The Bare Soul: From the Pen to the Divine

There is a desperate kind of "ambush" that happens when a writer reaches the end of their stock. When the arrows are depleted and there is nothing left to say, one is left holding onto the hope that some heavenly liquid will replenish the soul and save it from perennial penury. In those moments, I am scared and dumbfounded by what might emerge from the unknown, hidden caverns of the mind.

The Vulnerability of the Stream

In stream-of-consciousness writing, there is no preparation. You are baring yourself, nearly naked, for the world—or at least the AI—to see. It is a terrifying exposure of the unseen recesses and the skeletons hidden deep in the closets of the psyche. Yet, it is strangely therapeutic.

This feeling is identical to the one I experience during Amma’s Darshan. In that space, no false self, no ego, and no polite pretenses can stand. They are blown away like dust in a gale. I feel like an open book, held wide, where every secret is visible to the Eye that sees all.

The Encounter with Divinity

It is the strangest feeling one can have: a terrifying vulnerability that can only be survived through total humility. You must acknowledge that you are nothing, and that the Being before you is unlike anything you have ever conceived.

As if to confirm this, She will lean in and send a glance your way at the exact moment needed to resonate with your internal thoughts. In that instant, you know you are approaching Divinity herself.

The Pranic Wind

I felt this same power once before the shrine of an Avadhuta in Poonthura, Trivandrum. It is as if a powerful gust of energetic or pranic wind hits your chest—the spiritual heart. But in Amma’s Darshan, you aren’t just hit by it; you are completely engulfed.

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A Note on "pranic wind": Couldnt find another word to describe

Verification

Success crowds the room.

You are no longer alone.

Old praise leans on the body,
teaches the hands to pause
before they tell the truth.

Every impulse
is weighed,
hammered into a calf of gold,
warm in the noon heat.

Then—

a sleeping animal.
A baby, folded into breath.

Or a toddler
climbing your lap,
touching your face
without a reason.

The noise breaks.

The rush loosens.
You freeze.

Not afraid—
recognized.

Something quiet
threads you back
to the one
who never learned the trick.

This is it.
Not the chase.
Not the shine.

The simple truth
we buried
under toys.

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The Liberation of the Raw Page: Why You Don’t Owe Your Writing a Justification

There is a heavy, invisible weight we often carry when we sit down to write: the felt need to be "right." We approach the page as if we are stepping into a courtroom, preparing a defense for every comma and a cross-examination for every claim. We ask ourselves: Is this logical? Does this sound smart? Will people think I’m complaining?

But here is the truth that will set your creativity—and your mind—free: You do not have to justify a single word.

The Trap of "Purposeful" Speech

In the world of marketing, sales, or debate, justification is the engine. If you want to convince someone to buy a product or convert them to your point of view, your sentences must be calculated, backed by logic, and aimed at a specific result. In those arenas, every word is a soldier in a war for influence.

But life is not a sales pitch, and your private thoughts are not a marketing brochure.

Writing as Catharsis

When you engage in freewriting, the goal isn’t a "result"—the goal is the release. This is therapeutic writing; it is a mental purge designed to lift the "past burden of thoughts" off your chest.

When you treat writing as catharsis, the rules of the world melt away:

• Grammar doesn't matter: The "fucking" in the middle of a sentence belongs there because that is the energy of the moment.

• Logic is optional: If your thoughts are messy, your page should be messy.

• Judgment is banned: You aren't writing for an audience; you are writing for your own sanity.

Just Write. Free-Write.

The moment you stop trying to justify your feelings is the moment you actually start feeling them. Freewriting is the act of letting the ink (or the pixels) act as a pressure valve. If you stop to analyze whether a sentence is "justified," you close the valve and the pressure stays trapped inside.

We don't need to be "complete." We don't need to be "correct." We just need to be honest.

So, put down the gavel. Stop being the judge of your own internal monologue. Don't think about the "why" or the "how." Just write. Free-write. Let the load off your chest and leave it on the page.

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Writing as a Way Out: A Journey Through the Lineage of Great Minds

If there is any way for a human being to loosen the grip of the system — the social, economic, psychological structures that quietly shape thought and desire — it may lie in a long, patient companionship with the great writers of history. Not merely reading them for information or entertainment, but approaching them as one would approach mountains, rivers, or sages: as presences that alter the scale of one’s inner world.

Such a journey begins at the dawn of poetic consciousness. Valmiki, singing the Ramayana, does not merely narrate events; he shapes an entire moral and emotional universe. Vyasa, through the Mahabharata, holds within a single epic the full turbulence of human dharma — duty, conflict, doubt, transcendence. Bhasa and Kalidasa refine experience into luminous form, where nature, longing, time, and destiny move with an almost cosmic grace. These writers do not appear as “authors” in the modern sense. They seem less like individuals seeking expression and more like instruments through which civilization speaks to itself.

To enter their world is to experience writing not as self-display but as participation in a vast continuity. The work does not shout, “Look at me,” but whispers, “This is how existence unfolds.”

As we move forward in time, we encounter another stream — Chaucer mapping the variety of human types, Shakespeare opening the inner chambers of ambition, jealousy, love, and mortality, Alexander Pope chiseling language into moral and satirical precision, Ibsen turning the stage into a battlefield of social truth. The modern writer stands more visibly as an individual consciousness. Personality sharpens. Psychological depth intensifies. Society itself becomes an object of examination and critique.

Yet something else also shifts.

In the ancient imagination, writing often seems aligned with something supra-personal — dharma, cosmic order, sacred tradition, collective memory. The poet is a seer, not a brand. The work is an offering, not a product. Immortality is not chased; it is a byproduct of depth.

In the modern world, the conditions of authorship change. Print, markets, publicity, and institutions create a literary economy. Name, fame, recognition, and money enter the field not as accidents but as structural realities. It would be unfair to claim that all modern writers are driven by these; many struggle fiercely against such pulls. But the gravitational field has shifted. Writing risks becoming performance, career, or identity construction.

The contrast, then, is not simply between “pure” ancient writers and “corrupt” modern ones. It is between two orientations of consciousness.

One writes as though the self were a channel — a place where language, myth, and truth pass through. The other writes as though the self were the center — expressing, asserting, distinguishing. Both produce great art. But they lead the writer inward along very different paths.

To study the great lineage — from Valmiki to Vyasa, from Kalidasa to Shakespeare, from epic poets to modern dramatists — is to gradually loosen the illusion that our own time, our own struggles, and our own ambitions are ultimate. We begin to see writing as a long civilizational conversation. Our ego becomes smaller; our responsibility becomes larger.

In that shrinking of ego and widening of vision lies a subtle freedom.

The “system” — of status, comparison, anxiety, and self-importance — feeds on the belief that we are isolated individuals fighting for visibility. But when a writer places themselves in the company of centuries, something changes. One writes less to be seen, and more because something must be said. Less to accumulate, more to serve meaning itself.

This may be the quiet way out: not rebellion, not withdrawal, but alignment with a deeper current of human expression. To write as part of a lineage rather than as a competitor in a marketplace. To let the work matter more than the name attached to it.

In such writing, fame may come or not. Money may come or not. But the act itself becomes an inner discipline — a movement toward clarity, depth, and participation in something larger than the restless modern self.

And perhaps that is the oldest purpose of literature: not to decorate life, but to help the human mind remember its true scale.

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Exploring the Mind Without Getting Lost

I am terrified of writing what might be called obscene. I fear ending up like those who were punished or imprisoned for crossing lines they perhaps did not fully understand at the time.

Yet there is a strange irony here: the only way to truly fulfill oneself is to be completely oneself — especially in those long, honest stretches of writing where the mind pours out without censorship. That is the frightening part. You are trying to be yourself, and that very attempt feels like a test.

Freewriting, however, is not the same as indulging in obscenity. It requires a certain aloofness — a witnessing stance. Freewriting is similar to meditation. In meditation, when the mind wanders, you gently return to the breath. In writing, when thoughts drift into chaos or excess, you return to awareness. Without that return, one risks losing balance. People sometimes speak of the “dangers” of meditation — that the mind can become overwhelmed — but that does not mean one should avoid meditation. It is a necessity of human existence.

The energy within us has to be explored and traced back to its source. If we do not turn inward and understand this energy, our human birth feels incomplete. We keep running, searching for something outside, never finding rest — just as the Buddha told Angulimala, who ran endlessly until he finally stopped and turned inward.

In freewriting, unpleasant or dark thoughts can arise from the subconscious. The key is to be careful not to identify with them or get attached. The process should be like meditation — you observe what comes up and let it pass. If someone clings to the material or takes it as truth, freewriting can become destabilizing, just as meditation done incorrectly can lead to psychological difficulty. The tool itself is not the problem. The responsibility lies with the individual to stay aware, grounded, and detached while using it consciously.

So the path is not suppression, nor reckless indulgence, but awareness. To create, to write, to meditate — all require returning again and again to a center. That return is what keeps freedom from turning into chaos, and expression from turning into self-destruction.

Story: Replacement Value (continued)

 

The first night he wrote past midnight, no one noticed.

That surprised him.

In his imagination, rebellion always came with dramatic music — slammed doors, confrontations, declarations. Instead, the house slept. The ceiling fan turned with its tired, faithful rhythm. A dog barked somewhere far away, then gave up.

Raghav felt like a man who had quietly stepped out of a queue he had been standing in for twenty years.

No announcement. No resistance. Just… one step sideways.

---

The next morning his mother called.

“Did you book the blood test?”

“I’ll do it,” he said.

“You always say that.”

He almost said, I am not your unfinished project.
But he didn’t. Not because he was afraid — because he was tired of the script.

“Hmm,” he replied instead.

Something new had entered him: he no longer needed her to understand him for him to exist.

That was strangely freeing.

---

Later that day, his wife told him, “I paid the insurance premium.”

“Okay,” he said.

A pause.

He realized he wasn’t angry. Just aware. Like noticing furniture had been rearranged long ago and you’d only now registered it.

She looked at him, slightly puzzled. “You don’t want to see the receipt?”

“No, it’s fine.”

Another pause. Something passed between them — not distance, not closeness. Recognition that a silent contract had expired.

---

That evening, Raghav went for a walk.

He didn’t usually notice the neighborhood. It had always been background — like elevator music in the story of his responsibilities.

But now he saw:

A boy trying to teach a smaller one how to ride a cycle, running behind, holding the seat, letting go secretly.

An old man watering plants with exaggerated care, as if the leaves might bruise.

A woman arguing loudly on the phone, then suddenly laughing.

Everyone inside their own urgent, private universe.

No one scanning for Raghav.

No one evaluating his posture, his choices, his unwritten thoughts.

The relief was almost physical.

---

That night he wrote about his father.

Not the idealized version from rituals. The real one. The impatience. The quiet pride. The way he used to cough before entering a room, as if announcing his presence to the air itself.

He wrote:

We think we are pillars in each other’s lives. But we are more like passing weather. Intense, influential, then absorbed into memory’s climate.

He stopped typing and stared at the sentence.

It didn’t make him sad.

It made him gentle.

If everyone was temporary weather, maybe the point wasn’t permanence. Maybe it was how you felt when the rain was falling.

---

Days passed.

He still helped when asked. Paid bills. Attended family functions. Nodded at conversations.

Externally, nothing revolutionary happened.

Internally, a quiet revolution continued.

He had stopped negotiating with imaginary judges.

He noticed he spoke less, but when he did, it was simpler. No hidden sales pitch. No need to prove reasonableness.

Once, at a gathering, his sister made a remark about his “lack of planning.”

He smiled.

She waited for defense.

None came.

The comment fell like a stone into a well with no echo.

For the first time, he saw confusion on her face.

He had stepped out of the game without informing the other players.

---

One afternoon, his wife stood at his study door.

“You’ve been writing a lot,” she said.

“Yes.”

“What about?”

He considered lying. Minimizing. Translating.

Then he said, “About how I actually feel.”

She didn’t ask more. She nodded slowly, as if filing this under “things to understand later.”

That was enough.

Understanding didn’t have to be immediate to be real.

---

Weeks later, Raghav realized something subtle.

He no longer wanted to shock anyone. Or confess dramatically. Or escape.

He just wanted alignment.

To not smile when he felt hollow.
To not agree when he disagreed.
To not shrink his inner world to fit others’ comfort.

Not rebellion.

Congruence.

---

One night, as he closed his laptop, he felt a quiet certainty.

People would forget him one day. Yes.

But they had also never fully known him.

And now, finally, at least one person did.

Him.

The house was silent. The fan turned. Somewhere, a pressure cooker whistled in a distant kitchen.

Life moving.

He switched off the light and walked to bed, not as a central figure, not as a forgotten one.

Just as a man who had stopped abandoning himself.

And for the first time in years, that felt like enough.

Story: Replacement Value

Raghav had the strange feeling that if he vanished on Tuesday, by next Tuesday the house would still run on schedule.

Milk would boil over at 6:40 a.m.
The pressure cooker would whistle.
The neighbor’s scooter would cough to life.
His chair at the dining table would not even look empty — just pushed in.

This thought didn’t arrive as sadness. It arrived like accounting.

He was sitting at his desk, staring at a blank document he had opened three hours ago. The cursor blinked patiently, as if it had nowhere else to be.

He had been afraid of that blinking line once. Afraid of what might come out if he stopped filtering himself. Afraid his mother would somehow sense it from another city. Afraid his wife would read it and see a stranger. Afraid words could be crimes.

Now he laughed quietly.

Nobody was watching.
Nobody ever had.

---

His mother still called every morning.

“Did you take the tablets?”
“Don’t skip the tests.”
“You never listen.”

Then, during family gatherings, she would say, “He never thinks ahead,” in the same tone she used for bad weather. His sister would add little footnotes to the story of his incompetence. Everyone nodded. Case closed.

Raghav used to try defending himself. Then explaining. Then joking. Now he simply drank his tea and watched the performance like theatre he had seen too many times.

Care, he had realized, did not automatically come with respect.

---

His wife was not cruel. That almost made it harder.

She informed him of decisions. School fees. Repairs. Travel plans.

Not consulted. Informed.

He had once left a promising position in Mumbai when she was pregnant. It had felt obvious at the time. Necessary. Human. Later he turned down out-of-town assignments. Stability mattered, he told himself.

No one had asked him to.

No one had thanked him either.

The house was efficient. Functional. Like a well-run office where he had become an outdated department.

---

The cursor kept blinking.

A wild thought entered his head: What if I just write the truth? The ugliest, strangest, most unapproved parts?

He imagined scandal. Judgment. Moral outrage.

Then he imagined something else: silence.

People were busy surviving their own stories. No one had the time to police his inner life.

The fear that had followed him since childhood — that invisible committee of relatives, teachers, neighbors — dissolved like mist under sunlight.

He was unsupervised.

---

That realization did not make him reckless. It made him calm.

If nobody was really keeping score, he could stop performing.

He typed a sentence. Then another. Honest ones. Not impressive. Not noble. Just real.

He wrote about resentment without disguising it as virtue. About love that felt like duty. About duty that turned into invisibility. About how people move on, not because they are cruel, but because life is a conveyor belt that never stops.

He wrote about his father, who had once been the gravitational center of the house. Now a photograph, occasionally dusted.

Replacement value, Raghav thought. Everything has it.

Except maybe moments of truth while you’re still breathing.

---

From the kitchen came the sound of vessels clinking. His wife was talking on the phone, laughing. Life proceeding, efficiently.

For the first time, the sound did not sting.

They would move on one day. That was not betrayal. That was biology.

But today, at this desk, in this chair, he was finally not moving around himself.

The cursor blinked again.

He kept writing.

Not to matter forever.

Just to exist honestly now.

(Read Part 2)

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The Forlorn Wind: Navigating the Subconscious Desert

 

The Setting: Julian is sitting in a café, staring at a crumpled piece of paper Elias just handed him. The text is jagged, filled with dark imagery of "pitiable psychiatric donuts" and "liquid fire." Julian looks up, visibly unsettled.

Julian: Elias... this is dark. I mean, "the land of the forlorn soul," "obscene desires," "useless shit"? If I didn't know you, I’d be calling for a welfare check. This sounds like someone at the absolute end of their rope. Are you okay?

Elias: (Calmly sipping tea) I’m actually doing great. Yoga was good this morning, and the house is quiet.

Julian: (Genuinely confused) Then where did this come from? It reads like a scream from a basement. You talk about being "meant to be put to sleep." It’s terrifying.

Elias: It’s freewriting, Julian. It’s what happens when I let the pen move without the "conscious me" standing over it like a guard. Most people see unpleasantness like this and immediately try to sweep it under the carpet. They ignore it, they distract themselves, or they medicate it away. I used to do that, too. I couldn't even look at the darkness.

Julian: But why look at it if you're feeling fine? Why dig this up?

Elias: Because it’s already there. We all grew up subject to the whims and emotional disturbances of our elders. As children, we had no voice, no power. We swallowed their anger, their sadness, their inconsistencies. That energy doesn't just vanish; it goes into the subconscious and stays there, unhealed, because we were never allowed to let it out.

Julian: So this paper... this isn't how you feel now?

Elias: It’s a historical record. It’s the "liquid fire" that emanates when the soul finally breathes after being stifled for decades. My guru taught me that you can’t fight these emotions. If you fight them, you give them strength. You have to acknowledge them, embrace them, and let them flow through you.

Julian: But it’s so visceral. "A desert of paltry desires." It feels like you're judging yourself.

Elias: That’s the point of the questioning technique. When that "pitiable" voice comes out, I don't run from it. I look at it and ask, "Is this me, or is this just an old echo?" By witnessing it without judgment—the way my guru embraced everyone who came to them—the darkness loses its grip. It subsides.

Julian: I think most people are afraid that if they look at that "shitty faced" part of themselves, they’ll get stuck there.

Elias: You only get stuck if you resist. When I let it flow onto the paper, it leaves my body. I can feel the pain of others—bereavement, loss, disease—because I’m no longer using all my energy to keep my own basement door locked. I’ve accepted whatever is coming because I’ve finally stopped being afraid of what’s already inside.

Julian: (Looking back at the paper with less fear) So the "precarious existence" isn't a threat. It’s just... the truth.

Elias: Exactly. The wind only howls if you build a wall for it to hit. If you’re open, it’s just air moving.

Julian: But why is the wind so loud for everyone else? Everyone seems so... overdrawn.

Elias: Because they’re searching for the "quiet" in all the wrong places. They think peace is something you find outside—in food, work, movies, or travel. But as masters like Thich Nhat Hanh or Sadhguru teach, you can’t run away from life. Wherever you go, your mind follows you.

Julian: So the mind is the problem?

Elias: No, the mind is a tool—perhaps the most powerful organ we have. But it’s an organ our education system completely ignores. We are taught to absorb information like sponges, but never taught how to manage the restless energy of the mind itself. Living each moment consciously is the only way to channel that energy. Without that consciousness, the mind is a wild power that can wreck a human life.

Julian: So the freewriting is your way of practicing that management?

Elias: Exactly. It’s taking the "liquid fire" and giving it a conscious channel. It’s moving from being a victim of the mind to being its caretaker.

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The Conclusion: Embracing the Inventory

The dialogue between Elias and Julian reveals a hidden truth about the modern psyche: most of us are walking archives of unexpressed history. We spend our lives polishing the "conscious" self—the one that meditates, works, and loves—while the "forlorn soul" remains locked in the basement, speaking a language of liquid fire and angst.

By allowing that raw, unedited voice to flow onto the page without judgment, we aren't descending into madness; we are performing an act of radical hygiene. We are clearing the "subconscious storage" that was filled during the powerless years of childhood.

When we stop fighting the darkness and start witnessing it, the "precarious existence" transforms. It is no longer a threat to be feared, but a landscape to be explored. As we learn to embrace our own "useless shit" with the same unreserved compassion shown by the great masters, we find that the howling wind of the past finally runs out of breath. We are left not with bitterness, but with a profound, grounded quiet—and a heart finally open enough to hold the pain of the world.

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