EPISODE 15: FROM 21st CENTURY BRIXTON TO 10th CENTURY KASHMIR

Welcome to my blog. It will make you think. What it will make you think, who knows?

Last week I went to the Brixton Splash; a street festival organized in part by my son. I lived in Clapham and Brixton for six years between 1977 and 1983 and hence was around during the first riots. In fact as a co-operation between community, police and council, the Splash is a response to those troubled times. Because of the early rain the attendance was initially low but the vibe was good and better when the sun came out. I chatted to my son’s boss and told him how proud I was of my boy and how pleased to feel the changes in Brixton. An hour later my son was locked in a pub while axe carrying marauders ransacked Curry’s.

I have other children living in Bristol and Birmingham, so I feel a little involved and although I know it is all part of the bad news agenda I have discussed previously, I am sucked in to comment.  First must come the acknowledgement that few in power will want to make, i.e. that the rich have the poor’s money. They may justify it through inheritance, through hard work, through their value to society, through their education, through their risk-taking, through their arms dealing etcetera: nevertheless whatever wealth they have is raised from the poor.

In my previous entry I mentioned the Lord’s Club, the spiritual view of society presented in the East in which everyone is theoretical equal, (by virtue of all being one god playing out the different roles) and that the business of life is a bit like a worker’s co-operative where you rotate the jobs on some seasonal basis and all get paid the same. Philosophies like this can be more tenable when you happen to be a fat Brahmin and less so when you’re an Untouchable destined to spend your (much shorter) life with the dirty and the dead. You could just decide that this particular member of the Lord’s club, this spark of divinity, will become a rampaging and murderous one. David Cameron today talked of the tradition in this country of ‘policing by consent’.

Do you consent to poverty while we walk away the all the toys? No? What’s wrong with you? Here’s a lottery ticket, here’s a crap education, here’s £6 an hour, now fuck off and make something of yourself.

Don’t get me wrong. I hate all those obnoxious, foul mouthed, violent, ignorant, and vulgar manifestations of humanity as much as you (if you do) but let us not believe that their petty thieving is anything compared with the murdering, pillaging and exploiting of our leaders and money-makers.

Now, just to show I’m down with the kids, here’s a picture of Abhinavagupta

in an epoch pen-painting in which he is depicted seated in Virasana, surrounded by devoted disciples and family, performing a kind of trance inducing music on the veena while dictating verses of Tantrāloka to one of his attendees - behind him two dūtī (women yogi) waiting on him.

A legend about the moment of his death (placed somewhere between 1015 and 1025 depending on the source), says that he took with him 1200 disciples and marched off to a cave reciting his poem Bhairava-stava, a devotional work. They were never to be seen again, supposedly translating together in the spiritual world.

I will allude to the scene at the beginning of the second Boggy Starless novel in which my hero emerges after a number of years in a cave with an Afghani Sage and Hashish grower.

Among Abhina’s manifold achievements were contributions to the theories of poetics and drama attributed to the Bharata Muni, the 5^th century BC musicologist who laid down the aesthetic rules of drama that still underpin all Indian classical dance and theatre. Muni claimed that when humanity began to suffer from pride and the joyful life became full of suffering, the god Brahma created drama—with its attendants music, poetry, and dance—to uplift humanity morally and spiritually by means of aesthetics (rasa).

Abhina elevated the theory of rasa, (lit. juice, essence, flavour) by equating aesthetic rapture with spiritual exstasis.

The eight basic rasas were identified as Love, Comedy, Sorrow, Anger, Energy, Terror, and Disgust. Astonishment. Later a ninth was acknowledged, shanta-rasa, ‘the specifically religious feeling of peace which arises out of world-weariness’. Abhina likens it to the string of a jewelled necklace; while it may not be the most appealing for people, it is the string that allows the jewels of the other eight rasas to be relished. These rasas, (which of course need not be limited to or defined by these terms), these flavours, are what an artist is intending to evoke in his audience. Why? Why put them through these emotions when already their lives are full of quite real dramas, emotions, comedies and tragedies et cetera? What excuse is there for that?

The answer, according to these sages, is that art is otherworldly or ‘Alaukika’ in its nature and when the right conditions are in place the true aesthetic object does not simply stimulate the senses but also stimulates the imagination of the spectator. Once the imagination is stimulated the spectator aesthete gets transported to a world of his own creation. This emotion deindividualises an individual by freeing him from those elements which constitute individuality such as place, time etc. and raises him to the level of universal. 

The aesthetic experience is the manifestation of the innate dispositions of the self, such as love and sorrow, by the self. It is characterised by the contemplation of the bliss of the self by the connoisseur. It is akin to the spiritual experience as one transcends the limitations of one's limited self because of the process of universalization taking place during the aesthetic contemplation of characters depicted in the work of art. Abhinavagupta maintains that this rasa (literally, taste or essence) is the summum bonum of all literature and art.

The significant word here is ‘transcend’. Why would a philosopher-concern himself with the theatre and the arts? Why, when all your teaching is about spiritual union with Universal Consciousness, would you involve yourself with the fakery of the stage? Answer? Because although the drama is pretence, it has the ability through the rasa, through the aesthetic experience, to take the ‘sensitive spectator with positive taste and mind’ to a higher state of awareness in which they transcend the emotions and experience bliss.

For a moment there, I almost had it, but something slipped away.

Rasa, according to Abhina, ‘Is the universal bliss of the Self or Atman coloured by the emotional tone of a drama,’ and, ‘the developed relishable state of a permanent mood.’ Rasa is characterized by a peculiar state of awareness that simultaneously ‘transcends’ (lokottara) the ‘objective’ configuration and the corresponding ’subjective’ emotion, but is nevertheless, unlike the introversion of a yogin, both receptive to and intent on enjoying the sensory impressions.

I mentioned earlier the love of creation that pervades Shaivism and talks of the world, of which we are part, as Shiva’s garden. Tantra particularly embraces sensuous pleasure as a spiritual path with the idea of transcending an experience at its most intense moment of manifestation. Abhina, perhaps an exemplar Tantric Master, applies the same approach to the arts and hence can conclude that the pleasure one derives out of a real work of art is no less than divine pleasure.

In opening Episode 14 I outlined a number of issues about story-telling that I have been mulling. What have I learned at the feet of the Guptas? Not enough of course: that the creative process is spontaneous, natural and divine; that the aim of a work of art, of kavya, is to give pleasure ‘but this pleasure must not bind the soul to the body’: that the senses are the spectators: that wise spectators, connoisseurs, can experience an aesthetic rapture identical to spiritual bliss.

I know I’m close but not quite there but my feeling about the value of writing is strengthened.

For wiser words on Abhina and Rasa cf //www.svabhinava.org/abhinava/Sunthar-integral/index.php

 

Ps for my audience: In order to appreciate and to enjoy anything beautiful or wonderful one must have taste and approach with a sense of aesthetic appreciation, responsive imagination, the capacity to identify with aesthetic objects, and intuition. (Abhinavagupta).

So sharpen up please.

EPISODE 14: IN WHICH THE AUTHOR AGAIN DISCUSSES THE NATURE, POINT AND PURPOSE OF CREATION

Welcome to my blog which frequently concerns itself with the nature and purpose of writing and the writer’s life.

 This morning I have been thinking again about my grandson and his love of story, about the success of J.K. Rowling and the innateness of story patterns, about the game of peekaboo, about the seduction of (personal) narrative, about the spectators in the Shiva Sutras, about the point or purpose of writing a blog, about the impulse to communicate, about rasa, and about Abhinavagupta, the 10^th century philosopher from Kashmir.

These are not new considerations for this mind; far from it. They are interconnected and concern issues I, perhaps, am still just grasping at, whereas finer intellects than mine can digest and spew out the complete Abhinavagupta compendium at the drop of a pandit. But we are where we are and I was saying to Trevor the other day, we’re all members of the Lords club with allocated roles which are equal in essence. Ho Ho!

Abhinavagupta has appealed to me since I first heard his name over thirty years ago: he and Kshemraja made Kashmir Shaivism romantic for me. Kashmir Shaivism is one of the two major systems of Indian thought espoused by my guru, Swami Muktananda. The other was Vedanta. Abhinavagupta, Abhina to his mates, was one of India’s greatest philosophers, mystics, and aestheticians. He was also considered an important musician, poet, dramatist, exegete, theologian, and logician – ‘a polymathic personality who exercised strong influences on Indian culture’.  Although Kasmir Shaivism predated Abhina, he synthesized the four strands that were preeminent and wrote commentaries and elucidations on many of the major texts, including the pre-eminent Siva Sutras.

 The appeal of Shaivism, (which is probably the oldest religion in the world) is that it can seem more life-embracing than its nihilistic counterpart. Of course no philosophies, belief systems, religions etc. are true. A best, they are models and manuals: and as such are not always easy to connect with what it is you actually do when you attempt to follow the manual. One is what you do; the other is an attempt to describe what you do. Often it helps to have a guide to show you what the manual means – but sometimes it doesn’t. Philosophies, especially those of the East, were meant to be practical guides to reality and the guru was the one whose job it was to lead you from the darkness of your present knowledge to the light of understanding. Gurus, even more than philosophies, need testing for the vast majority, as in any field, are charlatans, liars, or just plain ignorant.

Abhinavagupta is, I believe, the one to explain to me why writers write and why being an artist is a good thing and how it is ‘that the experiences of the hero, the poet, and the aesthete are identical’ as claimed by no less than Abhina’s teacher in dramaturgy, Bhatta Tauta.

In Kashmir Shaivism the creator is called the Supreme Artist. The creation of the universe is seen as a compulsive artistic act. (Elsewhere in this blog I refer to this five-fold act of creation, sustenance, withdrawing (destruction), revelation and concealment) in which creations are produced solely for the heck of it, for the pleasure of the artist, for the experience of bliss, or rasa, that this artist has throughout the whole process. You are feeling happy, you burst out in song, and then the song makes you happy:  maybe one could call this the supreme self-expression.

Whether I recognise this as so, or not, it begs the question, why do I want other people to read my book/blog/creation? What’s in it for them, what’s in it for me?

Shiva Sutras 3:9-11

9: Nartaka Atma:

The Self is a Dancer. Or, ‘Such a one (who is awake) is always immersed in the consciousness of his essential nature and is a Self that is only an actor (on the world stage.)

10: Rangontaratma:

The inner Soul (i.e. the subtle and causal aspects which contain the inner life of the individual) constitutes the stage (Of the Self that is the actor).

11. Preksaksani indriyani

The senses (of the yogi) are the spectators (of his acting).

So in Sutra 11, I get an answer to my question posed some weeks ago, namely, who are the spectators to the cosmic drama? Essential to the concepts of Shaivism is the axiom, ‘As Above, So Below’ - though they have a number of ways of putting it. Shiva is the jiva, Universal Consciousness and Individual Consciousness are the same thing, the cosmic process is the same is the individual creative act, As Here, So Elsewhere etc. Or, as the Prtayabhijna Hridyam says, ‘Even in this condition (of empirical self), he (the individual soul) does the five (cosmic creative) actions like Him (i.e. Shiva.)

In my first discussion of this sutra I was wondering why an artist creates, or rather, for whom? The cosmic answer appears to be for the enjoyment of the creator. So how does the creator enjoy the creation? Through the senses.

I have three translations of these sutras. The one I’m familiar with is Jaideva Singh’s. After each Sutra (pithy saying) he writes an extensive translation and an exposition. The opening part of the translation for Sutra 11 is: ‘The senses like eyes etc. of the yogi witness inwardly their inmost Self full of the delight in exhibiting the world drama. By the development of the performance of the drama, they provide to the yogi fullness of aesthetic rapture in which the sense of difference has disappeared.’

Iyengar’s translation of the sutra is: The Organs of Sense are the Audience. And the exposition: The eyes and other sense-organs of the Yogi introspectively see his real nature, filled with the pleasure of manifesting the drama of the world. They attain by the excellence of the play, the state where distinctions are abolished and they are filled with the appreciation of the wonderful play.

The third translation is by I.K. Taimni. Today space does not permit any fair reflection of his approach but the translation adds an ingredient which, ultimately, may help me relate the cosmic process to the individual one. The sutra reads like this in his hands:

The other Jivatmas (living beings) witness the part played by a particular Jivatma on the world-stage through their sense organs. They are not able to see the Atma (true Self) of the actor but only the extended part s/he is playing in the world.

I would like to draw all this to a rapid and meaningful conclusion. But I can’t.  Another time; next week perhaps. I’d like to think I’d get another 5,000 words of my novel done by then because the last two weeks have been extraordinarily slack.

See you.

EPISODE FIVE; IN WHICH A WONDERING AND WANDERING MIND FINDS ITSELF, FOR NO GOOD REASON, CONTEMPLATING THE CREATION OF THE COSMOS.

Welcome to my blog which has the ambition of entertaining you while reflecting the ‘life’ of a writer-in-waiting. And what’s he waiting for? Money? Recognition? Success?  Or the ability to answer the question, ‘What do you do for a living?’ Maybe by time we get to the end of this study (only 65 weeks to go!) we might know better whether any of these results prove to be relevant.

At the moment we can see the writer in his big brother house, sitting at his wobbly MFI desk, one hand keyboarding, the other clutching a cup of tea. It is six in the morning and the room is bright with sunlight.  He is thinking. A writer, this writer, spends a lot of time thinking. He only does this because he can’t help it. Even after thirty years of meditation, the thinking remains untrammelled. Rather than being penetrating and progressive, this sort of thinking is like a rapidly moving downward spiral which ultimately leaves the thinker somewhere up his own arsehole with his fists in his ears to drown out the repetitiveness of the words in his head. The only cure, it turns out, is to write something down. Then there is a shift and everything moves on and new thoughts appear.

I’ve been thinking about creation, and of painters.

You may have noticed that this is called a ‘self-help reality novel’ because part of the story is about a writer who uses deliberative techniques to support his endeavour like, for example, those described in Robert Fritz’s books, ‘Creating’ and ‘Your Life as Art’.  Robert is very keen on using the painter analogy:

“One of the best ways to quickly explore the major principles of the creative process is by thinking about how painters work. Painters use every principle that you need to understand to create your life as art.”

Fritz then develops the theme by inviting us to imagine being the painter with a blank canvas and asking him/herself, ‘What do I want to create?’

On reading that, I recalled having seen a similar analogy in one of my books on Kashmir Shaivism. After three hours searching, I found it amid a host of analogies and descriptions used by Shaivite philosophers in the 10^th century to describe the creation of the universe. (Apologies in advance for obscurantism, any apparent religious wording, untranslatable Sanskrit terms written without the right accents and any ennui engendered. Let’s face it, I haven’t many readers yet so I may as well get it out of my system. You can always come back next week, please.)

‘If the Highest Reality did not manifest in infinite variety, but remained cooped up within its solid singleness, it would be neither the Highest Power nor Consciousness but something like a jar.’

‘As the great banyan tree lies only in the form of potency in the seed, even so the entire universe with all the mobile and immobile beings lies as a potency in the heart of the Supreme.’

‘Just as a peacock with all its variegated plumage lies as a mere potency in the plasma of its egg, even so the entire universe lies in the Shakti of the Supreme. The Shakti of the Supreme is called Citi (Consciousness), or para-Shakti (the great vibration) or paravak (the first word.)

‘He (i.e. shiva, universal consciousness) Himself full of joy enhanced by the honey of the three corners of his heart, viz., Will, knowledge, Action, raising up his face to gaze at (his own splendour) is called Shakti.’

‘When He becomes intent to roll out the entire splendour of the Universe that is contained in his heart (in a germinal form), he is designated as Shakti. Shakti is his intentness to create and is the active or kinetic aspect of Consciousness.’

‘At first (logically, not chronologically) there was only ‘Sat’ (existence which is consciousness) – all alone without a second. He gazed and bethought to himself, May I be many, may I procreate!’

‘Just as an artist cannot contain his delight within himself, but pours it out into a song, a picture or a poem, even so the Supreme Artist pours out the delightful wonder of his splendour into manifestation or creation.’

‘Shakti thrown up by delight lets Herself go forth into manifestation. All manifestation is, therefore, only a process of experiencing out, creative ideation of Shiva.’

‘Just as an artist has at first a hazy idea of the picture he has to produce, but later a clearer image of the picture begins to emerge into his view, even so at the Sadashiva stage, the Universe is just a hazy idea, but at the Ishvara stage it becomes clearer.’

And thus we are returned to the painter analogy. However, before addressing what the painter chooses to create, maybe we could first notice that at some point previously the desire to create must have arisen in him. Where did that come from? And why? At what point in the evolutionary cycle did music and art become survival tools? What needs to they fulfil?

According to the selected quotes above taken from indian thought, the desire to create is natural and is inherent in the nature of being and consciousness. Imagine, if you would, an amorphous blob of nothingness stretching infinitely in every direction. In that blob there is ‘a somewhat of a movement’, a throb, a heartbeat, a feeling of explosive energy and that movement, in a flash, ripples out giving the appearance of a cosmic process of creation consisting of emanation, existence, dissolution, concealment and revelation.

Well maybe that’s a bit much to imagine all in one go.

My word count tells me that my 1,000 words is almost up. The bad news is I may have to continue in the same vein next week or until I’ve got this stuff out of my head. Meanwhile I’ll briefly sum up my thinking so I can move on. (Remember I’m writer so it’s all about me even when I pretend it isn’t.)

The essential message of Shaivite monistic philosopher is that ‘the jiva is shiva’, that the individual is no different from the cosmic processor and thus we have the same compulsive desire to create, originating as a throb within our blob and unfolding continually in a recognizable process that produces our experience. Can I illustrate this?

Come back next week.

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The Significance of Shiva's Dance

This cosmic dance of Shiva is called 'Anandatandava,' meaning the Dance of Bliss, and symbolizes the cosmic cycles of creation and destruction, as well as the daily rhythm of birth and death. The dance is a pictorial allegory of the five principle manifestations of eternal energy — creation, destruction, preservation, salvation, and illusion. According to Coomerswamy, the dance of Shiva also represents his five activities: 'Shrishti' (creation, evolution); 'Sthiti' (preservation, support); 'Samhara' (destruction, evolution); 'Tirobhava' (illusion); and 'Anugraha' (release, emancipation, grace). The overall temper of the image is paradoxical, uniting the inner tranquillity, and outside activity of Shiva.
Text taken from hinduism

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