By Radha Ma |
25 years ago I sat in a master’s level anthropology course at Columbia University while attending NYU. I was trying to find my way on a trail of signifiers, headed by “Caribbean Studies”, whose signifieds eluded me for many years, until I was deep into discovering my inner labyrinth under the guidance of Shunyamurti. Last night he showed a lecture for our doc film night: there was Mick Taussig, in a tousled pink shirt still pouring out his ideas at the age of 80. One of the most vivid memories of my life is participation in a class of Taussig’s, I believe the Spring of ’95; it was Magic of the State. I could not understand a word of it as I was not an anthropology student. But I had read a book of his, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, and decided I wanted to study with him. A spark had been lit in my mind, when political economy and performance studies were linked, by his work. These two realms served as pillars upon which my mental life could begin to grow, and Taussig was the “master signifier” of them, even if my mind could not delve yet into their deeper connections and ultimate meanings.
When I arrived to NYC I wrote three simple things in my notebook that summed up my desire: “POETRY/FORMS/THE DEEP”. At that moment in my life I also began studies in musical composition with a jazz master, and fell deeply in love with that vocation. For this postmodern afflicted soul, “music” and “mick” were the two signposts that shaped my mental development at the time. And all that was achieved during those two years was a love of music, and, a fable I wrote for the final project in Taussig’s class. It was he who suggested I write a fable, since I confessed to him I didn’t feel I had enough theory to really grasp his class! I wrote a story about two women who go to Cuba to try to understand the Cuban revolution; one of them transfigures into a palm tree at the end of the story, joining other palm trees in a counter-revolution against the revolution, as the denouement (for some reason, I was in love with palm trees). He said only publishable works in his class receives an “A”. I got the “A”! Later I tried to turn it into a play for my Master’s Thesis, and we both admitted (Taussig and I), that I failed. Then I (still) graduated and it was all over.
So I got on the soul train to California and soon met Shunyamurti. I did not realize then that Shunyamurti and Taussig were both shamans, but the incredible threads of each of their “shamanisms” were woven together in my mind the night of January 24th, 2020, when Shunyamurti began the evening class with the words: “Zen masters are poets and performance artists; not all poets and performance artists are Zen Masters. But poetry and performance art are part of shamanism”. That is was important to use the help of the frame of reference of cultural anthropology to understand the “different tools and different social functions” of the different shamanistic practices of the world, and that was why, it was later revealed, we were watching a lecture from one of the world’s leading anthropologists, Michael Taussig, “a lecture that is really performance art”, Shunyamurti added.
He continued by explaining how cultural anthropology can help us understand the implications of phenomena that arise in consciousness, “help us discover a black hole or blind spot within our consciousness”. The concept that would be the shamanic tool of this particular lecture was mimesis, specifically “the mimetic relationship between nature and culture”. Nature is capable of mimetically responding to culture and consciousness, by giving back the same poison that consciousness has delved upon nature, creating an infernal sublime. The question implied in this idea for Sat Yogis, stated Shunyamurti, is to know what is the accurate response to transform an end into a beginning? I understood Shunyamurti’s words to mean, how do we respond accurately to the end of nature and culture in this apocalyptic moment, to the poisons returning to us from our repressed consciousnesses, these minds that are filled with mimetic reiterations of a poisonous culture. We have created our own end, that is a new beginning. Will we make it into poetry through the appropriate magic ritual of our own ego death?
Shunyamurti offered a unique insight, that nature is offering us a divine gift- Her Vibrational Frequency- that we can mimetically attune to, and ride the wave into the next quantum iteration of a new unfoldment of logic of worlds. He invite us to take in Taussig’s poetic tropes, tropes that can change the way we digest information and “mimetically activate the capacity to resonate with the mind of God”, to understand this infernal sublime moment as the performance of our synchronous attunement with nature’s metaphorical mimesis- a oneness with all the elements while one holds the high note, that Taussig then performed in his lecture, at one with himself, his words, ideas, and shamanistic core.
Taussig opens the lecture by expressing that magic ritual is based on sympathetic magic, on mimesis, and that nature itself is filled with similarities and “the yearning to become Other”. Immediately I saw the unity of yoga with shamanism thanks to years of training in atmanology with Shunyamurti. The ego that starts out hating the other, due to abandonment and lack of divine love from its caretakers, pours out its poisons into the world creating an inferno that then must once again reveal God; those who awaken along the way, yearn to become Other in a conscious and Self-directed way- other from itself, that is a suffering self. The ultimate Other is God, or the Self. When the ego stays closed, it dies within its shell and that encasing will be shattered open at death, or in an apocalypsis, that reveals one is actually mimetic with one’s highest Nature. In a similar way, the shaman heals the sick who cannot become other from their ailment, and he becomes other-worldly, and can take in the poisons of illness or black magic and transform them by mimetically vibrating with them but from a higher point in consciousness that is able to raise those energies into a new octave, and thus heal them, revealing a higher Nature.
Of Taussig’s three theses, re-enchantment of nature, dark surrealism, and metamorphic sublime, it is this last one that resonates with the threads I am weaving today: cascading tumultuous things becoming rivers and insects and people through ruptures and dislocations…”forming hybrids easily”, “mimetically sensuous with the ocean, with the sun….reciprocity…”. Then he shows a friend posing in a photograph…as a palm tree! My fable! This is now too mimetically sensuous! And the friend is holding a bunch of palm fruit! The strangest coincidence of my life in Costa Rica is my ending up addicted to eating palm fruit! And now Taussig researches palm oil production and evil and other things…
From Art, becoming palm tree and palm fruit, to Alchemy, with palm oil in the martini glass, the metamorphic sublime, to the magic of the state again! The invisible war machine…all of a sudden, I GET IT. I follow him. I had to study 25 years with Shunyamurti, to follow one little lecture, to realize I am in a mimetic relay! “Insects identical to rose petals…” Ha ha ha. Do you know I am the mystic rose? And I am surrounded by insects! And not only that “the Saint wants to become what he sees”. YES! It has taken Shunyamurti the better of 18 years to pry me lose from the ego-that-hates-the-other (and is mimetically bonded in hate with it) to begin to feel rapturous mimesis with nature. I am in love with birds! And sky! And wind! And to those, I can die. I can give my being over to the elements and feel no narcissistic terror of ceasing to exist. “The Saint wants to enter into everything…” This idea is the undoing of the ego, that wants to withdraw from most things and enter into only a few unconsciously selected things that it wishes to dominate and destroy or realize its destruction with. The infernal sublime! We have become our own lower nature and made nature now into that inferno. The bridge is to unite with magic ritual taking place at the highest levels of consciousness. I could only write those words thanks to Shunyamurti, and know what I am talking about. But this mimesis with all of God’s metaphors I see as the way through the end, to the new beginning; like what is called the passaggio in classical singing, from the lower voice to the higher voice, a narrow tunnel that we manage to get through by mixing both voices together so that they become one and there is no resistance to the upward movement of sound.
Trickery, shapes, age of meltdown, all in the voodoo light of a magical dawn. Sounds like Sangam Yuga, Mick! You aren’t using language to say BS! You are speaking the moment of confluence of light and dark, just before the meltdown, and the new movement of thought that will come when we cast a new magical spell over the world, a world with a new glow, speed, love…all we have to do is open up that other fire, “called yourself”, and allow ourselves to be “pulled into the otherness of Being”, through mimesis with the Self.
And Shunyamurti ended the evening reminding us that the substance of the world is love, and through our love we will “re-enchant our consciousness as the Presence of God”. The history of the world is performance art, you say, and everything good and evil is playing their part in the symphony. Our role is to play the note of unconditional love in that symphony, by getting out of mimetic mind altogether and not melt down with the current world but to transform along with the deeper world alchemical process happening right now as we speak it and dream it from our inner shaman’s cave.
May this world always be filled with such magical beings with their magical notions, such as Taussig and Shunyamurti.
Postscript, 12-7-20, two days ago on 12-5-20, an old friend from New York City, when I was at NYU and taking Taussig’s class, contacts me. “My name is Raquel and I am trying to locate [Natasha]. She wrote a fable years ago and I have it and read it again. Can you put me in touch with her? I want to do a video…”
