Go with the flow? Six plausible options for dealing with change

What is the proper response to this burning, bleeding, milk secreting, honey babbling world? It seems to me that the range of responses are pretty limited, and can be boiled down to six plausible options:

• acceptance and celebration (go with the flow) 
• detachment (disengage from the flow)
• imitation (be the flow)
• control (govern the flow)
• outright rejection and resistance (hate the flow)
• escape (ignore or deny the flow)

Let’s look at each in turn:

1. Acceptance and celebration (go with the flow). Some wonderful illustrations of this attitude to existence come from the Dionysian rites elaborated in Euripides’s great play, Bakkhai. In Greek myth Dionysos, the god of wine, represents:

• nature’s overwhelming persona degenerating energies; and
• amelioration of the persona’s suffering in the midst of those energies (via intoxication, spell, illusion, trance).

Dionysos was symbolized and mirrored in ancient rites, as when the Bakkhai’s  maenads braid snakes through their hair in honor of the god (like this quote, all subsequent quotes below come from scene 1):

[Zeus] crowned him with a crown of snakes—

Which is why the maenads catch these eaters of

What is wild and braid them through their hair.

And here is how Euripides presents the chorus’s call to join a Bakkhic celebration:

Crown yourself with ivy,

O Thebes, where Semele [the mother of Dionysus] lived!

Abound, abound in

Evergreen

Leaves and red berries, consecrate

Yourselves as Bakkhai with

Sprays of oak and pine!

Over your dappled fawn skins drape

White woolen curls and strands,

And with all your violent fennel-rods

Be holy! Now the whole earth

Will dance together when Bromion [another name for Dionysus] leads

Worshipers to the mountain. To the mountain—

where the throng of women

Wait together, stung to a frenzy and driven

Away from their shuttles

And looms to Dionysos!

The procession to the mountains is accompanied by the Korybantes, ecstatic drumming and pipe-playing young men devoted to the Phrygian mother-goddess Kybele:

Triple-crested Korybantes

Devised for me

The circle of stretched hide!

In the frenzy of the dance

They joined this beat with the sweet

Calling breath of Phrygian

Pipes, they gave the drum,

Pounding for the Bakkhic cries

Of ecstasy, to Mother Rhea.

And why is this procession into the mountains engaged in collectively? Because:

Our Dionysos rejoices when everyone is dancing.

Below is the chorus depicting this charismatic Dionysian rapture when it reaches the mountains. Notice the embrace of predatory aggression, the acceptance of whatever flows, and the celebration of fire, fast motion, vibration, sound, and leaping:

How sweet he is in the mountains,

When running with his worshipers he throws

Himself to the ground, wearing his holy fawn skin—

Rapture of killing and the spilled

Blood of eating

Raw the flesh of the hunted goat!

[. . .]

From the earth comes flowing milk, flowing

Wine, flowing nectar of bees! The Bakkhic One

Lifts his blazing torch high,

The sweet pine smoke streams

Like Syrian frankincense as he races

Holding the staff of fennel—

Running and dancing, joyously

Crying, Dionysos stirs

The straggling maenads to shake

With rapture and he whips

His long fine hair in the air of heaven.

Amidst their joyful cries

He roars to them, “Onward,

Bakkhai! Onward, Bakkhai!”

You are the pride of gold-

Giving Mount Timolos.

Sing of Dionysos to the thundering drumbeats,

Your shouts of rapture exalt

The god of joyful cry.

With Phrygian crying and calling,

When the melodious holy

Pipes with holy notes

Resound around those

Who throng to the mountain,

To the mountain!

Then, like a joyful foal, when it plays

Near the grazing mare, the woman

Worshiper swiftly, nimbly leaps!

This is acceptance.

Another way to think about “go with the flow” can be found in the 1970s poster caption accompanying an image of Swami Satchidananda riding a surfboard:

You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.

2. Detachment (disengage from the flow). One of the great texts of Buddhism, which T.S. Eliot likened to the Gospel of Matthew’s “Sermon on the Mount,” is the Buddha’s “Fire Sermon,” which, in Bhikkhu Thanissaro’s translation, begins thus:

Monks, the All is aflame. What All is aflame? The eye is aflame. Forms are aflame. Consciousness at the eye is aflame. Contact at the eye is aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the eye — experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain — that too is aflame. Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I tell you, with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, and despairs.

Buddha makes the same observations about the ear, the nose, the tongue, the body, and the intellect. Here’s how the deconstruction sounds as applied to the intellect:

The intellect is aflame. Ideas are aflame. Consciousness at the intellect is aflame. Contact at the intellect is aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the intellect — experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain — that too is aflame. Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I say, with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, and despairs.

And what is the result of experiencing existence as aflame? Disenchantment. In other words, once you get fed up trying to make permanent what is, in its very nature, not permanent, then you’re teachable; you’ve finally come to the end of your illusions, your delusions. This is followed by a loss of passion, which, according to the Buddha, is a desirable arrival point, since passion is at the root of suffering: 

Disenchanted, he becomes dispassionate. Through dispassion, he is fully released. With full release, there is the knowledge, ‘Fully released.’ He discerns that ‘Birth is depleted, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world.’

Here’s a photograph, from Wikipedia Commons, of the site in India where the Buddha supposedly gave his Fire Sermon:

3. Imitation (be the flow). Now we come to Friedrich Nietzsche. Like Euripides and the Buddha, Nietzsche recognized that existence is change, but his response was not to go with the flow, or disengage from the flow, but to be the flow. Not to do as one should, but to do as one will, is Nietzsche’s admonition. One need not submit to Dionysos as such, or disengage one’s passions to avoid disappointment and suffering, as Buddha prescribes. Instead, one can enjoin passion—enjoin life—with the relish of a predatory bird, as if one is the god Dionysos himself. The very last sentence of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo  is this:

Have I been understood? Dionysos against the Crucified.

4. Control (govern the flow). An extension of Nietzsche’s position, this is the Apollonian assertion of persona into Nature, and is exemplified by the hero of Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, Howard Roark. At the beginning of the novel, Roark, standing in an area of wilderness, surveys a cliff:

He looked at the granite. To be cut, he thought, and made into walls. He looked at a tree. To be split and made into rafters. He looked at a streak of rust on the stone and thought of iron ore under the ground. To be melted and to emerge as girders against the sky.

These rocks, he thought, are here for me; waiting for the drill, the dynamite and my voice; waiting to be split, ripped, pounded, reborn; waiting for the shape my hands will give them.

5. Outright rejection and resistance (hate the flow). This attitude toward existence can be found exemplified in 1 John 1:15-17 in the New Testament (KJV):

Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.

And don’t forget Dylan Thomas’s poem in which he urges his father not to “go gentle into that good night”:

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

6. Escape (ignore or deny the flow). This is the way of Don Quixote. Here you might simply live in the blissful imagination, or psychologically drop out via, say, immersion in a transcendental cult, or even just Gilligan’s Island  reruns. Living with nostalgia is one way to both ignore change and resent it.

Which of these six stances toward existence do I subscribe to? I suppose the art of life is to know what your purpose is, and which attitude is best applied to any given moment.

Or is this just me expressing my own incoherence?

Perhaps I’m missing something here. The opaque God of this energetic world is great and we mortals are small. Is anything, really, ever wholly adequate to coping with this fact?