India, Part Two
Conversation Threads
I could write extensively about the people I met at the ashram: the corporate director who left his empire to seek more meaning in his life, the Vipassanā devotee who found her way to Advaita, the retiree questioning love’s endurance, the mother torn between duty and self-discovery.
This essay captures only two of the many conversations that shaped my time here. The first explores how tradition, gender, and spiritual practice intersect. The second reflects on the compatibility of contemplation and science, two modes of inquiry that often seem at odds but might not be.
As always, I hope you enjoy reading, and I welcome your reflections!
On Women and Spiritual Life
After a meditation session, a few other women from the group and I made our way to a tiny café nearby where the croissants tasted like brioche.
Between us, we spanned atheist, Jewish, Christian, and Orthodox traditions. As we sipped our coffees, our conversation turned to what it’s like growing up atheist versus religious, and how each of us was approaching Advaita Vedānta from such different starting points. We reminisced about the latest kirtan (chanting session), where villagers had gathered at the ashram. Among the swamis (renunciant teachers) was one, and only one, woman from Brazil, once a psychiatrist. I wish I’d spoken to her, but I didn’t get the chance. Her question to Swami J, the next day was remarkable:
“Once we become realized, what is left to do in this world?”
“Service”, he replied.
On one side, the women from the kirtan circle, the village women, and the children; on the other, the swamis and those serving them. To the left sat the spiritual and community leaders, at the back, we, the Westerners, observed the whole scene from afar. And sprinkled throughout were sevaks (people performing seva, a form of service in the ashram) dressed in white, ensuring the ceremony flowed smoothly.
A circle of women led the chants for three full hours while the swamis sat still and solemn. The energy in the women’s dance was almost transcendental. To witness this contrast, between the women’s multicoloured saris, ornaments, and jewels shimmering as they moved, against the plain white and saffron of the immobile servants and swamis, was arresting.
From there, our talk drifted to how women realise themselves spiritually in a world that asks so much of them, as mothers, caretakers, and workers, and how most spiritual paths have historically been dominated by men (Klingorová & Havlíček, 2015). We spoke about how essential it is for all of us to have the space to flourish spiritually if we feel called to, despite the relentless demands of daily life.
Ways of Knowing
If the first conversation questioned who has access to spiritual life, the second turned to how we access truth altogether.
A friend of mine and I have been debating whether contemplation and science can truly meet. Our conversations tend to orbit around that tension. We keep returning to the same crux: whether these two modes of inquiry can coexist, or whether they’re bound to speak past each other.
Books like The Universe in a Single Atom, where the Dalai Lama explores the overlap between scientific inquiry and contemplative insight, have helped me think more clearly about this. He distinguishes between first-person and third-person ways of knowing1, a distinction some philosophers refer to as perspectival asymmetry or gap (Masi, F., 2023, Milicevic et al., 2025).
The first-person stance studies reality from the inside, using awareness itself as the laboratory. It offers a disciplined path for direct investigation, a thread running through Advaita Vedānta’s vichāra, Buddhist vipassanā, Zen zazen, and even phenomenological epoché in Western thought.
The third-person stance, by contrast, studies the world from the outside, through observation, measurement, and verification, knowledge that can be shared and tested. The friction between them lies in their standards of evidence: the contemplative treats their own subjective filter as data; while the scientist tries to remove it from the equation.
And yet, the gap feels narrower than it once did. Neurophenomenology (Bockelman et al., 2013; Milicevic et al., 2025) now attempts to integrate subjective reports, behavioral data, and neural measures, combining first-, second-, and third-person perspectives into one framework.
Similar work translates contemplative theories into scientific language (Wright et al., 2023), turning centuries of inner observation into ideas science can test. The authors show that meditation traditions, like those found in Buddhism, offer detailed maps of the mind that can be expressed in functional, measurable terms. Their “Thin Model” describes how first-person experiences, such as changes in focus or self-awareness, can be linked to brain and behavioral data.
The tension between first-person and third-person knowing seems to be what the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium is trying to untangle. They study so-called “spiritual” or “mystical” experiences using scientific and clinical methods. Their goal is to understand them rigorously and ethically, integrating subjective reports with measurable data. I find that approach compelling, a kind of epistemic humility that takes both introspection and observation seriously.
Of course, first-person inquiry has its limits. Introspection is prone to bias and interpretation; we often build stories about our experience rather than observe it directly. Yet to ignore the subjective altogether is to fall into a deeper blind spot, the inability to account for the consciousness doing the measuring.
As the Dalai Lama suggests, a more complete understanding of reality and how the mind works may require both perspectives: science to map the outer world of data, evidence, and physical law; contemplation to chart the inner landscape of awareness and experience.
A growing body of work also highlights the value of second-person perspectives, relational or dialogical forms of inquiry where insight arises through interaction rather than isolation (Milicevic et al., 2025). Traditional practices such as satsang could be seen as exemplifying this mode of knowing.