Among the Trimurti-- Brahma (the Creator), Vishnu (the Sustainer), Shiva (the Destroyer)--the past, present or future sufferer is often drawn to Shiva rather than Vishnu or Brahma This makes sense. Shiva's got the danse macabre, the five heads, the elephant man for a kid. It's demonic yet human. Also, every culture starts with the idea of death and dissolution. Indeed the root impulse of all culture is to band together to create rituals that attempt to stave off death. And I don't just mean exercise and under-eye cream. Just as the mind needs its obstacles or it's just jelly in a jar, civilization needs the monster behind the wall and civilization is that very wall. AKA it's what you do all day long. As Zorba the Greek once said, "Life is how the time goes by."
Interestingly, it is in sustaining our day-to-day selves that we perceive the idea of a plateau or, worse yet, an impasse in the practice of our amazing lives. Then we get aggravated. I mean, how many years will it take me to go from crow to headstand? It feels like Shiva himself is lowering the floor away from me when actually Vishnu is challenging me to garner my true self and turn what seems like a death-defying drop to a manageable plop. And what's the worse thing that can happen? I fall on my head? It's only five inches from the ground. Besides, it is in the course of the impasse, the course of readying ourselves, that we deepen who we really are. It's seems terrifying, but it may just be riding the wave. Think of it as soul surfing.
Only here's the radical part: What we perceive as nothing is really everything which is no thing at all. Trippy, but the Gita describes Vishnu as being beyond human perception. Not bad for a guy with four arms. Not to mention two of his ten avatars are Ram and Krishna. Though even they seem to get more airtime. But that's the thing with Vishnu: even though he's the middleman in the Trimurti, indeed the gig with the least accolade, his consort is Lakshmi (Abundance). Not only is Lakshmi quite attractive in her own right-- the Hindu Venus on the Half-shell-- but she is also the personification of Maya (Illusion). Thus Vishnu (the Sustainer) needs Illusion in order to propagate and keep on keepin' on. It's all in the in impasse, baby. Only what if the impasse is actually a crossroads? What then? How will the time go by? Or rather as Yogi Berra once said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."
So Vishnu is more of an active force than we usually assume. Just because he is the maintainer doesn’t mean when he keeps things going they are static—energy is always in motion. Even when you feel stuck-- when you can’t wait for Shiva to come and smash through your bored stasis-- you could try to see every moment as an active, maintained gift. I mean, the world could crumble to bits at any second, thank you Vishnu and Lakshmi for holding it together.
This is a trippy post E, it made me think of the progression of time and transitions in life, indeed, “Life is how the time goes by”. It isn’t always arithmetic, like “now this is created, that gets destroyed”. Sometimes we are being maintained and just riding the wave.
It made me think of the transitions of Om—that the waves are always moving and pulsing in our lives, things are always beginning, staying and dying, and the pulse never ends. But like you said, underneath it all is this weird “nothing is really everything which is no thing at all”... I love the soul surfing, just going with the flow, of breath and the body, ahhh. That’s what yoga is about to me, being able to appreciate the flow, even when it flows to a plateau, can you still be with it and know that too is lively. Om, thanks Em.