Isn't the goal of a life to develop such a large mask wardrobe that if someone stumbles behind the doors, they’d never get to Narnia? Life as being lost eternally in the mask wardrobe. (Bergman as a cinematic master of this truth.)
Yoga, if it subjects itself to anything but itself (breath, spirit, animating, the natural action of air), becomes a practice of spiritual Botox. Yet this is what we typically see: morality, convention, artifacts, reputation, money competing with and dominating the breath--which in life is nimbleness.
In the old equation, one can only accept love into one’s life to the extent one accepts death—which is to say, in life, grief. Grief as a magic carpet of being.
Human #1: Are you a writer?
Human #2: Let’s just say I have an unusually intimate relationship with creation.
The depths to which one accepts pain in oneself are the depths to which one accepts pain (and hence anger, mistrust, imperfection, love) in others, to which one accepts the world. Much of technological society is constructed to stretch a kind of plastic wrap around this pain; but by mitigating pain in this way, we mitigate our acceptance of the world, others, and ourselves, and live increasingly in illusion.
My parents gave birth to me physically.
My children gave birth to me spiritually.
Perhaps the biggest challenge of migrating from heaven and hell to earth is the gear shift into a kind of oneiric first gear. Earth is slow. The benefit of having experience in heaven and hell is that one has learned to move quickly and is not surprised on the occasions when heaven and hell erupt on earth and rapid action is required. Like animals who sense a tsunami before humans (who have derooted themselves from the rhythms of earth), so the one who’s been to heaven and hell and returned to earth can anticipate eruptions, feels the distant movement of clouds and rocks. This is the task of the modern human: to find nature in the city. But the only place it can be found is deeply buried in the body.
Some lines from Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia:
Live between divine forgiveness and the torment of your soul.
We must listen to the useless voices.
You must stretch the corners of the soul like a sheet.
It’s the so-called healthy who have brought the world to ruin.
God governance. We develop our own principles, often unconsciously or paraconsciously, for recognizing the divine in ourselves and in others, for managing awe (and so overwhelment) and thus keeping the divine in perpetual check. (The cosmic chess game never ends.) When doing this with a degree of consciousness, humans can begin damming the divine, begin using it for certain purposes. (Our bodies are spiritual steam engines which we’ve only just begun to understand and exploit.) In short, god is now simply another technology. (Will we, some centuries hence, if we survive in any meaningful sense, struggle with the same problems of excess in the divine realm as we do now in the realm of nature? Too many dams. Ecotheology problems? Or is the divine, being infinite by nature, not subject to such abuses, and is that the key?)
