Domesticating the wild of plurality

image attribution: Raja Ravi Varma, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The other day, in one of my Individual Program sessions, the person I was working with asked me to send her some of the images I had shared as part of our dance invocation. This is a request that emerges each time we have a situation of information exchange. There is a need for “owning” or, at the very least, collecting that information. We do not trust the experiencing that is emergent from information, and the possibility that our experience may offer us other intelligence beyond the limits of the information.

Information, with its noisy appearance of plurality, deludes us. We feel we have “acquired” quantities of knowledge when we can “have” the information. Indeed, I sense that information has substituted for experiencing. However, there is little real plurality here when we consider the diversity of Nature and Reality itself. Information paradigms, sourced from our mental consciousness of duality and definition, may oversimplify the complex plurality of Truth/Nature/Reality.

The archetypal Goddess Lakshmi holds an important invitation to our information-dense time. Rather than a singular manifestation, ancient texts speak of hundred Lakshmis. This kind of plurality is common in relation to archetypes of manifest reality (often referred to as the mind-region between the polarity of Earth and Sky). For example, Rudra is another archetype that is often manifested as multiple Rudras.

Lakshmi’s domain is the inevitable collision between our information-seeking intelligence of definition and categorization, and the more expansive yearning in us to experience unity amidst the diversity of material reality. We have been tormented by this collision for centuries and have come up with rather inadequate solutions to domesticate the wildness of the Truth of plurality. Leading with verbal languages, we have sought to tame this wildness into appearances of managed and curated Reality. When we assume that we have mastered Reality in these ways, we must, with great energy and willfulness, ignore the greater part of Reality that eludes our conquest through information.

Lakshmi or Lakshmis, do not reject the ordering impulse within us for that is also a part of the movement of Reality. Rather they ask us to experience plurality as a Body-led consciousness. The most ancient hymns to Lakshmi as Shri in the Rig Veda extol Her sensorial domain as the moist Earth, as the coolness of the Moon, the blooming of the lotus, and the beauty of “things” or matter.

Lakshmi is the divinity of Vasa or home, firstly the home of the Body, where we primarily live, just as we live in a house. In attending to the multi-dimensionality of “home” we imbibe the intelligence of external Reality. The greatest mystery is Body, and in the dynamics of home including the everyday life of family and work. It is not the big existential questions that are truly urgent to us, but the often implacable nature of ordinariness. We are confounded by birth, death, disease, love, beauty, familial bonds, and friendships. This is where the great battles of Reality occur and is archetypally revealed by the many epics across the cultures where home, family and kin become the sites of seminal struggles.

Lakshmi’s physicality holds intelligence about the encounter between Reality’s elusive plurality and our mind’s lust for definition. Rather than the usual descending energy of the Sacred Feminine, Lakshmi rises from the great waters of the archetypal churning of the ocean. In this rising, She is akin to the thrusting energies of the Divine Masculine as manifested for example in the linga aspect of Shiva. Her rising Body blooms from the stalk of its unified legs as the blooming of heart and face. However, the heart here is not thrown open as it is with some Divine Masculine deities, rather it is gently bowed down. The heart energies here are home-ward directed rather than outwards into the world. In the same way, Her navel is described as deep suggesting the same confluence of how emergent and ascending energies can still be directed towards the home of the Body.

Lakshmi is an incredible synthesis of extroversion and the intimacy of home and domesticity. She suggests that plurality is a humble and humbling intelligence. My father once told me that it is in our personal and domestic lives that the greatest of people are either brought to their knees or supported to flourish. In our focus on so called public spaces of social media celebrity, we lose the delicate and quiet opportunities to encounter the mystery of ordinary life which starts with our Body and our intimate spheres. Indeed, Lakshmi’s suggestion is that it is the simplicity of sensorial Body and a daily domestic life of beauty and ceremony that allows us to encounter Reality in its fullness.

The wisdom of plurality is a sovereign intelligence as suggested by the association of elephants with Lakshmi. Elephants are signals of royalty that is Earth-grounded and weighted. Plurality is the essence of the material experience of Reality. It is of Earth and of the manifold diversity of Nature. It’s true experience has nothing to do with our proclivities for describing and translating matter into information. Like life itself, it must be experienced and lived, and its intelligence is eternally emergent and transient.

The invocation to Lakshmi as Shri in the Rig Veda also includes the Tree archetype which is traditionally associated with Body-led invocations. For example, the ancient dancers or Apsaras are often invoked as tree-deities and dance itself can be experienced as the dance of Nature as manifested in the intelligence of Trees. Indeed, Lakshmi is asked to remove our delusion, which is inevitable when we meet plurality with the homeless intelligence of mental and verbal consciousness, through the flowering of the tree that will bear fruits. In other words, tending the Tree so it can flourish, and flower, is the antidote to mis-interpreting Reality. The teaching of plurality is in Nature and not in our mind-created narratives.

In this fruit-laden tree of the Body and our homes is the experience of abundance. Abundance is inherent in the abundant and vast plurality of Nature. We do not need to manufacture a narrative about abundance, we simply need to mirror the abundance around us and in the multi-dimensionality of our Bodies, consciousness, intimations, and expressions. For me Lakshmi’s most potent invitation is to relinquish defining lenses about our own nature. This is not to propose that definition has no role to play because Lakshmi is situated not in a conceptual and abstract experience but in the everyday material experience of body and activity. When we experience the explosion of plurality, it holds definition in its rightful place.

Infinite intimations begin with the home of our Body and Consciousness. Like Lakshmi’s lotus-blooming stance, grounded in the wild and dark oceanic depths of mystery we can participate in taming and domesticating narratives. This is dance that holds the taste of the immanence of infinity in a finite material existence.