Lila: Become Who You Are
“Be not attached to being an actor and be not attached to the fruit of the action.”
In my opinion, “Lila” is one of the most fascinating concepts of Hindu mythology. In fact, for me it is more than just a concept — it is a principle that organises, permeates and underlies all of existence.
For those who truly understand it, I believe it can eliminate suffering and make your life much more fun.
It can even, perhaps, allow you to glimpse some sense and meaning out of the seemingly pervasive randomness of the universe.
As your understanding grows, you may find that you break away from simply ‘playing your part’ in the stage of society — mindlessly following the cues of the prompter — and start writing the script of life yourself.
Through the tragedies and comedies, pain and ecstasy of our reality, you will perceive an equanimous smile of the nameless ‘Script Writer’ — which is you and nothing but you.
You may start comprehending how carefully chosen your roles are (and the roles of those around you) and how synchronous and non-random all your encounters are.
In essence, how perfect it all is.
Perhaps you are shrugging your shoulders at the incredible nonsense you’ve just read. If so, please bear with me. I dare you to ponder on just one courageous assumption, following a few paragraphs below, and gently grapple with the implications of it. No gnosiological sins will be committed in this article.
“In all languages except Sanskrit, self refers to ego or some personalized individuality. In Sanskrit, Self is defined as Brahman, which has no other meaning but Brahman. Brahman itself is That itself.”
As the physicist Fritjof Capra puts it, “The basic recurring theme in Hindu mythology is the creation of the world by the self-sacrifice of God, whereby God becomes the world which, in the end, becomes again God. This creative activity of the Divine is called Lila, the play of God”.
Transpersonal psychiatrist Stanislav Grof continues on this thought:
“Additional important dimensions of the creative process that are often emphasised are the playfulness, self-delectation, and cosmic humour of the Creator. These are elements that have best been described in ancient Hindu texts that talk about the universe and existence as Lila, or Divine Play. According to this view, creation is an intricate, infinitely complex cosmic game that the Godhead, Brahman, creates from himself and within himself. He is the playwright who conceived the game, as well as its producer, director, and also all the actors who play the countless myriads of the roles involved.”
Now, just for a minute, assume you are indeed inside the Lila. Could you potentially reconcile your experience and self-awareness with this assumption?
How would it work? Who would you be then, at your level of individual identity? And in what way would your interaction with the so-called “Supreme of the Supreme” proceed?
What level of autonomy could you assume, and how responsible would you be for your actions, decisions, feelings and thoughts?
“Just play your role in the Lila with no expectation or attachment.”
At the first glance, these ideas might seem unsettling or odd.
We already know that nearly all of our so-called “conscious” decisions are manipulated by an autonomous part of the brain, which is susceptible to being cognitively biased in many ways. But what if that wasn’t the full story? What if it wasn’t just about your subconscious?
What if somewhere inside your psyche there is also an Omnipotent Puppeteer gently prodding and influencing you alongside your Script?
Imagine someone you like. Might this be because you need to play a part of the Lila with them? Like magnets, you were attracted to one another somehow, and you could not resist despite the strong opposition of your rational mind.
Or, however, strongly you tried to save a relationship, nothing worked and everything began falling apart. The events did not align, and the obstacles prevailed. Well, there was nothing you could do there. It was simply time for you and them to start another act.
Have you ever experienced a scenario when all of a sudden you decide to call someone, and it turned out to be, inexplicably, exactly at the right auspicious moment?
Or when, for some unknown reason, your mind falls into a lethargic torpor and you accidentally make a stupendous blunder which you could not imagine possible… only to be expelled from one game and land beautifully into another, more interesting one?
Or… well, frankly, I could continue giving examples forever.
These ‘meaningful coincidences’, which Carl Jung called ‘synchronicities’, are what I will call Lila’s prompts.
“I am time, the destroyer of all.
I am immortality and I am death;
I am what is and what is not.
Curving back within myself I create again and again.”
Before proceeding further, let us ponder the following question. If our world was created as Lila, what is its purpose?
The opinions vary here. I’ve met many teleologically oriented minds who believe the world is gradually improving on a grand scale, and that individually, we are improving as well — by learning lessons from our ordeals and interactions. Though appealing this vision may be, I do not believe this is what Lila is about.
As Alan Watts observed, “When they (Hindus) speak of the creation of the universe…they call it the play of God, the Vishnu Lila, Lila meaning play. And they look upon the whole manifestation of all the universes as a play, as a sport, as a kind of dance.”
In a similar vein, J.R.R Tolkin writes of a God named Iluvatar in The Silmarillion, who creates the world and all its unfolding history from the music: “Then the voices of the Ainur… began to fashion the theme of Iluvatar to a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Iluvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void.”
Maybe the world is not created from music. Maybe the world is music. Let that sink in.
There is no higher purpose in music other than ecstasy and bliss. There is no beginning and there is no end. There is immersion, total forgetfulness, pure creativity. All the dualities, joy and suffering, comedy and drama are yours, the notes of your life. Take it!
It is not about trying to keep the same melody or clinging to a good scene, however fantastic and climatic it was. It is about movement and impermanence. You would not enjoy playing the same music time and time again. Let it go and move onto the next act.
There are many opinions on what Lila is about. But we do not truly know. And we are not supposed to, at this level of egoistic identity, or we would be very bad actors. And what’s more, the whole game would soon become extremely boring.
“Not by refraining from action does man attain freedom from action.
What your part is — play it” .
But I have some good news for you. You can be promoted from a piece on a chessboard to a Script Writer, and here I will outline a clear and unambiguous path to that end.
You start accepting the game as it is. You will assimilate all things so perfectly that there is no longer any possibility of a struggle.
You learn to enjoy it in any form and under any circumstances, no matter how painful or disruptive it occasionally is. In doing so, you will become completely non-attached to the roles you play and their outcomes. You are doing what you do, yet there is no doer.
You are no longer identifying “with experience, with belief, with your country, your ideals, wife, husband, love, no identification at all”. You become “nothing”, and it reverberates through your brain.
And if you are a genuine Script Writer, you would not write it for yourself. You would hold all others as close to you. You would become them too. You would feel their joy and suffering, you would live through their triumphs and failures. You would not differentiate. You would be creative and destructive, compassionate and ruthless, but loving and sacrificing. You would be It.
Let me finish with the instructions that Lord Krishna, the manifestation of Lila, gives to Arjuna, the warrior:
“All actions take place in time by the interweaving of the forces of Nature; but the man lost in selfish delusion thinks that he himself is the actor.
But the man who knows the relation between the forces of Nature and actions, sees how some forces of Nature work on other forces of Nature, and becomes not their slave.
Those who are under the delusion of the forces of Nature bind themselves to the work of these forces…
But the man who has found the joy of the Spirit and in the Spirit has satisfaction, who in the Spirit has found his peace, that man is beyond the law of action.
He is beyond what is done and beyond what is not done, and in all his works he is beyond the help of mortal beings.
In liberty from the bonds of attachment, do thou therefore the work to be done: for the man whose work is pure attains indeed the Supreme.”
Post Scriptum. The sources of some quotations are omitted because, in the spirit of the article, there is only one Source. All authors of those quotations were Enlightened Beings, so they would not mind.
Acknowledgements. I am grateful to Rebecca Coxon, documentary filmmaker and writer, for the creative help in writing this article.
