Saturday, April 26, 2025
Aho’ Rajanaka,
I hope this finds you well. (This is the recorded version of today’s Newsletter, here in the text version also on Substack includes the schedule of our Zoom Sessions, including a warm affirmative for today’s Hanuman and the Greatness of the Shadow and tomorrow’s Sunday Mahabharata.) But on to more immediate matters at hand.
America’s bank robber not named Trump, the more romantic deception that is John Dillinger didn’t say this but Johnny Dep playing Dillinger did: “I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars, whiskey, and you. What else you need to know?”
(Not endorsing this hat but it sure looks like Team Shiva, no?
Of course, I also can hear this line in the voice of none other than Shiva Nataraja. Shiva is talking to the ravishing and indefatigable Shakti. As we watch the scene play out, we naturally ask ourselves what is such a lovely soul as our resplendent g0ddess doing with a guy like that, you know, The One (albeit Without a Second) smeared in ashes, bedecked with serpents, hair twisted in knots, and otherwise being That Guy.
(We’ll conveniently bypass the best reasons we have for this otherwise unlikely liaison but suffice it to say, I recall what it’s like to show up for a date and have a father give me that look and we both know I deserve it.)
Surely our mythic conundrum warrants giving the entire matter of “That One” (tad ekam) of Rg Veda 10.129 another look. Who knows if That One knows from whence all this came, asks the Vedic Rsi Prajapati Parameshti, but we know that Shiva is never much given to doubt, much less self-doubt.
The poetic utterance itself is creation, and our puzzlement arises because creation may not be created at all, at which point That One is off the hook for knowing from whence. He participates in the problems we face and is not here to solve them. Is That One Shiva? Surely Shiva thinks so. Of course, Shiva may think he manages Team Shiva only to victory but the Game doesn’t actually work out that way.
It is unfortunately not in Shiva’s over-encoded masculine profile for him to recognize the shadow that is certainty nor to accept how one’s shadow overwrites the opportunity to address its unsavory implications. Shiva begins reality lamenting that it didn’t have to be this way, it coulda’ been betta’.
Now given the opportunity to do what’s better Shiva decides for alternative facts on the White House lawn, has his spokesperson and clever like a Fox (apologies to real foxes) State Media channel lie on his behalf. Shiva apparently needs to believe himself irrefragable and brooks no ambiguity. It’s not a happy thing to discover that your god has the tendencies of a narcissistic sociopath. We should only expect that of an American President.
Anyways, Shiva calls it, that’s the play. We live with the consequences because His call somehow stands. Thus, the universe is Shiva’s call---and solely his to make, he would like us to think---and the best our Devi can do is and acquiesce to the outcome.
In the story of the Dice Game we learn how Shiva can’t accept the truth right before his eyes; his denial in losing the game and being left with the extra piece in his hand, that he does indeed lose the “friendly” game to his beloved is beyond his capacities to appreciate. We all live with the residuals and ramifications of his dishonesty, just as we do our own.
But the point isn’t just that the god does the same stupit [sic] stuff we do, it’s that his stupit stuff’s got legs. We’re entangled in something far larger than ourselves and it’s not sin. It’s more about how the “divine” power itself is, umm, broken and that we’re not merely suffering our own failures but also those of our fearless leader---and that’s a problem, ‘cause some well-placed fear would have proven helpful to Shiva. When The Power reminds you that you are not The Power, you have to come to terms.
That’s at least a portion of the point of making this tale a cosmic drama, thus making it myth makes it applicable to all and every, such that authority and power we can’t control or even access reminds us how we the innocent will also be subject to its excrescence. Shiva makes no effort to learn from his mistake because he willfully denies making them. And that falsity becomes reality.
Making the problem mythic means that the lie isn’t merely a glitch in The Matrix, it’s now a feature of reality itself. Alas, we are living in a world broken by dissimulation that even when we know has happened makes us victims and from that state of affairs attempt to make whole.
The point of course is that the universe cannot be made whole again because Shiva is the one who broke it by denying what he did. We might expect to deal with such irremediable reality were it merely the work of an imbecilic president elected by those equally incapable of understanding their own moral turpitude and complicity in evil. That said, here we are, and the matter is cosmic, even if it is merely appearance, another ephemeral feature of conditionalities we would prefer to tell ourselves won’t apply in The Ultimate. Here we learn The Ultimate is as responsible for the problem as the rest of us and has no plans to fix it.
What I like best about this story is that it tells us first not to expect reality not to be broken in ways we can’t fix, that it’s not entirely our fault, and then, second, that we should do our best not to be like Shiva even when we know that we are nothing but Shiva. To wit, we’re all gonna do it again where “it” means that we’re going to deny reaity because we decide for the fiction rather than face the facts. Even if we know better, we’ll do that because it’s far harder than even Shiva ever imagined to be perfect---because there is no perfection. He still hasn’t quite grasped this point either.
With Shiva’s failure to see the truth, or perhaps even more importantly in his inadmission of error, refusal to revise his take, or bring some just remediation to an otherwise unjust, unwarranted, shabby, even iniquitous situation, he chooses instead for a peccant mendacity. We all know this is gonna make things worse. And so here we are. We live in a universe in which disingenuous perfidy has consequences tumbling into unreality that becomes far too real, doing far more harm than good. What can be done about that?
I would like to live in a world in which the umpires and the players are honest, particularly when everyone involved knows they blew the call. And I mean everyone knows and the blown call is beyond any, all, not even close, you gotta’ be kiddin’ me robbed in broad daylight. But Shiva the Umpire makes three calls all at once: "I call them as I see them,” "I call them as they are," and alas, "They ain't nothin' until I call 'em." Calling them as they are is of course where the discrepancy lies when we have to face what he thinks he saw. But even that isn’t as important as the fact that they aren’t nothin’ until called and that call changes the game.
This all happened on a microcosmic scale last night when the Mets suffered a triple play and everyone including both teams and the umpires knew that the umpires had blown the call. A blown triple play is rare in baseball in ways that America seems willing to make over and over again, say the 2016 election, two impeachments, how many failed prosecutions, and then 2024 re-election? Apparently, it ain’t over it’s over and we should wonder if we’ll ever get another chance.
The blown call for the Mets last night stood and while we don’t know if this blown call cost the Mets the game, it sure didn’t help. That other factors are in play and that the game’s outcome is likely more complex than any one call shouldn’t be ignored. Truth is that the Mets should have won despite the blown triple play and they didn’t---and this too sounds errily like where America may be going too. But there might yet be another moment, more complexity and a different outcome for us. We’ll see.
My point is that the universe appears to work the same way. We are living in a blown call, the Umpire knows it, we all know it, and as much the demons aka the other team benefiting from the blown call and unwilling even to mention the matter with real honesty are complicit in the lie because the truth would not benefit them. The outcome is a game lost to the truth but still a real loss, and this time we all know that it went the wrong way and there’s nothing to be done about it but live with the consequences.
The Met’s game is just baseball but we do learn from them to get up tomorrow and play another day, see if the outcomes are any more fair, accept that plenty of blown calls will happen again and won’t be admitted or somehow fixed. In this moment in which we witness and are subject to a unthriving American democracy overwritten by a leader whose choices, mistakes, and failures will impact the whole of the world and the course of human civilization, we find ourselves again in a situation not of helplessness but rather of having to deal with matters we can’t possibly control.
Can we avoid Shiva’s error for ourselves? The myth wants that question to remain a question. What we can do is attempt to survive the consequences of this wall to wall misegas and perhaps influence what we might not be able to change.
This power of influence is called abhicarana in Sanskrit. It doesn’t mean we can fix stuff. It admits to the reality we would prefer the fantasies of perfection rather than accept reality as broken. Abhicarana is the power we need to move along, somehow mitigate the irremediable facts, and build a bridge to better out of the rubble of truth. This isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds.
In fact, because the myth tells us that it’s the best we can do, there is cause to believe there can be some relief. After all, Shiva does dance and Shakti offers the scoundrel love, and they come to terms in the face of their mutual shadows. Maybe that’s what we must do too. Live with the shadows of truth that we don’t fix but somehow try to make better. There’s not going to be an upgrade to perfection. We going to have to live with ourselves.
Abhicarana---the power to bring agency, instigate movement, rouse the soul, urge ourselves on to change we can live with---this will be an important topic for our coming Rajanaka Summer Camp. It will also be a matter to address in our future conversations. When we can’t change a blown call, how do we go forward? The change we want may not be in the dice or within the powers of judgment of those making the calls (including ourselves for ourselves).
But we aren’t helpless and that too is part of the game. There is more game to come, another and another and if we are lucky life is a long season and the grind is part of the delight. Hot summer nights played under the lights and day games that follow though we are all exhausted. We need all learn better how the game is really played because we can continue to play the game, blown calls and all.For those who believe the rules can be made fair for all, I wish that too but that may not matter as much as the fact that calls will inevitably be blown---and that we’re not interested or maybe even capable of repairing the errors.
We’re going to have to deal with it all: the cheats, the liars, the outcome of the thrown dice, our frustrations with an imperfect world that seems to make Murphy an optimist. We’re going to have to learn what we can sway and juice, energize, animate, and induce. That power is called abhicarana. We’ll look for more mythos and another night game with the umpires to find out more about what this means and what it means to live a life with blown calls.
Saturday Hanuman link: https://rochester.zoom.us/j/95057662268
Sunday Mahabharata link: https://rochester.zoom.us/j/314987250
Downloadable Archive for Hanuman: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/fl8lkz3lv53lzmny28o55/AM5yQB5YSYn9WO2j7x3R4cU?rlkey=x604wds1ljxwyuhzvmhkjyozj&st=u0y07ce5&dl=0
Mahabharata Archive: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/wn3icbb418qcsrjqhk6ke/AGRZlDr4jD3CwECPGlLpoAc?rlkey=7otclsh4b0z7igpauy4y69e0t&st=dz9n4h7f&dl=0
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