Wanderer by Rajender Krishan
Paperback ISBN : 978-1-947403-15-4 Amazon ebook ASIN : B08T7VS8DZ
Available on Amazon USA | Amazon India

Meditative mystic
wants to remember
by unlearning 
what was learnt

This is one of the shortest enigmatic poems in Rajender Krishan’s book Wanderer.

Deceptively simple, ten words.  

The title, Cipher can be understood to mean Shunya – nought – nothingness – emptiness. 

 What does it mean to unlearn what was learnt? It means not to have a mind enmeshed by the totality of stubborn beliefs, impressions, fetishes, illusions, phobias, inner conflicts and complexities that constitute a self. Such a mind has to be unravelled, the knots untangled to allow a free flow of truth, of reality into one’s consciousness. ‘Unlearning’ signifies that the mystic must purge his mind of the obstacles that hinder it, empty it of non-essential dross to encounter what lies forgotten beyond recognition.    

That something is truth veiled behind reams of delusory self-images; constricted in the folds of distinctions concocted by the ego...you and I, them and us; theirs and ours; the victim of vanity. Truth does not need to be learned.  It is the bedrock of existence embedded in the illusory maze of self-deception. To unlearn means to peel away, layer by dense layer, the blindfolds we have put on our understanding of the true Self. It is the persistent longing of every human life but to attain it the soul must walk naked, empty, with a fierce thirst on a path without measure in search of cognition.

We have to enter the territory of ‘shunya’ to release the Self from the self.

Read also:  Wanderer: More Poems by RK