Day 11: Giriraj Dandavat Parikram Musings
- unlike the previous day, there is no “flow” this morning
- It’s like breaking through one constricting circle of resistance and experience the annulus of greater freedom, but within no time encountering yet a new constricting circle in the now realized fortress of concentric circles; another liminal space to be crossed. Sigh.
- The pain of becoming —ie the pain of transfiguration and apotheosis— and the pain of remaining as one is and developing all the little and big neuroticism that spring from the soil of stagnation is not the same.
- It’s a trade off— neuroticism for apotheosis or vice versus. Each obeisance representative of the choice being made moment to moment — every knee paining, elbow paining, heart resistant moment.
- My mind is brought to the ocean of devotees from one of our ISKCON youth yatras. All looking the same like the ocean of milk! But out of the ocean comes the moon, goddess laksmi, and before that that terrible poison. So the standardized forms (even of devotion communities/institutions) may need to be outgrown for true individuation before our Lord and Lady. But a terrible poison may have to be endured for it to be possible.
- What a strange paradox that to individuate, conformity to standardized forms (or maybe even ritual practices?) may stagnate, but only by a perfect conformity (of heart) to the Absolute (translated to and conflated with standardized religious forms) is individuation made possible. This spirit stuff full of these bewildering almost wilderness of paradoxes.
- Anyway, “Be different” (a sort of motto I’ve adopted over the years). The other option, as poetically and frighteningly put by Joseph Campbell is not giving: “Full circle, from the tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb, we come: an ambiguous, enigmatical incursion into a world of solid matter that is soon to melt from us, like the substance of a dream. And, looking back at what had promised to be our own unique, unpredictable, and dangerous adventure, all we find in the end is such a series of standard metamorphoses as men and women have undergone in every quarter of the world, in all recorded centuries, and under every odd disguise of civilization.”
- Down I go…just one more!
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