About Akilesh
About my spiritual journey...
I was a spiritual seeker for over two decades. It started in my teenage years when, struggling with existential depression, I met an important teacher and learned some of the fundamentals of Hindu mysticism, or Vedanta.
That was just the beginning of my quest, however. I quickly learned that powerful mental and emotional obstacles kept me from fulfilling my spiritual potential. Over the course of the next decades, I discovered and worked through those obstacles through intense (and often very frustrating!) self-exploration, experimentation, and through the application of eastern and western philosophy, literature, and psychoanalysis. I've seen how the central mystical insight Vedanta presents interacts with these other fields in the context of personal spiritual obstacles.
I came across my most important spiritual teacher of all in the work of Ramana Maharshi, who, I found, encapsulated and simplified the spirit of advaita vedanta in an extraordinarily simple and pure way.
At a certain point, something clicked, and I discovered what I had been looking for. I realized who I was -- and just as importantly, who I was not.
The craving for existential truth and for a final liberation from suffering was quenched, because the seeker of these was not who he had seemed to be.
My more conventional credentials...
One of my qualifications as a seeker is that I've criss-crossed many bodies of knowledge to find what I was looking for! I hope to shorten the search for others.
Education:
Juris Doctor, Harvard Law School
Master of Information Systems Management from Carnegie-Mellon University
Master of Arts in Forensic Psychology from the City University of New York.
Fellow at the Writers' Institute of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Other publications:
My most recent books are How to Find What Isn't Lost: A Short, Pro-Intellectual, Pro-Desire Guide to Enlightenment and Spiritual Dialogues with Akilesh. In my younger days, I co-authored, from the seeker's standpoint, a book-length dialogue on Hindu philosophy entitled Irreverent Spiritual Questions. More recently I have published essays in Philosophy Now, the world's largest-circulation philosophy periodical, in The Millions, a prominent online literary journal, and in Lines of Flight, a contemporary publication encouraging innovative thought on philosophy and contemporary society. I have also had short fiction published in non+x, a journal of contemporary Buddhist cultural criticism, and in the literary periodical Literate Sunday.
Feel free to reach out if you have other questions.
Warmly,
-Akilesh Ayyar