Primordial Time and liberation from the noose of Time loops
Photo: 450 million year old rocks embedded with shell-life fossils indicating that the region was likely once a shallow tropical sea.
Recently I went on an extraordinarily ordinary pilgrimage—to the sites around Canberra, the place where I live, where there are material connections to the geological “Deep Time” of the Earth.
These are humble places, one hidden under a busy overpass, one outside a government department exploring rocks for mining, and one under a major road. Of course, the land we stand on anywhere on Earth is “Deep Time” matter. These places just brought that fact to our attention.
And so it was that the beloved mountain near my house is likely 450 million years old and possibly an old volcano. There is evidence of volcanic rock on the mountain. Most of Canberra likely was a shallow tropical sea and some of the rocks still hold fossils of the shell-life of that time.
Running my hand over this Body of Earth was the most sacred thing I have done in many years. It felt as if each site was a temple, reminding us of the whole of Earth as a temple. I did not need opulent buildings and pomp and splendour. In the quietude under the overpass, a friend, whose idea the pilgrimage was, and I, placed our hands on the material manifestation of infinity, ancientness, and immortality.
Matter is immortal because it transforms and never perishes. Rock as matter holds story and the wisdom of mystery in such a tangible way that is impossible to bring into words. The touch of an ancient fossil, the beauty of the spirals on their shells, or the poignancy of their bodies left behind for millions of years for two people to hold was overwhelming.
Ancientness is the invocation of Deep Time in archetypal dance. The oldest Deities are “elder” or ancient. Some of them are literally ancient, like the Goddess Dhumavathi with her ageing body. Some of them like Jyeshta simply mean elder. Jyeshta deities may be Goddesses or Gods. As a Goddess manifestation Jyeshta is supposed to disturb domesticity. A contemplation of Deep Time does alter the present and our intimate narratives. This disturbance is not because that is the intention of the Deity. It happens because our narratives are not cognizant of Deep Time. We do not place our time here in the context of the billions of years that have been before each one of our lives. And our narratives of reality come from this disconnection. Jyeshta invites us to attend to the long past of life itself which is material rather than conceptual. An ageing body or an elder is the reminder of this long ancestry of our material manifestation.
I feel that when we speak of ancestry today, even in some archetypal contexts, we refer to familial or societal ancestry. This is not Deep Time. Perhaps a consideration of some ancestry is better than nothing. However, I also feel that there is a tendency to draw a continuum from these approaches to considerations such as heritages of beliefs and philosophies from the past, in the sense of lineage, which is not the same as an Earth and Body centred consideration of Deep Time.
As I stood in front of the rocks, fossils, and ancient trees, I experienced the sensation of the universal and the intimate in the same moment. This was not a personal ancestry experience but of the ancestry of Earth. This is a completely nonlinear experience because I cannot tie it to anything causal. There was an unexpected sensation of tenderness. It was exquisitely poignant that delicate fragment of bone signals something of our existential ancestry hundreds of millions of years ago. And that birthed the sacred tenderness of life, so vast yet so fragile, so cosmic yet so intimately moving. I felt held and reassured in an explicable way.
We who live considering matter as selectively sentient in narratives that benefit our own claims of superior sentience, may find these invitations from primordiality dismissive. Hidden under our infrastructure, they may be forgotten or referred to occasionally. When I looked at the layers of congealed bones that held in a few centimetres the movement of vast ages of time, sentience poured out like a magnificent waterfall. I sensed the dance of ages, the contraction of bone which is the essence of Body, and the residue that continues its movement language of cataclysms, radical transformations, endings, and beginnings. It was Shiva’s cataclysmic dance, many times over, right there on a small slice of rock!
The link between rock, Deep Time and archetypal dance is more than random. In the ancient dance text, Natya Shastra, one of the names for a multi-dimensional archetypal dance movement is Pindi. Pindi is associated with divinity in the sense that it usually refers to an archetypal movement of a Deity. For example, the deity Krishna is usually expressed as the Deity with the flute. This dance movement is a Pindi.
A Pindi is also used in the text for dance constellations which are to be expressed by specific group formations—a garland, clump, entwined like a creeper, or fragmented.
When we consider the general meaning of Pindi, it means a congealed or dense lump of matter. It is a body that is formed from the contraction of matter to a high level of solidity. It is a congealing of many in the one. Like the rocks, it holds garlands, clumps, creepers, and fragmentations of histories of ages deep beyond what we can imagine.
When I gazed upon the rocks, I sensed a teaching about Pindi.
On the morning of our pilgrimage, it so happened that the text with the mention of Pindi came up as I was researching something else. I did not think much of it at the time. Until I was in front of the rocks and the connections with Pindi began to glimmer like the flakes of gold on the ancient stone.
Pindi is a dense congealing of many dimensions—dance, archetype, devotion, primordiality and our defined narratives. The Body is the site of emergence of this Pindi. In Body-led philosophies, Bone is the essence of Body. Bone is also where dance is birthed. One could consider the Indian archetypal dance movements as arrangements of bone. In ancient shamanic rites, bones are ritually re-arranged to symbolically express that the transformation of Consciousness is a re-experiencing of Body literally through dance where the bones are re-arranged through movement.
Goddesses such as Chammunda invite us to contemplate the skeletal essence of Body. Bones are what remains of us after Death, it the material dimension of our immortality. In the ancient rocks, the bones of life that lived millions and even billions of years ago survive to allow us a glimpse of the material nature of infinity and immortality.
The dance Pindi, like the rocks, holds primordial truth in the bones. This truth is that of Deep Time, of the layers upon layers of life and realities that have existed beyond our wildest possible imagination. It is not the full story of how everything happened because that is not the question of Self-inquiry. It is a taste (Rasa) of the vast mystery that is material, the everyday Earth upon which we walk each day of our lives with nary a thought for Her majestic ancestry. If we are not obsessed with information, this taste is more than enough to sense how mystery is not entirely other but is signaled by the simple expressions of Nature we disregard—soil, the life that has lived on this planet longer than our human existence, and the rocks upon which we pour concrete for our infrastructure projects.
Each Pindi is an invitation to surrender to the layers of life that catapult towards beginnings and endings. Like the movement in the rocks, the Pindi is also about cataclysms, and the dance is a lightning expression that transforms through the union of cataclysmic ending and beginning. A rock often holds the intelligence of many cataclysms, each layer different from another, as each new emergence is a new reality.
Deep Time is cyclical only in the principle of a movement of cataclysmic ending and re-emergence of something new. It is not a “history repeats itself” time loop of repeated narratives. We assume this platitude to our own detriment. In my view, history repeats itself because we keep repeating ourselves by ignoring the many cataclysmic invitations that litter our lives both at intimate and societal levels. In our addiction to restoring the status quo, we change but marginally and delude ourselves that things like technological change are radical transformations of Consciousness.
The water Deity Varuna holds a noose in His hand. In the ancient hymns to this Deity, it is said that the liars are dragged away with His noose. So, what is the Truth? The Truth in the Varuna cosmos is the waft and weft of Reality, that multi-dimensional movement which combines ebb and flow and the spreading and expansive sideways flow. These seemingly incongruent principles unite in dance Pindis. When we dance these Pindis, they are like ancient rocks, dense with ancient intelligence, not of humans or homo sapiens or any ancestors of our human life. Rather it is the intelligence of sky, waters, soil, mountains, birds, reptiles, mysterious sea creatures, and trees. A liar is someone who does not experience this unfolding movement of Truth but locates Truth in narratives of linearity. In Varuna’s cosmos, liars will likely live by “history repeats itself” time loop. They are already prisoners of Varuna’s noose.
In a Pindi or in the expression of an ancient rock, history ends. Reality is the shimmering movement of many possibilities. It is not in attending to conclusions that we are part of this movement but in attending to the movement itself with its waft and weft.
When we dance a Pindi, if we attend with presence divested as much as possible of the mind-dominated information collection intent, we are seen and touched by a sacredness unlike any other. And it is different each time because it is never the full story. Yet, that little glimmer explodes with the awe of everythingness so we know that everythingness can never be encompassed. Each Pindi, like each rock, is but a glimpse of the infinity of possibilities that has already materially manifested on this Earth that is our home. In the Pindi as in the rock, infinity, everythingness, immortality and eternity, are rendered material.
Another experience of this Deep Time pilgrimage was the sensation of spacious patience. My friend referred to the rocks as the “Patient Ancients”. In Indian archetypal wisdom the Earth’s attribute is Kshama or patience. The underpinning Pindi for Deity is a movement that manifests endurance, waiting or patience. The Deities, the Ancients, wait with infinite patience. When we manifest this waiting, we mirror them. The dance of matter is inevitable. We participate in harmony when we wait and allow the intelligence of this primordial dance to lead us. As it leads Earth and all Cosmos. Why would we, in our right minds, imagine that we, who have but emerged in this particular constellation of matter in a millisecond of Earth’s life, will single-handedly spearhead the fate of Earth and the cosmos!
Caressing a 5.5-billion-year-old stone is when the Divine is soil and flesh. The Pindis render the Divine as Body, bones, sensations, and movement. It matters that we can ground the sacred and the divine in the material realms of Body and Earth. In my view, it is our journey back to Body that will birth a radical new reality that is also as ancient as Deep Time. And this journey is already held in the womb of Pindis and other ritual dance traditions of cultures that have quietly continued to honour the wisdom of Deep Time.
Led by dancers, poets, devotion, and the primordial dance of Nature, may we liberate ourselves from the time loops of Varuna’s noose!