From Dancing Shiva to the OB-Van: How Symbolism, Suffering, and Ananda Reframe Reality

Walk into certain temples in India and you’ll see statues and structures that stop you in your tracks.

A giant stone boulder perched impossibly on a slope.
A Dancing Shiva frozen mid‑movement, surrounded by flames.
An entire hall lined floor to ceiling with mirrors, so that every object you see reflects your own face back at you.

At first glance, these images feel exotic, maybe even decorative. You notice the craftsmanship, the scale, the strangeness. But without context, you miss what they are actually doing.

They are not just art. They are interfaces.

They are carefully designed tools to remind you of something you keep forgetting: who you really are, and what this reality is for.

For leaders in complex environments, that question is not theoretical.

Where you anchor your identity and how you frame reality quietly shapes every decision you make.

The arm and the foot: forgetting and access rights

Consider the famous image of the Dancing Shiva.

In this figure, nothing is random. Each element carries a specific meaning:

• A small drum in one hand represents creation.
• Another hand extended in a gesture of reassurance represents preservation.
• A hand holding fire represents destruction.
• One leg stands on a dwarf-like figure, symbolizing ignorance or inertia.
• And then there is a detail that is easy to overlook: an arm stretching across the body, partially blocking the view of the heart, while the raised foot points away.

That arm is not just a pose. It is the veil of forgetting.

It represents limited access rights to the full field of consciousness: the amnesia that allows a vast informational field to have a localized, partial experience through a single human life.

The raised foot plays the opposite role. It is grace and reconnection: the restoration of access, the moment when the veil lifts and you remember more of what you are.

The interplay between arm and foot captures a deep dynamic:

• Forgetfulness limits your access so you can have a specific, localized point of view.
• Grace restores access so you can remember the larger context.

Without the arm of forgetfulness, there would be no individual vantage point. Without the foot of grace, there would be no path back to awareness.

Both are necessary for the “game” to exist.

The mirror temple: everywhere you look, it’s you

Now imagine walking into a temple where everything is covered in mirrors. Statues, carts, figures, walls – all tiled with mirrored surfaces.

Wherever you turn, whatever you look at, you see yourself.

You don’t need anyone to explain the symbolism. The architecture itself delivers the message:

Everything you encounter reflects you back to yourself.

For a leader, this is not a mystical abstraction. In daily life, every conflict, every admiration, every irritation is a kind of mirror:

• The traits you most resist in others often point to unacknowledged aspects of you.
• The qualities you most admire show you latent or underused potentials in yourself.
• The situations that keep repeating highlight where your worldview is too narrow.

The mirror temple simply makes that logic impossible to ignore. You cannot look “out” without also seeing “in”.

Combined with the Dancing Shiva, a pattern emerges:

• The veil of forgetfulness lets you experience yourself as separate from what you see.
• The mirrors expose that separation as an illusion, showing you that what you meet is, in some sense, yourself.

This is not just spiritual poetry. It’s a description of how learning really happens: through reflection, friction, and repetition.

Didactic tools, not decorations

In traditions that use these symbols, none of this is meant to be purely aesthetic.

• The Dancing Shiva embodies the cycles of creation, preservation, destruction, forgetting, and awakening.
• The mirror temple embodies the insight that all appearances are self-reflections.
• Even the stark practice of meditating near burning bodies is a tool: a way to confront the impermanence of the body and loosen identification with it.

These are not arbitrary rituals. They are didactic devices.

They exist to help you negate mistaken identities:

• “I am this body.”
• “I am my possessions.”
• “I am my thoughts and emotions.”

By bringing you face to face with death, transience, and reflection, they methodically strip away layers of misidentification and invite a deeper question:

If I am not fundamentally my body, not my assets, not my transient mental states…
What am I actually?

Future enlightenment as a trap

In modern culture, we tend to approach this question like a project.

We want a spreadsheet:
Meditate X minutes per day, do Y retreats per year, follow Z practices, and—after a certain number of hours—you “qualify” for enlightenment.

This mindset contains a hidden assumption:
“Right now, I am not that. If I work hard enough, I might become that in the future.”

But that assumption conflicts with a deeper perspective voiced in this conversation:

You are already the larger consciousness you are seeking.

The issue is not becoming, but remembering.

When you frame enlightenment as a future achievement, you reinforce the sense of lack:

• “I am not there yet.”
• “I do not have it yet.”
• “I must perform certain tasks to earn it.”

The very belief “I lack this” is what keeps the perceived distance alive.

From this angle, many spiritual instructions are misheard. If someone tells you to stand on one leg for a day, but never explains why, you fixate on the action, not the intended recognition.

The more useful shift is subtle:
Not “I will one day become what I’m not,” but “I am already that, and I am rediscovering it under layers of forgetting.”

Desire, lack, and the mechanics of manifestation

The same pattern shows up in how we think about desire.

When you want something—a promotion, a relationship, a specific outcome—what is often most active under the surface is not the image of the desired object, but the felt sense of “I don’t have it.”

That background belief is described as the true “manifesting” element.

You might think you are broadcasting “new role, more impact, more income,” but what your system is actually saturated with is “I am lacking. I am incomplete until this happens.”

From a non-dual perspective, the more constructive orientation is:

• Recognize that, at the deepest level, nothing is missing.
• Act from fullness, not from compensating for a perceived hole.

That doesn’t mean passivity. It means that your actions are not driven by the need to patch a fundamental deficiency, but flow from a recognition that what you are cannot be improved or diminished by external conditions.

Karma and the weight of intention

This leads directly into the question of karma.

In this conversation, karma is framed very concretely:

• Karmic activity: doing something in order to get something (action driven by compensating for lack).
• Non-karmic activity: acting without hidden agenda, without trying to fix a perceived deficiency.

Example:

• You paint simply because painting is an expression of what you are. You are not trying to prove your value or secure an outcome. That is non-karmic.
• You paint with the primary focus on selling the painting to solve a money problem. The action is now tied to a lack-based intention and becomes karmic.

From this vantage point, much of modern life is structured to generate karma:

• Goal-setting centered on what you “don’t have yet.”
• Productivity driven by fear of falling behind.
• Social compliance rooted in the fear of exclusion or punishment.

We are conditioned to operate from compensatory intent rather than from sufficiency.

The idea of a truly non-karmic life—a life where actions arise from completeness rather than lack—is radically at odds with how most systems around us are built.

Fear, consequences, and the stories that bind us

Why do we cling so tightly to karmic, intention-driven living?

Largely because of fear of consequences.

• We fear being excluded from the group.
• We fear legal or financial penalties.
• We fear illness or physical death.

So we tell ourselves we “have to” play the game a certain way to stay safe.

The conversation invites a more provocative question:

What if even those feared outcomes—exclusion, fines, imprisonment, death—were also seen as part of the larger field of experience?

That doesn’t mean recklessness or glorifying harm. It means noticing how much of our behavior is driven by a particular identity-anchoring:

• If you are your role, your possessions, or your physical form, the potential loss of these is unbearable.
• If you see yourself as an expression of a larger informational field, the stakes are different.

The same external event looks completely different depending on which “you” you think you are.

Truth vs happiness

This leads to a crucial distinction:

Most people organize their lives around happiness.
This usually means: maximize pleasant experiences, minimize painful ones.

Within duality, that is understandable:

• A healthy body feels better than an ill one.
• Comfort feels better than discomfort.
• Gain feels better than loss.

But happiness, in this sense, is always conditional. It depends on:

• Getting the promotion
• Keeping the relationship
• Staying healthy
• Achieving the “red car” or whatever symbol of success you have in mind

The conversation proposes a different organizing principle:

Don’t orient around happiness. Orient around truth.

Truth, in this context, means recognizing the actual nature of your identity:

• Not just as a body or a psychological story
• But as a field of consciousness or “information-field” that uses all experiences—joyful and painful—to know itself.

When you truly anchor in that, a different quality of joy emerges: Ananda.

Ananda is not “I got what I wanted.” It is the bliss that arises when you see that:

• Every experience, pleasant or painful, contributes to self-recognition from the perspective of the larger consciousness.
• To reject any part of the experiential spectrum would be to reject parts of yourself.

If you selectively push away the painful half of the spectrum, you are not only staying in duality, you are also cutting yourself off from part of your own wholeness.

The coin you can’t split

A core metaphor in the conversation makes this concrete.

Imagine a coin:

• One side is labeled “joy,” the other side “suffering.”
• You would prefer to receive only the joy side.

But reality never hands you half a coin. You always receive the whole thing.

• You can’t have joy without the possibility of suffering.
• You can’t have gain without the possibility of loss.
• You can’t have love without the possibility of grief.

They are not separate objects; they are two aspects of one process.

Trying to live a life of “joy only” is like collecting coins but insisting on keeping only one side. The attempt is doomed from the start.

From the non-dual perspective, liberation doesn’t come from eliminating the “bad” side. It comes from recognizing that both sides are aspects of the same reality and integrating them:

• Not “I will eliminate suffering,”
• But “I will accept and integrate suffering as fully as joy, knowing both are expressions of one field.”

That is where Ananda becomes possible: when you see the perfection of the whole mechanism, not just the pleasant outputs.

Cameras, the OB-van, and the informational field

To understand this integration more viscerally, another metaphor appears: the camera and the OB-van.

Picture a live sports broadcast:

• Around the stadium, there are many cameras. Each has its own angle, its own zoom level, its own limitations. Each camera operator is intensely focused on “their shot.”
• Somewhere in a truck outside, there is an OB-van (outside broadcast van), where all camera feeds converge. A director sits there, watching every angle, switching views, orchestrating the whole transmission.

Now translate that:

• Each human being (and perhaps every animal, every form of life) is like a camera: a local perspective, a particular lens on reality.
• The informational field or larger consciousness is like the OB-van, the place where all perspectives are available at once.

From the camera’s point of view:

• Being dropped, damaged, or turned off is a disaster.
• Its entire world is that one angle.

From the OB-van’s point of view:

• Losing one camera feed changes the overall picture, but the broadcast continues.
• The director sees all angles simultaneously and can appreciate the richness that comes from having many different lenses.

In identity terms:

• When you identify solely as the camera operator, you are at the mercy of every local fluctuation in your life.
• When you begin to identify as the director in the OB-van, you still care about each camera, but you see them as part of a much larger tapestry.

The key shift is not to stop being a camera, but to remember that you are also the director.

Training for the hard moments: marination and firefighting

It’s one thing to nod along to these ideas while sitting comfortably in a garden with coffee. It’s another to hold them when life gets rough: in war, in illness, in loss, at the moment of death.

The conversation is candid about this:

• It’s relatively easy to agree with non-dual logic in pleasant conditions.
• The test is whether you can access the same insight with a diagnosis on the table or real danger in front of you.

Two metaphors describe how to prepare:

1. Marinating meat
• Repeated reflection on these ideas is like marinating meat: the longer it sits, the deeper the flavor seeps in.
• Over time, the worldview doesn’t stay just intellectual; it permeates your responses.
2. Firefighter training
• Firefighters don’t wait for a real blaze to learn how to handle a hose. They practice on controlled fires.
• Similarly, thinking through and feeling into these perspectives in everyday conditions gives you “muscle memory” you might draw on in crisis.

The point is not to pretend that you will be perfectly serene in every situation. The point is to cultivate enough familiarity with the OB-van perspective that, when life gets hot, you have at least some chance of remembering there is more to you than the camera you currently inhabit.

Identity anchors and a stable harbor

Ultimately, the question behind all of this is very practical:

Where do you anchor your identity?

You have options:

• House, car, bank account – all volatile and vulnerable to external change.
• Body – guaranteed to age, become ill, and die.
• Thoughts and emotions – constantly shifting and often contradictory.
• Informational field / larger consciousness – the background in which all of the above arise and disappear.

Anchoring in the first three almost guarantees chronic anxiety. Sooner or later, each will be challenged or removed.

Anchoring in the last does not make you invulnerable at the human level. You will still grieve, hurt, and fear. But it changes the backdrop against which those experiences unfold.

You are no longer just the camera trying to keep its lens intact. You are also the director in the OB-van, watching all feeds, learning from the entire spectrum, and recognizing that even the most difficult shots are part of a larger creative process.

This doesn’t trivialize suffering. It reframes it.

And that reframing is not just a private spiritual hobby. It directly shapes how you lead, how you design systems, how you respond to crisis, and how you hold power.

In the end, what the Dancing Shiva, the mirror temple, the cremation grounds, the coin, the cameras, and the OB-van are all pointing to is the same thing:

You are more than the narrow story you usually tell yourself.
You are the field in which all stories take place.

Recognizing that does not make life easier in the usual sense.
But it can make it truer. And from that truth, a different, deeper kind of joy—Ananda—can arise.

(This article was inspired by a Conscious Conversation with a dear friend & professional colleague on 12th July 2024.)(ID:CO|AF)