The Sanskrit word for "Divine Play"
a reflection on trying to understand everything
In my first year of The Living School, I was assigned an essay from New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton. Twenty-seven years old and having just birthed my first baby, the fire of inner devotion burned bright and hot. Twice a day, during nap times, I would sit for Centering Prayer by the wood stove in our little cabin in the mountains. Life still felt so new.
A particular excerpt stood out to me from that reading:
"For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity, and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats our very blood, whether we want it to or not.
"Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance” (303).
For years now, I have contemplated “the silence of the spheres.” What spheres? I had anxiously asked on that carpet by the fire. This week, the quote circled back through my studies with The Church of Conscious Harmony. It was odd to feel it land in a well of understanding this time. Since life feels somewhat less new now, I can better taste myself in shackles of sadness, absurdity, and despair. I have verified the uselessness of these states and longed enough for the silence that lies beyond them, where the music of the wedding feast always plays.
Revisiting this teaching reveals to me more plainly the eastern influence Merton was under. I have a stronger sense now of the distinct flavor of spirituality which might inspire one to consider life as a cosmic dance, twirling over the eternal emptiness in the shape of matter and time.
Lila is a Sanskrit word and concept arising from Hindu traditions, translating most simply to “divine play.” It asserts that creation, instead of being an objective for achieving any purpose, is rather an outcome of the playful nature of the divine. Lila assumes the perfection of Divine Source (God) which, therefore, could want for nothing, and thus creates the cosmos from pure freedom or abundant bliss rather than necessity.
Recently, I shared an article with you describing one man’s spontaneous awakening after being poisoned and returning from near-death. In his reflections, John Wren-Lewis makes a compelling argument for a cosmological revisioning based on lila.
“A truly mystical paradigm has to be post-evolutionary, a paradigm of lila, divine play for its own sake, where any purposes along the line of time, great or small, are subordinate to the divine satisfaction that is always present in each eternal instant. Mystical gnosis is knowing the instant-by-instant delight of Infinite Aliveness in all manifestation, irrespective of whether, from the purely human standpoint, the manifestation is creative or destructive, growing or withering, evolving towards some noetic Omega or fading out…
Finite life is a continual instant-by-instant voyaging out from the ‘eternal Home’ into the time process to discover new ‘productions of time’ for eternity to love as they arise and pass away…
The main positive advice I would give to spiritual seekers is to experiment with any practice or idea that seems interesting—which is what the Buddha urged a long time ago, though not too many of his followers have ever taken that part of his teaching seriously. Ancient traditions and modern movements alike may be very valuable as databases for new adventures, but to treat them as authorities to be obeyed is not only ‘unscientific’—it seems actually to go against the grain of the divine lila itself, since novelty is apparently the name of the time game.”
My resonance with this article was immediate. I welcomed the challenge it presented to my current worldview under the cosmology of The Fourth Way. I was inspired by the possibility that I’m mixed up in inflating my own personal significance, as I am prone to do, and inflating the human experiment at large. I have thought something depended on our being here. I have thought it was important that I make good use of my body and time. I have thought we were headed somewhere.
In one sense, it could be a dangerous revision - I can see that teetering too far into the existentialism of everything existing purely for God’s playful discovery might result in apathy and lead to an extreme depreciation of life. If none of this “matters” in the way I once believed, for instance, then I’m under no obligation to maintain my basic human decency, save the consequences I might experience under the dimension of time, which is illusionary anyway.
Let us not throw out the baby with the bathwater, as some folks say. The question of separation from our divine source remains and is important to our conception of the world and time as God’s dance. Merton says, “Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats our very blood, whether we want it to or not.” Even if it’s only with our intellectual understanding for now, we benefit from the realization that we are the dance itself, at least a number in the grand production. And, curious enough, beyond the actual beating of our hearts and intake of our breath, we seem to have some agency regarding our theatrical flair. We can choose how we feel about dancing.
"Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.”
“…any purposes along the line of time, great or small, are subordinate to the divine satisfaction that is always present in each eternal instant. Mystical gnosis is knowing the instant-by-instant delight of Infinite Aliveness in all manifestation…”
In my brief research on the meaning of lila, I stumbled on a parable that gives further dimension to this teaching:
A new flute was invented in China. A Japanese master, upon hearing the beauty of its sound, took the flute to Japan and played it all over the country.
Once, after playing the flute in a small village, there was hushed silence and then the oldest man present said: “Like a god.”
The villagers asked how long it would take to learn to play the flute like that. “Years,” said the master, but he was willing to take on a student. And so the villagers chose a talented and hard-working young musician, and the master gave him a simple melody, which the young musician managed to play. But something was missing. The student wanted to impress his teacher and kept trying, but something was still missing. He became more and more desperate and frustrated. He no longer enjoyed his music and eventually fell into poverty.
After a long time, he returned to his village and was persuaded to play again. He stood there full of shame, with his old flute in his hands. With nothing to gain or lose, he played. At the end of his performance, there was absolute silence in the room and an elder was heard to say: “Like a god.”
☼
For me, this story bridges the chasm in my understanding between, on the one side, all manifestation arising for the mere play of God and, on the other side, God depending on our vigilant inner work to maintain the homeostasis of the cosmos. And on every side, how God is not a distant observer, but the Patient Longing to hear our music. The pulse of the dance. The ping of delight. That little whisper sometimes piercing the silence of the spheres that says… Drop it like it’s hot 🎶
Ha! We wouldn’t want to get too stuffy up in here with all this philosophical mumbo-jumbo. Play your damn flute, okay? Give up your petty despair! Stand up right now and wiggle around in the weirdest way you can imagine for the sheer novelty of it!
It is an absolute wonder you exist.
I’m sending my favorite song again, as a reminder of the miracle you are and also as a reward for wading through this essay.
Talk soon.
After reading your post I spent several hours sitting at my piano figuring out how to play something I really wanted to play. I also decorated my Avocado tree with green yarn while listening to this marvelous wonder of a song (dissecting a bird ....etc) with headphones on. And then I delighted in the fact that I did not Google if it is good for trees to have yarn on them. 🙏💖🥰thanks Jane for writing and sharing.
I am rereading this today while I’m washing at the launderette. Have you read any of Joseph Campbell’s work. Your article is following along with much of his thinking. I was just curious!♥️♥️♥️