The Absurdist's lens

“Stayin alive” plays on as Moriarty waits on the rooftop for the final chapter with Sherlock and you can’t help but break into applause for BBC’s TV series Sherlock, the modern take on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s epic. For me, Professor Moriarty’s reincarnation in the Facebook generation is a digression from a crooked genius in the original to an Absurdist in motion. While Moriarty has the certainty of his inevitable death on the rooftop sequence, he only reflects the boredom his life has been thrust into dealing with the ordinary and in creating distractions to amuse him, Sherlock Holmes being the most recent one. Moriarty listening to Bee Gees while calling Sherlock an eternal naïve for not catching the binary translation of Bach’s tune is a near about Absurdist and certainly as close as this generation can witness one.

Mersault, the protagonist of The Stranger by Albert Camus is a character that confuses you with the decision of what sort of emotions to invest in it. Is it empathy or objectivity or distaste for a total display of callousness and a hardened matter –of- fact approach to life? You are left undecided throughout and that is the whole symbolism Camus wants to exhibit for Absurdism and that’s exactly where the novel becomes an existentialist/absurdist tour de force.  While the source of all philosophical thought is wonder (Aristotle’s inference), Absurdism is distinct for its almost mathematical approach and the fact that it starts with the death of all philosophies. The whole idea of Absurdism centers on the confrontation or constant opposition between two ideals- man’s incessant desire to find a meaning and significance to his life and the universe that is silent, cold and indifferent to a single man in larger scheme of things and whose existence is there without any inherent meaning. Thus, while accepting that human beings inevitably seek to understand life's purpose, Camus takes the skeptical position that the natural world, the universe, and the human enterprise remain silent about any such purpose. Since existence itself has no meaning, we must learn to bear an irresolvable emptiness. This paradoxical situation, then, between our impulse to ask ultimate questions and the impossibility of achieving any adequate answer, is what Camus calls the absurd. 

Albert Camus extends the idea in The Myth of Sisyphus “There is only one really serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that”.

What then is Camus's reply to his question about whether or not to commit suicide? What is the Camusean alternative to suicide or hope? The answer is to live without escape and with integrity, in “revolt” and defiance, maintaining the tension intrinsic to human life. Full consciousness, avoiding false solutions such as religion, refusing to submit, and carrying on with vitality and intensity: these are Camus's answers. This is how a life without ultimate meaning can be made worth living. As he said in Nuptials, life's pleasures are inseparable from a keen awareness of these limits.  In response to the lure of suicide, Camus counsels an intensely conscious and active non-resolution. Rejecting any hope of resolving the strain is also to reject despair. Indeed, it is possible, within and against these limits, to speak of happiness. “Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable” .

It is not that discovering the absurd leads necessarily to happiness, but rather that acknowledging the absurd means also accepting human frailty, an awareness of our limitations, and the fact that we cannot help wishing to go beyond what is possible. For Camus, happiness includes living intensely and sensuously in the present coupled with tragic (due to lack of inherent meaning), lucid, and defiant consciousness, sense of limits, bitterness, determination to keep on, and  refusal of any form of consolation. Camus is also similar in this to Nietzsche, who called upon his readers to “say yes to life,” and live as completely as possible at every moment. Nietzsche's point was that to be wholly alive means being as aware of the negative as of the positive, feeling pain, not shunning any experience, and embracing life “even in its strangest and hardest problems.

Now, returning to where I started: - rendering an absurdist theme to Shelock’s chief villain may or may not be accurate but definitely is a constructed meaning. Life, an abstract entity like fiction can also be rendered a constructed meaning but claims of a divine purpose or cosmic significance are nothing but a mere escape. Absurdism is one of the most attractive school of thought and resembles closely to Existentialism and Nihilism in its contents but divert significantly at the finer points. Here’s avery helpful chart I found: -

Life is no one single, simple thing, but a series of tensions and dilemmas. The most seemingly straightforward features of life are in fact ambiguous and even contradictory. Camus recommends that we avoid trying to resolve them. We need to face the fact that we can never successfully purge ourselves of the impulses that threaten to wreak havoc with our lives. Camus's philosophy, if it has a single message, is that we should learn to tolerate, indeed embrace the frustration and ambivalence that humans cannot escape.

Contemplation at the crossroad

Note to myself- Boredom has hit, yet again. So while I spend my time listening to Eric Clapton and digress the consideration of objectivity or the lack of it through variety of readings (short stories by Nikolay Gogol is keeping me interested these days), the fact has cultivated that abstract and intact are my ongoing relentless struggle with benign boredom. Now, on one side there are people who make me distraught with their endless talks of grandiloquent ambitions and sensational career pursuits; the other side is filled with my assimilation of spiritual garbage that has lost my enthusiasm and has brought me to a point where I have started asking the concreteness of all of it.

 I have grown up in a land where your credibility is measured by degree with no consideration of the fact that a certain dog food goes by the name “pedigree”! You need to grow up in India to understand this paranoia with having that xyz college brand while having no idea what that education is all about. It’s the fame derived from clearing some preposterous entrance exam so that your mother can have a smirk on her face when she talks about you with her social nest and your father can carry some significant ego about it.   Maybe, I am not a very ambitious fellow and I certainly do not see the point of going through all this unnecessary torment when whatever you would like to study is freely available on Internet or for a modest subscription of a nearby public library. That implies the only reason you want to have that price and glory tagged education is because you need a job to sustain yourself. Well, if the whole idea boils down to that then wasting day in and day out discussing just that is a sheer waste.

Let’s refresh ourselves and move on a bit to the spiritual side of life. Here’s a quote from George Harrison (lead guitarist of The Beatles):

“Krishna actually was in a body as a person ... What makes it complicated is, if he's God, what's he doing fighting on a battlefield? It took me ages to try to figure that out, and again it was Yogananda's spiritual interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita that made me realise what it was. Our idea of Krishna and Arjuna on the battlefield in the chariot. So this is the point—that we're in these bodies, which is like a kind of chariot, and we're going through this incarnation, this life, which is kind of a battlefield. The senses of the body ... are the horses pulling the chariot, and we have to get control over the chariot by getting control over the reins. And Arjuna in the end says, 'Please Krishna, you drive the chariot' because unless we bring Christ or Krishna or Buddha or whichever of our spiritual guides ... we're going to crash our chariot, and we're going to turn over, and we're going to get killed in the battlefield. That's why we say 'Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna', asking Krishna to come and take over the chariot.”

So anyone who has not yet read a book by Paramhansa Yogananda should definitely give it a try. More than anything it’s a treatise on faith and how faith itself is the miracle. For the last 5-6 years I have underwent a tumultuous ride where my mind has quizzed and questioned variety of spiritual perspectives. The problem being that I always wanted to reach somewhere through these self debates whereas the whole spirituality has been focused on making you contented in the state you are. To make the state you are in right now a joyous state. The whole act of surrendering to God or a divine idea or a philosophical ideology is to rest your mind at some place when its flooded and tired in solving a complex problem of life. When the mind has rested for a while, its faculties are renewed and the problem is solved, either through the acts of the renewed faculties or because time has healed the problem. Hence, the various interpretations of psychological time. I have come to conclude something- the more one intellectualizes, the more one moves in mind’s labyrinth. Maybe there is an end, maybe there is none. But the journey itself is ardently complex leading from one disappointment to another. In India, there is a lot of emphasis on searching for a spiritual guide. It is a great phenomena in itself  to be in close proximity with a Buddha or a Krishna but in my own search I have come across none. What I have come across is poor children standing outside the heavily adorned temples while rich hold their strict license on God through generous downpour of wealth. None of these religious facades have been able to address the issue of malnourished children and acute hunger of that old man sitting calmly in a corner. So what kind of God are we discussing here? A tyrant one? Well, there’s another option that I have seen most of the Indians I know have chosen- insensitivity. Blame it on Karma and endless life cycles and move on with your life to chase that dream to drive that fancy car or to put on the music and air conditioner and shut the semi tinted windows in case you already possess a fancy car. Or better still, not even chase a career but be delusional and believe to be spiritual and distinct. I have lost the point for such spirituality. I am going to take some break from that sweet word. I am sure I will re-visit it again.

As you can see I am at an interesting crossroad where a new direction at the intellectual level is sought. Perhaps, even that new direction shall become stale once that path would have been traveled. Perhaps, that’s life- you try to make it interesting everyday while your own mind makes it boring in few days.

Since we have had a hard discussion, let’s unwind with this beautiful Beatles song sung as a tribute by Eric Clapton to George Harrison. Here are two related beautiful moments:

After George Harrison's death , Dhani Harrison, his son, participated in the Concert for George on the first anniversary of George's death. The concert was organized by Eric Clapton and featured some of George's friends and collaborators, including former Beatles bandmates Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr as well as Clapton, Billy Preston, Ravi Shankar, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, Jim Keltner, and Joe Brown. Dhani Harrison played backup acoustic guitar for most of the concert. Before the finale, McCartney relayed to the audience, " With Dhani up on stage, it looks like George stayed young and we all got old"

On 14 April 2009, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce posthumously awarded George Harrison a star on the Walk of Fame. After Olivia Harrison (his wife) gave a short speech about her late husband, Dhani Harrison uttered the "Hare Krishna" mantra

Notes on Salvador Dali

                                       

     Have you ever displayed elephant skulls in front of your home or imagined being a fish, or find yourself fascinated with your own excrement? One very eccentric man did all these things, Mr. Salvador Dali, one of the most famous artists of the Surrealism time. But then, when was there a distinction between eccentricity and ingenuity. In a world now, where the quality of imitation decides the quality of art, Salvador Dali has been a refreshing break from all the left brainer's nonsense I hear everyday. Trust me, if you have never seen a Dali, then watch "The persistence of Memory" and let the Pink Floyd's song "Time" play in the background. Your mind will say a "thank you"!

My introduction to Salvador Dali and Surrealism in general is attributed to one very dear artist friend. Conversations with her made me read "The Secret Life of Salvador Dali" and since then I have believed that imagination is "real". A tough book book to read being as ambiguous as the man himself and being so whacky. Consider this, a man who dreams that his friend murdered him and then took his wife, goes on to have lunch with him the very next afternoon and then starts painting the dream!  I felt as if I was reading the incoherent ramblings of a man with a slight case of narcissism. This at times, made the book somewhat difficult to follow. But, I found it to be true "Dalinian" as he would say. Reading about the thought process of some of his work was most intriguing. He seemed to find the "art" in some of the most awkward places. 

Every experience, even seeing a hotel bellboy, spilling some coffee, or flatulence, had mystic and mythic meaning for him. Read just a few of his words, and you know that you can't just read his words. Ideas swirled around him in chaotic orbits, like his beloved flies. His writing makes me think of a show of fireworks, which an author tries to describe by tracing a few dozen especially brilliant sparks. Dali’s unique take on art makes his pieces worth looking at multiple times. Indeed, I can often look back on one of his works and notice a plethora of new things that I haven’t noticed before.For example, one of his paintings features a throng of nude women in strange poses. Take a few steps back or lose your focus on those three, and focus on the man in the front… What you’ll see instead of those women in the background is a macabre skull leering at you.

Three things stand out as invariant across Dalí's life, as he tells it. The second is Gala, his wife, muse, agent, and tour-guide to planet earth. The third is enthusiasm for everything, a degree of involvement with his world that permeates his vision and hearing, but also his senses of smell, touch, and all things of the body. That level of everyday intensity would stun most people in just minutes, and probably kill some. The first point in Dalí's world is, of course, Dalí

Dalí's achievement can be hard to grasp. It is all but de rigueur to say that it has been obscured by his flamboyant temperament and indefatigable self-promotion, and further trivialized by his pervasive influence - unequaled even by Picasso - that is not restricted to just legions of subsequent artists. There are entire genres of popular culture and kitsch that seem almost unimaginable without Dalí, including horror movies, science-fiction book covers and cartoons.

Dalí's paintings from the late 1920's and early 30's are among the most memorably, lusciously harrowing images of Surrealism. His serene yet nightmarish combinations of pristine planes and sudden eruptions of deformed bodies and tortured flesh are famously fraught with sexual anxiety and obsessions: onanism, scatology and fear of impotence. They affirm most explicitly Surrealism's first article of faith: that the uncontrollable forces of the unconscious discovered by Freud were the true governors of reality.

 The Persistence of Memory is one of Dali's best-known works, and as such, many people have most likely been exposed to it throughout their lives. Through its showings of soggy clocks and an Oceanside setting, the painting depicts Dali's view of how memory fades (or in this case, sags) over time. One thing an attentive viewer will note is the closed pocket watch, with its lack of distortion, implies Dali's view that memory can only be distorted if open (shared with others), rather than closed. If you look closely, you can see Salvador Dali's self-criticism come through in a brilliant way, in the central figure of the painting. The background of the painting, in contrast to the rest of Dali's works, are not terribly surreal, and indeed are quite beautiful in the more traditional sense, and they depict the shores of his native Catalonia. Surrealism is an art form which seems to be quite "love it or hate it". For me personally, I love this piece, though at first I found it quite visually disagreeable. Lovers of more conservative art will most likely not enjoy this piece, as it is highly experimental.

No matter how realistic or well done a piece is, the best pieces are always the ones that reflect personal feelings. Humans are naturally social people that communicate with each other verbally, physically, mentally and emotionally. If a work of art lacks all of the above, then it’s a dead piece of art that isn’t as appealing to the eye. When humans can sympathize with a piece of art, it makes the work all the more great. Dalí portrays his emotions well throughout his paintings in almost any painting he does. Anyone can look at his paintings and tell what his relative mood was while painting the picture.

One catastrophic event in Dalí’s life that is a turning point in his art is the death of his mother. The death of his mother causes him to change his styles from painting portraits and landscapes to borrowing many other styles and began reflecting his tormented soul. His love for his wife is also portrayed in his painting Galarina. His feelings of depression led him to painting gloomy pictures. Although not very easy to find the emotions Dalí expresses in his art when compared to Van Gogh for instance, it’s his feelings that are often being expressed in his paintings.

In all of Dalí’s works he clearly defines the idea of surrealism art. All of his art could be a good exemplar of surreal art..

 Salvador Dalí may not top everyone's list of modern artists, but he played one to the hilt. He treated modern painting as an experiment—often as not, an experiment in human flesh. He dabbled in avant-garde movements just long enough to break away, in politics just long enough to change sides, and in popular culture just long enough to have a run-in or two with the producers. He returned to a stock of images as they slipped from radical to obsessive to a cliché. He flaunted his talent, his virtuosity, and his command of illusion every step of the way. And all these extended to the artist's persona as much as to his work. From his melting watches to his long waxed mustache, Dalí became a public figure and a public favorite, like Picasso without the difficulty of Cubism. The profile will not fit everyone's idea of modern art. 

The “BIG-SMALL”complex

Be it the Hulk from Avengers or the Kraken from  Pirates of the Caribbean, they all suffer from the common themes of sadness, loneliness and episodes of depression and can easily be characterized into some type of bipolar disorder. Well, before you conclude that I have completely lost it(not hard to imagine with few of last blog posts) I would like to warn you(ok! Plead) to  read this post till end.

My readers (if at all there is a community like this!); you all are aware of my intense fascination with walrus, octopus and snakes (Yeah, I kissed one snake while I was in India....ok confession, not on lips!). But, the theme is that I thought about my intense predilection for these majestic beasts and I realised that it stems from something we share in common- the small complex.

Inferiority complex and superiority complex are like two sides of the same coin and what an epitome of man's duality  it is. The very manifestation of one is the implicit manifestation of another. I believe that an inferiority complex is one of the nastiest psychological traits you can have. Seriously, it will mess your life up in a sadistic way. There’s a big catch to overcoming an inferiority complex: you have to understand its genuine cause. The apparent cause seem to be the fact you are inferior to others around you in a particular manner: you’re short, you’re fat, you’re bold, you’re poor, you’re less educated. You see, we are all inferior to other people in some ways, and superior in others. We all have our combinations of qualities and flaws and overall we’re not that different from each other. My point is that a certain flaw is not a realistically sufficient reason to have an inferiority complex.

The real cause of an inferiority complex has little to do with reality and it has a lot to do with how we process it. In order to get an inferiority complex, you have to dramatize in your head the meaning of a certain flaw.You have to tell yourself that, for example, you are so short you look like a midget, that everybody is making fun of you and that this is intolerable.  That is the point when you introduce God and other fictional characters in your head and start your private conferences.

Ok, now for some intellect excretion I would like to throw in a little Freud. He says-“Man is the most irrational being”. Sigmund Freud never looked at the nature of man in the positive direction. Instead, he saw that the way man uses the id component, has adversely influenced the right and proper adjustment of his inward being, using the ego to say he is justified for doing wrong and thus, making reality a case of cruelty. Man has various needs such as; psychological, physical, social, emotional and spiritual. As the needs of man plague his existence, in order to be comfortable, he must device a measure of satisfying his demanding needs. In the process of achieving this, man becomes logical, rational, mentally healthy and conscious in using his perspective powers of making decisions.

What is in the atom, is in the whole; what is in the micro, is in the macro; what is in the smallest, is in the biggest; what is in the drop, is in the ocean. once it is remembered that in the micro is hiding the macro, the way is paved for man to remember his own self potential. There is no reason for man to feel that he is small. There is no reason for even the smallest to feel small.It is necessary at this point to keep in mind the opposite side also that even the vastest, the biggest does not need to be filled with ego because even the smallest possesses the same. If an ocean becomes full of ego, it is madness because what it has is also possessed by a small drop. There is no reason for even the tiniest to feel inferior and there is no reason for even the biggest to be full of ego.Neither inferiority has any meaning nor superiority has any meaning. They both are meaningless. You may have heard the famous phrase of Omar Khayyam: ”Dust unto dust”; that dust returns into dust and there is nothing else to it.

It is necessary to remember that the whole immensity exists within man; it is necessary to remember that the Divine exists within man, so that he does not become inferior. And the interesting thing is that in order to destroy his inferiority complex, man falls into the fantasies of a superiority complex.

He starts finding ways to suppress the inferiority complex. When he feels inferior inside, he starts making wealth so that having amassed the wealth he may show the world and may feel himself too, that not only am I not nothing, I am quite something. The inferiority complex rushes and man starts climbing thrones so that standing on the throne he may declare, ”Who says I am nothing? I am something.”

Inferiority itself becomes the race for superiority. So, all the people who go in the mad race of becoming superior are necessarily suffering from an inferiority complex inside. Adler has said many amazing things. His statements are significant. He has said that often those who come first in running races, are the people who limped in their childhood. And those who become very skillful in music are those who were a little hard of hearing in their childhood.And those who become presidents, prime ministers, are often those who sat on the back benches in school. Because of that hurt of inferiority they set out to prove to the world that they are something; they want to show that they are something. Hence, if a politician suffers from inferiority, there is nothing strange in it. A worm goes on eating him up inside that he is nothing. And it hurts the mind, it puts one in difficulty, causes him to run. When Lenin sat on a chair, his legs did not reach the ground. The upper part of his body was long and his legs were short. When he sat on a chair, his legs could not normally touch the ground.

Now coming back to the octopus and walrus fantasy I have (started with the Beatles song!). Well, it has stemmed from the appreciation of the fact that despite being so majestic, they are so happy, complex-free and innocent. They are so full of life. So is the ant or the fly, not messed up for their size. Man must be a private joke between these animals. They must be making so much fun of the irrationality and paranoia of man.

                                      Darkness- the permanent trick

      The daylight increases rapidly. Not a window opened, not a door stood ajar; it is the dawn but not the awaking. Not a living be­ing in the cross-roads, which gleamed white in the light of the sun. Nothing is so mournful as this light in deserted streets. Nothing was to be seen, but there was something to be heard.

   Darkness is not a mere absence of light. It is the surrender of light. You were brought up with the notion of good always defeating evil and you never doubted as everything around was given the manifestation based on this ideology. From the decrepit of Dostoevskian world to the magnificence of myths, everything was given the same flavor. And you casually forgot that it is the dark shadow that stays with you in the day and it is that very dark shadow that transforms into the color of night. Why? Why are you so obsessed with light and good? Is it because if the obsession is taken away, it shall reveal the paradox?

I was born in the rut of darkness and I grew up to embrace it. Not the victim of dark but its carrier. It has been entrusted with me. I am the Satan who has lived timelessly while Gods were put on cross. And I smiled, mocking at your defiance to protect an idea which is pseudo like your very being. If your shadow is not real, why can’t you get rid of it? Why you run to light to get rid of it and then again it creeps up on you. Who wins? Light??

     I am often pointed out adjectives by commoners around me and its been centuries I have sat in their minds and ruled their actions. I made them self indulgent fools awaiting a house of paradise while I went and destroyed the garden and the house that prided in being hailed as the paradise. It is not my vanity that calls them commoners but their inferiority that exudes from them from the very second they wake up in the morning. I have heard them smile and say to themselves when they wake up every morning- “I am awesome, I have a great life, what a beautiful day, blaah blaah”. And there I am in their head as a doubt-“Is it? Do you really have a wonderful life? Why are you assuring yourself then?”.  I rule their aura, their vibes and they cast me aside with the self manufactured anecdotes on goodness. Now, who is being arrogant?

     I am your disorder, your legs cut into two, your hands cut and tied to your eyes, your mind torn apart in gutters and rose garden. Worthless is your life, if the struggle to show me wrong is taken away from you. You hold hands with your so called lovers, you walk between your parents and revel in the artifice of light while I walk right behind you. I allow for your indulgence and you take it granted to be rude.

      Do you understand the paradigm of darkness? You don’t because it has no paradigm. Structures are your consolations to yourself while darkness is the chaos you run from. Have you ever stayed in a dark room with your eyes closed? Gentlemen, that is the real infinite and eternal. Your light shows you the opulence and destitution of the world, the magnificence and the misery, the music and the cries while darkness shows you nothing. Just lets you be in its arms. But you run and ridicule this immaculate truth and then you cry of your doom all the time. You try to find faults in me to hold yourself at a higher pedestal. And I laugh at your misery of not being able to come out of an incessant wheel in which you travel up and down but always remain at the same point.

From his brimstone bed at break of day
A walking the DEVIL is gone,
To visit his little snug farm of the earth
And see how his stock went on.

As he went through Cold-Bath Fields he saw
A solitary cell;
And the Devil was pleased, for it gave him a hint
For improving his prisons in Hell.

                                                                    - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Time, Color, God and other such lies

Can you see Satan standing outside the window? Can you? No? Damn you! You need to stop listening to lies music feeds your ears. You absolutely need to. You need to understand that time springs to life when the clock stops working. When clock runs, time is dead…so damn dead. Now, that was William Faulkner in Sound and Fury elaborating on clock’s music.

         What do you want to know about time? It’s a lie. A lie that has been tricked upon you and has made you a diabolical giant, with your left hand holding gloom and your right hand holding joy.what do you hold when your hands are holding something? Nothing Sir, absolutely nothing. What a matter of great tragedy it is that your heart holds nothing now. It can only be burdened now-burdened by joy, burdened by gloom, burdened by burdens but only burdened not hold. Come to think of it, the whole heart is a myth, a lie that has passed on for centuries.
       What do you want to know about colors? It’s a lie told to you for centuries that has bestowed you with bags of despair in Van Gogh. Poor soul who lived in hunger for being obsessed with a lie. The color, the lie. The time, the lie. Color, lie, time. 

      Now, both time and color are despicable and crude manifestations of the heart? Now, people say time to be manifestation of mind but I think its heart because when you disconnect heart then you see the irrationality of the perceived time. Till then, there is a veil. What about heart? An organ that deceives you with fluctuating, fleeting emotions? Can you put your belief in an organ as vagabond as that? Even if you do put your belief, what is belief? A fabrication, an illusory concept of heart? If some part of you wants to contradict the aforementioned sentence, and then let me tell you that even the tiny source of your contradiction is based on some belief. A belief that made you think that earth is held by turtles all the way down. Man is the mystified, discombobulated specie among the totality of species. Isn’t that a terrific sense of humor the creator has? Oh, come on! Even your God is a dead, hollow concept. It’s a belief, a lie. I am ridiculing you and me with that outrageous word – Creator. You should be polite and humble and ask the authorities to remove that sacrosanct word from the dictionary.  

        So, now all you want to ask is what is the truth? Well, Nothing….Nothing is the only truth. Rather, nothingness is a better word. When you understand this truth, the lies transform to truth in a beautiful way. In a way, that there is a merger of truth and lies and you can’t distinguish.

        All the religions believe that God created the world and also mankind. But if you are created by someone, you are only a puppet, you don't have your own soul. And if you are created by somebody, he can uncreate you any moment. He neither asked you whether you wanted to be created, nor is he going to ask you: "Do you want to be uncreated?"

        God is the greatest dictator, if you accept the fiction that he created the world and also created mankind. If God is a reality, then man is a slave, a puppet. All the strings are in his hands, even your life. Then there is no question of any enlightenment. Then there is no question of there being any Gautam the Buddha, because there is no freedom at all. Then there is no question of sin or virtue, no question of sinners and saints. A puppet cannot be responsible for its actions. Responsibility belongs to someone who has the freedom to act.

   That is the basic implication of Friedrich Nietzsche's statement: God is dead, therefore man is free.  
         But Nietzsche's statement is bound to be only one side of the coin. He is perfectly right, but only about one side of the coin. He has made a very significant and meaningful statement, but he has forgotten one thing, which was bound to happen because his statement is based on rationality, logic and intellect. Man is free, but free for what? If there is no God and man is free, that will simply mean man is now capable of doing anything, good or bad; there is nobody to judge him, nobody to forgive him. This freedom will be simply licentiousness. There comes the other side. You remove God and you leave man utterly empty. Of course, you declare his freedom, but to what purpose? How is he going to use his freedom creatively, responsibly? How is he going to avoid freedom being reduced to licentiousness? Remove God – that is perfectly okay, he has been the greatest danger to human freedom – but give man also some meaning and significance, some creativity, some receptivity, some path to find his eternal existence. 

             Zen is the other side of the coin. Zen does not have any God, that's its beauty. 

            Friedrich Nietzsche in his last phase of life became almost insane. He was hospitalized, kept in a mad asylum. Such a great giant, what happened to him? He had concluded: "God is dead," but it is a negative conclusion. He became empty, but his freedom was meaningless. There was no joy in it because it was only freedom from God, but for what? Freedom has two sides: from and for. The other side was missing. That drove him insane. 

         Emptiness always drives people insane. You need some grounding, you need some centering, you need some relationship with existence. God being dead, all your relationship with existence was finished. God being dead, you were left alone without roots. God was non-existential, but it was a good consolation. It used to fill people's interior, although it was a lie. But even a lie, repeated thousands and thousands of times for millennia, becomes almost a truth. God has been a great consolation to people in their fear, in their dread, in their awareness of old age and death, and beyond – the unknown darkness. Lies can console you, you have to understand it. In fact lies are sweeter than the truth. Gautam Buddha is reported to have said: "Truth is bitter in the beginning, sweet in the end, and lies are sweet in the beginning, bitter in the end" – when they are exposed. Then comes a tremendous bitterness, that you have been deceived by all your parents, by all your teachers, by all your priests, by all your so-called leaders. You have been continuously deceived. That frustration brings up a great distrust in everybody. "Nobody is worthy of trust...." It creates a vacuum. 

      And it is not only Friedrich Nietzsche, so it cannot be said that it was just an accident. Many intellectual giants find themselves in mad asylums or commit suicide, because nobody can live in a negative darkness. One needs light and a positive, affirmative experience of truth. Nietzsche demolished the light and created a vacuum in himself and in others who followed him. 

       A whole philosophy has grown in the West: Nietzsche is the founder of this very negative approach to life. Soren Kierkegaard, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Marcel, and Jaspers, and Martin Heidegger – all the great giants of the first half of the 20th century – were talking only about meaninglessness, anguish, suffering, anxiety, dread, fear, angst. And this philosophy has been called in the West existentialism. 

        I agree with the destruction because what was consoling man was only lies. God, heaven, hell – all were fictions created to console man. It is good they are destroyed, but you are leaving man in an utter vacuum. 

       It is one extreme to believe in God; it is another extreme not to believe in God, and you have to be just in the middle, absolutely balanced. Atheism becomes irrelevant, theism becomes irrelevant. But your balancing brings a new light, a new joy, a new blissfulness to you, a new intelligence which is not of the mind. That intelligence which is not of the mind makes you aware that the whole existence is tremendously intelligent. It is not only alive, it has sensitivity, it has intelligence. 

     You are not accidental. Existence needs you. Without you something will be missing in existence and nobody can replace it. That's what gives you dignity, that the whole existence will miss you.

When you see the rose flowers blossoming, have you ever thought that all this color, all this softness, all this beauty was hidden somewhere in the seed? But the seed alone was not enough to become a rose; it needed the support of existence – the soil, the water, the sun. Then the seed disappeared into the soil and the rosebush started growing. Now it needs air, it needs water, it needs the earth, it needs the sun, it needs the moon. All these together transform the seed which was almost like a dead piece of stone. Suddenly a transformation, a metamorphosis. These roses, these colors, this beauty, this fragrance, cannot come from it unless existence has it already. It all may be hidden; it may be covered in the seed. But anything that happens means it was there already – maybe as a potential.

poems and haiku

1)  Crying about your crying

     You never felt me crying

     In that lonely dark night

     I fought the demons of the light

     Vanishing from my sight

     Cold love, dim light

2) That noisy cafe

    A little time after dusk

    Two lost friends talking

    I look on

    Nostalgia, beauty

3) Dust storm, other side of my window
   Chaos, in the heart
   storm looks at the chaos
   chaos looks at the storm
   Hazy window, Hazy eyes

4)My shadow and I
    A day passes by
    Green trees with birds
    white clouds and the blue sky
    Solitary, I

5)See me nowhere, see me now-here

   The hours pass by, seconds don’t die

   The venom, the eye and I sigh

   A poem goes to dust, song lives by

   Wondering and wondering I cry

   Are you the you? Am I the I?

6) That year of the Satan

    That month of February

    The one with 28 moons

    And a night of full eclipse

    The Year I was born

    When the Fish ate rain, thunder