There are certain thoughts that don't just pass through the mind, but quietly rearrange the furniture of your entire life.
Most thoughts are background noise: half-finished to-do lists, recycled arguments, phantom conversations, half-remembered reels. They rise, collide, fade, and are replaced by the next batch. But once in a while, a different kind of thought appears. It doesn't add anything new to your personality. It doesn't make you more impressive, more efficient, or more "together". Instead, it does something far more subversive: it loosens the very knot of who you think you are.
I call this the highest thought.
The highest thought is any thought that instantly reconnects you with Truth and breaks the illusion of the small 'I'.
By "Truth", I don't mean a slogan, a doctrine, or a belief that must be defended on social media. I don't mean a spiritual label or philosophical position. I mean something far simpler and far more intimate: the quiet reality that is present in you in every moment, which the mind keeps forgetting and waiting to be rediscovered. It is what remains when all the noise inside you settles for a second.
That "Truth" is not something only monks on mountains can access. It is not something we create by trying very hard to be spiritual. It is already here, like the sky behind whatever weather our minds are currently hosting. The highest thought is simply the one that helps us notice it again. It sounds simple, but is radical in its impact.
I didn't arrive at this understanding sitting in a Himalayan cave. I first arrived at it in a forest in the Netherlands walking with a musician.
The trees were ordinary, the path was ordinary, the weather was doing its usual Dutch performance of being undecided. But inside, nothing felt ordinary at all. There was a kind of low-grade ache: the ache of repeating the same patterns, running into the same emotional walls, watching the same inner movie of "me and my problems" on loop.
I was walking with a figure you will meet very soon in this book, Frank Spronk. For a while we talked in that casual way you talk when you are actually avoiding the real subject. At some point, the sentence I had been circling around slipped out of my mouth without permission:
"Then who am I, really? Please help me… Frank?"
I wasn't asking for a clever answer. I was asking for a way out.
He didn't respond with a lecture. He didn't quote Sanskrit. He didn't hand me a three-step framework for inner peace. He gave me a single image – one thought – that my mind could hold long enough for it to crack open.
He said, very simply:
"As a little wave in the ocean of waves, know that you are water, Mohit — and not the wave."
That was it.
For a moment, my mind stopped. Something inside, which had been squeezed into the shape of "my life, my story, my success, my failure", loosened. The familiar feeling of being a cramped, separate creature, this one fragile wave trying desperately not to crash, softened.
The thought itself was simple. But it had a different taste from my usual thoughts. It didn't tighten the chest; it relaxed it. It didn't create a new identity; it made all identities feel strangely transparent. It didn't inflate the ego; it made the ego almost irrelevant.
That is what the highest thought does. It doesn't make you bigger as a person. It makes you less trapped in being only a person.
When I use words like "Truth" or "Reality" in this book, I am not asking you to join a particular religion or accept a ready-made theology. I am pointing to something you can verify quietly in your own experience.
If you look underneath everything you experience, you may notice three things: a quiet awareness that simply knows what is happening, a sense that there is a larger wisdom or intelligence shaping your life in ways you did not plan, and a kind of living energy that makes you breathe, move, feel, and act.
And these are not three separate things, really. These are three ways of noticing the same underlying Reality.
Sometimes you feel it more as awareness – the simple sense of "I am" before you add "...this, that, successful, failed, loved, rejected". Sometimes you feel it more as guidance – a nudge, a coincidence, a door closing that later reveals itself as protection. Sometimes you feel it more as energy – a sudden clarity, courage, or tenderness that doesn't feel manufactured by your thinking.
Different flavours, one source.
You can call it God, Self, Consciousness, Presence, the Ground of Being, or not call it anything at all. The name is negotiable. The fact of it is not. The highest thought is the thought that returns you to this.
Because the mind is not always in the same mood, the highest thought does not always wear the same clothes. It adapts to where you are.
When the mind is spacious and still, the highest thought might sound like:
"At my core, I am just this open, peaceful awareness."
Not a role, not a CV, not a mess to be fixed, not a persona to be maintained. Just awareness: the clear space in which every experience rises and falls. To rest in that even for a few breaths is to taste a peace that does not depend on Wi-Fi speed, stock markets, or who texted back.
When you are in the thick of things like writing emails, washing dishes, sitting in meetings that should have been emails, the highest thought might be:
"Let a deeper wisdom act through me."
You still speak, you still decide, you still show up. But there is a subtle shift from "I alone am carrying this" to "I am an instrument; something larger can work through me." Life feels a little less like a burden, a little more like a collaboration.
In moments of devotion when the heart feels tender, raw, or cracked open – the highest thought might be:
"I am held; I am not alone."
Whether you call that Presence "God", "Higher Power", "the Universe" or simply "something beyond my frightened mind", the effect is the same: a softening of the inner grip, a quiet relief at not having to be the sole manager of your existence.
In fear, the highest thought can be as sharp and simple as:
"I am more than this frightened story about myself."
Fear always comes wrapped in a narrative: "I am going to lose everything", "I will be rejected", "I am not enough", "I can't handle this." The highest thought doesn't wrestle with the details of the story. It gently shows you that the story is not the whole of you.
In confusion, when thoughts chase each other like dogs running in circles, the highest thought might be:
"There is a deeper truth beneath all these thoughts."
The mind doesn't have to immediately find that truth. It just has to stop crowning its own noise as the ultimate authority. That small gap is enough for something saner to breathe.
What all these variations share is not their wording, but their effect.
The highest thought has a signature. You don't recognise it by how grand it sounds, but by what it does to you inside.
So why call it "highest"?
Not because it makes you sound profound over coffee. Not because it floats a few inches above the ground in spiritual vocabulary. It is highest because of what it does the moment it is sincerely entertained.
It lifts the mind: from narrowness to a sense of space, from anxiety to a little more clarity, from comparison to a quiet contentment, from "I must control everything" to "I am willing to be an instrument", from being lost in the world to remembering what truly matters, from being trapped in the small 'I' to resting, however briefly, in Reality.
It doesn't guarantee that nothing difficult will ever happen. It doesn't come with a supernatural warranty card. What it changes is the place you are standing inside yourself.
A problem faced from the cramped room of the ego feels unbearable. The same problem, seen from the wider space of Truth, may still be painful but it is no longer a prison. There is room to breathe, to respond, even to grow.
The highest thought does not promise, "You will never fall again." It whispers something quieter and more powerful: "Whatever happens, it cannot and will not touch what you truly are."
This book is, in one sense a travelogue, of how I slowly began to take that whisper seriously.
It is not a manual. I still forget what I've understood and remember what I should probably outgrow. There are days when I behave like a reasonably functional adult, and days when I audition for the role of Arjuna on the chariot, having a dramatic breakdown on page one. But something fundamental has shifted: the axis on which I stand.
I did not arrive there by myself.
I was – and am – surrounded by lanterns that light up the forgotten ancient path that is eternally relevant.
Some of them wear ochre robes, some wear T-shirts, some wear the quiet of old Himalayan stones. They are the figures you will meet in these pages: Frank and Paula in a little Dutch town, Swami Advayananda in Kerala turning scriptures into a living treatise, Lolita in Palo Alto where kitchen became an altar of love and Light of lights, Divine Life Society in Rishikesh where the source of all the lanterns I met was itself lit, Swami Abhedananda in the Himalayas distilling entire lifetimes into a single sentence. Through them, scriptures stopped being "philosophy" and became biography: not theirs, but mine; not mine, but something prior to "mine" altogether.
As you read on, you will walk with these lanterns through forests, ashrams, city streets and internal breakdowns. You will see how the highest thought is not an abstract idea but a way of seeing that slowly frees us from the cramped sense of "I" and reveals Reality as it is – spacious, intimate and already present. As you read, you'll notice that some ideas repeat and some passages feel denser than others. This is deliberate. The lanterns you are going to meet in this book never hesitated to bring me back to the same highest thought, again and again, until it stopped being an idea and became a way of seeing. I have kept that flavour here. When you meet a familiar insight in new words, treat it as a returning, not a redundancy. And when the text feels dense, it is not to scare you away but to invite you to slow down and walk with me a little more carefully.
Each chapter is, in one way or another, a record of returning: of coming back from distraction to presence, from borrowed illusions to our own tradition, from a limited self-image to the quiet fact of our true nature.
If, while reading, you find yourself pausing – not because of a clever sentence, but because something wordless inside you has nodded – then this book has already done its job.
The rest of the book is simply this: what happened when I started taking that nod seriously and began, however clumsily, to live in the direction of the highest thought.
