The following post is only a portion of the truth.
An exercise in eating the shadow.
Bodhi Zendo,
Perumalmalai,
March ‘25
I recall, sitting outside the Zendo, watching the sun peeking out over the hills. I was wearied and bruised from the incessant death-blows. Many of which were self-administered. In fighting against death’s landing, I had become accomplice to this transformative energy’s process of self-murder.
Exhausted, I set to drawing, mindlessly scribbling with pen against paper, transmuting the inner chaos. With the mind suspended, I simply followed the lines as they webbed out of the pen’s abdomen. Vortexes appeared in an apparent disarray. Though their forms weren’t random. There was order in those spiralling lines. Such seeming chaos was actually a cosmos in the making.
Once the furious, initial sketch had been discharged from my system, I looked down at what had been thrown up, with great scrutiny, as if searching for a future portent – something like those soothsayers who eye the grainy spatter at the bottom of their tea-cups for a glimpse in the mirror.
Then, without thinking, I followed my hand as it retraced and deepened certain lines of the scribble. Gradually, I pulled out faces and bodies concealed within, as if plucking them out from a veil, lifting them to the surface from a buried depth. Brows deepened, wrinkles forked and hair sprouted as I filled in and accentuated the details.
Eventually, fully-fleshed out and sketched-in characters stared up at me.
This had always been a precious experience of mine. To simply put the pen to paper and draw without a destination in mind. To let the creation take care of itself and the image organically emerge.
It came naturally enough. Ever since I was a little boy, drawing all over my hands, on the underside of the kitchen table or in the back of my exercise books. I’d even got into trouble, once or twice, for filling over half of my books with more drawings than schoolwork. It wasn’t that the teachers didn’t like my doodles, only that there was “a correct time and place for them.”
I wondered what that little boy would make of the person he is now.
A soft, fleeting sob and a half-stifled gasp in realising that the little boy was still there, looking out through the same pair of eyes. And he thought it was pretty darn cool, actually, that I’d found myself, a traveller, sat in contemplation over the Southern Indian landscape, albeit lost and confused but somehow still holding up and honouring his free-spirited side.
Wasn’t life, after all, meant to be an adventure?
And the little boy thought that for all the things I’d gone through, experienced and co-created in my life, blindfolded as I had been for the most part, it had turned out well enough. Sure, there were dark days when I couldn’t appreciate that, and sure, there were probably areas that could be improved, but at least this was my signature in the making, as imperfectly drawn as it might be.
Life, like one of my messy drawings, had unfolded in a way that I could never have dreamed up. Just as when the drawings were finished, it was obvious that they were once-in-a-lifetime and belonging to one lifetime. They had happened in the moment and could never be reproduced again, not with all the mental effort or premeditation in the world.
And even if one were to replicate, to a near-perfect degree, such drawings, they could never replicate the original experience of creation as it first transpired. And that was the point. The drawings had simply come through me. My hand had moved according to intuition. Something larger was clearly at play.
So, I wondered, could I apply the same approach to my writing? Without interrupting myself during the regurgitative process, without attempting to predefine or over-engineer the outcome, and, perhaps most significantly, with as little attachment to the outcome as I could handle.
Don’t Interrupt
I thought of the romantic version of Jack Kerouac’s composing ‘On the Road’. The legend goes that it took him only three weeks to write, typing it out almost non-stop on a 120-foot scroll (multiple sheets of paper taped together in order that he not interrupt his flow).
This legend likely originated from Steve Allen’s talk show. When questioned how long the book took him to write, Kerouac barely hesitates: three weeks.
In actual fact, this is more accurately the time it took him to type up the final draft. The birthing process of the novel was one filled with multiple rewrites and rejections over the years. Not to mention the inculcation process of the novel’s inspiration itself: those several years spent travelling ‘on the road.’
I would assume that for many creative endeavours, to calculate the length of time it takes to generate, organise and finalise anything is an impossible task. Is not every collected experience in our individual lifetimes responsible for whatever we create today?
And even if Kerouac was capable of writing, from scratch, a finished manuscript in no more than three weeks, could we really separate the crucible of all his lived years from that process of creation?
Undoubtedly, he was a writer seriously dedicated to the craft. Though his spontaneous and free-flowing prose-style is all too often derided as having no technique, he did, in fact, work on and refine his own technique. The sprawling, uninterrupted, fast-moving text was a deliberate design, one made to emulate the constant motion of being on the road, and not an incoherent, drug-fuelled stream-of-consciousness joyride as many of his critics proclaim.
So, firstly, there’s something useful and grounding in acknowledging Kerouac’s commitment to craft and taking note of his multiple rewrites and rejections. It’s a personal reminder that this whole vocation of writing is going to be hard. These moments of severe self-doubt and questioning myself are part and parcel of the passion; it’s likely inescapable that I’ll continue to meet them at various junctions.
Secondly, regardless of whatever the reality might have been, something in that mythic image of a man sitting at a typewriter, ‘bleeding’ as Hemingway would say, uninterrupted, on a comically absurd length of scroll, with the same key-tapping intensity as a court reporter committed to transmitting, in full, the psychic case put before him, spoke volumes.
It spoke to the spirit that inspired Kerouac and the Beat Generation. It spoke to the revolutionary force that drove their revolt against a literary landscape that, in their view, had become stale, stuffy, constipated and dangerously limited in the portions of society, voices and stories it committed to page.
This revolt spoke to a surrender necessary to the act of creation. It spoke to an ideal of the liberated self that would allow whatever came through to do so, uncensored, unhinged and wildly honest. It seemed to me, in that, there was a recognition of the larger creative power acting through us.
This was an act of opening the valve of the often inflated sense of our own importance and surrendering to the whole self. We are not lone geniuses in a vacuum. Rather, we are humble ritual-performers, devotees committing time each day to the practise, so that the Muses might bless us with their visitation.
And when the Muses do visit, there is nothing else like it. They guide our hand and look over our shoulders. On those days, somehow, we have stepped out of our way and got the conditions just right to allow for an open channel of transmission.
Mircea Cărtărescu, the Romanian novelist and poet, in an interview with the Louisiana Channel, describes his writing process in similar terms:
“When I write, I feel a sort of split in my personality.”
“For me, writing is not concerning my normal personality, but a second one, which emerges from the moment I sit down and start writing. It’s like some other person has written everything that I have.”
“I have no previous plan. I never know what I’m going to write on the second page. So I work completely without a synopsis, without a plan. I’m led by my own book which is making itself, in a way, without my direct participation.”
The ego becomes secondary to the act of creation, almost as to be uninvolved. Perhaps the ego’s only involvement need be the desire to express oneself, a certain confidence that our voice deserves to be heard, and the willpower to sit down and write in the first place. Beyond that, when the ego is over-involved, it constricts the channel of transmission.
I could certainly see how I’d been placing my own channel in an egoic stranglehold as of late.
There had to be a removal of expectations or of certain conditions being met. A total detachment from the outcome. At least in the initial transmission.
And what are these qualities of acceptance and unconditionality if not belonging to the energy of love?
Perhaps, that is what this identity collapse was teaching me. Perhaps the collapse was not a total erasure but a temporary breakdown. A necessary process to show me how certain constraints or ideas choking my creative process could be reshuffled. So that I could see more clearly that love had to be the primary motivator underneath every act of creation.
If I was attempting to make things happen according to a premeditated idea, if I was constantly interrupting myself or not allowing myself to finish things because it didn’t align with how I’d expected things to feel or to look, then I wasn’t meeting myself and the creation with love.
Getting Out of My Own Way
I’ve not stopped writing since I left Bodhi Zendo a month ago. But I have had time to contemplate how certain aspects of my ego have obstructed my own expression. The list, I’m sure, is by no means complete, but below are some notables:
A Desire for Recognition.
A View of the World as Competition.
A Feeling that I’d Failed to Realise my Potential.
A Paralysis against a Tyranny of Choices.
The Desire for Recognition & The World as Competition
Even if I achieved worldly recognition, I already knew well enough by now that it wouldn’t solve the larger issue of self-acceptance. This quest for external validation was really a yearning to be accepted from within. The outside world couldn’t ever fulfil that younger, unmet desire. That was something only I could solve.
Still, despite understanding the ‘why’ behind the desire, I was still at odds with the side of me that enjoyed the fantasy of fame, of being celebrated in my lifetime. I had spent many years pretending that it didn’t exist. It violated an image I’d fashioned for myself, in my formative years: the high (dare I say: beyond human) ideal of the artist who does it purely for the art, without an ounce of self-interest or vanity.
The more I refused to admit this part of me existed, the more intense the internal friction grew. And the longer this recognition-seeking part of me went unacknowledged, the more aggressively it would intervene upon the creative process. Because, ultimately, the soul stomachs no lies, and anything in us that goes unseen or denied will do all in its power to make itself known.
The moment I decided to say hello to this aspect of my being and welcome it in, then the more clearly I was able to trace its history. I recall now, during many periods in my life, when facing rejection, a response uttered inside me, unspoken outside, something like:
“Just you wait until I show you. I’ll show you what I’m made of. Just you wait.”
It felt like I’d been waiting all my life to show the world “what I’m made of.”
There was, I realised, a retaliatory force within, caustic enough to eat at my insides, that wanted to shock, shout and scream down the world. It wanted to take centre-stage and settle the matter once and for all, to lay down such a great work of art as to irrevocably change the world and state with unshakeable certainty:
“This is for all who ever doubted me.”
But this voice scared me. It sounded like the voice of a toddler throwing a tantrum, or a revolutionary who, in time, became just as bad – or even worse – than the oppressor they’d ousted. It contained within it an innate violence, a desire to exact a vendetta for past grievances, whether real or imagined.
And this crowd of hecklers, saboteurs and people who’d ‘ever doubted me’, where exactly are they?
I couldn’t point to a single one of them. The truth was that they didn’t really exist. They’d only ever existed in my mind. I wasn’t really trying to prove my capability to the world as much as convincing myself it truly exists inside of me.
This need ‘to prove myself’ was also connected to another conditioning of mine that I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge. This too had grown inwards and become a silent crusade, boiling under a lid, causing all manner of internal fissures. It was an aspect of myself that I judged as ugly, immature and undeserving of a place at the table. As such, I’d pushed it away and it had ruled me from its place in the shadows ever since.
It was the part of my conditioned mind that believes, to some extent, that life is a competition. A contest in which there are a limited number of opportunities out there. Room enough only for a certain amount of people on the stage. Through this lens, the success story of the other becomes a mirror of the failures of the self.
It is not a loving way of looking at the world. It doesn’t constitute my whole way of looking either. But it is there. And it is one of the most frightening things to admit aloud. To air my scar tissue. But I do so only because I don’t believe that I’m alone.
Is the wider world not living proof of the prevalence of this scarcity mindset?
The insatiable hoarding of power and endless warring for resources. How else to explain this than to acknowledge the pervading belief that “there’s only so much to go around.” A belief that if someone is winning “over there”, then it means someone is losing “over here.”
It’s obvious enough why this mode of perception is damaging to any creative process. To strive to be the best, to strain to outdo all others, thus closing the doors of collaboration, only poisons the well. To draw from such a place only exacerbates the sickness.
The Unmet Potential & A Tyranny of Choices
Then there was the notion of unmet potential – the feeling of having failed.
My suspicion is that this was the mouth of an ancient wound speaking. Whether contracted in childhood, in a previous lifetime, or if it was simply my lot as a human being, like anyone else.
So often this harsh feeling nagged that I hadn’t lived up to my potential. A notion I snagged onto and couldn’t quite put down. It seems that I had spent too long in the fantasy-world imagining myself as the writer and not quite done enough to ground that possibility in reality.
I had become conscious that this fantasy of mine served as a comfortable smokescreen. A protective mechanism, in some way, to distance me from the general difficulty of being human. How did so many others manage “to adult” in this world and during these times?
Okay, admittedly, I wasn’t completely deceived by this mirage.
I’d heard and seen enough to know that rare was the person who had it all together, but still, so often I was convinced that I need to grow up. That it was my time to rise up and meet the challenges of the season, to migrate from boyhood into manhood, even if I lack the necessary rites of passage to do so.
On so many days, I was convinced that I had hoarded so much potential but failed to actualise. And I was sick to the gills of it. I wasn’t getting any younger. Something had to stick and I had to succeed.
Of the few things we do know, we know that every second brings us closer to our mortal end and we know that we have to live by our choices. The bliss of youth is to be full of total potential; we find ourselves staring down an infinite highway of possibilities.
However, as the years pass us by, that window of potential diminishes. While we could continue cruising down that interminable stretch, we know that we’re going to have to take one of the roads branching off the highway eventually. Otherwise we risk moving but never really getting anywhere.
This was the idea propounded by this tremendous fear in me. That if I wasn’t careful, I would end up circulating in perpetuity, without a clear destination, looking in the rear-view mirror at all the turn-offs I could have taken but was too afraid to.
What had always terrified me was that to commit to one road was, it seemed, to deny the possibility of travelling down another road. But not choosing was still a choice. And that choice ensured only that I’d remain in this nowhere place, a sort of purgatory where one is paralysed by the tyranny of choices.
The agony of indecision and overwhelm in the face of too many choices (a privileged position to hold, for sure) reminds me of Sylvia Plath’s description of the fig tree in The Bell Jar:
“I saw my life branching out before me like the fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
It summed up my dilemma perfectly. I was terrified that if I delayed any longer – if it didn’t make a decision over which writing project to commit to – that the moment would be missed. All of the figs would then splatter and spoil and I would starve.
There seemed to me so many possibilities that I didn’t know how to feed each in the space of a day. I felt like a one-man office trying to meet a hundred deadlines in the space of twenty-four hours. What was once a devotional practise charged with an undying passion had now become the blunt end of discipline’s axe.
A Necessary Rebuttal
The question is: did I really believe any of this? Deep down, that is.
Did I really believe that I would starve against a view of ruined and uncaught figs spoiling before me?
Did I really want to adhere to a worldview that told me there were a limited number of open windows in one’s lifetime, closing fast and sealing shut forever if I failed to act?
No. Actually. Not one jot.
If I truly believed that, at my core, then why did I keep on moving?
It seems to me that we are not the pickers of the fig tree at all, angling for ‘the right time’, groping for whatever falls into our outstretched hands as if we were beggars. Rather we are the fig trees themselves.
What if there are many branches to our being and our possibilities are fruiting all the time? And just because some fall by the wayside, that doesn’t mean we stop producing fruit.
I can’t really see how indulging certain aspects of my being negates the fruit dangling on other branches. On the contrary, each branch appears to sustain and give life to those others. This was the holistic ecology of my being. The branch that found expression in writing could only be fortified in the one that liked to draw, or to wander and travel, to act or to study history and culture and so on.
Each of these outward-stretching limbs had grown into my larger being’s architecture. The only mistake I’d perhaps made was in focusing on one as the total definition.
It’s worth noting here, that, as others have pointed out, Plath later goes on to dismantle, in part, her own fig tree analogy:
"I don't know what I ate, but I felt immensely better after the first mouthful. It occurred to me that my vision of the fig tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.”
Perhaps intended as a sideways wink to the reader not to dwell so gravely on the Fig Tree. Or to maybe go and eat a snack when in the pangs of another existential void.
Closing Remarks
What if these fears were all part of the journey then? What if focusing in on them as damning evidence of my fraud was the only oversight on my part? What if I could take in a wider view, not to deny the existence of fear, but to see its place in the larger whole?
What would happen if I drew attention to the fact that I’d never given up? Even under those cloudbursts where I’d convinced myself that I was utterly purposeless and aimlessly wandering, I’d still always find my way back to the same thing. Was not my constant turning up, regardless of the blows, self-inflicted or not, indicative of a deeper belief that overrode these demons, diversions and doubts?
What if we could congratulate ourselves for our bravery – whatever we are each following? What if we could celebrate our foolhardiness? What if our pluck and courage could be the source of a greater self-love?
So then, with a boatload of doubts stacked against a ceaseless burning, I move forward. And if questioning and being terrified is part of the process, then so be it. I’ll get on with the work, humbled but passionate; near-defeated but always getting up; triumphant in spirit but not without a few wounds.
References:
Louisiana Channel. “Writer Mircea Cărtărescu: “I Write without a Plan.” | Louisiana Channel.” YouTube, 3 Dec. 2024, www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqJHfKBgZkg. Accessed 11 May 2025.
Plath, S. (2005). The Bell Jar. Faber & Faber.