Purnam adah purnam idam
Purnat purnam udachyate
Purnasya purnam adaya
Purnam evavashishyate.
This phrase has echoed throughout human history, originating in the Upanishads, one of the most revered bodies of ancient Indian wisdom. I have heard it rendered in so many different forms—chants, poems, prayers, songs—and somehow, each time, it carries the same atmosphere.
When I was a child, I spent many of my weekends at the temple in my village. I loved going to the children’s classes, where I learned to play classical instruments like the harmonium and drums, studied Hindi, and learned classical dance. I also loved being part of the children’s choir during the weekly services.
Every Thursday night, the priest would use this Purnam phrase.
I never knew what it meant.
But I loved the atmosphere that seemed to build every time I heard the chant in the background.
There was something about the sound, the repetition, the people, the instruments, the rituals, the movement. I didn’t have the language to understand what was happening, but my body seemed to recognize something in it.
Perhaps this is one of the ways lineage works.
Something can enter us long before we understand it.
Only in recent years, as I mentioned in one of my previous posts, did I feel myself being drawn back toward my lineage. I began paying closer attention to its wisdom, its rituals, its symbols, its aesthetics, and its ways of seeing existence.
And I began to wonder whether my attention had been nourished by these things long before I consciously understood them.
Perhaps something had been seeded.
Perhaps something was trying to express itself through me.
I feel creativity is cooking somewhere in that space.
Looking back, I now understand that much of the metamorphosis I was going through seemed to depend on remembering something this piece of knowledge had already seeded in me.
It was not so much about becoming someone new.
It was about remembering who I am.
Already whole.
Already radiant.
Already part of something much larger than the separate identity I had been trying to construct.
The Purnam teaching is often translated in terms of fullness: that which is whole arises from wholeness, and even when wholeness is taken from wholeness, wholeness remains.
I find myself returning to this again and again.
Because there is a difference between intellectually believing that you are whole and beginning to live from the felt recognition of it.
When you know—really know, even without being able to explain why—something about who you are and where you have come from, your trajectory begins to reshuffle.
The way you move through a room changes.
The way you meet people changes.
The things you notice change.
The things you are available to receive change.
There is a kind of rejoicing and aliveness that begins to associate itself with ordinary moments.
You let life touch you.
You become less defended against existence.
You become more available to beauty.
This is something I often notice when reading the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita. Again and again, I encounter images of rejoicing, celebration, dancing, playing, singing, devotion, and a kind of freedom from the seriousness with which we sometimes hold ourselves.
Perhaps this is not incidental.
Perhaps this is what happens when awareness becomes intimate with existence.
You don’t need to force yourself to become creative.
You become more alive, and creativity begins to happen as a consequence of that aliveness.
Before I had any conscious relationship with this wisdom, I also began noticing a number that seemed to appear throughout my life.
It appeared in my university student ID, in personal dates, in my telephone number, and I would often notice it on the clock.
I don’t know that the number itself possesses some inherent power or message.
What interests me is what happens when something becomes meaningful to us.
A symbol can become a point of recognition.
It can remind us of something we have begun to remember about ourselves.
For me, 833 became connected to this larger remembering.
I began to understand myself not as an isolated individual trying to manufacture a meaningful life, but as an expression of something whole.
An expression of infinity.
An expression of consciousness.
An expression of beauty.
An expression of existence itself.
And when that understanding moves from an idea into the body, something changes.
You feel as though you are overflowing into life.
You don’t have to announce it.
You don’t have to convince anyone.
It begins to become perceptible.
People sometimes come up to you and tell you that they feel peaceful in your presence.
They may not know why.
You may not know why either.
But perhaps presence has an aura.
Perhaps what we embody becomes perceptible before it becomes explainable.
This is what I mean by an embodied memory of abundance.
Abundance, in this sense, is not primarily having more.
It is remembering the fullness from which you are already participating.
And perhaps this is why presence can feel different when we stop relating to ourselves primarily through deficiency.
When we are no longer constantly asking:
What am I missing?
What do I need to become?
What do I need to acquire?
What do I need to prove?
Something else becomes possible.
We can begin asking:
What is already here?
What am I already part of?
What beauty is already moving through this moment?
What becomes possible when I remember that I am not separate from the wealth of existence?
Perhaps this is part of humanity’s deeper work.
Not to accumulate enough to finally feel whole.
But to remember enough of our wholeness that we can participate differently in life.
And perhaps, when we do, we become something for one another.
An atmosphere.
A place of rest.
A source of beauty.
A reminder.
An altar.
Maybe the purpose is not simply to remember who we are for ourselves.
Maybe we remember so deeply that our remembering becomes available to the people around us.
We become altars for one another.
And perhaps this is one way of understanding abundance:
Not as something we possess,
but as something we embody so fully that it begins to circulate.
Existence.
Consciousness.
Beauty.
Perhaps remembering these is not an escape from life.
Perhaps it is the beginning of fully participating in it.
