Island - Aldous Huxley [88]
There was silence. Murugan yawned ostentatiously. The old priest lighted another stick of incense and, muttering, waved it before the dancer, waved it again around the cosmic love-making of Shiva and the Goddess.
“Breathe deeply,” said Vijaya, “and as you breathe pay attention to this smell of incense. Pay your whole attention to it; know it for what it is—an ineffable fact beyond words, beyond reason and explanation. Know it in the raw. Know it as a mystery. Perfume, women and prayer—those were the three things that Mohammed loved above all others. The inexplicable data of breathed incense, touched skin, felt love and beyond them, the mystery of mysteries, the One in plurality, the Emptiness that is all, the Suchness totally present in every appearance, at every point and instant. So breathe,” he repeated, “breathe,” and in a final whisper, as he sat down, “breathe.”
“Shivayanama,” murmured the old priest ecstatically.
Dr. Robert rose and started towards the altar, then halted, turned back, and beckoned to Will Farnaby.
“Come and sit with me,” he whispered, when Will had caught up with him. “I’d like you to see their faces.”
“Shan’t I be in the way?”
Dr. Robert shook his head, and together they moved forward, climbed and, three quarters of the way up the altar stair, sat down side by side in the penumbra between darkness and the light of the lamps. Very quietly Dr. Robert began to talk about Shiva-Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance.
“Look at his image,” he said. “Look at it with these new eyes that the moksha-medicine has given you. See how it breathes and pulses, how it grows out of brightness into brightness ever more intense. Dancing through time and out of time, dancing ever-lastingly and in the eternal now. Dancing and dancing in all the worlds at once. Look at him.”
Scanning those upturned faces, Will noted, now in one, now in another, the dawning illuminations of delight, recognition, understanding, the signs of worshiping wonder that quivered on the brinks of ecstasy or terror.
“Look closely,” Dr. Robert insisted. “Look still more closely.” Then, after a long minute of silence, “Dancing in all the worlds at once,” he repeated. “In all the worlds. And first of all in the world of matter. Look at the great round halo, fringed with the symbols of fire, within which the god is dancing. It stands for Nature, for the world of mass and energy. Within it Shiva-Nataraja dances the dance of endless becoming and passing away. It’s his lila, his cosmic play. Playing for the sake of playing, like a child. But this child is the Order of Things. His toys are galaxies, his playground is infinite space and between finger and finger every interval is a thousand million light-years. Look at him there on the altar. The image is man-made, a little contraption of copper only four feet high. But Shiva-Nataraja fills the universe, is the universe. Shut your eyes and see him towering into the night, follow the boundless stretch of those arms and the wild hair infinitely flying.
“Nataraja at play among the stars and in the atoms. But also,” he added, “also at play within every living thing, every sentient creature, every child and man and woman. Play for play’s sake. But now the playground is conscious, the dance floor is capable of suffering. To us, this play without purpose seems a kind of insult. What we