Unease and solitude

Photo: Barbie Robinson

As I prepare for my intensive on the Rasa or archetypal practice of Unease, I have encountered a dimension of many of the Deities of this sensation which intrigues me—solitude. Deities of Unease such as Mahakala and Dhumavathi are explicitly dwellers of solitudinous domains including cremation grounds and forests.

Dhumavathi is invoked as the Divine that positions Herself outside of all the usual structures of Reality—marriage, family, kin and village. Many stories that relate to Her origins speak of either being rejected by Her spouse for Her wildness which is considered “inappropriate” within societal structures, or that She is what remains when we choose to step outside the “norms” of organized structures. A story that illustrates this is Her emergence from the immolation of Goddess Sati.

Sati chooses Shiva, the wild, unkempt, primeval Divine Masculine, against the wishes of her father, the patriarchal masculine that wishes for conformity to pre-existing ideals of power and success.

When Sati turns up uninvited to a ritual held by Her father, She is humiliated for Her choice of Shiva. The sacred union of Divine Feminine and Masculine, that moves in domains beyond our narrated and organized Reality, may inevitably and naturally be abhorred by the patriarchy.

Sati’s rage at this humiliation immolates Her and Dhumavathi rises from the smoke. Dhumavathi is thus the essence of the Consciousness outside what we narrate, approve and organize. This narrated Reality may often be the “community” paradigm, the sense of belonging we seek that is about signing up to a pre-existing ideology.

Community is the aspirational paradigm that is offered as an antidote to the destructive and isolating individualistic movements of our time. Indeed, community does offer a balancing experience and is valuable in this context. However, in self-inquiry traditions, signing up to anything is to outsource one’s subjectivity. The invitation here is to be able to hold a nuanced intelligence that can act and express in a multi-dimensional and ever changing Reality, in other words to experience Reality as the dance that it is in essence.

In ritual dance traditions, the sacred cave is the subjective cosmos. It is plumbing the depths of our Consciousness to taste (Rasa) the constellation of Body, senses, movement and archetypal intelligence that is at once intimate and universal. It is that experience that is a continuum with the elemental movements of Nature including Water, Earth, and Fire and how these coalesce in our Bodies as life and energy. Ideology, including the most noble ones, separate us from this subjective cosmos.

Subjectivity is not a random and intelligence-free domain. Rather it is the “cave” of sacred ritual invocations. The constellations of these traditions which include dance, ritual, sensation, and archetypes, are sophisticated modalities that allow the emergence of the cave within us.

The “cave” is a space of solitude. It is where we leave everything we know, including all narratives of Reality, and attend to what emerges. This attending is the ritual dance. The attending requires solitude, especially within us. It does not require a literal retreat into a cave or cremation ground, rather it is about invoking these spaces within us. The “stillness” is one of mental chatter of pre-existing templates and stories.

This is why Body-led rituals are the languages of invocations in the cave. We do not bring yet another mental template to control Body, instead we lead with Body and Her dynamics of movement, rhythm, symbolic expression, and archetypal Consciousness. Our Body is as ancient as the Earth upon which we stand. And it is this primordiality that brings us to our cave of subjectivity and to our universality as part of Nature. This is a paradox and that is why dance is its language because dance is the expression and movement of paradox.

Solitude is a precious space in our times. We have a surfeit of loneliness but a paucity of solitude. The intelligence and value of solitude is all but lost in our times. Solitude is not a romantic and easeful experience. In our polarised Reality, we see self-inquiry, philosophy, and spirituality as being antidotes for suffering in their offer of ease. And they do offer much value in this role. However, beyond the polarity of suffering and ease, there is transformation and freedom, which are inevitably radical.

Herein comes the sensation of Unease (called Bibhatsa in Indian Rasa philosophy). It is uneasy to be solitary, especially in a Reality that proposes communal belonging as the ultimate benchmark of good life. The markers of belonging whether it is family, marriage, village or ideology, are not designed to support the radical diversity of subjective experiences of self-inquiry. As a result we standardise the infinite Divine also into templates with specific “outcomes” which point to whether you have “achieved” spiritual “goals”!

When ancient ritual traditions saw artistic intelligence as the domain of self-inquiry, they recognised something that we have lost sight of—art is the language of subjectivity that is the Consciousness of archetypal intelligence. In this role of art, it is completely free of all instrumentality—that is, it is not in service of any pre-existing paradigms. This is not to say that art that is in service to ideologies is not valuable, simply that in excavating archetypal intelligence of our subjectivity, non-instrumentality is essential.

The intelligence of ritual art, including dance, is not random or naïve. We can see the depth and the intractable intelligence of ancient traditions in the monuments they have left for us. Every ancient monument presents to us the enigmatic and profound wisdom of ancients. It is not at all necessary to be romantic about the past in order to encounter these signals with alertness and presence. We still have many of these traditions amongst us, especially ritual dance.

The loss of importance of the intelligence and importance of dance happened with the loss of the centrality of Body as the site of Reality. The more mind-led we became, the less we experienced Body as Reality. And we also lost sight of dance, which is of course rooted in Body, as a language and intelligence, that is other than verbal languages. Ritual dance does not illustrate verbal languages, the very idea of the nature of language is other in these traditions. As the choreographer Ohad Naharin said, “Dance is about dance.”

A positive that emerged with the invisibility of dance as a lens on Reality is that it has been mostly undisturbed, like the ancient monuments of Gobekli Tepe. Deliberately buried and therefore untouched by the ravages of human “civilizational” march, there is a breath-stopping pristine directness to the messages of mystery in these monuments. While scholars “decode” these messages, as a dancer one meets it from another Consciousness and the connections are lightning bolts in the Body.

Dance, buried under layers of words and text, also retains the scent and Body of that ancient intelligence. We dance ancient Body, and we sense ancient elemental movements that have been since the beginning of Time—Water, Earth, Fire, Wind. And of these elements is revealed a Truth that is impossible to bring into words in its soul-racking subjectivity but also vastly connecting in its universality. This is the “community” of dance—of elements, animals, birds, trees, and soil.

And we are gifted this revelation in the solitude of the cave, attended by Unease and its Deities who are ferocious and protective, abhorrent and beauteous, and of smoke and snakes.