How do we practice "allowing"?

Photo: Geoffrey Dunn

At the heart of most philosophical and spiritual traditions is the invitation to “allow”. Sometimes words such as acceptance, submission and surrender are also used in this context. These are fraught words because they have associations of compliance and conformity. For many of us these words may bring sensations of disempowerment.

We do live in times of an intensification of conformity. Recent years have exacerbated division and even words such as community and tribe have taken on connotations of signing-up to ideologies and separating oneself from other ideologies. There is no space and time for nuance and plurality.

In this context “allowing” is an invitation to be approached attentive to the wisdom of the philosophies that hold such an invitation. “Yagna”, which has been narrowly translated as “sacrifice”, is the invitation in ancient Indian dance which goes to the sensation of “allowing”.

Why should we “allow”? What are we invited to “allow”? What is the constellation of “allowing”?

We are invited to invoke the Yagna body because it is a state of being that does not value memory, and accumulated knowledge including of oneself and the past. As such it encounters Reality as moment by moment unfolding. The proposal is that we cannot approach this with the mind because the mind is created from Time, and lives in linear movement of past and futures based on the past. We cannot simply state we divest ourselves of the past, because that is just a thought.

Yagna is ritual movement that allows for body-led experience of Time as the eternally unfolding present. It is both the death of Time and the immortalization of Time in the same movement. Ancient deities like Mahakala, who are invoked in the preparatory rituals of dance, were archetypes that supported this invocation as invocations of the paradox of Time.

There is nothing other worldly about ancient dance—it is pragmatic, grounded and of this world. Time is Reality. We have a life-Time in the body, this is Reality. Within this embodied finite Time is also the taste of infinity. In this paradoxical experience we taste the complexity and unknowable essence of Reality—Mahakala.

And Mahakala is vital to divest ourselves of the Hubris which is the essence of our mechanistic approach to Reality.

What do we “allow”? Some of the above reflections go towards this question already—we “allow” an encounter with Reality in its fullness of unknowability and mystery. We “allow” Reality to move us rather than the illusion that we manage and control Reality.

The most important sensation of “allowing” in the body is flow. Flow has become a pop-culture word largely implying smoothness and slowness. However, in dance flow simply means connections between movements. The dynamic of this connection will vary depending on the movements we wish to connect. It is like a river that flows over varying terrains and sometimes meanders, sometimes waterfalls, and sometime rushes. It is flow that connects seemingly disparate dimensions of Reality. Whereas our minds consider dualities as separation, flow in dance is about how our body holds the intelligence of connection when we get out of the way.

In a ritual archetypal dance, flow is invited between paradoxical sensations held in the space of the Deity. We do not explore flow at a personal story level—for we have left our personal narratives at the beginning of Yagna as the past.

What is the constellation of “allowing”? The Yagna ritual is archetypal invocation. It is not to be instrumentalised because any instrumental intention taints the ritual with the known and the past. We “allow” the invocation of the archetypes to reveal through the multi-sensorial body, the wisdom of infinite presence as Reality. This is not a realm for words because it is not the domain of the known and the knowable. However, the unique and essential invitation of dance as Yagna is the necessity of expression.

Yagna is not a movement towards interiority or introversion. Rather the invocation must be expressed, the Deities must dance, and the Rasa or sensation-wisdom that emerges must be shared amongst those who “allow” the receiving.

So why is Yagna translated as “sacrifice”? The sacrifice in Yagna is of our Hubris. And this is no easy ask and is to be honoured in our consciousness with the ferocity is requires. In ancient traditions we see images of the warriors offering their heads as sacrifice to the Goddess as symbolic of Yagna. Such is the ferocity of leaving the past and the known.

At the same time, Yagna is drenched in benevolence and heart. And this blooms when we have sacrificed the self-interest of our Hubris. The Deities and the gifts of their intelligence are of the nature of sensations—desire, fear, wonder and compassion. Without self-interest, when we invoke Yagna, we encounter the Divine as Reality, and as the everyday, moment by moment dance of our life-Time.