Things that matter the most are not to be understood

Photo: Barbie Robinson

The mind must “understand” to find meaning. As we live in mind-led consciousness, we assume that understanding is the universal approach to Reality. Archetypal wisdom traditions propose creativity as an experiential expression of Reality which has nothing to do with “understanding”. One of the important wisdom invocations of this entirely different way of encountering Reality is the archetype of Water.

In my current course, “Invoking the Ancient Waters”, we are exploring the archetypal intelligence of water. In the dance tradition I offer, water has a central place as the archetypal dancer, Apsara, denotes beings that move in water.

The Sanskrit word for water is associated with movement, expression (which is of course the inherent in movement), binding and spreading. Underpinning all these attributes is the lens of nonlinearity or nonduality. Water’s essence is flow, which is what binds one movement to another. Flow has infinite possibilities from the linear to beyond the lens of linearity. For example, a river meanders across the land, and an ocean spreads and ebbs and flows all at the same time. In archetypal dance, this multi-dimensionality becomes material as movement constellations which involve multiple kinds of movements at the same time. This is the everythingness bound by flow of movement.

Oceans and rivers gather everything in their flow. In its ferocious expressions, the ocean as a tsunami licks civilisation back into its bowels, like Kali’s tongue. The binding here is not constraining but that which connects disparate matter and experiences through flow. The binding is the unbound flow, the licking back of separation into the waters of everythingness.

To the mind, with its need for understanding, this is chaos and cataclysm. It is tantamount to death. Without definition and separation even the human becomes irrelevant. We exist because we can separate ourselves from everything else. We also exist when we are seen and acknowledged by systems and structures within which the separation is valid. For example, when we belong to a community, we are seen for the separation of that community at the same time as being validated for belonging to that group. There is separation and belonging that is mediated by the mind-created structures and definitions which we would understand as binding in our mind-led intelligence.

The binding of the waters is birthed in the dissolving of such definitions and the systems that create and support them. This is not a political act of rebellion against an external system. Rather it is a deeply intimate act of encountering the limitlessness of our Consciousness which is universal and subjective in the same moment. Like the waters, it holds everything and in that very everythingness something essential about life itself is revealed.

This is the “secret” wisdom or intelligence of the waters. It is “secret” because it is inaccessible by understanding and by the mind. It is forever unknowable and hence remains a secret as far as our mental intelligence is concerned. And herein lies the challenge of archetypal wisdom.

“I don’t understand” is a statement that I hear quite often in my programs. I suggest to people who want to understand that there is nothing to be understood. But that is baffling to our very sense of Reality. Reality in our usual experience is what is understood, validated, and agreed upon. And there is a role for that approach to Reality. We do not have to leave the mind behind because the waters are about everythingness. We are invited to hold that approach to Reality simultaneously with an experience of Reality that is not understood. Mystery co-exists with the known—that is the proposal of archetypal wisdom. It is our mind-led approach that denies all other experiences other than what is defined and validated by its own lenses.

Interestingly, the invitation of water is the same thing—to attend to its intelligence through its own lenses and not through the lenses of the mind. We have assumed that the paradigms or lenses of the mind are the absolute approaches that deliver us the intelligence of Reality and into which all dimensions of Reality must conform. The waters suggest that this may not be the case.

The archetypal association of dance with water goes to the heart of creativity. It proposes that creativity is of flow that binds that which appear disparate to the mind. Creativity is self-referential. It is about itself and not in service to mental paradigms. It is also the language of the archetypal or primordial dimensions of Consciousness. This is the whole from which the mind cleaves to offer us the gift of linearity. Cleaving is at once a gift and a curse for it also separates us from the whole.

Archetypal dance is the mother of creativity. From dance, we experience the intelligence of the primordial waters. This intelligence can then infuse all other creative expressions—artisans, sculptors, painters, and poets express the dance of the waters through their creative offerings. However, the priest who receives the teaching offers it through the Rasa (sensation) of their dance. The birthplace of creativity is the oceanic waters of Body as embodied udaka or upward flowing waters.

The word Udaka means that which finds it difficult to flow upwards. Tears are udaka, springing from the depths of our poignant encounter with that in us that is entirely of ourselves, unreferenced to anything external. Udaka is a poetic flow. It is not managed and created by the mind or even its notions of poetry. Rather we learn the nature of the poetic from Udaka.

Udaka is associated with death—the ritual offering of water to a dying person. Archetypally what must die for the wellspring of waters to emerge as expression upwards and outwards into the world is our Hubris. The mind must become part of the everythingness of the waters and not the force exerting mastery and control, even through understanding. Creativity as a sacred expression is birthed in the death of the dominance of understanding.

Relinquishing understanding is the greatest challenge of encountering the primordial dimension of our Consciousness. It is also the sap of creativity. In the dance text, the Natya Shastra, as part of a series of ritual invocations at the outset, we are invited to voice “nonsensical” syllables. The embodiment of the archetypal deep sea creature Makara, who is a combination of many disparate lifeforms, includes a gaping mouth which emits other-worldly sounds. When these attributes are embodied, it is a radical invitation to humility, including of the pride in our verbal prowess that distinguishes us, by our own definitions, as superior life. The chaos the mind fears as that which cannot be controlled through understanding is within us.

In our times we have brought creativity to its knees through its slavery to understanding. Recently I was at an exhibition of visual art where the guest of honour prescribed how one must experience the work. I sensed he felt an obligation to direct people’s “understanding” so that they would not dismiss the exhibition as something they did not “understand”. “I do not understand” is the statement of doom in our world.

There are many things that must be understood, and these include most if not all the paradigms of knowledge as a mind-led activity. And then there is the domain of archetypal wisdom that is not for understanding. Someone in my program stated that understanding only gets in the way of the experience.

The name of the aesthetic philosophy of India is Rasa which means, amongst other things, sensation, essence, and savouring. It comes from the world of the kitchen. We do not understand food, we savour it. Savouring is a visceral sensation. It is deeply intimate, subjective, and delicate. It is also only meaningful through direct experience. I cannot savour something on behalf of someone else and we cannot outsource the savouring if we wish to experience it ourselves. In our times we have even outsourced savouring to experts who will tell us what is worthy of our appreciation! We live in times where we cannot be trusted to our own subjective experiences.

Rasa is associated with anubhava, which means direct experience. Indeed, the experience of Rasa is called Rasa-anubhava, the direct experience of Rasa. The nature of that experience is not explained and described in the dance text, which is the source of this philosophy. Rather it is signaled through oblique and poetic allusions and associated with diverse enigmatic dance and archetypal expressions. In practice, I sense that Rasa is eternally elusive to definition and is always something of itself in the moment of its emergence. Anubhava or direct experience is transient, just like dance itself. It offers no repeatability value although we may repeat choreography at a formal level. The revelation of Rasa is a ritual and ceremonial invocation and not just a performance of dance. In this invocation, it is always a transient and one-off experience each time.

Transience is the vessel of infinity. The Divine is Rasa because of this infinitude of possibilities. We directly experience how Reality/Divine can be beyond definition in this offering of Rasa. Even as we commonly propose the Divine as infinite, we still aim to understand and fix the Divine through narratives, conclusions, and templates. In Rasa dance, we encounter the everythingness and transience of each experience. This means that coming to the invocation with previous memories of experience or with a view to capturing it through understanding is irrelevant.

The vast bodies of water that cover Earth and the water bodies that are the essence (Rasa) of lifeforms render the everywhereness and everythingness of waters a material experience. It is not a metaphorical or allegorical proposition which entertains the mind. It is matter and Body that renders something real. Rasa or sensation, in archetypal tradition, is as material as soil, Body and water. Our direct experience of Rasa materializes the intelligence of the encounter with the primordial waters. This materialization becomes expression as creativity.

The word for creativity that is used in the ancient texts in the context of water is “Maya”. Maya means sorcery or the prowess of an illusionist. It is an expression that is alchemical, that deceives our Hubris, tricks our conclusions, and radically transforms Reality through this direct experience. This transformation is one of perception. One of the people in my programs said that what the water invocation brought to her is the fundamental way in which her perception of her daily life transformed. She attributed this to the everythingness intelligence, that most precious ability to savour plurality at all levels. When we experience this, it is nothing akin to tolerance or acceptance. It is the fiery soul of creativity where a searing apprehension of the total movement of Reality births as its lightning taste.

It is only when we can liberate creativity from understanding that Reality unfolds its magnificent dance within our oceanic beings. Living as we do in a Reality structured by opposites, to not understand means ignorance, and in the narrow alleyways of the mind that is correct. When we stand on the shores of an ocean, if we are prepared to throw off our slippers along with our Hubris, and yield to the ebb and flow of the waves for its own sake, something of the poetry of the water’s archetypal wisdom may stir within us. And it has nothing to do with understanding the waves, the wind and the meeting of sky and sea in the distant horizon. It has everything to do with savouring Nature’s poetic offering beyond the science and meaning and description we have assigned to it.