Hippolyta

A switch

Chapter 20  Hippolyta

“I'm doing this to myself. I know it,” said Neela.

“You were responsible for getting kicked out of the village?” Charles asked.

“It's my dharma,” Neela replied, his voice was a little withdrawn but he was fighting to stay focused.

Together with Peter, the three of them walked at the edge of Neela's village, along the river as it flowed downstream.

“For the record, can you describe in one sentence, what might have happened to you?” Charles continued.

“I was completely destroyed....my joys....my passions....my identity....totally isolated.”

“How would you now describe this person who bought and managed a hotel and is walking with us today?”

Neela hesitated and then replied,

“This is just my shell, my physical body....,” he was saying, when Charles cut him off.

“How does your physical nature relate to your passions?”

“I was born with that.....it is my right....it represents my parents.....,”

“So you didn't create that. When you engage your passions to speak, you might have say, ' this is what every one says',” Charles suggested.

Neela turned to look at Peter. Peter made no motion to speak. He turned to Charles again.

“I understand what you are saying,” he said, “ I've read about people completely rebuilding....in Vietnam....Syria.....Bosnia... ,”

“That's what I mean,” Charles cut in warmly.

“You're saying that I ought to rebuild my passions, brick by brick.....,”

“Start with the small things,” Charles suggested.

Neela's legs had grown wobbly. They stopped to sit on some rocks by the river. Neela hung his head and wrestled with something in him. They waited. When he spoke again, he seemed quite clear on issues.

“I ought to go back to Srinagar,” he declared. “There's nothing for me here anymore.”

It had been almost two months since Neela returned to his village. The force of his youthful memories acted as magnet on him. His life as a child had been as if a dream. He had never truly related to the village in a living experience. All he had were memories, based on what he thought his experiences were and he was trying to make it real for him.

In the legend of Herakles, the hero was believed to have killed his wife and family, in a metaphorical destruction of his social nature. As atonement, Zeus had commanded that he spend a certain period living with Hippolyta, the Queen of the Amazons.

A man such as Herakles combines all the qualities of the creative force of the mahimorata and is possessed of an intuitive sense of its play with the innamorata. Any attempt to bring to him a learning encounters a response that is intimated as regards what the learning hopes to achieve.

In a learning situation, his defenses respond to justify his own actions and cultivate their own self sufficiency of purpose. This extends to practices of sodomy for an affirmation of its sexual self sufficiency.

However, sodomy as a substitute for sex between genders, denies the continuity of the species and the intimation of such a fact, is experienced in the individual as a sensation of self destruction. This leads to despair.

The Hippolyta factor is an instrument of nature and acts in accordance with its innate need to stymie the defenses of the individual. Accordingly, she relates to him in a manner as to take the opposite position of everything that he expresses, causing in him a reversal of attitudes and a convolution that is so severe, that it denies a thought even as it is born.

The effect of these conditions causes the individual and the society to gravitate to greater body mind impulses rather than the reasoning of the mind. In relying on the passions, the individual minimizes what was previously perceived as the power of thought in his actions.

Thereafter, in a culture that is based on the tenets of the body mind, the individual arrives at the perception of himself from another perspective and realizes the self prophetic nature of the mind in his actions. In overcoming this, the individual learns to relate to his physical environment and creates only those responses consistent with the stimulus of the environment.

In time, he cultivates a refinement in the understanding of intelligence and is able to bring himself into accord with the tenets of its practice. Such an understanding, he would find, aims to optimize our reasoning and the affirmation of the societal nature of our lives, as the best course for the continuity of the species.

In the East, the practice of nihilism, arose as a school of thought, that addressed itself to these issues, with the power of logical thinking as the substitute for intelligence. It continues to this day with different variations of the practice both as institutionalized learning and by individual effort in the life of the householder.

Neela's condition was therefore archetypical of the theme described. Its prescription called for the individual to be isolated in a social environment, in order to allow him an opportunity to re-cultivate his experiences from scratch.