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Rebirth road

  • 1 min read

Updated: Sep 9, 2023


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Leaving the city, I’m a gray cloud made of workday dust and the worry of being late. I crawl into the bus, because I missed the train, in the careless trample of a hundred feet trying to get away.


‘But, why?’


“Don’t ask why. Just keep moving,” the road tells me. I submit.


The city fades. Lines of windows flashing television screens get slowly replaced by dancing shadows of trees. Glimpses of paddies emerge earthly green, cast into temporary pools of yellow by the lamps dotting the streets. With that, I find that I’m healed—from the Monday-to-Friday, from the apathy of the herd. I’m reconciled with the world.


On the road, I’m reborn. I’m a bird taking off from the street wire to spread my wings over the holy mountain. The air is a song.


I’m home, long before home.




This story ‘Rebirth road’ was inspired by a work of mixed media art by the Sri Lankan artist Dhammika Perera. Dhammika’s hometown is by the tranquil inland hills and rivers of Sri Lanka with a view of the sacred Sripāda mount; he had to take a daily commute to Colombo for his day job as a teacher at the University of Visual Arts. Talking about those years spent in commute, Dhammika says he remembers the healing in the journey. The experience of growing past the city’s exhaustion with the changing landscapes stayed with Dhammika, inspiring him in the art studio of his village home. This original art is now available at the PW Store.



Reading List, March 2023

  • 5 min read

Updated: Apr 1, 2023

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Our monthly stories are productions looking to connect people to the magic of stories.

We create supplementary reading lists as a way to give you an insight into the inspirations and thinking behind our monthly stories. These reading lists take you behind the story, revealing the process of its making.

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Image: Cienna Smith



Rasa → Śāntam (शान्त) Peace, tranquility. Presiding deity: Vishnu. Colour: perpetual white Śṛṅgāraḥ (शृङ्गारः): Romance, Love, attractiveness. Presiding deity: Vishnu. Colour: light green


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Archetype → Lover


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Love defies the ego’s instinct to selfishly survive. Love attunes you to another being, and through that experience, it attunes you to yourself with renewed devotion.


This month’s newsletter is curated around the storytelling archetype of the lover. We borrowed the lover archetype from the psychology theories of Carl Jung. It’s an interesting archetype that helps us typify personalities that seek connection through intimacy, attentiveness and enjoying experiences. To those with a dominant lover archetype, experiencing the object of their affection means everything. Profound expressions of love are the signature trait of the lover. We use the lover archetype in stories; sometimes as characters we make—like Kavita—and other times as brand personalities that we create stories for. We find the lover archetype driven to make decisions through passion, and always looking to fill their vast capacity to experience, and of course, to love.


But, stories involving the lover archetype are not limited to learning to love another or the self; this archetype also connects to spiritual love and ecstasy. This story about Kavita was designed to induce two rasas (a state of mind caused by emotions)—śringāra (sensuality) and śāntam (tranquillity).


This reading list will take you through the ideas, incidents, people, films, music and research that inspired us through the making of this story.



March 2023


  • When the incredibly talented English musician Ratan Devi—whose real name was Alice Ethel Richardson—married the prolific Sri Lankan writer and philosopher Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, the couple seemed to form a creative powerhouse. But, their promise was short-lived after they formed a friendship with the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley who was dubbed the ‘wickedest man in the world’ at the time. The couple got involved with Crowley’s sex rituals exploring the connection between sexual arousal and altered states of mind, ultimately leading to the destruction of their relationships, exposing the danger of the practice at inexperienced hands.

    1. 2023, Ed Holland, The singer and the mystic; Love, Music, and Magick in 1910’s New York. Medium.

    2. 1929, Magick in theory and practice by the Master Therion (Aleister Crowley). Crowley, Aleister. Lecram Press, Paris.



  • Sometimes, humans form sexual fixations with inanimate objects. Often, these objects resemble a glorified version of the human body—like sex dolls, mannequins or statues—and other times, they are objects that spark more abstract desires. Characterized by sexual or romantic attraction focused on particular inanimate objects. Individuals with this attraction may have strong feelings of love and commitment to certain items or structures of their fixation.

    1. Objectophilia. Wikipedia, retrieved March 2023: Object sexuality or objectophilia is a group of paraphilias characterized by sexual or romantic attraction focused on particular inanimate objects.

    2. 2022, In Love With A Chandelier, Objectum Sexuality. OMG Stories. Youtube.

  • 2018, Ulrich Pfistere. Divine ecstasy and eroticism in catholic art. München: In Catholicism—and similarly in most other religions— moments of religious rapture or elation, of prophetic inspiration or overwhelming emotion are thought to lead to ecstatic states while encountering divine sublimity. This short paper analyzes the idea through some of the most beautiful works of European religious art capturing divine ecstasy.


  • 2016, Madhura-rati. Hare Krishnas: Krishna is known as a god who accepts his devotees as lovers. Madhura-rati, or attachment in conjugal love, is described as the conjugal relationship experienced between the Godhead and the devotee in Krishna worship. Conjugal love is divided into two classifications-namely, dutiful love as husband and wife and amorous love as lover and beloved.


  • 2006, Divine Intoxication & Rumi. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee. Ascent Magazine: Rumi’s poetry touches on every dimension of the love between God and the mystic. This is one of the reasons that makes Rumi’s mysticism so attractive—it’s not simply the beauty of his language but also the emphasis on exalting affections. The lover he writes about is often unnamed and remains between divine and human.


  • Maithuna. Wikipedia, retrieved March 2023: Maithuna is an idea of spiritual union in tantric practices that involve both physical and metaphysical union, usually without any release of sexual fluids. Tantric teachers and practitioners describe it as a penetration of sexual energy, in which the two opposing forces, the masculine and the feminine, transfer and come to a balance; a sexual union of the subtle bodies.


  • 1981, Under Pressure. David Bowie and Queen. EMI Elektra Records: ‘Because love’s such an old-fashioned word, and love dares you to care for the people at the edge of the night, and love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves.’ The song is considered among the greatest musical productions of all time, and a twentieth-century anthem for universal love.


  • Anandamyi, Wikipedia, retrieved March 2023: Anandamayi was an Indian saint whose spiritual path was defined by the practice of love and joyfulness, known as the path of Bhakti (trans. Loving devotion). Her name—chosen by Ānandamayi herself during the self-initiation into a spiritual journey—translates to ‘joy permeated’. Anandamayi pointed to love as a path to understanding, and joy as a viewpoint toward truth.


  • 1969, My sweet lord. George Harrison. All things must pass. Apple records: George Harrison's ‘My sweet lord’ stands alone in the history of rock music for going against the secular grain as a full-on love song to the almighty. It was written by Harrison in the aftermath of his spiritual awakening following The Beatles’ visit to Rishikesh, India, in 1967 when they were learning from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The song captures what the musician felt as an overwhelming desire to be in union with god—an idea with roots that can be traced back to the eastern concept of monism which talks about being one with the only truth in the world. Peppered with blissed-out hallelujahs and Haré Krishna utterances, the song captures the idea of loving the divine in a way that was not limited to a single religion.


  • 1981, The essence of Yajnavalkya Smriti. Translated and interpreted by V.D.N. Rao, Mumbai: Yajnavalkya was a Vedic sage from c.700 BCE. He recorded observations of his philosophical explorations with remarkable lucidity and he was often overwhelmed by the sheer weight of this knowledge deeming it impossible to originate from his human mind. Therefore, he attributed this knowledge and works to the feminine icon of knowledge—Saraswati. He harboured a lifelong devotion to the goddess, writing hymns of praise to express his bhakti (devotional love) for her. But he considered his intellectual pursuits to understand the human mind and use that knowledge to structure society as the ultimate homage to the goddess of knowledge, and the only way in which he could truly ‘see’ her.


  • 2017, Longing for the Beloved. Mirabai Starr. Parabola: There is a longing that burns at the root of spiritual practice. This is the fire that fuels the spiritual journey for some. Romantic suffering seems central to this kind of devotion. Throughout history, there have been holy lovers who swear by the glorious sweetness that lies on the other side of yearning, when the boundaries of the separate self momentarily melt into the one reality.

Reading List, December 2022

  • 5 min read

-

Our monthly stories are productions looking to connect people to the magic of stories.

We create supplementary reading lists as a way to give you an insight into the inspirations and thinking behind our monthly stories. These reading lists take you behind the story, revealing the process of its making.

-


ree

Rasa → Śāntam: Peace or tranquillity. Deity: Vishnu. Colour: perpetual white. Śṛṅgāraḥ (शृङ्गारः): Romance, Love, attractiveness. Presiding deity: Vishnu. Colour: light green


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Archetype → Caregiver


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Although loving ourselves is easy to dismiss as self-help book junk material, it's at the root of learning to care for anyone or anything else. Self-love, when explored beyond the self-help fodder, is quite a difficult form of love to cultivate without conflicting with widely accepted ideas of humbleness, selfishness and what it means to be part of society.


It’s a form of love that calls us to be blatantly truthful, which opens the potential for it to become deeply uncomfortable. But, what does, after all, loving ourselves even mean— particularly if we’re aspiring to be unselfish and generous, and to outgrow the ego bubble that we’ve grown accustomed to calling the self? Why is it more natural to some people than others? What happens when self-love manifests in its physical expression conflicting with our deep-seated guilt and shame of selfishness?


The December 2022 monthly story explores some of these ideas through a character and a fictitious place. Together they channel ‘the caregiver’ archetype from Jungian psychology which we use as a storytelling tool. From another storytelling tool we use—the eastern performance art theory of Rasa, this story was constructed with the moods sāntam (tranquillity) and undertones of sringāra (desire).


This reading list will take you through the ideas, incidents, people, films, music and research that inspired us through the making of this story.



December 2022


  • Autosexuality was coined by sex therapist Bernard Apfelbaum in 1989 to refer to people who have trouble being turned on by someone else sexually. But, feeling turned on by yourself is common; some experience it more like an orientation, feeling more aroused by themselves than by others.


  • In the cautionary Classical Greek myth of Narcissus, we are given an insight into the dangers of solipsism and self-obsession. Narcissus, the son of the river god Cephissus and the nymph Liriope, was prophesied to live to old age, only if he never looked at himself. He gained many female admirers, entranced by his beauty, but rejected them all. Narcissus falls in love with his reflection, having chanced it in a river, at which he stared until he wasted away, and died. The word ‘narcissist’ derives from this story.


  • There is an almost immediate and automatic connection assumed between autosexuality and narcissism, for obvious reasons. But, the two are very different behaviours, almost contradicting one another. So, no—autosexuals are not necessarily narcissistic. Autosexuals are more comfortable in their own company, unlike narcissists who crave outside attention & constant validation. Autosexuals can be pleasers & daters who still prefer private personal sexual experiences, which contrasts with narcissism. Auto sexuality starts with self-consolation & going out alone before it becomes a preference.


  • 2013, Archetypes: A Beginner's Guide to Your Inner-net, Caroline Myss, Ph.D. : Archetypes are universal patterns of behaviour that, once discovered, help you better understand yourself and your place in the world. In this book, Myss writes about ten primary feminine archetypes that have emerged in today’s society: the Caregiver, the Artist/Creative, the Fashionista, the Intellectual, the Rebel, the Queen/Executive, the Advocate, the Visionary, the Athlete, and the Spiritual Seeker.


  • 2015, I arranged my own marriage; Arranged marriages and post-colonial feminism. Pande R., Newcastle University: This study of the practice of arranged marriage among women of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin resident in Britain is interesting because it examined the traditional approach to nuptials within a very different cultural context which is the UK diaspora. It examines the conflation of arranged marriages with forced marriages and the assumption that arranged marriages are examples of cultural practices that thwart individual agency.


  • When the stunning gold-gilded, brass statue of Tara arrived at the British Museum from Sri Lanka, it was seen as too dangerously erotic and voluptuous for public display; and it could be viewed only by scholars on request. But, Tara is a religious being, from Sri Lanka’s old Buddhist tradition that has no difficulty in combining divinity and sensuality—a concept perhaps alien to many cultures like those in Britain and even to current post-colonial Buddhist culture in Sri Lanka.


  • 2010, Turquoise in the Life of Native Americans, Oksana Y. Danchevskaya Moscow State Pedagogical University, Proceedings of the Eighth Native American Symposium: In many ancient philosophies connecting minerals to self-healing, turquoise holds a particularly revered place. Turquoise is believed by many energy healers as the stone for self-care because of its ability to induce self-forgiveness and self-acceptance when a user achieves resonance with the natural vibration of the mineral. Native Americans’ ideas about the metaphysical properties of the turquoise stone may have played a significant role in developing this reputation around the mineral as an element of self-care.


  • 2019, Objects of Despair: Mirrors. Meghan O’Gieblyn. The Paris Review: No common object has inspired obsession and satisfaction as much dread, confusion, and morbid anxiety as the mirror. Ever since their invention, mirrors have shaped our idea of the self, self-worth and identity to startling degrees.

  • Caribbean poet and playwright Derek Walcott—the 1992 Nobel laureate and a writer of such extraordinary poetic prowess—addresses the beauty of self-love in a poem titled “Love After Love,” found in his Collected Poems: 1948–1984 (public library). On an archival On Being episode titled “Opening to Our Lives,” mindfulness pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn reads Walcott’s masterpiece—undoubtedly one of the greatest, most soul-stretching poems on self-love ever written.


  • 2021, Abdallah Ghazlan, Tuan Ngo, Ping Tan, Yi Min Xie, Phuong Tran, Matthew Donough. Inspiration from Nature's body armours – A review of biological and bioinspired composites: Mother-of-pearl, or nacre which forms pearls, is key for some shellfish to protect and care for themselves; it’s one of the most fascinating and beautiful protective materials in nature. Mother-of-pearl makes up the inner shell lining of pearl mussels and some other mollusks. Pearls themselves are made of the same material. Scientists have been studying how molluscs use this material for self-care and protection so that we can understand its extraordinary resilience and shielding quality. Some of these findings could help create a blueprint for engineering tough new materials in the laboratory.




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