Nature as Consciousness

Just as a dancer after a performance brings her dance to a close

So also Nature having revealed Her essence to the mind, dissolves.

-Sankhya Karika (date unknown)

Many centuries of condemning the material as lesser and un-divine brings us to the “virtual’ reality domains of our times. Today our reality is largely circumscribed by the devices which get ever smaller, ever intimate and ever interactive with the closest material domain—our bodies. Reality becomes non-material, just as the Divine became non-material over thousands of years. Our worlds are within our devices.

This is far away from the roots of divine invocation as experienced in body-led dance traditions. In ancient Indian dance, Nature is the divinity. This is not simply a matter of perceiving the Divine in Nature but it is a proposition that the Divine is only sensed through Her movements in Nature. This is a radical invitation and one that can never be “translated” into mind-sourced knowing channels including words.

Nature is not an objective domain because we exist within Her. As such to position ourselves as a “spectator” of Nature is “Maya” or delusion. When our minds posit this duality, we are essentially in self-deception. Any “knowledge” that flows from this duality is rooted in disharmony and disconnection.

Nature is experienced as “Rasa”, the taste beyond the performance, the sensation that is invoked by the dancer and which is equally experienced by the “spectators” of the performance. Rasa unites dancer and spectator, dissolving duality in a shared domain of sensation. The mind dissolves into the Rasa and becomes one with Nature Consciousness.

The essence of Nature is creative energy because it is that energy that underpins manifestation itself. It is by harnessing this creative joy and sensation that we become one with the essence of Nature. This creativity is primordial, it is not a skill of the mind. It is of the same essence as the beauty of flowers, the grace of a lion’s gait and the movement of leaves in the wind. There is no Divinity that is divorced from this primordial beauty and creativity.

Returning to the materiality of our bodies, of beauty and of Nature is vital to tethering ourselves in reality. The nature and sensation of the Divine is the same as Her manifestations both in Nature and in our own bodies.

Placing our hands on Earth or resting our heads against a tree is to sense Nature’s eternal calling to us—intimate, heart-achingly simple and abundantly accessible.