Dear Jeyamohan,
I have been listening to your speeches on YouTube for the past two years. In a way, they have become a substitute for something I lost long ago—the habit of reading.
I lost my reading habit nearly twenty years ago. I feel that loss even today. There was a time when I could read and spend hours with a book, but now I find it very difficult to read anything. It is a great loss, because reading once gave me a way of going beyond the immediate world around me.
Yet my mind has never been satisfied with the ordinary things that gather around me every day. There is always a yearning for something beyond what is immediately visible, something that can take me deeper into life and into myself. I feel that there is something beyond my present understanding, and I am constantly looking for a way to reach it.
At present, listening has become the only way available to me. But most speeches and talks available around us are aimed at the average listener. They are designed primarily to entertain, simplify and keep people engaged. Those who can entertain large numbers of ordinary listeners are naturally considered great speakers, and their videos keep reaching us through every form of social media.
Your talks are different. You seem to be speaking to those who have an original quest within them—to people who are not satisfied with ready-made answers and who want to look beyond the familiar boundaries of life. You do not seem to be trying merely to entertain the listener or to make a difficult idea easy. Instead, you are trying to awaken something in the mind.
That is why your speeches have become so important to me. I often feel that you are not simply addressing my intellect but speaking directly to something deeper in me. Sometimes, while listening to you, I feel that a question which has been silently present in my mind for years has suddenly been given a form and a language.
Perhaps this is why I continue to listen to you, even though I have lost the ability to read as I once did. Your talks have opened a small path back towards that larger inner world which I have been missing.
Thank you for continuing to speak to those who are still searching.
Prabhakar
