My Too (Many) Cents

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...

 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, ...

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 ...

 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 ...

 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...

 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 ...