When I left my hills for high school in the capital at sixteen, I arrived armed with two proud achievements. First, I was a veteran of a private war, having battled astral beings in nightly sleep paralysis since childhood. Second, when the world tried to hammer my soul into the flat, linear sheets of algebra and indices in middle school, I had categorically refused.
My mind clung to one non-negotiable truth: I was going to a science school to explore Sciences on my own terms, but at no cost would I be beaten into thin sheets, salable on the free market. This karmic knowing had found its voice in an ancient mantra carved on the school library: Appa Dipa Bhava — “be your own light.” But my teenage heart, burning with defiance, heard a different command: outshine everyone; be your personal fire — sovereign yet the brightest.
This ambition crystallized when I discovered a tape recording of Rajneesh, a voice from beyond life, revealing he had achieved enlightenment at twenty-one. I silently benchmarked myself against this 20th-century prodigy, turning his legend into my finish line of evolution.
The Initiate
By age seven, life’s tests had begun, and I was neck-deep in its terms. It was clear from the start that my karma had signed a pre-life Contract: worst trials first in childhood, their hard-won wisdom to be harvested later, each in its rightful season.
My nights fell into a ritual of terror. I’d go to bed after evenings spent playing on the riverbank, a place where locals whispered of ghosts congealed from the deep dark. The moment REM sleep began, those warnings would manifest. I would be pinned down by shadow beings, in an astral space overlaid upon the physical one.
It was a horror movie long before I knew what CGI was. I, a spectral stunt double, was hurled against walls, slammed into doors, dragged into dark alleys or sometimes even kidnapped by air to be forced prostrate on an unknown shrine—a victim of a brutal, astral torture, a kid held captive within his own Hologram while his body lay motionless in bed. I would try to scream, but my voice was a phantom in my own throat.
No mercy could wake me, unless, rarely, the body would stage its own crude revolt: a leg kicking into the void, a hand spasming against the wall—the primal flinch, a temporary short-circuit in the paralysis.
The Misfit
Just as I was learning to navigate the inner landscape, a second siege began from the without. At twelve, the war for my spirit opened a second front, in a new school, on the plains.
They introduced new languages: first the mathematics of Hellenic symbols, soon followed by the digital logic of little boxes and code. These alphabets looked utterly alien to me, more threatening than the astral ghosts, now familiar. I had managed to learn Devnagari and English, my first two sets of alphabets. But these new shapes—Phi (φ), Sine, Cosine, which I later learned had swept in from across the oceans, looked like the dry, prickly cacti that grew near my riverbank.
Teachers, themselves lost on the syntax, urged me to rote-learn the formulas first and build a foundation; my problem was with the very question of foundation. “What legs do they stand on?” I’d ask. “On what ground? And why does ’45 degrees = 1′?”
It didn’t make sense to me. The cells of a spreadsheet felt like little prisons for names and numbers; the cryptic commands of HTML were just a riddle to my mind. They all seemed like legless ghosts ready to pin me down.
Days later, teachers would arrive with the answers, their faces bright with the finality of LHS=RHS. Am I older in spirit than these teachers? I would wonder; their proofs were always shallower than my frustration. I started seeing no point in asking them question. They hadn’t found an answer yet.
I began to suspect something was wrong with the whole school system. This neither felt authentic nor fun. It felt like a cunning ruse designed by some bored—a system designed to erase spirit and nature, lashing human freedom to the flat grid of the free market.
This imposed curriculum was in every class. They used intimidating symbols to domesticate newborns with fear—a grand flattening of the wholesome flowering of one’s spirit.
“You can forge me in fire, fine. But you cannot beat me into thin sheets to be sold on the free market. I am not ductile. I am not refined.” I offered my teenage manifesto, to teachers—the foremen of the system.
This refusal to be manufactured for an assembly line destiny and the instinct to battle anything just imposed—is what made me a difficult teenager to raise.
The Capital and The Crucible
The city was where my father attended high school, securing a government job before starting his family, and where my elder brother had finished high school before finding his exit abroad.
My family believed the capital’s sophisticated schools would finally instill responsibility in me. But my spirit, which refused to march in straight lines, only accelerated its rebellion.
The official education meant to fix me couldn’t hold me for a week. It proved itself to be a machine for flattening—the same war, just on a wider terrain. Counselors spoke of career paths across sciences. Educators fused terms into a frenzy of jargon: Chemical Biology, Object-Oriented Programming, Physical Chemistry. From the back bench, I saw it: the uniform a straitjacket, the tie around my neck a lasso—the first of many the system would throw.
The lecturers were fresh graduates, teaching transiently to pay bills while preparing to flatten themselves into corporate roles. The school owners were businesspeople who could have just as well run restaurants or distilleries.
For them, we were a head count on the free market. The school was a system where lost people prepared more lost people to sell their own disorientation.
Frustrated, I threw kicks at hanging leaves and jumped railings on my commute. I did push-ups on school benches, sprinting down hallways between periods. At sunset, billboards promising education that exported labor shone absurdly beside stalls where old people sold camphor wicks and jaggery. The machine was everywhere, yet the city’s torn-out infrastructure proved its true purpose: it was designed to grip minds remotely, with no need to fix the crumbling world outside.
Having hated one-size-fits-all market approaches all my life, I decided to seize a left-hand path of education. For me, education only made meaning if it aligned with what the spirit yearned to learn in this lifetime.
A Left-Handed Education
I began visiting bookshops, finding books on the marginalia of human experience—parapsychology, exorcism, anything strange. I wandered through old nooks of the city to see centuries-old sculptures and architecture, scanning for clues. These visits to the inner city—once a Hippie Mecca, as I learned—were addictive. They felt like carrying new ghosts from the riverbank, burdening my awareness with new desires.
I began missing assignments, failed my first test ever. My refusal to trim my hair—my rejection of the groomed and compliant—got me barred from the lab at times and ejected from classes for being difficult to manage.
At evenings, I strolled the darkest streets alone trying to own my fear, bristling and ready for a fight—issuing a challenge to any shadow that dared cross my path. I could feel how the astral realm thickened in darkness, in the very spaces where most saw only chain snatchers or stray dogs.
The Test Flight
At night, far from the barricades of my hills in both space and time, the city’s chaos fed my chronic insomnia. This became fertile ground for lucidity. My love for observing did not cease with sleep; it simply changed its stage.
Dreams were vivid—some prophetic, most allegorical. Some nights I chased wild horses with bare hands, thrown brutally in the attempt. Other nights I found myself on barren hills, chased by lions, running toward clouds.
It was a gesture of such pure need that it could not help but evolve. This repetitive running towards the clouds taught me to take up flight. Anywhere I felt unsafe, I’d fly. Flying became so real I could feel the loneliness of an eagle. I even began waking with the quiet confidence that maybe I could fly in real life, one day.
Dream-flight had carried me across mountain ranges and unfamiliar valleys. Yet the moment I encountered an ocean, my mountain spirit faltered, doubting its ability to cross the vast, unknown expanse.
The Biforked Truth
I frittered away two years scavenging any path that looked different from the norm, aware this could be a liability for any straight career.
With the final exam looming, my knowledge was a scattered constellation: rudimentary atomic theory and entropy, spacetime and natural selection, neurotransmitters, and this new word that fascinated me—neuroplasticity. All were footnotes to the official syllabus.
When the pressure to conform peaked, my intuition pulled me toward forbidden fruits. My heart returned to the same chapters on entropy and evolution, pulling me down internet rabbit holes. This chaos of information revealed a truth I had felt but never seen: life was not merely karmic, but a dynamic interplay between the karma I arrived with and the ancestral DNA unspooling in my physiology. They were two lineages of cause—biforked, yet equally sovereign.
Under the pressure, I saw it: evolution was telling me that flight, for all its glory, was not the final answer. My own evolution, before I was a fully formed man at eighteen, demanded a new path. It was no longer to flee from ghosts, but to resist; to stand my ground and fight in the inner terrain.
The kid under the spell of sleep paralysis demanded a conscious fight. I faced my exams not as academic tests but as acts of resistance. Beyond them, the next inevitable step—college or a job, for which I was ready for neither—loomed like a larger, more sophisticated grid. A new lion had already begun stalking me from the future.
This insecurity became a whetstone, sharpening the only skill native to me: observation. For days and nights, I became a sentry at the gate of my own mind, patrolling the elusive border where life whooshed into dream. Breath after breath, I went so deep into the watch I lost all sense of which side of awareness I was on.
Until one night, my dreams resurrected forgotten worlds and blessed me with two lucid tests—faced with a courage I’ve since regarded as the twin sutras of a lifetime: one of force, the other of finesse.
The Rollback: The art of Finesse
I woke up as a kid again, disoriented—was it dawn or dusk?
I felt abandoned even before my eyes looked for my parents and found no one.
Fighting a rising fear, I slipped out onto the patio and veered toward the cowshed. The cattle oven was cold; no gruel simmered.
The moon hung low; in the dim silence, I reckoned they were still at the grocery store a mile down the road. I dashed for the field—a shortcut I knew better than the long, solitary mile I wasn’t sure I could face alone.
It felt like going astray, not freedom. I looked back in desperation. The trail home was gone. My village lay in darkness, unlit before the days of electricity.
Just as the locals whispered, I began to feel ghosts Congeal from thin air. The more fear I felt, the denser they became.
“You will be given to a Shaman to be sacrificed, like your best friend who didn’t return from the river on that monsoon evening.”
One voice from my childhood returned—a woman in a distant village, rumored to practice witchcraft, who claimed to know of me as the kid born on a full moon, on a winter solstice.
Instinctively, my hand shot beneath the pillow for my talisman, a brass compass, a junk shopkeeper had given me as a guide for meditation. But my gaze was arrested by my own hands in the moonlit dark: a man’s hands—veiny and strong.
“Bring me your Shaman. I’ll face him. I am ready to die among the cacti; I return the spirit home, but I refuse your terror henceforth.”
In the resonant silence that followed my challenge, a lifetime’s pattern snapped into focus: I had always received fear with more fear. But the ghost was not facing the scared child of the riverbank tonight. It was facing a high schooler, and he accepted challenges with courage.
In that split second, my inner compass snapped to true north. The directive was now absolute: Withdraw.
I left my body frozen. On the astral plane, I retreated from it all—the riverbank, the cacti, the stones, the bedroom, the stolen childhood, the very image of my parents. I severed every thread of sentiment, gathering the projection back. The serene energy condensed into a single, self-aware point—a wormhole to reality. This was the unwavering mind, the ground of the movie, the one who knew: I am the sleeper in the high school dorm.
The phantom collapsed inward, condensing into a dense vibration that solidified as my own body.
The dome light resolved into view; it had been masquerading as the moon the whole time. The knocking on the door was no longer an intrusion, but an invitation. “It’s dinner time,” a voice called.
The Viking Dive: The art of Force
I stood at the door of a room I hadn’t seen in years—the one I’d shared with my elder brother back in the plains of Chitwan, during my middle school stint.
Every detail was rendered in high fidelity: the study table, the curtain, twin beds and my sketches on the wall held up with cheap gums.
A single line of HTML code on my copy caught my eye; I zoomed in, and it read: <ocean>raging</ocean>. The pricky little code triggered an old anxiety: Did we forget to pay the rent and for food all these years? It’s been over five years.
I pulled back the curtain out of habit, expecting the familiar street. Instead, I saw a terrifying, raging ocean, as if the house perched on a Mediterranean cliff at night. This is rendered! Nepal is landlocked. An ocean? You’re dreaming old friend. My lucid awareness whispered.
Some forgotten idiom floated up like a command from the underworld: “If there’s a tornado, dive into its eye.”
I climbed onto the windowsill. Just as I prepared to jump, I heard the homeowner’s voice: ” we will have rice pudding for lunch, Saroj stay! We got extra milk from the farm today.”
Amused by the absurdity, I stepped down. Proud of myself that I was okay with jumping and okay with staying, while in the background the knowing remained firm and anchored that I am dreaming.
I walked the hallway, feeling the dream render each frame in real time. I wanted to see how the kitchen had evolved.
The homeowner’s little daughter tripped and spilled milk running down the stairs. This snapped me back to my purpose. No more flight. Time to fight the lion, I said to myself. Agreeing to descend to a primal mind, I climbed back onto the frame and took a nosedive, the fall stretching slow-motion into the abyss.
A ferocity that even lions would retreat from. A feat so contrary to the evolutionary learning of the mind that the dream’s GPU couldn’t render the lethal fall. The Hologram crashed. The Reality collapsed into a dense vibration, condensed into a single point of heat at my navel. I was thrown back into waking life, fully charged and awake.
Back to the Hills
I returned to my hills, with a lighter spirit, long curls, and a well-built body, carrying the hard-won harvest of my life’s trials—the yield from the karmic Contract I signed before the dark initiation began.
Childhood was formally over, yet I remained the same lone observer on the riverbanks, on the trails, drifting through experiences haunted by the memory of a stolen joy, under the mystical shade of the Himalayas.
Realizations overlapped—what felt supremely important one day had to give way to the next, all on the same finite canvas. But those dreams became the legends of a lifetime. They were founded upon two tectonic plates beneath my psyche: Patience and Courage, forged karmically throughout my childhood.
Long before life granted me the freedom to choose where to fight, it taught me, brutally, how to accept and endure, and to build my foundation not despite the shadows, but precisely where they lingered.
When my peers emailed photographs from the graduation ceremony, I felt no need to be in it. The diploma I valued was woven into my mind-body fabric, earned through the twin arts of force and finesse—a sovereign knowledge, unhooked from any system.
The harvest
The first dream revealed the Sutra of the Rollback—a bottom-up ascent from the world of Samsara, through the body-mind, and into pure awareness. In yoga, this is Pratyahara: the art of recalling awareness inward from the senses, through the mind, and back to the source.
It begins with a single realization: that you are trapped in a Hologram of your own making—be it a dream, a personal drama, or a prefabricated destiny. The first act of sovereignty is to stop and observe. You cease feeding the phantom your attention. This act of acceptance is a profound intervention on the subtle layers of consciousness beneath the thinking mind.
Next, you perform the great reversal: you gather your scattered awareness and roll it back to the core of your mind – the wormhole to the soul. It is the lone child finally leaving the haunted play of the riverbank to return home. Rollback is the conscious undoing of projection—withdrawing your extroverted awareness from the world of objects back to the subject – the seer, with immense discipline. This is the way of Gyana.
The Viking Dive, on the other hand, demands the heart of a Viking—one whose clarity is a blade severing the negotiable from the non-negotiable. It is the top-down approach, flowing from the clarity of the self, through the mind-body into action.
This sutra works for traps built not merely in your mind, but into the very fabric of Samsara. When you are trapped in a system, whether a dream, a dogma, or life that feels scripted, tei you must perform an act so definitive, so contrary to its fundamental logic, that the system cannot compute it. You do not negotiate with what you see as shackles; you tear them apart. This is the way of Action.
Thus, all reality—the inner dream and the outer world—is a construct, built upon the twin edicts of personal Karma and the Ancestral Contract written in your DNA- the living echo of evolution. To defy this Contract with awareness, or to shatter it with action, is the ultimate act of sovereignty.
The Rollback returns you to the source, collapsing local illusions. The Viking Dive reveals a fundamental truth: the canvas of the world is woven from the very fabric of your soul. You can retreat into this fabric with finesse, or you can rupture it outward with force. Either way, a deeper, subtler foundation will always claim you.
