Thursday, December 23, 2010

Home on the Range

I have always assumed that my surname, Angsten, was derived from the German Angst, with its negative connotations of fear and anxiety. While not exactly inspiring, it seemed suitable to a writer of adventure thrillers. In researching my latest novel, however, I've discovered a more positive spin on the name. It now appears perfectly--even cosmically--appropriate for an author named Angsten to be writing what I'm currently writing: a contemporary thriller about the origins of eastern mysticism and the age-old quest for liberation.

I've been doing a lot of reading on the ancient Vedic people--the Indo-European or 'Aryan' tribes that swept down into India from the steppes of central Asia early in the second millenium BCE. Like most of the Indo-Europeans, these Vedic nomads were in constant need of fresh pastureland for their cattle and horses. The Sanskrit scholar Wendy Doniger, in her recent book, The Hindus, describes them as basically "cattle herders and cattle rustlers who went about stealing other people's cows and pretending to be taking them back."In this regard--as well as in their fondness for gambling--the Vedic people resembled the cowboys of the 19th-century American West. They were driven, like their vast herds of horses, "to move on, always to move on, to new lands." This insatiable urge for expansion was supported by their religion and expressed in their collection of spoken prayer known as the Rig Veda--the oldest religious poetry in the world.

Among these poems the word prithu--'expansiveness'--is frequently encountered. Derived from the name of a mythical king who hunted cattle on the broad plain, prithu connoted something like 'the wide-open spaces.' And that's where my surname comes in:
"The opposite of this word prithu is the word for a tight spot, in both the physical and the psychological sense; that word is amhas, signifying a kind of claustrophobia, the uneasiness of being constrained in a small space. (Amhas is cognate with our word 'anxiety' and the German Angst.) In this context, amhas might well be translated, 'Don't fence me in,' since it occurs in a number of Vedic poems in which the poet imagines himself trapped in a deep well or cave, from which he prays to the gods to extricate him."
For these ancient cowboys, then, the term from which the name 'Angsten' is derived was less an expression of fear and anxiety than of the inherent human yearning for freedom.
That yearning went beyond the physical plane; it literally drove these cattle rustlers into the spiritual realm. The ninth book of the Rig Veda celebrates a fiery hallucinogenic plant known as soma, which played a key role in several important Vedic rituals. The following is a typical passage:
We have drunk the soma; we have become immortal; we have gone to the light; we have found the gods. What can hatred and the malice of a mortal do to us now? The glorious drops that I have drunk set me free in wide space. (8.48.3)
The entire book reiterates this blissful theme of transcendence. Professor Doniger concludes: “The feeling of expansiveness, of being set free in wide space, is not merely a Vedic political agenda, an expression of the lust for those wide open spaces, it is also a subjective experience of exhilaration and ecstasy.”

Though today we do not know what the soma plant was, it's easy to imagine its possible influence on history. The Vedic hymns it inspired formed the fountainhead of Indian civilization and the beginnings of Hinduism, the world's oldest living religion. It may just be possible, as many have suggested, that it was soma that spurred those early cowboy/mystics to probe deeper into the nature of reality, to learn how to harness the wild horse of the mind, to whip a galloping thought across the infinite Ground of Being.

11 comments:

  1. i'd like to think that we're all 'resonations' of the infinite, sort of a localized manifestation of the 'force'
    have you been able to find any teachings that suggest how to hold these thoughts and perspectives when at work? that's the hardest thing for me

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  2. Beautiful comment, and your question is right on the money. How to keep the transcendent perspective when plunged in the tumult of action. It's exactly the problem my novel attempts to address, with my hero caught in the midst of a war. For me, that would be the ultimate test: to carry the Infinite into a battle. It's the same story told in the Bhagavad Gita, that consummate work of the Vedas. I recommend Christopher Isherwood's crystalline translation, and suggest that you read it daily--right after you meditate.

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  3. Modern man, being non-nomadic, may never find greener pastures. They may travel, but do they see? or do they look? Catch my meaning David?
    When one learns to truely see, they can then stop the world.By stopping the world,one finds the freedom to be able to travel beyond it.These thoughts arise from the knowledge I learned long ago from the books of Carlos Castaneda as a student of the Yaqui Indian culture.You remind me of him a lot.

    However, you have a much broader mind and spirit.Your fiery quest for knowledge of MANY other cultures is indeed, in my opinion, a sure sigh of a true seer.I am glad you are excited about the deeper meaning of your surname. You, Mr.Angsten, have implanted a visual in my mind of you sitting atop a restless steed, trying to guide an aimless herd (your readers) to greener pastures where there just might grow some interesting, mind opening plants to graze upon. "Freedom Rider"

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  5. Thanks so much for that, Karen. Very well said. People like you make it fun to be alive.
    I, too, was a Castaneda fan, and studied his work in a course at Grinnell. Though I hardly consider myself a 'seer,' I do try to see things more clearly as I write. To me, in both reading and writing, that's the essential pleasure.

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  6. To clear things up from my last post, when calling you a 'seer' I did not mean in the prophetic sense. I meant you stop to really see what you are looking at. My command of the English language does not always deliver my meaning.Perhaps this is my first incarnation into an English speaking culture!

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  7. Your command of the language is excellent--I understand your meaning exactly!

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  8. Thanks Mr Angsten.......I am wondering if Carl Jung's "Man and His Symbols" has had an impact on your thinking and writing?

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    1. Karen, just wanted you to know the new book is finally out-- The Assassin Lotus. Hope all is well.
      --David

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  9. I have within an arm's reach a thumbed-to-pieces paperback of MAN AND HIS SYMBOLS I bought back in the 70's, along with at least a dozen more books by Jung and his various philosophical descendants--James Hillman, Anthony Storr, Rollo May, Bruno Bettleheim, Robert A. Johnson, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Joseph Campbell, and particularly Marie-Louise von Franz, who is brilliant on fairy tales (I mentioned her covertly in the Author's Note to DARK GOLD, a novel she very much helped me to write). Jung's conceptions of the archetypes, the unconscious, the Self, the shadow (see aforementioned Author's Note) and his writings on symbolism and mythology have become intrinsic to my thinking and writing, and I go back to 'rediscover' his work quite often--it always seems fresh and revitalizing. Jung is a real pal for artists and writers. He's been a great guide and companion to me.

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  10. It seems we share several well worn books by awesome writers...
    Edith Hamilton, Carlose Castaneda,
    Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and perhaps others, maybe Shinzen Young
    or Anodea Judith among others. So, why is it you are an author and I am just an old hippy constantly flipping through the pages of such books? I know the answer to that question. You have the brilliance to put them all together into novels that both enlighten and thrill the very soul.I am simply happy to let you do the writing, while I sit in my lowly abode and enjoy them!

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