The Pastime
To each is given a Beautiful Mind, but it’s not for thinking…
thereby:
Join in celebration the celibate monk
hailing the skies with whites of eyes
singing thru his sacred conch
and swim with more indulgent gods
who find no man or worship odd...
Lo! – I bask in the Lagoon of Love like a lotus-eating
sea-cow, so pardon if my discourse breaks a bit adrift.
For in ladling my snout thru electric-blue supralogical
pools, my kelp fronds unspool and drift I indeed do,
out and away to the full Play of the Sea!
The Tides of Time flow in our veins, Immortal Swan, so come run with
me! One last sleepy breath before awaking to Dawn’s swelling pink,
cowrie toes perched with feather’d lightness upon the thunder’d brink.
Before you rolls on its foaming rim the all-seeing Blue Iris of the World! –
come drink, drink deep from this endless Lila-Bowl of Nectar Wine
and savor the refined and quenching tang of Elixir Superfine!
Then let me draw you along the Chalice Rim by your moistly
kissing skin, for its inborn penetrant
Pulsate Ring to bring you to shim’ring concupiscence! Next
dissolve and dive exalting in, for our spume-shroud nuptial bed
awaits. Anchors away! – kick up a spray! – this is alternating
current at its very best, where two hearts beat in a singl’d breast.
Verily, we shall grip like joined hands ‘round wire
the galvanic Spire to Heaven!
Nothing is risked in the Sun-kissed drumbeat tryst other
than to end up honeycomb-cupped, Love-dazed and nectar-glazed. So
are you open to Tantric erotica-mysticism? Then come show me
yours, and I’ll show you mine, just a moment in non-time, in a
long-storied line, of experience Divine, as alone in my cell, I slip
earthly hell, and fly high above, on God beats of Love, for not just
the Sea, is the rhythm you see in me! Ready?
For verily, dual-gendered Dulcet in a wet suit, I surf
a singing Tantric wave front, hot frenzy caught
flagrante delicto, poised at the peak, the peach in
mid-bite, triumph in full-flight, delight on delight
unfolding on an endless pulse of blossoms, each from the
heart of another. This wave need never break as I ride
the froth and roar of its reaching bore, sailing past the
death of self, the death of Death, slipping thru the teeth
of life’s lament and down the throat of protean pleasure,
never twice the same.
Unfurling this curl curls also the toes, for here
Tantric paths juxtapose at their least repose!
Born Again with fishy kin, I walk and waver on Holy Waters,
skimming the bending skin ‘twixt worlds: a trembling
veil scarce fit to float a pin, then swoop thru an
Amrita-lit surge that swings up and over to chute my
sugared Soul to sounding Depth!
Crownward soars a riptide’s roar as I am borne to the Deep
Unborn! Then Sea humps its back for a fresh invade, mounts and drives
in a liquid blade, cuts away all mortal sway, and frees
the Soul’s swooning slide thru Heaven’s Gate to plunge
in full lubricious spate of pleasure super-satiate so
keen and brink I outward weep and inward drink a saturate
stream of tears!
O Sweet Paradox! – sweet nectar wrung from an Agony of Ecstasy!
O Death! – where is thy sting? – your envenomed Bees so enlivened sing!
Ah! – in these electric tears of amplifying enchantment I drown,
somewhere beyond bliss, lost in whole-body mudra:
an untaught and unthought flexure of fluid motion that
mirrors the infinitely varied custom Kama Sutra I in
fever-dream perform with and for my unseen Odalisque.
You witness Her fever upon me now, Spirit and words
rising like vapor from a simmering samovar heart!
Such ecstatic radiance! I float buoyant, an animated
uncorked wineskin of sparkling rapture, a luminous vibratactile
distillation of effervescent consciousness – oof! – such a mouthful
of yeasty life, such leavened Heaven,
such heady brew indeed! Drunken tapestries of
ambrosial light shimmer, drift, and weave thru a rising
weft of inner sensation that fizzes, gushes, and sweeps
to and fro as tho by the touch of an ethereal broom.
If you are how you feel, then I’m a fructifying
Love-fruit – don’t just inspect what I write –
fall face-first and take a bite!
My chakras have become sugar-spun lotus blossoms,
petals blooming as tremulantly luminant as offertory
oil flamelets cast thru a coruscating lightning storm!
The surrounding air is electric and palpable – softly resisting
yet yielding like a dance partner or lover’s body. Tell me true:
is it much the same for me as you? For tho our Fruit may bear
a different hue, both bask in Light and taste of Dew!
Paradise glows on your lover’s face before diving in; my veil's
more thin, that’s all, before I swim thru my Chosen, my
Love Supreme, and She thru me, every stroke Olympian
perfect, every whim fulfilled ere its want is known. I become a
Fire-Seeded oyster and She my vigorously vibrating Pearl, causing a
crazily consuming itch and its curative scratch to arise as one – ah! –
so I expose both archly curved bellies to the Tide’s caress and become the
most blissful bivalve in the Sea!
My Amorist awakens and nourishes in me hitherto unknown hungers, but
also see to their satisfaction. The consummation of our Love thus becomes
Holy Communion, the shared consumption of a matrimonial
Eucharist. Lo! – to be seized and devoured by Heaven – such
compensation for a life left out in the cold!
So forget your ancient and venerated hymns, ‘tis the silly season
of inspiration: “With this body I thee wed; to my Goddess I’ve been fed!
‘Tis truly two fullness in one – was I good for you too, Love?”
As you see, I’m sick – Love-sick – and in my delirium cast
caution aside like Karmic seeds – careful where you sit lest one sprout,
a besotted sapling swirling in circadian Dance! In the meantime,
may I Kechari-kiss the Bride/Groom? Here I go, slip-sliding away…
Shakti’s patience soon runs thin, so drives deep in a centrifugal
spin to fling from my fervent kernel its slimly protesting shell:
“Ah, my Muse, is it wise to spill my Sea-salt sweet psychic
seed here and now?” For the one Supreme Wave arches upon
the next, there’s no calling back the bow-shot, the throe-shock, left in
onlookers by a seated solitary Lover in open air reaching,
Reaching - … Oh God! – She comes! She comes! – and I,
the flower-bedecked, bee-tipped arrow, dart eager for the whirling
Whorl of Her burning Heart!...
*sigh* Such Holy elevation of flesh and Spirit!
What is it to make mad, wanton Love with God? What is it
to have one’s chimes rung by God? Indeed, it seems I’ve
been forever a bell, only now to be lifted by the breath and
heart-struck! How could more rightly be desired?
But I do desire, so – oh! – Wild Thing, I know I love you --
would you be my Private Dancer? Then with
juices sizzling in hot anticipation, I watch my Lover
answer thru billowing, pillowing
clouds that surge in moistly muscular consortings
around an upfolding mountain. (Hail Shiva!) Suddenly from
their Holy Congress a new kind of Perfect is born, as in a whirl of
wildfire tresses Nataraj arrives, quickening my tissues,
drawing my flesh boneward and sinews back like bowstrings, then filling
me with a shifting medley of Dance Divine, all interwoven with abrupt
intermissions in body, breath, and volcanic explosions of hot
bastrika that wash down my body like pyroclastic flows.
Within these nacreous jets and shimmering sheets of
running Light, I Dance, brisk arabesques shrugging free
sheafs of cadmium-glow steamers that coil their strength
then spring into space with the authority of solar flares,
like arrows shot from Sarva’s bow, all from palms, fingertips
or the cupola of my ringing head. I feel like Indra, charging and
discharging lightning bolts to galvanize the World!
Bedazzled by my bright children, I somehow cause, behold,
and share in their flight, twisting and dishing out dizzying
body English as we ride our endless bungee cords of light!
Empty space has filled with a Red Sea of parting liturgical
lute-strings and the slightest twitch rubs me against
them like an ecstatic cat, all wild-eyed and bristle-tailed
as resplendent chords resonate thru my goose-bumped flesh –
rroww!
Verily, I have awakened inside a Van Gogh landscape of
inner sight, sound, and touch! Surrounded by an ocean of
sighing vortexes and coruscating spun-glass fireballs,
every moment stirs up ornate floral, foliate, and geometric
figures that trail after me thru the air. Ohh – this is the
best, as with whimpering palms I scoop skyfuls of
numinous energy up over me in a Baptism of Zest!
Lightning crackles from hands to crown, with slow
mudras and crisp flamenco wrist flourishes wrapping
my mind with untamed kudzu vines of electric pleasure –
no, it’s even more amazing! – as wave upon wave of
sharp-heeled mind spiders march like high-stepping
conga lines of tingly sea urchins over my brain-coral head –
no! –I’m a sea anemone, and a crowd of clownfish
children comb my tentacles into a delightful garden of
topiary shapes of peak sensation before playfully tromping
them down to start all over again!
When I extend my hands, a ghost pianist sits down in me to
play, phalanges of flame licking up and down a vertebral keyboard,
plucking haunting pangs of anguished pleasure from deep within my cerebral
folds. If I raise my arms just so, a sitar cuddles up close,
stings bending to the will of my musical ministrations. Never
have a man and his instrument been more closely wed as
Moonbeams reach thru me to finger-pick and weave
fibers, song, and Souls together as One. Oh, how others
stop and stare, but very little do I care,
sitting there, worrying, fretting the air – ah!
However my racing mind may interpret
the continuous play of miracles
there is such prancing detail in the inner movement that I
trataka on my wagging fingers a moment, entranced by
their wire-like entwinement with the flame-forms crushing grapes
of such tart delight in my skull. It is clearly not my life
alone I hold in these lotus hands, as with a single salute
a whole troop snaps to attention!
Then I broaden my movement and Sanskrit calligraphy begins
streaming out against the glassine serene, a flying Fantasia prayer carpet
of musical notation that unscrolls at toe-tip as I break the bonds
of earth. Now I am gone, I am God, I am Dance,
mortal frailty vivified to inexhaustible artistry! All
becomes kinesthetic line drawn like poetry thru curved
and 3-dimensional space as I carve the blue ice of the sky
with elaborate strokes, shedding iridescent beauty like a
molting peacock. As sharks must swim to live, I must push
Dance thru my gills to die – to die unto the Life Supreme!
A winter carnival of translucent forms appear in my
contrail, each one beginning in crystalline surprise
then melting back into the abiding memory of a
forgetting hyaline sky. Follow my long centrifugal proof
of Divinity until you lose yourself in it’s endless
turns and your ego sails off the slate into Silence. Here,
where logic surrenders its unmerited throne,
you encounter the instructive realm of the koan, the
Cloud of Unknowing, the Unreasonable Effectiveness
of Mathematics. My formulas existed long before man
arrived to perform them, so don’t bother to question,
don’t stop to think, just release your grip and sink!
Look also to the self-born wisdom of your prayer beads,
which have also broken free from their imprisoning thread
of decorum and now cavort madly in and thru the world. In that
running riot of color, the chaotic Dance of earthly objects, see with
unfettered eyes the Divine proof pick up and resume, for just as
God is found all around, thru the many may be seen the One.
Yes, as a ladder is climbed past each rung and gestalt grasped beyond
its sum, let Me come at you in a flood of wild born and infinite forms, spilling
like finch-flocks into your eyes until you shout in devout surprise,
cry out with awe and raw delight. There! – in the sight and sense
of fullest delight lies the Light! Tat tvam asi, shining
creature – That Art Thou!
Who am I to speak? I am He who pulls and splits the reed
of past and future to fashion the papyrus of the present!
Then I pipe and the World dances, writing a recurrent
script down my Mobius strip. You expected beginning and end?
Not in my Universe! And don’t think to master this Art thru
words: listen instead to your body, where you’ve heard the beat
of my damaru from the start, kicking up your heals in the womb,
waving your arms thru the nursery room! I bent to bestow my
Blessed Kiss to you before birth, Little One, and your giggles bubbled up
to shine in your mother’s eyes. Divinely conceived, the Secret still
sibilates in you like ginger beer, but you must grow hush to
again feel Heaven’s Drumbeat right here!
… Meanwhile, back on earth, I open mortal eyes and a vastly
foreshortened and diminished world reappears. The cell’s slit window
shows no sign of a lesser sun – good! – the mundane can wait!
So I close my eyes to burst the bars and the Eternal dawns
once more, rising like a fantastical terrarium globe within.
I sit for a moment like Brahma upon the navel-lotus, blinking
entire worlds in and out of existence. Laughing, I pick one
and topple in, to swim again a Healing Sea. On a whim
I wing back thru the silvered surface to strike against
the sky – to challenge God! – then, oh, such a sated
moth am I, falling in loosened skeins
of smoking loops till – phut! – shining minnowhood
returns.
This Multiverse, this Pantheon, of worlds and sprightly gods
sleeping so lightly in me: can I cat’s-cradle them to you with a few
magic mudras, or speak into your skin thru some hotly rhymed sign
language? (As I grasp for the key, just gasp when you feel free!)
In the meanwhile, no better time to let my fingers do the talking,
as I begin to genuflect the gestures of a thousand religions
past and present as constellations of their deities fly and fall
like meteors. Seeing that all forms pass – even gods – it is to the
Firmament above and the pageantry below that I babble and bray
my praise in countless unknown tongues. Heaven’s whore, it is
Belief itself that I believe in, and from my prison-anchored
brothel hail and ply Love’s trade with any Deva or Devata that sails by!
Now you may think me a Pagan suckled in countless creeds
outworn, or that I see Truth in possessing the omnivorous palate of
a pantheist, or even that I’m a fallen yogi who has merged with the
forces of nature. Well, I stay well fed, regardless. And tho it does
seem I’ve been falling and merging all my life, I at least now do so as
a Vedic Icarus, repeatedly falcon-stooping to pierce the Sun and Moon I
bear captive within. (Or is it not I who lies captive to you, my
Sovereign Ornaments?!)
It is anywise a gainful prize that buoys me blessed in this cursed realm,
so let us now ascend to the summit of my soul’s inspiration. Toward this
end, I bring a different weight to bear, shaping rapture like malleable clay
to a steep inner topography. Then following a wise inner guru, my tantric
Tenzing, I ascend like Sir Edmund Hillary thru a preposterous
Himalayan landscape.
First upon a mountain I climb, to squeeze this howling peak of
honeyed repletion, then release and glissade to the bee-keeping
valley below. But like Sisyphus back I return, pushing a
boulder of delight before and within me! Each advancing peak
and valley is ever higher than the previous, each antipode seeming the
end purpose of Existence, each rapturously resonant in its own
range, from crisply shivering sopranos to humidly thundering
bass. Where is the memory of my previous life as a flatlander?
Those pages are thankfully ripped from my Book of Life, and I climb
as a youth freshly initiated and flush with the sport of Sacred Mountaineering!
Tho a breathless journey (a condition in fact it demands),
a greater goal lies yet ahead. For in time, the obscuring
mists of Maya begin to part, and something akin to
Shangri-La appears like a gleaming castellated temple
at some mysterious distance. With a cry of
ecstatic joy my soul rends its mortal cage, escapes
my lips, and like a driven pheasant, thunders off
to its goal, an Immensity I am always
so surprised to find residing within myself!
A stunning qualitative shift here occurs,
one that for me transcends any possible imaginings of Heaven.
This truly above the clouds and beyond the pale
in every perfect way, for I have crested
Mount Meru to find its nectar-rayed Moon at play!
A terra incognito surpassing normal learning and
pleasure, mortals cannot create the brilliance of its numinous Light
but can place themselves in its path, and indeed, shafts of the
Holy Glance do pass, freshly shorn, thru my motionless,
pellucid and emptied form.
I reach into spirit memory for words, but find that this
wonder-filled state surpasses the power of description. Even
my normally robust fairy-wing pen has folded its flight to the dumb-tongued transparency, the silent sleep of a shed chrysalis. Where is my Luna Muse to flit
and spangle the page with tales of Thule, the utmost reach of my travel?
It is locked inside, by turns as elusive as silica sand or immobile
as packed earth within. What is left but to reduce myself to
molten glass and let a far more skilled Artisan breathe a bauble
of animate Spirit back in…
Rejoice! – now Divinely blown to a Perfect Vessel, all points
equidistant and equal to the Source, I become you and We,
nowhere yet everywhere! The body of clay is gone, ionized and
plasmacized, an ecstatic placenta lining the entire
womb-chamber, or Garbhagrah, of the World. O Lord – the
pangs have come and a Fullness demands to be born!
The Temple ceiling erupts into a lake of Fire, and in a last
self-possessed act I pinch off my Soul-candle and fling it upward…
Now! – in self-immolation I dance thru the pyres in sheet upon
sheet of howling, driving Flame. The World coalesces into
primeval Nada, but Nada writ large, bannering the vault of
Heaven! Sun storms of incandescent sound crush time to dust and ripple the
fabric of space, obscuring my face. Is it yours? The cheeky lass at the
café? The hunk at the office? The sparrow above, the worm below? I turn
and turn again before you, the Golden Compass pointing to God
in all directions, immanent, risen – Risen as well in you,
Star Child! We are both of Divine Nature, so come,
sever and fall, unmake yourself one of men, and join Me!
… Somewhere outside time and space, a figure sits
weeping and wet-faced, arm outstretched in abhaya. He is alone yet…
the furthest thing from alone – absorbed in a Hindu Apocalypse
of unspeakable intensity. Here Child, lift your quivering chin
and tell us of Engulfment.
O Lord, I see and hear but as if by whole-body braille,
for my physical organs of sense are effaced by excess light
and sound. It is thus by my entire being that I feel and see waves of the
Sacred Sound stand and intersect to form a granular matrix of Nada,
And from the Nada flow atoms in an endless Stream,
from which Waters I witness the Ten Thousand Forms emerge,
all like sand dancing into patterns on the Drumhead of the World!
There too I am danced into Divine existence as a self-born
mysticism of living stone – sentient Shivalingam –
which nothing can cast down. Within this blended pillar of
frozen Flame and Sound, all separation and pairs of opposites are
reconciled, the Key has turned in its ordained Lock, and all
of duality has woven non-dual. Sweeten me with milk,
garland me with flowers, for in this shining moment
the Fire worshipper is One with God!!
And now time and space have reconvened, and I’m
myself again. Or am I really, don’t you oft’ wonder?
For direct experiential contact with the Divine is the Biggest of Big
Love, and akin to Death by Holy Astonishment! To know this
height of flight is never to be the same, and to be left
no more satisfied with ground-dwelling than an albatross.
Thus arises the sannyasin, renunciation of earthly
pleasures, and the desire to live forever aloft.
(One day my voice too shall completely fade into the distance.)
Thus, as the caterpillar earn her wings in chrysalis absorption
and the pickle gains his tang thru seated marination
- neither to ever return to unripe condition –
so it is with the devotee and her practices.
So if these words at all lure you from the nest
you need a Flight School to learn the rest.
It’s free to board, but be forewarned
that few persevere to seize the Core
where Primal Sound becomes Sacred Shore.
How about you? Will you come to Aerial Soar?
Or perhaps your Fire of Love has long arose
and you come as One who fully Knows.
But once riding the Central Sea’s repose
welcome back Home, Cowrie Toes…!
-Ananda Tandava
