Democracy and self-inquiry

Photo: Moving Archetypes group class by Geoffrey Dunn

"...that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

-Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg address

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…”

-W B Yeats, The Second Coming

The iconic words of Abraham Lincoln describing the modern birth of democracy in the Unites States of America recognises the birth of freedom through revolution, sacrifice and, more directly, death. He draws a line from the death of people who fought for freedom and the emergence of a political and social system that locates agency in the phrase “of the people”.

The very same phrase “of the people” is found on a wreath above the gravestone of the little-known priestess Isias in Cappadocia, Turkey. And in the Indian context, the ancestral origins of the popular deity Ganesha come from the word “gana” which means populace or people. Ganesha is thus the Isha or the power or dominion of the populace, or a Deity that holds the essence of this power.

As the priestess of the Goddess Isis, Isias connects, stewards, and facilitates the populace to experience the consciousness of Isis. The role of ancient priests/shamans/dancers was to be the doorway experiences, and to hold the archetypal intelligence which are expressed as Deities, so that the populace may be guided to share in this experience. Shamans or priests were not simply people who self-identified as such; traditional shamanic and ritual cultures had sophisticated wisdom about how to recognise a shamanic consciousness and how to midwife it safely towards manifestation.

In the case of Ganesha, as the Deity of obstacles, Ganesha presents a multi-dimensional invocation of the nature of the doorway towards archetypal consciousness. Ganesha suggests that what facilitates is also what is experienced as the obstacle. There is a battle at the doorway that requires the sacrifice even of our paradigms about obstacles. This is primarily our mental lenses of gain and loss. We cannot enter the archetypal doorway so long as we are there to gain something or if we are afraid of losing something. In the language of the mind, we have everything to lose and nothing to gain. Therefore, relinquishing or sacrificing the mental lenses is the death that is required.

The nature of archetypal consciousness is not rendering one special or above the populace. If anything, it is quite the opposite. Archetypes dissolve us into Reality. We become life itself. We are the eyes of the animals, the breath of the trees, the colours of the sunset, and the dance of the stars in the sky. In the ancient Vedic invocation of Purusha or that consciousness of Body that is archetypal, Purusha is given a thousand heads, eyes, and limbs. This is the multi-dimensional consciousness that is immanent within us and within life. We are the one and the many in equal measure without hierarchy.

The archetypal dancer or Apsara was one whose wisdom about transforming consciousness was valued by Gods and kings. In the Natya Shastra, a king bemoans the absence of Urvashi, the Apsara, and asks for Her to return so that his court is returned to its archetypal wisdom as the source of all other intelligence.

The absence of an archetypal source intelligence creates fragmentation and chaos as other approaches to Reality function within a context where the “centre cannot hold”. The Apsara is an important dweller of the “inner chambers” of the king’s court and a unifying and distilling intelligence that weaves together the primordial and the individual into a dancing expression of harmonious action of Rta (organic flow of Reality).

Today we see populace largely as tribes who come together because of shared ideologies. We even look at self-inquiry and spirituality through this very same lens. We must gather around those who affirm the same spiritual philosophies. We interpret the populace to mean community rather than community of life in the broadest sense.

This looks the same as the “gana” or populace of Isias and Ganesha, but it is not the same at all. For example, the ganas of mythology are also associated with the iconoclastic Deity, Shiva. As Shiva ganas, there is little of our community building behaviours seen in them. Like Shiva, they were wild, and “uncivilized” according to our definitions of civilisation. One of the reasons for revering Shiva is that He is the leader of the wild and unpredictable ganas.

Gana as the “tribe” of life is beyond our controlling assumptions of well-behaved communities. It is the everythingness of life held together in the unity of manifestation. Our existence means that we are part of this gana of life at this time, which includes the Earth and all Her life and the universes beyond.

In this experience of Gana, intelligence flows from the archetypal self-inquiry towards other intelligences. Just as in the king’s court, the Apsara holds the source of all other courtly knowledge including that of the ministers, treasurers, and generals. This is not to say that the flow is one way. The archetypal intelligence distills and clarifies other lenses on an ongoing basis. The nature of a ritual tradition is the necessity to reignite the invocation each time. It is not a static technique to be repeated for mastery or control.

Today we have reversed this flow and approach archetypal wisdom through the lenses of the king’s court filled with ministers, treasurers, and generals. In this court, the Apsara is only one of many stories rather than a living wisdom reignited through ritual invocation. The intelligence of archetypal self-inquiry morphs into democracies of shared ideologies.

Often, I have people in my programs who struggle with the fact that I do not espouse “following” or discipleship. It is not that I reject community deliberately. When it happens, it is a beautiful thing. However, I am reserved about communities of belief and practice. The more important thing in self-inquiry as I have sensed this is the community with life itself. It is the community with Nature without the slightest sensation of hierarchy, that truly alleviates separation and loneliness. We are most fully ourselves and we are most fully accepted for who we are in this experience of community with Nature.

Lincoln’s words echo archetypal intelligence even if he may not have consciously meant to do so. Democracy or being part of the larger in its archetypal sense of the democracy of Nature, requires battle and sacrifice. This is not about literal battles but battle as archetypal consciousness. The most ancient of Goddesses were war Goddesses. This is the archetypal invitation of ferocity as an essential sensation of self-inquiry. In ritual invocations of war, ferocity, fear, and desire, we were able to attend to these necessary drives in us in ways that allowed an inquiry into their archetypal intelligence.

Bereft of archetypal wisdom as Body-led invocations, today we are left with the residual literal tropes where, despite our valiant efforts, “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold”.