The sacred intelligence of subjectivity

Photo: Lorna Sim

We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences, and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves: nothing original, pristine, clear.

-J Krishnamurti

The subjective has been discredited universally. While it was the domain of ancient philosophy, with the advent of science as the dominant and absolute lens on reality, the value of subjective experience vastly diminished. It was assumed the subjective had no rigour or intelligence.

The subjective was “anecdotal” and was only of value when it was part of a group of similar experiences that legitimised it at both at the group and individual level. A unique experience was non-existent, or a fantasy.

Artistic activity is rooted in the subjective. It is an expression of the intimate experience and vision of the artist transformed through the dynamics of their practice as an offering to the world. In India artistic practice has a long history as a spiritual and philosophical tradition. The Rasa philosophy, which is the central discourse on how an artistic practice is a philosophical and spiritual inquiry, is a sophisticated confluence of art, consciousness, and archetypal approaches.

Direct experience is a vital aspect of Rasa—the fullness of the practice is only revealed to those who have direct experience, those who are practitioners who have received the transmission of the practice from elders who inherited the embodied wisdom.

The textual aspect of Rasa is secondary to embodied experience and wisdom. The Natya Sastra, the seminal commentary on Indian dance, often states that what is not described in the text will be known to the practitioners.

There is a paradox here about the importance of subjective knowledge and its universality. The transmission of teaching was not necessarily idiosyncratic, nor was it a faithful replication of the past. For example, in my own study of dance from my teacher, the legendary Guru Vempati Chinna Satyam, most of the teaching was through transmission. He rarely, if ever, taught in the linear way of breaking down choreography and teaching “steps” or “movements”. He held the whole and we were invited to absorb it with a kind of diffused attention which included not just his dance but his presence and implicit sensations that we could not bring into words.

Vempati Chinna Satyam was no replicator of tradition, he was a creative genius who enriched and deepened Kuchipudi dance, of which he was a tenth-generation dancer. Dancing with him I experienced at a very young age (I was about ten years old when I started studying from him) how an intimacy of artistic manifestation becomes universal. It was as if his generous openness to his sensation world underneath the narrated worlds in which we live, connected with what is human in me. I remember feeling the artifice of the governing narratives of our reality from that time.

From my teacher the greatest gift I received was that the tremulous honesty of mystery is our universal nature. When we plumb the depths beneath the narratives with which we costume ourselves, we come to the space of sacred unknowability. I witnessed the wondrous beauty of art sourced in that trembling of mystery, our own uknowability. The subjective became cosmic.

When we have the duality of objective and subjective, and we have a hierarchy that values the objective, it follows that artistic practices are undervalued as entertainment or instrumental to more scientific paradigms. For example, today the arts often must service health, economics, climate science, religion, and other paradigms to argue for relevance. While all these calls on art are valuable, art as the “other” space, the subjective that links us to the mysterious archetypal, is almost invisible.

Functioning in the duality, we may also feel the subjective is simply the opposite of objective. What I am reflecting about is a subjective that is beyond this duality. I experience this as the space of nuance and complexity. It is my attending to how I arrive at a position without making that inquiry instrumental to belonging to any side.

My spiritual practice, which is dance, is my inquiry in this context.

Dance helps me hold a multi-dimensional being in a complex, multi-dimensional reality. I feel able to resonate with mystery, and to encounter reality with freshness rather than with a perception that it is only a repetition of the past. There is a place for all paradigms in this encounter—all that we know and all that we will never know. And that is where I taste the infinite possibilities of Reality, which is the infinity of the Divine.