A Personal Reflection on Rahu, Restlessness, and Returning to the Self
By Harshna Chandolia
We live in what the ancients called Kali Yuga, an age of distortion and forgetfulness. But to me, it’s more than a symbolic cycle from scriptures. It feels real, lived, present. It feels like we’re deep in Rahu’s era, a time ruled by illusion, where what looks most real often isn’t.
Rahu doesn’t destroy by force. It seduces. It replaces truth with image, essence with appearance. And more than ever, we’re now living in the projection rather than the presence.
Think about it, the rise of social media, AI, crypto, avatars, and deepfakes, this isn’t just technology evolving. This is reality being rewritten. Curated. Filtered. Sold back to us as connection.
We scroll more than we speak. We consume more than we contemplate. And somewhere along the way, we’ve started mistaking all of this; the feed, the updates, the performance, for life itself.
There used to be space in our minds. Now it feels constantly crowded.
We pick up our phones for a second… and find ourselves scrolling through lives that aren’t ours. It’s not conscious. It’s conditioning. And maybe that’s why spirituality and wellness feel so loud now, not because we’ve become more enlightened, but because we’re more exhausted. Not just from working, but from endlessly absorbing.
We’re overstimulated, undernourished.
The nervous system wasn’t built to carry the world. And yet here we are, carrying the weight of every conflict, trend, opinion, and update, most of which have nothing to do with us.
Ironically, the very tools that were meant to connect us now leave us more isolated than ever. We sit next to the people we love, but scroll away from their presence. We perform intimacy online, while losing the real thing offline.
This too is Rahu.
Not evil. Just empty.
A constant chase for something just out of reach, beauty, validation, relevance, peace, whatever it is, it always lives in the next swipe.
And here’s what I’ve come to realise: the digital world isn’t the problem. The problem is forgetting that it’s not the whole world.
Technology is a tool. But the moment we stop choosing how we use it, it starts choosing who we become. And that’s when Rahu turns from archetype to addiction.
I’ve felt it too, that hollow restlessness after a day of passive scrolling. That strange emptiness even after being “seen” by hundreds. That feeling of being full… but of nothing nourishing.
That’s when I return to stillness. Not because I’m trying to run away from the world, but because I’m trying to return to myself.
Stillness isn’t absence. It’s clarity.
And in the middle of this noise, it’s the only place I can hear the truth. This is why Vedanta speaks so directly to our times.
Because Vedanta was never about renouncing the world, it was about seeing through it.
It doesn’t ask us to delete apps or avoid information. It asks us to remember who we are beneath all of it.
“You are not the mind. You are not the body. You are not the noise.”
You are the witness. The seer. The self that remains when everything else flickers and fades.
And maybe that’s the only real freedom left today, not escaping the illusion, but seeing it clearly… and choosing to live from somewhere deeper.
In the age of the mirage, the most radical act is to be real. To pause.
To breathe.
To remember.