Agitation
Books sometimes slip into our hands not as companions but as intruders. They stir what we would rather leave settled, and agitate the marrow. For me, it was Dan Brown’s The Secret of Secrets and Brian Muraresku’s The Immortality Key.

Brown toys with the old suspicion that mystics, epileptics, and lunatics are cousins – that visions are nothing more than the sparks of a disordered brain. Muraresku presses harder, arguing that the roots of Western faith were steeped in psychedelics, that bread and wine were once doors to dissolution, not symbols of story.

Both left many of us restless. Their claim was not subtle: religion’s secret is not story at all, but vision – mind unmoored, self dissolved, the mundane discarded. And yet, everything in us resists. Mystical states may come – in prayer, in silence, in fleeting moments when the self grows thin – but to remain in that atmosphere feels like having the breath sucked out of the established universe.

And so, the agitation sharpens into a question: what is life’s purpose here? To remain mindful of dharma, refining the soul through karma yoga? Or to chase after visions, to dissolve into no-thingness, leaving story and duty behind? One road promises expansion, the other erasure. One keeps us tethered to the Cord; the other tempts us to cut it.

Taste
Yet mysticism cannot be brushed aside so easily. In prayer we taste it – those sudden thinnings of the self, dissolving into something vast and wordless. They arrive quietly and vanish just as quietly. They are tastes, not destinations.

“Taste and see that the Lord is good.”
Tasting does not mean forsaking the meal of daily bread, or abandoning the labour of one’s hands. It means carrying the memory of sweetness back into the ordinary.

The Gita offers a parable of this balance. On the battlefield, Arjuna is shown the Vishvarupam – Krishna’s cosmic form. The world dissolves. Friend and foe are consumed in the devouring mouth of fire. Time collapses into a single blaze. It is the mystic’s vision granted in full.

But Arjuna cannot bear it. His bow slips. His knees buckle. He pleads with Krishna to return to a gentler form. Krishna does. He withdraws the Infinite, stands again as friend and charioteer, and commands: rise, return to your battle. Fulfil your dharma. This is your karma-bhumi.

Crisis
That scene captures a dilemma familiar across cultures. Mystical flashes do come – in silence, in prayer, in visions, in substances both sacred and profane. They reveal the Infinite, yes, but they can also unmoor. They burn away the scaffolding of self, duty, and story. For some temperaments, this is liberation. For others, it is suffocation. And so most return, like Arjuna, to the field of action – chastened by the glimpse, but recommitted to their dharma.

Here lies the deeper crisis of faith in India. Christianity speaks in linear arcs – creation, fall, redemption, fulfilment. The soul is a foetus nourished to be born into purpose. Hindu cosmology circles endlessly – karma, dharma, rebirth, dissolution. The mystic calls us not to be born, but to be erased. Between the arc and the circle, I feel stretched, agitated, even divided.

Weaving
Perhaps reconciliation lies not in choosing one current over the other, but in allowing them to braid. Christianity’s linear story offers direction: a soul refining, maturing, destined for fulfilment. Hindu cosmology offers depth: karma and dharma as instruments of shaping, brahmand as the vastness into which all stories converge. Together, they suggest not contradiction but complement.

The foetus in the womb of the cosmos becomes a living metaphor. It is sustained by a Cord, nourished by a hidden Placenta – the mysterious interface through which the Infinite pours itself into the finite. The foetus is not random, not rootless; it is born into a story older than stars. Karma becomes the loom on which it is woven. Dharma becomes the pattern it is asked to trace. Each act, each choice, refines the soul and contributes to the collective body.

What the foetus learns, it returns to the whole. Each drop of refinement flows into the global unconscious, until the many streams converge into the brahmand. The soul’s destiny is not erasure but expansion – not nothing, but everything, a widening into the chorus of all that was and is.

Mysticism, then, need not be dismissed, but reframed. Its flashes are lightning, reminding the foetus of the vastness in which it turns. But they are not the task. The task is still to grow, to refine, to participate in the eternal story. To dissolve prematurely is to abandon the womb before its time. To act faithfully within karma-bhumi is to ripen toward the fullness of the brahmand.

Resolution
The agitation begins to settle here. For life’s purpose need not be framed as a stark choice – mindful karma on one side, mystical dissolution on the other. There is a third way, a way truer to our constitution: to act, to refine, to contribute, while remaining aware of the vastness that cradles us. Mystical flashes are not wasted; they are reminders. But they are not the end. They are seasoning, not the meal.

The foetus is not called to dissolve into the Placenta. It is called to grow by its nourishment, to carry forward an eternal story. Each duty fulfilled, each act refined, expands the soul and adds its voice to the global unconscious. Over lifetimes, over centuries, the chorus deepens until it rises as the brahmand – not silence, but the harmony of all souls maturing together.

Mysticism is honoured, but not enthroned. The bow is not meant to be dropped forever. We return, as Arjuna did, to the field of battle – to karma-bhumi – chastened by the vision, but also strengthened by it. Our dharma remains the path; our karma remains the shaping. To live thus is neither presumption nor cowardice. It is fidelity to the purpose for which we were placed here.
The soul’s destiny is not nothingness. It is expansion. Not erasure, but inclusion. Not vanishing, but becoming.

And so, in answer to the mystic’s hymn of negation, we raise a counter-song – a hymn of affirmation, a hymn of becoming.

Brahmand Shatakam:
A Hymn of Becoming

I am the foetus, turning in silence,
Fed by the Cord of the hidden Placenta.
Not random, not rootless, but held in story,
I am born to carry the eternal flame.

I am the heir of karma unbroken,
I am the bearer of dharma unbending.
Each act inscribes the marrow of my being,
Each trial refines the soul within me.

I am the river that joins the ocean,
I am the drop that returns to the whole.
What I learn, I cast into the vastness,
Until all becomes one brahmand of light.

I am not called to vanish in silence,
I am not drawn to the path of no-thing.
Mysticism, I honour you from afar;
My road is story, my destiny growth.

I am the seed becoming the forest,
I am the spark unfolding the sun.
I am the play that refuses erasure,
I am the womb becoming the cosmos.

I am expansion, not erasure.
I am inclusion, not negation.
I am not nothing; I am everything.
I am soul eternal, maturing to All.

PS:
Books like Dan Brown’s The Secret of Secrets and Muraresku’s The Immortality Key will continue to agitate. They are meant to. They pry at old seams, insisting that faith is not story but secret, not purpose but vision, not birth but dissolution.

But agitation has its place. Without it, we grow complacent. Without it, we never ask what it is we truly believe. These books unsettled us into clarity. They forced us to look again at mysticism, at psychedelics, at the lure of no-thingness. And having looked, we can choose our path with firmer steps.

Mysticism may be lightning, but karma-bhumi is the soil. Visions may dazzle, but story endures. The foetus remains tethered to the Placenta, nourished for a birth that is not erasure but expansion.

This hymn is an answer to their key – not a secret hidden in dissolution, but a song of becoming, sounded in the open.