The Fourth Dharma Will Transform Reality
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The ego swims in the sea of signifiers, and those signifiers are private—so private that the ego itself does not know what they mean, because the signified lies in the subconscious. And it’s only the censor that determines how much of that is revealed. And even in the subconscious, because of the plurality of fantasies, of conflicting drives, of opposing frames of reference, the signifieds are inherently destabilized.
And so meaning is always cracking, is always shifting, is always unstable and self-contradictory. And yet the ego-mind cannot tolerate not being within a frame of reference that gives it the illusion of stability—the illusion of a context that gives it certainty as to what it wants, who it is, and what it’s all about. And yet the ego also knows, in its moments when it is truly candid with itself, that all of that is a fiction, a delusion, and simply an anchoring in a fiction, because the Real is too much to be able to bear.
And because the ego has only signifiers to use for its currency of communication, of exchange, of relationship, it has to pretend that those signifiers have a constant value, and the same value to the other as they have to oneself. And yet the ego knows that it is only projecting that stability of understanding, that illusion of a meeting of the minds, because monads never meet. And each ego lives in its own world of signifiers with illusory relations to their own signifieds. And therefore the ego is always prone to, and liable to, fall into an abyss of psychotic lostness, in which the signifiers that it uses to anchor itself in an identity dissipate and lose their solidity, and the ego is suddenly empty of any sense of reality.
So the sangha is now screening a series of films with the title Mahabharata; but if anyone thinks that that signifier that is used as the title of the film has any relationship to the epic poem by that name, then there is a complete misunderstanding. The Mahabharata with that title, that is a video spectacle, has almost no relationship to the epic poem. This is a complete fictional adaptation by two people, Carrier and Peter Brooke, that are simply projections of their understanding of reality, using signifiers pulled out of that original epic poem, that is such a long work—it’s longer than all of the other epics combined—Bible, Iliad, Odyssey, the Kalevala, you name it—it’s more than all of them, and the narratives contained in them put magic realism to shame. It’s magic on acid. And because the signifiers were written thousands of years ago in a social context totally different from our own, and written for minds that had completely different kinds of ego structures than our own, it is literally impossible for us to have an understanding within the ego frame of reference of what the Mahabharata is about.
And because it is actually about aboutness, it is about “How do you reestablish a reality after the collapse of a world order?”, right? Because it’s about that liminal shift between Dwapar Yuga and Kali Yuga—but the poem itself superimposes that with the same shift that occurs, and the same destabilization of meaning and being, between every yuga, and at the end of the kalpa itself. And all of those are contained within the signifiers that refer to a signified that transcends the possibility of being phenomenologically grasped, because it is dealing with the noumenal roots of the phenomenal manifestation.
And that’s why, although the core of the film at least, and for many, the poem, is about dharma as that consistent frame of reference of law, of order, of truth, of being, that remains constant through time; which is why they refer to it as the Adi Sanatana Devi Devata Dharma, the dharma that was there for the gods and goddesses of Sat Yuga, and remains even to the end of Kali Yuga.
But does it remain? If you’re no longer a god or a goddess, can you really live by the same dharma? Or do you live by remnants of the signifiers that are traces, memory traces of what is lost—not what is possible, but what can no longer be achieved? Isn’t it a nostalgia for, literally, a lost golden age that, in the attempt to recreate, causes ever more of a fall? Isn’t that the paradox of dharma?
And in the very attempt to consistently live according to the dharma, the dharma is totally exploded apart. And in order to adapt to the chaotic shift of circumstances at the end of a yuga, and particularly at the end of Kali Yuga, there has to be an acceptance of the inconsistency that shows up from one moment to the next, from one signifier to the next, from the same signifier in one moment to the next, and from each individual monad to the other, a total il n’y a pas. And this is shown in the inconsistency of the way that the dharma is lived, which in every case is an exception to the rule, never a following of it. And if you take the dharma of marriage as the key core rule that holds society together, and childbirth, how many children are born from gods rather than from humans? Or from parthenogenesis? Or from a male sperm dropping into a fish and being cut open and producing magical offspring? How many of these kinds of situations? How many wives had five husbands rather than one? How many situations were totally inconceivable to any kind of social organization?
And so what we’re dealing with is a situation in which there can be no frame of reference, no dharma that can hold the consistency of a reality, that can enable an ego to feel sane. And therefore, until you rise above the ego level, the kind of anxiety that will be felt, the kind of madness, the kind of terror of going mad, that the ego will suffer from, will become ever more unbearable.
And so in the Mahabharata—at least in the epic poem, not necessarily in the film—Vyasa, the authorial participant observer, notes that there are three modes of dharma: There’s the Pravritti Dharma, when the world is expanding chronologically in time, and social life can seem to be normal, can seem to be consistent, so that you can rely on people’s word, on promises, on the sun rising the next day, on peace being sustained, and relationships being stable. But that Pravritti Dharma, once you reach that liminal point and you cannot trust anything or anyone, including your own memory, including your own mind’s understanding of what just happened, including all of the things that one takes for granted as an ego to establish oneself as a being in a world, then that Pravritti Dharma does not allow an ego-consciousness to sustain a life. And only at the soul level, where the dharma of the soul is no longer that of Pravritti, the soul’s dharma is Nivritti—especially at the end of a yuga—a light goes on within the soul that says it’s time to return to God, because nothing here makes sense; it’s time to return to some standard of consciousness that has criteria that can enable me to achieve the truth, the Real, the fullness of what is, rather than to live in a chaotic fiction in which I cannot establish any stable basis for existence.
And so the Nivritti Dharma…
This Post Has One Comment
Carol Livezey
21 Apr 2022Thank you Shunyamurti for your teaching, wisdom and knowledge. You always inspire and keep me listening, trying to understand, and brightening my day. Thank you