Hungry Ghosts and Paranoid Androids
A piano version of Radiohead’s Paranoid Android by Josh Cohen.
April 21, 2022
Hungry Ghosts and Paranoid Androids……..
O Bharata (Arjuna)! Know the the darkening quality of tamas to produce spiritual ignorance, which deludes the mind and makes people lazy, heedless and excessively attracted to sub-concious sleep. (14:8)
Drunkenness is tamasic. Drug addiction is tamasic. Dull mindedness is tamasic. Stupidity is tamasic. Anything, whether wrong food; habitual inactivity; lack of proper exercise; unwillingness to to puzzle anything out or to face any challenging reality; passive acceptance of things as they are, however degrading they may be to one’s consciousness, and not caring to see them improved: anything that keeps one from mental clarity may rightly be called tamasic.
Tamas is that quality in human nature (born, however, of cosmic nature) which attracts misery of all kinds. It creates such a thick wall around the ego that it causes one to view himself and his own interests as completely unrelated to anybody else’s.
In the analogy of the ocean and the waves, tamas represents that part of the wave which protrudes farthest from the ocean bosom. The action of tamas is generated by the “rajasic” middle part of the wave. Tamoguna*, in itself, has no power, and only disintegrates into foam after it reaches its peak of self-expression. In the flow of energy in the spine, tamaguna is the downward pull of matter attachment, after one reaches the point where one no longer seeks anything actively, but rather clings blindly to whatever material thing or condition the ego insists on as being “mine, and no one else’s.”
*Tamoguna - the darkening quality, that which obscures the underlying unity of Life
Extract from Chapter 27 “Transcending the Three Gunas”
The Essence of the Bhagavad Gita explained by Paramhansa Yogananda
We live in a world increasingly populated by hungry ghosts, empty shells, never satisfied, never full, endlessly craving.
Nothing wrong with that.
Its only through the experiences of this temporary, transient world full of opposites that a quiet, inner desperation, leading to a yearning, can arise.
A quiet inner desperation, a yearning for something completely different, forged from experiencing the good, the bad, the happy, the sad, and everything in between.
A quiet inner desperation that can lead to a yearning for something sparkling new in the core of the core of ones being.
