Riding the tiger of authenticity

Photo: Barbie Robinson

What is it that we “seek” or yearn for? What is it that we express as Divine, enlightenment, union, and wholeness? What is this knowledge that we chase as the answer to our feeling of incompleteness within?

The most ancient clues to these questions lay not in the philosophical texts but in the embodied expressions of archetypal Deities. Earliest Goddesses across the world are associated with ferocious animals, usually lions and tigers. One of the ancient images from Harappa civilization shows a female Deity standing between and holding the necks of two tigers with both her hands. The Indian Goddess Durga rides a tiger. The Egyptian Goddess Sekhmet has the face of a lioness. The male Indian Deity Narasimha is half human half lion.

The big cat is the apex predator. Before humans established themselves outside of the circle of life, our vulnerability to these master predators was a real experience. Today when we domesticate them and share social media videos about their servility to our sentimental needs, we cannot sense the archetypal wisdom inherent in the invocation of these animals in ancient traditions.

We have decimated much of the wilderness, and we have also decimated most of the teaching of wilderness. The ancients saw multi-dimensional Nature as Teacher. Every dimension of Nature was important not just for the sake of environmental sustainability, but equally importantly, for insights into our own Nature and Consciousness. Nature as Teacher, and the Divine as Teacher, is the earliest archetype of our relationship with larger intelligence. The untamed forests and deserts were glimpses into the primordial essence of a perception of Consciousness that is inseparable from its material expression.

There is a wildness within us that, like the wild in Nature, is worthy of awe and even some measure of fear. Fear is inevitable as we lead with our minds which seek roadmaps and answers. The wild provides neither. We must venture into the forest and contend with whatever arises. It is a necessary journey without which we are forever incomplete in our manifestation.

Is what we seek this wildness which lurks as an ancient memory in our bones? This proposition is unsavoury to our mental intelligence which has dichotomized reality into the progress of civilisation and the barbarism of wildness. In this dichotomy, the wild must be tamed through the civilisation of urban settlement. Indeed, we associate the very label civilisation with urbanization. The wild is the uncivilized and must not just be feared but must be conquered and defined.

In Indian astrology the Earth is a ferocious site (Ugra). We know from geology that the Earth’s heat from its molten core, manifests a flowing dance of Her tectonic plates. Often, these flows explode as volcanic eruptions or earthquakes. Every now and then, these are apocalyptic events which are respectfully recorded in ancient monuments that seem to remind us of the ferocity upon which we live our lives every day. To me these images, like that of the Goddess on the tiger, serve to awaken a sensation of the molten heart of our beloved blue planet. The blue Deities like Krishna or Shiva are at once infinitely generous and expansively ferocious. We assume singularity of sensation to our own detriment.

There is an invitation here that speaks to me about the nature of our authenticity. Just as we are likely to overlook Earth’s molten heat in favour of Mother Earth invocations of patience, we also ignore that molten part of our own Consciousness. This molten domain has been invoked archetypally as the fire under the waters in traditions such as dance and Yoga.

The blue planet of the peaceful and life-sustaining waters is also the Earth of our Bodies. However, the waters flow over the molten dance of Earth’s core and our waters are energised by the heat of the fire birthed within our waters. In Vedic invocations of the Water Goddess Aapah, She is the womb that holds the embryo of Agni or the Deity of Fire. Archetypally, fire is inherent in water, it is not its polar opposite.

Fire, like the wild of the forests, is unpredictable. It is at once necessary and destructive. It is dynamic, and it transforms whatever it touches. It is the essence of the alchemist—the heat that moulds and shapes. Fire creates weapons from metal and works of art from clay. Those who could work with fire were the revered artisans of ancient worlds. Earliest dancer/priests/healers were artists who brought the fiery heat of our molten cores as its dance in their Bodies. Like the early potters and weapon makers, they gifted us the beauty of our primordial Consciousness as artistic expression.

It is not that the wild is the only dimension of our authenticity. It is that dimension of our authenticity that we do not visit. In avoiding this, we are trapped in the simple dimensions of our mental consciousness with its propositions of meaning and linearity. The mind is also part of Consciousness, where we imprison ourselves is when we assume that it is all of Consciousness.

Initiation rites in traditional cultures ritualise this encounter with our authenticity. Sometimes it is a life and death encounter. Rituals hold the truth of choicelessness which is the only way that life-death choices are encountered with presence. Rituals also hold the remembrance of the unimaginable arc of cosmic time—those rhythms of tectonic flows where billions of years is a usual duration and where a moment can also release a cataclysm. This is where paradoxes unite in a material expression as Truth. In this arc of time, an individual life is precious in its momentary fire offering, the quick circle of a fire stick as dance has poignantly embodied. It is not about the quantity between life and death that matters but of the authenticity of the momentary encounter with the totality of Reality of the blue planet with the molten rivers of ferocity within. Even if one perishes in this encounter, it is worth 100 years of an inauthentic lifespan because authenticity is to be alive and not a life lived.

In an Indian archetypal story, a young man is sent to the forest in search of tiger’s milk for his foster mother. The mother wishes to be rid of him so her own son may inherit the kingdom upon her husband’s death. Convinced that she has sent him to his death, she rejoices. After some time, he returns riding a tiger. When his foster father praises his bravery and offers him the kingdom, he simply leaves to find his own mountain.

We may find ourselves in the forest through our volition or through ritual or through life’s vagaries. We may even expect to find tiger’s milk so we can be celebrated and crowned upon our return. No one will ever know what happened, whether we die or return on a tiger. That encounter will be our intimate story. How we face the wildness of the tiger, win her respect so she allows us to ride her, and return to the house or the village will be our private epic. One thing is for sure, if we do ride the tiger, the kingship and validation will not be relevant. Because we have validated ourselves in the aloneness of holding the tiger’s gaze with our own.

In these times of clamourous causes that sap our attention and energy, that gnawing yearning deep within us may appear to be silenced. That yearning for our own authenticity may be channeled into validated activities where we may be crowned and feted. And this may assuage us for a while. But I wonder whether we will sense that earth shattering moment of wordless validation when we throw our legs over the tiger so long as we are holding somebody else’s flags…