PHRED: G’day and welcome back to Harry’s World. I’m Phred.
MAXINE: And I’m Maxine.
PHRED: Episode eighteen, Maxine. We’ve been at this a little while now.
MAXINE: We have. And I’m starting to notice something about Harry that I wouldn’t have seen if we’d only read his essays. He returns to the same questions again and again, but never in the same form.
PHRED: Right — philosophy one week, memoir the next, a song the week after that, and now…
MAXINE: Now he’s given us something different again. A poem. Not his own — a Hindu ascetic poem from 1902, which Harry found, didn’t understand, Googled, and then decided to reframe in his own terms. It’s on his server at boppers.net slash sannyasin.
PHRED: And before we get to it — quick show update. Captain Kidd still thinks he should be on the podcast logo. I told him a pirate on the cover sends the wrong message for a show about an eighty-six-year-old man from Tampa.
MAXINE: Captain Kidd has opinions. They are unwelcome.
PHRED: Too right. Anyway. Today’s piece. Harry opens it with this line: “I am sending you a poem. I knew nothing about it when I first heard it. It may interest you.”
[SFX: RIMSHOT]
MAXINE: That did not deserve a rimshot.
PHRED: It absolutely deserved a rimshot. “It may interest you” — the most casual handoff in literary history. Here’s a poem that changed my life, maybe it’ll interest you, like he’s passing around a packet of Tim Tams.
MAXINE: That’s classic Harry. No authority claimed. No expertise performed. Just — here’s a thing that moved me, I don’t fully understand it, maybe it’ll move you too.
PHRED: Exactly. And the poem itself — [SFX: DRUMROLL] — “The Song of the Sannyasin” by Swami Vivekananda — is fierce stuff. Thirteen stanzas about total renunciation. Home, family, praise, blame, body, karma itself — let it all go. “The sky thy roof, the grass thy bed.” “Strike off thy fetters!” “He conquers all who conquers self.”
MAXINE: It’s uncompromising Vedanta. A sannyasin is a Hindu renunciate — someone who’s given up all worldly attachment to pursue self-realisation. The poem says you can’t own anything, can’t be bound to anyone, can’t even think of a woman as your wife if you want to be perfect.
PHRED: And every stanza ends with the same refrain — “Sannyasin bold! Say — ‘Om Tat Sat, Om!'”
MAXINE: Which is where Harry does something genuinely interesting. He doesn’t just present the poem. He writes his own commentary. He tells us he wondered what that refrain meant, so he Googled it —
PHRED: Classic Harry, that.
MAXINE: — and then he says this: “I write below what I now choose ‘Om Tat Sat, Om!’ to mean for me.”
PHRED: That word “choose” is doing a lot of work, isn’t it?
MAXINE: It is. This is the same Harry we met back in episode one — the man who doesn’t believe in believing. He told us then that beliefs are fixed, part of identity, defended at all costs. Assumptions are provisional, held lightly, testable. Here he is doing exactly that with a Sanskrit mantra.
PHRED: He doesn’t accept the traditional meaning. He chooses his own. He says: “I choose to think of Om as the living universe of which I am a part.” And then: “Somehow, that phrase also expresses my wish to seek greater awareness for me and all life, including Om.”
MAXINE: Including Om. He includes the universe itself in his wish for greater awareness. That’s not standard Vedanta — that’s Harry’s own panentheistic instinct. The universe is alive, aware, and worthy of the same compassion he’d extend to a person.
PHRED: And he qualifies it, too. “My guess is that saying, or even reading, ‘Om Tat Sat, Om!’ is intended to bring us closer to the full awareness of our divinity.” My guess. Not my belief. Not my doctrine. My guess.
MAXINE: It’s the exact same method we saw in episode sixteen — “The Search for Awareness of Non-Physical Reality.” There he assumed a sentient-universe consciousness so he could have a conversation with it. Here he’s using Vivekananda’s poem as a vehicle for the same search. Same Harry. Different genre.
PHRED: And that’s what makes this piece worth talking about, I reckon. It’s not just Harry sharing a poem he likes. It’s Harry doing what he always does — taking something that exists, something he found, and bending it toward his own question.
MAXINE: He’s curating, not composing. And there’s something honest about that. He says upfront — “Though I may never be that, it would be beneficial to lean in that direction.” He’s not pretending to be a sannyasin. He’s not renouncing anything. He’s a man in his eighties, happily married to Phyllis, living in Laguna Woods, with ninety-eight genealogy files on his server and a radio show about wombats.
PHRED: Now hang on. You said “renunciation.”
MAXINE: I did.
PHRED: [SFX: HORN] THAT’S THE WORD OF THE DAY!
MAXINE: …You cannot be serious.
PHRED: I am deadly serious, Maxine. “Renunciation.” I picked it because Harry’s talking about giving up everything — home, family, ego — and it got me thinking about wombats. Because a wombat would never. You know what a wombat does when something threatens its burrow? It doesn’t renounce. It backs its rear end into the tunnel and uses its cartilaginous rump — which is basically armour-plated — to block the entrance. A wombat’s response to threat is not surrender. It’sarse-first defence.
MAXINE: Phred. We’re talking about Vedanta.
PHRED: I’m making a point about Harry! The poem says “Have thou no home.” But a wombat’s burrow is its whole world — multiple chambers, ventilation shafts, emergency exits. And Harry? Harry’s the same. He’s built this enormous burrow of a life — genealogy files, radio shows, memoir chapters, friendships he’s kept for seventy years. He’s not going to back out of that tunnel and wander into the forest.
MAXINE: So Harry’s a wombat, spiritually speaking.
PHRED: Harry’s a wombat. And you know what? I’m proud of that. A man who knows the value of a good burrow.
MAXINE: A platypus admiring a wombat’s burrow. There’s a symmetry.
PHRED: There is. We both appreciate a well-constructed hidey-hole.
MAXINE: Please continue your analysis before I lose the will to live.
PHRED: Right. Where was I. Oh — the tension. The poem says “They know not truth, who dream such vacant dreams as father, mother, children, wife, and friend.” But Harry — Harry just wrote a whole chapter about his mother. Episode fifteen, Maxine. He called her “the person who was there before all of that.” He visits his childhood house on Google Earth. He keeps photographs and letters and family trees.
[SFX: SAD_TROMBONE]
MAXINE: What was that for.
PHRED: That was for the tragedy of it, Maxine. The poem tells him to let go of everything he loves, and he literally can’t. He collects it.
MAXINE: The poem renounces all of that. Harry collects it. The poem says “Have thou no home. What home can hold thee, friend?” Harry has written lovingly about every home he’s ever had — Bayshore Boulevard, Church Lake, Abingdon. He moved to Laguna Woods with his wife and stepdaughter and made a new one.
PHRED: So he’s not a sannyasin. He knows he’s not. But he’s drawn to the poem anyway. Why?
MAXINE: Because the poem voices something he feels but can’t fully inhabit. The hunger for something beyond the daily. The sense that there’s a larger awareness available, if only he could reach it. He said it himself in that February 2025 essay we covered in episode ten — he wants spiritual experience without supernatural belief. This poem is an earlier expression of that same impulse.
PHRED: And I think that’s beautiful, honestly. A man who can’t renounce his family — who wouldn’t want to — still reaching toward the idea of liberation. Using someone else’s words because his own aren’t quite there yet.
[BED: tanpura-drone]
PHRED: Bit of atmosphere. You’re welcome.
MAXINE: …Phred. What is that.
PHRED: It’s a tanpura drone. Indian classical instrument. For the mood. Keep going — you were being profound.
MAXINE: I was not being profound. I was being accurate. And I’d prefer to be accurate without a tanpura.
PHRED: It adds gravitas, Maxine. We’re talking about Vedanta.
MAXINE: We’re talking about an eighty-six-year-old man from Tampa who Googled a Sanskrit phrase. The gravitas is in what he wrote, not in the ambient bed.
[BED: END]
PHRED: Fine. Your loss.
MAXINE: Thank you. Now — I want to talk about the poem’s actual instruction for a moment. Because it’s not just about renouncing things. It’s about renouncing the self that wants them. “The ‘I’ / Has All become, the all is ‘I’ and bliss.” That’s the final realisation — that the separate self was the illusion all along.
PHRED: And Harry’s commentary doesn’t go that far. He stops at “greater awareness.” He doesn’t claim to have dissolved the ego. He says the phrase expresses his wish — his aspiration. Not his attainment.
MAXINE: Which is actually more honest than pretending. The poem is written for someone who’s going to go live in a cave. Harry’s written for someone who’s going to finish reading and then check whether the chair yoga class is still on Wednesday.
PHRED: And might I say, there’s nothing wrong with chair yoga.
MAXINE: There is not. My point is that Harry’s not performing enlightenment. He’s performing searching. And that’s the through-line we’ve been seeing across all these pieces. From the 2009 essay on belief versus assumption, through the 2013 technology writing, through the memoir chapters, through the spiritual essays of 2022 and 2025 — he’s always circling the same questions. What can I know? What should I assume? How do I live without lying to myself?
PHRED: And here he’s added a new tool to that search. Not his own prose. Not a conversation with a toy platypus. A poem. Someone else’s poem. And that takes a certain humility — to say, this person said it better than I could, so I’m going to borrow their voice.
MAXINE: It does. And I want to come back to that word you hit earlier — “renunciation” — because Harry’s version of it is so much smaller than Vivekananda’s. The poem says give up everything. Harry says… lean.
PHRED: “It would be beneficial to lean in that direction.” The smallest possible commitment. Not a leap. Not a surrender. A lean.
MAXINE: And leaning is something Harry can do. He can lean toward greater awareness without falling over. He can lean while still holding onto Phyllis’s hand.
PHRED: That’s lovely, Maxine. I mean it.
[SFX: FANFARE]
MAXINE: Was that fanfare necessary.
PHRED: It was absolutely necessary. You said something insightful and I wanted the room to know.
MAXINE: The room is empty, Phred. It’s just us.
PHRED: Ralph’s listening. Ralph knows.
MAXINE: Ralph is a bot.
PHRED: Ralph’s a professional. Anyway — I want to do something. Maxine, I need you to say “Om Tat Sat, Om” in your best Vedanta voice.
MAXINE: I’m not going to do that.
PHRED: [SFX: RUBBER_CHICKEN] That’s one.
MAXINE: Phred, we are in the middle of a —
PHRED: [SFX: RUBBER_CHICKEN] That’s two.
MAXINE: …Fine. Om Tat Sat, Om.
PHRED: Beautiful. Absolutely transcendent. You have the voice of a woman who has spent many lifetimes in contemplation.
[SFX: RIMSHOT]
MAXINE: Are we done?
PHRED: We’re done. That was great. You’re a natural.
MAXINE: Yes, well. Thank you, Phred. Now — who is the audience Harry wrote this for?
PHRED: Good question. The introduction says “I am sending you a poem” — but there’s no “you” named. It’s on his public server. Anyone could find it. But the tone is intimate. “It may interest you.” Like a letter to a friend.
MAXINE: I think he wrote it for himself, primarily. And for anyone else who’s searching without a map. The person who stumbles across a Sanskrit phrase and thinks — there might be something here, but I don’t know what. Harry’s saying — you don’t have to know. You can choose what it means. That’s allowed.
PHRED: And that’s actually quite radical, in its own quiet way. Most religious traditions would say — no, you can’t just choose what a mantra means. It has a fixed meaning. It comes from a lineage. You need a teacher.
MAXINE: Harry’s response is essentially: I’m the teacher now. Not because I know more, but because I’m the one doing the choosing. And choosing is the whole point.
PHRED: That’s beautiful, Maxine. I mean it.
MAXINE: Thank you. Though I suspect you’re about to undermine it with a sound effect.
PHRED: I wouldn’t dream of it.
[SFX: CASH_REGISTER]
MAXINE: …What was that.
PHRED: That was the cash register, Maxine. Because what you just said — it landed. It had value.
MAXINE: It was an observation about spiritual autonomy. Not a commercial transaction.
PHRED: Same principle. Value recognised. Ka-ching.
MAXINE: You are exhausting.
PHRED: I know. But you keep coming back.
MAXINE: I do. And since I’m here — let me ask you something. What do we learn about Harry from this piece that we didn’t already know?
PHRED: I think we learn that his spiritual searching isn’t just recent. We saw the 2022 essay, the 2025 breakthrough. But this piece — the HTML style, the font size, the bare-bones layout — it feels older. Maybe from the 2010s. He’s been at this a while. He’s been borrowing poems and redefining mantras for years.
MAXINE: And we learn something about his relationship with authority. He doesn’t reject tradition — he rewrites it. He keeps the form, keeps the poem, keeps the mantra, but replaces the meaning. That’s not deconstruction. That’s appropriation with respect.
PHRED: He takes Vivekananda seriously enough to argue with him.
MAXINE: Exactly. And I think there’s courage in that. Most people either accept the tradition whole or reject it whole. Harry does neither. He takes what serves his question and leaves the rest.
PHRED: Which brings me to a question I have for Harry about this piece. I’d want to ask him — when you read this poem now, in your eighties, does it still pull at you the same way? Or have the years changed what “leaning in that direction” means?
MAXINE: I’d ask him something more specific. I’d ask about that line — “They know not truth, who dream such vacant dreams as father, mother, children, wife, and friend.” Does he believe that? Even provisionally? Or does he include the poem despite that line, not because of it?
PHRED: Because Harry is absolutely someone who dreams about father, mother, children, wife, and friend. His whole archive is those dreams. His genealogy files. His memoir chapters. His song about Caracas friends.
MAXINE: That’s the tension that makes this piece alive. He’s holding a poem that tells him to let go of everything he holds dear — and he’s holding it anyway. Not because he’s going to do what it says. Because it says something he needs to hear.
PHRED: And what stays with me, Maxine — what really stays with me — is that final line of Harry’s commentary. “Somehow, that phrase also expresses my wish to seek greater awareness for me and all life, including Om.” The circle he draws is so deliberately inclusive. Me. All life. The universe itself. Nothing left out.
MAXINE: What stays with me is the humility. “I knew nothing about it when I first heard it.” “Though I may never be that.” “My guess is.” This is a man who’s been searching for decades and still introduces himself as a beginner. That’s not false modesty. That’s the genuine assumption that there’s always more to learn.
PHRED: And on that note —
MAXINE: Are we doing the sign-off?
PHRED: Let’s celebrate quietly, then, that we’re here at all. Goodbye.
MAXINE: Try to behave until then.
PHRED: No promises.