Creative healing methods, including ritual therapy, offer us ways to address all kinds of grief: subtle to catastrophic, known and unknown, recent and historical.
Yet materialism, which has dominated our intellectual culture since the Victorian age, covers fewer and fewer bases of life in the twenty-first century. The natural sciences are increasingly defined by quantum data, interdimensional formulas, and fields like neuroplasticity, which uses brain scans to demonstrate the capacity of thought to alter neural matter. Our ordinary reference points of life are in greater flux today than at any time since Darwinism upended what it meant to be human in the Victorian era.
In more than one contemplative tradition, the crossroads signal literal and metaphorical death. They symbolize a crisis or a point where a shift must be made to claim an alternate future.
Violence has become a structural part of the Colombian psyche perpetuating wounds even in the youngest members of the population. Healing these wounds is now a priority of peace agreements.
In this article, I will focus on the lengthy, convoluted, and symbolically weighty version of the Jaya, Vijaya, and Narasimha story that one can find in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, which I will henceforth refer to as the Śrīmad Bhāgavatam.