I have, at various points in my life, been very sure I was right. About cricket. About whether the milk should go in before or after the tea. About geopolitics. About what the other person in an argument was actually feeling, even when they disagreed with my diagnosis of their feelings. Especially then.

This is not a confession. It’s a pattern recognition.

The brain, it turns out, doesn’t show us the world. It builds a model of the world and then presents that model with the confidence of a property developer showing you the brochure instead of the plot. We live inside the brochure. We defend the brochure. We forward the brochure to everyone we know with a note that says: this is prime real estate, don’t miss out.

And what are we defending, exactly? A self that is mostly a story we tell about a collection of habits, fears, and reactions to our mother’s particular way of sighing. That’s the thing that needs to win. That’s the thing we go to war for.

Satyameva jayate, we say, very confidently. Truth alone triumphs. And then we assume the truth is what we already believe.

But the older reading is more devastating. Sat is what is. Not what you think is. Not what your side proved. What is. And what is doesn’t need to win. It persists. It doesn’t even notice the argument.

In the Mahabharata, nobody wins. The Pandavas win and then spend their entire post-victory lives walking toward death one by one in the Himalayas, dropping as they go. The Kauravas don’t win. Krishna doesn’t win in the way we mean winning. The war happens, and then it doesn’t matter, and then Dvarka sinks into the sea.

Totality persists. This is not winning. This is just the universe doing what it was going to do anyway, indifferent to our elaborate scorecard.

The self’s response to this information is to quietly appropriate it. “Ah yes,” the self says, “totality persists. And I am one with the totality. Therefore, in a sense, I persist.” This is the self winning by annexing the thing that was supposed to dissolve it. It does this every time. It is very good at this.

Which is why spiritual realizations keep needing to be re-realized. The flag gets planted and the forest grows back.

Here is the only thing I’ve come to that doesn’t immediately get reabsorbed: the body knows something the mind hasn’t accepted. When the fear circuitry quiets — not through suppression but through something closer to seeing that there was never a separate thing to protect — the body changes its orientation. Not toward death as tragedy. Toward it as continuation, the next movement of the same thing with life as another identity.

I don’t take me seriously. I still want the milk in second. And I notice, occasionally, that the argument doesn’t feel as urgent as it used to.

That might be age. It might be something else.

The brochure is still beautiful. And the developer is developing. But winning doesn’t matter anymore. Not even in cricket.