At times in our psycho-spiritual practice we need to be willing to appear awkward for a time as we reassemble and reacclimatize ourselves to ritual and ceremony, to preciousness and delicacy, and growing sensitivity. We are like little people overwhelmed by truth, divinity, and eternity, but alternatively we are like giants who have become self-inflated, blown up out of proportion, cumbersome and unable to respond to the grace of the sacred delicacy of the Divine.

In a previous period of my life I was a member of a film crew. We were located near a warehouse complex in London’s East End for the filming of Paul McCartney’s movie Give My Regards to Broad Street. This movie panned but it should have been big. It was full of celebrities, super-session musicians. The producer George Martin was there and Dave Edmunds, Eric Stewart and Ringo and Paul from the Beatles. All this at a time when the Beatles reunion (which never happened) was being hotly debated as usual, here was half of the band in a crummy warehouse in a London backwater. Everybody had eyes for the on-set recording of rock’n’roll that was taking place with Martin behind an enormous sound-desk and the supergroup romping through rock standards and old Beatles hits.

But I found myself distracted. Along with the celebrities, pop stars, and pretty actresses assembled there was the wrestler Giant Haystacks. He was seven feet tall, weighed 685 pounds, and was easily the biggest human being I had ever been in a room with. He was so big and heavy that the carpenters had had to take the doors jamb out to widen the entrance and reinforce the old Dickensian wooden floor to accommodate him.

Most of film work is waiting, whether you’re the star actor or a gofer. So I was sitting opposite Giant Haystacks in some awe, imagining what it might to be like to be so impossibly large when he leaned slightly sideways, bent forward, and very delicately retrieving a white paper cup from the floor where it had fallen, straightened up, and gently placed the cup on a little table beside him. I don’t know if he had dropped the cup or if it just happened to be there. What was extraordinary about the act was the delicate way he did it. And of course I could see he had to. Just for a few seconds I felt something of what it must be like to be him, the effort that was needed to execute such a simple task, the mindfulness needed to maneuver his bulk, the necessity of gentleness when from sheer weight, size, and forcefulness you could without thinking break, injure, or damage other people objects the environment around you so easily.

Today, in insensitive times, an era that is closed off to the sacred, we may for a while have to retrieve the white paper cup, learn to humbly lean sideways, bend forward and bring delicacy and exaggerated sensitivity to the retrieval of our souls. Like Gulliver in Lilliput we have become over large, overblown, and many things are out of proportion.

When I see documentary footage of the fakirs and sadhus at the tri-annual meeting known as Khumb Melah, where hundreds of millions of Hindu worshippers assemble for a ritual bathing, I am reminded of Giant Haystacks. The Khumb Mela is the unspeakably large Hindu gathering of holy men and women fakirs and sadhus, many of whom intentionally inflict physical hardships on themselves in the cause of peace or as a gesture of worship—arms held in the air for decades, some who never cease from standing, and others who sew their lips together and exist on liquids. Giant Haystacks was reputably deeply religious and he described himself as a total loner—both arguably qualities of the mystic. His surely was the way of the fakir. An unselfconscious sadhu, Haystacks had chosen—or perhaps it was chosen for him—the spiritual way of awareness of the bodymind, of the fakir overcoming the physical body as a way to God.

BLOG entry #61