Cosmic time and lifetime

Photo:Barbie Robinson

 “ If you can see death and decay all around you then your world will turn luminous …. “

-Words from Individual session invoking Dhumavathi, the Goddess of decay and endings

Like many people I teach, I also hear much about the age of transition in which we are living. I hear eminent people speak about a change of ages, and the coming of a different paradigm of life. I often consider how I situate my lifetime in relation to these cosmic time movements. I hear people share with me how the incessant conversations about ages that are made up of thousands of years can serve to further distance us from the immediacy of our lifetime which is relatively only a drop in the cosmic time.

And it is not only astrology that serves to distance us from the here and now. Futuristic narratives, which in our times are mostly dire, also pull us towards the distant horizon which we really cannot see, but which we nevertheless imagine based on whatever narrative we most align with. In the meantime, the seconds and minutes and hours of our lives keep dropping down in the hourglass of our lifetime.

Ancient astrology traditions were at once cosmic and intimate. They mapped each life in the stars through archetypal connections. Dance in many ritual traditions is an integral way in which these connections were made material. Indeed, my sense of the archetypal dimension of dance is that it may well be the source of astrological knowledge.

It is the body that makes Reality visceral and intimate. The body locates itself in the present, while the mental consciousness is shaped from Time. The problem with mind and Time is that it is mostly about the past and the known. We then project the past and the known into the future. There is no space for infinity of the unknowable in this way of perceiving Time. There is also little that is new, original, and radical in a Reality that is founded on the past.

The essence of the body-mind duality is in Time. The body reminds us of our mortality, of the Truth that our lifetime is not a procession of the ages but a blip in eternity. Mortality is terrifying to all of us. Our mind’s greatest project is to escape from this fact. Meanwhile, our body’s nature is to inhabit this mortality and to ground us in the transience of this lifetime.

It seems to me that a popular project in these times is to “know” and thereby conquer Death. Not fearing Death is proposed as a noble state of being. And immortality is proposed as the goal of an advanced human civilisation.

In the popular Netflix series “Lucifer”, one of the storylines is of the Biblical Cain who is cursed with immortality. The series shows the suffering his never-ending lifetime, as he searches for ways to bring the procession of the ages that is his lifetime to an end. In many Indian myths as well, immortality is a quest that brings destruction and suffering, not only to the person seeking it, but also to the Earth and humanity.

To accept mortality is not the same as wanting to die or to be fearless about Death. I feel Death is worthy of fear and awe. Many of the ancient Deities were associated with Death. These traditions have been referred to disparagingly as “death cults” as if they were life-deniers and subsumed by fear. On the other hand, philosophers have referred to our times as “death phobic” in our refusal to be mature about our mortality.

Sometimes the focus on long pasts and distant futures robs us of our lifetime. The Goddess in the dance tradition is invoked as elusive, ephemeral, and pulsating. This is the nature of our lifetime. And the nature of Reality. The Goddess, our life, and Reality are the same invocation. The Divine is infinite because She is ineffable and elusive to form and Time. Our lifetime is also elusive to our sense of Time as a linear chronology of pasts and futures. The Goddess is the immanent energy in our bodies, and the immanence that infuses the most distant universes. We taste the celestial on our own tongues.

It is the trembling, fragility of my lifetime that holds the mystery and magic of Reality. It is the Truth of the unknowable ending, and the baffling prospect of unbeing, that makes every second of my lifetime count. In that honouring is where I sense liberation from Time and relish the taste of eternity. This is the paradox of spiritual Truth—it is our mortality that holds eternity.

Dance is the language of the ancient Goddesses because dance is an ephemeral expression. It is a manifestation of the beauty and poignancy of fragility. When I dance, when I teach dance, and when I listen to people who dance with me share their reflections, I sense how turning towards the wondrous fragility of our lifetimes is deeply humanising.

Perhaps our quest could be to learn from the ancient traditions that held the wisdom of supporting us to inhabit our humanity, with all its messiness, with its inevitable march towards unbeing and with our unbearable yearning for immortality. This would serve to align us with the Reality of our precious lifetime more than the quest for achieving immortality.

The ancients across many cultures left for us the wisdom that when we turn towards what makes us most human, we at once inhabit a luminescent and divine Reality, within and without.