Bias

I have read, written, and experienced bias a lot. The weird thing about bias is you are unaware that you are biased but quick to point the same in others.

That gap — between seeing it clearly in someone else and being blind to it in yourself — is where most of us live.

If I try to trace my journey — from taking life, work, and relationships too seriously to seeing it all as play with no real control — one thing stayed constant. Bias.

With my rational hat on, I prioritized commitment over love. I was fearful of wrongdoing. Worried about losing trust, even from strangers who had barely seen me. Most of all, I was afraid of criticism.

For a long time, I called this pragmatism. Clear thinking. Discipline.
It wasn’t. It was fear wearing a suit. The mind is a brilliant defense attorney. It builds logical, convincing reasons for every choice. And you believe them. Because they sound so reasonable. What I was actually doing was defending who I said I was yesterday — not choosing based on today.

That is a bias. One of the quieter ones.

There is another form I became aware of later. Using the wrong tool for the territory.

In work, the rational approach mostly holds. You think through problems. You structure. You analyze. That’s the right instrument. But I carried the same instrument into relationships. Into love. Into conversations that needed presence, not solutions.And that’s where it broke things. Not dramatically. Slowly.

You don’t feel the damage when you’re calculating in a territory that needed you to simply feel. You think you’re being helpful. You think you’re being responsible.

What you’re actually doing is creating distance with both hands while telling yourself you’re building something. One form of bias is selfishness. Another, less visible one, is this — replacing connection with competence in places where competence was never asked for.

When I discovered Ashtavakra Gita and Vigyan Bhairav Tantra — and before that, the practice of meditation — I thought I was moving past all this.
I wasn’t. I was just becoming more aware of it. The awareness didn’t dissolve the bias. It just gave me a witness. A Drishta. Someone watching from a step behind, noticing the pattern as it was playing out instead of only after the damage was done.

Without that witness, the mind just amplifies itself. Like a microphone held too close to a speaker — it makes the noise louder, not clearer. You start mistaking your own echoes for truth. Your System 1 fires, you feel certain, and the bias runs the day.

The Drishta doesn’t stop the bias from arising. But it creates a small pause. A thehrav.

In that pause, you see: this is yesterday’s identity defending itself. This is fear dressed up as reason. This is the brain doing what the heart should be doing.
You don’t always change course. But you see it. And seeing it is not nothing.

Here is what I am still learning. Bias doesn’t leave. It is baked into how the mind processes everything — faster than you can catch it, quieter than you expect. The goal is not to become unbiased. That is the wrong target.

The goal is to stop being a naive user of your own mind. To notice when you are in Pattern 2 — compressed, tight, defending, performing. And recognize that you have the option to step back. Not to a technique. Not to a framework. Just to presence.

Ashtavakra calls it settling. Not a milestone you reach. Not a state you maintain. Just the occasional moment when the mind steps aside and life resumes without narration.

I am still attempting to write about that. And I mean attempting genuinely — because what has been glimpsed cannot be fully described. It is like the taste of sweetness that a deaf-mute enjoys. Real. Complete. But impossible to fully communicate.

The bias will be there tomorrow. Some of it I will catch. Most of it I won’t.
But the clouds passing through the sky do not own the sky. They pass.
That might be the whole practice.

One question to sit with this week:
Where are you using the rational hat in a territory that doesn’t need it?
You don’t have to answer it. Just notice what comes up.

Thehrav means pause — the calmness that comes with complete consciousness. Not emptiness. Not escape. Just a moment of seeing clearly before moving again.