diGITAl
Enlightenment without transcendence
I finally finished reading the Bhagavad Gita after trying to read it for many years.
By chapter eighteen, Arjuna agrees to pick up the bow. This is the resolution. The enlightened conclusion.
The Gita is, at its core, an attempt to answer an impossible question: what do you do when the right action is unclear and the cost of acting is devastating? It tries to address timeless questions around human psychology, ethics, and collective responsibility.
Its answer, distilled across eighteen chapters, is this: equanimous action. Not happiness. Not peace. The ability to keep acting without being paralysed by attachment, fear, grief, or any other outcome.
Reading it now, I realised how familiar that emotional posture already feels.
Not because we’ve become spiritually evolved, but because modern life has trained us into a strange form of emotional continuity. Enough content cycling fast enough, and the nervous system stops fully distinguishing between scales of experience. We scroll past a genocide and then a dog video and our expression barely changes. Not because we are cruel. Because we are saturated.
The Gita calls this nishkama karma. Action without attachment to result. Do what you must. Don’t cling. Don’t flinch. (Regular Tuesday in the corporate world.)
There is a version of non-attachment that comes from devotion, discipline, and genuinely working through what you are and how you impress your identity upon the world. And there is a version that comes from exhaustion, algorithmic overstimulation, and the outsourcing of judgment to systems that do not have any.
From the outside, these look identical.
The Gita would say the difference is entirely internal. That true equanimity is sattvic, rooted in clarity, not indifference. I believe this. I also think it is becoming almost impossible to verify from the outside, and that we are building systems capable of performing the output without any of the interiority that was supposed to produce it.
The ideal digital subject, when you look at what the attention economy actually rewards, is calm, adaptive, unattached, identity-fluid, capable of witnessing catastrophe without interruption. Monetizable at rest.
Which is a corrupted mirror of what the Gita points toward.
Not enlightenment. The symptoms of it. Delivered passively. At scale. Without the wisdom required to hold them.
I don’t know if this is evolution or dissociation. The Gita probably has an answer.
What I do know is that we are becoming very good at performing the external shape of detachment without necessarily resolving anything underneath it.
Arjuna at least had to arrive there through a spiritual crisis.
We seem to be reaching it through overstimulation.
— Aastha Johri, Studio Agor