The Mansion of Fun
Tuesday, June 7th, 2005Most of us are like those American families during the Cold War who built nuclear fallout shelters in their basements. They really believed that the canned goods and water bottles they stowed so jealously would get them through nuclear winter. Right.
So we’ve got our ego, and our identity, and our story about our ego and our identity. We’ve got our childhood story, and our maturation story, and our story about what we are “working on.” We’ve got our trauma story and our triumph story. And we’ve got our relationship and sex stories.
We’ve got our feelings about our body, and our feeling about where our body ends, and we’ve got our body projects: what we are “working on.”
We’ve got a job to pay for our stories, and a place for our story to live. Most likely, our job and our place to live are vital to our story.
We’ve got our friends who listen to our stories, and we’ve got friends we connect to because they have a different story. We fight about our stories, and this is called “processing.”
We’ve got what we like and don’t like. What we support and don’t support. What we believe in and don’t believe in, or what we fret about because we can’t decide. We’ve got our Important Decisions.
We have our outrage and our “falling in love.” We have habitual emotions. We have habitual fears. And we are afraid to die.
All of these are our “canned goods”: all of the goods we inherit from conventional concepts of reality coming to us and through us in time.
Our root sense of separation from others and the world is our bomb shelter.
And the Cold War is the self-perpetuated dogma that reinforces our sense of separation, the same sense of separation we seek to alter through spiritual practice.
All of this must be lost, must be surrendered, in order to grow. We must surrender our habits, our conventional notions of safety, and our fixed ideas about everything. We must do this, not so we can transcend the cruddy, muddy, rutting world, but so that we can re-enter it with flexibility, adaptability, equanimity, playfulness, and openness.
The Tantras refer to duality as “The Mansion of Fun.” Until we are fully open to the world and living from a base experience of non-separation, we are living in “The Bombshelter of Compulsion” instead.
Growth requires loss. This is not a punishing truism, but a cosmological formula that contains worlds of Tantric depth.
Each time we surrender our habits of limited, dualistic, me-you, self-other life, or when they are simply ripped from us in moments of true grace, we leap, or are pushed, into the void. We have to quit a job because it is hurting our health, and therefore our practice, but we don’t know what will replace it. Or we wait too long to make our move and get fired. We have to leave or change a relationship that is limiting us, but there is no clear alternative in sight. We drop a cherished self-definition, and nothing rushes in. Or the grace of a difficult life situation reveals our conventional ideas of self to be pure fiction.
These “moments,” as frightening as they may be, are necessary and wonderful opportunities for tasting the groundless, boundariless hosting element of the world, that vastness beyond mere space we call Shiva. They also demonstrate to us the natural rhythm of the universe, the pulse between its mode of appearing as unmanifest open spaciousness and manifest form, between Shiva and Shakti. As we relax more and more, we eventually live from within the experiential knowledge that the terrifying “nothing” is our true refuge; it is the ground of freedom. Only from within that groundless ground can we re-enter duality as free human beings and play in Ma Shakti’s Mansion of Fun.
OM Shanti, Shambhavi
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