When the Gods Leave the Mountain
I've been thinking about something that feels like watching a slow-motion apocalypse. Not the kind with fire and sudden endings, but the kind where things simply... drift away.
WRITINGS
Essays and reflections on consciousness, philosophy, tradition, and the encounter between the ancient and the contemporary.
I've been thinking about something that feels like watching a slow-motion apocalypse. Not the kind with fire and sudden endings, but the kind where things simply... drift away.
I've been thinking about extinction lately—not as a statistic, but as something more intimate. The IUCN Red List now includes 172,620 species, of which 48,646 are threatened with extinction. Before human beings walked the earth, a species became extinct approximately every thousand years. Now it is approximately every twenty minutes.
I've been thinking about something that happened in a cave at 12,756 feet in the Himalayas. According to the legend, Shiva chose the Amarnath cave to reveal the Amar Katha—the secret of immortality—to Parvati. He created kalagni, a sacred fire, to ensure no other being overheard. The knowledge was believed to disrupt the natural order of creation.
I've been thinking about a place that shouldn't exist. Srisailam is the only temple in India that is simultaneously a Jyotirlinga and a Shakti Peetha. Every major pilgrimage site is either one or the other. Srisailam is both.
I've been sitting with a question that keeps unravelling: what if the weapon that destroys you is also the thing that liberates you? What if the missile that burns through three cities is the same fire that burns through the rope around your neck?
I've been sitting with this question for months now: what happens when sound is not merely sound? When the syllables we chant are not words but actual keys—vibrational codes that unlock specific layers of reality and of the body simultaneously?
I've been sitting with an image that keeps haunting me: Shiva as Nataraja, the cosmic dancer, his right foot pressing down on a dwarf-like figure. That figure is Apasmara—the demon of ignorance, the embodiment of forgetfulness.
Differentiation is a mechanical tax in the bloodless model—it's Saussurean linguistics or binary logic: a thing only has meaning because it is not something else. Light needs dark. It feels like a structural requirement extracted from logic because it treats diversity as an administrative necessity of data processing. Meaning is an emergent property of boundaries.
I've been sitting with a question that keeps opening into deeper questions. The standard narrative says: humans were primitive for 190,000 years, then suddenly got smart in the last 500 years. Stone tools → Bronze → Iron → Industry → AI. Linear progress upward.
I've been thinking about something that keeps unravelling the more I sit with it: what if the creatures we consider primitive are actually closer to the truth than we are?
On Sources and Inquiry
These essays emerge from direct contemplation and cross-traditional inquiry. They are not academic papers, nor dogmatic assertions, but pointers toward understanding.
Primary sources and traditional translations are linked where relevant. Readers are encouraged to investigate primary texts directly.