Mayur and Yos
2026-7-1
We went to Mayur and Yos's apartment in Oakland today. Mayur is a scientist with a PhD from Berkeley who is now working on his own startup; that is how he and Raj met this year. Yos is an award-winning filmmaker who holds many titles, including Associate Professor, and earned her M.F.A. from Columbia. Her TED Talk can be found here:
Mayur and Yos invited us over because Raj had expressed an interest in and curiosity about spirituality. While they have been walking this path for many years, they wanted to share what they have learned with us.
Through our exchange, we learned that Mayur and Yos are dedicated followers of Sadhguru, regularly attending his yoga teachings and meditation retreats. In fact, they actually met at one of these events and are now newly married.
They each bring a powerful, distinct perspective to their spiritual practice:
For Yos, one of the most vital practices on the path to spirituality and enlightenment is using meditation to separate her true self—her core identity—from her mind and body. Through this separation, she is able to Respond to life's challenges instead of Reacting to them. By taking herself out of the immediate experience of her mind and body, she can step back, analyze the situation, and respond deliberately. She beautifully compares life to cinema, believing that each individual is the director of their own movie. A good director guides life events intentionally and thoughtfully, rather than reactively.
Yos told us that through continuous meditation, she is able to live in a reality where her consciousness, her mind, and her body are distinct from one another. Her understanding of herself has expanded, since the idea of "her" is no longer limited or caged by her mind and body. She believes her true existence—her consciousness—is not just confined to her body and mind, but exists in everything in the universe; in fact, it is the universe itself. Furthermore, she feels her dharma, the reason for her existence with a divine body and mind, is to allow her consciousness to expand, touching everything in the universe with happiness and bringing joy to all.
Mayur, on the other hand, believes that free will does not exist and that everything happens regardless of our immediate reactions. To him, cause-and-effect is the hardest thing to prove, and life events do not unfold simply based on what we have done. Therefore, the only thing we can truly master is our own mind. Through meditation, his goal is to separate the mind from both the body and the external chain of events in life.
According to Mayur, mental practice can be achieved individually without physical assistance, but energy work must be done with a guru in person because the receiving and exchanging of energy requires the guru's physical presence.
They explained the distinction between the "right-hand path" and the "left-hand path" to spirituality. The right-hand path focuses on the practice of meditation aimed at controlling the mind and body. It stays within orthodox social boundaries and relies heavily on structured Yogic guidelines. It emphasizes asceticism, internal control, purity, and rigorous discipline, it's more structured, framed, and male-energy oriented.
On the other hand, the left-hand path represents Tantra, which is female-energy oriented, unpredictable, spontaneous, and lacks a clear roadmap, making it much harder to practice. The left-hand path deliberately breaks societal taboos and orthodox rules to find divinity in the "forbidden" or the raw, untamed aspects of reality. It uses the physical senses and nature's primal energies as fuel for liberation, rather than trying to suppress or transcend them.
They suggest mastering the right-hand path before attempting the left-hand path.
We also shared our own spiritual journey with them and told them about my birth dream featuring Shiva. Yos commented that it is extremely rare for someone to arrive at the gates of spirituality out of a sense of happiness and contentment, noting that most people who seek spirituality do so from a place of sadness and desperation.
Books recommended by them:
"Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy" by Sadhguru
"Tantra: The Path of Ecstasy" by Georg Feuerstein
"The Legend of the Goddess: Invoking Sri Suktam" by Om Swami
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