My Too (Many) Cents

recently while looking through some of my old writing, I found an essay I wrote for some college applications. I remember writing it from a perspective of what colleges want to see in an applicant; someone curious but not jaded, smart enough to say that the system is screwed up in some ways but not courageous enough to try and do something about it; someone who can generally pretend to be happy about life in a naive 16 year old kind of way. Or maybe that is how most 16 year olds are and I was just weird. Anyway, this essay was funny and refreshing in a nostalgic way to me so hope you have fun reading it too.    My Experiences with Coffee I had always known about coffee- it often incited my curiosity but was relegated to the class of “old people drinks” at that time, far from my reach. One day when some guests were around, I was finally allowed to have this mystical drink. I decided to have some black coffee – which only the cool people had. As I absorbed the cup’s heat and aro...

in several deep metaphysical philosophies, there is an acceptance that all human energy at its core is erotic.The word erotic is used not in a narrow and perverted sense in the form it exists currently; an unholy marriage of excess production, rampant advertisment and consumerism, and just bastardized in every way conceivable. There is however a dimension to it that escapes even all this desecration so to speak.  I was reading Georges Bataille recently and his idea of the accursed share seemed very interesting to me. Especially as someone who engages in creative activity semi-regularly. Again, I enter into philosophizing and intellectualizing when I start writing about these topics, which are ultimately useless to 'The Truth" I must remind myself and also the reader, but here I do so in a controlled environment letting my thought take over to see what beautiful creation can arise out of it.  Aside here on viewing thought as an instrument. I have come to learn that even spiritu...

      Hello everyone,  I haven't posted here in a long time but today again some thoughts brewing in my head have come to a boiling point and hence I believe that I must express them here.  I am infinitely enchanted by metaphysical speculation when its interesting enough (which is why Advaita Vedanta appeals to me so much for example). I have realised that all these things are totally useless when I am concerned with finding the truth however.  In finding the truth, even a statement starting with an 'if' no matter how pure the metaphysical speculation that comes after it becomes utterly useless, an Idea, an abstraction. However, thinking in these ways is still fun and sometimes a guilty pleasure for me. In a Deleuzian sense, it seems to me like the nomad who has just chanced upon a village. It is fun and safe to be there for some time, however you know that you must continue your journey onward. It is with these ideas that I started metaphysically speculati...

Creativity is one of those things that we don't really have a good framework for understanding.  Is it a unique perspective in looking at different things that arises due to the difference in the affirmative deleuzian sense of your experiences from the moment you were born?  Is it an active process that requires effort?  Is it a natural outcome of whatever comes from being in the flow state, a creative state of being? These are things I have been thinking about recently.   Thought can be Trained.  I came upon this line of thought (ironically) when I was analyzing the process of how one of my friends thought about certain math problems. They are the type of person who most people consider a 'genius' but as I analyzed their thinking(while we were solving math problems together), I realised that there is not that much difference in the movements of our thought.  Their thought was more analytical or careful in a sense at some places, examining the assumpti...

Hello everyone, today I'd like to talk about perspectives that I have recently come to on love. It is mostly informed by my reading of the book 'All About Love' by Bell Hooks, and of course, some video essays that I unhealthily binge-watch along with my meals.  It is quite hard to talk about love in an objective manner. One of the primary reasons for this is that most of us are not even talking about the same thing when we use the word, love. When the word is used in a rap song that has been created in today's culture, (though that is probably a rarity) it is referring to or trying to represent quite a different concept from what a spiritual guru uses it for example. Love is Spiritual One connotation I found interesting was something that relates very (seemingly) disparate paradigms of thought; Transgressive literature and Kashmiri Shaivism. I haven't read the primary texts for either of these so my interpretations might be wrong, however, the concept is interesting...

You were just a kid.  Society told you you were smart. You were good at the mathy stuff. The grownups liked it when they told you two numbers and you could add them really fast. They subtly encouraged you, to study more. Feed the machine.  Or maybe you were not smart. You realized that the world goes around smart kids. They compared you, with your siblings, your classmates your relatives. They gave you examples of striking personalities, feeding the tendrils of ambition in your tender mind. I want to be like X when I grow up. I will grow up and become successful. They never defined successful for you. You were implicitly promised that you would be loved and everyone would be nice to you when you finally became "someone".  Maybe like many of us, you fell into their trap. You worked on being good at something you didn't enjoy so that you could be better off than others, and finally they could give you some love. Respect comes with money, status and power they told you. If y...

here's a post that has been languishing in my drafts since last semester. Hello everyone, welcome to another rant. This time you get to see me at my most anxious, as I have an exam in approximately 5 hours and I should be getting to sleep but I got the motivation to write and I have learned better than to fight against the inner voice that rises inside and tells me to regurgitate something onto this editing page.  Of course, another semester of college has started and quiz week already crept up on me as I was involved in a plethora of other things.  Many different things seem beautiful to me and worth pursuing, such as music, fitness (not in a naive superficial aesthetic level which I believe a lot of gym culture (though a net positive in promoting health) has reduced it to), and also most esoteric (read schizophrenic) types of mathematics, physics and computation concepts (Category theory, Trinitarianism and Topology are somethings which I have recently become very interested...

 Hello everyone, welcome back to another unfiltered rant, this time at a more reasonable time as I attempt to fix my sleep cycle in college. I recently had the opportunity to visit the Krishnamurti study center in Chennai for a weekend retreat and have enlightening (i.e. discomforting) conversations with people who had been following K's ideas for much longer than me, but more importantly, people who were actually open to seriously inquiring about life and the human condition in contrast to many people in society today. Being on the beautiful campus was a great experience for me, though my definition of great also involves questioning everything I know about myself and society and going through existential crises. Once I came back into 'the real world' so to speak, specifically my college, I've been feeling as though something is off though there are perhaps more factors associated with that feeling than just the experiences. Here, I just want to talk about random thing...

 Hello everyone, I just felt like writing something which would get me canceled in the future today, so here goes. (Of course, I am just kidding, please do not cancel me, all my views here are transient and I am open to learning more about these topics if you have a more coherent perspective on them). These are views that have been informed by many things, e.g. Jungian Archetypes, David Deida, Kashmiri Shaivism, and One chapter I remember reading from Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy (and also possibly many other places which I forget mentioning. Well the first thing to clear, which seems so simple to me, yet I don't know how many people get wrong, is understanding masculinity and femininity as archetypal attributes of our egos instead of fixed essential groundings depending on our biology. There can be men who have a feminine temperament and women who have a masculine temperament. Now, In my opinion, the "politically charged debates" aren't exactl...

 Hello everyone to another random blog post. Today I wish to expand on some of the ideas I mentioned in my last post 'Stressed Out' from a different perspective which I have been evolving.  Of course all of this is just speculative and just my perspective so there is no authority from the position of which I am speaking. However, these are just observations which I have deliberated upon and which seem pretty plausible and interesting explanations to me. I had started reading Semiophysics by Rene Thom (which funnily I came upon by learning about catastrophe theory). It was very fun as the book has extremely dense but insightful concepts from varying disciplines. One of the main ideas mentioned in the book was related to salient forms which are basically discontinuities in the field of perception that allow them to be noticed (which he related to a different way of defining real numbers as discontinuities on a line). These could be anything such as colours, smells, sensations et...

 Hello again to a random rant of which the only redeeming factor is in my opinion the fact that it is as unfiltered as I can get. So apart from the fact that the title of the post is the name of a twenty one pilots song which I really like, I also want to talk about some ideas which have been zooming around in my head. I don't really expect anyone to read this however I just want to document these ideas because they seem interesting to me in their own right. So I've recently been reading to and listening to many talks by Gabor Mate. What initially started as a want to closely understand ADHD (after my lowkey insane rant last time about neurodivergence which I almost considered deleting) led me to his book scattered minds (which ironically I didn't finish) but I have also been listening to a lot of his talks. Many of his ideas seem strikingly relevant to me.  One of these for example is how genetics only increase our predisposition towards certain diseases and are not determ...

 Hello again everyone to a rant which is just going to be me talking to myself which I don't expect anyone else to be reading, so read at your own risk. Before even starting this rant I have the meta ironic image of a troll face emoji saying "I WON'T TAKE MY MEDS" or the meme of "This could have been prevented with regular therapy" being presented in my head as a possible satirization of what I wish to say here so I feel I should address that. Ironically satirizing an image to remove the romanticism associated with the perspective of the person in that situation is not an adequate response to their argument.  Okay, here we go. The first point I want to make which seems very counterintuitive to me even as I say it and all the rational parts of my brain scream at me to stop is that in purely intellectual terms or from deductive methods of reasoning, you simply cannot understand the intersubjective experience of someone else's consciousness. Actually on sec...

So, I recently watched a video by the YouTube channel natural hypertrophy (which is a great channel you should check out if you have time) titled "I am better than you". In Nietzschean terms he explains how saying that you are better than someone is something society constantly tries us to guilt trip over which is an example of the slave inversion of values in practice. He further differentiates between the humility of the strong will, which realizes itself to be strong and sees itself truly placed compared to all the other geniuses around us compared to weak humility which tries to downplay itself while enjoying the attention it gets from people saying that someone is so good yet remains humble. Instead of accepting the harsh reality of continuous improvement being required, it would rather stagnate itself and others around it even to the point that it starts feeling miserable about itself instead of accepting its true calling and engaging in a sort of Dionysian dance of cre...