Full Circle

It was a pleasant evening. It was summer but there was no sign of it in that mountain evening. On the first day of August, as I stood near the ITI gate, I was sure of my purpose but not of the force that gave it its potency. I had to meet her, talk to her and tell her something of the circumstances which made my life so very different from when we had last met. It was a hopeless endeavor from the very beginning. A conversation requires receptivity in the listener. I simply could not accept that she had no patience for me though everything pointed to that. When we had last met four days back and she had taken me to her home, the air was that of cold formality and discomfort. But wasn’t there one moment of that same old empathy and deep bonding? If only one moment. Wasn’t she my angel for that moment of gaze and that second of concern? Was she not still the woman I had loved to the point of ecstasy though that love had long been mired with naked jealousy and spite? If she no longer meant anything to me, why had I come back to Solan, the town replete with her memories, and why was I waiting for her to come back from her internship. The point I had chosen was strategic. Whether she got down at the Ganj bazaar bus stand or the New bus stand, she would have to pass from ITI gate to reach her home. This was the third evening I had waited for her. On the previous two evenings, my choice of location hadn’t been strategic enough and I must have missed her because she got down at the wrong bus stand. But today I was determined to meet her and all roads converged at the point where I was standing. I could have called her no her home number but I wanted to talk to her face to face, to let my facial expressions show my sincerity and to look into the visage that had inspired poetry in me. I was not in the best of health. Something was wrong with my stomach and I had an inkling of a fever. I was unshaved and unwashed, wearing a shabby shirt. But appearance hardly mattered to me then. As the evening begun to darken and I had almost lost hope, suddenly she appeared in all her enigmatic beauty. Wearing a light salwar kameez, she was coming towards me. I hadn’t seen her in salwar kameez ,the traditional north Indian dress, since we were classmates, ten years ago. She saw me and her gaze showed discomfort and even a hint of contempt. For she was not alone. Walking side by side was a young man, dressed in a neat pair of fashionable clothes and looking foolishly handsome and charming, if you know what I mean. He seemed taller, neater and more broad-shouldered than me. He even seemed more handsome than me. Now, reasonably I should have done one of the only two decent things to do. The best would have been to intercept them and politely tell her I wanted to talk to her. The second best would have been to keep standing there and let them pass. What I did was the worst possible. I followed them while she knew I was following them. I crossed them near the Traffic chowk and our eyes met, my eyes were a mixture of hatred and pleading and hers of contempt and some other emotion I cannot fathom. I stood still. I saw her conversing with her man and the way she looked into him, the way her gaze completely dominated him and perfectly flowed her being into his being, made me sure they were lovers whose love had stabilized into a shared rhythm when one body talks to another body without any language. I stood stupidly gazing at her against my better judgment. The two of them stopped near the DC office and were having some conversation when suddenly she pointed her finger at me and her lover followed her finger to look at me. And I was looking at her and her pointed finger and the strange mix of ugliness and authority which her face seemed to have become. She seemed to be gesturing me to come to them. It was all dizzy, like a dream. But I saw clearly that she was gesturing me to come to her. I even heard her command for me to come. Like a servant, I moved towards the woman I had loved with all my heart for the last ten years.
‘He is Aman.’ She told her man. ‘So, he is Aman.’, his voice seemed weak and strangely vulgar to me, whether because it really came from a weak man or because of my spite for him is something I can’t ascertain with the intense subjectivity which colors such encounters. ‘Meet Bhanu’, she said to me and after seeing the disgust in my face to which she responded with an expression which was a cross between disgust and spite. I was looking at the ground because my face was full of such hatred and such a realization of my weakness and defeat that I just couldn’t face her. As for him, I thought I would punch him if I looked at him long enough. But would have I? He seemed stronger than me and I was down with fever. I had a tough motorcycle helmet with me and I have hit men much stronger than me when provoked but here, what ground was there for me to fight him? She was free to choose anyone to be her boyfriend, to move around with anyone. But my heart knew nothing of this sort. It was full of intense hatred and a shame which made me shrink. It seemed my very body would crumble under shame. They were talking to each other and he was flashing a cell phone far more expensive than the one I then held in my pocket. The shame was killing me. “ Excuse me Priya, can you please give me your cell no.?” How damn foolish it was on my part to say that, to be so formal as if I had seen her for the first time as if she was that bastard’s property. “I can’t give it to you.”, her voice was pure hatred and hatred always made her look ugly and mean. And she walked away. I stood looking at the ground. He too didn’t move. I considered my options. Should I hit him with my helmet? Finally I moved away. For the next two weeks, I sat in my room, hardly eating anything. Piles of newspapers collected outside my door and I cried unwept tears. As I later looked back at that evening, two things struck me. The first was the feeling of déjà vu and almost pleasure when I saw them coming towards me on the mall road. It seemed so poetic to be defeated in love like this and to see the woman I had loved so deeply and for so long walking with a worthless spineless worm. The second thing was the cycle of karma. It was so beautiful the way it had happened. Two years back, I had boasted to him that he was an economic failure and would never be able to provide for her while I was off to a lucrative career with an MBA admission in a top B-school in hand. Now, the tables had turned. Severe mystical explosions had made me leave my MBA midway and I was living on my parent’s money while he had completed his MBA (from the useless HPU, I thought to some relief compared to my coveted MICA). And he still had her when I had boasted to him she would soon tire of him like her string of earlier boyfriends. Life indeed had come full circle.

Together

Before the ancient joy burst into an infinity of stars, you were together. Together you multiplied to embark on a voyage of stars. Together you created worlds from the mists of your shared desire and together you parted in your unity. You seek each-other while being what you seek. Your desires are faint echoes of your fullness. Yet you explore your limits by groping the darkness of separation. From the valley of sin, you have a better view of the peak of virtue.But you are neither the valley nor the peak. The sky kisses both and yet remains aloof. But even the sky doesn't penetrate you. You are your own fulfillment. Together would you find your song and the dream of separation would merge into joy.

Eternal Moment

A moment exists independent of all past; free from all future. Eternal and immutable, it is acausal and without any effect into the future.The linkage between two moments is a delusion created by mental co-ordination. When we profess eternal love to people we can't bear the sight of later, the moment doesn't die; the moment of eternal love. Multitudes have wished eternal love and multitudes would do it. They will all perish and their beloveds merge into nothingness but the smiling moment would ever remain.An eternal moment of eternal love.

For Priyanka

We couldn’t walk together
for the path was steep and auburn at your side
and I was besotted by the moon’s scent
which took me to the vast expanse
from where your river wasn’t visible

You, young fawn, are playful
yet you eat not the fruit of joy
for thorns have their charm
though blood makes you tremble

The brook of passion is yours’
but its waves are flickering
and dreams vanish with the stars
leaving a lucid memory behind

Kiss the hot lips of passion
but lose not the breath of life
play with the burning candles
only to blow them off in sun

Your wounds are alive in me
and the pain in them rejoices
to find fertile ground for love
which deepens the dark night

Go in tornadoes unfazed
play with fierce tigers
or sleep with wolves
I would not let them touch you
or make you the prey of harm

My fullness is your becoming
the explosion is the thunder
which would make you rainfed
with joy of the infinite

Summons From The Goddess

As I probed my psyche with Darshan, I felt an increasing attraction towards Durga, the Mother Goddess, which soon took the form of an obsession. My mind embarked on a voyage of its own and logic became the tool of a specific chain of thought. I reasoned that I had been brought up In Solan, a town associated with Durga, and had a devotional heart in my childhood. Till the age of fourteen, I was devoted to God .On attaining the age of 14, two decisive changes confronted my impressionable mind- I had to leave my then beloved town, Solan when my family shifted to Punjab, and I fell deeply in one-sided love with Priyanka, the newcomer in class ninth. Both had profound effect on my consequent years, and were deeply inter-related. My love for Priyanka wouldn’t have become an obsession, and wouldn’t probably have been retained for so long and with such deep passion, had it not been for the physical distance which separated me from her, and let me create a mental image of her, which was at variance with her mundane reality. The thing which struck me was that I became an agnostic and started doubting the existence of God just after I fell deeply in love with Priyanka. I reasoned that I had transported the devotion that I earlier felt for an abstract deity to a girl when sexuality awakened in me. This had been facilitated by the physical distance that separated me from her for the next seven years and the almost zero interaction which I had had with her. The other theory that exploded in me was a bit more intriguing. It had to do with striking a balance between the male and female dimensions of my psyche. I reasoned that in Solan, the feminine archetype has a strong presence. The feminine is associated with the unconscious or the natural while the masculine is the conscious and the artificial or manmade. The mountains are natural, hence feminine. Besides Himachal is dotted with shrines glorifying the Goddess. Solan ( Shoolini/Durga), Shimla ( Shyamala/Kali), Chandigarh( close to my hometown, though not in Himachal/ Chandi), Mansa devi and many others. Crowning them all is Vasihno devi, the shrine of my ritualistic birth through the mannat in which my parents had asked the Goddess to give them a son, whom they had promised to bring back to Her soon after birth. This was a promise which they had never fulfilled while I had attained the age of 22. I further reasoned that my psychological distress had started on migrating to Punjab. I theorized that Punjab has strong masculine cultural vibrations with the female aspects grossly sidelined. Considering that it is the state with one of the worst sex-ratios in India and no natural landscape (tilled fields with excessive spray of insecticides are anything but natural) and a patriarchial dominant religion ( Sikhism with ten male Gurus and monotheism with no worship of the absolute in feminine terms) and a long history of political turmoil and general violence ( masculine activities), the feminine dimension of my psyche was suppressed. I also felt that Himachal was the domain of the Goddess while Punjab was the territory of the masculine Sikh gurus. ( It must be appreciated that this chain of thoughts is relevant only to understand my state of mind and has no meaning otherwise and is inherently flawed for being divisive and reductionist, if not outright incorrect. Sikhism mentions the God as being both the father and the mother and Punjab has a very sizeable Hindu population.) I felt the feminine dimension of my psyche, personified as the Goddess was punishing me for leaving her domain of influence ( Himachal) and stopping her worship upon migrating to Punjab through the masochistic thought-pattern that so disturbed me and yet seemed insurmountable.In Himachal I had worshipped God in male idiom ( Shiva or a male saint) and had seen Solan as my mother, thus balancing my internal gender energies. This balance was broken in Punjab where I was already in the presence of a strong male cultural sphere but was unable to give the female energy any outlet. This I thought had resulted in masochistic fantasies. However, it must be noted that masochistic fantasies were present in me from early childhood when I was very much in Solan. Freud was right when he talked about childhood sexuality because I clearly remember erection at an age close to five when a group of girls from my primary class were dominating a boy in a recess game.I was capable of sexual arousal through normal fantasies but masochism was, and has remained till date, the dominant theme in my sex-related imagination. However physical pain or vulgarity of any kind always disgusted me. The thing that aroused me was the idea of a beautiful woman whom I loved so much as to be her devoted slave and who was ultimately benevolent to me as a deity though initially testing my devotion.What struck me in those days of introspection was the remarkable similarity between my thought-pattern and the rituals of Goddess worship in the Indian Shakta tradition. Before probing the train of thought further, I must clarify the difference between Shakta tradition and masochism and pinpoint my exact position. The Shakta school of Indian mysticism sees the primodial Devi or Shakti, as the supreme conscious bliss of pure being, complete in Herself and without and absolutely independent of any male consort. It can be said that in Shakta tradition, it is the devotee who provides the male element( presuming that he is male) and doesn’t delegate it to any divinity. Male consorts play a role in vaishnava/shaiva theology where the goddess appears as the active energy of her inert consort ( eg Parvati for Shiva, Lakshmi for Vishnu and so on). The views of Shakta and Vaishnava/Shaiva traditions are irreconcilable in the position given to Devi. The Devi is supreme is Shakta tradition and it is with this school that I am concerned. In the Shakta tradition, the aim of the devotee is to worship the Goddess and be a recipient of Her benevolent grace before ultimately merging into Her infinite bliss of pure being. Though usually devotees look towards the Goddess as their Cosmic or Personal Mother, the relation of a devotee and the Goddess is by no means limited to any particular idiom. Any relation with the Goddess can be conceived. She can be seen as supreme bliss or infinite consciousness in purely abstract terms or as a beloved, friend, teacher, majestic empress, sister or any other relation which suits the individual temperament of the devotee. Depending upon the psychospiritual stage of development of the devotee, the relation can also be negative in idiom, for example an enemy of the Goddess whom she conquers or a slave whom She controls utterly. Even if the devotee visualizes himself as the slave of the Goddess, she would still be benevolent and merciful to him in the end and guarantee his spiritual salvation through her benevolent grace. However, in the initial, lower stages, She can be cruel and wrathful to destroy his ego and other gross afflicitions. Its similar to a mother punishing her young child to improve his character or a female teacher chastising her male pupil to make him learn. As the lower stage is transcended, the relation takes positive idiom of love and grace until ultimately, all strands of relation are transcended and infinite bliss beyond manifestation as Goddess- devotee attained. Masochism, deriving its name from Leopold Masoch, who authored ‘ Venus In Furs’ about being enslaved and humiliated by a beautiful woman was earlier classified as a paraphilia but is now considered normal though atypical. Its relation with tantra is that of a glowworm and the sun at best and dust and effulgence at worst. vulgarized masochism has nothing to do with tantra. In its refined form, it has minor similarity with lower-end beginning tantrik rituals. Yet in essence, the two differ widely. Masochism may have more in common with ‘yoginis’ , specifically referring to evil female nymphomaniacal spirits who deter and obstruct sadhakas. It is thus highly dangerous, probably much more than normal sexual desire which has a gross evolutionary purpose to serve.
Here I am giving an example where a masochistic theme is used in a lower-end tantrik ritual.
"Another type of stri puja, or a preparatory phase for it, has been mentioned by Benjamin Walker. Here the man to be initiated has to play the part of a domestic servant in a woman's household, slowly progressing toward an intimate relationship with her.
At first he sleeps in the same room with her, but on the floor, while she sleeps on the bed. After two weeks he joins her in bed, but at her feet; then beside her, but clothed. Then he lies beside her nude, fondling and caressing her. Then he has intercourse with her, but without emission. Benjamin Walker. Tantrism. page 51
This ritual technique for building up erotic tension has been used as the plot for a beautifully written story, Moonjewel, by William Kotzwinkle. http://www.yoniversum.nl/yoni/stripuja.html (source)."
On further probe, the other thing which struck me was my unease at being a Sikh in a Hindu majority state. I was always psychologically a Hindu, but having worn the visible external symbol of Sikhism ( unshorn hair) till the age of fourteen ( when I had my hair cut, superficially to make myself attractive to Priyanka, but primarily to free myself from the identity-badge of Sikhism and to integrate myself to the wider canvas of Hinduism) I was subjected to taunting and both overt and covert discrimination by my classmates and at times, even by teachers. The devastating effect which it had on my psyche is significant because a very deep-rooted desire in me was to become acceptable to the Hindu society, which I thought I could do, only as a Hindu. The lenghts to which I went for this were considerable ( for e.g. even supporting extremist Hindu ideology and referring to the teaching about Sikh gurus in ‘History of Punjab’ class as discrimnatory towards Hindus as they shouldn’t be forced to read about the gurus of another religion!) . It could be said that my reaction to being discriminated against for my visible Sikh identity as a child was to cling to Hinduism the moment I shed it. My feelings in this direction were so deep that at times I feel I subconsciously wanted to fall in love with and marry a Hindu girl to become more of a Hindu.
In this light , my obsession with Priyanka and burning desire to marry her inspite of her having no emotions for me can be described as an attempt to integrate psychological loose-ends from my childhood. Priyanka, to me was always the angel who manifested as the newcomer in ninth . To win her affections seemed the ultimate prize. My heart had been sealed at the age of thirteen and I never felt any emotional attachment to any other girl save Priyanka. Looking from minority/majority perspective, it is significant that she is a Brahmana, ritually, the highest caste of Hinduism. She seemed to me, then, as the prize of Solan, the town I grew up in, and even her lack of affection for me made her all the more attractive for being an unachieved trophy. This of course was subconscious and not something that I admitted to myself or overtly knew. However because of my deeply introspective nature, it was never too far from the surface. Yet, even if valid, it was true only on the mundane sphere and my passionate love for Priyanka was much more than mere caste-gymnastics.
As I became aware of this apsect of my thought-pattern, I discussed it at length with Mathew, the cultural studies faculty at MICA. I also told my father about my neurotic attachment towards Hinduism and even an antipathy for Sikhism. He told me he himself found Hinduism deeper at mystic level but had never felt any antipathy towards Sikhism. That was the point when my mother told me that she had dreamt of a temple of the Goddess from which the Goddess Herself emerged and handed her an infant a few days before my birth. This came as a revelation to me and affected me deeply. In itself it was a minor detail{ my mother had dreamt of a gurudwara( sikh temple) and Guru Nanak a few days before she gave birth to my younger brother ; a professor related her dreams with cultural psycholgy and the archetype of maternity}. However the way the pieces joined together to make the picture was remarkable. This, then were the links.

1.) My parents took a mannat from Vaishno Devi before my birth.
2.) My mother dreamt that the Goddess herself handed over an infant to her a few days before my birth.
3.) My mother has shown psychic abilities in other instances. For example she saw my father’s face before meeting him and came to know of her mother’s death and my father’s serious accident beforehand through intuition.
4.) I was born with deep devotion towards a feminine figure of awesome majesty which was corrupted into slight masochism. This I related with a punishment for not worshipping Durga and my parents’ not fulfilling the mannat by taking me to the shrine after birth.

To this, I added Priyanka. In Indian devotional religion, there is a practice known as ‘nyasa’. It refers to descension of divinity in a mundane object for a while for the purpose of worship. After the worship is complete, the divine consciousness leaves the mundane object. . I felt I had performed a nyasa on Priyanka – that she was the idol through which I was always worshipping Durga! My extreme devotion to her, but without any carnal desire, indeed an inability to think about her in carnal terms and belief in her as the source of infinite love and joy all indicate that I was looking for the great Goddess in a mere girl who had all the frailties of an ordinary human being. This was also supported by -
1.) My talking about the unfulfilled mannat to Vaishno Devi to Priyanka, she being the only person with whom I discussed it.
2.) My becoming religious again on meeting her after seven years. ( The divinity was expanding from her source-body.)
3.) My deep desire to starve myself to death in the Shoolini ( Durga) temple in Solan when I couldn’t contact Priyanka for many weeks.
4.) My dream in which Priyanka was Ganga, the personification of spiritual purity (inspite of her being just a beautiful girl with normal shortcomings).
5.)I told Priyanka that I remembered her instead of God whenever I had any trouble. I told her she was the God whom I worshipped. To this , she protested she was too human. ( To love somebody and not to see God in her is to taste but the brim of the cup. The beloved is God and love is the origin of God.) I messaged her that I would find God for her. She gave me back my mysticism, just as she had taken it from me.
If the great Goddess can be worshipped in a stone idol, she can much more be seen in a human idol through nyasa, especially when there is impenetrable physical distance between the woman and the devotee ( as was the case with me for seven years). ). As I found out while studying Indian Cultural history ,( A Cultural History Of India, edited by AL Basham) later, this concept was specifically used by and theorized upon by Bengali tantriks. Chandidas, the fourteenth century Bengali devotee, is the first great name in Bengali bhakti literature. He held that the only way to salvation is the love of God, and that this love must be based on an earthly passion for a particular person. This passion, however needs to be sublimated, and therefore the beloved should be an inaccessible woman, for instance, a married woman, or even better, a woman who doesn’t respond to the devotions of the seeker. This failure to find a response on the gross plane would soon sublimate the love to divine plane. Besides it’s the foundation of the metamorphosis of worldly love ( Ishq-i-zamini) to spiritual love (ishq-i-haqiqi) in sufism. Consider that Rumi , the doyen of mystics, considered Majnun the greatest of all mystics. He said it was divine rapture which made Majnun kiss the dog of Laila, his earthly beloved.
It shouldn't be assumed that I went through all this convoluted mental logic through some effort. It was more like bursts of insight. What had seemed hazy yesterday seemed clear like sunlight today.Now as these thoughts sunk into me, I felt an immensely powerful pull from Durga. Every cell in my body felt the great Goddess of the shrine of Vaishno Devi was calling me. It seemed She would pluck out my soul from my body. I had to go and merge into my Goddess. I tried resisting but all effort was futile.

Shower Of Bliss

Awareness existed but I was nowhere. Pure consciousness had risen with all delusions swept away. I had this beatific experience two years back. It all began in 2004. I was then in Chandigarh and madly in love. Once while reclining in a coach, I suddenly felt a surge of ineffable, almost unbearable bliss rising up my body and a delicious feeling flooded my being. Consciousness was subtle and profound and beautiful. I felt like God. I thought it was love.Spiritual ecstasy is impossible to elucidate. Those who experience it know it. It is the profoundest consciousness of the highest bliss, the greatest happiness that exists, the supreme flowering of being. It begins with loss of body consciousness and expansion of consciousness beyond, way beyond the trap of individuality.

The Dream Of Passion

Humans search for the elusive entity beyond the mundane concrete reality. To exist and not to transcend reality is to die by slowly merging into an endless void. The seed must be buried if the flower is to bloom even if spring has too short a run. But only the infinite can sate the human soul and it requires the sacrifice of individuality, the final illusion that binds consciousness in the mortal coil. To love is to lose the binding ego and have a glimpse of the vastness of eternity where neither right nor wrong exist and meaning is transcended as a mental construct. Mere physical attraction can pave the way for a deeply transcedental experience which is beyond the ordinary. This is my story - incomplete, fragmented but authentic.When I first had a glimpse of it, I was in a bus and it was night. A current of bliss seemed to rise through my body and consciousness became unbearably soft and delicious. Existence was a thin layer beyond which an ocean of bliss beckoned. The doors were opening. But it was some time before I realised it. As a child I was afraid of dying. I remember lying on the bed awake at night, aged hardly six, thinking of my impending death or that of my father. I was in perfect health but had become conscious of my mortality and death seemed profoundly disconcerting. I asked my father how real death was and if there was an escape. Thus began my journey into myself, the journey to find that which transcends mortality, that which lies beyond gross physical existence.

Bumpy Road

Soon after the US Pizza, I and Anil decided to visit Rajneesh Krishna (RK), the Consumer Behavior faculty at MICA. I still felt I had some psychiatric disorder but its symptoms had become too complex for any inference to be made. The loss of individuality at US Pizza didn’t gel in with anything I had read or known. I told RK about my low mood and tried to relate it to my unrequited love for Priyanka. I don’t know why I mentioned Priyanka to him although she hadn’t figured in prominently in my thoughts which had an existential flavor. He showed interest in my thought-pattern and asked me not to regard it as pathological in nature. He told me about his experience in IIT-B when he had lost his father. In those days, he was mortally scared of crows and used to be afraid that a crow would come and bite him. When somebody told him about the strong association of crows with death in Indian culture (crows are associated with ancestral spirits and shraddhas (ceremonial month when ancestral spirits are offered funeral oblations) in Hinduism) and related his fear of crows with his refusal to accept the death of his father, he was cured of the fear. He felt I was depressed due to pent- up emotions which needed to be unveiled. He asked me to come again when Shubra Gaur, the Organizational behavior faculty would also be there. Gaur talked to me from a psychodynamic perspective and tried to gather information about my childhood and intimate relations. All that came through in that conversation was my neurotic obsession with the mountains where I had grown up and my pain at Priyanka’s rejection of my deep love for her. Gaur asked me to acknowledge fully that Priyanka never loved me. I told her I had accepted that the relation had ended. She said, “A relation has to exist to end. The truth that you must acknowledge is that you never had a relation with her.” This hurt like hell. It hurt because it was true. I had loved her and her alone yet we had no relation. Priyanka herself told me the same thing in almost the same words a few weeks later. Shubra told me I didn’t show any symptoms of bipolar or biological depression which even otherwise, couldn’t be confirmed without a bio-chemical analysis of brain. She asked me to consult a psychodynamic psychotherapist whom she knew. She also asked me if I would like to see PAT ( Professor Atul Tandon), the director of MICA. I was ok with it. I met PAT along with Gaur, RK and Anil. He asked me if I wanted to talk to him in private. He asked about the cause of my low mood and the strategy I had adopted to cope with it. Again I related it to my unrequited love for Priyanka. Priyanka had become a scapegoat for my archetypical fossils of id.
The doctor Gaur had recommended was Darshan Shah. Young and understanding, he was the best of this breed I have come across. I told him about my fear of going insane. He said it was unfounded and asked me not to leave the hostel for home but to continue the therapy with him. As a psychodynamic psychotherapist, his approach was, of course, radically different from the neuropsychiatrists I had consulted earlier. We discussed my past. I told him about my experiences at US Pizza and Desai’s clinic I also told him about a teenage incident when I had spoken to my father as some supernatural entity who had ‘occupied’ my biological body. He showed interest in it and asked me to describe the incident. It had happened in 1998 when I was studying in tenth standard. One night, I had told my father in chaste Hindi ( we always use Punjabi at home) that I was not his son but a yogabhrishta ( a fallen yogi/ spiritual seeker) who had entered the body of his son to fulfill his carnal desires. Besides I had asserted my superiority over him as an experienced yogi who was a master of the occult and the mystical with the ability to enter into the bodies of others. My father asked me if I remembered what I had told him in the night the next morning and I replied in the negative though my memory of the conversation was perfect. I had lied to avoid awkward questions for I had no idea why had I talked in that manner with him. I asked Shah if it was a psychotic episode. He said it wasn’t a psychotic episode. . He said psychotic episodes are characterized by amnesia which was clearly not the case with me. He felt it may have been disassociation. However, still the fact that I remembered it well was crucial. As I attended more of his sessions, I told him about my neurotic attachment with the mountains which he related to gigantic archetypes in my unconscious. he felt the peace I felt in the mountains or around an ocean was due to the physical reflection of my internal mountains of archetypes which such landscapes offered. He further felt I was unable to express aggression or hostility and its suppression was creating a knot in my mind. I found this insight relevant to my life-experiences.
Then I told him about my masochistic fantasies. Masochism is a term derived from the name of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch who authored ‘Venus In Furs’ in which he talked about being enslaved and humiliated by a woman. Some people relate physical violence along with vulgar and disgusting things with masochism. My fantasies were concerned with having to submit before an all-powerful female divinity who was endowed with awesome majesty and power. I had these fantasies form a very young age- at least from the age of five.

Death

priyanka.she has gifted me a slow death.or have i gifted it to myself
and malign her name
i think of her.i dream of her.and she is not mine.she's a mirage that i
chase and my lips are parched
she is a shadow that i want to grasp
a dirge that i want to sing in a marriage
a death that i want to live
a pain that i want to adore
a void i want to bless existence
i have even lost my way with words
my muse has deserted me
life doesn't seem worth living and death doesn't come
how beautiful death is,how serene,peaceful,loving,all accepting
death loves all,accepts all
she loves and accepts saint and sinner,the mighty and the humble,the wise and the fool alike in her loving arm
then why has death forsaken me
why doesn't she embrace me in her extinction
i wish death would come
like mother's love
she would end my pain
i would cry into her bosom and she would understand
i would tell her how i loved priyanka and how i suffered for her and she would understand
and i would be happy that she understood
and she would tell me of the day when she would embrace her too
and unite her and everybody else with me
amd me with everybody else
till everybody and everything becomes one
and eternal unity
prevails

Jealosy

Can hatred spring from love? Animal hatred, at once passionate and bloodthirsty. I love her or do I hate her for loving him. I have burnt in my own personal hell- the hell of jealousy. All my illusions of love, of tenderness have been swept away. I wish he were never born. Or that I were dead.I hate him for being loved by her. The more she loves him, the more I want to kill him. It wouldn't satisfy me to murder him. If I achieve absolute power, I would gas him to death. No, I would invent seventh degree torture and make him a specimen of living death while denying him the luxury of death. I would make him suffer physically what I have borne mentally. He is my beloved's boyfriend. She adores him. I have loved her ever since I was thirteen. I never as much as thought about another girl. She is everything to me. And then I came to know about him. And my love vanished into the quagmire of jealousy and bestial hatred. How can hatred spring from love. Was my love a charade altogether? Did I never love her, not even for a single moment? Was I living in an empty emotion for eight years? She lambasted I didn't knew what love was.Now after two and a half years, I still felt like breaking his skull when she introduced him to me. Yeah I hate him for being loved by her. For snatching her away from me. For defeating me. For hurting my ego as nobody ever can. For showing me the hollowness of what I considered sacred in me. May God give him peace and the gift of pure love which He denied to me. May she be happy in his love. Only that these are mere moral dictums. Not my feelings. I am too human. I know too well the pangs of jealousy, the inferno of hatred, the pain of being robbed of a delusion.