Leela Shakti – Play Power

Leela Shakti – Play Power

[00:45] The Writing of the Gods

In Sanskrit, there is a phrase called Leela Shakti. Now, Leela can be spelled one of two ways: either L-I-L-A or L-E-E-L-A. Leela, L-E-E-L-A or L-I-L-A.

And the reason why these alternate spellings exist, in Roman characters, we call the characters that we use for spelling English are not properly called English characters. They’re called Roman characters because they come from ancient Rome. They come from Latin.

And so, the characters that we use in English, A, B, C, D, and so on, we have 26 letters that we use commonly to combine to make a word, and, in Sanskrit, there are 54 characters that can combine and permute. In English, if you saw something that was spelled L-I-L-A, you might not know how it’s pronounced because vowel sounds in English can vary, one character can be pronounced in a variety of ways.

So, someone might see L-I-L-A and say, Ligh-la but, in fact, it’s Lee-la, Leela. And so, in the Sanskrit calligraphy, which I’m looking at an example of right now, is the calligraphy is known as Devanagari. Devanagari means the Agri of the Devas, the writing of the gods.

Devanagari script or calligraphy, there is literally one character for every exact sound.

Unlike using the Roman characters for English, where “a” could be pronounced æ, ə, æ, ɔː, and so on and so on. There’s so many different ways of pronouncing “a,” a, e, i, o, u, these vowel sounds, each of them has a tremendous number of ways of pronouncing it.

[02:53] The Infinite Organizing Power Attributed to The Feminine

In Sanskrit, in the Devanagari script, every single potential sound that the human voice can make is described by a particular character. And therefore, when you read the Devanagari script, there’s no potential whatsoever for mispronunciation. You can’t mispronounce, if you know how, if you’re literate in Devanagari script.

Meanwhile, we have to use, for English-speaking and European-speaking people, we have to use Roman characters. So, Lila, L-I-L-A, but pronounced Leela, or L-E-E-L-A.

What does it mean? It means literally the word play, and it could be play as in playing like a child playing or an adult playing a game, or it could mean a play as in a theatrical performance play.

Either way, it’s all play. Leela Shakti. Shakti—the infinite organizing power attributed to The Feminine. Shakti. Leela Shakti. Leela Shakti, the play power. The play power of what? The play power of the unmanifest when it comes into manifestation. 

So, from the Vedic perspective, there’s the one indivisible, whole Unified Field, and it has two aspects to it. Pure Being of transcendental nature, that means the unmanifest, unexpressed, underlying, we’re going to call it capital T, capital A, The Absolute. The Absolute is the non-changing, underlying field that is transcendental. It is beyond relativity.

[04:50] Play Power of The Totality

It permeates and pervades The Totality of all relative changing things In much the same way that the colorless sap that is embedded in every part of a flower, though invisible, the colorless sap has the ability to turn itself into the color of green and to become, say, a stem. The colorless sap also has, within it, the potential to convert itself into a sharp pointy thorn that sits on the side of the stem.

The colorless sap, remaining colorless, has the capacity to bring itself into manifestation as a petal on the flower or as a fragrance of the flower. And so, different colors, different forms, different shapes all come out of the colorless sap.

If we think of the transcendental field of Being, the unmanifest aspect of Totality, we call the unmanifest, The Absolute, there are no sequences in it because there’s no time in it. It is timeless, it is event-free, but it is laden with infinite potentiality. It doesn’t like being only one and indivisible.

It likes to break its symmetry and to come into manifestation to play. And this is what’s called the Leela Shakti, the play power. The play power that is also embedded in unmanifest form within The Absolute comes into expression, it bursts forth, it issues forth. Being becomes. The unmanifest manifests. The pure is-ness comes into expression of sequence.

Different qualities, different expressions, sequences, therefore time appears. In the moment you have sequence, you have sequential elaboration, the movement of one form and phenomenon into metamorphosis into another form or phenomenon. So this is sequential elaboration. This is expression and this turns out to have a theme to it and that theme is evolution.

[07:41] Simplicity to Sophistication

Everything starts off being very basic, and then moves into being less basic than that, more elaborate, less basic than that, and even more elaborate. And there is eventually a sufficient amount of sophisticated complexity that, taken all together, is elegant.

This movement from baseline simplicity and individuation coming out of the unmanifest, moving into a sequential elaboration of ever-growing sophistication, culminating in elegance, this is the trend of things, forms and phenomena, and out from The Absolute, into maximum elegance, and then reaching its crescendo and then collapsing back into the unmanifest again.

And so, this cycle of unmanifest through the process of manifestation, the process of sequential elaboration of ever-growing sophistication, reaching crescendo, reaching its maximum point of expressiveness, and then declining back into the unmanifest again. This cyclical behavior is known altogether as the Leela Shakti.

[09:15] Sequential Elaboration

And what do we find in the sequential elaboration? We find story. You know, you get to meet somebody once and you say to them, once you have a little bit of camaraderie, “What’s your story?” And, depending on how relevant they think it is to tell you their story, they might let you have a little bit of detail of information about them.

As you get to know them a bit better, you get to know more. As you get to know more, you start to understand the person, what it is that makes them tick. And they you. They’re also understanding you more and more.

This is sequential elaboration, unfolding of greater and greater amounts of detail, and then a storyline emerging, and then as we grow in our consciousness, and we look back at our storyline, and the storylines of others by whom we are surrounded, and then the storylines of a collective, like a family, the collective storyline, the larger collective of a society or culture, the larger collective storylines of a nation, and then the ultimate big storyline, at least for this little dot—this blue dot hovering in space that we call Earth—the storyline of the various cultures of humanity of the Earth, all these storylines.

And what we see in these storylines, if we allow our awareness to transcend just localized boundaries of time, we see evolution, progressive change in the sequential elaboration.

Story. Story moving from less sophisticated to more sophisticated, and in the Vedic worldview, consciousness moving from less sophisticated physiologies through progressive incarnation in ever-more sophisticated individualities, eventuating in the enlightened state, where the individual’s consciousness and the brain supporting that consciousness are able to see all of the patterns emerging, being able to see beyond the localized space-time of a localized event, being able to see the overall pattern, the thematic behavior of everything that surrounds one.

[11:55] Elevational Theater

This is enlightenment. Where one can see the totality of evolution occurring, the breaking of the symmetry of the super-symmetric unmanifest Absolute as it comes into Being. Being, becoming, unmanifest, manifesting, moving through the various stages of rudimentary simplicity into ever-growing greater sophistication and complexity.

Sophisticated complexity is the definition, one definition, of elegance. The arrival at crescendo, and then the reunification with The Absolute and the cyclical (or cyclical if you’re American) behavior of all of that is the Leela Shakti, the play power of The Totality. And it’s a play. Everything’s a play.

Everything’s a story. All forms, all phenomena, whatever it is they do or whatever role those forms or phenomena play, are parts of a story of the ever-increasing assembly of more and more sophisticated consciousness. This is the Leela Shakti.

Leela, sometimes people eliminate the word Shakti but it should be there really. Leela Shakti, play power of The Totality.

The elevational theater. Why do we say elevational theater? Any story always starts with a status quo of some kind. “Once upon a time there was this,” and it’s describing whatever a status quo is. And then, as the story progresses, the status quo has to go through change.

Something comes, something happens that interrupts the storyline, an interrupting force, something that disrupts the status quo. So the interruption of the status quo. 

[14:04] Plateaus and the Status Quo

Sometimes this is a fall, perceived as a fall from whatever the glories of the status quo were. From the ashes of that fall come the rise, the Phoenix, the rise of the consciousness reassembling itself, having learned from the previous status quo what was sustainable and what was not. Rising out of the fall into an upward progression, assembling greater capability, greater knowledge, greater perspective.

And then, coming up to a new plateau, and that plateau having a degree of sustainability for a period of time, never forever, because forever is a never in the relative world. A plateau of what appears for the moment to be ideal, but which also must be subjected to disintegration. And a fall from that status quo, and from that fall another rise, and from that rise another plateau.

When any story is looked at, there’s always status quo, fall, rise, new status quo, plateau, new fall, new rise. Where do you start the story? Do you start the story that you’re telling down deep in the fall? Do you start the story that you wish to tell at the middle of a previous status quo, the middle of a previous plateau?

Do you start the story in the rise to a new status quo? Where do you start a story? Where do you end a story? This is all an invention. It’s an invention of giving any story a certain beginning and ending, giving it a kind of narrative size.

[16:02] Leela Shakti and the History of The Universe

If you want a short story, you have a short expression of plateau, fall, rise, new plateau—or fall, rise, plateau, or rise, plateau, fall… whatever kind of sequence you wish to put that in, short story.

If you want to have a longer story, then you might incorporate two or three of these plateaus and falls and rises and new plateaus. If you want a very long epic, then you have 20 or 30 of these plateaus, and falls, and rises, and so on. Now you have an epic.

What is the narrative size? Well, what’s the point of your storytelling? What kind of perspective do you wish to gain? In an epic, we get epic levels of perspective. In a short story, we get little snippets of perspective.

And so then, Leela Shakti, the way in which The Universe is enjoying witnessing the elevational theater of the relative world. The Absolute refusing to continue to be unmanifest, coming into manifestation, and witnessing itself move through all the diversity, witnessing itself move through all of the individualities, witnessing itself moving through all of the storylines and collectively one great storyline. What is the history of The Universe? Leela Shakti.

Jai Guru Deva.