Prelude: The Lilac Dance

About two years after the night in the wooden house, and about two years before the retreat that named the Goddess, she had a dream.

She was watching an aerial dancer. The dancer was performing on lilac silks — tecidos lilás — long panels of fabric suspended from some invisible rigging, which the dancer climbed and wrapped and fell through and caught herself inside. The dance was spiraling and weaving. The color of the silks was a specific shade of violet-lilac that she would, later, recognize as the color she had already been using for her own things — her writing, her small websites, the logo she had sketched years earlier for an LLC she had named without quite knowing why. The dream color and her brand color were the same color.

She watched the dancer with a delight she had not felt in waking life for some time. Then, in the way dreams do, the watching dissolved into the being: she became the dancer. She was the one weaving the silks, the one spiraling. The fabric moved with her and held her and she felt, for what seemed a long time, the pure joy of embodied grace.

Then a thought arrived.

The thought was: how cool I am.

The thought was not elaborate. It was not malicious. It was a small movement of self-congratulation — the kind that would have passed unnoticed in waking life, absorbed into the stream of ordinary thinking. In the dream, the thought had consequences.

The silks changed. They did not tear or unravel. They turned. The lilac fabric, which had been her partner in the dance, became a serpent — thick, muscular, the same color as the silks had been, now alive and coiled. The serpent closed around her. It tightened; she felt heat. She felt herself falling — the rigging was no longer holding her — and as she fell she felt burn marks appearing on her body where the serpent had touched. The marks were the print of the snake's skin, stamped into her own skin. Not wounds. Imprints. A scaled pattern, the exact texture of the snake, now on her body. She landed on the ground. The ground was solid. The dance was over. The marks stayed.

She woke up.

She lay in the dark for a long time. She wants to report the dream factually, the way one would in a dream circle — the sequence, the colors, the images — not what she thinks they mean. The dream is the data. The meaning is what she has, over years, been allowed to find inside the data. Jung named this in his memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections: some archetypal dreams are not solved in a week or a month. They are carried for a lifetime. He was integrating his own childhood dreams into his eighties, never finishing. This is one of those dreams for her. She does not expect to have finished with it.

What she can say, in the register of personal interpretation and not of claim, is something she has been circling for four years. The imprints on her skin felt like the mark of what happens when self-centeredness becomes load-bearing. Vanessa Andreotti would say it is the consequence of the belief in separation. The Śaiva tradition would say it is the harm of mistaking the individual for the unit of reality. The Christian register she grew up inside would say it is the small, familiar sin of pride, rendered physically. She does not need to decide which vocabulary. What she is sure of is that the dream showed a specific thing: the dance is available, the thought how cool I am is what turns the silks into the serpent, and the marks left behind are not wounds but imprints — the exact pattern of the serpent stamped into the skin of the dancer who forgot she was not the whole of the dance.

She had no vocabulary for this, that night. She had the dream.

She had, before the dream, been trying to name the shape of her practice.

She had started a small website where she wrote about whatever she was sitting with. She had called it Life is Process. The name had felt true when she chose it — a refusal of the static categories she had grown up inside, the Catholic saved or fallen, the professional successful or failing, the contemporary healthy or anxious. Against all of these: life is process. Not a state. A verb.

After the dream, the name began to feel wrong. Life IS process was too declarative — the form of a claim — and claims had a way of becoming the next static category even when they started as refusals. She did not want to stand on a slogan.

She remembered the dream. Specifically, the color — the lilac, the same color she had used for the little LLC she had set up years before. The LLC's name she had chosen before any of this vocabulary: PlayfulProcess. The serious thing and the playful thing were not opposites. The quality of her best thinking was a quality of lightness rather than grimness. The opposite of being-correct was not being-foolish but being-stiff.

She renamed the website. Life is Process became PlayfulProcess. Small on paper; significant in the body. The name was no longer a claim. The name was a mode — the playful way of being inside the process, which was the only way she had ever been able to sustain the process over time. The playfulness was not decoration. It was the technique by which she did not harden into the slogan's next victim.

She did not realize, then, that PlayfulProcess was pointing at something a tradition she had not yet walked into had already named with precision.

The word, in the Śaiva tantric tradition she would later meet through [T], is līlā. It names the play of consciousness — the unforced, self-delighting movement by which the one consciousness manifests as the whole varied world without any purpose beyond the playing. Līlā is not decoration on top of seriousness; it is the fundamental operation. The cosmos is not a plan being executed. The cosmos is a play being played. The practitioner's work is not to escape the play; it is to join it knowingly, without the mistake the dreamer in the silks had made — thinking she was doing the dancing rather than being one of the places the dance was happening.

She would, years later, read this and feel the recognition arrive in a specific way. She had named her company PlayfulProcess. The tradition had a word, līlā, which she had not known when she named the company. She did not claim the company and the tradition were saying the same thing. She noticed only that she had arrived at the word by one route and that the tradition had arrived at its word by another, and that when she eventually read the tradition she recognized something she had already been working on.

It had happened to her once before, with Paradevi. She stopped telling herself the pattern was coincidence. She did not move to the opposite conclusion. She simply stopped dismissing it.

About two years after the lilac dream, she went to a retreat in Ojai.

The retreat was held at the Krishnamurti Foundation. She was not drawn there by the central figures — the ones whose faces are on the books — but by people on the periphery who had been quietly developing the dialogue modality Krishnamurti had developed with the physicist David Bohm in the 1980s.

A specific oddity about this: the people at the center of the Foundation did not seem to like Bohm. She does not, to this day, fully understand why. Bohm had been one of K's most serious interlocutors; the dialogue method itself had grown out of their work together. And yet the Foundation, as she encountered it, treated Bohm as an awkward branch to be pruned, or simply not watered. The people running the peripheral retreats were drawn to Bohm; they had preserved the dialogue modality precisely because the center, in its preference for Krishnamurti-as-sole-source, had mostly let it wither.

This mattered to her for a reason she could not have articulated before the retreat. Up to that point she had felt — she had heard others say — that Krishnamurti had not left behind any practice. Just a teaching about the impossibility of teaching, a friend had put it once, dismissively. What she discovered in those peripheral circles was that K had in fact left a practice behind. It was dialogue. He had developed it with Bohm, across years, as the method by which the insights of his solitary talks could become collectively embodied rather than merely transmitted. The Foundation had mostly declined to carry it forward. The people at the edges had carried it forward anyway. She has stayed a student of the edge-carriers, as a general posture, since.

The dialogue modality has no teacher and no subject. A circle sits together and observes the movement of thought collectively, without assigning it to particular speakers in the conventional way. The aim is not to conclude. The aim is to let thought watch itself, which is a thing thought does not ordinarily do.

At this retreat, sitting in those circles, she understood emptiness.

Not first encounter — she had been reading about emptiness for years. First time it stopped being a concept. Watching her own thoughts arise and pass, it became unavoidable — the way a geometric fact becomes unavoidable when you finally see it — that the thinker behind the thoughts was not a separate entity watching the thoughts. The thinker was a thought like the others. There was no one at the center. There was thinking, happening, with no one doing it. When the retreat named this emptiness, the word fit. Not the emptiness of absence. The emptiness of no separate self to be full or empty.

What struck her harder was the second recognition, the next day during a walk.

The emptiness was not separate from the rest of life. She had half-expected she would need to leave something behind to rest in it — that emptiness was a quiet room one entered by exiting the noisy room of ordinary existence. What she found instead was that emptiness was orthogonal to the noisy room. It was pervading the noisy room the whole time. You did not need to leave samsara to find nirvana; nirvana was what samsara was doing when you were not distracted from noticing. The two could coexist because they had never been two. The traditions that had been saying this for two and a half thousand years had been saying something precise. She had been unable to hear the precision until the dialogue had, in its patient way, cleared the channel.

Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, a book she had read at twenty and had not fully understood, ends with Govinda kissing the forehead of the aged Siddhartha and seeing his friend's face become every face, every being, every event, all at once, all one. Hesse has Govinda try, in that moment, to imagine Sansāra and Nirvāna as one; the imagination fails, and then the seeing takes over, and Govinda understands without having needed to imagine. Siddhartha smiles. Govinda weeps and bows. The book ends.¹

She remembered, walking the dirt paths of Ojai, that Sam Harris had said something similar in a recent interview with Buddhist monks — that since he had recognized the still point he had entered samsara more fully, not less. The recognition had not removed him from the world. It had let him be in the world without the defensive crouch. Sam was describing the Siddhartha arc in a modern vernacular — a man who had spent his twenties searching for a way out of the noise, had found that the way out was the way in, and was now reporting back from the inside.

One more thing happened at that retreat.

She had been walking alone in the mornings before the circles began. The retreat was in the hills above Ojai; the paths were unmarked. She had been struggling with a decision — she cannot now remember which one. On one of those walks she put on a Krishnamurti talk through her headphones. The talk was about choice.

Krishnamurti's argument was that choice, in the sense modern people usually mean it — I weigh options, I select, I exercise will — is largely an illusion. The selecting is done by conditioning that precedes the apparent selector. What is usually called choice is the rationalization of an action that had already been determined by millions of small prior conditions.

She listened, walked, listened. She became absorbed. At some point she realized she had not been paying attention to the path. She looked around. She did not recognize where she was. She tried to retrace her steps and found she had taken turns she could not reconstruct. She was lost in the mountains above Ojai, with a Krishnamurti talk on choice still playing in her headphones, and with the inability to choose — which path back, which direction — enacting itself in real time.

She was eventually two hours late. The retreat had been waiting. She arrived embarrassed. She told the hosts she had been listening to a talk on choice and had gotten lost. One of them laughed, the laugh of someone who had been in these mountains for a long time. Krishnamurti, she said, said it was good to get lost.

Not consolation. Description. The getting-lost was the teaching. She had been given a practical demonstration of what the talk had been saying abstractly. She could not, through deliberation, have arranged to be the person who got lost in the mountains while listening to a teaching on choice. The arrangement had arranged itself.

She realized, on the plane home, that getting lost had always been her practice. The retreats, the career shifts, the countries, the languages, the books she had picked up without knowing why, the strangers she had listened to without filtering — all of it had been a kind of sustained getting-lost, which had turned out to be a form of being-found by the specific things that wanted to find her. Some traditions name it as a method. Most modern cultures frame it as a failure. It was, structurally, how she had learned everything she had learned that was worth having.

This was why Life is Process had always felt to her like a statement of something she already knew. And why, after the dream, she had softened it to PlayfulProcess. The playful was the modifier that made the process livable over a lifetime. Without it, process becomes a grim discipline. With it, the process is līlā, before she knew the word — the getting-lost that is also the being-found, the dance on the lilac silks that is grace as long as the dancer does not claim the grace.

The burn marks from the serpent did not go away in the dream, and they did not quite go away in the life either. The cautionary scar is part of what keeps her honest. The dance is available; the self-congratulation is the thing that turns the silks into the serpent. The practice is to keep dancing and to keep watching for the thought. She has not mastered the watching.

The Goddess had a second name. The first was Paradevi. The second was the name the dream had always known. They are one naming in different languages, delivered to a woman who has been, in the specific way she has been doing it her whole life, getting slowly, patiently, usefully lost.

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