- maryoutandabout.blogspot.com
The churning of the Sea of Milk or the Milky Way is an interesting Hindu creation myth. It involves a serpent and a mountain.
In the story, the gods held the tail of the snake, while the demons held its head, and they pulled on it alternately causing the mountain to rotate, which in turn churned the ocean. The mountain began to sink and so the god Vishnu in the form of a turtle came to the rescue and supported the mountain on his back.
I got to thinking about this story as I was reading The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. He says that the demon is resistance – the thing that gets in the way of our fulfilling our goals.
As I read, I kept thinking, “Resistance to the resistance is still resistance.” This troubled me. Later in the book, Pressfield speaks of angels, muses, allies. They are, he tells us, forces counter-poised against the resistance.
“More resistance,” I thought.
So my question is: Is all this churning (effort, battle, resisting resistance, etc.) necessary to create a sparkling Milky Way? To create at all? Is war really how to make art?
Then I thought about riding, and how all the resistance in the world is useless. How it is by aligning, opening – finding the onward, flowing, shaping, guiding quality in the riding – I become part of that glorious movement. The “join-up” as Monty Roberts says.
Abraham teaches that resistance is just tethers us to what we don’t want. That when I say “no” to something, I bring it to me – special delivery. Because no is just the other end of the stick from “yes,” the tails side of the coin.
What are you resisting? And what is the opposite of resistance?
Photo: Pam White from the videodance film TILT by Paula Josa-Jones and Ellen Sebring
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