The
Reality
Sutras
Seeking the Heart
of Trika Shaivism
Jaya Kula Press
110 Marginal Way, #196
Portland, Maine 04101
jayakula.org
© 2018 by Shambhavi Sarasvati
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Cover and interior design and layout: Saskia Nicol
saskianicol.com
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018904586
Sarasvati, Shambhavi
The Reality Sutras: Seeking the Heart of Trika Shaivism
ISBN:
978-1-7322183-0-7 (pbk) 978-1-7322183-1-4 (ebk)
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.
The
Reality
Sutras
Seeking the Heart
of Trika Shaivism
Shambhavi Sarasvati
Jaya Kula Press Books
by Shambhavi Sarasvati
Pilgrims to Openness: Direct Realization Tantra in Everyday Life, 2009
The Play of Awakening: Adventures on the Path of Direct Realization Tantra, 2012
Returning: Exhortations, Advice and Encouragement from the Heart of Direct
Realization Practice, 2015
No Retreat: Poems on the Way to Waking Up, 2016
Nine Poisons, Nine Medicines, Nine Fruits, 2017
The Reality Sutras: Seeking the Heart of Trika Shaivism, 2018
My wish is to be neither an ascetic
Indifferent to the world
Nor a manipulator of supernatural powers
Nor even a worshiper craving liberation—
But only to become drunk
On the abundant wine of devotion.
—Utpaladeva, Shaiva Devotional Songs of Kashmir1
As far as the space of the universe extends, so far extends the space within the heart. Within it are contained both heaven and earth, both fire and air, both sun and moon, lightning and the stars.
—The Chandogya Upanishad2
CONTENTS
Two Handfuls of Rice
Reality is knowable
Everything is God
Your senses are for directly discovering your real nature
God is wisdom virtue
Desire is required
Freedom is the unlimited capacity for self-expression
Shakti is the power of self-reflection
All self-reflections are enjoyed by the Lord
Diversity is a real experience
Know yourself and know God
There are no individuals
Worlds are experiences
Belief, faith, and trust are obstacles to self-realization
I am here, I am everywhere
Unmind the mind
There is no emptiness
Impermanence is the glamour of God
The whole of life is the means of realizing the Self
God is both the limited and the unlimited
Ignorance of your real nature is the cause of suffering
There is no suffering
Manifest life is a cascade of becoming and unbecoming
Maya makes diversity for the Lord
All is perfection
Recognize, gain confidence, and immerse yourself in presence
Guru is the View, the method, and the fruit
Lose the watcher
The mind is the organ of curiosity
The relative purpose of life is self-realization
Duality is for the enjoyment of reciprocity
Rest in your real nature
Ananda is aesthetic appreciation
Everything is equality
Ethics are already built in
The heart is the gateway to unconditioned wisdom
Devotion is wisdom’s crucible
The View expires
Keep on Continuing
For disciples and devotees of that
______________
Two Handfuls of Rice
I am writing this book as a small offering to my students and to all those who desire to better understand the View of Trika Shaivism, also known as Shaiva Tantra. Students of other direct realization traditions, such as Dzogchen and Chan Buddhism, will find much resonance here.
The Sanskrit word for View is darshan. In Tibetan, View is tawa. View has a few special meanings in direct realization traditions. It means both to see and what we see as a result of doing spiritual practice. It also means the instruments through which we see and a way of living that embodies the wisdom we directly encounter through spiritual practice.
View teachings let us know what our traditions have to say about existence, cosmology, the self, God, consciousness, and realization. In the direct realization traditions, we say: Learn the View, practice with the View, embody the View. When we have recognized our real nature and, through practice, come to embody the teachings in our perceptions and activities, we are said to be living the View.
Studying the View of your tradition is critical to practicing correctly. This is easy to understand. If I go for a walk in the woods, and my orientation is that I am trying to catch a glimpse of a certain rare bird, I may find that bird. If my orientation is that I am simply walking along and enjoying being outside, I will likely achieve that, but I probably will not find the bird.
Likewise, some people perform rituals with the View that they are propitiating great beings in order to accumulate merit. In direct realization traditions, we are more likely to perform ritual with the View that we are trying to recognize our own, already perfect wisdom nature through the medium of the ritual. To a great extent, the View with which you practice determines the result. For this reason, it is important to understand the View of any tradition in which you are participating so that you can practice correctly and move without undue delay toward realizing what that tradition has to offer.
View and the role of textual study
In direct realization traditions, the teacher, the teachings, and the practices you do all help you to directly recognize or encounter your primordially enlightened nature. You directly realize the nature of your self, of reality, through a process of opening the gates of the senses, including the mind.
The word in Sanskrit for direct realization is pratyakshadarshana. Pratyaksha means “direct.” So pratyakshadarshana means directly experiencing or having the darshan of the ultimate nature of reality with your own senses. Direct realization is not primarily an intellectual understanding; it is 100% embodied, useable, experiential wisdom about how you and life actually are.
Despite popular and erroneous notions that direct realization traditions are all about effortless, “sudden enlightenment,” both sadhana (spiritual practice) and textual study are emphasized. In combination with oral instruction and practice, studying the texts of a tradition helps us to clarify, enlarge, and guide our understanding of View.
Some students approach text study in a more intellectual way as if they were reading philosophy or theory. But for a student who is ripe, reading about the View can act as a potent catalyst for directly relaxing constricting patterns of body, energy, and mind. For this reason, students are advised to read and also to meditate on key teaching texts.
What kind of book is this?
The Reality Sutras is a handbook of View teachings. I am doing my best to make essential aspects of the View of my Indian tradition accessible to contemporary students. For the most part, I am reporting on what I have discovered for myself through engaging in spiritual practice. My hope is that The Reality Sutras will inform, but foremost that it will serve as a s
ource of contemplative material for practitioners. Occasionally I enrich a passage with a quote from my root Guru, Anandamayi Ma. She was not a teacher of Trika Shaivism, but her teachings were always about directly realizing the nature of the Self.
You won’t find many footnotes here. I am not making a conventional effort to convince you that I know what I’m talking about or that my tradition’s View of reality is one you should adopt. More than proving something to your intellect, I would prefer to move you. From my perspective, the only desirable proof of my little offering is whatever response of “yes” you discover within yourself and then whatever unfolds after that.
With infinite love,
Shambhavi
Portland, Maine
1
Reality is knowable
The nature of reality, your own nature, is an open secret announcing itself everywhere and always available to be directly known and more fully embodied.
Many spiritual traditions hold the View that reality is unknowable or a mystery. This makes sense only if what you mean by “knowable” is “explainable.” Of course, we cannot capture and explain every aspect of reality with words or even with numbers.
Let’s say you take a workshop describing all of the different styles of meditation, their histories, and how people have practiced in different spiritual traditions. You even read some scientific studies about the effects of meditation. But after a long period of gathering descriptions, explanations, and information, you still do not have much understanding of meditation. In order to have real knowledge of meditation, you have to meditate!
Meditation and other spiritual practices require you to engage your body, your energy, and your mind. They are embodied, experiential, and immersive. Knowing in the direct realization spiritual traditions means that by doing spiritual practices such as meditation, you can directly discover the real nature of the Self and existence. Using your five senses and your mind, you can find out who and what you are and how things work.
The discovery of your real nature is not just information. It is embodied knowledge. By practicing just with your body, energy, and mind, you transform your moment-to-moment experience. You begin to have spontaneous insights into fundamental processes of reality. You enter into a rich conversation with our alive, aware world. You ultimately discover the capacity to interact directly with the subtlest aspects of nature, including space and time.
The knowledge, or more properly wisdom, one gains by doing consistent spiritual practice is instantly usable. It is much more thoroughgoing than an explanation, and yet it cannot be explained by ordinary means. It can be pointed toward, experientially revealed, and demonstrated. The goal of spiritual practice is not to comprehensively describe or neatly explain reality, or to dominate it, but to be able to respond to life with unrestrained compassion, clarity, intelligence, creativity, and spontaneity. Enlightened, embodied wisdom is always in action. Ultimately it is action that emerges from and expresses the wisdom of the heart.
We call that which we discover through sadhana by many names: God, Self, reality, Shiva Nature, nature of mind, Buddha Nature, Christ consciousness, Krishna consciousness, aware livingness, instant presence, flowing presence, essence nature, or the natural state. My Guru, Anandamayi Ma, simply called it that.
2
Everything is God
All worlds, all creatures, and existence itself are made of and full of a single, continuous, self-aware consciousness and its creative energy.
Consciousness and energy are the ground and the substance of your existence. Always together, with no experience of separation, they comprise an infinite ocean of unconditioned awareness and its creative potency. From this ocean, the experiences of the diverse forms of manifest life naturally arise like waves. The waves of manifest life are made by the ocean of consciousness and energy, arise within that ocean, dissolve back into that ocean, and are composed of that ocean.
The ocean and its waves are a living symbol. A living symbol is one that doesn’t just represent what it symbolizes in an arbitrary way, but one that actually partakes of what it symbolizes or is an aspect or direct expression of what it symbolizes. When you do spiritual practice, living symbols can appear in your mind or in visions to teach you about how reality works. You will definitely start to notice that many important aspects of our world function as living symbols.
You may find it helpful to meditate on living symbols or observe them in your day-to-day life. For instance, gazing at the ocean and remembering the View can give you a direct experience of the nature of reality. The ocean and its waves are an important living symbol for direct realization practitioners.
When we first begin doing sadhana, we embody the erroneous conviction that we are individual waves moving along in space without an ocean. We feel fragile and separate. Our experience is characterized by loneliness, aggression, and defensiveness. As we progress in our practice, we begin to experience the reintegration of body, energy, and mind with that continuous ocean of living presence.
The Sanskrit word for reintegration or immersion is samavesha. Rather than intellectually understanding the natural state, or witnessing something, we are actually trying to rediscover our continuity with living presence. We are trying to discover that the ubiquitous ocean of living awareness is our real nature, not separate from or different from us. We practice to remain consciously immersed in that.
The base state of reality, living presence, may be too subtle for our ordinary senses to discover right now. But if our senses are a little more open, presence itself, the livingness of everything, will become definite and palpable. We learn directly for ourselves that this living presence is continuous, eternal, and uncaused. We learn through our senses and our mind that it sits behind all phenomena, giving rise to all from within itself.
3
Your senses are for directly discovering your real nature
Sadhana frees our limited senses to directly encounter their continuity with reality’s infinite capacities for seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling and with infinite mind.
You may have noticed that some people’s senses are sharper or duller than others. Listening to a complex piece of music, some people are going to hear more nuance and others less. Some people have a more vibrant experience of color or a more refined and subtle sense of taste. When our senses are dulled, we cannot participate or express ourselves fully. You can understand this from your ordinary experience. When you have a head cold, your senses are dulled, and you feel less able to engage with life. The clarity and openness of our senses affect our relationship to everything.
Now imagine that the senses, including mind, are notes on an infinite piano keyboard. The senses of most human beings fall along about two octaves, ranging from the dullest to the most keen of us. But there are infinite other notes representing refinements and expansions of the senses that most of us cannot even imagine in our current condition. Sadhana opens our senses so that we can play and enjoy more of the notes.
Sadhana works by eroding our experience of being separate individuals. Over a long time, our experience of our senses also becomes less individualized. Our taste, touch, hearing, seeing, smelling, and sensing with our mind literally escape the boundaries of individuality and become more continuous with the senses of the larger reality, a.k.a. God. Or you could say that the field of the play our senses becomes larger.
This release of the senses from the cage of individualism will enable you to explore the depths of life without a microscope and to see far flung times and places without a telescope or a time machine. You will gain understanding of how reality works directly from reality itself, and you will be able to participate and express yourself more fully.
But we should not get stuck here. The essence of self-realization is not to wield spiritual powers. The essence of self-realization is to embody cosmic wisdom virtues such as compassion, kindness, clarity, skillfulness in action, and mercy. You become established in the heart. For a person
who has some actual realization, any special skillfulness of the senses that develops will naturally be used to shower virtue on everyone.
4
God is wisdom virtue
God is unconditioned, unrestrained, and spontaneous intelligence, compassion, mercy, generosity, creativity, curiosity, precision, patience, and clarity.
God has many names. In Trika Shaivism, God means all of reality, all of existence. God means that living awareness, that supreme subjectivity with no cause, no outside, and no other.
When I was first learning Tantrik sadhana, my teacher used words such as “omnipotent,” “omniscient,” and “omnipresent” to describe God. I did not find this inspiring. In fact, I found such descriptors to be clinical and abstract. I had entered the practice feeling that I did not believe in God. I wanted to know about reality. In my limited View, reality and God were different, and God did not seem necessary. So I put God on a back burner and just focused on my sadhana without much understanding of what “God” might refer to.
Years later, I encountered my Guru, Anandamayi Ma. She had already ceased to inhabit a human form, but as I learned, she was and is still very much here. Through a special experience, she taught me about the real nature of God.
One of Anandamayi Ma’s main ashrams sits on the banks of the Ganga in Varanasi, just north of Assi Ghat. I had no experience with ashrams or temples and felt timid entering either. Upon crossing the threshold of the ashram, a young Bengali man greeted me. He was not a sannyasin, but was engaged in full-time seva as an administrative assistant and science teacher in the ashram school.
We chatted for some minutes. He served me chai. At some point, he said, “You should visit the balcony. Ma always gave satsang there. Westerners never visit it, but you should go there.” He pointed toward an external stairway leading up to the second floor.
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