Introduction

Every three years I have a rebirth ceremony where I think deeply about my past, my future, my dreams and the trajectory of my Destiny.  During this time I change something fundamental about my life.  In the rebirth ceremony of 8/8/2020  where I gave birth to The Age of Dissemination, I decided to explore romantic relationships for the first time at the age of 39.  

I received some valuable feedback that this webpage on romance is 'navel gazing', which I learned is defined as "self-indulgent or excessive contemplation of oneself or a single issue, at the expense of a wider view."  For your pleasure, below is a picture of my hairy navel so that you may gaze at it as well <3. This writeup is primarily meant as introspection and self exploration.  I publicly post it because many people who have known me for a long time and have seen me grow have asked questions and they may find my responses interesting.  I also think it can be valuable to share different life journeys in the form of an honest diary to the public.  

On this page, I will answer the following questions:

<3   Why I did not date for 39 years   <3

For the last 39 years, my little spelunker and I have explored the gentle vastness of my virginity, never having tasted a kiss and never wondering whether that kiss carries Herpes Simplex Virus One.  Together, we have never even initiated a hug, saturated with romance, wet with hormones and dry with anticipation baked in the long evolutionary history of sex and reproduction. 

And before I explain why, I should say that unlike some others, the multilayered supple flower of my virginity is not rotten  and seething with fermented bitterness and anger.  Instead, I am really happy and content and superchill.  I really love where I am in life right now.  If I had to do it all over again, I totally would do it, again and again, the same way.  

The other misconceptions that sometimes people form is to assume that my celibacy is a form of religious chastity, which isn't true because I am not religious.  Similarly, I never actually renounced romantic relationships, I just never actively looked for them.  Some people assume that I am asexual, however, for better or worse, like mostly everyone else,  I am perpetually consumed by a churning hunger that only produces the rich milky butter of lust. 

Finally, while I don't advocate this lifestyle for anyone, I also don't dissuade anyone.  I think it is important to share different life journeys and experiences so that each person can personalize and construct their own unique path. 

I will reveal the reasons that I did not date in chronological order. 

Stage 1: Middle School

 Middle School was a battleground, there were fights almost every week and every morning, as we waited for the school to open, all the bro-adolescents would stand in circle-jerk formation spitting into a communal puddle of spit.  In the mess of Middle School, my hormones were just awakening and I can still remember when girls/women would elicit a confused warm fuzzy feeling and when that transitioned into an uncontrollable torrent of unforgiving and maddening frenzy.  In those early years, the two reasons below are why I did not pursue romance and both of those reasons have persisted into my adulthood.

Back then, when I was paralyzed by the new surge of hormones and where, imbalanced, everything was dizzy and blurry with an uncertain fog, I could not detect whether anyone was interested in me.  As the years went by and I gained wisdom and white hair and was blessed with baldness, my radar of romance nevertheless did not improve in accuracy.    In my new adventure into romance, I will first have to go on a side quest to refurbish my romance radar and receive training to decipher $ignal from noi$e. 

In my early years, I had no idea how to express the complex overlapping feelings of my identity pushed through the sieve of romance.  As I grew older, and cycles of depression and incremental healing led to the birth of my mythological universe SOMDEland, one of my greatest passions of life became creating collaborative relationships with anyone who was interested.  I deeply cherish and love collaborations, especially those that bring me way beyond the orbits of my own creative solar system.

To nurture these collaborations and honor everyone who was interested, it was really important to create a safe environment where anyone could approach me without having to worry that I would misconstrue their interest as a signal for romance. In doing so, my brotherly vibes grew extremely strong and became the signature quality of my personality, and so I never practiced expressing myself romantically and sexually.  

Stage 2: High School and Undergrad

In high school my personality died and was reborn every year. 

The sheer turbulence of my hormones tore straight through my core and I was so completely overwhelmed.  Their power frightened me and my destiny was so frail, like a lingering trail  of smoke loosely held together by fading memories.   Helpless, my every moment was punctuated with thoughts of romance. I would think about it all day and could not sleep at night. Day after day, I would spend literally hours a day, whether in class or at home, completely submerged in a parallel fantasy world of romance and most of the time it wasn't even explicitly sexual. It was me doing crazy backflips or heroically fighting villains and all through complex multiday intricate plot lines of romance. Most of this was a consequence of the misery of high school and undergrad, of having to spend every waking moment of my life trying to study.  The binge and purge of knowledge without anytime to digest along with my limited working memory and processing speed, created an environment of incessant procrastination and no relief.  The only escape I had were these fantasies and soon I became their prisoner.  The more I daydreamed, the more I procrastinated, and the greater my frustration grew and the only relief was more daydreaming.  They were a drug and I was addicted and it was debilitating. 

There was a part of me that wanted so badly and so desperately to be free, where I could allocate all of my brain power to think about epic ideas and to create things of breathtaking beauty that brought me pride. But I just couldn’t,  I was completely swept away and adrift, I was helpless, and this inability to control myself left me feeling so worthless. This desire for liberation from my thoughts of sex and romance, mixed with the toxic cocktail of self hatred and the inability to motivate myself led to the next point (point 4).  It is important to note that thoughts of romance and sex were not the primary reason for my negative state of being but rather a consequence of my inability to motivate myself and my inability to thrive in the high school and undergrad system.

In high school and undergrad I went through cycles of ravaging depression that would leave me paralyzed in a cesspool of demotivated inaction that fermented and bubbled with frustration.  I hated myself and I would write it on my hands and on my table.  Most of this was because no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t get good grades and that was the entirety of my identity.  Another part of it was that my father injected poison into our family and I watched my family spasm and suffocate.  Perhaps the final component was my inability to guide the flow of my mind to create anything of beauty.  I felt unaccomplished, stupid, and unable to control anything in my life. I felt like a pariah.  I remember that one time I felt so ugly that I decided not to look in the mirror for a full week, with the hope that somehow I would look better then. I was so disgusted with myself for feeling like that.  Why should I feel like this? Why were society's expectation like fangs tearing my flesh?

From these cycles of depression and my inability to control any of the outcomes in my life, I explored the old philosophy of detachment.  I tried to create self sustaining happiness from within while detaching from most external sources.  So, I reduced my desires for material possessions and for romance. I also detached from my fear of society’s expectations. I showed everyone my grades which used to embarrass me. I began my rebirth ceremonies, where I began cutting weird shapes into my hair.  I started wearing torn clothes and growing long beards.  At first I was so scared to go outside and I felt even more ugly.  As the hurricanes of failure tore me from outside and from within, over the years, I incubated within myself and slowly began to create my own universe, SOMDEland, that sustained me and eventually I learned to see beauty outside and within. 

Stage 3: After undergrad into now

Through cycles of depression and the cold and hot process of annealing and forging my new identity, and, through small victories scattered across a decade, a slow change began to germinate.   I went from self-hatred to a feeling of self-love and my internal monolog changed (this is the story of Zzymbr and my subconscious).  I began to balance.  I began to dream and grew the strength to create incremental steps to reach those dreams (here is a video that shows how I developed the incremental steps). Slowly I began depositing different islands of creativity on my website and began connecting them with woven storylines.  And as I did this, my perception of beauty and my Landscape of Reward fundamentally changed.  Because I could not draw support, sustenance, validation, or anything else from romance, my reward system was woven without it and I began filling that void with a new romance...and I fell in love with the world.  I could see a dynamic and nearly infinite universe of beauty all around me. My third eye of science opened and I found beauty in Nature, the Earth seen through photography, through drawings, captured in my clothing and woodworking artwork and in the meditation of music that I composed and especially in the symbolism of my mythological universe of SOMDEland and in the social interactions whether through educational outreach or through events and rebirth ceremonies. 

Because I felt content and happy and because my reward system had fundamentally changed and because I could see a vast universe of beauty, I no longer felt lonely and, even though I still had incessant urges, I no longer had a need for a romantic relationship, so, I never actively pursued romance.  I wasn't against it but I didn't need it either. 

It is important to note that I am not enlightened or anything crazy like that, I have many down moments, I was in a very negative place for the first 2 years of high school teaching and for the first 6 months of my life journey to India and for the first 2 years of graduate school.  It is also important to note that everything I described can be acquired when in a romantic relationship.  For me, it was easier to acquire these abilities in the absence of romance because it was a necessity in that situation. 

The final component of my romantic inaction was based in the feeling that my destiny was not fully bloomed.  After undergrad, as I became a high school teacher and then went on my life journey and then went to grad school and then became a postdoc, I came asymptotically close to reaching my dream...the dream to create something that I found breathtakingly beautiful.  However, I was afraid that the torrent of hormones and emotional attachment from a romantic relationship would rewire my Landscape of Reward and fundamentally change the trajectory of my destiny, which I felt had not fully solidified and strengthened.  I wanted to make sure that I was fully emerged from my cocoon and no matter what perturbations I would feel, my journey to my dreams and the emotional algorithm to approach it would be resilient and adaptable.  


A summary of this section can be found in the following video:

<3   Why I decided to start dating after 39 years  <3

To understand why I am considering starting my journey into romance, it will help to read the previous section which is jam packed with regurgitated self analysis.  However, consuming all of those processed thoughts will most likely lead to constipated attention and to prevent that, I will distill for you a short sugary summary.  The first 2 reasons for my romantic inaction were caused by inabilities which still exist within me.  The next 4 reasons were mostly about a deep desire to create something that I found breathtakingly beautiful before going on the journey of romance.  I wanted to be able to climb to a vantage point beyond the lingering fog of frustration, breath freely and unhindered, and see the rolling landscape of my destiny and chart a path to my dreams within the eddying winds of success and failure.  For me this path winded through detachment which included romantic inaction.  As mentioned in the previous section, designing one's destiny and exploring deep thoughts are all possible while in a romantic relationship.  I never dissuade anyone from pursuing romance.  It just turns out that for me, the absence of romance created an interesting habitat where ideas could be incubated and destiny could be hatched. The three reasons below explain how I went from a detached state of mind to one where I decided to actively explore romance. 


When I reached the reBirth Ceremony of 2020, for the first time I felt that I had a clear sense of my dreams and the flexibility to consume old ones and create new ones.  I felt as if I had developed clear communication between my conscious and subconscious minds and rewired my reward system so that I could motivate myself to implement the incremental steps needed to approach my dreams.  Now as my exoskeleton congeals and hardens, I am not as worried that I will be swept away and left completely adrift, and so, actively exploring romance is an option. 

My first metamorphosis's fruition is my website

Bubbling up from the depths of my subconscious-stream into my stream of consciousness, daily, have been thoughts of romance and sex intertwined with an ineffable feeling that my metamorphosis wasn't complete.  What led to the feeling that my metamorphosis is mostly complete?  While the answer has already been explored in the first section, I think, for my self-analysis it is important to reiterate the journey of metamorphosis from middle school until now. 

As my sexual self awoke in middle school and into undergrad, I felt out of control, lost and adrift.  I felt like a failure and grew and harvested self-hatred and self-disgust within myself, much of which was caused by an overpowering need to create something of beauty but having no way of even identifying what I wanted to accomplish and no way of controlling my motivation to pursue it.  Around that time I began incubating ideas within myself and I started my rebirth ceremonies, my  nastypose and my mythological universe as agents of transformation.  At this time in my life, since nothing was certain, my dreams were undefined and I couldn't motivate myself to do anything, I felt that I was not ready for romance, which could bring a torrent of hormones and possibly dislodge me from a path to my dreams  that was important to me. 

In my early twenties, when I became a high school teacher, my  landscape of reward slowly began to change.  To become an effective teacher, I had to open my universe and my heart and this caused me to change my destructive negative internal monologue into one that was positive and supportive.  As I became better at the artform of teaching, my self confidence grew and I created content that brought me pride.  By the end of my final year of teaching, I felt mostly content and happy.  Nevertheless, as I looked at my internet search history and kayaked through my stream of thoughts, I still felt mired in stagnation that reeked with unidentifiable dreams brimming with frustration.

For this reason I went to graduate school where I would hopefully learn to think anew and idea generate within the academic battle field.  While I dipped back into depressive states in the first few years, by the end of graduate school, I felt more capable of generating ideas and implementing self-motivated and self-driven projects, such as Deisortium and the WHS-Brandeis Summer Research Program.  Once I graduated, in the analysis leading to the Rebirth Ceremony of 2017, I realized that I still had a lingering fog of frustration that permeated deeply into the soil of my mind.  Most of this was because my dreams were still vague and  undefined.  It is then that I created a public document called, A Rough Plan For the Rest of my Life. 

The document, while rough and incomplete, added greater clarity and, yet, I still did not feel as if I had reached the point of metamorphosis.  I needed more momentum, more time to think, more time to analyze and compile and create a living portfolio.  I spent the next three years as a postdoc where I focused on giving birth to my website.  On my website, I began depositing all of my islands of creativity and as I transformed into a bird and obtained a bird's eye view of my birthing destiny, I saw how each island could connect in a vast intertwined network  and how I could create incremental bridges to realize my bigger dreams.  And so, came my rebirth of 2020, where for the first time in my life, I felt as if I had reached my point of metamorphosis. Some of this journey and how I rewired my motivation system is explained in this video.  Because of this, I feel that I am now ready for the intensity of romance. Even if I get my heart broken and lose my mind for a year, I know how to reach my dreams because it lives within the soul of my website. 

Experimentation with alcohol and marijuana  didn’t fundamentally change anything 

My rebirth ceremony of 2017 marked the finish of my PhD and the start of my metamorphosis.  As my exoskeleton formed, I felt the time had come to test the properties of my unfolding destiny.  While I had never renounced romance (I just didn't actively pursue it) I did completely refrain from drugs and alcohol.  The following memory I think summarizes why I decided to refrain from alcohol.  Back in the early years of undergrad, my roommates would try really hard to get me to drink. They would talk about how fun and liberating it was.  I remember that I once proposed that we go dumpster diving because at the time BU was installing ethernet (it was when the internet came to the dorms for the first time in history) and also renovating the science center, and there were all sorts of treasures in the dumpsters.  All of my roommates rejected the idea...but as the night wore on and they got totally 'shitfaced', I proposed the idea again, and now they all wholehearted agreed. And so, as a band on brothers, we all adventured deep into the night and as we jumped and rummaged through the dumpster like raccoons, the police came.  I was the only one who was sober and I explain how we wanted to give a new destiny to things that were otherwise destined to be trash. The police liked my answer and left.  It was a triumph and we all had so much fun. We giggled and laughed and explored and we found amazing things like broken microchips and metal poles.  The next day, none of my roommates remembered our adventure.  To me, I wanted to be free and lose my inhibition from the power of my own mind.  I wanted the live life and remember the exhilaration.  I did not want to give that license to a substance although I never minded if others used it.  For that reason, I never drank or did drugs. 

Then, at the age of 36, after my rebirth ceremony of 2017 and after finishing my phd, I drank alcohol for the first time and shortly after I smoked my first joint.  For three years I pushed my limit.  Once I even  had a drinking shamen guide me to the next level of drunkenness which eventually led me to vomit all over the Brandeis campus in a manner that would make any undergrad proud.  And yet, I was so disappointed  because no matter how drunk I got, I only felt dizzy, nauseous and motion sick. I didn't feel socially fluid, I didn't feel a loss of inhibition, I didn't feel exhilaration.  It could be that I am biochemically different than others, or it could be that since most people experiment with alcohol when they are young and also learning how to socialize and feel liberated from parents that they build an association between alcohol and those feelings.  Since I experienced alcohol later in life after I had already built other mechanisms, it had minimal positive effects on me and they didn't bring me anywhere that I couldn't go myself.  Either way, the minimal effect that alcohol and marijuana had on my reward system reinforced my confidence that I was nearing the point of metamorphosis and that the trajectory of my destiny was not so easily swept away. It also convinced me that my identity  didn't depend on refraining from drugs/alcohol or from not actively pursuing romance. 

Picture on left is the first time I drank alcohol (with the exception of the Blood of Christ which I tasted once as a child).  The picture was taken right after I successfully finished my PhD defense at the age of 36.  Around that time I also tried my first joint, make from the homegrown plant of a friend. 


2. When my subconscious and conscious minds disconnect, my subconscious reveals a desire to explore romance

As mentioned above, a significant portion of my journey on finding balance in my life has been because I was able to change my negative internal monologue into a positive one and because I was able to develop a clear and strong line of communication between my subconscious (Zzymbrr) and conscious (Vivekanand Pandey Vimal)  minds.  In general, because of this harmonious resonance, I am usually in a good place.  

However, there have been very rare events where the bridge of communication has fallen apart and revealed interesting properties of the chasm that separates my conscious and subconscious.  I have discovered that these rare events usually happen after I share the full span of my existence with people who later on, I feel, reject my identity.  By sharing so much, I realized, that I inadvertently  and unknowingly weave my reward system and sense of self worth into their value system.  When they reject me or ignore me, my system crashes and I feel worthless and, in the most extreme cases, the bruised lactic acid dripping from my hurting ego drowns the beauty I once saw in the world around me.  In those moments my perception itself becomes distorted and my reward system becomes flattened and riddled with attractor points that cause my mind to loop (check out my related artwork, "Nature's Fissures on the Earth of SOMDEland").  And then, although rare, within that disharmony where my subconscious is no longer hypnotically entrained to my conscious mind, my subconscious begins to have a temper tantrum. It is embarrassing to admit, but within the hole of hurt, my subconscious yearns for a romantic relationship where his bleeding rejected fragile male ego can feel loved and admired and appreciated by another.  It is surprising because the injury of rejection that elicited these feelings have always happened in nonromantic contexts.  These moments are frightening because it took me a lifetime to rewire my reward system to self generate validation, happiness, contentment and a view of beauty, and, all that it takes is a small hurricane of rejection to uproot everything and throw my mind into a prison of looping thoughts.  Nevertheless, these moments of disharmony and disconnection helped me realize that my subconscious still  has a desire to experience romantic relationships.  He waited all of these years for me to reach my first metamorphosis and now I should honor his desires. 

I have a need to practice harmonizing my subconscious and conscious minds after rejection of self

Perhaps the only fear that I have is that romance will completely overwhelm me and rewire my entire landscape of reward that has taken decades to build.   Right now as I write this, I feel so good and my mind is so clear.  I feel free and I never feel lonely and I see beauty all around me.   It is scary to think that romance may create an irrevocable dependence. I say this because I have seen several people make a similar transition from having never experienced romance to becoming fully immersed in it.  For the vast majority, after the initial positive spike, they all float down to the same baseline as they were before romance. The only difference is that they become dependent on having romantic relationships to maintain the same level of happiness they had from before.  If you take away that relationship, they no longer can stay at the same baseline and instead precipitously fall.  This idea of dependence isn't specific to romance, this is just how we function.  When I was addicted to Qtips my baseline of happiness did not improve, however I needed to clean my ears multiple times a day just to maintain my usual level of happiness.  Romance is stickier than Qtip-addiction because it taps into a genetic evolutionary river of behavior that is written deep within our behavior. 

Through introspection I have realized that when I am far away from the attractor point of romance, I can be very content and happy and don't even have a strong desire to explore it. However, once I am near that attractor point, I will emotionally attach and I need practice living within its gravitational pull and I need practice falling into the hole of rejection and developing the mental muscles to climb out.  That is, one motivating reason to date is perhaps to gain the practice, flexibility and strength to withstand waves of rejection while maintaining peace and tranquility within my subconscious. 

This drawing, made for the following series, shows the personified representation of my subconscious (Zzymbrr) who has fallen into a fissure/attractor point on the Earth of SOMDEland, which is my mythological universe that represents my subconscious mind.  The fissure depicted in the drawing is Nature who has embedded certain expectations of justice, love, hate, sex and violence that may be inherent to the Human.  Therefore this fissure represents anything that can cause your mind to loop, such as being in a depressive or angry state or being consumed by romance. Usually SOMDEland  is beautiful, lush, peaceful and tranquil and I have no desire to explore these fissures, however once I am nearby, their gravitational pull draws me in with emotional attachment.  If I fall in, it changes (distorts) my perception of reality and perpetuates looping thoughts.  For example, when I feel depressed, the same world feels different and I reinterpret experiences that often furthers my narrative of depression.  The fissures are not evil or bad but rather are just processes of the mind.   My time has come to spelunk into these fissures and explore them and understand them and grow the muscles needed to be able to emerge from them. 

If you are interested in experiencing this journey, you can play the video game that I developed with a friend. In the final stage you fall into a fissure and go through a klien tube. When you emerge, the world is the same but perceived entirely differently.  This link will allow you to freely download the game. 

3. New collaborations derived from romance are interesting

I love forming collaborations and explore new creative spaces. Dating, to me, is just another avenue to explore fascinating people and new ideas.  While all of my non-romantic collaborations completely satisfy me, I am sure that romance will motivate a whole different line of artwork.  There is something very ancient and primal about courting, mating, dating and sex and I am curious what sorts of rituals and artwork I/we create when submerged in those vibes. 


The same exact content as in this section can be found in this 30 minute video: