Metaphysical decorating is about releasing the Energy in our environment, in the objects around us. This lesson, Energy Through Our Relationship with Objects, Lesson XI explores how.
In the first episode of Bill Moyers’ Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, Campbell told Moyers about the Hindu myth about a hungry monster, Kirtimukha. A demon is coveting the god Shiva’s wife, so Shiva creates Kirtimukha to devour the demon.
But then the demon turns remorseful. So Shiva forgives it and no longer needs the hungry monster.
But, then, that leaves Kirtimukha starving and rebuking Shiva for creating it. So, Shiva tells it to consume itself. Just as only the monster’s head remains, Shiva is so taken watching life feeding on life that he places Kirtimukha’s head at the entrances every shrine to Shiva and many to Buddha.
This parable tells us, Campbell explained, that we must accept reality’s shadow to live in this world — its struggle, sorrow, inequity, greed, cruelty, and every species’ desire to consume the other species. Shiva’s homage to Kirtimukha shows that we must accept and honor the material before we find the spiritual. Shiva emphasizes this pathway when he tells Kirtimukha:
“He who will not bow to you is unworthy to come to me.”
Finding the Spiritual Through the Material
The West has ancient traditions of saints, philosophers, and spiritual leaders showing and saying that the material world is evil. They espouse nonmaterial values over cravings for wealth and material belongings. It makes many of us feel ambivalent about things we love. We sometimes admire those who have more than we do.
But why must materialism and spirituality be mutually exclusive, an either/or? Why must loving the material be loving the spiritual less? Here is a reason:
Western philosophy convinces us that spirit and matter don’t mix.
To decorate metaphysically, in a way that releases Energy, we must overcome our biases for or against material and spiritual things both. Our beautiful belongings and physical comforts need not eclipse their spiritual properties, and our spiritual sensibility should not come to eclipse the physical beauty around us.
In metaphysical decorating, our relationship with the material and the spiritual is unified, inseparable, interdependent. Metaphysical decorating assumes that we are in a living relationship with our objects because a vital life force is part of them and part of ourselves.
It takes inner work to stop choosing matter over spirit or spirit over matter and to connect them. Objects of physical and spiritual beauty emit Energy for us; objects lacking physical or and spiritual beauty deplete us. When our mind and spirit are in tune, we feel our relationships with our objects. That is why Marie Kondo tells us to part with objects that do not give us joy. [1]
Objects Are Connected to Us
I do not completely agree with Ms. Kondo that we should just discard an object when it gives us no joy. We should first evaluate what it is about the object that leaves us indifferent or disturbed. Are we associating some mild irritation, scarcity fears, subtle tugs of unprocessed grief, or something else? As we part with objects that stifle our Energy, we are freed to experience remaining connections of the Energy of love, joy, and gratitude.
Objects and Body Schema
We have used reasonable speculation to examine decoration and our relationship with objects, but science is here, too. Neurologists say the human mind forms a model they call body schema to track where our body and its limbs are and what they are doing. Body schema tracks one’s relationship with objects. It registers our body in space. Our brains constantly update our body schema as we move. [2] We trip on a rug, and it helps us re-balance ourselves. It shows us to duck under overhanging branches.
Amputees’ phantom limb experiences are examples of body schema. They experience a lost limb as still there. They feel its pain and even such maddening sensations as itching.
Understanding body schema is helpful in psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, robotics, sports medicine, and metaphysical decorating.
Our Body Schema and Our Objects
Thanks to body schema, when we use our objects, they become us. That would explain why losing our possessions upset us. For me, losing a contact lens used to be like losing a part of myself, and now it’s when I misplace my reading glasses. For many people, a minor car scrape or dent is serious.
Body schema makes us feel that the tools we use are part extensions of ourselves. Or the car we drive! Cars are as tools, extensions of drivers’ body schema. Behind the wheel, we know when a car is about to cut us off and our emotions are on display.
Body Schema Experiments
How does body schema do all that? When we use a tool or drive a car, our brains begin to enlarge our body schema to incorporate its area. (See the diagram of body schema changes of rhesus macaque during and after they use a tool.) [3]
Body Schema, Movement and Energy
A tool is something that helps us do or change something, so might our brains interpret most anything in our environment as a tool? Are they the only things that can change the body schema? I actively move my down quilt to warm myself as I turn in bed at night. Would a functional MRI show that quilt becoming part of me? How about my treadmill? How about my espresso machine? No need to answer that question. I know that Nespresso and I share the same soul!
Let’s also think about the things we do not touch with our hands but with the movement of . . .
. . . Our Eyes.
Can it be that when we gaze at an object of beauty, it becomes part of our body schema? What happens when we sit in a room that creates energizing eye movements, beauty, and pleasure? Does our body schema become part of our environment, making a case that everything that surrounds us must be beautiful?
I believe it does.
And with a bow to Kirtimukha, we must understand that the objects we touch and the objects we see share their energy with us.
Picture Sources:
1 Logo of Mandarin Mansion. Line drawing based on the iron guard of a 15th century Chinese sword in the Royal Armories in Leeds
2 Kirtimukha Asparah Gallery, asparahgallery.com
3 Tumblr via Flickr: Sharon and Peter Komidar
4 deccanviews.wordpress.com
5 tumblr.com
6 en.wikipedia.org
7 know-your-heritage blogspost.com
8. Astamangal, art from Tibet, Nepal and India, info@astamangala.com
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There are two parts to this website, The Lessons which are more difficult in concept and the blogs which are lighter in nature. Blogs that you might enjoy which have the same theme as Lesson XI are:
A Lesson connected to Lesson XI is Our Relationship to Our Objects and the World, Lesson XII. Besides our individual interrelationships with objects, I believe that what we possess connects us to the subtle energy of other people, other cultures, and the planet itself. Material objects can be the most spiritual of commodities because they lead us to deal with the earthly lessons we are here to learn
Please note that my website allows you to leave comments at the end of the blogs but not at the end of each lesson. If you have a comment or question about a lesson, you may email me at ruta@rutas-rules.com