I keep a small photo of a dear friend on the corner of my bookshelf. A little garland of dried flowers encircles its wooden frame.
It’s not really a photograph; it’s a simple montage: a silhouette of a woman swan-diving through space against a backdrop of stars that radiate out from the center of a distant galaxy.
It’s an image that, by my friend’s own declaration, tells us who she really is.
So, even though I have actual photographs of her, this is how I like to remember Lisa.
The dynamic form of the silhouette — the arc of her back, the projection of her torso, the extension of her arms and legs, her forward gaze — evokes a sense of fearless exhilaration.
If form follows function, then the function of this form is to experience complete freedom in perpetual flight through limitless space.
Freedom to go anywhere. Freedom to let go of going anywhere. Freedom to let oneself be carried by cosmic winds to wherever they may lead.
Freedom to love everyone and everything on a deep, spiritual level that reaches beyond the temporal dualities of relative good and evil.
This is the nature of vimokṣa, complete freedom that finds its ultimate fulfillment in complete love: love of everything, love for everyone, and the welcome reception of love from the totality of reality.
But does the totality of reality have any love to offer?
We project attributes of personhood on the universe often enough, usually as a neutral alternative to what we might otherwise characterize as divine reciprocation or even intervention.
But a universe that knows and cares about who we are and what we do is a conscious universe that’s equipped with the attribute of personhood.
It may seem counter-intuitive to the modern mind, but the idea of a personal universe is one of the core concepts of bhakti-yoga. Where modern materialism sees a random, impersonal, and meaningless universe, devotional yoga sees cosmic design by a conscious, caring force who endows the universe with intrinsic meaning.
As Swami Padmanabha puts it in his book Radical Personalism, bhakti-yoga posits personhood as “the locus and ultimate explanatory, ontological, and even theological principle of all reality.”
Which is to say that, from the perspective of bhakti-yoga, reality itself has the attribute of personhood.
To possess the attribute of personhood means, first of all, to be conscious, and secondly, to have senses that connect consciousness to the inner and outer worlds that consciousness is conscious of.
The coherent organization of senses requires a form. Our bodies are coherently organized sets of senses moving through a coherently organized natural world.
Similarly, if bhakti-yoga is right and personhood is the ultimate principle of reality, then reality itself would naturally have a form suitable for the ultimate expression of personhood: complete love.
Which is to say that the ultimate function of form is to act as a medium for love.
And an ultimate reality with a personal form designed for complete love would naturally be inclined to make the availability of that love known:
“O mighty armed, just hear my voice once again. Because I think of you as my dear friend, I shall speak my supreme message for the sake of your well-being.” – Bhagavad Gita 10.1
What I find especially striking about this verse and others like it that appear in the Gita is that they take the form of an invitation rather than a commandment. Love can’t be forced. Freedom is the prerequisite for love and complete freedom finds its ultimate fulfillment in complete love.
In the end, we go wherever our hearts take us. The cosmic winds that carry us to our next destinations aren’t just charged particles of pure chance; they’re energized by our desires and directed by the will of providence.
I’m grateful that the will of providence carried Lisa into my life, or me into hers, as the case may be. For the better part of a lifetime we shared an inside joke about the climactic line from a ridiculous 1958 cult classic sci-fi film: “Do you want to kiss me now?!”
An actress named Laurie Mitchell played the title role in the movie but, for me, Lisa will always be the Queen of Outer Space.
Wishing you all good fortune,
– Hari-k