The notion of lila, especially as seen through Shiva’s dice game, shows us an archetypal pattern that is at the base of the many different subjects we have been considering. The Cosmic Game is the birth process, and it is at heart of all creation, a literally universal pattern that pervades the entire cosmos. The play of consciousness, lila, is the death-rebirth process, this universal play is the process, the movement, the forming and reforming, the structuring, destructuring and restructuring, the constantly renewing, recycling, making of new things out of previous things, and eternally returning again and again. To paraphrase Billy Flynn in Chicago (Marshall, 2002) “call me crazy, but doesn’t it sound a lot like” . . . bricolage? It does, and we will follow up on this later.
Lastly, let me allude to what we have learned so far: We have seen that everything is really no-thing, that the universe is flowing movement, and is interconnected; that things which have come before help to form and inform the present. Ancient wisdom and modern science seem to be seeing many things similarly. Lila has divine roots and there is a lot of movement involved so if we try to stick to one side, we can get sick and become de-luded, out of play. We have seen the working of maya, that it is all an illusion, that we are all just making it up, and that it is all the result of Divine play. There are sometimes methods to madness, and strange attractors and archetypes help to make order out of chaos. Chaos can be our friend if we creatively participate in it like the ancient people did in their rites of passage, where they periodically renewed themselves and their world. Lastly, thanks to Grof’s cartography, we can know where we are, which helps facilitate effective and appropriate action. Now that we are familiar with the cosmic play, death-rebirth pattern, let us see how it plays out in the virtual realities of the upcoming "Kaleidoscope of Culture" section.