Four Brothers

Sri. Atmaram had four sons. He was indeed so attached to them that they entirely fulled up his consciousness.

The eldest was Chitta. Chitta had a headstart compared to others as he remembered his grand-parents and even his great-grandmother. He was full of the family's old stories and lived with a deep sense of Khaandaan history. You wouldn't guess it when you saw the brothers together, but Chitta always had an influence on the decisions made by the other three.

The second one was a vain fellow. He was born when Sri. Atmaram was already well established in life. He named his second son Aham. Aham struck everyone as full of I-Me-Myself. The brothers had to find a way to live and play together "around" Aham's sense of self-importance.

The third was Buddhi. Buddhi was a clever fellow, able to study well, and played brain games like chess. He would always find a way to tackle any problem they faced, and honestly, the brothers always looked up to him for solutions, whenever they came up against any challenge.

The fourth was irrepressible. He had been named Manas. He was full of fun and was always ready to party. He made friends easily and broke up too in a jiffy. A most outgoing sort of fellow, Manas was the life and soul of any party. But whenever he was upset, or had to be reasoned with, only Buddhi could deal with him.

These four brothers - Chitta, Aham, Buddhi and Manas, were the inner courtyard as it were of Sri. Atmaram's world.

Everyone therefore said, "If you want to convince Sri. Atmaram about anything, go to his four sons. They will convince him." 

Prof. S. S. Raghavachar - a Tribute

My talk at the Tribute function in the Department of Philosophy, Manasagangotri, Mysore, on 12 June 2025, Thursday (embedded with navigatio controls):  

This is the PDF of my talk transcript. The video has also been recorded and can be watched below:

 

How we colour our awareness of things

We are constantly exhorted to become more aware every moment. We are asked to deal with every situation, person, and object with awareness.

But did we realise that our awareness is always influenced by our biases, emotions and memories? This gave me an idea.

When we shoot a picture on our mobile phone, we can edit the image using the same camera app in most cases. This editing is like applying awareness to our perceptions! See a typical edit screen in the image above. 

There is an analogy on each aspect here:

1. Crop - we are selective in our awareness, we never see the whole picture. 

2. Rotate - our biases cause a subtle change in reality so what we see is somewhat rotated from reality, often we see it upside down! 

3. Exposure - this aspect determines how much concentration we have in awareness.

4. Contrast - we always add an extra emphasis to distort our awareness of reality by comparison with something else or someone else. This is unfair to reality. 

5. Saturation - we react to a thing by making a molehill into a mountain. This increased colouring is nothing but our samskaras reacting with reality.

6. Warmth - this is emotional attachment to things or people. So never is our awareness truly objective. 

7. Highlights - we always pick some elements in a thing - for example some words hit us and we ignore others. No two people therefore hear the same thing.

8. Shadows - either ignorance or insensitivity leaves a lot of our awareness in the dark about reality. Everything in life has shadows that speak to us. We only choose to not become aware of it. As they say, "listen to the silence between words."

So awareness is a lot like post- processing of an image!