We are running out of breath!

Summary:

          He discovers that his dream—where the horses hold the reins—reveals a deeper truth: control often collapses when the self grows exhausted, and surrender can become a form of clarity. His breathlessness symbolizes the mind’s futile struggle to command what must be allowed. The widening “hole” he feels is not emptiness but revelation, like the Upanishadic void or the Greek primordial gap. Encounters with Nietzsche’s horse, Dostoyevsky’s beaten mare, and Jöns’ silent corpse in The Seventh Seal show him that truth often speaks through silence. In the end, he realizes the horses have always known the way home.

   As soon as I opened my eyes this morning, I told myself,

“I am running out of breath.”

I didn’t get up then; I lay there for a few more hours, questioning myself: what am I running out of? The question became more dense and compact every time I repeated it. Then I started remembering the dream I’d had that night. I was riding horses again, but this time the reins were in the horses’ hands. Seeing my empty hands, I lifted my palm toward my face, covered in a kind of insanity-laden overwhelm.

When my palm touched my face, I flinched a little. My hands were cold—not from the weather, but from the weariness of comfort. I took my hands away from my face. The horses saw my discomfort. After a few miles, they tried to give the reins back to me, but I told them, “I am running out of breath. Just keep riding—be my sarathi.”

Often when you wake up in the morning, it is natural to feel more exhausted than before you went to bed. You feel, in the morning, that the symbolic language of “life, desire, will, drive” all sounds like an unfiltered metaphysical alarm.

It is not paralysis when I refuse to get up as soon as I open my eyes; it is only the delay of the lungs’ volition. When you realize that all at once, then “breath” becomes “control”—your reins become exhausted effort.

But where, and how, does this breath-that-becomes-control descend into my volitions? If you have read the Upanishads, you would know that the horses are the senses, and the Atman, Buddhi, and Manas are the passenger, charioteer, and reins, respectively.

When I wrote last year about Dostoyevsky’s horse’s funeral, I thought I would have nothing left to say about horses anymore. But fate does not spare you; I had to write again—the philosophy of horses.

Everyone knows what happened in Turin. Nietzsche hugged a horse for the last time and collapsed for life. He went mad and was admitted to an asylum, where he spent the remaining 11 years of his life, until his death in 1900.

Actually, it began long before, when Dostoyevsky wrote about the dream of the poorly beaten horse, and Nietzsche read it. Fate, eh! He actually hugged that beaten horse and collapsed his mind. What a fate humans have.

Let me add my opening paragraphs here from my earlier post:

I am going to dissect my reading philosophy in this post—how I got engaged with Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky. I was 23—pure, raw, intentional. Even at that tender age, I knew I was wounded. But what was that wound? I never knew. Or never properly defined it—until one day, I read the book called The Outsider (note: don’t be confused with my book The Outsider). Everything started from there: my philosophy, my passion for writing, everything—that hole—that gazed back into my inner functionality—Funeral of Dostoyevsky’s horse .

And the hole never abated, never since, but it’s getting wider ever since. This morning when I woke up, I felt that same ‘hole’ which was about to throw its undeniable abyss at me. At my face. And it succeeded. I tried to wipe that fate from my face and felt my hand was cold, then the horses watched me back with suspicion. What was this reversal? The senses leading the Self, instead of the other way around. The metaphor of the charioteer was inverted: instead of Krishna (Hindu god who told Bhagavad Gita in the battlefield of Kurukshetra) whispering his wisdom, my lungs refused to beat and said,

“Not today. Let the horses lead.”

When you sleep (I was sleeping since I was born, never actually awake), your mind carries unspoken questions into unconscious terrain as Jung suggested in his book Red Book. Dreams do the heavy lifting we refuse to acknowledge while awake. And more so when we refuse to relinquish its reins long enough.

Long ago while I was researching dreams for my then manuscript (which published in 2019), I had encountered Freud and later Jung. I was 23, yes. A kid. A fatigued kid. And as soon as I got my hands on The Outsider later and read about the hole, I didn’t shout “I am not alone”; instead I told myself, “The hole breathes, I can hear it.” I told myself, holding that book in hand, ‘The hole is the beginning,’ and ‘I have a bigger hole than Wilson mentioned.’ This self-assurance somehow relaxed me, but I never knew instead of getting smaller, the hole was getting wider and my breathing becoming heavier.

At some point, “the reins must return.” Before I completely left the bed, I said that.

This time my horses didn’t say “Ich verstehe dich”—“I understand you,” but they kept silent themselves. When knight Antonius Block was resting on a seashore after the crusade, watching his horse, maybe he felt that too: my horse doesn’t understand me. My conscious doesn’t understand me. The Seventh Seal (1957) is one of my favorite cinemas where a disillusioned knight returning home from the crusade is exhausted with his own existence, but his squire is different—

 

That’s him, Antonius’ squire—Jöns. They were riding and Jöns went to ask one man sitting against a big stone on the meadows. He was dead. But when the knight asks, “Did you ask for a nearby inn?” then what he said is quite impressive. He said, “Not exactly.” The knight inquired, “Was he mute?” Jöns said, “No, sire, actually he was quite eloquent.” Because the philosophy behind this is: when someone is closer to seeing the truth, that doesn’t scare them; they feel that act is quite eloquent. The same when thousands of years ago Indian rishis saw the truth so closely and instead of being scared, they embraced it—that act of seeing behind the in-itself. When my horses didn’t understand me, I didn’t argue with them, but I gave them my reins instead because I was ignorant—I failed, long ago, to see what Jöns had seen.

What one encounters is not the voice of a dead man; it’s the unmediated presence of truth, which often speaks louder in silence than living mouths ever do. My mistake was: all my life I tried to reach truth using reason, crisis, religion and doubt, but what Jöns did was impressive—he acted like a fool-prophet, with whim, trying to reach the truth (the double) through receptivity. Before I had given my reins to the horses, I should have known these truths. But I failed to see the actual ‘hole’ in the wall. When I saw Jöns’ face after he encountered the dead man—I didn’t realize then, but years later I came to realize that the dead do not speak, but their silence annihilates illusion.

That silence is the eloquence—which I have to embrace not by being dead but being alive! Is it possible? My whole life I am trying to rip that illusion (the double) from my own vein. To get the idea of ‘ripping,’ sometimes I ride horses, sometimes I go on crusades with knights, or sometimes I go sit along with Nietzsche in his asylum. Antonius questions, challenges, wrestles like the rest of us, but Jöns accepts (that’s what we need to learn to see): which I have learned already. Then what is the problem? To argue with the horse is to insist on mastery. I have learned this quite long ago (cf. Neupane, 2025) when I was writing my fifth book, The Unknown Existence of Being—where I treated struggle vs. acceptance of human being through the narrator Kalaḥ, who shows humans wrestling with puzzles, beads, rituals, and time. Yet surrender to void and silence is presented as wisdom.

Immediately upon waking from the bed, I thought about the ontological recoil I had years ago: I often feel like I am incarnating into something thousand-legged, a centipede coiling itself to devour its own fear. But horses and the reins—how did I get back in time?

For that I just needed courage. 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 (see The Ontology of the Blue Wall) and whip over your own gap. Everything is fine unless you feel a gap between the ledger of your longing—longing for sharing your own oblivious area of psyche with another person (i.e. Other)—that helped me to understand my horses and the reins later.

 

But here’s the paradox that morning revealed to me: the gap itself is the courage(that gap in my skull). Not the crossing of it. Not the bridging. The gap. When I finally sat up in bed, still feeling that coldness in my palms, I understood something Kierkegaard knew when he wrote about the leap of faith—but he got it wrong, or maybe I read him wrong all these years. The leap isn’t into faith. The leap is the gap itself, suspended, infinite, the moment between letting go and not yet grasping. That’s where breath lives. That’s where the horses know better than the charioteer.

You see, Plato gave us the allegory of the chariot in Phaedrus—two horses, one noble, one base, and the charioteer struggling to maintain control, steering toward the Forms, toward Truth with a capital T. But what if Plato, in all his wisdom, missed the essential point? What if the struggle itself is the illusion? What if those moments when the horses take the reins aren’t moments of failure but of recognition?

I walked to the window. Morning light was doing what morning light does—indifferent, constant, neither cruel nor kind. And I thought about Schopenhauer, how he would have loved this metaphor of mine, this giving-over of the reins. His whole philosophy was about the Will, blind and devouring, and reason as this thin veneer we paint over our animal drives. But even Schopenhauer, that pessimist saint, that philosopher of suffering, he too held onto control through his very act of naming it. To say “the Will controls us” is still to position oneself above it, observing, categorizing.

The horses in my dream didn’t argue philosophy. They just were.

And suddenly—I don’t know if you’ve ever had this happen, this moment of recognition that arrives not as enlightenment but as a kind of exhausted surrender—I remembered another scene, from Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev. There’s that sequence where Rublev watches the young bell-maker, the boy who has no idea how to cast a bell but acts with such certainty, such unwavering conviction that he knows, even though he doesn’t know. And the bell rings. Of course it rings. The whole film is about this: that sometimes the hands know what the mind cannot yet articulate. Sometimes the horses know the path when the charioteer has gone blind from too much staring at maps.

I wrote in my notebook (because what else do we do when we’re trying to capture something that dissolves even as we reach for it): “The reins as metaphor always assumed the rider wanted to go somewhere. But what if stopping is the destination? What if the horses, patient all these years, were waiting for me to finally get tired enough to let them rest?”

Breathlessness, I realized, isn’t about running out of oxygen. It’s about running out of the need to control even your own breathing. Hypervigilance of the self. That’s what we’ve made of consciousness in this modern age—or maybe it was always this way, and the Upanishads were trying to warn us. Brahman and Atman are one, they said, but we hear it as philosophy, as metaphysics, when really it’s instruction: stop trying so hard to be yourself.

There’s a line from Celan—Paul Celan, who understood something about voids and silences and the failure of language—he wrote: “Es ist alles anders” (Everything is different). And then later, in another poem, something like the world as a “thousand darknesses.” I don’t have the German in front of me now, but the feeling is there. When Nietzsche hugged that horse in Turin, when he finally broke, maybe he wasn’t going mad. Maybe he was finally going sane in a world that demands madness as the price of participation. Maybe that embrace was his horses telling him: you’re done now. You’ve pulled long enough. We’ll carry you from here.

Eleven years in the asylum. Eleven years of silence after a lifetime of words, words, words. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, The Gay Science—all that speaking, all that pronouncement. And then: nothing. Or not-nothing. Something else. Something that looks like nothing from the outside but might be, from the inside, everything. That eloquent silence Jöns recognized in the dead man. I want to share a verse from the Isha Upanishad — one of the ten major Upanishads everyone should sit with at least once in their life. Whenever I find myself in doubt, I return to this:

That is complete, and this is complete.
From that completeness arises this completeness.
If you remove completeness from completeness,
Only completeness remains.

Sometimes I wonder: The Double—is it complete, or incomplete?
Or maybe the reins were always completeness, but incomplete without The Double.

So perhaps that’s why it appeared in my life—this mirror, this echo—to show me what is real, what is not-nothing. If so, then yes… that’s a blessing.

I thought about my own writing, these past years. How much of it has been trying to prove something, to demonstrate my understanding, to show that I’ve read, I’ve thought, I’ve grasped. I have improved. The grasping—there it is again. The reins. The need to hold, to direct, to master. And all of it, every single word, has been breath spent trying to control breath.

When Dostoyevsky wrote about that beaten horse in Crime and Punishment—a little boy watching a peasant beat his horse to death, whipping it again and again because it can’t pull the impossible load. The boy runs to embrace the dead horse, kissing its face. And we read it as early trauma, as symbolic of Raskolnikov’s sensitive soul that will later crack under the weight of his theory about extraordinary men. But what if it’s simpler than that? What if it’s about recognizing that the horse was never supposed to pull that load? That the whole setup was impossible from the start?

And my load (it’s not milord!): trying to understand the hole instead of being the hole.

The morning was getting later. I made coffee—that ritual of mine, that small act of ordinary being—and I noticed my hands had warmed up. The coldness from the dream had faded. And with the warmth came something else: not resolution, not answer, but a kind of truce. The horses and I, we’d negotiated something in that in-between state, that hypnagogic territory where metaphor and reality haven’t yet separated into distinct categories.

Jung called it the transcendent function—this ability to hold opposites together without resolution. The conscious and unconscious in dialogue, not battle. And here’s what I realized, standing there with my coffee: I’ve been reading Jung wrong too. Or reading him right but applying him wrong. The transcendent function isn’t something you do. It’s something you allow.

Like breath.

You don’t make yourself breathe. You let yourself breathe. And when you’re running out of breath, it’s because you’ve been trying too hard to control the rhythm, to master the very thing that only works when you surrender to it.

The horses understood this all along.

So maybe this essay—this continuation—is my act of returning the reins. Not to take them back, but to acknowledge they were never really mine to begin with. That “my” senses, “my” thoughts, “my” volition—all of these possessive pronouns are the problem. The gap isn’t between me and truth. The gap is me. And truth is what remains when I stop trying to close it.

Running out of breath, then, becomes: finally breathing.

The horses are still there, patient as ever. And if tomorrow morning I wake up again with cold hands and the urge to take back control, well—that’s fine too. That’s the rhythm. Grasping and releasing. Effort and surrender. The chariot moves forward not because the charioteer is skilled, but because the horses know the way home.

And home, I’m starting to understand, isn’t a destination. It’s the movement itself. It’s being-in-motion. It’s the gap.

But here’s what they (philosophers and scriptures) don’t tell you about gaps—about voids, about that space between inhale and exhale where nothing happens and everything happens—they don’t tell you that the gap has texture. It has weight. Or maybe weightlessness, which is its own kind of gravity. I’ve been sitting here for an hour now, the coffee cold, watching dust particles in the morning light doing their slow drift, and I keep coming back to that image from my dream: my empty palm facing me, cold, and the horses watching with what I can only call—what? Concern? Recognition? Maybe horses don’t have expressions we can read. Maybe we project onto them what we need to see. That ontology of the blue wall had an expression which I had got right.

Heidegger wrote about Dasein—being-there, being-in-the-world—and everyone gets caught up in his terminology, his Germanic compound words that seem designed to obscure rather than illuminate. But what if he was just trying to say what my horses already knew? That there’s no separation between the being and the world, between the breather and the breath. Dasein isn’t a thing that exists; it’s existing itself. And the moment you try to grasp it, to hold it, to put reins on it—it becomes something else. It becomes das Man, the “they-self,” the inauthentic mode where you’re living according to patterns that aren’t yours, breathing rhythms you learned from somewhere else.

I think about all those years I spent—and here’s the embarrassing part, the part where the philosopher has to admit he’s been the fool in his own allegory—all those years trying to achieve authenticity. As if authenticity were a destination, a state you reach after sufficient self-examination and willpower. Trying to be authentic is like trying to fall asleep; the very effort defeats the purpose. You can’t will yourself into surrender. Which means—and this is where it gets vertiginous (my next behemoth book is about this Nausea), where the hole opens wider—surrender itself might be another form of control in disguise.

The horses didn’t ask for the reins back. I gave them. But was that giving a choice? Was it truly letting go, or was it strategic, calculated, another move in the endless chess game I play with myself?

 

Kierkegaard again—his pseudonymous authors, each one a different mode of existence: ethical, aesthetic, religious. He never wrote in his own name, not really. Always behind masks, always indirect. Because maybe the only honest way to speak about existence is to admit you can’t speak directly. I have hidden my identity too, many places, many times. You can only circle it, gesture toward it, let the horses pull you in the general direction while you pretend you’re still steering.

There’s a moment in Stalker (another favorite of mine; I have gone through this a hundred times)—another Tarkovsky film, because once you start with Tarkovsky you can’t stop; he’s like the visual equivalent of this kind of thinking—there’s a moment where the three men are lying exhausted in the Zone, and the Stalker says something about how when a man thinks he’s looking for happiness, he’s actually looking for suffering. That the room which grants your deepest wish is terrifying precisely because what we think we want and what we actually want are so catastrophically different.

What if I don’t actually want the reins back? What if this whole essay, this whole philosophy of surrender, is just another elaborate construction, another way of maintaining the illusion of control by intellectualizing its absence? Jung warned about this—about the inflation that comes from encounter with the archetypes, how the ego can identify with the Self and think it’s achieved something, when really it’s just found a more sophisticated prison.

My hands are warm now. Completely warm. Ordinary. And I notice—this is strange—I notice that I’m disappointed. As if the coldness meant something, signified something, and its absence is a kind of betrayal. We do this, don’t we? We take our symptoms and make them symbols, our sufferings and make them meanings. Nietzsche had his migraines, his half-blindness, his lonely walks in the mountains, just as me (except I am totally blind now), and he made philosophy from pain, yes, but he also made pain into philosophy—sacralized it, justified it, until the suffering itself became the point. I made my Who Will Bury the Dead God, The Outsider, The Unknown Existence of Being out of that disappointed being-ness.

When he collapsed in Turin, when he hugged that horse—was that the moment the pain finally stopped meaning something? When it was just pain, just an animal being beaten, just a man who couldn’t bear to watch? Eleven years of silence after that. What did he think about, if he thought? What did he dream, if he dreamed? Did the horses visit him there, in whatever landscape his mind had become? When I accepted the ontology (fate) of the blue wall, was that the pain I swallowed? Or was that the threshold I was standing on?

Anyway, I wrote in The Unknown Existence of Being about Kalaḥ—time, death, the dark one—and how the narrator watches human beings scramble for gaining on meaning, on purpose, on some assurance that their suffering isn’t arbitrary. But arbitrary isn’t the same as meaningless. This is what I’m only now beginning to understand. The horses don’t follow a path because the path has meaning. They follow it because that’s what horses do. And somewhere in that distinction lies something I can’t quite articulate yet, something about the difference between purpose and being-in-motion.

Camus wrote about Sisyphus, about imagining him happy, pushing that boulder up the mountain for eternity. And everyone quotes the ending, about revolt and absurdity and freedom. But what strikes me now is earlier in the essay, where Camus talks about the descent—that moment when Sisyphus walks back down the mountain to retrieve his boulder. That’s the moment of consciousness, he says. That’s when Sisyphus is aware of his fate. And I always read that as the moment of tragedy, the moment of recognition. But what if it’s not? What if the descent is when Sisyphus lets the horses lead? When he’s not pushing, not striving, just walking, just being in motion without the weight?

The gap, I said earlier, is courage. But now I want to revise that, or complicate it, or maybe just admit I was wrong—the gap is where courage dissolves into something else entirely. Something we don’t have a good word for. The Germans might have had one. Gelassenheit—Heidegger’s term for releasement, letting-be. But even that feels too deliberate, too much like something you do rather than something you stop doing.

My coffee is cold. I should make more. This is what ordinary existence is—these mundane interruptions, these bodily needs that don’t care about your philosophical revelations. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe the whole edifice of Western philosophy, from Plato onward, has been one long attempt to escape the body, to get beyond the horses, to pure reason, pure form, pure consciousness. And all of it—all of it—has been running from the one thing we can never outrun: that we are animals who think, not thoughts that happen to have bodies.

Nietzsche knew this. He wrote about it constantly. The body as the great reason, he called it. And yet even he, even he, couldn’t help but construct systems, pronounce judgments, make declarations. The will to power, the eternal return, the Übermensch—all of these are still attempts to grasp, to hold, to make sense. And maybe that’s fine. Maybe the oscillation itself is the truth. Grasping and releasing. The systole and diastole of consciousness.

I keep thinking about that dead man in The Seventh Seal, the one Jöns encounters. Eloquent in his silence. What does a dead man know that the living can’t learn? Or rather—what does he not-know that frees him from the burden of knowing? (Maybe the reason I keep telling my friends that I must die before forty) Death as the ultimate surrender, yes, but also death as the condition we spend our whole lives preparing for by practicing smaller deaths. Sleep each night. The dissolution of ego in love, in ecstasy, in exhaustion. Every time we let the horses lead, we die a little. And in dying, we live.

Running out of breath, I said this morning. But breath runs out regardless—that’s not the problem. The problem is thinking you can prevent it, thinking you should prevent it, building entire philosophies around the prevention of the inevitable. Schopenhauer again: life is suffering, desire is suffering, the only escape is negation of the will. But what if the will doesn’t need to be negated? What if it just needs to be unharnessed? Let it run where it will, the way horses run in open fields when no rider is there to direct them.

They still run. That’s the thing. Freedom doesn’t mean stasis. It means movement without destination, breath without control, being-in-motion without the burden of arrival.

The horses are still there. They’ve been there all along. Patient, waiting, ready. And I’m still here, still writing, still trying to think my way into something that can only be lived into.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll wake up with warm hands. Or maybe cold again. Maybe the horses will have wandered off, bored with my endless circling. Maybe the reins will be back in my palms whether I want them or not.

But today—right now—there’s just this: the gap, the breath, the motion.

The ‘hole’ getting wider. And somehow, despite everything, that feels like enough.