Samudra manthan
Churning the ocean
author: Matthijs Cornelissen
last revision: November 2020

Once again, the devas and the asuras, the gods and the devils, are fighting and as usual the gods are losing. At the beginning of their fights the gods always lose, just like in ourselves: the good parts may be good-willing but the dark parts are stronger. When the devas and the asuras are fighting, the devas lose until the moment comes that they call in the help of the Supreme, whether in the form of Shiva, Vishnu, or Brahma. By themselves, the gods are not strong enough, just like our mind is not always strong enough to conquer the instincts of the vital nature. But in the end, the devas always win because the devas know that there is something beyond them, while the devils think they are their own boss. The devas may call the Supreme Shiva or Vishnu, depending on the tradition the story belongs to, but the important point is that they call the Divine to help them, and it is then that they win. Now in this story, while the fighting is going on, the devas hear that in order to win, they need first to find the nectar, amrit. Amrit is a secret substance that makes both blissful and immortal, and the way to find it is to churn the ocean of life. And so they try. They take Mount Meru, the mountain at the centre of the earth, put it upside down in the ocean, wind the world-snake (which is the force of evolution) around it, and they start churning the ocean by pulling and then letting go, pulling and letting go, just as it was done when our grandmothers churned butter out of milk. But unfortunately the gods are not strong enough, so the ocean hardly stirs and they are getting nowhere. Vishnu then gives them a rather dangerous suggestion: he says they should ask the asuras to help them. It takes them time to agree, but when they finally do, things suddenly speed up: the gods pull on one side, the devils on the other, and an epic tug of war begins. It goes on and on, mount Meru turning then this side, then the other, and slowly, slowly, something deep below the surface of the ocean begins to stir. But, poor gods: it is not the amrit that rises to the surface, what comes out are the most terrible poisons! When the gods panic and cry for help, Shiva, comes to their rescue and drinks all the poison, which is why he is, till this very day, always painted in blue. But still, after a long and tedious battle, when all the darkness, all the poisons have been dealt with, the Amrit finally appears. The moment this happens, the gods get again terribly worried, because they think the asuras will get it first since they are always faster and way more clever. This time it is Vishnu who comes to their rescue. He manages to distract the asuras and gets them to start fighting amongst themselves, so that the devas can obtain the bliss and immortality that will enable them to defeat all the evil in the world.

The story offers a perfect description of what happens in ordinary life. We are all the time churning our own subconscious, sometimes the good forces win, sometimes the bad forces win, and we all know what comes out first. In our surface nature, we receive positive and negative influences. We try to keep it all in neat order, but it doesn’t work very well because the dark forces are too clever and overcome our better efforts. Worse, the moment we start taking it seriously and try to do something about it, it gets worse. When we begin to look inside, the first thing we find are more problems. We realise we had many more defects and difficulties than we thought. On the outside things looked quite ok but once we start looking behind the scene, we notice that we have all kinds of things that we never could imagine we had.

This is the dark corner of the subconscient realm which Freud discovered, and where he got stuck. He called it the unconscious, the place where we store the stuff that we don’t want to see in ourselves, but which remains there nevertheless. In asserting the existence of this subconscious realm, Freud was not wrong: when one stirs up the inner ocean, the first thing that comes out is all the stuff that we do not like to know about ourselves, all the things that we have suppressed; this is the material that comes up first. He also saw correctly that till we have properly dealt with this negative material, it continues to put up its dirty head and spoils the apparent beauty on the surface. Where Freud went wrong is that he hopelessly overgeneralised the discoveries he made and thought that this dark corner was all there was in our subconscient. In reality, there is besides the dark material he knew, a wide variety of beautiful inner material in the subconscient and that too influences us far more than Freud was aware of. We are much more connected to others and we can get influenced by forces from above as well as from below. We are influenced by much that is darker than what we know on the surface but we can also receive inspirations, visions, and intuitions that go way beyond our ordinary thought.

The Samudra Mantran is a wonderful rendering of the processes of self-development and psychotherapy. When one starts looking inside to discover more happiness and perhaps, who knows, enlightenment, the first that comes up is the darkness, but there are many other aspects to the story. The most important one may well be the distinction between the asuras and the devas, the devils, and the gods: the devils are convinced there is no-one beyond them, they are their own boss; the gods know they exist by the Grace, the Love, Light and Power of the Divine who is at the same time deeply intimate to them as well as infinitely beyond. A second message is that peace and quiet rarely lead to progress: it is the fierce tug of war between the powers of good and evil which gives the power of evolution enough energy to effect change. A third one is that one can try to deal with one's difficulties oneself, but that that doesn't always work: a real solution can only come when one hands the battle over to the Divine. That doesn't always make the battle less fierece or painful, but it is the only way to bring a permanent victory. The best way to deal with our anger, our jealousies, our desires, is to hold them up to the Divine and let the Divine handle them. If we deny them, then sooner or later they'll mess up our lives indirectly; if we try to fight them on our own, the fight may well go on forever. if we concentrate too much on them, we get lost in the darkness; The quickest and safest way is to pass them on to the Divine.

Psychologically, all this is real and concrete enough. As long as we are fighting with our mind against the darker impulses in our nature, there is not much chance that we will get anywhere. But if we find our soul, which is what is meant in the story with drinking the amrit, then we realise our immortality and obtain an unconditional inner delight. We become then the free, observing puruṣa, which can call in higher powers of harmony to deal with the darkness in our nature, and that works far better than what we can do with our own egoic strength. One could say that this is the core of Indian approaches to self-development as well as psychotherapy: we need to find our eternal centre to set our nature right.