“Man’s
redemption lies through & in love” - Victor Frankl.
It is not only that the absence of a prospective
listener dampens the voice of a thinker. Something a lot sinister can be
underway beneath the superficial act of everyday human persecution. I had
witnessed the death of a thought, not in an absence of empathy but in a presence
of indifference.
The four walls are not enough to desecrate one’s
originality, to wane one’s ambition, or to bind oneself to one’s present predicament
so inescapably that the past seems impossible, and the future, at best,
improbable. It is not enough! But we are capable of more. I have seen the most
ruthless impulse of the human mind; I have survived it. Indifference! If struck
in the right amount, at the right time, at the right victim, it can accomplish
the direst of all human sins – the killing of a soul.
I have witnessed a quietus – an outrageously
silent suppression of voice – outrageous in its knowledge of the suppressed
& silent in its ignorance of the suppressor. The killer doesn’t know that
he’s killing, & the victim doesn’t realize that he’s dying until the deed
is done. The victim remains a silent spectator of his own demise, a satisfied
consumer of a slow & sweet poison, stuck in a bootloop, asking the same questions
over & over again, overworking & overbearing his mind, eventually
wearing it out till the point it begins to give up.
Beginning to give up is to give up beginning. And
here plays a melancholy, the kind that rhymes at humanly funerals, only sadder.
A soul has died. This is what death looks like in the spirit world. The body
oozes out of the soul, but the weight of the soul remains unchanged. The spirit
world believes that the body would travel to the indifferent world in a failed
search of redemption.
But the body is also plagued with a similar
indifference now, only graver. It’s doesn’t know that it had a soul once, it
doesn’t care that the priced possession is now lost. Nothing matters but
survival – one day at a time. Stuck between this world and the next, only
partially alive, the body fails to associate with its fellow beings. It pretends
to have a soul. There are millions of them, but they all persist in isolation,
in their own pretentious soul bubbles. They don’t matter anymore, not even to themselves.
A funeral is staged in the spirit world, where the
soul lies motionless, speechless, paralysed, but not careless. It is not
cremated or buried, for it is already beyond death.
You see, dying in body is not the same as dying in
soul. The spirit world denies death. Every soul has a purpose; and the body is
a means to the purpose. While the human world in its indifference strives to
kill this purpose, the spirit world is obsessed with infusing meaning into
everything they see. This is the war we are unknowingly engaged in – a constant
perpetual war of means & meaning, between indifference & obsession.
So, the dead souls are resurrected; another body
is put onto them. And they’re lunged back into the same indifferent world. This
is the spirit-world’s revenge on our world. Nobody prays for the departed body.
And for this the body may never rest in peace. The soulless body is just
collateral.
You, my friend, whose soul died, may never rest in
peace. But remember that you’re not only a victim, you’re also more than a
persecutor – you are a persecution on to the spirit world. You are an evidence
of an experiment gone insanely successful. You are the proof that human world
has got what it takes to kill a spirit, to murder a soul, and not even flinch
during or blink after the act.
But lately, there has been a glitch in this arcane
system. Some of old and new possessors of the same soul have met. They have
discovered a way out, out of this war, out of the suffering of the indifference
of humans & obsession of the spirits.
They have fused both the world and rejected both
at once. This is a devout communion of meaning & indifference - an internal
meaning, an external indifference!
They understand that the world doesn’t have to
mean anything, and they don’t necessarily need to have a purpose towards it.
They understand that to find meaning in the other is enough.
They also understand the reverse – they may not
mean something to the indifferent world. It is enough to mean something to the
other.
It is terribly easy
to reach this sense of simultaneous indifference & purpose. You can see it
as I speak of it. The real quest is to not let your soul die, and if it does,
to find the person who has it.
