The Challenge of Divine Expression

The thing that struck me the most when I started practicing the Vishnu Invocation was what felt to me like a very steep drop in energy after the first pause on the way back down from the divine. As on the way up, there is a pause on the way down after the first three notes (9-Sa*, 10-Ni, 11-Dha). These first three notes feel very close to me, as if they have a strong family resemblance. Sa* represents the higher root chakra - basically God, or our divine Self or Home or Heaven. It’s a higher root chakra so it’s also safe and secure but it’s divine so infinitely better. Ni represents our Crown Chakra again but when singing it I’m struck by how coming down through it is always so much easier than accessing it on the way up. This feels to me like a metaphor for the whole spiritual journey: it’s impossible to access the divine until we fully surrender which is itself impossible for the ego to achieve or will. But on the way back, the divine passes through the gateless gate effortlessly, and then illumines our Third Eye chakra, to grant us wisdom. To me this three note movement feels like Grace coming into our consciousness. It’s clear and effortless. It’s a free sample of the most glorious flavour of realization you’ve ever had.

Sadly, there is then a pause. Which according to the pattern, means something of a different nature is going to be required for the progression to proceed. Listening to the following three notes (12-Pa, 13-Ma, 14-Ga) always feels to me like either a major come down or, at best, a very gentle loving lullaby. In other words this pause is emotionally hard, or at least heartfelt. And because it takes place before the Throat Chakra - the chakra of truth and expression - it announces the challenge of divine expression. Why is it hard for the divine to find expression via the human voice, heart, and power? My intuition is that it’s because so much inevitably gets lost in translation. As discussed earlier, it’s impossible to express the absolute Truth. Just as it is impossible to communicate the taste of mango by describing it. So when the divine takes human form or is expressed by human beings, something infinite is irremediably lost. And to the divine being that we are this would feel like a loss. But there is just no way around that. It seems to me this is a fundamental feature of the human-divine reality. Sages tell us that we can only be the Truth. But we cannot really comprehend, communicate, or understand the divine or the infinite. Not as our egos would like to: not with our minds.

[Box : Kant himself recognized this challenge when he developed his categories of the understanding as part of his theory of Transcendental Idealism in the Critique of Pure Reason. According to the father of western Enlightenment, we can never know whether things-in-themselves are: really spatial or non-spatial, really temporal or timeless, genuinely caused by one another, composed of substances, one or many, finite or infinite. We can never know what things are like in their intrinsic nature because the very structure of the human mind imposes itself - filters and formats if you will - everything that we perceive.

And it’s not just Kant, even hardcore materialists and physicists today accept that absolute or certain knowledge is absolutely impossible (viz. the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, Einstein’s General Relativity, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems).]

However there is another possible interpretation of the emotional drop into Pa-Ma-Ga, from the divine into the embodied. If one can remain aware of one’s own divine nature even as one recognizes that it can never be fully or even adequately expressed, then the softer tone of Pa-Ma-Ga can be felt as a deep compassion for all embodied beings, oneself included. As Jack Kornfield put it, ‘Your compassion is incomplete if it doesn’t include yourself.’ In other words, it’s actually hard to be the divine in human form. Isn’t that also the point of the story of Jesus? That God took on a human form and suffered horribly for trying to express the Truth as fully as possible? And didn’t Jesus have compassion for his tormentors when he said, ‘Forgive them for they know not what they do’ even as they stabbed Him on the cross?

And yet, we are called to express our divine nature as best as we can. Luckily most of us don’t have to suffer a fate as terrible as that of Jesus but we are all divine, and unless we walk daily in the light of that Truth, then we have lost more than Jesus for He knew perfectly well what He was. And that’s probably why He didn’t run away from his ordeal. I would have that’s for sure!

I believe this impossible challenge is, like the others, an opportunity to practice. So many of us have lost our voice. The throat chakra is the main pathway for communication, self-expression, and truth. Sadly for so many of us, because of past trauma, conditioning, and/or cultural repression, we seem to be cut off from our ability to speak our truth. Perhaps we start there. First by being completely honest with ourselves, then by doing our best to speak our truth and act on it from an open heart. This will help us remain in the light and also hopefully, successfully meet the last challenge: the Challenge of Divine Fertility.

"The Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao"

En quête de résonance

- Lao Tzu