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...