I distinctly remember a Tuesday last month at the office.
At 10:00 AM, we had a breakthrough. A major architectural hurdle we’d been banging our heads against for weeks suddenly cracked. The latency dropped by half. The product felt like magic. I was convinced we were going to take over the world.
At 2:00 PM, a critical dependency updated, silently broke our core logic, and took the staging environment down. An investor email I’d been banking on came back as a polite, devastating "pass."
By 4:00 PM, I was staring at my terminal, wondering why I didn't just take a high-paying job writing React components at a FAANG company.
This emotional whiplash is the defining feature of building a startup. The highs are blindingly bright; the lows make you physically sick. Most founders I know spend their entire waking lives trying to solve for this volatility. They read stoic philosophy. They build elaborate productivity systems. They try to flatten the curve, seeking a mythical state of steady, linear progress.
I tried that too. It doesn't work.
The problem isn't our reaction to the volatility. The problem is our fundamental misunderstanding of what creation actually is.
Western thought, particularly in business, worships the straight line. Up and to the right. Predictable MRR growth. Consistent velocity. We view volatility as a bug in the system—a failure of management, a lack of discipline, or a sign that the idea is flawed.
But when you look closer—at physics, at biology, at human consciousness—nothing real moves in a straight line. Everything alive vibrates.
In Kashmiri Shaivism, an ancient philosophical system from northern India, they have a word for this: Spanda.
Spanda is the primordial throb. It is the continuous, dynamic vibration of consciousness that manifests as the universe. It is the pulse of creation itself.
Unlike Advaita Vedanta, which often teaches that the world is an illusion (Maya) to be escaped so we can rest in static, peaceful awareness, Kashmiri Shaivism says exactly the opposite. The chaos, the friction, the wild swings between expansion and contraction—that is the divine. It's not a distraction from reality; it is the very fabric of it.
If you apply this to building a company, it shifts everything.
In the framework of Spanda, reality breathes. It expands (Unmesha) and it contracts (Nimesha). You cannot have one without the other.
When the staging server goes down, when the investor says no, when the users churn—we experience this as a failure. We feel it as a personal failing. We contract.
But in Kashmiri Shaivism, contraction is not a mistake. It's the gathering of energy. It's the necessary withdrawing of the universe before the next explosive expansion. You cannot leap forward without first compressing the spring.
Think about how muscles build. You literally tear the fibers (contraction, pain) so they can rebuild stronger (expansion). If you try to build a product without ever breaking it, you are building something fragile. If you never face a harsh rejection, your pitch remains weak.
The crushing lows of startup life aren't signs that you're doing it wrong. They are the Nimesha. They are the necessary compression required to force you to rethink your architecture, refine your narrative, and harden your resolve.
The suffering we experience as founders doesn't come from the volatility itself. It comes from our resistance to it. We suffer because we demand a flatline in a universe that only knows how to pulse.
If you want a flatline, get a stable corporate job. The line there is very flat. It’s safe, predictable, and entirely devoid of the violent, terrifying spark of true creation.
A flatline on a heart monitor means you're dead.
When you start a company, you are opting into the Spanda. You are choosing to wire yourself directly to the raw, unmitigated vibration of bringing something new into existence.
So, the next time your code breaks, or your runway shrinks, or you feel that familiar pit in your stomach, stop trying to intellectualize your way out of it. Stop trying to "fix" the fact that you feel terrible.
Recognize the contraction for what it is. Feel the compression. Hold your breath. Let the spring coil.
The expansion is coming.