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| This image reflects the central theme of the essay: what comes through us is not ours to own, but it must be served with reverence. |
A Sense of Completion
There are moments when writing no longer feels like production, expression, or even reflection. It feels like the completion of an inner act.
This is how I feel now.
For several years this blog has not been “content creation” for me. It has been something more intimate and more severe: a way to survive, to preserve sanity, to gather fragments of truth, to digest wounds, to pass through disillusionment, to serve what still remained living, and finally to seal certain understandings that had ripened through experience.
Some posts were simple collections of words from saints and mystics. Some were commentaries on songs. Some came from pain. Some from study. Some from the need to separate truth from distortion. Some were written under pressure that did not allow silence. Some were not fully clean in tone and later needed to be removed or corrected. But all of them belonged to a real movement.
Now, after finishing the long work with Abhinavagupta’s Parātrīṃśikā Vivaraṇa, and after completing the reflections that had been waiting in me for years, especially the recent series on Gurren Lagann, I feel that a large inner arc has closed.
This does not mean that the blog is finished. I do not think writing is over. But the old pressure has changed. Something that was pressing from within has been offered. Something that needed language has received language. Something that was not yet sealed has been sealed.
That feeling is distinct.
It is not triumph. It is not ordinary exhaustion. It is closer to the feeling after a yajña: the offering has been made, the fire has consumed what had to be placed into it, and now one cannot pretend that the same inner work is still unfinished.
For me, writing has never truly been preaching. Even when the tone was sharp, even when the subject was spiritual, even when the texts spoke about teachers, traditions, śāstra, mystical experience, wounds, or discernment, the deepest movement was not to stand above others and instruct them.
The deeper movement was to say what had become true through life.
Writing, for me, is a form of sealing.
A truth may be felt for years before it is spoken. It may live in the body, in memory, in pain, in devotion, in contradiction, in repeated encounters with the same pattern. But until it is written clearly, something remains unfinished. The writing does not create the truth. It completes its digestion.
That is why I cannot write merely because a topic is interesting. I can admire many things, read many things, watch many things, and still not feel any need to write about them. But sometimes something pierces deeply enough that it becomes part of the inner work itself. Then, after years of pressure, the writing appears almost suddenly, as if it had been waiting beneath the surface.
The speed of writing does not mean that the understanding is new or shallow. Sometimes words appear fast because the life behind them was not fast.
And now, because that inner pressure has quieted, I feel no need to force the next thing.
A living blog should not become a machine. The current cannot be served by manufacturing continuity. Sometimes it speaks through hundreds of posts. Sometimes through one line. Sometimes through translation. Sometimes through a song, an image, a wound, a memory, a scene from an anime, or a verse from a śāstra.
And sometimes it speaks through silence.
The task is not to keep producing.
The task is to remain faithful to what is real when it appears.
The First Era: The Voice of the Saints
The first stage of this blog had almost no personal voice.
It was mostly a gathering of words from saints, mystics, bhaktas, jñānīs, ascetics, avadhūtas, and realized beings: Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharshi, Vijaya Krishna Goswami, Avadhūta Nādananda, and many others. Their words formed the body of the blog much more than anything I could say myself.
At that time this felt completely natural.
I did not think that I had any right or need to write much in my own voice. My feeling was simple: what is essential in spiritual life has already been spoken by those who truly saw. The path has already been walked. The great ones have already given the medicine. Why should I add my personal opinions to what was already luminous, tested, and alive?
So the blog began as preservation.
Not explanation.
Not self-expression.
Not personal teaching.
Preservation.
I gathered what pierced me, what supported me, what gave direction, what kept the inner field from collapsing. The outer world had become uncertain, and the words of the saints were not literary material. They were shelter.
There is no need to romanticize this. It was not yet a mature personal voice. But it was not empty either. It was a real mandala of refuge.
Before I could speak in my own voice, I had to sit among the voices that kept me sane.
Even though there was almost no direct personal writing then, my voice was already hidden there in another way. A selection is never neutral. What one preserves, what one returns to, what one places before others, what one feels to be worth remembering — all of this already reveals an inner orientation.
That first era also protected me from a certain danger. It prevented the blog from being born only from my own psychological material. Before personal interpretation, there was contact with something greater than the personal. Before analysis, there was reverence. Before critique, there was listening.
That mattered.
Because personal voice without reverence can easily become self-enclosed. It may sound strong, but it has no depth behind it. The first era gave the blog roots in voices that were not mine, and this remains one of its strongest foundations.
Even now, I do not see that stage as obsolete. The words of Ramana Maharshi or Ramakrishna do not become irrelevant because one passes through later stages of understanding. The speech of realized beings does not belong to a temporary psychological phase. It may meet us differently at different moments of life, but its source is not exhausted by our current state.
That is why I do not regret the first era.
It was not yet “my writing” in the full sense, but it was a necessary beginning. It created a treasury. It gathered medicine. It established the blog not as a personal platform first, but as a place where the living voices of the path could be remembered.
Only later did the personal voice begin to emerge.
And perhaps it could emerge only because, before speaking, I had first listened.
The Second Era: Personal Fire Through Wound
The second stage began when my own voice started to appear.
The doorway was unexpected: mystical commentaries on songs.
At first this may sound strange. A spiritual blog rooted in saints, śāstra, mystics, and realized beings suddenly began to turn toward songs — not only sacred hymns, not only formally religious compositions, but songs that pierced something directly. Songs in which, for a moment, I felt that another voice was speaking through ordinary human form.
This became one of the central discoveries of that period.
The Goddess is not confined to official gatekeepers. She is not imprisoned in institutions, initiatory hierarchies, authorized custodians, or those who claim to control where the current may appear. Sometimes She speaks through scripture. Sometimes through mantra. Sometimes through a saint. And sometimes, unexpectedly, through a song that was not written as theology at all.
This was a real liberation.
It was also a revolt.
Not a revolt against tradition itself, but against the inner structure that had made me believe that the living current could be recognized only through certain approved doors. The song commentaries became part of my disentangling. They were a way to say: no, the current is wider than that. If something truly pierces, opens the heart, changes the inner weather, and reveals a truth one cannot deny, then it cannot be dismissed merely because its outer form is not traditionally prestigious.
During that period I was also processing wounds connected with spiritual authority, inherited voices, previous certainties, and teachings that had guided me at one stage but later needed to be questioned. Some voices I had once taken almost as final. Some frameworks had shaped how I understood surrender, discipline, grace, guru, Goddess, tradition, and even my own pain.
I needed to separate truth from distortion.
And I did it through writing.
I was not writing as someone who had already calmly solved everything. I was writing while the inner structure was being rebuilt. There were old voices inside me that had to be answered. There were wrong understandings that had to be corrected, not abstractly, but in the nervous system, in the heart, in the daily sense of reality.
This is why that period had fire.
Sometimes clean fire.
Sometimes mixed fire.
I want to say this honestly.
Not everything in that stage was pure. There was real current there, but there was also dirt. There were moments when the commentary was alive, and there were moments when I tried to squeeze mystical meaning where there was not enough living force to justify it. There were songs that truly opened something, and there were songs where I imposed too much. There were texts where the voice was clear, and others where I can now see ego, theatricality, wounded self-importance, or the desire to make something deeper than it actually was.
Recently I went through some of those older posts and deleted what felt too mixed or too dirty in current.
That was necessary.
Not because the whole stage was false, but because the stage was transitional. It carried real breakthrough, but also the smoke of the fire through which I was passing. A voice does not always emerge in pure form. Sometimes it first emerges through pressure, injury, revolt, and the desperate need to breathe outside an old structure.
I do not regret that stage.
But I cannot write now in the same way.
More than a hundred mystical song commentaries were written, and I do not feel that this field is endless. Most songs are just songs. Many are beautiful, emotional, skillful, and moving, but not every beautiful song carries a mystical breakthrough. To pretend otherwise would be false.
If one day a song truly shatters me again, if it opens something with undeniable force, then perhaps another commentary will come. But I do not want to squeeze meaning from music merely to continue a form that once served me. The current must be organic. If the song does not pierce, silence is better.
Another major current of that second era was connected with Dhumāvatī.
I do not doubt that I had real mystical contact with that field. It was visceral, powerful, and significant. Dhumāvatī appeared not as a decorative goddess, not as a concept, but as a force connected with collapse, loss, stripping, and the truth that remains when external supports fall away. During that period, Her presence made sense of certain experiences that otherwise felt almost unbearable.
But here also there was a temptation.
At a certain point, I felt the pull to form an identity around that contact — to become, in some subtle way, a voice of that goddess, a witness of Her, almost a prophet of Her field. I can see now that this was dangerous.
The experience may have been real, but identity is another matter.
A contact with a deity does not give one the right to build a spiritual persona around it. A powerful experience does not automatically become a mandate. The Goddess may touch, burn, strip, reveal, and pass through one’s life, but that does not mean the ego should establish a throne from that contact.
So now I would say it simply: that contact happened. It was real for me. It shaped me. But I do not claim ownership of it. I do not claim a special identity from it. I do not want to present myself as belonging to that goddess in some public, exalted, or authoritative way.
The experience was part of the path.
It is not my crown.
This, perhaps, is the deepest lesson of the second era. The personal voice had to be born, but it also had to learn not to intoxicate itself with its own birth. The current had to break through inherited forms, but then it also had to be protected from becoming another self-image.
That era gave me speech.
It gave me revolt.
It gave me discernment.
It helped me digest wounds that could not remain unexamined.
But it also showed me how easily a wounded voice can mix truth with ego, and how necessary it is to return later, clean the field, delete what should not remain, and refuse to make an identity out of what was given for transformation.
The second era was the birth of personal fire.
But fire alone is not the end.
Fire must eventually become clarity.
The Third Era: The Sober Current
The third stage of the blog felt different.
It was still personal, but no longer in the same way. The center was no longer mainly wound, revolt, separation, or opposition to voices that had once shaped me. Something had become quieter. Not weaker, but more sober. The writing still carried fire when needed, but the fire was less theatrical, less reactive, less bound to the need to prove, expose, or break something.
This stage began through a more careful re-seeing of figures and texts that had occupied powerful places in my consciousness.
One important moment was the series of reflections connected with Lilian Silburn. For a long time, her figure had almost a throne in my inner world. Not simply as a scholar, but as an icon — someone connected, in my mind, with a refined, almost transparent entrance into Kashmir Śaivism and the French reception of these traditions.
To reflect on her soberly was not a small act.
It was not an attack. It was not a dismissal. It was not an attempt to reduce her importance. But it was a necessary dethroning of an inner image. The person, the scholar, the translator, the spiritual atmosphere around her — all this had to be seen more clearly, without unconscious idealization.
There is a stage where the soul needs icons. Later, the same icons must become human again. If they remain on the throne too long, they distort perception. One no longer sees the person, the work, the limits, the context, or one’s own projections. One sees only the aura one has created around them.
So those reflections were part of the sober current.
They removed another layer of enchantment.
But the largest work of this third era was the long engagement with Abhinavagupta’s Parātrīṃśikā Vivaraṇa.
This text had lived in me for a very long time. It was not a casual subject. It had exerted pressure for years, perhaps for a decade. I knew that I was not inwardly satisfied with the existing ways it had become available to me. The translations, selections, and reflections that existed certainly had their place. They opened doors. They preserved something. But for me they were not enough.
The pressure remained.
I needed to go through the whole text. Not through a fragment. Not through scattered quotations. Not only through someone else’s arrangement. I needed to face the work directly, slowly, passage by passage, until the text was no longer merely an object of reverence somewhere in the distance, but something digested through attention.
That is why the long series appeared.
It was not a scholarly project in the ordinary sense, although it required scholarship, care, comparison, and linguistic attention. It was also not only a devotional project, although devotion was certainly present. It was a form of service to the current of the text itself.
For months, the attention had to remain there. Other possible writings appeared in the background, but I could not easily turn away. The work demanded continuity. It had its own gravity. To interrupt it too much would have felt like breaking the vessel before the offering was complete.
That discipline changed the tone of the blog.
In the second era, writing often came from the need to break through something. In this third era, writing came more from the need to stay with something until it revealed its structure. It was less like striking a wall and more like sitting before a flame, feeding it carefully, and refusing to leave before the offering was complete.
This is why I call it sober.
Not dry. Not cold. Not merely academic. But sober in the sense that the current was not being used to intensify a personal drama. The personal life was still there, of course. No real commentary is impersonal. But the text itself stood at the center. The task was to listen, translate, reflect, and serve.
And then, after the Abhinavagupta work was completed, another long-standing pressure emerged almost immediately: the series on Gurren Lagann.
On the surface, this may look like a complete change of world — from one of the greatest tantric exegetes to an anime about drills, robots, and impossible heroic force. But inwardly, it did not feel like a fall into something lesser. It felt like the same current moving through a completely different form.
That anime had been with me for about fifteen years. At first, what reached me was Kamina’s fire — the refusal to break, the shout against the ceiling, the force that helps one survive when there is no inner structure strong enough yet. Later, through life, other parts became visible: Rossiu, the corruption of responsibility; the Anti-Spiral, the temptation to freeze life after seeing suffering; Simon, the hidden one who passes through collapse, betrayal, power, love, loss, and final anonymity.
The series was not really about anime.
It was about maturation.
It was a way to seal a personal mythic arc that had been unfolding silently for years. What I first watched as inspiring spectacle later became a map of spiritual growth, disillusionment, responsibility, pain, and freedom.
That is why the series came so quickly.
The writing was fast because the digestion was not.
This, for me, is one of the main marks of the third era. The writing no longer needs to pretend that only traditionally sacred forms can carry truth. After Abhinavagupta, one can still write about anime, a song, Tolkien, or a personal wound — not because all forms are equal in the same way, but because the current is not imprisoned by prestige.
The question is not whether the form looks serious enough.
The question is whether it has truly pierced.
Still, this freedom must be handled carefully. The second era taught me that not everything that moves emotion carries mystical current. Not every song needs commentary. Not every image requires metaphysics. Not every beloved work should be inflated into revelation.
The sober current demands restraint.
It does not say: everything is sacred, therefore everything can be interpreted.
It says something more precise: the current may appear anywhere, but it does not appear everywhere with the same force. When it appears, one must serve it. When it does not appear, one should not manufacture it.
This is the difference.
The Silburn reflections helped dethrone an icon. The Abhinavagupta series helped satisfy a decade-long pressure around a text that demanded full attention. The Gurren Lagann series sealed a personal arc of maturation that had been ripening beneath the surface for years.
Together, they formed a different mode of writing.
Less possessed by wound.
Less dependent on opposition.
Less driven by the need to create a spiritual persona.
More careful.
More responsible.
More willing to let the work itself dictate the form.
In this third era, the current no longer needed to be defended against someone.
It needed to be served.
Stewardship, Not Ownership
This third era also changed my understanding of responsibility.
Not abstract responsibility. Not moralism. Not the desire to appear pure. I mean something much more concrete: when a certain current passes through a person, work, tradition, image, word, or practice, it should not be handled carelessly.
Two recent experiences made this especially clear to me.
One was connected with an artist whose mystical paintings had deeply affected me. Some of her works carried a force that was not merely aesthetic. They were not only beautiful images or spiritual decoration. They had presence. They opened something. They touched many people.
Then, as part of her own attempt to drop the spiritual avatar and step away from the identity built around that work, much of that public presence was wiped away.
I do not want to judge this harshly. I can understand the impulse. The spiritual persona can become a prison. Praise, metrics, followers, recognition, and the subtle intoxication of being seen as a vessel of sacred beauty can become poisonous. Sometimes one has to step back radically to see who remains without the avatar.
But something in this still caused pain.
Because there is a difference between dropping attachment to being the artist and erasing the work that came through the artist.
When work has become medicine for others, it no longer belongs only to the inner drama of the one through whom it appeared. The artist may need silence. The artist may need retreat. The artist may need to stop feeding the persona. But the work itself has entered the field. It has touched hearts. It has become part of the nourishment of others.
The second experience involved a traditional spiritual field, a living lineage, and a person who clearly had knowledge and some real insight. The outer signs were serious: tradition, transmission, sacred technique, inherited authority.
But the actual encounter felt rushed, commercialized, and careless.
Serious questions were handled too quickly. The field felt like it had been placed on a conveyor belt. Something that should have required attention, depth, and responsibility was treated almost like a short transaction.
Again, I do not want to turn this into an attack on a person.
The point is the distortion itself.
When someone carries sacred knowledge, or claims to act from a traditional current, sloppy work is not a small thing. It damages trust in the field. It leaves the seeker with the painful impression that even what is ancient, subtle, and powerful can be handled with the mentality of a marketplace.
This is especially painful when there is real insight present.
If someone is simply false, the matter is easier. One can reject it and move away. But when there is something genuine mixed with carelessness, commercialization, haste, or lack of human attention, the wound is more complex. The current is not absent, but the handling is unworthy of it.
This has become important for me.
If something real comes through us, we do not have the right to be sloppy with it.
This does not mean perfection. No human vessel is perfect. Mistakes happen. Tone can fail. Judgment can be incomplete. Human beings are not pure channels in some fantasy sense.
But there is still a difference between imperfection and negligence.
To serve the current means to take care. To revise. To listen. To not exploit trust. To not use sacred force for personal inflation. To not treat people’s serious questions as disposable. To not confuse detachment with carelessness.
This applies to writing as well.
If a text carries force, then the writer must be careful. Not frightened, but careful. Words can help, but they can also wound. They can clarify, but they can also intoxicate. They can liberate, but they can also manipulate. A fiery post written from dirty current may strengthen exactly the thing it claims to expose.
That is why, over time, I had to return to some of my own older writing and remove what no longer felt clean.
This was not weak self-censorship. It was responsibility. Some writings belonged to a stage, but not all of them deserved preservation. Some were necessary for my own processing, but not necessary to remain in the public field. Some carried too much wound, too much ego, too much forced meaning, or too much theatrical fire.
To delete such things is also part of stewardship.
But to delete everything because “nothing belongs to me” would be another distortion.
For a long time, the question of ownership was not simple for me.
At one stage, it was natural to feel: these are my writings, my reflections, my discoveries, my voice. The blog was something I was building. The words came from my effort, my reading, my practice, my pain, my discernment, my struggle to understand. There is truth in this. It would be false to deny the human side completely.
But later the pendulum swung in the opposite direction.
I began to feel that nothing truly belonged to me. The current was not mine. The Goddess was not mine. The words, insights, recognitions, even the force behind the writing — all of this seemed to belong only to Her. The blog itself felt less like a personal project and more like something placed into the hands of the current.
There was truth in this too.
But now I feel that both positions, if taken absolutely, are incomplete.
To say “this is mine” too strongly turns the writing into possession. It makes the current serve the ego. It creates the subtle intoxication of authorship: my voice, my insight, my power, my spiritual authority, my special vision. That is dangerous. The moment living truth becomes personal property, it begins to contract.
But to say “none of this has anything to do with me” can also become false.
It may sound humble, but it can erase the actual human work. It can erase the years of reading, suffering, practice, failure, attention, revision, discrimination, and responsibility through which the writing became possible. It can turn the living human vessel into a ghost, as if nothing concrete happened through this body, this mind, this life, this wound, this effort.
That too is not mature.
The current does not write in the abstract.
It writes through a particular life.
Through memory. Through scars. Through language. Through temperament. Through mistakes. Through devotion. Through fatigue. Through pressure. Through discernment. Through the ability to say no to a sentence that is not clean, to remove a post that carries dirty fire, to wait when the topic is not ripe, to publish when silence would become cowardice.
So the mature position, as I understand it now, is not ownership and not erasure.
It is stewardship.
What came through me does not belong to my ego. But it did come through me, and therefore I am responsible for how I handled it.
This feels more truthful than both extremes.
Not “this is mine.”
Not “I am nothing and therefore have no responsibility.”
But: something passed through this life, and I must serve it as cleanly as I can.
It was given by the current, worked through my life, shaped by my effort, and offered back without possession.
This is my personal reason for writing.
A truth may live inside for years as pressure. It may appear first as intuition, then as wound, then as contradiction, then as repeated life-pattern, then as inner recognition. But until it is written clearly, something remains unresolved. The writing does not create the truth. It gives it form. It seals it. It offers it.
That is why I cannot manufacture this work.
If there is no pressure, no piercing, no inner necessity, then there should be no post. I may still think, read, watch, study, and live, but not everything needs to become writing. The current must not be forced into productivity.
And when the pressure does come, the task is to serve it without vanity and without cowardice.
To write carefully.
To write honestly.
To offer it.
And then to let it go.
So this is where I stand now. The blog has passed through different voices because I myself have passed through different fires. At first, it was a place of preservation, where the words of saints and realized beings held the field before my own voice was ready. Later, it became a place of personal fire, where songs, wounds, revolt, discernment, and the painful need to separate truth from distortion gave birth to speech. And then, more gradually, it entered a soberer current, where the work became less dependent on opposition and more concerned with service, clarity, and responsibility.
I do not see these stages as mistakes. Some things needed to be deleted. Some writings were too mixed, too wounded, too theatrical, or too bound to a state that had already passed. But the movement itself was real. It was life becoming understanding through pressure. It was not clean from the beginning, and perhaps it could not have been. A human voice often has to emerge through smoke before it learns how to carry fire without being possessed by it.
Now I feel that a certain arc has completed itself. Not the path, not the blog, not the work of discernment, but one particular pressure that had lived in me for years. Something has been offered. Something has been spoken. Something that needed form has received form. I do not need to pretend that the same inner work is still unfinished merely to continue producing words.
The conclusion I can make now is simple: what comes through must not be owned, but it also must not be treated carelessly. The current is not mine, yet I am responsible for the way I meet it. If it speaks through saints, I must listen. If it speaks through śāstra, I must study. If it speaks through a song, image, wound, film, anime, or silence, I should not reject it because it does not wear a serious mask. But neither should I force meaning where nothing has truly pierced.
So I will not manufacture continuity. I will not write merely to keep the blog alive as a machine. I will wait until something ripens, presses inwardly, and demands form. Then, if the current allows, I will write again — not to possess it, not to preach it, not to build an identity from it, but to seal what has become true.
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