Scrutiny, not applause: When a Philosophy meets its skeptics

Indian spiritual figures have been travelling abroad for more than a century. Halls have filled, applause has sounded, and followings have formed across the world. My tour of Britain in May to July 2026 might, at first glance, look like one more link in that same chain. But what mattered in those rooms was not the name of the venue; it was who sat across from me, and the standard against which the argument was placed.

The tour began on 30 May at the Cambridge Union, moderated by Professor Jaideep Prabhu. That same day, a student put her point plainly. "At Cambridge, learning is based on evidence, and every belief is tested against a standard. So how is this philosophy any different from any other belief?" It is the kind of question most figures in this field rarely face on a public stage. The answer was not a defence. "Let us rebuild this framework right now, right here, from scratch," I said, "leaning as little as possible on belief and dogma." If a framework is universal, it cannot belong to any one person; it has to be built together and tested together. What took place was not a lecture but a construction, halted again and again by objections and demands for clarity. A session scheduled for one hour stretched into nearly three sittings across two days. Later, when a participant thanked me for sharing "my philosophy," I corrected her: it was not my philosophy; it had been built together, in that very room. When someone asked where the framework drew its authority from, I set the question aside. Nothing had yet been asserted that needed defending. The "I" being questioned is real only because it keeps being uttered; you yourself are its only proof.

In the days that followed Cambridge, the tour rested on this same principle. At the London School of Economics there was a dialogue with Professor Jonathan Birch, who has led the Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience and whose work has shaped Britain's animal welfare laws. At University College London there was a long conversation with Professor Steve Fleming, an expert in metacognition. In Hampstead, there was one with the Cambridge-trained biologist Rupert Sheldrake. At Queen Mary University, with Professor Lars Chittka, a Fellow of the Royal Society and an expert in insect cognition, as well. And with the Harvard-educated psychologist Dr Melanie Joy, who works on the psychology of eating animals, as well.

These gatherings assembled not for emulation but for examination. Those present had every reason to challenge the framework I was putting forward, not only in practical terms but in their own professional interest.

The Mistaken "I"

At the centre of this philosophical framework is a question that shifts the very source of human problems. The real issue is not external but psychological: a mistaken sense of "I" that identifies itself with the body and the mind. Vedanta calls it the ego. From it arise those patterns of fear, desire, conflict and consumption that widen into social and ecological crises. The implication is direct, and uncomfortable: without examining this inner structure, external solutions such as law, technology and reform will remain incomplete, because the same agent that creates the problem stays active within the solution too.

This error reaches furthest at the table. In physical terms a human being is almost entirely animal; the small remainder is not a mark of rank but a swelling, and that swelling is the ego. It is what lets a person look away from the eyes of a lamb, and the same practised looking-away later lets him look away from the eyes of his own child. No appetite of the body requires this; the demand is psychological. It is not the human being who kills; it is the ego.

During London Climate Action Week, the present climate effort was compared to a society that keeps repairing roads and ambulances without touching the condition of the drunk driver. The belief that technology and policy will solve the crises has to be abandoned. Technology is born not of human need but of human desire, and what the world calls success is, to a large extent, only another name for a growing carbon footprint. At the LSE, after a conversation with the former French climate diplomat Gautier Houël, who has worked around COP26, he wrote on his social media: "Most climate discussions stay focused on technology, policy, finance or innovation. This one began somewhere else: with us."

Rooms Built to Test

At Queen Mary University of London, when the ego was called the "master exploiter" seated behind every discovery, Professor Chittka offered examples where scientific work led directly to conservation. "I am perhaps a little less pessimistic," he said. The answer came not by stepping back from the framework but from within it. The agent that does the damage is the one that repairs it too, and the repair does not acquit it. It is a clean-up campaign run by the exploiter himself. When the violence of animals was called instinct rather than something psychological, Chittka countered with field observations. The answer was that the observer is himself projecting his human interiority onto animal behaviour. "Sir, you yourself have long campaigned against anthropomorphism," I said, "and I am afraid that at this moment you are doing exactly that." I asked him to name a single problem on the planet that was not of human making. He would not accept the terms, saying he was reluctant to accept that human beings are bad or evil by default, and he offered his own life as an instance: he had been shaped by his experiences, he said, and saw nothing wrong in the view. That, I replied, is still the ego speaking. Neither bowed, and neither was left without an answer. The dialogue ended without agreement, but with full engagement on both sides.

The LSE evening was different. The room was full of warmth, not tension. But the warmth did not lessen the central disagreement. It was argued that animal welfare law has been growing for nearly two centuries, and yet neither the rate of species extinction nor per-capita meat consumption has fallen. The one who makes the law and the one who breaks it are, in the end, the same person. Professor Birch did not give up his ground on the instrument. "Do laws help? I think they do. But I do not believe they solve all our problems." He granted, too, that directly cultivating compassion would be the better road, and reached for Bentham: the question is not whether a being can reason, but whether it can suffer. The sharpest moment of the evening came when Professor Birch said, "But I think we matter." I answered at once, "No, we do not." His counter-question was direct: what measurable change has come from my work? An answer exists. Media reports record more than a million animals saved from slaughter in 2024, and more than two hundred thousand registered students in my structured programmes of self-enquiry. Whether these figures meet Birch's standards is a fair matter for debate, though the numbers are real.

Even at UCL, when Professor Fleming appreciated an analogy of mine that separates metacognition from self-knowledge, the disagreement remained. A car's speedometer reads the system, while the driver examines himself and, in the end, finds that there is no driver at all. But Fleming did not agree. "There is one part of your analogy where I would perhaps differ," he said, "and that is the notion of the driver." I did not sidestep the point but carried it forward. If the system has no separate dashboard, then the very sense of a separate ego reading the dashboard is itself the error, a loop turning back upon itself with no real existence. And insight begins precisely where that loop steps back. Fleming immediately came back and asked: if the ego is an illusion, then whose is the error? My answer was that the one who is speaking and thinking is the one predicating itself as well. No separate observer exists apart from the ego who could say that there is an error. Fleming took the disagreement to its very limit, holding out a research goal that runs against the whole framework: an account of the mind so complete in its computations that there is no need to admit any third thing. My answer was direct: "You may explain it, and the ego will say, I did the explaining." By the close, his account of the evening and mine had settled on the same image: two people climbing one hill from opposite sides. Dr Megan Peters, who chaired the session, ended by noting how much the two approaches had converged, and where they still diverged.

With Dr Melanie Joy, the exchange turned the question inward. She agreed that the deepest change must be spiritual, and asked whether psychological work might prepare the ground for it, giving people the capacity to face the harder question. I marked the boundary of her field rather than dismissing it. Psychology is the ego studying the ego-infested mind; it brings the disturbed mind into view, but not the one doing the disturbing, who hides behind the study as the one conducting it. She did not concede, and said she was not sure she could have faced the spiritual question at all without first doing the psychological work on herself.

In Kingston, the conversation with Rupert Spira was the closest philosophically, yet even here it was not allowed to dissolve into mutual admiration. Where most Advaita teaching turns towards awareness, I keep bringing the conversation back to the ego. "If you are speaking of spirituality without the ego," I said, "then we are speaking of medicine without the patient." He offered a Zen line on speech and silence, and said he agreed with me up to a point. I did not accept the reading, and said the weight of that story falls not on the speaking or the silence but on the "I" that imagines itself doing either. Here the vocabulary was extended on its own ground in such a way that it challenged not only the conversation but the tradition standing behind it.

A Weak Engine for Growth

In these dialogues the risk leaned to one side. The professors were on their own ground, in their own subject, in their own institution, before their own colleagues. The conversation was held in their language, the language of empirical science, and not in the tradition's own vocabulary. In a format of that kind, the framework had to be tested every time, and there was no room to escape by saying, "this lies beyond the scope of my tradition." The established guru circuit usually keeps its distance from a format like this.

Comparisons are inevitable, so it is better to make them with care. Vivekananda at Chicago in 1893 belongs to another category: great oratory before a receptive audience, not cross-examination. The nearer forms are older and rarer. The old Indian practice of shastrartha staged exactly this kind of public contest, a thinker placing his position and his standing before a qualified judge. In the modern period, the long conversations between J. Krishnamurti and the physicist David Bohm come closest in form. One small coincidence is worth noting: Rupert Sheldrake, who spent close to two hours in dialogue at Hampstead, had known Krishnamurti and recalled their meetings in England, California and India.

The framework I carried was not built to gather large crowds. It has no branded technique, no repeatable programme, no certificate. These are not statements that recruit customers; they generate friction. A format like this produces more resistance than enrolment. By conventional measures, it is a weak engine for growth.

What this proves is limited, but real. It made a demand of both sides that traditional gurudom does not. The speaker had to bear the risk of being shown wrong, and the audience had to take part in examination in place of applause. In a field where the test of success is usually the size of the crowd, this tour set down another test: whether the argument holds up in that room. It is an unusual question to ask, and it says a great deal. Whether this can grow larger, or even wishes to, remains an open question.

Acharya Prashant is a philosopher and author whose work centres on self-inquiry and its application to contemporary life; Views presented are personal.