So I just got back from India. I was born there, and have been trying to figure the place out for some time now.

Gurdjieff wrote a book titled "Life is Real, Only Then When I 'Am'", and I'm sure he meant something entirely different by it, but I Am allowed to Be and feel that my Life is Real most acutely on the streets of India. Everywhere else, life is sanitised and its daily abrasions abstracted, and man has largely conquered the vagaries of nature and its shocks and uncertainties slip through the cracks only during war and natural diasters, while in India the rules of the jungle still apply, but with modern infrastructure and implements in place of organic life. It's a short cut to mental illness for the common man, but also probably a fast track to liberation for the spiritual aspirant, simply because of the dense and intense array of experiences its streets afford.

In other news, I found out that a number of my relatives in India are walking, talking machines without souls, like most people everywhere else in the world.