The Laughter of the Avatar
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Krishna is an interesting figure. We don’t talk that much about Krishna—we’re more into the teachings of the Shaivites, and all of that, but Krishna is, I think—what’s interesting about him is he’s a rogue, like Shiva, and he steals butter, and he kills demons, but sort of in his spare time, and it’s just for a laugh, and there’s nothing serious.
I think his message is, the one sin is to take life seriously, to think that there are any rules when you’re in God-consciousness. He even tells Arjuna, “You can break the rule, ‘thou shalt not kill’—because nobody dies anyway, right?” When the time comes that you need to fight, you fight. And when the time comes to be at peace, you are at peace. There’s a season for everything, and you have to be able to be in a totally free spirit, which is what, I think, he signifies—that freedom.
He and Radha both signify that freedom of breaking past all conventional rules in their relationship itself—it was a breaking of the rules. And all of the messages that Krishna gives are messages of total love. And if your love for God is total and absolute to the point that you are in union with God, you can do no wrong, even if it would look wrong in comparison to whatever statutes or ordinances of dharma are given at a lower level, for those who are still in the ego, for whom those rules are indeed important, and create a superstructure in which one can grow into Krishna-consciousness. But once one has achieved the liberation from the ego, one’s in a state of total freedom.
And so that’s perhaps the great prize that one earns through one’s discipline, and one’s surrender to that power, and that intelligence that is beyond the ego, so that one’s freedom comes as an impeccable action that is somehow aligned with the necessity of the moment—even though that could never have been predicted or have been allowed by any kind of institutionalization of religion, or of commandments of God, or whatever, because Krishna is able to see between the lines of the text and the fine print of all the commandments, and go beyond, to that level of the author of the dream, who is beyond any of the constraints of a being who is still identified with a character in the dream.
But one can’t fake that—it has to be real. If one tries to be a trickster, or a crazy wisdom teacher, before one has reached that level, then it’s going to fall flat, or become corrupted, or in some way fail in its capacity to blossom into a renaissance in which an entirely new paradigm of reality emerges, with beings who have all risen to that level of joy in which there is the freedom to be absolutely spontaneously without reference to any external criteria. But to get to that level you have to have eliminated all suffering—all taking yourself seriously as an ego—because you don’t exist—and a complete elimination of the tragic sense of life that every ego has.
It’s total comedy, really. It’s all just joy and it’s all beauty, and it’s laughter. And that laughter, though, can only come in the fullness of its reality when it’s God’s laughter. It can’t be at any other level. But to earn the right to that freedom of joy we really have to have purged and eliminated any sense of suffering, any sense of being in a world where bad things are happening, and not seeing the perfection of it all.
One has to have that pristine vision, and that’s the true virginal nature of Krishna—no matter how many gopis he has lain with, he’s still a virgin—and so are they, because of that total beautiful incorporeality of the presence of that consciousness.
And that is the aim that we have to have achieved, that level of lightness of Being. That is what really enables the soul to transcend and to become one with God. That lightness that has completely freed itself from any karmic residue, and no longer has any projections on anyone. If there are any projections that you have on anyone, of any negative kind, or even of a positive kind—because that, too, is based on either some infatuation, or some wishful thinking, or some other egoic need of a mother or a father, or of whatever—but one has to be totally free of all projections and all dependency on the other, on any other and every other, in order to be in that state of total lightness, where one cannot be hurt, and one’s joy is totally contagious and liberating, and not based in some private joke of an ego, or some attempt to deny one’s own entrapment in certain attachments and certain identifications—but a freedom from any concern for the life or death of the bodily vehicle—that lightness is required.
And so we have to have gone through ego death and the rebirth as pure Spirit. That is Krishna-consciousness. It’s also Christ-consciousness, but Christ had to do it through crucifixion; Krishna doesn’t have to go through any of that—it’s just a total path of joy. So I recommend that version of the Vaishnav pathway. But if you have already been crucified, rise off the cross, don’t stay on it any longer, and get to the same ultimate destination, and realize that you are that now, and you have a right to that level of total blissful living, without any concerns for the mundane limitations that the big Other tries to put on you—that you need money, and you need this and that in order to feel good—none of that has any validity or reality. And it’s when you have freed yourself from all of that nonsense that the ego is diluted by, and indoctrinated into, and imprisoned by—when you have freed yourself from all the prisons of belief systems that create some illusion that you have been born into the world as a bodily being, and someone else gave you a name, and you have to follow certain rules, and their fantasies about you, and their projections, and all of that— when you have been totally freed—which requires total absolute silencing of the ego-mind until there is no residue of past tendencies, no residue of addictive habits, no residue of, let’s say, projections of traumatic situations from the past onto the present—but there’s a complete clean slate in which you are fully present here and now to the divine nature of every being as a manifestation of the One Self…
Audio File: The Laughter of the Avatar – Audio File.mp3