TQI Conception and explanation

It's the desire which is the reason for High TQI.

Note : This explainer document is created out of a two part talk with Guha Ji, where he explains internal demand and mechanisms of thought and its relationship with desire for freedom. It is presented with minor changes made to enhance readability.

Authority comes from the inevitable landing, the place where you are going to land no matter who you are or how much you know. So that's the dynamic.. When I was reading the Yoga Sutra, much of it was appealing because I already felt that way. The whole point was that they have a model. Often I didn’t accept it, but some of the explanations they conceived by observing “certain” people and giving examples—by doing that, they created a model. I was not very happy with that, but it’s okay. One has to think really hard and come up with such a model.

In their observation what they were saying is, it's the layering or coverings of the knowledge which is responsible for the desire in the mental world. If you don’t know about it, how can you desire it? When you come to know something, then only it becomes possible for you to appreciate it, and in appreciating that thing, a component goes to “I want to be like that”, otherwise you won’t be able to appreciate it. That's the nature of the whole thing. For example, the moment you appreciate a yogi, a small component of your desire pattern is already liking it so it wants to be like that. In any field of our existence it's like that. These desires form layers of intention in our thought process. These layers are a result of social interaction. By itself for itself, there is none i.e. you are not born with these layers (The Substrate).

When you look at something, you have been trained to accept what you see as something necessary to live sanely and intelligently in the world. Because of this training, you are expected to, for example, appreciate words and ideas, or to discriminate between what is good and what is bad. You are constantly told that if you do not discriminate, you will be harmed or used. So you learn to become smart. And how do you become smart? By looking at many different things. In that process, something suddenly resonates within you, and you begin to appreciate it. “Oh my God, this person is doing it like that”—this happens in every field of human expression.

And human expression comes from conflict, period. You are asleep, and someone pulls you out of it. Mother, father, teacher, friends—everyone is pushing all the time. This constant push itself creates conflict. That is the nature of it; there is nothing you can do about it. Over time, you accept some things and reject others, and it all becomes a mess. What remains in that mess are conflict components: a part that appreciates, a part that criticises, and, as a result, your desire increases. These are called “layerings of knowledge.” They are layers reinforced by you yourself—by your thoughts, through repeated patterns of thinking—until they become solidified. These layers cannot be removed with just soap and water (laughing); they need something like nitric acid to clean the floor. When these layers begin to loosen, it only happens because of a certain movement in the substrate itself. That movement creates further movement and loosens the dirt. This radically changes the nature of the layering. As the layers fall away one by one, the system begins to perceive something deep and wise: that the world of the “known” is immense, and every day it is growing more and more. Take any subject. What existed in the last century and what exists now have almost no resemblance. Knowledge has grown beyond the scale of civilisation itself.

So what is the qualitative understanding of this? It is simple: your desire is decreasing, and wisdom is seeing that what can be known is immense. Desire itself is an important thing. Hindus call it the movement of the soul, purushartha. Purusha is the one that wants, and artha is its goal or action. So if the layers are loosening up and substrate itself becomes desireless, then the purusha and its artha become meaningless, because there is no goal. The goal has to come to an end— This is Krishnamurti 101.

UG also says it (the goal) has to come to an end; there is no choice around it. As long as there is conflicting knowledge, the goal cannot come to an end. It is not a possibility, but a certainty. It is the foundation itself that has to do the work. Today, you have twenty-five thousand more ways to acquire knowledge; it has become very easy. So how will the goal come to an end? The end of knowledge—“freedom from the known”—is the same thing. These people are smart; they pick one or two ideas from here and there (the ancient text), try to explain using the same model though, and continue everything as before.

Even UG didn’t “understand” many things because he didn't think about these things so deeply but he found that he can’t create a model. So he just practically divulged this information in his functioning of life and living and it just hits hard. I have an alternative model as I thought about these things quite deeply. So let us look at it again - why do you need quality? - to do something, no?

Otherwise, what is guna? Guna is quality. If I have no use for something, why should I bother about its quality? The same applies to desire. What quality is required? None. Quality is simply potential or talent, and that is what is called guna.

They have even categorised the gunas as sattva, rajas, and tamas. You need tamas; otherwise, how will you produce babies? These are confused individuals showing something as bad and something as good. What they presented as good created further mess in humanity.

Most people think that going to a temple is good, and that continuing to go is also good. But it is dangerous, because it ultimately becomes a subtle introduction to slavery.

Your texts say that samskara has to come to an end. What is samskara? It is God, everything else like that—you just don’t see it. Even praising a Jain muni is samskara. It is totally counter-intuitive, and what they are suggesting is counter-intuitive.

In the end, it turns out that everybody wants to bind you into a game, without addressing any real freedom at all—the freedom that this land’s essential knowledge system aspired to for centuries, even thousands of years. What is happening today in temples and in politics is exactly the opposite of how it began. Every single religious and political system is like this. On that point, UG is right, because he sees it clearly. There is not a single exception.

So this is not about clarity in the usual sense. Clarity is very easy, you can logically defeat someone and arrive at a conclusion that is considered clarity. But no, that is wrong. Real clarity is to not arrive at a conclusion and stay there for good.

Devoid of any conclusion when the mind can not perceive an end, it can not move. If you are in the middle of the ocean and do not know which direction to go, you do not go anywhere. You do not put in any effort, because it would be a waste of energy. At least you can float and survive a little longer. That is the perception: not arriving at a goal, because there is no such thing as arriving at a goal. There is no goal at all. This is not a tongue-twister. It is quite simple, yet it is impossible.

Because you want to know—it could be anything— what matters is that, you want to know. That is the point. This very urge to know is the seed of continuity. And the moment “how” appears, it becomes double trouble.

Whenever anyone gives a model, it is wrong, because it immediately creates a desire to find out whether the model is right or wrong. I sensed this, and I refused to put my energy into it. Others may be interested, but I am not. That is the whole point.

In the beginning, I had a lot of energy, and I did not realise that this is where we get caught up in goals and creating models. The moment I gained clarity through insight, it ensured that I continued for some more time with the same energy. In doing so, I had completely created an alternative view of the structure of experience—one that could see God, see past lives, and see all these things. Yet that model was completely different, with nothing to do with the models that religious people have put forward.

Now you may want to know what that model was. It was simple: software and hardware. Maybe AI is somewhat similar to it. Software—psychology, knowledge, information, the mind—interacts with hardware—the body, biology—and creates substantial change, even within a single generation. That is the beauty and the complexity of the brain. How does this happen? Software is nothing but knowledge and information, and that is what gives experience. Without it, there is no experience. Experience has to be captured by oneself through software; otherwise, you cannot experience anything. It would be like deep sleep—things come and go, leaving no trace. If the software does not record it, nothing will. And even if something is recorded, without software, how will you read (retrieve) it? Change is meant only for the software. Otherwise, there is nothing to change. So if I do not know what has happened to me—say, my food habits have changed—that is it; it is uninteresting. Yesterday I could eat something, today I cannot. That is all.

I cannot give you the sense of health and contentment I am experiencing. Even when I say this, I am using software. Without software, I cannot give you anything at all. Suppose even that information is absent—how do you perceive anything? Others have no clue either. You are only guessing about yourself. Do you really know what is happening inside your brain, inside your system? You may be affected, and you may not even know it.

There is no such thing as faulty hardware. There is no right or wrong. There is only a particular pattern, and that pattern is trying to optimise itself using what it has been given. There is no perfect nose or perfect heart. Perfection is a human idea. A nose has to smell; as long as it smells optimally, it is fine. Whether it is flat or long does not matter. It only has to be in the right place, connected to the brain and the olfactory nerve. The thing is, when I start speaking, I do not have to think about anything. There is no effort on my part to convey something to someone. Yet you are trying to listen to me—that is nature. You are not really understanding anything. We are only creating a model and then breaking it. I am not playing games; seriously, this is the nature of it. Still, you are trying to figure it out. Look at what happens to attention. When you try to focus, when you try to attend, you cannot hold on to worrying thoughts. If you do, you will lose me.

Every word has to make some sense, even though after five minutes you will forget what I said (laughing). That is the benefit. Hello—the benefit is this: you have been exposed to 500 AQI, and now, somehow, you are being forced to live in 10 AQI for one hour. But then you ask, how will I reproduce 10 AQI when I go back? (laughing)

This “how” takes you very quickly back to 500 AQI. The system wants 10 AQI, but you are not allowing it. You keep telling yourself, “I am so sad, how can I be happy?” You do not have to think about happiness or sorrow at all. When you pay attention, it becomes difficult to keep a continuous train of thought. I am forcing you to just pay attention, and the train is moving very fast. You cannot record everything you are seeing. When you miss something, you want to stop me and say, “Tell me again.” I myself do not know—hello.

If I break an egg, I cannot repeat it. I cannot go backward and make a broken egg into a new egg. That is the flow of new information and entropy. Sorry, that is how it is. I broke the egg, and now you are asking me to say it again (laughing). There is no replay. Replay exists only in recordings, not in real life.

There is no need to believe my answers. What do you believe? You believe only when you already have answers. How can you believe in something when there is no meaning, no answers, nothing—no image, no knowledge, no information? To believe, you need solidified information.

Belief is like overused information, like rust on iron. It takes away the shine forever—the shine of the human mind. Our ancestors spoke of the mind as a witness, but where is the witness? There is no clear reflection. Everything is rusted. What you see is a twisted world.

Imagine looking at yourself in a bent mirror—rusted, warped, twisted. If you think you are seeing reality through that image, that is what you will become to yourself. That is the result of the so-called witness. If I had an agenda, everything would be a mess. The natural movement would be gone. An agenda means trying to impress someone. I have not seen anyone like that—except the old man. Nobody else in the world.

There are different types of thoughts, just as there are different types of air molecules in the air—oxygen, nitrogen, traces of petroleum molecules, lead, and so on. In the same way, in the world of thought, every thought can be identified by its specific intention and purpose. It is a world of numbers. By numbers, I mean measurement, not quality. Physics is strange that way—there is no quality anywhere, only quantities. If air molecules are moving and I want to measure speed, I simply assign each molecule a vector at a given moment: 5, 6, 7—I choose the unit. When I say the wind is moving at 30 miles per hour, what is the wind? It is only an average of many air molecules. Not all of them are moving at 30; some are at 29, some at 28, some at 21, and so on.

Thought is similar. But there is a difference: air does not vanish, while a thought can vanish. That is why thought appears to have an ephemeral quality.

Just like moving from high AQI to low AQI is an internal demand, similarly there is a demand within the body and mind to move from torturous thought to orderly thought—from high TQI to low TQI.

The fact that, even when I speak gibberish, you are still trying to understand shows this clearly. There is only one qualitative movement from within, a tendency toward orderly thought. That movement reflects the instrument itself—the mind—trying to express and restore its own sense of wellbeing.

***TQI Conception and terms of usage ***

Why an index? An index is just a number you see. By itself, it has nothing to do with anything directly. It is a quantitative and relative measurement of specific molecules or particles, even though you may not know what those particles actually are. Researchers study each particulate matter or chemical to understand how hazardous it is and at what PPM (parts per million) it affects human health. Based on that, they create an abbreviation and assign a number. In this way, they quantify it and present a relative measurement. So what do you really know? You only know the number. If it is low, you think it is good. If it is high, you think it is bad. That is all you know. There is also a scale. We say, “Oh, it must be greater than 500,” but that number by itself does not mean much. It is like a thermometer that measures from 97 to 106 degrees Fahrenheit. Beyond that, it may not even function properly. We end up with the realisation that these measurements are limited by the scale we have created.

So when this word came to my mind—“index”— I thought, why did I use it? because it is just a mimicking quality, like indexing something, but for human feelings, there is no real measurement.

What do we actually see? It is like in a restaurant when they ask, “Can you rate our service, sir?” They show faces from a crying face to a smiling face, from 1 to 10. If you choose 10 with a smiley face, it means very good. If you choose 1, it means very bad. But what is the real quantitative measurement there? Is there any objective measurement at all? At the end it is completely subject-specific. You may like the service and give it a 6. I may not like it and give it a 2. Someone else may love it and give it a 9. So a “thought quality index” is also subject-specific. It is not like a real index that reflects a healthy, moderately healthy, bad, or hazardous physical environment. People who live in places where air pollution is not a problem may not even think about AQI. But if they come to cities like Mumbai or Delhi, they will suddenly feel the need to check the AQI (laughing). If you live in a place like Perth, where the AQI might be 10, with hardly any pollution, no cars, you do not even think about it.

But the thought quality index is a strange thing. For example, I say I am unhappy. What does that mean? It means there is some thought bothering me. Often, you do not even think about your health unless there is pain, or difficulty in breathing, or something seriously troubling you. Otherwise, your sense of health is only a thought. Sometimes a doctor tells you that something inside you is not good. That information itself makes you unhappy. But what if the information is wrong? It may not be a real reflection of your health. In the same way, the thought quality index is a very important aspect of mental health. I may be constantly worried for no real reason at all and the TQI can be very high for no real reason. I may have money, good health, and a good family, yet I am worried and unhappy. There are people like that—aren’t there? So this TQ indexing is a strange thing. Thought plays a major role in determining happiness and unhappiness. It is all a relative measurement.

Now, if we go a little deeper, some people will ask: what is thought? Suppose you close your eyes and ask yourself, “What is thought?” What will come to your mind? Immediately, there is some reference, some knowledge. Thought is always about something. Even in this moment, it is about thought itself. So how do you understand it? You turn to language. Language comes to your rescue. But if you look at Eastern traditions, you may get confused because there is no single clear term for “thought.” There are many related terms—chinta, manas, chitta. These words overlap and are used differently in different contexts. Chitta especially is a very confusing term. Western philosophers did not go deeply into these distinctions. Instead, they created a broad term called “consciousness.” In our tradition, we also have a similar word—Chetana.

Anyways. Now, some people could ask, what is thought? What is mind? What is consciousness? Well the thing is that, when you ask these questions, you are getting into definitions. Why am I unhappy? Because I am thinking. Certain information has come to me and I interpret it as bad news instead of good news. It may not directly relate to physical health, yet it has everything to do with health. If you are mentally unwell, you will not take care of your body, and your overall health will decline. That is important.

At the same time, what does thought really have to do with health? In one sense, everything. In another sense, nothing. The information that makes you unhappy may be wrong. I may assume I am not good enough, that I look bad, that nobody likes me or loves me. There are countless things I can worry about and feel bad about. When this confusion arises, it can actually be a good thing. What they call “fluttering in consciousness” is nothing but thought. It is the fluctuation in consciousness that creates the desire to acquire more information. That process is called thought.

There are situations that feel like transitions. In the morning, I am in Delhi; now I am in Puducherry. In the same way, I may suddenly move from a dark place in my thought world to a place where everything feels lighter. Of course, this shift can also happen in simple ways. I could go to a bar and have a couple of drinks and feel relief. I could go to a sports bar and watch my favourite team win. There are many ways to experience temporary alleviation. But what if you do not know the reason? Suppose you have not consumed alcohol, cannabis, or any other chemical that alters your state. Suppose no special good news has arrived—no sudden wealth, no great achievement from a loved one. None of these usual causes are present, and yet you suddenly feel happy. What do you do?

You might even joke about writing to your psychiatrist: “I am smiling from ear to ear and I do not know why. Am I mentally sick?” And perhaps he might say, “Yes, come for a session.” (laughing). Earlier, you were paying money to become happy. Now you are happy for no reason, and someone might say that is not a good sign. So I thought that TQI—the Thought Quality Index—might be an interesting way to speak about this: a way to consider happiness that appears without a clear cause, or a happiness that is acausal!

It is not a rare phenomenon where we come from. It is there in our tradition. The term is called ahaituka anandam—causeless happiness. There is no causal connection. All your sorrow, by the way, is causal. If you come to know that you are not well, or that there is some cause for your not being well, the first and foremost impact is on the physical body. Believe me, that is the only thing in your possession. Nothing else is under your control. Even this is not fully in your control, but at least you can help it. Other things you cannot even help. Whether it is your son, daughter, or wife—nothing. At most, you can take them to a doctor. You cannot really do anything. Nothing is in your hands.

The only thing you can directly do something about is your own physiological existence. So TQI can play a great role if you discover something that you cannot examine—something you do not know. All other things are known, and yet you cannot deny this. That will be the day you have stumbled upon something very good, very nice. That is low TQI. Otherwise you can generate a thought, you can pipe dream and make yourself happy. But it is not doing a great thing to your body. But with this (acausal happiness), ultimately for the first time your body is not burdened. Because this unburdenment is a massive desire for the integrated organisational demand. This is emancipation.

It is not information. It is outside that realm of information matching that can give you happiness and sorrow. So breathing, knowing, meditating, doing whatever you want to do—these are additive or subtractive processes. Anything that adds or deletes is keeping the movement alive. You can go on gathering information all your life. It is like a merry-go-round; it only increases the speed. After some time, you can neither jump off nor can you tolerate the spinning. Your brain is going to drive you nuts.

If you keep gathering information, and the sources and diversity of information nowadays are vast—like with AI tools—the overload is immense. There is no limit. It becomes a cesspool. The speed at which information is being produced on this planet is mind-boggling. In every field there are thousands of papers, because there are platforms, free platforms. Anyone can write any two cents and put it there. What will happen? People will be confused—more confused than before.

So why am I saying this? When you need to know, you must know. But when the need to know has no specific demand from within, it is only harmful. Therefore, freedom from the known is a very important aspect in understanding what knowledge is actually required for our life, our living, and our integrated health.

Students cannot even read that phrase—“freedom from the known.” It sounds like an antithesis. The immediate reaction is: “I have to know. Tomorrow I have to go and give a lecture. Nobody is going to listen to me if I speak like this. I have to prepare. I have to decide and publish to them an outline in advance what I am going to say. I have to give them something quantitative, something structured, something they are expecting to hear.”

Here, neither I know what I am going to say, nor you come prepared for what you have to listen to. That is why nothing is going to stick. Neither will I know what I said, nor can you assimilate what you heard, because there is no quantification. That is why, even though we human beings are very familiar with this kind of thing—“Could you please survey our service?”—there is no quantification in the measurement of such a survey. It is personal. The same way is TQI, it's personal. That's why it is called the Thought Quality Index.

One good thing about this (very low TQI) is that thinking about things can sometimes add very little momentum. And it is not something that I have invested in or discovered; it has been there from the beginning, from where we come from. It is when a system's dynamics is clean and when it vibrates according to its natural frequencies. Then, It is somehow connected with nature, and the energy exchange is clean.

This has been observed by those (ancient thinkers) who have tried their best to get out of the problem of sorrow, which is thought-induced. They found that thinking creates impressions called samskara or conditioning—like when a child has been abused and has gone through bad conditioning. Okay, so this has already been there for a while.

All of this comes into the world of layers that are accessed by thinking. So whenever there is disturbance, those layers add, or block, or come as a handicap to the way of fresh thinking. It is almost like imagining a substrate that is not clean, or a string that is not clean, and somebody is trying to vibrate it—it does not give its natural frequency. They worked very hard to find out how to remove that. That, by the way, is the whole Yoga Sutra—how to remove that conditioning from the brain. What one can do so that those things are eventually taken care of by the system itself. Like a cut mark on your body, gradually it will be taken care of by the skin.

So, if the neurobiological circuitry is not recurring(ly) using the same nightmare, the system can take care of itself. And it is a very funny term—when the substrate is clean, it means you are healthy. The probability of thought creating impressions goes very low. And talks in such an environment have a low TQI. At that time(with UG), I was not thinking in terms of TQI; I was thinking about samskara, conditioning.

I discovered that in the company of UG, and I was always surprised. I was not learning anything, nor was I taking any special healthy food or doing anything in particular, yet the system was feeling better. So I thought there was some reason, something going on, which was effectively taking away what was disturbing the integrated health of the system—the defects that were not allowing it to have dynamic equilibrium. Defects that were not really desired by the system, but forced upon it. And when the system’s own demand is satisfied, it unleashes what it needs. And it was not knowledge. How do I know? Because it started feeling unburdened.

There are many other signs. And nobody can tell those signs. Nobody can describe them; it will be a constant discovery for you If you stumble onto the acausal nature of lower thought quality, that which makes you feel good. Thought is still there, just like air is there (in low AQI environments)—but the AQI in the same air can also be very high depending on the quality of air. Similarly It is the quality of thinking that causes disturbance in you. The sound comes, and we are listening. We are using thought in listening. It is like air—you cannot help but use the process through which we learned everything. Otherwise, we cannot hear.

So thought is very much there. It is as much there as air is there, whether the AQI is 500 or 2. But when the quality of thought does not create an adverse situation, the system is not under conflict. So do not think too much about TQI—that is only going to increase your TQI. It is like saying, “I worked very hard to reduce my ego,” and then suddenly declaring, “Aham Brahmasmi.” Not a single exception among the great people you know. No humility. Humility is a façade. Only when somebody can laugh stupidly(laughing)—that is where you find…Alright, enough. So you go home with nothing. Maybe just some good timepass. There will be a simple, clear facial expression—you can see it yourself. Alright.

I remember someone who was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. She received a letter from someone. She was reading it with great attention—every sentence she read, her face reflected the meaning of each word. You could see it clearly. She was completely there with every line. Then she reached the end of the page—it was a two-page letter, written on both sides. She turned the page and began reading the letter again from the beginning. She had completely forgotten that she had already read it. (laughing). Seriously, this went on three or four times. She kept reading it. And every time she read a line, she was fully present with it. Each line had its own meaning, and it showed on her face. The only thing was, she forgot the previous line.

Because UG said, “When you cannot even remember your own name, that is the day you are there.” Who am I? I don’t know. So it was just a curious observation by someone reading this document describing TQI—that they were reading one line and forgetting the previous line while reading it (the first part of this writeup).

That means even the write-up has a very low TQI and it is called samskara shashav—information that comes to you without leaving an impression. If you forget the last line, it is not stored in your memory. So what is conditioning? The great yogis worked very hard to reach that samskara shashav—the end of conditioning. That is the essence of the great Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, without standing on your head forever.

You are doing samskara shashav. (laughing)