Beyond The Walls You Cannot See

Beyond The Walls You Cannot See

When Openness Replaces Prejudice

Dear friends,

A man inherits a house with stained glass windows on every wall, and each pane shows the world outside in a single colour. Through the blue glass the garden looks melancholy. Through the red glass it looks threatening. Through the amber glass everything appears old and faded. He has lived so long with these windows that he has forgotten that they are coloured at all. He simply believes the world to be as he sees it. One monsoon evening, a storm cracks a single pane, and through the clear gap he glimpses colours he has no name for.

Most of us live in that house. The stained glass we inherited was not installed by us. It was placed there by family, culture, community and our own experience. And its danger lies not in the colours themselves but in our forgetting that the glass is coloured at all. We look through our prejudices and believe we are seeing clearly. This is the condition that Babuji identified with startling precision when he called prejudice the deadliest poison to spiritual life.

The Poison That Feels Like Wisdom

Poison is an interesting word. It implies something that enters a living system and corrupts it from within. A poisoned body does not know it is poisoned until the damage is already done. And this is precisely what makes prejudice more dangerous than any of the obstacles we have explored so far. In The Awakening of Purpose, laziness was visible. In Building a Strong Foundation, doubt was felt. In Reaching for the Sky, pride could be detected by anyone willing to look honestly. But prejudice? Prejudice wears the robes of discernment. It presents itself as loyalty to truth, as wisdom earned through experience, and as the mature ability to judge correctly. A prejudiced mind does not feel sick; it feels certain.

The great American educator John Dewey called closed-mindedness “premature intellectual old age”. The mind loses its suppleness. It can no longer receive, analyze or respond to what is genuinely new. Every fresh person, every unfamiliar idea and every experience that does not fit the existing frame is filtered through conclusions formed long ago. We stop encountering reality; instead, we encounter only our opinions about reality. And we mistake the two.

The Chain It Strengthens

Babuji’s insight reaches deeper than psychology; he identifies a metaphysical consequence. Prejudice, he says, adds one more link to the existing chain of egotism. Let’s consider what this means. Every act of prejudice is, at its root, a declaration: My view is the correct view. My group is the right group. My way of seeing is the way 4 of seeing. Even when it appears as a judgement about others, it is fundamentally a statement about the self. And each such statement thickens the shell of ego, the very thing that separates the individual drop from the ocean it longs to rejoin.

This is why Babuji arrives at such startling logic: the realization of the Limitless becomes an impossibility. It does not become difficult or unlikely; it becomes an impossibility. You cannot reach the Infinite while building finite walls. You cannot merge with the whole while insisting on remaining apart. A consciousness that has drawn a boundary around itself and declared everything outside that boundary as lesser, wrong or other has structurally disqualified itself from the experience of vastness. This is absolutely logical.

The Bridge That Became a Wall

Perhaps the most sobering dimension of Babuji’s analysis is what happens to religion itself under the influence of prejudice. Religion, which was designed as a bridge between the human and the Divine, becomes a barrier instead. The very instrument of connection becomes the instrument of separation. How? Because when we approach the sacred through the lens of “my religion is the only true religion”, we replace the living experience of the Divine with a dead allegiance to form. We worship the container and forget the water it was meant to carry.

This is not a problem confined to any one tradition. It lives wherever human beings mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. It lives in the Hindu who will not sit beside a Muslim to meditate. It lives in the scientist who dismisses all spiritual experience as delusion. And, if we are rigorously honest, it may live quietly in us too, in corners we have not yet examined, in assumptions so familiar we have forgotten they are assumptions at all.

What Dissolves the Glass

Just as an empty cup has the capacity to receive, an empty heart has space for love. And love is not something we produce, but something that arises when the conditions are right. Prejudice is one of those deep roots that must be pulled out to leave room for love’s entry. And yet, beautifully, the reverse is also true: love itself is the force that dissolves prejudice from within. Fear contracts while love expands. And prejudice, which is ultimately a contraction of consciousness around a fixed position, cannot survive genuine expansion.

This is where meditation becomes indispensable. You can neither argue yourself into loving everyone, nor can you shame yourself into openness. In the silence of deep practice, when thought settles and the chattering mind quietens, something remarkable happens. The boundaries we have constructed begin to feel like just that: our 6 own constructions. We realize that these boundaries are neither reality nor truth, but just habits of mind, patterns of reaction and inherited conclusions we never thought to question.

Through pranahuti, divine Transmission, the heart softens through direct contact with something vaster than the mind’s categories. In that vastness, there is simply no space for prejudice; not because we have fought it away, but because we have expanded beyond the territory it once occupied. A river that has reached the ocean does not concern itself with the particular valley it once flowed through, as it has become too large for such small allegiances.

The Crack in the Glass

Prejudice not only damages the one who holds it but also radiates outward. Others feel it, children absorb it and communities fracture along its invisible lines. When Babuji wrote that India had achieved political freedom but not freedom of the soul, he was identifying something timeless: external liberation without internal liberation is incomplete. Each of us is responsible for examining our own inner atmosphere. There is no need to examine ourselves with guilt, because guilt is just another form of contraction. Instead, try introspecting with honest curiosity: “Where have I stopped listening?” “Where have I decided, without fresh evidence, that a person, a path or an idea has nothing to offer me?” “Where have I confused the comfort of certainty with the presence of truth?”

That man in the inherited house did not need to destroy his windows. He needed only one crack, one small opening through which unfiltered light could enter. The crack is the beginning of spiritual freedom: it is not the accumulation of more correct answers, but the willingness to hold our answers lightly, to let the vastness of reality continually surprise and reshape us.

The walls we cannot see are always the hardest to dismantle, but here is the quiet truth that makes this work worth doing: we do not dismantle them by force. We dissolve them by growing too large to live inside them any longer. And as those walls dissolve, a new movement begins to stir in the cleared space, where a presence has been waiting all along. We will explore this in the next message: the moment when love, now free of every obstruction, turns its full force toward the Divine and becomes devotion.

With love and prayers,
Kamlesh

Message on the occasion of Golden Jubilee Celebrations of Yogashram Shahjahanpur Batch 5: 28 February to 2 March 2026