Gregory: Ok, what is your name?

Rishav: My name is Rishav.

Gregory: And your age?

Rishav: Thirty-two.

Gregory: Your profession?

Rishav: Illustration is my side hustle. Graphic designing is my side hustle. But I’m really, I am a restaurant owner. Small restaurant owner.

Gregory: Where are you from? Where’s your home?

Rishav: My home is in Varanasi. It’s in India.

Gregory: Ok. I’d like you to remember, Rishav, your childhood. Any age under 18.

Rishav: Ok.

1.

Gregory: What do you know?

Rishav: What do I know as a child, obviously?

Gregory: Yes.

Rishav: Well, I know that nothing is impossible. If anything is possible by any human on this planet . . . like if something, it may be a skill or a hidden talent, or maybe a miraculous talent. If it is possible for any human, even a single human, then it is possible for anyone else as well.

Gregory: Mhm, and this perspective you developed at what age?

Rishav: I think I was five or six.

Gregory: Mhm, and what was impossible for you that became possible through this mindset?

Rishav: I always . . . my father always told me that if you think that something is possible you are going to achieve it, anyway. So that mindset, that conditioning, helped me . . . I won’t say it helped me achieve anything substantial, but even in my daily life, the smallest of challenges . . . I always had that attitude. I started believing that if there’s a problem, I can solve it. I can research about it, I can read about it, and then I can solve the problem. Instead of anyone else or any expert. If there’s an expert, then I can be that expert as well.

Gregory: Mhm, I understand.

2.

Gregory: Rishav, please describe what this planet smells like.

Rishav: When I was a kid, I used to live in a hill station. I lived there for nineteen years. Nineteen years of my life. So . . . my mornings . . . it was always cold. Even in the summers. It was colder than in other places in my country. So for me, the earth smells like fresh snow, sometimes . . . sometimes like the fresh smell that comes from the soil when it rains. That is what it smells like.

Gregory: Mhm, alright.

3.

Gregory: How is it possible to forgive the unforgivable?

Rishav: As a child?

Gregory: As a child.

Rishav: [Silence] I believe by thinking that I was forgiven when I made mistakes. My parents never made me feel like a sinner. Yeah, my parents never made me feel like I was committing any mistakes. Or they never blamed me, or never taunted me, never called me with names. So I think that taught me that if someone has done something wrong unless it’s like something like murdering and all those things.

Gregory: Yeah, so how do you forgive that?

Rishav: As a child, I don’t forgive that. Actually, I feel that it’s not in my power to forgive that. Or even hold them accountable for that. As a child, I believe that God is going to intervene in this. It will settle the things. Whatever it deems right. I don’t think I can do anything about it.

4.

Gregory: What makes you happy?

Rishav: Trying something new. Doing something new and seeing it manifesting after putting in efforts. If I see someone singing, a musician . . . if I see someone playing the guitar, I feel like that I must learn this and then actually holding the guitar in my hands and giving it a try, and even if I see the slightest of improvement from day one . . . then, I think that made me happy. I think it still makes me happy . . . things like that.

5.

Gregory: Describe a world in which God exists and a world in which God does not exist.

Rishav: Ok.

Gregory: Let’s go with the one where God exists . . . first.

Rishav: [Long silence] I think both denotations. God and no God exist in the very same world. Among us. In a way, I’ll explain it . . . I wake up in the morning. I take out my bicycle, start riding it towards my school. I see the sun is shining . . . as kids, even as adults, but especially as kids, we really like puppies. We like small animals, animal babies . . . so when I used to see them, I really questioned that something as beautiful as this cannot be created unless there’s God. There has to be God if there’s something this beautiful. And when I’m using the word beautiful, I don’t mean its physical features. I mean the way it is. The way it jumps, the way it howls. Its voice . . . and the emotions, the feelings. The hominal search.

How can something be so beautiful and so lovely?

And as humans, we can feel some kind of positive hominal search inside them when they see kids. Maybe I had a bad day, my teacher might have scolded me that day . . . and then when I’m coming back to my home, a small child smiles at me. Magically, all my pain vanishes. That’s magic.

Gregory: What if someone that doesn’t believe in God sees the same in that child, same smile . . . and gets inspired by that smile?

Rishav: Yeah, I believe there’s God in that person’s world, but he doesn’t recognize this. Maybe his mindset, his conditioning has been so bad. As if there’s some kind of blinding sunglass. And that’s why he’s unable to see past it. His mindset, his thinking is confined in certain axes. And that’s why he thinks, he assumes that there’s no God.

Gregory: But that human . . . Let’s suppose that human feels all the feelings that you feel . . . is susceptible to love just the way you are, except he or she doesn’t consider the source God.

Rishav: True.

Gregory: Is it possible?

Rishav: Yeah, I’ve met quite a few people who say that “Okay, how can I believe in God?” or “How can I believe in anything that I cannot see? Who has told you that there’s God?”

They ask questions like that.

No, I haven’t seen God. Then they come to ask me, “Okay, so you are brainwashed by the elders and the social conditioning. There’s religion, there’s God. God said this, God said that.” I say to them, “No, I don’t believe that.”

Gregory: The source is invisible, though.

Rishav: Yeah.

Gregory: So it can be interpreted in many ways.

Rishav: Sure, absolutely. Personally, I feel that any person who actively, or consciously, says that “I don’t believe in God” . . . they actually, subconsciously, believe in God.

There’s no person, there’s no human who doesn’t subconsciously believe in God.

Gregory: What is God to you?

Rishav: God to me . . . is an entity who doesn’t have the same sense of rights and wrongs as we humans have. What I mean by that is we have this tendency—no matter when we define Gods or superheroes or any supernatural being, no matter how we define their structures—we try to project our best selves on them.

You’ll always see people telling same, “God said this . . . God said, ‘if you hurt children, you’re going to hell’ or ‘you’re going to pay for this.’ God said, ‘this is bad.’ God said, ‘killing is a sin.’ God said, ‘helping the poor is very good.’ ”

I think . . . God’s ways do not have the kind of rights and wrongs that we have. What I mean by that is the way we define that this is right and wrong, God doesn’t define those things as right and wrong as we do.

Gregory: So you don’t think God has anything to do with religions then?

Rishav: Yeah, I don’t think so. Religion is a different thing. Religion is manmade. When I say that I’m not religious, people say that I’m anti-God. No, I’m not anti-God. Just because I don’t believe in God the way you do, doesn’t mean I’m anti-God.

Gregory: Mhm. So by God, can we say that you believe in some supreme source of power?

Rishav: Absolutely!

Gregory: Okay.

Rishav: There are so many things we cannot explain if there’s no supreme entity. Superior entity than us.

6.

Gregory: What is your most vivid memory?

Rishav: As a child.

Gregory: From your childhood.

Rishav: When I was a kid, when I was four, five, or six years old . . . I have an elder brother, he’s six years older than me. So in the morning, when we woke up, we used to ask our dad, “we want to ride a horse, we want to ride a horse.” It has become a morning ritual.

He would say, “I’m in no mood today, please!” We would say, “No, please, dad, please, please, please!”

Gregory: Every day? [Laughs]

Rishav: Yeah, every day. And he would then get up on the bed and he would lie on his stomach with his elbows above… What I mean is, with his elbows on the bed and . . .

Gregory: Mhm, mhm.

Rishav: And I and my brother would ride on his back . . . and we would ask him to imitate the movements of the horse. [laughs] And we would keep doing it for half an hour . . . and that is how most of our mornings started. No matter how our dad was tired . . . he would comply. [laughs] There was no way out.

7.

Gregory: So, the last question for you as a child.

What will be the kindest thing you do when you’re older?

Rishav: As a child?

Gregory: As a child . . . that you thought of.

Rishav: Okay. I’ll adopt as many homeless children as possible. As much as my finances support me. I’ll adopt as many children and try my best to give them the best life possible.

_

Gregory: Please answer the next seven questions from your perspective today.

Rishav: Okay. As an adult.

Gregory: As an adult.

_

8.

Gregory: What is going to be in your suitcase on the day of departure -to another planet- (literal or symbolic)?

Rishav: My suitcase or briefcase will have lots of letters. Letters to my loved ones, obviously. And people with whom I couldn’t reconcile my broken relationships.

So my suitcase or briefcase is going to have a lot of letters to them. I’ll be thanking them and I don’t mean that in an ironic sense or sarcastic sense. I’ll be thankful to them. And whatever happened, I think when we are at the end of the road when we are standing at the end of the road . . . ok, he betrayed me; she did wrong things to me and all those things . . . those things don’t even exist at the place where we are going to leave this world. I think that we always carry a part of every person we meet and talk to. Even for a small while.

Like, today I’m talking to you or you’re talking to me. It’s . . . The probability is very high that we are not going to talk after twenty years. Maybe we are going to meet . . . we don’t know. We don’t know . . . The world is an amazing place. But no matter what, we are going to carry a small part of each other within ourselves.

9.

Gregory: How many lives would you like to live?

Rishav: Just this one.

Gregory: Why no more?

Rishav: I think the mere fact that any living creature has life . . . it brings pain. Even the smallest of things. You got to experience this or that because you’re alive.

But the thing is, if I had not been born, I wouldn’t have known that, okay, I’m missing this.

You regret something when you know that there is something. When you, when you don’t know there’s something like, if I know there’s a chocolate, there’s this ABC chocolate that tastes very good. But for some reason it is out of my reach, then I’m going to crave for it. And if I don’t get it, I’m going to regret it.

Gregory: But now that you know that it exists, this life exists, wouldn’t you want a different experience, maybe?

Rishav: Yeah, I understand. I think that kind of thirst is never going to end. And if, suppose I say that, “Okay, dear God please grant me even more life, I want to live, I want to experience new things, I want to see the world with a different perspective, from a different country, from a different body.” And I know, by the time I’m on my deathbed, in my next life, I’ll again want to be in the third one. And then the fourth one, the fifth one.

Gregory: So it’s never going to be enough.

Rishav: Yeah. It’s never going to be enough.

Gregory: But it’s enough for you now, though. According to your answer, it’s enough for you now.

Rishav: Because there, um, are two words. There’s a word want. And there’s a word need. I understand that, I personally feel that needs should always outweigh your wants. In any aspect of your life. That’s how you live a good life. That’s my perspective, obviously. I cannot say that it should be . . . this is how everyone should think. I’m not saying that.

Gregory: But you’re given the opportunity. Would you take it?

Rishav: Yeah. [Silence] If I, if, if God tells me that, “if you don’t take this opportunity, everything is going to be zero for you. There will be no afterlife. There will be nothing. [Laughs] You won’t go to celestial bodies or something. You won’t experience an afterlife or anything else.” Then I’ll say that “I don’t want that opportunity. It’s very good that you can achieve that zero.”

Gregory: I’m misunderstanding you. Would you reiterate, please? So you’re given another opportunity.

Rishav: Yeah.

Gregory: And you’re not taking it because God is telling you what again?

Rishav: If God, um, because God is telling me that if you don’t take this opportunity, then there will be no afterlife. That everything will turn into dust for you.

Gregory: You’ll vanish.

Rishav: Yeah, you’ll vanish. You’ll not experience anything in any form.

Gregory: You’d rather vanish than come back—

Rishav: Yeah, exactly. Suppose if God told me that “If you don’t take this opportunity you’re going, you’ll have an afterlife. Or maybe many afterlives. Different experiences.” Then I would say, “No,” then I’ll take the opportunity to be born again. As a human or maybe any . . . Probably as a human [laughs] on earth.

Gregory: You would rather have another life on earth than an afterlife?

Rishav: Yeah.

Gregory: You don’t like the idea of an afterlife?

Rishav: Yeah, I don’t like the idea of an afterlife. I don’t like the idea of reincarnations.

Gregory: Reincarnation in any form?

Rishav: Yeah.

Gregory: Not in this reality, even? You have no idea in what reality? In what form? You are opposing all of this?

Rishav: Yeah.

Gregory: So you’re okay with being shut down completely at the end of this road?

Rishav: Exactly. Exactly.

Gregory: Would you please explain why?

Rishav: Yeah. Um, I think in almost all religions, and cultures, and most people all around, tell us, teach us, and condition us into thinking, “Be thankful to God that he or she gave you life.” That God gave you life. Why should a pressure cooker or a refrigerator be thankful to a human that, okay, you made me a refrigerator?

Gregory: But a refrigerator is not a sentient object though, right?

Rishav: Yep. Yep. That’s our, that is our perspective. We are as disposable, as refrigerators, as chocolate wrappers. No matter how much we like to think that we humans are very important or human lives are very important, or any living creature is more important than a nonliving thing. Ultimately, everything is matter.

Gregory: What about consciousness? What do you think about consciousness?

I have mixed feelings about it. Because we as humans haven’t reached that level of enlightenment that we can actually define, or understand consciousness, or establish any strong evidence in any form that okay, consciousness stays in this form or for this long. Or that way . . . here or there.

Gregory: It’s not detectable in other words.

Rishav: Yeah, yeah.

Gregory: So because there is no evidence, you tend to dismiss it.

Rishav: No, it’s not that there’s no evidence that’s why. It’s like, we don’t know the shape and form, or how long does it exist. And all those things. Suppose there’s consciousness, and when a person dies, leaves the body, the consciousness, the conscious mind, the consciousness remains. For how long?

Gregory: What if time doesn’t exist? Why do you care about how long, or what shape or form?

Rishav: That’s what I’m saying. If there’s no time, time limit to it . . . I am highly skeptical about this that . . . How is it going to help anyone? Or any dimension? Or how is it going to fulfill any purpose? An actual purpose.

And when I say an actual purpose, what I think is . . . we are actually, we humans, and all the living creatures on earth, or planets or everything that exists is actually there to fulfill some purpose of God. Or maybe it’s not God, it’s someone who are superior than us.

Gregory: Mhm, and that purpose manifests in what form?

Rishav: The purpose, um, what I mean is that we cannot ascertain the purpose. I mean, someone who’s or who are superior to us . . . suppose we are mere machines to them, like a cell phone, like I said, “an AC, a refrigerator.” And we are fulfilling some kind of purpose. And since we are on the receiving end, like we are, we are the one serving, we are never going to know what is the purpose we are fulfilling. Just like a refrigerator never knows.

Gregory: No, I understand. So we know what the refrigerator does. What it produces for us. Would you theoretically assume what you produce that might be of help for that supreme entity?

Rishav: Yeah, sure, just like the refrigerator is helpful to us. But there’s no point of the refrigerator being thankful to us.

Gregory: Okay, and what is your purpose? What do you produce for that supreme entity is what I’m asking?

Rishav: We help run some kind of function, some function that helps in running the universe, as we know, what we call “universe.” We are a component together, together we are a component that runs a part of the universe. And I don’t know what that part does to our supreme. But I feel so.

Gregory: Collectively? Or individually as well?

Rishav: Collectively, collectively.

We tend to give ourselves a lot much value than we actually have. We value ourselves more than necessary.

Gregory: Mhm. Would you put yourself on the same level as, let’s say, an ant? Do you do more, in other words, than the ant does? Are you valued more?

Rishav: I don’t think so. I don’t think so. It’s not more or less, it’s about performing a different function.

Gregory: Mhm.

Rishav: That’s what I think.

Gregory: Okay.

10.

Gregory: Rishav, what should be forgotten and what should be remembered?

Rishav: Everything and anything that brings a sense of resentment or grudges . . . those things should be forgotten. Forget how it made you feel.

Gregory: Mhm. And what should be remembered?

Rishav: That no matter what, times change. No matter how bad you feel. No matter how hopeless you feel. Sometimes you just have to keep repeating to yourself that ok, this shall pass. This is not going to stay the same. Even if you don’t get the feel of it. There are many extreme situations in life which cannot be undone. No matter how much we want or think or pray for. There are things we cannot change. We cannot go back to where they used to be. We feel horrible and feel that this is the end . . . Now nothing can go right in our lives.

The thing is, keep telling yourself that maybe this particular thing is not going to resolve. But a few days later, or maybe a few months later, maybe a few years later, we are going to have a complete change of our perspectives.

We don’t really actively believe in the power of perspective. It can change everything. Even if you keep fighting against it, like okay, I’ll stay the same, I won’t change my perspective. You will never know when the world and its experiences and incidents and accidents in your life, actually change your perspective. That’s evolution. We cannot stop it. That is how we are wired.

So if we just sustain, survive for those bad times, for those extreme moments. If we just sail through them.

Gregory: Are you an optimist?

Rishav: Yeah, absolutely!

Gregory: And you’re okay with being shut down at the end of the road.

Rishav: Yeah! I didn’t say that with any sense of depression, or sorrow, or frustration.

Gregory: Do you suffer here?

Rishav: Not actively. Not as bad as many people do. This is how it is.

Gregory: Mhm. So there’s a lot of pain in your life.

Rishav: Yeah. Actually, they give meaning to life. Those painful things.

Gregory: Mhm.

Rishav: I think, the best thing that one can achieve . . . any living creature can achieve is getting off this cycle of reincarnation or rebirths and life.

You get dissolved into the ultimate truth.

Gregory: You get dissolved into the ultimate truth . . . which is?

Rishav: The creator . . . God.

11.

Gregory: Rishav, what would you like to know?

Rishav: When I was seventeen, at most sixteen, I was sixteen or seventeen. I remember I was sitting on my terrace and having a conversation with my friend. It was late night. I remember asking him, “Have you ever imagined if there was nothing?” And he was like, he didn’t understand my question. And then he looked at me and I told him, I’m saying, “Imagine if there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. No humans, no planets, no stars, no galaxies, no Milky Way, nothing! If there was no creator, there was no God, then?”

And I realized that is where our brain stops. That is the limit we are not ought to cross.

Gregory: Mhm.

Rishav: We are not meant to answer that question. We are not meant to understand that. We humans have this tendency to understand only those things which have a start and which has an end. And even if something doesn’t have an end, we understand only those things which had a start. We are fine if this thing or this man or this creature is going to live to eternity. But we are not very welcoming of this idea that this certain thing or that certain thing had no start. It never started.

Gregory: But there’s also a theory where people say, people believe that there was always eternity. There was no beginning, no end.

Rishav: That is exactly the only possibility we can think of. With our human brains obviously. Maybe there are even greater things or greater notions which are beyond these things like eternity, and endless.

I’m sure . . . I’m not sure, but there could very well, be words or notions, which, which go above these words such as eternity, and endless, and something that didn’t have any start or something which didn’t, which is, which has no end. I’m sure there are notions which are higher than these. We are just incapable of thinking beyond that.

Gregory: Mhm. Let’s go back to nothing for a minute or two. What do you think of it? And what would you like to know? So the question is, what would you like to know? Would you like to be introduced to nothing?

Rishav: It’s like a black hole. You cannot experience nothing. We humans, that’s the irony, we humans cannot experience nothing. Because if there was nothing, how do you experience it? Because there’s just nothing, no atoms. Nothing! Just . . . there’s no God. There’s nothing! Blank. Zero.

Gregory: So is it eternal nothing or just nothing?

Rishav: Eternal nothing. Because it’s nothing. Yeah, nothing.

Gregory: So there’s no difference between eternal nothing and nothing?

Rishav: From there, I don’t think so.

Gregory: And how can there be something from nothing though? Right? The trivial question that we ask ourselves.

Rishav: Exactly.

Gregory: So what do you think about that?

Rishav: [Silence] I think that is where we switch, as we like to call it, that is where we switch dimensions.

In other dimensions, in things which we are not habituated to think of. About things which we don’t understand, we will never understand, about a place, about a world which we cannot even call a world, where the rules are not the same.

Gregory: So we cannot comprehend that information.

Rishav: Yeah, exactly. Even when we think about aliens, and imagine about aliens, we give them all those scary shapes and funny shapes and all those things. Why are we even giving them shapes . . . or physical form?

Gregory: Do you think there are some that have a physical form?

Rishav: There must be, there could be. Obviously, we cannot ascertain anything, for sure. But yeah, there must be. If we, being humans, can imagine it . . . we are very little things. Yet if we can imagine it, I’m sure there are.

12.

Gregory: Rishav, would you describe yourself to non-human intelligent life, please?

Rishav: In words?

Gregory: In words . . . preferably.

Rishav: That’s, that’s [Laughs] . . . that’s something.

[Silence] Don’t believe us. Don’t believe most of us. If you see any creature like me, run south.

13.

Gregory: What is in the middle between good and evil?

Rishav: Reality.

Gregory: Mhm.

14.

Gregory: Ok, and the last question. What makes you happy?

Rishav: Learning. Learning about the world. Thinking . . . learning the fact that I know nothing. This gives me immense pleasure. The more you dive into something, any topic, the more you learn. Oh my God, I know nothing about it! I used to think that I know a lot about it, if not all of it. I used to think, okay, I’m an expert in something . . . there’s no end to know about something, to explore something. There’s no end to it.

_

The Stoic

Fear no ripple,
Dread no sail.
Trieth nonchalance,
You’ll never fail.