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© 2025 by Awakening Beauty
The Journey into the Logic of Life
Reclaiming the Biological Intelligence of Being
For over three decades, I have been exploring the integral nature of cognition, beauty, and values—not as abstract concepts, but as living processes that shape how we see, feel, and act. They are not separate faculties; they are one organic movement through which life sustains itself.
Literates Learn the WORD; Illiterates learn the WORLD
A turning point
For over three decades, I have been exploring the integral nature of cognition, beauty, and values—not as abstract concepts, but as living processes that shape how we see, feel, and act. They are not separate faculties; they are one organic movement through which life sustains itself.
In 1981, during my third year of engineering, I decided never to take a nine-to-five job. All around me, I saw people merely surviving, trading their time and energy for a paycheck. I vowed, instead, to work only on what felt genuinely meaningful.
What is knowledge
I also found the students and teachers equally disinterested in true learning which gets extended in their job life, too. My disillusionment was compounded by the starkly Eurocentric curriculum. This glaring omission forced me to ask a more fundamental question: What is knowledge, and how is it truly created? I began teaching to understand how we lose the joy of learning. I saw that this alienation starts in school, where students are cut off from their own cultural and cognitive roots.
What is beauty
At the National Institute of Design, learning felt alive and creative. Yet even this freedom operated within a Western framework—its aesthetics, values, and processes. I realised that creativity, too ,can become mechanical and colonised when it imitates another civilisation’s logic. I began to question: What is beauty? How does it arise? The deeper I looked, the clearer it became that real creativity must serve life, not control it.
Role Reversal
My time with non-literate artisans was profoundly transformational. I arrived as a teacher, but became their student. While I was colonized by formal education, they possessed full cognitive autonomy, remaining deeply rooted in their culture and an authentic, inherent aesthetics.
Literates learn the WORD; Illiterates learn the WORLD
Living in their community, I witnessed intelligence in its pure, natural state. They learned directly from life itself—without curriculum or instruction. In their world, knowing was inseparable from doing, and learning was synonymous with living. Everything they created carried innate beauty, for beauty arises naturally from a life that conserves energy and exists in harmony with nature.
Knowing of being
This revelation led me to stop reading in 1991. I sought to reclaim the body’s innate intelligence and observe how understanding arises before words. I came to see knowledge not as a mental construct, but as something that unfolds from the body's dialogue with the world—a "knowing by being."
Learning as creation of Knowledge
I watched children master complex traditional crafts by their adolescence through observation and immersion. That changed everything. My question shifted from How to teach children, to How do children learn —for nature has already made us learning beings.
The Cognitive Crisis
Humanity’s deepest crisis is not political or technological—it is cognitive. When community-rooted learning was replaced by institutional education, we became literate in words but illiterate in being. We now learn about life instead of living it, and we severed thought from life. The result is a civilization that analyzes everything yet understands nothing — a world cut off from the senses that make knowing possible. The ecological and emotional collapse around us begins in this very fracture.
Reclaiming the Body’s Intelligence
My work since then has focused on three movements:
• Trust the senses as the foundation of intelligence.
• Trusting life as the foundation of Being.
• Reawaken beauty as life’s organizing principle.
• Restore the unity of knowing, feeling, and being.
These are not ideals—they are biological truths.
Reclaiming the Body’s Intelligence
• Trust the senses as the foundation of intelligence. • Reawaken beauty as life’s organizing principle.
• Trust life as the foundation of Being.• Restore the unity of knowing, feeling, and being.
Workshops, online sessions
These immersive experiences are designed to help participants reconnect with their senses, reawaken their embodied intelligence, and question the assumptions of modernity.
Some of the sessions are – Against Methods, Existential Rights of children, Impact of Literacy on cognition, Redefinitions etc….
Re- Villaging Retreat
This retreat is for parents practising 'Do Nothing Parenting'. Here we are attempting to live a community life we all long for, where we are just letting the children be in the lap of nature, and we adults do our things and observe. This is an opportunity for us adults to go inwards, understand our fears and conditionings, reflect and truly unlearn from children. Through this deeper observation, we begin to see children anew: their spontaneity, openness, playfulness, the way they face fear.
Professional Space
Over the years, I have shared my work as a visiting professor at various design and architecture schools—spaces where young minds grapple with creativity and meaning. (Including IIT Mumbai, NID Ahmedabad, NIT Calicut, IIIT Kanchipuram, Woxsen Design School, and Anant University etc.) I have also been working with schools to help them to reimagine their cognitive conditions to enable children to unfold naturally and teachers to understand natural learning process.
