The unease of "tragic realism" of our times

Photo: Geoffrey Dunn

The philosopher Professor John Gray recently used the term “tragic realism” in his discussion of how he views the events of recent times. While I do not necessarily align with all his views, the term he used to describe reality as “tragic realism” struck a chord with me.

Professor Gray used the term to denote the intensely less than ideal options that we are faced with in the history of the times in which we find ourselves alive. He spoke of “difficult” and unsavoury choices, and the necessity to not “shrink” from it. I found myself relieved that someone was voicing the unease that I have felt in these times and which other people have shared with me.

While Professor Gray was discussing world events, I sensed the intimacy of the unease at individual levels. I sense the so-called optimistic returning- to-what-used-to-be stance as escapist. I also sense the mystical emergence of a new order as equally escapist. The truth, as always, is something in between. The radical unease and disintegration may hold within it the emergence of another approach to life. However, we may have to develop skills to dwell in the unease without the duality of escape or suffering of catharsis. Because either of those extremes may not provide the energy to recognise the radical emergent intelligence, if indeed this is a possibility.

Every day I feel called to acquiesce with difficult choices that I experience as revolting within me. In recent times these have included being part of large corporate compromises of my personal information more than once, and endless servicing of bureaucratic needs which have been intensifying over the years. These situations have something in common—they deny my individual humanity and make me simply bits of information open to reconstruction, transference, and conclusions. In other words, I become defined and fragmented in equal measure by that “information” and must service the fragility of such bases for the rest of my life. This takes great energy and time, but more importantly it dehumanises me, nay it de-enlivens me. I no longer feel connected to an organic flow of Nature, Earth, sensation, and movement as the bases for my sense of being and living in the world.

I sense the continuum between the chaos that impacts my daily life and the macrocosmic fragility of politics and ideologies with great unease. And offerings of a light-filled age that awaits just around the corner do not align with the churning unease of this present time.

And then Mahakala has emerged in these times. He appeared in my individual programs and then in my group sessions. Mahakala is exactly the sort of archetype that can move in these times of extraordinary unease. He offers little romanticism with His snake-clad wildness and his ferocious trident. But He does offer unflinching support to walk or dance with us in this unease. Perhaps that is the “tragic realism”—there are no “perfect” options. Much as we may flinch from the company of this kind of archetypal Divine as almost grotesque and somewhat unsettling, His invitation is to acknowledge the nature of our times as such. The acknowledgement cannot be an intellectual position because the mind abhors such complexity. It must be a dance, an embodied activity and movement within, with, and through the unease. In that movement is energy, intelligence, and revelation of possibilities. This is the experience of emergent intelligence within chaos because that is not a linear possibility.

Mahakala’s generous proposal is that energy, dynamism and creativity are still possible once we can divest ourselves of the easeful comfort of perfection and self-righteousness.

Another example closer to our secular predicaments in that of the archetypal warrior Arjuna. Faced with the repugnant unease of having to battle his own family in a seminal war, Arjuna decides to escape, albeit for seemingly infallible moral and philosophical reasons. His Divine teacher and mentor, Krishna, invites him to act and to move into the heart of the battle. This is no perfect option, but the only one that holds movement, change, and the possibility of radical and emergent intelligence.

There are times in our lives when we are Arjunas, facing that uneasy moment of difficult choices. The “battle” is not a warmongering call, rather it poignantly recognises the deep unease of the situation, and the intractable choices that cannot offer simple comfort, morality, or calm. In these moments we face the truth that the movement of Reality is far greater than our ability to manage it, and far more complex that our stories of calm and stillness. And in this realisation is great unease, and some despair, at the fallacy of the Hubristic foundations of our narratives of Reality.

I sense it is this misalignment which is the root of unease. This is Mahakala’s cave. One of my philosophy teachers once told me that we know there is Divinity because we have ancient guidance. And Mahakala is a wondrous example of the generosity of Divinity. He allows us to experience even our unease as Divine, as elemental, and as inevitable in the movement of Reality. It frees us from the despair of personalising this energy, without escape or “suffering”. He offers to dance with us and enliven even these experiences of unease with energy, creativity, and discovery.

In so dancing, we find an expression for deep sensations of the times. In expression they reveal the intelligence, and allow the divesting of those paradigms that no longer serve us in the eternal unfolding of Reality.