“No virtue or vice, no pleasure or pain,
I need no mantras, no pilgrimage, no scriptures or rituals,
I am not the observer, nor the experience itself,
I am the form of consciousness and bliss,
I am the eternal Shiva (1).”
Despite the fact that writing is second nature to me, I often find it redundant, useless, a burden: there’s not much to say or add, the most important and precious things in the world can’t be put into words, and I’d rather focus on something else. Terminology becomes heavy, words get to sound inadequate, clumsy and fake. I feel a growing need for clarity and freedom from any kind of language (2). But in the meantime I keep coming back to the approximate tool that writing is.
Everything I write is based on my experience and understanding. They might very well not coincide with other people’s experience and understanding. I think everything is interconnected, but the facets of this wholeness differ even if, directly or indirectly, from one perspective or another, and from different kinds of planes of perception and consciousness, they refer to same thing. I’m not even sure about this, but I tend to think this is how it is.
I mainly write about my own self-knowledge process, metaphysical subjects, cinema, music, trauma & healing, and the connections between them.
In my writings I like to draw on the potential of contradictions (or apparent contradictions), as a means of exploring a multifaceted, multidimensional knowledge and vision, which follow a certain logic of experience and don’t always comply with rational logic; as well as a catalyzer of inner search and deep inquiry.
“Meaning lies in the confrontation of contradiction – the coincidentia oppositorum. That’s what we really feel, not these rational schemes that are constantly beating us over the head with the ‘thou shalts’ and ‘thou should’, but rather a recovery of the real ambiguity of being and an ability to see ourselves as at once powerful and weak, noble and ignoble, future-oriented, past-facing.” (Terence McKenna)
With some of the things I wrote in the past and which are still published I don’t resonate completely anymore, or I find them irrelevant now. If I keep some of these texts on the website, it’s because I still find parts of them valid. I have already said that, in this regard, I should look at my own writings the way a snake would look at the skin it shed. An equation wherein writing would be the process of shedding one’s skin.
See also: Writing process, thought process.
Path, dogma, discourse, doctrine
A label, a name, a concept, a discourse, a uniform, a ritual, a technique – all these are mere instruments.
With some paths, discourses and practices I resonate more than with others. I don’t define myself by any of them, nor do I identify completely with any of them.
I don’t take path and dogma to be one and the same thing.
If there’s a path that I’m devoted to, that is my own path.
“One’s own [prescribed] duty, even tinged with faults, is better than the duty of another, even perfectly performed. To die in the course of performing one’s own duty is better than engaging in another’s duties, for to follow another’s path is dangerous.” (Bhagavad Gita – III, 35)
Background
My main areas of interest include metaphysics and mysticism (with an emphasis on oriental approaches), cinema, music, ethnography/ethnology (African and oriental cultures), philosophy, literature, psychology, the individuation process, trauma healing. I have a special affinity for such-called world music and African & Indian cinema. I’m passionate about the syncretism and the various connections between, as well as the way in which different areas of knowledge converge (the relation between music and trance, the concept of processuality etc.)
I have also created a page dedicated to my interest in African cinema: African Explorations – A Cinematic Journey.
Endnotes
(1) The lyrics are part of Nirvana Shatakam by Adi Shankaracharya. This English translation is a combination of this version and this version.
(2) What is beyond any kind of language? Probably some kind of sublime inexistence.
When do conceptual distinctions stop being useful, functional, and meaningful? When do they start being a burden and a pointless obstacle, creating even more separation and neuroticism? Can anything actually be put into words? How does one define anything? How does one define what they do or what their work is about? And, for that matter, how does one put into words who and what they are?
Sometimes, with language, I feel as if I’m trying to catch something but it always slips away. Words are like nets – inefficient, blind, artificial nets. Everything that can be put into words or defined is subject to change and fluctuation. To define means to put limits.