The Book of New Beginnings

It's now well over 2 years back when I suddenly woke up to find that the whole world had already been badly bitten by the blogging bug (how's that for alliteration, by the way!) and, for a change, it was one of the better strains of the zeitgeist flus to catch. I'd quickly got myself a spot at blogspot (that's the easy part) and scribbled some long-winded mumbo jumbo by way of introduction, with promises of following it up with a lot more stuff about anything and everything that caught my fancy -- gadgets, software, music, movies, arts, books, places, people, philosophy, life, this world and the worlds invisible -- a forever-expanding list of the many things that increasingly interest and intrigue me. But that commitment, sadly, was never fulfilled to the extent I would've desired, and what little I did write never quite passed muster even by my own standards (being a sort of perfectionist doesn't allow your own self to be easy on poor you).

But in all this time I never really stopped discovering and learning about so many things out there that have made much impact upon me on various levels and brought many changes to my views on things, and in some cases, totally changed them for new and really expanded my consciousness -- something I myself could easily gauge from the fact that not only my expression and style in those old writings began to seem very clumsy to me, but that I could only barely recognise myself anymore in those words and ideas. That to me seemed like a great progress already.

For I'm not sure if people realise how important it sometimes is for them to collect and express their own thoughts formally in writing, not just to help others learn something of them but even to help themselves connect much better with their own deeper selves, -- and what a soul-wrenching exercise it can sometimes be! If you're even slightly idealistic you'd instantly realise that it really requires you to be totally honest and open with yourself to be able to claim to say the final word even to yourself on anything to the best of your knowledge -- that is, if at all you believe you've reached any conclusion on the matter, for more often than not, it's also a great wisdom to adopt the agnostic attitude regarding ultimate matters and admit that you can never really reach the seabed of Reality. Anyway, the point is, blogging could be a kind of exorcism, a way of giving a concrete, coherent shape to the oft-eluding phantoms of your inmost thoughts, beliefs and assumptions, many being subconscious, and bringing them out in the open to be examined under the light of pure Reason (if nothing better has yet taken shape in you) and to accordingly modify, correct or expand upon them, as required. And if you continue doing that with even a modicum of regularity it should be evident that very likely you'll soon end up with a self-documented account of your own personal evolution over the years. I'm willing to wager that that must be on the mind of a good number of folks who used to fill up their diaries daily, the old-school way.

That in a way was my intention behind starting that blog the last time, which didn't quite take a flight to my liking. So I have torn that down and decided to make a fresh start with this one, of penning down (keying down, to be precise) some of the cool things that I happen to notice or go through and, for the sake of completeness, some of the not-so-cool and even the totally uncool ones too.

And with a renewed determination this time to keep up my self-made personal commitment. More power to me!

PS: Please excuse my preposterous and almost blasphemous blog title, but I thought this line adapted from Sri Aurobindo's poem Savitri -- the longest piece of epic poetry in English, for those who don't know -- could be a neat and fancy title for my own blog. Here's the line in context (Book 1, Canto III):

...She gathered the lost secrets dropped by Time

In the dust and crannies of his mounting route

Mid old forsaken dreams of hastening Mind

And buried remnants of forgotten space.

A traveller between summit and abyss,

She joined the distant ends, the viewless deeps,

Or streaked along the roads of Heaven and Hell

Pursuing all knowledge like a questing hound.

A reporter and scribe of hidden wisdom talk,

Her shining minutes of celestial speech,

Passed through the masked office of the occult mind,

Transmitting gave to prophet and to seer

The inspired body of the mystic Truth.