Intimacies: Raison D'être
In Lila was created as a record of personal musings, essays, and dearly hand-picked selections of artworks, quotes, and other content of great artistic merit that needed a coherent and beautiful home. The selected works have accompanied me in moments of a heightened consciousness only accessible when one is sensitive to the inmost authenticities of the human condition. What I strive to realise with In Lila is an expression of my own deepest, most intimate sensations of self and of man’s place in the universe—sensations which I believe resonate on a universal level with all human beings at our core, and which I am continuously discovering through my writing and the development of my ideas therein, in such a way that I can therefore connect with others on the most profound level of which I am capable.
In a life dedicated to beauty and its purity of presence, I hold intimacy (ergo, art) as the strongest antidote to the pathological disconnections that have seen the endless maladies of our kind—whether psycho-spiritual, cultural, or ecological—since before the beginning of recorded history. I believe that the beauty of art—and therefore, the salvation of man—lies very simply in the expression of our most intimate sentiments, murmurs and palpitations of the soul.
What I do with In Lila is fourfold.
In my Inquiries, I begin by holding personally curated films, books, poetry, and other such works in my consciousness, letting them soak and permeate with the ocean of ideas, questions, and related works in my mind. The common threads woven through the material I digest and make use of are the qualities of notable literary or cultural value, thought-provoking expression, and homage to the profundity of man.
Inviting you to consume these beauties with me, I strive through my essays to use them merely as points of departure from which profound philosophical inquiries can be made, subsequently taking us on a journey from the beauty and artistry of the work at hand, through to the deepest depths of the nature of these inquiries as they relate to the themes that are put forward along the way. These themes can range from anything to the nature of reality, the suffering of man, or the urgency for justice, and so on. In this, I invite you along with me in humouring and indulging in these fascinating provocations of the mind as they progress through ever deeper levels of consciousness, as well as those of the amazing authors, artists, and poets that most inspire me in my personal pursuit of a higher truth.
I so often find in these processes that many of the themes of the books, essays, and films I'm consuming and the ideas I'm exposing myself to at the time of writing have a beautiful manner of interconnecting in the most fascinating and mind-bending of ways. This often makes me incredibly excited to share with the world the frontiers of my personal philosophy as it unfolds. For this reason, the pieces might often turn out quite long, as they naturally and organically grow of themselves into something of an epic journey of mind and soul. By the end of each essay, I often find myself afloat and enraptured within a rather peculiar state of consciousness, one sullied only by a deep longing to share these beautiful spaces with another. By revealing my own inmost explorative voyages, I hope to reach a similar place in you in which genuine wonderment and enlightenment can be evoked. Indeed, at least for me, these long essays seem to always become a kind of parable, or a Zen Buddhist koan, that uses art as a common point of departure for a journey inwards to varying levels of intellectual and spiritual enlightenment.
Meanwhile, my mind is always simultaneously holding so many thoughts and ideas concerning such themes as philosophy, society, technology, self-actualisation, and so on—thoughts and ideas that may not necessarily find their way into a full literary disquisition. They instead find their home in In Lila Insights.
In Lila also serves as a repository for the best of human creation that I have had the pleasure of coming across, and am most eager to share with you. In Lila Ideas is an ever-growing effort at cataloguing the finest written work I’ve come across that help us navigate and refine what it is to be human. For the rest, In Lila Treasury presents a personal collection of my most inspired picks of visual art, poetry, music, and other such works for your pleasure to delight in.
Through creating and sharing all this content, I am continuously uncovering and getting closer to In Lila's beautiful raison d'être that I feel from the depths of my heart—like a carnation slowly unfurling and revealing herself with every expression of her beauty, the more that I am patient with her. I hope my writings here will be as enjoyable to the readers to read as they are for me to write, and will contribute whatever they are worth to the psycho-spiritual evolution of humankind. In Lila is my labour of love, my cherished brainchild, my ever-changing work of art to the world. I'm very happy to have you here, and I hope that all together, and in our own ways, we will each manifest the greatest part of which we are personally capable in some day actualising The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible.
Photo taken in the mountains of Da Lat, Vietnam, my town of residence.
