The unease of mystery

Photo: Geoffrey Dunn

In recent times, I have encountered many people in my programs share with me about their feelings of unease. Of course, there is plenty in the world now to make people uneasy. We may feel uneasy because we cannot see a way through, a solution or a destination.

Many of us respond to this by signing up to some solution, any solution. A plan of action seems to be the way out of the unease. Of course, this may be a necessity for some of us and a wise way of encountering the situation. I am thinking of people whose lives have been overturned by flooding in Australia and how they have to act to save their homes in the middle of their anguish and suffering.

For those of us where that unease is more internal, a mechanical course of action may be sensed as inauthentic and an escape. We may feel an invitation to dwell in the mystery, the unknowability that the unease holds at its core.

Mystery has largely become a romantic notion in our times. Having disconnected it from ancient ritual traditions, mystery becomes a sort of aspirational space for everything we desire, and which we do not always find in our ordinary lives.

Ancient ritual traditions that invoked mystery inevitably had rather ferocious deities. This signaled something about the nature of mystery and its experience in our consciousness.

In Indian dance tradition, there is a deity called Mahakala. In the Rasa philosophy or the inquiry through sensation and dance, Mahakala is the archetypal deity of Bibhatsa, which is the sensation of revulsion bordering on terror.

Mahakala is darker than the darkest hour of a new moon night—that is He is in practice invisible energy thereby provoking fear and terror in us. We are worshippers of light. We like everything lighted up and clear and visible. Many centuries ago, across many traditions of the world, we moved from the worship of Night to the worship of Day. Sky became more important than the darkness of Earth. Mind and its ability to separate, label and define, became more important than the body and its nonlinear, nondual, and inclusive intelligence.

The night and darkness became invocations of ignorance and evil. Even today we refer to times of chaos as “dark ages”. And we wait for light to lead us into enlightenment.

As worshippers of light, the dark waters of unknowability make us uneasy. This unease is a potent and visceral sensation. We have little intelligence about this quality of revulsion and aversion because we flee from it with narratives of transformation into our desired destinations.

Mahakala is the invitation to inquire into the unease that is the essence of mystery. It is that inner conflict within us that go to the very core of our “swabhaava” or Self-expression. The Self here is that which underpins all the roles and narratives which we have acquired, and with which we have costumed ourself through our life. There is an inevitable unease in times of mystery when easy mechanistic solutions fail to stifle this sensation. That is the Mahakala consciousness.

What Mahakala reminds us is that there is divinity and energy even in the revulsion of unease. This is not the same as indulging in unease—Rasa tradition is not about “allowing” as a passive act of surrender. Rather the Mahakala archetype provides us a constellation of inquiry which invites us to the body, and its energy and movement, as the source of insight and intelligence.

For example, in Mahakala there is a focus on returning to the architecture of our body (our bones) as the experience of “structural” frameworks. This wondrous connection of concept to body invites us to experience the nature of structure as an intimate and visceral sensation. Our skeletal framework is capable of incredible movement, sensuousness, benevolence, and change. It is multi-dimensional by nature. How do we then consider the structural frameworks of our lives from this sensation? Why do our external structures become rigid when the very structure that holds our body is flexible and made to dance? What does that rigidity limit in us at a visceral and sensation level? How does that limiting manifest in our lives and beliefs?

This is just one dimension of Mahakala, and He holds many more wondrous invitations. And yes, there is unease in these explorations because we do not “comfortably” go into radical inquiry of any kind. At the same time, it is not the “suffering” that is also ascribed to the experience of mystery in a dualistic approach of bliss-suffering. It is simply a pragmatic and inevitable sense of aversion to attending to the deepest interplay within us between the unfolding for which we were birthed in this life, and what we end up “doing” in a mechanistic reality.

Dr Vandana Shiva, the inspiring environmentalist, invited us to consider our embodied lives as that of seeds. Just like a seed holds the life of a tree or a plant, so also our bodies hold our life stories. And our bodies are committed to supporting the unfolding of that life story. This unfolding, just like in a seed, is a divine mystery. As Dr Shiva says, to claim control of the seed is an act of ignorant hubris. How much more hubristic is it to claim mastery of our seed-body’s unfolding!

It is when there is the inevitable contamination from our mechanistic impulses that the uneasy interplay begins. And Mahakala is here to help. Even though He may not look friendly or amenable. That is also an invitation to our biases around how we limit the divine dualities of darkness-lightness, and beauty-ugliness.

In these times when some of us many encounter this internal unease, Mahakala may be lurking in the darkest of our nights, dancing to His drum the freedom from the prison of duality.