Member-only story
The Layers of the World.
How traditional perspectives make sense of our brain and its many voices and why that’s important to self-development.
Here in Bali, the world comes in layers.
Sometimes this is seen in the stacked properties of a shrine, the oceans of existence and the turtle and serpents upon which the worlds rest. . . sometimes the worlds stand side by side like the shrines of a family temple.
There is a shrine to the ancestors newly departed, the memories of our recent past and how it shapes us. There are the shrines to the guardians and the mindfulness necessary to make a place sacred.
There is the shrine to the triumvirate, Siwa (Shiva), Visnu (Vishnu), and Brahma; change and destruction, lived life and heroism, and the god of creation.
Beside the shrine to the triumvirate, in the most sacred portion of the temple, is the shrine to Acintya, the One God, presented as a hermaphrodite possessing the powers of the masculine and feminine, believed to be the “Beingness” behind the many faces of the gods.
To the West is the shrine to Taksu, the human ability to open to divine creativity and allow it to flow through them into the world.
