This folk story was first published by Ramakrishna, and is traditionally taken to describe the awakening of the spiritual person. The tiger has often been a symbol for Indian spiritual attainment. I am currently enjoying Philosophies of India by Heinrich Zimmer, a seminal work in the understanding of Indian religions. He makes the comment near the beginning, that India underwent a transformation at the time of Homer in the West (beginning 800 BC), when the Vedic literature took a decisive and long-lasting turn. This was the beginning of the time of the Upanishads. The whole significance of this change, was the move away from an external religious focus (rituals, propitiation of the gods for material well-being etc) to the inner life. This was the time that Soma changed its meaning. Originally an hallucinatory drink from what many now believe to have been a certain kind of mushroom, commonly imbibed, to a spiritual force within.
Zimmer made the comment that the West has yet to undergo this societal Roar of Awakening, as described in the tiger story above. He maintains that all civilisations in their journey towards what is of primary value, arrive at this crossroads, and either opt for the path of inner truth, or walk in denial the path of outer illusionary value systems.
I am fascinated by the last sentence: "Come, we shall go now for a hunt together in the jungle." Did that not take your eye?
As a spiritually awakened person, the world-at-large is our jungle, and we hunt there. Yes, that is what we do. When we awaken every morning, we enter the jungle, and we are hunting from that moment until we fall asleep at night. Of course, for those sufficiently skilled, the hunt continues through sleep. We hunt 24hrs a day. But what are we hunting for?
Many do not grasp this, and it marks the difference between those who have passed a certain threshold on the path, and those who have not.
As hunters of the spirit, we are seeking what the Indians call shakti, and others call personal power. We tend to think we are hunting realisations, and that is not inaccurate, but realisations come as a result of having stored shakti. Sure, we seek realisation, and intentionally set that up, but no realisations are possible if the inner power to reveal has not been acquired, thus we hunt shakti, personal power, in every little action or thought or emotion of the day.
There are two ways to do this as a basic core functionality (there are other ways as an adventurer). Firstly, we seek to resolve successfully and effectively every issue that presents to us, from the act of standing up from our bed in the morning, to tasks of our work or emotional confrontations in our personal life.
There is a danger in this, in that we become obsessed with success. Task-resolution success. It is important to attempt to resolve every task that confronts us with a successful outcome, and in fact, the hunt for success becomes of itself a spiritual hunt, because it is the world teaching us that we must strip out all dross from our being in order to succeed. This is where wealth is a massive hindrance to the hunt for shakti - because we simply buy our way out of trouble.
But there is a flaw in the outer world's judgement of outcomes. It is the field of action, not the object of that action. The object of action is to store shakti through action, not to succeed in resolving action externally. We utilise the false quest of 'success' purely for the purpose of storing more shakti. Shakti is stored through effort, but it can also be lost.
When the spiritual tiger hunts in the jungle, they appear to every onlooker as a person obsessed with victory. But what is not so easily seen, unless from another who knows, is that this tiger is involved in a most complex manoeuvre. A core pivotal identity of this tiger is not a prisoner of the world. The world swirls around, and the actor displays his or her stupendous skill in controlling the flow. Yet deep in the core, he or she knows it is a game. We call this controlled folly.
Controlled folly is a crucial tool in the hunt of shakti. We operate on the ground, without magical weapons, to bring about resolutions that are as effective as possible, and through that struggle we gain shakti. But we are internally free from the final success and failure. In my early days, I had to inculcate this principle into my sluggish being, and one act I did to embed the concept, was to refuse to attend my degree graduation from university, much to my mother's displeasure. It, along with many other similar acts, remains as a silent protector of my ultimate quest.
But secondly, there is a deeper way to store and not lose shakti through the jungle hunt. It is precisely the interface between the inner realisation of the folly, and the outer pursuit of the control. This interface has to be exercised continuously, and also continuously de-stressed. Every time we confront something, some person or some process which becomes maddeningly infuriating, our hunt has found its quarry - aside from seeking outer resolution, our primary task is to disengage from the inner anger and frustration. If we fail, even if we succeed outwardly, we lose shakti. Only when we are able to enter a situation which triggers our inner dissonance, do we have the real opportunity to acquire shakti by stepping aside from our emotional reaction - stepping into our core sanctuary of equilibrium. Not by denying the emotionality, and not by denying it an expression, but freeing ourselves inwardly from its all-consuming invasion.
It is in that moment that we, as spiritual tigers, feed.
