rAvaNa dies again
Ravana Dies Again
I remember asking my father after watching Ramlila twice: but they already killed Ravana last year and why did they kill him again? And my father said: you, son, have to kill Ravana again and again till the end of time. I simply failed to comprehend his statement and even forgot about this conversation. After five decades, I came to realize its depth and fathom meaning of repeated death of Ravana.
I do not know of the original Ravana. He could simply be an archetype. We may have always simulacra to burn. But it is the simulacra that is infused with life and that haunts us in our dreams and that shakes our reality. Like a shadow, Ravana catches us and drives us insane of power.
Demons are not all bad. For look at the advocates of Ravana today. They are mostly decent people. They just want those who do not like them or do not think like them or do not speak like them to be killed. They are otherwise completely rational. You can see Ravana screaming through the lynching mobs and masking themselves in the animal hides. These are not the masks to cover their identity but only to reveal the bestial within.
All Ravanas are stuffed effigies. They lack originality. All Ravanas are clowns as they lack authenticity. But all Ravanas pose an antithesis to humanity. Living human is about confronting our own negation, while alive, to see how our shadows are more alive than ourselves. If you think effigies are lifeless, you should talk to a Voodoo priest or an Tantric practitioner for that matter.+++(5)+++ Entities come to life the moment living beings impose life there. They animate when we want them to. And at times, our shadows confront us and force us to infuse life in the shadows, letting Ravana come back to life.
For every generation, they have this pious task to burn the effigy of Ravana. For Ravana dies again and again.
Tulsi
Very little she knew that she was tricked. She had married a demon, a mighty one named Jalandhara. Her real name was Vrinda. One day Vishnu came when her husband was out fighting with Shiva. She could not resist the charms of Vishnu and she fell for him head on. For Vishnu, it was just another day in his cosmic play of maya. When he was leaving, she curses him, thy shall be reborn a rock, you heartless wretched one! Vishnu says smiling, you then will come to rescue me, born as Tulsi the plant.
Ghost memory
I just remembered when I was a ghost. I do not think you can fathom what it feels like, for you have never been a ghost.
Those were the days I used to spend the summer in my sister’s house and every dawn I would go to the banks of Trishuli and meditate on my favorite rock for a few hours. My meditation dress was white.
One morning when I was done with my meditation and was stretching my body, I heard screams across the river. Through the gentle vail of fog, I could see some people running in different directions. Since the sound of the river was strong, I could not hear the words.
That evening, I heard the news that by the banks of Trishuli is a white ghost.
Now you know what I am talking about.
tantra and rules
Many people are driven into tantra for its misnomer: if I follow tantra I can escape all rules, all disciplines, and can do whatever I like. And yes, you can. Who is ever going to stop you?
But even when you practice tantra, if you drink poison you die. You are not growing wings to fly off a cliff because you have recited so many mantras. If you want to remain calm, you have to follow sattva, and if you want to be agitated, you have to follow rajas, and if you want to go inertia, you follow tamas.
These are the universal laws, and you repeating some mantras is not going to change these. You need to understand that tantra stands on top of Sāṃkhya, like a mansion on top of a solid rock. You cannot blast the rock and fantasize the mansion floating up in the sky. If you ground your practice on real expectations, you will never be disappointed.
Crazy religion
They say, video games are to blame. I wonder, how much video games these ISIS and Qaeda Mullahs play?
Corona spread
Sustained denial of science by the religious organizations is having a direct measurable effect in the way corona is spreading through the church and the mosque. Religious leaders have defied the lock-down and found ways to gather their followers, and inadvertently transmitted the virus. someone should document all these incidents for a systematic anthropology of horror.
Quotes
“To seek encounter with an other, then, is very different from seeking to know it, at least when knowledge is understood in scientific sense. . . To treat a person as an object of investigation in this sense however unquestionably violates their subjecthood; it is to treat them as pure externality, infinitely open to outside scrutiny, their being not in any sense their own.”
Freya Mathews, For Love of Matter, p. 77.
Indigenous knowledge
while the arguments are valid that we should incorporate indigenous knowledge in our education system, the bigger problem is, these studies have themselves been the harbinger of imperialism and colonialism. the problem is not about what they say, it is about their stubbornness to accept a real difference, real epistemic difference that constitutes cultural difference. and their presumed ownership of the truth.
Eating others
when we stop eating other sentient beings, we will not just be the human beings, we will also have discovered humanity within us.
The Feast
Rituals are incomplete without a feast, whether the occasion is marriage or death. In our work life, we call the feast a conference. This is where the bards sing their best song and the stage glows in their glory, the audience claps in amazement, and the moment of work, the moment of slavery as if becomes a defining mark of liberation.
The ancients tied their words in chandas, which simply meant rope but referred to the meter. When the masters changed the fetters, the beasts enjoyed their fancied freedom and composed meaningless songs that they sang with no melody.+++(4)+++
The ancients used the vac to confront their ego, assumed its transcendence that they discovered in the fettered speech. The new ones renounced the truth at the cost of the shadow, decimated the originals to propagate the simulations, and they themselves transformed into never-ending simulations.
The only thing that endured was the feast. The kings were long gone and so was the meaning. Life assumed its monotony but what endured was the hunger.
When we learn to quench our thirst by a mirage, we find ourselves in eternal thirst. This is eternal to us, as it lasts till our being in the world. The ancients battled over words, and so do the modern ones. The ancients recognized it as a play, a means to please the kings, seduce their wives, and confirm the number of cows. This goes the same with the moderns. We literally have to count our cows and whether they are healthy or not is dependent upon the peer-reviews. +++(Rishis mapped the speech with cow.)+++
And there are always interlopers wanting to belong somewhere and feeling important enough to exist. And the vendors. In the past, they used to trade the soma plants with their young cows. Once the fetters were removed, networks became the trading coins. It is after all the soma that the ancients sought after, and this is the same soma that we seek today. Only that they captured the real cows and squeezed the real soma. All we have left is their simulations.
The Gates
The vertical split that resembles the temple structure if both sides merged is a common feature of the Balinese temples. I was first perplexed and later thrilled entering the Japanese temples guarded by Kongorikishi who are articulating the first phoneme in Sanskrit, “a” and the last “h” with an actual vocalization of the silent “m”. And then noticed terror, arousal, and humor, and occasionally bewilderment or vismaya in the gestures expressed and iconized at the gates. There are of course animals, sometimes even their hierarchy, and the skulls of death. Philosophers so far have focused either on what lies within or what stays out and is purged out, but I suspect not enough time has been spent in meditation upon the gates that are neither inside nor outside.
First of all, we dogmatically think of the gates as the means to enter and forget that we exit by the same means. We never wonder, “where are the gates?” They are neither inside nor outside. And this does not mean that there lies a separate plane, a distinctive category, a different entity, that is neither and both.
No other culture has mastered diversity as much as the Balinese culture by preserving difference in the cultural modes of expression. The bewilderment expressed by the glaring eyes, the horror expressed by the fangs and the disgust by the deformities or even the perplexity by the stretched tongues that are sometimes stuck together have one thing in common: they are all subsumed by humor. The guards here are not just ferocious warriors carrying weapons but are in ecstatic laughter while at the same time ready to strike. We can see the eros subsuming other emotions in Khajuraho or in some temples in Nepal. Most often, the gates are guarded with terror, the means that engender fear.
The gates thus expunge what is not absorbed within. And oftentimes it is the beast, the animal that comes out, not fully vanquished or erased but not absorbed within. And occasionally finds some space in some corners, again as the guards, like the bull of Shiva or the lions of Durga.
The gates are the epistemic windows through which the self encounters the other, as it is at the gates that the self becomes the other, the inside discovers its externality, and it is where the outside finds its internality. The gates are the faculties, the most tangible parts of the flesh that the self touches and becomes one: this is at the gates that the self and the other meet, the flesh becomes the self and the self discovers its carnality.
The guardians of water are oftentimes on top of the gates. There may also be Garuda the bird that carries nectar and defeats death, expressed by the snakes. The gates are where the jouissance flows uninterrupted. When Abhinava talks about prakasa and vimarsa expressed by “a” and “ha”, he does relate the deepest of the organs, the skin, the carnality of the jouissance+++(=joy)+++, expressed in the orgasmic expression of “ah”, the same jouissance rediscovered by the Bodhisattvas while guarding the temples and the same joy felt by the guardians at the gates of the Balinese temples.
There is nothing when we look through inside: as if language of images is finite and finds its expression only when it is entering. It is in the entering within that the spheres appear as spheres, that the in-between manifests as if some other planes, but there are no layers from inside to actualize the world. The gates thus are ever-open wounds that are merely expunging what goes within. And what is expunged is not vanquished but are conserved in the skins, the walls of the temple. And this is where the sacred resides. Inside is nothing; it is not the thing that we encounter within. The sacred lies at the gates, the skin, that is an open-system, expressed by the wide-open eyes and the agape mouth.