The Primal Scene Revisited

Yesterday, after talking to Madhuri, I mentioned the primal scene. I had in fact written something on the subject way back in 2012 and it was still in my drafts. This comes from some thinking about Freud and the thought: "Radha and Krishna are our parents before we were born." In other words, we were born of love, and that this love can be identified with the summum bonum. It is an archetypal way of looking at reality meaningfully.

The thoughts in the article were mostly disorganized and in need of more explanation, but I posted it anyway without too much decoration. 

Reality is always about broken ideals. Imperfection is the rule, not perfection, no matter what your idea of perfection happens to be. Religion is about adhering to those ideals even imperfectly rather than abandoning them. Love is the highest ideal, but who knows or experiences it? And who believes in it to the exclusion of the other accomplishments in life? And is love possible outside of vidhi, the rules imposed by dharma?

So in any relationship, one partner will be more idealist, one more realist. One more internally oriented, the other more externally. Those are the parallel lines on the way to the apex of the triangle. What is wanted is that they should interlock, like the Ira and Pingala channels surrounding the Sushumna. 

Funny that the path of the Kundalini should look like a fragment of DNA.

As I was saying the other day, the symbolism of the spinal cord and the rising of energies, etc., are an insight of the internal view of the human body. The contents of the thousand-petalled lotus are the goal and when two individuals intertwined are both mentally aligned in the thousand-petalled lotus, when the energies are aligned in the thousand-petalled lotus, then one attains to its contents. cintamani-prakara-sadmasu.

The reason the sexual sadhana is so important is because it brings tremendous force to bear on unity. The two entities are melted together as Rupa Goswami describes. For those who have experienced this, there is really no part of their sadhana that is not affected by it.

But there is something that I must address, another elephant in the room of which that up to this moment I have avoided speaking. That is related to the use of marijuana. There is a strong prejudice against marijuana in orthodox Vaishnava circles, including the Gaudiya Math and ISKCON, so I have been careful to not advertise my use of it, even when it came out in various trickles and bits, that I was taking shelter of Vijaya. But over the course of time, it started to be used against me and the hypocrisy of doing so while accepting the social norm that it was a "bad" thing that had no redemptive or positive value. 

For the orthodox, whether Brahmin or Vaishnava, marijuana usage is associated with the "deviant" cults like Bauls and Sahajiyas, both of whom are comparable to bohemian-type independent cultural identities within the straight culture of Vaishnava Brahminism, or Sanskritized Vaishnavism. Whatever the case, that fundamental distinction is true: the Bauls and Sahajiyas are rebels and romantics in a straight world. The problem is this: Religion is the "straight" response to "stoned" revelation.

In India I having been using bhang regularly for several years now. But this is not the first time in my life that I have done so. Most significantly was the use of psychedelics in my late teens, which directly or indirectly culminated in my becoming a Hare Krishna -- a stoned act if there ever was one. The premise, put bluntly by the early ISKCON preachers, was to "stay high forever." And that is what we wanted, an intelligent natural approach to fulfilling the insights that had come to us through psychedelics. Make no mistake, there would have been no Hare Krishna movement without psychedelics, but it was fundamentally a "straight" movement. It harnessed the energy released by psychedelics and channeled it into other ways of thinking and acting in relation to God. 

The trouble is that one then starts to look at the products of the stoned perspective through straight lenses. Now I am not going to deny one or the other. These are opposed ways of looking at the world, one somewhat irrational, the other rational to the extreme; rational to the point of dessication. We Vaishnavas are rasikas, we want to taste the rasa. We believe in bliss, and in a way it is a science of bliss. And the essential element of bliss is love. That is a stoned perspective. The straight perspective is to say, "Yes, but there are rules!" It is the difference between raganuga and vaidhi bhakti.

Bhang made it possible for me to get a feeling for what it meant to be Brijbasi. Being a Brijbasi, for someone coming from the West, is a very stoned thing. Here is suppose by stoned I mean mad, for it is the very antithesis of the modern world.

A long time ago, in Rishikesh, where marijuana grew wild everywhere around the ashram, I started to hunger to taste it again. And after I did, it was not long before I came to believe that yoga itself was the discovery of marijuana intoxicated ascetics, who used it to enhance awareness of their internal functioning, both of the body and the mind. The body is, after all, the first sadhana. 

Asana does not just mean being able to twist your body into strange shapes, It means to use an external object to go inward. The alambanas are the different points in the body, which one awakens through stretching and breath control. The mind follows the breath, that is one of the basic points of hatha yoga. Marijuana heightens awareness of the minutiae of sensations involved in holding certain positions, stretching muscles, the relation of the breath to movement and so on. 

Another beneficial effect of marijuana that I got was stamina, stamina for yogic practices. With the use of bhang in particular 

[I avoided smoking for the smell problem. I kept my use of marijuana as private as I could and preferred to keep it that way. It is only now that I have decided to just be honest about it and say why I use it.] 

Bhang not only makes one more strongly aware of the need of the body to stretch or move or be activated in some way so that it remains enlivened. But one has to break against the tamasika elements in the body that impede practice. Bhang helped me overcome that and to sustain periods of proper yoga practice that were very valuable in deepening my understanding of the process.

It made me sing and hear my own singing, and more and more, to want to sing for others. This may well be a gross overestimation of my talent, but I know that my real talent does not lie in anything but my being. 

It provokes thought in me. It makes me see things and relish things even in the ordinary. But in the matter of this bhakti sadhana, it fills me with a sense of wonder and deepening realization of what was being said, what was being discussed, what was the preoccupation in the work of the Goswamis. To understand the Braja mood is really only possible for the stoned mind. [Of course here I am not specifically to any herbal remedies, but of an insight and a perspective that is often recognized by those who have had some psychedelic experience or other.]

This morning I started to work out in the back yard, to clean the mess that a couple of rainfalls, a shedding spring tree and the birds that Madhuri feeds had done. I started to sing the morning tune of the maha mantra. Madhuri prefers silence, or Chopin. She does not seem to care much for my singing, but she cares less for the fact that I take marijuana. 

So I am in a position of trying to justify my use of marijuana to her. She has taken a strong negative position. I have only asked her to put aside her prejudice and judge me on the basis of my behavior.