Modernity:
A Crisis of the Imagination
Last night was arguably the most important holiday of the year for Hindus, Mahashivratri, a night believed for centuries by countless humans to be endowed with special spiritual qualities. It is a unique evening where, interestingly, more than only devotees of “Lord Shiva” spend the entire evening attempting to ignite a feeling of spiritual ecstasy. This experience is typically activated through acts of prolonged meditation, chanting, prayer, dancing, singing, laughing, and wild ritualized surrender to a higher force that takes place throughout the night until the first rays of light dispel the dark.
Shiva, the well-fit, dreadlocked, half-woman, half-man, “Lord of Destruction” adorned with a cobra, a trident and a crescent moon, to whom this great night is devoted to, is believed by many to be the first practitioner of yoga, whose origins are unknown yet first was come into contact with high in the Himalaya mountain range… dancing.
I wasn’t myself able to stay up all night singing with the Shiv devotees this year, but I was deeply moved by the sounds of devotional ecstasy I could hear from the villages dotting the mountain my family and I reside on now as we drifted to sleep. As a middle-aged father of a toddler, I dare say I rarely stay up past 9:00 most nights and, since being back in India I have only left the relatively safe and predictable confines of our friends’ pleasant garden nook a handful of times. Turns out travel in the subcontinent is far easier when you are young, single and without an easily distracted three-year-old daughter. Who knew?! Yet even though my excursions here have been fewer and somewhat less adventurous than they were when I journeyed here as a younger man with fewer responsibilities, the power of the Indian imagination is still wildly palpable. One needn’t do much more than open a window to catch a whiff off the multifaceted web of Story keeping alive the hearts of what the World Bank would consider, severely impoverished people. And as I surf the web, painfully consuming the polar opposite back home in Babylon, in what one might refer to as a complete inability to imagine anything at all, it becomes blindingly clear how important it is to cultivate a capacity to imagine, or, to borrow from the literal meaning of the word “Shiva” look deeply into “that which is not”.
There is a price to pay for a good imagination of course. For the past week we have reluctantly bore witness as our neighbor here in Kalimpong suffers from being possessed by various “evil” spirits. A steady stream of shaman have come through daily and nightly to perform pujas (prayers) while villagers physically hold this troubled soul down in an effort to exorcise her demons. It has been quite an ordeal to say the least. And if the parties involved are merely acting, they are putting on one hell of a performance. So far at least three ghosts have been convinced to depart the young woman, the home and the land after communing extensively with the shaman. This young woman however, still seems to be an open vessel, as more spirits keep visiting her and I can’t help but consider, why is this such a common event in the Himalaya? Why doesn’t this happen so much in the West? It seems to me that it is because people here have an incredible capacity for imagining unseen worlds.
Indeed, it may be safer to view the whole world in terms of deductible material objects that follow known law, to limit ones catalogue of story to but one or two books, to reduce all wisdom into scientific data, etc, ignore all other options to such an extent that they have no more room to breathe, but to do so greatly limits our capacity, not only for bad things to occur but for good things to happen too.
For greater worlds to come into view, a greater capacity for belief is required of us. My daughter, a lover of the story of Peter Pan, knows this truth dearly! But it’s more than mere fairy tale. It’s natural law. Doctors of western medicine know full well the relationship between belief and well-being. “The Placebo Effect” clearly demonstrates how powerful a role beliefs play in determining our ability to heal when sick for example. The more we can open ourselves to possibility, the more we are able to consider new ways of being.
I did miraculously manage to muster up the courage a couple of days ago to navigate through the dusty, chaotic streets of Kalimpong to attend the Vajrakilaya empowerment at the local Sakya Monastery. The ritual aims to empower believers with the ability to harness obstacle-defeating powers by means of continued deep concentration upon the so-called Vajrakilaya yidyam, a wrathful form of the Buddha Vajrasattva. A powerful member of the colorful Tibetan pantheon usually depicted carrying a dagger called a phurba or kīla, Vajrakilaya is often represented with three faces adorned by a crown of skulls. He has six arms: two holding the phurba, two hold one vajra each, one holds a flaming snare, and the other a trident. He triumphantly annihilates under his feet demons who represent the many obstacles to spiritual realization.
For some, this may sound strange and/or exotic but this particular Vajrayana Buddhist method of skillfully visualizing certain energies in a deeply focused, wildly animated way with the intention being to develop heightened inner qualities for the purpose of benefiting others seems totally natural to most here in the Himalaya.
Visualizing into existence something or someone we cannot see in the known realm isn’t as strange as it may seem upon first glance. Consider how many proper, sophisticated, well groomed citizens of the modern west have a deep seated belief in an invisible long haired bearded man in the heavens who supposedly manifested briefly for a time here on Earth long ago in the form of a Palestinian Jew (white no less!) claiming to be the son of the God he simultaneously claimed to be and was sent here to save mankind from “sin”. While here he walked on water, turned water into wine, brought back to life the dead, made the deaf hear, the blind see, etc. Tibetans don’t think it’s strange to believe such a far fetch tale at all! And neither do most American politicians.
Take another example. Capitalism. We slice up a bunch of rectangular pieces of very thin wood and call it paper. We print fancy images of dead presidents and numbers on said pieces of paper with green ink. We then tell everyone these pieces of paper are valuable. The higher the number in the corners, the more valuable the piece of paper. Everyone believes this story to be true. Very much so. Amazing the power of the human imagination!
Humans have historically built unfathomably amazing worlds from the inner seed of imagination. Yet here we are, 2024, thousands of years into our journey together, entering foolishly into what will surely be one of the warmest years in human history due to our inability to imagine a world beyond the mad, mad world modernity (i.e. Western expansion) has wrought upon us all. And the best the U.S. can come up with is another fight between Biden and Trump. WTF? Seriously. In the holy name of Shiva, Vajrakilaya, Mother Mary, Joseph, Jesus Christ and Taylor Swift…. WHAT THE ACTUAL F@CK?!?!
My friends, we have a serious crises of the imagination on our hands and unless we want to spend the rest our eternity with Virtual Reality goggles on we had better rise to the occasion immediately and get creative. We cannot afford to have another four years of Trump OR Biden. Truth be told we can’t afford another four years of narrow thinking modern view period. But at the very least we need muster up the courage to think beyond Biden and Trump. For the love of language!
We simply cannot keep going like this. With the best among us able to do little more than rally to tell everyone on Facebook that “The lesser of two evils is better than facism!”. Now is not the time for lukewarm activism. Now is the time to call on the big guns. We need Maha Dev! We need Kali Ma! We need Jesus smashing the tables of the greedy bankers in from of the temple court! We need Vajrakilaya and someone much more akin to the likes of say, Brother Cornel West than…. Biden. BIDEN??? AGAIN?!?! Come on people. I know we gotta beat Trump but this shit is getting embarrassing.
Matthew 21:12-13
So, what’s it gonna take? Are we afraid that if we actually believe in something that evil spirits will enter us like the young woman residing beside the home we currently occupy? Has our addiction to the illusion of safety allowed our capacity for risk to atrophy? Or have we simply been sold the same old boring ass story of white possibility as told by empire over and over for so dang long that we simply can no longer remember how to imagine another possibility?
I am literally surrounded by trash here in India. It’s everywhere. Piles and piles of waste EVERYWHERE. Why? Because India is one of those places the so-called “developed” world literally ships their shit to. Discarding their privileged righteousness out of sight so they can keep thinking their little castle on the hill will remain beautiful forever. But the fact is, we all live on the same planet and just because you can’t see the filth, the filth has infected us all. And furthermore, my dear friends, the empire isn’t wearing any fu@king clothes. It behooves us thus to step away from the screen and look out the window. Voting for the lesser of two evils isn’t going to clean this mess up comrades. We need a new game altogether.
When is the last time you really journeyed deep into your subconscious, like Shiva on a moonless night, and gave yourself permission to dream? To dream deeply, with wild abandon, to consider a more beautiful world? Strip malls, life insurance policies, A.I., a mighty military presence, Amazon Home Delivery and social media are far from being the pinnacle of human achievement, and they are doing little to boost us further along the collective journey toward spiritual advancement, or any advancement of any kind for that matter. If anything, the stupid, sterile inventions of modernity, as they wreak havoc on the Natural World have, at best, done little more than divide us, by limiting our ability to come together and forge genuine relations with fellow humans and the greater-than-human worlds as we go about spending the majority of our days numbed out in front of glowing screens.
Because of the Grand Story of Separateness modernity has convinced us of, we are now quickly emerging into a boring era of arguably the lamest imaginations ever known, where instead of a vast cornucopia of diverse and intricately beautiful expression everyone instead simply wears t-shits and blue jeans, takes selfies, eats KFC, speaks only American english and worships Taylor Swift. (*Don’t get wrong, props to Taylor Swift. Please forgive the digs. I’m just sayin’. Is that really what the aspiring Brahmin priest ought be listening to as he cares for Lord Ganesha? Do her songs have the capacity to feed such a mighty god? Maybe so. Heaven knows, those tracks are pretty catchy!)
Temple boy listening to T. Swift inside a market Ganesha temple in Kalimpong, India
…..
My fellow siblings of this curious bardo, I offer you a great and challenge! Who amongst us is worthy of such a noble task?! Is it you?!?! I dare you to wildly dream, if for only an instant. For the benefit of all the gods modernity has killed and the great grandchildren you may never see, for just a few short moments….please, put down your phone and allow yourself to believe more.
What would a world beyond capitalism taste like? What would a planet without hate breathe like? What if our educational institutions taught the true names, origins and uses of all plants in our local bio-regions? What if nightly news offered regular details regarding the architecture of Peace? What if no one was allowed to run for president until they spent 40 days alone in the wilderness? Where would a path beyond justice lead us? What if we allowed god to be bigger than just one religion, sex to be more expansive than him/her or they? How would the national anthem sound if it didn’t have bombs bursting in air? Where would heaven be if it was right here? Who would the bad guy be if we had no word for “other”? When would then be if our time wasn’t money… but art? What if we could drink water directly from our local rivers? What if we could see the stars again, uninterrupted by discourteous, uninvited satellites? What if we, as they did all throughout India last night, danced ecstatically together, regardless of race or creed, until dawn?
…
*please, if you found this inspiring you to dream even a wee bit more than usual, consider sharing. We need more dreamers.
*For more information on Mahashivratri, please visit the works of: Isha
*For more information of presidential candidate Brother Cornel West: CornelWest2024
#maypeaceprevailonearth
Religion is alcohol for stupid people.
Alcohol is also alcohol for stupid people, but that’s another story.