The wonderful Danish writer Isak Dinesen once suggested that there are three occasions for happiness in human life: when there is an excess of energy; during the cessation of pain; and when we possess the absolute certainty that we are doing the will of God. The first of these belongs mostly to youth, and the second is, by definition, brief. The third, however, is open to anyone at any and all times. To possess the absolute certainty that one is doing the will of God requires coming into relationship with the slender threads.
It puzzled me for many years that so many of the poorest of the poor whom I made friends with in India were happy when there seemed to be so little for them to be happy about. Over the years I learned that these people were in touch with a kind of happiness that is beyond the vagaries of fortune or possession. The will of God is theirs for the simple coin of faith, and nothing can take that away from even the lowliest beggar. No horror of the leper or despair of the abandoned can defeat the certainty that one is somehow carrying out the will of God, and, remarkably, this balm is still available to us all.
My whole life has been an attempt to find and follow the will of God, and at the same time it has been a passage into solitude; my sense is that, for me, the two have been inseparable. At some level I understood that this was my destiny from a very early age, but another part of me made a desperate rebellion against the solitude and thus set up the basic conflict of my life. When I was alone, I could not bear the loneliness of it. When I was with someone, a voice was constantly whispering in my ear that I ought to be alone.
Only in recent years have I reached a new capacity. Now I can be alone for long stretches of time and yet not be inspired to do anything to remove the aloneness; I can stand the solitude of being with God. What a strange and marvelous goal to reach! Why does it take so many years to learn something so simple? In a similar way, I can enjoy companionship with my friends or even lecture and take part in large communities without having it spoiled by the insistent voice in me gathering me off into my solitude.
I am repelled by most of what I have read or heard on the subject of serving God, but one passage has stayed with me as a quiet solace: Thomas Merton once wrote that any man who is obliged to bear the solitude of God should not be asked to do much else in life. He implied that it was so difficult a job that the true servant of God often has little energy or strength for anything else. Maybe this is slightly overblown, but in general I agree, and Merton’s suggestion seems to be borne out in my life. Each of us seems to have different degrees of the Golden World available to us, but I know that we all must have at least a taste of it.
I have learned to accept the necessity of solitude, but that does not impair my friendships. It was, once again, a dream that told me the next progression of my life. Soon after my last trip to India I had an extraordinary dream:
A few friends of mine, perhaps a dozen, are on the top of a great mountain. We are standing at the pinnacle of the highest peak in sight, far above timberline. It is exceedingly, breathtakingly beautiful. The air is clear, the sunshine bright and golden, and the vista is breathtaking. You can look around for 360 degrees and see snow-covered peaks on every side. The entire scene is thrilling, exhilarating, magnificent.
My friends and I are all awestruck by this setting, when, to my astonishment, I notice that all the mountains in sight, with the exception of the one we are standing on, are melting. Like burning candles, they are gradually losing their shape, becoming liquid, and draining back down into the sea. Despite my recognition of this, I am still inordinately happy. I possess the knowledge that the mountain on which we stand is also going to melt and dissolve away quite soon. But I also know with absolute certainty, as if I have heard the voice of God, that everything is exactly as it should be.
No words are spoken in my dream, but a thought comes to me: “There is one act of volition remaining in your life, and only one. You may do it or not do it, as you wish.”
I immediately know that this action is the will of God, and so I must do it. The final action is to draw my friends together in a small circle, put our arms around one another’s shoulders, and lean inward so that our heads make a slightly smaller circle. I must make this circle as perfectly symmetric as possible. We joyfully form the circle and stand there together waiting for the melting of our mountain, but I am not frightened; I am absolutely joyous. The dream ends with our circle waiting for the mountain to dissolve away, as it is the end of the world.
Like all dreams, this one has apparent meaning and yet also is mysterious and puzzling. Often dreams fail to tell us on what level they are pertinent. They may be foretelling an outer event, or they may be describing an interior psychic event. The situation depicted in the dream also may be general in nature, such as a comment on society or on the time in which we live. The time dimension in dreams is maddeningly imprecise. Our dreams do not follow linear clock time, so I must ask myself: Is this event something that has happened, that is about to happen, or that is a prediction of something far off in the future?
Once when I lectured with the great Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz many years ago, she spoke about death dreams, and that is what I believe visited me here. One of the characteristics of an impending death is the perfection of the dream, when everything is just right, or some perfect order has been established. Often this is an indication that the dreamer is near the end of earthly life, as though the dream is saying there is no longer a need to stay around because the work is done. This dream is obviously about the end of a world, though I don’t believe that it means the planet Earth is about to melt. I have no intention of making a placard and going out on a street corner to shout, “Repent, the world is coming to an end!” There are people who do exactly that in response to a dream or vision, but I feel that this would be interpreting the dream on the wrong level. I presume this dream means one of two things. It could be a simple message announcing my physical death. I am in good health and nothing is apparently wrong with me, but I am already one year older than the average life span of the American male, so I have surpassed the statistical average. Or, could it mean the end of an era in my life, a change in direction or vocation?
Carl Jung once wrote that we should accomplish our death, a statement that has great meaning for me. I recently overheard a conversation in which a woman who was dying was listing all the things she and her husband were going to do as soon as she got out of that hospital bed. “We will go sailing, and then we will take that trip to the Bahamas that we always dreamed about,” she said, going on with many other things that had remained unlived up to that point. This woman actually died in the middle of a sentence like this. I was greatly saddened by this death because it revealed so much unfinished business in the woman’s life. My ideal is to die in a state of equilibrium, a point where there is nothing churning in me or demanding attention, no unfinished business.
The Hindus say that it is unfinished business that leads to reincarnation. Although I don’t entirely subscribe to the idea of reincarnation, I do believe that unlived life is a terrible burden that our children inherit. Many people end up saddled with the unlived lives of their parents, trying to make up for all the things their parents never did. Ideally, all of the contents of our interior being should either be experienced or sacrificed by the time of our death; this is what it means to accomplish our death. Of course, none of us can experience all of our potential, but we can draw energy out of the unlived aspects of our being.
I regret the general attitude in our society that we should keep our lives completely full—forever thinking up new horizons—right up to the end. I don’t think that is what old age is for. In the collective American consciousness we are taught to cling to youthfulness, warding off gray hair and wrinkles. An unlived portion of life can be sacrificed—that is, transformed by making it sacred. For example, if I harbored an unfulfilled wish to be an Olympic runner, that wish clearly could not be fulfilled in my life. But by working consciously with that desire, I could at least rechannel the energy into something possible to me. I would start by recognizing the fact that my dream of being a great runner has never and will never be fulfilled. Then I would allow a period of time to grieve the loss. Then, and this is the key, I would create some ritual to mark the passing of this unlived potential.
Here is another example. Some time ago I found a silly resentment in me concerning the fact that most of my friends had been to Hawaii and I had never been there. Whenever someone talked about a trip to Hawaii, I felt that I had missed out on something desirable. Of course, I had been to India and other places much more exotic than Hawaii, but still this somehow bothered me. A couple of years after becoming conscious of this wish, I accepted a lecturing trip to Hawaii and got it out of my system. But suppose that lecture opportunity had not presented itself? I could still have created a meaningful ritual to sacrifice this unlived potential. A psychological response would have been to use active imagination to explore what this Hawaii issue was really about for me—to confront my own unconscious wish.
Sacrifice is an important concept for anyone interested in leading a religious life, but most people today seems to think that sacrifice means giving something up, such as giving up candy at Lent. This is how shallow our religious sense has become. Sacrifice really involves the art of drawing energy from one level and reinvesting it at another level to produce a higher form of consciousness.
Human existence seems to be for the express purpose of advancing consciousness. We do this by building up one level of consciousness and then sacrificing it to a higher level of consciousness. In time we master that new level of consciousness and then we must in turn sacrifice it to a still higher level. All of us have the experience of being confronted with something that simply will not work with our familiar way of doing things. The innocent consciousness of the child must eventually give way to adult consciousness. A young person at the age of twenty-one must step into his or her own life; this person is no longer a teenager who can properly live in his or her parents’ house and let them do the laundry. The energy invested in an old way of being must be pulled out of the old pattern and reinvested in a new pattern.
We go through several distinct passages like this. Each of us must sacrifice childhood to enter adolescence, then adolescence must be sacrificed for early adulthood; in the marriage vows two people must sacrifice their individual desires for a new, higher purpose—the marriage; and parents must in many ways sacrifice their selfish desires in order to serve the needs of their children. Women experience a major transition at menopause, and if they can consciously realize this change as a sacrifice performed in a sacred manner, they gain a new maturity and a higher form of consciousness. The same applies to men: if they can get through a midlife crisis by sacrificing their youth in a meaningful way, then they can go on to a rich old age, but if they cannot make this sacrifice properly, then you will find instead an aging adolescent driving a sports car and chasing after his youth. Few things are more pathetic.
Sacrifice is an interior event, but it seems to be greatly aided by external ceremonies. The ancients would take their best ox and cut its throat to mark a sacrifice, or they would kill a goat or a bird. I abhor the killing of animals, but I understand why ceremony is such an important aspect of sacrifice. Today we have available to us other ways of accomplishing the same thing. It is possible and necessary to create our own meaningful rituals and ceremonies. I often prescribe this for people who have lost touch with traditional religious teachings: make up your own ceremony. “What shall I do?” they ask, and I say that it will be fresh and powerful if it comes directly from your own psyche. I’ve seen people discover or invent profoundly meaningful rituals to help carry them through a needed sacrifice.
One of the finest ceremonies I have observed came from a young friend of mine. This fellow had a dream that he was at a Saturday night party where everything was going wrong. The food was inedible, no one would talk to him, and he was feeling absolutely miserable. We talked this dream over, and he went home and worked on it. He came back the next week and said he realized that Saturday night consciousness had died for him, by which he meant the American ideal of Saturday night as the time to party, get drunk, and have mindless fun with the gang. Usually this Saturday night syndrome is not as much fun as it is said to be, but I watch most young people trying to wring some personal satisfaction out of it anyway. People know they have a God-given right to some feelings of ecstasy, so they are driven to more and more excessive behaviors to get that Saturday night high. The very word Saturday comes to us from the Latin saturnalia, which means an occasion of unrestrained or orgiastic revelry, and the festival of the god Saturn, a Dionysian deity, was celebrated with feasting in ancient Rome.
My friend researched all of this and decided that a sacrifice was called for; he decided to sacrifice the Saturday night syndrome. He hunted around his house for something that would represent this syndrome and decided to go out and buy a Big Mac hamburger. He then took a shovel, went out to the backyard, and buried this symbol of the “fast life” and instant gratification. He did this ceremony with great seriousness to mark a change in his lifestyle. Saturday night was never quite the same for this young man again. He was able to reinvest the energy that had been tied up in the old pattern and thereby move on to the next level of consciousness. This was a wonderfully creative, meaningful, tailor-made ritual not found in any book.
It is in a similar fashion that we should approach those unlived aspects of our life before death. That which is unlived should be examined, made conscious, and then transformed.
Learning the value of meaningful sacrifice is not the same as denying pleasure or practicing asceticism. There is a wonderful saying from the Judaic tradition suggesting that every legitimate joy you deny yourself on earth will be denied you in heaven. This speaks to the false spirituality of asceticism. Trading in one thing to get something better is not a spiritual act at all; in fact, it is highly egocentric. You shouldn’t make a sacrifice in hopes of getting something back from God. I see many people who pray to God to make things go the way they like or who tithe to a church to achieve social standing or some other worldly goal. This is not sacrifice at all. Properly, a sacrifice should be suffered simply because it is necessary for the transformation of consciousness—to get beyond the wishes of your ego, not to satisfy those wishes in some backhanded way.
So, getting back to my dream of the circle of friends, it may be suggesting the death of an old perspective or a form of consciousness. The circle may indicate a meaningful ritual for marking this transformation.
I recently had another dream that seems to speak to the same issue. Here is the dream:
I sit down at my desk to write. I am using a fountain pen, and I discover that the pen no longer uses ink but instead is filled with water.
Taken together, these two dreams could be suggesting the end of my writing career, or, alternatively, they could suggest that my work should be performed with no trace—that is to say, without any ego involvement. This is a primary goal in the Buddhist tradition—to carry out worldly acts with total presence, appreciating the fullness of each moment, acting with “no trace” and without asking “what’s in it for me?” Most of the great religious works of art, including the cathedrals, the stained glass, the illuminated manuscripts, were never signed by their creators. Probably both ways of viewing the dream are true.
In the Western tradition there is a delightful medieval story called “M’Lady and the Tumbler” that is instructive.
There once was a monastery that was famous throughout the land for its beautiful tapestries, its fine illuminated manuscripts, its paintings, its weavings, its choir, and its philosophical writings. Everyone who lived at this monastery was expert in some high art, except for one little fellow. This monk felt terribly inadequate because he couldn’t do anything with such high art. This feeling went so deep in him that finally one day he said to himself, “I will give to M’Lady, the holy Virgin Mary, what I can, for that is all I have.” He had been a circus performer before coming to the monastery, and he was a tumbler.
Several days later, when all the other monks were up in the chapel participating in the high mass, the little monk went down into the crypt. He was such a nobody in the monastery that no one ever missed him or knew where he was. He found himself entirely alone in the crypt and began to perform his circus tumbling act before the statue of the Virgin.
This went on for some time, until one day another monk came down to the crypt to fetch candles and witnessed this strange scene. He was scandalized and immediately ran to the abbot. “Your Holiness, do you know what is going on in the crypt during high mass?” The abbot had some perception, and he told the monk that they would meet the following day and go down to the crypt to witness this scene.
The next day during the high mass, the abbot and the informer left the sanctuary and went down to the crypt to see what was going on. Sure enough, there was the little monk doing his tumbling act before the statue of the Virgin. The informer was by this time shaking with outrage, but the abbot held him back and continued to watch. When the tumbling was over, M’Lady the Holy Virgin came down off the pedestal, held out her hand, and blessed the small monk for what he had done.
The abbot turned to the informer and said, “More real worship goes on here than takes place upstairs.”
It is told that the tumbler later became the next abbot of the monastery, ushering in a golden age.
This story helps me to understand that if I write with a fountain pen containing only water, that is enough. While the human, practical side of me has a hard time relating to this dream, I have grown rather fond of that simple yet elegant image: writing with the ink that leaves no trace. It speaks to me of performing every act as a sacrifice.
Whatever the purpose of my recent death dreams, their effect has been to leave me intensely happy and satisfied for months, and this is a gift that I do not take lightly. My visions and my dreams tell me that death is a happy experience, and I am convinced of that. There was a time when the biggest fear in death for me was the loss of my friends, but now that I have had the circle of friends dream, even this prospect has lost its sting. These dreams seem to be saying that not only is death a natural occurrence, it is a valuable and meaningful experience in which I am linked with those people who are dearest to me. What a happy thought!
I HAVE TALKED THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK of slender threads and the need to balance heaven and earth, but I must admit that my capacity to hold the splendor and the glory of that experience has varied enormously at different times throughout my life. It’s tempting to talk about golden light and ineffable glory when one is thinking of heaven, but this is literalizing the Golden World too much. I can say that gradually the two worlds—the Golden World and the earthly world—have come to coincide in me. I will argue against those who talk of heaven as the next world. It is more accurate to say that we all are in heaven right now, and we are all in hell right now. The difference in our experience has to do with each person’s capacity of perception.
At present, my friends have become the strongest expression to me of the Golden World. In the circle of friends dream, as the mountains are dissolving away, I am instructed to put my hands on the shoulders of my friends and make a circle. You will recall that this is the second time it has been revealed that the form of a circle would save or transform me. In the dream of the snake and the three Buddhas, the huge, archetypal dream that I once told Dr. Jung, I was running desperately from a giant snake; it was my making a circle for the snake with my arm that led to transformation. In this more recent dream, as I face the end of the world it becomes clear to me that making a circle with my friends is the will of God. I have one act of volition open to me; I can choose to accept or reject the will of God. I know that I must affirm it. I am sobered by the Catholic doctrine that one has free will only to do—or not do—the will of God. This seems small choice in life, but the subject is so vast that it overwhelms every other consideration.
In a larger sense, this is the business of any artist—and we all are artists of life—to give form to the will of God. Everyone needs to ask how he or she can make a container to hold the splendor of God within life. It is up to each of us to create this form. No matter how poor a household I visited during my years in India, there always was a small corner that was designated as a holy place; even those people who lived on the street and had few possessions always had a tiny altar to honor the gods and to remind them that this is our earthly task.
I once asked my learned Brahmin friend in India, Simanta Chatterjee, if he had ever been in the presence of an enlightened man. He refused to answer.
“This is an issue of life and death for me, Simanta, and I must know,” I insisted.
Again, I was greeted only with silence, but I was like a bulldog who wouldn’t let go.
“Does it exist only in the collective unconscious? Does it ever exist on the face of the earth? Have you ever been in the presence of an enlightened being?”
Finally he responded, “Once.”
I nearly stood straight up. “Who was this person?” I asked.
“You,” he said, and I was so shocked that we never talked about the subject ever again.
I don’t share this exchange as proof of my wisdom; on the contrary, it is an act of humility. What I think Simanta was trying to tell me is that every one of us is an enlightened being. It is not necessary to go dashing across the world to sit at the feet of Sri Aurobindo, Sai Baba, or anyone else. To do so is to miss the point entirely. Enlightenment is simply being, the act or fact of being a human with consciousness that you are following the will of God. Nearly everyone gets a taste of this through romantic love. When you love someone, some part of you knows that the other person is just an ordinary human being, but in your heart you know something else is also true—the beloved puts us in contact with heaven. What the sages and prophets tell us is that this experience doesn’t have to be located in just one person. Now, approaching my seventy-sixth year, I go walking down a street and I am sometimes bowled over by the beauty of some person or some simple thing. I have to stop and catch my breath. This comes with a ripeness of consciousness, a growing capacity to see the Golden World frequently.
Not long ago I had another fascinating dream:
I am backstage at a concert hall in ordinary dress. Suddenly someone opens a door onto the stage and thrusts me through it. I find myself on a brightly lit stage with an organ console ready for a concert. Music is on the stand, and a huge audience of people is applauding for me. Everything is set for a concert, but I don’t know what to do. Thoughts race through my mind: I am not prepared to play; should I announce to the people that it is a big misunderstanding? The atmosphere is full of expectation. I walk to the music rack of the organ and see that it is filled with compositions I have played at various times in my life. But I have not practiced! Perhaps I could bluff my way through it. Then suddenly I know what to do. I sit down at the organ console, but I do not touch the keys. There is no audible sound, but I look at the music score and hear the music, and the audience hears it, too. I play the whole concert in this manner, never touching a key. At the beginning of the concert the audience is hearing the music because I hear it, but by the end I realize that they hear the music as if direct from heaven, and they no longer need me as intermediary. The concert ends; I bow and walk off stage.
This seems to be one more in a series of death dreams. As the dream suggests, I am ready to leave the stage. I do not fear death, as I see it as being akin to a dewdrop falling back into the sea. Unlike most people, I have identified with the sea rather than the dewdrop for most of my life. In India the word for death is liberation, and a funeral there is a celebration. More then anything else, this dream tells me that it is in the most subtle, undisplayed way that the divine music may be presented.
DURING MY LAST TRIP to India I witnessed a remarkable funeral of a man who was one of my rickshaw drivers in Pondicherry. I awoke early one morning to hear a great wailing down on the street and the sound of a single drum beating a slow rhythm. I looked over the edge and saw a knot of rickshaw drivers gathered around the bit of sidewalk “owned” by the driver who was lying there dead. He had died in the night, without warning, and his family was making the most dreadful wailing. Never have I been faced with the paradox of India more directly than in hearing this wail of despair and the funeral preparations which are the joyful departure of a soul and the celebration of his liberation. I walked by, shy, trying to think what would be good manners and what would be evasion and coming up with my best/worst English understatement.
When I came back from breakfast, the funeral arrangements were being organized and the body was on a bier made of coconut palm leaves piled high with flowers. The rickshaw community of that street is close-knit and mostly family related; they were all there, each doing his or her part of the funeral arrangements. They saw me coming and drew me into the family circle, asking for money to get the things they needed and for me to take pictures of the dead one so they could keep him in their shrine forever. Every Hindu house has a shrine; it may be an elaborate room in a wealthy house never used except for a puja or a few square inches of the six square feet of sidewalk that was this man’s home. So I dropped my shyness and was drawn into the endless flood of tradition and ceremony that constitutes an Indian funeral.
Several drummers came and alternated their brazen noise as relatives and friends danced the funeral dances. Even the two orphans were dancing the strange explosive steps that seem to fling any part of the body that can be extended out into space, to be balanced by another part of the body convulsively moving in the opposite direction. The lepers and elephantiasis victims on the street were doing their version of this ecstatic wild dance. Only the widow refrained from the dance, and she kept up her screaming wail and rending of her garments. The heads of the widow and orphans had been shaved, and a special caste mark had been put on the foreheads and chests of the two children.
One of the strangest customs for this Westerner to absorb prompted me to ask, “But why have they put sunglasses on the dead man?”
“Oh, Sahib, it is very bright in heaven and he could not see his way without sunglasses,” I was told. I had to go lean on a wall for a while to contemplate the questions in my mind: Will someone think to put sunglasses on me when I die? Will it be that bright? Isn’t the idea silly? No, it is not silly! How do they know? Where does ceremony stop and fact begin? Who can know? I had to wrench myself away from the wall and get busy with something else to keep from drowning in an abyss of unanswerable questions.
The widow was shorn of all her ornaments (perhaps a dollar’s worth of finger rings, toe rings, a cheap necklace), for she may never wear any ornament again as a widow; she may never marry again, may never again wear any cloth but white, and is doomed to what is nicknamed the “White Death” in India. It was not all that long ago when she would have been put on her husband’s funeral pyre and burned with him.
The drums and the dancing went on all day long. It was the liberation day for the man, and everyone except the widow was celebrating the joy of it. Even the two orphans were dancing, though tomorrow would begin the uncertainty of their lives. But I had to lean on a wall again to ask, What certainty had they to lose? The next famine or epidemic would take them over the edge of certainty; their father’s death was but the disguise of the hand of fate.
At 5 P.M. the body (sunglasses now replaced with two coins) was lifted onto a wooden bier and was carried off to the burning ground. I had gathered enough intelligence to tell both my number one and number two rickshaw drivers they had no more duties that day and should take their friend to the burning ground. As they left to walk the dead (liberated) man to the burning ghat, I felt unbearably lonely and out of it all. Here I was in my luxury and with the safety of a thick wallet, but I had nothing of the safety or community of those people. Who was the deprived one? Who was the lucky one? Who belonged to whom? Since that emotion-charged experience, which I recounted many times to friends after returning home to the United States, I have had more than one offer to put the sunglasses on my body at the appropriate time, which pleases me immensely.
OLD AGE HAS BEEN the best time in my life, a reality that no one ever predicted or told me about. Without question, these are the happiest days, and I feel slightly guilty about that happiness. For most of my life I was so weighed down with meaninglessness and loneliness that the contrast now is remarkable. One reason for this happiness may be that I am more likely to follow the will of God because I have so much less energy to resist it. I don’t have the surfeit of energy that Isak Dinesen says is the first occasion of happiness. It also is possible that an introvert like me has the psychic structure to be more at home during the second half of life. As physical activity decreases, one is forced to drift into the inner world in old age, and this is a territory in which the introvert is likely to feel quite at home. I am aware each year of my energy decreasing, I speak more slowly these days, and I simply lack the energy to do everything I might like to do in a day. This slowing down may be quite frightening to extroverts, who thrive on the stimulation of the external world.
As I reflect on the present time being the end of an era, it is difficult for me to imagine what the next millennium will bring. On a psychological level, I see signs of what could herald a major change in the collective unconscious. The symbol of “up” that has been dominant in nearly all recorded history seems to be changing. In common sense, nearly everyone in modern society believes that up is good. We all want to have an “up” day, we believe that heaven is “up there,” the abode of the “man upstairs.” Similarly, if you are getting anywhere in life it is always up, such as climbing the corporate ladder, ascending to the heights of popularity. But I have a sense that this attachment to up may be changing in the next century.
Virtually all the good dreams I hear from patients lately seem to be “down” dreams. Downward can also be a holy move, a desirable direction. For example, I encounter dreams in which someone enters a cave, goes down a mine shaft, falls down a well, or in some other way moves downward. One man I saw recently had a dream in which he was walking on the street when a downpour began and he was washed by the deluge into a sewer—an image that is about as down as you can get. When he finally landed he was in a holy place, and the Virgin Mary was there. I wonder if only a modern consciousness would carry such imagery. This may be a turning to the opposite, by which down becomes desirable. If this is true—it’s too soon to tell—then we have a lot to learn about downward movement.
Until the industrial revolution most people lived close to the earth, submerged in the earthy side of life. People lived off the land, they walked to wherever they were going if they traveled at all, they pulled water up out of the earth in buckets. Since people were bound to the earth, the holy movement needed to make them whole was upward movement of thought and abstraction. This upward movement was built into our language and customs. The place up away from the earth became equated with good; cities competed to see who could have the tallest skyscraper, nations competed to see who could go the farthest into space. For decades now, people have looked for artificial ways to “get high” and escape the earthy bounds of their lives. But what if we have escaped so much from the earth that our psychic need is now reversed? We hardly ever set foot on soil these days. People must discipline themselves to run just for exercise. It is conceivable that what is required to round out a modern person, to help make us whole, is to incorporate the downward, earthy movement of things. This will require an entirely new ethos and mythology. New symbols may be stirring in the collective unconscious to reverse the movement that has been predominant for thousands of years.
There seems to be a wave of nostalgia for earthy things; the American collective unconscious seems to be in love with old-fashioned qualities. For example, I see people who don’t need to bake returning to home-baked bread just so they can have the pleasure of dough in their hands. Urban people increasingly collect antiques and go on “primitive” vacations. Kids purchase jeans that have already been worn down or torn at the knees. I have even heard that one of the most famous New York fashion designers hired technicians to make the gates squeak at his newly constructed ranch house in the Rocky Mountains. This nostalgia for the earthy seems to be a growing hunger for Westerners who are too far removed from the earth. When I was traveling to India each year I would take with me a suitcase full of modern gadgets for my village friends there and bring back a suitcase full of old jewelry, gems, statues, and other items for my friends in America.
The rise of the feminine in our culture also may be an important step in this turn to the downward. Though the lineage of the ancient goddess religions is, for the most part, lost to us, we do know that they were much more grounded in matter and the earth. I was once at a conference when a woman confronted me at the lunch break and out of the blue said, “I understand, Mr. Johnson, that you have spoken against the ordination of women priests!”
I’m not sure where she got her information, but I thought for a moment and then replied, “Now that you mention it, I’m not sure I am in favor of women priests, but I would certainly support women priestesses.”
“What would a woman priestess do?” she inquired.
“Well, I’m not sure, because that lineage has been destroyed by the patriarchy,” I said, “but I have a sense that their ceremonies would take place in a crypt at midnight.”
This reply reflects my belief that the feminine, earthy element must be different from the masculine, sky god quality that dominated Western thinking for centuries. Wholeness requires that we develop both aspects.
Here is yet another dream from my recent series of death dreams:
I am in San Francisco at a great nineteenth-century hotel. It is aristocratic, dignified, and beautiful. Every detail is wonderfully tended to. A woman is with me in the dream, and she is clearly my woman. I’m not sure if she is my wife or if the hostess of the party has assigned her to me or what, but I have a clear feeling that she belongs to me. She is in her twenties and most beautiful. She is dressed in a subdued way, with no ornamentation. The cut of her gray velvet evening gown clings to her body with perfection. This woman never says a word in the dream, though she is awake and alert. We are in a small public room with a few other people, when an earthquake begins. At times the quake is so violent that the room is turned on its side. No one in the room is hurt, however, and after the quake subsides not even a vase is out of place. We all know that the rest of San Francisco—everything outside our building—has been completely leveled. We go down the stairs and out into the street. Nobody is frightened, but someone has a portable radio and they hear that Cal Tech has announced that the earthquake was a 12 on the Richter scale. We all are in awe of this. Until recently the Richter scale stopped at 10, so this means it was a record-breaking quake. A few minutes pass, and then someone says that they have reconsidered, and it was really a 12.5 earthquake. End of dream.
When I awoke from this dream I was feeling fine, though I was a bit shocked. Although the city was destroyed, my little circle of gracefulness and aristocracy was fine. I am fascinated by the numbers 12 and 12.5 in this dream. Christ has long been associated with the number thirteen, as there were twelve apostles with him at the Last Supper. The number thirteen has been thought to be unlucky because it is so good no one can hold up to it. If we were coming close to the number thirteen it could mean the end of the world or the second coming, but again, when seen in the context of my series of dreams, I tend to think this is yet another signal of my impending death and/or a transformation.
I often wonder about what the remainder of this desperate century will bring, and I have come to the conclusion that God is out of the box. That sounds like a joke, but I mean it in all seriousness. Long ago God lived in the tabernacle, and only a priest had the key. Not only were we locked out, but God was locked in. There was safety in this arrangement. Then, somehow, the box became broken in the twentieth century, and God got out. Very few of us seem to know what to do with this desperate fact: God is loose! God is out and is now appearing everywhere. I would love to read a history book written a hundred years in the future to see what we will do with this new power. It has wonderful possibilities and dreadful consequences if it goes wrong.
ONE OF THE MYTHS from India that I find particularly touching and profound is the story of Sita, Shreedaman, and Nanda, an unlikely trio. It is not a happy story, but it is a deeply moving one, concerning desire, human folly, relatedness, and purpose in life. I will bring my personal story to its conclusion with this mythic story, which is called “The Transposed Heads.” I am indebted to Thomas Mann for hiss retelling of this Hindu gem.
From the outset it is important to keep in mind that this is an interior story. Of course, it has exterior repercussions, but our story relates to the double animus in a woman (or the double anima in a man). Animus and anima, feminine and masculine forms of soul, were used by Dr. Jung to describe the personification of the masculine in a woman’s unconscious and the personification of the feminine in a man’s unconscious. All of us carry within us an internal soul image, an image that pulls us toward the Golden World. The problem is that in the West so many people have lost their connection to the divine world that they project this holy image exclusively upon another human being who cannot bear its weight. We call this romantic love.
What is this double soul image that is so deeply etched into the expectations of every man and woman? Every woman has built into her a double expectation or set of ideals of what a man should be. Similarly, every man carries within himself a set of images of what the ideal woman should be. Our story concerns these expectations within a woman, but a similar process takes place in every man. When a young girl is sixteen it may be the local football star who will set off her inner soul image—a big, strong guy who is a Saturday afternoon hero. Slowly, throughout a young woman’s life, the animus may migrate through other stages and end up with a cultural hero, a lofty masculine ideal. But no woman—and no man—escapes being torn between ideals and expectations of the opposite sex, as our story will clearly demonstrate.
The less conscious this inner expectation is, the more totally it may come to dominate us, creating all kinds of havoc and suffering. Many people in Western culture get into a pattern of trying to marry one of these soul images, since we hunger so greatly to possess it. Inevitably, we become disillusioned, as over time it becomes clear that our human companion reflects only partial aspects of what is so deeply desired. People then have an affair or get divorced and marry someone else who constellates other aspects of their ideal. Eventually that projection, too, begins to wear thin. This is a terribly painful pattern, leaving much wreckage in its wake. The worst of this projection of a divine image on another human being is that it obscures a true human love, which, though less compelling, is far more stable and valuable than any projection could possibly be. It is my hope that the more we know of these dynamics, the more we can be free of them. So, let’s turn to our story.
“The Transposed Heads” is the story of Sita, but it begins with two blood brothers: Shreedaman and Nanda. In India, this relatedness of blood brothers does not mean that they are biological brothers but rather that they have sworn lifelong friendship and have sealed this pact with the exchange of blood. There is no word in the Western language that does justice to this form of relationship; it is presumed that blood brothers will take care of each other, serving as companions to each other and safeguarding each other for the rest of their lives. If you are sick, lost, or facing misfortune, your blood brother will be called.
Shreedaman is a Brahmin, the caste of priests and teachers in India. He is so intelligent that he has a big, wonderful head atop a slight body. When you look at Shreedaman, you get the sense that his body must be tired of carrying around such a big head. In fact, he possesses the stature of a bent cucumber. Shreedaman is thinking all the time, as is the custom for Brahmins.
Shreedaman’s blood brother, Nanda, is from a lower caste, and, accordingly, his body is all thick, strong, and muscle bound. He has a low brow, and he works as a goatherder. Nanda wakes up in the morning with high energy and works all day without ever becoming tired. He is the epitome of physical strength, but he possesses not much in the head. The unique thing about Nanda is that he has a lucky calf mark pattern in the hairs of his chest. It is a special configuration.
In this pair of blood brothers—a pair of opposites if ever there was one—Shreedaman provides all the sense and Nanda provides all the strength. They spend as much time together as they possibly can, and they need each other. One lives on muscle and the other on intelligence (here it is important to keep in mind that our story refers to two inner forces). If Shreedaman has an errand somewhere, then Nanda will find an excuse to tag along, and vice versa. They are like two halves of a single organism.
So one day Shreedaman is called upon to travel on some Brahmin business, and Nanda discovers simultaneously that he, too, must go to a meeting at very nearly the same location. Off they go together, departing early in the morning. Shreedaman is already tired before the day is scarcely begun, so Nanda carries all their belongings. They never quibble about this; it is just accepted that one has the muscle and the other possesses the brains.
Along the way, Shreedaman talks and talks, quoting the Upanishads and other learned books; he puts forth articulate interpretations of Hindu theology, going on and on. Nanda isn’t much interested and doesn’t understand most of what is said, but he enjoys just hearing Shreedaman talk. Nanda takes it upon himself to make sure that his companion doesn’t wear out too badly.
It is noontime, and since the two have a lunch with them and it is growing increasingly hot, they decide to rest under a tree next to a tributary of the Ganges River. They sit down on the banks of the stream and enjoy their lunch. After eating, both men become a bit drowsy in the heat of midday. They are about to doze off when Nanda, the one who has ears for the doings of the outside world, hears something unusual. He looks about him and then whispers, “Shreedaman, wake up! It is incredible. It is not supposed to be, but a young woman is just around the bend, and she is walking down to the river to perform her daily absolutions. She surely believes that she is unseen.”
One of the worst things in India is for a strange man to see or watch a young maiden undress. Shreedaman looks around the corner and spies her. Then he whispers to Nanda, “You are not supposed to look. Simply close your eyes.”
Nanda says back, “But you’re watching!”
“Yes, but we are not supposed to,” Shreedaman says, still gazing intently.
“We must avert our eyes,” Nanda insists. “It is the law.” But venturing into the rudiments of theology, Nanda says, “You’re always telling me that we must accept the misfortunes and hard knocks of life; well, surely we are meant to accept the nice things, too,” and he continues watching.
Some part of Shreedaman knows that he should immediately stop what he is doing, but strangely he cannot think of an answer to Nanda, so the two young men continue to watch.
Sita, for it is she who has gracefully glided down to the river, is the loveliest creature imaginable. She has long, flowing black hair, a gentle curving neck, great round breasts shaped like ripe melons, a slender waist. It is Sita—doe-eyed, sloe-eyed, dove-eyed, partridge-eyed, almond-eyed, lotus-eyed—the loveliest of all the maidens.
The two young men watch spellbound as Sita disrobes herself and walks with the grace of youth and the dignity of heaven. She steps down into the water and performs her noonday absolutions, then returns to dry her body in the sun, dress, and walk back to the pathway.
The two observers are struck with silence. Nanda breaks the silence by telling Shreedaman that he has seen Sita before—more than that, he once held her in his arms! This is unthinkable in Hindu custom but is somewhat explained as Nanda’s story goes on. There is a custom in old India that on the shortest day of the year the strongest youth takes the most beautiful maiden from another village and performs the ceremony of “The Enticement of the Sun.” This consists of the youth tossing the maiden into the air as far as he can manage. This is an enticement to the sun to cease its withdrawal and return to make another season. If this ceremony is not performed, the sun might forget its worldly duty and continue declining, which would bring time and life to a stop. Nanda explains to Shreedaman that Nanda and Sita had been chosen for this ceremony several years earlier.
Shreedaman and Nanda were almost never quiet, but when it came time to gather up their things and continue on their journey, they were strangely silent. Presently, they had to part ways, so they said good-bye and agreed to meet back at the same place by the river three days later. Off they went to their business meetings, and they soon became lonely for each other.
Three days later, Nanda returns to the appointed meeting place. He is always the first to arrive. He has not waited long, however, when he sees Shreedaman coming down the road. Even from a distance it is clear that Shreedaman is in a terrible mood; he drags his tired body along in the dust, and his big head, which is simply too much for that frail body to hold up, sadly flops from side to side. This is not the first time that Nanda has seen this, so he shouts out to his blood brother, “Shreedaman, you look like a monkey who has just fallen from a tree. What is the matter?”
“It is too terrible,” Shreedaman replies. “Please just make a funeral pyre for me. Set it to burning immediately so that I can cool my misery in the flames!”
Nanda is accustomed to such poetic utterances from the mind of his Brahmin friend, so he does not take him seriously.
“Shreedaman, what has happened to you. Are you ill?”
“Nanda, I tell you, just light the funeral pyre.”
“Shreedaman, what is the matter?”
“Just light the funeral pyre, like I said.”
At this, Nanda agrees to gather wood and prepare a funeral pyre, but he admonishes his friend, “I warn you, if you climb into the flames I will accompany you. I cannot conceive of living in this world without my beloved friend.”
This startles Shreedaman enough to gain his attention, and his story begins slowly to unfold. “It is simply too much, Nanda, I can’t stand it. I have fallen in love with Sita, and I can’t live without her. Just get the funeral pyre going.”
“Oh, that is all it is,” replies Nanda. “There is an easier way of coping with that than a funeral pyre. If you like Sita that much, I will go play intermediary, court her, and win her for your wife.”
When courting in traditional India, it has long been the custom that a man never goes on his own behalf. To do so would be a terrible breach of custom. The proper approach is to send an intermediary, preferably someone who can sing well and who knows how to perform as a desirable suitor. All the preliminaries of courtship are carried out by this intermediary.
“What’s the point?” asks Shreedaman. “She would never have me.”
“How can you think that?” says Nanda. “You are a Brahmin and the most eligible bachelor in the land. You are handsome, you have a good reputation, lots of money. I’m sure her parents would jump at you in a minute.”
In due course, Nanda convinces Shreedaman of the possibilities of this courtship. Nanda then goes off to do all the courtship formalities, and Sita’s parents refuse them all, as is good manners during the first several weeks. This is proof of the young woman’s virtue. It is not until Shreedaman’s parents approach them that Sita’s parents agree and the long formalities of courtship begin. An astrologer is hired, who puts the two charts together, then gives his approval. One parent takes a gift to the second set of parents, then the astrologer is brought forth, and, if all goes well, a date is set for the wedding. An Indian wedding is five days and five nights of ceremony and celebration. Garlands of flowers are placed around the heads of the bride and groom, and they are led around the village in triumph.
Ideally, a bride and groom should never see each other until the end of the wedding, or it is a terrible breach of custom. At the end of the fifth day, the groom meets the bride, and they walk together seven times around the camphor fire. Only then do the attendants take the abundant flowers away from the face of both bride and groom, and they look at each other for the first time. But in this story, the bride saw her husband for the first time while the husband saw his bride for the second time. This bodes ill fortune and foretells a dark time ahead.
Shreedaman is delighted with Sita, and he hides the fact that he already knows her beautiful face. Nanda is delighted to see his friend Shreedaman so happy. Sita, too, is happy. Nanda and Shreedaman have been together for most of their lives, and Shreedaman cannot even think, of leaving his friend, so all three depart the marriage celebration together and set up a household.
It pains me to tell what happens next. After several weeks of happiness, Sita somehow loses custody of her eyes. Her eyes keep drifting to peruse the fine, muscle-bound body of Nanda, most particularly that lucky calf mark on his chest hair. Her husband, Shreedaman, talks all day of virtue and great wisdom, and she loves him deeply, but still Sita cannot keep her eyes off Nanda.
Some might say that you could expect such a disaster considering the fact that the laws of marriage were broken from the very beginning. Shreedaman had seen Sita prior to the fifth day of the marriage celebration. It isn’t long before relations begin getting very tense among the three parties in the household. Shreedaman is so intensely involved in his intellectual pursuits that he does not notice how acutely unhappy Nanda has become. And soon the guilt-stricken Nanda will not even look at his blood brother. A tornado of energy begins to build.
As anyone knows, if things are going badly, the first thing to do is to tell the neighbors and family how well things are going. Everyone in the village is told how fine things are in the new household. In fact, the trio decides to reveal to Sita’s parents that a baby is on the way, for, indeed, Sita has become pregnant. They set out to the house of Sita’s parents with Shreedaman and Sita sitting in the back of the dromedary cart and Nanda in the driver’s seat.
Now, when you are lost on the inside, it doesn’t take long before you become equally lost on the outside. Soon Nanda takes a wrong turn, and by nightfall they are off on a little road that comes to a stop in the middle of the forest. It is getting dark, and there is nothing more to do. They spend a miserable night in the forest, bitten by mosquitoes and bugs and beset by lack of sleep. Sita is unhappy. Shreedaman is unhappy. Nanda is unhappy. No one ventures to say a word, but when dawn comes up they can see that they are stranded near a temple. It is a temple dedicated to Kali, the personified nightmare of Lord Vishnu. She is the most horrible of the many gods and goddesses in India. She has snakes for hair, fangs like a canine, eighteen arms—all holding something terrible—and she wears human intestines and skulls for necklaces.
Shreedaman announces, “Before we backtrack, give me five minutes to say my prayers to the goddess Kali.” He goes into the temple, and by this time Shreedaman is so in despair that for once in his life he is speechless. He realizes that he was the one who set all this trouble into motion by not averting his eyes from Sita at the river. Shreedaman confesses to Kali, “There is only one thing left for me to do in this world, and that is to add my blood in sacrifice to the goddess.” Pulling out the knife that he wears on his belt, he severs his own head with one swift blow.
It is a terrible scene. Shreedaman is lying there, blood gushing forth from his severed neck, the goddess Kali surveying the carnage. Meanwhile, Sita and Nanda remain seated outside in the cart, both suffering from acute embarrassment over their mutual attraction. They don’t dare look at each other.
Finally, Sita grows tired of waiting and declares, “That husband of mine! He has probably gone into a trance state and will be in there until noon meditating and thinking nothing about us. Nanda, go in and get him!”
Nanda goes into the temple and beholds the terrible sight of his beloved Shreedaman lying there with blood coursing from the severed head. Nanda, who was never given to thought, snatches the knife from Shreedaman’s hand and cuts off his own head. If Shreedaman has poured forth his blood before the goddess, it is enough for Nanda to do the same.
Sita continues to wait outside. She waits and waits and waits, until she loses her temper again. “Those two boys are probably sitting in there talking and forgetting about me entirely!” She jumps out of the cart and goes into the Kali temple, where she sees the most horrible sight imaginable. Her widowhood flashes before her, and not only does she witness Shreedaman’s body, she also sees her beloved Nanda lying in a pool of blood. There is nothing in the world to give her solace or comfort. She goes out to clear her eyes and reenters to make sure she has seen correctly. Then she staggers out of the Kali temple, grasps a vine hanging down from a banyan tree, ties it around her neck, and is about to hang herself. At that instant, the voice of Kali comes out from the temple.
“Sita!”
She freezes, for the goddess has spoken. The goddess gets up from her throne and walks out of the temple to address Sita. “Do you know why all of this has happened? It is completely your fault. I put judgment upon you for the worst possible punishment, and that is that you may not die; you must live.”
The men were at fault for being voyeurs, but Sita was at fault for wishing to change her husband’s character or physical appearance. All three were engaged in a consciousness much too narrow for the magnitude of their relationship.
Sita falls to her knees, washing the feet of Kali with her tears and imploring the goddess to hear her pleas. Then she thinks of a ploy that might soften the heart of even the terrible stone goddess. “There is another life to take into consideration,” Sita says, “for I am bearing a child. Please, can’t you repair all of this?”
Kali is so touched by this that she replies, “I think that you are truly sorry in a genuine way. Go into the temple and put the heads back on the two young men. If you do it quickly enough, and with genuine contrition, then they will live and you will be forgiven for your sins. But, mind you, be sure to get the heads on facing the right direction or the men will be the laughingstock of their village.”
So Sita, hardly believing, goes into the Kali temple and picks up a grisly head and places it onto a body. It comes back to life! Having seen a miracle once, she takes up the other bloody head and puts it on the other body, and it too comes to life! In a few minutes, three people stagger out of the darkness of the Kali temple, delirious with life as is possible only when one has faced death. They are laughing and singing as never before. They dance and dance and dance. Guilt has been assuaged and life restored. They are safe and together, and everyone is happy.
But now the greatest shock ensues. Shreedaman says to Nanda, “Take your hands off my wife!”
“What are you talking about?” replies Nanda.
They set to quarreling, and it takes some time before they realize what has happened: Sita has put Shreedaman’s head on Nanda’s body and Nanda’s head on Shreedaman’s body! When Sita sees what she has done she feels considerable guilt, but then she laughs delightedly, for now she has the best of all worlds, a fine head atop an equally fine body. Then all three fall completely silent.
Shreedaman’s head with Nanda’s body says, “I tell you; that is my wife! Get your hands off her.”
And Nanda’s head with Shreedaman’s body replies, “Well, who slept with her on the wedding night—you or me?”
“But who said the marriage vows?” asks Shreedaman’s head with Nanda’s body.
“Well, who’s the father of the child within her?” replies Nanda’s head with Shreedaman’s body.
They argue back and forth like this until they came to a complete stalemate. India knows what to do when you run into an insoluble problem—find the nearest holy man and put the matter to him, accepting his word as absolute law. So they all get in the dromedary cart, and off they go to find a holy man. The journey takes three days, but they find a holy man beside the Ganges River. It seems that at some earlier time Nanda had approached this very holy man and had poured out his anguish that he was simply a bunch of muscles; he had told the holy man that he longed to be more spiritual, and the holy man had given him a set of exercises to help spiritualize himself. The holy man sees Nanda’s head with Shreedaman’s body approaching and cries out, “Oh, you see the yoga has worked! See how slender your body has become. See how ascetic you are now!”
But Nanda with Shreedaman’s body is not at all pleased by this, so the holy man inquires if something else is wrong. They pour out the dreadful story, and in the end the holy man is holding his head in pain. “You have given me such a headache,” he tells the trio. “Go away and come back in three days, as I must meditate upon this matter.”
They return at the end of three days, and the holy man says, “It has cost me all of the meditative power I have, but the answer is quite clear: the head is dominant over the body. So Shreedaman’s head, even with Nanda’s body, is the rightful husband of Sita. The couple must go home. Nanda with Shreedaman’s body, you stay here with me and do your asceticism. You once asked me for a spiritual life, and now you have the proper body to do it.”
So Shreedaman with Nanda’s body and Sita go home to reestablish their lives. Things go well for a while. Sita is happy, as she now has a husband with a good head and a good body. In time, however, things begin to change. The head is so dominant over the human organism that soon Sita can see that Shreedaman’s head is shrinking down Nanda’s beautiful body. In only a few short weeks it is looking just like Shreedaman’s body again, and Sita is in despair to find that she is back where she had started.
Soon after that, Sita’s baby is born, a son who is named Samadhi. In the moments after birth Sita is in terror. It is well known in India that if a mother is thinking of a man other than her husband at the time of conception, the child will be born blind. So Sita holds up the baby as soon as possible and is relieved to see that he is not blind. But still Sita cannot control herself; she is intent upon going back to the river where the holy man lives to see Nanda with Shreedaman’s body. She has to find out if he has transformed his body back into Nanda’s beautiful body with the lucky calf mark on the chest.
So early one morning Sita hitches up the dromedary cart and sets out with her baby son, Samadhi, in her arms. Shreedaman-with-Nanda’s-body-grown-increasingly-Shreedaman-like awakes at dawn and knows immediately where his wife has gone. He borrows a dromedary cart and follows his wife. He arrives a day later than Sita and peers into the hut, only to find Sita in the arms of Nanda-with-Shreedaman’s-body-grown-increasingly-Nanda-like. Lest my readers be distressed at this, I must point out that it is Shreedaman’s body who is embracing Sita, so no dharma is being destroyed by this apparent breaking of the law.
Shreedaman-with-Nanda’s-body-grown-increasingly-Shreedamanlike realizes he has come to the end of his life, and he quietly walks down to the Ganges River, where he sits down to meditate. Soon Sita and Nanda-with-Shreedaman’s-body-grown-increasingly-Nanda-like awake, and, without a word, the three of them join in a circle, a circle of friends that is reminiscent of the time that they danced together before the Kali temple. They stand in absolute silence and realize that they have come to the end of their human resources. There is no place else to go. They stand mute for a long time and watch the sun rise. Each understands that nothing that causes another pain is worth the having; nothing that diminishes another is of any value; nothing that is won at the expense of another is workable; no happiness that causes another loss is worthy.
Finally, Sita breaks the silence and instructs Nanda-with-Shreedaman’s-body-grown-increasingly-Nanda-like to go gather wood for a funeral pyre. This is a relief to him, and he does exactly as she instructs. The funeral pyre is built, and Sita, the loveliest of all young women, Sita of the black, hair, the moon face, the slender neck, the great round breasts—doe-eyed, sloe-eyed, dove-eyed, partridge-eyed, almond-eyed, lotus-eyed Sita—ascends the funeral pyre and sits down upon it. Then Shreedaman-with-Nanda’s-body-grown-increasingly-Shreedaman-like joins her on the funeral pyre and sits at her right hand, and Nanda-with-Shreedaman’s-body-grown-increasingly-Nanda-like joins them at Sita’s left hand.
Samadhi lights the funeral pyre, and so concentrated are these three individuals that not one sound issues forth from them. The funeral pyre burns for twenty-four hours, as is the custom, and a Dom, from the caste of funeral attendants, sweeps the ashes into the Ganges River.
Samadhi, the boy left by Sita, is given to a temple widow to be raised until the age of twelve; at that time he is to be turned over to the Brahmins for instruction. It is told that by the age of twenty-one Samadhi was incredibly wise and had a beautiful body, including a fine Brahmin’s head, sleek muscles, and an unmistakable lucky calf mark on the hairs of his chest. So fine was Samadhi that the king of Benares employed him to be the court reader for the palace, and he led a long and illustrious life.
THE STORY “THE TRANSPOSED HEADS” instructs us on the dangers of projecting the soul image, called the animus in a woman or the anima in a man, into the human world. We try everything in the world, except the right thing, to possess this divine image. The story tells us that the solution is to gather up these split images, along with the ego, and put them on a funeral pyre. This must not be taken literally. It is a prescription, not for suicide but rather for the burning up of one’s animus or anima illusions.
In our story, a young boy survives; his name is Samadhi, which in Sanskrit means peace, joy, and tranquillity. He has the best characteristics of the three main characters—the grace of Sita, the Brahmin head of Shreedaman, and the fine inexhaustible body of Nanda. That is the experience of samadhi. Samadhi is the sum total of the three—the ego plus both sides of the soul image—incorporated into a fourth to provide a new unity of consciousness.
If you can consent to the funeral pyre in the proper way, then the duality that makes such a shambles of both our inner and outer lives can be brought to a unity. Some part of Shreedaman, the Brahmin, knew immediately that a funeral pyre was called for when he first gazed upon Sita. Connecting with the divine image called for a sacrifice, and this might have provided a solution early on, but no youth ever seems to realize this truth.
A false way of dealing with the struggle is depicted midway in our story, when the two young men cut their own heads off. This is akin to giving up the struggle. It only leads to more confusion and suffering. Transposing of heads is a false transformation, a clever trick to get both of a pair of opposites. Only a true synthesis can bridge these apparently irreducible opposites in our nature.
It is only later, when the funeral pyre can properly be built, that the unitive experience is possible. A funeral pyre is necessary for burning up the old form of consciousness. As long as you think in terms of this one or that one, then you are still caught up in the world of duality. But if you can stand to live in paradox long enough, then a transformation takes place and a new consciousness is born—a child called Samadhi. This occurs when one has stopped trying to maneuver external reality so that it will work out as the ego desires. One turns authority over to something greater than oneself; the, ego is sacrificed to the Self, the earthly world serves the heavenly world, and one learns, at last, to trust the slender threads.