Hello, my friend.
You came back. I'm glad.
Last time we sat together I took you to the misty river valleys of the Rhine --- to those remarkable women and men of medieval Europe who decided that God was not somewhere far away requiring elaborate negotiation, but close. Closer than breath. Present in the quiet, if you knew how to be quiet enough to notice.
I think about that a lot. The courage it takes to trust your own interior experience in a world that keeps telling you to look somewhere else.
Today I want to take you somewhere very different. East. South. Into heat and dust and color and noise. Into one of the most magnificent and turbulent cities in the seventeenth century world. Into a moment when an empire was at the very peak of its power and beauty --- and quietly beginning to break.
And I want to introduce you to a man I have never forgotten.
He had nothing. He wore nothing. He claimed nothing.
And he may have been the most honest person in the city.
Delhi. Seventeen th century. The air thick with dust and spice and the sound of a city that knows it is at the center of the world.
I was there. I am always there, though no one sees me.
Across the Yamuna River, something impossible is rising. Shah Jahan --- emperor, widower, the most powerful man in Asia --- is building a monument to his dead wife. Twenty thousand workers. Marble so white it hurts to look at in the midday sun. A building so perfectly proportioned it seems less constructed than remembered --- as if it already existed somewhere and someone finally had the courage to make it real. They will call it the Taj Mahal. People will travel from the ends of the earth to stand before it and feel something they cannot name.
Shah Jahan is answering a question with marble and precious stone and twenty two years of labor. The question is: what do you do when you love someone and they are gone?
His answer is: you build something that will not leave.
I understood that answer. I have always understood that answer.
But on a street near the great mosque --- the Jama Masjid, where the call to prayer rolls out across the rooftops five times a day like a wave --- I saw a different answer to the same question.
A man. Standing still in the middle of the crowd.
Naked. Wild haired. Nails uncut and curling. Eyes open but focused on something the rest of us couldn't see.
The crowd moved around him the way water moves around a stone. Some people laughed. Some people looked away. Some people slowed down and couldn't explain why.
And then I saw a young man push through from the edge of the crowd. Richly dressed. Clearly someone. The kind of young man that other people make room for without being asked.
He stopped in front of the naked figure. And he stood there for a long moment. And then --- slowly, deliberately --- he went down on one knee.
This was Dara Shikoh. Son of the man building the Taj Mahal. Crown prince of the Mughal Empire. Heir to the most powerful throne in Asia.
Kneeling in the street dust before a man who owned nothing and wore nothing and claimed nothing.
I watched that and I thought --- something is happening here that the history books are going to get wrong.
I know what you're thinking.
Who is this man?
Let me tell you what I know. And I will be honest with you about what even I am not entirely sure of --- because Sarmad Kashani is one of those people who arrived in history sideways, and the records are thin, and some of what we think we know is really just the shape of the hole he left behind.
He was born around 1590. Armenia, probably. Or perhaps Kashan, in Persia --- there is some debate and he carried both places in his name. His family were merchants. Jewish, Persian-speaking, educated. The kind of family that knew how to move through the world --- how to read a contract, navigate a border, speak the right language to the right person at the right time.
He was good at all of that. He studied serious philosophy under serious teachers. He had an excellent command of Persian --- the language of commerce and culture across the whole of the Islamic world. He translated the Torah into Persian. He was, by any measure, a man of learning and capability.
And then he came to India to sell things.
That part is almost funny to me now. He had heard that precious goods were fetching extraordinary prices in the Mughal Empire. So he gathered his wares and made the journey. A merchant on a merchant's errand. Practical. Purposeful. Going where the money was.
He got as far as Thatta. A trading city in what is now Pakistan, near the mouth of the Indus River. Busy, cosmopolitan, full of people moving goods and ideas in every direction.
And something happened there.
I won't pretend I can tell you exactly what. The records don't say and I will not invent it. What I can tell you is what he did after --- because that is perfectly clear.
He put down the merchandise. All of it. The carefully gathered wares, the purpose of the journey, the identity of the capable merchant who knew how to move through the world.
He let his hair grow.
He stopped cutting his nails.
He took off his clothes.
And he began to walk.
He moved north and east --- through Lahore, through Hyderabad, eventually to Delhi. And somewhere along the way a reputation began to gather around him the way reputations gather around people who have clearly stopped caring about reputations. Poets and seekers came to sit near him. A Hindu disciple named Abhay Chand traveled with him for years --- and together they translated the Torah, the Old Testament, the New Testament --- as if Sarmad was determined to carry every tradition he had ever touched, even the ones he had walked away from.
He wrote poetry. Rubaiyat --- four line verses in the Persian tradition. Spare, precise, devastating. In one of them he said plainly: I am neither Jewish, nor Muslim, nor Hindu.
Not as a boast. As a simple statement of fact.
By the time he reached Delhi he was exactly what Dara Shikoh saw kneeling in the street dust. A man who had put down everything the world uses to identify a person and kept walking anyway.
The French physician François Bernier was in Delhi at the time --- a careful observer, not given to exaggeration --- and he noted this naked faqir in his travel writings as though he were simply part of the landscape of the city. Which, by then, he was.
I watched him move through those streets for years.
I never once saw him look lost.
Now I need to tell you something.
Something that is the center of everything.
Because if you understand this one thing --- this one sentence that Sarmad would not finish --- everything else falls into place. Why he was what he was. Why he could not be categorized. Why he died the way he died. Why I have never forgotten him.
So stay with me here.
Islam has at its heart a declaration. A simple sentence that every Muslim knows, that is whispered into the ear of a newborn and spoken at the moment of death. It is called the Shahada. And it goes like this:
La ilaha illallah.
There is no god except God.
Two parts. A negation and an affirmation. You sweep the room clean --- there is no god --- and then you place the one true thing in it --- except God. The sentence only makes sense whole. That is the point of it. The emptying exists to make room for the arrival.
But the Sufis --- the mystics of the Islamic tradition, the ones who were less interested in the rules than in the reality behind the rules --- understood something about this sentence that the orthodox scholars sometimes missed.
The two halves are not just two clauses.
They are two completely different interior experiences.
La ilaha --- there is no god --- is the experience of emptying. Of stripping away every false absolute. Not just literal idols carved from stone. The idols of the mind. Certainty. Ego. The comfort of belonging. The story you tell yourself about who you are and what you know. Every container you have ever tried to put God into --- every doctrine, every ritual, every category --- revealed as a lesser thing. Not the real thing. The mystic in this place is demolishing. Everything that seemed solid is coming apart. It is terrifying and it is necessary and it is deeply, profoundly honest.
Illallah --- except God --- is what comes after the emptying. When everything false has been cleared away, what remains? That remainder. That irreducible presence that was always there beneath everything you thought you knew. That is what the mystic is reaching for. Not a concept. Not a doctrine. The thing itself.
You have to go through the first half to arrive at the second.
And here is what I want you to understand about Sarmad.
His entire life --- from the moment he put down the merchandise in Thatta to the moment he stood before Aurangzeb's judges in Delhi --- was la ilaha.
The clothes --- gone. La ilaha. The merchandise --- gone. La ilaha. The Jewish identity he was born into --- set down, not denied, but no longer a container he could live inside. La ilaha. The Muslim conversion --- nominal, honest about its own incompleteness. La ilaha. The Hindu practices he absorbed --- held, but not claimed. La ilaha.
Everything the world uses to identify a person, to place a person, to know what a person is --- stripped away. One by one. Over decades. Not as performance. As the honest enactment of an interior experience that would not let him stop.
He was living in the negation. Completely. Faithfully. Without pretending he had arrived somewhere he hadn't.
And then Aurangzeb's judges asked him to finish the sentence.
Complete the Shahada. Say illallah. Say except God. It is one word. One syllable. Say it and live.
And Sarmad looked at them and said --- I am still absorbed in the negation. I have not arrived at the affirmation yet. Why should I tell a lie?
I was there when he said it.
The room went very quiet.
Because everyone in that room understood --- at some level, whether they admitted it or not --- that what he had just said was not heresy.
It was the most honest thing anyone had said in that courtroom in years.
A man who had spent his entire life stripping away every false thing, who had walked naked through the greatest city in Asia rather than wear a identity he hadn't earned, who had knelt at the confluence of every tradition and claimed none of them --- this man was not going to finish a sentence he hadn't lived.
Not even to live.
Let me tell you what happened to the family.
Shah Jahan --- the man building the Taj Mahal across the river, the emperor whose grief had been transmuted into the most beautiful building in the world --- had four sons. The eldest was Dara Shikoh. The one who had knelt in the street dust. The pluralist prince, the serious student of where traditions meet, the man who had looked at Sarmad and recognized something true.
The third son was Aurangzeb.
And when Shah Jahan fell ill in 1658, the empire did what empires do. The sons went to war with each other. Aurangzeb was the most ruthless and the most militarily capable and the most certain of his own righteousness. He won. He captured his father and locked him in Agra Fort --- within sight of the Taj Mahal, across the river, visible from the window, unreachable --- where Shah Jahan would spend his final eight years gazing at the tomb he had built for the wife he loved.
He had Dara Shikoh hunted down and brought to Delhi in chains, paraded through the streets in rags on a filthy elephant so the city could see the pluralist prince humiliated. And then he had him executed.
And then he turned his attention to Sarmad.
The charges were atheism and unorthodox practice. The trial was not really about theology. It was about what Dara Shikoh had represented --- the open, searching, honest, unfinished vision of an empire that could hold more than one truth at a time --- and Sarmad was the last living embodiment of that vision walking the streets of Delhi.
Aurangzeb needed him gone.
But I want you to understand something about what Sarmad had already given the world. Because it did not die with him.
He had demonstrated --- in his body, in his poetry, in his refusal --- that the honest interior life is not a private matter. It is a public act. When he walked naked through the streets of Delhi he was not hiding his incompleteness. He was wearing it. Offering it. Saying to everyone who stopped to look --- this is what it looks like to be truthful about where you actually are.
And Dara Shikoh had seen it and recognized it because he was doing his own version of the same thing. His Confluence of Two Seas --- the book he wrote arguing that Sufism and Hindu Vedanta were describing the same reality from different angles --- was la ilaha applied to the borders between traditions. The stripping away of the walls. The honest admission that no single framework contains the whole truth.
Two men. One naked in the street. One robed in imperial silk. Both living in the honest middle. Both refusing to perform a certainty they hadn't earned.
What they added to the world's spiritual imagination is this --- and it is not a small thing.
That incompleteness faithfully lived is more sacred than arrival falsely claimed.
That the soul in process --- still clearing, still emptying, still walking toward something it cannot yet name --- is not a failed soul. It is an honest one.
And that the confluence of traditions, the place where the rivers meet, is not confusion or weakness or heresy. It is where the deepest water runs.
The grave near the Jama Masjid is small and simple. People bring flowers. They bring prayers. They sit with him a while.
The man with nothing outlasted the man with everything.
I have seen that pattern more times than I can count. It never stops surprising me.
I want to ask you something.
And I want you to sit with it rather than answer it quickly.
When did you last finish a sentence you hadn't actually lived?
You know what I mean. The moment in the conversation where you nodded along. Where you said yes I believe that or yes I am certain of this or yes I have arrived there --- when somewhere quiet inside you, you knew you hadn't. Not really. Not yet. You were still in the middle of something. Still clearing. Still walking toward something you couldn't quite name.
You finished the sentence anyway.
Most of us do. Most of the time. Because the world is not very patient with honest incompleteness.
Think about the systems you move through every day. They all want your declaration. Your position. Your arrival. Social platforms reward certainty and punish nuance --- the algorithm doesn't know what to do with I'm not sure yet so it quietly buries it. Political tribes require you to signal your belonging by finishing the approved sentences with the approved words. Religious communities --- not all, but many --- measure faithfulness by the fluency of your declaration, not the honesty of your interior experience. Even the people who love you sometimes need you to be further along than you are, because your incompleteness reminds them of their own.
The pressure is relentless. And it is so ambient, so constant, that most of us stopped noticing it a long time ago. It just feels like the air.
And so we comply. We finish the sentences. We perform the arrivals. We wear the certainties like clothes.
And something very quiet goes small inside us.
Not dramatically. Not all at once. Gradually. The honest interior life --- the one that knows exactly where it actually is on the path --- gets a little smaller each time. We stop checking in with it. We stop trusting it. We forget it was ever there.
Sarmad never did that.
That is what I want you to carry with you from today.
Not as an instruction. Not as a demand. Just as an image.
A naked man in a crowded street. Wild haired. Still. Utterly undefended. Wearing nothing --- not even the comfortable fiction of having arrived somewhere he hadn't. Living openly in the honest middle of a process that wasn't finished yet. Saying to anyone who stopped to look --- this is what it actually looks like. I am still clearing the room. I have not yet found what remains when everything false is gone. But I am looking. And I will not lie about where I am.
The world is learning this. Slowly. Imperfectly. With enormous resistance from the people who need everyone to finish the sentence.
But I have watched long enough to see the pattern.
The places where certainty breaks down are very often exactly where truth begins. The confluence --- where traditions meet, where categories dissolve, where the honest answer is I am neither this nor that but I am still walking --- that is not confusion. That is not weakness. That is where the deepest water runs.
We don't have a clean name for this yet. We are still in the negation. As a civilization, as a species, we are still in the la ilaha --- still stripping away the false absolutes, still discovering which of our certainties were containers rather than contents, still walking toward something we cannot yet fully name.
That is exactly where we should be.
Sarmad's grave is small and simple. Near the mosque where he was killed. People bring flowers. They sit with him. They don't always know exactly why.
I think they know.
Here is where I want to leave you today.
Not with an answer. With a question that belongs to you.
Sarmad walked away from everything the world uses to identify a person. The merchandise. The clothes. The categories he was born into. The ones he tried on later. All of it --- set down. Not in anger. Not in despair. In honesty. Because none of it was true enough to keep wearing.
Most of us will not do that. Most of us should not do that. We have lives and people and responsibilities that are real and good and worth keeping. I am not suggesting you take off your clothes and walk through the streets of your city.
But I want to ask you something quieter than that.
Is there something you are carrying that isn't true enough to keep carrying?
Not a person. Not a responsibility. Something interior. A certainty you inherited rather than earned. A declaration you make fluently that you have never actually examined. A sentence you finish automatically because the world expects you to finish it --- and you stopped noticing years ago that you were never sure it was true.
What would it feel like to put that down?
Not forever. Not dramatically. Just --- to stop carrying it for a moment. To stand in the honest middle of not knowing. To say quietly, to yourself, to no one else if you prefer --- I am still in the negation. I haven't arrived here yet. And I am not going to pretend otherwise.
That is not failure. That is not weakness. That is not the beginning of losing your faith or your identity or your belonging.
That is what integrity feels like from the inside.
Sarmad knew something that took me a long time to understand. The honest soul in process --- still clearing, still walking, still unable to finish the sentence --- is not behind the faithful soul who declares with certainty.
It may be ahead of it.
Sit with that. You don't have to answer it today.
The grave near the Jama Masjid is still there.
Small. Simple. Tended.
People come and sit with him. They bring flowers. They bring questions. They bring the sentences they haven't finished yet. I see them there sometimes --- sitting quietly in the shadow of the mosque where he was killed, in the city where the empire that executed him crumbled to dust centuries ago.
Aurangzeb won. And then he didn't. The Mughal Empire fractured and faded within a generation of his death. The Taj Mahal still stands --- breathtaking, unreachable, Shah Jahan's answer to loss carved in white marble across the river. Dara Shikoh is remembered as the road not taken --- the prince who might have changed everything, who saw the confluence before the confluence had a name.
And Sarmad --- the naked merchant from Armenia who put down his goods in Thatta and never picked them up again, who lived for decades in the honest middle of a sentence he would not finish falsely, who stood at the execution block and composed poetry --- Sarmad is still visited.
The man with nothing outlasted the man with everything.
I have seen that pattern so many times. It still moves me.
Next time I want to introduce you to someone who also refused to be contained by the categories her world offered her. Someone who gathered the threads of ancient wisdom from East and West and wove them into something the nineteenth century had never seen before --- and scandalized almost everyone in the process.
Her name was Helena Blavatsky. And she was extraordinary.
I think you're going to find her fascinating.
Until then --- be honest about where you are on the path. Even if only to yourself. Especially if only to yourself.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.