The Beggar and the Guardian of the Cave

Photo: Geoffrey Dunn

Desirous of voluptuous and essential exultation, (nevertheless) I find myself severed

So that I wander around begging people.

-Atharva Veda

I recently had the extraordinary privilege of an inquiry into the sensation of Unease, which in the Rasa philosophy of dance is called Bibhatsa. As part of the guidance for that intensive, I encountered the archetypes of the Beggar and the Guardian deities of the cave.

As the verse above proposes, there may be two dimensions to our desire to express our authenticity creatively and joyfully—the desire itself and its invitation to dare to plumb the depths of our being, and the lure of the Beggar to look outside for “methods” and approval to “allow” this authentic creativity. As it happens, the verses above are an invocation of Goddess Saraswathi, the Divine energy of authenticity as creative expression in the world.

The Beggar here is no simpleton to be dismissed as irrelevant and powerless. Rather it is the domain of everything that keeps us addicted to beggary—approval, measurement, permission, goals, visibility, and community. Beggary may well be the foundation of most of the paradigms we inhabit unconsciously every day of our lives. Beggary is packaged in palatable designs such as service, purpose, duty and obligation. However, the heart of a mind-dominated and measurement driven approach to Reality is the poverty of authenticity and the freedom to acknowledge a plural, diverse and complex Reality.

The coercive power of the mind is its scarcity-dominated narratives which keep us in want, need and in fear of loss and failure. The Beggar is forever walking around, grazing for better pastures in an eternal search for the better, bigger and higher. They move from one location to the next, comparing benchmarks, stealing strategies and information where they become desperate, and becoming increasingly brutal in their efforts to improve their outcomes. The Beggar does not see any other choice in a Reality where everyone mills around in the same beggary cosmos. They must play the game or perish.

The invitation of the deities that are the Guardians of the cave is to join the in their dance. This is no simple invitation. These Guardian deities, like Rudra, are energies of the heart. They dance longing, loss, passion, lamentation, desire, and wildness. The wildness is not a faux opposite of “polite”, rather it is that space unconquered by the domesticity of the Beggar. It is of the nature of Nature, soil, animals, bird, thunder, storms, and fire.

Fire is the essence of these Guardian deities. Fire is the wild forest fire that is at once magnificent in its towering and unpredictable beauty, and fearsome in its uncontrollable, destructive energies. The heart is wildfire expression. It is an ancient lament that remembers loss, for to love is to inevitably encounter loss. It is an ancient howl of Yearning to return to love, to move desire, and to express passion. All these co-exist in the same dance.

The Beggar is very attracted to the invitation of the cave. The Cave is the realm of Reality that is not of the mind. It is the mystery of Body and the darkness of the unknowable. The Beggar is greedy for adding this “information” to their begging bowl. This is the next frontier of conquest, the milestone that will enhance their USP in the marketplace.

They turn up at the door of the cave, armed with the begging bowl and with the backpack of tricks and strategies to outwit the Guardian. The Beggar is supremely confident as the Guardian appears to be a rather primitive being that has no friends or community. The Guardian’s bark may be worse than His bite is what the Beggar concludes. The Beggar is ready for a conflict, a battle where they must master and dominate the Guardian and force His submission. This will get the Beggar access to the so called “mystery”. They can then peddle this in the marketplace and garner approval, success, recognition, and other gains.

A shock awaits the Beggar at the cave’s door. Rather than fighting the Beggar, the Guardian is singularly uninterested in confrontation. He dances around the Beggar, eludes them, tricks them, grabs their bag of tricks and teases them. The Beggar’s own trickery is mirrored to them but in far more unexpected and unknowable ways.

The Beggar cannot get their minds around the nature of the Guardian. Is He evil? Is He serious or merely playful? Is He dangerous and life-threatening? Is He a friend or foe? Is He human or animal, Divine or a trickster pretender? Is He naïve or intelligent?

All the dualistic paradigms of the Beggar lie in ruins under their feet. There are no answers to any of their questions, and it is impossible for the Beggar to create a narrative about this Guardian. Without a narrative, the Beggar is bereft of any clues as to how to deal with this encounter.

The Unease of not knowing begins to overwhelm the Beggar. They realise that their expectation was that the uknowable will perforce become knowable because that is the mastery paradigm they have always inhabited—knowledge, including “self-knowledge” is to be learnt, practiced and mastered. To truly encounter an experience that cannot be brought into word or thought is terrifying in a way that redefines the very nature of terror itself.

This is an intimate Unease, that crawls beneath their skin, churns in their guts, sickens the heart and humiliates the mind. It is the terror of the uselessness of all their accumulated knowledge, information, success, and achievements in helping them in this encounter with the Guardian. It is as if they have the most sophisticated firepower that human mind has invented and yet this simple, wild, unkempt, being has stopped them in their tracks with just His fangs, claws and His lamenting howl that resounds across the cosmos. It simply makes no sense whatsoever. That senselessness is the paralysis of Unease.

They are two choices left to the Beggar—they can simply take their backpack and leave the cave. After all no one knows about their journey to the cave. The invitation was to come alone. The Beggar may feel thankful about this. At the very least no one has witnessed their “failure”.

The Guardian is not invested in whether the Beggar stays or leaves. His loyalty is to the cave and the Goddess within. He will do everything, including sacrifice His life, to honour that loyalty. Sacrifice is essential in His constellation. It is not the sacrifice that is attended with the Hubris of suffering, but one that emerge because of one’s desire, longing and love for the Goddess. As an ancient mantra of Shiva (one of the manifestations of the Guardian cosmos) states, experiences fall away like ripe cucumbers from their creeper. That is the falling away of what we have accumulated in our backpacks. The Guardians themselves sacrifice in every moment. Their primordiality is the Rasa of that sacrifice, the falling away of all stories that separate us from our place within Nature, our essence as matter and soil, and our sensation as fire, water, earth and wind.

The Guardian is not interested in assessing the Beggar. He has invited the Beggar to dance with Him, to match Him in His Rasa, and to journey with Him into the cave. He promises nothing, not even survival because He does not hold that milestone for Himself. He is a creature of the moment, of experience as flow and dance, and of expression as authenticity that is free from any instrumentality. He does not need destinations and goals. So, He cannot promise what He does not dance. The Beggar’s assessment of failure or success comes from their own cosmos of beggary and not from the cosmos of the cave.

The second choice that is available to the Beggar is to simply step into the dance with the Guardian. This means contending with and dwelling in, their Unease. There is no option to avoid Unease by stories of suffering in order to achieve spiritual enlightenment because the Guardian does not offer any destinations including of enlightenment. The only offer on the table is the dance with the Guardian.

In this dance we are invited to “match” the Guardian, and not in a competitive sense. The Guardian holds the sensation of Hasya or laughter in equal measure as Unease. We are invited to hold the sense of playful trickery and teasing, that Hubris-busting Rasa that divests ourselves of the self-centeredness of dualistic paradigms of suffering-peace and ignorance-enlightenment. We do not become the Deity, channel the Deity, or master the Deity. We simply dance in His presence and respond to His Rasa or sensation.

In so doing the Beggar consciousness receives no attention. We do not grapple with the Beggar, try to reason with them, struggle to meet their needy pleas for recognition, approval, belonging, mastery and purpose. We realise that the energy the Beggar demands is like a black hole, we can never satisfy the Beggar. Reasoning with the Beggar is to be trapped in their hall of mirrors. The Beggar is a master trickster. Just like the Guardian, their appearance belies the power of their consciousness. The Beggar in fact is a brutal bully.

The Beggar tricks us into defining our lives as linear journeys towards goals and milestones. They trick us with narratives of immortality, timelessness, and arrivals. They remove us from the fragile, momentary, beauteous, Body-led, material Reality which is Truth. Because this fragility makes us Uneasy with its sense of finitude and limits. Therefore, the Beggar’s offerings are addictively attractive to us as we can escape from the ferocious Unease of the fragility of matter and of life.

The Guardian’s dance allows us to experience the infinity of each moment. We sense how it is in the finitude of limits, in the beauteous sensory truth of matter, and in the sensation intelligence of Body that infinity and timelessness becomes material Reality. We hold the aching joy of loving-lament, raging-passion and longing-expression freed from oppositional simplicity. This is where authenticity as creative expression of beauty, divinity and truth emerges.

And in this dance, the Beggar finds their place because the Guardian is not opposing them. The Guardian expands Reality beyond the Beggar’s cosmos of poverty and scarcity and allows expressive experience (anubhava) as the basis of flow and unfolding Truth. The Beggar does not disappear for they are also a dimension of Reality as much as the Guardian. However at least they are now aware of a dance that is not of their contracted cosmos.

In this encounter we co-create with the Divine and our expression becomes what Nature truly needs. We join the birdsong welcoming of Night and the offering of breath of the Trees. We join them in the web of purpose that is primordial.

Attending is the most powerful action we have in this embodied life. We can choose to attend to the Beggar, argue with them and try to convince and change them through analysis. Or we can attend to the Guardian’s dance, in the quiet of our hearts, alone but not lonely, and unseen but not invisible. For in this dance the clouds see us, the birds sing for us and the trees bow their branches as we stand under them.

And these are not merely metaphorical words, for metaphor becomes material in this dance.