Paul Alexander Wehner, 40, is a kind of a person that’s difficult to describe and easy to experience. He’s one of those to whom paradoxes make perfect sense. A technologist who’s increasingly getting spiritually engaged with self, in the process, the artist in him is accentuated. Though, in this day and age, science is only demystifying mythology and, therefore, there’s no inherent disconnect between the two. Paul is the best of the two worlds. He took a long break in India to expedite this transition. A journey unto self is a self-discovery. And a bit in him shifted. He painted and he wrote copiously.
Paul, an American, was in India for a few months, good part of the trip was spent alone in Rose cottage in Hartola, Uttarakhand. He fasted for a week, this was when he was writing prolifically, seven hours a day, flood gates opened, interior monologue was cathartic, the stream of consciousness shaped a narrative. I saw his notebooks, and, it seemed, thoughts nearly outpaced his writing at a frantic pace.
He was not notionally alone; his solitude was breached by the intense connections he formed along his journey. He dealt with their strong presence so that he could employ his solitude to have a dialogue with himself. And it happened.
The intensity of his written words reveals the unwritten. He was possessed, it seems, when he wrote with frantic prolificness. Writing as an experience can be dopy. And this ability, this drive, as he says, are ‘gifts gifted to me by God.’
The panacea to all that ails is self, knowing oneself. Self can be a lingering mystery that manifests variously, and never really fails to surprise (I’m drawing this from my own experience). Ego, this self-seeking living, where mind impersonates self, can be misleading. We are stifled by our own world view and who we think we are. It is all so simple which makes it very complicated. Mystical. This tryst with self is demystifying myths, is illuminative. Paul has the scientific temper to do it spiritually.
He would go out on bike rides, for the first time in a decade, on the narrow winding streets of the mountain. Adventure is what he sought, and the uncertainty of exploring a new place was alluring. He took some great pictures of bountiful nature and people. He met up with young lads playing cricket, and a local hosted him while he took pictures of the setting sun behind the hill with dark silhouettes of vegetation accentuating the foreground.
When we met in a coffee shop in Delhi, he had green tea. We talked about nothing in particular, it was an open discourse, a freewheeling interaction for a good two hours. A couple of days later, we met on a sunny afternoon by the pool of a five-star hotel. I tell him that this profile will be an interior monologue inspired by his being—benign yet intense.
I like that he has been a student all his life, learning new skills is often followed by excelling in practicing those skills. He did a degree in management science from MIT and fifteen years later did master in public administration from Harvard University. He has founded many tech companies, and for more than 5 years is the CEO of XR Ventures, where he ‘advises startups disrupting the global economy, helping them shape their product vision and build high-impact teams.’ Paul has learned various facets of filmmaking, is a photographer, a standup comedian, and what not?! And, he habitually does well.
A big crisis in life is when there’s no crisis. Choice-overload can be paralysing. There is a need for a break from the past to start afresh. I’m positively jealous of him that he can take a few months off and travel to sort of ride the tide of change.
I explained things I do to know more about him. I told him that I sketch people in the nude for they reveal a certain facet of me to me, variously, incrementally, in a piecemeal manner, yet, it is profound and enriching. And the more I know about myself in this way, whets my curiosity to know more. He interjects to say, ‘that means you don’t know yourself,’ and emphasises the real way to know self is to look inwards (without saying: rather than to convince others on some pretext to shed clothes).
Paul let me give a cursory look at his poems and writings, and I have to say, he’s unambiguous about many amorphous things, ideas and feelings come thick and fast to him when he writes. And when you get to describe the divine, one of the best ways of doing it is to talk loudly about what it does to you, and in the process, one gets to understand, the unmanifested manifest, or the manifested unmanifest. God. The given.
The intensity of his written words reveals the unwritten. He was possessed, it seems, when he wrote with frantic prolificness. Writing as an experience can be dopy. And this ability, this drive, as he says, are ‘gifts gifted to me by God.’ I’m waiting for his writings to get published.
Kumbh, where he spent a few days with his shaman friend from Mexico. Spiritually dusty was his stay. Some of the sadhus, he felt, were professional about being a mystic. There’s a burgeoning transcendental economics at play in the mortal realm. He twice bathed in Ganges. An elderly woman watched his possessions when he took holy dips holding her husband’s hand, a Brahmin priest, and they hit it off despite not speaking a common language.
Mother has had a profound impact on him. Love is engagement. It’s about connecting with people and letting the energy flow, glows as it flows. And thinking of him, no one tag does him justice, perhaps, that’s why he’s a creative polyhistor and does well in all his chosen endeavours be in tech, art, finance, economy, writing and other life choices he’s made. The ambiguity offers him a certain clarity. The journey unto self that brings him to India is best described in his own words, to figure out ‘what I need to be to be the very way I want to.’
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