by Sonny Saul
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
--- --- ---
“It is through the body that metaphysics
will be made to enter the mind”
Antonin Artaud
--- --- ---
I should only believe in a god who knows how to dance.
Only in dance do I know of parables for the highest things.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (Zarathustra)
--- --- ---
Regret, still laughing, began a dance.
--- --- ---
Regret
Darkness called for sleep. Gotama responded, dreamlessly. And when dawn followed close upon the steamy night, immediately, straightaway upon awakening, experiencing the rushing sensations of a perpetual recession of his inner horizons everything expanding but all complete and in-the-moment, conceptual thought suspended—he took up where he had left off, sitting beneath the tree.
The air was still cool and felt fresh. The sun not even up midway behind the clumps of thick banyans which grew parasite-like interspersed among the tall palms, when Kama Mara’s youngest daughter came, in turn, to play her role.
Immediately affecting, her presence communicated the natural profundity, beyond experience, of all child prodigies. Yet, she knew that she was no longer a child.
Hardly extending a gesture of greeting as if she had always known him, or as if they had only recently left each other’s company, Regret’s first words, though delivered that way, were not casual. Over her shoulder, as if absorbed elsewhere, she said, “The most spiritual beings are also the most courageous, and always experience the most painful tragedies.”
Then, turning, she walked right up to him and said, “My sister, Fulfillment, told me what happened. It hasn’t taken me so very long, compared to you to learn to love, and to be in love with life… How different we have been!”
“When life puts forth its greatest forces of opposition, to whom ought we to look for inspiration? Why didn’t your remember Manu? Well…? Who has ever faced more difficult problems, and who ever brought a broader ‘YES!’ to life?”
“Manu’s way, was the original way. I doubt that Manu anticipated a movement of people who would abandon society altogether in favor of a mystical Union with the Divine. I know that certain ancient and very great Rishis have renounced the world—but only and always in a temporary way, and for a specific goal.”
As if people spoke about these things all the time, her sentences flowed, one after the other, as if what she said were the most matter of fact and natural things one might say.
She spoke these sentences one after another, as if what she said was the most matter of fact thing in all the world.
More than simply ‘beautiful’, though she was beautiful by any standard, Regret’s appearance and the effect she knew it always had, combined with the range of her perceptions, and the fluent ease with which her mind worked, gave her a rather ultimate confidence.
Gotama, still emerging from nothingness was, by contrast, un-fluent. He watched her, and listened with the greatest attention. Not only could he not help smiling, he began to laugh out loud. It was as if each of these sisters had her own key to his personality.
Unable to swallow her own impulsive laughter, Regret burst out, “I am called ‘Regret’, and, you see I’m a girl. I’m closer to immortality than you… closer to the source. The knowledge I have, intuition grants… and the means of expressing emotion, no less essential.”
Commencing a series of very slow Aryavartran pirouettes, arms extended and only slightly bent, her words ceased. The speed of her revolutions increased. She pulled her arms in. Her body became a blur. When, eventually, she stopped Regret said, “While you spent years of effort, all I had to do, all I did, was… realize.”
Regret’s delight in performing her role was obvious. At this moment, for her, Drama where all liberties are possible, and Life were not opposites. “Last temptation!” she called out, making herself giggle. “Or, shall I choose, and reject you, so as to deprive you, or maybe rather to shield you from the vanity of triumph?”
Regret held his gaze and smiled with him, assuming a cordial confidentiality. This time very slowly drawing her long thin arms in and alternately extending them, and all the while moving about in a circle, she began to spin again. Not in the least out of breath, halting directly in front of him, she announced. “This is the finale, the last scene in the last act. Will you have the courage to be inconsistent? Will you draw the full conclusions from the knowledge you have obtained?”
Her long, slim legs moved imperceptibly, carrying her in retrograde motion. “Here’s how I see it.” she said, “whatever your goals were, you weren’t achieving them. You couldn’t achieve them no matter what. But now… now you see things differently. Suddenly, all the goals have vanished… giving you this great freedom… but not from the direction you were expecting.”
She spoke as if she were reading his mind and heart. “At last, you’re able to embrace life. Now you understand just how misanthropic it was to place such value on Eternity … Timelessness…”
Imperceptibly, her legs carried her forward towards him so that she was able to say most quietly, “Where once you held spiritual perfection at the center of all reflection, now that is finished. Now you are able to see that the fruit of true wisdom is not manifest in a person removed from society. Siddhartha, how is it even possible to imagine wisdom without contacts with others.”
Subtle movements of her face, the shaping of her mouth, gave her poetry an added power.
“How insufficient is spiritual perfection without love!
How much better ignorance and bungling with love
Than… knowledge and skill without!”
Now Regret seated herself and took his hands. Something made her smile, almost right away. “Love is freshly born in you. It’s ready to grow, and to develop,” she said. “You have become like me, and like my sisters, and… my father. Advancing the work of love is our life. It’s how we live… our way… Really though, its just a matter of course—and nothing at all… something which cannot be avoided…”
With that she was standing again and had already begun to slowly spin in rotation around Gotama. Her words and thoughts had come with increased rapidity and now, while she danced, Gotama reheard them.
When the dance had gone on long enough, Regret, causally, her smile innocent and self absorbed, touched his arm, making sure she had his attention, and asked, “Shouldn’t every child be taught, right away, as I was, to understand one’s own relation to infinite being… and have all of childhood to wonder over it…?”
“My parents told me that it was like in the game of hide and seek… Brahman plays at hiding itself in all things. Well, if we really appreciate this analogy, remember and feel that Brahman, whether hidden or revealed, is in, and is all things, then our actions will flow and everything we do will be right action.”
Regret resumed her dance.
Gotama heard her words as prescient, precipitating echoes, which formed for the first time in his own thought. He yielded to her lead and Regret, immediately sensing it, began a new series of movements, which, functioning like a modulating bridge in music, transported her from one area to another. All led to a further and explosive burst of unsuspected energy. Cartwheels and vaulting somersaults carried her back, smiling, before Gotama, where, beginning a new movement, she spoke/ sang its opening theme.
“On the surface of the water.
lotus flowers float just level.
Above the water,
others stand up.
Under the water,
are many more.”
Folding, or rather crumpling herself upon the earth as the sound of her voice faded, Regret became so absolutely still that, suddenly, it was as if there was no one there. The effect of this sudden cessation was that Gotama felt an increased self awareness and the ensuing quiet most patiently invited his response.
Regret, meanwhile, had gathered herself and arose. Adopting
and holding a series of poses—the sort we now know as the postures of classical Hindu dance which, functioning like a set of transitional phrases in music, announced that the final movement thematic material had arrived.
She began slowly, executing stately Aryavartan pirouettes, again tracing a circle around Gotama and the tree. Stopping right behind him, putting her hands on his shoulders, in the most measured way, she explained. “The world of is like a lotus pond.”
As if she were blowing him a kiss, Regret said, “An explanation can’t be something private. It must be public. You will have a teaching for us all? ”
With this rather abrupt arrival back in the tonic key, she made a deep, sweeping bow and began to giggle contagiously. The high degree of her perceptiveness was brought into great relief by her youth and humor.
Only a little composing herself, she added, more seriously, a coda; “Your old way of life was way too self concerned and too negative. Now you affirm life. Everyone will see it. You’ll communicate your experience.”
Her tone had changed. She was at her most assured. “Actually… your experience will communicate itself. This is just what will make you great… and such an important teacher. You will advance, not my father’s message, what help could you be with that? But rather, simply, you will teach, show… what you have learned.” With a burst of laughter she absolutely could restrain no longer, Regret was finished.
Kama Mara had, at first, appeared to Gotama as completely terrifying, personifying his own greatest fears. Desire seemed a part of himself—his own feminine unconscious nature. Fulfillment appeared to completely embody everything beautiful. But it was Regret’s own spirit that was winning Gotama’s heart. Enjoying her immensely, Gotama’s smile warmed them both.
Regret became silent and withdrew into the shade. She leaned up against the tree, her arms wrapping around a branch up above her head. As each of her older sisters and her father had, she was discovering herself in relation to Gotama. His state of mind, so different from her own, without recourse to very many words, had made itself felt.
With a genius for intuition, which amounted to an almost extrasensory perception, Regret sought out the fullness of detail, the depths and pinnacles of his character. Her enthusiasm for this task was boundless, her spirit a sure thread.
Placing her bare feet together, she stood with her hips thrust back. As if they were wings, she raised her arms out behind her, palms up. Fingers extended, she relaxed into the pose and said, “In this world, which bursts with life, thought is not ours alone. I too hear the voices of the stones and grasses. Whose heart could not be affected? All things feel and sway mankind.”
Her balanced pose, held almost long enough to stop all momentum, had functioned as a ritardando. Lowering her arms and bowing to Gotama, she said, “How can one love humanity, know its ills, and have no compassion? Compassion… that’s always the source of grace and power. It enriches everything about and around us, regardless of whether this is our intention.”
“Siddhartha, you are an explosive man, with tremendous forces stored up. For a long while you have been gathering, saving up, conserving and your energies are powerful. My father is a great man in this way as well… but he is different. Always so aware of ancient greatness, instead, he says that mankind’s will today is toward nothing. THAT’S why he called me Regret.”
“Can you follow me just a little longer? Here the way father looks at it, it’s not the task of the healthy to nurse the sick. He says that the necessity is for physicians who are themselves sick.”
“He’s chosen you. You are the predestined savior. You will be a support, a prop, a model, taskmaster, tyrant, and God. Your legend is prepared; your distinctive art, and your craft, your mastery, your destiny, and happiness. Now that you are cured, you will defend your people, of course against sickness, but also against us, my father and my sisters; the healthy.”
“You’ll show the way, provide a method. It will all come naturally. You will take the life loving and life affirming compassion you have discovered to the world for the profit, good, and happiness of man. You will provide a technique for really getting somewhere. ”
Quickly, her posture expressing the utmost deference, she sat down, cross-legged, right next to him, their knees almost touching. More than anything, she wanted now to be quiet.
Had her final cadenza been too dense and too long? Had she rushed the tempo, over acted, and stepped outside of her role? She knew that she had not failed to strike a common chord with Gotama, but now, looking at him, and for the first time since she had begun her performance, feeling his gaze upon her, she began to feel self conscious and said, “Of course, everything I’m telling you already know.”
What seemed to overcome Regret was an unfathomable serenity that she felt emanating from behind the kindness of Gotama’s expression, his complete absorption, as if an inner fire burned that compelled his attendance upon it.
The effect of Gotama’s state of mind, so different from her own, so inexplicably powerful and magnetic, had, through the course of the scene, made itself felt and it had struck a chord within her. Spontaneously, she was moved to emulate him. Any self-limiting affirmations or negations were suddenly out of the question. Neither would she now avoid the false or seek the true.
Regret felt all this quickly, clearly, and quite naturally. Without taking thought, she began to attune herself to his state of being. Starting with the patterns of his breath, she let his presence overwhelm her. All and everything that she had so artfully and passionately expressed disappeared. She now saw everything from an unexpected angle. She had surrendered to the Buddha Mind.
All and everything habitually perceived was now appearing fresh, and within the context of a continual rush of the experiencing of eternity, obviously necessary and linked in the fertility of a universal will. She quite forgot herself. The ritual and its final act were concluded but Regret was unable to make her exit.
Without taking thought, she began to attune herself to his state of being.