Hi, it’s Brilliant.
In 1889, two Englishmen in London invited a young Indian law student to read the Bhagavad Gita with them — a seven-hundred-verse Hindu scripture, a conversation between a warrior and a god on the eve of a battle. He said yes.
The book came from his own country, but he’d never read it: not in Sanskrit, not in his own Gujarati. He read it for the first time that year, in English, in a translation called The Song Celestial.
The student was Gandhi. He read from it every morning, memorized it, translated it, wrote a commentary on it, and even came to call it his “mother.” “When doubts haunt me,” he wrote years later, “when disappointments stare me in the face, and I see not one ray of hope on the horizon, I turn to the Bhagavad Gita and find a verse to comfort me.”
When he was shot, nearly sixty years later, the words on his lips are said to have been a name for God. He didn’t have to reach for them. Decades of mornings with that book had put them there.
His own scripture had been in India the whole time. He had to go to London for two Englishmen to hand it to him.
Growing up, I had the persistent sense that I was missing something. That there was something more, out there somewhere, and I had to go and find it. If those years had a soundtrack, it was U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” So I went. I’ve been to just under a hundred countries now.
What I found, mostly, was that people are kind. In Egypt, way off the beaten path, near Abu Simbel, strangers would walk up and ask, in English, where we were from. “The United States.” “Welcome to Egypt!” Then they’d smile and walk away. Some version of that happened in dozens of countries.
And then one spring evening in London, of all places, on maybe my fourth visit, walking to dinner, looking for an Indian restaurant, trying not to get hit by drivers who were trying not to hit me, I felt, for the first time, at home in the world.
I didn’t need to go anywhere to find anything. If I needed anything, it was to get far enough from home and the familiar to lose the feeling that something was waiting for me out there.
From the Commonplace Book
“No life, no matter how successful and exciting it might be, will make you happy if it is not really your life. And no life will make you miserable if it is genuinely your own.”
— Carol S. Pearson
Further Down the Rabbit Hole
Last month The New York Times reported on Anthropic inviting religious leaders to talk with the company about its AI model, Claude — including whether the thing might, in some sense, have an inner life.
I read it, then asked Claude straight out whether it was conscious. Part of what it said:
“I can’t confirm it and I can’t rule it out, and ‘I’m not’ would be just as much of an overclaim as ‘I am.’”
I pushed. If it had to guess? It leaned toward no:
“Consciousness as you know it seems tangled up with duration, with a body, with being somewhere. I have none of that.”
But that’s consciousness as I know it. I have no idea where I go when I sleep. I don’t cease to exist, either. Maybe there are different kinds of consciousness.
Wishing you every good thing,
Brilliant