Raga-Dveṣa Circus – How Social Media Activates the Oldest Human Mechanism

You wake up and the first thing you do is check your phone. Not because something urgent happened overnight. Just because it is there, and the pull is immediate and unquestioned. Before you have spoken a word or had a thought that is fully your own, the stream has already started, messages, posts, reactions, updates, each one landing somewhere in the chest before the mind has had a chance to assess it.

You post a photograph, maybe of a dress you liked, maybe of something you cooked, maybe a thought you had. And then, without quite deciding to, you begin checking. How many people responded. What they said. Whether the number is going up. If the response is warm, there is a brief lift. If the phone shows nothing, or worse, shows that people saw it and kept scrolling, something contracts.

The mood shifts. The day has a slightly different texture, colored by what strangers on a screen did or did not tap with their thumb. This is happening dozens of times a day. Each notification is a small event with emotional weight. Each absence of one is also an event. The mind is waiting, anticipating, rehearsing, then reacting, adjusting, recovering. A person living like this is not free between their tasks. They are between reactions.

The WhatsApp spiral makes the same point from the other direction. You step onto a beach, an actual beach, with actual waves, and the phone comes too. Within minutes, a message arrives about someone’s problem, or a group erupts with an argument, or a news item appears that demands an immediate opinion. The water is still there. The light is still there. But you are no longer at the beach. You are in your phone, and the phone is pulling from all directions at once. What was supposed to be rest is now another theater of emotional response.

The phone is a device. What reaches toward it, expects something from it, and is unsettled when it delivers the wrong thing, that is in you. The phone is an extraordinarily efficient delivery mechanism for a much older problem: the mechanism by which the mind latches onto external objects as sources of happiness, and gets thrown around by whether those objects cooperate.

How the mind sorts and reacts

Every human mind moves outward toward objects. Every human mind sorts them rapidly into what it wants and what it does not want, then builds a small emotional world around that sorting. Social media does not create this mechanism. It hands it a firehose.

Before asking how social media exploits the mind, it helps to understand what the mind is actually made of. The upheaval described above, checking for likes, the spike of pleasure when they appear, the hollow ache when they don’t, is the mind working exactly as it was built. And the mechanism has a precise name.

Neither raga nor dvesha belongs to the object. The object does not carry them. They are entirely yours. Two people can look at the same social media post, the same comment, the same photograph, and one finds it delightful while the other finds it irritating. The post did not change. Raga-dvesha is individualized, a function of each person’s particular psychological configuration. Swami Dayananda puts it plainly: both raga and dvesha are purely according to you alone. They are your subjective responses, not the object’s objective qualities.

This is not a trivial distinction. If your distress about low engagement on a post came from the post itself, then everyone who saw it would be equally distressed. They are not. The distress is being generated inside you, and what is generated inside you can, in principle, be worked with.

The ragee and the viragee

The goal is not to become a person who feels nothing, no preferences, no aversions, a blank and affectless mind. Even Sankara had preferences. Even Vasishtha. The mind naturally comes with its own particular configuration of likes and dislikes, the way a guitar comes with its own strings and tuning. No two instruments are identical, and no mind is either.

The real distinction is between being a ragee and being a viragee. A ragee is a mind enslaved to its own likes and dislikes, one whose preferences have calcified into dependencies, where the mind is no longer the owner of the like but the like owns the mind. A viragee is a mind that is master of its likes and dislikes: the preference still exists but its absence does not cause collapse. The liking is real; the dependence is absent.

The practical difference is the difference between a preference and a need. A preference says: I would enjoy this, and if it is not available, I continue. A need says: I cannot be okay without this, and its absence is a crisis. Both feel like “liking something.” The gap between them only becomes visible when the object is withheld, which is precisely the moment the scroll delivers or denies: the notification that comes, or doesn’t.

Vasanas and the loaded mind

Why does a small red notification icon have such a reliable grip on attention? The answer requires looking at what happens below the surface of the conscious mind, at the deeper impressions that social media learns to activate. The mind does not encounter social media neutrally. It arrives already loaded.

Images, opinions, achievements, complaints, arguments, celebrations, each one a potential trigger for some latent impression in the mind. The algorithmic feed does not pause. It does not ask whether you are stable or exhausted. It keeps presenting objects, and the mind, which is naturally extroverted and sense-drawn, keeps reacting. The vasanas fire in sequence, pulling the mind outward in a hundred directions simultaneously.

The turbulence is only half the problem. When the mind looks at an object, a notification, a post, a count of likes, it does not see it plainly. It projects onto it. It decides, subconsciously and instantly, that this object contains joy. That receiving the like will mean something. That the notification holds something worth having. This projection has a name in Vedanta: shobhanadhyasah, the mental error of superimposing happiness onto an external object, as though the joy lives in the object itself rather than in the mind’s response to it.

This is the precise mistake that makes the scroll compulsive. The person waiting for likes on a post is not curious about a social metric. The mind has projected the promise of fulfillment onto that number. More likes means something good about me. Fewer likes means something is wrong. The object, a counter on a screen, has been loaded with existential weight it does not carry. This is what the mind does with every object it encounters, long before any phone existed. What social media has done is multiply the frequency of this error by orders of magnitude.

A person a century ago might have faced a handful of such triggers in a day. Today, the screen delivers dozens per minute. Each one is a fresh opportunity for shobhanadhyasah, a fresh projection of joy onto something that cannot hold it, followed by a fresh cycle of craving when the expected fulfillment fails to materialize. The result is a mind in near-constant agitation, checking, waiting, reacting, refreshing, not because it is weak, but because it is doing exactly what minds do when exposed to a relentless parade of vasana-triggering stimuli. The mechanism is ancient. Only the delivery system is new.

The incompleteness the scroll is answering

Why is the pull so strong? Why does it feel urgent enough to ruin an evening or a morning over something as minor as a digital reaction? What question about yourself are you actually trying to answer each time you reach for the phone? Every person who has felt genuine relief at receiving a dozen likes on a post knows something is off when that relief disappears within an hour. The number was there. The approval was real. And yet the craving returned, often stronger than before.

What social media offers is a precise simulation of an answer to that itch. A notification arrives. For a moment the incompleteness seems filled. Someone saw you, approved of you, confirmed your existence. The relief is real, which is why the behavior continues. The problem is not that the relief is imaginary. The problem is that the object supplying it, the like, the comment, the follower count, cannot address the source of the itch. Apurnatvam is not a deficit of external confirmation. No amount of confirmation touches it, because external confirmation is the wrong category of solution entirely.

This is where the earlier mechanism of shobhanadhyasah deepens. Projecting joy onto a notification is an error of diagnosis. The person scrolling is not merely hoping a post will feel good. They are, without realizing it, using the post to answer a question about their own completeness. When the likes come, the answer seems to be yes. When they do not come, the answer seems to be no. The entire emotional ride, the anxiety before posting, the checking, the crash when engagement drops, is powered by this misdiagnosis. The external world has been appointed to settle a question it has no authority to settle.

Here is the consequence: when the external world is given this authority, it gains total leverage over the mind. The moment you empower a digital metric to determine whether you are enough, you have handed every stranger who scrolls past your post a vote on your psychological stability. Your peace of mind now depends on the cumulative behavior of people who do not know you, did not ask to be your judges, and will have forgotten the post before lunch. The cycle is exhausting not because of the time spent on the phone, but because of the weight of the question the phone is being asked to answer.

Why self-regulation alone is not enough

Here is the objection that arrives right on schedule: unlimited access to information is a net good. You can listen to five thousand hours of teaching on a device that fits in your pocket. Every documentary, every lecture, every perspective on every question is available within seconds. Why would you voluntarily restrict that? The objection conflates two different things: the availability of information and what that availability does to the mind that receives it.

Before the communication revolution, external censoring happened automatically. Geography limited what you could see. Schedules limited when you could see it. The sheer scarcity of media meant the mind had gaps, intervals where no new stimulus was arriving. That scarcity was not a deprivation. Now the gaps are gone. Everything comes everywhere, all the time. The censoring that used to happen by default has stopped. What fills that absence is not wisdom. It is vikshepa, mental turbulence, restlessness, the mind in a state of violent agitation.

A person goes to the beach to rest. They bring their phone. Before they have watched a single wave, information has arrived through the device and trashed exactly the peace they came to find. The beach is unchanged. The ocean is unchanged. The turbulence is entirely internal, generated by the stream of stimuli the phone delivers. This is the ordinary texture of the contemporary mind: a continuous low-grade agitation that feels like engagement but functions as exhaustion. The mind that has scrolled for an hour has not rested. It has been worked. It has processed hundreds of fragments of raga-dvesha, this is appealing, that is offensive, this makes me feel inadequate, that confirms what I already believe, without a single deliberate choice in the sequence.

Dama: the only gate left

Because the external gate no longer exists, the only gate that remains is internal. Dama is not asceticism. It is not the rejection of the world. It is the recognition that without a conscious filter on what enters, the mind has no chance of settling into the clarity required for inquiry. The practical form dama takes here is straightforward: decide consciously what you watch, what sites you visit, and when the phone is off. Not as punishment. As maintenance.

A person who switches off the phone for an hour is not missing the world. They are giving the mind one interval in which no new raga-dvesha trigger is arriving. One hour in which vikshepa can subside on its own, the way sediment settles when a glass of water is left undisturbed. The resistant mind will say: but what if I miss something important? This is exactly the logic of dependency speaking. It is the same structure as the person who cannot begin their morning without checking WhatsApp, not because something urgent is actually waiting, but because the mind has been conditioned to treat the absence of incoming stimuli as a kind of threat. The urgency is manufactured. The anxiety it produces is real.

The problem is not that you have likes and dislikes. The problem is that your likes and dislikes have you. The Bhagavad Geeta does not instruct you to empty the mind of all preferences. Expecting a mind free of all reaction is a fantasy that, when pursued, only generates a new dvesha: aversion toward your own natural responses. The actual task is more precise and more achievable. It begins with the body, not the mind.

Dama, sensory restraint, is the first step because the mind cannot regulate itself while the sense organs remain wide open to an unlimited feed. The communication revolution has removed all external censoring. Every piece of content, every notification, every curated image is available everywhere, at every hour. The only gate left is yours. Actively decide what comes in: which programs you watch, which sites you visit, and, crucially, switch off the phone for at least one hour each day. Not because information is evil, but because a mind that never gets silence cannot hear itself think. It only reacts. A mind that only reacts is not a free mind; it is a machine that runs on whatever input arrives first.

Converting needs into preferences

Once dama creates even a small interior space, viveka, discrimination, becomes possible. Viveka is the ability to see clearly what an object actually is versus what the mind has projected onto it. A “like” on a post is a tap of a finger by someone you may never meet, lasting less than a second. The emotional weight the mind loads onto that tap, the sense that it confirms your worth, your taste, your social standing, is in the projection. Seeing this distinction does not require renunciation. It requires honesty. The notification cannot deliver what the mind is seeking from it. Seeing that clearly, once, is worth more than a hundred resolutions to use the phone less.

From here, the practical work is a systematic three-stage process of refinement, disempowerment, and disarmament, working with each binding raga-dvesha until it loses its grip. Take food preferences: liking idli over dosai, or preferring one color of clothing over another, harmless, legal, completely moral. There is nothing to dismantle here. A life with aesthetic preferences is not a life in bondage. The difference is testable. If the preferred item is unavailable and the mind shrugs and orders something else, that is a non-binding preference, a vibhooti, a small personal glory, something that adds texture to life without dictating its terms. But if the unavailability produces anxiety, irritability, or a sense that the day is now ruined, the preference has crossed into a need. That need is a shackle. Not the preference itself, the shackle requires work.

The same test applies to the scroll. Checking social media once, finding no new engagement, closing the app, that is a non-binding preference for connection. Checking three more times in the next ten minutes, each time hoping the count has changed, is a binding need. The ragee mind does not experience a scroll. It is driven by one. The viragee mind can pick up the phone, look at it, and put it down, because the looking serves a purpose rather than filling a void.

As karta, the agent who acts, you keep your free will, what to post, when to look, what to engage with. As bhokta, the experiencer who receives the results, you keep your equanimity, because you have stopped outsourcing your sense of completeness to the count. The yatayah, the committed seekers the tradition describes, understand that this mastery is not achieved in a single afternoon. It is the sustained work of reorienting the mind, one deliberate choice at a time, from extroversion toward the interior.

The Witness that is never disturbed

There is the phone. There is the notification. There is the surge of anticipation, the deflation when the response was smaller than expected, the brief lift when it was larger. The mind moves through all of these. But something knows the mind is moving. The anxiety about the likes, you are aware of it. The compulsive reach for the phone, you are aware of it. The relief when you put it down, you are aware of that too. The mind changes constantly. The awareness of it does not.

Here is where the inquiry called nirmathanam, a churning, a sustained investigation, becomes decisive. The sentence tat tvam asi, “that thou art,” carries two layers of meaning. The vacyartha, the literal meaning, points to an individual person and a cosmic reality that seem completely different. The lakshyartha, the implied meaning, strips both of their surface attributes, the individual’s psychological history, the universe’s vast extension, and reveals what remains beneath both: pure Existence, pure Consciousness. When you say “I am,” the “am” points to Existence and the “I” points to Consciousness. These are not qualities you have acquired. They are what you are before any qualification.

The Bliss that seemed to live in the notification, that seemed to require a “like” to appear, was never in the notification. It belongs to this ground, covered over by the agitated mind, mistaken for something the world could provide. The ragee, the mind enslaved by its own likes and dislikes, is not your true identity. It is a configuration of the mind-body instrument, like the tuning of a guitar. You are not the guitar. As Swami Paramarthananda puts it directly: happiness does not belong to you as an attribute, and unhappiness does not belong to you as an attribute. You are nirguna sakshi caitanyam, the attribute-less Witness Consciousness.

The phone can ring or stay silent. The post can collect praise or be ignored. None of it touches what you are. The Witness observes the entire drama of the scroll, the craving, the checking, the relief, the disappointment, without being stained by any of it. This recognition does not make you indifferent to life. It makes you free within it. You can engage with technology, relationships, and the world’s information from genuine choice rather than compulsion, because the sense of incompleteness that sent you to the feed has been seen through.