Monday, December 6, 2021

Rule 2: Treat Yourself Like Someone You Are Responsible For Helping



Yin and Yang:
Garden of Eden:

RULE 2: TREAT YOURSELF LIKE SOMEONE YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR HELPING

WHY WON’T YOU JUST TAKE YOUR DAMN PILLS?

Imagine that a hundred people are prescribed a drug. Consider what happens next. One-third of them won’t fill the prescription.30 Half of the remaining sixty-seven will fill it, but won’t take the medication correctly. They’ll miss doses. They’ll quit taking it early. They might not even take it at all. Physicians and pharmacists tend to blame such patients for their noncompliance, inaction and error. You can lead a horse to water, they reason. Psychologists tend to take a dim view of such judgments. We are trained to assume that the failure of patients to follow professional advice is the fault of the practitioner, not the patient. We believe the health-care provider has a responsibility to profer advice that will be followed, offer interventions that will be respected, plan with the patient or client until the desired result is achieved, and follow up to ensure that everything is going correctly. This is just one of the many things that make psychologists so wonderful – :). Of course, we have the luxury of time with our clients, unlike other more beleaguered professionals, who wonder why sick people won’t take their medication. What’s wrong with them? Don’t they want to get better? Here’s something worse. Imagine that someone receives an organ transplant. Imagine it’s a kidney. A transplant typically occurs only after a long period of anxious waiting on the part of the recipient. Only a minority of people donate organs when they die (and even fewer when they are still alive). Only a small number of donated organs are a good match for any hopeful recipient. This means that the typical kidney transplantee has been undergoing dialysis, the only alternative, for years. Dialysis involves passing all the patient’s blood out of his or her body, through a machine, and back in. It is an unlikely and miraculous treatment, so that’s all good, but it’s not pleasant. It must happen five to seven times a week, for eight hours a time. It should happen every time the patient sleeps. That’s too much. No one wants to stay on dialysis. Now, one of the complications of transplantation is rejection. Your body does not like it when parts of someone else’s body are stitched into it. Your immune system will attack and destroy such foreign elements, even when they are crucial to your survival. To stop this from happening, you must take anti-rejection drugs, which weaken immunity, increasing your susceptibility to infectious disease. Most people are happy to accept the trade-off. Recipients of transplants still suffer the effects of organ rejection, despite the existence and utility of these drugs. It’s not because the drugs fail (although they sometimes do). It’s more often because those prescribed the drugs do not take them. This beggars belief. It is seriously not good to have your kidneys fail. Dialysis is no picnic. Transplantation surgery occurs after long waiting, at high risk and great expense. To lose all that because you don’t take your medication? How could people do that to themselves? How could this possibly be? It’s complicated, to be fair. Many people who receive a transplanted organ are isolated, or beset by multiple physical health problems (to say nothing of problems associated with unemployment or family crisis). They may be cognitively impaired or depressed. They may not entirely trust their doctor, or understand the necessity of the medication. Maybe they can barely afford the drugs, and ration them, desperately and unproductively. But—and this is the amazing thing—imagine that it isn’t you who feels sick. It’s your dog. So, you take him to the vet. The vet gives you a prescription. What happens then? You have just as many reasons to distrust a vet as a doctor. Furthermore, if you cared so little for your pet that you weren’t concerned with what improper, substandard or error-ridden prescription he might be given, you wouldn’t have taken him to the vet in the first place. Thus, you care. Your actions prove it. In fact, on average, you care more. People are better at filling and properly administering prescription medication to their pets than to themselves. That’s not good. Even from your pet’s perspective, it’s not good. Your pet (probably) loves you, and would be happier if you took your medication. It is difficult to conclude anything from this set of facts except that people appear to love their dogs, cats, ferrets and birds (and maybe even their lizards) more than themselves. How horrible is that? How much shame must exist, for something like that to be true? What could it be about people that makes them prefer their pets to themselves? It was an ancient story in the Book of Genesis—the first book in the Old Testament—that helped me find an answer to that perplexing question.

The Oldest Story and the Nature of the World

Two stories of Creation from two different Middle Eastern sources appear to be woven together in the Genesis account. In the chronologically first but historically more recent account—known as the “Priestly”—God created the cosmos, using His divine Word, speaking light, water and land into existence, following that with the plants and the heavenly bodies. Then He created birds and animals and fish (again, employing speech)—and ended with man, male and female, both somehow formed in his image. That all happens in Genesis 1. In the second, older, “Jawhist” version, we find another origin account, involving Adam and Eve (where the details of creation differ somewhat), as well as the stories of Cain and Abel, Noah and the Tower of Babel. That is Genesis 2 to 11. To understand Genesis 1, the Priestly story, with its insistence on speech as the fundamental creative force, it is first necessary to review a few fundamental, ancient assumptions (these are markedly different in type and intent from the assumptions of science, which are, historically speaking, quite novel). Scientific truths were made explicit a mere five hundred years ago, with the work of Francis Bacon, René Descartes and Isaac Newton. In whatever manner our forebears viewed the world prior to that, it was not through a scientific lens (any more than they could view the moon and the stars through the glass lenses of the equally recent telescope). Because we are so scientific now—and so determinedly materialistic—it is very difficult for us even to understand that other ways of seeing can and do exist. But those who existed during the distant time in which the foundational epics of our culture emerged were much more concerned with the actions that dictated survival (and with interpreting the world in a manner commensurate with that goal) than with anything approximating what we now understand as objective truth. Before the dawn of the scientific worldview, reality was construed differently. Being was understood as a place of action, not a place of things.31 It was understood as something more akin to story or drama. That story or drama was lived, subjective experience, as it manifested itself moment to moment in the consciousness of every living person. It was something similar to the stories we tell each other about our lives and their personal significance; something similar to the happenings that novelists describe when they capture existence in the pages of their books. Subjective experience—that includes familiar objects such as trees and clouds, primarily objective in their existence, but also (and more importantly) such things as emotions and dreams as well as hunger, thirst and pain. It is such things, experienced personally, that are the most fundamental elements of human life, from the archaic, dramatic perspective, and they are not easily reducible to the detached and objective—even by the modern reductionist, materialist mind. Take pain, for example—subjective pain. That’s something so real no argument can stand against it. Everyone acts as if their pain is real— ultimately, finally real. Pain matters, more than matter matters. It is for this reason, I believe, that so many of the world’s traditions regard the suffering attendant upon existence as the irreducible truth of Being. In any case, that which we subjectively experience can be likened much more to a novel or a movie than to a scientific description of physical reality. It is the drama of lived experience—the unique, tragic, personal death of your father, compared to the objective death listed in the hospital records; the pain of your first love; the despair of dashed hopes; the joy attendant upon a child’s success.

The Domain, Not of Matter, but of What Matters

The scientific world of matter can be reduced, in some sense, to its fundamental constituent elements: molecules, atoms, even quarks. However, the world of experience has primal constituents, as well. These are the necessary elements whose interactions define drama and fiction. One of these is chaos. Another is order. The third (as there are three) is the process that mediates between the two, which appears identical to what modern people call consciousness. It is our eternal subjugation to the first two that makes us doubt the validity of existence—that makes us throw up our hands in despair, and fail to care for ourselves properly. It is proper understanding of the third that allows us the only real way out. Chaos is the domain of ignorance itself. It’s unexplored territory. Chaos is what extends, eternally and without limit, beyond the boundaries of all states, all ideas, and all disciplines. It’s the foreigner, the stranger, the member of another gang, the rustle in the bushes in the night-time, the monster under the bed, the hidden anger of your mother, and the sickness of your child. Chaos is the despair and horror you feel when you have been profoundly betrayed. It’s the place you end up when things fall apart; when your dreams die, your career collapses, or your marriage ends. It’s the underworld of fairytale and myth, where the dragon and the gold it guards eternally co-exist. Chaos is where we are when we don’t know where we are, and what we are doing when we don’t know what we are doing. It is, in short, all those things and situations we neither know nor understand. Chaos is also the formless potential from which the God of Genesis 1 called forth order using language at the beginning of time. It’s the same potential from which we, made in that Image, call forth the novel and everchanging moments of our lives. And Chaos is freedom, dreadful freedom, too. Order, by contrast, is explored territory. That’s the hundreds-of-millionsof- years-old hierarchy of place, position and authority. That’s the structure of society. It’s the structure provided by biology, too—particularly insofar as you are adapted, as you are, to the structure of society. Order is tribe, religion, hearth, home and country. It’s the warm, secure living-room where the fireplace glows and the children play. It’s the flag of the nation. It’s the value of the currency. Order is the floor beneath your feet, and your plan for the day. It’s the greatness of tradition, the rows of desks in a school classroom, the trains that leave on time, the calendar, and the clock. Order is the public façade we’re called upon to wear, the politeness of a gathering of civilized strangers, and the thin ice on which we all skate. Order is the place where the behavior of the world matches our expectations and our desires; the place where all things turn out the way we want them to. But order is sometimes tyranny and stultification, as well, when the demand for certainty and uniformity and purity becomes too one-sided. Where everything is certain, we’re in order. We’re there when things are going according to plan and nothing is new and disturbing. In the domain of order, things behave as God intended. We like to be there. Familiar environments are congenial. In order, we’re able to think about things in the long term. There, things work, and we’re stable, calm and competent. We seldom leave places we understand—geographical or conceptual—for that reason, and we certainly do not like it when we are compelled to or when it happens accidentally. You’re in order, when you have a loyal friend, a trustworthy ally. When the same person betrays you, sells you out, you move from the daytime world of clarity and light to the dark underworld of chaos, confusion and despair. That’s the same move you make, and the same place you visit, when the company you work starts to fail and your job is placed in doubt. When your tax return has been filed, that’s order. When you’re audited, that’s chaos. Most people would rather be mugged than audited. Before the Twin Towers fell—that was order. Chaos manifested itself afterward. Everyone felt it. The very air became uncertain. What exactly was it that fell? Wrong question. What exactly remained standing? That was the issue at hand. When the ice you’re skating on is solid, that’s order. When the bottom drops out, and things fall apart, and you plunge through the ice, that’s chaos. Order is the Shire of Tolkien’s hobbits: peaceful, productive and safely inhabitable, even by the naive. Chaos is the underground kingdom of the dwarves, usurped by Smaug, the treasure-hoarding serpent. Chaos is the deep ocean bottom to which Pinocchio voyaged to rescue his father from Monstro, whale and fire-breathing dragon. That journey into darkness and rescue is the most difficult thing a puppet must do, if he wants to be real; if he wants to extract himself from the temptations of deceit and acting and victimization and impulsive pleasure and totalitarian subjugation; if he wants to take his place as a genuine Being in the world. Order is the stability of your marriage. It’s buttressed by the traditions of the past and by your expectations—grounded, often invisibly, in those traditions. Chaos is that stability crumbling under your feet when you discover your partner’s infidelity. Chaos is the experience of reeling unbound and unsupported through space when your guiding routines and traditions collapse. Order is the place and time where the oft-invisible axioms you live by organize your experience and your actions so that what should happen does happen. Chaos is the new place and time that emerges when tragedy strikes suddenly, or malevolence reveals its paralyzing visage, even in the confines of your own home. Something unexpected or undesired can always make its appearance, when a plan is being laid out, regardless of how familiar the circumstances. When that happens, the territory has shifted. Make no mistake about it: the space, the apparent space, may be the same. But we live in time, as well as space. In consequence, even the oldest and most familiar places retain an ineradicable capacity to surprise you. You may be cruising happily down the road in the automobile you have known and loved for years. But time is passing. The brakes could fail. You might be walking down the road in the body you have always relied on. If your heart malfunctions, even momentarily, everything changes. Friendly old dogs can still bite. Old and trusted friends can still deceive. New ideas can destroy old and comfortable certainties. Such things matter. They’re real. Our brains respond instantly when chaos appears, with simple, hyper-fast circuits maintained from the ancient days, when our ancestors dwelled in trees, and snakes struck in a flash.32 After that nigh-instantaneous, deeply reflexive bodily response comes the later-evolving, more complex but slower responses of emotions—and, after that, comes thinking, of the higher order, which can extend over seconds, minutes or years. All that response is instinctive, in some sense—but the faster the response, the more instinctive.

Chaos and Order: Personality, Female and Male

Chaos and order are two of the most fundamental elements of lived experience—two of the most basic subdivisions of Being itself. But they’re not things, or objects, and they’re not experienced as such. Things or objects are part of the objective world. They’re inanimate; spiritless. They’re dead. This is not true of chaos and order. Those are perceived, experienced and understood (to the degree that they are understood at all) as personalities— and that is just as true of the perceptions, experiences and understanding of modern people as their ancient forebears. It’s just that moderners don’t notice. Order and chaos are not understood first, objectively (as things or objects), and then personified. That would only be the case if we perceived objective reality first, and then inferred intent and purpose. But that isn’t how perception operates, despite our preconceptions. Perception of things as tools, for example, occurs before or in concert with perception of things as objects. We see what things mean just as fast or faster than we see what they are. Perception of things as entities with personality also occurs before perception of things as things. This is particularly true of the action of others,34 living others, but we also see the non-living “objective world” as animated, with purpose and intent. This is because of the operation of what psychologists have called “the hyperactive agency detector” within us.35 We evolved, over millennia, within intensely social circumstances. This means that the most significant elements of our environment of origin were personalities, not things, objects or situations. The personalities we have evolved to perceive have been around, in predictable form, and in typical, hierarchical configurations, forever, for all intents and purposes. They have been male or female, for example, for a billion years. That’s a long time. The division of life into its twin sexes occurred before the evolution of multi-cellular animals. It was in a stillrespectable one-fifth of that time that mammals, who take extensive care of their young, emerged. Thus, the category of “parent” and/or “child” has been around for 200 million years. That’s longer than birds have existed. That’s longer than flowers have grown. It’s not a billion years, but it’s still a very long time. It’s plenty long enough for male and female and parent and child to serve as vital and fundamental parts of the environment to which we have adapted. This means that male and female and parent and child are categories, for us—natural categories, deeply embedded in our perceptual, emotional and motivational structures. Our brains are deeply social. Other creatures (particularly, other humans) were crucially important to us as we lived, mated and evolved. Those creatures were literally our natural habitat—our environment. From a Darwinian perspective, nature—reality itself; the environment, itself—is what selects. The environment cannot be defined in any more fundamental manner. It is not mere inert matter. Reality itself is whatever we contend with when we are striving to survive and reproduce. A lot of that is other beings, their opinions of us, and their communities. And that’s that. Over the millennia, as our brain capacity increased and we developed curiosity to spare, we became increasingly aware of and curious about the nature of the world—what we eventually conceptualized as the objective world—outside the personalities of family and troupe. And “outside” is not merely unexplored physical territory. Outside is outside of what we currently understand—and understanding is dealing with and coping with and not merely representing objectively. But our brains had been long concentrating on other people. Thus, it appears that we first began to perceive the unknown, chaotic, non-human world with the innate categories of our social brain.36 And even this is a misstatement: when we first began to perceive the unknown, chaotic, non-animal world, we used categories that had originally evolved to represent the pre-human animal social world. Our minds are far older than mere humanity. Our categories are far older than our species. Our most basic category—as old, in some sense, as the sexual act itself—appears to be that of sex, male and female. We appear to have taken that primordial knowledge of structured, creative opposition and begun to interpret everything through its lens. Order, the known, appears symbolically associated with masculinity (as illustrated in the aforementioned yang of the Taoist yin-yang symbol). This is perhaps because the primary hierarchical structure of human society is masculine, as it is among most animals, including the chimpanzees who are our closest genetic and, arguably, behavioural match. It is because men are and throughout history have been the builders of towns and cities, the engineers, stonemasons, bricklayers, and lumberjacks, the operators of heavy machinery.38 Order is God the Father, the eternal Judge, ledger-keeper and dispenser of rewards and punishments. Order is the peacetime army of policemen and soldiers. It’s the political culture, the corporate environment, and the system. It’s the “they” in “you know what they say.” It’s credit cards, classrooms, supermarket checkout lineups, turn-taking, traffic lights, and the familiar routes of daily commuters. Order, when pushed too far, when imbalanced, can also manifest itself destructively and terribly. It does so as the forced migration, the concentration camp, and the soul-devouring uniformity of the goose-step. Chaos—the unknown—is symbolically associated with the feminine. This is partly because all the things we have come to know were born, originally, of the unknown, just as all beings we encounter were born of mothers. Chaos is mater, origin, source, mother; materia, the substance from which all things are made. It is also what matters, or what is the matter—the very subject matter of thought and communication. In its positive guise, chaos is possibility itself, the source of ideas, the mysterious realm of gestation and birth. As a negative force, it’s the impenetrable darkness of a cave and the accident by the side of the road. It’s the mother grizzly, all compassion to her cubs, who marks you as potential predator and tears you to pieces. Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection. Women are choosy maters (unlike female chimps, their closest animal counterparts39). Most men do not meet female human standards. It is for this reason that women on dating sites rate 85 percent of men as below average in attractiveness. It is for this reason that we all have twice as many female ancestors as male (imagine that all the women who have ever lived have averaged one child. Now imagine that half the men who have ever lived have fathered two children, if they had any, while the other half fathered none). It is Woman as Nature who looks at half of all men and says, “No!” For the men, that’s a direct encounter with chaos, and it occurs with devastating force every time they are turned down for a date. Human female choosiness is also why we are very different from the common ancestor we shared with our chimpanzee cousins, while the latter are very much the same. Women’s proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained (competitive, aggressive, domineering) creatures that we are.42 It is Nature as Woman who says, “Well, bucko, you’re good enough for a friend, but my experience of you so far has not indicated the suitability of your genetic material for continued propagation.” The most profound religious symbols rely for their power in large part on this underlying fundamentally bipartisan conceptual subdivision. The Star of David is, for example, the downward pointing triangle of femininity and the upward pointing triangle of the male. fn1 It’s the same for the yoni and lingam of Hinduism (which come covered with snakes, our ancient adversaries and provocateurs: the Shiva Linga is depicted with snake deities called the Nagas). The ancient Egyptians represented Osiris, god of the state, and Isis, goddess of the underworld, as twin cobras with their tails knotted together. The same symbol was used in China to portray Fuxi and Nuwa, creators of humanity and of writing. The representations in Christianity are less abstract, more like personalities, but the familiar Western images of the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child and the Pietà both express the female/male dual unity, as does the traditional insistence on the androgyny of Christ. It should also be noted, finally, that the structure of the brain itself at a gross morphological level appears to reflect this duality. This, to me, indicates the fundamental, beyond-the-metaphorical reality of this symbolically feminine/masculine divide, since the brain is adapted, by definition, to reality itself (that is, reality conceptualized in this quasi-Darwinian manner). Elkhonon Goldberg, student of the great Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, has proposed quite lucidly and directly that the very hemispheric structure of the cortex reflects the fundamental division between novelty (the unknown, or chaos) and routinization (the known, order).44 He doesn’t make reference to the symbols representing the structure of the world in reference to this theory, but that’s all the better: an idea is more credible when it emerges as a consequence of investigations in different realms. We already know all this, but we don’t know we know it. But we immediately comprehend it when it’s articulated in a manner such as this. Everyone understands order and chaos, world and underworld, when it’s explained using these terms. We all have a palpable sense of the chaos lurking under everything familiar. That’s why we understand the strange, surreal stories of Pinocchio, and Sleeping Beauty, and The Lion King, and The Little Mermaid, and Beauty and the Beast, with their eternal landscapes of known and unknown, world and underworld. We’ve all been in both places, many times: sometimes by happenstance, sometimes by choice. Many things begin to fall into place when you begin to consciously understand the world in this manner. It’s as if the knowledge of your body and soul falls into alignment with the knowledge of your intellect. And there’s more: such knowledge is proscriptive, as well as descriptive. This is the kind of knowing what that helps you know how. This is the kind of is from which you can derive an ought. The Taoist juxtaposition of yin and yang, for example, doesn’t simply portray chaos and order as the fundamental elements of Being—it also tells you how to act. The Way, the Taoist path of life, is represented by (or exists on) the border between the twin serpents. The Way is the path of proper Being. It’s the same Way as that referred to by Christ in John 14:6: I am the way, and the truth and the life. The same idea is expressed in Matthew 7:14: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. We eternally inhabit order, surrounded by chaos. We eternally occupy known territory, surrounded by the unknown. We experience meaningful engagement when we mediate appropriately between them. We are adapted, in the deepest Darwinian sense, not to the world of objects, but to the metarealities of order and chaos, yang and yin. Chaos and order make up the eternal, transcendent environment of the living. To straddle that fundamental duality is to be balanced: to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure. When life suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping and meaningful; when time passes and you’re so engrossed in what you’re doing you don’t notice—it is there and then that you are located precisely on the border between order and chaos. The subjective meaning that we encounter there is the reaction of our deepest being, our neurologically and evolutionarily grounded instinctive self, indicating that we are ensuring the stability but also the expansion of habitable, productive territory, of space that is personal, social and natural. It’s the right place to be, in every sense. You are there when—and where—it matters. That’s what music is telling you, too, when you’re listening—even more, perhaps, when you’re dancing —when its harmonious layered patterns of predictability and unpredictability make meaning itself well up from the most profound depths of your Being. Chaos and order are fundamental elements because every lived situation (even every conceivable lived situation) is made up of both. No matter where we are, there are some things we can identify, make use of, and predict, and some things we neither know nor understand. No matter who we are, Kalahari Desert–dweller or Wall Street banker, some things are under our control, and some things are not. That’s why both can understand the same stories, and dwell within the confines of the same eternal truths. Finally, the fundamental reality of chaos and order is true for everything alive, not only for us. Living things are always to be found in places they can master, surrounded by things and situations that make them vulnerable. Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned. Nonetheless, chaos can be too much. You can’t long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are learning what you still need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be found.

The Garden of Eden

Remember, as discussed earlier, that the Genesis stories were amalgamated from several sources. After the newer Priestly story (Genesis 1), recounting the emergence of order from chaos, comes the second, even more ancient, “Jahwist” part, beginning, essentially, with Genesis 2. The Jahwist account, which uses the name YHWH or Jahweh to represent God, contains the story of Adam and Eve, along with a much fuller explication of the events of the sixth day alluded to in the previous “Priestly” story. The continuity between the stories appears to be the result of careful editing by the person or persons known singly to biblical scholars as the “Redactor,” who wove the stories together. This may have occurred when the peoples of two traditions united, for one reason or another, and the subsequent illogic of their melded stories, growing together over time in an ungainly fashion, bothered someone conscious, courageous, and obsessed with coherence. According to the Jahwist creation story, God first created a bounded space, known as Eden (which, in Aramaic—Jesus’s putative language—means wellwatered place) or Paradise (pairidaeza in old Iranian or Avestan, which means walled or protected enclosure or garden). God placed Adam in there, along with all manner of fruit-bearing trees, two of which were marked out. One of these was the Tree of Life; the other, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. God then told Adam to have his fill of fruit, as he wished, but added that the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was forbidden. After that, He created Eve as a partner for Adam. Adam and Eve don’t seem very conscious, at the beginning, when they are first placed in Paradise, and they were certainly not self-conscious. As the story insists, the original parents were naked, but not ashamed. Such phrasing implies first that it’s perfectly natural and normal for people to be ashamed of their nakedness (otherwise nothing would have to be said about its absence) and second that there was something amiss, for better or worse, with our first parents. Although there are exceptions, the only people around now who would be unashamed if suddenly dropped naked into a public place— excepting the odd exhibitionist—are those younger than three years of age. In fact, a common nightmare involves the sudden appearance of the dreamer, naked, on a stage in front of a packed house. In the third verse of Genesis, a serpent appears—first, apparently, in legged form. God only knows why He allowed—or placed—such a creature in the garden. I have long puzzled over the meaning of this. It seems to be a reflection, in part, of the order/chaos dichotomy characterizing all of experience, with Paradise serving as habitable order and the serpent playing the role of chaos. The serpent in Eden therefore means the same thing as the black dot in the yin side of the Taoist yin/yang symbol of totality—that is, the possibility of the unknown and revolutionary suddenly manifesting itself where everything appears calm. It just does not appear possible, even for God himself, to make a bounded space completely protected from the outside—not in the real world, with its necessary limitations, surrounded by the transcendent. The outside, chaos, always sneaks into the inside, because nothing can be completely walled off from the rest of reality. So even the ultimate in safe spaces inevitably harbours a snake. There were—forever—genuine, quotidian, reptilian snakes in the grass and in the trees of our original African paradise. Even had all of those been banished, however (in some inconceivable manner, by some primordial St. George) snakes would have still remained in the form of our primordial human rivals (at least when they were acting like enemies, from our limited, in-group, kin-bonded perspectives). There was, after all, no shortage of conflict and warfare among our ancestors, tribal and otherwise. And even if we had defeated all the snakes that beset us from without, reptilian and human alike, we would still not have been safe. Nor are we now. We have seen the enemy, after all, and he is us. The snake inhabits each of our souls. This is the reason, as far as I can tell, for the strange Christian insistence, made most explicit by John Milton, that the snake in the Garden of Eden was also Satan, the Spirit of Evil itself. The importance of this symbolic identification—its staggering brilliance—can hardly be overstated. It is through such millennia-long exercise of the imagination that the idea of abstracted moral concepts themselves, with all they entail, developed. Work beyond comprehension was invested into the idea of Good and Evil, and its surrounding, dream-like metaphor. The worst of all possible snakes is the eternal human proclivity for evil. The worst of all possible snakes is psychological, spiritual, personal, internal. No walls, however tall, will keep that out. Even if the fortress were thick enough, in principle, to keep everything bad whatsoever outside, it would immediately appear again within. As the great Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn insisted, the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. There is simply no way to wall off some isolated portion of the greater surrounding reality and make everything permanently predictable and safe within it. Some of what has been no-matter-how-carefully excluded will always sneak back in. A serpent, metaphorically speaking, will inevitably appear. Even the most assiduous of parents cannot fully protect their children, even if they lock them in the basement, safely away from drugs, alcohol and internet porn. In that extreme case, the too-cautious, too-caring parent merely substitutes him or herself for the other terrible problems of life. This is the great Freudian Oedipal nightmare.49 It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them. And even if it were possible to permanently banish everything threatening —everything dangerous (and, therefore, everything challenging and interesting), that would mean only that another danger would emerge: that of permanent human infantilism and absolute uselessness. How could the nature of man ever reach its full potential without challenge and danger? How dull and contemptible would we become if there was no longer reason to pay attention? Maybe God thought His new creation would be able to handle the serpent, and considered its presence the lesser of two evils. Question for parents: do you want to make your children safe, or strong? In any case, there’s a serpent in the Garden, and he’s a “subtil” beast, according to the ancient story (difficult to see, vaporous, cunning, deceitful and treacherous). It therefore comes as no surprise when he decides to play a trick on Eve. Why Eve, instead of Adam? It could just be chance. It was fiftyfifty for Eve, statistically speaking, and those are pretty high odds. But I have learned that these old stories contain nothing superfluous. Anything accidental—anything that does not serve the plot—has long been forgotten in the telling. As the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov advised, “If there is a rifle hanging on the wall in act one, it must be fired in the next act. Otherwise it has no business being there.”50 Perhaps primordial Eve had more reason to attend to serpents than Adam. Maybe they were more likely, for example, to prey on her tree-dwelling infants. Perhaps it is for this reason that Eve’s daughters are more protective, self-conscious, fearful and nervous, to this day (even, and especially, in the most egalitarian of modern human societies51). In any case, the serpent tells Eve that if she eats the forbidden fruit, she won’t die. Instead, her eyes will be opened. She will become like God, knowing good from evil. Of course, the serpent doesn’t let her know she will be like God in only that one way. But he is a serpent, after all. Being human, and wanting to know more, Eve decides to eat the fruit. Poof! She wakes up: she’s conscious, or perhaps self-conscious, for the first time. Now, no clear-seeing, conscious woman is going to tolerate an unawakened man. So, Eve immediately shares the fruit with Adam. That makes him self-conscious. Little has changed. Women have been making men self-conscious since the beginning of time. They do this primarily by rejecting them—but they also do it by shaming them, if men do not take responsibility. Since women bear the primary burden of reproduction, it’s no wonder. It is very hard to see how it could be otherwise. But the capacity of women to shame men and render them self-conscious is still a primal force of nature. Now, you may ask: what in the world have snakes got to do with vision? Well, first, it’s clearly of some importance to see them, because they might prey on you (particularly when you’re little and live in trees, like our arboreal ancestors). Dr. Lynn Isbell, professor of anthropology and animal behaviour at the University of California, has suggested that the stunningly acute vision almost uniquely possessed by human beings was an adaptation forced on us tens of millions of years ago by the necessity of detecting and avoiding the terrible danger of snakes, with whom our ancestors co-evolved.52 This is perhaps one of the reasons the snake features in the garden of Paradise as the creature who gave us the vision of God (in addition to serving as the primordial and eternal enemy of mankind). This is perhaps one of the reasons why Mary, the eternal, archetypal mother—Eve perfected—is so commonly shown in medieval and Renaissance iconography holding the Christ Child in the air, as far away as possible from a predatory reptile, which she has firmly pinned under her foot.53 And there’s more. It’s fruit that the snake offers, and fruit is also associated with a transformation of vision, in that our ability to see color is an adaptation that allows us to rapidly detect the ripe and therefore edible bounty of trees. Our primordial parents hearkened to the snake. They ate the fruit. Their eyes opened. They both awoke. You might think, as Eve did initially, that this would be a good thing. Sometimes, however, half a gift is worse than none. Adam and Eve wake up, all right, but only enough to discover some terrible things. First, they notice that they’re naked.

The Naked Ape

My son figured out that he was naked well before he was three. He wanted to dress himself. He kept the washroom door firmly shut. He didn’t appear in public without his clothes. I couldn’t for the life of me see how this had anything to do with his upbringing. It was his own discovery, his own realization, and his own choice of reactions. It looked built in, to me. What does it mean to know yourself naked—or, potentially worse, to know yourself and your partner naked? All manner of terrible things—expressed in the rather horrifying manner, for example, of the Renaissance painter Hans Baldung Grien, whose painting inspired the illustration that begins this chapter. Naked means vulnerable and easily damaged. Naked means subject to judgment for beauty and health. Naked means unprotected and unarmed in the jungle of nature and man. This is why Adam and Eve became ashamed, immediately after their eyes were opened. They could see—and what they first saw was themselves. Their faults stood out. Their vulnerability was on display. Unlike other mammals, whose delicate abdomens are protected by the armour-like expanse of their backs, they were upright creatures, with the most vulnerable parts of their body presented to the world. And worse was to come. Adam and Eve made themselves loincloths (in the International Standard Version; aprons in the King James Version) right away, to cover up their fragile bodies—and to protect their egos. Then they promptly skittered off and hid. In their vulnerability, now fully realized, they felt unworthy to stand before God. If you can’t identify with that sentiment, you’re just not thinking. Beauty shames the ugly. Strength shames the weak. Death shames the living—and the Ideal shames us all. Thus we fear it, resent it—even hate it (and, of course, that’s the theme next examined in Genesis, in the story of Cain and Abel). What are we to do about that? Abandon all ideals of beauty, health, brilliance and strength? That’s not a good solution. That would merely ensure that we would feel ashamed, all the time—and that we would even more justly deserve it. I don’t want women who can stun by their mere presence to disappear just so that others can feel unselfconscious. I don’t want intellects such as John von Neumann’s to vanish, just because of my barely-gradetwelve grasp of mathematics. By the time he was nineteen, he had redefined numbers.55 Numbers! Thank God for John von Neumann! Thank God for Grace Kelly and Anita Ekberg and Monica Bellucci! I’m proud to feel unworthy in the presence of people like that. It’s the price we all pay for aim, achievement and ambition. But it’s also no wonder that Adam and Eve covered themselves up. The next part of the story is downright farcical, in my opinion, although it’s also tragic and terrible. That evening, when Eden cools down, God goes out for His evening stroll. But Adam is absent. This puzzles God, who is accustomed to walking with him. “Adam,” calls God, apparently forgetting that He can see through bushes, “Where are you?” Adam immediately reveals himself, but badly: first as a neurotic; then, as a ratfink. The creator of all the universe calls, and Adam replies: “I heard you, God. But I was naked, and hid.” What does this mean? It means that people, unsettled by their vulnerability, eternally fear to tell the truth, to mediate between chaos and order, and to manifest their destiny. In other words, they are afraid to walk with God. That’s not particularly admirable, perhaps, but it’s certainly understandable. God’s a judgmental father. His standards are high. He’s hard to please. God says, “Who told you that you were naked? Did you eat something you weren’t supposed to?” And Adam, in his wretchedness, points right at Eve, his love, his partner, his soul-mate, and snitches on her. And then he blames God. He says, “The woman, whom you gave to me, she gave it to me (and then I ate it).” How pathetic—and how accurate. The first woman made the first man self-conscious and resentful. Then the first man blamed the woman. And then the first man blamed God. This is exactly how every spurned male feels, to this day. First, he feels small, in front of the potential object of his love, after she denigrates his reproductive suitability. Then he curses God for making her so bitchy, himself so useless (if he has any sense) and Being itself so deeply flawed. Then he turns to thoughts of revenge. How thoroughly contemptible (and how utterly understandable). At least the woman had the serpent to blame, and it later turns out that snake is Satan himself, unlikely as that seems. Thus, we can understand and sympathize with Eve’s error. She was deceived by the best. But Adam! No one forced his words from his mouth. Unfortunately, the worst isn’t over—for Man or Beast. First, God curses the serpent, telling him that he will now have to slither around, legless, forever in peril of being stomped on by angry humans. Second, He tells the woman that she will now bring forth children in sorrow, and desire an unworthy, sometimes resentful man, who will in consequence lord her biological fate over her, permanently. What might this mean? It could just mean that God is a patriarchal tyrant, as politically motivated interpretations of the ancient story insist. I think it’s—merely descriptive. Merely. And here is why: As human beings evolved, the brains that eventually gave rise to selfconsciousness expanded tremendously. This produced an evolutionary arms race between fetal head and female pelvis.56 The female graciously widened her hips, almost to the point where running would no longer be possible. The baby, for his part, allowed himself to be born more than a year early, compared to other mammals of his size, and evolved a semi-collapsible head.57 This was and is a painful adjustment for both. The essentially fetal baby is almost completely dependent on his mother for everything during that first year. The programmability of his massive brain means that he must be trained until he is eighteen (or thirty) before being pushed out of the nest. This is to say nothing of the woman’s consequential pain in childbirth, and high risk of death for mother and infant alike. This all means that women pay a high price for pregnancy and child-rearing, particularly in the early stages, and that one of the inevitable consequences is increased dependence upon the sometimes unreliable and always problematic good graces of men. After God tells Eve what is going to happen, now that she has awakened, He turns to Adam—who, along with his male descendants, doesn’t get off any easier. God says something akin to this: “Man, because you attended to the woman, your eyes have been opened. Your godlike vision, granted to you by snake, fruit and lover, allows you to see far, even into the future. But those who see into the future can also eternally see trouble coming, and must then prepare for all contingencies and possibilities. To do that, you will have to eternally sacrifice the present for the future. You must put aside pleasure for security. In short: you will have to work. And it’s going to be difficult. I hope you’re fond of thorns and thistles, because you’re going to grow a lot of them.” And then God banishes the first man and the first woman from Paradise, out of infancy, out of the unconscious animal world, into the horrors of history itself. And then He puts cherubim and a flaming sword at the gate of Eden, just to stop them from eating the Fruit of the Tree of Life. That, in particular, appears rather mean-spirited. Why not just make the poor humans immortal, right away? Particularly if that is your plan for the ultimate future, anyway, as the story goes? But who would dare to question God? Perhaps Heaven is something you must build, and immortality something you must earn. And so we return to our original query: Why would someone buy prescription medication for his dog, and then so carefully administer it, when he would not do the same for himself? Now you have the answer, derived from one of the foundational texts of mankind. Why should anyone take care of anything as naked, ugly, ashamed, frightened, worthless, cowardly, resentful, defensive and accusatory as a descendant of Adam? Even if that thing, that being, is himself? And I do not mean at all to exclude women with this phrasing. All the reasons we have discussed so far for taking a dim view of humanity are applicable to others, as much as to the self. They’re generalizations about human nature; nothing more specific. But you know so much more about yourself. You’re bad enough, as other people know you. But only you know the full range of your secret transgressions, insufficiencies and inadequacies. No one is more familiar than you with all the ways your mind and body are flawed. No one has more reason to hold you in contempt, to see you as pathetic—and by withholding something that might do you good, you can punish yourself for all your failings. A dog, a harmless, innocent, unselfconscious dog, is clearly more deserving. But if you are not yet convinced, let us consider another vital issue. Order, chaos, life, death, sin, vision, work and suffering: that is not enough for the authors of Genesis, nor for humanity itself. The story continues, in all its catastrophe and tragedy, and the people involved (that’s us) must contend with yet another painful awakening. We are next fated to contemplate morality itself.

Good and Evil

When their eyes are opened, Adam and Eve realize more than just their nakedness and the necessity of toil. They also come to know Good and Evil (the serpent says, referring to the fruit, “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil”). What could that possibly mean? What could be left to explore and relate, after the vast ground already covered? Well, simple context indicates that it must have something to do with gardens, snakes, disobedience, fruit, sexuality and nakedness. It was the last item—nakedness —that finally clued me in. It took years. Dogs are predators. So are cats. They kill things and eat them. It’s not pretty. But we’ll take them as pets and care for them, and give them their medication when they’re sick, regardless. Why? They’re predators, but it’s just their nature. They do not bear responsibility for it. They’re hungry, not evil. They don’t have the presence of mind, the creativity—and, above all, the self-consciousness—necessary for the inspired cruelty of man. Why not? It’s simple. Unlike us, predators have no comprehension of their fundamental weakness, their fundamental vulnerability, their own subjugation to pain and death. But we know exactly how and where we can be hurt, and why. That is as good a definition as any of self-consciousness. We are aware of our own defencelessness, finitude and mortality. We can feel pain, and self-disgust, and shame, and horror, and we know it. We know what makes us suffer. We know how dread and pain can be inflicted on us—and that means we know exactly how to inflict it on others. We know how we are naked, and how that nakedness can be exploited—and that means we know how others are naked, and how they can be exploited. We can terrify other people, consciously. We can hurt and humiliate them for faults we understand only too well. We can torture them—literally— slowly, artfully and terribly. That’s far more than predation. That’s a qualitative shift in understanding. That’s a cataclysm as large as the development of self-consciousness itself. That’s the entry of the knowledge of Good and Evil into the world. That’s a second as-yet-unhealed fracture in the structure of Existence. That’s the transformation of Being itself into a moral endeavour—all attendant on the development of sophisticated selfconsciousness. Only man could conceive of the rack, the iron maiden and the thumbscrew. Only man will inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. That is the best definition of evil I have been able to formulate. Animals can’t manage that, but humans, with their excruciating, semi-divine capacities, most certainly can. And with this realization we have well-nigh full legitimization of the idea, very unpopular in modern intellectual circles, of Original Sin. And who would dare to say that there was no element of voluntary choice in our evolutionary, individual and theological transformation? Our ancestors chose their sexual partners, and they selected for—consciousness? And selfconsciousness? And moral knowledge? And who can deny the sense of existential guilt that pervades human experience? And who could avoid noting that without that guilt—that sense of inbuilt corruption and capacity for wrongdoing—a man is one step from psychopathy? Human beings have a great capacity for wrongdoing. It’s an attribute that is unique in the world of life. We can and do make things worse, voluntarily, with full knowledge of what we are doing (as well as accidentally, and carelessly, and in a manner that is willfully blind). Given that terrible capacity, that proclivity for malevolent actions, is it any wonder we have a hard time taking care of ourselves, or others—or even that we doubt the value of the entire human enterprise? And we’ve suspected ourselves, for good reason, for a very long time. Thousands of years ago, the ancient Mesopotamians believed, for example, that mankind itself was made from the blood of Kingu, the single most terrible monster that the great Goddess of Chaos could produce, in her most vengeful and destructive moments.58 After drawing conclusions such as that, how could we not question the value of our being, and even of Being itself? Who then could be faced with illness, in himself or another, without doubting the moral utility of prescribing a healing medicament? And no one understands the darkness of the individual better than the individual himself. Who, then, when ill, is going to be fully committed to his own care? Perhaps Man is something that should never have been. Perhaps the world should even be cleansed of all human presence, so that Being and consciousness could return to the innocent brutality of the animal. I believe that the person who claims never to have wished for such a thing has neither consulted his memory nor confronted his darkest fantasies. What then is to be done?

A Spark of the Divine

In Genesis 1, God creates the world with the divine, truthful Word, generating habitable, paradisal order from the precosmogonic chaos. He then creates Man and Woman in His Image, imbuing them with the capacity to do the same—to create order from chaos, and continue His work. At each stage of creation, including that involving the formation of the first couple, God reflects upon what has come to be, and pronounces it Good. The juxtaposition of Genesis 1 with Genesis 2 & 3 (the latter two chapters outlining the fall of man, describing why our lot is so tragedy-ridden and ethically torturous) produces a narrative sequence almost unbearable in its profundity. The moral of Genesis 1 is that Being brought into existence through true speech is Good. This is true even of man himself, prior to his separation from God. This goodness is terribly disrupted by the events of the fall (and of Cain and Abel and the Flood and the Tower of Babel), but we retain an intimation of the prelapsarian state. We remember, so to speak. We remain eternally nostalgic for the innocence of childhood, the divine, unconscious Being of the animal, and the untouched cathedral-like oldgrowth forest. We find respite in such things. We worship them, even if we are self-proclaimed atheistic environmentalists of the most anti-human sort. The original state of Nature, conceived in this manner, is paradisal. But we are no longer one with God and Nature, and there is no simple turning back. The original Man and Woman, existing in unbroken unity with their Creator, did not appear conscious (and certainly not self-conscious). Their eyes were not open. But, in their perfection, they were also less, not more, than their post-Fall counterparts. Their goodness was something bestowed, rather than deserved or earned. They exercised no choice. God knows, that’s easier. But maybe it’s not better than, for example, goodness genuinely earned. Maybe, even in some cosmic sense (assuming that consciousness itself is a phenomenon of cosmic significance), free choice matters. Who can speak with certainty about such things? I am unwilling to take these questions off the table, however, merely because they are difficult. So, here’s a proposition: perhaps it is not simply the emergence of self-consciousness and the rise of our moral knowledge of Death and the Fall that besets us and makes us doubt our own worth. Perhaps it is instead our unwillingness— reflected in Adam’s shamed hiding—to walk with God, despite our fragility and propensity for evil. The entire Bible is structured so that everything after the Fall—the history of Israel, the prophets, the coming of Christ—is presented as a remedy for that Fall, a way out of evil. The beginning of conscious history, the rise of the state and all its pathologies of pride and rigidity, the emergence of great moral figures who try to set things right, culminating in the Messiah Himself —that is all part of humanity’s attempt, God willing, to set itself right. And what would that mean? And this is an amazing thing: the answer is already implicit in Genesis 1: to embody the Image of God—to speak out of chaos the Being that is Good —but to do so consciously, of our own free choice. Back is the way forward —as T. S. Eliot so rightly insisted—but back as awake beings, exercising the proper choice of awake beings, instead of back to sleep: We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, remembered gate When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning; At the source of the longest river The voice of the hidden waterfall And the children in the apple-tree Not known, because not looked for But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea. Quick now, here, now, always— A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of things shall be well When the tongues of flames are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one. (“Little Gidding,” Four Quartets, 1943) If we wish to take care of ourselves properly, we would have to respect ourselves—but we don’t, because we are—not least in our own eyes—fallen creatures. If we lived in Truth; if we spoke the Truth—then we could walk with God once again, and respect ourselves, and others, and the world. Then we might treat ourselves like people we cared for. We might strive to set the world straight. We might orient it toward Heaven, where we would want people we cared for to dwell, instead of Hell, where our resentment and hatred would eternally sentence everyone. In the areas where Christianity emerged two thousand years ago, people were much more barbaric than they are today. Conflict was everywhere. Human sacrifice, including that of children, was a common occurrence even in technologically sophisticated societies, such as that of ancient Carthage.59 In Rome, arena sports were competitions to the death, and the spilling of blood was a commonplace. The probability that a modern person, in a functional democratic country, will now kill or be killed is infinitesimally low compared to what it was in previous societies (and still is, in the unorganized and anarchic parts of the world). Then, the primary moral issue confronting society was control of violent, impulsive selfishness and the mindless greed and brutality that accompanies it. People with those aggressive tendencies still exist. At least now they know that such behaviour is sub-optimal, and either try to control it or encounter major social obstacles if they don’t. But now, also, another problem has arisen, which was perhaps less common in our harsher past. It is easy to believe that people are arrogant, and egotistical, and always looking out for themselves. The cynicism that makes that opinion a universal truism is widespread and fashionable. But such an orientation to the world is not at all characteristic of many people. They have the opposite problem: they shoulder intolerable burdens of self-disgust, selfcontempt, shame and self-consciousness. Thus, instead of narcissistically inflating their own importance, they don’t value themselves at all, and they don’t take care of themselves with attention and skill. It seems that people often don’t really believe that they deserve the best care, personally speaking. They are excruciatingly aware of their own faults and inadequacies, real and exaggerated, and ashamed and doubtful of their own value. They believe that other people shouldn’t suffer, and they will work diligently and altruistically to help them alleviate it. They extend the same courtesy even to the animals they are acquainted with—but not so easily to themselves. It is true that the idea of virtuous self-sacrifice is deeply embedded in Western culture (at least insofar as the West has been influenced by Christianity, which is based on the imitation of someone who performed the ultimate act of self-sacrifice). Any claim that the Golden Rule does not mean “sacrifice yourself for others” might therefore appear dubious. But Christ’s archetypal death exists as an example of how to accept finitude, betrayal and tyranny heroically—how to walk with God despite the tragedy of selfconscious knowledge—and not as a directive to victimize ourselves in the service of others. To sacrifice ourselves to God (to the highest good, if you like) does not mean to suffer silently and willingly when some person or organization demands more from us, consistently, than is offered in return. That means we are supporting tyranny, and allowing ourselves to be treated like slaves. It is not virtuous to be victimized by a bully, even if that bully is oneself. I learned two very important lessons from Carl Jung, the famous Swiss depth psychologist, about: “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you” or “loving your neighbour as yourself.” The first lesson was that neither of these statements has anything to do with being nice. The second was that both are equations, rather than injunctions. If I am someone’s friend, family member, or lover, then I am morally obliged to bargain as hard on my own behalf as they are on theirs. If I fail to do so, I will end up a slave, and the other person a tyrant. What good is that? It much better for any relationship when both partners are strong. Furthermore, there is little difference between standing up and speaking for yourself, when you are being bullied or otherwise tormented and enslaved, and standing up and speaking for someone else. As Jung points out, this means embracing and loving the sinner who is yourself, as much as forgiving and aiding someone else who is stumbling and imperfect. As God himself claims (so goes the story), “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” According to this philosophy, you do not simply belong to yourself. You are not simply your own possession to torture and mistreat. This is partly because your Being is inexorably tied up with that of others, and your mistreatment of yourself can have catastrophic consequences for others. This is most clearly evident, perhaps, in the aftermath of suicide, when those left behind are often both bereft and traumatized. But, metaphorically speaking, there is also this: you have a spark of the divine in you, which belongs not to you, but to God. We are, after all—according to Genesis—made in His image. We have the semi-divine capacity for consciousness. Our consciousness participates in the speaking forth of Being. We are low-resolution (“kenotic”) versions of God. We can make order from chaos—and vice versa—in our way, with our words. So, we may not exactly be God, but we’re not exactly nothing, either. In my own periods of darkness, in the underworld of the soul, I find myself frequently overcome and amazed by the ability of people to befriend each other, to love their intimate partners and parents and children, and to do what they must do to keep the machinery of the world running. I knew a man, injured and disabled by a car accident, who was employed by a local utility. For years after the crash he worked side by side with another man, who for his part suffered with a degenerative neurological disease. They cooperated while repairing the lines, each making up for the other’s inadequacy. This sort of everyday heroism is the rule, I believe, rather than the exception. Most individuals are dealing with one or more serious health problems while going productively and uncomplainingly about their business. If anyone is fortunate enough to be in a rare period of grace and health, personally, then he or she typically has at least one close family member in crisis. Yet people prevail and continue to do difficult and effortful tasks to hold themselves and their families and society together. To me this is miraculous—so much so that a dumbfounded gratitude is the only appropriate response. There are so many ways that things can fall apart, or fail to work altogether, and it is always wounded people who are holding it together. They deserve some genuine and heartfelt admiration for that. It’s an ongoing miracle of fortitude and perseverance. In my clinical practice I encourage people to credit themselves and those around them for acting productively and with care, as well as for the genuine concern and thoughtfulness they manifest towards others. People are so tortured by the limitations and constraint of Being that I am amazed they ever act properly or look beyond themselves at all. But enough do so that we have central heat and running water and infinite computational power and electricity and enough for everyone to eat and even the capacity to contemplate the fate of broader society and nature, terrible nature, itself. All that complex machinery that protects us from freezing and starving and dying from lack of water tends unceasingly towards malfunction through entropy, and it is only the constant attention of careful people that keeps it working so unbelievably well. Some people degenerate into the hell of resentment and the hatred of Being, but most refuse to do so, despite their suffering and disappointments and losses and inadequacies and ugliness, and again that is a miracle for those with the eyes to see it. Humanity, in toto, and those who compose it as identifiable people deserve some sympathy for the appalling burden under which the human individual genuinely staggers; some sympathy for subjugation to mortal vulnerability, tyranny of the state, and the depredations of nature. It is an existential situation that no mere animal encounters or endures, and one of severity such that it would take a God to fully bear it. It is this sympathy that should be the proper medicament for self-conscious self-contempt, which has its justification, but is only half the full and proper story. Hatred for self and mankind must be balanced with gratefulness for tradition and the state and astonishment at what normal, everyday people accomplish—to say nothing of the staggering achievements of the truly remarkable. We deserve some respect. You deserve some respect. You are important to other people, as much as to yourself. You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world. You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself. You should take care of, help and be good to yourself the same way you would take care of, help and be good to someone you loved and valued. You may therefore have to conduct yourself habitually in a manner that allows you some respect for your own Being—and fair enough. But every person is deeply flawed. Everyone falls short of the glory of God. If that stark fact meant, however, that we had no responsibility to care, for ourselves as much as others, everyone would be brutally punished all the time. That would not be good. That would make the shortcomings of the world, which can make everyone who thinks honestly question the very propriety of the world, worse in every way. That simply cannot be the proper path forward. To treat yourself as if you were someone you are responsible for helping is, instead, to consider what would be truly good for you. This is not “what you want.” It is also not “what would make you happy.” Every time you give a child something sweet, you make that child happy. That does not mean that you should do nothing for children except feed them candy. “Happy” is by no means synonymous with “good.” You must get children to brush their teeth. They must put on their snowsuits when they go outside in the cold, even though they might object strenuously. You must help a child become a virtuous, responsible, awake being, capable of full reciprocity—able to take care of himself and others, and to thrive while doing so. Why would you think it acceptable to do anything less for yourself? You need to consider the future and think, “What might my life look like if I were caring for myself properly? What career would challenge me and render me productive and helpful, so that I could shoulder my share of the load, and enjoy the consequences? What should I be doing, when I have some freedom, to improve my health, expand my knowledge, and strengthen my body?” You need to know where you are, so you can start to chart your course. You need to know who you are, so that you understand your armament and bolster yourself in respect to your limitations. You need to know where you are going, so that you can limit the extent of chaos in your life, restructure order, and bring the divine force of Hope to bear on the world. You must determine where you are going, so that you can bargain for yourself, so that you don’t end up resentful, vengeful and cruel. You have to articulate your own principles, so that you can defend yourself against others’ taking inappropriate advantage of you, and so that you are secure and safe while you work and play. You must discipline yourself carefully. You must keep the promises you make to yourself, and reward yourself, so that you can trust and motivate yourself. You need to determine how to act toward yourself so that you are most likely to become and to stay a good person. It would be good to make the world a better place. Heaven, after all, will not arrive of its own accord. We will have to work to bring it about, and strengthen ourselves, so that we can withstand the deadly angels and flaming sword of judgment that God used to bar its entrance. Don’t underestimate the power of vision and direction. These are irresistible forces, able to transform what might appear to be unconquerable obstacles into traversable pathways and expanding opportunities. Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your Being. As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, “He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.” You could help direct the world, on its careening trajectory, a bit more toward Heaven and a bit more away from Hell. Once having understood Hell, researched it, so to speak—particularly your own individual Hell—you could decide against going there or creating that. You could aim elsewhere. You could, in fact, devote your life to this. That would give you a Meaning, with a capital M. That would justify your miserable existence. That would atone for your sinful nature, and replace your shame and self-consciousness with the natural pride and forthright confidence of someone who has learned once again to walk with God in the Garden. You could begin by treating yourself as if you were someone you were responsible for helping.

Sunday, December 5, 2021

A glass of milk (Motivational Story)



One day, a poor boy who was selling goods from door to door to pay his way through school, found he had only one thin dime left, and he was hungry. He decided he would ask for a meal at the next house. However, he lost his nerve when a lovely young woman opened the door. Instead of a meal he asked for a drink of water. She thought he looked hungry so brought him a large glass of milk. He drank it slowly, and then asked, “How much do I owe you?” “You don’t owe me anything,” she replied. “Mother has taught us never to accept pay for a kindness.” He said, “Then I thank you from my heart.” As Howard Kelly left that house, he not only felt stronger physically, but his faith in God and man was strong also. He had been ready to give up and quit. Year’s later that young woman became critically ill. The local doctors were baffled. They finally sent her to the big city, where they called in specialists to study her rare disease. Dr. Howard Kelly was called in for the consultation. When he heard the name of the town she came from, a strange light filled his eyes. Immediately he rose and went down the hall of the hospital to her room. Dressed in his doctor’s gown he went in to see her. He recognized her at once. He went back to the consultation room determined to do his best to save her life. From that day he gave special attention to the case. After a long struggle, the battle was won. Dr. Kelly requested the business office to pass the final bill to him for approval. He looked at it, then wrote something on the edge and the bill was sent to her room. She feared to open it, for she was sure it would take the rest of her life to pay for it all. Finally she looked, and something caught her attention on the side of the bill. She began to read the following words: “Paid in full with one glass of milk."

Saturday, December 4, 2021

2011-May-8



Index of Journals
May 8, 2011

I have Digital Circuits and Systems (DCS) third terminal tomorrow and I was just worried about it. I did a lot of things other than studying through the day; I hope I wouldn’t be sleeping tonight and study for exam tomorrow. I am scanning diary pages instead of rewriting them on computer. Badi buaji gives me fine food and there are not much problems with food though the extra load that fruits put on my stomach is the point to consider. 

Basically, I slept through the day. In the evening, I went down to check if anyone wrote under my post, I wanted to know the companies which were coming to train us in summer, not even a single comment. I talked to Vibha and she wanted to talk about life after talking about all the current sources of tension, I just told her to meet me in real somewhere and we would talk her topics then. I had to go offline right after, it was getting very late.
God bless me
Ashish

2011-May-7



Index of Journals
May 7, 2011
I die correcting Ankur’s bad habits of littering room and then I just give up, thinking not to get involved in any kind of trouble with the people here. I have already tried to get involved with them and it is bad as it can be at this moment, the flower of problems is about to blossom. Shruti would be pushing herself onto Jabru and Ankur. Ankur would be studying and she would come and tap his back, lay on him, show love absolutely unlike sisters. I was right about her, though she keeps distance from me. Shruti keeps the dog tied to her at times, and that’s unruly to behave like that with an animal. Only person I have not involved with is fufaji yet, though I use his computer at his office down stairs and Ankur and Shruti have very often been warning me to not use that computer, never mind how many times they use it, father-sibling-relationship. I was thinking of cleaning Ankur’s place and I just threw his mosquito killing sprays, they were empty. Buaji picked them up from the bin and told me to keep them in the closet like place, between living room and Shruti’s bedroom, where shoes/slippers are kept. I just went on my to throw the curd plastic can out from the fridge to the bin, I had partially destroyed it in my hands when buaji came running, ‘there’s dry curd in it for preparation of more’. I was like ‘wow, my mistake’, I handed the can back to her. 

I got the Electrical Science practical right, Akash and I just had to right the practical and hand back the sheet. Earlier at 8 Vivek Dubey sir himself hadn’t come, we got to perform on the permission of other teacher. Akash resisted on getting it easy for us, otherwise I would be always trying to fit in the system and get the things done. He got ‘Thevenin’s theorem’ for both of us, and sat together to write it. We were sent to Dubey sir and he just let us go after taking noting our roll numbers, without taking our viva. That was really kind of him, or that is just the way how reappear-practical test happen.

I was standing in stairs with S2 section students while waiting for Hemanshu Verma, who had my Software Engineering (SE) book. I hadn’t lost it, I almost felt like life in me. There passed Deepika ma’am (Analog Electronics), she just called out my name to ask me how my studies were going on, and if I had cleared all the subjects of third semester. That was felt really good, because I can’t expect that kind of love from anyone at college after what I have been through, and the fact that she called out my name was really a mood-lifting moment.
I asked Neeru ma’am for her number and she said ‘no’. I retorted ‘why!’ and the look on her face was worth watching. I just hope that I don’t get into trouble ever again with teachers at ADGITM / NIEC.

It feels like I am over with my good time with Ankur, we are getting into the system of each other as try to sit myself in his room. He keeps it dirty.
God bless me
Ashish

2011-May-6



Index of Journals
May 6, 2011
I had to give Electrical Science (a second semester subject) reappear practical exam today. I wasn’t ready for the exam, nor was Akash. I wasn’t into entangling with the teacher over postponing the date like Akash, and he actually got that done. We have to get to college at 0800 for viva. I had just got the file ready for name’s sake by the help of Shruti. It was worth appreciation but she said too much of shit after and around the time while she was working with me that my mind is against the idea of talking to her about it. 
I wasn’t expecting the examination procedure to be formal like how sir said, he told us to sit and write the practical. The idea was worth a laugh. Akash talked to him and he gave us time for tomorrow. I returned home with stories to tell, ‘Faculty was having lunch and he gave us time for tomorrow at 8.’
God bless me
Ashish 

2011-May-5



Index of Journals
May 5, 2011
    
It was Algorithms Design and Analysis (ADA) practical today. The exam went fine, I was not nervous for this exam after I learnt of sir’s friendly attitude with students during the B batch viva. He was all the same with ours as well. He didn’t flip out on anyone, not even on Roshan who did 10 practical writings instead of 16. I did the 16th in the morning to raise my average, Vibha had calculated her average to be lesser than mine but she said ‘8.9’ to sir during the viva, that’s point-one more than my average. Sir was impressed with Tanvi, the s**t. The females score easily at ADGITM / NIEC, take it to be Computer Graphics (CG) headed by Anshul sir, or ADA taught by Prashant sir. I am lucky to have Vibha in my life. I met with her group after the exam and it was okay between me and them, I was worried about Sonam but it is all fine now. Sonam called in the evening to my surprise, she asked me if I take her comments at heart, I just called her crazy for having of that sort, and told her that I just feel pity for Dhanraj and Ravi when she and Srishti get together to rip them off their respect. I am glad that she doesn’t consider me as a bad guy. I am not a bad guy. 
During ADA practical sir asked to implement Rabin Karp algorithm using graph, Nitish said something which seemed to be half-right start of the problem. I couldn’t reach a conclusion to put down and sir had already sent others out for not having even the slightest idea. I hope I get good marks, I got 16 in ADA second terminal, which is good, because I was very worried about my score, and I couldn’t have failed in ADA again. 
I talked to teacher for Electrical Science reappear practical exam in first block, and it is dated for tomorrow. I am pretty busy today, Shruti is helping but I am still worried because I don’t think getting Shruti to work is a nice idea, well, she herself came by to help. Akash Rajpoot has the images of the file but he hasn’t sent the whole file, I just don’t want him to be betraying me like anyone else. 

Smita wanted me to talk to amma on Rekha buaji’s word. She has been trying to connect since two days back and it would have been third had she sent a message today. 
God bless me
Ashish
Tags: Journals

2011-May-4



Index of Journals
May 4, 2011

It was Software Engineering (SE) practical today. I was very nervous; I had in mind that I would impress the teacher, Preety ma’am. Unfortunately, she never gave me a chance. The exam had to start at 1000 but students collected at 0900 because the teacher last day passed the timings of the batch of S2. I was worried for the exam, I read the project file to be sure that I don’t miss out when the project is discussed and I get no credit. Nitish had the file when we entered the room, I didn’t mind. I didn’t want any trouble with him, I need friends more than credit at the moment, and for the teacher I want her attention more than the attention of the mate. I guess I got none, or may be otherwise. She asked us to draw the DFD for the project, we were drawing and then she questioned Nitish, without questioning me she just said ‘okay, I am done’. I didn’t give a fuck; I walked out with the guy. I don’t want to mess with the teacher. That’s how the viva got over, the B batch had Algorithms Design and Analysis (ADA) and it was only laughter and fun that the practical ended up with. Prashant sir was joking with them, and they had fun. 
I lost my Software Engineering (SE) book; I must have left it near by the watchman. Plus, I have figured out that I have missed out my Rs 1500 somewhere while shifting my place. It is going to be disaster. My resource is out, and then this loss.
God bless me
Ashish

2011-May-3



Index of Journals
May 3, 2011

I had Computer Graphics (CG) practical today. I went to college on time taking the auto-rickshaw. I was sleeping until late seven when badi buaji lectured me. I straight away went to have a bath and got ready. Badi buaji made breakfast and I left early. I had to study but I couldn’t hold up for long when I was awake in the middle of the night. I went to give exam without preparations, I studied with Vibha for a while and that raised my confidence, though it didn’t help. Sir took a lot of time on Irfan and Vibha and that was second last batch. When it came to our turn, sir asked one or two questions (he asked me what’s polygon, was that a joke), saw our files, marked the front page of mine, and let us go after giving us C on our faces. I came home and Ankur wasn’t there, I heard he was gone to get cooler. He got two coolers after about two hours of wait. It was around four in the evening, anyone would need lunch by that time. Badi buaji served Ankur and fufaji, I was waiting and Ankur had to tell badi buaji to give me food. She said she thought I would make it late, mind games would never stop! We slept through the evening in the cooler. I studied after waking up for a while and hope that it would help. I have to lecture Ankur to study; he would talk for hours to phony girlfriend. I got a call from amma around the same time when he was on phone. I wished to buy sandals. There is still a jeans left in Mayur Vihar, amma told me about that.
God bless me
Ashish

2011-May-2 (Osama Bin Laden killed today in drone attack by American force in Pakistan)



Index of Journals
May 2, 2011

It was Digital Circuits and Systems (DCS) practical today. I had planned to study early in the morning but it was not possible, I couldn’t resist sleep. I reached college on time. I heard there was some seminar going on at the time of practical so practical had been postponed. The practical happened on time, some students appeared late and teacher didn’t allow them in. I got half and full subtractor, I forgot the equations but Vibha helped. It was in viva that I was hurt hard. I forgot the way to solve numerical on multiplexer to implement Boolean expression. I had spent good time on that question. I don’t expect teacher to be lenient, I am worried. 
Later when I went to collect practical file I saw that Priti ma’am had spared me in those places where she marked most of the other students, forget Neha, ma’am wrote ‘photocopied’ on the front page of her file. I was thinking if I was being ignored but Vibha thought she was very partial. What kind of partiality is that?
I spent day on giving final touch to Computer Graphics (CG) file. Its front page had to be made. There was work to be done on Software Engineering (SE) project file, when ma’am said file is to be put in leaflet folder the file came back to me. I know Parul for sure. 
Buaji was going to be met by some guest at home, and she had to clean whole house, that was amazing. The house was very dirty before but it was all cleaned now, truly amazing.
Osama Bin Laden killed today in drone attack by American force in Pakistan. It was all over news today.
God bless me
Ashish

2011-May-1



Index of Journals
May 1, 2011

The day was fine. I got to eat Karela in lunch, which was very bad though it didn’t taste bitter. I did study a bit today, but a lot is needed to be done. 
Badi buaji promised babaji that she would not speak of anything promissory now; it will only be my results that will shut everyone up. Badi buaji has given words and I have to fulfill them. She gave me Rs 1500 hundred, off which Rs 1000 are for books and Rs 500 are for paying prices in travelling and all. I was listening to music just now and she just came by to see what I was doing, she was worried and there was a sort of rejection in her actions though her voice was polite again. He reminded me of the words she has given to babaji.
Ankur and Shruti waste so much of their time sometimes it worries me when I see them. The big news of today, AIEEE paper leaked before the exam in Kanpur, U.P. It was all over news, two paper series was postponed by three hours henceforth. 
God bless me
Ashish

2011-Apr-30



Index of Journals
April 30, 2011

It was just another day; I couldn’t study much through the day. I could not study today. Sometime in the afternoon Manju buaji came here, that was a surprise to me. I talked to Rekha buaji on phone, she wanted to lecture me on respect, people are asking me if I told amma that I would kill her. That was a joke between me and amma and Prashant was witness to it, he exaggerated it and used it against me. Well R/buaji wanted to lecture me on respect, and she said to me that ‘she didn’t call to be lectured but to lecture’ when I was explaining myself to her. I wished Prachi for her birthday that was yesterday. Manju buaji was avoiding me; yes she was avoiding me though she did ask me about something once. 
I was lectured by badi buaji in very polite words. The lecture was long that was annoying. I am counting that over half-an-hour long lecture a time wasting element of the day. 
I have Digital Circuits and Systems (DCS) practical on Monday and I need to do a lot tomorrow.
God bless me
Ashish

2011-Apr-29



Index of Journals
April 29, 2011

I went to college to register for exams, to meet Aksshita and return her file, and get ADA file checked. I got nothing exactly right. I had to call sir when students learned that sir hadn’t come until ten-thirty. Varun didn’t call, it was Arushi who made me call sir, and I couldn’t have refused to her. Sir wasn’t coming today, and files would be checked on Monday. Just look at the attitude of the man. We got the registration done with another teacher, a senior teacher. I forgot to bring the money and I had to do between home and college, which was really tiring. I met with HOD of first year, Kavita ma’am along with Akash and Shukla. She wanted our questions in the form of application and by the time we wrote application she was gone, actually it was already 1430 when we got there. While returning from college we got along Kirti and this guy started again with his R50. He went too bad to get me on my nerves before Akash and Shukla lost interest in our fight and stopped us from communicating. My bus pass date is out and I have travel from feeder from now on. Days of cost cutting are back. 
My ADA practical are not all right and I was worried about it, but not anymore. I am not doing the ADA file again. 
I woke up in the evening due to mosquitoes encircling me. I took the swatter and electrocuted few to ashes. It made noise and I was called out by uncle. He started with saying that I should not kill mosquitoes, I recanted this. The discussion went brutal with me adamant about killing mosquitoes because they are a problem.  uncle was left with no option but to become violent, in the drawing room he had tried to bend my fore-arm but failed, there were calls from babaji and the place of the fight changed. He said that I have to first accept blindly what is said. I denied to the very idea of it. He went mad. The discussion had started on light words in drawing room to physical violence in amma, babaji’s room. I said I could be answering him back whenever there is a need, and there was question of sort ‘look how he is replying, he would have hit out on us outside’. My answer was ‘thank god that I am not hitting out now’, that was my one big hit. There was heated discussion on my comment that there was never proper parental guidance. Chachi tried to get involved at many times but uncle kept her away, and during the early stage, the very first time when I had told her not to intervene, uncle had resolved for a slap. Prashant had come up on my ‘big hit’ to say to amma that she shouldn’t be supporting me. uncle sent him back. Anu and Srishti were sitting there, and weeping tears in astonishment. Srishti did try to stop me from taking the discussion forward but I wasn’t going to pay value to her words though I did give her enough attention. Second big hit was when babaji was talking and uncle talked in between standing by my side, I cried ‘I am listening to you’ at uncle. What next, you know. The discussion had stalled after sometime and I was in my room, there was phone call from Manju buaji in between the fight and now there was a door bell. It wasn’t Manju buaji because it was badi buaji. Shruti came to my room; I had to weep when badi buaji came too close to calm me over the shit that happened. The discussion began again. Shruti got me to pack my things up. In other room badi buaji was talking to them and I heard she told chachi that she shouldn’t be poisoning uncle’s ears, there was brawl over this but that settled because there was even more important one going on. uncle resolved to hit me even before badi buaji. Right from the beginning, in clear words, uncle wanted me quiet at all times like old times but we are a lot different now, I changed for good, and he worsened by beating of the time. When I got to the other room, uncle said that I should go with badi buaji, and he told badi buaji the same with confidence; that was tricky. He didn’t know that I had decided likewise in other room with Shruti. I had took out books, and packed the bag with things in drawer. I was making badi buaji count what I remember from recent past about uncle but she shut me up and told me that I should tell her those things at her place. Before leaving she made me touch the feet of everybody, and then we left with amma, Anu, and Srishti crying out the car window. Srishti told to call and talk to uncle at least once. Badu buaji lectured me a lot in the car, but once I was at her place it didn’t feel very different from my last stay here few days back. I hadn’t eaten anything since morning (I had chaat-pakoda before leaving Mayur Vihar), the four aloo-parantha(s) were still packed in my college lunch box. I couldn’t eat them all before abnormally filling myself up and having no choice but to leave the fourth parantha. I was worried about my personal diaries that uncle might destroy any time. I called Anu around 0000 and told her that I would be coming there between 0630 and 0700 in the morning. Actually badi buaji decided there that I wouldn’t be coming back to Mayur Vihar anytime before the exams are over, it was giving me tension, there is a lot in the diaries and I wouldn’t want it all to come out. IIT was discussed boldly during the discussion it was like every topic circled around it. I had to tell uncle that when he got into BHU it wasn’t IIT then. I made him count that he can’t call me ‘son of pork’ and when he accepted in pride that yes he did call me that, I told him to now correct the mistake he just realized. He said 3.5 lacs are nothing, I asked ‘why’, he said coaching institutions are nothing, I asked ‘why’. I got him agreed to the fact that first the solution to the problem will be given and then conditions and terms. He had given the before the idea that Anu and Srishti be shifted to replace me and Prxnt in that room, and I would be sent to the cabin in the balcony, and discussion had settled first time before the entry of badi buaji on this note. uncle was pointing to America and my dreams of hitting out on international exams like GRE to show that I am delusional, he call me angry and out of mind, but the way I would look into the eyes of people to scare them to death was way more than any words could convey. I can’t count the number of times I had given uncle the looks of Hannibal-Cannibal in his eyes, sending him direct message that he has no effect on me. Plus, I remember my statements like ‘I will remember this’ during one of earliest blows, and when I had lip-synched ‘you will get it back’ during another around in the last quarter. When he had tried coming up violent on me, chachi had tried her best to stop him but to no effect. I never got on to chachi; I knew where I was aiming at. He had called me failure from time to time during the discussion and I had to point to my previous results, he would point to my last two years at NIEC. I told them that I wasn’t living life with NIEC so it wasn’t a fair fight. I had show again and again that no matter what he says it is illogical and he himself can’t reason it. “Sky is the limit of everything”, this was the quote out of my mouth I had started with. uncle kept asking if I was going to teach them of limits now. Mine was impulsive but uncle is naturally retarded. He called me arrogant many times and where I was hitting out with punch lines, he was actually physical in hitting with not much to say but some very particular words, failure, arrogant, respect, and etc. 

God bless me
Ashish

2011-Apr-28



Index of Journals
April 28, 2011

I had been to college to finish my ADA file but not many students had come. I sat with Vibha to go through the day. Though she was of no help, nor was Nitish. I could have completed my practical file had I not been running after the girl. I tried to take Nitish and Vibha along with me to the net lab to finish the ADA file but the people were just not very interested. I couldn’t finish my file and sir didn’t check the files of those who did practical lesser than 15. Arushi did 15 practical by the end of the day, and her friend Parul and her toy boy Abhilash. I had asked for the file sheets but she denied because her file sheets were getting copied by the rest, she got a long list. People now think she has borrowed character traits from Parul, the holy slut, the parrot, the bad-word. During SE period Priti ma’am had sent Arushi to declare to empty classrooms. Unfortunately nobody moved out, Vibha and I were going to the library when we were encountered by the Director. He just asked us a few things, and I told him the name of the teacher and the subject on which we had project. He said, “There are no projects in second year, projects come in third and fourth year.” Right next he told Vibha to call Priti ma’am up. Vibha went to get Priti ma’am and I told her that it is her who has to get her and not me. I am glad she didn’t have me into trouble, which was very nice of her. Director in the classroom lectured both the students and the teacher, he said, “she earn from you, you should get the full benefit from her.” Everybody was happy to listen this about Priti Verma Dhaka. In ADA lab sir simply asked for files with 15 practical sessions, he checked Arushi, Parul, and Abhilash’s file without much intrusion (that was obvious), I did try to tell him of error in the code in their files but sir said he just don’t want to know, so what the fuck? That was way too creepy; there is total discrimination between the two groups of first section.
God bless me
Ashish

2011-Apr-27



Index of Journals
April 27, 2011

I went to the college to submit the file, and it worked out well in the beginning. I called Parul to get the handwritten drawings and she came with them and submitted them to the teacher. I didn’t bother to confront the teacher because I didn’t feel that would have been a great idea. Then she also told her to come at 1230 so I let the file remain with her. Where the scene happened is when she didn’t return the file back to me, I thought I should have it. That was crazy, it made me crazy but then I had other things to do. The Computer Graphics (CG) file, I completed the file in one day and got it checked. Aksshita was a great help, she was copying from Sonam’s file. I didn’t talk to Sonam though she confronted me once to ask about the project file. Yesterday I had to go the college but it didn’t fit my schedule so I didn’t. These three people called me enough number of times; I got to give Parul’s call a miss. Sonam called from Niharika’s number (I learned later) to get to me. She went to the teacher to complain of me for being late. That was sick. I didn’t bother, and Vibha told me about this that Priti ma’am after hearing my name involved gave it a pass. It was my first lab session with Priti ma’am and she told those students to go who had submitted the project. I got to leave early and I was helping myself with the Computer Graphics (CG) file until the day’s end. 
At home I was working up my Algorithms Analysis and Design (ADA) file, I spent a lot time in knowing what programs were running and what were not. I copied a few of those and it didn’t make till 15. I was working out mosquitoes of the room and amma babaji kept screaming along with swatter’s sound. Babaji was looking crazy when screaming. Prashant didn’t turn on fan in even in this environment, badi buaji was wrong when she predicted about this dick that he feels more heat than I do, or actually it is no heat but something else that’s driving his actions.
I had got call from Ankur twice; later Ankur told me that it was badi buaji and not him. He reconfirmed about my plans. I am in Mayur Vihar for one and a half months.
God bless me
Ashish

2011-Apr-26



Index of Journals
April 26, 2011

I was walking in the market on my way to stationary and I saw Hardik returning from somewhere on the other side of the road. He ignored me, did he? I just didn’t bother to say anything and now it is feeling bad to me, like we were supposed to be friends after all the shit I have been through whole my life. Let me just fuck it.
I had planned to leave badi buaji’s place by ten with Ankur and then visit college once from Mayur Vihar to submit project but it didn’t happen that way. Ankur woke me up at six in the morning, which was not required. I got ready before Ankur and Shruti by eight or something. Then I went down to finish my work, I had to go around Ankur real hard to get the motivation to go down and finish the printing work by myself. He took time to get ready and eat his breakfast upstairs and he came down when he was completely ready. He helped me forward a mail to Nitish which I couldn’t do by myself due to system problem. Then I downloaded some Eminem tracks which Srishti had and then her folder was deleted from the laptop probably by uncle. It was good, then I watched Playboy website for rest of the time. They have awesome stuff, nothing like anything anyone knows on the face of Earth. Most of the times when I would go to badi buaji’s room I would find Shruti watching television, I would dare to disturb her and she would whine girlishly. I was doing up down indecisively to wait for a call from badi buaji or babaji or amma. It happened only by afternoon that final plans of my departure were laid. I had discussed my plans with all the three and they had heard my plan for next one and a half month of college about fifteen to twenty times. I guess now they tell it back without mistake. Badi buaji wrote down my results on a piece of paper just like how babaji make me write marks after every semester. 
Badi buaji and Manju buaji talked continuously and I had to leave as babaji will come to pick me up outside the street in car at the time of returning from the court. I couldn’t go with Ankur because I hadn’t eaten breakfast when he left around 0930. Shruti had seemed not very happy with me over here but when it comes to the news of Ashish Jain leaving she seems to be back with her childish voice. She talked to happily when it came the time when badi buaji asked her to drop me to the car. She came by to see Manju buaji and babaji in the car. While leaving badi buaji handed me Rs 200 that was good.
I came home and no one had changed, neither changed the topics of conversation. The property, the swatter, the exams, the results, no topic had changed. 
Badi buaji kept giving me philosophical lectures, she kept telling me that her place is always there for me, I can be studying there where I can give my best and she wants nothing else. I brought home two under wears and shirts of Ankur. I was wearing one when I came back home and amma said she didn’t like it.
There I had used one of their extra toothbrushes, their towel, and Ankur’s raiser. I was supposed to carry these things with myself but I forgot.
God bless me
Ashish

2011-Apr-25



Index of Journals
April 25, 2011
I went to college from badi buaji’s house. I had thought of 0730 as the time when I would leave but it became late, and buaji made it late. Actually, I had been to bed very late after work last night. I woke with Ankur and got ready with the flow with which things were going on here. I had get print outs of the work Ankur and I digitized yesterday. The cartridge needed a shake after a few pages, so Ankur postponed the idea of printing more pages right at the moment. I had told him of letting me buy a new cartridge but he delayed it in the name of his father that he would buy a new one. I got the print outs in the morning. I was just late to the bathroom and late for the breakfast and late to the bus stop and late to the college but early to the class. Badi buaji had been doing some court work for today’s case. She had a case filed for today. I got cacadi as vegetable again. That was stupid, she had made it for dinner last night and I had hated it. It was even more terrible to see that I got the same vegetable in the lunch after college as well. I somehow finished the thing and left. I sat in the wrong bus at first, and then had to change the bus for Kashmere gate. I got 13 in Software Engineering (SE); ma’am said I am careless otherwise I could do more. Next period was OS and took notes of her subject for the first time, the teacher was checking onto this. I mean I never took notes of her subject far as I remember so she was keeping an eye on me, sort of yes. Next was CG lab but students were completing SE lab files to submit out of time before 1030. It was SE lab for B batch but she collected projects of A-batch students as well. I got Sonam’s pages of last DFD topic and Vibha made a few drawings for me, the easy ones. I finished my file and submitted on time. Parul and Sonam took the project to the teacher and Priti ma’am pointed out mistakes there, several of those. The thing that hurt the whole class was that she said she want the diagrams to be hand written by all of the four of every project. That was way more than crazy. What is crazier, the CG teacher, Anshul sir. He got the students to get print puts of CG file there were about 70 of those pages and now he said he want the file handwritten. I finished drawing for SE project file with Sonam and Parul. Nitish is just lost with other stuff, I can’t pull him to do work for the project like how I had to pull Sonam.  In the break Sonam declared before her friends that now that the project is over, I don’t mean anything for her, she doesn’t know, nor should I know her, she also want me to delete all her numbers from my phone, Tata-Tata-bye-bye. That was big disgrace, that was public, I mean indigestible but I remained quite to swallow down the insult. I took it lightly, though it did hurt hard. I got 16 in OS that was fine. I got 20 in CS that was good; I got 5 in DCS that was very bad, though I was expecting nothing more. Vibha was comparing her marks with me and I got more marks than her in two subjects till now, may be three. When I was sitting with her she said that I scan girls and that I am THURKEY. I protested her on this, though somewhere deep down I knew she was right. I said it is not a big deal to scan girls. Vibha got 8 in CS, I loved that. Apurv got lesser marks compared to his fellows, they are improving, those guys, stupidest people of class are improving. They kept me aside during the exams to avoid competition from me. It did affect my results. They are not my friends anymore. 
I came back home tired, and got to eat cacadi. That was very bad. I thought of getting the books here, I talked to Shruti about, and to Ankur also but it occurred to me that I needed to hurry. Shruti made me wait for badi buaji and by the time it was evening after I had put on shoes to go, I gave the thing a second thought. I was making list of item and books I had get here to live life of student, but as time passed the list grew with it. Then I noticed that practically life here wasn’t very different as I had wanted. There are people here, I have to live peacefully with them. I need to get away with lectures of badi buaji. What is very different here is that I get to sleep properly, otherwise the two places Mayur Vihar and here are not very different when it comes to my study schedules. The distractions here are peaceful distractions and distractions there are mentally disturbing distractions. I decided to get back to Mayur Vihar; all I needed to do was to finish work here. I needed printouts of corrections in the project and then I could go back even now. But I was waiting for Ankur and never came. I was snoozing in the drawing room while waiting for him. He came around 2130 and I had dinner with him. Then I had fruits which is a tradition of here, to eat fruits after dinner or lunch of whatever. People keep eating here. I slept right away after denying to milk to buaji after dinner. It was 2200. I just need a plan to make an exit from here with all the work I have to carry on along with.
God bless me
Ashish

2011-Apr-24



Index of Journals
April 24, 2011

All I did today was Software Engineering (SE) work. I had been to the second hand book market with Shruti today to get her PMT text books. It took us two hours there. After returning I did my work and Ankur was life-saver today. He helped me with DFD soft copy for lab file and a few pages of typing work for project plus the title pages. Without him I couldn’t have thought of completing even to acceptable amount. God bless him. It is 2337 and I have get up at 0600 next morning. I got call from Anu. I don’t have much problem over here. My balance of phone was 0.2 down from 7.2 after yesterday afternoon and today it was Ankur’s phone which helped me connect with Sonam today, I am really happy that she was open to talk. I don’t know why. I kept Parul’s name always in the last everywhere; I want her to feel how it feels to be dealing with mean people. After all, I did work more than any of them. I need learn various streets of this place in order to be going to college tomorrow. It has been three days here but still every street looks all the same in this congested area, buildings extending out of proprtions in inside streets, and advertisement banners everywhere on decades old buildings on either side of main road running outside the residential area.
God bless me
Ashish

2011-Apr-23



Index of Journals
April 23, 2011
The day was fine. I had a lot of Software Engineering (SE) work to pass time ‘comfortably’. In the morning badi buaji made it clear that I can stay long as I want. That meant two years. I am staying here as per my wish, it means. I had asked this question to Shruti and to Ankur when I got to go out with them one or the other time. I had told buaji that I might go to college today in the morning but then I cancelled my plans seeing that I had a lot of work to so already and I would help them in the process then I would be left with no time to type for them. I was almost over the limited work I had from them and I wanted the matter from Sonam to carry on the work. They had finished the project in rough and I had to digitize it. I was freaking out with no work in hand; the tension of exams was taking birth. I made calls to Sonam’s number and she wasn’t at home. I freaked out after knowing this; I believed that her sister and her brother and her family were lying to me. I made more calls, and initiated text service for a day to text as much as possible to get Sonam online. I texted all our mutual contacts ‘where’s Sonam’, that was crazy. I got it right finally. Sonam was with Vibha and all in Kamla Nagar, getting work done for her lab file. Her cell phone was not working and I had to tell Vibha to let her call me from her phone, to this she said ‘where is your balance, ass!” I met them at the fixed place in Khajouri. The moment when I left badi buaji’s place for this Shruti had come to ask me to teach her Chemistry. God, that was very unfortunate. In the afternoon, Shruti had to get her IPU admission form submitted for this work people thought they could use me but I had work to do so badi buaji didn’t force. But it was amazing how fufaji was trying himself on me. That was really sad, I mean it is just second day. I got missed call from amma when I was in bus while returning back from Kashmere Gate. Plus, I want to tell that Sonam had come with Vibha to see me. It was funny that I had to call Ankur to get back home; luckily he was returning home after work and was near Golcha theatre.
God bless me
Ashish

2011-Apr-22



Index of Journals
April 22, 2011
In the morning I called Sonam back when I had cancelled my plans of going to the college on Saturday all so suddenly. She hadn’t called Parul yet, neither had she got any response from Nitish. I had to make a couple of calls from Sonam to Parul, then Sonam again and work was settled with communication in between them three. They all were coming tomorrow and getting the work finalized. Parul as usual slutty didn’t speak after picking the phone on first call and then picked the second time by the grace of god.
Badi buaji was here in the morning and right when I went to amma’s room to fresh-up badi buaji held me for various issues like not bathing, eating habits, and very recent, mosquito swatter. There was very brutal discussion, I cried in the end. Actually, I was just out of bed, I hadn’t cleared my eyes yet and there was a lot of dirt that just catalyzed the watering process of eyes. Otherwise, I didn’t have to be that weak. At one time, badi buaji called Babbu mentally weak because he didn’t listen to his parents, she blamed his disobedient nature towards his parents the reason why he is in the situation in which he is. That was funny, I had to protest. The next high was when babaji said I got JEE rank over 1lac that made the tears fall out, but not before I said, “thirty thousand, ninety percentile” and left for the bathroom. I came back from the bathroom to my room and Shruti was there and soon badi buaji was there. She tried to calm me down by promising me of the internet modem. I was feeling good inside about it. Later badi buaji made plans of taking me with her to her house, that was not on my mind but I didn’t say ‘no’ because I had work on internet and I have to finish project work.
We (badi buaji, Shruti, and I) went to Manju buaji’s house after this and there went on discussion about almost the same topic. They wanted to discuss my personal life. So, I unfolded about my relationships with people at home with one or two examples. I was on a high during the discussion and I had to look down on Manju buaji who thinks almost in the same way as amma do. I had to tell her to be realistic and logical; she would tell me things out of emotions, psychology, Jainism, morals, and ethics. I wanted materialistic things for my ears. I had to be really rude and unhealthy in way of talking at few at times while communicating with Manju buaji. That was bad, I know but I was on a high. I couldn’t understand why I had to be considered mentally weak for the actions of Sadhana (mom), Hem, and all, like the amount of terror Manju buaji was trying to generate while speaking of them. I considered it illogical and I just asked them to let me test them, but both were reluctant. There was a high when badi buaji asked what it would be when Sadhna will come and disturb me, would I be hitting her? I said, “Yes.” That surprised badi buaji. Then they were telling me of their doubts about what wrong I could do, drink, drug, girls, etc. Finally we settled when badi buaji said she got and she said she could summarize my story in single piece, i.e., “I need success at any cost.” It was surprising for me when both of them said they think of chachaji almost like how I do. I made them clear that I am not into Jainism and I only want to be independent. Badi buaji wouldn’t lecture me for going to temple and remembering god now on. She, too, only want me to study. I told them what mamaji had said ‘there are engineering colleges in every ten kilometers’, what photo shop worker had said ‘engineers have respect as that of prostitutes’, and what I think of myself that ‘I got flow better than any of my contemporaries, whether it be two up or two down’.
It was only 2330 when I settled myself in Shruti’s room; yes I got bed in Shruti’s room. Shruti, fufaji and buaji sleep together. Well, I am thinking if I should consider it untrue because holding hopes with anyone never results in sweet fruit. You have to be on your own. Badi buaji seemed skeptical about considering a purchase of modem soon, because I have internet here in fufaji’s office 24*7.
God bless me
Ashish