Diwali is coming up, and you’ve started the three-day ritual of cleaning your home. You scrub the floors, clear the clutter, wash the curtains, and lay out fresh linen. Everything feels renewed. Then someone visits, walks through the front door, pauses, and says, “This place feels light.”
I love that feeling. The freshness of a newly cleaned room, the softness of fresh linen, the quiet pleasure of entering a space that has been cared for. Growing up, I witnessed the beautiful transition from Diwali to Christmas, when homes were renewed, familiar spaces were adorned, and there was a sense of novelty that seemed to embrace everything with warmth and love.
It makes me wonder about the old saying that cleanliness is next to godliness. Perhaps there is something profound in the way a space transforms when we meet it with purity, attention, and adoration.
The space was always there. The walls had not changed their nature. The furniture had not become something else. Yet, through the care we gave it, we began to experience it differently.
What if we could meet our own lives with that same newness, care, and adoration?
What if the life we have been trying so hard to transform is also waiting to be noticed differently?
The Self We Left Behind
I often find myself returning to childhood memories.
I remember my Sunday routine of going to the market to buy the Sunday Chronicle, especially for the children’s corner, where short stories appeared in the Sunday edition. I remember writing letters to my older cousins and sending Christmas cards to my classmates. I remember tea parties, the games we played, and the excitement of ordinary gatherings.
There was so much life in those seemingly small moments.
Sometimes, I revisit these memories and ask myself, Why am I remembering this now?
Perhaps it is not simply the memory that is returning, but the feeling underneath it.
That unmistakable sense of being alive. The delight of discovering something new. The pleasure of participating in the world without needing it to lead somewhere. The childlike capacity to be captivated by a story, a game, a gathering, or the possibility of making someone happy with a handwritten card.
There was no elaborate strategy behind these moments. I was not trying to become my highest self. I was simply living, noticing, creating, and participating.
What if that playfulness was never something I outgrew, but something I learned to overlook?
Somewhere along the way, many of us begin to believe that the highest expression of ourselves must be waiting in the future. We are told, directly or indirectly, that we will become someone remarkable after we have accomplished enough, earned enough, achieved enough, or become acceptable enough in the eyes of others.
So we pursue the qualifications, the career, the relationship, the house, the recognition, and the financial milestones.
There is nothing inherently wrong with these desires. They can be beautiful expressions of our creativity and aspirations. But what happens when we make them the conditions for feeling whole?
We postpone our joy until the next achievement. We delay our creativity until we have more time. We wait for the right relationship to feel loved, the right opportunity to feel purposeful, and the right circumstances to finally feel at peace with ourselves.
And even when the thing arrives, something can remain unfulfilled.
We have reached the destination, yet we have not necessarily arrived in our own lives.
Perhaps this is because we have been searching for our Highest Self as though it were a future identity, when what we are longing for is a different relationship with the life we are already living.
The Highest Self is not a distant version of you, waiting to be achieved. It is the fullness of your being becoming available to your present experience.
Existence, Consciousness, and Bliss
In the Vedic tradition, the expression Sat-Chit-Ananda points toward existence, consciousness, and bliss. These are not merely abstract ideas to contemplate. They offer a way of reflecting on the nature of being itself.
We exist. We are conscious of our existence. And through that consciousness, we can experience the wonder, beauty, and aliveness of being here.
Yet how often are we actually available to this experience?
We can walk through a garden without noticing the flowers. We can eat a beautiful meal while thinking about the next appointment. We can sit beside someone we love while mentally rehearsing tomorrow’s responsibilities. We can spend an entire day surrounded by life and still feel disconnected from it.
Our bodies are here, but our attention is elsewhere.
We have become so accustomed to anticipating the next moment that we overlook the one in which our lives are actually unfolding.
And this is where I see the possibility of remembering our Highest Self.
It begins when we stop treating the present as a waiting room for a better life and begin recognizing it as the place where life is already happening.
Sometimes, the doorway is laughter. You catch yourself laughing at the paradox of existence: how seriously we take our plans, how desperately we chase certainty, how often life surprises us with something we could never have arranged.
The laughter softens you. For a moment, you are no longer fighting life or trying to control every outcome. You are participating in its mystery.
Other doorways are quieter.
Actually listening to a song instead of letting it play in the background.
Savouring your morning coffee.
Cooking a meal with care.
Taking a walk and noticing the trees.
Asking your neighbour how they are and staying present long enough to hear the answer.
Returning to a creative practice you abandoned because it did not seem productive.
These moments may look ordinary from the outside. But something changes when you meet them with your full attention.
You are no longer simply passing through your life. You are allowing yourself to be touched by it.
This is beauty consciousness: the capacity to recognize and participate in the beauty that becomes available when awareness meets existence with intimacy.
Beauty, in this sense, is not limited to what pleases the eye. It is also the felt coherence of a moment, the tenderness of a relationship, the elegance of an idea, the joy of movement, or the quiet recognition that something in you has come alive.
It is a way of perceiving, but also a way of participating.
The Sacred Practice of Beginning Again
Think about what happens when you clean your home for Diwali.
You remove what has accumulated. You clear what no longer belongs. You give attention to the corners that have been neglected. You prepare the space to receive the occasion with reverence.
What if we approached our inner lives with the same spirit?
Not by condemning ourselves for the ways we have lived, but by noticing what has accumulated in our attention.
The old narratives that tell us we are behind.
The comparisons that diminish our joy.
The expectations that make us perform a version of ourselves that no longer feels true.
The distractions that keep us from feeling what is actually happening within us.
We do not need to wage war against these patterns. We can begin by noticing them.
And then, gently, we can return our attention to what is here.
A pause can become a kind of inner spring-cleaning. We interrupt the familiar momentum of our thoughts and allow ourselves to perceive the moment afresh.
We notice the breath moving through the body. We feel our feet on the ground. We listen to the sounds around us. We become curious about what we have overlooked.
We make room for something other than our habitual interpretation of life.
This does not mean ignoring our difficulties or pretending that every circumstance is beautiful. Grief is still grief. Uncertainty is still uncertainty. Some situations require boundaries, difficult decisions, practical action, and support from others.
But even within difficulty, there can be moments of tenderness, insight, connection, or possibility that become visible when we are able to meet our experience rather than remain entirely absorbed in the story we tell about it.
The practice is not to force ourselves to see beauty everywhere.
It is to become available to the beauty, truth, and possibility that we might otherwise overlook.
Let Yourself Be Moved
One of the great creative practices available to us is to let ourselves be moved.
We have been taught to measure movement by visible outcomes: the business launched, the book published, the money earned, the relationship secured, the milestone achieved.
But there is another kind of movement that happens before any of these things.
A melody stirs something in you.
An image stays with you long after you have seen it.
A childhood memory returns with an unfamiliar tenderness.
A conversation awakens a question that changes the direction of your thinking.
You feel drawn to learn something, make something, visit somewhere, or express something you have been holding inside.
These experiences may not arrive with a complete explanation. Sometimes, you feel the movement before you understand its meaning.
And perhaps this is precisely why we need to cultivate our capacity to notice.
When we are constantly rushing, consuming, and reacting, we can miss the subtle impulses that might otherwise invite us into new forms of expression.
But when we make room for silence, play, beauty, and wonder, we begin to notice what draws our attention and what feels meaningful to us.
Not every impulse needs to become a calling. Not every coincidence needs to be interpreted as a sign. And not every feeling requires immediate action.
We can remain curious. We can explore. We can allow an idea to develop through experience, reflection, and discernment.
The point is not to control what emerges.
It is to become available to the possibilities that emerge when we are more fully participating in our lives.
Perhaps purpose does not always begin with a grand declaration about what we are here to do. Sometimes, it begins with the small things that move us, the beauty we keep returning to, and the activities in which we feel most alive.
Over time, these moments can reveal something about our nature: what we value, what we love, what we want to create, and how we wish to contribute.
The Highest Self, then, is not merely an image of who we hope to become.
It is also discovered through the quality of attention we bring to who we are becoming, moment by moment.
The Light We Bring Into the World
Imagine what might become possible if we approached one another with this same attention.
What if we looked beyond the roles people occupy and became curious about the human being before us?
What if we allowed others to express their individuality without immediately measuring it against our expectations?
What if we could recognize beauty in a person without requiring them to conform to our idea of what is beautiful?
We often speak about changing the world, healing humanity, or creating a more compassionate society. Yet our participation in these possibilities begins in the ordinary encounters that make up our lives.
It begins in how we listen.
How we speak.
How we respond when someone disappoints us.
How we treat the people whose contributions are rarely acknowledged.
How we allow others to belong without asking them to diminish themselves.
This is where the personal becomes collective.
When we become more attentive to our own experience, we may become more capable of meeting the experiences of others with patience and curiosity. When we reconnect with our creativity, we have more opportunities to contribute something meaningful. When we recognize the dignity and beauty of our own being, we may become less compelled to seek superiority by diminishing someone else.
Our inner life does not exist separately from the world. It shapes how we participate in it.
And this is one of the ideas at the heart of my developing philosophy of Sacred Economy: existence is not merely a collection of resources to extract, accumulate, and possess. It is a living field of relationships in which our attention, creativity, care, and contributions matter.
We participate in the world through what we notice, what we nurture, what we create, and what we allow to circulate through our lives.
The beauty we recognize can influence the beauty we express. The care we cultivate can shape the care we offer. The possibilities we allow ourselves to explore can become contributions that enrich the lives of others.
We do not have to wait until we have perfected ourselves to participate in this movement.
We begin with the life that is here.
Diwali Is an Invitation to Remember
As Diwali approaches, I find myself thinking about the symbolism of light.
We light lamps, clean our homes, prepare beautiful meals, gather with family, and renew traditions that have been carried through generations.
We make space for something sacred.
And perhaps the invitation extends beyond the ritual itself.
What if we allowed the light we celebrate to become a reminder of the awareness through which we meet our lives?
What if we brought that awareness to the way we speak to ourselves, the way we care for our homes, the way we relate to our families, the way we create, and the way we participate in the wider world?
We may discover that the life we have been searching for has not been entirely absent. We have simply become accustomed to overlooking parts of it.
The playfulness of the child is still available in the pleasure of making something for no reason other than the joy of making it.
The creativity we thought we had lost may return when we stop demanding that every expression prove its worth.
The intimacy we seek may begin when we give our attention to the person, place, or experience already before us.
And the purpose we have been chasing may become clearer as we learn to recognize what moves us and how our nature wants to participate.
Perhaps the Highest Self is not waiting at the end of a long journey of self-improvement.
Perhaps it is revealed in the quality of our participation—in the way we allow ourselves to be touched by existence and respond with beauty, creativity, care, and love.
We do not need to become extraordinary before we can begin.
We can start by noticing.
By pausing.
By meeting this moment with the same care we give a freshly cleaned home.
By allowing the familiar to become new again.
And by remembering that we are not standing outside life, waiting for it to begin.
We are already here, participating in it.
Perhaps that is the light we are being invited to remember this Diwali: not a light we must acquire, but the capacity to recognize and express the light that is already here.
May this Diwali be an invitation to return to your own presence, to rediscover the beauty of ordinary moments, and to let your inherent nature participate more fully in the life around you.
Happy Diwali.
