The tyranny of positivity and the absence of ferocity

Photo: Barbie Robinson

One of the people in my Individual program was reflecting upon the difficulty of finding spaces of affirmation for a solitudinous reflection that is free from the need to feel “happy” and “light”. We recognised the noisy clamour, especially amongst spiritual teachers, about focusing on the positive, and the exhaustion this may bring in the context of the internal and reflective needs of Self-inquiry.

I find it intriguing that while there is endless commentary about the transitory nature of the times we live in, and about the new era that awaits, these commentaries are accompanied by predictions about how this “new” era will look. People either propose a dystopian future or one that will be a golden era of divinity. I must admit that neither fills me with hope, and this has to do with how we arrive at these scenarios rather than what they propose for the future.

I sense that we have lost the intelligence of inhabiting the “new” in any real sense of that experience. Therefore, we have already roadmapped “new” in known narratives of dystopia or enlightenment. There is nothing new about these two scenarios and everything in between them. The “new” is what is not already known, and perhaps what cannot be known. This is mystery, which is the heart of ancient ritual traditions.

So, in a sense we could say that the “new” itself is an ancient experience wondrously invoked in embodied rituals. Mystery is as ancient as life, always unknowable and therefore eternally “new”. I sense that this is not the “new” that we propose awaits us because we do not like to acknowledge the eternal unknowability of Reality. I sense we are in terror of such a perception of Reality.

The experience of Ugra or ferocity in ancient ritual traditions went to this experience of mystery. We cannot inhabit spaces where our usual paradigms of meaning, truth, sense, fact, and reason, must be relinquished for an entirely other movement of Reality. This experience is not a superficial or casual event, merely to be instrumentalized for “healing” or for the novelty of “God” encounters. They were sophisticated invocations that strengthened an intelligence about Reality that held our mechanistic mental consciousness in its rightful place, while honouring the ever-emergent intelligence of a larger and connecting consciousness that is body-led.

The project of rinsing our consciousness of ferocity or Ugra is an age-old one. Indeed, it is inherent in our own consciousness constellation because the mechanistic aspects of our consciousness, which aspire for domination, require that we are empty of Ugra. Fear is a powerful way of imprisoning us in the known even while we pretend that we are moving in something new. Ugra is not the overcoming of fear, rather it is the energy that allows us to be in the room with fear without judgement. There is no denying that mystery is fearful—however we do not have to be paralysed and apathetic because of this fear.

I sense the relentless focus on positivity as the emptiness of Ugra. Of course, oscillating in the duality of our mechanistic minds, we may conclude that if we are not positive, we have to feel miserable. However, in practice it simply means that we feel neither positive nor miserable. Perhaps we feel quiet, reflective, and inquiring. We may feel that we do not need to sign up to tribes and clubs to “belong” to an ideology. I have heard people share with me that they feel distressed by all the emphasis on community and gatherings. They feel that their need for solitude or for more intimate encounters is “abnormal”.

We keep touting the human is a “social animal” theory ad nauseum. However, the nature of what it means to be social has radically transformed over time and we have not accounted for these structural changes. And, Self-inquiry is not a community building exercise, neither is it an ascetic retreat. It begins with the relinquishing of these paradigms of duality of belonging and excluding and inhabiting spaces of nuance and emergence in each moment of our lives. Importantly, it is about attending to our own unfolding, honouring the multi-sensorial intelligence of our bodies, and recognizing our life as an offering to Reality. From this intelligence we connect with Reality in the most expansive way—with Nature, with each other and will all of life unconditionally. We do not have to define ourselves in limited ways just to belong to tribes.

When I put this in words it may seem like an idealistic dream. And that is also a sign of the absence of Ugra. Our minds convince us that it is an unrealistic project and not worthy of exploration. That is the tragedy of our times. When we continue to inhabit the same mechanistic intelligence, we fool ourselves with signals of change and transformation. We build on the teetering foundations of past knowledge under the hubristic paradigm of progress. There is in truth nothing new about this trajectory.

Ugra is an intimate and personal energy. It is not directed against anything for that would be to inhabit the same duality model of mechanistic intelligence. It is energy from the body and Earth that fuels our strength to grab the ground beneath us even as it shakes, shifts, and sometimes opens up under our feet. It is the energy that turns towards mystery and invites that intelligence, not merely as an “experience” of other, but as an abiding consciousness and Truth.

In ancient rituals, Ugra is the energy that turns us towards Divine/mystery/Reality not as a story but as movement and sensation. It is what makes the Divine intimate and visceral. It is this intimacy of the Divine that humanises us, rinses Hubris from our mechanistic minds, and reinstates us within the web of Reality.