Taste it! Breathe it in! The Next Big Thing!
What follows is an excerpt from the Forword to my book The Next Big Thing! by Professor Ananta Kumar Giri. Giri is a prolific writer, global wayfarer and deep thinker whose curiosity with the human condition is relentless and dynamic. He is a great co-traveller and spirit.
Forword by Ananta Kumar Giri (Extract)
The next big thing is already in us as a reality and a potential of blossoming and co-realization of intimacy and infinity, aspiration and grace, struggle and co-creative reconciliation. The next big thing is to realize our present wasted lives, as Marcus Bussey, the alchemist of soul, a sadhaka of a new cosmic humanity and my dear friend and inspiring co-traveller, tells us in his poem, ‘For Life is on him wasted’ found in this remarkable offering, The Next Big Thing:
Sad is the man who cannot dance
For life on him is wasted…
Tragic is the man who cannot love
For life is on him wasted…
Based upon our realization of wasted lives, the next big thing is to continue to struggle and aspire for realization of more fullness and manifestation of greater realization of our personal, social, cultural and cosmic potential. As Bussey writes in his heart-touching poem, ‘It’s TIime,’:
It is time to love and laugh more
And time to cry and grieve
It’s time to take responsibility in all its forms
It’s time to outlive the bad in all and seed the good
I am restless with this sense of timefullness of things.
This restlessness with ‘timefullness of things’ makes Bussey an explorer of a different time, a different being, a different temporality and spatiality — a pregnant temporality and pregnant spatiality — and an archive of alternative memories of past, present and future. This exploration also is a call for us to free ourselves from the clutches of presentism and an imprisoning logic of history and to always explore new movements of reality, realization, possibility and possibilization. In this journey we become new archaeologists, perhaps Tantric archaeologists of memory and future where we move beyond graveyards of wasted lives and cultures and see signs of a new meaning, a new co-creative future. As Bussey invites us to sing with him in his poem, ‘A New Renaissance’:
The memory of what was is alive in us, tickling our soul;
the hope for what might be, quickens the spirit and suggests
ever so cheekily a new memory, a reconfiguration…
But in this journey of excavation and new creation, memory work and meditations, our existing and dominant language of self, culture, society and the world fail us. Here we must acknowledge the limits of existing language. Perhaps in this sense, the great poet Paul Antschel Celan told us, that we can only stammer in our age. But while beginning with stammering with a sadhana of soul, language and the world, we can also create movements of a new language, poetry, self and society and this is the sadhana of The Next Big Thing. As Bussey tells us in his poem ‘The Next Big Thing’:
I am called to trust in Greater Things
Cast off the weight of the past
When I love I am expanded!
Fear cuts me off; diminishes me
And then I fail to see the pattern,
Fail to connect the dots and taste
My connection to all that is.
To move beyond fear is the next ‘Big Thing!’
To take up love as the challenge that enables,
To realise the power of collective movement where
The most mundane of experience reveals itself in a myriad of ways
To be a message to me, and you, that we can be so much more…
The next big thing is to realize that the world consists of Ananda, Joy or Delight, but also to realize how it is being destroyed by structures of social and soul domination and to strive to struggle for transformation. The next big thing is to realize, as it is written in the Upandishads, Ananda Brahmana Vidyan No Bibheti Kadachana — Knowing that the Brahma is Ananda [Joy or Delight], one is not afraid at all. But the next big thing is also to realize that Ananda calls for realizing the link between Anna and Ananda — food and bliss; and embodying this spirit of critical and integral Ananda, Bussey tells us, ‘Poverty and Planet call us to account!’ Further,
Material being is empty when soul is absent,
soul-sickness excavating the cave, hollow man-woman
dancing in despair when the lights go out
Taking this sadhana and struggle for Ananda further Bussey tells us:
Delight! Pure and simple.
Delight in skin and touch and breath.
Delight in the sense of being in the world,
crafted from it and falling ever into it.
Next time you encounter anger
greet her fairly and hold her close.
Know that all that is within is without,
the world is of our own making,
Yet the making is confused, hidden and labyrinthine.
Take everything personally and know that
nothing is personal:
Action is the only medicine
for the condition of life;
Love is the only balm.
