Every reader find themselves. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, readers would perhaps never have seen in themselves.
PROLEGOMENON:
Your answers — anyone's answers — may become for another reader just such an ātmanopticon: in our world where nothing ever happens the same way twice, truth resides in the reconstruction of events without precedent.
A practice: the questions invite an unguarded, thoughtful state of awareness. Whatever you write remains yours! Nothing in stored unencrypted on the server. What the answer discloses is something interior (அகம்) — a subject, the grammatical I, a formulation of truth.
Return after enough time (and a dose of a species of amnesia) to answer again. The earlier answers may seemingly belong to someone else; the one answering now is provisional. An other emerges from these memories fecund with friendship, laughter, success (and some failures)--from lived life! The questionnaire is a mechanic rendering the past legible in the present. It records an oh-so-ephemeral ego's predilections during what we hope & pray to be the long cross from birth to death of self.
This recognition adds no new person. It sees the ones already given — who answered then, who answers now, who will — as one light regarding itself. Find who sleeps.
That is what this instrument is for.
a gate:
we meet @ this gate:
What follow are not intended to be polite questions. Consider this an ice-breaker, and these are holes in the ice. Answer honestly, spontaneously and something cold touches the feet.