Deity in Rasa

Photo: Geoffrey Dunn

Deity is the heart of Rasa. It is Deity that holds the alchemy of the Rasa experience. Deity is not created or “acted” but is found when the self becomes one with the constellation of dance. Deity is movement, form, feeling and the state of being of the performer. Deity is not a story but a feeling that is held in movement.

In our times deities have become sentimentalised into romantic stories about possession, becoming goddesses and the like. However deities are far from experiences of bliss and ecstasy—they are ferocious, paradigm-dissolving movements that offer nothing that will add to stories of ego self-aggrandisement.

A feeling becomes a Rasa when we move into the deity dimensions, which is the movement from the possible and the desirable to the impossible and the uknowable. We think of the impossible as gross feats such as people flying like birds or ‘out-of-body’ experiences. However, the impossible is far more subtle than just the opposite of what we have deemed through science, rationality and other paradigms as the possible. It may be experiences that are inconceivable because they are invisible to us in our usual ways of perceiving and interpreting reality. It is also likely that people who move in these realms cannot find ways to language their perceptions or do not wish to do so.

Deities are not thoughts, stories or concepts—if they are anything, they are dances of feelings. However they are not those feelings that we have controlled and managed through naming and defining them, thereby forever separating them from our living experience of feeling as an ever flowing river. The dance of the deities is always unknowable. The liberation it offers is when we can dance the uknowable without demanding to hold it as an idea or a thought we can “use” in an instrumental way.

Dancing deities are spaces of unconditional generosity. They are not experiences of an individual performer for an audience but a movement that occurs without any intention of needing an audience and can be experienced by anyone who is ready to dance the unknowable and who is in the presence of such a movement.

Knowing dancing deities is vital in our times when we forget the taste of liberation, and freedom becomes ever more reduced in its aspirations. Liberation/moksha is a radical dissolution of all that which enslaves us in prisons of time, memory and mechanical processes with delusions of truth. And deities are dancing this liberation into being if we are ready to dance them.