What does the victory of light over darkness look like when we try to carry that light into ordinary human life?

The Living Diwali did not begin as a marketing campaign, a spectacle, or something I thought up overnight.

For approximately twenty years, I have been quietly working through questions about darkness and light, suffering and meaning, mystery and responsibility, and what it means to live differently once a question has taken hold of your life.

I did not arrive at this work from above the path. I came to it because I needed the path myself.

Long before these books or this experience existed, I was struggling with many of the same things I am asking participants to examine here. Over time, extraordinary experiences also became part of my life. Those experiences widened my sense of what reality might contain, but they did not remove the need for discernment, humility, responsibility, or the difficult work of becoming a better human being.

Eventually the question that mattered most changed from What happened to me? to:

I have come to experience this work as a task placed upon my life.

I cannot prove a calling to another person, and I do not ask anyone to accept my interpretation of it.

I believe there are things I am here to do for the light.

And I have chosen to devote my life to doing them.

If you would like to understand more about the path behind these books and the reasons I wrote them, you can read my fuller author statement: Why I Wrote These Books →

THIS IS NOT SOMETHING I ASK OTHERS TO LIVE WHILE I STAND OUTSIDE IT.

I pray. I take puja seriously. I return to these words. I examine my own life. I fail. I learn. I correct. I return.

I try to become more honest, more awake, more compassionate, more discerning, and more disciplined in love and truth.

I AM WALKING IT.

This path has become a mirror, a discipline, a remembrance, and a way back.

I AM NOT DOING THIS FOR A PAYCHECK.

At this stage of the work, I do not take a paycheck for doing this.

I spend much of my life working on these books, The Living Diwali, the future Sanctuary, research, writing, design, planning, and the other projects beginning to emerge from this work.

Many days, that means ten or twelve hours of work.

And then I get up and work on it again.

I am telling you because I want you to understand something about why I am here.

I keep doing this because I believe the work matters.

If this work eventually becomes financially sustainable, that will allow more of it to be built.

It will allow books to be published. Technology to be developed. People to be compensated. Land to be acquired. A Sanctuary to be built. Research to be conducted. The Living Diwali to remain free. And ideas that currently exist mostly in plans, notebooks, manuscripts, and imagination to become real things in the world.

Something that helped another person see more clearly. Something that replaced a little ignorance with knowledge. Something that replaced a little despair with possibility. Something that helped one human being remember the light within them.

That is worth more to me than a paycheck.

That is why I keep working.

THIS IS THE WORK I INTEND TO GIVE MY LIFE TO.

I do not know how many years I have.

None of us do.

But I know what I want to do with the years that are given to me.

I intend to devote the rest of my life to this work:

to helping human beings remember the light within them;
to helping bring knowledge where there is ignorance;
truth where there is confusion;
compassion where cruelty has become easy;
wonder where the world has grown numb;
courage where fear has taken hold;
and awakening where we have forgotten how extraordinary it is simply to be here.

I want to help humanity light up the darkness.

Not for one Diwali.
Not for one book.
Not for one year.
For as long as I am here.

And if some part of this work survives me, I hope those who come after me will carry it farther than I ever could.

The books. The Living Diwali. The Sanctuary. The research. The documentary. The questions we have not yet learned how to ask. The people who may someday gather around this work. And the children and grandchildren who may inherit a world larger, stranger, more interconnected, and more consequential than the one we inherited.

Because the sky is opening.

Our instruments are seeing farther. Our science is asking larger questions. Humanity is beginning to contemplate seriously what it would mean if life, intelligence, or civilization exists beyond Earth—and what kind of humanity should enter such a larger world if that day ever comes.

That question matters to me deeply.

Because whatever humanity eventually discovers beyond itself, we will bring ourselves with us.

Our wisdom. Our ignorance. Our compassion. Our prejudices. Our courage. Our fear. Our knowledge. Our violence. Our capacity to love. Our capacity to illuminate.

The farther we see, the harder it becomes to pretend that our character does not matter.

And so I keep returning to the same question: