Few things

Just a few random things

Tomorrow begins the festival of Holi, the hindu new year, which is insane and crazy, so much so that I'm not even supposed to leave the house for the next two days. I don't want to miss out on the fun, but my program leaders and host family insist that it is too dangerous. Whatever. Hopefully I'll have a fun experience despite being under house arrest.

I want to change what I said in each of the last two blog entries a little bit. SOmething my dad said in response to yesterday's entry that I really appriciated. Skip if you're not interested in these spiritual philosophical issues:

"I want to respond first to your blog on Shiva and how Hindu
mythology relates to its cosmology--you can put any of my response on your blog if you wish as a "comment." First, you explain this stuff very clearly, especially given its complexitity and its distance from western ways of thought. I did have one question about Hindus who pray for immortality--isn't the idea to get off the wheel of rebirth and become part of Brahman without even having an Atman--or is that too much a Buddhist spin on the thing? I really like what you said about finding salvation in the immediate, everyday--you sound very much like Walt Whitman here, or D. H. Lawrence trying to explain Walt Whitman.

The western psychologist who helps the most in explaining mythologies is Carl Jung, although he was not that helpful in actually helping people, including himself. He posits that the psyche at the beginning is in a state of undifferentiated, unconsious unity, out of which all the opposites the conscious mind later creates as the ego grows--male/female, light/darkness, inner/outer, good/evil--split themselves off. We ourselves split ourselves off from the entire psychic whole by constructing an "ego"--a male or female identity that leaves behind in the unconscious its opposite--or "contrasexual"--aspects, and a "shadow" that contains its negative [or unacknowledged] aspects. The task of the second half of life--or in deep spiritual experiences in the first part of life--is to reunity with this psychological ground of our being, to recognize as our own and understand those previously unconscious parts of ourselves--it's like that moment in The Tempest, when Prospero says of Caliban--"This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine." So there's a basic unity-division-reintegration pattern, that in some ways is cyclical in smaller movements in our lives as well. It's present in the Hero Myth, when the hero leaves home, encounters figures like his shadow self, the anima [the princess to be rescued and married] the wise old man [like Tiresias he/she is often hermaphroditic] suggest the original unity of the psyche. I realize this is to psychologize and introject myths and cosmologies--like the alternate kalpa cycles of unmanifest-manifest, unmanifest, etc., or the garden of eden, expulsion and dispersion, and then the heavenly paradise. But that's also what you're doing when you identify your inner rage with Shiva. Can you say more about what you're discovering about yourself and how you might be dealing with it? "

That was good and I'll type a full response maybe tomorrow, or maybe after Holi. But one ammendment I wanted to make now:after thinking about it muchly, I've decided that I beleive something different than hindus: I beleive we all have an Atman, and the aggrigate of all those individual spirits constitutes the big Brahm, but there's no external god outside of life. This is how I can remain an athiest while awknoleging our spiritual nature. I see no need to actually beleive in an external Brahm. This is also one of the main ways I differ with Buddhist mythology. Buddhists beleive that there is only the brahm and the atman (self) is illusion. Although I can see myself beleiving that the self is an illusion, there is no brahm outside of it. At this point, it really becomes only a scemantic difference, but it comes up in almost every conversation about it.

Then, about music: there's no way that indian music could replace jazz in my life because it's a little too structured, they are too loyal to the tin/tal beat, and don't change the beat to the extent that jazz drummers do--they improvise, but they never actually turn the song into a different song, never turn the music on its head. I'm going to bring back CD's, but if you are impatient and want to spend too much money, I think there's a cd available online called something like "Sitar Masters of Banaras" that has my guru--Ramuji on tabla, and Swamiji on sitar. I'll bring back music, though.

More later.
best
jed