Three Thoughts

Every year when I visit New York, meeting my mentor at our usual spot is a non-negotiable tradition. We spend time doing a high-density debrief, covering everything from the past year’s surreal experiences to our ongoing spiritual growth.

This year, our core takeaway came down to a single conclusion: True growth requires human connection.

At first glance, hermits in deep mountains or solitary ascetics seem to have achieved ultimate wisdom and inner peace. Yet, self-alignment built without engaging the real world is often just an illusion created by a vacuum.

When you are alone, maintaining inner order is effortless. Free from external interference, your mind feels self-sufficient and airtight, tricking you into believing you have transcended everything. But that tranquillity isn’t the result of profound spiritual mastery; it simply means your system hasn’t been stress-tested yet.

As Sartre famously noted, “Hell is other people.” This doesn’t mean people are inherently malicious but means others serve as an unavoidable mirror. The moment we step into close relationships or dive into the complexities of the real world, that mirror reflects our unhealed cracks, hidden attachments, and buried traumas in the most glaring and unvarnished way.

Other people become the projection screen and testing ground for our subconscious. Intimate relationships, in particular, are the ultimate crucible: every speck of control freakishness and fear we ignored in solitude is instantly exposed the moment we intertwine our soul with another.

Rather than seeking calm in isolation, true spiritual growth requires us to face whatever appears when life holds up a mirror.

Through all this friction and self-discovery, the ultimate goal is radical surrender. We have to trust that no matter how chaotic life gets or how much turbulence our relationships bring, we remain safe.

As I wrote in the previous article, life never gives you more than you can handle. Life’s disruptions are the universe’s way of reminding you: You are deeply loved.

Only when you fully surrender to these experiences will you realise that all these challenges are simply here to guide you back to your inner wholeness.

I noticed an interesting phenomenon over the past couple of days. At a gathering in New York, I met a textbook example of a certain type of young professional. The very first thing out of his mouth was straight to the point: “What do you do?”

Sitting quietly at our table was a genuinely top-tier industry titan, completely understated, unassuming. When asked, he just smiled coolly and said, “Oh, I just write things.” In a split second, a flash of thinly veiled contempt and disinterest crossed the young man’s face. He turned right around to go cozy up to people with fancy titles printed on their business cards.

This scene instantly brought to mind the Sweeping Monk from Chinese wuxia novels: everyone around him thinks he’s just a janitor, completely unaware that he is actually an unfathomably powerful martial arts grandmaster. That kind of superficial blindness, where someone gets fooled by appearances and exposes their own shallow depth right in front of a true master, is absurdly funny.

Why are so many young people so obsessed with probing for job titles and stacking up labels?

Because in their mental framework, the world is a strict hierarchy made of titles, resources, and status classes. They are in a rush to use external tags to prove themselves, and they’ve grown accustomed to quantifying others the exact same way.

They treat human interaction like an abacus. Asking about a title in the first breath is fundamentally a quick calculation: “Are you useful to me?” They rely far too heavily on external packaging, terrified that people won’t know who they are. Sometimes, they even use titles to throw their weight around and intimidate others, all to mask an inner emptiness and a lack of real confidence.

As the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne observed, it is a supreme vanity to dress oneself up in borrowed beauty. When a person stakes their entire dignity on a glamorous title, they’ve essentially been alienated by it. They think they’ve secured a VIP pass, but they’ve actually just lost themselves right at the threshold. Conversely, people who truly stand at the top and possess a rich, grounded core left the “needing external labels to prove my worth” phase behind a long time ago.

People with top-tier don’t need other people’s gasps of amazement to validate their existence, which is why they are much happier blending into the crowd and returning to simplicity.

The title on your business card, the label your company gives you, the glamorous tags we wear… they are just props we borrow for the play we call society. When the show ends and the curtain falls, you can’t take a single one of them with you.

Once you see through this, you understand why people who try way too hard are always so off-putting. Because their tension, snobbery, and posturing look like naked vulnerability to anyone who actually knows what they’re looking at.

The deepest abundance in life has never needed decibels or titles to prop it up. And those who remain addicted to pricing everything with a label will likely spend their entire lives missing out on the true, effortless power of the sweeping monk.

Anyone who truly understands mathematics knows it is typically an ascetic pilgrimage paved with rigorous logic, painstaking derivations, and endless reams of discarded drafts.

Srinivasa Ramanujan was an absolute anomaly, like a self-taught outsider stumbling upon cosmic secrets. Lacking formal university training and armed with little more than a poorly typeset, second-hand formula book, he nonetheless sent cold sweats down the spines of Cambridge’s greatest mathematical titans.

Born in 1887 into a modest family in southern India where finding a decent library was a luxury, Ramanujan viewed mathematics entirely differently from his peers. While others climbed a methodical staircase, mathematics for Ramanujan arrived as a series of direct, unmediated divine miracles.

When he mailed a thick stack of manuscript pages scrawled with bizarre formulas to the renowned Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy, Hardy’s initial reaction was that some lunatic was playing a prank. The equations were downright eerie: devoid of proofs, lacking any intermediate derivations, appearing out of thin air. Yet when Hardy and his colleagues forced themselves to verify them, a cold chill ran down their spines: the formulas were entirely correct.

Hardy immediately pulled the impoverished young Indian prodigy over to Cambridge.

Thus unfolded one of the most surreal episodes in human academic history. The British academic establishment swore by rigorous empirical evidence, demanding that every single theorem pass through layers of strict logical validation. Meanwhile, Ramanujan casually explained that the formulas in his head were “fed” to him in dreams by his family deity, the goddess Namagiri. He claimed the goddess would literally unfold vast mathematical tapestries directly upon his tongue.

He would routinely sit at breakfast, nonchalantly tossing out formulas capable of shaking the scientific world. When a frantic Hardy demanded proofs, Ramanujan would look at him with genuine perplexity: “Why would this need a proof? It is already written in the mind of God.”

What makes his legacy truly spine-chilling is his sheer chronological defiance. The things he casually doodled in his notebooks looked like celestial gibberish at the time, only to turn up nearly a century later as the exact cryptographic keys needed by modern physicists to calculate black hole entropy and string theory. It was as if he could casually stroll into the source code library of the universe, walk back out, and sketch what he saw on a napkin.

Tragically, the fuel for such raw genius burns out at a terrifying speed. During his time in Britain, battered by the damp, gloomy weather, an inability to adapt to local vegetarian requirements, and a brain operating at maximum overdrive for decades, his body completely collapsed. He fell gravely ill and returned to India in 1919, passing away in his hometown at the young age of 32.

Even from his deathbed, his final letter to Hardy was a feverish derivation of “mock theta functions.” Decades later, those fragments once dismissed as madness were finally decoded by computer scientists, revealing them to be vital to understanding the physics of black hole interiors.

Ramanujan remains a singular miracle in the history of mathematics. Through a short, scorching life, he left behind a haunting reminder: beyond the cold boundaries of human reason, there may indeed exist an ineffable intuition that touches the infinite.