Nature and Culture, Personal Will and Divine Will - Mythology of Radha and Krishna
Radha and Krishna, neither complete without the other. Radha, older, already married, denies the social expectations of her reality to steal into the night and dance with Krishna. They follow their nature, it is their natural pursuit of bliss, and the desire stirs from deep inside.
They fear, particularly Radha, of defying cultural norms but cannot resist the almost magnetic urge to be near, to be with one another.
Krishna, as an avatar of Vishnu, is a sustainer of culture and a domesticator of nature. Domestication does not mean dominance. To stop listening to and being in relationship with nature is to ignore a large piece of ourselves, not just as individuals but also as unique expressions of the same absolute, infinite, abiding consciousness. There must be a balance, and balance isn’t a destination. It is a moment-to-moment response to the circumstances at hand. It’s beyond equilibrium and requires fluid and shape-shifting pressures working in harmony to maintain stability at a center – at our center. When these influences are out of whack, we are out of whack. Our feelings are disruptive, they cause us to feel in a myriad of ways uncomfortable and unsatisfied. It can be low-level, it is not always dramatic and explosive. Sometimes we are just a bit irritable. Annoyed. Still hungry when we are full.
We can ignore these sensations, these truths rising into our awareness from deep within. But why? And, what does this balance look like to you? – Answer first how you want it to look, and then be honest about how it actually is presently. If we don’t get real we can’t do a damn thing that will have a lasting and beneficial affect.
After Radha and Krishna’s promise to each other, Krishna is visited by Brahma late in the night after Radha has fallen asleep. He reminds Krishna of his purpose – Vishnu descended in human form to rid the world of evil, particularly to rid the world of his uncle, Kamsa, an incarnation of a demon beaten in battle once before, Kalanemi. This remembrance causes him to leave her before she wakes.
While we have personal will, and desires and intentions that require skilled and practiced listening to know firsthand (beyond base desires - food/sex/sleep), it must all play second fiddle to divine will. This story represents divine will tangibly, as a task that must be completed, but in our lives it likely looks quite different.
There is no specific single destiny that is ours – one that we must meditate on and hopefully can pluck from the sky out of billions of fates before our human lives are over. There is however a flow of life energy present in the universe that we can choose to tap into, we can choose to flow with. Whatever the universe wants it will do through us when we choose to stop butting our head against a wall, stop swimming against the current.
We set a course and the flow takes care of the nuances of our journey. Our passions, our happiness, our fear and our sadness, they are all our honored guides. Each of us get neurotic thoughts throughout our days, but the nagging, specific thought that goes around the block and comes right back, that’s the bad girl to listen to. That’s the one whose whispering directions into our soul.
What if, instead of saying, “Shut up shut up shut up!” and trying to shove it deep down inside, you invited it into full awareness, in for tea so to speak, and asked it what the fuck it wants?
Only you know the answer. If we are willing to truly hear, we always know what we must do next, even if it is a tiny step, like get out of bed.
We have an eye and a heart for the big, the grand, the overtly magical. Day-to-day though, these processes occur in the most mundane of ways. It’s a thought, a breath, a day dream, the completion of a chore, a phone call from a friend, an email from a colleague.
It’s not “Jesus take the wheel,” I am completely incompetent and unable to decide, it is pursuit of what feels right without being attached to a singular mental image you may have of the outcome.
SUPER EASY.
Of course it’s not. And there are times that even when we know better we choose not to act on that knowledge. That’s OK. Our egoic understanding of time is linear, but existence isn’t. We will make all kinds of shapes with our path, we will learn what we were meant to learn, and as long as we keep trying, we will get to where we want to go and where we were meant to go.
If you want an answer to satisfy the question of HOW, there is only one: listen. But how do we listen? In any way we can. Meditate. Journal. Reflect in nature. Exercise. Spend time in silence. Experiment, and take to heart what Rumi told us all long ago, “There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”