Can a ritual performed in a dream be for real? In the sacred
literature of India, there is no doubt. Mind you, the ritual conducted in the
dream world may involve living a whole life in another reality. The remarkable
story of King Lavana, as recounted in the Yogavasistha, is an example.
In the lush country of the northern Pandavas, a king called
Lavana performed a complex religious ceremony in his mind. It was the sacrifice
of royal consecration, which made him a true king. What he accomplished in his imagination
was entirely real. But there were consequences.
Lavana is sitting
on his throne when a magician appears, bows and invites the king to watch a
marvelous trick. When the magician waves his peacock-feather wand, a man enters
leading a horse. The king stares at the horse, transfixed, and then begins to
fall from his throne. The servants catch him, but he is completely disoriented;
he does not know where he is.
When he recovers himself, he explains that he
believes he mounted the horse and galloped away hunting across a great desert
and into a jungle until he was pulled out of his saddle by a creeper and left
swinging in a tree. He was starving by the time he was discovered by an
Untouchable girl who agreed to rescue and feed him on condition that he married
her and lived with her in her village.
He spent sixty years with her, and had
children, and ate carrion in cremation grounds, and forgot he had ever been a
king - until a terrible drought struck the land and, in desperation, he ordered
his son to kill him and eat his flesh. He was about to throw himself on the
pyre when a great shout restored him to his throne.
As he finishes this speech, the magician
vanishes. It now becomes plain that what the fellow with the wand effected was
no mere conjuring trick but a "divine illusion" designed to
demonstrate the nature of reality.
Lavana sets out to revisit the landscapes of
his adventure - and finds the desert and the jungle he crossed, and the
tree where he hung, and the village of the Untouchables and the crone who was
his mother-in-law and recalls the king who married her daughter and the drought
that destroyed the rest of the family.
We eventually learn that Lavana's sufferings as an
Untouchable were not only real but were arranged by Indra, to fulfill the
ritual requirement that a king who performs the sacrifice of royal consecration
must endure twelve years of suffering. By effecting the whole complex ceremony
of the royal consecration in his mind - through an act of imagination - Lavana
had accomplished instant initiation.
Wendy O'Flaherty comments on this tale from the Yogavasistha
in her excellent book Dreams, Illusion and Other Realities: "To this day,
many Indian sects hold that anyone who dreams that he is initiated has in fact
been initiated." This has ancient precedent. In Vedic sacrifice, one
priest serves as the witness. He does nothing except think the
sacrifice while others make the physical motions.
Image: Indian king (Maharaja of Patiala) in 19th century picture
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