Oh yeah, and I would heartily recommend Gopi Krishna's : "Kundalini, the Evolutionary energy in man" as an amazing first hand account of the metaphysical intricacies of phenomena that we sometimes get fleeting glimpses of in the inspirations of geniuses. Here's an excerpt : "...The verses occurred suddenly at odd times in the day or night, preceded by a voluntary pause on my part in the normal process of thinking. This preliminary cessation of mental activity was soon followed by a state of deep absorption, as if I were diving within myself to reach a certain depth where I could catch the vibrations of the message always expressed in poetry. The lines developed from an extremely subtle form, an invisible seed, and instantaneously passed before my mind as fully formed verses, following each other in rapid succession until the whole passage was completed, when I suddenly experienced a desire to withdraw myself from the state of semi-entrancement and return to normality..."
And finally after many such experiences of seeing compositions appearing in many many languages in his mind : "..German was followed by French and Italian. Then came a few verses in Sanskrit followed by Arabic. Surely there could be nothing more convincing than the phenomena I had witnessed during the previous few weeks to bring the idea irresistibly home to me that I was in occasional contact with an inexpressible fount of all knowledge and that but for my inability to understand and transcribe, I could take down poetic pieces in most of the wellknown languages of the earth. I felt wave after wave of conscious electricity pass through me replete with knowledge to which, because of the poor capacity of my brain, I could not have full access. Language fails me when I attempt to describe the experience which off and on has all along since then been the most sublime and the most elevating feature of my existence. On every such occasion I am made to feel as if the observer in me, or speaking more precisely, my lustrous conscious self, is floating, with but an extremely dim idea of the corporeal frame in a vividly bright conscious plane, every fragment of which represents a boundless world of knowledge, embracing the present, past, and future, commanding all the sciences, philosophies, and arts ever known or that will be known in the ages to come, all concentrated and contained in a point existing here and everywhere, now and always, a formless, measureless ocean of wisdom from which, drop by drop, knowledge has filtered and will continue to filter into the human brain. On every visit to the supersensible realm I am so overwhelmed by the mystery and the wonder of it that everything else of this world, everything conceived by us of the next, every fact and incident of my life save this, every momentous event of history, every ambition and desire, and above all even my own existence, life and death, appear to be trite and trivial before the indescribable glory, the unfathomable mystery, and the unimaginable extent of the marvellous ocean of life, of which I am at times permitted to approach the shore...."
"...THE daily dive into the conscious ocean to which I had now unexpectedly found access had a most exhilarating effect on my mind. I was overwhelmed with wonder at the incalculable wealth I had found within myself. The distracting anxiety I had felt and the grave doubts I had entertained about my condition vanished altogether, yielding place to a feeling of inexpressible thankfulness to the divine power, which in spite of my ignorance, constant resistance, many faults, frailties, and mistakes, had wrought with matchless skill a new channel of perception in me, a new and more penetrating sight in order to introduce me to a stupendous existence. In spite of all my efforts, the news of the strange psychic manifestations in me leaked out. My host, friends, and colleagues at the office were struck by my altered behaviour and my constant mood of deep absorption. Even if I had tried, I could not have shaken it off, being myself entirely carried away by the wonder of an occurrence beyond anything
I could have imagined. I certainly could not hide from my close associates a development that had the effect of startling me out of my equilibrium. My host, uneasy at my constant perambulations in a state of deep abstraction, almost to the point of being totally oblivious at times, grew positively alarmed at seeing my lights on at odd hours in the night and finding me awake, writing in a mood of utter preoccupation..."
I get reminded of how GNB would say that his compositions would come to him fully formed (He was a Sri Vidya upasaka too) or why sleeping or silence or meditation can refresh the mind and do wonders for creativity. Or how long term memory works when you can't recall something right away, but after some time your brain retrieves the data for you. Or how PMI missed the Niagra Falls because a korvai had chosen just that moment to make it's way into his awareness.
Or how Ramanujam claimed to have intuitive flashes of whole theorems unfolding before him. A small version of this is something I've experienced repeatedly in many exam papers (and I have often regretted when I didn't listen to my instincts and it turned out to be the right answer). Perhaps this even explains our tendency for hagiography and reverence of our favourite geniuses or why IITM slang has a word phrase called "Gawd level" for genius too amazing to believe.
Speaking of all this, what in the world am I doing up at 1 a.m spending this much time on a rasikas post? I think we can return to the greatness of ARI's music now...
THE END
I also regret that I am unable to see the first attempts to reach the South Pole in the same (romanticized) manner again when I read about the poor dogs and the ponies and what extreme hunger and conditions can do to a person -- now I get an idea of how brutal it must have really been.
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