The Reality Sutras

by Shambhavi Sarasvati

  10

  Know yourself and know God

  What we have been seeking to know is our own, already enlightened essence nature. Recognizing the Self, we experience it everywhere.

  When we wake up, we discover that the fundamental nature of all of reality is self-aware, creative subjectivity. We come to know this infinite subjectivity as our very own self and the self of all else. Whether we first experience this self as being “out there,” or “inside” makes no difference. Eventually there is no inside and no outside. Recognizing essence nature anywhere enables you to recognize it everywhere. This is a core teaching of both Trika Shaivism and my root Guru, Anandamayi Ma.

  One time, a student of mine began to practice sahaja, or nonconceptual, open-eyed contemplation. When you first begin to practice sahaja, it feels quite austere. But as you continue, it becomes the most relaxed and engaging practice in the world. In fact, sahaja means naturalness.

  After my student had been doing the practice for a while, she reported feeling spooked because she was having the experience of someone sneaking up on her from behind. She was beginning to sense presence.

  Presence is what we can call our experience of pervasive vitality and awareness. Going deeper into presence over time, we encounter wisdom itself. Instead of experiencing space as empty and objects as dead “stuff,” we recognize and become immersed in the friendliness, liveliness, and intelligence of everything.

  Many people writing about Tantra focus on experiences of energy. However, the ultimate fruit of practice is usable wisdom, not simple experiences of energy. This must be kept firmly in mind so that one does not get stuck.

  The job of the teacher is to directly introduce students to living presence. This is called “transmission.” Transmission is a natural circumstance through which the student experiences the essence state of the teacher, or the primordial Self, in themselves.

  Some people think that transmission means the teacher is giving you energy, or giving you something you lack. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is a disservice to students to teach them this falsehood. You already have everything; you are perfect and complete. Transmission is an experiential reminder of who and what you already are. In fact, transmission only works because your essence nature and that of the teacher are the same and continuous.

  The experience of lack, or incompletion, is an aspect of impermanence and, on one level, an expression of the cosmic Guru function. Because of our experience of lack, we also experience longing. It is longing that ultimately impels us to seek to know our real nature. But our real nature is eternal. What we discover in a transmission situation is the eternal, always and already indwelling in all.

  Students who understand how to work in a direct realization tradition know that transmission gives you an experience of the fruit of the practice. Then you do your practice to discover the fruit in yourself. You can use transmission as a beacon. In Vajrayana traditions, this is called “taking the fruit for the path.”

  For instance, if you move to my neighborhood, I might drive you around and show you the locations of the grocery store, the parks, and cafes. But later, when I am not around, you have to find these places on your own. You have to remember the experience of driving to those locations and feel your way back to them. For the purpose of this analogy, I am assuming you are not using GPS!

  Just so, recalling the feeling-sense of transmission, the student uses sadhana to find their way back to that. Sadhana is the method we use to walk back to our semi-forgotten primordial, enlightened nature.

  The ancient Tantras teach that you do not have to go anywhere to find God, to find the Self. This living presence is everywhere, and is in fact the real nature of all phenomena. Everything you need to discover has already been given to you, right where you are, here, now, and always. All of the wisdom you might discover “out there” is alive in your body, your mind, and your very own breath. So instead of beginning at the beginning, you begin at the end. You begin with a taste of the awake state and continually call that forth to guide you home.

  11

  There are no individuals

  Most people have the experience of being a distinct body surrounded by empty space. This is a real experience, but it is not your real condition.

  Let’s go back to the ocean and its waves. The ocean is a living symbol of the continuity of consciousness and energy. Out of the ocean, waves arise and subside. All of the beings, plants, and manifestations of this world are like those waves.

  You can recognize a wave, but if you consider a wave more deeply, you realize that a wave has no life apart from the ocean. In fact, a wave is made by the ocean, made of the ocean and is continuous with the ocean. A wave is an aspect of the ocean, not separate from it. A wave is completely dependent on the ocean, and each wave is a product of the whole ocean. Importantly, you cannot specify where a wave ends and the rest of the ocean begins.

  Just like waves, our bodies, emotions, and minds are infinite events of consciousness and energy. Our forms arise out of the ocean of consciousness and energy, are made of that ocean, and remain always continuous with it.

  We are individual stylings, or style waves of God, but we are not separate from the whole. We are waves having experiences of being particles. We are one body with the capacity, the power, to produce experiences of multiplicity and distinction.

  The natural condition of being a human style wave is that we forget to greater or lesser extents that we are continuous with all else. When we are relatively unenlightened, we suffer from our experience of separation. We have to remember or rediscover continuity using a kind of disciplined approach we call sadhana. When we wake up, we can understand that the experience of distinct form is a source of delight.

  Our fear of and denial of impermanence also arises from the experience of separation. We have a fundamental understanding of the fragility of this form, and we generally try to defend ourselves. We defend our bodies, we defend our minds, and we defend our self-concept in our attempt to create a situation in which we can hide from impermanence and feel safe.

  Imagine if a wave thought itself to have an independent existence. Instead of knowing itself to be a scion of a vast, powerful, magnificent, eternal, and shining ocean of life, it felt separate and vulnerable. The wave might try to defend its existence, just as we do. Swimming among a bunch of defensive, aggressive waves, each trying to maintain its own territory, would not make for a fun swimming experience!

  When we do spiritual practice, our sense of distinct physical boundary begins to soften and become more porous. Our self-concept begins to feel very limited and constricting as we have more direct engagements with living presence. We work harder to relax our limitations and become capable of encountering life in a less conditioned way.

  We will always be able to recognize and work with our individual style-wave of consciousness and energy. However, the more we are able to integrate our awareness and energy with the awareness and energy, the more continuity rather than separation will become the basis for our lived experience.

  12

  Worlds are experiences

  We live in a subjective, not an objective world. All worlds and beings, and the experience of objectivity itself, arise within a subjectivity.

  How many times have you heard, “This is just my experience, but…”? You may not realize it, but this statement is a product of centuries-long debates about View.

  In the common understanding of orthodox Western science and philosophy, a table is a real object that exists objectively outside of any person’s experience of the table. Your experience and my experience are considered to be filters through which objectivity is distorted. We each encounter a slightly different table because we are experiencing it through our subjective senses. But outside of these, a real table exists, or so the story goes.

  The terms “subjectivity” and “objectivity” have specific meanings in philosophical and scientific traditions. Subjectivity generally indicates a
subject, an individual, with the capacity to self-reflect and some agency. The View of most Western philosophical traditions is that subjectivity is a lens through which individuals perceive reality in their own unique ways. Objectivity is when circumstances are viewed as they really are, not ‘distorted’ by a perceiving subject.

  Objectivity can be used very loosely, for instance to describe supposedly unbiased journalism. But in its stricter scientific and philosophical senses, objectivity is a kind of holy grail that refers to a circumstance in which we would be able to encounter the world undistorted by our perceptions. In Kantian philosophy this is called das Ding an sich, or the thing in itself.

  The glorification of objectivity comes at the expense of the denigration of experience. When we say, “this is just my experience,” we are signaling our understanding that subjective perception does not accurately represent the objective real. In fact, we are saying that something outside of our experience always trumps experience.

  This View has trained many people into believing that a so-called rational thought process also trumps modes of knowing via more immediate, sensory experience. I have noticed, among my students and other people, a degradation in their ability to access and trust the immediate wisdom that appears as a surge of inner knowing, or a prompting from our alive, aware world. These forms of experience are always available to us, but many of us have turned away from them.

  In the Trika tradition, “objective” has a different meaning than it does in orthodox Western philosophy. Here, “objective” indicates that which has been emitted by and within the subjectivity. Objects and an objective world experientially appear to be external to that subjectivity. In other words, objective here means the appearing of an other, actually many others, from and within the body of the one. Subjectivity, or consciousness, is the foundation of all that is. Objectivity is a concept and an experiential mode being created by an omnipresent subjectivity.

  Orthodox cultures of scientific rationalism have distrusted direct, sensory experience and have elevated the objective in status, even when the objective is considered to be unreachable for now. The discovery of more realized spiritual practitioners is that what we call matter is actually an experience made available by a subjectivity for itself. Shiva Nature’s life process is to create experiences of external worlds and beings for its own enjoyment and then to discover through the play of awakening that they are not external at all.

  More importantly, Trika practitioners come to understand that we live in a totally communicative and alive situation. No action goes unresponded to by the whole. Things and beings appear and resolve back to the unconditioned just like in an orchestra where instruments play and fall silent in response to each other and the guiding desire of the composer. Responsiveness, not objective material processes, are the basis of existence.

  Returning to our table, these days we can say with scientific certainty that a table, or any other object, is mostly empty space populated by a combination of atoms and molecules. But how does this circumstance present us with experiential qualities such as form, hardness, smoothness, coolness, heaviness, and so on? Fairly recently, scientists have posited that “solid tableness” is produced as a result of human interaction with the states of energy that give the table texture and other qualities. This description of matter gets closer to what yogis in Tantrik traditions could have told scientists a thousand years ago. But there are significant differences between even this update and the experience of yogis.

  For a Tantrik practitioner, or any practitioner with some realization, a chair is not “just” an experience with the objective chair hovering sadly out of reach. Nor is it fundamentally a combination of atoms and molecules interacting with an environment, although this would be a fine relative description of a chair. Consciousness and its energy, or wisdom, is the fundamental nature of matter, not atoms and molecules.

  What we call “matter” are the appearings of Shiva Nature. It is Shiva Nature that is producing experiences of solidity out of itself. The real nature of matter is a flow of responsive experience within a continuous subjectivity. Furthermore, a practitioner with some accomplishment can see, without any technological support other than years of sadhana, that a table is comprised of alive awareness and is continuous with all else. How is this so?

  First it is necessary to understand that our physical eyes are not the organs of sight. They only serve as living symbols of the pervasive seeing power of this reality. In fact, all of our senses are the senses of all of reality showing up in a limited configuration as us. When we profoundly relax our body, energy, and mind, more subtle sight becomes available to us. We begin to participate in the expanded seeing that is happening everywhere. This is really not so hard to understand.

  Even among ordinary people, there is a vast range of capacity to sense and see. Listening to music, some people will be able to hear with more precision and clarity. Relating to others, some people are able to more sensitively see and feel the condition of other people. Then there are people who have prescient dreams, or can effect subtle healings, or who can communicate to non-human beings.

  When we consider this “ordinary” range of human senses, it is not so hard to understand that our senses have a lot more potential! If you have ever studied a spiritual tradition, or spent time with spiritual practitioners, you likely know that people with honest spiritual accomplishment have the most refined and expanded senses. They can galvanize people with their enormous compassion, insight, energy, and kindness. They can sometimes see the pasts and futures of others, even beyond this lifetime, walk through walls, produce objects out of “thin air,” appear in two places at the same time, and similar activities. These occurrences are the result of the relaxation of one’s self-concept and the resulting increasing integration of individual senses with the sense capacities of reality itself.

  So, back to the table! When an accomplished practitioner looks at a table, they might see an ordinary table, but in some circumstances, they also might see a lively, variegated field of intelligent light that is continuous with and responsive to all else. The primordial intelligence of this light is communicated directly by itself. Just as we know a human being possesses intelligence by looking at them and engaging with them, we also recognize that intelligence and aliveness in everything when we perceive and engage with our more awake senses. We discover directly that this primordial consciousness is producing the experience of table out of its own body of awareness and energy and that “table” is continuous with the totality of the creation.

  So in the Tantrik View, there is no objective chair “out there” beyond the reach of consciousness. Experience is primary. The chair, or any object, is an experience being produced by primordial consciousness and energy for its own enjoyment. The phenomenal world actually is a theater of experiences.

  Our experience of waking up is the central drama in this theater. In order to play well, we must consult our own experience and learn to read the ways in which wisdom is communicating to us through our gross and subtle experiences. We must learn to follow and take refuge in the multi-faceted speaking of wisdom through every aspect of this theater of experience created by wisdom, for wisdom.

  13

  Belief, faith, and trust are obstacles to self-realization

  We are explorers and experimenters. Our aim is to discover for ourselves the nature of reality and the Self.

  Religions ask for your belief, faith, and trust. These foundations of religious doctrine and institutions don’t require you to arrive at a more personal, direct, and incontrovertible experience. You can, if you like, rely on what you have read, or have been taught by an authority figure, or have been told to believe. This is, of course, very comforting for many people.

  Trika Shaivism asks for your courage, your doubt, your persistence, your intelligence, your devotion, and your unstoppable desire to find out for yourself. The practices of Trika Shaivism and other direct realization traditions lead to concrete, practical
, usable wisdom. They lead us to pass through doubt to unshakable confidence in the natural state.

  In his commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, the great 10th century Kashmiri Tantrika Abhinavagupta writes: “The best candidate for instruction is a person who has doubts about the topic that is going to be presented.”4 Doubt is viewed as a soft, open position from which spiritual exploration becomes most possible and fruitful.

  Hakuin Ekaku, a Zen teacher who lived at the cusp of the 17th and 18th centuries famously said: “At the bottom of great doubt lies great awakening. If you doubt fully, you will awaken fully.”5 The lesson is: Don’t be afraid of doubt. Use it to get rid of everything other than what proves, through experience, to be incontrovertible.

  Trika Shaivism is deeply devotional, but it is not a religion. It is more of a spiritual technology for clearing doubts about the nature of reality and becoming more spontaneous, skillful, expressive, and compassionate. You will be asked to test and experientially discover the View. You must be willing to do the work to find out for yourself using your body, energy, and mind. Your teacher will not be satisfied, or even pleased, with proclamations of trust and belief.

  Pratyaksha pramanam means the exploratory, experimental process of “measuring” reality via the direct experience of the senses. It is understood that, along with some expert guidance, the human body, energy, and mind are your best tools for walking out of karmic obfuscations into the clarity of self-knowledge. Exploring step-by-step new landscapes of understanding; diving deep into the infinite subtleties of the heart; becoming fluent in the myriad languages of body, energy, and mind; discovering directly for yourself: this is the adventurous and uncompromising way of Trika.