AI is a disruptive force. I was skeptical about its impact but now seeing the rapid developments by Anthropic I can say I am now a convert. While in 2025 AI was in development stage at this point we are in an accelerated implementation stage.

There are some significant changes I see happening:

• More work will be expected out of fewer people. Companies like Tata, Infosys and other outsourcing firms will likely require more output per person as AI can fulfill a lot of the simple tasks. Specialists will likely be turned into AI tools. The people doing the tasks will become reviewers, not writers.
• As people and companies build their own tooling specific to their company’s use case the need for data becomes more important. Data becomes a way of building tools.
• Services as a business model will be impacted. If companies can put together their own custom solutions targeting their needs with AI tools guiding them then the need for services becomes niche. Companies will hire consultants for specific cases not for general purpose.
• AI will make everyone entrepreneurs. The cost of building something is going way, way down. While there will be slop, we are going to rapidly be able to create new things. The cycle of creative destruction will speed up. New products can be created and launched rapidly. We are back to the MVP world where even Microsoft is shipping junk product to iterate quickly. Yes, there will be slop but this is a matter of normality for most startups. So slop in of itself is not that problematic.

What does it mean for us?

We are going to transition to becoming an AI first product company. We will be focusing less and less on services and will be completely focused on products that have AI at the core. The products will be based around being inputs for AI to make additional decisions around.

The goal is for us to launch a product quickly, set up the processes for improvement, and sell and market with a few workers. This will require a mindset shift in the way we work. Currently, we have a services mindset where delivering high quality work to customers is expected instead we need to change to a mindset of velocity.

Some things we need to do:

• Launch fast. We need to launch new initiatives quickly. The market will tell us based on if people buy our products or not.
• Less permissions needed. Everyone should be able to build and deploy new features without asking for permissions. We will have a few criteria but everyone should be able to launch as needed.
• Vibe code, deploy and test. Build quickly using vibe coding. Use AI tools to launch new offerings.

It is easy to ruminate on the past and future of a business but it is hard to see where you are in the present. Data forces you to understand the present. Once you have figured out the present and always clearing out anything in the past or future then you can clear your mind to the capabilities you have and remove anything that does not provide value.

The data fueled present is much like meditation for an individual. It forces a company to also be in th present.

To get started in my reading I am focusing my energies on a few sections:

• Biographies. Read biographies of saints and yogis.
• Meditation. Learn the foundations of meditation.
• Cooking. Learn how to cook well.

This also includes a general study of the Hanuman Chalisa, Yoga Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita. The goal is to deepen the study of these three texts.

However, to understand the texts is to study the saints who lived the yogic life. The stories are easier to remember than prescriptions so that is the focus of my energies. Once the stories are internalized then I can then understand the Bhakti and Prayer. The Sadhana portion is there to remove the blemishes and figure out how to lead a more yogic life.

The goal is to build devotion. It is not at this point to decern Brahman or get into pure meditation. It is to purify myself and to get into a belief of Isvara without doubt.

I am updating my routine where I am changing Pray to be Contemplation. I realize that my work time is important to, well, work on Sakha and Samaja related tasks. What I constituted as the Pray time was also meditation, svadyaya, reading classics, and learning Hindi. So I am changing the Pray time to Contemplation time. This allows me to use this time a bit more broadly to improve each of the limbs that I have including studying cooking, exercise and other sadhana adjacent things.

As I contemplate sevaka and samaja, I realized that the sevaka exists to promote Sanatana Dharma. I want people trained within the framework to use it to promote Santana Dharma. Having a separate samaja pillar doesn't make sense with that. So samaja will be merged back into sevaka under yama. The goal is to outgrow the ego, and promotion of Sanatana Dharma is the way to accomplish that task.

Sevaka exists to build good character, to lead society. A sevaka is also a representation of society. So society should not be something separate from that world view.

Lastly, this simplifies what had before the focus. There should be two focuses sevaka and sakha. The sakha is the business units to help society. The sevaka is a part building and influencing society.

I made the practice of the sevaka unnecessarily complex. A fault of my own ignorance and misunderstanding and lack of depth of knowledge. To simplify I am going back to the eight limbs of Patanjali as the core practice. When I started a year ago I wanted to incorporate the four yogas into a single practice but now realize that the eight limbs already combine the four. Maharishi Patanjali already figured it out, I being some guy don't need to replace this system with my own when I haven't even fully figured out His.

So I am simplifying the sevaka path to just be the practice of the astanga while incorporating the Vedanta philosophy. This simplifies the entire sevaka path to just be the Patanjali path which makes it much much easier to communicate as well as knowing what aspects of the path I need to improve.

• All yoga is now under sevaka.

Constantly thinking about work doesn’t focus my brain it scatters it and makes it difficult to focus. So I’ve split my days into three two hour chunks. Scientifically the brain can only work son intensely for a short burst of time. An hour and half seems to be about he max but I given myself a buffer of 15 mins on both sides to get going.

A problem I have faced is a guilt for not studying the shastras on a daily basis. A guilt for not studying that doesn’t lead to any positive outcome other than stress. Sometimes I want to study something else other than shastras. So I am reframing my Work schedule to learn, work and study with a focused intensity.

This means the most important spiritual tasks are my meditations. The true culmination of Bhakti and Karma Yoga. While I do want to study the shastras I will read them in focused intense manner similar to the other tasks that I have in mind. I think this will mean I can focus on finishing a complete text instead of just reading a couple of pages a day. I keep forgetting what I read if I just read a couple of pages a day.

So my work is going to be focused intensely on specific tasks:

• Study intensely a book or topic
• Memorize shastras
• Work on business tasks

I wrote previously that I wanted to cultivate devotion as pure meditation was not providing me with the Brava that I wanted. Further, just sitting in meditation all the time was leading me to get a bit antsy. Meditation creates focus, but if Bhagavan isn’t in focus, then the carnal pleasures become the objects of focus. So I decided that I want to focus more time on devotion as part of my day that takes on various forms not just meditation. What I came to realize is a few things:

1. Meditation time should be considered Devotion time. Whether I am on the meditation cushion or not I need to develop a love of Bhagavan. By focusing only on meditation I am limiting myself to potentially other forms of Bhakti. Further, 10-20 minutes of deep meditation is much better than 30 minutes of spacy meditation. I am focusing more on quality as opposed to length.
2. This devotion time I can use for other things. I need to get into the shastras more deeply and this time spent throughout the day is time I can use for this focus. Further, I can use it as a time for prayer, sastra reading, meditation, and hatha yoga study, and reading of some classics.

In order to simplify my life even more I have divided my day into two buckets: Devotion and Work. Yes, I include time for exercise, family and cleaning. But for the most part the day is simply broken into 2 hour work chunks and 30 minute devotion chunks. This radically simplifies what I need to think about at any given time. This also gives me ample time throughout the day for devotion and thinking about Bhagavan to center myself.

I still hope to meditate about 30 minutes a day, but it also gives me 2.5 hours to dedicate to studying other things.

Lastly, the Devotion time should be focused on improving one of the 8 Limbs. This is a significantly important point. By improving the 8 Limbs I am focusing on progressing spiritually not just arbitrarily reading things.

While I am reading a great many texts at the moment the end goal for all of this is to get to liberation. All this reading isn't for fun, there is an end goal in mind. There are better things to read than how to discipline yourself.

As I read these texts I am overcompensating by reading more than I need to with the assumption that I incorporate the best ideas into my Sadhana, move on from the texts that didn't provide much, and then largely focus on the sastas and the texts that were exceptional.

So if the texts in svadhyaya seem like a lot, it's because I am trying to read a lot of texts to find the best ones.

To prioritize my read texts in the following order according to the teacher:

1. Swami Dayananda Saraswati
2. Swami Chinmayananda
3. Swami Vivekananda
4. Swami Sivananda
5. Others

This order is based on the cummulative knowledge of the teachers and in many ways the teacher's ability to communicate to me through the language they use. While I do like reading Swami Sivananda, the language is a bit more dated than the jokes that Swami Dayananda Saraswati uses. In this way the texts just feel more alive and relevant to me.

I am no trying to say that the other teachers aren't good, but I am trying to prioritize my ability to understand the texts and incorporate the ideas into my Sadhana quickly.

While I love Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda’s teachings, the Vedanta Societies of the West seem to be tailored to whites and Bengalis. While I have no problem with these institutions being devoted to developing Vedanta for those who are not from Indian backgrounds this poses a limitation for myself who is from an Indian background.

The Vedanta Societies seem to have taken on a very church like demeanor which is not something that I grew up with going to Hindu Temples. While I will continue with reading and thinking about Ramakrishna and Vivekananda I think in terms of a sangh I will focus on the Chinmaya Mission. Vivekananda is modern India’s spiritual father and if I were in India I would follow the tracks of the Ramakrishna Mission. However, the Ramakrishna in the West seems to be about promoting Vedanta among non-Indians. It sets aside the Puranic literature.

While I do believe in the universality of Vedanta to all religious systems, I am Indian. The Puranic literature with the plethora of devas and asuras plays an important part in the Vedanta teaching. The Puranic texts form a moral compass from which we can then move to the more metaphysical aspects of Jnana Yoga. Unfortunately, it seems the Hindu smriti texts are not a core teaching of the Ramakrishna tradition. In this regard the Ramakrishna tradition seems to be lacking. By trying to be universalistic in its teaching of Vedanta, it limits the focus on any specific Bhakti outside of Sri Ramakrishna and Sri Sarada Devi’s teachings. While the teachings of Ramakrishna are quite illuminating I do want to study more of the smriti’s which don’t seem to have a strong focus.

So I think the natural lineage of Vivekananda in modern Indian context is the Karma Yoga ideal built into the RSS. While I will continue on reading the texts of the Ramakrishna Mission as they are quite good in terms of practice I will center on the RSS as the Vivekananda lineage.

While Chinmaya is a primarily Jnana Yoga path, the beginning of Jnana Yoga is Bhakti and Chinamayanada does seem to cover a lot of the early teachings of Adi Shankaracharya. Further, while Vivekananda built the Ramakrishna Societies in the West when there were not many if any Indians, Chinamayananda started in the 70s when more Indians were in place. So lots of the traditions that I grew up with are in place.

Anyways, from a sangh and a family standpoint the Chinmaya Mission seems to be closer to what I want to be a part of in terms of community.