I’m not a guru, so I won’t offer “guidance” in the traditional sense.
What I can offer is my experience, how I’ve been trying to understand and live dharm.

Think of this as an open exploration. Something we can refine together through discussion, debate, and introspection. Because the goal isn’t just to understand dharm for ourselves but to eventually help others approach it in a more structured and meaningful way.

The Real Problem Isn’t Information—It’s Approach

From my journey so far, I feel most people struggle not because Jainism is complex, but because their approach is unstructured.

Three core challenges stand out:

1. Right Motivation

• Most people are not motivated towards dharm.
• Some who are motivated might be motivated for wrong reasons.
• Many have waves of motivation which are not consistent and are on and off in nature.
• The first level of effort should be to get the right motivation, a superficial motivation which doesn't sustain for too long won't work.
• If one has the motivation, they can consistently put efforts to find the right direction and optimize the journey forward.

But motivation is where everything begins.
A shallow motivation doesn’t last. And without sustained motivation, no method or direction will work.
The real question is Why do you want to understand dharm?

In my experience :

• Right Motivation can be derived out of pure tireless curiosity to figure out truth! And that should be so pure that you are not chained by certain povs. You should unchain yourself from it all!
• Be so curious and determined to figure out the truth that you go beyond Panths, sects and religions. You develop Anekantwad view of things.
• See jainism as the training ground which gives you core truths (Which you can challenge and experiment on as well), system of logic to breakdown things, analyse and conceptualise things! Treat your swadhyay as your mental gym that enables you to analyse Anekantwad and get closer to truth!
• Swadhyay and dhyan helps us into understanding of our Aatma's core properties and how rare and difficult it is to get a chance to explore ways to unlock our true potential.
• The realisation of how rare human life is, and how rare a chance we have of getting Samyak darshan(सम्यक् दर्शन), and how rare it is to remain in the right state of mind to find and pursue a worthy path can be a great motivation!
• Rituals involving dhyaan and study of it regularly can rebase and remind us of the motivation to stay consistent.
• Questioning and debating our motivation can help in reaffirming and strengthening the motivation.

2. Direction

• If one has motivation sorted, the next big thing is the right direction.
• Even people with pure motivation end up going in the wrong direction, leading to wasted efforts and zero or negative results.
• It is very important to become super mindful and introspective when studying and implementing or experimenting on things to realise if we are going in right direction and one should be flexible to course correct their direction as early as possible
• This can mean, debating with others and most difficult of all, debating with our own intuition, and beliefs.
• There are so many things to study, and all of them feel like basics that one must study to understand next level of depths that one can easily get overwhelmed with the options.

What helps:

• Being deeply honest with yourself
• Staying logical and curious
• Being willing to course-correct early
• This often requires:
  • Debating with others
  • And more importantly, debating your own beliefs and intuitions

A good starting point (in my opinion):

• Dravyanuyog (understanding the core substance that form the universe)
• Followed by Jain Karma Philosophy

This builds a foundational lens through which everything else starts making sense.

3. Optimization

Let’s be practical.
We don’t have unlimited time. Most of us can’t dedicate our entire lives to dharm.

So the question becomes - How do we get maximum depth with limited time?

Some principles that help:

• Don’t isolate topics completely, have basic awareness across domains
• Focus on understanding why something is done, not just what

• And optimize for the real value of it, don't get lost in packaging and presentation layer of things.

• Stay curious - always dig deeper into reasoning
  For example:

You might chant navkar mantra daily. But if you deeply understand how it contributes to nirjara (shedding karma), and truly optimize on your bhav and meditate during those chants, your intent changes and so does the impact.

At the core, everything depends on bhaav (intent).

Better understanding → Better intent → Better outcomes.

Always look out for optimizing things. It is like sharpening your axe, you will be surprised how much returns this would give!

Rituals Are Just the Starting Layer

If we zoom out on rituals and traditions and try to decode them, they all try to solve all three problems:

• Motivation
• Direction
• Optimization

But they are often diluted and designed for initial engagement.

Beyond a point, you have to take ownership and approach dharm strategically.

Push vs Pull: Two Ways to Learn

My journey has been shaped by two learning styles:

1. Pull-Based Learning (Curiosity Driven)

You get curious about something, you ask around and understand it. This leads to deep but scattered insights. Creates “islands of wisdom” over time.

This works, but depends heavily on:

• Frequency of curiosity.
• Intensity of it to actually drive you to exploration.
• Access to the right guidance and resources during those exploration

Coincidence to acheive all of these is not always possible, hence it is not a very reliable path.

Also the fact that the ocean is very vast and all the islands that you stumble upon might be so far away that you end up leaving to destiny for allowing them all to merge some day to form the whole picture.

2. Push-Based Learning (Structured Path)

A predefined sequence of learning sounds more systematic!
But here’s the challenge:
To design the “perfect path,” you need to already know everything.
Kevalis had that perspective. We don’t. People might have some idea around some structure.
If you ask anyone
So most structured resources today are:

• Interpreted
• Layered
• Sometimes incomplete
  My Realization: It’s Not a Loop, It’s a Spiral
  Let me share a personal experience.

I once started a structured playlist on Jain cosmology. It had prerequisites. Those prerequisites had more prerequisites.
Soon, it felt like a never-ending loop.
Dravyanuyog required Karma philosophy
Karma philosophy required Dravyanuyog
Anekantvad connected to both
Which led to Nandi Sutra
Which again linked back to Karma
At one point, it felt like I was stuck.

But then something clicked:
What looks like a loop in 2D is actually a spiral in 3D.
Each cycle:
Revisits the same concepts
But with greater depth and clarity
And suddenly, confusion turned into structure.

The Strategy That Worked for Me

I now approach learning like this:

• Push at the macro level
  → Follow a broad structure (like Dravyanuyog playlist)

• Pull at the micro level
  → Dive into curiosity whenever it arises

This hybrid approach:

• Prevents aimlessness
• Avoids rigidity
• Allows depth to emerge naturally over time