Dualistic and transcendental spiritual traditions hold the View that there is an unbridgeable divide between matter and spirit and between sentient beings and God. The possibility of both sin and evil arises from this division. Matter, including bodies, appetites, and women, is degraded. Spirit is pure.
Direct realization traditions in general have no concept of sin or of salvation for that matter. If everything is made of and by enlightened essence nature, then sin cannot exist, and salvation is irrelevant. We are all already made of God from the beginning. We don’t need to be saved.7
Our understanding of behaviors such as anger, jealousy, sadness, comfort-seeking, and greed is that they are the result of natural, Self-imposed limitations on the full flower of wisdom. Our limitations contain hidden seeds of wisdom virtue, and so wisdom may be discovered even in the midst of limitation. This means that no matter what condition you find yourself in, you can always discover the wisdom speaking to you in every situation. You can choose to follow that. Following wisdom is the royal road.
Everything we do, no matter how heinous, is an attempt to rediscover continuity. When a person forms or joins a cult, or some kind of segregated movement, they are trying to find connection. When a person drinks or does drugs, they are trying to relieve themselves of the boundaries and burdens of the small self. When a person harms themselves or others physically, they are still trying to experience some kind of continuity. A punch in the face is still a connection, albeit a very limited connection. Everyone in every circumstance is attempting to heal the experience of separation that we call anavamala.
In addition, because reality is simple, reiterating the same principles all the way through an infinite multiplicity of expressions, all of our karmically limited experiences are directly connected to more subtle and expansive expressions. We can follow the thread and arrive at a bigger View and more freedom.
My sticky, grabby love for a single person is universal love for all people under tension. Under the force of sadhana, my body, energy, and mind can relax. Virtue can unfold and find its larger expression.
My overweening self-concern is concern for the well-being of all under tension. My craving for sweets is the same longing to taste the sweetness of all existence. My undiscerning devotion to a very limited teacher is that clear devotion further down the road, but just under tension.
Anandamayi Ma said:
In the world, everybody’s mad about something or the other; some more, some to a lesser extent. See, God’s play (lila) is so enjoyable. He has created a madhouse. Try to find yourself through yourself.8
In every act and every thought, we are expressing the fundamental wisdoms of enlightened essence nature. With the right help and good methods, you can always find yourself through yourself.
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God is both the limited and the unlimited
Limited, relative experience and the absolute always come together. Only the revelation of the whole is self-realization.
Relative or limited experience means our ordinary experience in dualistic karmic vision. We are conditioned by concepts, by limited desires, and by our attachment to linear time. Relative experience begins with anavamala, our experience of separation.
Relative teachings and relative View help us to navigate our life as beings experiencing separation, birth, death, and suffering. For instance, we can observe precepts and take vows in order to regulate our conduct and conserve energy. We can try to do no harm to ourselves and others. We learn not to put our hand in fire or try to walk through a wall.
Absolute experience is enlightened experience. It means that we much more fully and consciously embody our real, unconditioned nature. We are not so bound by habit patterns or by attachment to linear time and concepts of space. Our activity is skillful, spontaneous, and uncontrived. We are being immersed in presence and have direct knowledge of the wisdom of the natural state. Absolute teachings and View relate to the ultimate nature of reality.
You may assume that the goal of sadhana is to leave the relative behind and “ascend” to a version of the absolute in which all differentiation is erased. In fact, sometimes when people hear nondual teachings, they try to ignore relative experience. This is called spiritual bypassing.
As long as you continue to experience separation, you’ll have to deal with the experience of suffering. You are going to have to deal with pain, disappointment, frustration, and failure. Dressing in white, chastising your senses, talking a good nondual line, and attempting to “rise” above it all does not change these basic facts. If a truck is heading toward you, and you don’t get out of the way, it will hit you.
You cannot ignore dualistic karmic vision, but under the force of sadhana, you can begin to experience the manifest world differently. From the perspective of View, the everyday and the esoteric are equally made by and of enlightened consciousness and energy. Relative and absolute are entwined. There is nothing to reject. A pile of poop is no less God than a sadhu. In India, you sometimes see people doing puja to fresh cow dung, or you come across offerings of flowers laid atop dung. It is very beautiful.
Doing consistent sadhana, we can begin to experience the limited world as an aspect or expression of enlightened essence nature. Our experience of body, energy, and mind begins to transform. Our level of suffering can subside even as we enjoy the experience of difference. But we are not leaving anything behind other than our suffering.
Realization does not leave anything out. As Anandamayi Ma said:
A state had been described where everything is burnt and only the One remains, so that even when searching for diversity one cannot find it anymore; everything has disappeared into the One. It means that some aspect is still in darkness, for this is not Self-Revelation. . . When pure consciousness has been attained the image will be known as the Essence Itself.9
When the image, when things, and beings, and worlds are known as Essence Itself, then the Self stands revealed. But as long as we are still busy rejecting and accepting, even rejecting dualistic vision, we are still in darkness.
Most of the View and practices we learn are aimed at helping us to work with our relative condition. We have to learn how to take care of our bodies; use our energy properly; recognize and release karmic patterns of body, emotions, and mind; and relate more skillfully to others. If we do not take care of the relative, it is much harder to realize. We may unnecessarily enter into a condition of self-neglect, or we may engage with others in ways that divert our energy and attention and delay or degrade our sadhana.
One of the human world’s great disciples, Jyotish Chandra Roy, said this:
On this life’s journey, keep attending to your own steps. As you come nearer and nearer the destination, you will find yourself reconciled not only to the Ideal, but also, most difficult of all, to others.10
In some spiritual traditions, students are taught relative View first. If they stick around and continue to practice, they are eventually taught Absolute View. In the direct realization traditions, the teaching method is different. Students are first taught Absolute, or Supreme View and, nearly at the same time, relative View.
The method of offering written teachings in the Trika tradition is similar. When we read a Tantra or other teaching text, the first teaching in the book is all-encompassing. If you can “get” that teaching, there is no need to read the rest of the text. Of course, nearly everyone needs to read it all!
More subtle practices are also given first, along with more concrete and accessible practices. The idea of this teaching method is that we are all in different conditions. Each person is a unique and infinite event. If a person can realize the most subtle teaching at the beginning, they should have an opportunity to do that. We can always “fall back.”
More importantly, the Absolute serves as a beacon and the biggest “container” for our lives and practice even when we are far from realizing it for ourselves. Knowing Absolute View helps us to not get stuck. For students in direct realization traditio
ns, the trick is to keep the bigger View in mind as we work with our limited condition. When we remember the Absolute in the context of our everyday lives, we are not taking things so personally. We are eroding our sense of self-importance and overheated self-concern. We are less likely to get stuck. So even for students with many obscurations, there is benefit in hearing of the Supreme reality, your own real nature.
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Ignorance of your real nature is the cause of suffering
Suffering is the absence of access to wisdom, not the presence of sin or fault.
One of the names of Lord Shiva, reality itself, is “the Auspicious.” When you do a lot of spiritual practice, you discover the essential wisdom and goodness of existence. You discover that reality is flooded with and made of wisdom virtues. These wisdom virtues are capacities such as compassion, mercy, kindness, tenderness, clarity, curiosity, intelligence, creativity, generosity, and playfulness.
Because there is only wisdom, we cannot properly talk of evil or sin. All of the acts we might call evil, sinful, or simply disturbed arise from anavamala, our experience of separation. When you are mired in the experience of being a body with space around you, when your own energy and mind feel isolated, when you have the understanding that you were born and are going to die, you are embodying anavamala. You have temporarily forgotten your real circumstance, what you actually are.
Our experience of separation gives rise to all loneliness, defensiveness, aggression, and attachment. If you firmly believe that you are this single person, you are going to defend your territory. You are going to try to resolve the “problem” of your loneliness and fragility. We do this by fighting off perceived attacks and clinging to whatever it is we feel will ameliorate our condition: other people or animals, possessions, food, power, and acclaim. This is suffering.
Anavamala comes in degrees. If you were a rock, you would still be made of enlightened essence nature. But that reality, out of its own creative freedom, has fashioned you with a high degree of anavamala. You would be very, very ignorant of your real nature. By the time we get to the portion of the continuum of becoming that is inhabited by dogs and crows, we can clearly see the ability to self-reflect.
Human beings host an enormously varied range of capacities to self-reflect and become more aware. Some people have no inkling that there is any kind of experience outside of their own limited perspective. They feel extremely separate. Others have an unstoppable desire to find out about reality and to be of service.
The experience of suffering relates to a natural and temporary limitation in our capacity to connect with the larger Self. It is an aspect of dualistic karmic vision. Yet all limitation is also the play of the one Self. The light of consciousness shows up as both the play of ignorance and the play of waking up.
One time, a father came to satsang. He had two daughters. One daughter had been murdered, the other raped. He was so enraged and distraught, he had to be hospitalized for a time and remained heavily medicated. He lost interest in his work and lost his job. His life was in a shambles.
During the course of several satsangs, he asked many questions. He was sincerely looking for a way out of pain. Among many other exchanges, at one point I related to him that I had been raped by a stranger as a young teenager. I was very upset, of course, but I never felt angry. I did not feel victimized.
At the time, I thought this was strange. I searched and searched within myself to make sure that I was not in a state of denial. After all, we are told over and over again that when a person is violently raped, that experience is supposed to cause lasting damage. But I did not feel damaged.
I finally came to the conclusion that I had not experienced the person who raped me as having actually done it specifically to me. I recognized that he was in the grip of compulsion. I could have been anyone. There was nothing personal about the act. Even at that time, I realized that raping and violence was on a continuum with many other kinds of harm. I wanted it all to stop, including whatever harm had come to this man that had left him in such a dark condition. I actually felt that he was much worse off than I was, in spite of the rape.
The father slowly started to understand that the world didn’t have it in for him or his daughters. Even if someone says they want to hurt you, specifically you, they are in the grip of karmic tension. If you were not there, they would find another “you.” When you start to dis-identify with your own karma, you begin to see more clearly how people are trapped in karmic habit patterns over which they often have little control.
The father also started to experience compassion for the people who had harmed his daughters. Instead of feeling that everyone involved was either a victim or evil, he began to understand that we are all in the same boat. He also understood that he and his daughters were not being punished. They were not being “paid back.” There was no sin, or fault, or blame to go around.
After some months, he left a more relaxed person. His relief was palpable, and this brought tears to everyone’s eyes. He had opened up to more of an experience of continuity, and his suffering was at least somewhat alleviated. This is an example of the relative nature of suffering and how opening to a wider View, a.k.a. greater wisdom, relieves suffering.
21
There is no suffering
Our life dramas are actual stories. Enjoyment, not suffering, is the foundation of existence.
We humans spend an absolutely enormous amount of our time engaged in telling stories, making stories, contemplating stories, and enjoying stories. We wake up in the morning and tell ourselves or a housemate stories about what happened yesterday, or about a dream we had, or about the day ahead. We turn on the news and listen to stories. Or perhaps we look at Facebook and read stories and then watch a story or two on YouTube.
If we spend our days talking to people, we are likely creating scenarios, planning, and telling stories about ourselves. When we are not speaking stories, we are narrating stories about the past, present, and future in our minds. Some of us make a living telling stories!
We get home and tell some more stories about our day, or about our thoughts and emotions. Then we watch stories on TV. Then we read stories to our kids. Then we go to sleep and dream stories all night long.
Maybe on the weekend we go to a play or a movie, or we visit with friends and share more stories. We go on a trip or a hike, and after we return, we have a lot of stories to tell about the relatively brief time when we were actually just experiencing something and not telling a story. If we are writers or painters or dancers or some other kind of artist, we have even more vehicles for telling stories.
Many of our stories are shaped by tensions and karmic patterns. They painfully repeat over and over again. The way we talk, our gestures, facial expressions, and other modes of communication often tell habitual stories and are part of our self-image formation. Occasionally we play more lightly and spontaneously with ourselves and our stories. We call this fun or art. We love contemplating ourselves through the experience of storytelling.
Why do we supposed-adults spend such an astounding amount of time engaged in creating stories? Because this is what God does. As above, so below. Everything in continuity, all the way through. Reality is simple this way.
We tell our stories. And God is “telling” us. We are God’s art, God’s drama, God’s creative self-expressions.
So how does this relate to suffering?
Nothing is really happening here other than a literal play of creative wisdom. “Play means both “playfulness” and “drama.” So there is actually no suffering. This is the absolute teaching. How can we understand this?
When you watch a movie, you are seeing a play of light and energy that has been shaped by creative intelligence. You know that. So you can enjoy tragedy, murder, mayhem, and destruction. You can enjoy crying and feeling really scared.
When you leave the movie theater or turn away from your TV and walk out into the world, you are also seeing an intelligent, creative play of li
ght and energy. You have just forgotten that.
Step out of ordinary mind for a moment. Contemplate just how weird it is that we enjoy all this painful, scary stuff in the movies. If it’s so bad in “real life,” why would we want to re-live it in the movies?
When we go to the movies, or to a play, or other performance, we are contemplating ourselves. We are appreciating our creativity and imagination. We are appreciating our own nature as human beings. This is what God does with the ‘story’ that is all of manifest life.
Manifest life is a display of the Supreme by the Supreme with all parts played by the Supreme. This alive, aware subjectivity is contemplating and enjoying its nature in the same way that we do. At the movies we are able to recognize this, and so we don’t really suffer. Even more impressive, we can “try on” suffering and enjoy its flavors.
In a real sense, we are like actors on a set. We have the capacity to enjoy playing all kinds of roles and to see others play them. If we are actors in drama, we can enjoy playing characters with limitations: someone who is inept at relating to other people and has divorced a lot of times or someone with a deadly disease. It is so much fun!
But one day, we forget that these roles are being played by actors. We suddenly believe that we really are those characters. Then everything becomes very serious, and instead of enjoying ourselves, we are suffering. This is our normal condition.
Swami Lakshmanjoo, the great 20th century teacher of Trika Shaivism, wrote in his commentary on Vasgupta’s Shiva Sutras:
In this field of drama, the actor is your own nature, your own self of universal consciousness. This self of universal consciousness is the one who is aware, he is the actor in this universal drama. Those who are not aware are not actors; they are played in this drama. They experience sadness, they experience enjoyment, they become joyful, they become depressed. But those who are aware, they are always elevated; they are the real players in this drama.11
The Reality Sutras Page 5