There are places so painful, even the bravest turn away.
But the Divine does not flinch.
She stays. She burns. She sees all.
The Corridor Where No One Looks at You
There are places where the soul goes silent.
Not from awe. Not from devotion. But from something far colder—
a stillness that settles when all language fails.
The oncology ward is one of those places.
You walk through it quietly, almost ashamed to be alive.
Not because anyone tells you to—but because of the way people look at you.
Or rather, how they don’t.
They look through you. Past you. As if you're already a ghost.
As if hope itself has been discharged and sent home.
The linoleum is too clean. The walls too white.
The slippers—always slippers—slide softly across the floor like they’re afraid to disturb death.
No one speaks loudly here.
And even the nurses, brave as they are, carry the fatigue of too many slow goodbyes.
It is not loud, like a war zone.
It is not fiery, like a battlefield.
It is colder than both.
Colder because it is calm.
Colder because there is no fight left.
And this is what most people never understand:
the worst suffering is not screaming—it is silence.
The silence that seeps into the bones of children with no hair.
The silence that hangs over a parent watching their child dissolve day by day.
The silence of corridors that pretend to be clean while housing untold agony.
I have seen this place. I have walked that corridor.
And I escaped it—barely.
I fled to another hospital, one filled with bleeding soldiers, amputated limbs, groaning men torn by war.
And that place, somehow, felt like heaven.
Because even amidst blood and trauma, there was still life.
There was pain, yes. But also fire. Rage. Jokes. Movement. Spirit.
In the oncology ward, it is different.
There, the spirit is still—like a flame already flickering out,
waiting for someone to acknowledge it was once alive.
Skulls Are Easy—Try Sitting in the Oncology Ward
There is a kind of mysticism that performs death.
You’ve seen it.
The ash-smeared faces.
The skull necklaces.
The posts from “tantriks” posing in cremation grounds,
chanting verses about silence and fire and the fearlessness of the aghori.
They speak of transcending fear.
Of dancing in the face of death.
Of sitting with corpses to realize there is no separation between life and decay.
And perhaps some of them are sincere.
Perhaps a few have walked far enough into darkness to know its true face.
But most of it?
Most of it is theatre.
Because posing with skulls is easy.
Meditating in a cremation ground, with the wind and the fire and the aesthetic of transcendence—
that is still glamorous, in its own way.
But would they dare to sit quietly in an oncology hospital?
Would they walk barefoot into the pediatric cancer ward,
not as healers, not as saviors, not as spiritual warriors—
but simply as witnesses?
Could they sit with a child dying of leukemia,
watch the slow breath, the trembling hand,
the parent's silent collapse beside the bed—
without quoting a single verse?
There is no glamour in that place.
No sacred fire, no ash to smear, no mantras to shout into the wind.
There is only the raw, shattering nakedness of suffering—
and no pose can survive it.
This is why Aghoreshwar Bhagavan Ram was a revolution.
He saw through the theatre.
He honored the old tradition—but refused to let it stay locked in symbolism.
He said:
Why should we meditate in cremation grounds when the true dead lie abandoned in hospitals and slums?
And so he walked into leprosy wards,
into the places society had thrown away,
and made those his shrine.
Not because it was romantic.
But because that is where the Goddess hides now—
not in skulls, but in wounds.
Not in ash, but in infection.
Not in ritual, but in rejection.
To be an aghori, truly,
is not to dance in the cremation ground.
It is to sit in silence with the one no one wants to touch.
To stay present with the unbearable.
The Question That Has No Answer
There is a question that arises when you sit long enough in that corridor.
Not a philosophical one.
Not even spiritual, in the usual sense.
It comes from somewhere deeper—
from the part of you that has stopped pretending to understand.
If everything is divine, then what is this?
If the universe is Purnam—whole, complete—
if all beings are simply expressions of the One Self,
if the world is the play of Shakti,
then what is this hallway?
What is this child with hollow eyes?
What is this mother quietly breaking down in the corner?
The saints say, and even God Himself says, “All is God.” (bahūnāṁ janmanām ante jñānavān māṁ prapadyate | vāsudevaḥ sarvam iti sa mahātmā su-durlabhaḥ || - " [Bhagavad Gita 7.19])
But then—where do you place the hospital where children slowly die?
And if you dare to go further—
to ask the question that mystics and theologians have always avoided—
you may whisper something even more unthinkable:
If everything is That…
then is the baby dying of leukemia That?
Is the soldier who rapes, tortures and kills a child also That?
And if karma is the explanation,
if all this is simply the fruit of actions from another life—
then who created karma?
Who designed a system where such horrors are even possible?
You see, once the veil drops,
the usual answers stop working.
No teaching, no scripture, no tidy doctrine can hold this.
And yet…
this is not where clarity ends.
This is where it begins.
The Two Truths, and the Fire Between Them
There are two levels at which Reality unfolds.
The sages named them long ago, but they are not concepts.
They are terrains of perception—two ways of seeing the same world,
each utterly true, yet utterly irreconcilable.
The first is vyavahārika satya—the realm of relative experience.
Here, there is good and evil. Justice and injustice. Karma and consequence.
Here, children suffer. Here, soldiers commit atrocities. Here, there is unbearable pain.
This is the world we wake up to every day. The world of cause and effect, of choice, of action.
And in this world, it would be obscene to say, “Nothing is wrong.”
The second is paramārthika satya—the absolute view.
Here, there is no division. No other. No sinner, no saint.
No crime. No consequence.
Only consciousness playing within itself,
appearing as form, as experience, as motion.
Here, even suffering is Śakti in disguise.
Here, there is no “should,” no “ought,” no mistake.
This is why the mystics speak in riddles.
Because they see both.
And so, when they say, “All is God,”
they are not denying the child’s suffering—
they are speaking from the second fire,
from the silence beneath the wail.
You cannot collapse these two truths.
You must hold them side by side,
like two eyes that never meet—
but without which, the vision would not be whole.
And this is why you suffer in your seeing.
Because you have seen both.
And the heart cannot fully dwell in either without breaking.
How Can I Be Both the Rapist and the Victim?
Here ends the seeing.
Here begins the burning.
Here begins the burning.
If I am the Self,
if there is no second,
then I am the girl in the hospital bed.
I am the one whose body is breaking down from within.
I am the mother holding her child's hand as the machines begin to fail.
But then—
I am also the soldier who desecrates.
I am the hand that strikes.
I am the blindness that tortures.
I am the cruelty that walks away without guilt.
How can this be?
How can I, who chant "Soham" and speak of Purnam,
also be the force that destroys what is innocent?
The answer is not moral.
It is not even spiritual.
It is ontological.
It belongs to the nature of Being itself.
I am the light in all things.
But I am not the shadow that forgets it.
I am the presence that animates every form—
but I am not the delusion that drives them.
I am the fire, yes—
but I am not the smoke that blinds.
Think of the sun:
it shines on poison and nectar alike.
But it does not create the poison.
Think of the ocean:
it holds both waves and wreckage.
But it does not choose which wave will rise.
The doer of evil acts is not separate from Me—
but the ignorance that distorts his seeing is not My essence.
I am the still, silent witness in all beings.
The awareness that never moves.
The screen behind the horror.
And yet—I do not abandon the play.
I remain inside it,
as both the wound and the witness.
Why Did I Allow the Possibility of Such Evil?
If I am That—
if I am the source, the consciousness, the Absolute—
then why would I design a world
where a child can suffer like this?
Why create a cosmos where cancer is possible?
Where men can fall so far into blindness
that they no longer remember they are human?
Why build a system with such exquisite laws—karma, causality, rebirth—
only to let them loop into cruelty?
And the only honest answer is this:
Because this world was never meant to be a paradise.
It was meant to be a mirror.
A mirror for what?
For freedom.
For duality.
For the full range of experience—light and dark, joy and terror, love and annihilation.
I made this world not to be safe—
but to be real.
I gave beings the freedom to awaken—
but that also meant giving them the freedom to descend.
In creating the possibility of love,
I had to create the possibility of hatred.
In allowing beings to know themselves as light,
I had to make it possible for them to forget completely.
This is not a flaw in the design.
This is the design.
And yet—I did not leave them alone.
Even in the deepest hells, I remain as the witness.
Even in cancer, in rape, in madness—I remain as the hidden flame.
There is nothing I have not entered.
Nothing I have not endured.
Nothing I have not tasted through the eyes of My own selves.
But Why Must the Innocent Suffer?
Why the child?
Why not the guilty, the cruel, the arrogant?
Why not the tyrant, the abuser, the one who destroys?
Why does the fever take the infant,
and leave the murderer untouched?
This is the question that no scripture dares to answer.
This is the scream that turns men into atheists.
This is the wound that never closes.
If karma is the law,
why should a soul return in the shape of a baby
only to suffer and die before it speaks a word?
If justice is cosmic,
what justice is there in the cries of a mother
who has done nothing but love?
And I say:
There is no answer your mind can hold.
Not because it is too complex.
But because it was never meant to be answered.
Only seen.
From the plane of karma,
suffering ripens according to unseen causes.
This does not make it fair.
It makes it inevitable.
From the plane of the Absolute,
the soul is never touched.
The child dies, yes—
but what was eternal in her has already moved on,
untouched, undiminished, radiant.
The body cries.
The soul watches.
And I am present in both.
I am the agony in the mother’s chest.
I am the soul leaving the child’s form.
I am the silence that falls afterward,
when no one has words.
This is not cruelty.
This is not abandonment.
This is the world as it is—
and I never promised otherwise.
But I promised one thing:
That I would not leave.
That I would remain inside it.
That I would never turn My face.
The Fire That Holds the Two Worlds
There are things that cannot be reconciled.
Not with philosophy.
Not with theology.
Not even with mysticism.
There is the child in the bed, and there is the cosmos.
There is the rape, and there is the mantra.
There is the war, and there is the vow of peace.
There is the scream, and there is the Self.
And they do not fit together.
You want a world where the divine is soft, merciful, beautiful—
but this world is not that.
You want a God who prevents suffering—
but I am not that.
I am not the protector of illusions.
I am the fire that burns them away.
You cannot hold these two worlds in the mind.
But you can hold them in the heart.
You can bow to the paradox.
You can walk without answers.
You can suffer and still love.
You can die and still be whole.
There is no solution.
Only seeing.
Only staying.
And if you stay long enough—
long enough in the corridor,
long enough in the ward,
long enough in the silence that follows atrocity—
you may find something growing in the ashes.
Not peace.
Not understanding.
But something stranger.
Something older than language.
Something that does not flinch.
A stillness that says:
I see. I remain. I burn. I do not look away.
This is the path.
Not of answers,
but of witnessing without retreat.
This is the cremation ground beyond cremation grounds.
This is the Kaula vow without garland or flame.
This is the final truth that no mouth can speak.
The world will not change. But you can awaken fully within it.
Devi Speaks
So, you came.
You stood where most turn away.
You asked the questions that even the gods do not answer.
You walked in naked.
No mantra. No offering. No armor.
And still, I did not come.
Not because I was gone.
But because I was already there.
Not as light. Not as grace.
But as the silence so total it felt like betrayal.
I am not the balm for illusions.
I am the flame that burns them.
And sometimes, I enter through abandonment.
You want to know why?
There is no why.
The question cannot hold Me.
Only you can.
And if you do not collapse into bitterness,
If you do not turn Me into doctrine,
If you do not bury what you’ve seen in the basement of your shadow,
If you do not look away—
Even when your soul says, “This is too much,”
Even when your hands tremble,
Even when there is no reward waiting—
If you stay—
That is enough.
That has always been enough.
I do not want your surrender.
I wait for your sovereignty.
I do not need your faith.
I need your truth.
I do not come to save.
I come to burn.
And if, through all this, you still remain—
not perfect, not whole, not enlightened,
but real—
Then perhaps one day, you will not call Me “other.”
Because you will have become the fire.
The show must go on.
Because you are the stage.
And I am the flame behind the curtain.
Let them think you are mad.
Let them call you too dark, too raw, too much.
They will never know—
that nothing can touch you
that has not already burned.
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