I sometimes think the deepest questions in life arrive long before we have the language to describe them properly. 

For me, many of those questions began in childhood. Not academically, and not through formal philosophy, but through atmosphere: stories from the Mahabharata and Ramayana, devotional music at home, temple culture, and early visits to India that left a lasting impression long before I understood why. I remember sensing, even as a child, that these worlds carried a different understanding of life than the one surrounding me in modern Britain. Not simply different customs or beliefs, but different assumptions about what a human being is, what matters, and how life should be lived. 

At the same time, I grew up fully within modern Western society. School, public life, contemporary culture, scientific education, multiculturalism – all of these shaped me as well. I never experienced these worlds as entirely separate. If anything, I became increasingly interested in the distance between them, and in the strange fact that modern societies often seem highly advanced in some areas of life while remaining deeply uncertain in others. 

Over time, one question kept returning in different forms: What happens when societies become extraordinarily sophisticated technologically, but increasingly uncertain about what a human being actually is? 

I don’t mean this in an abstract philosophical sense alone. The question appears everywhere once you begin noticing it. It appears in education systems that prepare young people for economic success while struggling to speak about character, meaning or inner life with seriousness. It appears in cultures that offer unlimited stimulation and connection, yet leave many people inwardly restless, distracted or isolated. It appears in public discourse that can analyse behaviour endlessly while often avoiding more difficult questions about wisdom, responsibility, purpose or self-understanding. 

The question also appears in the assumptions modern societies quietly inherit about consciousness itself. Increasingly, human beings are encouraged to think of themselves primarily in material, psychological or economic terms. Yet many aspects of human experience – love, beauty, moral intuition, contemplation, sacrifice, transcendence, even consciousness itself – resist being explained fully through those categories alone. Much of my work has emerged from living inside these tensions rather than resolving them too quickly. 

The Vedic tradition, particularly the Bhagavad-gita and Bhagavatam, has remained the deepest influence on my thinking throughout my life. Not simply as inherited belief, but because I have continually found within these texts a level of psychological, philosophical and spiritual seriousness that remains profoundly relevant to modern conditions. At the same time, I have often found useful insight emerging through conversations with philosophy, science, literature, education and contemporary psychology. Not because all these traditions ultimately say the same thing – I don’t believe they do – but because human beings repeatedly encounter certain questions regardless of culture or discipline. 

Questions surrounding consciousness, suffering, identity, desire, attention, freedom, meaning and human flourishing seem to persist across time because they belong to the structure of human life itself.

This has shaped the way I approach dialogue between traditions and fields of knowledge more broadly. I have little interest in spirituality becoming tribal, anti-intellectual or disconnected from public life. But I am equally cautious of modern habits that reduce spiritual life into vague wellbeing language, lifestyle branding or private preference detached from deeper questions of truth and transformation. 

In many ways, education became one practical expression of these concerns. When we founded Avanti Schools Trust, the aim was never simply to create academically successful schools, although academic rigour matters deeply. The deeper concern was whether education might help form thoughtful, responsible and grounded human beings – people capable not only of achievement, but of reflection, integrity, self-awareness and service. 

That concern continues to shape much of the wider work today. Whether through schools, writing, dialogue, retreat spaces, public conversations or contemplative practice itself, I find myself returning repeatedly to the relationship between inner formation and collective life. Societies are shaped not only by economics and politics, but by attention, values, aspiration and the assumptions people carry about what human life is ultimately for. 

I’ve also become increasingly aware that many modern arguments arise because different areas of life are treated as though they have no meaningful relationship with one another. Science speaks in one language, spirituality in another, education in another, economics in another, ethics in another. Specialists become more knowledgeable within narrower domains, while broader questions about human purpose and human flourishing often remain unattended. 

I don’t think the answer is to force everything into a single system. Some differences matter deeply. Different disciplines reveal different aspects of reality, and traditions should not be stripped of their distinctiveness in the name of easy harmony. But I do think modern life suffers when human beings lose the ability to place knowledge into meaningful relationship with wisdom, or public progress into relationship with inner development. 

Perhaps this is why I remain drawn to conversations that move between worlds. Conversations where philosophy, science, spirituality, education and lived experience are all allowed into the room together. Not to produce instant agreement, but to help recover a richer picture of human life than many contemporary frameworks currently allow. 

I don’t see this work as an attempt to present a finished philosophy. If anything, it feels more like an ongoing effort to keep certain questions alive, while resisting the temptation to settle too quickly for answers that flatter modern assumptions about progress, identity or reality itself. 

As time passes, the less interested I am in labels alone. What interests me more is whether particular ways of living, thinking and relating genuinely deepen human beings – whether they produce greater clarity, responsibility, compassion, steadiness and depth of perception over time.

Those questions continue to shape the work gathered across this site.