Reborn, but not Re-incarnated

Give a musician their weapon of choice - a guitar, a tabla or a piano or any instrument they use to make the air waves move. The first 15 minutes of the jam , will be something that the musician has been playing for the past 15 years or more. Its like a muscle memory. I pick up the guitar almost everyday and automatically my fingers start jamming out the tunes I learnt when I first started playing the guitar. This warm-up tune or riffing lasting anywhere between 15 mins - 30 mins makes me forget all that I wanted to forget before I picked up the guitar. It celebrates, what all I wanted to celebrate. This warm up jam is like a pendulum coming to a halt. Sometimes it also feels like being strapped on a rocket escaping the gravity of the earth and finally settling into the weightless orbit of Earth. A musician from here onwards can enjoy the weightlesness one experiences under the influence of a gravitational fall or can propel oneself further into deep space to tender to his or her adventurous impulses.

And what follows after an hour long jam is hard to describe. It is a mixture of lot of things - tranquility, ecstacy, melancholy, bliss, blankness, euphoria and much more. Such a drastic metamorphosis in a span of one hour might seem impossible if described to most people. But if you have friends who are musicians you must have noticed - the musician before and after the jam. They are not on this planet anymore. It takes them time to come back to Earth. A keen listener of music experiences this too. Just listen to your favourite album with lights out and your eyes closed for an hour. What follows afterwards, when I started out as a musician and even presently sometimes - I used to describe as a rebirth. You leave your body, this planet for a few hours and come back again. The problem that arises, a question that has been plaguing me recently, the blessing which sometimes feels like a curse, and which will require me a lot more paragraphs to address in this blog is - I am tired of being reborn. Bored maybe. Please do let me know my readers how many times in your life have you been reborn. I have asked this question to some of my friends in the past few months with replies following more or less in the following categories -

1) Bhai tu daaru pi. 80%

2) Are you okay? 10 %

3) You know X years back....( life changing event narration ) 10%

I owe a lot to my friends who shared very personal events that took place in their lives and experienced what cannot be described accurately in words, but can be approximately be defined as a rebirth. Certain events in my own life - those rare events which force you to confront the hidden aspects of life - both interior and exterior - Events that teach us lessons that no book or teacher can teach - Events which you never ever imagined could leave you unscratched & alive & breathing - Our worst nightmares - We all encounter such events in our life and when we are surprised that we survived such events, we succumb to our temptation to defy death and decide to be born again. What I also learnt from my own experiences and from the experiences of my friends is that besides one process, almost all other stories of rebirth & its synonyms were seeded in events which caused a lot of suffering. Our everyday myths and folk stories too, attest to this. No one experiences rebirth when they are awarded for their labour. The key to joy and happiness wont unlock for you to the doors to rebirth - if such a door exists. And that one process which I mentioned earlier which defies the trend is creation. Creation of art, friendships, love, tools & technology etc - where the creators enjoy the process more than anything else and the elation that one experiences upon completion of such a process - can again be approximately defined as a rebirth.

Now, before we further dive into this topic let me make a few things absolutely clear - I my readers, have a lot of faith in your intelligence. And if you are familiar with my work,I hope that you have figured out that even though I have a fetish for a scientific outlook on life and naive amusement with the literal interpretation of myths & the supernatural, I am a man currently beholden to the laws of poetics. I know that the dead cannot rise from their graves. The afterlife to me is a coping fantasy. I am aware of the limits of written language. This blog is an exercise for me to probe these limits after careful pondering and studying the work of master wordsmiths - poets & philosophers - who have written on this topic already. The feeling of rebirth which follows after a long jam on my electric guitar, a feeling which I was so familiar with has started to betray me recently and this essay is an effort to understand this evolution of one of the most essential joys of my life. Patience is not one of my strongest virtues. I know that only time will reveal to me one day the alchemical result of this process but I can't help myself, knowing very well the risks of misunderstanding these subtle intuitions of mine, I cant help myself to at least document this process while its taking place in the manner of Strugatsky Brothers whose sci fi novels have no science.

The year 2024, has been the most enriching year of my life since my original birth on this planet. This year compressed all the things that I have experienced 35 years before this into one. And now as this year draws to and end its like life coming to a full circle or reaching the vortex of a spiral. A lot of my fears and fantasies were sublimated this year. A lot of questions for which I was seeking answers to were answered this year. One question however, which still tickles me is this question of rebirth. The perplexity which has trapped me is that before this year began I had a very clear understanding, a very poetic one, of rebirth derived from personal experiences. But with the magnitude of events I was a part of this year, I have started experiencing something novel. Earlier in my life I would have lazily classified this feeling as a feeling of being born again. But now I know that this process I am currently experiencing is different then that. Its not just merely my soul poetically leaving my body and my imagination running wild to discover ideas, truths and untruths. Its not merely a change in the outlook of my life - a broadening of my understanding of this universe. Its much more than the acceptance of my new found responsibilities and duities towards my loved ones and community. Its not the discovery of a new purpose in life. The events of this year finally allowed me or forced me to merge two streams of my existence - 1) A Kafkaesque fantasy of a hunger artist which I presented to myself & the world, 2) The fortunate capitalist hippie, which I hid form myself & the world to serve my Kafkaesque fantasies. Its a very subtle humbling, a new kind of fearlessness - its like walking on the banks of a beautiful river and without you knowing the river expands and you find yourselves walking in the river. Its like being touched by something or someone that before this seemed untouchable. And I am touching it back, feeling its alien texture and feeling the infinite life force behind this metaphysical membrane, trying to understand it.

So overwhelming is this new life force that it has completely out-powered the much hyped forces of rebirth. A rebirth which earlier seemed to me this life...

**Note to the reader - I am resuming writing this essay after a period of approximately 6 months. The brevity of the themes I wished to explore here caused immense strain on my creative lobes. Lacking both the creative stamina & time I decided to pause this stream of consciousness. Now, with me a few months into my semi-retired life I have decided to finish this essay. Rather than starting from scratch I have left the above paragraphs untouched. One's old & uncooked writings are often enlightening & I wish to resume this essay with the benefit of a 6 months reflective period on these themes and with time to spend which this essay deserves.

Now convinced that I have been reborn several times during this life of mine, I was seeking an explanation for the changes in my persona & evolution that have happened in the past year or so. A very blunt way to put is that this time around I found things changing in my DNA. My past rebirths now feel like a simple rebooting of a system. Once turned back on, my memories, my persona, my perceptibility felt & remained the same. Same hardware and the same OS still guided my body. Yes, there is that re-ignition of fire, the cleansing of the spirit to quote the mystics. But once you have experienced it multiple times this rebirth looses its metaphysical grandeur and spiritual drama. A rebirth no longer feels like life changing or life altering. And even though a lot of things in your external life change - changes bought by the cosmic forces & by your own will, the internal world & disposition more or less remains the same. A state of strangulation was reached which miraculously, unknown to me, eventually led me to present day - sitting on the banks of Dal Lake, writing this essay on a wintry evening, the beginning of my retirement, my commercial obligations behind me, a future of still waters, full time creative ecstasy, a strange calm, un-restrained alchemical freedoms in front of me. Like a butterfly breaking free of its cocoon and flying away to explore the miracles on this planet. One year of strangulation & sufferings leading to this strange, stirring harmony - not completely still- but shimmering, like the surface of a lake on a windy day. And I bow down to my masters - humbling me for the past decade - the masters who guided me to a world of alchemy & adventure, warned me of its dangers & passions, strengthened my DNA, constantly tilting the balance of my fate towards poetry & art and led me to this day. The supreme masters - culmination of billions of years of evolution, suffering, violence, poetry & alchemy - the evolutionary superchargers - TOOL.

Spiral Out

I first heard Tool when I was 21 years old. Adam Jones - The Daemon of everything Electric - recorded the album Lateralus - The album that supercharged my life then & once again now- when he was 36 years old - the same age as I am now. I smile now at the naivety & arrogance of my youth. How like a child I entered the cosmic playground laid down by these musical wizards - assuming it to be the final & ultimate playground of my dreams & desires. I smile at my journey as a sound engineer, a musician and an artist, not with humility and wisdom, but with a poetic zeal & wonder. I laugh at my new found innocence - laughing at my old understanding of suffering and of Lateralus. Back then this album released me of all my sufferings - so I believed. Guiding my multiple rebirths over the years, this album's most astonishing gifts, I am receiving only now - 14 years after I begin my journey as an engineer - artist - at the same age when these musicians from Hell A recorded this album - crystalised, sublimated & polished by life & their music. This is the gift of what I can most accurately describe as a re-incarnation. A bold claim I know! But I can't describe it any other way.

The pain & sufferings & unravelings of the past year now feel inevitable & necessary. The curses still exist, and I know that they will continue to exist & guide my fate - but it will be a fate that I always desired & willed for. It is impossible for me to write down the profundity of my predicament. I have not yet shared it with anyone. The mathematical possibility of such a predicament for a planetary being according to my rough calculations is in the range of 1 in 3 trillion. In PTA's film Phantom Thread, Mr Woodcock hid a patch of clothing in all his tailored creations with the words "Never Cursed" engraved in them, unknown to his clients. He hid these because his creations would be incomplete without this curse and openly highlighting such curses violate the laws of poetics to which he was beholden to. Wether Mr Woodcock's curse bought him joy or grief, wether he wants to be rid of it, is left open to the viewer. This movie however, takes place in post WWI Britain, approximately a century before the release of Lateralus - the album that morphs curses into blessings. What a glorious gift it is to be born in the age of Lateralus - where poets need not sunk by tragic fates - but can be elevated by them & can joyfully embrace them.

"I'm incurable" - Mr Reynolds Woodcock

For those who listened to this album and its alchemical equivalent - the famous line by Bill Hicks - "There is a ledge beyond the edge.", the bounty has been extraordinary. The risks have been rewarded handsomely - both materially & spiritually. Most people who meet me have call me lucky & privileged not knowing fully about the struggles & pains of my journey. No fault of their own - The laws of poetics prohibit me from wailing over my miseries and allow me only to share joy, paradoxes & perplexities as JL Borges beautifully wrote. This journey has allowed me to witness & experience everything that a poet needs to - love - hate, beauty - ugliness, ecstasy - agony, poverty - wealth, rewards - punishments, life -death.. And when all has been experienced the circle of life is unveiled to reveal the spiral of life, and it is this unveiling which I have deduced to be a kind of re-incarnation. Rebirth is like waking up from a long deep slumber. Reincarnation happens when instead of going back to sleep again, you get out of your bed and begin your day. And every morning, when we get out of our bed and live our lives we are reincarnated. Every day we live new stories, create something new, learn something new, and if you become aware of your reincarnations you realise, in words of Walt Whitman- ''All knowledge is but remembrance and all novelty is but oblivion."

This new found approach to creation - from oblivion to novelty - has also redefined the way I am living my life now. Tired of being reborn - reincarnations are what I am seeking now & they are seeking me. And reincarnations need time and acceptance. It is like finding freedom within the all powerful forces & fields yielded by a higher power. It excites me what kind of reincarnations will be bestowed upon me. There is a guide, a map of sorts, if my intuition is correct - the albums of Tool released after Lateralus. And these albums now tell me - that even though I have been reborn countless times, I have not yet been reincarnated.. I am undergoing one....

The inspiration behind this essay.

This shop owner does'nt have time for TOOL.