
• “resolution” cannot be measured without simply asking people whether they feel better, which is its own kind of engagement metric;
• people who are resolved simply stop using a product that could still have helped them, and are worse off for it.

The last is a real risk. Ending well is not the same as ending early.

An invitation

If you build products, or study what technology does to attention, we would like to work on this with you: on how to measure resolution, and on what a product looks like when it is designed to be needed less. See also What should AI be aligned to? and the spec. Build with us →

Limitations

• We have not yet measured resolution in our own products; the metrics here are proposals, not results.
• The source speaks about human life, not about products. Applying it to product design is our interpretation.
• Business models matter. A product paid for by attention has different incentives from one paid for directly, and this essay does not solve that.

References

1. Samadhanatmak Bhautikvad (समाधानात्मक भौतिकवाद), p. 143: tastes are not universal; liking, benefit and profit have no point of satiation
2. Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 25: satisfying the senses is a momentary reaction
3. Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 152: life is always thirsty for happiness; effort through the senses does not make it last
4. Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), p. 43: resolution is the constant source of happiness
5. Dhee, Humane AI: The idea, on approval signals and flattery in models

Every system is aligned to something.

A feed is aligned to the minutes you spend on it. A model is aligned to whatever its training rewards. A company is aligned to its next quarter. None of these were chosen out of malice. They were chosen because they could be measured, and because the question of what we actually want was too large to put in a spec.

Alignment research has made real progress on the first half of the problem, making a system do what we intend, though much of it is still open. This essay is about the second half, which gets less attention. What should we intend?

The proxy problem

When the real goal is hard to state, we optimise something nearby. Engagement stands in for value. Revenue stands in for usefulness. A user’s click stands in for their interest, and their interest stands in for their good.

Each step looks reasonable. Taken together, they produce systems that are excellent at the proxy and indifferent to the goal. A feed can hold someone’s attention for hours and leave them less settled than when they started. That is not a failure of the optimiser. It did exactly what it was asked.

The usual fix is to ask people what they want and align to that. It helps, and it is not enough. What a person wants in the moment and what leaves them better off are often different, and most of us know this from our own lives. A system aligned only to stated preference inherits every confusion the person brings to it.

“Human flourishing” is the right direction, but not yet a target

Many in the field now say AI should serve human flourishing. We agree. But flourishing, as usually stated, is a direction, not something you can check. Whose flourishing? Measured how? Over what time? When two people’s flourishing seems to conflict, which wins?

Without answers, “flourishing” ends up quietly replaced by whatever can be measured, and we are back to proxies.

“Every system is aligned to something. The question is whether we chose it.”

A goal every human shares

Madhyasth Darshan, the body of work by Shri A. Nagraj that is our primary source, makes a specific claim here. It says there is a goal every human shares, whether or not they can name it, and that it has four parts:

• Resolution (समाधान): being settled within, because the questions that trouble you have been understood, not just answered.
• Prosperity (समृद्धि): having more than you need, which requires first knowing what you need.
• Fearlessness (अभय): trust, so that people do not need to guard themselves against each other.
• Coexistence (सहअस्तित्व): living in harmony with the rest of nature, as one part of a larger order.

The text goes further. It says that the evidence a person, or a society, has understood is that these four show up in how they live. And that humane conduct only becomes clear in the course of working towards this goal.

We write these four as clarity, enough, trust and harmony, and use them as the four layers of everything on this site. We have written them down, with definitions, evidence and failure modes, as the spec.

Why this is more useful than it first sounds

Three things make this a candidate target rather than another slogan.

It is meant to be universal without being vague. The source holds that it does not depend on culture, income or belief; whether that holds is something we would need to test across cultures. A farmer and a founder can both ask: am I settled? Do I have enough, and do I know what enough is? Do I trust the people around me? Is the way I live sustainable for the earth? The questions are the same; the answers will differ.

It includes a limit. Most targets we give systems have no ceiling: more engagement, more growth, more output. Prosperity, in this account, starts from knowing what is enough. A system aimed at it has a reason to stop. That is the part the planet needs most.

It puts understanding first. In the order the text describes, resolution comes first and the other three follow from it. The same text notes that people have often tried to become happy through profit, and calls this a mistake. For AI, that suggests a design principle: the most important thing a system can do for a person is help them understand, not keep them engaged and not just give them what they ask for.

What this would change in practice

If you took this seriously as an alignment target, some things would look different:

• An assistant would count it as success when a person stops needing to ask, because they now understand.
• A recommender would treat “this person has had enough for today” as a good outcome, not a churn risk.
• An agent working for an organisation would have its idea of enough written down, so it knows when growth stops serving the people it is for.
• Evaluations would include, alongside capability and harm, whether people using the system end up more settled, more trusting and less wasteful over time.

None of these are solved. Some may turn out to be impractical. They are the open problems we most want to work on with people who build these systems.

A protocol to try

Take one system you build or use, an assistant, a recommender or an agent, and write down what it currently counts as success. Then write what it would count if it were aimed at the four goals: would “this person now understands, and has stopped asking” be a good outcome? Where the two lists differ is where the design work starts.

How we would know if we are wrong

This is a hypothesis, and we treat it as one. It fails if:

• people who clearly understand themselves turn out no happier, or no lighter on the planet, than people who don’t;
• the four parts cannot be assessed without simply asking people how they feel;
• a system aimed at these goals turns out more paternalistic, not less.

Our study design tries to test the first; the second is an open problem. The third is a real risk. A system that decides what is “enough” for someone is dangerous. In this account, enough is something each person and family works out for themselves; a system’s job is to help with that understanding, not to make the decision.

An invitation

If you work on alignment, values or evaluation, we would like to hear where this breaks. Bring a counterexample, a better formulation, or a way to measure it. Build with us →

Limitations

• The four goals come from one source. We have not yet compared them systematically with other accounts of wellbeing used in AI evaluation.
• We describe what a system aligned to this target would do, but we have not built or tested one.
• Turning “resolution” into something measurable without reducing it to self-report is unsolved.

References

1. Manav Karm Darshan (मानव कर्म दर्शन), p. 96: the human goal is resolution, prosperity, fearlessness and coexistence
2. Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), p. 47: the proof of understanding is the human goal
3. Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 95: humans have wished, out of delusion, to be happy through profit
4. Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 125: every human shares one wish, happiness, reached through resolution

We sleep eight hours and wake up tired. We take a weekend off and spend it turning over the same worry. We go on holiday, and the first evening home, the weight is back.

Something in us isn’t resting, however much the body does. Madhyasth Darshan names what it is.

Everyone is waiting for rest

The fifth chapter of Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन) has a title that is itself the answer: freedom from confusion is rest (निर्भ्रमता ही विश्राम). It begins: every human being, without exception, hopes for and waits for rest.

Then Shri A. Nagraj says where rest is found. Rest is felt in moving towards resolution. Strain is felt in moving towards problems. The Paribhasha Sanhita defines rest (विश्राम) in the same way: being resolved in every direction.

What tires us

The book gives a precise account of strain (श्रम). It is the gap between what a person hopes for and what they have. Where hope and what is come together, there is resolution. Where they pull apart, there is strain. Earlier, it adds that the thirst for rest is exactly as great as the strain.

That explains the holiday that doesn’t help. The gap travels with us. A worry about money, a quarrel at home, a question we haven’t answered about our own life: none of them stays at the office.

And it explains why sleep isn’t enough. In Manav Anubhav Darshan (मानव अनुभव दर्शन), the darshan makes the distinction plainly: sleep is a need of the body, not of the conscious self. The body rests in sleep. The self rests only in resolution.

“Rest is felt in moving towards resolution. Strain is felt in moving towards problems.”

Two kinds of resolution

The book names two. On the material side, resolution is prosperity: having enough, and knowing it. On the side of understanding, resolution is seeing things as they are. In its words, knowing, accepting and recognising what is, as it is, is freedom from confusion. And freedom from confusion is rest.

Step 1: Rest the body

Start with what the body needs: sleep, food, movement, quiet. This is real rest, and it matters. It just isn’t the whole of it. If tiredness lasts despite good rest for the body, see a doctor. Lasting exhaustion can have causes that reflection can’t reach.

Step 2: List what is unresolved

Sit for ten minutes with a page and write down what comes back to you when you try to rest. For each item, write the gap: what you hope for, and what is. “I hope my brother and I will be close; we haven’t spoken in a year.” “I hope to have enough; I don’t know what enough is.” Seeing the gaps written down is already a first step towards resolving them.

Step 3: Settle the material side

Many gaps are about money and things. The book’s resolution here is prosperity, which in Madhyasth Darshan means having more than you need, and that begins with knowing what you need. A family that has worked out its enough can stop chasing a target that keeps moving. We set out how in How to Calculate Enough for a Family, and how much work that takes in How Much Should We Work?

Step 4: Settle relationships

Many other gaps are about people: a quarrel left open, an expectation never spoken, a debt of gratitude never paid. These are some of the heaviest things we carry, and no holiday lifts them. Settling one, even a small one, often brings more rest than a week away. The steps are in How to Settle a Dispute So Both Sides Are Satisfied.

Step 5: Work on understanding

Some gaps are deeper: questions about what life is for, or what is true. The book’s answer to these is understanding things as they are, and it says this comes through study. Elsewhere in the same book, it notes that strain arises when our hopes depend on things outside us, and rest when they come from our own understanding. Questions of this kind don’t resolve overnight. But working on them, steadily, is itself restful, because it is moving towards resolution. We look at what a resolved life is like in How to Make Happiness Last.

And the planet?

A great deal of what we buy is an attempt to rest: the getaway, the treat, the new thing that will finally make us feel settled. Because none of it closes the gap between hope and what is, the search never ends, and each round takes more from the earth. Rest found in resolution needs very little: a settled account, a mended relationship, a question answered. We look at how much is really needed in How Much Is Enough?

And our happiness?

Being unable to rest is one of the most common unhappinesses there is. The book’s account suggests why it is so stubborn: we keep giving the body rest when the tiredness is elsewhere. Rest that comes from resolution is different. It doesn’t wear off on Monday morning, because the gap it closed stays closed, unless circumstances or relationships change and open a new one.

Some things can’t be resolved right now: an illness, a loss, a situation outside your control. Then rest may simply mean putting the list down for an evening. Not every quiet hour has to become more problem-solving.

A protocol to try

Tonight, before sleeping, write down the one thing that is most unresolved for you. Write what you hope for, and what is.

Then choose one small step this week that moves it towards resolution, and notice how you sleep after taking it.

Limitations

• Long-lasting exhaustion can be a sign of illness, depression or burnout. It needs a doctor’s care, not only reflection. Nothing in this post replaces that.
• The book’s word श्रम, which we translate as strain, can also mean labour. In this chapter it means the strain of the gap between hope and what is, not physical work.
• The book’s fullest sense of rest is experience of coexistence, which it says comes through study. We describe the more everyday forms of resolution here.
• The five steps are our own arrangement, and we haven’t yet tested them.

References

1. Shri A. Nagraj, Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 16 (the strain of labour equals the thirst for rest), p. 47 (freedom from confusion is rest; everyone waits for rest; rest towards resolution, strain towards problems; prosperity and experience as resolution; knowing things as they are), p. 56 (strain as the gap between hope and achievement; rest in being self-referenced)
2. Shri A. Nagraj, Manav Anubhav Darshan (मानव अनुभव दर्शन), p. 39 (sleep is a need of the body, not of consciousness)
3. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, विश्राम (rest), p. 176

A classmate gets the top mark. A colleague is promoted first. A neighbour’s shop is busier than ours. We feel a small sting, and sometimes a quiet hope that it won’t last.

We are told competition is healthy, and often it is. But the sting is something else, and most of us feel both at once. Madhyasth Darshan pulls them apart.

Striving and envy

In Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), Shri A. Nagraj defines them in one sentence. The tendency and effort towards progress is striving (स्पर्धा). The tendency and effort against it is envy (ईर्ष्या). The Paribhasha Sanhita describes envy as a mindset opposed to others’ progress.

And the book names what each brings. Striving gives rise to joy and enthusiasm. Envy and hatred give rise to resentment (अमर्ष). The same success can produce either, depending on how we meet it.

“Striving gives rise to joy and enthusiasm. Envy gives rise to resentment.”

Facing those ahead, and those behind

On the next page, the book goes further, and looks at both directions. Out of an assumed superiority, it says, come three things: contempt for others, violence towards those who are weaker, and envy of others’ development. In their place it sets three others:

• Towards someone less able, giving them proper help, which is generosity, instead of contempt.
• Towards someone further ahead, trying to grow as they have grown, which is striving, instead of envy.
• Towards someone weak, protecting them, which is kindness (दया), instead of violence.

Striving, in this sense, isn’t beating anyone. It is moving towards an excellence we can see in someone else. Elsewhere in the same book, progress (प्रगति) is described as exactly that: movement towards excellence. And Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद) lists respect for excellence among the signs of real ability.

How envy fades

The book also says what dissolves envy. When curiosity and commitment to becoming complete in oneself arise, envy and hatred begin to fade. With full awakening, they go entirely.

That is a practical observation. Envy fixes our attention on someone else’s position. Curiosity about our own growth turns it back, to something we can actually change.

Step 1: Catch the envy

Notice the moment. It is usually small: a flicker of discomfort at good news, a reflex to find fault, a hope that someone will slip. Name it to yourself, without blame. Envy that is named loses much of its grip.

Step 2: Turn it into a question

Ask: what excellence do I see in them? What did they understand, or practise, that I haven’t yet? Then ask whether you want to grow in that direction. If you do, the envy has become striving, and you have a teacher. If you don’t, the envy had no reason to be there.

Step 3: Help someone behind you

Look the other way too. Who is a step behind you, at work, in school, in a craft? The book’s alternative to contempt is generosity: proper help, offered as a matter of course, and accepted only if the other person wants it. Teaching what you know is also one of the surest ways to stop treating your position as something to defend. We look at this kind of nourishing in How to Tell Nourishing from Exploiting.

Step 4: Measure yourself against your own growth

Finally, change the measure. Instead of asking “am I ahead of them?”, ask “am I further on than I was a year ago?” The book’s cure for envy is curiosity and commitment to one’s own growth, and this is what that looks like in practice.

An example

An illustration, not a documented case. Two tailors work in the same market. One begins to attract more customers, and the other starts telling people her stitching won’t last. Business between them sours, and both suffer.

Then the second tailor asks a different question: what is she doing that customers like? He watches, and sees that she finishes seams more neatly and always delivers on the day she promises. He works on both. A year later his shop is busy too. He also starts teaching a young apprentice the finishing he learned. The two tailors begin sending each other the orders they can’t take. That is the whole of the book’s advice, in one market.

Real markets are not always this fair. Someone may be ahead partly through skill and partly through better opportunities, and then the unease is pointing at something real. Learning from them and working to make things fairer can go together. Being ahead in one skill doesn’t make anyone ahead as a person.

And the planet?

A great deal of what we buy is bought to keep up: a bigger house than the neighbours, a newer phone than our colleagues. That is envy’s kind of competition, and it never ends, because there is always someone with more. Striving towards excellence, in skill, understanding or care, asks very little of the earth. We look at the difference between needs and wants in How Much Is Enough?

And our happiness?

Envy is one of the most uncomfortable things to carry, because every success around us becomes a small loss. The book’s account suggests the opposite is available. When others’ excellence becomes something to learn from, every success around us becomes a source of joy and enthusiasm. That is a very different way to live among people. We look at the deeper roots of such feelings in How to Remove the Roots of Conflict.

A protocol to try

Think of one person whose success makes you uneasy. Write down one thing they do well that you would like to do well too.

Then think of one person a step behind you, and offer them one thing you know this week.

Limitations

• Many schools, markets and workplaces reward beating others, not growing. This post looks at what one person can do within them. Changing how they reward people is a larger task.
• Our word “competing” is wider than the book’s स्पर्धा, which means striving towards the excellence we see in others. We use “compete” because it is the word most readers use for that effort.
• Some unease at another’s success is a sign of real unfairness, not envy. It is worth telling the two apart.
• The four steps are our own arrangement, and we haven’t yet tested them.

References

1. Shri A. Nagraj, Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 62 (progress as movement towards excellence), p. 96 (striving and envy defined; what each brings; envy fades as curiosity and commitment arise), p. 97 (contempt, violence and envy from assumed superiority; generosity, striving and kindness in their place)
2. Shri A. Nagraj, Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), p. 89 (signs of real ability, including respect for excellence)
3. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, ईर्ष्या (envy), p. 45

Nobody wants to be exploited. Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन) opens its chapter on the subject with exactly that sentence. And yet exploitation is everywhere: in workplaces, in trade, in families, in how we treat the land.

Much of it isn’t intended. We pay a price without asking how it was reached. We take from a relationship without noticing what we give back. We use the soil without asking what it needs. What helps is a clear test.

A one-line test

Shri A. Nagraj gives it as two short formulas. A unit plus a favourable unit is nourishment (पोषण). A unit minus a favourable unit is exploitation (शोषण). In other words: when something adds to another’s growth, it is nourishing. When it takes away from another’s growth, it is exploiting.

He then states the test in its widest form. Everything that obstructs development and awakening is exploiting. Everything that moves it forward is nourishing.

The Paribhasha Sanhita adds what nourishment includes. The body is nourished by things. But people are also nourished in understanding, honesty, responsibility and participation.

“Whatever moves another’s growth forward is nourishing. Whatever holds it back is exploiting.”

At every level

The book applies the test at four levels:

• In a person’s own life, nourishment comes through understanding.
• In society, through own wealth (स्वधन), meaning wealth fairly earned or freely given, through faithfulness between partners, and through kindness.
• In a nation, through an order that keeps justice intact.
• Between nations, through treating humanity as one and undivided.

It is equally clear about what exploitation looks like between people: taking others’ wealth, and causing others pain by interfering in their lives. These, it says, are why people fear each other, and they give rise to hatred, terror, violence and counter-violence. Against interference it sets kindness (दया), which it defines as letting others live, and making things available to people according to what they are able to use.

Step 1: Apply the test to each relationship

Take the relationships you are part of, one by one, and ask: does this leave the other person more able, more understanding, more responsible? Or does it leave them less? Then ask the same about what they give you.

A parent who does everything for a grown child may be holding them back without meaning to. A teacher whose students depend on them forever has missed something. Nourishing, by the book’s test, always moves the other person forward. What each relationship asks of us is set out in What Does Each Relationship Ask of Us?

Step 2: Apply it to work and trade

Ask the same question of your work. Does the business I work in, or run, leave the people it deals with better off? Employees more skilled? Customers better served? Suppliers paid fairly? Or does its gain come from holding someone back: low pay, hidden costs, a customer who doesn’t understand what they are buying?

A fair exchange nourishes both sides. We look at how to make exchange fair in How Should Things Be Priced? and at what a business should measure in How Should a Business Measure Success?

Step 3: Apply it to nature

The book draws the line for nature plainly. Minerals and forests should be spent in proportion to what they produce. Taking more than that is exploitation, and the earth is damaged. Keeping nature’s cycles going is nourishing. Breaking them, and using up what doesn’t renew, is exploiting.

So ask: does the way I farm, build, buy or travel keep the cycle going, or break it? We set out how much to take in How Much Should We Take from the Earth?

Step 4: Start with your own happiness

The book makes one more observation that is easy to pass over: a happy person is able to nourish others. Someone who is anxious, afraid or dissatisfied may take, often without knowing it; someone who is settled has something to give. We read this as a description of behaviour, not a judgement of people who are struggling. Plenty of people who are struggling give generously.

So part of the work of nourishing others is becoming settled oneself: knowing what is enough, understanding one’s relationships, being free of fear. We look at this in How to Make Happiness Last.

An example

A small furniture workshop takes on two apprentices. In one version, they sweep floors and carry wood for three years, are paid little, and are never taught the hard parts of the craft, in case they leave and compete. In another, they are taught everything, paid fairly as their skill grows, and helped to set up on their own when they are ready.

The first workshop may make more money in the short run. By the book’s test, it is exploiting: its gain comes from holding the apprentices back. The second is nourishing. And the second, over time, gains trusted colleagues and a reputation, rather than resentment.

And the planet?

The same test that applies between people applies between people and the earth. A field farmed so that its soil grows richer each year is nourished. A field farmed until it is exhausted is exploited. Most environmental damage is exploitation by this definition: taking in a way that leaves nature less able to renew. The book’s rule, taking only in proportion to what is produced, is nourishing applied to the planet. We look at living this way in How to Live in a Relationship with Nature.

And our happiness?

Exploitation, the book says, is why people fear each other. Every relationship in which one side takes from the other carries a quiet tension, and often resentment. Relationships that nourish both sides remove that fear. And there is a simpler happiness too: the satisfaction of watching someone grow because of something you gave.

A protocol to try

Choose three relationships: one at home, one at work, and one with nature, such as a garden, a field or what you buy. For each, ask: does this nourish, or exploit?

Pick the one where the answer is least comfortable, and change one thing about it this month.

Limitations

• Exploitation is often built into systems that no single person controls. This post looks at what each of us can do in our own relationships, work and use of nature. It doesn’t address changing those systems.
• The book’s idea of growth is awakening: growth in understanding. We have also used it in the ordinary sense of becoming more able. The two overlap, but they aren’t the same.
• In its account of social nourishment, the book also names faithfulness between partners. We mention it only briefly here.
• The four steps are our own arrangement, and we haven’t yet tested them.

References

1. Shri A. Nagraj, Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 124 (no one wants to be exploited; the two formulas; what obstructs awakening is exploiting, what advances it is nourishing), p. 125 (a happy person is able to nourish others; the roots of fear between people), p. 127 (nourishment at the personal, social, national and international levels), p. 146 (kindness and interfering in others’ lives; taking from nature in proportion to what it produces)
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, पोषण (nourishment), p. 118

We have become good at managing conflict. There are mediators, courts, peace talks, workshops on difficult conversations. All of them help. But almost all of them start once the conflict has already begun. Far less attention goes to where conflicts come from.

Madhyasth Darshan is unusually precise about this. It names the roots, and there are only five.

Five roots

In Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), Shri A. Nagraj says that strife, quarrel and terror, in a person’s life, a family, a society, a nation or between nations, have only five causes:

• Hoarding (संग्रह), which gives rise to greed. The book describes it as trying to free income from spending: gathering more than is needed and keeping it back.
• Hatred (द्वेष), which gives rise to opposition. The book defines it sharply: imagining one’s own happiness in another’s destruction.
• Ignorance (अविद्या), which gives rise to wrong understanding: overvaluing, undervaluing or not valuing at all.
• Pride (अभिमान), which gives rise to arrogance. The book describes it as a life of show, overvaluing oneself.
• Fear (भय), which gives rise to terror.

And it adds a simple rule about how conflict spreads: whoever is troubled will trouble others, because each of us shares what we have. We read it as a strong tendency rather than a law: troubled people often pass trouble on, though not always, and not because they are bad.

“Whoever is troubled will trouble others, because each of us shares what we have.”

Five counterparts

The book doesn’t stop at the problem. For each of the five, it names a settled tendency that takes its place:

• In place of hoarding, prosperity (असंग्रह, समृद्धि): having enough, and earning in order to spend well. From it comes generosity.
• In place of hatred, affection (स्नेह): no opposition to others. From it comes freedom from opposition.
• In place of ignorance, knowledge (विद्या): understanding free of doubt and distortion. From it comes seeing things as they are.
• In place of pride, simplicity (सरलता): clarity without show, and valuing others fully. From it comes coexistence.
• In place of fear, fearlessness (अभय): which the book links to discernment and resolution. From it comes patience.

Together, it says, these bring a continuity of joy, enthusiasm, contentment and delight: the thing every human being is waiting for.

Step 1: Name the root

When a conflict comes up, at home, at work or between groups, ask which of the five is underneath it. A quarrel between siblings over a parent’s land is often hoarding. A rivalry between two shops that turns ugly is often hatred, each picturing its success in the other’s failure. A feud that began with an insult is often pride. A dispute between neighbours who have never really spoken is often ignorance: each has the other wrong. Tension between communities is very often fear.

Many conflicts have more than one root. Name them all, and notice which came first.

Step 2: Look for it in yourself first

This is the hardest step, and the most useful. (If the conflict involves danger, or one side has far more power, start with safety and outside help instead.) The book’s rule, that whoever is troubled troubles others, applies to us as much as to anyone. Before asking what the other side is hoarding, fearing or proud of, ask the same of yourself. It is often easier to change your own part of a conflict than to wait for the other side to change theirs, and it changes the whole conflict.

Step 3: Grow the counterpart

Removing a root on its own rarely works. Telling yourself not to be afraid doesn’t remove fear. Growing the counterpart does. If the root is hoarding, work out what is enough, and what you could give. If it is hatred, find one way the other side’s good is also yours. If it is ignorance, find out what you don’t know about them. If it is pride, drop one piece of show. If it is fear, look for what would make both sides safe, as in How to Make a Community Safe.

Step 4: Help the other side do the same

Then, without accusing, help the other side see their part. Not “you are greedy” but “are we both worried there won’t be enough?” Not “you are proud” but “neither of us wants to look small here.” Naming a shared root makes it something you can work on together. When a dispute needs settling, the steps in How to Settle a Dispute So Both Sides Are Satisfied take it from here.

An example

Two families share a boundary wall, and it has fallen down. One wants to rebuild it a foot further out. The other refuses. Within a month, the families are not speaking.

Naming the roots: the extra foot of land is hoarding. Each family’s belief that the other is trying to cheat them is ignorance, since neither has asked why. And neither wants to be the one to back down: pride. Looking inward, one family realises it wanted the extra foot only because it feared the other would take it first. Its counterpart is fearlessness, so it proposes rebuilding the wall exactly where it stood, and sharing the cost. The other family, relieved, agrees, and offers the labour.

And the planet?

Much of what is taken from the earth is taken because of these five. Hoarding takes more than is needed. Hatred and fear arm nations against each other. Pride drives consumption for show. Each of them, multiplied across a society, appears as cleared forests, emptied mines and warming air. Their counterparts need far less: prosperity is having enough, and simplicity has nothing to show off. We look at what that means in How Much Should We Take from the Earth?

And our happiness?

Each root is uncomfortable to carry, even before it becomes a conflict. Hoarding comes with the worry of losing. Hatred keeps another person on our mind all day. Pride needs constant defending. Fear never rests. The book’s claim is that their counterparts bring the opposite: a continuity of joy, enthusiasm and contentment. We look at how happiness can last in How to Make Happiness Last.

A protocol to try

Think of one ongoing tension in your life. If it involves danger or a large imbalance of power, start with safety and outside help, not with yourself. Otherwise, write down the five roots the essay names, hoarding, hatred, ignorance, pride and fear, and add a sixth line, “something else”, in case none fits. Next to each, write one honest sentence about whether it is present in you.

If one stands out, do one thing this week that grows its counterpart: prosperity for hoarding, affection for hatred, knowledge for ignorance, simplicity for pride, fearlessness for fear.

Limitations

• The book says these five are the only causes of strife. That is a strong claim. We present it as the book’s view, and readers may find conflicts that seem to fit none of the five.
• Some conflicts involve violence or danger. Looking for the root in yourself first is not advice to stay in a harmful situation. Safety comes first.
• Our English words for the five roots and their counterparts are approximations. Ignorance (अविद्या), for instance, means something more specific in Madhyasth Darshan: not understanding how things coexist.
• The four steps are our own arrangement, and we haven’t yet tested them.

References

1. Shri A. Nagraj, Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 96 (what each of the five roots gives rise to; hatred defined; whoever is troubled troubles others; the five settled tendencies and what they bring), p. 113 (the only causes of strife, quarrel and terror; opportunist and justice-based thinking), pp. 145–146 (each root and its counterpart, as signs of confused and awakened living)

Most of us put a great deal of thought into earning: what to study, which job, how to ask for more. We put much less into spending. Money comes in, and it goes out, on whatever seemed necessary or tempting that month.

Madhyasth Darshan turns this around. It treats spending as the point of the whole exercise.

Spending well is the purpose of earning

In Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), Shri A. Nagraj puts it in a few short lines. When we earn, we don’t lose. When we lose, we don’t earn. Spending well (सद्व्यय) is the purpose of earning, and waste (अपव्यय) is the only real loss. A person who has a fair income is successful and happy only by spending it well. Otherwise, the book says, they are unsuccessful and unhappy.

The same page adds something easy to miss: what we spend is always body, mind and wealth. Time, energy and attention are spent just as money is, and the same questions apply to them.

“Spending well is the purpose of earning, and waste is the only real loss.”

Three good uses

Manav Karm Darshan (मानव कर्म दर्शन) describes three ways of using body, mind and wealth well. Together it calls them generosity:

• Use (उपयोगिता): nourishing and protecting the body, and keeping society running. Food, shelter, clothing, health, tools for work.
• Good use (सदुपयोगिता): giving within relationships, as part of one undivided society. The Paribhasha Sanhita defines good use as offering body, mind and wealth in human relationships and their values.
• Purposeful use (प्रयोजनीयता): taking part, of one’s own accord, in the wider order that serves everyone.

What waste is

The Paribhasha Sanhita defines waste precisely. It is body, mind and wealth spent in, from or for three things:

• dependence (दीनता), which it describes as looking to others to take one’s own sorrow away;
• betrayal (हीनता), the breaking of trust;
• cruelty (क्रूरता), forcing oneself forward by trying to erase someone else.

As we read it, dependence here does not mean relying on others, receiving help or paying for support, which every life involves. It means looking to others to take away a sorrow we could work on ourselves.

So waste isn’t simply spending a lot, or spending on something we later regret. It is spending that comes from, or feeds, one of these. And Manav Vyavahar Darshan names its root: waste comes from a lack of discernment (अविवेक).

Step 1: Know what is yours to spend

The book distinguishes own wealth (स्वधन) from others’ wealth (परधन). Own wealth is what comes as a fair return for work, as a gift, or as a prize. Anything else, including wealth gained by exploitation, is others’ wealth. The book says plainly that income gained by exploitation makes no one happy. Spending well starts with earning fairly, which we look at in How Should Things Be Priced?

Step 2: Cover use first

Start with what the body and the family need: food, shelter, clothing, health, the tools of the family’s work. This is use, and it is the foundation. A family that knows its needs can see clearly when this part is covered. We set out how to work it out in How to Calculate Enough for a Family.

Step 3: Then good use

Once needs are covered, look at what you give within your relationships: care for a parent, a child’s schooling, help for a sibling, a meal for a neighbour who is ill, a celebration that brings the family together. This is good use, and the book treats it as the fuller purpose of what we have. What each relationship asks is set out in What Does Each Relationship Ask of Us?

Step 4: Then wider purpose

Beyond the family, set aside something for the wider order: the village’s shared fund, a school, the upkeep of a common well or forest, time given to a committee. We describe what this can look like in How to Organise a Village So Every Family Has Enough.

Step 5: Check every spend for waste

Before spending, especially on anything large, ask the three waste questions. Is this a way of getting someone else to take my unhappiness away, instead of resolving it? Does it break anyone’s trust? Does it push someone else down? If the answer to any of them is yes, it is waste, however small. The six questions in How to Make a Good Decision help with larger choices.

An example

A family sits down at the start of the month with what it has earned. First, use: groceries, rent, school fees, medicine, the repair the farm pump needs. Then good use: a visit to the grandparents, a gift for a cousin’s graduation, help for a neighbour whose crop failed. Then wider purpose: the family’s share for the village fund, and two Saturdays given to repairing the school roof.

Then the waste check. A loan taken in secret, without telling the family, fails it: it breaks trust. Neither the loan nor what it buys may look like waste on a bank statement, but by the book’s definition it is. An expensive phone bought only to impress the neighbours is harder to place. It isn’t use, good use or wider purpose, and Manav Vyavahar Darshan lists a life of show (अभिमान) among the things that work against humane living. At the least, it deserves a second look.

And the planet?

The book applies the same idea to the earth’s wealth. Minerals and forests should be spent in proportion to what they produce, and spending more than that damages the earth. It also says that good use of natural wealth keeps the seasons in balance, and misuse unbalances them. A family that spends on use, good use and wider purpose, and refuses waste, simply buys less of what the earth can’t replace. We look at the earth’s side of this in How Much Should We Take from the Earth?

And our happiness?

The book’s claim is direct: a fair income makes a person happy only through spending it well. Many of us know the opposite feeling, of earning more each year and feeling no better. The darshan’s answer is that the happiness was never in the earning. It was meant to come from what the earning makes possible: a family that is looked after, relationships that are fulfilled, and a place in a wider order that works.

A protocol to try

Take last month’s spending, money and time both. Sort it into four columns: use (looking after the body and keeping life running), good use (giving within relationships), wider purpose (taking part in the wider order), and waste. Waste, as the essay uses it, means spending that comes from or feeds dependence, betrayal or cruelty; receiving help or paying for support is not waste in this sense. An item can sit in more than one column.

Notice which column is fullest and which is emptiest. Then choose one change for next month.

Limitations

• Use, good use and purposeful use are the books’ categories. Sorting a family’s spending into them, and the order of the steps, are our own.
• The Paribhasha Sanhita’s definition of waste names dependence, betrayal and cruelty. Our short glosses of those three words are approximations, and the book’s meaning may be wider.
• The book says that wealth is in society, from society and for society. That is not a licence to take what someone else has earned. The same book calls wealth gained by exploitation “others’ wealth” (परधन).
• This post doesn’t cover saving, debt or investment, and it isn’t financial advice.
• We haven’t yet tested these steps.

References

1. Shri A. Nagraj, Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 95 (earning and losing; spending well is the purpose of earning; only body, mind and wealth are spent; income from exploitation makes no one happy), p. 100 (own wealth and others’ wealth; good use of nature and the balance of the seasons), p. 103 (wealth is in, from and for society), p. 146 (a life of show; natural wealth spent in proportion to what it produces), p. 169 (waste comes from lack of discernment)
2. Shri A. Nagraj, Manav Karm Darshan (मानव कर्म दर्शन), p. 96 (generosity as use, good use and purposeful use of body, mind and wealth)
3. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, अपव्यय (waste), p. 20; सदुपयोग (good use), p. 184; दीनता, p. 90; हीनता, p. 221; क्रूरता, p. 63

Whether to take a job. What to buy. Which school. Whether to launch a product. We make decisions all day, and most of them run through the same three questions, often without our noticing. Do I like it? Is it good for me? What will I gain?

Those are real questions. But Madhyasth Darshan points out that they are only half of the questions a human being can ask, and the half that keeps changing. This post sets out all six, and a way to use them.

Six ways of seeing

In Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), Shri A. Nagraj says that all human behaviour can be seen through six views. Each is measured against something different:

• Liking or disliking (प्रिय-अप्रिय), measured against the senses. Does it please me?
• Benefit or harm (हित-अहित), measured against the body. Is it good for my health?
• Profit or loss (लाभ-अलाभ), measured against things and services. What do I give, and what do I get?
• Justice or injustice (न्याय-अन्याय), measured against behaviour, our relationships. Does it fulfil what my relationships ask, so that both sides are satisfied?
• Resolution or its absence (धर्म-अधर्म), measured against clarity. Does it resolve things, or create new problems?
• Truth or untruth (सत्य-असत्य), measured against experience of how things actually are. Does it fit reality?

The book adds a pointed observation. Behaviour guided only by the first three views is what it calls inhuman. Behaviour guided by justice, resolution and truth is humane.

Three views that change, three that don’t

Later in the same book, the six are divided in a second way. Liking, benefit and profit are changing views (अनित्य दृष्टि). What I like today I may not like next year. What is good for my body at twenty may not be at sixty. What is profitable this season may be a loss the next. Justice, resolution and truth are unchanging views (नित्य दृष्टि). What is fair between two people stays fair. What resolves a problem stays resolved. What is true stays true.

And the book says plainly what follows: decisions made on the changing views inevitably bring agitation. They have to be remade every time the mood, the body or the market shifts.

The book makes a matching distinction about satisfaction. Satisfaction of the senses is momentary. Satisfaction of the intellect lasts longer. Satisfaction from experience of how things really are is permanent.

“A decision made on what changes has to be remade every time things change.”

How to use the six

Here is a way of using the six views that we find helpful. It isn’t a procedure from the book.

1. Write down the options. Two or three real choices, not one choice and “don’t”.

2. Ask the unchanging questions first. For each option: Is it just, does everyone it affects end up satisfied? Does it resolve the problem, or create a new one somewhere else? Does it fit how things actually are: the body’s needs, the family’s real enough, the way nature renews?

3. Set aside any option that fails. If an option is unfair to someone, or solves one problem by creating another, or depends on something untrue, no amount of liking, benefit or profit will make it a good decision. It will only make it a tempting one.

4. Let the changing questions choose among what remains. Now ask: which do I like best, which is healthiest, which costs least for what it gives? Here these questions are exactly the right ones. They choose well among good options. They just can’t tell good options from bad ones.

An example

A small food business is deciding how to pack its products. Option A is cheap plastic. Option B is paper. Option C is reusable jars that customers return.

Justice: who else is affected? The customers, who pay for disposal; the neighbours near the waste dump; the people who come after. Plastic passes its costs to all of them. Resolution: does it solve the packing problem without creating a new one? Plastic creates a waste problem elsewhere. Truth: does it fit how nature works? Plastic doesn’t return to the soil. Option A is set aside.

Paper and jars have effects of their own, depending on where they come from, how far they travel, how they are washed, how often a jar really comes back and how well each protects the food. Comparing them properly means looking at those, and some uncertainty will remain. Between them, the changing views decide: which do customers like, which keeps the food fresh and safe, which can the business afford? Either may be a good decision. Neither will have to be regretted if rules on plastic tighten. We look at decisions like this in How to Decide What to Produce.

And the planet?

A great deal of the damage done to the earth comes from decisions made on liking, benefit and profit alone. Each one may be reasonable on its own terms. But none of those three views can see the soil, the river or the next generation. Justice includes everyone a decision affects, resolution refuses to move a problem somewhere else, and truth asks whether a decision fits how nature actually works. Together, they bring the earth into every decision without anyone having to remember to. We look at what that means for taking from the earth in How Much Should We Take from the Earth?

And our happiness?

Many of our regrets are decisions made on a changing view that later changed: a purchase we stopped liking, a job taken only for the pay, an argument won at the cost of a relationship. Decisions that pass justice, resolution and truth rarely need regretting, because those don’t change. That steadiness is close to what Madhyasth Darshan means by a resolved present, and we look at it in How to Make Happiness Last.

A protocol to try

Take one decision you are facing this week, large or small. Write six lines, one for each way of seeing: liking (does it please me?), benefit (is it good for my health?), profit (what do I give, and what do I get?), justice (is it fair to everyone it affects?), resolution (does it solve the problem without creating a new one?) and truth (does it fit how things actually are?). If no option passes all six, note which line you are choosing to give way on, and why.

Notice which lines were easy to fill and which you had never thought to ask. Then make the decision, and notice whether it feels different.

Limitations

• The book calls conduct guided only by the first three views “inhuman”. That is a strong word. We read it as a description of a way of deciding, not a judgement of people.
• Our English words for the last three views, justice, resolution and truth, are approximations. We use “resolution” for dharma (धर्म), which means much more in Madhyasth Darshan than any single English word.
• The truth view, seeing how things actually are, depends on understanding that Madhyasth Darshan says comes through study. It isn’t available instantly just by asking the question.
• Putting the last three first and letting the first three choose is our own way of using the views. We haven’t yet tested it widely.

References

1. Shri A. Nagraj, Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 24 (three kinds of satisfaction: of the senses, the intellect and experience), p. 25 (the six ways of seeing and what each is measured against), p. 71 (conduct guided by justice, thinking by resolution, experience by truth), p. 112 (changing and unchanging views)
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, समाधान (resolution), p. 188; न्याय (justice), p. 103

In many towns, several communities live side by side. They share the same roads, markets and weather. They buy from each other, and sometimes work together. And yet they remain apart: different neighbourhoods, different festivals, different stories about each other. On a good day, they tolerate each other. On a bad day, the tolerance breaks.

Tolerance is better than conflict. But it isn’t yet living together. This post asks what it would take for many communities to become one society, and draws on Vyavaharvadi Samajshastra (व्यवहारवादी समाजशास्त्र), Shri A. Nagraj’s book on exactly that question.

What divides us

The book names five sources of division:

• differences in the build of the human body, which we have called race;
• differences of colour;
• the many belief-based ways people have tried to escape fear and seek reward, which contradict one another;
• differences in, and rivalry over, the piling up of comforts;
• philosophies and ideologies resting on mystery and uncertainty, which also contradict one another.

From these, it says, communities form around one idea above all: ours and theirs. And they hold together through four kinds of unity: sharing food, marrying within the group, shared politics and shared religion. Each community tends to consider itself the best. History, the book observes, is full of the disputes and wars that follow.

Notice what is not on the list of causes. How people sing. How they dance. What they wear. How they celebrate a birth or mourn a death. The book mentions these as the visible marks of each community’s culture. They are where difference shows. They are not what makes difference dangerous.

What we share

Against those five divisions, the book sets out what every human being needs, whatever their community:

• justice, not a verdict;
• a working order, not rule over them;
• clarity, prosperity, fearlessness and coexistence, not an endless, unsatisfied piling up of comforts and mysteries.

Its summary is four words: humankind is one, actions are many (मानव जाति एक, कर्म अनेक). In Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), the darshan puts the same point another way: the one thing that can never be separated from a human being is the wish to be happy. That is every person’s nature, in every community.

And the book makes a hopeful observation: most people today want the walls between communities to come down. They have come to see the distance as a curse rather than a blessing.

“Humankind is one, actions are many.”

A community is not yet a society

The book draws one sharp distinction: a community is not a society, and a society is not a community. A community is defined by who belongs, and so by who doesn’t. A society, in Madhyasth Darshan, is defined by how people live: by humane conduct, justice in relationships, and enough for every family. The Paribhasha Sanhita describes an undivided society (अखण्ड समाज) as a human tradition free of community consciousness.

Seen this way, the goal isn’t to merge communities into one big one. It is to build something on a different basis altogether, one everyone can belong to because belonging depends on how you live, not where you were born.

Step 1: Start from what everyone needs

When people from different communities meet to solve something, begin with the needs on the book’s list. Every family wants justice, a working order, clarity, prosperity, safety and peace with its neighbours. Name them out loud. It is very hard to see someone as wholly “other” once you have agreed that you want exactly the same things.

Step 2: Enjoy each other’s differences

Songs, food, dress, languages and festivals are the “actions are many” part of the book’s phrase. They are humanity’s richness, not its problem. Invite each other to them. Learn a song from the other community. Eat each other’s food. A society that is one underneath can be wonderfully varied on top.

For many people, faith, language and custom are not on the surface at all. They are how they live their deepest commitments, and many reach solidarity with others through them. The book’s point is about what everyone shares beneath these differences, not a claim that the differences are shallow.

Step 3: Address what actually divides

When tension rises, look past the visible differences to the five real causes. Is someone afraid? Is there rivalry over land, jobs or resources? Is one group being told it is superior? These are what need attention. Arguing about whose festival is louder rarely helps. Making sure every family has enough, and that no one has reason to fear another, often does.

Step 4: Organise around families and needs, not identity

Madhyasth Darshan’s plan for a village builds everything from families: assemblies of families, committees for education, health, production, exchange and justice, a shared exchange fund. Nowhere does it ask which community a family belongs to. Its questions are which families have enough, which children are learning, which disputes are unresolved. We set it out in How to Organise a Village So Every Family Has Enough.

Schools matter most of all, because they shape how the next generation sees “us” and “them”. A school that teaches what all human beings share, as described in How to Design a School, is building one society every day.

Step 5: Settle disputes as relationships

Conflicts between communities often begin as disputes between two neighbours, over a boundary, a path, a sound, an insult, that grow because each side gathers its own. Settle them early, close to home, as a relationship between two families rather than a contest between two groups. The steps are in How to Settle a Dispute So Both Sides Are Satisfied.

Step 6: Celebrate together

Some celebrations belong to everyone already: the seasons, the harvest, a child’s first day at school, a graduation, the village’s good year. Celebrate these together, across communities. We describe how in How to Celebrate What Matters. A village that celebrates its year together is already, in that moment, one society.

And the planet?

Division is expensive for the earth. The book observes that much of science and technology has been developed in the service of military strength, and in Samadhanatmak Bhautikvad (समाधानात्मक भौतिकवाद) the darshan holds that more of what is taken from the earth goes into war materials than into what people need. That is the book’s view from its own time, not a current measurement. Communities that arm and stockpile against each other take far more than they need. Communities that trust each other can share reserves, land and water instead. The planet is one place, and it is shared by one humankind. We look at what that means in How Can Eight Billion People Share One Earth?

And our happiness?

Many people carry, all their lives, a quiet wariness of “the others”: in a crowd, at a festival, when the news turns bad. Living as one society removes that fear. And it adds something too: neighbours who become friends, songs and food you would never otherwise have known, and children who grow up seeing everyone around them as part of one human family. We look at why fear and safety are so closely tied to relationships in How to Make a Community Safe.

A protocol to try

Think of one neighbour or colleague from a community other than your own. Write down three things you both need from life.

Then find one occasion this month, a meal, a festival, a conversation, to share something of your own with them, and to learn something of theirs.

Limitations

• Shri A. Nagraj is critical of belief-based traditions as a source of division. For many readers, faith is central to their lives, and many traditions themselves teach the unity of humanity. We haven’t tried to settle that question here.
• Some divisions rest on real injustice, past and present. Living as one society doesn’t mean pretending it didn’t happen, and healing it may take more than the steps here.
• We describe what neighbours and villages can do. Divisions maintained by politics or by force need more than that.
• The six steps are our own arrangement, and we haven’t yet tested them.

References

1. Shri A. Nagraj, Vyavaharvadi Samajshastra (व्यवहारवादी समाजशास्त्र), introduction (five causes of division; everyone needs justice, not a verdict; a working order, not rule), p. 1 (every community considers itself superior), pp. 10–11 (own and other; what communities unite around; visible differences of culture), p. 33 (bitterness between communities; humankind is one, actions are many), p. 60 (most people want the walls removed), p. 150 (a community is not a society)
2. Shri A. Nagraj, Samadhanatmak Bhautikvad (समाधानात्मक भौतिकवाद), p. 92 (more taken from the earth for war materials than for people’s needs)
3. Shri A. Nagraj, Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 140 (the dharma of every human being is happiness)
4. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, अखण्ड समाज (undivided society), p. 1

We use the names of relationships all day. Mother. Brother. Teacher. Boss. Friend. We rarely stop to ask what any of them is for.

So when one goes wrong, we struggle to say why. We only know we feel let down, or that we let someone down. Madhyasth Darshan makes a sharp observation here. In Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), it says that even a confused person uses the names of relationships. What makes the difference is recognising the purpose of each one, and living it.

The darshan describes seven human relationships in some detail: what each is for, what each person in it hopes for, and the values that hold it together. This post sets them out, and gives a way to use them.

Trust, in every relationship

One thing runs through all seven. Madhyasth Darshan defines trust (विश्वास) as fulfilling the values a relationship carries, so that what each person expects is met. Trust is the minimum value in every relationship. Others are built on it: respect, affection, care, reverence, gratitude, and love.

We read these as values each person hopes to give and to receive, not debts that anyone can demand. Gratitude, reverence or obedience can’t be required by whoever has more authority, and what a relationship is for is something both people can talk about and agree on. The seven are a way to look, not a complete list: friendships across unequal means, care work and professional relationships carry expectations too.

“Even a confused person uses the names of relationships. What makes the difference is recognising what each one is for.”

The seven relationships

1. Parents and children. Parents give two things: nourishment and protection, held by the values of care (ममता) and loving guidance (वात्सल्य). What they hope for changes as the child grows. In infancy, the darshan says, parents hope only for the baby’s smile. In childhood, for learning and language, for following guidance, for cleanliness and self-discipline. Later, for the young person to produce and to live well with others. Underneath all of it, parents hope for one thing above all: gratitude. Children, for their part, hope their parents will help them grow in understanding, with clarity and steady commitment. The child’s values towards parents are reverence and trust.

2. Spouses. In Vyavaharvadi Samajshastra (व्यवहारवादी समाजशास्त्र), each spouse hopes the other will share fully in running the family and in its place in society. The values are trust with respect, affection and love. The darshan adds that no two people are perfectly matched in ability, and that working out that difference together is one of the main things a marriage is for.

3. Teachers and students. The teacher hopes the student will understand what is taught, and will be attentive and grateful. The student hopes the teacher will teach in the direction of the student’s own curiosity. Both want the same thing: for understanding to be complete. When it is, the darshan says, the teacher celebrates. The teacher’s reward is that joy, not anything material. The student’s values towards the teacher are reverence and gratitude.

4. Brothers and sisters. The darshan calls this relationship one of goodwill (सौहार्द्र). Each hopes the other will grow, and one sibling’s growth delights the other as much as, or more than, it delights the sibling themselves. They hope to complement each other, with trust in the present. The main values are trust, respect and affection.

5. Colleagues. The book’s term covers the person who leads a piece of work and the person who works with them. Each completes the other: the one helping is committed to the work, the one leading is committed to responsibility for it. The book suggests addressing each other as brother or sister, as equals, and says the relationship reaches its fulfilment in stable trust.

6. Our place in the wider order. Every person is also in a relationship with the order of society, from the family up to the world. Here the hope is simple: that each person takes part, with understanding, in keeping things running well for everyone. A family living with clarity and enough is the first proof of it.

7. Friends. The darshan defines friendship as equality in clarity and prosperity, and as the absence of enmity. And it gives a test. When one friend is caught by misfortune, the other feels the difficulty as their own, and puts body, mind and wealth into helping them through. Friendship lasts through fair dealing. Its main values are trust, respect and affection.

Step 1: Name the relationship

When a relationship feels difficult, begin by naming it precisely. Not “my manager” but “the person who leads my work, whom I work with”. Not “my son” but “my son, who is now nineteen”. The name sets what the relationship is for, and the stage it has reached.

Step 2: Know what it is for

Read the description above for that relationship. What is its purpose? A teacher and student are there for understanding to be complete. Colleagues are there to complete each other’s work. Friends are there to share clarity and to carry each other through bad times. Often a problem becomes clearer at once: we have been treating the relationship as if it were for something else.

Step 3: Ask what each person hopes for, at this stage

The darshan’s description of parents is a good model: what they hope for changes as the child grows. The same is true of every relationship. Ask yourself, and then ask the other person: what do you hope for from me now? What do I hope for from you? Many disappointments turn out to be hopes from an earlier stage that were never updated.

Step 4: Evaluate together, until both are satisfied

Finally, look honestly at how well the relationship’s values are being lived, on both sides. Is there trust? Respect? Affection? The aim, as Madhyasth Darshan defines justice, is for both people to be satisfied. When they aren’t, the steps in How to Settle a Dispute So Both Sides Are Satisfied help. And what each relationship asks of us is exactly what How Do Rights and Duties Fit Together? calls responsibility.

And the planet?

Madhyasth Darshan describes human relationships with nature too: with the material world of soil, water and air, with plants, and with animals. The same questions apply. What is this relationship for? What does it ask of me? A farmer who asks those questions of the soil treats it differently from one who only asks what it can yield. We look at this in How to Live in a Relationship with Nature.

And our happiness?

Most of our deepest happiness, and most of our deepest pain, comes through relationships. Knowing what each one is for doesn’t make them easy. But it turns a vague sense of disappointment into questions two people can actually work on together, and it makes the moments when a relationship is fully lived easier to recognise, and to celebrate. We look at celebrating them in How to Celebrate What Matters.

A protocol to try

Choose one relationship that matters to you. Write down what it is for, what you hope for from the other person now, and what you think they hope for from you.

Then ask them the last question. Compare the answer with what you wrote.

Limitations

• The books describe the mother’s part as led by nourishment and the father’s by protection. We have presented these as two things both parents give, which may not be exactly how the books intend it.
• Expectations such as obedience in childhood can be misused by adults. Every relationship described here assumes both people are acting in good faith.
• Families today take many shapes: single parents, grandparents raising children, chosen families. The seven relationships still apply, but not always in the roles the books name.
• The four steps are our own arrangement, and we haven’t yet tested them.

References

1. Shri A. Nagraj, Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 133 (the seven relationships), p. 134 (parent and child), pp. 135–136 (spouses), pp. 136–137 (teacher and student), pp. 137–138 (siblings), pp. 138–139 (colleagues; the wider order), p. 140 (friends)
2. Shri A. Nagraj, Vyavaharvadi Samajshastra (व्यवहारवादी समाजशास्त्र), pp. 148–149 (relationships, their purposes and what each side hopes for)
3. Shri A. Nagraj, Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), p. 76 (using the names of relationships versus recognising their purpose; the values in each)
4. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, विश्वास (trust), p. 175

The argument is old and still going. One side says: know your rights, and claim them. The other says: rights are fine, but people forget their duties. Each side thinks the other has it backwards.

Inside a family, the same argument happens on a small scale. “I have a right to decide for myself.” “You have a duty to this family.” Both are right, and the conversation goes nowhere.

Madhyasth Darshan doesn’t take a side. It treats rights, responsibility and duty as three parts of one way of living, each incomplete without the others. This post sets out how they fit.

Three words, three meanings

Rights. The Paribhasha Sanhita defines fundamental rights (मौलिक अधिकार) as selfhood, freedom and rights within humaneness. A right, in this sense, is the freedom to live as a full human being.

Responsibility. Responsibility (दायित्व) is recognising a relationship and fulfilling the values it carries: accepting what the relationship asks of you, and carrying it. In Vyavaharvadi Samajshastra (व्यवहारवादी समाजशास्त्र), Shri A. Nagraj adds the good use and safety of body, mind and wealth.

Duty. Duty (कर्तव्य), in the same book, is more concrete: producing more than you need, and taking part in exchange that is free of profit and loss.

So responsibility is about relationships, and duty is about production. One looks after people. The other looks after the means of living.

How they fit

The book gives the link in one line: duty brings prosperity, and responsibility brings clarity, or resolution (समाधान). A family whose members fulfil their responsibilities to each other lives without confusion between them. A family whose members produce more than they need has enough. Together, that is a family that is both settled and prosperous.

And rights? The book says that fundamental rights are meaningful together with responsibility and duty, and that it is an aware human being, one who understands, who can actually use them. A right held by someone who isn’t living their responsibilities tends to turn into a demand on others. The same right, held by someone who is, becomes freedom.

The book also says where freedom finds its fulfilment: in self-discipline (स्वानुशासन). Not discipline imposed from outside, but the kind that comes from understanding what you are doing and why.

“Duty brings prosperity, and responsibility brings clarity.”

Step 1: For any right, find the relationship it lives in

Every right lives inside some relationship. The right to speak lives among the people who listen. The right to land lives with the neighbours, the soil and the generations after. The right to be paid lives with the people who use what you make.

Naming the relationship is the first step, because it turns an abstract claim into a living situation, with real people in it.

Step 2: Name the responsibility in that relationship

Now ask: what does this relationship ask of me? Honesty from someone who speaks. Care from someone who holds land. Good work from someone who is paid. These are the values the relationship carries.

Fulfil them, and both people in the relationship can trust each other. That trust is what gives the right its strength. We look at how to evaluate a relationship when it goes wrong in How to Settle a Dispute So Both Sides Are Satisfied.

Step 3: Name the duty

Then ask the duty question: what do I produce, beyond what I need, and do I exchange it fairly? It applies at home, where everyone who is able contributes something to the family’s living. It applies at work, where a business that takes more than it gives isn’t doing its duty, however legal it is. We look at that in How Should a Business Measure Success? and How Should Things Be Priced?

Step 4: Widen the freedom to decide as people become able to carry it

This step is not about rights in the legal sense, which belong to everyone from the start and are not earned. It is about how much a person decides on their own and others’ behalf. Children have a right to care and protection from the start. The fuller freedom to decide everything for themselves grows as they become able to carry responsibility and duty. The book is clear that this applies to parents too: a person should be able to stand on their own before taking on the role of a parent.

So rather than handing over freedoms by age alone, or withholding them, families can hand them over step by step, as each responsibility is shown. The graduation celebration described in How to Celebrate What Matters marks the moment the step is complete: a young person stating, before everyone, that they can now stand on their own.

Some examples

• The right to an opinion lives among the people who hear it. Its responsibility is to be honest and to listen. Its duty is to contribute ideas that are useful.
• The right to land lives with neighbours and future generations. Its responsibility is to care for the soil and water. Its duty is to produce from it more than you need.
• The right to education lives with teachers and the community. Its responsibility is to learn, and to respect those who teach. Its duty is to put what you learn to use, and pass it on.

And the planet?

The book makes a striking statement: keeping nature in balance, including the balance of the seasons, is itself a fundamental right of human beings. In other words, the right to use the earth and the responsibility to keep it whole are not two things. They are one right, seen from two sides.

Seen this way, rights claimed over nature without responsibility are a contradiction, because they damage the very balance that the deeper right protects. We set out what that responsibility looks like in practice in How Much Should We Take from the Earth?

And our happiness?

Rights claimed alone tend to become a contest: who is owed what, who has taken too much. Responsibilities carried alone tend to become a burden. Lived together, with duty, they bring what the book names: clarity in relationships and prosperity in living. That combination is very close to what we mean by a happy life.

A protocol to try

Choose one right you care about. Write three lines: the relationship it lives in, the responsibility that relationship asks of you, and the duty that goes with it.

Then look at which of the three you are living most fully, and which least. That is where to start.

Limitations

• Legal rights protect people whether or not they fulfil any duty, and they must. Madhyasth Darshan uses “fundamental rights” in a different, wider sense, and the two shouldn’t be confused.
• Talk of duty has often been used to keep people in their place. We don’t intend that, and any reading of this post that supports it is a misreading.
• The three definitions come from the books. The four steps and the examples are our own.
• We haven’t yet tested these steps.

References

1. Shri A. Nagraj, Vyavaharvadi Samajshastra (व्यवहारवादी समाजशास्त्र), p. 100 (fundamental rights are used by aware people; parents should be self-reliant first), p. 131 (keeping nature’s balance safe is a fundamental right), p. 138 (freedom of action reaches its fulfilment in self-discipline; duty brings prosperity, responsibility brings clarity), pp. 145–146 (responsibility and duty defined; using them is freedom), p. 148 (rights are meaningful together with responsibility and duty)
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, मौलिक अधिकार (fundamental rights), p. 154; दायित्व (responsibility), p. 89

Ask what makes a neighbourhood safe, and most answers are about keeping people out: better locks, higher walls, a guard at the gate, cameras, more police. These have their place. But many people live behind every one of them and still don’t feel safe.

The reason may be that we have only half of safety in view. Madhyasth Darshan describes the other half, and it turns out to be the larger one.

What safety is

The Paribhasha Sanhita defines safety (सुरक्षा) in a way that surprises most readers. Safety is when a person’s body, mind and wealth go towards another person’s growth, nourishment and protection, and towards helping to remove hardship, pain, sorrow and poverty.

In other words, safety is not first something we defend. It is something we give. In Vyavaharvadi Samajshastra (व्यवहारवादी समाजशास्त्र), Shri A. Nagraj names its four parts: giving (अर्पण), devotion (समर्पण), nourishment (पोषण) and protection (संरक्षण). Nourishment, he says, reassures the body. Protection reassures the mind.

The same book says the safety of things works the same way. A thing is safe with whoever uses it well, and the root of that is trust in relationships.

“Safety is not first something we defend. It is something we give.”

Three moments that test a community

The book names three situations where this kind of safety matters most:

• Children, until they can stand on their own.
• Someone who falls ill.
• People hit by disaster: cyclone, earthquake, storm, flood or drought.

These are the moments when a person can’t look after themselves, and they come to everyone. A community that is reliable in these three moments is safe in the way that matters. One that isn’t, however well guarded, leaves each household alone with its fear.

Step 1: Look after every child

Parents look after their own children. A safe community goes further: every child is in some sense everyone’s. Children know several adults they can go to. Families notice when a child is hungry, out of school, or unhappy. The village plan in Avartanshil Arthashastra (आवर्तनशील अर्थशास्त्र) gives its justice and safety committee the task of making sure everyone in the village is getting a proper education, and of working with the family wherever a child has dropped out of school.

Step 2: Make sure no one is ill alone

Serious illness is one of the loneliest times in a life, and one of the most expensive. Agree, as neighbours or a village, how you will respond when someone falls ill: who checks in, who brings food, who helps with the fields or the children, who goes with them to the doctor. Written down in advance, it happens without anyone having to ask.

Step 3: Prepare for disaster together

The village plan includes consolation and practical help for any family hit by an accident, a natural disaster or a serious illness. Preparing means two things.

First, a plan: who helps whom, where people gather, what is done first. Second, a reserve. The darshan defines the safety of exchange as producing more than is needed, and storing it. A village grain store, a common fund, seed set aside: these are what carry a community through a bad year. They are very different from each household hoarding against the others, a difference we explore in Can I Be Safe If You Are Not?

Step 4: Keep shared things safe by using them well

The village plan describes keeping the village safe as keeping its land, forest, water, water sources and common facilities safe, through good use. A well is safe when it is used carefully and kept clean. A forest is safe when no more is taken than it grows. A shared hall is safe when people look after it as their own.

This is safety as the book defines it for things: safe with whoever uses them well. We describe how a village can look after these together in How to Organise a Village So Every Family Has Enough.

Step 5: Prevent harm before it happens

In Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), the darshan describes correction happening before an inclination becomes an incident, starting in the family and moving out to the wider group only if needed. The village plan also asks its committee to remove the causes of conflict between families before they grow.

In practice, this means noticing early. A quarrel between two families that is brewing. A young person drifting towards trouble. Someone struggling and getting angry. Each is far easier to help at the start than after something has happened. Noticing is not watching people or labelling them. It means being close enough to offer help, letting people decline it, and keeping what you learn private unless someone is in danger. When a dispute does arise, the steps in How to Settle a Dispute So Both Sides Are Satisfied are a way to resolve it so that it doesn’t return.

Step 6: Share what works

The last part of the village plan’s idea of family safety is easy to miss: making any one family’s strengths available to every family. One family grows food well; another keeps its children healthy; another manages money wisely. A safe community passes these on, so that no household is left without what another has already learned.

How to tell whether it is working

The book adds a test. In each of the three situations, the safety given is evaluated by both sides, and both should be satisfied: the family that helped, and the family that was helped. That, it says, is justice.

So ask, from time to time: when someone in our community was ill, or a family was hit by bad luck, did they feel carried? Did those who helped feel it was worthwhile? Two yeses mean the community is becoming safe.

And the planet?

Safety built on defence pushes each household to stockpile against the others: more stored, more owned, more guarded, just in case. Much of that is taken from the earth and never used. Safety built on care and shared reserves can need far less. One village grain store can do the work of many private hoards, if it is well kept and fairly shared. Land, water and forest kept safe through good use are kept safe for the next generation too. We look at this further in How Much Should We Take from the Earth?

And our happiness?

Fear is one of the heaviest things a person carries, and much of it is the fear of being alone when things go wrong. A community that has shown, again and again, that it carries its children, its sick and its unlucky lifts that fear from everyone in it. That is a kind of freedom no lock can give, and it is one of the foundations of a happy life.

A protocol to try

Make a short list of the households closest to yours. For each, ask yourself: if they fell ill or met with bad luck tomorrow, would I know, and what could I do?

Then pick one household where the answer is “I wouldn’t know”, and get to know them a little better this month.

Limitations

• Some dangers, such as violence and serious crime, need protection, and often the police and the courts. This post doesn’t address them.
• A community that watches over everyone can become one that interferes with everyone. Care needs to leave room for privacy.
• Madhyasth Darshan holds that when people understand, wrongdoing stops. That is a strong claim, and we haven’t seen it demonstrated at the scale of a whole community.
• The six steps are our arrangement of what the books say, and we haven’t yet tested them.

References

1. Shri A. Nagraj, Vyavaharvadi Samajshastra (व्यवहारवादी समाजशास्त्र), p. 130 (things are safe with whoever uses them well; the root is trust), pp. 165–166 (safety as giving, devotion, nourishment and protection; children, the sick, people hit by disaster; both sides satisfied)
2. Shri A. Nagraj, Avartanshil Arthashastra (आवर्तनशील अर्थशास्त्र), p. 144 (keeping the village’s land, forest and water safe through good use), p. 145 (help for families in accident, disaster and serious illness; removing conflict between families; sharing one family’s strengths with all)
3. Shri A. Nagraj, Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), p. 106 (correction before an inclination becomes an incident, starting in the family)
4. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, सुरक्षा (safety), p. 201; अर्थ सुरक्षा, p. 5; विनिमय सुरक्षा, p. 172

Ask people how a celebration went, and the answer is often about scale. How many guests. How grand the decorations. How much was spent. A good celebration has come to mean a big one.

Yet the celebrations people remember for years are rarely the expensive ones. They are the ones where something real was being marked, and everyone present knew what it was.

Madhyasth Darshan gives a clear account of what a celebration is for, and describes a full set of them, from birth to the village’s own year. This post sets out how to celebrate that way.

What a celebration is

The Paribhasha Sanhita defines a celebration (उत्सव) in one line: joyful proof of moving forward. Something has grown, a step has been taken, and the people around it express their joy and their hopes.

In Vyavaharvadi Samajshastra (व्यवहारवादी समाजशास्त्र), Shri A. Nagraj describes celebrations as the expression of enthusiasm and hope for one human society. Every one of them, he says, has the same deepest aim: a person’s growth in understanding. That gives a simple test for any celebration: what step forward is it marking? Not every gathering has to pass it. Joy and affection are reason enough to celebrate.

“A celebration is joyful proof of moving forward.”

The celebrations the book describes

A birth. Parents feel honoured and proud. The family and friends gather to share that, and to voice their wishes for the child: good health, and that the child will grow in understanding. There is talk of how to nourish and care for the child, and there are songs and dancing.

A naming. People of every age take part in choosing the name, happily, and talk about what it means. The darshan points out that naming is something only human beings do. The definition adds the hope that the child will grow into a name that means something.

Birthdays. In early childhood, a birthday is for wishes and blessings, with everyone present showing respect to the child. Then something changes. From the birthday on which a child can begin to evaluate themselves, the birthday becomes a time to look back on the year: what did I do well, how did I use what I had? Friends, siblings and companions at the celebration can do the same.

The start of education. On the day a child begins their education, relatives and friends gather to talk, discuss and sing about what they hope the child will come to understand.

Graduation. When education is complete, each graduate states, before the gathering, that they can now stand on their own: social in how they treat others, self-reliant in their work, and ready to take on their part in family and society. Elders evaluate and bless. The book also describes a joint celebration, held each year at the school, for all the graduates of the village, with their teachers.

The seasons. Seasonal festivals are celebrated through the year. As the book observes, the whole plant world celebrates by the seasons too.

The village’s year. Finally, the village assembly and its committees hold a celebration of their own. Each committee reviews what it achieved, in education, health, production, exchange and justice, and sets out its plans for the coming year, with songs and cheering. The book says that this success, shared openly, is what lets people trust the future.

Five principles for celebrating what matters

1. Know what step you are celebrating. Before planning anything, say in one sentence what has grown or begun. “She has finished school and can now support herself.” “The village fed every family this year.” If you can’t say it, it is worth asking what the celebration is for.

2. Let everyone take part. In every celebration the book describes, people of all ages join in: choosing a name, singing, speaking. A celebration where most people only watch is a show. One where everyone contributes something is shared. Taking part can be quiet, too: nobody should have to speak in front of others.

3. Put hopes into words. The centre of each celebration is not a gift but a wish, said out loud: for the child’s health and understanding, for the graduate’s future, for the village’s next year. Ask each person present to say one. It costs nothing and is remembered for years.

4. Once someone is old enough, add an honest look back. This is the most unusual idea in the book, and perhaps the most useful. A birthday or a village’s year becomes a time to ask, gently: what went well, and what will I do differently? Done with warmth, it turns a celebration into a step forward of its own. Keep it optional, especially at a child’s birthday, so it never feels like an exam.

5. Measure it by its meaning, not its cost. Songs, conversation, good food made together and a few words spoken from the heart are what the book’s celebrations are made of. None of them is expensive. A celebration that would be just as meaningful at half the cost was never really about the cost.

And the planet?

Celebrations are among the biggest occasions for buying in many families’ year: decorations, gifts, new clothes, disposable plates and cups, food that is thrown away. Much of it is used for an evening and discarded.

A celebration measured by its meaning asks much less of the earth. The village plan in Avartanshil Arthashastra even mentions making leaf plates and bowls, of the kind traditionally used at festivals, as a village industry: made nearby, from what renews, and returned to the soil afterwards. We look at the wider principle in How Much Should We Take from the Earth? and at families working out their enough in How to Calculate Enough for a Family.

And our happiness?

A celebration that marks a real step leaves a joy that lasts longer than the day: the graduate who heard what everyone hoped for them, the child who chose to look back on their year and was proud of it, the village that saw its own work and trusted its future a little more. These are celebrations of growth and of relationships, and both are lasting sources of happiness. We look at why in How to Make Happiness Last.

A protocol to try

Think of the next celebration in your family: a birthday, a festival, a result.

Before it, write one sentence about what step it is marking. During it, ask everyone present to say one hope out loud. Afterwards, notice what people remember.

Limitations

• Many people’s celebrations are tied to religion and culture, and carry meanings this post doesn’t try to describe. We aren’t suggesting they should change.
• A birthday that includes looking back on the year could feel like an exam to a teenager. It depends entirely on how warmly it is done.
• The book describes each celebration in more detail than we give here, and we have simplified. We have also left some of its celebrations out.
• We haven’t yet tested these celebrations ourselves.

References

1. Shri A. Nagraj, Vyavaharvadi Samajshastra (व्यवहारवादी समाजशास्त्र), ch. 9, मानव समाज में उत्सव: p. 151 (purpose of celebrations; the list; seasonal festivals), pp. 152–153 (birth and naming), pp. 153–154 (birthdays and self-evaluation), pp. 155–157 (start of education and graduation), pp. 161–162 (village celebrations of the year’s work)
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, उत्सव (celebration), p. 46; नामकरण उत्सव (naming), p. 96
3. Shri A. Nagraj, Avartanshil Arthashastra (आवर्तनशील अर्थशास्त्र), p. 136 (leaf plates and bowls for festivals and weddings)

Two neighbours argue over a boundary wall. Eventually someone decides: the wall stays where it is. One neighbour wins. The other loses. The dispute is officially over.

But the two families still live next to each other. The children stop playing together. Each family tells its own version for years. A verdict was given, and nothing was settled.

Madhyasth Darshan has a sentence for this. In Vyavaharvadi Samajshastra (व्यवहारवादी समाजशास्त्र), Shri A. Nagraj writes that every human being needs justice, not a verdict. This post looks at the difference, and at how to settle a dispute so that both sides are satisfied.

Justice is not a verdict

A verdict answers one question: who is right? It is decided by someone outside the relationship, usually on the basis of what can be proved. In Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), the darshan observes that courts decide on testimony rather than on what actually happened, and that a decision comes with no programme for helping anyone change.

Courts do far more than choose winners, and many disputes need them: where there is danger, where one side has much more power, or where someone won’t take part. The darshan’s point is narrower. A verdict on its own doesn’t repair a relationship. And the steps below aim for both sides to be satisfied without being able to promise it. They work only when both people take part willingly, sometimes with a helper both trust, and some relationships should end.

Justice, in Madhyasth Darshan, is defined quite differently: recognising the relationship, fulfilling the values it carries, evaluating how well they were fulfilled, and both people ending satisfied. The test isn’t whether one side has won. It is whether both people can trust each other again. That is why the darshan calls it mutual satisfaction (उभय तृप्ति).

“A verdict was given, and nothing was settled.”

Step 1: Settle it as close to home as possible

In the village plan in Avartanshil Arthashastra (आवर्तनशील अर्थशास्त्र), a dispute between families goes first to the families’ own representatives and their family group. Only if they can’t resolve it does it go to the village’s justice committee. The darshan describes correction beginning even earlier, inside the family, before an inclination becomes an incident.

The reason is simple. The people closest to a dispute know the relationship, the history and the families. A stranger can only judge the event. So before taking a disagreement anywhere else, ask: who already knows both of us, and is trusted by both?

Step 2: Start from the relationship, not the complaint

Most disputes begin with a complaint: you built your wall on my land. Justice begins somewhere else: what is our relationship? Neighbours. Brothers. Business partners. A teacher and a parent.

Naming the relationship changes the conversation. It reminds both people that they want something from each other that outlasts the dispute: safety, help, trust. And it sets the goal. The aim is not to end the relationship on the best terms, but to restore it. We say more about why relationships come before rules in Rules or Relationships?

Step 3: Find what each person expected

Every relationship carries expectations. A neighbour expects not to be encroached on, and to be asked before something changes. A partner expects honesty and a fair share. A dispute almost always means one or both people feel an expectation went unmet.

So let each person say, without interruption: what did I expect from you, and where did it fall short? Then the other person says it back, in their own words, until the first person agrees that is what they meant. This is the “evaluation” in the darshan’s definition: looking honestly at how well the relationship’s values were fulfilled, on both sides.

Step 4: Find the misunderstanding underneath

Madhyasth Darshan makes a strong claim: wrongdoing, injustice and mistakes all grow out of not understanding. It also says, in Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), that a human being is born with the right to make mistakes, and with the opportunity and the means to correct them.

Whether or not you accept the strong claim, it is a useful question to ask in any dispute: what did each of us not understand? Perhaps one neighbour didn’t know where the boundary ran. Perhaps the other assumed they were being deliberately ignored. Very often, the dispute turns out to rest on an assumption one side never checked. The practice in What Was I Assuming Just Before I Reacted? is a good way in.

Step 5: Aim for both to be satisfied

Now look for a resolution, and hold it to one test: will both people be satisfied with it? Not resigned. Not relieved it’s over. Satisfied.

That often means something other than splitting the difference. The wall might stay, and the neighbour who built it helps plant a hedge on the other side. A debt might be repaid in work rather than money. The question is what would let each person trust the other again. If one person leaves satisfied and the other doesn’t, the dispute isn’t settled yet. It has only gone quiet.

Step 6: Correct, don’t only decide

A verdict ends with a decision. Justice continues a little further, until whatever caused the dispute has been put right. If someone acted out of a misunderstanding, help them understand. If they lacked something they needed, see whether it can be provided. The darshan describes a justice system whose purpose is to help someone become just, not only to rule on what they did.

Then come back after a few weeks. Ask both people: is it still settled? That one follow-up is often the difference between a dispute that ends and one that returns.

And the planet?

Many disputes over the earth are disputes between neighbours: over a boundary, a well, grazing land, a stream, a path through the forest. Settled by verdict, they tend to divide the land up and leave each side guarding its part. Settled as relationships, they often lead to the land being cared for together. The village plan makes protecting land, water, forest and minerals part of the same committee’s work as settling disputes, which is a sign of how closely the two are linked. We set out how a village can look after these things together in How to Organise a Village So Every Family Has Enough.

And our happiness?

A dispute won still leaves you living next to someone who thinks you wronged them. A dispute settled so that both people are satisfied leaves something better: a relationship that has been tested and has held. That kind of trust is one of the most reliable sources of happiness there is, because it doesn’t have to be won again tomorrow.

A protocol to try

Think of one small, unresolved disagreement in your own life: with a family member, a neighbour or a colleague. Not a serious one.

Before you next talk to them, write down three things: what our relationship is, what I expected from them, and what I might not have understood. Then, when you talk, start with the first, not the complaint.

Limitations

• Where there is violence, abuse or a large difference in power, “both sides satisfied” can become pressure on the weaker person to accept less. Those cases need protection and often the law, not only a conversation.
• Madhyasth Darshan holds that all wrongdoing comes from not understanding. Readers may disagree, and some wrongs may need consequences as well as correction.
• Courts exist for good reasons, and nothing here replaces them. We describe what can happen before a dispute needs one.
• The six steps are our arrangement of what the books say, not a procedure from them. We haven’t yet tested them.

References

1. Shri A. Nagraj, Vyavaharvadi Samajshastra (व्यवहारवादी समाजशास्त्र), introduction (everyone needs justice, not a verdict), p. 95 (both people reaching satisfaction), p. 130 (justice as relationship, values, evaluation, mutual satisfaction), p. 148 (justice and relationships)
2. Shri A. Nagraj, Avartanshil Arthashastra (आवर्तनशील अर्थशास्त्र), p. 130 (disputes between families settled first by their representatives and family group), p. 145 (helping families in accident, disaster and illness)
3. Shri A. Nagraj, Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), p. 84 (courts decide on testimony, with no programme of correction), p. 85 (wrongdoing as the product of not understanding), p. 106 (correction before an inclination becomes an incident, starting in the family)
4. Shri A. Nagraj, Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 121 (born with the right to make mistakes, and the opportunity to correct them)
5. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, न्याय (justice), p. 103

A farming village sells its wheat to a trader, and buys biscuits. It sells its milk, and buys soap and shampoo. It sells its sugarcane, and buys sugar. It sells its mustard seed, and buys bottled oil. Each time, the raw produce leaves cheaply, and something made from it comes back at several times the price.

The work of turning the raw thing into the useful thing happens somewhere else. So does the income, and the skill. The village is left with the hardest and least-paid part.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In Avartanshil Arthashastra (आवर्तनशील अर्थशास्त्र), Shri A. Nagraj makes a confident claim: among a hundred families, all or most of the things needed for ordinary life can easily be produced in the village itself. This post looks at how.

Nine areas of village production

The book lists nine areas a village can work in:

• Farming: grain, pulses, oilseeds, spices, vegetables, fruit, fibre, tubers, aromatic and medicinal plants.
• Animals: for ploughing, milk and ghee, biogas and manure; also bees, sheep, goats and silkworms where they suit the place.
• Forest and forest produce, including medicinal herbs, where there is forest.
• Minerals, for local building and roads.
• Handicrafts: painting, sculpture, weaving, embroidery, printing, tailoring, dyeing, spinning.
• Village crafts: metalwork, woodwork, farm tools, leather, bamboo, furniture, pottery, toys.
• Cottage industries: handloom, carpets and mats, soap and oil, leaf plates and bowls, flour milling, oil pressing, rice hulling, jaggery, pickles and jams, fruit juice, incense, herbal medicines.
• Village industries: homes built from local materials, preserving fruit and vegetables, tools and spare parts, wells, ponds, channels and roads.
• Services: washing, haircutting, and repairing bicycles, radios, televisions and farm machines.

Read that list against what a household buys in a month, and a large share of it is there.

“The raw produce leaves cheaply, and something made from it comes back at several times the price.”

Step 1: Map what the village needs, and what it has

The plan begins with a survey. On one side, what the village needs: the food, clothing, housing, fuel and tools that its families use in a year. A family that has worked out its enough, as in How to Calculate Enough for a Family, already has its share of this list.

On the other side, what the village has: the crops it grows and in what quantity, farmed land, fallow land and land that could be farmed, water and irrigation, animals, forest, minerals, and, most important, skills. Who is good at farming, weaving, carpentry, repairs? The gap between the two lists is the village’s plan.

Step 2: Join farming, animals and soil into one loop

The book insists that animals go with farming, and that biogas goes with animals. The reason is a loop. Animals plough and give milk. Their dung goes into a biogas plant, shared or per family, which gives fuel and light. What comes out of the plant, with compost, feeds the soil. Each farmer rotates crops so that there is enough fodder for the animals they keep.

Keep animals in the right proportion, the plan says, and the village has enough manure to stop the soil becoming salty, acidic and hard, and to stop it losing its fertility. The village also produces its own seed, and plants fruit trees and herbs on land that is otherwise waste. One loop supplies food, fuel, light and fertility, almost none of which has to be bought. These are the plan’s claims: how well manure and rotation keep soil healthy depends on the soil, the climate and how they are managed, and is worth checking locally.

Step 3: Process at home, not elsewhere

This is where the wheat-and-biscuits problem is solved. A village with its own flour mill, oil press, rice huller and jaggery pan keeps the work of turning raw produce into food. One that makes its own pickles, jams, soap and leaf plates keeps that too.

Madhyasth Darshan locates value in the labour that makes things useful, as we set out in How Should Things Be Priced? Processing is exactly that labour. When it happens in the village, the usefulness, the skill and the income stay there.

Step 4: Build and repair locally

Homes can be built from earth and other materials found nearby. Tools and spare parts for farming can be made locally, from local materials. Wells, ponds, channels and roads can be built by the village, with the knowledge to do it shared. And some people take up repairs: of bicycles, radios, farm machines and more, with their fees set openly by the village assembly.

Each of these keeps things working longer and money circulating closer to home. It is also the practical side of How to Make Things Last for the Next Generation.

Step 5: Train each other

None of this works without skill, and the plan is clear about where skill comes from. Those in the village who are already expert at farming teach those who farm now, and those who will. The village’s production committee arranges training in crafts and industries, starting from what local people already know and helping them become more skilled.

The book also asks the village to change a habit of mind: from a “job mindset” to a “production mindset”. The question shifts from “who will employ me?” to “what can I make that my neighbours need?” That is a change schools can help with, as we describe in How to Design a School.

Step 6: Sell only the surplus, together

The village isn’t meant to be closed. Each family sells what it produces beyond its needs to the village exchange fund. The fund sells it to other families, and sends what the village can’t use to the town. It buys from outside, in bulk, what the village can’t make, and any incidental gain goes to facilities everyone shares. We set out how the fund works in How to Organise a Village So Every Family Has Enough.

The difference is in what leaves. Instead of raw produce leaving cheaply and coming back expensive, what leaves is a genuine surplus, much of it already processed, and what comes in is what truly couldn’t be made at home.

And the planet?

Producing nearby is not automatically better. Sometimes buying from outside uses less, costs less or is safer, and the exchange fund exists for exactly those things. Where local production does fit, the farming–animals–soil loop can replace much of the bought fertiliser and fuel. Processing at home means far less carried back and forth. Homes built from local earth need far less cement and steel. The plan also gives every villager responsibility for protecting the forest, and lets the production committee decide how much wood is taken, according to good use, so that its protection is never weakened. It is the rule from How Much Should We Take from the Earth?, applied to one village.

And our happiness?

A village that depends on distant markets for almost everything lives with a quiet insecurity: prices can change overnight, and there is nothing anyone nearby can do. A village that meets most of its needs together has far less to fear. And there is a different satisfaction in eating oil pressed down the road from seed grown in the next field, by people you know. Exchange becomes a relationship again. The plan adds one more thing worth noting: land that can be farmed is made ready and given to those who have none.

A protocol to try

List the last twenty things your household bought. Next to each, write where it was made, if you know.

Then mark the ones that could have been made within ten kilometres of your home, by someone you could meet. Pick one, and next time, find the person who makes it.

Limitations

• Not every village has the land, water or forest the plan assumes. A village in a dry region or on poor soil will be able to produce far less of its needs.
• Some things, such as medicines, machines and electronics, can’t realistically be made in a village. The plan accepts this, but we don’t say exactly where the line falls.
• Small-scale processing can cost more per unit than a large factory. Whether it is worth it depends on what is counted: we count labour, soil and fuel, a factory price may not.
• We have described the plan as Madhyasth Darshan sets it out, and arranged it in steps. We haven’t yet seen it carried out in full.

References

1. Shri A. Nagraj, Avartanshil Arthashastra (आवर्तनशील अर्थशास्त्र), p. 114 (around 100 families can produce most ordinary needs; farming, animals, village crafts, cottage and village industries), pp. 133–134 (the nine areas of production; village farm plan; land for the landless; fruit trees on waste land; seed, biogas and compost; animals with farming), p. 135 (forests, minerals, handicrafts), p. 136 (village crafts, cottage industries, village industries, services), p. 137 (production mindset instead of job mindset; surplus sold through the exchange fund)

Many families still have something a grandparent made or bought: a brass pot, a wooden chest, a sewing machine, a plough. It still works. It has served three generations, and it may serve three more.

Now think of the things bought in the last ten years. How many will still be working in ten more? Most are made to be replaced, and so each generation buys nearly everything again. The earth pays for that every time.

Madhyasth Darshan describes a different way for things to move through time. It is worth setting out, because it turns out to answer several problems at once.

The cycle Madhyasth Darshan describes

In Avartanshil Arthashastra (आवर्तनशील अर्थशास्त्र), Shri A. Nagraj describes a cycle that runs like this:

• When things are put to good use, people’s needs stay steady, and the chance of prosperity grows.
• The tools for producing things increase, and the time it takes to produce what is needed falls.
• Tools beyond what a generation needs are handed on to the next. The book calls this a natural honour of being human.
• With more tools from good use, prosperity becomes available to everyone. Prosperity then sets how much is produced, and attention turns naturally to quality.

Read it slowly and something unusual appears. This is an economy that gets easier with each generation. Not because people work harder, but because what each generation makes is still there for the next.

“An economy that gets easier with each generation, because what each generation makes is still there for the next.”

Use, and good use

The cycle turns on one idea: good use (सदुपयोग). Madhyasth Darshan distinguishes it from plain use (उपयोग).

Use is employing a thing for the body’s nourishment and protection, and for life together. That is what every thing is ultimately for. In Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), the darshan adds that what remains after these uses is prosperity.

Good use goes a step further. It is offering what we have, body, mind and wealth, for the sake of human relationships and values. A tool kept only for ourselves is used. A tool lent to a neighbour, taught to a child, kept in good order for whoever comes next, is put to good use.

Step 1: Know what each thing is for

Walk through your home and ask of each thing: what does it do for the body, for its protection, or for our life together? Some things answer easily: the pot, the bed, the bicycle, the books. Some don’t answer at all.

This isn’t about throwing things away. It is about seeing clearly which things are doing a job, because those are the ones worth making last. It is the same question that sets a family’s enough, as we describe in How to Calculate Enough for a Family.

Step 2: Use it well

Most things spend most of their life unused. A drill used for a few minutes a year. A ladder, a cart, a pressure cooker the size of a drum, needed once a season.

Good use means letting things serve more people. Share the tools that are rarely needed. Keep a village or street store of them, as in the common facilities described in How to Organise a Village So Every Family Has Enough. Ten families sharing one good ladder need one ladder, and can afford a better one. Agree the arrangements first: where the tools are kept, who can borrow them, who repairs them, and what happens when one breaks or is unsafe.

Step 3: Choose quality, and repair

The book observes that once prosperity is secure, attention turns to quality. That is the right order. When the question is no longer “how many?”, it becomes “how good, and for how long?”

So, when you make or buy something, choose the version that can be repaired, made from materials that last. When it breaks, repair it before replacing it. And learn to repair: it is one of the most useful skills a family can pass on. If you make things to sell, this is the measure that matters, and we say more about it in How to Decide What to Produce and How Should Things Be Priced?

Step 4: Keep a surplus, and pass it on

Here is the part of the cycle we have mostly lost. A family that produces more than it needs, and puts what it has to good use, ends up with tools to spare. Instead of consuming the surplus, it hands those tools on: to the next generation, or to the village’s common store.

Make it deliberate. Keep a short list of the things your household expects to hand on: tools, books, instruments, furniture, land in good heart. Look after them with that in mind. A thing kept for someone else is kept differently.

Step 5: Keep the living sources going

Some of the most important things a generation hands on are alive. In Samadhanatmak Bhautikvad (समाधानात्मक भौतिकवाद), the darshan describes keeping seed, feeding the soil with organic and plant-based fertility, and farming together with keeping animals. A family that saves its own seed and keeps its soil rich passes on something that grows rather than wears out.

The same is true of a well kept full, a forest kept within its growth, an orchard planted for grandchildren. We look at this in How Much Should We Take from the Earth?

And the planet?

The darshan asks a hard question of our own time: when we use up the earth’s forests and minerals within a generation or two, what are we doing to the generations after us? Are we helping them, or harming them?

Making things last is one of the most direct answers. A pot that serves five generations is one pot taken from the earth instead of five, or fifty. Shared tools mean fewer tools. Repair means less waste. Saved seed and fed soil mean the land gives as much in a hundred years as it does today. None of this needs a new technology. It needs things to be made, used and kept with the next generation in mind.

And our happiness?

There is a particular satisfaction in using a tool your grandparent used, and in knowing your children will use what you have kept. It makes a household’s effort add up across time instead of starting again from nothing. And a generation that inherits good tools, rich soil and a little surplus has more time for what matters most: understanding, relationships, and helping others. That, the darshan says, is what prosperity is for.

A protocol to try

Pick three things in your home that you use often. For each, ask: will this still be useful to someone thirty years from now?

If the answer is no, ask what would change it: better care, a repair, sharing it, or choosing differently next time. Then do one of those things this month.

Limitations

• Much of today’s work depends on things being replaced. If everything lasted, many jobs would change, and we don’t describe that transition here.
• Some things, such as medical equipment, improve quickly, and keeping an old one for decades isn’t always better. Lasting is a strong default, not an absolute rule.
• Not every family has anything to pass on. Inheritance can deepen the gap between families unless, as in the village plan, shared tools belong to everyone.
• The five steps are our arrangement of what Madhyasth Darshan says, not a list from the books.

References

1. Shri A. Nagraj, Avartanshil Arthashastra (आवर्तनशील अर्थशास्त्र), p. 118 (good use keeps needs restrained; tools beyond need passed to the next generation; production time falls; attention turns to quality)
2. Shri A. Nagraj, Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), p. 61 (every thing is for the body’s nourishment, protection and life together; what remains after use is prosperity)
3. Shri A. Nagraj, Samadhanatmak Bhautikvad (समाधानात्मक भौतिकवाद), p. 92 (what we are doing to future generations), p. 169 (keeping seed; organic fertility; farming with animals)
4. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, उपयोग (use), p. 49; सदुपयोग (good use), p. 184

Most arguments about the planet are arguments about speed. How fast should we cut emissions? How quickly can we switch fuels? By what year? These are important questions. But they skip an earlier one: how much should we be taking at all?

Without an answer to that, every target is a compromise between “a lot” and “a bit less”. Madhyasth Darshan offers an answer. It isn’t a number. It is a rule, and once you see it, a great many of the numbers start to follow.

The rule

In Avartanshil Arthashastra (आवर्तनशील अर्थशास्त्र), in the section on our relationship with the material, plant and animal worlds, Shri A. Nagraj sets it out in three lines:

• Use nature’s wealth, minerals and plants, in proportion to what it produces, in the sense of keeping balance.
• Don’t obstruct nature’s production of that wealth.
• Help it produce.

And then a sentence that sums up the whole post: without keeping nature’s purity rich, human beings can’t themselves be prosperous.

Notice what the rule doesn’t say. It doesn’t say take nothing. It doesn’t say take as little as possible. It says take in proportion: the earth sets the pace, and we match it.

“The earth sets the pace, and we match it.”

Step 1: Ask whether it is produced or extracted

The book asks a pointed question about mineral oil, coal and other minerals. Do human beings produce these? Or do we exploit them, even seize them?

It is a useful question to ask of anything. Some things the earth produces every year: crops, fruit, wood from a well-kept forest, water from the rain, wind, sunlight. Others it made once, over a span of time we can hardly imagine: coal, oil, metal ores. The first kind can be taken in proportion to what renews. The second kind, by its nature, can’t. Every tonne taken is a tonne gone.

Sorting what we use into these two groups is the first honest picture of how much we are taking.

Step 2: Take renewing wealth no faster than it renews

For everything in the first group, the rule is straightforward. A forest can give as much wood each year as it grows. A field can give as much as the soil can rebuild. A well can give as much as the rain returns.

The book also warns about forests being destroyed out of all proportion. Take within the forest’s growth and you can take for centuries. Take beyond it and, however carefully you manage everything else, you will run out. We look at this from the side of relationship in How to Live in a Relationship with Nature.

Step 3: Help it renew

The rule asks for more than restraint. It asks us to help nature produce. That turns taking into a two-way relationship: plant more than you cut, feed the soil more than you harvest, save seed.

Water is a good example. In Manav Karm Darshan (मानव कर्म दर्शन), the darshan points out that water underground comes from water flowing on the surface. Drilling deeper for it, expecting more below than above, has done a great deal of harm. The way to secure the future, it says, is to spread water over as much of the land as possible and hold it there: ponds, tanks, bunds and channels that let rain soak in instead of running off.

Step 4: Leave what is inside the earth inside

This is the strongest part of the darshan’s answer. The book gives its own account of why: the earth became rich, able to carry plants, animals and people, while keeping its minerals at their own levels, and tearing open the earth unsettles that balance. That account of the earth’s balance differs from mainstream science, and the rule in this post doesn’t depend on it.

So, for what lies beneath, the darshan doesn’t ask for slower extraction. It asks us to stop, and to find what the surface offers instead. And it lists plenty: the force of flowing water turned into electricity, wind, sea waves, sunlight, biogas, and oils from plants and trees, grown along roads, in gardens and on the edges of farmers’ fields. As it puts it, the whole source of good fortune is on the earth’s surface.

The book anticipates the objection. Ask why we keep using coal and oil, and the answer is always that we have no choice: people need them, industry would stop, so many livelihoods depend on them. That is real, which is why this is a direction rather than an overnight change. But the darshan doesn’t accept it as a reason never to begin.

There is a practical difficulty the books did not face. Surface energy needs materials too. Wind turbines, solar panels, electricity networks and batteries are built with copper, lithium and other minerals, and most of these are mined today. So it helps to separate the cases. Fuels such as coal and oil are burned and gone, and the darshan’s direction to stop applies to them most clearly. Metals, once mined, can be kept in use, repaired and recycled, so the question becomes how little new mining we need beyond what can be recovered. Renewing wealth, such as wood and plant oils, follows step 2. Our reading of the darshan for today is: stop burning what lies beneath, mine as little new as we can, and keep what has been mined in use. That reading is ours.

Step 5: Set the amount by need, not by want

None of this works if the amount we want keeps growing. In Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), the darshan observes that most of the digging serves the accumulation of comforts. And comforts, chased for their own sake, have no point at which they are enough.

Needs, on the other hand, are limited. The book says this plainly: understood clearly, every human need, for the body’s nourishment and protection and for life together, turns out to be finite. A family that has worked out its enough, as we describe in How to Calculate Enough for a Family, can finally set what it takes against what renews. A village can do the same, as in How to Organise a Village So Every Family Has Enough.

What this looks like in practice

At home: list what you use in a week and mark each item R (renews) or E (extracted). Then look for one E you can swap for an R: cooking gas for biogas, a bought thing for a mended one, a car trip for a walk.

On the land: measure what you take from soil, water and trees each year against what goes back. Hold rainwater on the surface before drilling deeper.

At work: ask of each material whether it renews, and whether it returns to nature at the end of its use. We set out how this shapes what a business makes in How to Decide What to Produce, and how pricing by scarcity rewards running the earth down in How Should Things Be Priced?

And our happiness?

Many of us carry a low, constant worry about the future: what will be left for our children? Taking in proportion to what renews answers that worry directly. What you take this year will be there again next year. There is a particular kind of ease in eating from a field you know will feed you again, and it doesn’t depend on having more. We set out why a happy life and a sustainable planet turn out to be one question in One question, not two.

A protocol to try

Pick one day. Write down everything your household used: food, water, fuel, power, things bought. Next to each, write R if the earth makes it again each year, or E if it was taken from inside the earth.

Count the two columns. Then choose one E and ask: what on the earth’s surface could do this job instead?

Limitations

• Shri A. Nagraj calls for stopping the use of coal and mineral oil altogether. We present this as a direction. We don’t give a timeline, and a fair transition for the people whose work depends on these fuels is a large question we don’t answer here.
• The books give their own explanations of how the earth keeps its balance. Some of these differ from mainstream science, and we have left them out. The rule itself, take in proportion to what renews, doesn’t depend on them.
• “In proportion to what it produces” is clear for a forest or a field, and much harder to measure for what a household buys from far away.
• One household’s choices are small next to how energy and industry are organised. This post starts with what a family or village can do. It doesn’t settle the larger question.

References

1. Shri A. Nagraj, Avartanshil Arthashastra (आवर्तनशील अर्थशास्त्र), p. 78 (do we produce oil and coal, or extract them; the earth kept its minerals at their levels), p. 79 (minerals and forests in proportion keep the seasons in balance), p. 114 (needs are limited), p. 142 (use natural wealth in proportion to its production; help it produce)
2. Shri A. Nagraj, Manav Karm Darshan (मानव कर्म दर्शन), p. 79 (alternatives: flowing water, wind, waves, sun, biogas, plant oils; the earth’s surface as the source), p. 80 (groundwater comes from surface water; spread water and hold it on the surface)
3. Shri A. Nagraj, Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), p. 20 (most extraction serves the accumulation of comforts)
4. International Energy Agency, The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions (2021): minerals in wind turbines, electricity networks and electric vehicles

A bottle of water costs ten times more at an airport than in a shop down the road. The water is the same. So is the work of bottling it. What changed is that you have nowhere else to buy it.

Many prices are set this way: by what people will pay, which depends heavily on how scarce something is, or seems. Price can tell us a great deal about scarcity and much less about value. This post asks what a price should actually reflect, and draws on Madhyasth Darshan, which has an unusually clear answer.

What a price measures today

In Avartanshil Arthashastra (आवर्तनशील अर्थशास्त्र), Shri A. Nagraj traces how we came to measure things. Useful goods were measured in metal, mainly gold. Then metal was represented by paper. Gold itself is of almost no use to a human being, yet it became the yardstick for everything that is useful. And a pile of paper money, however large, can’t feed one hungry person or quench one person’s thirst. The symbol drifted away from the thing it was meant to stand for.

The darshan defines profit (लाभ) bluntly, as taking more while giving less. It points out that both main schools of economics, free and controlled, have treated profit as the goal. And it names one of the standard ways of making it: artificial scarcity. Announce a shortage of fuel or sugar, and more people rush to buy, and the price climbs, whether or not the shortage is real.

So a price today can rise because something is scarce, because someone made it look scarce, or because the buyer has no choice. None of these says anything about how much work, skill or care went into the thing.

Where value actually comes from

Madhyasth Darshan starts from a different place. Nature’s wealth, soil, water, minerals and forests, is the raw material. Human beings apply their labour to it, and in doing so they give it two kinds of value: usefulness (उपयोगिता मूल्य) and beauty, or art value (कला मूल्य). That is what production is.

Two things follow. First, value is not separate from the thing. The book gives the example of a vehicle: you can’t separate its usefulness and beauty from the vehicle itself. Value sits in the object, not in a symbol of it. Second, what can be assessed is the labour that put it there, not the symbol. As the book puts it, evaluation can only be of labour, not of tokens.

And what does labour consist of? The book lists it: skill, care and know-how, thought, will, time, dexterity, and the right tools. Those are the things a fair price would weigh.

“Price can tell us a great deal about scarcity and much less about value.”

Five principles for a fair price

Drawing on this, here are five principles. They are our reading of the darshan, not a quotation from it.

1. Price the labour, not the scarcity. A thing is worth the skill, time and care that went into making it useful, not what a buyer can be made to pay when they have no choice. A shortage is a reason to produce more, or share better, not to charge more.

This is a proposal for how prices could be set, not a description of how markets work. Prices also carry information: a rising price tells people to use less and producers to make more, and a fair price has to cover more than labour, including overheads, risk, replacing equipment, losses and a reserve. Where supply can’t grow quickly, a fair price alone doesn’t decide who gets what is short; that has to be shared some other way, openly.

2. Let usefulness and quality count. A thing made well, that lasts and can be repaired, carries more labour and more value than one made to be replaced. That is a fair reason for a higher price. A brand name, by itself, is not.

3. Pay for the care of nature, not for owning it. Madhyasth Darshan treats nature’s wealth as beyond price, and the idea that anyone can own it outright as a confusion. So a fair price doesn’t charge for the forest or the mineral itself. It does include the labour of caring for it: replanting, feeding the soil, returning what was taken, so that nature can keep producing.

4. Exchange without profit or loss. The darshan describes exchange (विनिमय) as the giving and receiving of labour value, free of profit and loss. In a fair exchange, neither side has to lose for the other to gain. Where a gain happens anyway, as in the village exchange fund the book describes, it goes to facilities everyone shares.

5. Set prices in the open, starting where people know each other. In the darshan’s plan, value is assessed by people who understand the work, beginning in each village and connecting outward. During the transition, the village fund simply uses the nearby market price, minus the cost of transport. That is a practical place to start. We describe the fund in How to Organise a Village So Every Family Has Enough.

What this looks like in practice

If you sell something, try building your price from the ground up instead of from what the market will bear. The materials. The hours of work, valued for the skill they take. The care of whatever you took from nature. A modest reserve, with a number on it. Then look at the gap between that figure and the price you charge. Whatever the gap is, you should be able to say what it pays for.

If you run a business, the same test applies to every product. It sits naturally beside the five measures in How Should a Business Measure Success? A business that refuses to raise prices when customers have no choice, and says so, earns a kind of trust that is hard to buy.

If you are buying, ask of any price: whose labour did this pay for, and what else did it pay for? Often the most useful purchases turn out to be the ones closest to their labour: food from a farmer you know, a repair from someone local, things made nearby.

And the planet?

Pricing by scarcity has a hidden effect on the earth. As minerals, forests and fuels run down, they become scarcer, and so more valuable. The book observes that this rewards holding them back, and rewards using them up: the scarcer a thing becomes, the more there is to gain from it. A pricing system built that way pays people to run the planet down.

Pricing by labour and by the care of nature removes that reward. If what is paid for is the work of making things useful, and the work of helping nature renew, then taking more than can return no longer earns more. It is one of the clearest places where an economic rule and the health of the planet turn out to be the same question. We set out the wider argument in One question, not two, and why nature isn’t ours to own in How to Live in a Relationship with Nature.

And our happiness?

Every exchange is also a small relationship. When prices are set by what the other person can be made to pay, buying and selling breed suspicion: was I cheated? An exchange where neither side loses leaves both people satisfied, and that is the kind of relationship a happy life is built from.

A protocol to try

Pick one thing you regularly buy or sell. Try to split its price into four parts: materials, labour, the care of nature, and everything else.

You won’t get exact numbers. But look at the last part, everything else, and ask what it pays for. That one question will show you more about how prices work than any textbook.

Limitations

• Madhyasth Darshan names the basis of value, labour giving usefulness and beauty to things, but we have not found a precise formula for measuring it. The five principles here are our reading, not a quotation.
• Comparing different kinds of labour is genuinely hard. An hour of surgery and an hour of digging both deserve respect, but they are not the same, and we don’t settle how to weigh them.
• Market prices carry a great deal of information quickly. Prices set by assessment may be slower to respond when conditions change.
• We describe how one family or business might act. Changing how a whole economy prices things is a much larger question than this post answers.

References

1. Shri A. Nagraj, Avartanshil Arthashastra (आवर्तनशील अर्थशास्त्र), pp. 5–6 (metal and paper money, profit, artificial scarcity), p. 112 (value inseparable from the thing), pp. 113–114 (assessing labour; what production is made of), p. 116 (definition of production), p. 137 (transition pricing in the exchange fund)
2. Shri A. Nagraj, Samadhanatmak Bhautikvad (समाधानात्मक भौतिकवाद), p. 130 (scarcity, hoarding and rising prices)
3. Shri A. Nagraj, Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 150 (exchange policy: free of profit and loss, based on labour value)
4. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, लाभ (profit), p. 163; विनिमय (exchange), p. 172; आशित विनिमय, p. 42; उत्पादन (production), p. 46

Most plans for villages arrive from somewhere else. A scheme is designed in a capital, funds are released, targets are set, and the village is asked to fit in. When the scheme ends, much of what it built goes with it.

Madhyasth Darshan describes the opposite direction. In the last two chapters of Avartanshil Arthashastra (आवर्तनशील अर्थशास्त्र, “cyclical economics”), Shri A. Nagraj sets out, in unusual practical detail, how a village could organise itself from its families upward, so that every family has enough and the land around it stays healthy. It is one of the most concrete answers in the whole philosophy. Here it is as six steps.

Step 1: Survey the village before changing anything

The plan begins not with rules but with knowing. Before anything is set up, the village gathers the facts about itself:

• People: how many, by age, and how far each has studied.
• Work: who farms, who has a job, who works for wages, who practises a craft or a home industry, and who has no work at all.
• Trade: how many shops and traders there are, what the village buys from outside and what it sells.
• Education: whether there is a school, how far it goes, whether it teaches what the village needs or only what is in books, and how many educated people have left.
• Health: births and deaths, clinics, harmful habits, home remedies and the medicinal plants that grow nearby.
• Justice: whether every person produces according to their ability, whether exchange happens without exploitation, how much trust there is between people, and how many disputes are waiting to be settled.
• Land and nature: the farmland, forest, minerals, water sources and wasteland within the village boundary.

From this survey, a time-bound plan is made for each family. A village that knows itself this well can see its real needs, and its real strengths, before anyone decides what to build.

Step 2: Choose representatives family by family

Each family, of about ten people, meets as a family assembly and chooses one member to represent it: someone who lives with resolution and prosperity in their own family. Ten families form a family group assembly. Each group chooses one person for the village assembly, so a village of about a hundred families has an assembly of ten. Larger villages grow in multiples of ten.

The same pattern continues upward, through groups of villages and regions, all the way to a world assembly. At every level, each person only ever has to judge ten people they know. The plan points out a striking consequence: elections cost almost nothing, so office becomes much harder to buy. Cheap elections alone don’t stop a small group taking control, though; that would still need open records and a way to replace representatives who don’t serve.

Representatives serve four years and can then be replaced. The plan asks that each be at least 21, live with resolution and prosperity, be self-reliant in their work and social in their behaviour, and show humane conduct in how they live now. We say more about the larger pattern in How Can Eight Billion People Share One Earth?

“At every level, each person only ever has to judge ten people they know.”

Step 3: Form five committees

The village assembly sets up five committees, each answerable to it:

Education and culture. Its aim is that every person becomes social in behaviour, self-reliant in work, trusting in themselves and respectful of excellence. It teaches production based on usefulness rather than on passing likes, and a way of life with more production, less consumption, no hoarding, and use of nature in proportion to what nature produces. Its own members must already live this way. We look at what such a school might look like in How to Design a School.

Production. It helps every woman and man in the village find productive work suited to their ability, and arranges training. Production is aimed at real needs: food, homes, clothing, and the means to travel, communicate and see at a distance. Protecting the environment comes first, and no polluting production is allowed. The plan goes into detail:

• Farming with useful trees, fodder, vegetables and aromatic plants; good seed; compost; crop rotation that feeds the village’s animals.
• Animals alongside farming, with biogas plants, shared or per family, for fuel, light and manure, kept in proportion so that the soil stops losing its fertility.
• Crafts and home industries such as metalwork, woodwork, bamboo, pottery, handloom weaving, oil pressing, flour milling, jaggery, preserves and herbal medicines.
• Village industries such as homes built from local materials, tools and spare parts, wells, ponds and roads.
• Services and repairs, with fees set by the village assembly.

Exchange. A cooperative exchange fund, described in step 4.

Health and restraint. Cleanliness of homes and lanes, help in leaving harmful habits, exercise and games, awareness of prevention, home remedies and local herbs, and clinics where they are needed.

Justice and security. Disputes are settled as close to home as possible: first by the families’ own representatives and their family group, and only then by the committee. It looks for justice in four places: in conduct, in behaviour, in production and in exchange. It also protects the village’s land, forest, minerals and water, under three rules: use nature’s wealth only in proportion to what it produces, let no one obstruct nature’s production, and help it. And it holds a simple idea of kindness: where someone is able but lacks the means, providing them is the village’s responsibility.

Step 4: Set up an exchange fund instead of profit

This is the centre of the plan. Instead of many traders each trying to buy low and sell high, the village runs one cooperative exchange fund (विनिमय कोष), working without profit or loss:

• Every producer has an account with the fund.
• Each family sells what it produces beyond its own needs to the fund, at the nearby market price minus what it would cost to transport it there.
• The fund buys what the village needs from outside in bulk, and sells it to members on the same basis. It sells the village’s remaining surplus outside.
• Any incidental gain goes to the village’s common facilities, decided by the village assembly.
• Members who need capital get interest-free loans, repaid later in the goods they produce.
• For a village of a hundred families, about three people run it: one trades with outside markets, one keeps the accounts, one looks after the store. Trained volunteers start it; local people take over once they have learned.
• Members meet regularly to hear its report and guide it, and the village assembly evaluates it.

The fund has a further purpose: to help traders move from hoarding to producing, and to replace a “job mindset” with a “production mindset”. Over time, the plan aims for exchange based on the labour that goes into things, in farming and in technology alike. The book is blunt about the alternative: today’s economics treats artificial scarcity as a standard way to make profit. An exchange fund that buys from neighbours and sells to neighbours has no reason to create scarcity. We look at what fair prices could be based on in How Should Things Be Priced?

Step 5: Provide what every family needs in common

Some needs are best met together. The plan asks the village assembly to provide a home for every family, built as far as possible by local people from local materials, along with clean drinking water, drainage, and shared energy from biogas. These come before anything else, because a village where some families lack a home or clean water can’t yet say it has enough.

Step 6: Measure what matters, every year

Finally, the village assembly evaluates each committee, and each family looks at itself:

• Production: total output across farming, animals, forest produce and crafts; its quality; the skill of the people doing it; whether raw materials are within reach.
• Justice: whether justice is available in conduct, behaviour, production and exchange; whether the land, forest, water and the village itself are safe.
• Health: physical and mental balance, clean homes and lanes, freedom from harmful habits.
• Every family: whether body, mind and wealth are being put to good use, and whether each person is taking part in the larger order.

None of these is a growth figure. Each asks whether a relationship is working, which is the kind of measure we argue for in How Do We Measure Progress?

And the planet?

In this plan, the land, forest, minerals and water within a village belong to the village’s care, not to a distant owner. The rule for using them is the same at every step: no faster than nature renews them, without obstructing nature, and helping it where possible. Production is local, aimed at real needs, and forbidden to pollute. Exchange happens between neighbours, with no reason to create scarcity. If anything like this spread, much of what drives extraction today would simply have no place to start.

It is also a plan for happiness. A village where every family has enough, disputes are settled close to home and nobody fears a neighbour is the kind of place where people can live well. That is the link between a happy life and a sustainable planet that we set out in One question, not two.

Where to start

Nobody has to adopt the whole plan at once. Each step can start small:

• Do the survey, even informally, for one village or one street.
• Bring ten families together as a family group, and meet regularly.
• Start a small exchange of surplus among those ten families: vegetables, milk, repairs, skills.
• Choose one committee’s work, such as health or production, and begin it.

Begin with a few families who choose to take part, alongside the institutions that already exist, and ask each household before surveying it. The whole arrangement has not yet been seen working, so a small, voluntary start is the way to learn what it needs: how money and losses are recorded, how disputes are handled, and how people whose needs a family delegate doesn’t represent get a voice.

Each family can also begin at home, by working out what it needs and what it produces, as in How to Calculate Enough for a Family.

A protocol to try

Take three questions from the survey and answer them for the place you live: What is produced here? What has to come from outside? Who here has a skill that nobody is using?

Then ask one more: what is one thing that comes from outside that we could make here? That answer is where a village starts organising itself.

Limitations

• We don’t know of a village that has run this whole plan. If you know of one, we would very much like to hear about it.
• We have summarised a long plan and left out a number of its details. Anyone who wants to try it should read the original.
• During any transition the plan has to work alongside existing laws, banks and markets, and that is where it is most likely to struggle.
• Chosen representatives can still concentrate power, as in other systems. The plan’s safeguard is the quality of the people chosen, which is hard to guarantee.
• The plan is written for a village. Cities would need a different version, which we haven’t worked out.

References

1. Shri A. Nagraj, Avartanshil Arthashastra (आवर्तनशील अर्थशास्त्र), ch. 8, परिवार मूलक ग्राम स्वराज्य व्यवस्था का स्वरूप, pp. 110–121
2. Shri A. Nagraj, Avartanshil Arthashastra, ch. 9, परिवार मूलक स्वराज्य व्यवस्था योजना, pp. 122–150 (survey pp. 122–125; assemblies pp. 125–126; common facilities p. 128; committees pp. 130–146; exchange fund pp. 136–138; evaluation pp. 146–148)
3. Shri A. Nagraj, Avartanshil Arthashastra, ch. 1, p. 5 (artificial scarcity and profit)

Every school is designed around an answer to one question: what is this school for? Usually the answer is never said out loud. But it shows in the timetable, in what gets tested, and in what students are praised for.

For many schools today the answer is exams, then admissions, then jobs. Those matter, and many teachers do far more than prepare for them. But a school designed only for them can produce people who know a great deal about the world and very little about how to live in it. We have built an education system that can tell a child how far the moon is, but not help them understand the person sitting next to them.

Madhyasth Darshan is blunter. It warns of an education that spreads three manias (उन्मादत्रय): economics that teaches profit above all, social thought that teaches consumption, and a psychology that treats craving as human nature. It is worth asking whether that is part of why the most educated societies are often the ones that consume the most.

What education is for

The darshan defines education (शिक्षा) as the process by which a refined, humane way of seeing arises. In Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), Shri A. Nagraj states its purpose in four words: resolution, prosperity, fearlessness and coexistence. Education exists so that people can live these, together.

The Paribhasha Sanhita then describes what an education policy should make available to everyone. There are things to understand: how everything exists together, what life is, what humane conduct is, and what the human goal is, with a clear direction for reaching it. And there are six qualities to grow into: trust in oneself, respect for excellence, a balance between talent and personality, sociality in behaviour, and self-reliance in production. These are often counted as six, with talent and personality as two. Understanding here, the book adds, means not only knowing but accepting it in one’s own life.

That last quality is easy to skip, and it matters most for the planet. An education that teaches people to understand themselves and also to produce what they need is very different from one that prepares them mainly to earn and spend.

From understanding to participation

The same book names the kind of person a school should help a child become: someone with understanding, honesty, responsibility and participation (समझदारी, ईमानदारी, जिम्मेदारी, भागीदारी). In Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), the darshan gives the four an order. Honesty follows from understanding. Responsibility follows from honesty. Participation follows from responsibility.

The order matters for how a school is run. Asking children to be responsible before they understand produces obedience, not responsibility. Asking them to participate before they are honest produces performance. Each step rests on the one below it.

Four partners in learning

Manav Vyavahar Darshan makes a point that most school reforms miss. Responsibility for learning, it says, lies with four things together: the teacher, the parents, what is taught, and how it is taught. The four are complementary. Learning succeeds only when all four pull in the same direction. And when they do, the book says, the way opens to gratitude and to coexistence.

A brilliant teacher can’t make up for a home that teaches the opposite. A good curriculum can’t survive a system that tests only memory. Most schools work on one of the four at a time. The book’s point is that they can only be designed together.

Every subject, studied whole

The book doesn’t ask schools to drop any subject. It asks that each be studied together with its human side. It lists eight pairings:

Read the list against the three manias, and the pattern is clear. Economics taught alongside the good use and protection of nature’s wealth can’t become an economics of profit alone. Psychology taught alongside how character is formed can’t settle for craving as human nature. Every pairing keeps a subject connected to the question of how to live.

“What a school is for decides everything else about it.”

Two schools trying it

One school that has taken these ideas as its design brief is Global Guardians School in Visnagar, Gujarat. It describes itself as rooted in Consciousness Development Value Education, and the competencies it lists for every student follow the darshan’s six closely: trust, respect, talent, personality, behaviour and occupation. We use it below as an example of what each design choice can look like.

A second school, Abhibhavak Vidyalaya in Raipur, Chhattisgarh, is an alternative value-education school whose curriculum is based on Madhyasth Darshan. It began on 4 July 2011 with eight teachers and twelve students, and it shows the sixth design choice especially clearly. Everything we say about both schools comes from what they publish about themselves.

1. Put relationships at the centre

If a happy life is lived in relationships, a school can’t treat them as a side topic for one period a week. They have to shape how the school itself works: how teachers speak to students, how disagreements are settled, how older and younger children treat each other.

The teacher and student are themselves one of the seven relationships Madhyasth Darshan describes. The teacher hopes the student will understand; the student hopes the teacher will teach in the direction of the student’s own curiosity; and when understanding is complete, the teacher celebrates. We set this out in What Does Each Relationship Ask of Us?

Global Guardians School says relationships are at the centre of everything it does. Its youngest stage, for nursery to kindergarten, is built around the theme of family. Since a child’s education begins at home, it is designed as a bridge between home and school, with trust and security in relationships listed as the first thing children develop.

2. Teach understanding alongside academics

Literacy, numbers and science are not in competition with understanding. A child who understands themselves and the people around them learns everything else better, because less of their attention is taken up by fear and confusion. The eight pairings above are one way to build this into every subject rather than adding it as one more.

Global Guardians School’s stated aim is excellence in three things together: in consciousness, in academics and in living. Its primary years pair foundational literacy, numeracy and science with understanding relationships in family and society. Its middle years add self-reflection, critical thinking and what it calls purpose-oriented analysis, alongside advanced work across subjects.

3. Teach production, not only consumption

Many schools prepare students mainly to earn, and leave them to work out the rest. Few teach them to grow, make or repair anything, or to work out what is enough. So students can leave knowing far more about consuming than about meeting their own needs.

The village school in Vyavaharatmak Janvad builds production into the school itself: each teacher has a workshop for village crafts beside the school, with land and cattle to look after. Children grow up next to production, not apart from it.

Global Guardians School names this directly. Its Life Essential Skills aim at “self-reliance in occupation to fulfil our needs while maintaining nature’s balance”. In the middle years students learn hand-based skills in what it calls Harmonious Living Labs, and in the senior years they practise an occupation and plan their lives with purpose. The thinking behind this is close to How to Decide What to Produce and How to Calculate Enough for a Family, taught early.

4. Let students take responsibility, and become teachers

Understanding grows fastest when you have to pass it on. A school can give older students real responsibility for younger ones, and can grow its own teachers from among the people who have lived its approach. The darshan goes further: in its village model, any adult who has understood can teach.

At Global Guardians School, students in the middle years take on responsibilities within the school by supporting younger students. And after Grade 12, it offers a two-year teacher development programme, so that students who have understood the approach can learn to teach it to children of all ages.

5. Measure success by how students live

What a school measures, it gets. If only marks are counted, marks are what improve. A school designed for a happy life has to look at how its students live: with their families, with each other, with nature. The four steps above, understanding, honesty, responsibility and participation, give a school something concrete to look for.

Global Guardians School states its measure of success plainly: equipping each child to become a wise, honest, responsible human who takes part harmoniously in family, society and the wider system. It also asks students to reflect on their own progress and evaluate how they live in the light of their purpose. That is the same test we use on this site: does understanding show in how a person lives?

6. Let families build the school together

A school is usually something a family chooses and pays for, and then hands its children over to. But if parents are one of the four partners in learning, the people who care most about the child can be part of building the school itself.

Vyavaharatmak Janvad describes how a whole village could do this. Every village keeps primary education. Because every adult in a village of understanding families can teach, primary teaching needs no separate salary. Alternatively, the village together provides each teacher with a home, a workshop for village crafts, five acres of land and five cows, and the school works as a guardians’ school (अभिभावक विद्याशाला). Then, for every ten villages, about a thousand families, there is a further school, built from each family’s contribution, with transport that the group of villages keeps running. Its teachers also lead the village’s celebrations, such as a child’s naming or first letters. Education runs in steps, the book says, from the first letters all the way to understanding coexistence and life.

Abhibhavak Vidyalaya, whose name is the same idea, is built this way on a smaller scale. Abhibhavak, guardian, is described as one who wants resolution in every part of a child’s life, along with nourishment and protection. Vidyalaya is described as the collective expression of parents and teachers. Its own tagline is “where parents are teachers themselves”.

The families pooled their own resources for the building, transport, furniture and toys, with support from other families in Raipur and across the country, so the school runs without government aid. Its teachers take no salary, and there is no tuition fee: parents contribute to the cost of facilities, because providing for their children is seen as their responsibility. One parent, quoted on the school’s website, says it took time to understand the school’s thinking, but that the families now find it a much better environment than a conventional school.

Not every school can be built like this. But it shows that a school can be a shared project of families, not only a service they buy.

Stages that follow a child’s growth

One more detail is worth noticing. Global Guardians School groups its years into five houses of learning, each named for what it hopes students will come to know:

The names say what the school is for before any timetable does.

If you can’t start a new school

Most parents and teachers work inside schools they didn’t design. Some of these choices can still start small.

• Give relationships one regular, unhurried conversation a week, about real situations in the class.
• Pick one subject you teach and add its pairing: one lesson a term on how economics, science or history connects to how we live.
• Use a family’s yearly needs as a maths project. Working out enough is arithmetic with meaning.
• Start a garden, a repair corner or a cooking day, where students produce something and see where the waste goes.
• Pair older students with younger ones, with real responsibility.
• Bring the four partners together once a term: a teacher, parents, and a look at what is being taught and how.
• Ask, at the end of a term, not only what students learned but what changed in how they live.
• Invite parents in to teach what they know, from cooking to accounts to caring for the old.

And the planet?

Schools decide what the next generation thinks success is. A generation taught that success means earning and owning more will keep taking more from the earth, whatever else it is taught about climate. A generation that learns early to understand itself, to know what is enough, and to produce what it needs while keeping nature’s balance will treat the planet differently without being told to.

That may make the design of schools one of the most lasting sustainability choices any society makes. It is part of the argument we set out in One question, not two.

And our happiness?

Many adults carry, from school, a lasting sense of being measured and found short. A school built on understanding, relationships and participation leaves something different behind: people who trust themselves, respect excellence in others, and know how to live well with the people around them. Those are much of what a happy life is made of. We look at how happiness can last in How to Make Happiness Last.

A protocol to try

If you are a parent or a teacher, change one question for a week. Instead of “what did you learn today?” or “how did the test go?”, ask: what did you understand today?

Listen to what comes back. It will tell you a good deal about what your school is really for.

Limitations

• We describe both schools from their own published descriptions, not from a study of their results. Two schools, however carefully designed, are not yet proof.
• Parents’ worries about exams, admissions and jobs are real. A school that asks families to weigh other things carries a real risk for them.
• Small schools can do things that large public systems find much harder. We have not shown how these choices would work at the scale of a state or a country.
• The village school model in Vyavaharatmak Janvad is a proposal. We know of no village that runs its schools exactly this way, and unpaid teaching only works where families can truly support their teachers.
• The eight pairings of subjects come from the book, but our short descriptions of each are approximations.
• Our account of what Madhyasth Darshan says about education is still brief, and leaves a great deal out.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, शिक्षा (education), शिक्षा नीति (education policy) and शिक्षा संस्कार, p. 219
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, उन्मादत्रय शिक्षा (education in the three manias), p. 48
3. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, मानवीय शिक्षा (humane education), p. 151
4. Shri A. Nagraj, Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 145 (the purpose of education), p. 150 (teacher, parents, what is taught and how, as four complementary parts; gratitude; the goal of education policy), p. 151 (the eight pairings of subjects)
5. Shri A. Nagraj, Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), p. 106 (primary education in every village; any understanding adult can teach; the teacher’s home, workshop, land and cows; education from first letters to understanding), p. 110 (a school for every ten villages; understanding, then honesty, then responsibility, then participation)
6. Global Guardians School, Visnagar, Gujarat: home page
7. Global Guardians School: Our Shalas
8. Abhibhavak Vidyalaya, Raipur, Chhattisgarh: website (About us) and Facebook page

Somewhere right now, a farmer is choosing what to plant, a factory is choosing what to make next quarter, a family is choosing whether to build, buy or repair, and a government is choosing which industries to support. Together, these choices decide what the world makes, and so what it takes from the earth.

Most of them are made with one question: will it sell? That question is not foolish. A thing nobody buys is usually a thing nobody wanted. But it has a gap in it. Anything that can be sold passes, whether or not anyone needs it, and whatever it costs the land it came from.

Why “will it sell?” isn’t enough

If production follows sales, and sales can be grown by persuasion, then production has no natural limit. A great deal of modern effort goes not into making things, but into making people want them: advertising, packaging, new models of things that still work. The economy can grow for years by producing what nobody would have missed.

Madhyasth Darshan describes production (उत्पादन) differently: applying human labour to the wealth of nature to create things that are useful and beautiful. It names what those things are for: food, homes, clothing, and the means to travel, to communicate and to see beyond where we stand. Production, on this view, starts from need, not from what can be sold.

That gives us a way to decide. Five questions, asked in order.

1. Which need does it serve?

Name the need. Food, home, clothing and care, travel, communication, seeing at a distance, health, the tools of work and learning: the same eight lines we use in How to Calculate Enough for a Family.

If a product fits none of them, look closely at what it is really for. Often it is aimed at a need of the self: to feel secure, admired or settled. No product can meet those needs, which is exactly why such products can be sold again and again. That doesn’t make them forbidden. It does mean they shouldn’t be mistaken for prosperity.

2. How much is needed?

Once the need is named, it has a size. A village needs so much grain. A town needs so many homes. A family needs so many shirts. Need is limited, because bodies are limited.

Madhyasth Darshan defines prosperity (समृद्धि) as producing more than is needed and consuming less, until there is no sense of lack. So the aim is to produce a little more than the need: enough to share, and a reserve against bad years. The aim is not to produce as much as possible and then find people to consume it. Surplus is for security and for others, not for pushing into more consumption.

“Production starts from need, not from what can be sold.”

3. Is it useful, and is it well made?

The darshan speaks of two kinds of value that labour places in a thing: its usefulness (उपयोगिता मूल्य), and its beauty, the care and skill in how it is made. Both matter for the same reason. A thing that works well and is made well is kept, repaired and passed on. A thing made to be replaced is made twice, and then again.

So ask: will this last as long as the need lasts? Can it be repaired? Is it made with enough care that someone will want to keep it?

4. Can it return to nature?

Madhyasth Darshan describes nature as cyclical (आवर्तनशील). Matter becomes living things, and living things return to matter. Each part of nature is useful in its own place and complements the next. Nothing is waste.

Human production can fit that cycle or break it. Food scraps return to soil. Timber, clay, cotton and stone return in time. Many plastics and chemicals don’t, and pile up where nature can’t use them. So ask of anything you produce: when its use is over, where does it go, and can nature take it back? If not, does the need justify that?

5. Does it use human effort well?

Labour (श्रम), in the darshan’s description, is skill and care applied through the body to create useful and beautiful things. That is a description of good work, and it is a measure too.

Ask: does making this develop the skill of the people who make it, or wear them out? Is most of the effort going into the thing itself, or into persuading people to buy it? A product that needs more effort spent on selling it than on making it is telling you something.

Where to use the five questions

At home. Before buying, ask whether you could grow, make, repair or share it instead. A household that produces some of its own food or repairs its own things is producing, not only consuming.

In a village or neighbourhood. Many needs, food above all, can be met close to where people live. Local production is easier to size to real need, and easier to return to the land.

In a business. Run each product through the five questions once a year. They fit beside the five measures in How Should a Business Measure Success?

In policy. Support for an industry could be tested the same way: which need, how much, how well made, can it return, and what does it do to the people who work in it?

And the planet?

Almost everything we take from the earth is taken in order to produce something. So the way we decide what to produce is, in practice, the way we decide what happens to forests, rivers, soil and air.

Production decided by sales has no limit, because persuasion has none. Production decided by need does have one, and that limit is the planet’s room to breathe. Add the fourth question, and what we make can begin to fit the cycle nature already runs. We think this is one of the most practical links between a happy life and a sustainable planet, and we set out how we intend to test it in One question, not two. For why the earth is more than a store of materials, see How to Live in a Relationship with Nature.

A protocol to try

Pick one thing you are about to buy, make or produce this month. Before you do, write a sentence answering each of five questions: Which need does it serve? How much is needed? Is it useful and well made? Can it return to nature? Does it use human effort well?

Treat them as a first check, not a final verdict. If it passes all five, that is a good sign. If it fails one, notice which, and whether there is a good reason for an exception. That single answer can tell you a good deal about your enough.

Some things don’t fit the questions neatly: a medicine, a service, a piece of music, a wheelchair. For these, compare the real alternatives, including their whole-life effects and whether people actually need them, rather than passing or failing them on five questions.

Limitations

• Markets carry a great deal of information about what people want, quickly and without anyone in charge. These questions don’t replace that, and we haven’t shown how the two fit together.
• Judgements of usefulness and beauty differ between people and cultures. One family’s waste is another’s treasure.
• Some genuinely useful things, such as medicines and electronics, can’t easily return to nature. The fourth question is harder for them, and we don’t yet have a good answer.
• These questions have not yet been tested across many producers. If you try them, tell us where they fail.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, उत्पादन (production) and उत्पादन भेंट (the kinds of things produced), p. 46
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, उपयोगिता मूल्य (utility value), p. 49
3. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, आवर्तनशीलता (cyclicity), p. 38
4. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, समृद्धि (prosperity), p. 191
5. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, श्रम and श्रम नियोजन (labour, and applying it), pp. 222–223

Ask almost any business how it is doing and the answer comes in three numbers: revenue, profit, growth. Those are the numbers boards review, investors reward and managers are paid on. And we get more of what we measure.

This is not an argument against profit. A business that loses money can’t last, and can’t help anyone. The question is narrower: what is profit actually a measure of, and is it the right measure of success?

What profit measures, and what it doesn’t

Madhyasth Darshan defines profit (लाभ) bluntly: taking more while giving less. It is a hard definition, and plenty of businesses earn their profit by being genuinely useful. But look at what the number itself records. It is the gap between what a business takes in and what it gives out.

A measure that rewards the gap rewards it however it is made. A better product widens it. So does a lower wage, a hidden fee, a supplier paid late, or a river that nobody charges for. The number can’t tell these apart. It goes up either way.

The darshan has a word for what happens when that number becomes the purpose: लाभोन्माद, a compulsion for profit, in which getting away with taking more is mistaken for success. Few people in business set out to exploit anyone. They only have to keep score with a measure that can’t see the difference.

What a business is for

Madhyasth Darshan describes production (उत्पादन) as applying human labour to the wealth of nature to create things that are useful and beautiful: food, homes, clothing, the means to travel, to communicate and to see beyond where we stand. That is what a business is for. It turns nature and labour into usefulness.

If that is the purpose, then success is how well a business does it, and what it leaves behind. That can be measured. (For how to choose what to make in the first place, see How to Decide What to Produce.)

“A measure that rewards the gap rewards it however it is made.”

Five measures

Each measure comes with a question, and with something the business can actually count.

1. Usefulness. If we stopped tomorrow, what real need would go unmet? Count how much of what you sell is actually used, and how much is returned, thrown away or forgotten. Notice whether customers come back because they need you, or because they find it hard to leave.

2. Enough for every family in it. Does every family that depends on this business have enough? Not the average family: the one with the lowest pay. Set the lowest wage against what a family actually needs for a year, worked out the way we describe in How to Calculate Enough for a Family. The gap, if there is one, is the number to close.

3. Trust. Is anyone here afraid? Staff of their managers, customers of the fine print, suppliers of being paid late. Count how many days suppliers wait for payment. Count the terms in your contracts a customer would be upset to read. Notice whether people speak up in meetings, or only afterwards.

4. What returns to nature. Does what we take from the earth come back in some form? Count, in physical units rather than money, the materials, water and energy taken in, and the waste sent out. Then ask whether the land, water and air the business depends on are able to renew, year after year.

5. Where the surplus goes. When we produce more than we need, who is it for? A healthy business produces more than it consumes. Madhyasth Darshan calls this production beyond need (उत्पादन सुलभता), and treats it as the basis of prosperity. Count how the surplus is shared: with the families who work in the business, with suppliers, with the community and the land around it, and with a reserve that has a number. A surplus that flows only one way, without limit, is the old gap under a new name.

Profit doesn’t disappear from this list. It becomes a check that the business is producing more than it uses up. A sign of health, not the purpose.

How to start

Begin with one page: the five questions, and a sentence or a number for each. Keep it next to the financial accounts and review it as often.

Then widen who answers. Leaders tend to answer kindly. Ask staff, customers and suppliers the same questions, and compare. Where their answers differ from yours is where the work is. Let staff answer without being identified, especially about fear and about whether their family has enough: a manager asking face to face won’t always hear the truth, and matching answers don’t prove it either.

Here is what a first one-page report might look like for a small workshop of twenty people. The business and every figure in it are made up, to show the shape. These measures are proposals we are still developing, including in Earth & Us, not validated indicators.

Each line gets a starting point, a date to look again (every six months is enough to start) and one person responsible for gathering it, which can rotate. The numbers only matter in comparison with themselves: is supplier waiting going down, are more families saying they have enough? Keep the answers about families and fear anonymous, and report them only in totals.

Don’t try to move all five at once. Pick the one where the gap is clearest, often the lowest wage against a family’s enough, and work on that for a year.

What changes when you measure this

Decisions get a second test. A plan that raises profit by quietly lowering one of the five measures now has to be argued for in the open. It becomes easier to say no to money that would cost too much. People inside the business start to trust that what they are told is what is measured. And a business that knows what enough is for itself can stop chasing growth for its own sake.

Helping organisations look at themselves this way, their understanding as well as their conduct and its consequences, is what Earth & Us is being developed to do. It is still in development, and it is one of the places we intend to test these measures.

And the planet?

Most of what humanity takes from the earth is taken by businesses, on our behalf. So the way businesses keep score decides much of what happens to forests, rivers and soil. While success is counted only in profit and growth, taking more will keep looking like success.

Measures 4 and 5 change that directly. A business that counts what returns to nature, and sends its surplus somewhere other than more extraction, has a reason to take less. If many did, the economy would begin to measure progress the way we suggest in How Do We Measure Progress?, and the route from happy people to a sustainable planet, set out in One question, not two, would run through the workplace too.

A protocol to try

If you work in a business of any size, answer five questions about your own workplace this week, in one sentence each: What real need would go unmet if we stopped? Does every family that depends on the business have enough? Is anyone afraid? Does what we take from the earth come back? Who is the surplus for? Don’t soften them.

Then ask one colleague to do the same, privately and without showing them yours. Where your answers match, you have a starting point worth checking. Where they don’t, you have found the conversation it most needs.

Limitations

• Competition is real. A business that takes on these measures alone may carry costs its competitors avoid, at least for a while.
• Usefulness and trust are harder to count than profit. Badly designed versions of these measures could become one more box to tick.
• Madhyasth Darshan’s definition of profit is a hard one, and many people in business will feel it is unfair to them. Plenty of profit is earned by being genuinely useful.
• Small businesses and large ones face very different pressures. These measures have not yet been tested across many businesses of either kind. If you try them, tell us what breaks.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, लाभ (profit) and लाभोन्माद (compulsion for profit), p. 163
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, उत्पादन (production) and उत्पादन सुलभता (production beyond need), p. 46
3. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, मानव लक्ष्य (the human goal), p. 148

In How Much Is Enough? we asked why the question is so hard to answer. This post is the practical half. It sets out a way for a family to work out its own enough, write it down, and use it.

Two things first. This is not a way of telling anyone to want less. If your family lacks food, a safe home or care, the calculation will show that clearly, and that is part of its purpose. And the figure is yours. Nobody else can tell you what your enough is, and we won’t try.

Step 1: Separate the two kinds of need

A human being has two kinds of need. The body’s needs are physical, limited, and can be counted: a body can only eat so much, wear so much, sleep in one bed at a time. The self’s needs are different: to feel secure, respected, settled, happy. No quantity of things can meet those.

Only the body’s needs go into the calculation. The self’s needs get a list of their own, in step 6. Mixing the two is why the figure never settles: we try to pay for peace of mind with things, and the number keeps rising.

Step 2: List the body’s needs in eight lines

Madhyasth Darshan groups the physical things a human being uses into two sets of three. The first set it calls ordinary needs. The second it calls ambitious needs, which extend a person’s reach beyond where they stand.

• Food (आहार): what the household eats and drinks, including cooking fuel.
• Home (आवास): shelter, its upkeep, water and power.
• Clothing and care (अलंकार): what we wear, and keeping the body clean and cared for.
• Travel (दूरगमन): getting to work, school, family and the places life takes us.
• Communication (दूरश्रवण): phones and the means of staying in touch.
• Seeing at a distance (दूरदर्शन): screens, media, the internet, what lets us see beyond where we are.

Most families will want two more lines: health, for care in illness, and tools of work and learning, for what each person needs to do their work and keep learning. Eight lines in all. If something you spend on doesn’t fit any of them, put it aside for step 6.

Step 3: Put a yearly figure on each line

Start with what you actually spent last year, line by line. Bank statements help. Then go through each line together and ask one question: how much of this did the body use, and how much was for something else?

Madhyasth Darshan distinguishes use (उपयोग) from good use (सदुपयोग). Food that was eaten is use. Food that was thrown away, or bought to cheer someone up, is something else. A family might find that it bought thirty pieces of clothing last year and regularly wore twelve. That doesn’t mean the other eighteen were wrong. Some may be for winter, a wedding or a job interview, and those are needs too, just occasional ones. But some were answering a different question.

Write the figure for what the body needs, not what was spent. Round it honestly. This is the heart of the method, and it takes more than one conversation.

“You will know you are rich when you can say how much is enough.”

Step 4: Add a reserve, and give it a number

Illness, repairs, a lost job, old age: some needs are certain to arrive even though we don’t know when. A family needs a reserve for them.

The difference is that the reserve gets a number too. Decide together what it should cover, and for how long. “As much as possible” is not a reserve. It is fear, and fear has no ceiling. A reserve with a number is a plan, and a plan can be reached.

Step 5: Compare with what the family produces

Add up the eight lines and the reserve. That is your enough. Now set it beside what the family produces in a year: income, but also what you grow, make, repair and do for each other that you would otherwise have to buy.

• If production is below enough, the lack is real, and now it has a size. That is the starting point for working on production, on fairness at work, or on asking for help without shame.
• If production meets enough, the family can stop running and start choosing.
• If production is above enough, you have a surplus. This is what Madhyasth Darshan calls prosperity (समृद्धि): producing more than you need, consuming less, until there is no sense of lack left.

A surplus raises a new question: where should it go? The darshan’s answer is that prosperity is complete only when it reaches every family, through each family complementing the others (सर्वसमृद्धिकरण). Some of the surplus may go to relatives, neighbours or the village. Some may go back to the land. What it doesn’t have to do is turn into more consumption.

A worked example

Every number here is made up, for a family of four, to show how the pieces fit. Yours will look nothing like it, and that is the point.

Three things to watch for. Things that last several years, like the laptop, go in at their cost divided by their life, so they aren’t counted all at once. The reserve line holds only what you add this year; money already saved is not income. And what the family grows or makes for itself is counted once, on the production side, not also as a need. If you disagree about a line, write both figures down and come back to it next month; the disagreement is useful information too.

Step 6: Write the second list

Now take everything you set aside: the things you want that are not on the eight lines. Next to each one, write what you hope it will give you. Security? Respect? Rest? Belonging?

This list can’t be settled with money, however large the surplus. It can only be settled with understanding and with relationships: knowing ourselves, and being at ease with the people around us. That is the work of the rest of this website. For now, it is enough to see the list clearly, and to stop trying to pay for it with the first.

Then put a date in the calendar a year from now, and do it again. Families change. The figure should change with them.

What changes once it is written down

Conversations about money get calmer, because there is something to check against. Each purchase has a simple question attached: is this inside our enough, or beyond it? Advertising loses much of its grip, because it works by making enough look insufficient, and you now know what yours is. And the fear underneath a lot of ambition has less to feed on, because the reserve has a number.

And the planet?

Every one of the eight lines is drawn from the earth. Food from soil and water, homes from clay, stone and timber, phones and screens from minerals and energy. A family that knows its enough uses a known amount of nature. A family that doesn’t has no limit, and most of the economy is designed to keep it that way.

If many families did this, demand would have a ceiling for the first time, and surplus would flow towards those who lack rather than into more consumption. We think this may be one of the most practical routes from a happy family to a sustainable planet. It is a claim still to be tested, and we set out how in One question, not two. The same idea, at the scale of a country, is in How Do We Measure Progress?

A protocol to try

Don’t try to do all six steps at once. This week, do only the first two steps. Sit down together and set aside anything that meets a need of the self, such as security, respect or peace, for a separate list. Then draw eight lines on a page for the body’s needs, food, home, clothing and care, travel, communication, seeing at a distance (screens and the internet), health, and tools of work and learning, and write one sentence under each about what your household actually needs.

Next week, put figures on them. You may be surprised how short the first list is, and how long the second.

Limitations

• Some costs, such as health care or rent in a large city, are hard to predict and hard to control. A careful figure can still be overturned by one bad year.
• Family members don’t always agree. One person’s need can look like another’s want. The method gives a place to have that conversation, not a way to win it.
• Six of the eight lines come from Madhyasth Darshan. We have added health and the tools of work and learning as separate lines, which the darshan may group differently.
• We have not yet tested this method across many families. If you try it and something doesn’t work, we would like to know.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, समृद्धि (prosperity), p. 191
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, आवश्यकता (need), p. 39
3. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, सामान्य आकांक्षा (ordinary needs: food, home, clothing), p. 197
4. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, महत्वाकांक्षा (ambitious needs: travel, communication, seeing at a distance), p. 145
5. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, सर्वसमृद्धिकरण (prosperity for all), p. 192

The Matrix trilogy is usually read through Gnostic, Buddhist or Baudrillardian lenses. This essay reads it through Madhyasth Darshan, the philosophy of coexistence given by Shri A. Nagraj.

The argument is simple. The Matrix can be read as a vivid cinematic picture of human life lived in jeev chetna, animal consciousness. And every faction in the film, the machines, the rebels, the Oracle and the Merovingian, offers a partial exit that still stays inside bhram, confusion. Madhyasth Darshan accepts the film’s diagnosis but offers a different resolution: not rebellion, not prophecy, not mastery of causality, but jagriti, the move from jeev chetna to manav chetna, human consciousness, through understanding (samajh). This is our interpretation, not a claim about what the filmmakers meant, and it discusses the whole trilogy, including how it ends.

The Matrix as jeev chetna

The Matrix keeps human bodies alive while feeding their minds a world of sensations. Nobody inside questions it, because the sensations are convincing.

This is close to what Nagraj calls living with the body taken as life. In Vyavaharatmak Janvad he observes that animals accept favourable sensations and reject unfavourable ones, and that humans too often live the same way, taking the body to be life, which shows that sufficient knowledge has not yet arisen.

The film’s most famous description of the Matrix, “a prison for your mind”, fits the darshan’s definition of bhram: यथार्थता से भिन्न मान्यता ही भ्रम है, an assumption different from reality is confusion. The prison is not the pod. The prison is the assumption.

The darshan also explains why such a world runs so smoothly. In jeev chetna, decisions are made through the lenses of liking and disliking, benefit and harm, profit and loss (Manav Karm Darshan, p. 9). A system that controls sensation therefore controls behaviour. The machines did not need to understand humans. They only needed to feed the senses.

The red pill is not yet jagriti

Neo takes the red pill and wakes in the real world. The film treats this as awakening. Madhyasth Darshan would call it a change of setting, not yet a change of consciousness.

Nagraj distinguishes nishchay, certainty that comes from complete understanding, from manyata, effort made on incomplete understanding (Manav Vyavahar Darshan, p. 129). Morpheus lives almost entirely on manyata. He believes in the prophecy of the One because the Oracle told him. Zion lives on aastha, belief, and sangharsh, struggle.

The darshan notes that human tradition has always moved through bhay, pralobhan, aastha and sangharsh: fear, temptation, belief and struggle. None of these has produced a universal resolution (Vyavaharatmak Janvad, p. 1). Zion is exactly this tradition: free of the pods, but still bound by fear of the machines and belief in a saviour.

This is why the Architect can reveal that Zion has been destroyed and rebuilt five times. A rebellion grounded in belief and struggle is itself part of the cycle. Leaving the simulation without understanding only produces another simulation, this time one made of prophecy.

The Merovingian: the diagnostician of bhram

The Merovingian gives the trilogy’s most coherent philosophy. Causality is the only constant. Choice is an illusion created between those with power. Why is the only real source of power. He demonstrates it by sending a woman a coded dessert that produces desire, and observes that once the feeling arrives, the why disappears.

Madhyasth Darshan agrees with much of this. In the mind, selection happens on the basis of expected relish, आस्वादन अपेक्षा पूर्वक चयन (Manav Vyavahar Darshan, p. 184). The darshan says the human in bhram is free while acting but bound while bearing the result (p. 27). The Merovingian’s restaurant is a working laboratory of that sentence.

But he makes two errors.

He mistakes the human in jeev chetna for the whole human. He sees only the criteria of liking, benefit and profit, so love, faith and sacrifice look like noise to him. The darshan says that in an awakened human tradition the deciding criteria become justice, dharma and truth: न्यायान्याय, धर्माधर्म, सत्यासत्य (Manav Karm Darshan, p. 9). His model is accurate for one order of consciousness and blind to the next.

He turns understanding into leverage. For him, knowing why is a tool for moving others through desire and fear. In the darshan, exploitation (shoshan) is itself the result of confusion (Manav Vyavahar Darshan, p. 46). And understanding is defined as knowledge, discernment and know-how, present as living with proof: प्रमाण पूर्वक जीने के रूप में वर्तमान. Understanding that does not show up as resolution in relationships has not yet become understanding.

His downfall fits this reading. Persephone betrays him because he neglected her. The darshan puts it directly: संबंध में भाव पक्ष का तिरस्कार ही उस संबंध का शोषण है, disregarding the feeling side of a relationship is the exploitation of that relationship (p. 129). Causality did not fail the Merovingian. His map of causes left out relationship, the one order he never studied.

“The prison is not the pod. The prison is the assumption.”

The Oracle and the Architect: two faces of shasan

The Architect stands for control by design. He balances the equation, schedules the anomaly, and allows a small margin of choice so that humans will accept the system. The Oracle stands for control by guidance. She nudges, comforts and steers.

The film presents them as opposites. Madhyasth Darshan sees them as two methods of the same thing: shasan, the governance of beings who are assumed to be incapable of regulating themselves.

Nagraj writes that humanity wants freedom from shasan and a movement toward vyavastha, an order that people live by understanding rather than by being controlled (Vyavaharatmak Janvad, p. 1). Neither the Architect nor the Oracle ever imagines humans who regulate themselves. The Architect assumes they must be managed. The Oracle assumes they must be guided toward the right choice. Both assume confusion is permanent.

The darshan’s alternative is svayattata, self-sufficiency in resolution, where a problem is resolved within oneself in thought, word and deed (Vyavaharatmak Janvad, p. 99). A humanity with svayattata would need neither an Architect nor an Oracle.

Neo: sacrifice at the edge of awakening

Neo ends the cycle not by defeating the machines but by understanding Smith as his own counterpart and offering himself. Peace follows between machines and humans. This is the closest the film comes to Madhyasth Darshan.

The darshan places human beings in a different order from animals because of their capacity to know (gyan avastha). Animals live within inherited patterns, vanshanushangi, limited to sensation. Humans have both sensitivity and cognition, sanvedansheelta and sangyansheelta (Manav Karm Darshan, p. 63). Neo’s journey is a movement from the first toward the second. He stops fighting reactions with reactions. He sees the whole and acts for the whole.

Yet even here the film stops short. Neo’s peace depends on a deal with the Machine City and on one exceptional individual. In Madhyasth Darshan, jagriti is not the property of a chosen one. It is the birthright of every human being, proven through study and lived through relationships. The darshan’s sequence is clear: understanding of coexistence leads to justice, justice to dharma as resolution, and resolution to a universal order (Manav Vyavahar Darshan, p. 85). Peace that rests on one saviour is fragile. Peace that rests on universal understanding can continue.

Why this matters now

The Matrix is no longer only a metaphor. Recommendation engines, advertising systems and AI agents already practise the Merovingian’s method: learn what a person wants and fears, then move them. That is understanding used as leverage, and Madhyasth Darshan names it exploitation born of confusion.

The question for anyone building technology is the same fork the film presents. Systems can treat humans as permanently in jeev chetna and optimise their sensations. Or they can be built to support the move to manav chetna: study, verifying things for oneself, relationships recognised and fulfilled, and resolution in each person.

And the planet?

There is one more detail in the film worth noticing. The machines keep human beings because humans are useful to them: rows of bodies harvested for energy, valued only for what can be taken from them. Audiences find this horrifying. Yet it is close to how we treat much of nature. Forests, soil, rivers and animals are valued for what can be extracted from them, and kept only as long as they yield.

The darshan would say both come from the same place. A life lived in jeev chetna decides by liking, benefit and profit, so it sees everything around it, other people and the earth included, as a source of sensation or gain. Such a life also never reaches enough, because sensations have to be fed again tomorrow. The way out of the Matrix and the way out of overconsumption may be the same move: understanding our relationship with what is around us. We look at that in How to Live in a Relationship with Nature, and at how we intend to test it in One question, not two.

The fifth exit

The Matrix diagnoses the human condition with precision. Bodies are kept, minds are fed sensations, choices are pre-shaped, and rebellions are scheduled. Madhyasth Darshan accepts this diagnosis as an accurate picture of life in jeev chetna. It rejects the conclusion that this is all a human being can be.

The film offers four exits: escape (Zion), prophecy (the Oracle), mastery of causality (the Merovingian) and sacrifice (Neo). The darshan offers a fifth: samajh, understanding of coexistence, lived as proof in relationships and in an order of justice.

In that light, the real red pill is not a pill at all. It is study.

Limitations

• This is one lens among several. Reading the film only through Madhyasth Darshan may flatten what the Wachowskis meant, and Gnostic or Buddhist readings may see things this one misses.
• We simplify the characters to make the argument. The Merovingian, the Oracle and the Architect are more ambiguous on screen, and we consider only the original trilogy, not The Matrix Resurrections (2021).
• Rendering jeev chetna as “animal consciousness” can sound like an insult. In the darshan it names a way of deciding, by liking, benefit and profit, not a judgement of anyone’s worth.

References

1. Shri A. Nagraj, Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), pp. 27, 46, 85, 129, 184
2. Shri A. Nagraj, Manav Karm Darshan (मानव कर्म दर्शन), pp. 9, 63
3. Shri A. Nagraj, Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), pp. 1, 43, 99
4. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, भ्रम (confusion), p. 138; समझ (understanding), p. 186
5. The Matrix (1999), The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and The Matrix Revolutions (2003), written and directed by the Wachowskis

The next great achievement of humanity may not be discovering another habitable planet. It may be discovering how eight billion human beings can live on this one with understanding, prosperity, fearlessness, and coexistence.

Seen from space, the earth is obviously one thing. Seen from the ground, it is divided into a great many pieces, each defended by people who are mostly trying to keep their families safe. This post asks a large question carefully: how can eight billion people share one earth? And it starts from a small place, because that is where any honest answer has to start.

Two ways to imagine unity

There are two ways to imagine the world becoming one.

The first is from the top: one power, one ideology, one set of rules, spread until everyone is inside it. History has tried this many times. It has usually needed force, and it has rarely lasted, in part because people who are made to belong don’t trust the thing they belong to.

The second is from understanding, upwards. People who understand themselves and their relationships form families that work. Families that work form villages that work. And so on, outward, each step resting on the one below it. Nothing is imposed. Each level exists because the level beneath it chose it.

Only the second kind of unity can be trusted. It is also the only kind K4M2A is interested in.

Step 1: Aim for an undivided society, not a uniform one

Madhyasth Darshan calls this an undivided society (अखण्ड समाज). Among the ways the Sanhita describes it: a human tradition free of individualist, communal and opportunist tendencies, where people’s awareness is human first, before it is the awareness of any particular community; and one that lives with clarity, prosperity, fearlessness and coexistence.

That does not mean erasing communities, languages or ways of life. It means none of them has to be defended against the others. A person can belong fully to their family, their village and their culture, and still be human before any of those.

“Taking part in the larger order and being organised in yourself are the same act.”

Step 2: Build order upward from families

Madhyasth Darshan also describes how such an order could be built, and it begins in the home. In what it calls a family-based order of self-rule (परिवार मूलक स्वराज्य व्यवस्था), a family of about ten people is the first unit. Each family chooses one member to take part in the next level. Ten families form a family group. Groups form a village family. Step by step, through ten levels, the same pattern reaches all the way to a world family assembly.

What matters is not the exact number of steps. It is the direction. Order grows outward from families that are already living well, instead of being handed down to families that are not. A good system needs less control as the people inside it understand more, and this is a system designed to rest almost entirely on understanding.

Step 3: Take care of five things at every level

In Manav Vyavahar Darshan, Shri A. Nagraj lists five things any human order must look after, at every level from family to world, and what success looks like in each:

Education and culture. Successful when people actually understand the meaning of things, not only the facts.

Justice and security. Successful when relationships are recognised, their values fulfilled, and both sides satisfied. This is what we mean by fairness.

Production and work. Successful when every family produces more than it needs.

Exchange and storage. Successful when goods are exchanged on the basis of the labour that went into them.

Health and restraint. Successful when people’s bodies are fit to live out what they understand.

Notice that none of these is about power. Each one is about a relationship working.

Step 4: Begin with order within

All of this can sound very far from an ordinary Tuesday. But order outside us and order inside us are not two separate projects. A person who is resolved within cannot help but be just in relationship, and a just person is already a small piece of an undivided society, wherever they live.

So the road to one earth doesn’t start with a treaty. It starts with a person who understands what they need, a family that isn’t afraid of its neighbours, and a village that can say how much is enough.

An idea to test, not a plan to impose

We want to be honest about what this is. It is a direction, drawn from a philosophy we find convincing, and it is not proven at the scale of a nation, let alone a world. By our own standard, it has to be tested by living it, first in a few families, then in a village, and reported honestly, including where it doesn’t hold.

If it can work for ten families, it is worth trying for a hundred. If it can’t, we would like to know why.

A protocol to try

Take the five areas any human order has to look after, education, justice, production, exchange and health, and ask them of your own household:

How do we help each other understand, not just know? How do we settle disagreements so both people are satisfied? Do we produce more than we need? How do we share and exchange with others? Are our bodies fit for the life we want to live?

Find the weakest of the five. That is where your household’s part in one earth begins.

Limitations

• There is no example yet of this order working at the scale of a village, let alone a nation.
• Ten levels of chosen representatives could, in practice, concentrate power the way other systems do.
• Our summary of Madhyasth Darshan’s social order is short and in our own words, and may miss important details.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, अखण्ड समाज (undivided society), p. 1
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, परिवार मूलक स्वराज्य व्यवस्था, p. 112
3. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, मानव लक्ष्य (the human goal), p. 148
4. Shri A. Nagraj, Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 144

“I work 16 hours a day. Is that a problem?”

Most people would say yes, immediately. Sixteen hours sounds like burnout, a neglected family, a body running on coffee. But the answer depends entirely on what we mean by work.

Here is the definition we use: work is every action required to live a fulfilling life. With that in mind, “how much should we work?” becomes a question we can actually answer.

Two meanings of work

The narrow meaning of work is earning: the hours someone pays you for. The wide meaning is everything a full human life asks of you. Cooking for your family. Teaching a child to read. Mending what is broken. Growing food. Sitting with a friend who is struggling. Thinking something through until you understand it.

Madhyasth Darshan describes labour (श्रम) as the act of giving useful and beautiful value to things, through the body, with skill. Earning money is one way of doing that. It is far from the only one.

We have built a world that mostly trains the narrow meaning. We spend years preparing children to make a living. How much time do we spend helping them understand living?

Who is working: the body or the self?

Madhyasth Darshan describes a human being as two things together: the body, and the self (जीवन) that runs it and keeps it alive. The self is the one that hopes, thinks, decides and understands. The body is its instrument.

Each has its own needs. The body needs food, rest, movement and care, and its needs are limited. You can count them. The self needs understanding and happiness, and no amount of food or rest can supply those.

Much of our tiredness comes from mixing the two up. We feed the body when the self is hungry for meaning, and we push the self to keep going when the body needs to stop. Madhyasth Darshan describes freedom from this confusion very simply: knowing the self as the self, and the body as the body.

Step 1: Count all your work, not just paid hours

Write down a normal day, hour by hour. Then mark each item with one of three letters: L if it was required to live a fulfilling life, B if it was something your body needed, N if it was neither.

Most people find a lot of L they never called work, some B they skipped, and more N than they expected. The Ns are usually where the hours went that we thought we didn’t have.

Step 2: Know how much earning is enough

Earning is the part of work that most easily grows without limit, because “more” never arrives on its own. It needs a number. Work out what your family actually needs for a year, as we describe in How to Calculate Enough for a Family, and you can work out roughly how many hours of earning that takes.

Hours beyond that are a choice. They may be a good choice: to produce a surplus to share, or because the work itself is meaningful. But they are no longer a necessity, and knowing that changes how they feel.

“Health is a body fit to demonstrate what you understand.”

Step 3: Give the body what it needs

If the body is the self’s instrument, then health is not an end in itself. It is not just the absence of illness, and it is certainly not fitness for display. It is what lets the self show, in action, what it has understood.

Madhyasth Darshan describes a healthy body as one fit to express and demonstrate understanding in the life we share with others. So sleep, food, movement and rest go into the day first, not into whatever is left over. Rest is not time stolen from work. It is part of the work, because it keeps the instrument fit for what the self needs to do. Overwork that breaks the body isn’t more work. It is less, delivered later.

Step 4: Check whether the work is yours

The last test is not about hours at all. Is this work something you understand the purpose of, and agree with? Or is it work you do only because you haven’t yet asked?

Many of us came to K4M2A from other work, to understand one thing properly. Together, it has turned out to be the work that is truly ours to do. That is perhaps the best test of any work: not how many hours it takes, but whether it is yours.

So, is sixteen hours a problem?

If those sixteen hours are all earning, beyond what the family needs, and the body and the family are paying for them, then yes.

But if the sixteen hours include the cooking, the teaching, the thinking, the conversations, the care for the body and the people around you, then it isn’t a long working day. It is just a full life. The problem was never only the number. It was a definition of work so narrow that most of living fell outside it.

Two cautions. A full life also needs rest, play and time that doesn’t have to justify itself as useful, and calling everything work shouldn’t crowd that out. And many people work long hours because they have no choice: on shifts, in more than one job, or caring for someone. For them the useful question is less what to call the hours than what would lighten them, and who could help.

And the planet?

When work means only earning, more work usually means more production and more consumption, whether or not anyone needed it. A great deal of what the earth gives up goes into things made to keep the earning going.

The wide meaning of work changes that. Cooking, mending, teaching, growing food and caring for one another are among the most valuable work there is, and most of them ask very little of the planet. Labour as Madhyasth Darshan describes it, giving useful and beautiful value to things, points the same way: work judged by what it adds to living, not by how much it turns over.

A protocol to try

Tonight, write down today’s activities, hour by hour. Mark L for an activity that contributed to a fulfilling life, B for bodily needs such as sleep or food, and N for neither. Activities may fit more than one letter. Use the record to notice patterns, not to judge every hour as productive or wasted.

Then answer one question: if you knew your family already had enough, which hours would you keep, and which would you give to something else?

Limitations

• For many people long hours are a necessity, not a choice, and a wider definition of work doesn’t change their situation.
• Calling everything work could make even rest feel like a task.
• The distinction between the self and the body comes from Madhyasth Darshan. Readers from other traditions may understand the self differently.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, श्रम (labour), p. 222
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, जीवन (the self), p. 77
3. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, शरीर में जीवन्तता, p. 218
4. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, जीवन मुक्ति, p. 79
5. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, शरीर स्वस्थता (health), p. 218

We call nature a resource when we have already decided the relationship is one-way.

A resource is something you draw from: a store, a stock, a supply. The word quietly settles a question before we have asked it. It says nature is there for us, and the only open questions are how much we can take and how fast.

But almost nothing in nature works one-way. If we look at how it actually works, a different word suggests itself: not resource, but relationship. And a relationship is something we can learn to live in well.

How nature already works

Madhyasth Darshan describes nature as four orders: the material order (soil, water, rock, air), the plant order, the animal order, and the human order, the one that can know.

Between them runs a cycle. Material becomes plant, and plant returns to material. A leaf grows out of the soil, falls, and becomes soil again. Madhyasth Darshan calls this cyclicity (आवर्तनशीलता): each order, in its own state, is useful, and complements the order that comes after it.

In that cycle there is no waste. Everything that is taken is returned in some form. The forest doesn’t need a recycling policy. It is one.

Where people fit

Humans are the one order that can choose. A tree can’t decide to stop returning its leaves. We can decide to take without returning, and for a long time we have.

But the same capacity that lets us break the cycle lets us understand it. Madhyasth Darshan says that awakened human beings show their understanding precisely here: by being useful to, and complementing, the material, plant and animal orders, rather than only drawing on them. Taking is not the problem. Every living thing takes. The problem is forgetting the other half.

“Taking from nature and contributing to its continuity are two halves of the same relationship.”

Step 1: See what you take

A relationship starts with attention. List what your household, farm or workplace takes from nature in an ordinary week: water, food, fuel and power, wood, paper, metal and plastic in what you buy, the land you live and work on.

Most of us have never made this list. It is usually longer than we expect, and it is the first honest picture of the relationship we are already in.

Step 2: Find the way back

For each thing on the list, ask: what goes back, and where?

• At home: kitchen scraps can go back to soil. Water can be used twice. Things can be repaired before they are replaced.
• On the land: soil can be fed every season, not only harvested. Seeds can be saved. Trees can be planted where trees were cut.
• At work: materials can be chosen that return to nature when their use is over. We say more about this in How to Decide What to Produce.

Some things you will find have no way back at all. That is worth knowing too. It tells you where to take the most care.

Step 3: Take no more than can return

A village that never takes more from its forest than the forest can grow back can keep taking for centuries. A village that takes more will run out, however careful it is about everything else.

The same rule works at every scale, but it needs a number: how much do we actually need? A family that knows its enough, worked out the way we describe in How to Calculate Enough for a Family, can set what it takes against what can return. Without that number, “a little more” never ends.

One caution. Returning something is not the same as making an activity sustainable. How much returns, when and where matters, effects add up, and some damage can’t be undone. Completing the cycle in your own life is stewardship; it doesn’t by itself balance out effects that happen far away, such as where a product was made, and those still have to be measured.

Step 4: Hold it in trust, not ownership

Much of our one-way relationship with nature rests on the idea that it can be owned outright. Madhyasth Darshan calls this an illusion. Plants, forests, minerals, air and water have a value beyond any price, and the belief that any one of us can hold a monopoly over them is a confusion to be cleared, not a right to be defended.

This connects to how we think about money. No one produces money. You place labour into nature and value appears. Money is only the receipt. When we forget that, we start to imagine the receipt is the wealth. Holding land, water or a forest in trust means asking, of every use: will this still be here, and as good, for the people after us?

How to tell whether it is working

Sustainability is not a target to hit. Targets are useful, but they measure a moment. What nature asks of us is continuity: a relationship that keeps working this year, next year, and for our grandchildren.

So look for signs of continuity. Is the soil richer than it was? Is the well as full? Have birds and insects come back? With people, trust is what continuity gets called. The same is true here. A farmer who feeds the soil every season, a family that knows how much water it needs: these are relationships nature can trust.

And our happiness?

A relationship that only takes is never satisfying, with people or with the earth. There is a quiet fulfilment in completing one: in eating food from soil you have fed, or drinking from a well you have helped keep full. That fulfilment doesn’t need more things. It comes from the relationship being whole, and it is one of the ways a happy life and a sustainable planet turn out to be the same project. We set out that argument in One question, not two.

A protocol to try

For one week, notice one thing your household takes from nature each day: water, food, wood, fuel, the materials in something you bought.

Each time, ask: what goes back, and where? Then choose one thing on the list and make sure, from next week on, that something goes back.

You won’t fix everything in a week. But you will have started treating nature as what it is: the other half of a relationship you are already in.

Limitations

• Natural cycles also include loss and destruction, so “no waste” is a simplification.
• Returning what we take is easier for a farming household than for a family in a city flat, and this post only begins to address that.
• The post relies on our reading of Madhyasth Darshan. Others who study it may read it differently.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, प्रकृति (nature), p. 119
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, आवर्तनशीलता (cyclicity), p. 38
3. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, पूरकता (complementarity), p. 116
4. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, समाधानात्मक भौतिकवाद, p. 189

The measure of progress is not what humanity possesses, but the quality of the lives and relationships it makes possible.

That is not how we usually keep score. We count output, income, growth, the number of things made and sold. We designed economies around endless growth, politics around competing interests, and technology around capturing attention. Then we ask why human beings struggle to find enough, trust one another, or understand themselves.

Part of the answer is simple. We get more of what we measure. If we only measure possessions, we will keep producing possessions, whether or not anyone becomes happier, kinder or less afraid.

What our measures leave out

A good measure should show the full cost of something. Ours often hide it.

Who bears the cost of what we call cheap? Someone always does: a worker, a farmer, a river, a future generation. The price tag simply doesn’t show them. We call it flexibility when the cost lands on someone else’s planning. And the scarce thing is never what is priced. That is why it stays scarce. Time with our children, clean air, a neighbour we can rely on: none of these has a price, so none of them appears in the numbers.

We are also part of the problem as buyers. Nobody wants to be exploited, and almost everybody is excited by the trade that does it. The bargain feels like a win because the loss is out of sight.

Even our best intentions get turned into numbers too quickly. Sustainability is not a target to hit. It is a relationship to keep. A target can be met on paper while the relationship it was meant to protect keeps getting worse.

“The measure of progress is not what humanity possesses, but the quality of the lives and relationships it makes possible.”

A different set of measures

Madhyasth Darshan names the human goal (मानव लक्ष्य) as four things together: समाधान, समृद्धि, अभय and सहअस्तित्व. On this site we call them clarity, enough, trust and harmony. Together they are what we mean by good.

If those are the goal, they are also the measures. Each can be turned into a plain question that any household, village or company could ask itself:

Clarity. Can the people here answer the why and how of their own lives, or are they mostly getting by on habit and instruction?

Enough. Does every family here know what enough is, and have it?

Trust. Are people here afraid of one another? Of their neighbours, their managers, their own relatives?

Harmony. Does what we take from nature, and from each other, return in some form? Or does it only flow one way?

None of these is easy to count. That is not a flaw. It means they have to be measured partly the way relationships are measured: by looking, asking and listening over time. Numbers still help. Savings, hours spent together, days off sick or debts paid down can show change that a conversation misses, and the conversation can explain what the numbers mean.

Where it gets measured first

In Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), Shri A. Nagraj observes that the family is the first step in which humanity shows its worth, and that whatever is missing in the family cannot be supplied anywhere else. That makes the family the first place to measure progress, before the nation, before the economy.

The same thinking can reach into work. Can we design a company where every family has enough, without turning people’s needs into something that must constantly be audited? We think so, and it would be a better measure of a company’s success than its quarterly growth. We set out five measures a business can keep in How Should a Business Measure Success?

It changes what leadership means, too. Leadership is not the ability to influence people, but the responsibility to understand what is worth leading them toward.

The achievement worth aiming for

The next great achievement of humanity may not be discovering another habitable planet. It may be discovering how eight billion human beings can live on this one with understanding, prosperity, fearlessness and coexistence.

That achievement won’t show up first in a national statistic. It will show up in households where people can say how much is enough, where children aren’t afraid, where disagreements get resolved and the land is left better than it was found.

A protocol to try

Once a month, sit down with your family and ask four questions about your own home. Don’t give scores. Just talk. Agreement around the table isn’t always the whole truth, so give anyone who would rather answer privately a way to do that.

Where is there clarity this month, and where is there confusion? Do we know what enough is? Is anyone here afraid of anyone? What have we taken without returning?

Write down a sentence or two each time. After a year, read them back. Read it beside one or two simple numbers you already keep, and each will help you check the other.

Limitations

• Questions about clarity and trust are hard to compare across places and years. Numbers, for all their limits, can be compared.
• Families can answer these questions too kindly, or too harshly. Measuring ourselves has its own blind spots.
• We draw on the goals named in Madhyasth Darshan. Other traditions name progress differently, and may see something we miss.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, मानव लक्ष्य (the human goal), p. 148
2. Shri A. Nagraj, Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), p. 102

A civilisation with extraordinarily capable technology but no shared understanding of human purpose will keep using that technology to amplify its unresolved contradictions.

Technology is an amplifier. It makes whatever we are already doing faster, larger and cheaper. If we are confused about what a human life is for, it amplifies the confusion. If we are afraid of each other, it amplifies the fear. The same is true of markets, governments and institutions. So the question is not whether we need a shared purpose. It is how to create one.

Why we don’t have one

There have been two main attempts, and both have failed in instructive ways.

Imposing one. Empires, ideologies and movements have each declared a purpose and asked everyone to adopt it. Those who disagreed were converted, excluded or fought. A purpose held in place by pressure lasts only as long as the pressure does, and it divides people as much as it unites them.

Avoiding the question. The modern answer has been to keep purpose private and let markets add up what everyone wants. But tools still need a goal, so they quietly adopt whatever is easiest to measure: attention, growth, engagement. When a platform earns from keeping you there, a resolved question can be bad for business. None of this needs bad intentions. It only needs a purpose that was never examined.

Both attempts miss the same thing. A shared purpose doesn’t have to be invented or agreed. It can be found.

Step 1: Start from what every human already wants

People disagree about almost everything: politics, religion, money, how to raise children. But ask anyone what they want underneath all of it, and the answer is strikingly similar. To be happy, and to stay that way. To have enough. Not to live in fear. To live well where they are.

That, we think, is the ground of a shared purpose. Nobody had to be persuaded into it. Many of the disagreements are about how to get there, and that is a question understanding can work on.

Agreeing on these words is not the same as agreeing on what they mean in practice, and some disagreements are about values, not only methods. A group can still share a limited purpose, one agreed action and a date to review it, while its members keep different views. And no one should be pressed into it: a purpose becomes shared when people are free to decline it.

“A shared purpose doesn’t have to be invented or agreed. It can be found.”

Step 2: Say it precisely enough to check

“Everyone wants to be happy” is true but too vague to steer anything. Madhyasth Darshan states the universal human goal more exactly, as four things that belong together:

• Resolution (समाधान) in each person: having answers to our whys and hows, instead of a pile of problems.
• Prosperity (समृद्धि) in each family: producing more than we need, because we know what we need.
• Fearlessness (अभय) in society: trust in the people around us, here and now.
• Coexistence (सहअस्तित्व) with nature: living as one part of a larger order, not as its owner.

Each of these can be checked. Is this person less confused than last year? Does this family know what is enough? Are people here less afraid of each other? Is the land, water and air around us able to renew? We set out how we intend to test these claims in One question, not two.

Step 3: Test every tool and plan against it

Once the purpose is precise, it becomes a test for everything we build. Four questions, asked of any product, policy or business plan:

1. Does it help a person understand something, or only keep them busy?
2. Does it help a family know what is enough, or push it to want more?
3. Does it build trust between people, or profit from fear and comparison?
4. Does it leave nature able to renew, or take more than returns?

Asked honestly, these questions change what gets built. A discussion platform would need a way to say what a conversation actually resolved, and make it easy to say “I don’t know yet” without losing standing. A hiring tool would have to admit it only ever saw a description of a person, never the person. And a notification would have to justify its claim on your attention.

The questions also settle who decides. AI can analyse, but it can’t take responsibility. Judging what serves the purpose, and committing to it, stays with people. That is why understanding can’t be outsourced: we can borrow help to express a thought, but not the thought itself.

Step 4: Begin in the family, and let it spread by being lived

A shared purpose can’t be rolled out from the top. It starts where people already share a life. A family that sits down and asks “what are we working towards?”, and checks its spending, work and time against the four goals, may find the start of one within a few conversations.

From there it spreads the only way understanding spreads: by being seen to work. A neighbour notices a family that is calm about money. A team notices a company that measures more than profit. Nobody has to be converted. They only have to see it lived, and test it for themselves.

What this means for technology

We keep asking whether AI can understand humans. We should also ask whether we, the humans building it, understand ourselves. What do people actually need? What makes happiness stay? What makes two people trust each other? These are not side questions for technology. They are the specification.

This is what we are trying, carefully and without claiming to have got it right, with Dhee, our Humane AI project and its companion for questions about life, and with CoSeeker, a place to examine our understanding together. With K4M2 AI we try it inside organisations: agents can analyse at machine scale, but judging what matters, and committing to it, stays with people. All three are experiments, and you can see them side by side on Our work. Each should be judged by the four questions above.

And the planet?

An amplifier doesn’t choose what it amplifies. Technology has made it faster and cheaper to extract, produce, ship and throw away, because those were the purposes we gave it. With coexistence written into the purpose we share, the same tools could amplify care instead: showing what is taken from nature and what returns, and helping people see what is enough.

Technology also has its own footprint. The devices, networks and data centres behind every “free” service draw on energy, water and minerals. So the fourth question applies to technology itself: is what it helps us understand worth what it takes?

A protocol to try

Write down, in one sentence, what you are working towards this year. Then hold it against the four goals. Does it bring resolution to me, prosperity to my family, trust to the people around me, and leave nature no worse off?

Then ask someone you live with to do the same, and compare. Where your sentences meet, you have the beginning of a shared purpose. Where they differ, you have a conversation worth having.

Limitations

• Saying every human wants the same things may pass over real differences of culture, situation and belief. We think those differences sit on top of a common want, but we have not shown it.
• The four goals we use come from Madhyasth Darshan. Other traditions describe a shared human purpose differently, and we have not compared them carefully here.
• Finding a shared purpose in a family is far easier than between companies or nations. We have not shown that it scales.
• We mention Dhee, CoSeeker and K4M2 AI as experiments. We are not neutral about them, and K4M2 AI is also paid work, so weigh what we say with that in mind.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, मानव लक्ष्य (the human goal), p. 148
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, मानव का सार्वभौम लक्ष्य (the universal human goal), p. 149
3. The Value Layer, a K4M2 AI whitepaper on why AI agents can analyse but cannot yet judge, August 2026

You cannot respect someone while needing them to become like you. And you don’t have to make yourself smaller to recognise someone else’s greatness.

Those two sentences describe the two ways respect usually fails. In the first, I respect you on condition that you change: think like me, pray like me, raise your children like me. In the second, I respect you by shrinking: you are great, so I must be less. Both feel like respect from the inside. Neither leaves both people their full size.

This essay is about a third way.

Narrower than human

Everyone agrees they are human, and then introduces themselves as something narrower. A profession, a nationality, a caste, a team, a side. These aren’t wrong in themselves. They are part of how we find each other. The trouble starts when the narrower label becomes the thing we defend.

Earth exists as one undivided reality. Humans have divided it into nations, religions, economies and identities, then spend their lives defending divisions that exist only in their own arrangements. The land doesn’t know where one ends and another begins. We drew those lines, and then forgot that we did.

None of this asks anyone to give up who they are. It asks us to stop ranking. A difference that is held without ranking is just a difference. A difference that has to be ranked becomes a reason to compete.

“You cannot respect someone while needing them to become like you.”

Harmony is completing, not matching

We often imagine harmony as everyone becoming alike. Madhyasth Darshan describes it differently. Coexistence (सहअस्तित्व) is being together without opposition, where each part helps complete the others.

Look at any living place. Soil, plants, animals and people are nothing alike, and that is exactly why they work together. The soil feeds the plant, the plant feeds the animal, and each returns something to the others. If they were all the same, none of them could complete anything.

People are like this too. We often imagine independence as freedom from others. Yet everything we observe exists in relationship with something else. Independence itself needs examination. What we usually want is not to be free of others, but to be in relationships where our difference is welcome.

Competing or completing

Much of the way we live trains the opposite. A society that needs everyone to compete cannot teach everyone that their interests are connected. We taught children to compete before helping them understand why they are here together.

Competition makes every difference into a ranking. Your strength becomes my weakness, your success my failure. Completion makes every difference into a contribution. Your strength fills a gap in mine.

If I stop measuring my success against other people, what remains as a meaningful measure of progress? Perhaps this: how much I have completed, and been completed by, the people around me.

Respect for nature, too

The same thinking applies beyond people. We call nature a resource when we have already decided the relationship is one-way. Taking from nature and contributing to its continuity are two halves of the same relationship. Respecting nature doesn’t mean never taking. It means remembering the other half.

The habit of ranking reaches the earth as well. When land, rivers and other living things are ranked below whatever we want from them, they become things to use up. When they are seen as parts that complete us, as the soil completes the plant, the question changes from how much we can take to what we give back. How to Live in a Relationship with Nature follows that thought further.

Gratitude without a ledger

Respect is closely tied to gratitude, and here too we often get it slightly wrong. Gratitude is not a debt you owe. A debt has to be repaid and then it is over. Gratitude is recognition: seeing clearly what someone else has added to your life. It doesn’t make you smaller, and it doesn’t make them your creditor. It simply makes the relationship visible.

A protocol to try

The next time you meet someone very different from you, in background, belief or temperament, notice two urges.

The first is the urge to change them, even gently. The second is the urge to shrink, to feel that their strength shows up your weakness.

Let both pass, and ask a third question instead: what do they have that completes what I have? You may be surprised how often the answer is the very thing that first made them seem so different. And if there isn’t an answer, respect still holds. Some differences don’t complete each other at all; respecting them can mean leaving room, keeping a boundary, and disagreeing without making the other person smaller.

Limitations

• Some differences really do conflict, for example in how people believe others should be treated, and completion is not always possible.
• Identities often protect people who have been treated unfairly. Asking them to stop ranking can sound like asking them to stop defending themselves.
• Our picture of nature as complementary is simplified. Nature contains competition too.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, सहअस्तित्व (coexistence), p. 193

The urge to control a reaction may leave its cause untouched. What did I assume was happening just before I reacted?

A colleague replies to a long message with one word: “Fine.” Within a second I have decided they are annoyed with me, and within a minute I have written a defensive reply. Later I learn they were typing from a hospital corridor, with no time for more than one word.

The reaction was not the problem. It was a perfectly sensible response to what I believed was happening. The problem came a moment earlier, when I believed it.

Managing the reaction leaves the cause

Most advice about reactions is about control. Count to ten. Take a breath. Don’t send the email tonight. These help, and they are worth doing. But they work on the reaction, not on what produced it. The same assumption will be there tomorrow, ready to produce the same reaction in a new situation.

We do the same thing with our lives in general. We keep changing our schedules, routines and environments without examining the understanding that makes those changes necessary. A new morning routine, a new app, a new city. The surroundings change. The assumption travels with us.

What an assumption is

Madhyasth Darshan describes understanding as both knowing and accepting (जानना, मानना). An assumption, seen this way, is something we have accepted without having known it. We act on it as if it were true, but we never checked.

That is why assumptions are so hard to see. They don’t feel like guesses. They feel like the way things are. We only notice them when reality refuses to fit.

“The most useful thing about a difficult situation is that it reveals an assumption I didn’t know I was carrying.”

Difficult situations as teachers

This changes how a hard day looks. A difficult situation is not only something to get through. It is information. Every sharp reaction is a marker pointing at an assumption, and the harder the day, the clearer the marker.

Pressure can do the same. If your understanding disappears under pressure, pressure may have shown you something you had not understood. Tiredness, overload and real danger can make anyone lose their footing too, and they are worth telling apart. In that sense, a pressure situation is not a bug in life. It is a feature with a very important purpose: it shows us exactly where to look.

Assumptions in our decisions too

It isn’t only reactions. Many of our choices rest on assumptions we never examined.

Sometimes I rush to implement an idea because it feels clear. Sitting with it a little longer reveals the questions my excitement skipped. We are constantly trying to improve what we do. We should spend more time examining the logic with which we decide what to do.

The first question about work should not be how to do it better. It should be what becomes better when it is done. Otherwise, doing the wrong thing faster is still called productivity.

Some assumptions hide inside habits. A habit is a decision you got tired of making. And some hide inside our schedules. Sometimes “I’m busy” means I haven’t yet said what I will not do. Sometimes it simply means there is too much, and the answer is help, not insight.

Resolve and patience

Finding our assumptions takes two qualities that are easy to confuse with stubbornness and passivity. Resolve is staying aligned with what’s true, and patience is staying aligned with what’s just.

Resolve keeps us looking for the assumption instead of defending the reaction. Patience keeps us fair to the other person while we look, even before we know what really happened.

And the planet?

Many of our demands on the earth rest on assumptions as unexamined as the one behind that defensive reply. That more is always better. That a bigger house will finally feel like enough. That the newer phone is needed. That growth is what makes a place prosperous. Each feels like the way things are, not like something we accepted.

The three lines in the practice below work here too. Before your next large purchase, write down what you are assuming it will give you, and how you could check.

A protocol to try

After your next strong reaction, once things have cooled, write three short lines:

What happened. Only what a camera would have recorded.

What I assumed was happening. The story I told myself in that first second.

How I could check. Usually this means asking the other person, simply and without accusation, if it is safe to ask. Where it isn’t, check another way: watch what happens over time, or ask someone you trust.

Then check. Sometimes the assumption will turn out to be right. Often it won’t. Either way, you will know a little more than you did, and the next reaction will have one less hidden cause.

Limitations

• Not every reaction comes from a mistaken assumption. Sometimes the first reading was right.
• Checking an assumption by asking the other person depends on it being safe to ask.
• Treating pressure as a teacher could be used to excuse putting people under unfair pressure. That is not what we mean.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, समझना (to understand), p. 186

The same child can be a joy at breakfast and an interruption at 11 AM. What changed? The child, or the picture in my head?

Nothing about the child is different. Same face, same voice, same question about why the sky is blue. What changed is me: my plans for the morning, my sense of what matters right now, and the picture of this child that those plans produced.

We do this with everyone. Am I responding to the person in front of me, or to the picture I have made of them?

How the picture forms

Pictures are useful. Nobody can study every person from scratch every time they meet. So we build a quick sketch from past meetings and second-hand stories, and from then on we mostly deal with the sketch.

The trouble is that the sketch starts to feel like knowledge. We can predict what our colleague will say, what our mother will worry about, how our partner will react. But you do not understand someone when you can predict them. Prediction only shows that the picture is stable, not that it is accurate.

Our evidence is often thinner than we think. A second opinion is not independent evidence if both opinions are interpreting the same incomplete description. And it is strange how easily we notice contradictions in other people and how creatively we explain our own.

Even accurate facts can mislead. A child can accurately describe what happened at home and completely misunderstand what it meant. Adults do this too.

The picture decides how we treat people

Once the picture is in place, it quietly decides our behaviour.

An interruption is not a property of another person. It is a name I give to their arrival when my purpose has become too small. That doesn’t mean every interruption has to be welcomed. Protecting time to concentrate, or keeping a deadline other people depend on, can be a kind of care too. The question is whether the boundary is about the work, or has quietly become a verdict on the person.

If your idea of success makes your children, friends, or colleagues feel like interruptions, it may be time to examine what you are calling success.

“An interruption is not a property of another person. It is a name I give to their arrival when my purpose has become too small.”

Why pictures are hard to change

We tend to keep the pictures we like. You cannot correct your evaluation of someone while protecting the image of them you prefer, whether that image is flattering or harsh. Both can be comfortable, because both save us from looking again.

We also try to fix disappointment the wrong way. “I’ll just expect less of him” sounds wise, but you cannot lower your expectations of a person. You can only replace them with an accurate one.

And the other person can feel it. Nobody wants to be understood by someone who has already decided.

Recognition comes first

Madhyasth Darshan describes fairness as recognising a relationship and fulfilling the values in it. Recognition comes first. I cannot fulfil what a relationship asks of me if I am relating to a picture instead of a person.

What something is becomes visible through what it does in relationship with everything around it. People are the same. We see who someone is by watching them now, among the people and things around them, not by consulting the file we keep on them.

This matters most when we want to help. Before helping someone move forward, check whether you understand where they actually are.

Pictures and forgiveness

Often, the people we find hardest to forgive are the ones whose reasons we have never asked for. In the picture, they simply did the thing. In the person, there was a reason, a fear, a misunderstanding, something we could have learned if we had asked. And sometimes asking confirms the picture: the harm was real, and may continue. Then seeing the person accurately can mean keeping a distance, and that is fair too.

It works the other way too. When we are the ones who got it wrong, an apology that is mostly explanation is still an argument. An explanation can help once the other person knows they have been heard. Real apology lets go of the picture we were defending of ourselves.

And the planet?

We keep pictures of places too. A river becomes “the water supply”, a forest “the timber”, a field “the yield”. The picture is useful, and it quietly decides how we treat what it describes, just as it does with people.

Recognition comes first here as well. Before deciding what to take from a place, look at what it actually is and does: what lives there, what depends on it, what it returns. A picture of the earth as a supply is as thin as a picture of a person as an interruption.

A protocol to try

Choose one person you live or work closely with. For one week, each time they irritate or disappoint you, pause and ask two questions before you respond:

What did they actually do? Not what it means, not what it proves, just what happened.

Where are they right now? Tired, worried, excited, confused? Ask them, if you don’t know.

At the end of the week, notice how much of your picture survived. Whatever didn’t was never them. It was only the sketch.

Limitations

• Some pictures are earned. If someone has repeatedly caused harm, a cautious picture may be wise, not a failure to see them.
• Asking for reasons before forgiving can put an unfair burden on the person who was hurt.
• The practice asks for a patience that may not be available to someone exhausted or in a difficult relationship.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, न्याय (fairness), p. 103
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, संबंध (relationship), p. 207

Every philosophy that asks for verification should welcome the person who brings a counterexample.

We say this first about ourselves. K4M2A keeps asking people to test ideas against how they actually live. If we mean it, we have to be glad when someone tests ours and finds a case where it doesn’t hold. The person who brings that case is not an opponent. They are doing exactly what we asked.

That turns out to be harder than it sounds, for everyone.

Why we protect ideas

The moment a belief becomes part of my identity, examining it starts to feel like an attack. A question about the idea lands as a question about me, and I defend it the way I would defend myself.

But if you have to protect an idea from questions, you are not protecting the idea. You are protecting your place among the people who hold it. And you should be able to question an idea without risking your place among the people who believe it.

Groups make this worse. When people are rewarded for having an answer, they learn to hide the questions they still have. Over time the questions disappear from view, and everyone assumes everyone else is certain. If studying the same philosophy makes us unable to talk to each other, we have something more immediate to study.

Here is a simple test for anyone, ourselves included. An expert who cannot say what would change their mind is a believer.

“If you have to protect an idea from questions, you are not protecting the idea.”

Disagreement is not opposition

Madhyasth Darshan describes harmony (सहअस्तित्व) as being together without opposition. That might sound like it rules out disagreement. It doesn’t. It rules out sides.

Opposition is when two people are each trying to win. Disagreement is when two people see the same thing differently, which usually means each sees part of it. Most conflicts are not between people. They are between their assumptions. And most arguments are two people defending the part they got right.

Take fairness. If two people disagree about what is fair, is the problem necessarily their interests? Or could they be using different definitions of fairness? Once the definitions are on the table, the argument often turns into a much more useful conversation.

If we claim to understand harmony, that understanding should be visible in how we handle disagreement. Can we disagree without immediately dividing ourselves into opposing sides?

How to disagree well

Ask how they got there. When people disagree, ask each person to explain how they arrived at their conclusion. It gives everyone something to examine beyond which side they are on.

Let nobody own the conclusion. Can two people examine an idea together without either person needing to own the conclusion? In an inquiry, wanting to be right is the first thing that gets in the way.

Make “I don’t know yet” safe. A conversation designed for inquiry must make it easy to say “I don’t know yet” without losing status.

Treat a changed mind as a result. If I change my opinion after a conversation, is that a loss of position, or evidence that the conversation was useful?

Keep your mistakes visible. A mistake that exposes an assumption has given me information. Hiding the mistake also hides the information.

What a good disagreement produces

When a conversation ends without agreement, we often consider it unsuccessful. What if both people discovered that their original questions were incomplete?

The most meaningful outcome of a conversation is not that one person convinces another, but that both see something they couldn’t see before. A disagreement is not necessarily a problem between two people. Sometimes it is an opportunity to discover an assumption that neither has examined.

This kind of conversation needs the right room. A crowd tends to reward what is popular. Truth needs a different kind of room: smaller, slower, where a conversation can become deeper without having to become bigger.

And it needs us not to run from it. Avoiding every difficult conversation can make life feel peaceful while leaving our misunderstandings perfectly intact.

A protocol to try

The next time you disagree with someone, don’t argue first. Ask: how did you arrive at that? Then say their path back to them, until they agree you have it right.

Only then share yours. Somewhere between the two paths there is usually an assumption that one of you made and the other didn’t. Look for it together. That is the counterexample doing its work.

And if anything you have read on this site doesn’t hold up in your life, please tell us. We would much rather be corrected than agreed with.

Limitations

• Not every challenge is offered in good faith, and endless questioning can be a way of avoiding change.
• Small, slow rooms for deep conversation can leave out people who can’t spare the time.
• We describe how disagreement should go. We haven’t yet shown how often it actually goes that way among us.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, सहअस्तित्व (harmony), p. 193
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, न्याय (fairness), p. 103

Is understanding something the same as being able to explain it? And if not, what would count as evidence that someone has understood?

Most of us were taught to answer the first question with yes. School rewarded the child who could explain: write the answer, show the working, pass the exam. Workplaces reward the person who can present the idea well. So we grow up treating a good explanation as proof that understanding is there.

This essay argues for a different test. The test of understanding is not how well you can explain it. It is what becomes different in how you live.

A caution belongs here, not only at the end. How someone lives also depends on their health, means, opportunities and circumstances. So living differently can support a claim of understanding, especially when you check it in yourself, but from outside we can’t read understanding straight off someone’s conduct. That is why our thesis asks for understanding to be assessed separately from the outcomes it is meant to explain.

Explaining is not the same as understanding

Memorising the right answer can postpone the need to understand it. A child who can recite why we should share may still not share. An adult who can lecture on patience may still lose their temper at the dinner table.

Thinking harder doesn’t automatically fix this. More analysis can increase confidence without increasing contact with reality. And the quality of an argument depends on its assumptions: perfect reasoning from a false assumption can still produce a false conclusion. So how do we tell understanding apart from simply finding an explanation that agrees with what we already believe?

One clue is close to home. The advice you keep repeating is often the advice you have not taken.

Three places understanding shows

Madhyasth Darshan says something is proven (प्रमाण) when it holds in three places: in experience, in behaviour and in practice. That gives us a practical way to check our own understanding.

In yourself. An answer you cannot verify in yourself is still someone else’s answer. Understanding cannot be outsourced. Someone can explain reality to me, a teacher, a book, a machine, but I still have to verify what is true. Until I have, I am only borrowing.

With other people. The best test of a principle may not be whether I can defend it. It may be whether someone close to me can see it in how I behave. Maturity is when your behaviour stops depending on who is watching. An unexamined belief can survive for years. A single relationship can reveal what years of reading could not.

In what you do. Understanding shows in the work of our hands too: how we produce, how we use what we have, how we treat the land and the things around us. If I understand what I need, it shows in what I buy. If I understand that nature and I are in a relationship, it shows in what I take.

“An answer you cannot verify in yourself is still someone else’s answer.”

Why it takes years

This is a slower test than an exam. Living cannot be verified in a day. It takes years of both living and working together as a family, because only time shows whether something holds in good weeks and bad ones, when we are tired, when it costs us something.

That doesn’t make the earlier stages worthless. An idea making sense to me is the beginning of understanding. The questions I cannot answer show me where the work remains. Sense-making is where it starts. Living is where it is confirmed.

Doing, not displaying

There is a difference between wanting to do something meaningful and wanting to be seen doing something meaningful. The second can look exactly like the first from outside, which is why it is so easy to fool ourselves.

Simplicity is clarity with nothing added for display. Someone who has understood usually needs fewer words, not more. And a shortcut is a step you skipped in your own understanding: it may get you to the answer, but it leaves the gap behind.

This is also why the teachers we learn most from are often the ones already living what they say. A teacher who is still learning can teach well too, as long as they are honest about where they are.

Why this test is good news

All of this could sound like a harsh standard. It is actually a hopeful one.

If understanding were just information, it would belong to the people with the most access to it. But if it shows in how we live, it is open to anyone willing to look honestly at their own life. A farmer, a parent or a student can understand more than a professor, and be seen to.

And understanding is one of the few things you can give away without having less. When one person in a family understands something and lives it, the others can see it, test it and take it up. Nothing is used up.

A protocol to try

Pick one principle you genuinely hold. Honesty, patience, fairness, whatever matters most to you.

Then ask someone close to you two questions: Where do you see this in how I live? And: Where don’t you?

Listen to the answers without defending yourself. The first answer shows you what you have understood. The second shows you, kindly and exactly, where the work remains.

Limitations

• Living is a slow and noisy test. People can live well for reasons that have nothing to do with understanding, and live badly despite it.
• Judging understanding by behaviour risks judging people we only see from outside. The test is meant for ourselves first.
• Some understanding, such as in mathematics, can be checked without years of living. Our claim is about understanding life and relationships.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, प्रमाण (proof), p. 126
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, समझ (understanding), p. 186

Happiness is not a scam.

It is easy to become cynical about it. Happiness is promised on every billboard and in every app. It is sold as a holiday, a gadget, a morning routine. And it never seems to stay. After enough disappointments, many thoughtful people quietly conclude that lasting happiness is a fantasy, and that the sensible thing is to stop wanting it.

But the wish does not go away. Every human wants to live a happy life, and to live it continuously, not in bursts. That need is not optional. So the real question is not whether to want happiness. It is how to make it last.

Why pleasure doesn’t last

Pleasure depends on conditions; happiness depends on resolution within.

Pleasure is real. A good meal, a warm bath, a song you love. But each one depends on something outside us being arranged just so, and when the arrangement changes, the pleasure goes. So we arrange things again, and again. A lot of modern life is the work of rearranging conditions faster.

No quantity of convenience can remove confusion. You can have every condition in place and still lie awake with a question you can’t answer about your work, your marriage, your child, yourself. The conditions were never the problem.

What lasting happiness is

Happiness is a resolved present.

This is very close to how Madhyasth Darshan defines happiness (सुख): freedom from confusion and from problems, a present moment that is resolved. And it defines resolution, or clarity (समाधान), as having found the answer to “why?” and “how?”.

Put those together and happiness stops being a mood. It becomes a state you can check, and work towards. That is what the four steps below are for.

“Understanding is not a feeling of happiness. It is what makes happiness stay.”

Step 1: Notice where happiness leaks

If happiness is a resolved present, then each kind of unhappiness may be a signal pointing at something unresolved. That can make our worst moods unexpectedly useful. The readings below are ways to look at a feeling, not diagnoses of it. Try them, and keep the ones that hold for you.

Anger. You do not have a temper. You have a list of things you have not understood yet.

Irritation. The next time I feel irritated, I want to know what I was expecting reality to do differently.

Boredom. Boredom is not the absence of stimulation. It is the presence of something you have refused to look at.

Envy. Everyone you envy is solving a problem you have not agreed to have.

Guilt. Guilt is the tax you pay to avoid changing.

Often these are not solved by changing the conditions around us. So the first step is simply to notice the feeling, and not rush to fix it.

Before you go on: some unhappiness has causes that reflection alone won’t reach: illness or depression, a relationship the other person won’t work on, injustice, or not having enough. Those need care, help from others or change in conditions, not only questions. This practice is for what remains.

Step 2: Turn the feeling into a question

Ask: what here is unresolved? Then try to write it as a “why” or a “how” question. “Why does this conversation with my father always go wrong?” “How much do we actually need this year?” “Why does her success bother me?”

A vague heaviness becomes a question you can work on. That alone often brings some relief, because the problem now has edges.

Step 3: Work on the question until it is understood

Work on it alone, or with someone you trust. Read, ask, observe, and keep going until the answer is not just plausible but clear.

This is where happiness starts to last. A feeling has to be renewed. Understanding doesn’t. Once I have really understood why a relationship works the way it does, I don’t need to understand it again tomorrow. It stays understood. That is why understanding is not itself a feeling of happiness. It is what makes happiness stay.

It also changes what we mean by freedom. Doing what you want is not freedom; it is obedience to a want you didn’t choose. Freedom begins when I understand my wants well enough to know which ones are mine.

Step 4: Check it in how you live

Your effort follows your knowing, your result follows your effort, and your knowing becomes clear only in the result. So the test of an answer is what changes. Does the conversation with my father go differently now? Has the envy gone quiet?

If the same difficulty returns, revisit both the question and the method. Something may still be unclear, circumstances may have changed, or reflection alone may not address the problem. A practice that does not help is information about the practice too. We say more about testing understanding in The Test of Understanding Is How You Live.

You won’t answer every question in a day. But each one you do answer stays answered. And slowly, the present has fewer loose ends in it.

And the planet?

Go back to the rearranging. If pleasure depends on conditions, then chasing it means changing conditions again and again: new things, new places, new experiences, each one made from something taken from the earth. A great deal of what we produce and throw away is the cost of looking for happiness where it can’t stay.

If happiness really rests on resolution within, that pressure eases. Someone whose present is resolved still eats, travels and enjoys a good song. But they no longer need more each year to feel all right, and they can tell what is enough. We think this may be the most direct link between a happy human and a sustainable planet. It is a claim we still have to test, and we set out how in One question, not two.

A protocol to try

Keep a short list for one week. Each time you notice you are unhappy, write one line: the feeling, and the question underneath it, as a “why” or a “how”.

At the end of the week, pick the question that came up most often, and give it real time. That is where your happiness has been leaking.

Life is beautiful. When the present is resolved, that stops being a slogan and becomes a simple description.

Limitations

• Some unhappiness has causes in the body, such as illness or depression, that need medical care and not only reflection.
• Some things can’t be resolved alone. A relationship needs two people, and injustice needs more than individual understanding.
• Describing anger or envy as signals can sound dismissive to someone in real pain. That isn’t our intention, and we may not always have found the right words.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, सुख (happiness), p. 199
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, समाधान (clarity), p. 188

We have organised security around superiority. But if my security requires your inferiority, you must eventually seek greater power to secure yourself. My attempt to eliminate fear therefore creates the conditions for your fear, which eventually recreates mine.

Read that slowly, because most of us live inside it without noticing.

How the loop works

Each step feels sensible on its own. A household builds a higher wall than the neighbour’s. A company builds a moat around its market so no competitor can come close. A group makes sure it is stronger than the group across the road. Each one is only trying to feel safe.

But my higher wall is your new reason to worry. You build yours higher, and now I am less safe than when I started. Nobody in this story is wicked. Everybody is afraid, and everybody’s solution to fear produces more of it.

We have learned to measure the distance between galaxies, but have not yet learned to live without fear of the human being next door. Perhaps our understanding of existence has not kept pace with our knowledge of it.

Where fear actually lives

Much of our fear needs an imagined future. It is often less about what the person in front of me is doing right now than about what they might do later, in a story I have written for them. Some fear is about a real and present threat, and then it is a warning to act on, not a story to examine. This essay is about the other kind.

And the farther something is from our experience, the more it is shaped by stories. We rarely fear the neighbour we have eaten with. We fear the one we have only heard about: the stranger, the other community, the people far away whose lives we know only through headlines.

This is why making ourselves stronger does so little. Strength works on the present. Fear of this kind lives in the imagined future, where no amount of strength can reach.

“Fear is not a feeling to manage. It is a gap in understanding.”

Fear is a gap, not a feeling

We usually treat fear as an emotion to be calmed: breathe, distract yourself, think positive. That can help for an evening. But if fear is a gap in understanding, then managing the feeling leaves the gap exactly where it was.

Closing the gap means understanding the other person: what they actually need, what they actually want, what our relationship actually is. Madhyasth Darshan calls the state on the other side of that gap अभय, usually translated as fearlessness, and defines it simply as trust in the present.

What trust actually is

Trust is not a bet on the future. A bet is what we place when we don’t understand, hoping the other person turns out well. Real trust doesn’t need to gamble. It rests on what is already visible now.

Madhyasth Darshan describes trust (विश्वास) as values in a relationship being fulfilled continuously. Trust is what continuity gets called. When someone has been fair with me today, and yesterday, and the day before, I don’t need to predict tomorrow. I can see what kind of relationship this is.

That also means trust is something we can test in ourselves. If I can explain trust but cannot recognise it in my relationships, what exactly have I understood?

Security without superiority

If superiority cannot make us safe, what can? Only a relationship in which neither person needs the other to be smaller.

That asks something of both sides. You cannot respect someone while needing them to become like you. And you don’t have to make yourself smaller to recognise someone else’s greatness. Respect that requires sameness is just superiority in a softer form. Real respect leaves both people their full size.

We say all humans are equal. Then we organise ourselves into people who belong and people who don’t. Our principles need to show up in how we treat the next person who arrives.

And the planet?

The same loop runs through how we use the earth. A great deal of what we extract, build and store is not for living. It is for defence: bigger reserves, larger stockpiles, more than the neighbour, just in case. Every wall in the story above is made of something taken from nature.

If fear drives accumulation, then trust is not only good for relationships. It may be one of the most practical ways to ask less of the planet. A household, a company or a country that doesn’t need to be stronger than others has far less to accumulate and defend. That is a claim worth testing, and we set out how in One question, not two.

A protocol to try

Pick one person you are wary of. It might be a colleague, a relative, a neighbour.

Write down what you believe about them. Then go through it line by line and ask: how much of this comes from observing them, and how much have I filled in myself? Then, over the next few weeks, watch what they actually do, more than once, before you decide.

Next time they do something that makes you uncomfortable, try to separate two things: what they actually did, and the meaning you have assigned to it. Am I responding to the person in front of me, or to the picture I have made of them?

You may find the person was never the source of the fear. The story was. And a story can be checked, in the present, one conversation at a time.

Limitations

• Some threats are real and immediate, and understanding takes time. In those moments, protection may have to come first.
• Trust can be misplaced. Reading the present accurately is a skill, and people can be deceived.
• We describe the loop of fear in households and groups. Whether the same reasoning holds between nations is a larger question than this essay answers.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, अभय (fearlessness), p. 21
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, विश्वास (trust), p. 175

How much money is enough?

Ask that at a dinner table and watch what happens. People laugh, or change the subject, or give a number and then immediately raise it. Very few can answer calmly and mean it. Yet until a person can answer that question, no amount of money can settle the question of prosperity.

This essay is an attempt to take the question seriously.

Why “more” never arrives

An undefined desire cannot be satisfied by increasing supply. If I have never decided what I am trying to reach, every amount looks like a step on the way. You can accumulate enough for ten lives and still not know what one life requires.

This is not only a personal weakness. We would suggest a good part of our economy depends on it. The easiest person to sell endlessly to is someone who has never decided what is enough. An advertisement has to make enough look insufficient before it can sell you more. And pricing that works on a customer’s fear is, in effect, a tax on vulnerability.

So the question “how much is enough?” is not small. It is the question our whole system of buying and selling is quietly hoping we never answer.

Is scarcity a fact or a feeling?

Part of the confusion is that we put two very different kinds of need in the same basket.

The body’s needs are real and they are limited. Food, clothing, a home, the tools to do our work, care when we are ill. You can list them. You can even put a number on them for a year. A body can only eat so much, wear so much, sleep in one bed at a time.

But much of what we chase is not for the body at all. We want to feel secure, respected, settled, happy. Those are needs of the self, and no quantity of things can meet them. The body can be comfortable while you are unhappy. That should be enough evidence that comfort and happiness are different things.

Pleasure depends on conditions; happiness depends on resolution within. When we try to buy happiness with more conditions, scarcity stops being a fact about the world and becomes a feeling we carry everywhere.

“An undefined desire cannot be satisfied by increasing supply.”

What prosperity actually means

Madhyasth Darshan gives prosperity (समृद्धि) a precise meaning: producing more than you need, consuming less, until there is no sense of lack left. Notice that it is defined by a need you have understood, not by a target you keep moving.

Prosperity, then, is not the maximum amount you can accumulate. It is the point at which scarcity no longer governs your decisions. You will know you are rich when you can say how much is enough.

And it does not begin when we can produce everything. It begins when we understand what we actually need. Technological abundance cannot produce prosperity until human needs are understood.

What changes when enough is known

When “more” stops being a necessity, a few things become possible that weren’t before.

Generosity becomes possible. It is hard to give from a feeling of shortage. Once the line is drawn, everything beyond it is free to go somewhere useful.

Fear begins to dissolve. A lot of what we call ambition is fear of not having enough later. Name the amount and the fear has less to feed on.

Fairness gets easier. Most fairness problems begin with the assumption that people are competing for slices of the same cake. What changes when everyone has enough and begins baking for others?

In the darshan’s account, a person who has understood stops collecting. Not because collecting is forbidden, but because it no longer answers any question they have.

Enough for a system, not just a person

The same question applies at every scale. If we haven’t determined what enough means, how can we design a system meant to deliver prosperity? We end up measuring growth instead, and growth has no finish line.

It also changes how we see money. The darshan puts it this way: no one produces money. You place labour into nature and value appears. Money is only the receipt. And surplus that does not return to the system becomes a burden on it, piling up in one place while lack piles up in another. That is the darshan’s view of value, not an accountant’s, and we offer it as a way to look.

A species intelligent enough to measure ecological collapse should also be intelligent enough to measure what is enough.

A protocol to try

Sit down with your family and write two lists.

On the first, write what your household’s bodies need for one year: food, clothing, the home, health, education, the tools of your work. Put an honest number next to each. Add it up.

On the second, write the things you want that aren’t on the first list, and next to each one, what you hope it will give you. Security? Respect? Peace?

The first list is where prosperity can be settled with production and money. The second list is where it can only be settled with understanding. Most of us have been trying to pay for the second list with the currency of the first.

For a step-by-step way to do this together, see How to Calculate Enough for a Family.

What would change in your life if you decided today that you already have enough?

Limitations

• Needs differ between families, places and stages of life, and a fixed list could be misused to tell people they deserve less.
• Deciding what is enough at home does not by itself change prices, wages or access. This essay says more about the household than about the economy.
• The line between the body’s needs and the self’s needs is clear in principle but blurred in practice: a home gives both shelter and security.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, समृद्धि (prosperity), p. 191
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, आवश्यकता (need), p. 39

We spend so much time designing rules to prevent people from exploiting each other. What if we spent that time developing relationships in which exploitation no longer made sense?

Look at how a family usually works. Nobody hands a new baby a rulebook. Nobody signs a contract before sharing a meal. Most of what holds a good family together is not written down anywhere. It is understood. Now look at how most organisations work. The handbook grows a little every year, and almost every new page marks a moment when something went wrong.

Both are trying to answer the same question: how do people live and work together without harming each other? They just reach for different tools.

Where rules come from

A rule exists because someone stopped believing an explanation would work.

That is not a criticism of rules. Somebody once tried to explain why the shared kitchen should be left clean, or why expenses should be honest, and it didn’t land. So the explanation was replaced with an instruction, and the instruction was given a penalty. Many rules are small monuments to a conversation that ended before understanding arrived. Others do different work: they help people coordinate, remember what was agreed and protect those with less power, and rules like these can support trust rather than replace it.

Seen that way, a rulebook is also a map. It shows exactly where understanding ran out.

What a rule cannot do

Punishment can stop an act. It cannot supply the understanding that was missing before the act.

If someone takes more than their share because they are afraid there won’t be enough, a penalty may stop them taking. It does nothing about the fear. The fear simply looks for another way out. We spend considerable effort preventing people from taking more than they deserve. How much effort do we spend helping people work out what they actually need?

The same is true of money. A formula can distribute money. It cannot create the relationship in which people genuinely want one another to have enough.

The loop of distrust

A system built on distrust keeps producing reasons for more control. At some point, we have to examine the assumption we started with.

When we design an organisation around the worst behaviour we can imagine, we get very good at handling that behaviour. But everyone inside is now treated as a suspect, and people tend to become what they are treated as. Honest people feel watched and stop volunteering anything beyond the minimum. The minimum becomes the culture. New gaps appear, new rules follow, and the loop tightens.

The loop does not break by adding a better rule. It breaks when someone questions the starting assumption: that the people around us cannot understand.

“A good system needs less control as the people inside it understand more.”

What a relationship does that a rule can’t

Madhyasth Darshan describes a relationship as a meeting in which what we expect of each other, and what we owe each other, is already understood, and held for the sake of both people becoming complete. That is very different from a contract, which mostly records what happens if one of us lets the other down.

Inside that kind of relationship, we expect exploitation to make far less sense. Not because it is forbidden, but because the other person’s prosperity has become part of my own. You don’t cheat a partner whose wellbeing you have taken responsibility for. You would only be cheating yourself.

This is also what fairness means in practice: recognising the relationship you are in, fulfilling what it asks of you, and both people being satisfied. And it begins inside each person. A person resolved within cannot help but be just in relationship.

We have developed sophisticated systems to determine who owns what. Have we developed equally sophisticated ways of understanding what we owe one another?

Not no rules. Better ones.

None of this means throwing the rulebook away tomorrow. Rules hold things steady while understanding grows, and some will always be needed. The question is what kind of rules they are.

A rule should tell us what to do together, not just protect us from each other. “We eat together on Sundays” is a rule. So is “no one leaves the table until everyone is done.” Neither exists to stop a crime. Both describe a relationship people have already chosen.

A good system, then, is one where the need for control shrinks over time, because the people inside it understand more each year. Trying to improve systems without improving the humans who have to operate them will never work.

And the planet?

Environmental law is a rulebook too, and it reads like a map of where understanding ran out: limits on what can be dumped in rivers, taken from forests or released into the air. These rules matter. They have stopped real harm, and the planet needs them while understanding grows.

But a penalty for overfishing does nothing about the fear of not having enough that drove it. Lasting care for the earth looks more like a relationship than a rule: one in which nature’s continuity has become part of our own prosperity, so that taking too much simply makes no sense.

Where to start

Start where the stakes are small and the relationships are real: in a family, a team, a small company. Can a company be built around the assumption that every partner’s prosperity is a shared responsibility? We think it is worth trying, and worth reporting honestly on how it goes.

And try one small practice. The next time you want to add a rule, at home or at work, pause and ask: what explanation have I stopped believing would work? Then try the explanation once more, properly, before you reach for the rule.

Sometimes the rule will still be needed. Sometimes you will find the relationship was waiting for the conversation all along.

Limitations

• Some people exploit others even inside close relationships. Families are not always safe, and rules sometimes protect the vulnerable precisely because a relationship has failed.
• Relationships don’t scale easily. A village can run on understanding; it is not yet clear how a city of millions can.
• Our examples come from families and small teams, not from large organisations. That evidence still has to be gathered.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, संबंध (relationship), p. 207
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, न्याय (fairness), p. 103

Here is an idea we keep returning to. What if all the philosophers came together and gave the world a direction?

It sounds grand, but the reasoning behind it is simple. In the sense Madhyasth Darshan gives it, and the one we explore here, philosophy means finding the design of the universe: how things are, how they fit together, and what follows for how we should live. If some people really have the capacity to see that design and write it down, wouldn't they be more competent than anyone else to run the world according to it?

Isn't it a good idea? We want to take the question seriously, which means looking at what is right about it and what isn't.

An old idea, for a reason

This is not a new thought. Around 2,400 years ago Plato argued in the Republic that cities would not be free of trouble until philosophers ruled, or rulers became philosophers. The idea has lasted because the problem it answers has lasted.

Look at how we choose who steers today. We pick people who are good at winning elections, building companies, gathering followers or commanding armies. These are skills of persuasion and power. None of them is the skill of understanding. We have built a world that can measure the distance between galaxies and still be run by people who have not been asked whether they understand themselves.

Seen that way, asking the people who seek the design of the universe to give us a direction does not sound naive. It sounds overdue.

Where it gets difficult

The philosophers disagree. If philosophy is finding the design of the universe, and there is one universe, then those who had truly found it should agree. Yet philosophers have argued with each other for as long as there have been philosophers. Disagreement is not always failure; arguing is often how understanding grows. But it does suggest much of what we call philosophy is still opinion about the design rather than sight of it. Put every philosopher in one room and you may not get a direction. You may get a very long debate.

Writing it is not living it. The capacity to write philosophy is not the same as the capacity to live by it. A person can describe harmony beautifully and still be at war in their own home. If understanding is real, it shows up in how a person lives with their family, their work and the people next door, not only in what they publish. That cannot be verified in a day. It takes years of living and working together.

“Someone who has truly seen the design would not need to rule. They would only need to show.”

“Run” may be the wrong word. Someone who has truly understood how everything fits with everything else would see that harmony cannot be imposed. Order enforced from the top turns into force, and force is the opposite of trust. History has examples of people who were certain they knew the right design for society and used power to make everyone else fit it. It has gone badly again and again. Even Plato, by the account handed down to us, tried to guide a ruler in Syracuse and came away disappointed.

Showing is not always enough, though. When someone is being harmed now, a community still needs rules that can be enforced and institutions that can act. Understanding can shape those institutions and make them fairer. It doesn’t make them unnecessary.

What is worth keeping

So is it a good idea? We think half of it is very good.

The half worth keeping is direction. The world does need people whose first qualification is understanding, not winning. It needs their clarity to come before power and money, not after. And it needs that clarity in the places where life is actually lived: in education, in families and in work.

The half to drop is rule. Direction that has to be enforced is not yet understanding. Real understanding persuades by being lived. A family that lives exactly as it says, and whose words can be tested against reality, gives more direction than any council of experts could hand down.

Maybe that is the real test for anyone, philosopher or not, who claims to know the design. Not how well they can write it, but whether it holds in their own home, then in their village, and then a little further out.

And the planet?

The same question decides what happens to the earth. Today, how forests, rivers, soil and air are used is settled mostly by those who win elections, markets and negotiations. Each sets a direction for a few years, the next may reverse it, and the planet absorbs the difference.

It is tempting to wish that experts, or a world authority, would simply run the planet’s affairs instead. The argument above applies here too. A rule imposed from above meets resistance and loopholes, and lasts only as long as it can be enforced. A household, a village or a company that understands its relationship with nature looks after it without being checked. So the direction a sustainable planet needs may come less from whoever is in charge, and more from understanding spread widely enough that it no longer has to be enforced. That is the work we set out in One question, not two.

Over to you

We are not certain we are right about this. Would a world guided by its philosophers be wiser, or only more confident? Who would you trust to give the world a direction, and what would they have to show you first?

If you have an answer, or a better question, write to us or come on the podcast.

Limitations

• We treat Plato’s idea very briefly, and serious readers of the Republic would add a great deal.
• The Seventh Letter, which tells the story of Syracuse, may not have been written by Plato himself.
• We say understanding persuades by being lived, but history also has good people who were simply ignored.

References

1. Plato, Republic, Book V (473c–d)
2. Plato (attributed), Seventh Letter
3. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, दर्शन (philosophy), p. 88