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on Change - Bojack Horseman and Friends from College

as I walked back from my lab after another late night Netflix binge, the humid breeze lapped against my skin doing no justice to the storm brewing within. When I walked past the lights and chatter of the people around me, my innermost thoughts once again took refuge in the solitude one finds with another entitled judgemental prick at a party; the sort of love a repressed father gives to his children, unable to tell them how much their proximity and play means to him except for mock outrage at the foolishness of their actions.  And though whatever flows here was also borne out of that cozy corner in a dimly lit club, what I really wondered then was how good it would be to have a soul to share this with again. The disgusting squishiness that vulnerability provides - the relief and tension of the feeling of a body sliding on top of yours, emotionally and physically. My mind turned to all the beautiful people who had inhabited my life, and it took a special depth of perspective of this...
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on 'Society and the Individual' by E.H.Carr

 This is my attempt to understand EH Carr's Chapter on 'The society and the individual' by articulating my thoughts about it.  There are mainly two arguments that the chapter seeks to make. The first is whether the historian himself is an individual. The second is whether history itself is made by great men or not. Carr's reaction to both of these is in the negative, with a little bit of nuance to it.  Part I. The first movement is to point out the false dichotomy in statements like those made by John Mill that "individuals are not different when brought together". This implies that there is a possibility of an individual without society or a society without an individual, which is impossible. 'No man is an island onto himself'. Though we may express our individuality in the ultimate freedom by commiting suicide as shown by the protagonist in Dostoevsky's devil, it is still bound by social forces.  The author points out that ethnonationalism based ...
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on 'What is History' by E.H. Carr

I have been assigned the reading 'What is History' by EH Carr. This is my interpretation of the first chapter as I attempt to make sense of it in my head.  The chapter is arranged quite similarly to a dialectical movement that flows through different phases. In the beginning, the author presents a dilemma, two opposing views: That of Lord Acton and that of George Clark - differentiated only by a span of 60 years.  Where acton represents the 'optimism' and 'clear-mindedness' characteristic of the end of the Victorian Age, Clark represents a pessimistic view, expressing concern about whether an 'ultimate history' could exist at all and whether any serious historian of their times would consider it a tractable problem to solve.  In the backdrop of this contradiction, which the reader must hold in their heads, the author raises the question 'What is history' which we slowly start a dialectical movement into.  However, what we start with first is ...
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anima.

The kids played by the river. For that is how they had grown.  The wisp bearded guru watched in stoic solitude with his legs crossed, as the seasons passed.  He watched as the boys grew up; From scratching their knees as boys, running around for no reason.  To sturdy, young princes - sharp of intellect, resplendent of valour and strong of morals - through whose bodies ran liquid steel as they went to war.  The guru had taught them all he could, about all he knew.  And in this process of growth itself, he himself evolved having given his all - in tending to their feistiness, in his devotion for the truth that had rubbed off on them.  And yet, all that had been bestowed upon them was Shakti, Durga, Kali.  The boys were themselves just vessels, for channeling what was gifted to them.  As they sunk under the surface of her many mysterious contours, the fire at their core kept their spine upright and perception focused - they started seeing something m...
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माया

Each word I write is a prayer of gratitude to that which comes through me. It is only with this evocation that I may begin writing in the earnest.  I am a child of the ancient east, a land rooted in such spiritual depth that may not be uncovered in eons of the superficial passing by we have begun to call life. This esoteric romanticization of that which is mystical by a mind petrified into rationality. This is maya.  A student once approached a master and told him he had had an awakening experience. Yet he had forgotten the depths from which he had emerged and wanted to "get back" to them.  Everything flows, and cycles and grows. Like the vines engulfing concrete.  And yet this too is maya. The master told him. The student came back again after months of study. Having noticed deeply the contours of his mind, with the instrument of his intellect.  Master, I have seen the purity of this knowledge, distilled to its essence until it can strike a hole through a ...
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divergence.

A whispered prayer escaped the dream of an artist's most sleepless night.  It asked god in a sincere manner whether it would be allowed to piece together a necklace of words for its own amusement today. The innocent selfishness of a child creating a sand castle.  It had earned its worth in the mundanity of the writer's everday existence.  And so he picked up the pen, not to move another towards his point of view, nor to examine truth in the blazing fury of intellectual dissection. It was a tender and loving movement.  Like dew drops sliding across a leaf.  Like the meticulous smile of a parent whose child has come back home, softly balancing on the bow of their lips a wrenching heart and feelings that threaten to overhwhelm. The roll of a pebble on the road, kicked and forgotten yet merrily singing along to its own destiny.  I pick the pen today not for truth, but for what it can bring out of me.  A tear of gratitude. A night of solitude.  The scr...
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notes on creativity

 My drum teacher once told me that every great musician stops hearing the sound of others music after a point in their career.  They no longer look at others engagement with their instrument with greedy eyes that try to imitate ideas. It is a different place we must go to as humans. Only in channeling that tempest are we truly living, Competition is mediocrity for with that we will never end up changing the face of a field itself.  In such a situation, what is our relation to the giants who came before us? Those who inspired us to reach these heights in the first place? The truth is the fire that burns in this other place. It is beauty and love too. And to pursue it sincerely demands a certain discipline.  One can play beats for 40 years of their lives and not understand the internal magic of the drums. That which brings clarity, musicality and otherworldliness.  To play sports like a musician and to play music like a sportsman. To imbibe the quality of inspirat...
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halo

Humans are beings born of thunder. Stolen from mother nature in her throes. Each of us has a grand potential. A message in a glass bottle, a prayer cast out into the chaos of the universe. Sincerity is the bedrock of all sacrifice As it is the bedrock of all desire. In the raging inferno of the sincerity of their quest, there are humans who discover remarkable things. Truths that bring tears to their eyes. Truths that bring humility to their presence. Truths that bring mastery to their movement through life.  There have been many among us who have had a thirst for life itself. Their inquiries into the deepest facets of existence have filled our religious libraries. We have formed cults around them as our dirty hands try to grasp the brilliance that shone through them.  Forgetting in those moments that we are forged from the same metal.  Such a realisation should fill a rational human with shame as to the trivialities they have let themself become conditioned by.  The...
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clothes for a king

 The reluctant prince must learn to use the scepter.  The flourish of magnificence is the beginning of the end.  Power flows and multiplies uncontrollably The applause, the praise, the cheer the money.  Yet the deafening presence must rule it all.  Silence the crowd in its aura.  There can not be a moment wasted on the unserious masses. For he is finally beginning to believe. His power is his shakti , his beloved.  Forever ready to be by his side.  In the dance of intensity, the world is delivered. From its abject meaninglessness.  To serve always,  To empty himself completely, To ravage her as she gifts him love and strength again and again. The humility that comes from intuiting the presence that shakes the confines of his humanity. They are the only clothes an emperor should wear. Namaste.
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Song of the Free

 Terrence Tao said in one of his interviews that sometimes some problems are just not solvable within one lifetime.  Because of being born at the wrong time, your attempt to look at the problem is like trying to climb the sheer face of a mountain with your bare hands.  I suppose with the truth it is always like that. The sheer determination to bring something into being which does not currently exist. That is what brings forth greatness.  There is great sensitivity and hardness to that. Austerities are in some sense a bulwark for the inner sensitivity to bloom.  Two authors I immensely respect are Krishnamurti and Kapil Gupta. They have tasted and embroiled themselves in truth for a good proportion of their lives.  In some sense they are like Rumi, whose writing I have also been absorbing the past few days.  However, there is a lightness and carefreeness in Rumi.  It is a ecstatic sensitivity that in its highest movement reaches up to the gods. An...
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A day I remember well.

  Those books do not interest me which are not written in the author's blood and tears The carefree bounce of the sunlight from the leaves of a tree. The child's carefree singing as he skips along a path laden with autumn leaves.  The parent's reluctant joining in on the child's wild abandon, freeing them from the anxieties of a middle class existence.  As they walk along together and feed the ducks splashing around in the pond.  That is a day I remember well.  The thoughts of getting ahead in the ladder of work.  The envy of comparison with those who had been around them.  The resigned hopelessness of a failing marriage.  Exploding into a flurry of rage.  The pure desperation and frustration of two children who never quite learnt to express these things. Or perhaps were never heard.  But that is not the story I lived through.  For it was the grating on my ears, of the sadness in their anger and the softness in their rage.  Tha...
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Abstraction and Complexity

 Beauty is life itself. Here I attempt to describe what I find beautiful within the intellectual landscape in which I exist.   Abstraction is a key idea in computer science.  Each piece of the technology we use has lifetimes worth of history and memory embedded in it. Generations of scientific progress, a historical march leading to the conditions for it's production and so on. And so, you cannot go by opening each and every door you see. The genuineness of your curiosity is determined not necessarily how deep you go, because it is rather easy to be that engrossed by any thing, but how much you can get back out from that plunge into the water.  You go too far down and suddenly you're learning assembly trying to debug some python code until you run out of mental space and give up. Or life forces you to with other commitments.  A balance has to be caught in Abstraction which one of my professors described as a middle out approach; Understanding enough of the ...
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Mastery

 Advertisment and Propaganda thrives on humans insistence that there is something that needs to be "fixed" about themselves.  The conditioning creates the tendency to remain trapped in problems, and most solutions offered are but the transformation of the problem from one form into another.  Dynamic, alive solutions in business, sport, creativity are localized, personal and long-term - to bring a qualitative change in a person's state of mind such that they look at the problem from a qualitatively different lens, dissolving it altogether.  But the mind instantly protests when faced with the fact that there is nothing "to fix" and nothing it can fix about itself. It is the reflexive reaction of a parent when faced with the realisation that their kids are not theirs to shape, but rather have their own journey.  That reaction of a loss of control, and the turmoil which follows is not an expression of the truth; Rather it merely enunciates the insecurities and anxie...
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live smart.

The human is engaged in a battle everyday.  A battle between the magnificence of his being and the finitude of his existence.  He does not realise this.  With all his movements through life, he is sloppy and inefficient. Excess prevails in every dimension of his existence.  All this is driven by an unchallenged assumption that has become societally ingrained among almost all of us.  You are not here forever. This life is but a moment in a cosmic cycle which leaves you with sheer insignificance in its wake.  Yet a human is also born from the same effulgent starts that make the universe go around. It is his birthright to actualize himself, to be so fully immersed in his experience of life that he pulls the whole of the universe onto himself.  It is only when one becomes empty, that the universe can work through him. That is the real training that produces a master: To love what one does so much, To give it one's all each moment. To die and get back up ag...
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Caskets of Mud

In the bustle of the everyday, when we adorn our masks and present confidently, callously in the world around us, we forget that people are not strong.  Life is never strong, never hard. It's a subtle magic that works through it and never refuses to give up no matter what the circumstance.  Self organizing into an intelligent response for whatever situation its put into. There is so much suffering and trauma around us all that the optimal method life has found through these people is to close up and harden up. If not through mannerisms and physical bodies then through actual dead and repetitive patterns in which they seek numbing. It is painful to see it happen. It is painful, and disheartening when I am watching and suddenly the beauty is gone, and I am just repeating a bunch of patterns. And the working of the mind is rather subtle. In the subtle flinch you have before taking a compliment, being unable to look someone in their eyes. The pathway of hurt has already been trigg...
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Going back

 A human can only channel what he possesses. For a beginner to expect world class performance of himself is inauthentic.  A judgement free watching of the seed of our potentials is all we can offer to life.  All the while serving as a bulwark for its protection. With even a little sincerity, this seed blooms with overwhelming intensity, again and again.  Yet most of us do not get to experience this too much.  In comparison there is always conflict, for I do not know I am dull unless I do not compare to someone who burns even brighter.  The beauty of sport is the barenness and purity that can be given to such a comparison. This is the essence of the sportsman spirit; To burn as intensely as possible in the sincerity of your craft.  If you win, you realise that it wasn't you that created the oppurtunities ripe for winning.  It was something that worked through you.  And if you lose, sincerely - You stand quietly in the enormity of the presence ...
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Specialization

Wherever pure awareness touches, it creates abundance;  In solving problems we uncover deep connections to areas of knowledge we would have thought never existed.  It furnishes the collective psyche.   The collective psyche is a store of information that can be extracted for solving problems.  The configuration in which the memory has been extracted predisposes you to certain patterns of behaviour;  that is karma.  This is also the specialist; Born into a location, into specific patterns of thought, action, movement, dance, technology creates a liking, an orientation towards these.  The focus on any pattern, beyond necessity is not love, it is attachment, desperation or insistence.  Like how the action of thought is forcing the framework I just cognized the beginning of with this post to come into being.  There is no reason for this exposition to continue, and it requires some actual narrowing of my focus to actually bring it to fruition...
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Negentropy

 At the end of the day, you are a being born of light.  How you live, how you spend each day is a reflection of this.  There is a subtle magic that comes as we become aware of things.  With our bodies, we start to notice constrictions and spontaneously moving in efficient ways such that our body can flow.  With our minds, the magic is how one becomes fluent in a language suddenly.  Language itself is structure in patterns of thought that help us solve problems a la Automata Theory. Each archetype in your collective psyche is an incomprehensibly large store of information, for recurring structures.  In moving your mind, you are forcing it when you constrict your attention and make it necessarily, mechanically become aware of certain loops. Yet when you leave it be, and notice the beauty of it, then a discipline arises from within yourself.  Like when you notice the subtle weight of your fingers while playing the tabla, it suddenly becomes an endles...
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gordian knot

Suffering is a gordian knot.  The one who is suffering is caught, in a spiderweb of silky steel. Each proverbial struggle only tightens the noose around their neck.  The light of reason can slash through it in an instant, but it doesn't even enter the realm of possibility for the one who suffers.  Their choice is limited, by the truth they know.  A master is someone who can show you that light in a given situation; A cold hard slap, or a warm loving embrace. The path to transformation scarcely matters to the one who desperately needs it.  Morality is a narrow crutch loaned from blind people to other blind people. In the understanding of the path, there is an intrinsic morality.  Commandments, prescriptions or any linguistic marker for that matter can never capture the essence of "goodness" that we desperately want to point towards.  It's the sand beside the sea. Once there has been a taste of the true essence, the world's all-you-can eat buffet of word...
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Mistborn and Human Potential.

 One of my favourite authors when I avidly read fantasy was Brandon Sanderson.  His world building and pacing was something that always kept me on the edge of the page while reading through the first few books of the stormlight archive. It reminded me of a childhood experience I had with Christopher Paolini's books. As the perspective shifts between multiple deeply fleshed out characters, I am tempted to read another chapter just to get back into the stream of consciousness of a character I had become absorbed in. Before I know it, I have devoured half of the book in an afternoon; the pages standing in my wake as Roran of the Hammer's epic battle or the Atium fueled spree at the end of mistborn. But perhaps what I appreciate even more about Sanderson's writing is just how much of it there is. The cosmere is chock full of such stories which he has been putting out at an astounding pace over the past few years. If you put out a thousand page book every 6 months for a decade, ...
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Words.

Impermanence is the nature of all things. This is not a platitude or something that merely meant to sound deep. This is a fundamental truth of life.  It is love that gives us a temporary relief against the great tragedy of this illusion - In loving something, or someone sincerely and deeply, one can really play this game as it is meant to be played, while bearing the pain of all the illusions that came forth before it. Really, we are all performers, and each movement of our language is a flow in the collective psyche.  It is dominated by conditioning, illusion, death and unawareness. But in the pure movement of love (that is also the fire of tapas), something is ignited. And that really, is truth - that is the revolution inside consciousness which Krishnamurti spent his entire life trying to muster. It is perhaps also a resolution to the movements found in marx - A society unalienated from its labour, its people - a creative and responsible society where each individual walks ...
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FI #7

 This is me attempting to have a rational conversation with myself about something that I struggle with, because no one else in the world will really fully understand my experience.  At the end of the day, this is still garbage in, garbage out because my thoughts here are informed by my conditioning which I could not fully choose.  It is one thing to assert that you are not the mind in the serenity of your courtyard, where only perhaps a few crickets dare chirp. It is entirely another to say the same in the middle of a hurricane that is your daily social interaction. The world is not entitled to let you keep your peace. To let you see far and deep with your quiet eyes. It is like a raging bull that will rock you around everywhere.  Every human has this faculty of discernment. The more you discern the more your world shatters. To some degree we like this resolution - it breaks through the initial illusions, gives us a sense of moral and (to its credit) some executive ...
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truth

 The pure sincerity of revolution. The fire in the revolutionary's eyes. The steadfastness of his being. That is the essence of truth.  In trying to express that through a framework, a need for others to understand betrays the purity of his truth.  It falls to the level of mere propaganda. When one writes to define and prescribe to others. To become the symbol of a movement, he has already surrendered to the unserious masses. The devotion to purity, the bone-chilling loneliness, nihilism. The desperation. All that is involved in a true exposition of truth.  The writing is but a mere excretion - of the process of coming towards a higher understanding. In the vestibule of this evermore intense moment, all that is untrue about oneself is killed. Sacrificed. We take this journey everyday. Coming face to face with this animal we call ourselves. Only when it is backed up into a corner, with nowhere to run can the mind really be conquered. Total absorption is what creates t...
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Bullshit

 The child gleefully laughed as his parents pretended to be weak and playfight with him.  In the childish innocence of the fantasies the group had weaved together, he found reprieve from a world that was already growing too barren to support the fertile ground of his imagination.  And then suddenly the ground was pulled apart from beneath him. He had passed the trial stage, into the most elaborate game of them all.  Ambitions, drives, desires, struggles. The theater of a thousand lifetimes. Each day he woke up, his mind entrenched into the depth of this plot. Every turn of a cog in this mechanistic masterpiece would set off a cascade of reactions. The result - a mind always at odds with itself. Always restless, never quiet.  Getting consumed by his own suffering, as the world seemed to close in around him. The illusion threatening to really kill him. And yet it never did.  It just sapped his life force away more and more - in the expectations of the kernel ...
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Journey.

 Another late night, spent alone in a lab. Another sleepy evening spent grinding iron, and kicking against the cobalt. Another average day spent sleepwalking through class. Another deadline forcing my brain to move from its sluggish slumber. Conversations with people that drag on as we are never quite able to say what we want to say. As we put unhealthy food down our throats, talk about how much suffering has been put on our plate in the chatter of a dishonest bourgeosie acquaintance, my mind grasps for something deeper. And in that grasping it gets submerged again, in limerent fantasies of someone's beauty, of the desire of being posesesed or possessing - reducing ourselves and others to playthings or objectifying them in our pedestalization.  Just commit to someone, to something, to some cause, to some greater purpose. Let this sisyphian struggle be over - with all the rationalizations bolstered by the chatter from an unserious world.  And then, when the game is up, whe...
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Limits of Thought

 The limits of thought is a series of conversations between Jiddu Krishnamurti and David Bohm. I remember being fascinated by this book two years ago, which made me stay up all night trying my hardest to grasp at the esoteric concepts being talked about.  The topics of conversation seemed reachable, because of K's simplistic language, yet subtly out of reach. Like my mind had to be very attentive to try and grasp at what was being talked about. This desperation to grasp these forms of knowledge has guided me on my journey uptill this point, and perhaps will continue to guide it further, but today I realised while reading a passage from Savitri by Sri Aurobindo that this is still incomplete.  Reminiscent of Kierkegard's question or anxiety about having faith, this question was encountered but at a much more subtle, much more real level. Our thought starts from epistemic axioms, lines so basic that without them you could not even begin parsing the content of your perception...
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Romanticizing the Rogue

 The archetype of a rogue, a subtle, dandy mysterious thief - moving through life with a certain poise and lightness is what I wish to talk about here. This is a selfish excercise in the exposition of beauty I see. Life is suffering. We try to forget it often with our societal numbing mechanisms or with plain denial but the fact remains true. The beauty of one's life is in their reaction to this information. Like viktor frankl would say (echoing the thoughts of the stoics), even if everything is taken away from you, how you react to a situation is a slave's freedom that can never be taken. In a recent interview, I really enjoyed the analogy Ido Portal gave of conceptualizing this suffering as an ether almost, that we move through literally and figuratively. Small things like how we walk, talk, breathe and relate to others determine our experience of life to a great degree.  An 'intelligent' (I use this term in the way Krishnamurti would use it) engagment with life is th...
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random thoughts.

The only question that matters in my life is understanding the mystery and wonder of consciousness. Over the past few years, everything that I have learnt and experienced has been in the background of this question. I have acquired practical knowledge sure, but only to be able to continue pursuing this question skillfully. However, I have realised that the practicality and superficiality have gotten to me in some aspects.  Some crevices of the catacombs this question uncovers require more than a superficial exploration. Perhaps every one does. There are lifetimes worth of knowledge in these treasure troves. Perhaps these valleys of the mind are the only places where humanity has ever been. Paths of movement through a manifold of resistance.  Time may be an illusion - all the knowledge is here for me this instant. It is only in expressing its truth that time comes about in the physical dimension. I had in my haughtiness considered myself to be better than a seeker now. Someone ...
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Freedom is within grasp

 Wherever you might be in life, there are a lot of things that are being thrown at you. But what you can realise is that a lot of it is really garbage. Societal expectations, projections, judgements. Your own conditioning of liking certain experiences. If you really look through the veil, freedom is always within your grasp. It is simply a matter of realising the current framing of your experience, figuring out the goals that come with that framing, finding an appropriately abstract way of acheving these goals and dedicating all the rest of the time to also engendering an internal place of love and freedom.  As a student and a researcher in a very intellectually rigorous course, I have a tendency to get overwhelmed often by assignments and readings. However, it is not an issue with how smart I am, rather I am just not allocating time efficiently when I do fall behind. Doing the readings before class and treating your class as a revision, doing all your assignments on your own ...
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