Grail

photo by altercator

Among the central tenets—if not THE central tenet—in the Advaita Vedanta, (which is one of the philosophical schools underlying Hinduism)—is that, as human beings, we routinely misidentify ourselves as an individual self as opposed to what we really are: the Universal Self, the fundamental ground of all Being, Pure Consciousness, the Atman, identical to all of Reality, the Brahman. 

Or, something like that.

Contemplative practices like yoga or meditation are designed, as the sage Patanjali says in the Yoga Sutras, to “still the fluctuations of the mind” so that our true nature is revealed and we can see ourselves—to use a common analogy—as the whole ocean rather than as individual whitecaps upon the sea.

As it turns out, however, instead of say, retiring to an ashram to chant the 108 names of God from dawn until dusk, you can achieve the same result by gathering up about fifty people on bicycles, have them ride to a wooded park on the edge of a warm, glassy lake, where—inspired by so-called “distributed scalable cocktails”—they will mingle and dance to a bicycle-mounted sound system whose highly-efficient power diodes make possible an audioscape in which it becomes impossible to deny that we are all part of the same thing, at least when Lil Jon’s Get Low is blasting through the speakers.

It makes you eternally grateful to be part of an entity in which whiskey-aided field repair of complex electronics by the light of bicycle headlights takes place and soon results in that classic marker of authentic transcendence: girls and boys dancing on tables in their underwear.

And while, in the Western tradition, spiritual pilgrims searched far and wide for their Holy Grail, mine was right there: a night-time swimming hole with an outdoor fire to boot!

Seems just like what the Vedanta is saying: this is simply too much for a single self; a more likely explanation is that it’s all our Awesome.