King Lear and The God of Nature

A central pillar of the Sat Yoga Wisdom School curriculum is our weekly Study Group, taught by Radha Ma. For the past year and a half, she has been illuminating many of Shunyamurti’s classic teachings, often returning to retreats and modules from my earliest days at the ashram. We are currently in Section Three—Powers & Pathways of Consciousness—Unit One, The Seven Gods. In the Study Group that inspired this article, Radha Ma delved deeply into the first of these seven gods: The God of Nature, and also touched on the second, The God of Unmasterable Emotions. As I listened, it occurred to me that the inner struggle between The God of Nature and its antithesis—the anti-god of Nature, Savagery—forms the central conflict at the core of King Lear, Shakespeare’s great alchemical masterpiece.

“The emotions that were perceived as our Nature as thunder became warring gods inside of us in the mythos time, and then became complexes in our mind that we could no longer master.”

— Radha Ma, Study Group, May 10, 2026

Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead.

— Act IV, Scene 7

Both Shunyamurti’s teachings and Shakespeare’s plays are alchemical maps of consciousness: Shakespeare at the level of mythos and Shunyamurti at the level of the ultimate Real. Every teaching transmits Truth that coheres around a central question that confronts the ego and ignites the buddhi. Every teaching offers a map out of the delusion of desire and fear. And I am always left with that choice: will I reflect upon this question and allow it, like acid, to dissolve my ego defences, or will I censor and forget and allow myself back into fantasy, projections, and jouissance?

In this Study Group, the question I was left with was: what power controls my psyche? Why am I still a slave to the rage that erupts within me? And how can I overcome the savagery within that is then projected outward as my own unmasterable emotions? The answer was direct and the map crystal clear: humility and reverence must be cultivated and dharma must be cleaved to. I must dismantle my ego defences and ignite the true feeling function to be free of the infernal anti-god within.

The teaching, as I understood it in a nutshell, was this: The God of Nature is the primordial and perfect unity of all three Reals. It is not a concept or an idea, not something we experience, but the ultimate, unfathomable manifestation of God. We are That.

Once we lost our resonance with Nature, the overwhelming forces that had previously been encountered as objective powers were personified as gods in myth and have now devolved into psychological complexes, pathologies, and symptoms. In these dying days of Kali Yuga, we have long since lost our reverence for Nature. We have debased the living world, turning it into a prostitute to be used and abused for our own profit. We can no longer tolerate resonating at the high vibrational frequency of the God of Nature. And so we find ourselves enthralled by, and worshipping, the anti-gods. The anti-god of Nature is Savagery. We have severed ourselves from the true feeling function, becoming capable of savage anger, heartless cruelty, and, in its psychopathic expression, murder.

And the Ariadne’s thread offered in this teaching to lead us out of this inferno? To restore ourselves to our own true divine nature, we must restore the feeling function. I had always been under the impression that I was “in touch” with the feeling function—or at least with my feelings—but what I understood from this class was that this was not at all the case. What I am in touch with is my own hypersensitivity. My emotions still erupt on a hair-trigger of defences, and yes, I can also be loving and kind, but this is not the feeling function. It is the slings and arrows of my own outrageous misfortune, oscillating between the sweet molasses cover and the underside of pride and arrogance.

The true feeling function is born of reverence and humility. I must learn to decipher my unmasterable emotions through Atmanological sessions and be humbled at last. I must encounter the wrath of the forest, face directly the forces of Nature, feel the overwhelming power that I do not possess, and bow before it. Only through such humility can true rapport become possible.

And is this not also the story of King Lear? An alchemical map of consciousness that depicts the fall from the God of Nature into savagery, unmasterable emotions, fragmentation, madness, and, through the direct encounter with Nature, the humbling and surrender of the ego, rebirth as soul, and, in the end, spiritual restoration.

What has enabled me to understand Shakespeare as the great alchemist that he is, and as a symbolic, mythopoetic call and response to Shunyamurti’s teachings, is Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, an extraordinary book by the great English poet Ted Hughes.

The central thesis of the book is that Shakespeare’s plays, from All’s Well That Ends Well to The Tempest, form a single vast myth—a kind of Shakespearean Mahabharata. At the centre of this myth is the Goddess of Complete Being, a total feminine presence encompassing the three great aspects of the Goddess: the Mother, the Sacred Bride, and the Queen of Hell. Shakti in all her glory and power. In each play, the ego, through pride, envy, arrogance, or ambition, rejects and casts out this divine feminine totality and must therefore encounter her dark aspect.

In the great tragedies, such as Macbeth and Othello, this encounter leads to the complete destruction of the tragic hero. But in King Lear, Hughes sees a new formulation within the larger arc: Lear casts out the Goddess, encounters the Queen of Hell, is stripped bare, and is finally humbled and reunited with his soul. Complete transcendence will not come until the final plays in the cycle.

At the beginning of the play, the kingdom still outwardly reflects a coherent cosmic order. Lear is king, father, and symbolic centre. His power is absolute. Yet internally he has already lost contact with the God of Nature. It becomes clear in the first scene that he no longer lives in reverence, but rather in narcissistic demand for mirrors of admiration.

The ageing king gathers his three daughters to divide the land equally between them. But first he asks each to offer declarations of their love. The elder two, Goneril and Regan, oblige, each striving to outdo the other. But his youngest and most beloved, Cordelia (cœur de Lear, the heart, the soul of Lear), cannot heave her heart into her mouth and speaks one of my favourite lines in all of Shakespeare:

Love, and be silent.

As Hughes writes:

Lear adopts a novel method of gaining reassurance [...] the love test. This provides the essential opening love crisis. Goneril and Regan win, by their shameless, voluble exaggeration of what will turn out to have been a lie. Cordelia loses by failing to find words that will express her conception of the truth. Lear interprets Cordelia’s failure to use the unscrupulously false language of her sisters as a flat denial of the ‘total, unconditional love’ which he demands.

Lear flies into a rage, and we witness the God of Unmasterable Emotions erupt through him for the first time. He divides the kingdom between his two elder daughters and declares that he will remain king in name only, residing with each of them in turn for a month, attended by one hundred knights. But when he first travels to Goneril and then to Regan, their true faces are revealed—as aspects of the Queen of Hell herself.

As Hughes writes:

Banishing Cordelia, Lear has banished his soul, and is sleepwalking in the soulless, ‘mad’ kingdom of his Tarquinian pride, ruled by Goneril and Regan. (He has thrown away the Eye—in the terms of the Egyptian myth—which was the divine sanction of his own kingliness, as well as Wisdom, Truth, Peace.)

They conspire to reject and humiliate their father, and in the end he is driven out into the wilderness, into the great storm, to confront Nature in all her power.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! Blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!

— Act III, Scene II

At the same time that Lear is howling at the storm without, he is battling the God of Unmasterable Emotions within. Lear’s rule collapses outwardly at the very moment his own psychic world fragments inwardly.

For now, let us leave Lear battling the storm and turn to another thread of the play. The aspect of King Lear that feels like the most direct expression of my own inner struggle, especially when seen through the lens of this teaching, is the story of the Rival Brothers, Edmund and Edgar.

Edmund embodies the fall into the anti-god of Savagery—clawing for revenge—while Edgar strips himself of all egoic self-images and goes naked into the forest, becoming Mad Tom: poor, humble, and reverential.

But as an actor in London, it was always the part of Edmund that I wanted to play, and it was his speech at the beginning of the play that first fused this teaching and the drama in my mind.

Edmund is the bastard, the illegitimate son, and in this speech he sets in motion his plan to usurp the legitimate Edgar. He invokes the Goddess of Nature, but it is truly the anti-god of Savagery that he is conjuring:

Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound.
Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moon-shines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?

Well then,

Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land.
Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund
As to the legitimate. Fine word, ‘legitimate’!
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top the legitimate. I grow; I prosper.
Now, gods, stand up for bastards!

And it is this self-image that I must most urgently dissolve. That ancient grudge, that stubborn sense of being wronged, of being illegitimate and seeking revenge at all costs. I, too, was a bastard son, some twelve or fourteen moonshines lag of a legitimate brother, and I recognised in Edmund that visceral rage, that desire to control, manipulate, and seduce.

But I am illegitimate to myself; the only true legitimate is God.

Edmund perfectly displays the anti-god of Savagery: heartless intelligence, lack of reverence, exploitation, envy, psychopathic ambition, sexual manipulation, and the rejection of moral law. Unwilling to be humbled, unwilling to accept his lot, and turning toward murder.

Edgar, on the other hand, is truly wronged, but his response offers us the map to salvation—the very trajectory Radha Ma described in the teaching.

Edgar begins as the legitimate son, but through Edmund’s machinations he is branded an outlaw, stripped of identity, and forced into exile. He chooses the lowliest disguise, draped only in a loincloth, smearing himself in dirt, and meeting Nature head on:

Whiles I may ’scape,
I will preserve myself; and am bethought
To take the basest and most poorest shape
That ever penury, in contempt of man,
Brought near to beast.
My face I’ll grime with filth,
Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots,
And with presented nakedness outface
The winds and persecutions of the sky.

He ends this great speech with one of Shakespeare’s most wondrous declarations:

Edgar I nothing am.

He becomes “Mad” Tom, cast out into the forest, into the belly of the beast, where he must confront his unmasterable emotions, the fragmentation of his psyche, and the powers of the God of Nature. What Lear resists and rages against, Edgar volunteers to face—naked, without projection, protection, or defence. He endures his ordeal, accepts his lot, and emerges ripe, humble, and wise.

Mad Tom teaches that to encounter the true God of Nature, we must shed the character to which we cling, de-story every narrative and ego-name to which we answer, relinquish every self-image, every trace of pride and arrogance, and confront the shadows and the gods utterly naked.

And it is here, stripped of every vestige of who we thought we were, that we rejoin Lear in the storm. As Hughes identifies, Lear is aware that the storm is also the Queen of Hell, but he himself is being transformed by it, and reborn out of it. It is as if, all at once, Lear encounters both the God of Nature and the God of Unmasterable Emotions. He must confront grief, rage, terror, guilt, remorse, and ultimately love—but all in forms he cannot control. In the end, he must allow himself to be broken. He must surrender.

As Ted Hughes writes:

Lear calls on the storm to expose those sinners who have hidden their crime—exactly as he himself has concealed, even from himself, the greatest crime against his own soul and against Divine Love: the rejection of Cordelia.

Finally, he addresses what he calls a prayer to the creatures that his arrogant pomp and pride ignored: the ‘poor naked wretches’. At this moment, the new self appears, running out of the hovel, as Mad Tom. The new self, in other words, is the old deposed ‘rational ego’, emerging from the wilderness, transfigured, enlightened by exposure to the elemental universe.

I think it is this recognition of the “poor naked wretches” that finally changes Lear—a recognition born of suffering. Suffering he can no longer defend against. Lear’s wheel of fire is not only the suffering imposed by fate, but the torment of emotions that cannot be mastered, only endured and finally surrendered.

And so Lear, reborn—innocent, repentant, atoning—is reunited with his core, his Cordelia. And she accepts him, her love never having wavered. But once fully reconciled, they cannot remain in this world. Cordelia is killed by Edmund’s final treachery, and Lear, unable to survive without his heart, follows her.

Tragedy destroys the outer kingdom, racked and ruined by all of our misdeeds and usurpations. Yet Edgar alone remains: the ripened soul who closes the play:

The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

Nirgun, I nothing am.

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