My thoughts

  Research Brief  ·  Arjavkumar Azad  ·  March 20, 2026 The Hidden Climate Toll of the U.S.–Israel–Iran War Three weeks of strikes on Gulf energy infrastructure have generated an estimated half a million tonnes of greenhouse gases. A new independent whitepaper quantifies the cost — and finds the answer isn't what most people expect. On February 28, 2026, the world's most oil-dense region became a war zone. U.S. and Israeli forces launched coordinated strikes on Iran, and within days, refineries were burning, gas fields were ablaze, and the Strait of Hormuz — through which a fifth of global oil flows every day — was effectively shut. The human toll has dominated headlines. But another toll has been accumulating silently in the atmosphere above the Persian Gulf: carbon. A new independent research paper,  Carbon Emissions from the U.S.–Israel–Iran War (Feb–Mar 2026) , published today, attempts what no government has done: put a number on the greenhouse gas cos...

  Pain and Suffering Are Not the Same Thing — And the Confusion Is Costing You Most people use the words pain and suffering interchangeably. English lets them get away with it. But if you speak more than one language — especially one with ancient philosophical roots — the distinction becomes impossible to ignore. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it. The Sanskrit Key In Sanskrit, the word for pain is Pida (पीडा) . It means the experience of physical injury or torment. Your bodysuit — the physical body you inhabit — has been harmed. Signals travel through your nervous system to your brain carrying one clear message: something here is damaged. The word for suffering is Dukkha (दुःख) . This is a completely different animal. Dukkha is the experience of non-physical injury. Your bodysuit is not harmed in any detectable way. And yet — signals travel through your nervous system to your brain carrying the exact same message: something is wrong. Same wire. Different sour...

Understand Your Suffering — And You May Truly Be Free I. The Cup Imagine a cup. Not empty, not full in any simple sense — but holding something . A mixture. Experiences, memories, rewards, wounds. Everything you have directly lived and indirectly absorbed across a lifetime. Everything that has passed through your awareness and left a residue. That cup is you. For most of us, the cup is filled not with what we chose, but with what we were given — or what we accepted in exchange for belonging, approval, or safety. The collective ego — the unconscious social field we swim in — offered us things we wanted: status, certainty, identity. And in return, we took on its anchors. Its fears. Its rage. Its inherited beliefs that no longer serve us. Here is the first thing to understand: those anchors were transactional. They were never truly yours. Their value was imaginary from the beginning. So the work begins with release. Slowly, deliberately — finding those anchors and letting them go. II. Wha...

  Executive Summary: A Theory of Void This paper proposes a structural distinction between Emptiness (sunyata) and a deeper boundary condition termed the Void , clarifying long-standing confusions around enlightenment, nihilism, and peak experiences. Classical Buddhist insight identifies emptiness as the absence of intrinsic essence in all phenomena. This realization dissolves attachment, suffering, and false solidity while preserving cognition, ethics, compassion, and creativity. However, emptiness itself is knowable, teachable, and observable . Anything observable must appear within a frame of awareness. Therefore, emptiness cannot be the ultimate limit. This theory argues that emptiness is contained . The Void is introduced as the pre-phenomenal boundary condition that allows even emptiness to appear. The Void is not an experience, state, or realization. It cannot be observed, stabilized, practiced, or inhabited. It annihilates the observer–observed distinction entirely....