Unhinged

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Unhinged

<March 26 2014>

I pick the pen up again.

The tattered seams holding together my sanity have all but disappeared. I stare at myself and
say, Sujith, you thug, you look like
a startled porcupine. The mayhem of the last week is a
harsh, unadulterated, kick-in-the-balls wake-up call and I feel like a
lynch-victim.

Screw this. I take off to the ranges, unhinged, a frothy madness clouding my reality.

The wind blows over the steps of the monastery, the trees sway and leaves fall, seemingly
unconcerned about their death and the sound of the forest, punctuated by bird-call, is a soft
roar.

The Himalayas.

Abandon dates, punctuation, etiquette, heritage, culture, the known and contemplate the
unknown, the mystery. Perceive the unexplained behind everything, every tiny thing. See the
shocking void that lies beneath all that arises and ask: Is the void God ? Watch your mind go
blank as you try to comprehend the Beginning. Watch your mind lose its edge and become
blurry as you attempt to explain pain. Watch your mind as you try to address your personal
anxiety, your feeling of desperation that is sometimes acute, sometimes impotent.

Isn't his personal welfare the only pursuit that a man needs ?

What, do you shake your head and repeat commonplace mutterings about communal harmony
? Come to India and see a country that is imploding into
a million fragments under the weight
of its dysfunction. The slums, the filth, the refuse, the anarchy and the people. The people who

breed simply because they don't know any better and don't have any interest, dormant or
active, in what lies outside the periphery of
their narrowed, litter-strewn vision.

Sweat poured off me, the air was heavy and I felt suffocated, hemmed in by the thick jungle.
Earlier that day, my guide watched with dark, suspicious eyes my attempts to control my
sugar-level that was careening around like a crazed dog. He looked on as I stuck a syringe into
my scarred arm and we silently resumed hiking.

The grandeur of the ranges reduces the chatter in my mind to a mumble and I wish this
happens more often.

The pulse of the world is violence personified and each man's life is lived out in rhythmic
conformance to a force that favors the strong. Every system that we bind ourselves to is
designed to fill the coffers of the wealthy and keep the rest, the masses, writhing in desperate
want.

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The hike to the frozen lake compensated abundantly for the travails of the previous days. The
lake lay nestled in a small depression surrounded by low-hanging hills, beyond which rose the
immense, high peaks of the K range. I walked around the lake, watching the center, which was
a solid white sheet that seemed almost alive, pulsing to an inaudible beat. The pristine silence
was accentuated by the thick blanket of snow that lay everywhere and I sat down on a rock
and watched the scene - a fragment of Creation that was complete and absolute.

My mind goes back to the hike.

The trail through dense jungle that held in its existence an eternal silence. The trees that rose
high above, piercing the whitest fog. The snowfall that
became crisp ice the following
morning as I trod lightly over a brilliantly white carpet, watching the jagged edges of the range
that lay to my right.
The exhaustion that burrowed its way into every inch of my bruised body
as I sank into the confines of my sleeping bag. The constant jingle of yak-bells.
The blue sky
that shimmered overhead, emerging after the passing of the storm. The wild yak that stood on
an incline, a subdued ferociousness in its
attitude that made me veer away with mistrust. The
blooming magnolias and rhododendrons that didn't sustain my interest for more than a few
seconds.
The wolf foot-prints in the freshly fallen snow. The glacial river in the valley, a
spectacular sight to behold when standing on a rock next to it,
or a thousand meters above and
the river much reduced, a silver thread with no visible origin.

And the lake. The sense of silent, strange wonderment that filled me as I sat in the snow and
grew cold watching it, as a depression slowly took
hold of me with mounting intensity and the
realization of my situation removed all traces of exhilaration and I wanted to crawl in a cave
that overlooked
the lake and curl up and die.

The magic disappears and my face assumes an attitude of pent-up rage and I glare at the world
with tunneled eyes that have their origin in my seething consciousness. When and how will
this anger end ?

I look at the whole of existence with venomous hatred - there can't be an explanation that
justifies a barbaric struggle to survive. What is to be gained ? Cheerful optimism about
humanity is disgustingly hypocritical.

Any philosophical system that attempts to explain the world without recognizing the fact that
my world is unique and begins and terminates within the ramparts of my consciousness, is
useless to me. A subjective evaluation of my condition is the polar opposite of all theories that
discard my existence as an individual. Religion is the worst offender, where I am reduced to
an insect that needs to grovel and beg for recognition before a menacing, unmerciful,
indifferent God who appears to be in an eternal siesta while blood fills the crevices of his
Creation.

I drag my knee and every stone on the pavement sends a bolt of pain that makes my fucking
teeth hurt. Knee caps make no difference and the pain is a reminder of my fading strength. The
bazaar is quiet, hardly warranting said nomenclature and I wander slowly, watching the
windows and the people stare at me. Maybe I look like a Martian. At a small store, I study
foreign letters on strange packets and pay using currency that has the King on it. The King.
This nation is a cult.

I blow a huge hole in my wallet in a few weeks as I throw away my money with abandon. Fuck
it all.
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The familiar, desperate aimlessness takes over and I run from one place to another, unwilling
to hitch myself to familiar surroundings. The remoteness and isolation of the land is small
comfort and I stay detached, watching the lives of the people around me and it's all the same.
Breed, hoard, die. A bastardized version of the Buddha's Teaching cloaks the land - a
compromised version of the Dhamma molded to be amenable to laziness and warped
principles.

My busted knee heals slowly, I grow impatient and recollect a Nanavira-ism: It is necessary to
accept limitations imposed on one with good grace.

This terrain is uninspiring compared with the grandeur of the S ranges which makes me lose
my faculty of speech when I stand on a ridge and watch the sun go down. Perhaps the lives of
the people who live here, obscured by weird customs and arcane traditions, might seem exotic
to an enthusiastic traveler, but the tale is the same to my cynical eye.

Royalty. What a joke.

The days move past me in a blur and I see no reflection of myself in the wall of time that faces
me every morning, as I end another insomniac night.

As we rode back, I watched the land, sick of the "culture" and "tradition" that was being
shoved in my face constantly.
A money grabbing enterprise veiled by a garb of ancient mystique that is decidedly
suffocating, I thought. In a state of half-sleep, I watched a brown blur, a blur of brown
mountains, brown monasteries, brown houses. The crash, when it happened, was a brutal jolt
and I snapped awake and saw the man fly through the air and slam on the hard asphalt. I got
out, shaken, and walked around. The back of the car was mangled and so was the man's hand.
Fingers were ripped out from their roots and hung in grotesque angles and blood poured out,
forming a puddle on the road. In complete shock, he sat up and stared at nothing in particular,
a glassy look in his eyes. People gathered around and watched him. Authorities Who Handle
Such Situations came and drew chalk lines, measured things and the man was whisked away
in an ambulance. One of the Authorities came
to me and said, You have to come with us and
give a statement. I nodded.

I cross the border again and as the train rolls past slums, mountains of garbage and a diseased
populace, I think of the girl.

A man was trying to sell the infant because he wanted money for liquor, we bought her and
she's been with us ever since, he said. I nodded and watched her as she whirled
around,
cooking a meal, humming something, her eyes shining with gratitude. A dispossessed being.

After three days of incessant travel, fending off questions from curious people, I reached the
village. It had an air of sad, funereal silence, the winter snow still everywhere, the sky clear.
None of the hotels had started business and the proprietor of Doctor Shaksuka Cafe welcomed
me with an inquiry as to why I was so early in the year. I need a place to regroup, I answered.
He took me to a room and said: You have use our dry toilet, until we get water from snow-

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melt. I nodded and went with him to the Dry Toilet (TM), which was a hole in the ground. I
looked at the hole for a while and said: I am checking in. This place is the Ritz.

Luis, the drunken old git, would be proud of me.

I travel deeper and higher and remnants of the winter are still present in this village. Blocks of
ice cover the streets and the surrounding mountains are covered by shimmering layers of
snow. Frozen waterfalls and glaciers dot the landscape. Trees that have not a leaf. Ibex that
roam the slopes, a rare sight - and I saw a whole herd of them. A few travelers roam the empty
streets and we nod as we cross paths and I continue to wander, paralyzed by an eternal inertia.

As I drag myself upward, it feels like the Earth is unwilling to abandon me to the sky. The air
at this altitude is raw and clean. My knee screams in pain as I lug my backpack, slowly
nearing absolute exhaustion. The ground is littered with ice. A lone, magnificent eagle glides
with effortless grace and I watch it until it disappears. Why am I doing this ? What am I doing
? My loneliness is a thousand times more acute, more searing, more immediate with every
passing day. The land around me is colored by a terrible indifference and I continue to climb,
a subdued anger replacing my earlier chaotic, splintered mood.

At this altitude, you learn to revere the sun.

I left the last village behind me, the last inhabited place on the Frontier. A narrow trail wound
upward and I climbed it and the three stupas came into view, as foretold. I paused to grant
reprieve to my lungs. Earlier, the family who took me in last night told me there is nothing
further. I nodded and set off, unwilling to engage their hospitality anymore.

I crested the mountain a while later and entered a land even more remote. A true panorama of
peaks, gorges, snow, ice and not a trace of civilization or humanity. I breathed in the stinging,

ice-cold air and knew Kipling wasn't far from the truth when he wrote that this is the land
where the Gods reside.

Why something ?

How does one answer this question ? Is this question in the realm of science ? Philosophy ?
Religion ? No discipline can explain its very existence, the
result would be infinite regress.
Are we supposed to behold the achievements of science with awe ? Very much so, but it
would be a feeble mind indeed that
doesn't acknowledge the limitations of objective, scientific
inquiry. God is a stale, timid answer to this question and is best ignored if any kind of

meaningful resolution is to be reached. That leaves philosophy and its branches of speculative
inquiry. A survey of all philosophical systems leaves one
dissatisfied. Yet, the persistent
presence of the question warrants a deeper investigation.

Unfairness is the nature of existence and one is forever trying to even the scales in one's life,
even though it is starkly obvious that the balance is never in favor of oneself.

We slave away diligently, taking comfort in the notion that our lives run alongside millions of
others and we conclude that the absence of any angular deviations
in our hive-like existence
implies all is good. We are model, upright citizens and we sigh with deep contentment when
we return to our nests after a day's work.
Old age, death are taboo subjects that we avoid with
alacrity. Violence, child-rape, war are assigned appropriate places in the order of things based
on our
current nationalistic allegiance. We spend our entire lives trying to conform. The

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prospect of being left out is frightening to a man and his all-consuming

desire as he grows
older is to acquire things to be on par with his peers and he expends all his energy in this
miserable exercise, desperate to avoid being
branded as a slacker.

Slacker: A man walking the tightrope that separates him from the exiled, the beaten, the
forgotten

We rode into a land I had not seen before. Vast snow-fields covered the floors of valleys and
rivers cut through them. Peaks were aflame in the evening sun. The village, when we finally
reached it, was similar to all the others.

The rejection of life is the extinction of suffering.

There is truth and there is untruth, and even if you cling to the truth against the whole world,
you are not mad.

Orwell

They assiduously learned to drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose
themselves in crossword puzzles - for they faced death, fear, pain and hunger almost without
defenses, could no longer accept the consolations of the churches, and could obtain no useful
advice from Reason. These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures
did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of
death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life

Hesse

You run away from contact, community and there is still your mind. Your mind feels sutured,
scarred and you are defenseless against the hopelessness that fills your awareness and you
search for diversions and activity, unable to explain your existence that is reducible to utterly
nothing. You ask, Who am I, and listen to the silence that follows the question. You rage
against the injustice that you think is being meted out to you and you scream, Why me. You
build vast structures of fantasy in your consciousness, terrifying monuments constructed in
periods of loneliness. And then you ask, Why me. You slowly renounce external attachments,
knowing that the roots are buried in your mind and will remain so until you burn the bridge
and become a supplicant, a heretic, an apostate. You think of your family and they appear
distant, strange and you observe the lack of guilt when you think of your estrangement. You
look at the people around you, people who have hitched themselves to their families, houses,
jobs and a faint misgiving makes you realize you are an alien, lost in doubt and indecisiveness.

You search for the Dhamma and it has disappeared from your life.

There is no nobility in poverty.

It's a myth conjured and perpetuated by rich people with smooth skin and clean fingernails.
The poor live brutish lives, chase worthless objects and are submerged in an ocean
of
mediocrity. Mediocre entertainment, mediocre thought, mediocre everything. The idea that
nobility is part of their aesthetic outlook is laughable when their
lives revolve around cheap,
cringe-inducing books, movies, music. They breed ferociously and bury themselves in a
nauseating mess of family, relatives, politics,
intrigue and competition. The
economic/historical explanation for their destitution only serves to emphasize this:

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Their poverty is not voluntary.

I come down from the high ranges and wander in lower, greener, crowded regions.

I know all the tunes of sappy, "romantic" songs and they are stuck in my head. In a bus, I
listen to a crooning female and I don't understand a word
and as the song screeches on, I
grimace and my anger boils over and I am sick of the unreality, the meaninglessness, the
torpid nature of the age we live
in and a fiery craving for annihilation takes form in my
consciousness. A rage possesses me, a medieval rage, a Germanic rage, a Genghis Khan rage
and
it wants to go nuclear, nuclear and burn down the hordes of painted faces, painted lips and
their putrid, tv-soaked lives, their babies and washing
machines and vacations and
'awesomeness' and 'coolness' and gray ashes will be all that's left of this world that refuses to
accommodate me.

I think of that which I perceive as a curse and I stolidly refuse to accept any explanation for it.
What hope can the world offer a man
who can see the fissures in 'redemptive' systems ?
Remove the bark from the consolatory solutions that reek of phenol and cowardice and you'll

see the abyss of ignorance that lies beneath them.

Good God Almighty. What a madhouse. And what a sham.

Posters, fliers everywhere. Instant Nirvana, poem readings, concerts, gatherings, "counterculture initiations", therapy sessions with tantric
connotations. A huge mob wanders around,
some of them half-naked, all of them bound to The Cause. "Musicians" throng street corners,
bellowing
songs like No Woman No Cry and a rabble crowds around, wearing Hendrix and
Marley shirts. The air, the atmosphere is grassy and the forced
"hipness" of the place makes
me gag. The gutters overflow with filth and pale-skinned zombies sit around and drone about
finding the "inner-self".

And the Buddha. Buddhist carpets, books, t-shirts, scarves, amulets, bracelets, jewelry, tattoos,
songs, chants, prayers, ornaments. A thriving
enterprise devoted to the sale of
Buddhist/Tibetan merchandise. More tourists, "hippies" pour in and the place is packed, cafes
overflow with people,
streets are jammed and the place resembles an outpost forsaken of
something. The mood enters everyone and everyone is sweating, half-crazed,
soaked up in the
fumes of "benevolence" and "compassion" that is revolting.

And the gutters overflow with filth.

A dispossessed people. A people in exile. Yes, it is so. But their means of asserting their
nationality, their "soul" is childish in its earnestness and downright disgusting in its
pretentiousness.

Monks immolating themselves in the name of creed, country have no place in the discipline.
Shed the charade of Buddhist "heritage" if you fight for "causes". The only welfare that
matters to an ascetic is his own - the world is an abstraction to him, his mind is his reality.

I eat gobs of fried dough in a frantic attempt to stop a hypo episode from descending into
further misery and I sweat and sweat and shake violently. After a short period of relative
calmness in which I disregarded the intensity of the disease, I am now seized by a violent
anger. I am tired, tired, oh fuck, I am tired of it all. The syringes, the micro-management, the
highs, the lows, the torrid nights, the sweat, the stench, the scarred skin, the finger-pricks, the
blood, the public displays of subcutaneous injections. Years and years of fighting this, and
now I am just fucking tired, I am just fucking tired

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I AM JUST FUCKING TIRED.

Unsurprisingly, irritation and a dense anger starts to cloud my days as I wander.

The greed that I encounter in "big" towns is tiring to handle. You can only climb up and down
a couple of hotels before caving in and choosing
the next seedy, rundown place that charges a
princely sum for a room with a greasy bed, filthy carpet and a smelly, ill-lit bathroom.
Because
you are an "outsider" and hence you must be fleeced

This is not the battle to be fought. The world is a singular cause for anxiety in a man's life and
an adequate amount of ballast is needed to avoid being tossed about. Indifference ? Resilience
? Stupidity ? Nay, they seem like practical answers, filled with street-wisdom, but they are still
terrific nonsense. Renunciation is the only answer.

A blur of sleepless nights, rickety buses, "luxury" buses, taxis, coffee-houses, bus-stands,
hotel-rooms, roadside eateries, tired eyes and a shock when I finally arrived.

The place was a dump, with roads dug up, debris and dirt everywhere, a thick layer of dust
covering everything. Something to do with "development". At the bus terminal,
the lone
person behind the counter shook his head sadly when I inquired about services. Everything is
closed, passes are not open, he said. I shook my head sadly
in return and looked across the
road at the fuel station. Hundreds of vehicles and people queued up, the serpentine queue
stretching beyond the corner, waiting
for fuel. Shops were empty. No supplies, I was told.

And now, I am tired. Prices for everything are insanely exorbitant, the town is a shit-hole and I
feel stranded.

I am still stranded, holed up in a hotel room, watching whatever is shown on the TV. And the
shows are enough to remove the last traces of hope in you.

We rode into the town in darkness and it was a study in frightening decay.
Men were lurching about like zombies, crowding around push-carts that were selling
something smoky. I walked some distance and entered a hotel. A sulky waiter sidled over and
glared at me and muttered, There is nothing. No vegetables, no flour, no milk. I looked outside
at the dark street which resembled a
medieval gaol and said, Bring whatever you have. He
went away and brought back a bowl of rice and a bowl of grease and oil with a couple of balls
floating
in it.

What is this ?

Meat.

What kind ?

He didn't answer and went away. I looked at the choice morsels of food in front of me and
then bit into a ball. It was rubbery and I gagged. And then
proceeded to eat all of it.

As I stood in the workshop, surrounded by shells that were once vehicles, surrounded by an
overpowering stench of diesel, grease, sweat and oil, I despaired.

Is this the contemplative life that you keep prattling about, I muttered. It's just a small
vehicular mishap, I replied. The day might yet have a redeeming ending.
And it did. Darkness
fell on the land and we crossed the last pass and I was calm, having subdued my agonies with
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a handful of pills and a syringe. And there it was.

A full moon that hovered above the horizon,
above the edge of the planet, brilliantly white, huge. We rode straight toward it on the floor of
the vast
valley and it filled the sky, outlining the ranges. All of us watched it and none said a
word and we rode on, awaiting the crest from which the lights of
the town could be seen and
the warmth, imagined.

A man taking pride in his family is an empty man indeed. A few minutes of copulation is an
accomplishment ?

Ours shall be misunderstood lives and yet we shall not be cowed down. The role of the heretic
will be assigned its due place only in retrospect. Our battles will not be fought on nationalistic
lines, our fight will be against the injustice of existence. Aye, we shall view life as a burden.
The caverns of our minds will be filled with anger and rage as we watch the degeneration
around us. We shall live parasitic lives and wander in remote wastelands and with upturned
heads watch eagles, looking down at us. The chaotic division of the world's spoils, favoring
others and leaving us in the cold, will fill us with heartburn and desire and yet we shall smile.

At the lunacy of it all.

The glances, the hand-holding, the whispered nonsense in each other's ears, the overt
suggestion of physical intimacy, the "accidental" caresses, the self-conscious display of flesh,
the possessiveness - what a load of horseshit "love", "romance" is.

Imperviousness is the ideal. The "sensitive man" is hogwash.

but why exist? The immediate answer, of course, is that we cant help it. We do exist, and
thats an end of the matter: let us rage furiously together or turn our backs in silence, au
choix; it is all the same in the end (that is, if there were an end). But no - there is a way out,
there is a way to put a stop to existence, if only we have the courage to let go of our cherished
humanity.

Nanavira Thera

I listen to conversations around me and the absolute lack of any compromise in the Dhamma
has never been more evident to me. The Teaching begins and ends with the tenet: Existence is
anguish. The whole world might believe otherwise, but it's still so. The sheer amount of
negativity in the Dhamma is the reality that we refuse to acknowledge.

A snippet of Sujith's Philosophical Genius: I bathe for my own personal edification. People
with perfume-scarred nostrils don't have a say in the matter.

Electricity arrived.

The water heater in the bathroom worked and I felt with amazement hot water gushing from
the tap. It's time, I decided. Armed with shampoo and soap, of multiple brands,
all
guaranteeing Scented Nirvana, I started scrubbing. I scrubbed and scrubbed, used toothpaste
("Fiery freshness for 12 hours") to clean toenails and
other nails and finally, scooped up a
handful of detergent to clean unmentionable places. I washed my hair and weeks of Unhairy

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Material disappeared.
The session ended and I looked at myself in the mirror and delivered an
impromptu speech to nobody in particular:

I look like a Bathroom Model From One of Those Advertisements in Which Beautiful People
Pee and Poo in Glistening Toilet-ware. In Slow Motion.

And to preserve for posterity the picture of Clean Sujith (TM), I scowled into the lens of my
camera. Task done, I breathed in the aroma of Surf Excel
that arose from my skin and went
out for a walk.

Renunciation of the world becomes a less formidable task when it is seen that the world is just
what is perceived by the senses and intellect. Even so, the Dhamma permits no compromise either one relinquishes every single attachment and becomes Awakened, or one doesn't. A
nightly orgasm has no place in the Arahant's existence.

I see myself as an inscrutable prophet, an icon. I build vast cisterns of hubris - it's bound to
break under the strain of constant self-glorification.

The freedom of software. How incongruous it sounds when you are sitting in the middle of the
Himalayas.

You want to be noticed. You want your life to be validated. How would you accept the words
of someone who says that your need for approval itself is deluded ?

The anger still burns and it's fierce, vengeful. A wrath that feeds upon its own embers and is
volcanic. I am consumed by the flames and wheedling entreaties only serve to intensify my
alienation. My consciousness is non-porous, icy, with no trace of phony sympathy and my
anger washes over its surface. The world can cave in and implode and I would die with a cold
indifference, apart, alone, immune to the shrieking of the rest. Wave after wave of anger
assaults me and I grind my teeth and grammar disappears and images of ferocious violence
impose themselves on my awareness and I scream soundlessly, I scream and scream and think
of a river of gushing, gushing, red, red, blood and I drown myself in it and arise, a blood-red
phoenix, a phallic God and I tear the complacent skin off the faces of those who sneer,
cocooned in their detergent-washed lives and whisper:

Now do you see ? Do you see now ? Do you see the pain of want ?

I am spent. Maybe the cold of the dawn has washed away my colorless anger.

The abstract, objective method of analysis advocated by the proponents of science is useless to
someone attempting to examine himself.

What a man feels is something that can't be reduced to a fact of science, because there is a
choice involved and how does one objectively explain choice ?
A man who chooses to inject
heroin into himself even though society tells him it is ruinous, is exercising a choice that is
scarcely comprehensible.
We decide he needs help - medical help - and conclude he's just
another victim. But, of what ? Diseases of the body can be observed with an analytic eye,
but a
condition of one's mind can only be inferred from what the subject chooses to reveal. A
psychiatrist is thus privy only to what his
patient considers amenable to exposure. The
Dhamma's way of personal, subjective investigation is the only valid way to resolve one's
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anxiety.

My tone becomes strident, didactic, unapologetic.

That I am a victim, is clear. That I am guilty, the crime being existence, is clear. What then, is
to be done ? The scientific method is inapplicable to the dissection of my
mind, since my mind
is private to myself and it can't be observed objectively by someone else. What laws govern
the choices I make ? If the haphazard systems
of morality and ethics invented by society are
relinquished, then my personal welfare is the sole criterion with which my actions can be
judged. And I would be
the defendant, the prosecutor, the judge and the proceedings would
take place within my mind.

There is no place for a God here. A God who refuses to grant succor and is deaf to my pleas
doesn't deserve a place even in the gallery. Family ? People who refuse
to grant a man the
freedom to pursue the avenues of action which he prefers, however unorthodox, shall be
relegated to the sidelines. The reasons for their
non-acceptance of his choices could be
manifold and one could spend a lifetime trying to console them, but if it's rightly seen that
their lives are rooted
in ignorance, then it would be extraordinarily foolish to be swayed by
their tears. The bonds of family ferment guilt in a man and it's a hard task indeed
to sever
them.

The whole of my existence has been distilled to a single point of contention and the staggering
progress of science amounts to nothing when the gaping
void in my life rears itself and a cloud
passes over my consciousness. Romanticized, poetical hymns in praise of Man's progress are
never cognizant of
the ugliness of the world. Abuse, war, mutilation. Why do religious
fanatics fail to see the flaw in their systems and reiterate with parrot-like earnestness:
We can't
explain pain, but we believe it's part of God's plan. Which part of the plan accounts for my
despair ?

No, this is a bloody travesty, I whisper. A man's anxiety can't be cured by space-travel,
gleaming buildings or xenophobic hysteria. The world is a motley
collection of mobs and I
look at the world with the eyes of an outsider and say, Whosoever lays claim to my life,
family or otherwise, shall meet a stony
silence, a silence that is the by-product of years and
years of despair and anguish.

The struggle to survive and stay afloat has never been more clear to me. We are terrified of
anything that disturbs our placid lives and any situation that
exposes the fragility of our
existence confuses us and we desperately search for ways to return to that which we are
accustomed to. As long as his days are filled
with a stream of activities that allow him to
sustain the illusion of well-being and progress, a man is unconcerned about the ambiguity of
his existence.
The invention of schemes to acquire things and maintain his "position" to avoid
being subject to ridicule by his like-minded peers consumes all his time,
but does he ever pull
back and see the futility of chasing ephemeral things ?

We hoard things, anticipating trouble in the future, but we secretly hope, we secretly believe,
that nothing calamitous will happen to us and our future
will be spared the unpleasant,
disastrous events that we see in other lives. Religious platitudes serve to perpetuate this
delusion and a man convinces himself:
I believe in God and subscribe to his authority, hence
my life is unique and blessed. Such a man is deaf to the screams of the pious who died at the
stake,
screaming the name of their God. Society gives us a variety of devices with the
assurance that our future will be a glittering tv-show and we lap it up, unmindful and barely

conscious of the wool that is pulled over our eyes. Every moment of our lives is concerned
with preparation for a future that doesn't exist.

The prospect of losing his present, comfortable situation is the primary impetus behind a man's
inertia; the prospect of social ridicule is the
impetus behind his pitiful ambitions. A sudden
event like a disease, a financial crisis throws a wrench in his wheel of normalcy. A drawn-out,
prolonged event
like the inability to acquire what his neighbors have makes him introverted
and he watches those around him with ill-concealed anger. Death is absent
in such a picture it's viewed as something distant, something inexplicable. Surrounded by family, we feel

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immortal and we think death can't

touch us. The suddenness of death doesn't deter us from
living in a fantasy-world of festivals, vacations and laughter.

In this complacent world of jobs, taxes and mortgages, the image of an ascetic is
incomprehensible. Why would a man renounce the pleasures of life ? Why would a man

renounce "progress" ? Why would a man renounce his family and finally, humanity itself ?
Answer: The ambiguity is resolved, the burden is offloaded. That this
life which is essentially
a mystery is not worth living is a heretical view and the ascetic acknowledges this and is
indifferent to the tidal waves
of popular opinion that crash against him.

I have been subject to fits of depression and anger for what feels like a lifetime now. The tasks
of pursuing a career, raising a family,
building a nest, being an approved individual, is
revolting to me. One loses his normalcy when one accepts the view that anxiety is abnormal.
The happiness
that people clamor to attain is to be rightly seen as fleeting. My addictions are
the result of the hopelessness that filled me as the Dhamma
became a debating point rather
than a personal endeavor. My anger is the result of my refusal to accept the situation and shift
the blame away
from myself. As I write this, a voice whispers: No, you always knew the real
cause. I still fume at the injustice that I think I am being
punished with and the anger is
astonishing in its intensity - it borders on the psychotic.

Every man who sees anguish, stress as life and sees renunciation as the solution has to go
through a painful process of withdrawal before arriving
at the Teaching. My process is
seemingly interminable and my consciousness has taken a beating. My disease prevents me
from taking the
alms-bowl and my rebelliousness prevents me from donning the garb of a
"model citizen", which means I am neither here, nor there. Family has long since
ceased to be
a factor and I am no longer seized by guilt when I think occasionally about said subject. Their
complete refusal to accept the tiniest
bit of deviation from their ignorant notions of filial duty
wearies me and I have no interest in either explaining my "waywardness" or
accommodating
their ignorance. It's infuriating to listen to "upright" people deliver parochial idiocy about the
"duty" of a man to serve others "unselfishly".
The last few years resemble an extended torture session and I see no end to the misery either.
Is this how things are going to be ? The only progress that I can see in myself is a concreting
of my refusal to accept the popular view that renunciation is stupid and the Buddha's
Teaching, irrelevant. What else could be expected from a world that is frightened of
individuality ? The "modern" man seeks anonymity by surrounding himself with a crowd.
He
loses himself in a variety of enterprises and desires recognition for his loyal slavery. The idea
of rebellion is disconcerting to him and he prefers
to maintain the status quo rather than face
disapproving eyes. He clutches on to a bunch of sentences uttered by "gurus" and religious
priests to help
him run his life. Others laugh, he laughs. Others save money, he saves money.
Others chase careers and job-promotions, he does the same. Others
get married and breed, he
doesn't rest until he can stand next to his woman and child and say, What next ?

And what of the man who fails in his pursuit of those who are ahead of him in the race ? A
slow fermentation of anger finally ending in resignation
as he realizes his failure and the rest
of his days are lived out in mute poverty. The bottom-feeders, the scavengers, the unwanted.
They are looked
at with frightened eyes by the privileged, who are terrified of the thin line that
separates their lives from squalor and struggle. Both camps veer away from
each other and
devote their lives to the worship of the small band of the super-rich, the overlords who hover
above both of them. The men who
run things. The men who device systems of subjugation.
The men with means to control the pulse of the masses. Men with power.

My anxiety is founded on ignorance. Ignorance of the cause of my anxiety. Far from being
mere word-play, this is a postulate that applies to all men.
Each man's anguish is personal,
though, and the degree of his suffering depends on his deeds, present and past. This is not a
simple idea - no man
assumes full responsibility for his condition, rather, a number of external
factors are blamed. The most deviant step that is to be taken, then,
is to turn one's eyes inward
and see the real cause. It's deviant because normally society assumes the role of the
diagnostician for the
ignorant man, providing stock explanations for the known and fanciful
theories or evasions for the unknown. But, when a man appoints himself
the sole arbitrator for
his existence, he no longer subscribes to convention.

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The unfairness that I resent is dependent on my conviction that I deserve more, that the world
must fulfill my desires, however selfish they
might be. But, what a man is able to eke out of
the world is directly influenced by a system of checks, balances and rations that we don't see.

An outside view is required to discern the forces that shape a man's condition. I still harbor an
inordinate amount of resentment and it shall
always be so as long as I look at an indifferent
world with skewed vision. Right view: the cleansing of one's accumulated misconceptions
through a filter, the Dhamma.

Sensual craving as a cause for stress is a deceptively simple answer. How easy it's to assume
that understanding it is the same as realizing.
People nod when they hear this utterance and
then proceed to write books to illuminate others with this wondrous wisdom, indulging in all
forms
of self-gratification and expecting their lives to be free of suffering, living in a state of
contradiction. When our lives are assaulted by
sappy, romantic images from every direction,
we conclude that sensuality is normal, natural. A radical revision of one's established views is

required to accept that sensual desire leads to anxiety, but the vicious cycle of desire and
satisfaction prevents one from ever observing
the hold of sensuality on one's mind. A life
dedicated to the task of taming the mind is the only way to break free.

In this world, the cry of the self-aware man is a cry for help and the Buddha's Teaching is the
Bible of the rebel. If a man somehow extricates himself
from the vicious shackles of society,
he is still bound by the cords of existence. And what is the Dhamma but the way to untie the
knots of existence ?

I don't know what is going to transpire in the remaining years of my life. Will I ever make the
Dhamma personal ? Will I spend all of my time conjuring up fantasies ? Will I rage and rebel
and reject everything and allow insanity to finally consume me ? I don't know.

<May 26 2014>

I gaze at the ranges and hear an echo of my alienated solitude and the wind carries it to me and
I listen to the wind as it passes me and I know I'll return.

<June 10 2014>
My life is exceedingly trying; I feel so alien to, so at variance with, what commonly
preoccupies men. Day in and day out I detect my heterogeneity in practically every contact
and
in the most varied ways. Encompassed at all times by curiosity, always a stranger, now
envied, now the butt of laughter, of boorish stares - everything possible is done to prevent
me
from being myself

Kierkegaard

<June 14 2014>

I can't stand the clamor of 'life' and go back to the ranges.

Complete detachment from affairs of the world is a prerequisite for concentrated thought.

I look at my past.

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My distress is not without a cause and the cause is not a vague metaphysical yearning, despite
what I tell myself. I know the actual cause, I have
known it for years and my attempts to
address it have so far produced suicidal inclinations and rage, rage, rage. I don't see a cure
anymore, but the
prolonged condition has exposed the impassive unfairness of existence and I
see no course of action other than vehement rebellion. How humiliating it is
to narrow down
the web of one's frustrations to a single vein and see the utter ordinariness of it.

The cause for all my periods of incoherent, noxious rage is something that is natural, then. If
the natural order of things is
uneven distribution of an ever-growing mountain of loot, the
deficit in my share is only to be expected. And perhaps, accepted. But, no man
is willing to
stay content with his portion. We covet. We want. Will the desire for possession be sated in
one's lifetime, though ? How can
a man's satisfaction be measured if not by comparison with
others ? And what sense does the assessment make in an unfair world ? It seems
foolish to
want even the slightest thing, let alone lofty concepts like communal harmony. Utopia: an
unnatural dream.

Rage became wrath over the years. Sometimes incoherent, sometimes concentrated. As life
became a series of dead days, I retreated further
and further into a dark cave and infrequent
contact with society invariably resulted in acute disgust and an increased longing for a
nihilistic
nothingness. Inside a citadel of motionless isolation, anguish reigned and I spent
hours, days in thin-lipped, mute fury, watching lunatic overtones
envelop my mind as it sunk
deeper and deeper into megalomania. A mind that seemed apart, pursuing channels that led
nowhere, chasing shadows
and whispers, until perverted images manifested themselves and
took center-stage. Images out of a Dostoevsky nightmare. And I knew I had truly
fallen into a
hellish abyss.

I am still falling. There are no visible walls and darkness is all there is and the pit is
bottomless. Where are the rest of the fallen ones ?

The present.

Wrath becomes self-incinerating wrath. I mutilate my mind with clinical precision and avoid
all paths that apparently lead to earthly bliss. Days
pass. Days become months, years and no
person can see who or what I have become. A life that is bereft of all that people classify
under the term 'normalcy'.
Sometimes I study myself in a mirror and wonder at the physical
ravages of aimless mutiny. You have not reconciled yourself with the situation, I tell
myself. I
never have, never will. My mind has become a furnace of conflicting ideas and the heat is
lacerating, scalding and the flames consume
all there is. My hatred of the ways of the world
has become hardened, immune and impervious to the cackling of the 'sympathetic', the 'noble'.

The present is loneliness. A vast, empty, black silence. A silence that lies over everything like
thick tar and what lies beneath
the surface is ennui, bubbling and frothing. I live inside this
isolation, this windowless cave and it feels authentic, real.
We lose our individuality in a
crowd and a mob-mentality herds us in this direction and that. An authentic individual is one
who is not
terrified of his true nature - which is the kernel stripped of every social baggage.
Nothing remains when years of stench-ridden, guilt-ridden
'life-wisdom' is shed, except a
valueless life, the earlier life diluted beyond regeneration. I breathe in the pure, rarefied air of
the
hermit's mountain and it feels like I have crawled out from under the leprous skin of
society.

From my lonely observation point, I silently watch the falsity of the lives around me. Lives
spent in chains, lived by people obsessed with justifying their chained lives. I love my family,
my life is calm and peaceful, says the employed man. I love my family, I can't explain it, I just
do, says the emancipated woman. I watch them with detached incredulity, wondering when
they would see the hypocrisy in their forced utterances. A man who cannot relinquish relations
and human contact has not seen himself as an individual. He sees himself as a projection of
confused, idiotic views that plague those around him. A distorted image that is composed of
misconceptions spanning a lifetime.
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Good God, the people of this country breed like there's no tomorrow.

The all-consuming enterprise of their lives is breeding. The poor breed with a vengeful
intensity. We are the low-lives that you look at
with distaste, they say. We can't acquire what
you have, so we shall spawn more of us to fill the gutters and rivers of filth that define
this
country, they say. The 'middle-class' breed with competitive intensity. They breed and parade
their offspring and quack about the
merits and demerits of fruit-juices, packaged milk and
detergent. They lug their children around with psychotic possessiveness and nurture them
with
stale, hereditary gems of advice. The rich breed with mostly silent nonchalance, sometimes in
the public glare. They are too idle
to worry about silliness like the filth that covers almost
every inch of this country.

Breed away, ye busy ones. Breed away. Let the water dry up, let riots break out, let the rivers
carry mountains of filth. Line up
outside foreign embassies under a burning sun and seek
asylum in alien lands and emigrate in search of 'better lives'. Live hollow, empty
lives even
though ye are surrounded by your precious kin. Live wasted lives, even though ye are
surrounded by a million miles of
pristine tarmac on which run a million vehicles - evidence of
mechanized progress which we are all so proud of. Live unquiet lives,
even though ye think ye
are surrounded by peaceful walls, peaceful traffic, peaceful skyscrapers, peaceful comrade-inarms who march
in unison toward a glorious, scientific future.

There is no individual in all your armies of push-cart babies and parents with bleached smiles.
None. An individual is one who
sees. An individual is one who is frightened of only his
welfare. How do I end this nightmare of mine, he asks. He seeks himself in a sea
of
inhumanity. Aye, it is inhuman indeed to bring forth a being into this accursed world and call
it an act of love - another
perversion of our times.

In the final accounting, a man's anguish will be all that remains and his treasured possessions
and family will desert him. Who will be vindicated then ?

We live in an age in which diligent activity is praised. A battalion of professions are there for
the choosing and a man is treated with contempt if he is idle. Curiously, the idleness of the
rich is looked at with envy and longing. Why the double standard ? Why are the wealthy
treated with deference instead of malice considering the fact that most of them lead lives of
leisure ? Maybe at the bottom of every man's heart lies a dormant desire for inactivity. A
desire to end the endless travails of everyday life. Is overcoming this torpor, this weariness,
the 'noble' thing to do ? The vagueness of the result of such an endeavor makes one reluctant.
What is to be gained by me, personally, by embarking on such a life-affirming project ? Let
the problems facing mankind and the world fade into a blurry horizon - what necessity shall
drive me to live an 'active', 'wholesome' life ? Satisfaction ? Happiness ? Recognition ? Thrill
? What ?

When the transient nature of all acquisitions is seen clearly, one becomes cold. One sees that
the satisfaction that fills us on acquiring something
will always be replaced by a new longing.
The happiness that we search for is a grotesque mask covering the malignant tumor of
constant desire. The
need for recognition in the eyes of others is indicative of the smallness of
one's stature. How puny and trivial are the prizes that a man wrests
from the jaws of a rotten,
hypocritical society ! No, life is not worth the struggle. No reward is big enough to justify the
barbaric struggle for survival.

"Face life and run a family", says the 'courageous' man.

The Buddha had such men in mind when he observed:

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This Dhamma that I have attained is deep, hard to see, hard to realize, peaceful, refined,
beyond the scope of conjecture, subtle, to-be-experienced by the wise.
But this generation
delights in attachment, is excited by attachment, enjoys attachment. For a generation
delighting in attachment, excited by attachment, enjoying attachment,
this/that conditionality
and dependent co-arising are hard to see. This state, too, is hard to see: the resolution of all
fabrications, the relinquishment of all acquisitions,
the ending of craving; dispassion;
cessation; Unbinding.
Enough now with teaching what only with difficulty I reached. This Dhamma is not easily
realized by those overcome with aversion and passion.
What is abstruse, subtle, deep, hard to
see, going against the flow - those delighting in passion, cloaked in the mass of darkness,
won't see.
Worldly rewards are assumed to be the pinnacle of acquisitions by most men. Something that
lies outside the dimension of human experience, outside the category of cognizable
phenomena doesn't hold much appeal and lesser pursuits are always chosen. The courageous
man doesn't see the utter lack of individuality in his actions, words - his very existence
depends on a distressing lack of self-awareness. To be aware is to be aware of futility.
The
courageous man lives his life in constant fear, covering his fear of deviant behavior with a
childish, immature disdain that is just pitiful.
The courageous man relies on the proximity of
familiar faces to avoid confronting his mortality. Death is an aberration in his blissful life and
it's
chased into a corner with confused, muddled arguments. Disease frightens him. Loss of his
possessions frightens him. He praises absurdities like bravery, valor in battlefields,
not
realizing that killing and mutilating other beings for the 'country' is the sign of a decadent
people.

The Sage says:

I've lived well the holy life, well-developed the path. Death holds no fear for me. It's like the
end of a disease. I've lived well the holy life,
well-developed the path, seen states of becoming
as devoid of allure, like poison spit out after it's drunk. One gone to the far shore without

clinging, without effluent, his task completed, welcomes the ending of life, as if freed from a
place of execution. Having attained the supreme Rightness,
unconcerned with all the world, as
if released from a burning house, he doesn't sorrow at death.

What says the 'courageous' man ?

I conclude my spasms of apologia.

Let all childish notions of 'virtuous' thought wither and fall away. Let the anger burn, fueled
by loneliness and envy. Let the laughter, ridicule
and sidelong looks of contempt be consigned
to the rubbish heap. This anger of mine shall be the tornado that pulls me upward, as people
beneath me grow smaller.
This anger of mine shall be the catalyst for my evolution into a
being with a revalued system. This anger of mine shall be the vehicle for my
transformation
into an individual. The anguish of being estranged from all of existence, all of mobility shall
be the sole yardstick for measuring my sanity.

Society is the most malignant, cancerous growth that afflicts Man. All his mental anguish
arises from his fear of critique by society.
Every action, every step is a movement in a
direction dictated by someone other than oneself. This state of numbness, inertia is concluded

to be 'peaceful' by those who watch themselves occasionally. But, have they ever striven for
absolute freedom ? Do they not see the perversion of their lives ?
Do they not see that
liberation from existence is the highest freedom ? Nay, their eyes are blinded and they stagger
around, consumed by a thirst for
possession that can never be quenched. Acquisition equals
liberation for such imprisoned men. Society swallows such lives with glee,
lives that are lived
out in dystopian conformance.

Intoxication with life is a disease. Sensual craving is a monstrous anomaly. What passes for
progress is a mistake. Art without violence is
stuck-up, stultifying boredom. What matters is
an individual's Release. Each person a judgment unto himself. The fate of mankind could be

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an
apocalyptic implosion, but false pity shall not rise in the lone wanderer. Untethered to
causes, he wanders. Subsisting on the rays of light from
an ever-receding horizon, he wanders.
Branded as a parasite by the rabble, he wanders. His equanimity is the surface of a diamond
and he awaits his
passage into the Deathless with timeless patience. He knows: the unraveling
of life is for the non-frivolous. The simple, the easily-entertained
are of no import and they
shape neither the world nor their own lives.

A wasted, abnormal life. That would be the reception of something that people don't
understand. I have struggled long enough against this cancer that's
devouring my mind and I
am tired. I want to shed the last traces of corruption in my mind, planted as seeds by a
malevolent society that are now grown
to mammoth trees. I seek no companion, no progeny.
A cave is all I need, a cave with the blinds drawn and there I shall live, watching my mind,
watching
the ways of my mind. An investigation without any outside help. The tools shall be
unrelated to anything that is concerned with the world. The method, the
process shall be
conducted with one over-arching commandment: uncompromising disdain for convention.

I stop analyzing the ways of society that are clear enough in their hypocrisy, inadequacy and
conclude: every soothing, 'redeeming' salve dredged from
the graves of the past, the
slaughterhouses of the present and inter-galactic spaceships of the future shall be considered
as ineffectual, non-remedial
placebos since they address neither the anguish nor the ambiguity
of my existence.

<July 03 2014>

Days and nights of cold solitude, in a cold land.

I wandered through a familiar land, nowhere to go, nowhere to be. I hiked slowly, watching
innumerable peaks that rose into a blue sky. I pitched my
tent in remote nooks, near streams
that gurgled softly over smooth rocks. Mornings saw me emerge from the tent into bitingly
cold dawns and crisp, sharp air.
I performed my ablutions in freezing water, waiting for the
sun to show itself. I went on long hikes on nearby slopes to reach a promontory, a plateau
from
where I could gaze at vast valleys and distant glaciers.

Occasionally, when my tent was near a road, visitors would come by and study me with frank
curiosity. A group of girls returning home.
What are you doing here ? Nothing. Are you
married ? No. This one is not married either, she said and prodded her companion. Peals of
laughter.
The victim blushed and covered her face with a scarf. I smiled and the banter went
on for a while, with lots of suggestive innuendos. They left.
A wandering monk came by and
looked inside my tent and then at me and went away without saying a word. I lay on soft grass
and watched him walk
away. Other bold visitors came, to accept my bribes of food: a
mountain rat, caterpillars, crows, sparrows. I took part in nothing and moved on,
a pilgrim
with no abode to call home.

I reached a monastery perched on the steep side of a mountain and was given rice in a bowl. I
ate it slowly and a shaggy, old, sick dog came
and sniffed my bowl and looked at me with
eyes that beheld an imminent death. We shared and ate together and I left after a while and
continued to
wander. I left villages and people behind me and camped in a grassy knoll,
subsisting on dry bread for a few days, loath to return to inhabited places.
Beneath an overcast
sky, I lay on rocks and watched the river and thought of my life.

I returned to places that were crowded and teeming with activity. I watched the Himalayas
overrun by bikers and families who had a thing in
common: they carried their girth with pride.
They yelled constantly and the noise was assumed by everyone as symptomatic of happy
tourists.
I slowed down and rode around in taxis filled with fair-skinned travelers from foreign
lands who wore rags that were falling apart and picked scabs
from their feet. Their idea of
freedom had something to do with a brutal abandonment of their earlier lives of white-washed
cleanliness. With such
company, I saw dawns breaking cover and semi-frozen lakes and rode
with ice-cold wind crashing into my face.

Supplies ran out and to restock things, I reached even more crowded places where people were

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frighteningly obsessed with 'enjoying' themselves.

I watched my stash of money bleed and
thought about going back to remote ranges and live in my tent. How much longer ? Coming
up with no answer, no viable
answer, I wandered on, my tent now a dead-weight on my spine.
I became adept at blotting out everything when I wanted to. The mountains faded into
the gray
background of my consciousness and I asked myself again: How much longer ? I never did
answer the question. Monsoon hit the mountains and I
had no intention of repeating past
experiences - holed-up in remote places falling in rain-shadow regions, but approach roads
buried under landslides
and cave-ins. I booked expensive tickets and ended the aimlessness.

As I sit in my room now, surrounded by stale lives, a faint poignancy makes me dejected and
wistful. I can't stand the world and I continue to long
for unfettered solitude in remote,
desolate lands. This longing, this want shall always be my shadow, I realize. What bliss it was
to stay alone in a tent someplace
remote and watch the land in the evening. The sun, the sky,
the wind. Imagine standing on the sheer edge of a cliff and watching a glacial panorama that

lies in front of you, as the evening wind blows into your face and hair, the last rays of a red
sun bathing everything in a carpet of reddish hue.
Imagine standing there, relishing the
absolute solitude that encircles you and awaiting the silence of the night inside your tent.
Imagine darkness falling
on the land and not a light to be seen anywhere. Imagine waking up
and emerging into an icy dawn and a slight breeze and waiting for the sun - it
finally reaches
you and you bask in the warmth. And you smile.

Well. I continue to live inside an alienated vacuum, disengaged from the insipid structures of
family and society. The ranges stay in my vision
and I know I'll return to walk on unmapped
trails, listening to the whisper of the wind in my ears.

<July 08 2014>

As I try to remain immune to the mayhem, the perpetually dissatisfied lives around me and
remain firmly in a rarefied land where the Dhamma is the
sole beacon, I come across this: The
Cave

<July 10 2014>

The Path has become a very private affair. A few sentences exchanged with erstwhile
acquaintances is enough to expose the
gulf between me and the world. I cringe when I think of
the banality of social life and realize the full meaning of the declarations:
From the cessation of contact is the cessation of sensuality.

The Buddha
Contacts make contact dependent on a sense of acquisition. Where there's no sense of
acquisition, contacts would make contact with what ?

The Buddha
Contact is the cause by which kamma comes into play.

The Buddha

I stop smiling and this troubled, crowded chapter in my life comes to an end. The rest of my
days shall be days of defiant solitude, with
the Dhamma as my refuge.

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Author: Sujith Manoharan
Emacs 25.0.50.1 (Org mode 8.2.10)
Validate

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