abhimannue

[abhimannue]

13 January 2022

i think that all of existence is a fractal loop of art creating more art. it’s the tension between love and conflict playing out into a forever. it’s a performance piece. we are created to create and our creations will create creations that create ad infinitum 

[abhimannue]

Just a 100 years ago, getting a full meal was a luxury for 95% of the population of the world.

Today 95% of the food available to us is considered unhealthy and fattening.

We went from showing gratitude and reverence to our sustenance to resenting and being guilty about what we put in our mouths.

How has one of the most fundamental joys of humanity, the act of eating hearty food with family and friends, become something we shirk away from with shame? Especially during festivals? Why are we being apologetic about enjoying ourselves? Why do we have to immediately confess to the person next to us that we’re going to make up for it by punishing ourselves extra in the gym next week?

Eat that rasgulla you asshole. You deserve that shit. Enjoy the fuck out of it.

Stop counting calories and count your blessing you chooth

[abhimannue]

How can I tell you what it’s like to be me? You haven’t been through what I have been.

I’ve had my freedom quelled by a tyrannical regime.

I’ve been abandoned by own blood.

I’ve seen buildings around me crumble into sands by a foreign power.

I’ve been silenced and I’ve been abused physically emotionally and spiritually. I’ve had every sense of security stripped off of me in decades of uncertainty.

Ive been humiliated and shamed for every aspect of my identity.

I spent 14 days with no food and sleep.

I walked aimlessly in the desert. I literally burnt my feet walking on live embers underneath my path.

And through the brightest of days and darkest hours I found a god and a fate smiling back at me.

I’ve had my heart put in a blender and made a smoothie by my lovers. I found the ecstasy you chase all your life in raves, in the giggles of child when he meets his laborer of a mother.

And despite everything you’ve done, I have done worse to you - in the words I have not uttered, in the deeds I have not done. How can I ask forgiveness for things you didn’t even realize that I had withheld.

And despite being this battered and bruised, I can tell you with no uncertainty - I still love you. I have nothing to prove to you. But I will give you my heart and my soul and my life. And I’m sorry that is all I can give, but that is all that I have left.

And as I stand now, stripped bare of everything, and you crack my nothingness open, you will see the light of a 1000 suns shine forth. I still love you. But I have nothing left to prove to you. I have nothing left to prove to you. I have nothing left to prove to you

[abhimannue]

The Bhagawat Gita as the Antidote to existentialism - Chapter 1 Verse 1

this is my trying to make sense of the Gita.  it’s poorly written. at this stage I’m just putting my points in words and then I’ll work on refining the language and structuring the essay better. Thank you for bearing with me while I’m on this journey.

The Bhagawat Gita opens with the lines

“Dhritrashtra Uvacha, Dharmakshetre Kurukshetre, samaveta yuyutsuvaha. Maamakapandavaschaiyva Kim karvata sanjayaha”. Without dissecting each phrase right at the get go, pay attention to the line “Dharmakshetre Kurukshetre” it means “the domain of action, the domain of war/battlefield”.

Hinduism doesn’t have one central Book like Christianity has The Bible and Islam has the Quran and Judaism has the Torah. 

Hindu texts start with the Vedas and continue into the Upanishads and the epics like the Mahabharata and Ramayana, Puranas, and then thousands of commentaries and other works by Hindu scholars throughout the millennia. To someone outside of the Hindu fold, this makes it impossible to know where to even begin when trying to understand the core Hindu thought and its essential teachings. Even a Hindu would find it nearly impossible to really explain what it means to be a Hindu. 

The Gita is a 700 verses and is set in the middle of the epic of Mahabharata.  It is the reporting of the dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna moments before the battle between Pandavas and Kauravas. It’s the biggest war of their time. It is narrated by Sanjaya to Dhritrashtra.

The Bhagavad Gita is considered the condensation of all the teachings of the Vedas and Upanishad, in essence making it a “User Manual of Hinduism” for those who want to lessons but don’t want to be a scholar.

The Gita is the first acknowledgment in Hindu philosophy that your life (which is the domain of action) is actually a battlefield where war is taking place, thus the importance of the line Dharmakshetre Kurukshetre

It sets the context of the entire book by saying that these lessons you are about to receive is to explain the way to win the war of life.

The primary characters of the Gita are 

1) Dhritrashtra the blind king and father of the 100 Kauravas who with their army are on side of the war, fighting against the Pandavas. 

2)Sanjaya is one of Dhritrashtra’s ministers. Sanjaya was granted divine vision (clairvoyance) so he has the ability to see anything that occurs anywhere in the battle field. Dhritrashtra uses Sanjaya as his eyes since he can’t see by himself.

3)Arjuna, one of the Pandavas in battle on the side of good, the greatest marksman and one of the greatest warriors in that universe. 

4)And Krishna who is the best friend, charioteer, and brother in law of Arjuna. While we know that Krishna is the incarnation of God himself, the other three characters just know him as Krishna their friend and advisor. Krishna’s role in the battle is to only ride the chariot of Arjuna, he has chosen not to fight.

The reason why there are 4 characters in the Gita is to illuminate the roles of the six aspects of our own identity. 

Dhritrashtra literally means Stronghold Nation or Unmoving Nation or Tight Nation (Dhrit is sanskrit is used to describe qualities of “holding on to something very firmly” so it could be used to mean stubborn, rigid, stiff, stifling), because a spiritually and intellectually blind man will use force and rigid structures and rules to command his kingdom or his life. This is us as a creature of habit shaped by our culture. Instead of seeing, we just follow rigid patterns. We rule ourselves like this because it’s easy, it’s stable, it’s stress free - which is a fine way to live if life was uncomplicated and and straightforward. But life has a dynamism that trashes such attitudes and methods which is why Dhritrashtra suffers his own might.

Sanjaya is our ability to perceive and report things. But Sanjaya is still just the messenger. Seeing is not in itself enough when it is detached from the power to rule. While Sanjaya and Dhritrashtra are not embodied as one being, the separation of our senses from our ability to act signifies us knowing what happens , but not allowing it to connect well enough to act upon the information. This is us the helpless observer.

Arjuna is us in two roles - the prince who is duty bound to carry out the war and the inquirer about the right motivations and attitudes to actually win the war. Arjuna thus fights an internal battle before he even enters the field to fight the battle on the outside.

Krishna is the two aspects of us, one as the charioteer, our attention, who leads us and navigates us through the paths of life to go to our missions and confront what we ought to. Krishna as the incarnation of God is also the aspect of us which is our higher consciousness who if listened to can guide us to the Ultimate Victory.

The six aspects of our identity are in a journey together to discover the ultimate existential truths. 

Back to chapter 1 verse 1

“Dhritrashtra Uvacha, Dharmakshetre Kurukshetre, samaveta yuyutsuvaha. Maamakapandavaschaiyva Kim akurvata Sanjayaha”.

“Dharmakshetre Kurukshetra” - from the moment you are born you are flung into the field of action which is the field of righteousness. It means that you are not meant to sit in the sidelines and watch and comment. you are meant to be in the arena of life and ready to fight. 

“Samaveta Yuyutsavaha” - “Assembled here in battle”.  Your conditioned social self that is run on traditions and habits (Dhritrashtra) himself will not fight in the war but he will want to have a point of view of others fighting battles on his behalf. Those who are blinded cannot fight. The rebels who are still awake are the ones who will take up this deed. 

“Maamakapandavaschaiyva” - “My sons and the sons of Pandu”. By differentiating the two sides as “my sons” and “sons of Pandu” he has already declared that he is not an impartial balanced observer. he is anxious of the fact that is his children against his brother’s, not his children against HIS OWN nephews. 

Within the first verse Dhritrashtra has displayed that he is set up for failure just by the act of being a partial, anxious, ignorant, second hand observer of the most significant moments of life. Sort of like how we sit at home and watching TV passively instead of going out there and living life. Or like how we take the circumstances of life as it is and accepting our fate and live in tight bubble instead of going out there and participating in the creation of our destiny by our own hands. 

And that’s just chapter 1 verse 1. 

[abhimannue]

What’s the hardest thing I can admit about myself?

I engage in “Subconscious self sabotage to fulfill the victim trope to garner sympathetic love.”

[abhimannue]

My soul has a bullshit detector.

when it realises that I'm living a lie or I'm complicit in untruth, it automatically disengages my mind, heart, and hands in order to prevent furthering the falsity. my Will is forever on the side of Truth and of Love, even at the cost of my own life. It does not compromise, it does not take prisoners.

Till this very moment, my psyche was torn between trying to accomodate the demands of a world of polluted ideologies & half measures, and my soul that demands nothing less than the relentless pursuit of excellence. as a result, I've let myself be reduced to scum in human form.

Today I face trial by fire. i am the the judge, I am the juror. As my sins burn away, as the inferno subsides, my destiny gets written with embers of what remains.

At the helm of this new dawn, I rise with the sun once again, bathed in the fire of redemption, renewed and ready. No more lies. No more half measures. No more compromises.

[abhimannue]

i want to melt into the night and become a part of the gold hues of city lights, become the crisp air, a whiff of smoke, a fleeting thought in the mind of a passerby

[abhimannue]

04/01/2021

The modern era is a different type of world. the heroes of the past who won the game may not even be able to launch today. the rules have changed, the conditions have changed, the target has changed, the methods have changed.

[abhimannue]

16/11/2020

Social Media isn’t the problem.  The reason social media is shit is because it exposes without filtration our own shitty nature by providing a free platform to say/show almost anything without real consequences

[abhimannue]

14/11/2020

A real father figure turns your fears into your fire

[abhimannue]

08/11/2020

Civilised society of free men functions because we trust individuals to take care of the corner they occupy. We are given the opportunity to be the master of our domains. If you want to be a king, be the king of everything in your control.If you do it better than anyone else, your domain will expand. You conquer the world by first conquering yourself. 

[abhimannue]

21st May 2020

"The key to great advertising is keeping the obvious in the background and telling people what they needed to know but couldn't know"

[abhimannue]

Calling out the bullshit cop-out tactics used by nihilists, to justify their own intellectual laziness in order to absolve themselves of any personal responsibilities of actually living in a dignified and meaningful life.

Oops. the title is a tad bit long. I guess i’m trying im trying to attract some trouble with this one. 

It’s very likely that since the time that cavemen were capable of thinking beyond where they can hunt down their next big buffalo, there was one lazy limping fool who just went “this is bullshit. How long are we going to hunt like this. Whats the point. we’re going to die anyway”. If the whole tribe thought that way we wouldn’t be here today like, 100,000 years or whatever later. That line of thought should have died with that damn fool - but that’s the problem with ideas. Even the bad ones outlive the brain that thought it, and it spreads faster than fucking ebola because words are disembodied vermin and ideas are non biological meme pathogens.  That idea of “whats the point, no one cares, it’s all made up, it doesn’t matter” has made it through to this day and age - made utterly poetic with Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot monologue by making the Human Endeavor sound banal and insignificant in the larger scale of things. Here’s the fundamental flaw in the assumptions on which Nihilistic, Moral relativistic (i’m going to call this group NRs for the ease) world view rest - that we are the end product, and that history ends with us, and life is going to confine itself to earth. It doesn’t consider the possibility that the human race has the potential to actually conquer the whole universe. It ignores everything about humanity that makes it light years ahead of our distant relatives. We have literally bent the laws of physics to use it to our advantage. In the cosmic scale we may be insignificant today. But look what we started as, what’s to say that we won’t one day be on every planetary system? Imagine if the first single celled organism on earth said, “fuck it, whats the point”. Using the same damn cosmic scale, our time has just begun. It’s just seconds that we’ve been here. Who knows where we can end up. To think we’re not significant speaks to the highest abstraction of Low Self Esteem issues. We’re going to go intergalactic one day. The whole “It doesnt matter because we’re going to die” is another way of admitting that significance can only assigned to an individual life starting at birth and ending at death. Bullshit. Individual life is a single unit in a continuous spectrum called Life with a big L and what we do has a ripple effect going into the future and around us. It speaks to the utter selfishness and self centered-ness and myopic vision of individual life if we assume that we are no more than our assigned 80 years. Afterlife or no afterlife. rebirth or no rebirth, what we do has butterfly effects. Our actions can resonate through time in ways we can’t even predict or imagine. Therefore the onus to live valiantly, to live big, to choose right (and to strive to be as aware as we can so that we can make the right choice) falls squarely on our shoulders. Nihilism, is a  convenient cop out that absolves you from doing the hard work of living well in an unpredictable and harsh world instead of being bold enough to face this son-of-a-bitch head on. The moral relativistic stand that follows from nihilism, that since “it doesn't matter, values don’t matter, so i can do what i want and you can do what you want who are we to judge is also Bullshit. Values have hierarchies. Some values are better than others. Our need to respect diversity has been pushed ahead so far that we are just afraid to challenge ethical standpoints obviously morally reprehensible. Philosophies and Religions are the amalgamation of values transmitted through stories in order to inform humanity about transcendent ideals that will maximize human prosperity for the longest possible extent. The ideas have evolved and will continue to evolve until we learn to how implement the most suitable ones for stages of development of the human civilization. The quest to identify the right code of moral living has not ended yet. “Anything goes as long as we’re chill” is just the refusal to do the hard work of examining the merit of a moral stand point over another and battling it out, out of fear of confrontation and disharmony. Political correctness has made us intellectually weak. I have to call out the bullshit of atheists here because their understanding of religion is too juvenile and they choose to debate/fight/attack bigots who actually are incapable of articulating the rationale behind their beliefs. Religion in its most benign for takes the most complex philosophies and turns them into codes of conduct and articulates them in story structures so that they are easy to transmit and imbibe. To dismiss religion is to throw the baby out with the bath water. The call of the hour is to tell the old stories with the words of today. The perennial truths will always be constant. 

Big Question – whats the point of saying this? What is the call to action? What are we to do with these facts?

1) Either nothing matters, or everything matters. We must live as if we are responsible for our lives and making it better instead of just getting by.

2) We must rediscover our value systems by wrestling with it everyday until we have re-established our own ethical standards we can apply to navigate our lives.

3) Use our imaginations to create new cultural artifacts that communicate the transcendent ideals to live by and strive to live up those ideals.

What will help achieve? A new humanity. A better humanity. Yes, of course it matters.  

[abhimannue]

Grandfather Time died today.

Grandfather Time died today.

I’m not very good with processing emotions so I have to write down my thoughts and let the words allow me to feel. Forgive my indulgence.

Grandfather Time died today.

I’m taking advantage of this moment to create something instead of grieving.  Forgive my self interest.

Grandfather Time died today.

I’m focussing on how this effects me instead of being helpful to my father who lost his father today. Forgive my self serving apathy.

Grandfather Time died today. I call him Time because he was a looming presence in the back of my head like a tyrannical inevitability that was benign but kept score. He would command from the top and keep his children in line without having to lift a finger. It was just the fear of time that reminded everyone of their mortality. That was it.

My father left home in his late teens to escape poverty and earn for that family of 7. He escaped the frying pan and jumped into the fire. No connections, no qualifications, no knowledge of the land, not knowing the language (This was during a time when there was no such thing as internet, mobile phones, google maps, AirBnBs, Ubers or internet Banking). That was the day Grandfather Time hung his hat 40 years ago and hasn’t worked a single day since then. Was he grateful? No, he was entitled. He felt like he deserved his new found luxury thanks to the labours of his first born who he had spawned and thanks to the exchange rate of foreign currency. This is an old story. This is a common trope for millions of families through the ages and it’s very likely that you too are a character in on of these stories. This is an old story. Grandfather Time had a choice to make. To become the benevolent overseer of incoming prosperity or to manifest his insecurities and keep an iron grip over his kingdom. I would be writing a different letter if he chose to be the first.

The last time I saw him he was a shrivelled bag of bones and confused moans. The persona left the body. There was only a wisp of a soul clinging on to inflict on itself the fear of the black abyss. Perhaps repentance, perhaps penance. But in that moment it became clear that sometimes facades have to drop to realise there was nothing there. The Monster was of my own making. A figment of my imagination created because it was too embarrassing to admit that the thing that I was afraid of was actually a mouse. Nearly 3 decades of anger, resentment, fear, and hatred boiled up in one moment when I heard that Time had moved on.

Grandfather Time died today.

When I was a toddler he would tell me that one day he would die but if I came to him on his death bed he would come back to life. Even if I had that power it is not a power that I wish to exercise.

My father suffers though. He was a dutiful son. He left his home to provide for his family. He suffered through isolation, persecution, alienation, and the final blow, rejection from the very family that he elevated. He suffers because the man who he did all of it for, for half his life, slipped away without saying a word to him. There is nothing I can say or do to give him back his best years. The best I can do is take up the mantle from him and let him hang his hat. It is long overdue.

Grandfather Time died today. The throne will be empty for a while. But the tyranny will live on through us. The best I can do is to channel my rage to become for my father, whatever his father could never be for him. 

Facades have to drop to realise there was nothing behind it. The Monster was of my own making. A figment of my imagination created because it was too embarrassing to admit that the thing that I was afraid of was actually a mouse. Not anymore. R.I.P

[abhimannue]

Sometimes it takes the facade to fall to realize that there was nothing behind it. The monster is your making because you're embarrassed to admit that it was a mouse that scared you. Never again. RIP.

[abhimannue]

A daring thought

What if the truth is that everyone deserves a dignified and beautiful life regardless of who they are and where they came from and what their craft is?

What if it’s not the size of your wallet but the contents of your heart that determines your value?

What if love has more powerful than the dollar? What if might bows down to compassion? What if success is a conversation to have with the mirror?

What if the laughter of the mob is a revelation of their own malice than a judgement of your own inadequacies?  These are not prophetic revelations. This is the regurgitation of obvious cliches.  

[abhimannue]

I want the world to look at me and feel the same rapture that I feel when I look at it