Podcast Episode: THE ABSOLUTE

Pip: What if the deepest question in philosophy isn’t “what is the Absolute” but “why does asking the question already miss the point?” Dippack Mistri has been sitting with that paradox, and the result is not light reading.

Mara: Today we’re in the territory of the Absolute — Brahman, Consciousness, Samadhi, and what it actually means to say “I am That.” Let’s start with the Absolute itself.

The Absolute: Spaceless, Silent, and Impossible to Grasp

Pip: The post opens with a provocation — not a definition. It asks whether the Absolute even exists, or whether Brahman is, as it puts it, merely a conjecture. That’s the tension the whole piece is built on: how do you talk about something that is, by its own terms, incomprehensible?

Mara: The anchor here is a passage from Tripura Rahasya, where King Janaka reflects on Nirvikalpa Samadhi: “Nirvikalpa samadhi is characterised by the experience of the true Self alone, namely, Pure Intelligence. Though eternal and resplendent even ordinarily, this Abstract Intelligence is as if it did not exist.”

Pip: So the highest state of realization presents itself as though it weren’t there at all. That’s not a paradox to be resolved — it’s the whole point. If the Absolute is spaceless and timeless, then the very apparatus we’d use to locate it, mind, language, here, now, is already the wrong instrument.

Mara: The post is careful about this. It argues that mind cannot survive in spacelessness because, as it puts it, “the nature of the mind is space and time.” So Nirvikalpa Samadhi isn’t a mental achievement — it’s the cessation of the conditions that make mental experience possible.

Pip: Which is where Paul Brunton comes in, and his account is striking precisely because it’s first-person. He describes the ego vanishing entirely — not merging, not dissolving, but simply gone — and what remained was something he recognized as his real self all along.

Mara: His words are worth reading directly: “It was not lost, merged, or dissolved: it was fully and vividly conscious that it was a point in universal Mind and so not apart from that Mind itself. Only the lower self, the false self, was gone but that was a loss for which to be immeasurably grateful.”

Pip: That phrase — “a loss for which to be immeasurably grateful” — does a lot of work. It reframes the whole terror of ego-dissolution as relief.

Mara: The post then draws a distinction between Nirvikalpa Samadhi and Sahaja Samadhi. Sahaja is the natural, continuous abiding in the Self — not a trance state, but ordinary life witnessed from within Consciousness. Sri Bhagavan Ramana is quoted: “Realization is already there. The state free from thoughts is the only real state. There is no such action as Realization.”

Pip: So the chase, as the post calls it, ends not with arrival but with recognition that you were never elsewhere.

Mara: And that recognition, the post argues, transforms how you move through the world — not by removing pain or duty, but by removing the identification with the body-sense that made suffering feel like yours to own.

Pip: The Absolute, then, is less a destination than a correction in perspective. Hard to package, admittedly, but possibly the only thing worth unpacking.

Mara: The post closes on Anandamayi: “It is but the Self that calls Itself, and none other than the Self that realizes Itself.” The seeker and the sought — same substance, same silence.

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Pip: Spaceless, timeless, and somehow the ground of everything. The post doesn’t resolve the paradox — it asks you to become it.

Mara: Which is, apparently, the only method that works. More from this territory next time.