The rope around the neck kills.
The rope around the ankles thrills.
The same rope that thrills can kill when it is stiff.
The same rope, when flexible, challenges death.
Bungee jumping teaches us one thing: the rope decides the outcome.
Or does it?
Let’s explore.
The snake around Lord Shiva’s neck can happily exchange pleasantries with its nemesis, Garuda — as Kannadasan beautifully puts it in Paramasivan Kazhuthilirundhu — because the snake knows one thing: as long as it is around the Lord’s neck, it is safe.
The bungee jumper is much the same.
For a few exhilarating seconds, the jumper is having a perfectly intimate conversation with death, sustained by an almost absolute faith in the rope.
So, what is the rope?
Is it the Lord Himself, appearing for that brief interval when the jumper is in free fall?
And if the rope is the Lord, what does that make the maker of the rope?
Perhaps the ultimate Consciousness — beyond even our definitions of God.
Follow that thought a little further and something fascinating appears.
Could we, ever so briefly, be witnessing Advaita in action?
The maker of the rope has unknowingly created a manifestation of the Ultimate Reality. The jumper surrenders himself to it, not through philosophical understanding, but through trust.
How mischievous is this Supreme Consciousness?
It makes us strain our minds to an almost absurd degree just to glimpse the connection.
Or perhaps that very strain is the point.
Perhaps intense focus is simply the temporary dropping away of all distractions — all the noise of Maya — until what remains is the Consciousness that was there all along.
Belief.
Bhakti.
Perhaps these are the first gates before one reaches pure Advaita.
Dvaita, Advaita, and everything in between may then simply be milestones on the same grand journey — each one a higher truth, replacing what came before.
As Swami Vivekananda suggested, we are all moving from a lower truth to a higher truth.
Oh, what a fantastic game!
But let’s leave all that for a moment and come back to the basics.
Bungee jumping also gives us an intriguing corollary to the grand Advaitic metaphor of the rope and the snake — provided, of course, that we briefly suspend the Upamana Dharma, the “guardrails for using a metaphor.”
In the traditional metaphor, the rope is mistaken for a snake.
But suppose we turn the metaphor on its head.
The rope and the snake are the same thing — at least in the experience of the terrified observer.
There is no ignorance required for the rope to produce the consequences of a snake.
The rope, while remaining entirely a rope, could cause the person to panic, freeze, lose balance, or even die from the shock.
The snake need not exist for the consequences of the snake to become real.
The rope that thrills can also kill.
So, returning once again to the world of metaphors:
What decides the outcome?
The rope?
The maker of the rope?
The Lord around whose neck the rope—or snake—rests?
Perhaps.
But there is one more participant in this game.
You.
The jumper.
And what does that make the jumper?
Now you know the game.
Comments