We have always chosen to adapt our economy and technology to human beings—not our human beings to
somebody else's economy and technology.
They've been taught from infancy to be fully aware
of the world, and to enjoy their awareness.
Which helps them, of course, to have an intenser awareness and a more understanding
enjoyment,
so that the most ordinary things,
the most trivial events, are seen as
"Dancing in all the worlds at once,
In all the worlds.
And first of all in the world of matter.
Look at the great round halo, fringed with the symbols of fire, within which the god is dancing.
It stands for Nature, for the world of mass and energy.
Within it Shiva-Nataraja dances the dance of endless becoming and passing away.
It's his lila, his cosmic play. Playing for the sake of playing,
like a child. But this child is the Order of Things. His toys are galaxies, his
playground is infinite space and between finger and finger every interval is a thousand million light-years.
Look at him there on the altar. The image is
man-made, a little contraption of copper only four feet high. But Shiva-Nataraja fills the universe, is the universe.
Shut your eyes and see him towering into the night,
follow the boundless stretch of those arms and the
wild hair
infinitely flying.
"Nataraja at play among the stars and in the atoms. But also at play within every living thing,
every sentient creature, every child and man and woman.
Play for play's sake.
But now the playground is conscious, the dance floor is capable of suffering.
To us, this play without purpose seems a kind of insult.
What we would really like is a God who
never destroys what he has created. Or if there must be pain and death, let them be meted out by a God of righteousness, who will punish the wicked
and reward the good with everlasting happiness.
But in fact the good get hurt, the innocent suffer.
Then let there be a God who sympathizes and
brings comfort.
But Nataraja only dances. His play is a play impartially of
death and of life, of all evils as well as of all goods.
In the uppermost of his right hands he holds the drum that summons being out of not-being.
Rub-adub-dub—the creation tattoo, the cosmic reveille.
But now look at the uppermost of his left hands. It brandishes the fire by which all that has been
created is forthwith destroyed.
He dances this way-—what happiness!
Dances that way—and oh, the pain,
the hideous fear, the desolation! Then hop, skip and jump. Hop into perfect health.
Skip into cancer and senility.
Jump out of the fullness of life into nothingness,
out of nothingness again into life.
For Nataraja it's all play,
and the play is an end in itself, everlastingly purposeless.
He dances because he dances, and the dancing is his maha-sukha, his infinite and eternal bliss.
Eternal bliss,
For us there's no bliss, only the oscillation between happiness and terror and a sense of outrage at
the thought that our pains are as integral a part of Nataraja's dance as our
pleasures, our dying as our living. Let's quietly think about that for a little
while."
Suffering and sickness, old age, decrepitude, death.
I show you sorrow.
"Open your eyes again and look at Nataraja up there on the altar. Look closely. In his upper right hand, as you've already seen, he holds the drum that calls the world into existence and in his upper left hand he carries the
destroying fire.
Life and death, order and disintegration, impartially.
But now look at Shiva's other pair of hands. The lower right hand is raised and the palm is turned outwards. What does that gesture signify? It signifies,
'Don't be afraid; it's All Right.'
But how can anyone in his senses fail to be
afraid? How can anyone pretend that evil and suffering are all right, when
it's so obvious that they're all wrong?
Nataraja has the answer. Look now at his lower left hand. He's using it to point down at his feet. And what are his feet doing? Look closely and you'll see that the right foot is planted squarely on a horrible little
subhuman creature—the demon, Muyalaka.
A dwarf, but immensely powerful in his malignity,
Muyalaka is the embodiment of ignorance, the
manifestation of greedy, possessive selfhood.
Stamp on him, break his back!
And that's precisely what Nataraja is doing. Trampling the little monster down under his right foot.
But notice that it isn't at this trampling
right foot that he points his finger; it's at the left foot, the foot that, as he dances,
he's in the act of raising from the ground.
And why does he point at it? Why?
That lifted foot, that dancing defiance of the force of gravity—it's
the symbol of release, of liberation.
Nataraja dances in all the worlds at once—in the world of physics and chemistry, in the world of
ordinary, all-too-human, experience, in the world finally of Suchness, of
Mind, of the Clear Light. . . .
Look at them there in their little cave of light.
And now shut your eyes and see them again—shining, alive, glorified.
How beautiful! And in their tenderness what depths of meaning!
What wisdom beyond all spoken wisdoms in that sensual experience of spiritual fusion and
atonement!
Eternity in love with time. The One joined in marriage to the many,
the relative made absolute by its union with the One.
island
