thinking

All Reasoning and No Feeling Makes Life A Dull Thing! (Published in Illumination)

As a kid, I didn’t have access to friends outside school and I wasn’t too friendly with my family members. This meant I had only myself to bond and play with.

My self-bond and self-play included various forms of imaginary fantasies, stories, and games — expressed through various parts of my body and books around me.

It is in light of the latter that I want to share an idea here.


Poem: Thus Spake Spit

Poem

A small light in these dark caves,
for now enough to save from extinction.
Slowly…igniting and turning into a dragon’s breath
I come from there,
the thought of where itself will frighten you of thinking
forever.

The fires will burn and burn…
drift and drift…
on it’s way
burning the heavens itself –
The same heavens
you lust for,
and kneel down or bend over for!

See, you are constructed with codes of geometric perfection
I have been spit due to lack of inclination
if you are an atheist
then I am God
if you contempt on barks
then I am a Dog.
You ascended into the mountains
I descended into the caves,
for you heavens are dearer
for me darkness is nearer.

Soon…when your mountains and heavens have burned
and turned
into thick dark clouds overhead
then…
when you finally see what I see
and shiver at the sight of raw darkness
I Will be your God
and show you that light
and watch as you learn to levitate and rise beyond
and smile at death forever
bless you!

(Edited)

From my book Paranoia


 

Conquering Event Anticipatory Anxiety

anxiety

One small victory in this huge war.

I have written about anxiety before. But today I want to discuss one of its lethal forms called Anticipatory Anxiety.

  • What are events? — Events are occurrences of limited time-span. Life is the sum of events.
  • What kinds of events cause such anxiety in me? —Events that include people or entities I am not comfortable with in the event environment. For example, if the event is a walk in a certain street at night, stray dogs that bark are things I am not comfortable with in that environment.
  • What is common in all those event anxieties? — Something undesired will happen in this event.
  • Personal Examples of Event Anticipatory Anxiety
  • What is the solution? — Try to recall instances of events above where you have been successful in order to wash the traumatic memories and replace them with successful ones.

Conclusion —

  • Event Anticipatory Anxiety is when I have the same anxious feeling while anticipating certain different types of events.
  • Such anxiety is caused by events that include people or entities I am not comfortable with in the event environment.
  • The prevalent thought in all those events is this: Something undesired will happen.
  • This is due to the traumatic memories of true events in the past when the undesired has happened.
  • What is the solution? How to be free from this crap?
    Recall instances of events where you have been successful so that you wash the traumatic memories and replace them with beautiful ones.

Medium Link

Poem: Sky and Clouds

It was a sunny morning
and so you planned to bask all day
when a lusty cloud came
from who knows where
and made it dark:
Now you shiver in pain.

You write these words
They go talk with gods
The gods get it
and make it sunny again!

Though the cloud seemed gone
You see it in the horizon
The damage has been done!

You have to be a Rshi:
Compose mantras and chant them full time.
And you have to plough your field
Chant and plough
Chant and plough.

You can see some clouds out there
But the sky is clean up here
You can’t un-see the clouds now
Chant and plough
Chant and plough.

It is night
but it’s too bright.
You want that cloud now
So you write different words
They go talk with same gods
The gods get it
and bring the cloud back again!

and the next morning…
you repeat it again.

The gods are greedy
The gods are crazy
They want sweeter words
They want them all the time
They want to play
They play with you all the time
But you don’t mind
Because you need a clear sky in the day
and some clouds in the night.
You are greedy
You are crazy.

You go through all this
to keep them near
To eventually reach beyond
them and there.


 

Poem: Me and Them

It’s evening and you sit here with your laptop in your room
while the world rushes home closing their desktops at work.
You’ve always been this way. You realize.
You and the world have always been this way.

When you were a kid,
while they learnt real politics outside with their imaginary guns
You learnt imagination inside because you couldn’t understand the politics of the world!

When you grew up,
while they played kings and slaves in streets, classrooms and playgrounds
You played god and designed and destroyed sportsgrounds and movie-sets inside your head.

But you were not as strong or stylish as you present yourself here
You were weak, bleak and you were scared of their breath
Not because they spat fire. But because they stank!
But you couldn’t ignore them because your horizon was still a virgin
And so you sat with them and even tried to impress them!
Even their bad breath you thought was a norm
So you stopped brushing too…
You were not at all as strong or stylish as you present yourself here.

It’s always been this way.

And then when you reached an age where boys made girls cry
You yourself cried in a classroom.
And then you were stared-at, kicked, teased, yelled-at:
By insecure blokes who saw nothing when they looked at themselves in the mirror.
You didn’t understand then that their expression towards you
was their expression towards themselves
You couldn’t understand that because you didn’t play with them outside.
And now they look at their watches at work, nervously waiting for the time they get to go back home
while you get to sit here calmly in your room writing magical words like these that turns them into whatever pleases your mood.

You’ve always been this way the world and you
First, the world throws shit at you and then you throw the world into shit.
And now the world plays king-king down there at Troy
While you play god-god up here at Mount Olympus!


 

Poem: Kush Galli

Composed at some point in 2016. This is about an alley near my home named Kush Galli where I frequently went to smoke.   

Never knew when this passage became a rest-path
A path of contemplation, solution.

You stood there, never knew from when
and lighted one cigarette after another
conquering one thought by another
While you always gazed around in reluctance.

It has become a house now,
yet always trying to illustrate a reason to make it home.

Sometimes,
You get there after a long while,
assuming you have got a license.
Other times,
You try to hide there, yet go there to hide.

Oft,
you act as a passer-by smoker
Yet, a ring of smoke you leave over…

If smokes could carry thoughts and desires
then may be,
someone can smell it
and inhale what I had to exhale…


 

 

 

10 Pieces Of Poetry That Broke My Mental Frontiers

what is poetry

Poems: Power of words to those who like to both think and feel.

Poetry, if done and read right, can thrust your mind (states, perception, beliefs, etc.) into previously unvisited zones at such breakneck speed that in no time you find yourself changed beyond even your own recognition.

This is largely because of the concise nature of the art: Mental States, Environment, Perceptions, Opinions, Worldviews, beliefs, knowledge, etc. compressed into a few words with analogies and non-linearity. They are like mighty bombs that can decimate any walls, bridges, boundaries and frontiers — If done and read right!

I say all this because I have had a strong and healthy relationship with poetry. Myself having published two books of them.

They have changed me, shaped me, destroyed me, designed me. They have helped me come out of many misery and sufferings. They have shown me many beauties and feelings. They have helped me break shackles and relationships. They have helped me build relationships. They have helped me explore, experiment. They have opened many closed doors. They have closed many open doors. They have broken emotional and mental frontiers allowing me to feel and see things I never would have even imagined existed.

Here are 10 pieces/sentences/lines/stanzas of poetry that have broken my mind’s frontiers.

Lunatic: Laxmi Prasad Devkota

Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

You’re clever, quick with words,
your exact equations are right forever and ever.
But in my arithmetic, take one from one-and there’s still one left.
You get along with five senses, I with a sixth.
You have a brain, friend, I have a heart.
A rose is just a rose to you-to me it’s Helen and Padmini.
You are forceful prose, I liquid verse.

This extract from a famous poem by Nepali poet Laxmi Prasad Devkota I read more than a dozen years ago, fueled me with so much rebellious energy that I still move with the same stock.

To break any frontiers, you need energy. You need constant energy and force. These few words did it for me. This is mental poetry at its best and finest.

Alone: Edgar Allan Poe

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were — I have not seen
As others saw — I could not bring
My passions from a common spring —
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow — I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone —
And all I lov’d — I lov’d alone —
Then — in my childhood — in the dawn
Of a most stormy life — was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still —
From the torrent, or the fountain —
From the red cliff of the mountain —
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold —
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by —
From the thunder, and the storm —
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view —

This poem connected me with myself.

I started seeing differences between me and others. I started seeing things in me I had never seen. I started accepting myself like never before. I started exploring my desires. I began the process of knowing myself. I ceased to be afraid. I was finally proud of who I was. I developed self-respect. I developed strength. I discovered myself.

1: Sad Toys, Takuboku Ishikawa

By Unknown author — http://www.echna.ne.jp/~takuboku/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2713139

When I breathe,
This sound in my chest
Lonelier than the winter wind

Japanese poet Takuboku Ishikawa died of tuberculosis. This particular poem expresses a lot. It grabs you by your outward looking head and rotates it enough so that you can look at yourself. Here and now.

There were bright glowing stars in my frontier, but after I read this…the direction of my frontier changed and I saw black holes.

the wine of forever: Charles Bukowski

the writing of some
men
is like a vast bridge
that carries you
over
the many things
that claw and tear.

I could have chosen a lot of Bukowski verses but I chose this particular stanza from this particular poem because with it I accepted that there were and are people in this world whom you can trust. In my case, those were people who wrote words. Although I consumed a lot of words in my lifetime, at one point I was stuck with mistrust and paranoia towards everything. This one helped me break that wall.

Also, Bukowski’s writing has carried me not only over things that claw and tear but also over many things that pinch and sting.

A Question: Robert Frost

voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth.

I was taking life too seriously when I stumbled upon this poem. This helped me tone down the seriousness and smile at the absurdity of existence.

Worldly Wisdom: Friedrich Nietzsche

Do not stay in the field!
Nor climb out of sight.
The best view of the world
is from a medium height.

While Nietzsche’s entire bibliography is a string of dynamite that knocks down frontiers after frontiers, this particular poem from The Gay Science gave me the perspective of perspective. I may look at all the frontiers I can and analyze them, get drown in them — yet is my view of the frontier itself proper?

Where’s the poet: John Keats

Where’s the Poet? show him! show him,
Muses nine! that I may know him.
’Tis the man who with a man
Is an equal, be he King,
Or poorest of the beggar-clan
Or any other wonderous thing
A man may be ‘twixt ape and Plato;
’Tis the man who with a bird,
Wren or Eagle, finds his way to
All its instincts; he hath heard
The Lion’s roaring, and can tell
What his horny throat expresseth,
And to him the Tiger’s yell
Come articulate and presseth
Or his ear like mother-tongue.

I had written a Medium story about this a little while back:

What Is A Poet? — According To John Keats

A Poet is a complete Human!

fradesh.medium.com

This poem is crucial for me because I like poetry. Reading, Listening, Writing, Spoken, whatever. But, my mind likes confusion.

While I yearned to consume/compose poetry and be a poet, my mind told me that poets were things of the past, waste of a life and things of no impact and substance. Be a king. Kings are the best. Be a businessman. They are the best. Be a pilot. Be a minister, etc. I listened to my mind for a long time. Not completely! Else I wouldn’t have discovered this particular poem.

I could finally see myself reading and writing compressed words and be proud of it.

The Best Time Of The Day: Raymond Carver

Cool summer nights.
Windows open.
Lamps burning.
Fruit in the bowl.
And your head on my shoulder.
These the happiest moments in the day.

Next to the early morning hours,
of course. And the time
just before lunch.
And the afternoon, and
early evening hours.
But I do love

these summer nights.
Even more, I think,
than those other times.
The work finished for the day.
And no one who can reach us now.
Or ever.

I discovered Carver when I had too many things going on inside my head and too many desires flowing inside my chest. I was emotionally and mentally confused. At my mental frontier, there was this big fucking question-mark laughing at me all the time. My personal life was disastrous. I was always anxious. I wanted to read everything, watch everything, be everywhere, be everything. Of course, this made me explore a lot of poetry too!

And I discovered Carver and this poem.

This poem demolished the question mark and showed me through tremendous magnification the real thing worth aspiring for.

Tune: Calming Wind And Waves: Su Shi

Listen not to the rain beating against the trees.
Why don’t you slowly walk and chant with ease?
Better than saddled horse I like sandals and cane.
Oh, I would fain, in a straw cloak, spend my life in mist and rain.
(From Selected Poems and Pictures of the Song Dynasty)

The desire for power and ways to get powerful were the furthest my thoughts were managing to reach at one phase of my life. This particular verse from the 11th century Chinese poet erased the boundary in one sweep, opening a brand new horizon in front of my eyes where I saw things more important than power. I spent hours basking in this poem.

Courage: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

CARELESSLY over the plain away,
Where by the boldest man no path
Cut before thee thou canst discern,
Make for thyself a path!

A decade ago, this particular stanza filled me with courage to go take risks, do something new, become something new, become myself, explore myself, design myself — become whatever I am and do whatever I do today!


Read it on Medium:

https://fradesh.medium.com/10-pieces-of-poetry-that-broke-my-mental-frontiers-84e565f7dda1

Subscribe to me on Medium: https://fradesh.medium.com/subscribe. 


 

 

Ten Haikus — Part 3


 

Ten Haikus — Part 2

You can read or hear them on Medium: https://fradesh.medium.com/ten-haikus-part-2-1e836e80ea01

My Weed Experience.

Weed Experience

It’s not good.

https://fradesh.medium.com/my-experience-with-weed-please-share-yours-1125484fcb05


 

How to Live A Profound And Colorful Life?

how to live

The Process of a answering this How To live question Begins With another question:

 

Live A Profound And Colorful Life | by Adesh Acharya | Dec, 2022 | Medium

As An Online Creator, You Are A Forager

online creator

But of which type?

(Maybe we should take our favorite animal and try to be like them)

Jonathan Wilkins, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Сергей Панасенко-Михалкин, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Self Improvement: Go For A Thought Drive

self-improvement through thought-drive

A trick for Self-Improvement. Unfasten all the seat-belts that bound you to seats. Wear something comfortable. Stretch your body parts. Take some deep breaths and get ready to go for a long thought drive.

What is a Thought Drive?

A thought drive is a drive where you free yourself from the cycle of static sitting or sleeping and hence, free yourself from many shitty and sleepy thoughts.

A thought drive is a drive where you move around in such a manner that it sets the platform for your thoughts to take you to amazing mental places to see spectacular things.

A thought drive is a drive where your movement acts as an accelerator and the thoughts that you will have inside as the views you would see from your physical vehicle window.

How do you go for a thought drive?

First, you have to be willing to see what your thoughts have got to show and tell you. After that, you have to move around. But, you have to let go of all those meditative, sedative mind-control, self-control, god-focus, self-focus lessons that shitty and sleepy gurus have preached to you. You have to be ready to listen to your thoughts. Listen to what they have always been meaning to tell you but you have always been shutting them off because you fell prey to the scam of some philosophical conman.

After all this, go for it. Move around in whichever pattern you feel comfortable. Long walks, short walks, to and fros, stand and stares. Find the sweet spot of movement, like you do with your car seat. And then welcome your thoughts. Accept them. Invoke them. Do not use dull philosophical theories to understand them or control them. Let them flow. Let them come. Accept them.

But how do you make sure you don’t get lost?

That’s a good question. Thoughts are stingy and lethal at times. that’s why you have to learn to be strong. You have to learn to be able to take every sting with a smile and you hve to be able to respond every slap with a deep breath.

Once you are ready with that and good to go for a drive, you have to begin with a single thought. It could be an image, a sound, an idea, concept, desire, goal, person, computer, star, whatever. Yes, right before you go for the drive, begin with a single thought. Then, finish the drive by coming back to the same thought. Finish it by bring the original thought back. And notice how that thought looked before the drive and after. If you manage to do that, you will not only have discovered a lot of things, but you will also have returned to your home safely!

Enjoy!

Go For A Thought Drive. Unfasten all the seat-belts that bound… | by Adesh Acharya | Dec, 2022 | Medium


 

The Visionary Approach To Life
Envisioning = more about will than originality.

visionary

Being Visionary is more about will than originality.

The Visionary Approach To Life. Envisioning = more about will than… | by Adesh Acharya | Medium

 

Seven Deadly Poisons Of Modern Life
Stay away. Stay healthy!!!

poisons of modern life

Stay away. Stay healthy!!!

Here we go then…here are SEVEN DEADLY ILLS OF MODERN LIFE:

Read it on Medium


Where Is The Meaning of Life?
When you aren’t pleased with their answers, you find your own.

meaning of life

Read Where Is the Meaning of Life on Medium


Heil Humans
It’s our universe and we have eaten nothing yet.

humans

Video Addiction
Lessons learnt during a break from the habit!

video addiction

What’s a Video Addiction?

Yesterday was the first day of my new experimentation:

Stopping the flow of a regular habit.

The habit = Regularly watching senseless videos on YouTube.

Yesterday, I successfully tolerated all my impulses to touch the YouTube app on my phone or press y + Ctrl Enter on my laptop web browser.

The reasons of experiment were:

  1. I got aware that I was watching way too much senseless videos
  2. I worried about how those videos might be affecting my feelings and imagination
  3. I wanted to find out if watching videos contributed to my constant agitation and anxiety.

The worst part was that I had developed the habit of playing nonsensical cricket discussion videos on YouTube in the background every time I tried to go to sleep. The app on my phone tells me that Monday alone, I watched around 4 hrs of videos on YouTube.

So, yesterday morning I thought it would be a nice idea to go cold-turkey on my video-watching habits and see what changes take place in me.

Achievement: I didn’t watch a single video.

I’ll go over a couple important things I was thinking yesterday. It was surprising how long it had been since I thinked with such flow. It appeared as though my habit of watching videos had turned off my brain.

One major change I would like to express right away is that I slept well and dreamt vivid after a while.

Anyway, here are the thoughts:

  • Be careful on whom you listen to: Listening to ordinary people on a regular basis can be disastrous to your life.
    Ordinary people: They are those who aren’t related to us and who aren’t our friends; they are those who aren’t mature in an intellectual and emotional sense.
    Now, it’s not hard to notice that platforms like YouTube, TikTok and more or less all social media are filled with such people. Regularly listening to them, especially on sensitive topics, means we are being deliberately or unconsciously led by ignorance because they don’t care about us (since they don’t know us) and because they aren’t mature enough to teach us. Which, as you may imagine, is not at all healthy.
    People who don’t know us but have have devoted their life to learning— even if they are strangers to us — might have acquired some wisdom to impart. If their hard-earned knowledge might not be useful to us, they might not be harmful either. But any bicky-dicky with an opinion can provide us nothing but senseless information. Even the advice that they give can have serious consequences to our thinking as what they provide aren’t the product of care-for-us or hard-learning.
    There are many with the habit of sharing their intimate information on the internet, which gets videod and then commented on by random strangers. My point is, if sharing our feelings on social media (or hearing about your problems there) was to solve our crisis, why would we need friends/families, why would we need art and why would we need education and learning? It won’t work. Our issues work deeper than the level at which social media interactions occur!
  • Is my video watching, my mental weakness? — Noticing how even a short abstinence from video watching had opened the floodgates of my thoughts, I wonder if I watch videos or stroll around the internet when I am afraid to think for myself or weak to use my own imagination.
    When I go on a YouTube video watching binge, I have the choice of selecting from millions of videos, which allows me to skip or fast-forward a video if I don’t find it to be as mind-numbing or enjoyable as intended.
    Which may imply that I have been using videos as a means of sucking-up all of my thoughts — to escape from my own head — which I do think is a weakness because, in ideally world, I would want to solve my thought-problems rather than ignore them.
    What I did during the break, however, was read books and what I found amazing was that reading a book now feels like a meditation. Now, considering how some thinkers of the pre-internet/TV days condemned too much of book reading as a sign of reading-so-you-don’t-have-to-think, one can imagine how deep they lived than us!
  • Is video watching a form of manipulation? — When I was younger, I remember learning a common success lesson from my grandfather and from some ‘you can do it’ book:
    ‘Successful/great’ people don’t spend their time around petty people or gossiping. They dwell in great ideas and deeds.
    While thinking on my bed, I wondered if any successful person (not in financial/social sense but as in the master of his/her art) of today would spend their time watching senseless YouTube videos. They would probably be either honing their craft or reading a great book on life.
    This made me question if senseless video watching is equivalent to spending time around petty people and gossiping. Which would mean such watching is a form of manipulation from the ‘system’ side — to keep you ordinary, to keep you a sheep! Why else would such platforms exist?

If I can continue this break, it may teach me the advantages of video watching and I may end up watching even more of them. It may also mean I will quit video watching altogether and maybe, become an activist.

Let’s wait and see: only time shall tell!

How Valuable Are You?
How important are you in this human infected world???

your value

Q: How valuable am I?

A: I am miserable. Habitually.

I was out to pick-up a dog cage from a pet shop yesterday. The cage was big and the street was narrow which meant I had to load it in the car in a short time. Motorbikes and taxis were already parked which meant I didn’t have much space to work with. I went past the shop looking for a place to turn around, and when I did, I spotted an empty spot from afar— a perfect spot. It was at the opposite end of the shop. I pressed the accelerator in excitement and went near. But what do I notice when I get there?

A young guy is sitting on his motorbike at the exact spot, leisurely using his phone. There was no point honking so I drove past staring at him and parked the car a little further. It would take more effort and time to bring the cage and load it in the car. But I did that. All the while cursing that young person’s existence in my head.

‘Why is this person even existing?’

‘There’s no use for creatures like these!’

I thought.

Miserable thought. Bad thought. I know. But I ask these too:

‘Why am I even existing?’

‘There’s no use for rascals like me!’

Whenever I get annoyed with someone (including me), I tend to have these thoughts. I tend to imagine the entire cosmos (as much as I think it exists) and judge the value of existence of each and every individual entity. Which is more important, the sun or the moon? The river or the sea?

What a sorry thing to do!

I…I know.

I don’t see much value in the existence of anything at all — including existence — apart from the value of existence itself. I mean, to exist is the only valid reason for existence. The only actual value.

Which means, I have no right to question the value-of-existence of anything or anyone. But I do it. I forget the lesson above.

Here’s why:

Because I am a human.

I am a human and I have been shown and told a lot that existence in itself is nothing significant, its what you make of the existence that matters. So naturally I have grown up judging the value of existence of everything:

Dogs have less value than humans and ants have less value than dogs. Plants have less value than ants while mosquitos are there to be killed.

And then there’s the human world:

Writers have less value than businessmen and cleaners have less value than writers…and likewise. Division of labor. In society like mine — Nepali/Hindu — there’s this caste more valuable than that and that more valuable than that…

Yes, with my own eyes I have seen dead politicians taken to cremation in a parade and I have also seen corpses burnt with no one at all to attend. Division of value. VALUE OF EXISTENCE. Which means, high value people have more right to exist and properly die.

Now, when I saw the bike person, my human ego told me that the person was beneath me in terms of value-of-existence. I may have judged based on occupation or caste. But I judged and thought the person had a lower value-of-existence than me (and my dog since the dog I considered my own). Now, if there was a businessman with his Tesla parked — would I question the businessman’s value of existence?

Instead, I would question my own value of existence!

What a petty, miserable being I am. Why do I forget the lesson?!

VAE = Value added existence.

Physical Pain — The Greatest Teacher
Nothing teaches you harder about life than the good old anguish in the body.

physical pain is a teacher

Before getting into why I consider physical pain to be the greatest teacher, let me give some background.

I am one of those who constantly and intentionally creates problems for himself. Even when there is nothing significantly alarming in life, I have the habit of questioning and worrying about things such that I miss everything else going on, every emotion flowing in and need someone else to remind me of the absurdity of what I have been thinking and worrying about. That someone doesn’t have to be a highly intellectual or spiritual person. That something doesn’t have to be sophisticated or philosophical. Hearing a ten year old kid react while playing a video-game can do the trick. But such encounters rarely occur.

Believe me, I have read and heard the best of preachers preach and the greatest of teachers teach.

‘Thou shalt not do this…’, ‘You have been viewing the world wrong…’, ‘This is the proper way…’…they say.

But for me, what they preach and teach has always been like listening to some music you don’t like. You can hear the music playing, you understand what’s going on…but it just doesn’t touch you.

That’s my character.

Now I want to share my present situation:

I am going through excruciating pain in my mouth because of a couple of rotten teeth. It has persisted for a couple of days during which it has grabbed my attention, sucked my energy, has made me scream in anguish, has taken buzz away from beer, clouds away from smoke, taste away from food and relaxation away from a cup of tea. It has eclipsed my entire being and my thoughts haven’t been able to focus anywhere else apart from the region that hurts.

Under this situation, however, when I move my mind around things, I am amazed at my stupidity for constantly and intentionally creating problems for myself when there are none!

‘Everything is so simple…why was I complicating them?’ I ask myself.

‘This goes here, this there…this fits here…that doesn’t fit there…It’s all so simple. WHAT WAS THERE TO WORRY?!’ I question myself.

This is why I call physical pain the greatest teacher. While I sit here as a being suffering from the complications of its own body, I don’t have time nor space to get lost in mental forests of gloom. For one, it is because I don’t have the energy. Which makes me question whether my anxieties and mental issues are the result of me not being able to apply my energy appropriately. While all the energy of my being is sucked by the consciousness of physical anguish there is little left for the reveries of mind. This is why, perhaps, the mind focuses on the real.

Other thing I notice is the absurdity of problem-creating itself. While I sit here trying to figure out ways through which I can rid myself of this anguish, my state-of-mind is that of the issues of the body. The body which is real. I think I look at the thing that usually bothers me with the same state-of-mind which crops all unnecessary parts and perhaps, the mind focuses on the real. Here there is no place for problem-creating. Things are the way they are!

I don’t know how long this pain will last. In fact, I am about to go visit a doctor. But I don’t want to forget the lessons that this pain has taught me. Lessons about my reality, human reality. About my energy, human energy. Lessons about attention and conscience. Lessons I could never learn from gurus and philosophers.

This physical pain has given me hints on what I shall do and avoid. What I should try to constantly realize. Some part of me wishes some kind of physical pain always remains in me. But again, it’s not comfortable. I have to get rid of this anguish and this is what matters as of now. I need to go to the doctor for I have tried toleration and bearance but none has worked. I have tried homemade ways to avoid pain killers, hasn’t worked. The pain is real. I need to trust the system now. I need to trust a doctor. I need to focus on what is real. I need to do that which is there — not worry about that which may not be.

Right now, I don’t have enough energy or time to question the morality of medical systems!

Anxiety: Shrewdness Or Illness?
Is anxiety the cause or the effect?

anxiety

You notice your anxiety and it burns such that you cannot help but question why you are feeling that way. By then, you have tried everything: distraction, inspiration, perspiration.

Questioning the reasons for anxiety is the only thing left to do and when you reach to that phase, half of it is already gone. ‘Why didn’t I do this before?’ you wonder. You begin digging, imagining, hypothesizing: what is causing this anxiety?

You go through multiple scenarios: past, present, future. Friends, family, self. Mental, emotional, physical. You trial and error through them. One moment you feel you have found the cause: memory of your bullies from school is causing this anxiety…but something doesn’t fit. ‘I have solved it before,’ you say and move on. Another moment: fear of failure! But still something doesn’t feel okay. The anxiety doesn’t leave! ‘No there’s something else,’ you say.

Existential Dread,’ you think.

‘Oh, the absurdity of choosing a career of a writer’

‘Yes…but no not this time…I have dealt with it already. I have ideas about it…I don’t need to be anxious…it’s something else’.

And then you think:…it’s not the cause that’s the cause. It’s the anxiety that’s the cause. It’s the anxiety — which like a python dwells inside you. Yeah, it sleeps a lot too. But when it wakes up…it consumes you. It sees complications where there are none. It feels wrong when there are none. It sees another python when there is none. It may not only be the effect of sharp perception which sees the fragility in everything, It may be the cause of wrong perceptions. It maybe behaving like the way they call quantum particles do. In this case, it is both the cause and effect.

As long as it is effect, you can put the python to sleep (by digging the cause)and move on until the python wakes up again. And then you do it again. But if it’s a cause? What do you do? — Medication? Meditation? Masturbation? But, they’re all temporary!

Since I have mentioned the term ‘quantum’ above, I once read Einstein saying this:

…Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.

I don’t know in which context he said it, but he said it good. The anxiety as the cause is similar. It’s some sort of weakness that lurks inside you and creates problem after problem. Time and time again. Why?!

It doesn’t let you have fun with your family, your food, your film. Doesn’t let you be at peace with your pet, your poetry, your plant. Nor does it let you do anything. It lurks and it hurts. Burns and it…It sucks!

It sucks color out of you, joy out of you, love out you, life out of you. And they say it is the sharp perception of the impending threat! I don’t wanna be sharp.

A better question then:

If you are constantly suffering from anxiety, are you shrewd or ill?

HINT:

(I have written this and now the python seems to have gone to sleep. I wonder when will it wake up again? Oh, wait…it’s back! Apparently, my thinking about it woke it up)


 

Random Writing
At times, just sit down without a plan and write. You will feel amazing!

random writing

After sharing some Random Thoughts, I want to talk about Random Writing.

Every now and then it is a blessing to be able to just sit down to write — without planning, without an idea, without something to say, without anyone to criticize, without dreaming of followers. Without caring about the functions of writing and duties of a writer.

It is something you cannot do all the time and you cannot plan. It just comes. Flows, rather. When the burden inside your chest becomes too heavy for you to even breathe, when the idea of being a writer becomes too impractical for you to even live. When you don’t want to speak anything anymore, when you don’t want to make it anymore!

But it happens because you have to still sit down and write something!

I once heard Anthony Burgess say he’d quit being a writer if he suddenly had a million dollars. But I have also heard Charles Bukowski say that writing was never a work for him. ‘It all flows too naturally for me once certain prerequisites are met,’ said he.

But they are old folks. Long gone! That was their deal. Why do I cling on to the thoughts of these thinkers of yore? After all, they didn’t know how it was like to live here — today — 2022 — …they didn’t feel how it feels to be me, or you.

How did this idea of becoming a writer even get into my head? And Why? Why didn’t I want to be a doctor, or an engineer? Is it their doing?

Q: Why do I have to do it? Why can’t I not-do it?

A: Thoughts. My thoughts.

They may have long gone, but human-thoughts haven’t.

Thoughts

Every now and then it is a blessing to be able to quit old thoughts and patterns of thinking. They are like extremely heavy loads to your fragile imagination. They break your proverbial back.

Why can’t I move on from old identities, old relationships, from old self?

After all, I am living in a new world. Why do old concepts like nations and religion keep bothering me? Why do they buzz in my conscience like a mosquito? This internet thing wasn’t there a while ago. If the internet was there in the age of enlightenment, there wouldn’t be advocacy for sovereign nations. Nations were supposed to be a bridge connecting all of us of different races and castes. And now we are connected. Yet nations exist today —and they themselves are disconnecting you and I! What an irony. I hate nations — I hate my nation — I hate your nation!

I once talked to an old writer, ‘You guys of today are lucky…the computer corrects your grammar,’ said he.

‘You guys were luckier. In your age, not everyone could publish,’ I thought.

Old thoughts! They bug, they bite, they hurt. I want to be new every second. I want to be someone else every new day. I want to kill the yesterday’s me. I can’t do all that with my physical body, but my mind is free. I can do that to my image and self. But, why don’t I do that?

Is it because I have a citizenship with my name on it?

I condemn nations. They all should die. Nations are pathetic concepts infesting our modern souls.

I wonder if someone from Norway also criticizes nations as much as someone like me — who is from Nepal — does?

It doesn’t matter. Nations are like old thoughts. They are old thoughts! They trouble humanity just as my old thoughts trouble me. They should die, just as my old thoughts should!

It’s therapeutic to sit down and write nonsense like this. I wonder if anyone will even read this particular word. And this little jibberish here: hfdaslvnadfkl. If yes, then here’s a small gift from me to you:

Hello, I wish you well for your life. Please take care of yourself.

But even if no one reads, I really don’t care (on this one at least) for I have cured my anxiety for now. That’s what should matter to me!

Trying To Make Philosophical Conversations Relevant
They go nowhere all the time!

philosophical conversations

I find myself feeling empty and frustrated during conversations of philosophical nature. By that, I mean conversations that are not gossip, or about success or money and are about the meanings of xyz. The feeling has occurred numerous times with numerous people.

I enjoy those conversations, that is why I get excited at meeting people with whom I can talk that kind of stuff. But every time, I end up disappointed and perhaps the other person(s) does too. Things go nowhere. Ideas go nowhere. Feelings go nowhere. What begins with beats of excitement always finishes with melodies of emptiness and frustration. Like swimming in nothing. There’s nothing to discuss after a certain point, no more to go. A void. A big dark void!

But a few days ago, after I devised a little concept called Contextual Philosophy I have begun to not only learn from but also enjoy philosophical conversations.

Contextual Philosophy begins with a simple premise: Why the hell should I talk philosophy with this person(s)? and goes to these:

  1. I will not talk philosophy with this person because I enjoy it
  2. I will not talk philosophy with this person because this person seems to enjoy it
  3. I will not talk philosophy with this person because we are bored
  4. I will not talk philosophy with this person to boast
  5. I will not talk philosophy with this person because I am a writer
  6. I will not talk philosophy with this person because I have just read a book
  7. I will not talk philosophy with this person because I am frustrated with my life

and so on…

As you can see, this leaves me with not many reasons to talk philosophy with people and hence gives momentum to contextual philosophy.

Why should I really have philosophical conversations with this person?

I have had a couple of conversations after this conceptualization and things have gone smooth. Emptiness and frustrations haven’t been there while fruitful conversations have existed. Philosophical ideas have been relevant.

While I try to think why this process has worked — apart from the questions raised restraining me from unnecessary impulses — I have experienced a few worthy reasons to be having philosophical conversations :

  1. If the ideas exchanged during the conversation make the participants question their desires in life,
  2. If all the participants can constantly question: what new conclusion will we derive from this conversation.

For instance, if we are conversing about the existence of god — and if we deduct all ‘I will not talk ifs…’ from it, we will be making sure all points we reach will be connected to the desires we keep within ourselves and will generate new observations. But, it has to be relevant to all parties. Although this may not seem like much of a change, it ensures the conversation doesn’t go out of hand (mind) and always has relevance to the lives of the participants. This takes away the unnecessary and void from philosophy.

I have found this to be a useful thing which has eradicated the emptiness and frustration.

While this may seem similar to Selective Talking, it is different as it deals with philosophical matters only — while Selective Talking could be about anything with anyone.

This simple experiment of keeping the context of philosophical conversation in mind while thinking up new thoughts and arguments, doesn’t allow philosophical talks to be empty which can also be applied to personal musings and writings.

Philosophizing has now become relevant, in fact the most relevant thing to do in life!


Also on Medium:

This Thing Called Contextual Philosophy | by Adesh Acharya | Jul, 2022 | Medium


 

The Skill Of Selective Talking
Why are some people boring to listen to?

Selective Talking

Before getting into selective talking, I want to give present some background. 

A few days ago, I attended a small literary gathering. There were different kinds of creative and intellectual people with diversity in profession, career-track, writing styles, etc. The things in common being that all were intellectuals and older than me. Much older. This allowed me to freely be curious as I freely asked questions and listened to them answer.

I introduced myself to almost every one there and keenly listened to them. Everything was going well. I was learning important things and getting to know them. After the event ended, I got to talking with a man in his mid 60s — a scholar who had degrees in Buddhism and Geography. I had started the conversation by asking him what his field was. But what followed from him was quite unlike anyone I had spoken to by that time. HE was both boring and anxiety-inducing for me:

He began narrating his biography: Where he was born, how/in what he was educated, how many surgeries he has had, where lives his son, what he studies, etc. etc.

I didn’t want to be rude so I listened. But I got bored. I wanted to walk-off. I wanted him to walk-off. I wanted someone to come and interrupt. I wanted the conversation to end.

The surprising thing was, I do understand that he was speaking of crucial things. In fact, he was providing me important life-lessons through stories of his own personal experiences. He had educated himself in diverse subject matters, so it was supposed to be very important for me to help balance and cope with my own struggles with balancing variety: BUT something was off in him!

‘This person speaks about important things, but it all feels nonsense to me.’

At first I thought it might have been my issue: attention deficiency and all that. But then, I had been listening to more than a dozen other people and none had bored me to such an extent, if at all. All had given brief and solid answers. It had all been enjoyable and impactful.

But then I noticed something: all of them (who didn’t bore me) were either much older than the person who bored me or were much more productive/successful in literature!

And that’s where I noticed something for the first time in my life: The Skill Of Selective Talking.

And then yesterday I discovered this Voltaire quote:

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

Curious and creative people usually have a lot of ideas inside their head. And I have come to believe that the most nonsense of talkative people are also either one of those. This quality (having ideas) pushes one to express. The most profound ones express with writing or other forms of creations. The not so profound ones have nothing but talking at their disposal. But that doesn’t mean the profound ones don’t talk or the shallow ones don’t write! My point however is: curious and creative people have a lot to express, but bad expression is worse than no expression, hence, selective talking is an important skill to have. And such talking is something that profound ones do. The shallow ones just blabber irrespective of the degrees they have acquired.

By selective talking I mean keeping these elements in mind while talking with someone:

Why is this person listening to me?
What should I talk?

When I said above that the older or more prolific ones out there had given me solid to-the-point answers and hadn’t bored me, I say they were the profound ones. And I think the profound ones ask the questions above and answer them carefully to themselves before talking with anyone else. Or they could just be old and too tired to talk.

Anyways, the fact remains that we talk to express and we express to communicate. What is the point of expressing things or expressing in a manner that bores others and therefore deafens them and doesn’t become communication at all? It misses the whole point. Understanding this is being profound.

The person that had bored me and hence taught me a valuable life-lesson (if he wasn’t doing it intentionally to teach me and was therefore the most profound of them all) was not selective talking. He was expressing himself out of his urge without considering me as a listener. He didn’t care about me or why I was talking to him for that matter. He just expressed himself. While everyone doing things for selfish reasons is the norm of life (as I myself was trying to learn for myself), his talking bored me. It was important but seemed irrelevant. It was sensible but sounded nonsense. For me, he made noise the whole time, didn’t communicate. He wasn’t profound or old enough!

After that I have tried to tell myself to practice this skill of selective talking. After all, why do I want to bore others and waste my crucial energy at the same time — at the gain of nothing? I am telling myself to rather be quiet and listen. Talk only when it’s worth it. When it is required of me. When I have something important or entertaining to communicate.

The same applies to videos, cinema, lectures, speeches and writing:

While there may be point in writing things for self-expression, there is no point publishing them if they are not selected carefully. If they are not selective-writings, they just occupy computer and library spaces and achieve nothing. They merely bore others and waste our energy (and time-money resources too).

EITHER BE PROFOUND OR GROW OLD!


 

The Read-Write Balance Agitation
When you read, you don’t want to write. You write and you stop reading. What’s going on?!

I don’t think I am alone in this. I am sure I am not alone in this. This restlessness is painful!

When I start a book, I do not want to stop until I have finished it. Yes, I have my Time Management Formula where I divide my day into parts where reading and writing get a certain amount of time each. I have divided in a manner so as to not mix them together. One at a time. It is supposed to help me cure this agitation, this headache:

Read-only from x to y AM.

Write-only from a to b PM.

Yet, when I start a book I want x and y to extend forever, killing a and b in the process. I want to read on and on: for the whole day, days or weeks. Until the book is finished. Done!

I find it difficult to get into the writing mode while I read.

The same happens when I am in the writing mode.

When I start writing a thing or two, I want a and b to extend forever, killing x and y in the process. I want to write on and on: for the whole day, days or weeks. Until I am exhausted and out of writing energy. Done!

I find it difficult to get into the reading mode while I write.

YET:

I have a Time Management Formula. It is supposed to help me cure this agitation, this restlessness, this headache.

This issue drives me crazy. Take this moment for instance. This moment: when I am writing this article, I am writing as if I will never ever read a book in my life. I am a writer, I don’t read, is what’s buzzing inside my head.

But something similar had happened this morning when I was reading a book:

I love to read, fk writing, was what was buzzing inside my head.

If looked upon as action, as a whole, I may have been successfully reading and writing. But during each process the difficulty, the restlessness, the agitation, the ache is real. It hurts.

I am trying to make friends of reading and writing. I want them to be friends. I want them to understand each other. I want them to understand me. I want them to understand the situation. I want them to understand the human irony.

At times, they do understand. But most of the time they don’t.

Yet in the overall context, I do both. But with pain. The Time Management Formula works. It is like a machine which pushes me to do things. It makes things happen. But it is like a machine. It doesn’t make me feel. It pushes me. It just gets things done. Just like machines.

I wish they (reading and writing) understood each other. I wish I could get up after finishing this and read for the rest of the day. But no! Another writing-idea has popped up. It’s as if I want to throw all the books away and just write for the rest of my life. Yet when I start reading, I don’t want to stop. After I finish something I want to read something else immediately. I want to go on and on…

Yet, the Time Management Formula works: like a clock. Like a machine. I want something organic…

What about you? Does this happen to you? How do you deal with this?



 

Human Knowledge Is a Big Fat Tangle
Can we look at our collective knowledge as the process of untangling the tangled?

tangle

The pursuit of truth for human beings (Human knowledge) is often depicted as being a linear affair. It either goes up:

We, evolved from apes, have managed to create computers, peek into our cells and now we have rockets and now we are heading into unknown space, time, and new dimensions and it is only a matter of time until we will discover the truth!

Or down:

The Truth: We, created by God…shall return back to God.

Either way, it’s a straight line. A timeline.

But I am having other thoughts:

The entire existence exists in the form of entanglement in our mind(s). Everything we have known so far, Every religion, science, art, philosophy, Every simple or complex knowledge, All our understanding, All our discoveries: are merely the process of untangling part(s) of a larger entanglement. The entanglement being our knowledge of our existence as a whole.

We untangle a knot, get excited and like a game of crossword puzzle, it leads to untangling of many other subsequent tangles. We then think we have unearthed the truth. Get excited. Oh, the joy of untangling!

Until… we hit upon another crisis…Time to untangle some more! Yet we don’t look at things as being in a tangle. We like to think of things as being linear. It feels as if every untangle is the last obstacle.

Who knows how large the overall tangle is?

Is this idea another untangle?

Or is it nothing?

Dealing With Verbal Poison
What To Do When Someone Hurts You (tries to) With Words?

Verbal Poison

There are many who, out of ignorance, out of envy or out of their own self-insignificance-perception will spit verbal poison at you. They will — with their petty mind — carefully locate the thing(s) that matter, strengthen you and derogate it to a great degree and you immediately find yourself facing crisis, feeling weak. Your foundation crumbles. No matter how capable you think of yourself, it is an extremely tough task to remain unbothered by the sting. When a snake bites you, you feel it!

Let the stinger sting. If you don’t feel a thing it might imply you are too malleable, dull or blunt. Sensing the sting means: you have your values and you perceive the sting. Which I think is a healthy thing.

At times there are stings which lead us to an appropriate direction while we might have lost track. Those however are in fact not stings but medicines for us. The difference between poison and medicine is in the intention. We’ve got to be able to spot the intention. Unable to know which ones are which might be detrimental to us.

But the real problem is when one allows the poison to sustain.

If that happens, we find yourself baseless, willess, strengthless — with the poison enveloping us and we thinking only of the person(s) who has stung. There we might even develop an impulse for revenge, which I do not think is a healthy thing. Our mind is supposed to be free, aware and ready for the next truth — thinking of giving a punch back to someone is the last thing we want it to be doing! We’re not that petty.

Worse than that would be: we boiling. Angered, fuming we spitting words back at that person. Words that hurt. Words that derogate. In other words, we ourselves stinging and spreading poison. We don’t wanna do that, do we?

Q: So what do we do then? How do we deal with verbal poison?

A: We rub the wound a couple of times and think of something else!

(What we value is valuable, that is why we the valuable one values it)


Life Is BIGGER Than Career
A nice career is for a nice life. Life is not a tool for a nice career.

Life is bigger than career

An interviewer asks the Iranian Film Director Abbas Kiarostami how he would like his legacy as a filmmaker /artist to be. In other words, he asks Abbas what he would like to be remembered by.

Abbas then gives a reply in a classic Abbas way:

…my pleasure is in my own existence, not in those works that would remain of me. If that should be in opposition to the fact that something would remain of me, but I wouldn’t exist, then I prefer that I should remain and my work wouldn’t.

I like his reply, just as I like his cinema.

Career is supposed to be there to make our lives better, not the other way around.

I have seen many people around me and have also read about a lot who approach things in the latter way. Life for them is just a vessel for their career and nothing more. This is not just the case of those avaricious ones or of ordinary ones such as businessmen and jobbers, this is also the case with many artists, thinkers, scientists, philosophers and politicians.

Call it ambition, call it duty, call it professionalism — call it whatever you like, such people get obsessed with their work to such an extent that their life takes backstage and their every meal and breath culminates in the thought of climbing another step in their career ladder.

In arts, when we hear of artists who take such an approach, we tend to call them geniuses — and the more miserable the artist the greater we perceive them to be.

One has to be really really special to be able to rise above the petty dealings of life and devote oneself completely to the related field, we say. And we passionately discuss the stories of their misery and the glory of their art. Our such interpretation of genius provokes and motivates many a talent to burn themselves out — destroying their life in the process — for the sake of their art. Art has weird sources of inspiration anyway!

But my point is: such an attitude towards art or anything as such is an irony. Art is a means to an end and that end is always life — be it life’s knowledge or experiences. Similar is every other activity which we call profession and in an individual’s pursuit sense we call career. Science, philosophy , politics and everything else in between and beyond — are means to an end called life.

Hold on a second there Mr. Stupidyou might sayif everything is a means to make life better, doesn’t excess in means imply excessive betterment of life? Doesn’t excess art, science, philosophy and politics imply a greater life for the practitioner as well as for the receiver?

Yes you are correct, I reply, But that’s exactly where I see the problem. And I give my own example:

Trying to make a living as a writer I understand the importance of reading. And at times, when I am reading to make my career better, I persevere in spite of anxiety, frustration, agitation and problems in relationships with my loved ones. In those moments, I get obsessed with reading to such an extent that I forget the very reason I have pursued a life as a writer — which is to live a life I think is the best. I forget that career-reading is a means to writing-career and writing career is a means to a writing life which is nothing but a means to a perfect life (as per my perception.) If only I could remember to shut Kant books at a point where they begin troubling my peace of mind!

This is exactly the problem with our educational structure. Education fundamentally is supposed to be something that acts as a means to provide us guidance and an environment for an appropriate life within which grades and such are supposed to be means for a better education. But what did we end up doing? — We ended up obsessing over grades and education and therefore ended up living a miserable student life.

A career obsessed scientist might eventually make discoveries for a better world, but a miserable scientist can equally do things that will take the world the other way.

Oh, if only we all remembered that any type of work we do is done merely to make our lives better : there would be less anxious and miserable of us and there would be more scrutiny in what we do, which could only mean one thing: there would be less anxiety and misery all around — which is after all a good start to provide a good and complete life for everyone! (Which is why listen to that wonderful piece of music anyway.)


Poem: Tiger and a Mouse

Poem: Tiger and Mouse

He has two forms:
Inner and Outer
Alone and with other.

While alone, he is vicious
Like a hungry tiger!

Someone comes and he transforms
Into a mouse!

What Is Virtue?
Can we freely select and manage our own virtues? What's your virtue, by the way?

what is virtue?

The Thesaurus in Merriam Webster defines virtue as such:

a quality that gives something special worth

But I like to define virtue as such:

a quality that you either have or want to have in yourself

In the traditional sense, this ‘special worth’ of Merriam Webster is socially given. If any qualities in a person of any given time and place is deemed worthy and ‘good’ by the society, that quality ends up being a virtue. But I don’t think that it should be the case. An individual should be allowed to determine what virtue he/she would want in themselves and fight or convince others that the virtue they have selected is more worthy then the one prevalent if that is not the case. It is about fighting for the true against prejudice.

While we’re critiquing traditional thinking, I am reminded of one Nietzsche from the 19th century.

In his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche talks about ideally have only one virtue. Saying how qualities evolved from the maturity of one’s passion is the best route to discovering one’s virtue, he also goes on to say that while it is illustrious to have multiple virtues, it is a hard ask. He says multiple virtues will eventually envy each other as they all vie for the highest position within you.

But I think multiple virtues can be managed together. For that to be possible though, we need generalization and a little act of symbolism.

At this moment, I want to share my virtues with you. (Not what I have, but what I seek in me.)

These virtues as of now are:

  1. Calmness
  2. Strength
  3. Depth

Now, what I did to make sure these qualities I want to have in me won’t fight and compete with each other as Nietzsche warned, I have used symbolism to turn all three into one.

First, let me quickly define what I mean by those words above.

Calmness for me is the quieting of thoughts such that they go about slowly, gently and smoothly.

Strength for me is when your thoughts stop and ignore fearly emotions. Strength is when your own thoughts dominate and beat the hell out of petty and harmful thoughts.

Depth for me is thoughts reaching the root of everything it encounters.

I initially didn’t want to write and publish this article because all this is my personal work in progress and I may not have the same thinking about these things tomorrow as of now. But then I wanted to go ahead and do it, for reasons I do not know yet.

Well then, with that out of the way, I want to talk about the generalizing and the symbolizing.

I searched for a single thing (symbol) that would successfully have all the three qualities I have in it.

What could that be which is calm, strong and deep? — And then I got it:

Ocean/Sea!

Ocean surfaces can be calm. Oceans are mighty strong. Oceans are seriously deep.

Okay, I do know how ocean surfaces are violent and disturbing too! Just like our thoughts. But since we are humans, we can decide how we would want the waters to flow.

Take a look at this for once:

I want that in me.

Not this:

THE END!

The Irony Of G.O.A.T – What is GOAT?
You worship your entertainers and you are ruled by them. This is because you feel tiny without them.

G.O.A.T

Let’s give some background before we discuss what is a GOAT:

The modern scientifically trained democratic man wants to mock and laugh at all gods and kings

‘Haha, gods are dead. It all started with a big bang, duh!’ says he.

‘Haha, kings are dead. Long live the market! says he.

And yet look at the irony:

The same modern man goes to concerts and worships his musicians. He comes back and tattoos the musicians’ name and face in the most intimate part of his body.

The same modern man goes to football matches carrying flags. He bows to his sports player and imitates the player in every way practical: hair, the way to walk.

And then this modern trend of calling other people G.O.A.T — which presumably stands for greatest of all time.

This term called GOAT which should have actually been used as a satire for such performers and players — who are in most cases the reminder of collective human boredom and insignificance— is in fact a term of reverence.

It is a term born out of the inner urge to see perfection, the ideal in any field. In other words, it is a term born out of the urge to see greatness, because they themselves feel tiny. It is the same urge that gave birth to literal gods and kings — Gods are great. Kings are great.

(The english word great is a derivation of Proto-Germanic *grautaz (“big in size, coarse, coarse grained”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʰrewd-*gʰer- (“to rub, grind, remove”).

The word great then is a relative term. You are always great relative to something. The classic Taoist case. But it is an urge isn’t it? You put five random people in a room and there is an urge in you to spot the perfect among them. The best among them. The great among them. And then you put the entire human history in a plane, the urge returns: you want to spot perfection, you want to filter out the best. The great. The great among the great: the greatest. Everytime you choose a great, you are belittling others who didn’t win over your perception. Everytime you choose a great that isn’t you, you are belittling yourself who didn’t win over your own perception.

My question and concern: Isn’t this urge the cause of gods and kings? Isn’t this urge the reason why humans have drawn vague and unnecessary lines between themselves? The same reverence which sustains our weakness, which makes us vulnerable, which makes us mote in the eyes of the greats!

How much have people across all cultures suffered because of this reverence! How much have people across all societies and states suffered due to the blindness and dumbness, force and fear infused by certain religions and monarchs?

When mythology was created, the goal wasn’t reverence for this or that god(s). When people came together, the objective wasn’t to choose a king to be a slave to. Life was supposed to be contemplative, imaginative, fun and organizable. That’s why those things happened. But then those things got exploited because some couldn’t rise out of their self-doubt and those systems got converted into organized systems of power. And people suffered…

People suffered and suffered until the progeny of the same culture and society dared to wake up and ward-off such reverence. And eventually the modern man was born: out of the hatred toward reverence. The modern man was born out of hope in science and democracy. The modern was born out of contempt towards political-religion and monarchy.

The modern man was supposed to enjoy Shiva but not revere him. The modern men were supposed to dance together in a circle but with an empty center.

But why then is the same modern man who has mocked upon literal gods and kings still so passionate about greatness? And that too for mere entertainers! Isn’t he supposed to have moved beyond greatness? Doesn’t the whole idea of his secularism and democracy revolve around anti-reverence? Doesn’t the whole idea revolve around self-belief?

This could only mean one thing:

The modern man has killed-off neither god nor kings, he is merely worshiping and being ruled by new ones.

In other words, the modern man worships and is ruled by his entertainers!

Q: And why does the modern man need such superficial entertainers?

A: Because the modern man isn’t self-assured yet.


Laxmi Prasad Devkota
What was Devkota all about?

In Nepal, it is difficult to find an intellectual unstained by Hindu/Buddhist or some sort of political ideology. This tendency might be a global phenomenon, yet, in Nepal, it stretches to a nauseating degree, so much so that you can correctly guess an intellectual’s entire idea-set by merely knowing his/hers religious/political inclination. The person I am writing about today is Laxmi Prasad Devkota.

He struggled with both those elements and yet managed to live and create in a way that included and transcended them.

You can’t predict him, you can’t guess him and you get both annoyed and exalted by his spontaneity and randomness: in other words, by his poetic genius.

There’s a lot of myth surrounding the man.

Stories of him giving away his coat to the poor; writing lengthy poems in cigarette packs; struggling immensely with money; being sent to Ranchi (a city in India known for mental treatment) — are abound. It was in this context that he was called a geographical mistake by a Brit whose name I cannot recall.

Yet some had enough sense to recognize him and call him a Nepali Mahakavi (Great Poet). But apart from that, his works and ideas aren’t popular in a folk sense and his presence is mostly limited within dull school-books.

Yes, such is the society of Nepal and such was the man born here: ahead of his time, inappropriately in space!

He mostly wrote poems (epic, short, metered, unmetered) spanning from Nepali Shakuntala to Prometheus. His seminal work Munamadan is still considered to be the greatest work of Nepali Literature. It is a tragedy about a man who leaves his wife and mother to go to Lhasa for a better financial life.

He wrote songs. He also wrote a lot of short stories and a novel.

His essays are brilliant and it is in this context that I would like to introduce his ideas to people who aren’t familiar with him.

A few years ago I published a collection of poetry in English named PARANOIA:

When I reached to the final stages the work — set to publish — I had the idea of using my work as a medium to interpret a couple of Nepali writers — in English. I translated certain lines I liked from Devkota’s essay collection and placed it in.

The translations include his thoughts on a wide array of things: creativity, art, science, philosophy, spirituality, education, life, god, etc.

I now want to quit this rambling of mine and insert those translations/interpretations so that you can judge and hopefully enjoy his ideas on your own.

Heart

Truth shines through feelings…

In the heart lies the luminosity of God.

Feelings or emotions are primary

Desiring and thinking come later.

Beast

Eyes identify

Brain understands

Ears listen

Heart feels.

To be devoid of these four is the sign of being a beast.

Depth

Difficulty doesn’t imply depth.

Difficulty doesn’t mean Art,

Incomprehensibility doesn’t have any value.

Schools are:

Industries

To manufacture machines.

Education system

And the soul desires a thing,

education provides something else.

All I’ve learned till B.A

in three years

I believe,

I can put into little children’s minds better,

reciting stories…

Folly

That we usually call Education

is making man stupid.

Creation Love Art

And love is the chief element of creation

Whilst Art is the chief action of love

Curiosity

I yearn to see:

What lies there in the heart!

Natural curiosity!

Sinner

I want to bow my head

As if the all pervading God is scolding me.

I know that I am a sinner.

Art

The beautifully illustrated Truth is Art

Which springeth from the creative imagination.

The truth lies in our life

and unless it comes from the formlessness to the form:

we do not realize it.

Civilization

Civilization hasn’t yet started.

We haven’t learned to respect life.

Real progress will start

The day our sentiment of brotherhood gets firm

Vairagya

As long as we aspire to become great in this world

or hold feelings to do things

and show our pride,

Vairagya is impossible.

Doubt

To doubt is better,

as it helps understand,

assists searching.

Question is everything, answer is maturity.

Dare

It is cowardice to not move forward in opportunity.

We cannot live in a life devoid of danger.

What Science does not

Science cannot satisfy man’s curiosity

and he searches for glimpses

beyond the Sciences

through the magic of emotional and imaginative world,

where man feels self-satisfied as if he is near the truth.

What Art not

The works done by mathematical formulas,

even though are the works of brain,

do not deserve to be called Art.

Painting is Art, Photography is not.

Where Art springs

When the creative imagination sees new dreams

Rising from imitation

And maneuvers its works in its own manner,

Art springs.

Let’s get small

There is fun in being small

We can see others’ significance dance around.

There is pleasure in the peacefulness of ego;

We can see others’ pretense.

Subtle Conscience

The energy to manufacture Art

Doesn’t come from the mere superficial darshan of objects

nor does it comes from mere intellect and knowledge;

It comes from those subtle consciences,

Which find emotional caressing from divine experience

rising above bestial eyes.

The beast merely looks and remains satisfied,

but man tries to touch the heart of everything.

Teacher and teaching

Science cannot locate everything

and our psychological studies end

within the darkness of the intellect.

This is why no teacher can teach.

Creativity

In the divine talent of the Creator

The word was born

And we,

studying this creation

attain clear messages of

Divine Conscience,

Divine Truth,

Divine Beauty and

Divine knowledge.

In the creative imagination of God,

Totality works and provides beautiful

lines and colors and forms

to the Truth of God.

We realize the ‘beautiful’ through the sensing of Truth

and where there is no Truth there isn’t beauty.

This Self-Illustrating form of God

manifests in artistic creativity such that

truth becoming beautiful descends to the outer forms of the senses.

Imaginative Truth

For me,

practicality is limited and

philosophy, intellect is blind.

I enjoy imaginative truth the most

and through it find the glimpses of God

Gambling

I enjoy gambling,

As I find ample opportunities there

To engage my mind and study.

Why is God silent?

It is the consequence of the

Western Civilization that,

God doesn’t speak in

Wind and Water.

Shadows

I speak with the shadows

For me,

The optical world is merely

The manifestation of the inside

And all solid objects are liquid.

The Poet

In the heart of the poet

The rocks speak

And the leaves have tongue.

Cadavers

Those who say,

The world doesn’t speak

Are Deaf

Those who say,

There isn’t life in the hills and the trees and the stars

Are cadavers.

Human Beings

If anything

Elucidates the affinity

Between man and God

It is Human-Heart and Imagination

In Art

Man seeks to

Show

His identification with the unknown

And in the world of the known

Seeks for the kingdom of the unknown

True Study

For studying the life of any culture

There’s nothing more enlightening

Then the Arts of that culture.

Near

We feel we’ve reached near to the Creator

When that eye in our inner world opens

Which

Can bring to form the unavailable and the irregular

And fill it with colours.

Imagination

A small spark of

The fundamental creative dream energy of God

In humans:

Is Imagination.

Man

He tries to create

Embrace nature

Runs after fresh magic to improve the world

Listens to the call of the unknown,

Ascending beyond sights and sounds

Seeks for the inner sparks and sounds

He turns forms into sounds and words into pictures

He dislikes boundaries

He wants to fly and pluck

Peek from darkness and

Steal the fire from heaven.

Work and Art

In a simple table,

The work of carpentry is done

Not Art.

But,

If a carpenter

Creates a table as if a beautiful dream

Art it becomes.

Dreams

We call those creations Art

Which are within the boundaries of truth and beauty

If they’ve got the natural affect

For the heart of life.

Empty dreams aren’t Art

As long as they don’t get published.

Truth and Beauty

Beauty arises from the prodigious consciousness of truth

As if truth,

Melting into life

Descends to the forms alive.

The Edgar Allan Poe Way
Poe's Method To Knowledge

I think Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka is one of the most underrated works of speculative philosophy:

Books in Brief — Edgar Allan Poe: Eureka | by Adesh Acharya | Medium

Published in 1848, this short work is where Poe searches for the sweetest-spot of wisdom to look into scientific and philosophical questions.

In his own words, he wanted it to be considered as a work of poetry:

To the few who love me and whom I love, to those who feel rather than think, to the dreamers and those who put their faith in dreams as in the only realities, I offer this book of truths, not in its character of truth-teller, but for the beauty that abounds in its truth, constituting it true. (Preface)

Apart from physical, cosmological, and spiritual implications, Poe in this work provides us with his epistemology. By that I mean — he provides us the method/way he believes in and has used to observe what he has observed and conclude what he has concluded. In doing so he has also provided us with his own brief interpretation of the history of philosophy.

I have summarized in this manner:

It was the metaphysicians who first came up with singular fancy that there exist but two practicable roads to Truth. Aristotle was the founder and popularizer of the deductive or the apriori method. He started with axioms, or self-evident truths and from axioms he proceeded logically, to results. His most illustrious disciples were one Euclid and Kant. Aristotle and his method reigned supreme until James Hogg preached an entirely different system, which he called the à posteriori or inductive method.

His plan referred altogether to sensation. He proceeded by observing, analyzing, and classifying facts — instantiæ Naturæ, as they were somewhat affectedly called — and arranging them into general laws.

While the mode of Aristotle rested on noumena, that of Hogg depend on phenomena; and so great was the admiration excited by this latter system that, at its first introduction, Aristotle fell into general disrepute.

But he recovered ground, and was permitted to divide the empire of Philosophy:

…the Aristotelian and Baconian roads are, and of right ought to be, the solo possible avenues to knowledge: — ‘Baconian,’ you must know, my dear friend,” adds the letter-writer at this point, “was an adjective invented as equivalent to Hog-ian, and at the same time more dignified and euphonious.

But these method retarded the progress of true Science, which makes its most important advances by seemingly intuitive leaps.

This way, investigation was similar to crawling and for many centuries,

…so great was the infatuation, about Hog especially, that a virtual stop was put to all thinking, properly so called. No man dared utter a truth for which he felt himself indebted to his soul alone.

For many years, it didn’t matter whether the truth was even demonstrably such, for the dogmatizing philosophers of that epoch regarded only the road by which it professed to have been attained. It all ended with the scrutiny of the means, where it was found that the mean fit neither under Hog, nor under Aristotle.

If the crawling system was exclusively adopted, men wouldn’t have arrived at the maximum amount of truth because the repression of imagination was an evil not to be counterbalanced even by absolute certainty in the snail processes. Nor was that certainty absolute. Their method was like holding something close to the eyes to see it better. Which in turn blinded the seers.

The major taint in Baconianism lay in its tendency to throw power and consideration into the hands of merely perceptive men who mostly dug for minute facts, especially in physical science. All they did was depended on facts and closed their eyes to everything else. They gave hard time to those who wanted to evolve from facts through generalization. They called them ‘theoretical,’ ‘theory,’ ‘theorist’ in a degrading manner.

On the other hand, the Aristotleians were blind as they had:

erected their castles upon a basis far less reliable than air; for no such things as axioms ever existed or can possibly exist at all.

The focus was a lot on Logic. A certain Mill said that the ability or inability to conceive is in no case to be received as a criterion of axiomatic truth.

But their logic was baseless, worthless and fantastic altogether. The two narrow and crooked paths then — the one of creeping and the other of crawling —is where they confined the Soul:

the Soul which loves nothing so well as to soar in those regions of illimitable intuition which are utterly incognizant of ‘path.’

This way, none of them came — even by accident — to the broadest, the straightest and most available of all mere roads — the majestic highway of the Consistent. They failed to deduce from the works of God the vitally momentous consideration that a perfect consistency can be nothing but an absolute truth?

After that proposition, the process of truth investigation was taken out of the hands of the ground-moles and given to the only true thinkers — to the generally-educated men of ardent imagination:

The speculators and the theorizers. The Keplers, The Laplaces, whose theories are corrected/reduced/sifted/cleared of their chaff of inconsistency —

until at length there stands apparent an unencumbered Consistency — a consistency which the most stolid admit — because it is a consistency — to be an absolute and an unquestionable Truth.

This new method is powerful and it is proved by the fact that Newton’ s gravitation was deduced from Kepler and Kepler being a speculator/theorizer had merely guessed it.

Yes! — these vital laws Kepler guessed — that is to say, he imagined them. Had he been asked to point out either the deductive or inductive route by which he attained them, his reply might have been — ‘I know nothing about routes — but I do know the machinery of the Universe. Here it is. I grasped it with my soul — I reached it through mere dint of intuition.’ Alas, poor ignorant old man! Could not any metaphysician have told him that what he called ‘intuition’ was but the conviction resulting from deductions or inductions of which the processes were so shadowy as to have escaped his consciousness, eluded his reason, or bidden defiance to his capacity of expression?

A conviction resulting from shadowy deductions or inductions.

Elsewhere, he describes an artist as someone with an exquisite sense of beauty which affords him not only a rapturous enjoyment but also a sense of deformity of disproportion (FIFTY SUGGESTIONS XXII).

Poets (who are artists) have the ability to sense the wrong and they can see injustice where the unpoetical see none. They have a clear-sightedness in respect to wrong which is nothing more than a corollary from the vivid sensation of right. Poets have an irritability towards the wrong.


When The Greedy Shall Solely Inherit The World
What about you — if you are not greedy? 

An Euro-American lover-of-money — moneyphile — named Peter Thiel wants to live forever!

While his greed for money and his desire to live forever are his personal choices — what amazes me is his greed for wanting to be a philosopher as well. (Some people need everything, don’t they?) He says something like this:

I think there are probably three main modes of approach to death…You can accept it, deny it or you can fight it.

Now, Mr. Thiel is a businessman, a merchant, a capitalist. He loves money more than anything. And he is proud of it.

This makes me want to quote Ibn-Khaldun (again):

…merchant must concern himself with buying and selling, earning money and making a profit. This requires cunning, willingness to enter into disputes, cleverness, constant quarreling, and great persistence. These are things that belong to commerce. They are qualities detrimental to and destructive of virtuousness and manliness, because it is unavoidable that actions influence the soul. Good actions influence it toward goodness and virtue. Evil and deceitful actions influence it in the opposite sense…

…These influences differ according to the different types of merchants. Those who are of a very low type and associated closely with bad traders who cheat and defraud and perjure themselves, asserting and denying statements concerning transactions and prices, are much more strongly affected by these bad character qualities. Deceitfulness becomes their main characteristic. Manliness is completelyalien to them, beyond their power to acquire. At any rate, it is unavoidable that their cunning and their willingness to enter into disputes affects their manliness (adversely). The complete absence of (any adverse effect) is very rare among them.

The character qualities of merchants are inferior to those of noblemen and rulers. This is because merchants are mostly occupied with buying and selling. This necessarily requires cunning. If a merchant always practices cunning, it becomes his dominant character quality. The quality of cunning is remote from that of manliness which is the characteristic quality of rulers and noblemen. If the character of (the merchant) then adopts the bad qualities that follow from (cunning) in low-class merchants, such as quarrelsomeness, cheating, defrauding, as well as (the inclination to) commit perjury in rejecting and accepting statements concerning prices, his character can be expected to be one of the lowest sort, for well-known reasons. It is because of the character that one acquires through the practice of commerce that political leaders avoid engaging in it. There are some merchants who are not affected by those character qualities and who are able to avoid them, because they have noble souls and are magnanimous, but they are very rare in this world.

With this, I want to define Mr. Thiel as having the following characteristics:

  1. Greedy
  2. Cunning
  3. Cleverness 
  4. Quarrelsome
  5. Persistent
  6. Cheating
  7. Defrauding

(No wonder he wants to live forever!)

Greed Mr. Thiel…greed! Wish someone had taught you some virtue in your childhood

As these people have both the will and the resource to make life extension happen — once such technologies will actually happen — these people will be the ones who will live the longest or in the craziest scenario: they will be the one who will live forever. With people who are not greedy, cunning, clever, quarrelsome, etc. perishing.

It implies the world will be inherited by people with values such as the ones given above. (greed, cunningness, etc.)

So what about those who are not of those characteristics? I mean what about those of us who are not greedy, cunning, fraud, etc.?

But I have a more serious consideration:

  1. Why do I care if Mr. Thiel and the likes live forever?
  2. Why should I care?
  3. Should I care?
  4. If yes, how can I stop them? OR how can I help establish certain equity first?

The Realm of Gods & Kings
There are two realms: On one dwell the Gods & Kings, and on the other You and I!

gods and kings

You, born in a normal family with normal requirements in life and a normal worldview properly begin your social life with your school.

There you are immediately introduced to rules and regulations. If you break them, you are punished. Your punishments are so impactful to your psyche that — after a certain while — even a thought about breaking them makes you scared. Anxious. If you are thick-skinned enough to not get scared, you will end up a hooligan, a thug.

Likewise, if you follow those rules and regulations, you are rewarded. You are rewarded with claps and medals and praises. This makes you proud of yourself. Your pride is such that — after a while — the thought of gaining more of those claps and medals and praises gets you drooling. You are lured. You want more. You want to achieve more. Hear more. Claps, praises.

And so the same formula of rules and regulations drive you through college and university where — if you perceive you haven’t been up to the rule, you get anxious and at the moments when you think you will achieve or actually achieve some kind of success, you get excited…

And this way, you get into the job market, and you go through your life.

The formula (once again) is simple for you: follow the rules and be happy or break them and be miserable.

Now, if you are lucky (yes lucky!) or crazy you will question who the fk created that system of rules in the first place. Only if you are lucky or crazy! And you will start questioning a lot of things. The foundation of the system, the motive, the people invovled, etc. etc.

There you will be stunned at your first hypothesis of the division. Yes, there is a division!

And then you will realize something that will feel like a slap: a slap vicious and lethal, embarrassing and humiliating than any teacher had ever given you:

What you did or did not was always ordained, controlled, fabricated!

Yes, your entire thoughts, desires and your bloody life was designed to make you exactly the way you ended up. You were never free, you were engineered! And it was never for you, you were just a tool…

And this is where you reach that realm: The Realm of Gods & Kings!

And then you will see them for the first time in a way you had never seen them. Yes, you had always heard of them, known them: but you had never understood them. Now, you understand them. Feel them.

They are the ones who drove you around like cattle. There you will see them and tremble at the sight. Tremble at your ignorance: they are the same kings, priests, philosophers, scholars and merchants that you were taught about. That you were preached about. Who were praised and venerated. Revered. Followed by thousands of you on Twitter!

Yes, you, you do think and talk to your buddies (same as you) about your big ideas — Where did this all come from, where might it be headed; what if life and what is existence; does god exist ; do aliens exist; democracy rules! — wear pendants and tikas, sit on your yogic postures chanting om, close your eyes and pray, sing, etc. but you do that with a vicious unconsciousness. Yes, you may talk and write about Plato, but you do it without a clue, without a sense. You are just a babbler, an unconscious machine. Going bla bla bla. Talking much but realizing nothing!

But guess what: they aren’t! They are your Gods and Kings!

You had once questioned god with your friends while smoking ganja on top of that hill, hadn’t you? Now, here you have it: Plato is your god, so is Buddha, Ashoka, Alexander and Napoleon! And so is Hawking. So are Jobs and Gates: Your gods and kings. For they set the rules. They watch you move. They decide your fate. They are in the realm of gods & kings, and you — you poor normal guy: aren’t! You are just normal. A normal tool. Nothing. You are dispensable. Manageable. Organizable. You, you normal person!


And then you think you are a democratic citizen of whatever your country. You talk of your vote, and your rights, and your activities.

Here’s to democracy:

Only when each and every human individual reaches the realm of gods & kings, will democracy even begin to be practical.

Until then:

Dream on, Run from bombs and surveillance!

Follow on, Praise on!

As to education:

Well, they removed this secret from the curriculum a long-long time ago!


How Essential is Learning?
The People of Learning

learning is essential

A quick glance of known/believed human history will reveal to us one constant: Learning is essential. Vital. Crucial!

Learning in the sense of:

the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences.

But another quick glance will reveal to us one more constant: learning has never been much popular among the masses. Yes, the populace has gathered a fact here, a fact there, and have been informed, but that cannot be said to be learning. Similarly, learning has had to face obstacles from many sources.

Yet, humans have been — time and again — able to learn and generate new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences with the load of all those people carried by a selected few in all time and place. Those carriers are the people of learning. Therefore, the value of learning and people of learning is constant.

We might never know the individual(s) who first came up with the understanding of the process of bipedal walking, fire production, stone tools manufacturing; language, art— yet looking at trends of how men have learned in recorded history, we can safely assume that there was someone somewhere who first converted an event of natural occurrence into a method. Who first converted phenomenon to knowledge. Crisis into solution. Despair into fascination. Those who did all these were people of learning.

It is those people of learning who first had the idea of viewing natural items as gods. Irrespective of civilization, this has been common. We might look upon that as weakness today, but for that time and place, this was learning: understanding, knowing, the world. You can’t call them weak. If that view didn’t happen, then who knows what would have happened! They had a way to turn fear into some kind of control. Those people of learning!

Similarly, it was peoples of learning who first had the idea of organizing pre-civilizations scattered societies into an order — once the number of folks increased. This too has been a constant in multiple civilizations. You might call it natural, I call it the doing of peoples of learning. Remove them from the equation, and we might not have been sitting here writing and reading on Medium.

And likewise, the peoples of learning came up with centralized power, religious rites, aesthetic buildings, laws, etc. And it was the same people who with their learning came up with the idea of things as diverse as citizenship, republic, and reason.

Indeed the rest is history. History made and interpreted by peoples of learning.

Without the people of learning, there might have been no history. You might say, there might have been a better history, but how? show me!

Irrespective of the moods of the temples, states, monarchs, councils, universities…People of learning have stood and shined.

Here today and heading to the future, uncertainties abound. Anxiety, paranoia, and stupidity reign supreme. That’s just the way we perceive natural things. But of course, here we are people of learning. Let’s understand and DECIDE where things shall go. Where we shall go. These kinds of shaping’s have always been the task of peoples of learning. Now it’s the time for current peoples of learning.

Let’s decide the fate of us all — our mind, life, earth, and everything else. If we won’t, then who will? — — Machines of Learning?


Two Contrasting Questions

question

For me there are two contrasting questions. Never in harmony!


 

Business and Peace

While thinking about the ongoing war in Eastern Europe and its consequences, my thought went to the businesses that are being adversely affected – along with lives in both Russia and Ukraine, with both suffering from their respective problems. How many dreams paused, threatened; how many goals destroyed; how many ideas shattered!

I am just trying to focus on business here.

One can understand how much is at stake in the execution of one. Particularly in modern times of uncertainty in everything. The risk, the hope, the plan, etc. Of course, life has more at stake – which once gone cannot be re-attained – yet business is where my thoughts are as of now. Those that are not operational due to the lack of peace. Those that have been affected by war. What would those businesses be wanting ideologically? Would they be concerned about the realpolitik? What would they support?

This took me to Ancient India, through a book called India: An Ancient Past… written by Burjor Avari.

In ancient India, after the rise of Buddhism, there were multiple instances where Buddhism as a religion was patronized, protected or supported by merchants or rulers. Especially the former.

First, it was during the Pre-Mauryan age, when Buddhist along with Jain monasteries were built which were enthusiastically received by kings, merchants and ordinary people. After that, during the time of the Satavahanas of the Deccan, there were numerous cave sites in NW Maharashtra, which housed Buddhists. There too evidence has been found of religious charities and endowments by merchants. People belonging to other professions and crafts were involved as well. And then there were other monasteries over the Satavahana Deccan, which too were established with endowments from the Andra merchants, who the writer says, ‘were some of the greatest donors.’

During the period in the history of India when the Kushans were dominant, there seemed to have been some kind of alliance between Indian merchants and Buddhist missionaries. At various places, merchants establishing their colonies and missionaries their monasteries went in parallel. The site of Ajanta caves is said to have stood in a strategic point at the merchants’ routes. Here too Buddhist monks and monasteries were richly supported by that merchant class.

Despite some mundane differences, the things in common between those ancient Indian merchants and the modern entrepreneurs are that they both work for profit, are involved in commerce and sell their goods/services. In this way, they both can be put under the umbrella term ‘business class.’

Buddhism as a philosophy – at its root – is one that talks about detachment and salvation from desires. The whole concept then builds towards disinvolvement, simplicity, knowledge, awakening – eventually culminating in nibbana. While at a first glance, this seems to be absolutely opposite to the motives of the business class, and one might ask why on earth would they be protecting and promoting such idea, anyone who knows anything about this philosophy knows that Buddhism isn’t the type of thought that reasons towards fight, ambition and war. Making it a socially passive philosophy too. An example of this is King Ashoka who, disgusted with his actions at Kalinga, adopted peaceful doctrines of Buddhism and went around building pillars and promoting the religion. He even deemed his further conquests religious.

It is quite apparent why certain groups of people in society who wouldn’t want war would want to promote and protect this philosophy of peace. Irrespective of their faith and ideology. And among them would surely be merchants and entrepreneurs – unless dealing with weapons, unless involved in a business untouched by war, or extremely opportunist. Which is a vast majority!


 

Life in Nepal

I had this idea to open my laptop and write in short about life in Nepal – the country of my birth and citizenship. Things to write have weird sources and this one is no different.

In regards to the people to whom I may be writing to : I had Non-Nepalese people in mind, especially the open minded and intellectual type – to provide them a glimpse of things from a relatively insignificant nation in the world. 


Well, some nations are significant. Extremely significant. While some are utterly not! While their existence and citizens in themselves are criteria for significance, I tend to look at two basic factors to decide for myself on what makes a nation/state significant or even successful: 

  1. Surviving
  2. Thriving

Surviving implies survival of the society/nation’s basis and essence: identity and peculiarity. Thriving on the other hand implies strong political, economic, cultural presence along with the ability to generate new knowledge and invent whole bunch of things. 

Surviving alone makes a society significant to itself while thriving makes it significant to others as well. Just as in the case of individual creatures. 

In this regard, Nepal is a surviving nation but a terribly non-thriving one! (It’s political, economic and cultural destiny is usually guided and at times even driven by agents that are not Nepalese.) 

That’s the first thing about Nepal: It’s an insignificant nation. (Ask every single Nepali person that you happen to meet in your country and they will validate this for you!)

Life of mere survival – on the inside – is not too amazing. It is the case of existence without meaning. You are just there existing. Surviving for the sake of survival. Nothing else. While some cases of survival are fierce: where you have to battle against adversity day in and day out; some are ordinary: you are just there because you are so insignificant that no one wants to even hurt you. Nepal is in the latter category. That is why it is the case of existence for its own sake. 

And this rubs on to you. You too are just surviving. You feel there is no larger motive and purpose. The evening sun hits you in your face, you feel warm and get drowsy. The sun goes away and you feel cold and lost. This is what happens if you get influenced by your nation. 

It is not that life out here is tough. It is dull. That’s the issue, if it was tough, you would have a purpose. If it’s dull, you just want to sleep smelling your own fart. That’s what this nation is doing and I guess that’s what most of its citizens are. 

Disposable waste generated each day from households lie shamelessly in the streets just because the bloody government can’t manage a proper landfill site, while sounds of construction equipment bombard your ears all the time from all directions. (They are apparently building houses to house KFCs and Pizza Huts). Look at the irony!  

People are obsessed with doing what they have seen Americans and Indians successfuly do in YouTube, Facebook and TikTok. Most young lads who have remained inside the country still find riding bikes at high speed is ‘cool’ and meaningful. You go talk to elderly blokes, and you will notice that their brains have stopped noticing anything in life apart from money. That’s the way it is. 

You respect the nation and decide you will live here. You go through your pains and eventually decide to make a living as a writer. No one cares. And then you write in English. You see a platform such as Medium. And when you are eligible, you realize that even Medium doesn’t care! (about your nation)

These are not talks of frustration. This is reflection. A part of reality.

See, I have things to motivate me and give my life direction and purpose. I am okay. I won’t quit and go. But at times, looking at the nation am a part of, I wonder if some nations (insignificant ones) should be allowed to quit and go!???  

Unless they can give themselves their own direction to go. 


 

Morning Shows the Day – Is it True?

Does morning show the day

Morning shows the day is a popular proverb. Is it correct, or is it merely a case of a lazy attachment towards mornings?

Let me give some background first.

Back at school, the classes I hated were Mathematics, Science (Physics, Chemistry, Biology), Computer, Dance, and Music. One of my earliest memories of mathematics is nervously queuing up to submit the homework to the teacher. I may have wet my pants on one or two occasions. While I could argue that my hatred towards and difficulties in mathematics – which still persists to this day – was because of that evilesque teacher, who frightened me a lot, I do not remember such intimidating teachers in Science, Computer, Dance or music. Of course, I have never loved math and neither has it been graceful to me. Although I tried my best later on.

This has led me to conclude that those hatred are directed more towards the subjects than classes. Never enjoyed science and computer! Always found scientific concepts boring and sedative. They never managed to trigger the learner in me. And since I never was a ‘love-what-is-right-for-your-career’ person, I never seriously tried. Computer classes were interesting as long as they provided me with the opportunities to play card games. I have never been a dancing person. In regards to music, I can confidently say that the dissatisfaction was more because of my boastful and annoying classmates rather than towards music itself. Later I enjoyed a lot of music alone!

School has long gone but my learning hasn’t ceased. I self-learn most of the time. Perhaps, because learning is the source through which only I can be better at my writing but actually because I love to learn.

I have tried to teach myself all sorts of things over the last decade. I have gone through Euclid, Einstein, Plato, Rousseau, Shakespeare, etc. etc. Some have been tedious. Some like a smooth ride. Analyzing which subjects have been which, I have realized that: Euclid, Einstein and the likes have been brutally tedious while Plato, Rousseau, Shakespeare, have been fun although not easy. In fact, this adult-age difficulty is the thing that made me think about what I may have loved at school in the first place!

Coming back to school, the subjects that I liked and felt more natural towards were Social Studies, English, Nepali, Environment and Population.

Although I never acquired good marks in anything in any classes, I remember once getting crazy high marks in Social Studies, not only by my standard but also my entire classroom’s!

Whenever it was time to go up a grade and new textbooks were made available, I finished reading (not studying) all chapters in Social Studies, and all stories, poems and essays in English and Nepali.

It is funny when I think about it:

I buy and download all sorts of books. And still to this day, the mathematics, science, and computer books feel very impenetrable and I have to focus incredibly hard to go beyond a quick skim – during which I get seriously doubtful and anxious. But books about politics, society-culture, psychology, philosophy, and literature get consumed with great enthusiasm and ease.

This has got me questioning whether interests are hardwired in childhood itself or whether it’s about the reluctance to get out of the comfort zone? 


 

Attention Crisis

attention crisis

Before talking about attention crisis, let me share a small story:

The ability to understand things in real time is more important than the ability to know facts.

Some Random Thoughts…

random thoughts
  • As I sit here with my laptop staring at this white canvas that tells me to write my story, I wonder who I might be writing it for. I wonder who would care about these ‘stories’ — which are in fact nothing but doubts, excitements, half-formed/uninformed ideas, opinions, perspectives and reveries. Yet, I believe such writing has the potential to do a lot if only a lot of people read seriously! I have even derived a quote: Writing is a small attempt with a huge potential consequence.
  • People who think a lot should write a lot. People who can’t think a lot should read a lot.
  • Some writer’s books feel like an ocean while some writer’s books feel like a muddy street.
  • Billionaires going on space trips and ordinary minds becoming writers is like wearing a woolen jacket on a hot summers day: They will only make things worse!
  • What I have noticed is, the more you write the better your typing gets. I do not know what importance it has on whatever I will end up writing today but I thought it would be a fun thing to share.
  • If you are like me who doesn’t have a dedicated list of things to write, then at times you must also feel there’s nothing special to write. What do you do then? Yet a feeling inside you pushes you to write, doesn’t it? It is like an addiction. But let’s be good on ourselves and call it a habit. Yet, that feeling is nothing but — the reasons why you write telling you why you should now be writing.
  • I started this by focusing on what Medium puts in its header: Title and Tell your story…I think it was a good start.
  • Yesterday I visited a book store and I saw a book written by a person who has participated in mediocre art-works throughout his life. His book was a Self-Improvement book and he was supposedly instructing others on how to live a quality life. IRONY!
  • If there’s anything in my life that resembles the cat and mouse situation it is me trying to interpret and understand what is causing my anxiety.
  • Apparently writing during a block is a lot like getting out of bed in winter mornings. Initially, you start imagining you won’t be able to get on with it. But once you decide to do it, you will always find a way around it.
  • People who have the habit of questioning whether their pursuits are substantial or not are both lucky and unlucky. Unlucky because they can no longer be children-like. Lucky because they can no longer be children-like.
  • As a writer, you can bend the Universe in whatever way you want. But for that you need strong shoulders. (Thanks Nietzsche!)
  • Let’s say, it’s 2070 and Humans have settled on Mars or some other planet. What did you imagine them doing there? — — I imagined them quarreling over some piece of land.
  • My dog is a local Nepali guy. What I realized today is — if I look at him without his name and all other cultural associations I have with him — he is a raw and wild animal living in a manmade world of language and technology.
  • Sometimes I utter the word Humans and enter a trance.
  • We humans, in this Cosmos is: a weird situation. Living to figure this riddle out is equally important to Living to make the world better, if not more!
  • You want to see the power of ideas? — — Imagine a cold dark pessimistic philosophy ruling over everyone’s thoughts!
  • Without entertainment and art, we would feel cold.
  • What is Art? — — Art is to humans what humans are to the Universe: Not practically necessary, but you haven’t been able to be without it either.
  • It is not AI vs Humans. It is Avaricious-Humans (AH) vs Humans.
  • Don’t be afraid of other people, ever.

These are some random thoughts I wrote when I had nothing specific to write. What do you write when you have nothing to write yet want to write?


 

An Effective Movie Watching Formula

I absolutely hate these kinds of writings:

Who the hell do I think I am to be writing about methods of my movie watching!

Am I a producer? No. Am I a director/editor? No. Am I a professional screenwriter or any other movie business professional? No. Am I an actor? No. Am I a critic? No.

Then why should you care about my methods of movie watching?

Let me modify one Rousseau from the 18th century:

I am not a — producer, director, editor, screenwriter, actor or critic. I am none. This is why I make this kind of list. If I was either of them, I would be too busy making movies, not these stupid how’s.

Okay with that aside, let’s begin.

What I mean to do here actually is share a formula of movie watching that I had devised a while back for my personal convenience. This formula has really helped me interpret and understand movies in context, their meanings and purposes — without which my movie watching would have otherwise slipped by as a mere one/two/three-hour pasttime-entertainment.

This formula contains multiple components and each have distinct parameters which add up for overall movie-quality.

I am sharing this for two reasons, firstly, so that it may be useful for someone and secondly, so that I may be suggested and critiqued in this so I can improve on it, hence, improving my movie watching experiences.

Before sharing the formula and briefly discussing the components, I would like to define movies in this context as:

Any fictional-moving-visual-entertainment.

It must be clear that documentaries don’t have anything to do here. But there is a problem, what about theatres and shows like WWE which has both live and TV audiences. For convenience sake, let’s include them as well!

But the main focus is on those 90+ minutes things which we all call — movies.

And there are no equipment and temporal boundaries. A fictional short shot with a cheap phone by a Nepali kid is as good as one by Christopher Nolan.

Here is the formula I use for movie watching —

ARFE-HT

Yes, it’s an acronym.

Each alphabet stands for one component and I mark them on the scale of 10. That is the parameter. Now let me describe the components one by one.

A — Aesthetics:

Technically, aesthetics is a philosophical study and examination of beauty and taste. But how I try to use it in movie-watching is by studying, examining and marking the ‘beautiful’ in a movie as per my taste. I don’t try to use ‘schools’ derived standards of beauty.

What I find beautiful is based on:

  • The color
  • The brightness
  • The set or location and costumes.
  • The music/soundtrack
  • The flow of transitions and cuts
  • The flow of shots and scenes
  • Synchrony between various components.
  • The Overall Story (not plots/subplots)

I think all these are self-explanatory.

I try to look at all these sub-components and then try to mark the overall aesthetics on the scale of 10, with 10 being the best and 0 being the worst.

Luc Besson’s Le Grand Bleu is a 10/10 for me.

I don’t remember giving zero to any. But few Nepali movies must have gotten a 1.

R — Reality factor:

While I prefer realism in movies, it is not at all necessary for all movies to be realistic. Yet it is difficult to define realism.

Which one would be more realistic: A movie based on a fantasy setting like say, Star Wars which manages to talk about human social issues and realpolitik or some types of Bollywood movies which deal with real life settings but go so astray from life that it has no resemblance with any part of our lives at all.

So, how I try to determine the Reality factor is by checking whether the movie has managed to show any kind of truth or not, by dealing with important subjects of our lives. Irrespective of the settings and characters. Star Wars gets higher point than this:

Gunda (1998) Full Hindi Movie | Mithun Chakraborty, Mukesh Rishi, Shakti Kapoor, Mohan Joshi — YouTube

I do think that the purpose of movies is to illustrate or show either the realities of life or the world. That is why I tend to mark movies with wisdom – highly. Whether it teaches me something important about our lives and the world or not, whether it challenges my opinions and perspectives or not – is what I try to determine.

Here too I try to look at all these sub-components and then try to mark the overall reality factor on the scale of 10, with 10 being the best and 0 being the worst.

Abbas Kiarostami’s The Taste of Cherry is a 10/10 for me,

The Bollywood movie mentioned above gets zero.

F — Feelings:

Feelings imply the ability of the movie to generate/trigger feelings and emotions in me. While a lot of movies intend to provide some kind of feeling but fail due to various factors, the ability of a movie — through its various players — to do things to me, is how I judge.

I have been using an ancient Hindustani theatre-use-evaluation method for the judgement of feelings. It is called Navarasa, or nine feelings to be played with by contents.

Those nine entities are:

  • Śṛṅgāraḥ : Romance, Love, attractiveness.
  • Hāsyam : Laughter, mirth, comedy.
  • Raudram: Fury.
  • Kāruṇyam : Compassion, mercy.
  • Bībhatsam : Disgust, aversion.
  • Bhayānakam : Horror, terror.
  • Veeram : Heroism.
  • Adbhutam : Wonder, amazement.
  • Śāntam: Peace or tranquility

I do not have a preference for this or that feeling. If a movie manages to hit me hard, I don’t care where I have been hit.

Let me provide my 10/10 movies for each (respective to the list above):

Mute (2018), Borat, (not being able to think of one), Where is my friend’s house?, The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Moon/Climax (2018), One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 2001:A Space Odyssey, Stalker (Tarkovsky).

E — Entertainment:

Because entertainment and fun are very very subjective and relative things, I have put my own margin into them. Plot-flow and performance have a great hand in this.

Photo by Laura Tancredi from Pexels

However, there is a limit as to how extreme one movie can go. Too much don’t-cares for the sake of making it artsy won’t do for me. Neither will mundane-repetitive-formulaic stuff nor pure comedy. I do have a guilty inclination — I find suspense/mystery pretty amusing.

The experience for me has to be tolerable. While a movie may have boring parts, every other factor mentioned here should work towards keeping me hooked. If it doesn’t manage to do it. It gets a low point on my scale.

Death at a Funeral (2007) is 10/10 for me, while any Bollywood blockbuster with a megastar is a 0.

H — Heroism:

This particular judgement of heroism differs from the one included in feelings. The heroism feeling mentioned under feelings is one where I appreciate the thought/deeds of character(s) in adverse situations. The toughness, the grit, the suffering, the act, etc.

But this heroism applies to movies where too much emphasis is provided to a character(s), such that they eclipse the story. In other words, heroism is where the actor or the character becomes more important than the movie and its story.

This is why it’s marking is done in reverse order. 0 is for movies with too much heroism such as Hollywood superhero flicks or Bollywood megastar ones. 10 is where the characters behave as characters and fit in perfectly with the story like in Rashomon.

T — Technicality:

This is where I look at the various technical aspects of movies which equally contribute to the overall performance and experience.

I have managed to find following important aspects:

  • Cinematography or Animation
  • Direction
  • Editing
  • Acting
  • Screenplay
  • Soundtrack and Music tightness
  • Plot/Subplot
  • Story

Here, the soundtrack differs from the ones in aesthetics in that this is whether or not the sound fits in with the cinema. Vangelis’ work in Blade Runner is absolutely beautiful, I do not find it apt in the movie. I felt Vangelis was more powerful than the narrative. So, it will get a high point in aesthetics but will not here.

All Coen Brother movies are 10/10 for me in terms of technicality.

So, this is how I watch my movies. I observe, analyze, mark and then add all of them up.

It may be a tedious, boring and inappropriate way for a proper experience but I found that it was the only way I could give context to my movie watching and make them relevant.

As mentioned earlier, I wrote this so that I could share the way I do it and also so that I could learn about my correctness and absurdities.


Dealing With Bad Thoughts

bad thoughts

Background

Before talking in detail about bad thoughts, let me give some context.


Future of Thinking

future of thinking

I asked myself about the future of thinking after I noticed how alert I was getting using my phone, laptop and TV.

I tried to understand the alertness and discovered that there was a voice inside my head that constantly reminded me that whatever I do in those devices is being surveilled, monitored and analyzed.


What is happening now is that this alertness is getting contagious. The hangover from device-usage is getting into my head. I am getting alert while I think, see or talk sensitive stuff in the same manner.

As if my thoughts and views are being surveilled, monitored and analyzed.

Is this what will happen to our thoughts in the future?


How To Handle Philosophical Arguments?

how to handle philosophical arguments

The dignity factor

The other factor I found was Cultural/Identity Sensitivity.

The other factor is emotional sensitivity.



We Humans Never Learn!

humans never learn

No matter how smart we think we are, we all are indeed fools.


Mind, life, life lessons, mindhack, articles about mind, articles about life, articles about life lesson, mind exploration, short articles about mind, english articles about mind, self improvement articles, Adesh Acharya, writings about mind

Desire Management Formula

It has proved to be very effective.

Let’s dive into the desire management formula.

A

B

C

D


Rahul Sankrityayan — The Birth of Brahman and Reincarnation


Nepali Folk Tales – Integrity of A Woman

Live a life of Integrity and Intelligence.


Once there lived a Pandit who had a beautiful wife. In fact, so beautiful that every man who ever laid eyes on her desired her. The prince, the minister’s son, the merchant’s son, and even the barber’s son were among the few that constantly drooled over her. But the Pandit was strict, so no one ever dared to go near and approach.

One day the Pandit had to urgently visit another country. He didn’t have any money so he went to the merchant and loaned 200 Rupees. He told him that his wife would manage some money by tomorrow and pay him back the day after. He went home and told his wife about the loan. She assured him that she would think of some way. The Pandit left in the evening.

The wife had a habit of bathing at the river at the earliest dawn. While she was coming back from her bath the next morning, thinking of ways to pay the merchant back, the king’s son blocked her way and said –

‘I am really enchanted by your looks. I want to take you to the palace tonight. How long will you keep up with that pathetic brahmin? I will give you whatever you want.’

The woman thought for a while and said –

‘Oh, Prince! Why don’t you come to my house at 10 PM tonight? I will fulfill all your needs.’

The prince said he would and they parted ways.

After a while, she met the minister’s son.

‘I am in love with your body. I want to make you the princess of my heart tonight,’ he said.

The woman told him to come to hers at 11 PM. Likewise, she met the merchant’s son and told him to meet her at 12 PM at her house when he too expressed his feelings for her. A little later, she met the barber’s son and told him to come at 1 AM. After this, she reached her home.

She thought for a long time after which she called and asked four of her close friends to come to hers immediately.

‘Friends, taking advantage of my husband’s absence, the prince, the minister’s son, the merchant’s son, and the barber’s son – all tried to seduce me today. I have cleverly called all of them – one at a time –  at my home tonight. I want you to come and help me. I want you guys to tell them I like surprises and then I want you to ask them to hide in the black boxes I have in the other room. Once they enter, I want you to shut it and lock it.’

The friends agreed.

That night, after supper they all got ready and waited. At 10 PM, the prince arrived. The woman hid and the friends cleverly made him enter the box. After which they shut it, locked it and placed it in the garden. The prince yelled from inside.

Likewise, at 11 PM the minister’s son came and they did the same. They managed to lock all four men by 1 PM.

The next morning the merchant came to take his money back.

‘What 200 Rupees? I don’t know of any such loan.’ the wife told him.

The merchant was in shock.

‘What are you talking about! Your husband took 200 Rupees from me the day before yesterday. He said you would pay me back today. You are deceiving me. This is not good,’ he said.

‘I don’t know of such commitments,’ she said.

This terrified the merchant. He swore at her and straight away headed to the King’s court. He explained everything to him. Since the merchant was the king’s close ally, he asked one of his guards to go and bring the woman to the court immediately. The guard did so.

‘Did you or your husband take the merchant’s money?’ the king asked.

‘No your highness. We haven’t taken anything from anyone. We are simple people with simple ways.’ she pleaded.

There was a heated discussion after that. The merchant insisted that they had taken money from him while the woman kept denying it. The king listened to all of it. He was slowly losing his patience. The woman understood that the king would support the merchant and not her if everything failed. So she made a move –

‘Okay! You guys may not believe me, but you surely believe in God. What if I called upon my goddess? If she asks me to pay the money back in front of you, I will pay it.’

Everyone was surprised. The merchant scolded her. But the king was a man of faith and spirituality. He wanted to see if that could really happen.

‘You can bring your goddess here, is that what you mean?’ the king asked.

‘Yes, your highness. I can bring her here in front of all of you,’ she replied.

‘Then do it,’ the king ordered.

‘But she is too heavy. I cannot carry her myself. I need a few strong men to come with me to my house,’ she said.

The king asked four soldiers to go with her.

When they reached her home, she asked the four men to wait outside for a while and entered.

She went to each of the black boxes and said –

‘Listen! If you do as I say, I will set you free at my home with dignity. Otherwise, I will take you to court and expose you in front of hundreds of people.’

Each agreed to assist her.

‘If so then I will take you guys to the court now and when the king asks whether I have taken money from the merchant, you guys should deny. Am I clear?’, she said.

All of them agreed. She asked the four men to come in and take the boxes away.

At the court, the boxes were kept in front of the woman. The King went near and asked –

‘Has this woman taken money from the merchant?’

‘No-No-No, she hasn’t,’ came voices from each box.

This amazed the King. He couldn’t hold himself any longer. He had to see the goddess! For the first time in his life!

He wanted that divine experience. So, he ordered his men to open the box immediately. They did so.

Four men stepped out one after another. It wasn’t difficult for anyone to recognize them. The King although disappointed, was amazed at the sight. He asked why they were shut like that. The woman explained everything. The four confessed.

The king was impressed with the woman’s wisdom and heavily rewarded her. He was sad that he couldn’t see the goddess though!

The men apologized. The woman went home pleased.


 

20 Wise Proverbs from Nepal

20 wise proverbs from nepal

The bigger the pile the bigger the strife.


  1. One who eats ember excretes ember — Your output depends on your input. If you listen to a dictator, you will praise the dictator!
  2. Without carrion, a vulture doesn’t roam — An opportunist isn’t there where there isn’t opportunity.
  3. I will fake a hit, you fake a cry — Let’s act together to deceive everyone else.
  4. A roaring tiger never eats — One who is intimidated, doesn’t hurt.
  5. Poor have no money, the rich have no heart.
  6. A sleeper loses, waker gains — If you are not alert enough, you will lose a lot of things. It will be taken by the one who is alert.
  7. Where there’s lake, there’s water — Lake is a body of water.
  8. Give your ears not your words — Listen freely, do not commit easily .
  9. A single moon is better than a thousand stars — A single person who seriously reads your works is better than many worthless followers.
  10. Only a snake sees a snake’s feet — To know the weaknesses of others, you have to be like them.
  11. Small mouth, big talk! — To talk of things beyond your ability.
  12. Washing an ass with soap won’t turn it into a cow — External change doesn’t mean change in substance.
  13. A barking dog never bites — Threatening things rarely hurt.
  14. It’s dark under a lamp — We focus far and wide and miss what’s beside.
  15. Never ask for directions to places you won’t go — Don’t concern yourself with things that are not important to you.
  16. Everyone is naked underneath their clothes — We all are!
  17. Suffering never comes alone — A single source of suffering hardly exists.
  18. The bigger the pile the bigger the strife — The more you amass your wealth, the more problems for you.
  19. You can hide contentment but not suffering — It is easier to be humble than be calm.

Did you like these wise proverbs? 

If yes, 

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Look At Things From A Different Angle

a different angle

When we have anxieties and frustrations, our thoughts are stuck at some point in between the present (A) and the future (B). Both being points previously opened by ourselves from a different angle.

In other words, WHEN we feel that way, it is mostly because we are not finding a solid thought pattern that leads us from our present point A to our goal B. This maybe due to newer challenges.

More often than not, the solution comes by itself after a duration of intense suffering. Or we might force things.

But it always has the same approach:

Looking at A or B from a different angle.

Detoxify Yourself From The Silicon Valley Influence

Understanding Steve Jobs Through His Quotes

As I went through his life and ideas, I realized how profound impact this guy and his type of thinking has had in our minds and the world today.

  • Spiritual/Religious leaders talked of material salvation, and ended up leading.
  • Democratic heroes talked of freedom, and ended up leading.
  • Communistic utopia promised of kinglessness, and ended of leading.
  • Weren’t spiritual talks a blessing to people when they failed to attain satisfaction through material pursuits?
  • Wasn’t democratic ideal a blessing to citizens when tyrants horsed around doing whatever they wanted?
  • Wasn’t communism a blessing when capitalistic thinking destroyed the life and soul of people who bled their sweat in work?
  • Tell them you are denting the Universe, and they will follow
  • Become a king through entrepreneurship, and they will bow
  • Create platforms, set the rules, and they will fight
  • Create technologies that expose their weaknesses, and they will drool
  • Create technologies that encourage laziness, and they will submit
  • Make them dependent on you and your work, and they will surrender
  • Tell them the market decides, and they will feel helpless
  • Tell them their life will get better, and they will believe

We start off by unlearning the lessons taught by them and detoxifying ourselves of their influence.

Technology isn’t wrong. The ones who control it should be scrutinized. Technology can be used for self-knowing, experiences, and exploration. It has to be freed from the clutches of Lusty boys of Silly-Con Valley! and so should our thoughts and life and the world and…


Time Management Formula

time management

We all have limited time. There’s a lot to think, learn, do and live in this duration. At times it feels a single life is not enough. And it isn’t! This makes effective time management a serious thing.

While we may not have been able to unearth an elixir to make us immortal (it’s good it doesn’t exist), we have been equipped with a good enough intelligence for us to do wonders with – if we use it effectively.

One way to do that is by trying to allocate and manage our life and its duration in an effective manner.

Time Management is simply the process of managing the time allocated to us for an effective life.    



The C-Clockwork



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Story about life: A Rat’s Story
Understand Yourself, Be Yourself!

image showing rat's story. Nepali Folk Tale

Enjoy this Story about life which both entertains and provides valuable life lesson!

Our task is to understand our desires and go after them — all guns blazing. Mastering the skills in the process.


What are Thoughts? – History
Let's look at all the famous people who have tried to understand thoughts

what are thoughts?

In the first part of my What are thoughts? series, I discussed basic things about thoughts and the importance of understanding them. This time I want to dive into the history of thoughts – which is nothing but a history of the attempt to understand them.

A Brief History

Throughout history, humans have attempted to understand the nature of thoughts, thinking, mind, heart, and brain.

The Edwin Smith Papyrus of Egypt from c. 1600 BCE is the earliest found documentation of such an attempt. It contains descriptions of the brain and its functions albeit speculative.

It is in Indian Philosophy that the pursuit gains serious consideration and gathers momentum.

The Chandogya Upanishad (600 BCE) describes the mind as an object distinct from the soul. In it, when Narada tells Sanatkumara that he has a thirst for knowledge, Sanatkumara says,

Before satisfying one’s thirst for knowledge, one has to know about the mind…

When Narada expresses further desire to know about the mind, Sanatkumara tells him that to know about the mind one needs to have devotion and before one can have devotion one has to have faith and has to know about concentration, for which, one has to know about happiness as concentration comes only in the pursuit of happiness. When Narada tells he wishes to know about happiness, Sanatkumara tells him the following:

Happiness lies in greatness. You will have to know about greatness. Greatness is that in which nothing can be seen, heard or known. It is immortality, it is the brahman. He is above and below, to the front and behind, to the north and the south. I am the brahman. I am he…Learned ones realize that it is from the atman that one derives the breath of life, hope, memory, sky, energy, water…meditation, emotion, resolution, the mind, speech, names, the mantras and all actions.

These earlier Upanishadic perspectives interpreted thoughts along with everything else as being given by some unitary entity. It further goes on to tell that,

in the physical body exists the heart in which the Brahman resides in minute form. The heart is like the sky, heaven and earth, fire and wind, the sun and the moon, lightning and the stars. Everything in the body is in the heart.

The Katha Upanishad describes the brain as the charioteer and the physical body as the chariot with the atman being the owner and mind the bridle. It talks about the need to pacify the mind without which, the intelligence remains without consciousness.

Describing Brahman, the Katha Upanishad says,

It is through the mind that one can visualize the brahman.

This type of thinking is of Advaita Philosophy which asserts there is only One entity in existence and perceiving otherwise is illusion. The reason things seem elusive and otherwise are due to ignorance and this is due to- Thoughts.

Thoughts are entities that hinder this natural connection of the mind and the brahman.

When there is contemplation of the non-dual Self, then all thoughts vanish and one is established in that Supreme Reality, says Ramana Maharshi, an Advaita monk of the 20th Century.

His philosophy revolves around the concept of Self which is both- every individual’s identity and the only thing in existence. The Self alone is real and there is no other consciousness to know it, for it is consciousness. The distinction between God and Soul too is not real and to know the Self is to be the self. Consciousness is existence.  Mind is only a name for thoughts of which ‘I’ is the support. Mind is truly nothing else but the thought ‘I’.

This way, the Vedic systems of thinking describe thoughts as things that create a perception of duality or diversity in an otherwise uniform existence with only a single entity. Thoughts, therefore, are something to control and eventually destroy. They arise due to the contact with the world with senses.


Buddhism has a general point of view that the thoughts themselves are part of consciousness and are thinkers.

Buddha himself had mentioned various types of consciousness, evolving from sense bases. For instance, visual consciousness arises because of eyes and forms. For them, the concept of contact is significant. Contact being the conjunction of the sense organs with the sensed object. It leads to the birth of feelings.

It is feeling that experiences the desirable or undesirable fruits of an action done. Besides this mental state there is no soul or any other agent to experience the result of an action.

Entire Buddhist thinking is described as follows:

Dependence or cessation of:

  1. Ignorance leads to Conditioning activities
  2. Conditioning activities leads to Relinking Consciousness
  3. Relinking Consciousness leads to Mind and Matter
  4. Mind and Matter leads to Six Sphere of Senses
  5. Six Sphere of Senses leads to Contact
  6. Contact leads to feelings
  7. Feelings lead to Craving
  8. Craving leads to Grasping
  9. Grasping leads to Actions
  10. Actions leads to Birth
  11. Birth leads to decay, death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, despair.

For them, the mind consists of 52 mental states among which feelings and perception are distinct. The remaining 50 are collectively called volitional activities. Among them, volition or citana is the most important factor. All these psychic states arise in consciousness.

Now, in regards to thoughts, they have a concept called ‘thought-moments’ which are time-limit of consciousness:

There is no moment when one does not experience a particular kind of consciousness, hanging on to some object whether physical or mental. Time limit of such consciousness is called thought-moment. Each thought moment is followed by another.

Consciousness consists of 3 separate instants: genesis, static/development, cessation/dissolution. Each new consciousness is in a state of flow, like a stream, which once gone never returns again.  This consciousness flow occurs without any interruption. Death too, is simply an event for them during which the final thought moment of a life conditions another thought-moment in the subsequent life.

This way the Buddhists look at thoughts as incessant instances in mind which ought to be eventually shut down or extinguished (nibbana).


To be continued…

Thought Management through Phone Wallpapers
Combine two things that are closest to you!

use phone wallpapers for thought management
I was scrolling through  my phone photos when I noticed something —

Four years ago, for the first time in my life, I had edited a photo of a page from my diary with ‘Goals’ on its header.

I know, there’s nothing special there. All I had done was use the vignette tool to make the center of the page brighter.

Here’s that image:

 phone wallpaper for thought management

Image I had used as phone wallpaper for thought management

The significance of this information is that   it was the first time I had used a photo of a self-written-text as my wallpaper in order to remind myself what I was about and what I was to do. It was the beginning of thought management through phone wallpapers.

That particular photo is followed by other photos in my phone. There are a lot more photos with similar design: A page of a diary vignetted.

I guess that marked the beginning of a habit that still persists in me — Designing and using phone  wallpapers for my thought-management. It has been more than five years within which I have collected some solid experience on it. That’s the reason why I wanted to talk about it.


Phone-Wallpapering for thought-management is a regular and natural activity for me. Whenever I have a new idea, new structure or a new paradigm, I either draw it in a paper, take a photo or use a photo editing app. It has proved to be useful. I like to call it: Mind-supplement-in-abstracto


Phones are without a doubt the most useful and personal technological devices. We learn, work, communicate and entertain ourselves in them. We spend almost all of our time with them (around).

They now play a role no other technology ever has. 

This possibly makes the phone screen the most viewed thing in our normal day, both in terms of frequency and duration.

Into the inner phone experience, the wallpaper or the background is the most general component. In terms of design, it is a base in which everything is built and exists. Apps come and go, change places. But the background remains!

This nature of the phone background and our high phone usage makes the background an ideal thing to replicate what we would like to have in the background of our minds.

Thoughts come and go. But the purpose remains!

This is why I used the term: Thought-Management. It is about using the phone wallpaper to manage our thoughts in the way they ought to be managed. In a way they will be managed!

That’s why the term Phone Wallpapers for thought management. 


Almost everyone who uses a phone keeps a wallpaper which is supposed to inspire or remind the person of what s/he is all about. After that, they look for aesthetics. It is done for symbolism. Everyone does it naturally. But what I am trying to put across is that, our thoughts are not as simple as that. Therefore, this task of phone wallpapering for our thoughts has to be taken more seriously and methodically.

Our minds are not naïve. They won’t obey what we would want them to obey! Things don’t work that way. the mind likes to counter-reason, it likes to explore, it likes to confuse! Providing it with only one vision and trying to discipline it on it is absurd.

A way to control or manage it is by using the phone-wallpaper more effectively:

The wallpaper has to be designed in such a manner that it addresses all aspects of our life and mind. The wallpaper has to address the confusions too.


One of the most popular result that shows up when we search for ‘phone wallpapers’ is of the night sky with stars, constellations and all that. The reason for their popularity is because, one they are aesthetically pleasing and two, because they provide context of what and where we are in this cosmos and what magic is/awaits us.

Such wallpapers provide inspiration and context. But they won’t be able to address all of our questions and doubts. For instance, when a part of us is concerned with our current income and expenditure, such lofty inspiration can hardly be of use. What use of the information that we are here in this vast unknown, smaller than a speck of dust, when our bellies are craving the next meal!

Yes, I know they are supposed to provide metaphysical/spiritual base. But if we are talking about using phone backgrounds effectively, it surely has to do more than that!

If our human mind was to focus on a single thing, there wouldn’t be the need for thoughts and thinking.

I consider thoughts to be useful. Not something to suppress or extinguish —  as others like to believe. Thoughts can and should be managed if we want to go to territories never gone before.

My pursuit is to open them up. To revolutionize human thinking.

If we want wallpapers to be our Mind-supplement we have to dig and design deeper.

We have to move beyond symbolism.

Here we are talking about using wallpapers to communicate to our mind all the things that we want to have communicated. A night sky wallpaper in the background with the current goals and obstacles written could be a good solution. This way our mind will notice the cosmic/metaphysical context along with the financial/moral whatever —just the way we want it!


What we can do is draw diagrams, make bullets — whatever we do to organize our mind —  and set it as the wallpaper of our phone.

I have discovered space-effectiveness. Which is the art of placing certain components at certain parts of the wallpaper for the best effect. I also have my ideas about image placing, text placing, color-usage and all that. But I will talk about all that later.

My idea with this was to roughly talk about phone-wallpapering. I would love to hear how you use your wallpaper as I have no idea how others have been doing it!


Mind: Thought Machines
We are bunch of minds. We are collection of thoughts.

There is another way of looking at history. As the struggle of human beings to understand, organize and use their own mind. That is, their thoughts!

It won’t be wrong to paraphrase one famous sentence of history this way:-

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of thought struggles.

To validate this silly argument, let’s start by suggesting that the struggles between good/bad, right/wrong, duty/passion, ideology/compassion, ego/emotion, gods – exist inside the human cranium (mind) in the form of thoughts and thinking. As struggles of the mind! 

That is why, all struggles are the struggle between thoughts. A crisis of thought management. A crisis of mind management. 

Identity is the way we define ourselves or the things which we identify ourselves with. This exists in the form of thoughts.  Our very existence and the proof of existence’s existence is only possible through thoughts, said one Descartes, a long time ago. But we will not go in that end of the spectrum here.

Let us rather go into the ancient times where different tribal groups fought and killed each other for resources.

The thing that separated tribal groups from each other and made them go for each others’ blood and bounty was their identities. Members of each tribe identified themselves as a part of that particular tribe and not the other. This made them think it was right to kill people from other tribes and not one’s own.

History shows that tribal groups fought with one another until their groups united into one. The same continued later when small states appeared.

When multiple groups united, the individual members who fought one another suddenly identified with the nemesis as one and searched for new foes with a different identity. The latest example of it is the fact that more and more people today are choosing to identify themselves as a single species called Homo Sapiens instead of identifying on the basis of their race, ethnicity, caste, class, nationality, continent etc.

Of course, there are those who would like us all to be obsessed with minor identities to exploit the sentiment of such identities for their own power-game, but it is safe to say that we all are becoming wiser by the day and learning to utilize our specific racial, ethnic identities for cultural and emotional values instead of using them to decimate each other. It is only a matter of time, and, yeah, of thought!

Our difficulties in thought management and the absurdity of what will happen if it is not done well was understood very well by some of the ancients folks who being way way way ahead of their times, worked hard to find some method to the madness.

While some came up with the idea of One identity with the entire Cosmos, a person called Buddha came up with the idea that this entire identity bullshit is the most bullshit thing in existence and we all have to get rid of it from its source in order to stop suffering and ending this identity game for once and for all. Buddha and his subsequent followers established an entire religion which is nothing but a course in thought management. Mind management!

buddha, mind, life lessons, articles about mind

Image of Buddha


With the identity side of thoughts aside, let us talk about our earliest tool of thought management. We are not going to talk about various forms of chemicals, which basically alter the brain neurochemically which takes thoughts to directions as per the nature of the chemical and the default character of the user. We are going to talk about a thing without which it would have been impossible for Buddha to do what he did — Language.

Many thinkers on thinking agree to the fact that it was language which allowed man to actually take a giant leap forward. Not only did it provide man with a sophisticated mechanism to record thoughts, it also allowed man to conceive previously unconceived things and communicate with each other better which only improved as ages passed by. One can only imagine where man would have ended up if not for language.

Along with it, humans had been using techniques of arts — drawing, music, storytelling, dancing to make sense of thoughts by expressing them in a systematic way. While the arts had allowed people to express what buzzes inside the cranium it was far from becoming an actually serious pursuit.

Then the Greeks beginning with the fabled Socrates ‘seriously’ began working on thought management. Plato became so obsessed with the idea of thoughts that he thought all there is- is in that form, while Aristotle took the game a hell of a lot of steps further and began the establishment of an entire system of thinking. While we can go on and on about such theoretical managers, all we will do right now is stop at Aristotle and say that the works he did opened doors to a lot of things in the domain of thought management and utility, the fruits of which we are enjoying today in the form of writing, rationalism, philosophy, science, technology, etc.

And now that we have arrived at today, we have arrived at a point in time where our understanding of our thoughts and their management are about to go to a whole new level. Perhaps, we are entering a period of significance in thinking matched only by the advent of language.

Thought Machines

The computer is a strange machine. While all machines and tools developed by man since his ‘rise’ had been to make his task of physicality, be it seeing or running easier and smarter, the concept of computing machines took tool usage directly into the domains of the mind. While various transport vehicles must have allowed ancient people to lessen the distance between their objects of interest which they had to count themselves, tools such as abacus allowed them to make counting easier and more reliable.

If language provided voice to human subtleties, computers provided tools to supplement the brain and mind in their tasks. Beginning with simple arithmetic operations, computers soon evolved into doing heavier and more sophisticated mathematical tasks, some of the type which is almost impossible for a human mind to do. But all this to supplement human mind’s labour.

If we are to stick to the definition of computer as a device that makes human thought management easier, then we have to include devices such as navigational compass, clock, recorder, camera to the list too.

The compass provided the ability to think through directions, the clock helped keep track of time, the recorder allowed to record sounds, which is an advancement of audial-memory and the camera enabled to record images, which is an advancement of visual memory. The difference between other tools for same functions such as a drawn map, notations and drawing and these tools is that the former tools cannot be qualified as machines, they are mechanisms/methods alright but are not automatic.

In regards to the camera, the reason it qualifies as a thought machine and tools such as binoculars and telescopes do not is that- binoculars assist the physicality, the eye while the cameras assist thoughts by saving space and effort for memory.

This brings us to modern gadgeteries. While smartphones with the internet are supposed to be such thought managers, their niche is limited to integrating all other forms of retro thought machines into them and enhancing communication. Along with it, they are important assistances for other functions such as selection (eg. shopping items), distribution, entertainment and information, among few. While the amount of information they contain can surely be said to be assisting thoughts, which they certainly do, they haven’t reached to a point where they automatically as a tool allow us to understand, interpret and manage our thoughts. They are merely existing in the form of content of someone else’s language or such other forms.

But there are three up and coming technologies that can make a difference — VR, AR and BCI.

One of the founding fathers of Virtual Reality, Jaron Lanier has listed a total of 52 definitions of VR in his book Dawn of Everything. Among those are definitions that talk about VR as a type of sensory and motor organs tricking devices which can make one identify with a whole other thing and environment instead of one’s own biological body and immediate surroundings.

VR functions as an immersive technology, in that, they temporarily disconnect all sense organs from the actual identities and environment and submerge them in some other scenario, tricking the brain/mind into believing that its actual body and hence responsibility is of that which is given by the device. This way of approaching the self can have huge consequences in the domain of thoughts and thinking. It directly toys with self-identification. But it doesn’t seem to have direct mechanistic implications in regards to our understanding of our thoughts and mind in general.

Augmented Realities on the other hand can be called extended and enhanced smartphones. They provide information better and easier but I don’t see them assisting in our thought comprehension.

And then come — BCIs

Brain Computer Interfaces in this context stands for consumer-end subset of neuroimaging which are fundamentally devices that allow us to send information of our brain directly to a computing device and vice-versa. It is a product that is and will be available to any human being. This is what makes it interesting and a serious contender for filling the shoes of language.

While still at their primitive stage, ideally, BCI can be that technology that allows us to see the happenings of our brain and mind in a system that is, firstly, not our own brain and secondly, is a machine. Language, Writing and Art allow the former but are not automated machines, meanwhile, a computer is a machine but does not have the ability to help us see those happenings if not for its usage in Language, Writing and Arts. BCI can be both.

With its capacity to map the workings of the brain in a computer in real time, we can expect to have greatly enhanced understanding of how our own brain works and which part of it does what when we are involved in x,y, or z. But as mentioned earlier, this mapping is still in its primitive stage due to the technique it uses called EEG which produces weak signals and is prone to interferences and also due to lack of information about brain-mechanisms, in other words on actuation.

Yet, they hold potential and no one can deny that. Considering the amount of investment being done on them in terms of both financial and talent resources, we can be sure that their limitations will surely be overcome in the not too far future.

Imagine being able to place a device in your head that is connected to your computer and being able to see the workings of your brain when you engage in xyz in real time. Now, imagine you being able to manipulate information in your brain, not by thinking but by making changes in the program in your computer which in turn affects the brain. Further, imagine your most important desire in life, say, taking care of your family, and imagine being able to computerally store that desire in a part of your brain via a computer and programming your computer to send you an electrical nudge each time you put on the device in that specific part of your brain where you have decided to keep that desire. Now we’re talking about thought management!

Imagine being able to see everything you have thought and your pattern of thinking in a computer device with you being able to press a few keys and play around with them! All this might be possible with BCI.

BUT

As with every other tool of importance, there will be vulturesque and hyenaesque humans to take advantage of your privilege.

Now imagine a corporation such as google or facebook being able to observe everything going on in your head and manipulating the information therein as they own the device or the system related to it! Not pretty now is it?

With great potentiality come great opportunities, ergo there will be opportunists waiting to cash in in your new found glory. But with the amount of control you have over your own thoughts, may be, you will be able to deceive them at that game and actually win! All this and much more is awaiting us with BCI.

We are on the verge of a paradigm shift in thought and thinking. Not only due to the technological sophistication but also due to the nature of our lives today with crazy amounts of information and complexities, we will be in dire need of thought assistance. Our brain will just not be able to handle the incoming times.

Name any kind of thought manipulating item and we are at a juncture where that item is getting more and more advanced with each passing day. This change is inevitable. All we have to do is think really really good now.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of thought struggles.

can be turned into:

The future of all society is the future of thought magic. Of mind magic!

We humans will have tremendous opportunities opening, the kind we are not even capable of imagining today once we get hold of the tools that will allow us to for the second time in history understand and manage our thoughts. Those tools are at our doorsteps. And so are opportunistic exploiters…

WILL WE WIN?

CAN WE WIN? but more importantly:

CAN WE BE FINALLY PUT AN END TO THE THOUGHT STRUGGLES?

CAN WE FINALLY CONQUER OUR MINDS?