The Rock: These are my brothers… legends I respect. I don’t know if I can throw them over that rope just to win.

Vince McMahon: This is your arena. The greats don’t hesitate—they step up, claim their destiny, and electrify the world. Now go take what’s rightfully yours.

In American gym culture—and thereby global gym culture as the influence of American pop-culture extends outwards through the Internet—there is a meme about the biggest guys being awfully gentle and kind. If you spend time doomscrolling fitness social media, you may have encountered this meme.

A meme is an expressible fragment of a culture. The relatability—and thereby humor—of a meme reveals shared culture.

There are two types of cultures that co-exist. A culture of freedom and a culture of abuse.

In a culture of freedom, beings have mobility. They can exercise such mobility to move away from a giant, leading to isolation for the giant. Therefore, in such a culture, a giant needs to be gentle.

In a culture of abuse, beings don’t have access to their mobility. In such cultures, giants can afford to be bullies. In not being gentle, their own hearts hurt, but the collective illusory veil in a culture of abuse can be thick. It prevents a giant from seeing the heart-hurt that his actions propagate.

Who is a giant?

A giant is a physically strong being that is capable of violence.

The capacity for violence has 3 components to it—

1. strength to conduct violence
2. skill to conduct violence
3. ability to let go of mental constructs that prevent violence

A giant is strong and is aware that he could let go of the mental constructs that hold him back from violence.

A giant lacks skill, thereby the tiniest nudge from him feels violent, as he bumbles unskillfully.

Skillfulness in conducting violence—martial artistry—brings gentleness to the giant.

I feel moved to tears thinking of the many tender relationships I have lost, in which I was physically stronger but hadn’t yet cultivated the capacity to be gentle.

I feel moved to tears remembering all the tender connections that I butchered because I was carrying gigantic amounts of repressed rage.

The gigantic amounts of repressed rage in me would leak into violence on humans in my company. A giant trying to shake hands with a human, crushing their hands in the process.

I call this era of my healing journey—where the rage was leaking out—the Vengeance era—it lasted from mid 2022 until mid 2025.

I was quite misanthropic in this era. I carried a deep hatred of all human beings in my subconscious. In my conscious mind, I carried a victim image of myself, coupled with a cry out to the world—how could you all let me down?

How could none of the billions of y’all barge in and rescue me? The farmhouse wasn’t that far out of town.

Victim self-images coupled with outwards cries of anguish seem to be symptomatic of unaddressed rage. Have you experienced that?

In moments of deeper awareness, I could speak and write about the misanthropy and yet I did not know what to do with it, nor did I feel any desire to address it. It felt justified. I was rightfully angry. Back then, I spent a lot of time in an American subculture where the weird is celebrated. The weirder you are, the more Woo!s you get. Folks in that subculture were so suffocated from the boxes that they grew up in that anything that seems out-of-the-box got applause. Sometimes, when you go too far out of a box, you are back in a box.

Misanthropy felt weird. I felt celebrated when I spoke about it. I suppose it could have been my awareness that was being celebrated. Or perhaps just being witnessed in something so dark, felt celebratory.

I couldn’t tell the difference.

While I was in the Vengeance era, I felt quite proud of myself for intelligently exiting the Suicidal era.

In the Suicidal era, I felt weak and broken. In the Vengeance era, I felt powerful.

Hatred pointed inwards feels miserable. Hatred pointed outwards can feel enlivening.

A lick of honey can feel enlivening.

I remember the turn outwards.

Back in my Suicidal era, I’d periodically get caught up in a suicidal whirl—this collapsed inner state where I was feeling utterly miserable, often due to something very simple in the outside world that had not gone as I would have liked it to, and the Fire would erupt inside me. I didn’t know how to dance with the Fire.

My heart would launch into panic.

I would try blocking out the environmental stimulation—sometimes quite literally blocking people on the Internet.

The old coping mechanisms—binging food or porn—had lost their grip on me after I recovered the memories. I vividly remember opening up PornHub at a later point in my journey of overcoming porn addiction and having a visceral knowing—uh oh, this is all sex abuse material, often underage. While I hadn’t yet faced the heartbreak of my own abuse, I got a ticklish thrill out of watching others being abused. Watching abuse play out made my hidden wounds feel seen, through all the layers of numbness I had swathed them in—creating this ticklish sensation that I enjoyed poking at.

Kink is like that.

I suspect that’s the case with other men too, even if their abuse history isn’t sexual. Points in their childhood where they weren’t met with due tenderness for their innocence bottled up grief. Bottled-up grief leads to ways of living—many of them quite culturally sanctioned—that involve objectifying others.

Porn usage is just one of many common objectifications. Justification of abortion by reducing life to a clump of fetal cells (an object) is another. Relating with another human led by the thought—what can I get out of this and what can I give them?—is one more.

In suicidal whirls, I’d be curled up whimpering. Wondering how I had gotten here and if there was any hope. A little voice would whisper different ideas about how such miserable existence could come to an end.

Having space to just sit with those different ideas was such a relief.

I never took any practical steps other than one time in Harrisburg, when I was driving on a bridge and my hand jerked uncontrollably on the steering wheel—the first glimpse I caught of demonic possession—knowing very clearly that it wasn’t me that jerked my hand.

But looking back, I doubt I was too far off from making an intentional move.

Suicidality creates this soothing denial within—oh you are just thinking about it, it’s no big deal. You are actually not gonna do anything about it—that makes it easy go get to the edge while fooling yourself that you had no intention of taking action. Till you are right there, and your mind gets convicted to act.

That’s the texture of Temptation in general. Persuasion swathed under denial till you get convicted.

“Oh I’m just watching these fitness influencers on Instagram for workout tips, this isn’t porn” till enough persuasion builds up, the denial steps aside and your mind is convicted to opening up PornHub.

My brother, do you know what I’m talking about?

The 4 stages of Suicidality are—

1. Contemplation
2. Ideation
3. Conviction
4. Attempts

I suspect it doesn’t take much to go from #3 to #4. The inner battle is fought between #2 and #3.

As ideation had taken hold of me through demonic whispers, a quieter, steadier voice spoke—

Vighnesh, you don’t deserve to kill yourself for what he did to you. You could kill him instead.

This gentle nudge channeled the hatred from my Self towards the second perp.

The main perp—my maternal grandfather—was dead.

I had exacted vengeance upon him by calling in his soul in a shamanic ritual at an ISTA gathering in May 2022, in which I mutilated him. It was supposed to be a conversational ritual. I ended up mutilating him. It felt quite satisfying. Truly, like an inner battle.

A few weeks after that, I recovered a new memory from a new perp, who was still alive. I tried the same shamanic ritual on him in August 2022 but it didn’t work. Was it because his soul was still embodied? I don’t know.

What works at one stage in a healing journey, often doesn’t seem to work at the next stage.

As I recovered this new memory—the first one where I could see the face of the perp and where I held no bonds of affection with him—panic attacks flooded through and the Suicidal era commenced.

There are 3 types of sexual abuse—

1. Abuse from someone you know and love
2. Abuse from someone you know but don’t love
3. Abuse from someone you don’t know and don’t love

In all three, I’m speaking (of course) of the diseased form of love that prevails in society today, not Love that is from God that spreads to all beings from every heart.

There could be a fourth type, I suppose—abuse from someone you don’t know but Love.

In #1, a part of me enjoyed the depth of physical affection that is a natural consequence of naked bodies meeting and another part carried shock, shame, regret and horror.

This polarity between sensual delight and shame is why survivors get wrapped up in abusive relationships. Now, when I notice shame or regret creeping up—for me or for her—in a romantic relationship, I make it a point to address that in conversation first, before continuing sensual connection.

In #2, I experienced pure horror and anger. I knew the guy, did not have much affection for him—who the fuck are you, brother, and what the fuck are you doing inside me?

#3, I’m not sure. I don’t know if I’ve experienced that. Sometimes, I have wondered why I get so affected by the caustic opinions of strangers. Is it because of #3? My grandfather and his friend were business partners at that farmhouse. What kind of business were they conducting? I wrote Compliant Assets from the part of me that wonders.

The Suicidal era commenced June 2022.

In a way, I felt relieved.

Panic attacks had always lived in me, as far as I can remember. Just that they were swathed in a layer of numbness—driven by a lifestyle of chasing external achievement, food, numbing substances, distractions (“ADHD”), humor as a defense mechanism and sex—and presented as anxiety. Chatter, chatter, chatter—not a moment of breath.

Now that the layer of numbness was gone—praise the good God for that!—I could see the texture of the anxiety very clearly. I could—finally!—breathe and ground, till the point I could not and was launched into a panic attack.

In other ways, my life was a wreck.

My CV read Indian Physics Olympiad, IIT Bombay, Stanford University, Meta, Suicidal Wreck. Maybe I should update my LinkedIn to reflect that?

A tiny environmental disturbance here or there—an offhand remark from a stranger or a lawnmower running in the neighborhood—would launch me into a flight response. My soul wanted to leave my body but my willpower wouldn’t let it depart anymore.

Sometimes, I’d lock myself in the bathroom inside a warm bath with Epsom salts—creating a womb for myself where I could breathe again. A personal baptism ritual that allowed the salts to absorb all that was dead inside me.
Sometimes, I’d wear noise-canceling headphones and stuff pillows on both my ears and shut my eyes tight till it subsided.

In such moments, I’d feel the urge to call it a day. I was very drawn to the concept of the 2nd Amendment but knew that if I got a gun, I’d probably be my first victim.

The steady voice came again…

No, no, no, why should you be the first victim, Vighnesh? While he still lives? We can’t let that happen now, can we? Fly to India, kill him, do it artfully and then live an anonymous new life on the beaches of Thailand.

Back in April 2022, I had spent a couple of weeks in Koh Phangan practicing Muay Thai twice a day, napping or getting a massage rest of the time.

I liked that life.

I liked what the voice suggested. I envisioned a grand finale of Healing Childhood Sexual Trauma, broadcast on all major Indian news channels.

After that nudge, any suicidal thought would get easily routed into vengeance fantasies against the perp.

I fantasized kidnapping him, force feeding him MDMA, holding space for his grief, receiving a confession. An apology. And dropping him back home.

I fantasized buying that farmhouse. Kidnapping him. Hanging him by meat hooks. Using a sharp carving knife. Having a good broadcasting set up. Extracting that apology along with his blood.

May be sipping some of the blood for televisionary effect? Like Kali might? I’m not sure about that. How do I kidnap him? Myself or by hiring goons. It felt more satisfying to be there waiting in the farmhouse and have goons drop him off, but then I wasn’t sure if he was already connected to all the goons in the area who might double cross me. I figured I might have to find goons from a different region of India. Much logistics needed to be figured out. When I’d get into a logistical space, my desire to avenge would often dissipate and I’d carry on with life. The seed of revenge was still stuck in me though and it’d bloom every now and then.

It felt healing. Was it healing? Is it better to hate another who, you believe, has wronged you instead of yourself?

I suppose it depends on the nature of how the hatred is expressed, no? Whether you are screaming the hatred into a pillow or screaming it into their face? Does it? I’m not sure.

While holding these fantasies, I thought that my vengeance was contained and directed towards a singular human. But the nature of human connectedness is such that if you harbor violent intentions towards one, it is quite difficult to be truly gentle towards others.

I would notice the righteous vengeance slipping out sideways with many of my regular relationships. When righteously held anger slips out, it carries with itself a new reasoning for its existence adapted to the current context.

I am never in the wrong, others deserve it because they did ____.

Because every human reminds you, at some level, of the human who deserves your vengeance.

I understood this essential idea and it showed up in the best art that came out of me during my Vengeance era—a torturous poem directed at the perp.

I posted it on IG. When I look at it now, I feel grateful that Social Media exists. That I could record myself in private and be witnessed by whosoever wants to witness me on the Internet.

Witnessing brings clarity to Desire—either releasing it or giving it a cleaner shape.

James understood this when he wrote in chapter 5 of his epistle—

Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.

That poem was an attempt from me to confess my sins before I understood what sin meant. Before I knew that holding hatred towards any human being was sinful—in the sense that it disconnects the human from the healing Grace of God.

The poem starts with my desire to forgive him—where did this desire come from? Aren’t we lucky to live in an era where forgiveness is culturally elevated as a trait?—with the caveat that I need to see his humanity to do so.

Then, it switches into cold reasoning disconnected from the heart—of the nature that might be found in a journal article on a horrific psychological experiment conducted in the 60s or modern research that reasons how conceived infants are fetal tissues—that I needed to see him without his face in order to forgive him.

Tap into the part of you that fosters cold, heart-disconnected logic and you will see that his face was too closely linked with the memory of being angrily mounted from the front—ergo, the best thing I could do was to carve his face off so I could see the flesh, blood and bones underneath.

You see, the flesh, blood and bones are something he shares with all humans in a manner that disconnects him from the horror that is associated with his facial features.

The signature of that poem was Cruel Logic.

I recorded it while I was still in the Suicidal era. I hadn’t yet figured out how to redirect the Rage at him. Cold, cruel logic reveals repressed rage. You can catch that in how numb I sound in the poem.

Once I managed to turn the hose of Rage around at him, I began to really enjoy myself burning in the Fire, instead of miserably collapsing in the face of it.

In my Vengeance era, I was seething with rage. My speech was punctuated with dark humor. At some point, I recognized this Sinister Joker archetype that was operating from within me that opened me up to the reality of Spiritual Warfare and demonic possession.

The tremendous amounts of rage I was carrying, would slip out towards unsuspecting friends.

The simplest manifestation of it was via judgments. I knew, at some level, that judgments are not good. They never felt great.

I justified carrying judgments by calling them evaluations. Now I know that all the Evil forces of Shame need to overwhelm a human is for another to express an evaluation that has not been expressly welcomed.

Paul understood this when he wrote in Chapter 6 of his epistles to the Ephesians—

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

It’s you and me against the forces of Evil, baby 😘 And by releasing judgments that we have of each other, even and especially in the heat of conflict, is how we win, together.

Back then, I carried a lot of judgments towards others. I’d see someone and immediately my mind would flood with judgments. Attractive, not attractive. Fit, fat. Good-looking, average, ugly. Smart, not smart. Rich, poor.

It’s okay, Vighnesh—you are just evaluating them and they don’t know you are doing it.

That was a delusion. Our thoughts are not as disconnected from each other as we think. Oof, my heart hurts at the innumerable judgments that have prevented me from open love-filled curiosity towards another person.

Scathing judgmental remarks would slip out in my speech. About my friends, about groups of people.

Repressed rage was leaking out of how I used words. Like a hissing snake, I spat rage left and right.

I was so grateful for the turn from Suicidality into Vengeance—it had brought me much relief in the depths of my suffering—that any attempts that people made to bring my attention to my leaky rage would provoke defense in me, upholding my Right to Expression.

Back then, I did not realize that the Right to Expression doesn’t guarantee a Right to Connection. Satisfying, long-lasting, heart-centered connections. The heart is truly not a space for judgments.

It is important to strike a balance between the Rights.

Back in that era of my healing journey, I held onto this self-aggrandizing notion that I was speaking on behalf of all the men who had been sexually abused, who were silent. I felt sad being alone in that. I wanted other men to share their stories and I silently judged them for leaving me alone.

I still hold that men, who have experienced child sex abuse, need to speak up publicly but have realized that no one can authentically exercise their Right to Expression by being judged.

If you judge a man, he might comply from fear. But the expression won’t be authentic. Truth cannot be born from Fear.

If you judge a human, for any reason whatsoever, you support the ever-present energetic forces of Shame that pounce upon the human and disconnect them from the life-giving nature of Authentic Expression.

I didn’t know back then, that it was possible to live a life without judgments and expressing them.

I didn’t know back then, that every judgment I had, revealed some way in which I wasn’t loving myself. That any silent judgments I entertain later show up as fears that others are judging me in the same way.

I had heard of these concepts in spiritual books, but I didn’t really know it experientially.

Love cannot be forced.

If you try to force an act of love out of someone, you may get that act out a few times but then you deaden the spirit of the individual in front of you. What pulled you in, leaves. And you have to find another to force yourself upon.

To no end.

As a man becomes physically stronger and recognizes his capacity for violence, it is essential that the man step into gentle-manliness.

In a culture that is wrapped up in abuse, a giant could afford to be a bully, but even that will leave the man unsatisfied in the long run. The man’s heart wants love and love cannot be bullied out of someone.

You may force your ejaculate into a woman who is unwilling but it won’t get you that merger of hearts that you are truly desiring.

You could forcibly merge bodies but hearts cannot be merged forcibly.

When your heart blooms and another’s heart blooms, in that blooming together, there is merger, and that needs gentleness. Gently tending, like you would, a flower.

A giant reminds others of all the times in their past that capacity for violence has been used for violence.

It is so heartbreaking to feel that in another’s heart. The unspoken truth of what the person in front of me has experienced when the capacity for violence has been used for violence.

Truly heartbreaking.

If I can stay with that heartbreak and feel the pain of it and release my tears in their presence, our hearts bloom together in a beautiful connection. It doesn’t need anything else other than that pause.

Far too long, I lived running away from the pause. Into intellectual ideas. Clever remarks. Stories about office colleagues. Flirtation. Escalation.

It is so nice to be in the pause.

If I can’t stay with that heartbreak, then I’ll collapse into attempts to stuff away my heartbreak, and attack outwards whatever reminds me of the heartbreak I carry. Unconsciously hoping that I can forget it.

My mind may forget it, but my body won’t. My body will then stay diseased.

The stuffing away of heartbreak is the source of chronic disease.

All men are my brothers.

My brothers have messed up. I have messed up.

There is such a depth of heartbreak I feel when I connect to another human and my heart picks up on the ways in which they have suffered because a brother has messed up.

How could I not be gentle in that moment? How could I be anything but gentle in that moment?

Giants need to be gentle.

Else they shall be doomed to never feel this beautiful tender moment of heart connection with another being.

God is the greatest giant of them all.

How could such a God be anything but gentle? How could he take great joy in sending plagues and murdering entire tribes and demanding reverence?

The God of the Old Testament reminds me of myself in my Vengeance era. Punishing anyone who tried to show him love. Like a kitten who has just been rescued from a cold, shivering night that swipes at her rescuers.

What is the nature of punishment?

As a perceiving being, what I perceive has a subjective component and an objective component.

I hold the possibility that all that we perceive is purely subjective. All that I perceive is clearly not objective, else you and I would always agree on what is happening, no? Anyone who has been in a relational conflict knows that how people remember conflicts can differ significantly.

That the actions of another human surprise you and that you and them can point and agree on the existence of an object indicates some level of objective reality for some definition of what the word objective means.

If another being existed entirely in my subjective perception, could any of their actions surprise me? Perhaps, if I willfully chose to forget in order to experience surprise?

What does that say about dreams? Often the beings I see in dreams act in surprising ways. Do they have objective existence?

Punishment really tests the separation between the objective and the subjective.

As typically used, punishment refers to the objective act that is inherently of a nature that imposes suffering.

But what if your subjective response to it is one soaked in the Spirit of Love, Forgiveness and Truth?

What if in the moment of being torturously murdered by me, the perp had looked heavenwards and said—Father, forgive him for he knows not what he does?

If your inner response to any external event was suffused with Love, Forgiveness and Truth, would anything qualify as a punishment?

If I surrender fully to the unfolding of Divine Will, can any act be punishing?

So is the God described in the Old Testament the same as the Heavenly Father in the New Testament? Perhaps what is written in the Old Testament is words of love, forgiveness and truth spoken by God, corrupted by the impure perceptions of the Prophets who were listening to him?

The Bible, thereby, would be the inspired Word of God, channeled by prophets who got progressively better at transcribing the Word, culminating in the purest of them all, Yeshua.

Is it possible that the earlier Prophets, caught up in their impure perceptions, were waylaid by demonic entities pretending to be God? Entities that rely on blood for life. Blood drawn from the phalluses of infant boys, of “enemies” and of animals.

Lying about who you are is not a behavior restricted to humans. Entities love to lie.

An adherent of the Old Testament—Jewish or Christian—would have no qualms in declaring this to be the case about Allah and Islam. Are Yahweh and Allah that different in the religious law they seem to impose? It doesn’t seem like it based on my reading of the Mosaic Law, the Book of Leviticus and understanding of orthodox Islamic society.

Giants need to be gentle.

My brother, cultivate physical strength, regain your capacity for violence and learn to use it for your inner battles.

As you strengthen your muscles in the gym, notice that a certain kind of tension and pain leads to growth. May that noticing help you say No to temptations that keep you caught up in a pleasure-chasing life.

Temptations born out of ego attachments can feel so conveniently family-ar. Kill what is familiar, so that you may be free. Free to be gentle.

As gentle as the most gigantic of bros in an American gym.