Kamal Ravikant's Blog, page 3

Chain

Hard Rock hotel, late night, walking back to my room.  Pass photos of famous musicians, stop and stare at them for a while.  Kurt Cobain.  You can see the pain in his eyes.  I look at others, similar.  Do all artists have to suffer?

 

Part of me resists when I ask the question.  I don’t want the answer to be yes.  But I let go, and the answer, instead, is of a different sorts.  They have to experience.  To live and experience life fully because when you create art, if it’s not true and real, you know.

 

Hemingway, Cobain.  Both killed themselves.  But what if they hadn’t?  What if they’d gone with the experience, whatever they were feeling, whatever they were fighting, knowing that it too would pass, and left behind would be the knowledge, the gift they could put into their art.

 

With the wisdom of age, what else could Hemingway have written?  And Cobain, perhaps he might be a poet today or even just another burned out rocker.  But whatever he’d created, as long as he stayed true to his experience, it would have connected and changed lives.  Just those two, what could have been…it’s sad, I will never know.

 

I’m old enough to have lost friends.  Random deaths are tough.  Suicides, the worst.  I’ve also lived long enough to look back at those gone and know that whatever they were dealing with, it passed.  They didn’t have to.  They could have been here, wiser and stronger and better.

 

No matter how smart we may think we are, no matter how committed we are to our truth, we can lose our way.  We’re human.  Made of flesh and feelings, not armor.  And knowing that, there is one thing we can do to help us, guide us back to the light when we’re fighting it the most.

 

Set the ego aside.  Reach out, share your truth, tell someone you love, “this is who I am.  This is what I stand for.  Hold me to it.”  Be accountable.  Often, we’ll do far more for another than we will do for ourselves.  Use that to your advantage.

 

Once, while meditating, I saw an image of my parents standing in front of me.  Behind them, their parents.  And their parents, and their parents, and their parents.  An unbroken line of lives so long that it faded into the horizon.   An unbroken line of lives that ultimately led to mine.

 

Then I thought of those who have touched my life.  Minor and major ways.  And all the lives that were lived so that just these few could exist and walk the Earth with me for a brief spark in time.  Lines upon lines, connections upon connections, ripples spreading across time and generations.  Humanity doing its dance so that you could be here, reading these words I just wrote.

 

Even if we may feel like it sometimes, we are never alone.  I write this, expecting that others will read these words.  I write them with the hope that they will improve your life.  I am giving you my all.  My truth.  That you will read it is a gift to me.  I may never meet you, but that’s ok.  I smile, knowing that we are links in a beautiful chain connected in ways deeper than we can imagine.

 

Whatever you experience in your life, choose for it to make you grow in amazing and unbelievable ways.  You owe it to yourself.  You owe it to those who came before you.  You owe it to those connected to you that you’ll never meet.  You owe it to those who have yet to come into your life.

Spiritual

The tools have changed, but the process hasn’t.  You sit, an empty page in front, whether it’s pixels or paper or parchment, and you fill it with feelings, with emotion, with life.  There is magic here.  Real magic.

The world quietly asleep outside the window, the clickity-clack of the keyboard, whatever music I’ve got on – chill, classical, lounge – and the white of the screen slowly filling.

You dive deeper, you strip away the cleverness and the words become more important than your ego and that’s when you know it’s real, when it’s good.  Light spreads out over the hills, dawn comes and passes, and a new day begins.

The feeling of when you step away, finished, and you look at the page and you know you tapped into something bigger than yourself to produce this, that feeling is, dare I say, spiritual.

Why I write

Hemingway said that you write for the one you love.  The last book was from a place of giving, written for a dear friend, something that I knew would help.  Honestly, up until I hit publish, I was on the fence about putting it out to the world.

I once heard that we all want good judgement, and good judgement is the result of experience, and experience is the result of bad judgement.  That made me laugh.  In that case, I thought, by now I must be the king of good judgement.

I sometimes think of my past self, the child growing to the man I’ve become.  He doesn’t exist anymore except in my imagination.  Memories arising when I least expect them.  Sometimes, I catch a glimpse of him and I feel such a fondness.  I wish I could spare him the pain I know he’ll experience.  But I also know the love he will as well.  The amazing things he’ll see, the adventures he’ll have.

At the same time, I, who has experienced all that he will, I so often forget the lessons.  So I write for him.  A guide, perhaps, to the future.  To the self that I will one day look back to and nod, knowing.

After Hemingway finished The Old Man and The Sea, the book for which he won the Nobel, he took the manuscript to his wife.  She read it, then said to him, “I forgive you for everything.”

The act of going within, finding our truth, and then sharing it, it helps us far more than we know.  Because when you find that gift and express it to the world, it is better, you are better.  It’s just the way things are.

That is why I write.  To share with ones I love, to share with myself, to remember and live the lessons, to make less mistakes – or at least better ones.  A guide for me to return to and apply because I know that when I do, my life flows naturally, things easily resolve themselves.  The struggle ceases and magic begins.

Guide

He does not exist anymore, except in my imagination.  Memories arising when I least expect them.  Sometimes, I catch a glimpse of him and I feel such a fondness.  I wish I could spare him the pain I know he’ll experience. But I also know the love he will as well.  The amazing things he’ll see, the adventures he’ll have.

At the same time, I, who has experienced all that he will, I so often forget the lessons.  So I write.  A guide, perhaps, to the future.  To the self that I will one day look back to and nod, knowing.  Smiling.

Love Yourself

I wrote a book.  Something simple, something true.  Something I learned that has been beautiful and transformative for me.  I put it on the Amazon kindle platform and  priced it low.  There is a paperback version as well.

It’s about sharing something I believe is important.

I hope you read it.  I hope you try out what I share.  It works.

The title of the book, “Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It.”

(Since I’ve been asked this by a few people, you don’t need a kindle to read the book.  Amazon has free Kindle apps for Mac/PC/iPhone/Android/Windows/Blackberry.  You can download them here)

Magic

I finish at the gym, walk outside, and sit on a wall by the driveway.  Indian summer evening in San Francisco.  Breezy, cool, fog above downtown.  Delicious.

I love my life, I find myself thinking, I love my life, I love my life, I love my life.  The thought flows as naturally as the wind.  I watch the skyline – people ask why I let my long hair fall in front of my eyes…it’s for moments like these, when I watch the world through wisps of silver – I love my life, I love my life.

Clouds move above, the thought shifts: I love myself, I love myself, I love myself, I love myself.  I’m smiling, then grinning.  All I am, my hopes, dreams, desires, faults, strengths, everything – I.  Love.  Myself.

If you can reach this point, even if it’s for a brief moment, it will transform you – I promise you that.

The key, at least for me, has been to let go.  Let go of the ego, let go of attachments, let go of who I think I should be, who others think I should be.  And as I do that, the real me emerges, far far better than the Kamal I projected to the world.  There is a strength in this vulnerability that cannot be described, only experienced.

Am I this way each moment, nope, but I sure as heck am working on it.

Thousands of years ago, a Roman poet wrote, “I am a human being, therefore nothing human is foreign to me.” I believe it to be true. So if  this is possible for one human, it is possible for anyone.  The path might be different, but the destination same.

Key is being open to loving ourselves.  Once we do that, life casually takes care of the next steps.

Remain open to that one possibility and you’ll experience the beauty of watching the world around you dance its dance while inside, you fully accept this marvelous amazing human being you are.  The feeling is, for lack of a better word, magic.

Gravity

I am a comet

She, an oasis planet.

I have no choice

but to blaze brilliantly

as I enter her atmosphere.

Muse

I love watching the way you look away to think, how beautiful you are, then you look back, the thought finished, and then you smile.

I see you

“I’ve been thinking about you,” I say.

“Me,” you say, the corners of your lips widening.  A slow delicious smile.  ”What about me?”

“Your eyes.”

I inch closer.  You let me.  Your chest rises against mine, falls to my breath.

“Your eyes,” I say again, “the freckles and sparkles, sometimes I think that if I stare too long, I’ll lose myself.”

Your breath deepens.  I feel it on my chin, hot.  Eyelashes close softly.  Eyelashes open.  I look at you, your pupils dilated big and open, and suddenly I’m swirling in colors so soft and tender – hazel, brown, green - and then I’m in your iris, it flashing bright and sounding a thump thump and I’m swimming, my hands parting the optic fluids, warm and silky, and into the long tunnel of your optic nerve.  It spirals like the barrel of a rifle, thunderclouds flashing and booming across neurons, kapow! kabam! – what do you see?  What message rushes to your brain? – and curiosity gets the better of me as I swim to the axon of the neuron closest to me, a mass of swirling electricity flashing across the body and tendrils in a sea of dark green.  The cell wall parts as I touch it, smooth against my skin as I enter, and closes behind me.

I float past enzymes doing their coupling dance.  A loose Oxygen atom zings past me.  I wave at it, giggle, and continue towards the center.  The nuclear membrane folds around me, tumbling me round and round and when it lets go, I’m inside staring at gigantic chromosomes criss-crossing each other like skyscrapers in a mad mad world.  I kick with my heels, gain momentum, shoot inside one, growing smaller and smaller until I see the beautiful double-helix and I stop in awe.

Everything you could be, all that you are, your potential, all encoded in spiraling staircases of molecules.  I want to kiss each and every one.  Which one expresses itself into your hair?  Which one into your laugh?

I float, growing smaller and smaller, feeling myself slowly drawn into your dna, the hydrogen bonds tickling my skin, making the hair on my arms rise, and then woosh, I’m moving fast, speeding past carbon atoms, still growing smaller and smaller, passing oxygen atoms, Van der Waals forces zinging me around like a pinball, and I’m tumbling tumbling falling falling, passing through thick fogs of electrons, feeling the charged hum as they buzz by me, and through black empty space until I see neutrons and protons, glowing purple and violet as they spiral around each other in lazy concentric circles and I slow, growing smaller.  Photons whiz by me, large blue balls, and I wait until one is near me and jump on.

“Whee,” I shout out as the photon lazily curves through space, a bright light far away growing larger and larger.  Neutrinos jump in and out of dimensions around us, little sparkles, some speeding past the photons, going backwards in time.  The light grows close, a spiraling galaxy, and I hear a voice, making me almost fall off the photon.  I grasp onto it tightly and turn to see God riding a photon to my left.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he asks again.

God really does have a long flowing beard, robes, the works.  He catches me staring at his sandles.

“Got ‘em at Nordstorms,” he says.

I nod idiotically.  He grins, starts to speed towards the light, leaving me behind.

“Wait,” I shout.  ”Wait.”

He slows until I’m alongside.  We both ride in silence.

“Go ahead,” he says gently.  ”Ask.”

I look at him, the galaxy unfurling in front of us.  Stars everywhere.

“What’s the point,” I say.  ”Of everything.  What’s the point?”

He smiles.  Neutrinos pop around us, fizzle.

“You are,” he says finally.  ”You are the point.”

Then he kicks the side of his photon like a bull and speeds off.  I watch him turn into a shooting star until it arcs into the galaxy in an explosion of light and then I’m tumbling backwards, off my photon, falling and falling, neutrons and protons growing larger and larger, then the humming fog of electrons flipping me around, and then your dna, your chromosomes, through the nuclear membrane, the cytoplasm, the cell wall, thunderstorms of sodium and potassium ions, and I’m out of the cell, spinning through your optic nerve, your iris, your pupil, and back to you, your breath warm on my face.

“I like how you do that,” you say.

“Do what?”

“The way you look at me.”  You bite your lip.  ”I feel like you can really see me.”

I smile, hold you tight.  We close our eyes.

Circles

A friend waits the arrival of his baby, his first child.  I can imagine the thoughts, the nervousness – holy shit! holy shit! – the wringing excitement.  Next week, life, as he knows it, will be transformed.  Thirteen years from now, he will attend his child’s Bat Mitzvah, then how many years to high school, then college graduation, then wedding, life’s milestones, one after another.

Few months ago, I received an email for a memorial service for a dear dear friend.  Memorial Service?  I knew she’d been in the hospital, but memorial service?  Holy shit, Leslie, holy shit, I lost you and I didn’t even know you were leaving.  Holy shit.

I spent that night looking at her photos on Facebook, hundreds of them, posted by so many people, many fans who’d never met her in person – she was a writer – sometimes feeling tears, remembering her laugh, how full it was.  ”Oh Lord,” she’d say, laughing, removing her glasses to wipe her eyes, “from your mouth to God’s ears,” she’d say when we’d be driving in her car on a cold winter evening in Philadelphia and I’d tell her that her novels should be turned into movies.

One birth.  Another.  Laughter, joy, celebrations.  One death.  Another passing.  Tears, sadness.  A life that was.  A life that will be.

I miss you, Leslie.

For the little time we walked together on this spinning ball, Leslie, I am grateful.  For the meals we shared, for the laughter, for the hopes and dreams, for the manuscripts we edited, for all that you were in your beautiful powerful womanly self, I am grateful.

Your path on this plane ended.  I miss you, Leslie.  Where your light continued on to, I do not know.  But I know this – your path touched mine and now I carry  a piece of you with me.  And so when I look at your photos and get sad, I remember that you’re with me, with all of us who ever met you, and I smile.