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Why did we choose for our patron a figure from the Tibetan tradition - so distant and so radically different to ours? Dakini means “wandering in the sky” or “moving in space”. She is the creative female energy represented as a beautiful, naked, totally free woman who dances life and dances death. Dakini expresses the dynamic female rule – continuous change. It is possible to be in touch with her only through direct personal experience, which enables us to regain primal non-dualistic wisdom. When we want to lock the wisdom in intellectual or theoretical systems, it becomes stiff and still. It does not “move in space” anymore and separates from the real life experience. There are many Tibetan stories about yogins who got mired in the seeming wisdom of intellectual concepts and dogmas. Then they meet an angry dakini with her confrontational wisdom who comes to shatter their illusion and re-establish their relation with living experience.
We do not study Buddhist teachings and we do not practise tantra, but we do feel a deep relation with dakini. When we awake our minds and bodies from lethargy, when we start discovering and experiencing the feminine power, then we are spontaneously in touch with dakini’s energy field. When we follow our intuition, when we let our body, the earth, the water, the air, the fire and all the life elements guide us we can rediscover the feminine wisdom older than any cultural context, rooted in life, in its very essence: dynamic, constantly changing, “moving in space”. When we release our shame and fear of revealing ourselves as we really are, then we experience the nakedness of dakini, the unusual power of disclosure, joyful and unconstrained by prejudice.
The language of Dakini
Anija Miłuńska
This time, between sleep and awakening, so precious! The conscious and unconscious meet here, on this bridge between worlds. The dominant principle non-existent, awakening doesn’t wake us yet, sleep doesn’t embrace us, non-sleeping, non-action. Neither the unity of darkness nor the multiplicity of light – and at the same time both.
For some reason I find these states “between worlds” most appealing, this time beyond time, in which doors open. And I best grasp this language of half-tones, which has not yet separated from experience. “Language of half-tones” – where does it come from? Where did I hear that? Of course, that’s how “dakini’s language” is described in tantric tradition. Allegedly, dakinis coded their wisdom in it. It’s a symbolical language, which cannot be analytically decomposed into basic elements. It’s incredibly condensed, a few symbols can be “written out” into several volumes of common, linear language. Quoting Tsultrim Allione: “Only very few have the ability to understand it, those who are in touch with Dakini’s energy field.” Well, but what does it mean to be “in touch with Dakini’s energy field”? Dakini means “one who can move through the sky”, which refers to energy moving in space. If I understand it well, it is the energy “moving in space”, dancing, spinning, which em-bodies itself, en-livens, realises and thus reveals itself. Surely, you cannot get in touch with energy conceptually, the only possible way is through experience (and that is why those who have had no such experience naively deny the existence of this dimension).
In many Tibetan stories dakini, in her angry version, appears to learned yogins, who have got mired in intelectual concepts, to awaken them to real experience, called – as we know – epiphany. Oh dakini! Why don’t you appear to our well-read sages, could it be that you consider it a waste of your (how else) energy? I hardly had time to write these words when a thought struck me like lightning: but she had appeared! Before they became so completely insulated, when they still followed the spiritual path, she certainly had! It’s just that “our” theological authorities didn’t accept her message, which they disliked so much that they reverted to extreme means. They didn’t leave their truth to, like yogin Naropa, embark on the search for live wisdom, no, they set the stakes on fire to solve the problem once and for all. And they did!
How important was the fact that – unlike for the Tibetan yogin – their belief system didn’t contain the powerful archetype of “ primal, non-dualistic wisdom beyond conceptualism”? When dakini revealed herself to Naropa in the form of a “hidious old hag” he was able to realise that her ugliness is a reflection of his own mind, a trick which he believed, “deceiving himself that he had attained true understanding, while in reality he had bulit an illusory castle of intellectualism and prudery”. Isn’t it curious that “our” spiritual inquisitors saw dakinis identically, as disgusting old women, only that they projected that picture on real women, whom they had to kill to destroy the image which haunted them. It took them a really long time, since the stakes burned for over two hundred years - not easy to burn that dakini, well, after all she is built from energy! But finally the result surpassed all expectations: since then conceptual, dualistic knowledge has had nothing in common with wisdom and intuitive understanding. What is more, since that time all women have been filled with terror faced with the option of revealing their energy of dakini, which gives them access to primal, non-dualistic wisdom. They are petrified because they know what it entails: a wart springs immediately on a disgusting nose, breasts dry up and sag and men turn away in disgust. Doesn’t every child know that this is the picture of wisdom in female form?!
Tibetan iconography depicts dakini as a beautiful, free, naked woman, unafraid of passing of time and death. She dances life and death. This is probably why we chose her as the symbol of our association. I still remember the day when I, shyly, suggested it, and women – to my great surprise – shouted: yes! A joyful, collective “yes” which knew what it meant though it was not able to explain itself rationally. It was a long, long time ago, seven or eight years back, eons! We remember those times with difficulty, those women, lost and uncertain, distrustful of their own experience, just following their intuition, what’s left of them? What transpired from that intuitive “yes” said to dakini?
All these years we’ve hardly ever evoked dakini, we haven’t done it consciously, as we have done with Mother Earth or Great Mother. We have worked with the energy of the elements (and then dakinis of five wisdoms represent energies of particular elements) , we have done a great many things not asking if they are dakini-like, the most important consideration being if they are authentic and relevant to our present experience. And that exactly – as I can see it today – has been the best way to follow dakini’s path, which is the path of live experience, direct insight, personal understanding of the “nature of things”. This is how I understand wisdom, always have, that is why grandmother-witch and dakini are my closest family, to which I revert intuitively, without the need to explain why, because it’s in my blood, soul, memory older than the woman I identify with.
Wisdom cannot be amassed, catalogued, or put into a system, because it is something different than knowledge. When I was an “employee of the department of philosophy” - how I had to fight for a place for such outlook on wisdom, in vain of course. Now I know I couldn’t have succeeded since dakini-witch was annihilated in this culture (if one can call it that) a few hundred years before I was born. When I think of myself as “possessing” wisdom, I turn it into an object, something static, stable, reliable (it is an image of a sage amassing treasures of knowledge, just like fools amass gold). When I dance life and I dance death, then the wisdom - the one which allows me to live and die, thanks to which my every cell knows how to do it - dances with me.
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