Hwa-byung will make you yell at your children fight with your family go all red in the face leap from your chair shaking knuckled fists.
This rising heart fire takes hold of you: poor and uneducated a stuck-at-home wife.
Hwa-byung will ruin your eating and sleeping grinding on old grudges seeping anger in rages too long suppressed.
The rising heart fire takes hold of men too: frustrated, mortified bad jobs with bad bosses who don’t show respect who reek of injustice until you smolder inside.
Hwa-byung is Korean for a mental disorder that may afflict anyone who withholds their anger that builds in intensity burns its way out bursts through walls tears down framing explodes like a bomb
hollowing you out in ways you don’t expect.
NOTE: Once classified under depressive disorders, hwa-byung is a culture-bound condition found only in Korea. It was thought to be limited to disgruntled housewives with passive husbands and overbearing in-laws. It is now being diagnosed in male employees who are full of anxiety, nihilistic ideas, and regret about their lives.
No Joke
On lovely Lake Victoria on the border with Uganda three female students at a missionary boarding school began to laugh and laugh
and they couldn’t stop and they didn’t stop and more students joined in and they couldn’t study and they couldn’t eat and they couldn’t sleep and they couldn’t do anything but laugh, laugh ’til it hurt ’til they were in pain and crying between laughing jags so the school closed down.
When school opened back up the laughing started back up so the school closed down.
Some girls arrived home in their small rural villages still laughing and laughing and village girls laughed too some boys, some adults and it spread, and spread to more than 200 people laughing and laughing for more than a year
and the experts blamed the emotional dissonance of a radical cultural shift from tribal communities to a modern way of life.
Laughter is said to be the best of all medicines but must always be taken in a moderate dose.
NOTE: The laughter epidemic was a mass psychogenic event that occurred in Tanganyika in 1962, soon after the country achieved independence. Schoolgirls brought the illness home to their villages and it spread wildly before disappearing.
The country is now known as Tanzania.
The Witches of Leroy
A pretty cheerleader fell down and that’s how it all began in the upstate New York town that invented jiggly Jell-O.
She screamed and flailed about cursing as if possessed cuss words she’d never say… she was not that kind of girl.
Her best friend suddenly ticced convulsing, crazed, she ran wild and sixteen other girls in town swearing, thrashing, crashing got rushed to the hospital their parents hysterical the ER in chaos the nurses, doctors puzzled as testing found no cause.
A rumor began to circulate about a toxic spill from a train derailment but testing showed no toxins on the high school grounds.
Erin Brockovich was invited to speak and attract the media declaring a chemical poisoning with opinion taken as fact.
But why only teenage girls? From chemicals miles away? Spilled four decades prior? Before the girls were born?
Time slid by as it always does the parents demanding answers accountability and recourse long after their girls recovered left for college and life away from the town that created Jell-O.
NOTE: Mass outbreaks of psychogenic illnesses have occurred in schools in many parts of the world. These events used to happen in convents and were once deemed satanic. Religious and shamanic interventions were employed when illnesses were medically inexplicable.
In the modern world, mass anxiety hysteria (acting crazy) and mass motor hysteria (sleeping sickness or convulsions) are social phenomena without identified physical pathology. Outbreaks are usually limited to the young and are believed to be triggered by issues in the community: emerging sexuality amidst social repression, poverty, dislocation, hopelessness.
*** The cut-throat tale drowns me in blood A sweet heart gives me a heart attack My favorite eyes blind me The future pushes me away And only the snow supporting cool Of me
*** The bombs instead of thunder crossed three times as if they had metal fingers. Angels learn to cry. The rain is learning to drip. I teach my thoughts to sleep and flow like water. I teach my saliva to flow. I’m learning to rain. I’m learning to cross my fingers every time someone dies. My dreams for a nuclear bomb to explode inside me without pain are not feasible. Instead of me, other people who want to live are dying. I am learning to live. I am learning to die. I teach life. I teach death. I teach. I’m studying. I can’t do anything. I don’t know. The angels hit the wrong buttons with their tears and it rains nuclear bombs. My heart stops and the hair on my head freezes in admiration. Groin hair no longer grows. Thoughts no longer grow. I dream that my lover fucked me so hard as if a nuclear bomb exploded in my anus. Teach me to love. I’m learning to die of love. Why am I not able to live with love? My eyes are cloudy. I teach my eyes to see. My eyes are learning to read the gazes of lovers who are no more. I count the trees that are no more. I look at the stones that used to be houses. I am learning the word no. I teach death. I study death. Angels drool and I drink this drool like nectar. The water is tainted with anger. The stone is again a ruin. The stone learns to be silent again. The stone will remain silent until the very end, but then it will be too late. I’m learning to drown myself in peace. I teach stones to be silent. I am learning to be a rock. I am learning to drown. I can heat up. I’m already at the bottom. The water screams everything in the language of dead birds. I swallow sperm in the hope that this is the filling of a bomb. I swallow pills in hope. I teach nuclear bombs to sleep.
*** The bomb didn’t kill you. Why didn’t it?
I pretend to still love you. Why?
Happy cards fill my mailbox again. What’s that for?
Winter is counting down the new year again. For whom?
*** What to feed the silence with?
My stomach rumbles without your moans My sperm is empty without your hole My head bursts like a watermelon My name is ripped off my passport
[I’ve got your cocaine name scratched into my veins Oahhh!]
A lonely room turns into a sunken boat A cemetery crawls out from under the bed A blanket hides the gray hair that hasn’t appeared yet
Silence is fed with old age that still not come
*** No one is born in a cemetery but I’d like to die in a maternity ward waiting for something new. No one else will be born after me. No one will see the new birth through my eyes. No one will die after I die (at least I won’t see anything else). After I die, I will stop being afraid of death. I will also stop being afraid of life, because life is a slow death. My gills will grow back in the morgue. I’ll turn into a fish and breathe glass emptiness. I’ll be cut into pieces. But who will eat me? Silence. No one asks the fish anything. Night. The fish won’t tell anyone anything. The cast iron board will slowly cover eyes. The fish will float downstream. We are all drowned. We’re all lil’ drowners who’ve overcome the fear of swimming outside the mother’s belly. The cosmos outside the mother’s belly is silent. Space is also a liquid. Space is also a fish. Everything flows. We all flow out. We will never meet each other again. We’ll never find self again. We’ll never press your random button, God. A bird with a beak overflowing with fluid sings softly. Death gives birth to a nothingness. A tree gives birth to a flower.
MARLOVIAN OVER-REACHER IN THE LUXURY RAUNCH OF DEVIL
Dr. Jernail Singh Anand
John Milton wrote ‘Paradise Lost’ to justify the ways of God to man. The man that we meet in Eden has now stumbled into the 21st century but his reluctant preference for the tree of knowledge has now become a passionate quest into the unknown. And we are face to face with several existential questions whose answers no thinker has provided till date: Can man know everything? Can he possess the ultimate knowledge? Is the physical world the only world about which man should know? What about the invisible forces which control men? Can AI bring to man insights into those realms which have been held sacrosanct till today?
In one of my poems, Godrok, which won me the title of the Grok Star from the xAI, I have shown how AI is helping Yama also in creating charge sheets, and serving them while man is still on the ventilator itself, and instead of death taking him into oblivion, the AI reconstitutes him on the hospital bed, into a small child, and is handed over to his new parents, with his entire memory reset.
With technological advances like Grok, we see technology running ahead of man. If we look at it dispassionately, advances in science and technology are meant to make life more livable, comfortable, and easy, so that most of the human jobs are taken up by technology, leaving time with man, to devote to his mental and moral upliftment, or it can be better described if we say, to bring him into a state of bliss, from where he had digressed.
The Limited Existence
Man is not bad, nor evil intentioned. Only he is crazy, and he forgets his limits. He forgets he has a body which has been forestalled from evolving beyond a certain point. He has eyes which have a limited vision. He has arms which do not extend beyond two feet. How big are his hands and fingers? Everything is in a fine balance, so that if even one becomes excessive in size, it will destroy the balance which characterizes the cosmic creation.
It is often said ‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing’. The truth is that Knowledge is a dangerous domain, and one reason why I call so is that Adam and Eve tasted the forbidden fruit at the instigation of Devil. Even today, we are living in that state of curse. The only proposition that emerges is that we can return to Eden, only if we relinquish all that we have accumulated over the years by way of knowledge? In other words, we shall have to ‘forget’ our knowledge, and press the ‘reset’ button, and return to the state of original intelligence, i.e. innocence. Only then, we can get back into the realm of bliss which was created by God for his chosen species, homo sapiens.
The Puppet and the Divine Will
It is an accepted truth that everything happens as per the Will of God. If man ate the fruit of knowledge, God created conditions, by sending Satan with an insidious message. We should remember that although we try our best to say that God is all powerful, omniscient and omnipresent, still, man has been cleverly endowed with a brain and ideas like ‘free will’. These ideas help God to escape all responsibility. The basic issue is: who provides the stimulus to man to undertake various deeds. Moreover, if we compare life to a film or a play, we shall have to accept that there is a director, and a script writer too, and men are mere actors who cannot trespass their script. It means whatever man does is already scripted and he is being supervised. In this way, it becomes clear that all that is happening is God’s will, and man is an intelligent puppet only.
The puppet is ‘intelligent’ because man is imparted a false feeling of self-importance, that he can do this or do that. Facts are disturbing. Man has no power over his birth. He has no power over the skin of his colour, his parents, the place where he will be born, and whom he will marry and where and how he will die. This shows that all these things are like different roles which have been prewritten. Otherwise, you won’t be on the stage.
In a drama, the director is invisible. We feel characters are acting on their own. In real life too, people seem to be acting on their own, while the fact is: they are helpless before an overriding fate. There are thousands of strings which control their actions, and the most surprising thing about human life is we have no idea who is pulling them. We think we are doing everything after brainstorming sessions. And thus, when some good takes place, we garland ourselves. But when something goes amiss, we curse fate. This shows that we accept we are being controlled by a superior force. But here is a catch too. When gods see people engaged in minor ego scuffles, they leave them to their fate. God gives them a long rope, and they strangle themselves to death. Getting free of them, gods go only after people who are meant to move the earth; on whose deeds depends the future architecture of human race.
It is not that we are being controlled, there are theories [Stephen Hawking’s Fermi Paradox] which show that what is happening to us now, the way things are unfolding, might have taken place, on some other planet, years ago. In the planetary world, where objects are situated millions of light years away from each other, it is not possible that things that happened there a year or two back are now unfolding on this earth. After such speculations, the questions gain more density: Do we go anywhere after death? I wonder if we really go anywhere. Going under the earth does not mean extinction. Losing the body and the bones does not mean the end of man. It is a cycle. Death is an illusion which keeps men on tenterhooks.
Justifying Ways of Man to God
Let me get back to my original quest to justify the ways of Man to God. We respond to our changing needs as times change, and relocate the social structures accordingly. AI too is the need of this fast generation. It is a great achievement of human mind, but let me alert you once again, we are navigating in the ocean of knowledge, and it was something God never wanted man to wade in. We have lost our innocence, and our bliss too. But, it is a paradox and a big surprise too, that it has never occurred to us for generations, and the sermonacs too are reluctant to point out this flaw of our civilization which is ‘progressing’ [?] on the wheels of knowledge. Where is it going? Away from its source? Shall it never return?
As pointed out earlier, we are imprisoned in our identity and nature blesses us with certain faculties which are essential to our existence, so that there is a working human being. With AI, we have crossed through the tight borders of reality and now, we can move at a faster pace, look far into planets, and think much faster. It is a feel good factor of our civilization, no doubt, but we shall soon start feeling that this artificial world is too much with us, and we shall start looking for our ‘self’ lost somewhere in this melee of thrills and a sense of artificial achievement.
The Alert
With AI and its ready powers, man has proved that he can create a world of artificial reality, which runs parallel to the original creation of God. But the only difference is that it lacks spontaneity that marks the divine creations. God, as I can see, is happy that if man took the path of knowledge, he has done so well. He is happy with man’s creative and inquisitive powers. But, we should not forget that God never wanted us to digress into Knowledge. God made it into a matter of choice. And even today, no God ever comes to life to force us into decisions we don’t want to take. He actually permitted us to create our own world with powers of the brain. So all this empire of knowledge, which is a creation of man’s choice, actually stands on the wrong side of things. It has a devilish imprint because it was Satan who had initiated man into the world of Knowledge, which was a moral and spiritual deviation. Now, we have taken this moral digression to the heights of non-creative imagination and are blindly following the agenda of corporates who have grabbed all centres of Knowledge. Holy knowledge which came from scriptures fell into the hands of quacks while the knowledge that man has now accumulated is also not neutral. It has an inbuilt mission to divest man of his divinity. Bliss, joy, happiness, are the byproducts of Innocence, towards which we possess neither any reverence, not any inclination. We prefer to remain acquiring knowledge which is an endless pursuit into the realms of nothingness.
Picnicing in the Pleasure Dome of Devil
As I said, we are treading on dangerous ground already, because it’s devil’s luxury raunch where we are camping now. In the first instance are we aware of it? If so, do we really want to renounce these joys and go back to Eden? The condition for entering the tents of God is: emptying this mind of everything we accumulated by way of Knowledge at the behest of Devil [sorry to infer]. Return to Innocence and Bliss it seems is a dream no infected mind will entertain.
If we want that God should own us, [how many of us really want?] we shall have to surrender all our knowledge, and embrace wisdom, and use this knowledge for the welfare of mankind. It is not that man disobeyed God. It was a rehearsed act. God gave man a very long rope. It is for us that we do not let this rope go round and round our neck, in the name of liberty [free will]. We should not forget that God loves his Satan too, because it is his police that strikes and brings to account people who err on the path of duty. Still, God waits for man to return to the divine fold, forsaking all his knowledge, artificial or original, because there [in His Golden Tent] we do not need it. Here too, we did not need so much. We actually overdid ourselves. AI is a Marlovian overreach for man, if he does not realize its evil potential, and surrender his knowledge to divine wisdom.
Dr. Jernail Singh Anand, [the Seneca, Charter of Morava, Franz Kafka and Maxim Gorky award and Signs Peace Award Laureate, with an opus of 180 books, whose name adorns the Poets’ Rock in Serbia]] is a towering literary figure whose work embodies a rare fusion of creativity, intellect, and moral vision.
