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 Country: INDIA
Member Since: October 1999
Last Login: 07/26/2020
Preface of a faceless person.
Normally, I am a busy man. Busy in the world of not of my choice, but a creation of coinciding situations, borrowed faiths and of my helplessness. I have created a multitude of selves, which impeccably fits into the world in which I feel a bit unfit. This is because, incidentally, I have also created selves who feel unfit.
I prefer to call this world, the world of sleeping souls. Though, right from morning, I interact with them, I laugh with them, I talk with them. As a matter of routine, I play all kinds of roles of their liking, to the best of my ability. They recognize me in these roles, as me. Is it an intentional befooling on my part? I presume it has a purpose. Or is it just my helplessness? I wish to come out of it. But I am afraid, if I stop the roles I am playing, they would stop recognizing me. And would I ever be able to confine those selves who feel so immaculately fit in their world? So the role-playing continues.
Impossible questions did start bothering me from my adolescent days and quite later I learnt that I was not the first person to question the age old questions related to the riddle of life and death, of without and within, of what is. Questions made me dip into books. Literature, theology, religion, spiritualism, mysticism, psychology, parapsychology, philosophy, modern physics etc. I tried to read as much possible, unguided. They did help me to understand the problem in a better way, frame the question in a more subtle way but they failed to answer any. Individually, they all tried to resolve in isolation. Answering a question without putting a question mark against it can never be taken as final. To me, no answer, no truth is beyond the realm of questions. Books on various disciplines helped me to relate and see the answers derived in isolation, and I concede, they helped me to cross a big hurdle of not seeing answers in isolation. My writing is an answer to my question or rather a question framed in a subtle way against all such answers. In a way my writing recompense. It probably recompenses the death I live every day. The only solace I can ever find.
All human values are self-deceptive. They are like dreams inside yet another dream. One claims to know the reality, the reality of dream when one walks out of it. But one again is bewildered when some day he again walks out of a dream to realize that he was in a dream inside the dream. One is logically right then to deduce that this walking out from dreams may yet prove to be well within yet another dream. I suppose that awareness has got many layers and trip into any layer is a dream of different order, clarity and reality. Then again one would naturally be inclined to deduct that freedom, values, scales, realities are nothing but a perception from different layers of awareness. Every time, they prove to be nothing but deception. A beautiful dream.
One feels free and values diametrically changed when out of one dream. At the advent of another disillusionment, the concept of freedom and values takes another change. A self is created to defend the newfound freedom. The selves, defenders of the old value system, despite shattered dreams and disillusionment want to walk back into the old dreams. They still persist and want to perpetuate the old values of the common belief system and the repetitive boredom of life.
The conflict is inevitable. You can see your mind as a stage where conflicting and contradictory selves appears, drawing energy and taking cue from the impressions from without, one after the other and fight each other to take charge. The situation is serious. The surrender can either take you back to the old belief system; old values, old illusions or you may become a neurotic case. In the first event, its a virtual death. In the second, mental asylum and the modern gadgets of the practicing psychiatrist supported by the advocates of the common belief system will leave no space to see that you are killed. Even if you are left alone, the situation doesnt provide you any solace. The only solace is a continuous state of conflict, conflict of selves. The so-called Nirvana of the stoics is nothing but an indefinite postponement of the conflict, an indefinite postponement of the trial. In other words, its simply postponing life. Living without living.
To me, there appears to be no permanent solution. No acquittal. If I face it, its a solace. If I surrender, its, a death. If my surrender is temporary it is a strategic postponement. Sufferings can be beautiful. A real solace.
In between, you see the glimpses of life. Glimpses of what is. Glimpses of the knowable. This is what keeps me alive. Writing is seeing for me.
The religion has proved to be irrational and a diving line; personal philosophies, a conditioned projection of ones own conditioning; the so called technological evolution has compelled the not so civilized to mask false values, has clothed the potential savage inside, projecting a respectable, organized human society; the political system and set ups has reduced an individual into a crowd; the boon of the manipulative science has converted a man into a machine; and so called social organization of the human has made him an Ant. The truth or a possibility of a truth is lost somewhere in the rumble-jumble of the so-called modern way of life. Seeing is becoming so difficult, knowing intricate, and being just impossible. The only solace is a belief that despite being part of it I am not part of it, that despite being member of the common belief system, I am an onlooker traveling to and fro from one awareness to the other, from one value system to the other, from one freedom to the other, from one dream to the other dream.
We all travel to and fro, left and right hemisphere of the brain, moving from one awareness to the other. Invariably, we jump from one self to the other self,picking cue and energy from the without and in the process creating new selves and imbibing with obsession, a chosen few. We are used to living with the borrowed faith, ironically, our selves being borrowed too, in the sense that we are creation of suggestions and impressions from without. It is very little that one can do (Do, again is a misleading term here) in a situation like this than to face, struggle and become one with it. Though, no amount of struggle will lead us anywhere and surrender will tantamount to death. Struggle then is no path but it is the only solace. A provisional or a short-lived surrender is OK from strategic point of view. A time gap for preparation.
During these trips, up and down, far and near, wide and deep, you see hope because you see. You see the intricacies and realities of your seeing, of knowing, of communication and of course, intricacies and realities of your being. As a matter of fact, you see glimpses of life, knowable, rather a ray of hope that it is. If the pulls and counter pulls of the situation created by the known and the unknowns permits you, you do verbalize them, give them a form. These verbalizations are becoming difficult day by day, because glimpses are rare, because the surrender is seldom strategic. It is becoming permanent and permanent in nature. My so-called poems are nothing but an intentional quick trick on my part, a device against growing pessimism within.
I write basically, to trick myself to believe that I am alive. My writing motivates me to live and believe that I am not yet dead. Writing to me is rather a device, a defense mechanism than a faith. It is a buffer between me and the meaninglessness and the boredom of life. My search of meaning, power and pleasure probably ends here. My endeavor TO BE gets some fulfillment here.
I prefer writing in Hindi. Hindi being my mother tongue, I feel more at home in it. I prefer writing short stories because experience of experiences is usually visual. Helpless I try to verbalize them. This helplessness is because of my conditioning of language. This verbalization makes it a sort of visual thinking. Hence, simple ideas, feelings, anxieties, observations and perceptions take a narrative form. No doubt, in order to give it a required shape, I have to do a lot or structural work. Poetry normally saves me from this architectural burden. They are verbalizations of simple observations on my part arranged and shaped in poetic fashion.
Every piece of my writing is a scene to me. This scene, to me, is a temporary, ever illusive, WHAT IS, my biggest query.
In the beginning, it appears in the shape of an impression. This can be a scene, a thought or both a visual thought. This can be the result of an action or a reaction. If this thought emerges out of the space in the present; that is, out of the space of time, then I put it in the category of Revelation, because this perception is my perception, a new perception, as far as I am concerned.
If I find the time and the situation suitable, then the first draft of my writing appears on paper. This will now be completed or redrafted when Ill go back to the same state of awareness. (Normally, it depends on the clarity of the scene. If it is distinct, yes, I complete it in one go. If not, then I make many drafts. And I can do it, only when I go back to that scene or that thought)
My problems, that reflects in my writings, cannot be confined that to a place or a period. They are beyond place-period situation. They can be the problems if any human being, at any place, in any time. And I believe, whoever is that being, would be my genuine reader.
All SEEINGS, all EXPERIENCES, all PERCEPTIONS, all REVELATIONS, no doubt, are subjective. In my writing, I intentionally, try to generalize them, so much so that the subjective ness transcends the boundaries of the place-period situation.
My writing doesnt have any direct impact of any author or person. My thought process does have. RD Laing, the great Psychiatrist; G.I. Gurdjieff, the great mystic; Albert Einstein, the great science philosopher; Kafka and Dostoyevsky, the great existential writers, besides the propounders of the three Viennese school of psychology i.e. Freud, Adler and Frankl, does have influenced my way of thinking. Tao, Zen and Vedanta, the great eastern philosophy too has direct impact on my way of thinking.
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