Work these days is monotonous. The technical name is 'transcription'. It is to listen to recordings and carefully write down what people spoke in a test, paying acute attention to minute details like duration of pauses, number of 'hmms' and 'uhhs', syntactic accuracy and linguistic complexity of language, and so on. Transcribing 5 minutes of recorded speech takes approximately 90 minutes. Extremely monotonous. The larger picture is clear- a PhD thesis in the area of language assessment. But remaining focused doing the monotonous daily transcription is a tough job. Yet, I drag through this drudgery to reach the golden goal hiding somewhere in the future.
Then comes the villain- the pounding in the head. Some people call it a migraine. I call it a devil. Or a demon. Or whatever I want to call it! While the headphones reproduce different test-participants' speech about themselves, their lives, interests, studies, and other people, my eyes, ears and brain try to focus on how they express what they express. As I do so, the pounding in my head becomes louder. "My name is..." The pounding becomes harder. "I come from..." "I love playing the guitar." "I have a very small family." "My mother is a teacher." The voices from the headphone slowly become rhythmically aligned with the pounding in my head. I can neither hear anything nor understand a word of what's being spoken. Everything around me is blurred out into a hazy hum. The laboratory in which I work, and the people around me dissolve into the air, and I become the pounding in my head. At this level, I walk to the rhythm of the pounding in my head. Or maybe I dance to the rhythm of the pounding. Faster and Faster. Harder and Harder.
Then at one point, I give up living. I am pushed to a point where I no longer exist. At that point, I end. I stop existing. Blank. At the base of that whirlwind of a spiral, I ain't. For me, that is the zenith of existence and non-existence. That's the top and the bottom, fullness and emptiness. end and the beginning. That's when the 'I' cease to exist as an embodied reality. I become weightless; the body disappears. The mind disappears. I disappear. There is no 'I'. It is just the pounding. And I am the pounding.
And that is what I call self, and you call god!
Then comes the villain- the pounding in the head. Some people call it a migraine. I call it a devil. Or a demon. Or whatever I want to call it! While the headphones reproduce different test-participants' speech about themselves, their lives, interests, studies, and other people, my eyes, ears and brain try to focus on how they express what they express. As I do so, the pounding in my head becomes louder. "My name is..." The pounding becomes harder. "I come from..." "I love playing the guitar." "I have a very small family." "My mother is a teacher." The voices from the headphone slowly become rhythmically aligned with the pounding in my head. I can neither hear anything nor understand a word of what's being spoken. Everything around me is blurred out into a hazy hum. The laboratory in which I work, and the people around me dissolve into the air, and I become the pounding in my head. At this level, I walk to the rhythm of the pounding in my head. Or maybe I dance to the rhythm of the pounding. Faster and Faster. Harder and Harder.
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The 'Pounding'
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And that is what I call self, and you call god!
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