I have always admired Jorge Luis Borges. Let us begin this writing—more of an etching in the inner bones—with a deep obeisance to him. Why did I say "etching in the inner bones"? Because courage—the courage to see reality, self, and suffering—requires immense bravery, a bravery that arises only when you open your "etched bones" to yourself. It is perhaps the hardest task: to believe that your own etching will make sense to others.

My recent book, The Outsider, carries this subtitle (which came to me suddenly the day I was submitting it): The Man Who Sees Everything and Nothing. Yes, to "see" everything is also to risk despair, as Kierkegaard warned: awareness brings dread. The title thus captures a paradox—true vision is both illumination and agony. In my recent book I have tried to explore how memory and missed opportunities shaped my consciousness (ledger) over the years with the help of cinemas, philosophy, arts and literature.

A few readers (I do not have many yet, because to truly know me one must be a truest reader of mine) have commented on the "see-ness" of that "see-mess." Why? Because the book is messy with genuine philosophical illumination. When someone called it "an etching in the inner bones," it suggested something more intimate than writing. The Outsider is a craving of experience, etched into the structure of existence. I screamed there, in my "theatre of cruelty," where words do not merely breathe—they envisioned.

Let's call The Outsider a phenomenological meditation on impermanence and the self's fragile constructions, and this one (The Courage to See Everything) is the bridge where I once stood and breathed to top my chest to say 'I will alive'. The courage to see everything is a war I waged but the outsider was a weapon that fired.

So, for me, this one begins with Borges' best reminder and starting point:

I rarely even get one occasion in a year—that is my own failing. Borges was right: "Thirty poems means discipline, especially when one must dictate every line." Every word demands suffering. In literature, this is creation through torment.

Last week, when I wrote one small memory from decades ago, The Paper Plane of My First Poem, I was brutally honest with myself—memory and regrets. I wrote: "I am not old, yet I feel aged in ways my calendar years cannot explain." It is the saddest line I have ever written in my nearly forty years. The paper plane—the fragile vessel of youth, folded by memory, destined at last to fall.

Blindness, I realized later in life, is not merely the absence of sight; it is a pre-rearrangement of perception. In the early '90s, the remarkable entry of the Double in my vision overwhelmed me, thrusting me "thwarted out of sight." I began to see myself as clumsy flesh, a sensory instrument for an unknown, broken world full of the Other—not yet metaphysical vision, but a first step toward it.

When I was in grade nine, our curriculum included Nepali poetry. The teacher recited aloud; it was my least favorite class. Now I regret it deeply. I tell myself I should have listened, I should have joined in. Years later, reading Milton's Paradise Lost, I felt a profound regret for my high-school teacher.

I remember having Paradise Lost open on my screen, a cheap beer in one hand, realizing for the first time the power of recitation. A poem only becomes alive when read aloud. I never recited a poem in class—even when asked (one occasion I did which I will tell you when it will be needed). I pretended to be sick to avoid reading. I was shy, perhaps already blinded.

Years later, drinking and reading Milton made me wish I had known him sooner. I wanted to return to that very classroom to apologize to my teacher for my refusal to heed him, to my own fear that kept my voice silent.

Milton went completely blind at forty, yet wrote Paradise Lost, one of the most visually vivid epics ever composed. Borges, losing his sight through congenital blindness, read and lectured on Milton. He felt a kinship with Milton, and in turn, I felt a kinship with both of them. I got it not from congenital, not from 'paradise lost' but from the back of the head. I wrote:

I got the 'gap between the ledger' from fate alone.

I fought with 'gap' and 'ledger' and somehow succeeded too. Ledger is consciousness itself and there had been always a gap—between what is written and what is lived, between self-image and self-being. Years I had fought with the gap, played dead with consciousness. Whenever I tried to flight-higher I always had been dragged down that unexplainable 'gap'. I fall for it. It drowned me to my lowest possible tragic ledger. There was a moment when I was in my The Year of The Double. One day I was having my leisure walk—one man came to me from my left side and said hello but I failed to see him and he taunted me not seeing him! Yes, I was reddened with shame and humiliation. The courage to see everything is thus the courage to stand inside that gap without filling it with illusions. I tried always like that—'Ah! sorry I didn't see you'—to fill the 'gap-excuse' and that would be lame to withdraw from reality like that. So how did I fill the gap between seen and unseen? How did I bridge this gap between body and spirit? I didn't actually erase it, I etched it into my bones—deep and years after that etched became the scriptures: "The Outsider was a weapon that fired; The Courage to See Everything is the war I waged." That micro-moment (there are many) contained everything Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty described in thousands of pages, that gap between 'hello' and 'sorry' breakdowns the disclosure of the body's failure, that showed me every time the Other's gaze fixing me as object. My being-in-the-world suddenly revealed as being-failed-in-the-world. It took times, forty years, to realized every hello's echo must not be heard.

It wasn't easy to fight with phenomenological study with the impermanence—which was when I said—"I am not old, yet I feel aged in ways my calendar years cannot explain,". When you walk behind time and wouldn't be able to see Heidegger's "being-towards-death"—which is always not about the death—it's actually the feeling of that weariness from infinite 'ontological wound'—that wound only God can give you. Each missed-poem, each silence in the classroom, each humiliation in between 'gaps', becomes an ontological wound. Nobody wants to revisit the wound but my wound could teach you how to 'see everything' even if you failed to 'see' the actual world—the world which is inside you—that energy to turn losses into universal metaphor—the labyrinth, the mirror, the Paradise Lost, The outsider—is all inside you—as Sartre told: the Hell is other people. My hell was inside too which I had to fight with.

Borges called it "a slow nightfall that began when I was a boy." For me, it was not slow—it struck like a hammer. Reading Milton's heaven, I felt a pang over my temples, thinking how he created visions without seeing the physical world, while Borges imagined labyrinths, mirrors, and infinite libraries without eyes. Both transcended sight, making darkness their raw material. I am proud and at the same time I am not—but when I speak of 'seeing everything' it's a 'sacred space' which was created by Nietzsche, he said: "One must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star." I had danced and created a star. So how one can create (resurrection) from "I destroyed them not for their lack, but for their brutal honesty."? Was honesty the key? No. Suffering was the key like in Bhagavad Gita it says in chapter 6 verse 5: Elevate yourself through the power of your mind, and not degrade yourself, for the mind can be the friend and also the enemy of the self. It means growth and victory come from inner struggle, I let my 'a man' lift himself by himself. I let him my 'him' not to degrade himself but to overcome himself. Some might say 'seeing everything' is a curse. To "see everything" is to renounce comfort but there is a trick to make 'The Blue Wall' to your yogic locus. I learned to meditate inward to see 'the world dissolve in consciousness' that's where my rectangular sponge became metaphor—the shape of experience contained by awareness, finite yet infinite, it took me nearly forty years to learn this awareness.

I pretended all my life that I could read, but the truth was harsh: I barely touched a physical book, ten sentences at a time, no more. What I needed—or perhaps desired—was clarity, a harmony of vision. I could watch objects, read words, but my blindness thwarted all miraculous longings. There are moments when eyes feel like traitors; I cursed God, I cursed myself—but no one else. Nietzsche used to take drugs to subdue his metaphysical pain and longing, perhaps. He hardly managed reading without vertigo or tear, that is the gap between the ledger I was fighting with. I am not saying that I am above Husserl, Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty but one thing I am certain is that they stop at describing the structure of consciousness when they reached to the 'perception as a opening' a disclosure of being. But—I took one more step, act of seeing.

Reading Seven Nights, I realized Borges was not describing the loss of vision; he was describing the birth of another sense—a metaphysical sense, born from deprivation. That was courage. Blindness is not always about vision, it's about the act of seeing, act of seeing the 'ontological combat' which everyone wrestles with. That war is called 'illusion of mastery', everyone tries to become master of this 'illusion', everyone tries to see 'everything' but to see everything is to surrender that 'mastery of illusion' first—for which Sartre called it 'the project of bad faith', the refusal to see one's own condition. I tell you one thing, Courage lies in standing naked before Being without flinching. How many times I flinched over this self-combat with consciousness! But I have learned one thing: that which Nietzsche always provoked transvaluation: transforming pain into strength, blindness into vision, that I have created the weapon (the outsider), the war (the courage to see everything) where there is the field my nothingness collided with my own being.

Occasions come unexpectedly. For me, they came first through the television screen, then through the blue wall and dreams. I have written—and torn apart—so many poems and fragments when confronting blackness. I wrote inebriated, inspired by distant persons, places, or experiences I had never encountered. They were always far, yet they illuminated me. I destroyed them not for their lack, but for their brutal honesty. My "The Age of The Double" was a gap—the necessary fracture of incarnation which Aurobindo once mentioned that 'consciousness as a descending flame that forgets itself in embodiment.' I fought with the Gap not being clever (not being condescending), not being even courageous but with 'etched within', feel it first, feel the fusion of subject and object nearer and then I learned to realize "not Seeing everything means refusing to anesthetize that gap". Before going further let me tell you what is this Gap? The gap is existential corridor between you and the Other. The Gap is purely what we live and what we understand our life, the self we imagine and the self that actually is. Without knowing these we cannot cross the ignorance we bound to see. Have you heard the word Abgrund? It's a groundless ground which Heidegger mentioned. I was in that inescapable tension in being. I was in that deep Gap, losing personal face, the inability to see the reality of the world. I had to stand on the groundless ground.

Sometimes I repeated: "Don't be too courageous; people will hate your courage." Is that true? Yes, somehow, but here what I did. I tried to anesthetize the gap—to make it numb but not with 'covering the gap' but letting its full weight of existence on my being, it crushed my whole life, it undone my whole establishment of my being but I arose from numbing and instead being completely lost I prescribed my soul to see everything with 'not looking away', It means accepting the split as sacred. Borges' blindness, Milton's vision, Nietzsche's madness—all are forms of "seeing everything": a gaze so open it cannot close again so I learned to live with the full awareness of imperfection, loss, and incompleteness—without numbing myself with illusion.

I envied Borges for his discipline: thirty poems dictated into the void, while I struggle to rescue even one from the noise of existence. I was illusioned with Anesthetizing (bad faith) and Jnana (To affirm life and its contradictions fully) from my vision. The blue wall became a meditation of the tired mind, an attempt to calm it. The rectangular sponge was a metaphor: the world, the experience of it, can be held in perception. I slept and played with it in my psyche, perhaps trying to rebuild lost strength—to understand the truest vision by compressing it into myself.

Somewhere Bloom writes: "Borges was a remarkably literary child; his first published work came at the age of seven—a translation of Oscar Wilde's story 'The Happy Prince.'"

I was no remarkable in anyway but my courage to see everything was a solitary path I had to walk with. Not entirely Sartre's Bad Faith explains the western temptation to look away from truth but it shows us how to look at it anyway and in the other hand Bhagavat Gita speaks of the mind as both friend and enemy—I took both refusal and battle in one spoon and drank it with Sartrean diagnoses—which philosophy tried to cure this 'gap' disease and eastern wisdom prescribed the cure, elevate yourself through inner combat. If Milton could paint heaven without eyes, perhaps I could take full spoon of courage as a initiation—that which was the blue wall and the rectangular sponge. One example of my true awareness of being that I mentioned in my book The Outsider, A gaze so open it cannot close again—the Gallon once it falls it can not goes back to the shelves.

There I wrote:

This phenomena taught me something entirely new that my beingness depends on something else but I had to fumble through the Gap—The Cleaving, clearing the outer layer of the true understanding. Was it all? No, my forty years of life I spend to define what Cleaving really mean, or how does we clear the Cleaving—the Gap. There was myriads of episodes that I dropped the gallon on the floor since my 'The Age of The Double', and every time this 'epiphany of negation' taught me (humiliated me) that It is the realization that no act, no gesture, no definition can ever complete being. I used to tell myself that there is no other way to define my own existence and face it, like Camus's Sisyphus faces the stone but later I conquered the 'friction zone', not entirely but in some degree I had won the battle.

Further I wrote:

When I was standing in the pool of spilled milk, I realized the zone of spill (Gap/cleaving)—is not chaos but revelation. It is the aesthetic of rupture: the place where form disintegrates and Being reveals itself as process, emerging out of the gap, then there freedom can be defined but not wholly yet. It can be defined as a emergent being over non-being—war between realizing the interdependence of both—being there and not being there. Or seeing or not-seeing.

Once when I was a little, I stared at my own hand for an hour, not the fingers (as usually I used to count them again and again), not the skin, but the existence of the hand itself. The fact that it is. The miracle and terror of its thereness. Most people look at it and see tools but I saw the abyss. I saw how precarious is my existence—I started to shake. I asked myself—how this hand (other) could simply not be, how consciousness I missed at every moment, how beauty of the hand itself I missed to see. I cried for an hour after staring my own hand. Was it realization of the gap between other and ME or that was simply the terrorization of being unaware!

Courage to see everything was begin when I stopped filling that gap with comfortable lies, pretentions but stand in it. I never hear the bone's breaking-echo but when I was started licking that blueness further I started to realized my next path—The Unfinished War between 'see' and not-to-see'—and heard the stillness inside my bones.

I began by bowing to Borges. I end by bowing to you, reader—whoever you are—for having the courage to see my gap, to stand inside this messy meditation, this etching in bones not your own.