33 posts tagged with "yama"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The path of yoga that I have been exploring is focused on devotion (bhakti/karma), discipline (raja), and knowledge (jnana). But what I realize is that before anything can be done on the discipline and knowledge path a firm foundation of devotion needs to be established.

This I don't have yet. I have it then I lose it, I get distracted, my ego takes over. I plan for the future! The devotion aspect is quite missing or not deeply rooted and it gets pulled into the whirlwind of life.

The problem I see is that devotion requires always being in the present whereas the ego is always scheming for the future or ruminating on the past. The past is gone and the future is uncertain. But the ego always wants something or another.

I also get caught up on history, economics, politics, and all these external things that are not in my control. These are transient things. They are unreal and fleeting. The only thing certain about them is that they will occur over and over again.

What we are about to face is the Bronze Age Collapse, or a collapse of a civilization. This has happened before and will happen again. So why worry about it? Getting pulled into these things is a distraction.

The only focus should be on devotion and doing the work. Whatever happens, happens.

So I am going to focus on devotion first. The question is how to cultivate devotion.

While I have been practicing meditation and have enjoyed the technical aspects of it, after all that is what the Yoga Sutras are, the problem is that it is not cultivating devotion. I am getting mindful, but without a firm foundation of devotion, my mind is restless and distracted.

It needs to be rooted which I don't have yet.

So while I will continue developing my meditation practice, I am primarily going to focus on devotion. In one way meditation is easier once you do it a while, but devotion is harder because it requires surrendering the ego.

What I realize is that devotion is based on stories. While meditation is a process it is stories that we remember and that we need to connect with. Bhakti is pure duality, Raja is about bridging that duality, and Jnana is about non-duality. So in devotion the first step is to just love Isvara without ego. The way to love Isvara is through stories.

So the goal for devotion is to:

1. Read stories of devotion from various traditions. (Bhagavad Gita, Ramayana, Puranas, etc.)
2. Read the classics from various traditions. (Iliad, Odyssey, etc.)
3. Read stories about saints and devotees from various traditions. (Tulsidas, St. Augustine, etc.)
4. Practice how to cultivate devotion through rituals, prayers, and other practices.

But the focus is stories. To read stories and immerse myself in them.

I am deprecating Deming incorporating those features into this website. The core features should not live separately. Further, I am putting Deepfacts, DBAZero and PolicyCop on hold. I am trying to reduce the number of projects I am working on to focus on the ones I think I can deliver the most value with. With DiscountCloud and Kubespot, I think I have enough to keep me busy for the foreseeable future.

Deming was a good experiment but I think it is better to have everything integrated into one platform. This website can serve as the hub for all my thoughts on business so it is better for that to live here.

So the projects I am going to focus on are:

• DiscountCloud
• Kubespot
• Surya Health
• Yerra Realty

Everything else is on hold or deprecated or merged into this website.

As I mentioned before my role has changed to Organization, Process Management, and People Development. What this actually means in practice is a few very specific things.

• Organization. Constant cleaning and standardization of the organization to ensure that it is optimized for learning and growth.
• Process Management. Constant review of processes to ensure that they are growing linearly.
• People Development. This is the most important part and what I realize is that people development is the core of everything. If I can develop people well then the organization and processes will take care of themselves.

What I am finding is that people development is to not focus on the company but developing the character of the people. The goal is to not extract from people, but to develop them such that they fit a higher purpose. So 80% of my focus will be on people development.

This changes things quite a bit because I have essentially become a teacher. My role is to teach people how to be better versions of themselves. The way to do so and the way I feel like I have become a better version of myself is through the study of shastras and the classics.

So People Development will entail:

1. Practical Training
2. Work Reviews
3. Shastra Study

So if my focus is on people development then what I focus on is how to teach people to be better versions of themselves. This means that I am largely focused on lesson plans and how to structure learning. This means a large part of my work is study.

We are standardizing on Github Actions for all routines. We are doing this by running self-hosted runners and migrating a lot of the tasks that we run on Kubernetes jobs over. While Kubernetes is great, one of the problems I have found is that when the entire team is developers having a common hook into Github makes it a whole lot easier to see what is happening. Since everyone already uses Github, having the actual job processing be in Github is not a bad idea.

Further, since we are a services first company, using Github Actions workflows to manually run tasks basically creates custom workflows that make it really easy to build pipelines.

As much as I like Github Actions one of the main pains is that the cost of it is very high. So running within a self-hosted environment seems like a good way to go. However, there does seem to be a new cost model coming out that may make it more expensive, but we will see what happens.

I have migrated completely to Github Issues for all my task management. This means that all my todos, tasks, and notes are now in Github Issues. This allows me to leverage Github's powerful issue tracking, labeling, and project management capabilities to manage my work more effectively. While I do not by any means think that Github Issues is the best task management system out there, it does connect to the Git repo and Github Actions which makes it a lot easier to automate workflows.

Further, as a services company, having everyone on Github makes it a lot easier to manage tasks and collaborate. Every company is on Github so the collaboration across companies makes it exceedingly easy. While I do think that Github is getting enshitified over time AI and all, it is still a powerful platform. While I do hope that I can move to Forgejo in the future, for now Github is the primary platform for everything.