Manipura – The City of Gems

"Remember when you were young,
You shone like the sun,
Shine on you crazy diamond."
                               -Pink Floyd, Shine on You Crazy Diamond

            (Nabhi) Manipura means literally “(naval) city of jems” and speaks to the tremendous wealth and power of this chakra.  It is situated in our navel center, the belly, home of the famous “core” that we always hear about in yoga and various other forms of exercise like Pilates.  The core isn’t one muscle, but rather a whole group of muscles that function as a sort of center of gravity for the rest of the body.  In hatha yoga, we tend to stretch outwards in most poses, the limbs reaching out infinitely, and the spine always lengthening.  The core provides the balancing act for this, literally and figuratively.  It pulls everything in to center, creating a sort of dynamic tension with the outward reaching limbs.  The core holds us up, orienting everything around that center of the body.  It allows for balance and movement, and is crucial for things like arm-balances and inversions.  Any fireman will tell you that carrying an unconscious person is much more difficult than a conscious person.  An unconscious person feels “heavy” because the weight is evenly distributed throughout the whole body.  A conscious person’s core is working, whether they are aware of it or not, pulling the limbs in to center, shifting their weight, etc.  It’s like the difference between trying to lift a 100 pound bag of bird seed and a 100 pound iron weight.  The weight is the same, but its concentration at a center (rather than shifting seed) makes for a very difficult experience in lifting it. 

            Just as the whole body orients itself to the core, we have a psychological factor that does the same job.  We locate this factor in the same physical area – the gut.  When we say “he’s got guts” or “she’s got a real fire in her belly”, we’re referring to this psychological quality of course, not the core.  We clearly identify the gut with courage, with fire, and with ambition, just based on those two simple images.  But what we’re really saying might be phrased as “he has a strong sense of his personal power which is able to carry him over any difficulty” (courage) and “she has a strong sense that she has the power to realize her ambitions” (fire the belly).  This is ultimately about our personal sense of self, of individual power and destiny – in a word, the ego.

            Now, in yoga the ego has a pretty bad rap.  Delve into the literature, especially the more New Agey kind, and you’ll read all about “transcending the ego” “realizing the illusion that is the ego” or the “limiting nature of the ego.”  I’m not saying that all of these are bad or wrong – I’ll say things far from it when we get into the higher chakras – but that they are incomplete.  We need the ego, just like we need the core.  The ego relates all of our experiences back to itself, organizing, translating, and importantly, assimilating.  We are constantly trying to incorporate our experiences into our sense of self, digesting them, so to speak.  When we have a regular psychological diet, we tend to have a rather stable (or even stagnant) ego; we ‘eat’ to maintain the status quo, or more negatively to expand the ego like a widening waist-line, perhaps overcompensating or protecting a ‘weak’ or ‘powerless’ core.  When we vary our diet, we may find nutrients our standard psychological diet neglected, like when we try yoga for the first time, but we may also find ourselves with a bit of spiritual indigestion.  Experiences come along that conflict with our notions of the way the world works, the projected order of our lives, and we may even find some ideas that we have a hard time “stomaching.”  We can’t figure out how to relate these things to the ego, and it gives us problems.  What happens then is psychologically called repression – if psychic fact or datum cannot be “me”, then is must be “not me”.  It then either sits below the surface, or is more often projected onto others.  

            Jung called this the “Shadow”, the bastard home of all those things that we reject (or vomit up, to continue the analogy).  I should also note that I connect the Manipura chakra to the Sun (this is not the only attribution, nor is it the traditional one), the classic Jungian symbol of the ego, our conscious identity.  The ego, relating everything to itself, creates a whole ordering scheme for the world.  The things that fit the scheme are excellent and put in their place, and the rest… well.  It becomes trivialized, or even violently rejected.  We might call experiences that don’t fit the scheme (especially those that show the ego as not the only or most important part of the whole person) are rejected as “irrational, silly, pointless, childish, pipe-dreams, dangerous, heretical, insensitive, over-sensitive, reactionary, radical,” just to list a few words commonly used to reject and ridicule.  An ex-initiate of a particularly literalist and seriously dysfunctional esoteric order called “The Hermetic Order of the Morning Star International” (or HOMSI, which may have been renamed by now – I can’t be bothered to keep track of esoteric politics) once told me that a common catch-phrase to explain away the many scandals associated with the leaders of this order was “the greater the light, the deeper the darkness.”  Clearly, this is a rather ridiculous platitude and excuse for bad behavior, but it is an excellent example of the ego in action.  Magic and mysticism can often be used for massive ego expansion, and I should note that the Golden Dawn tradition in all of its various manifestations tends towards a solar emphasis.  When we shine the bright light of the sun on the world, things are ‘illuminated’ indeed, and sight allows us to clearly distinguish objects in experience.  Bright sunlight also creates deep shadows that conceal and hide.  When we identify exclusively with the solar ego, we drive much that is important but which we have difficulty identifying with (or, ‘stomaching’) deeply into the Shadow.  Therein, we see it only in others whom we can then more easily hate, just as it seems that every magical order of the above type seems convinced that every rival order is full of black magicians (or every fundamentalist community sees ‘satanists’ or ‘witches’ under every rock).  In light of my previous post it may also be useful for me to note that HOMSI apparently (most of this is rumor, but from a few independent sources) had a universally Christian leadership, and despite their public claims, restricted the advancement of neopagans (a rather large group in the order) and Thelemites, aka, polytheists.  Christianity, ultimately a solar manifestation (despite its 4^th chakra origins – more on that later), privileges unity above multiplicity.  In Christianity, even the Trinity is really just One.  Polytheism is the way of the 2^nd chakra, the darkly lit world of many stars, and it looks like solar-Christian HOMSI just couldn’t stomach it.  Balance is crucial in dealing with the ego.  When the sun is too bright, we can’t see the stars, but when it’s just starlight all the time, we can’t see anything clearly.

           

            Manipura consciousness is greatly concerned with authority, hierarchy, and order.  A central image is that of the King and Kingdom – everything is fine when every subject does its job.  The serfs farm, the nobles fight and politic, the church ministers, and the king rules, directly and through his governors.  When some free-thinker comes along and refuses to submit, that free-thinker is soon a head shorter.  If it doesn’t fit the hierarchy, it is treason, heresy, or any other label you’d like, and must be annihilated.  Society, like our own egos, is conceived as fragile, and we must constantly be on the look out for that which threatens to send everything back into the chaos from whence it came.  Only the 4^th-chakra Enlightenment, with its notion of individual rights (where each is ultimately a King unto himself, within a society of Kings), do we have free enquiry without fear of persecution, and as recent politics has shown (stem-cell research is a good example), we’re not yet completely safe.  Why not?  Well, because our 4^th chakra democracy contains people who see the world through all of the lower chakras.  Those of the 1^st and the 3^rd warn us of dangerous ideas threatening society, of the Others, and tell us to “take it back” as local tea-party politician Greg Ball exhorts.  We may profitably ask what he wants to take back from whom. 

            This “King Consciousness” is extremely evident in religious thought, especially that which comes out of “kingly” civilizations, most especially the Roman Empire and Middle Ages.  Neoplatonism (and its close follower Hermeticism) originated at the end of the Roman Era and gave us notions like 7 heavens, choirs of angels like the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, etc, as well as an inverted hierarchy for the demonic realm.  Ultimately, I believe that most of this stuff originated with personal, one might say Gnostic, experiences.  However, in order to ‘digest’ these often strange and inexplicable experiences, people organized them in a very 3^rd chakra way.  They looked without and saw that, at the time, the best, safest and most bountiful civilizations were characterized by a strong central government by one-man and his capable governors, along with the rest of the Imperial hierarchy.  Areas where that influence was not evident, as in the history before its ascent, were dark, barbaric, chaotic and primitive.  To them, as Maximus says in Gladiator, “Rome is the light.”  Affix to this admiration for the power of the Empire a similar appreciation of Plato, and you get Neoplatonism.  Plato said that the gross things of this world are but shadows to the perfections of the Ideas on another ‘plane’ that the objects here just emulate.  The Neoplatonists saw even in the corruption of the late empire, a divine blueprint of the harmony of the universe which on another plane took the form of God’s own hierarchy.  Natural phenomena were explained by the notion that spiritual beings were everywhere, ordering creation according to divine will, like the emperor’s soldiers or tax-collectors.  Further, to get over certain logical problems with that arrangement, they postulated numerous worlds, dimensions, levels, etc, that acted as planes upon which the various levels of intermediaries could act our their duties, just like the empire had the Capitol, as well as regional seats for the Governors.  This is projected outwards into the heaven in astrology as well, where the planets are said to rule certain signs, and govern certain things about our lives. 

            Ultimately, I regard all of this as a beautiful creative act of imagining that created space for the possibility of interaction with these various things - of gnosis, in other words.  That said, I regard the experience as of something real – that there’s something there (wherever there may prove to be) that can be experienced.  When we look at the angels and spirits of neoplatonism and magic, we might be tempted to call the whole affair “silly” or “irrational” and push it into the shadows.  Ultimately, we need these imaginings, to keep a conscious idea of these events and experiences, to make some kind of personal sense out of them, however untrue the imaginings may be as accurate descriptors.  They may well even limit the collection of future data – and here is what the mystics warned us of.  If we regard angels as silly, we’ll never see them.  This is not to say that there are angels, just that we won’t see them, objectively real or not.

            The King easily becomes the Tyrant, and this is a serious problem.  The Manipura chakra is the center of order, yes, but also of witch-hunts, as I previously implied.  The first chakra tells us to trust authority, and that authority is found in the 3^rd.  We trust that someone will fix things, often the President, our own democratic King.  1^st chakra loyalty tries to get us to overlook their faults, perhaps explaining their darkness as a by-product of their incredible light.  This is certainly the logic that keeps dictators in power.  Yes, President Mubarak is terrible and violated human rights with impunity, but he keeps the terrorists (read: Shadow) out.  Yes, President Bush violated the law, international and domestic in his persecution of the Enemy, but he’s our president, and we have to stand by him. 

            I think most of the readers of this blog have a problem with authority.  Many yogis and most of my friends distrust the government almost as much as they distrust Wall St (another excellent example of the selfish part of the 3^rd chakra).  Where does this distrust come from?  Ironically, I think it is from well-balanced and strong Manipura Chakras.  If we had weak 3^rd chakras, we’d be looking for authority outside of ourselves to tell us what to do.  We see that occasionally in the yoga world as those who never get out from under the shadow of the great guru, or who idolize the celebrity yogis like Rodney Yee or Cyndi Lee, who often display merit largely physically or through a good business acumen rather than real knowledge.  The 3^rd chakra, being about status, our own place in the hierarchy, locates us above or below others.  We are submissive to our betters and dominant to our underlings. It cuts your very own place in the tribe and greater world.  We all break away from our parents at puberty, and this is necessary – how far is the question.  When we have a weak 3^rd chakra, we imagine ourselves low down in that hierarchy.  When we have a strong 3^rd chakra, we imagine ourselves quite high.  To have a problem with authority, to me, means regarding your own authority as preeminent.  

            To see the world through the 3^rd chakra as a primary lens is to see hierarchy everywhere, and to be hyper-aware of one’s place in it, ie, to be ‘status-conscious’.  Our goal in the chakra system is to progressively awaken, balance, and transcend each chakra and all that it represents.  To transcend the bottom three, the physical triad if you like (as they regard all things as objects in some sense), we need a strong impulse.  We need drive, a strong sense of self-confidence, a belief in our own ability to succeed, and the courage to accept the possibility that spiritual growth and mystic experience is not just the purview of clerics, saints, or gurus, but our own natural-born right.  We need a fire in the belly.  Only with that fire can we evaporate the moisture of our imagination, sending it upwards to the airy world of the 4^th chakra (which is quite dry without it).  Only with that fire can we burn through the 1^st ‘knot’ that is said separate the bottom 3 chakras from the 4^th, keeping us from higher truths.  When we confidently step out of the 3^rd chakra we become aware that the hierarchy is all an illusion, that we are all Kings (or have the potential to be), and that each of us has a unique authority over our own lives. 

            As an addendum, I’d like to draw your attention to an intriguing article in the NY Times by Stanley Fish.  This piece contains some really interesting stuff, but ultimately I look at it as containing interesting chakra insights (particularly of the 3^rd and 4^th).  I don’t agree with all of it, especially his conclusion, but I’ll leave it to your own ingenuity to see what I mean.

Stories from the Bhagavata Purana: Part II, Churning the Ocean of Milk

You may have heard of Creatio ex Nihlo (creation out of nothing), but have you ever heard of Creatio ex Lactis (creation out of milk)?  That’s my subject for today – the story of the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, which is usually understood as a creation story but has much more to it than that.  It is a bit more elaborate than the Gajendra story, so please pardon the length of the post.  First, my synopsis (complete text here):

            Picking up where we left off in my last post, the paradise-like mount Mandara (Meru) floats in an ocean of milk.  After the Gajendra tale we discussed, the devas (“shining ones,” or Gods) and the asuras (demons) end up fighting a terrible war.  The Supreme Deity (Brahman the absolute, symbolized here as Vishnu) calls up Shiva and Brahma (the creator god, not to be confused with Brahman, the impersonal absolute) and suggests that to stop the war they convince both sides to join forces for a truly epic task:  churning the ocean of milk to find the mythic amṛta (pronounced ‘amrita’), or nectar of immortality.  Mṛta means death, and when you add an ‘a’ in Sanskrit, it reverses the meaning (like theist becoming atheist).  The amṛta then is the essence of life itself, the divine ambrosia which makes whomever drinks it immortal.  There are parallel European myths, such as the Norse Idunn with her youth maintaining golden apples, and more closely the ambrosia of the Greek Gods, with which there is a clear linguistic connection.  

            Who doesn’t want eternal youth?  Demons and gods both are excited about the prospect, so the war is quickly suspended and both the good guys and bad guys team up to churn the ocean.  Vishnu’s great serpent (called ananta, or "endless") uproots the great mountain so that they can use it as the dasher to churn the milk, and he also acts as the rope they use to rotate the mountain.  The mountain immediately starts to sink, but Vishnu is there in a pinch and holds it up by becoming a giant turtle.  The assembled forces then begin to churn the ocean.

            The first thing that happens is that an intense heat is generated, so that the gods can barely continue.  Also, the churning awakens the various nasties living in the milky “waters” – crocodiles and serpents especially.  The workers appeal to Vishnu, gives them the strength to persevere.

            Now the churning starts to bear its fruit.  Although in the story 14 different things come up, I'm going to limit myself to talking about the main three.  First comes the hālahala, a terrible fatal poison which threatens to spoil everything and poison every living thing on earth.  Desperate, they turn to Shiva, who, being so holy, and so self-contained and perfected, offers to drink all the poison up.  When he does so, it turns his face blue permanently.  A few drops of course spill, which become the venom of poisonous animals. That’s just how these creation myths go.

            Now that the poison is gone, the crew gets back to work, churning away for thousands of years.  The next thing to come is Lakshmi, the great goddess of fertility, wealth, and essentially all worldly goods and material happiness.  Immediately everyone gets distracted, presumably because of her sheer sexiness.  Most forget the amṛta entirely, even starting to fight over her.  Vishnu solves this problem, upraising Lakshmi to his side as his wife.  With her enthroned in heaven, everyone can get get back to work.  

            Finally, the amṛta comes out in a pot carried by the divine god of medicine, and no sooner does it arise than it is stolen by the asuras, which of course starts another war.  The devas eventually win, destroying the asuras and the nectar is rescued and the gods become immortal.  Creation also arises out of this churning (Lakshmi, etc). 

            Now lets get into what all this means.  Swamiji’s narrative was what got me started on this, so I’ll give that first:  the churning is yogic meditation, which first brings up poison, or impurities and complexes, to the surface of the mind which can only be absorbed by a yogi whose non-attachment, austerities, self-control, and self-understanding are like unto that yogic archetype Shiva.  Then comes Lakshmi, which represents the Siddhis, the “perfections” or “powers” that come to the yogi as he nears the goal.  These are traditionally said to be distractions from the path as it is tempting to use them for worldly gain and can lead the yogi to a great fall.  We see this in the churners forgetting their work when they see the beautiful Lakshmi.  The worldly powers must be offered up to higher ideas and wedded to God; in other words, used only for spiritual purposes, if at all, so that the churning can continue.  Lastly comes the nectar itself, knowledge of the Self, the immortal part of us, which we might call the immortal soul. 

           

            I must say, I love this interpretation, as it certainly follows the process of meditation, but reading the actual text I feel the need to add to it my own thoughts.  I've been reading a lot of Jung lately, so it's going to be heavily psychological.  You may recall from last time that the Ocean of Milk can be seen as the Unconscious, and that its an ambivalent symbol containing both our primal fears and issues (crocodiles and other reptiles), as well as the nectar of immortality itself.  The mountain is an earth symbol, stability, and here also I’d say consciousness, which is dislodged from its thrown by the serpent of wisdom, and nearly drowns.  Only the intervention of God (self surrender), saves it.  The serpent can also be a connection to the idea of kundalini, the shakti or power of consciousness dwelling in the spine.  It is kundalini which rises up to activate each of the chakras.  The churning first brings uncomfortable heat, as anyone who has ever examined himself, or for that matter practiced hatha yoga, knows.   The heat can also represent tapas, or austerity, the 'heat' generated by the purification of the body and mind.  It is characteristically unpleasant and difficult. Only faith in the process gets us over that first hurdle.  We get used to it and then we are able to start churning in earnest.

            The first things that come up are the complexes, the “issues” we all have under the surface.  Complexes are defined by Freud as essentially knots in the Libido, the sum total of our mental energy.  These knots “tie up” this energy, and when we work them out, whether through therapy or meditation, the release the energy back into the whole.  Jung adds to this that it is as if these complexes (and other psychic contents) seem to act autonomously, and he suggests that consciousness has invested them with a bit of itself.  By that logic, undoing these knots is reclaiming and unifying consciousness.  Clearly, this isn’t easy, and there’s a reason the poison was said to spread in every direction to destroy everything it touched.  Aren’t our own inner demons kind of like that?  Think of an irrational fear you might have and how that can poison an otherwise good experience.  Think of how jealousy can poison a beautiful relationship.  Without self-control and non-attachment, reclaiming these things (“swallowing” them), is nearly impossible. 

            Ah, but what rewards there are for those who are willing to do the work!  Lakshmi herself, all worldly good, comes out of the churning next.  In my opinion, the Siddhis of yoga are the increased mental (and physical) power that is unlocked as we work out our physical and mental knots.  The more mental (or physical) energy we reclaim, the more “powerful” we become.  Of course, if we began the process frustrated with the world, our new-found power may cause us to get lost in it.  Suddenly, the things that seemed unattainable become easy to the yogi, be it finding a healthy relationship (now that we’ve left our issues at the door), being physically able to enjoy the body in sports and recreation, or having the concentration and mental power to make lots of money.  The temptation is to stop at this point to enjoy our results. It's very common to use yoga as a way to merely “fix” ourselves, or help us function better in the world of men.  I don’t honestly believe that there’s anything wrong this – we should be glad for any yogi who is able to digest his own poison.  However, this text (and the whole tradition) is emphatic in its teaching that there is more yet available for those who can take their worldly power and dedicate it up to God (marrying Lakshmi to Vishnu).  This giving up of the fruits of our labor is called karma yoga, sublimating our worldly activities - work as prayer.  We can also consider this in terms of universal archetypes.  Lakshmi is the divine mother, the earth goddess, which here ascends to heaven as a divine consort.  We see something similar in the Catholic notion of the Assumption of the Virgin.  Jung makes a big deal of this in numerous works, and for good reason.  Mary, the earthly woman in whom Christ gestates, can be considered the “shadow” of the Holy Trinity which so conspicuously lacks a female component – Christianity’s blind spot we might say.  The Assumption of the earthly woman, bodily rather than in spirit, to heaven, has been depicted in art and literature for centuries, but it was not a part of official church doctrine until the 1950s, and then only in response to popular belief, not the church fathers.  See Jung’s Answer to Job for a more complete discussion of this.

            The last thing is of course the nectar itself, the symbol of the goal, which creates a war again between the devas and asuras.  I encourage you to glance back at an older post of mine, “Daddy, why do the Demons Howl,” for a bit about what the asuras represent.  We can liken the devas, the “shining ones”, to the opposite, the uplifting and virtuous thoughts of the mind.  We may take this war as a final conflict of the opposing forces in the mind, provoked by the end being in sight. It’s a fierce battle, and at its climax, the demons create a terrible illusion of a mountain from which falls burning trees, rocks, etc, and this nearly causes the lines of the devas to break and run.  But at the last moment, the supreme Lord himself appears on the battlefield, and the illusion instantly vanishes.  It’s an intriguing moment:  the illusion is specifically a mountain, which seems again to be a symbol of stability, and probably the ego itself.  We can call this the illusion of a stable ego, which the demonic forces exist only in relation to.  You can look at it this way – “demonic” ideas, as symbolized by the asuras, are given power only because we mistake the ego as the whole Self (taken either in a Jungian or Vedantic sense).  The thought to steal or possess is only possible in relation to the ego, which feels itself special and deserving of possession. In other words, we can look at the egotic asuras as selfish motivations and the limited attitude of the individual ego.  We can only justify selfish behavior when the ego appears dominant and stable.  If the ego is seen as illusory, then how do we justify gratifying its desires?  So too here, as the Lord, i.e., the true Self in the religious sense, or as a symbol for the totality of the psyche (in the Jungian sense), destroys at last the illusion so cherished by the asuras, and allows the gods victory.  

            Interestingly, this victory is not as complete as it first appears.  Even after the asuras are slain, the Supreme One causes them to be revived.  There will be later wars between the two factions, and this appears to be God’s desire.  The lesser gods have faith in that plan, but don’t always understand it.  The demons don’t get it at all, even possibly thinking God on their side (like all egoists) and they continue on their destructive path.  I’m not going to go too far into it, but after the churning story, Bali, the greatest of the demons, even invades heaven, taking over earth and heaven.  He is tricked into giving Vishnu in one of his forms 3 footsteps of his new realm, whereupon Vishnu reveals to Bali his true celestial form, with one step covering the whole earth, with another heaven.  Bali, enlightened by the vision, offers his own head (ego), “a man’s most prized possession” as he puts it, as a place for his third step.  He becomes changed thereby, and tells the rest of the demons to retreat.  To paraphrase “The same Supreme Lord that helped us before (revived us) now wishes for our defeat.  We cannot therefore win by any means, and we must therefore retreat until the time is right for us.”  This is a wonderful change of events.  Bali, the demonic general, comes to a new understanding of himself and his type in the relationship to the whole (psyche).  Both the devas and the asuras are changed by this conflict, and a new order is given to the world.  To me, this can be just as easily read as saying a new order is given to the mind.

            In a way this esoteric interpretation is actually a full reversal of the popular meaning.  Meditation and many forms of mysticism actually seek to reverse the process of creation, and if you think about it, that’s really what this is describing.  The undivided Ocean of Milk is not the primordial unconscious, but the unconscious we start with when we begin to meditate: a mixture of poison, power and nectar.  Through the churning we separate out what the years have added to the psyche, trying to get at the immortal primal self or soul that underlies it.  The power and the poison are like nature and nurture, creating the content of the ocean, while the nectar is our bare essence.  If anything, we start with the amrita, and acquire the poison through our experience.  This “creation” myth esoterically interpreted is actually its opposite, a myth of “uncreation.”  I can’t help but think of the gnostic ascent, in which as the soul ascends upwards it sheds the influence of the planets (symbolical of the personality traits), getting lighter and lighter until only the bare soul stands before God.

            As I’ve covered most of this Canto, so its fitting that I end with its final image: Vishnu incarnated as a giant fish.  I’ve been reading Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis, and he dedicates some space to fish symbolism, emphasizing the unblinking quality of its eyes.  This appears in two forms, either the constellated form (many eyes, often appearing as stars), and a singular form (the eye of God).  Given the aquatic nature of this whole chapter, and thereby its connection to the unconscious, we can describe the various forces of the psyche that appear in it as the constellated unconscious; the autonomous complexes and forms which have to be resolved, i.e., fight it out, that their energy may be reclaimed.  If you’ve seen the movie Inception (which I heartily recommend), you may remember the moments where the unblinking eyes of the “projections” turn upon the dreamer – that’s the constellated unconscious.  The ocean of milk here is separated (as light from darkness) into the poison, the powers, and the nectar.  The differentiation requires a new order to be created; paradise cannot be regained once we have tasted the fruit and we have to find a new wholeness, and perhaps a new relationship with ourselves.  A battle must be fought in the mind for dominance, aka unification, of the world. And at the end the text presents as its last image of the chapter something that seems to have little to do with the rest of the story – God incarnating as a giant fish, with its unblinking eye, the eye of God.  This, as Jung would no doubt agree, is a symbol of the Self, the totality, now swimming dominantly in the ocean of the unconscious, whose unblinking gaze the newly reconstructed ego (like the enlightened Bali) can never again hide from.  The Self has become One whole, One mind, One God, and though the battles go on, even the generals of the forces of evil now know that there is a place for the good and the evil in the hands of God.

Stories from the Bhagavata Purana: Part I

            There’s a fascinating Hindu creation story in the Bhagavata Purana which Swamiji recently brought to my attention.  The Bhagavata is a rather long Vaishnava work, mostly detailing Vishnu’s (as Krishna) various incarnations but containing a wealth of other stories.  The 8^th Skanda, or Canto, called “Withdrawal of the Cosmic Creations” is particularly interesting to me, as it contains the story of the Churning of the Ocean of Milk.  You may have heard of it before, but I’d like to analyze it in a bit more depth.  It’s an important story, often told in a simplified form to children, but it is also a rich source of traditional exegesis, as well plenty of fodder for my own more modern interpretation.  I’ll retell part of the story here, and hopefully we’ll get at some of the underlying archetypal currents.  Before I get to the Milk story however, I’d like to start with the opening of the Canto, which superficially seems to have rather little to do with the rest of it (other than establishing the setting), but is very valuable in its own right.

            The Canto begins with the depiction of a setting much resembling Paradise, or the Primal Garden.  It is a mountain of three peaks rising out of an Ocean of Milk.  In this “garden” there is perfect harmony, lots of beautiful flowers, and peace among the inhabitants.  This peace is largely due to the power of the Elephant King Gajendra, who protects the small animals from the larger.  One day, he comes across a pool of refreshing water, and being a family man, brings his family along for a dip and drink on the hot day.  Being lost in the thoughts of his family, his foot is grabbed by a crocodile in the water.  All the other elephants come to help, but they can’t drag Gajendra out, as none is as at home in the water as the Crocodile.  Gajendra, realizing that no one can help him, surrenders himself to the Supreme One, and in so doing so is saved, the Crocodile being cut in half by the Lord’s power.  He then goes about the island praising the Lord, doing mantra and sacrificing, etc.  He then receives the further grace of remembering his past incarnation (something not normally allowed to animals) as a ascetic yogi who in meditation failed to rise to greet an ancient Rishi (seer), and was thus cursed by him to incarnate as an elephant.  He is then taken up as an associate of Krishna, and is allowed to ride upon the back of Garuda, the King of the Eagles.

            The story completely shifts course after this, but before I go further, I want to take apart what we’ve already seen.  Firstly, the Garden is the primal creation, the world before the Fall in the Abrahamic religions. It represents a state of innocence, and we can interpret the myth of the Fall as an awakening to consciousness - the eating from the tree of knowledge, prompted by that wise old serpent (that's the gnostic interpretation anyway).  In the Bhagavata, there's a similar "bliss in ignorance" (as we see, the elephant does not really know his own nature at first), and everything appears harmonious and without conflict. 

            As we have seen, the harmony is partially based on the efforts of Gajendra, the elephant King.  Things appear orderly, but we know there's more in the world than the innocent elephants know, and not all of it is good. The elephant is the traditional Indian symbol for the earth element and the root chakra, being large, physically powerful, and as immovable as a mountain. The elephant is stability, has ties to our roots (an elephant never forgets), and here the King of the Elephants is also described as a house-holder, connecting him with family life (the in-group, or tribe).  It is this that gets him in trouble, the text tells us.  By enjoying his family he is distracted and fails to notice the danger in the water.  He is, we might say, unconscious of it.  Water here is a crucial symbol, one which C.G. Jung never fails to connect to the unconscious and the irrational part of us that lurks under the surface.  It is an ambivalent symbol, as the unconscious is so incomprehensibly vast.  It is the nourishing, sustaining, life-giving water, the font of renewal (baptism), the creative power, as well as the keeper of our secrets, the place where our Shadow dwells, and can be full of unexpected dangers, symbolized by the Crocodile.  Gajendra brings his family to the water to rest and relax, to restore from the hot day.  Water also represents the feminine or relational quality (usually unconscious in men), which appears as Gajendra’s distraction by the familial relationships.  He is unable to see what lurks under the calm surface.  We may remember the Greek Narcissus, who caught his own image (the reflection in his unconscious, his persona) in the water, was fascinated and drowned.  Here, the elephant, the strongest of beasts, is caught as well, and begins a mighty struggle to extricate himself.  But, not being a water animal (the conscious ego is not the native inhabitant of the unconscious), he can’t free himself under his own power.  Neither can outside forces help him.  It is only by surrender to a higher power, a Redeemer, which Jung would call the image of the complete Self (not in the sense of the soul or atman, but in the sense of the totality of the psyche, conscious plus unconscious), that he is able to get free.  We might say that he then “gets some religion.”  His further grace of remembering his past incarnation is also worth commenting on.  He was once human, and because he was too lofty a yogi (who couldn’t even bother to pay attention to his surroundings – life on Earth), was given an animal form, specifically the symbolic animal of the Earth.  In other words, he is made to descend.  But by his struggle in the waters, he is uplifted, and his ego is understood and transcended. He ceases to identify merely with the conscious ego, but with more of his whole Self.

            The lowest chakra is the Muladhara, or "root support" Chakra, and in Hindu mythology the world is said to be supported by elephants, and they symbolize Earth.  The second chakra is connected to water, and is emotional and fascinating (sex is an important association).  So we see here Gajendra stepping up into the second chakra, symbolized by being pulled into the water.  After his struggle, he dedicates himself to spiritual work, what we might call tapas.  This is connected to the internal flame of motivation and purification (Sulphur in alchemy), and the fiery 3^rd or egotic chakra.  By grace he is given knowledge of past lives, which effectively overthrows the limited egotic point of view (psychologically, we might say he becomes aware of other 'selves').  He recognizes that he is a high soul, who, because of past karma, has been brought low (to the earth).  By this, he is upraised by Krishna, who is said to rule the heart, and is given the privilege of riding upon the back of the Eagle King Garuda, a clear symbol of air. Air is the element of the 4th or heart chakra.  We may say, in total, that the story of Gajendra is the story of a man who rises high spiritually, but who is forced to “come back down to earth” before he may once again ascend, this time higher than before.  For many of us, this is what working with the chakra system is like.  It makes you start at the beginning, to get humble and dirty down in the gritty earth, before we can rise up again on the back of Garuda the Eagle. 

            I bring up the chakras because I’ll be starting a 7 week Chakra Cycle in my Sunday 10am Open Level Flow with Meditation class next week (4/10).  I hope to include a post on each of the Chakras as we progress through each, and it is helpful to understand them as symbols associated with very real psychic contents.  Stories like the above can be very useful in understanding the psychic processes that can result from meditation on these powerful symbols.  As this post has gotten lengthy, I’ll break it up and discuss the Ocean of Milk next time.