Chernobyl of our Minds, Asphyxiation of Spirit

Spirit stagnates when surroundings grow stale for reasons of relinquishing the wanderer’s attitude to all things transitory and curling up in a nook and embellishing it with familiar objects whose disintegration is slower and perhaps longer lasting than ourselves. It gives a misleading impression of foreverness, an ersatz permanence against all evidence to the contrary in abundance and unison.

Worlds outside and within gather moss, lull us into slumber through shifting landscapes within and surrounding the boundaries we draw in ignorance around ourselves.

That you sit in a reverie contemplating the loss of language and metaphors, images and expressions strikes a cord. I am reminded of my studio apartment in Shanghai staring at the world below from my eighth-floor windowpanes… I sit and am taken over by an inexplicable force, to write down a list of things and objects, an inventory of presence inanimately weaving my nest of safety - tea leaves, porcelain cups, paper, pen, ink, sheets, fabrics, tobacco leaves and cotton-lit afternoons.

During those long days perched by the windowpanes watching the Sun rise, afternoons linger and dusk overflow before twilight, I could get a sense of my being, the vast dynamism of actions and impulses, an immense flood of existence diverted insidiously down thinner and thinner channels that are now reducible to a scroll on a five-inch screen and a tap on some icon…

A scroll and a tap, the visual field held hostage to a five-inch simulacrum, limbs stagnate, body lying on a bed like a patient struck by an interminable illness… so many days, months and years, I have lain like a sausage, enchained to this technological handcuff... a prisoner unaware of his incarceration. 

Previously, I imagine having a meal roused one to a walk to the grocers, an exchange of words, a touch of green leaves, fruits and vegetables, carrying it in a bag, impressing a crease upon fingers, shuffling the weight between two arms to give some rest to one as the other bears its burden, feet trodding away, eyes catching sight of scenes scented with everyday ordinariness. Older pedestrians, young office workers, drivers, cars, cyclists, familiar faces in strange postures, stranger shapes going about familiar motions...

Such scenes arouse little eddies of understanding and rivulets of compassion for others against that egotistical stream that assails one to a separateness, a grandiosity, and evokes day dreams and builds many a monument to one’s delusional greatness...

Sauntering is a soothing cure to the sickness of the Self. It levels the world somewhat, establishes a sense of shared being and belonging, enforces the truth of our dependence on others, and gently erodes the sandcastles of pride and arrogance.

These days, such occasions are few, and a sickness of the spirit has set in. Languishing in the dungeons of our mind... where the smartphone, like a clip, keeps our eyelids forcefully open, feeding an incessant sea of garbage, the refuse of so-called civilisation. One is reminded of the man in A Clockwork Orange, who allows for such humiliation. 

And how did we become foot soldiers of others’ degradation? In the name of economics, growth, job markets and pursuit of GDP (I have thought of it often, the Gross Delusional Product of our warped humanity) to reduce, belittle, and denigrate a vast humanity to a state of servitude no longer labelled as such but made more pernicious for the disguising label of gig workers and entrepreneurs… nothing enslaves more than promises of freedom. Adverts and slogans promising liberation are gateways to damnation...

Taught by our peers, elders caught up in the ever-same whirlwind of circumstances, and childish suspension of disbelief, I cannot say how many decades were spent in a blindness where every poison pill was justified in the name of breaking hold of old mores upon us... And I drowned deeper and deeper in the cesspool of humiliation… many years ago, you said to me, “we can only make a slut of ourselves,” and the truth of that remark strikes so true, a quick summation of our condition!

Lest this become an account of condemnation and be read as a polemical barrage against my age, I am grateful for the friends and peers who extolled, gently nudged me towards higher pursuits, despite my abrasive arrogance! You must remember how A. once told me to get rid of my fuck you face! I laughed at it then, and now can only see the truth and necessity of that admonition. 

Some innate trait in us, unattended to, un dealt with, in the circumstances, captured us bit by bit, minute by passing minute, aided by an insatiable lust for words, spinning phrases, convinced of their authority in the face of all virtues. Words and images luring us, and we relented, seduced by the charms of all that the senses could be offered, and the mind became both an overlord of our being while at the same time a slave of the age and its enticements…

Few feelings leave more of a bitter taste than that of being used, squeezed dry of vitality and made a cog in some vast machine milking us dry and too blind us to our own misery, shoving in our mouths and minds a bone to chew on, intoxicated by the taste of blood from our own bleeding gums… 

This past winter, I visited R. in Ranchi and was sipping on tea by one rapidly spreading stall of a tea shop franchise stores. Our conversation turned to breeding of cows… no longer left in nature, bred in captivity, and fed for the sake of being milked for our gluttonous hunger for milk, ghee, butter and supermarket aisles full of milk produce. Natural seasons and cycles are a lost memory for the bovines who have for such a long time made human civilisation possible by their flesh, blood and rivers of milk...

A doctor shows up with bull semen, R. tells me, arouses the tied up cow with finger strokes, some flicks to create an opening into the animal into which an intruding fist smears her womb with semen from an unknown, unseen, unencountered creature, all facilitated by an artificial arousal of her sexual and procreative urges… 

And she is to become pregnant, beget a calf, whose life is to be short if it is a he, no fields to be ploughed anymore... no need to feed the bull... no need to keep him alive... it does not add to the economy! He is slaughtered and, when possible, sold for his flesh in the marketplace.

If it is a she cow, she is fed, and milked until her own cycles of hideous insemination and giving birth in bondage repeat till her udders run dry and she is left to the cares of the streets... and then, she is let go to go hungry and die grazing on plastic... to become a feast of poisons for scavengers in the skies diminishing in numbers by the day.

You write to me of loss of language, I see a river of bleeding humanity. That which is good among us trampled, the animal instincts in us denaturalized to be made better use of... make us docile like the bovines... to see our spirits squeezed dry and our instincts beaten to pulp... to make us zombies perpetrating the horrors onward to others in a cycle of desoulation… and a philosophy of materialism to inure against pangs of guilt, to douse out the fires of moral revolt with sensual enticements!

To have friends in such times, a pair of listening ears, and hear from the murmurs of a heart struggling to make sense of it all, is a great consolation. To find people reaching deep in the reservoirs of spirit, to awaken and nurture the good, and see them enlivened and transformed in the process, gives courage.

Examples and teachings of the holy sages of antiquity gently show us the way, towards spiritual regeneration, towards benevolence and piety, a loosening of one’s bonds - in times when we are so smitten... by chains that grow tight and our instincts ensalved to a dose of euphoria... a pursuit of hedonia that proves insufficient time after time... that those distant voices of sageliness can still awaken us is no small wonder and a great beneficence.

So sit with yourself and let such good roots be watered and the chains slowly grow weak… i am here and cannot tell you how much it joys me to hear such words coming from you… i read them again and again…, and that i do not immediately respond to them, i hope you do not take it to be signs of ignorance and dismissal but a mode of silent listening, one that lets things seep deeper and is not in a hurry to respond from the superficial layers of being.