The journey of the sadhika, the practitioner, is from the played to the player, from one who has forgotten to one who remembers. Upon remembering, we can more consciously participate in the lila, the sport or the play of the divine.
You will probably wonder at some point: what about compassion? What about kindness? If all suffering is relative to dualistic experience, and the foundation is enjoyment, why bother being kind or helping anyone?
There is no sense in which we hear “there is no suffering” and then repeat that with a superior air next time a friend approaches us with a problem. We are also not going to ignore our own suffering in an attempt to be “spiritual.”
It is hard for students to remember this, but everything is already made of and full of virtue. Wisdom virtues, such as compassion and kindness, are built into the fabric of reality. Shiva Nature is goodness without an opposite.
On the level of relative experience, the more you wake up, the more you will naturally express these wisdom virtues effortlessly. Highly realized people are more compassionate and kind, not less. Embodying the recognition of your real nature and the real nature of everything is equal to embodying all wisdom virtues more fully.
We get caught up here because in our relative condition, we believe there has to be a reason to be compassionate and kind. If that reason is taken away, seemingly by the teaching that there is no suffering, then we become afraid. We cannot imagine unmotivated compassion and kindness. This is our limitation.
But the universal Self needs no reason to express compassion. Compassion is its nature, and it expresses its own nature without restraint in all circumstances. Our job is to rediscover that.
22
Manifest life is a cascade of becoming and unbecoming
Manifest life continually emerges from the heart of the Supreme Self in an effulgent cascade of becoming and unbecoming that has no up or down, no beginning and no end.
Imagine a vast, shining, horizontal field. From that arise and subside an infinite number of forms. These forms can be more subtle or more gross, more expansive or contracted, more expressive of wisdom or less. This arising and subsiding continues everywhere, throughout all time. It is the never-ending life process of the Absolute.
The cascade of becoming and unbecoming is not an origin story that starts at a point in time and eventually comes to an end point. Although represented vertically when visualized during a traditional teaching, it is not vertical. The field of becoming and unbecoming is alive everywhere all at once.
Tattva means element. The thirty-six, or sometimes thirty-seven tattvas, as described in the Trika teachings are experiential potentials or capacities that emerge from the totally unconditioned, alive and aware base state of infinite potential. These capacities ultimately produce experiences of the five great elements: space, wind, fire, water, and earth. These in turn give rise to the most condensed forms such as planets, stars, you, me, cars, and rocks. I refer to this as a cascade because, at a time when I was doing intense sadhana, I had a waking vision of the powerful, magnificent overflow of the creation from its heart. It filled my entire field of vision, and it appeared as a moving cascade.
The cascade begins with the unconditioned and its complete freedom to create experiences out of the play of self-limitation. Consider hearing. We humans and many other creatures have organs of hearing: our ears. Ears are tangible. They appear to be made of dense material. They are what we commonly call things.
Your physical ears are a gross manifestation of the more subtle, less localized capacity of this alive, aware reality to produce sound and the experience of hearing. Our condensed, limited ears emerge or are emitted through a cascade of becoming that begins with the primordial Self’s most subtle, expansive, and pervasive capacity to sound and to hear.
The primordial power to sound and to experience hearing is less conditioned and more generalized than hearing a particular sound with a particular organ. It is the universal sounding and hearing of reality itself present everywhere.
As we move along the cascade of becoming toward the more limited and conditioned, we eventually bump into you and your strong conviction that you need your physical ears to hear. You are conditioned by this embodied belief. Just as it is difficult for people to let go of any entrenched habit, it is difficult for most people to let go of their fixed idea about ears and to listen without the support of their physical ears.
But every ordinary person hears sound in dreams. Where is this sound? Where is it coming from? And what organ is hearing this sound? Even if you believe that the sound in dreams and the organ of hearing in your dreams is the brain, you can understand that this “brain sound” and those “brain ears” are more subtle and less conditioned than the sounds you hear and the ears you hear with when you are awake.
In your dream, you can hear sounds that are fanciful and are not occurring in your physical environment. If you are good at dream yoga, the practice of aware dreaming, you might even be able to control what sounds you hear in your dreams.
But when you are awake, you cannot hear a tropical bird singing in the tree outside of your home in North America in the dead of winter. You cannot make any sound appear just by willing it to appear. Your waking life is more conditioned by your embodied concepts of reality.
In fact, yogis discover that our literal ears are not our organs of hearing. Our ears are living symbols of an aware, awake reality’s capacity in general to produce sound and experiences of sound. More realized yogis can hear, not only the gross sounds of every day, but more subtle sounds, for instance inner sounds from the subtle body and sounds from far away and from more subtle realms of existence.
It is not even so uncommon that people whose senses are naturally a little more open, or who have done some spiritual practice, are able to receive instruction or teachings via subtle speech and subtle hearing. You may have had this experience yourself when you heard an inner voice giving you wise instruction or urging you to take or avoid a certain course of action.
All of our sense organs, including our minds, are gateways to more subtle sensing. They emerge from the tattvas, capacities that sit behind and give rise to experiences of physical form. As we subtilize our senses, we rediscover less conditioned intelligence, less conditioned insight, and less conditioned compassion. We reconnect our perceptual and expressive capacities back to the universal.
23
Maya makes diversity for the Lord
Maya is the sculptress and the sorceress. She carves out worlds with the knives of time and unknowing.
In Sankhya, the ancient dualistic tradition of India, and in the nondual, more transcendental Hindu traditions, Maya is most often translated as “illusion.” According to these Views, Maya is the Shakti, the power, that causes us to mistake this world for the Absolute. She is feared and even reviled for this reason. Maya is a temptress, luring us away from God with shiny, unreal objects of desire.
The Vedic and Tantrik associations with Maya are “art,” “magic,” and “power.” These get closer to the role of Maya in Trika Shaivism. Maya wields Shiva’s power of self-limitation. She is the weaver and the artist. The tools of Maya Devi are the five kanchukas, or forms of self-limitation on the experience of the fullness of the Absolute.
Kalā is limited action.
Vidya is limited knowledge.
Raga is the limitation of the feeling of completeness.
Kalā is the experience of linear time, of being subject to birth and death.
Niyati is the limitation on omnipresence.
In the Trika, Maya is she who creates the wild diversity of beings, worlds, and circumstances. She uses her tools, the kanchukas, much like the sculptor or the ceramist. She carves out the infinite displays of the manifest from the unconditioned via limitations on time, understanding, the feeling of completeness, omnipresence, and power. She is the cosmic creative force that shapes the overflowing and unstoppable impulse to self-express. Maya is sometimes called “the weaver of the g
arb” because she “costumes” unconditioned Shiva Nature and causes it to appear in diverse forms.
Maya also inaugurates the entire play of sadhana. Our perception of our own limitations, our feeling of incompletion, and the longing to encounter the limitless drive us to seek teachers and teachings and to undertake spiritual practice. This is the grand game of Shiva-Shakti. There is enjoyment in the experience of separation and in finding one’s way back to self-understanding and union. And so reality enacts the play of sadhana with a little help from the powerful Maya Shakti.
24
All is perfection
Everything here is a perfect expression of living awareness. True, false, right, and wrong do not apply.
On a relative level, if a truck is headed toward us, we try to get out of the way. If we are taking an arithmetic test, we want to answer that 2+2=4. If a door is closed, and we want to pass through to another room, we open the door. We can’t walk through the closed door, and we wouldn’t bash it in with a sledgehammer. That would bring un-wanted consequences such as repair bills and possibly eviction. In general, we cannot ignore these aspects of relative, dualistic experience.
These are some of the practical moves we make in order to navigate our lives here in samsara. But many times we are not so practical.
We complain endlessly about other people’s behavior and about difficult circumstances. We find it “wrong” or even “evil” when people do not conform to certain standards of behavior established by us or our societies. We find fault with natural disasters and rail at God. We celebrate when people behave as we wish and expect, when the weather is good, or when our good works are recognized. We experience outrage when people disagree with truths we feel are evident or when they criticize us. We feel comfortable and confirmed when we are surrounded by those who agree with us.
The complaints and celebrations, the outrage and confirmations, all are aspects of suffering. Our feeling of being okay is at the mercy of ever-shifting circumstances. We are leading fragile, uneven lives ping-ponging between feel good, feel bad, approve, and disapprove.
When we have first-hand experience of essence nature, we come to understand that everything in manifest life is that showing up as a person, a car, a building, or a circumstance. Every manifestation in our relative experience is the play of God with God playing every role. So on an Absolute level, everything is perfect. Everything is goodness without an opposite.
“Truth” as applied to reality itself is nonsensical. You would not walk up to a tree and declare it “true” or “false.” That would not make any sense. Even if a tree were ill or deformed, you would not declare it “evil” or “wrong.”
People are no different from trees. All manifest life is the self-expression of an aware, alive reality. A painting may be more or less sophisticated. A tree may be healthy or diseased. A spiritual tradition may have a narrow or a wide view, but they are all equally expressions of wisdom. Even a lie is a real expression of God. Everything and everyone is acting their part perfectly. In a real way, everything is a perfect expression of that Supreme Self. When we understand this, we can develop abiding appreciation and respect for others.
Many people naturally want to have something like “truth” to hold onto, but truth and falsity are always relative. Here, Swami Lakshmanjoo explains Abhinavagupta’s teaching on the real nature of the svatantrya: the unconditioned freedom of self-expression that is enjoyed by God.
The greatest svātantrya (independence) of Lord Śiva is durghaṭa saṁpādana: [that] which is possible, that becomes impossible; [that] which is impossible, that becomes possible.12
If the possible can become impossible and the impossible possible, where does “truth” lie?
Unfortunately, the word Sat in Sanskrit is very often mistranslated as “truth.” Sat does not mean truth. It connotes existence, presence, endurance, authenticity, and goodness. People reading teachings often get the wrong impression that we are supposed to be looking for the truth when in fact we are being pointed toward immersion in natural, usable wisdom.
As practitioners, we are holding the relative and the Absolute together. We act practically and effectively on a relative level while making an effort to base our experience in the Absolute. We are not trying to bypass the relative.
As a navigational tool, it is extremely useful to remember that whatever ideas of truth and falsity or right and wrong you are hanging onto, there can always be an otherwise. Your truth is someone else’s falsity. A cultural or political “truth,” and especially religious “truths,” are highly contested around the globe. Even the so-called laws of physics do not apply in every circumstance. And then, what about other universes? Perhaps in some place, objects fall upward and time runs backwards. Who knows?
With this understanding, we can stop relating to circumstances through emotional hysteria and dogmatism. We can be more compassionate and more skillful. We can be better listeners. We won’t build so many walls.
25
Recognize, gain confidence, and immerse yourself in presence
There is no path, but while we are enjoying the relative experience of a path, we can benefit from a map.
Pratyabhijña is most often translated as “recognition.” The Pratyabhijña school is one of the Kashmiri spiritual traditions that came to be included in the View of what we now call Trika Shaivism or Shaiva Tantra. During the late 9th century to early 11th century, Somananda, his disciple Utpaladeva, Abhinavagupta, and his disciple Kshemaraja wrote the texts that became the foundation of the modern understanding of pratyabhijña.13
Pratyabhijña means to recognize your real nature, or the nature of reality. Recognizing your real nature does not mean to discover something for the first time. You are actually re-discovering or remembering.
Recognition is necessary to begin direct realization sadhana. This may happen spontaneously, but more usually it happens in the context of your relationship to a teacher and a practice. Through the alchemy of transmission, the teacher and the practice re-introduce you to your real nature. This can happen many times over before you recognize.
Recognition is not discovering something new. It is also not an intellectual recognition or understanding. You also cannot permanently refuse to recognize. Recognition of your real nature is an inevitability, in this life or another. As Utpaladeva writes: “Sovereignty is established through inner awareness. Therefore only the foolish strive to establish or deny the Lord.”14
In other words, the Supreme is already established as an inner awareness. The capacity to recognize and what is to be recognized are “built-in” from the beginning. Karmic conditioning obscures this inner awareness like the clouds obscure the sun. But the awareness is always there in full measure. Trying to prove or create an experience of the Supreme intellectually, or denying the existence of the Supreme, or blocking its announcement, are foolish operations. Ultimately, the Supreme will be victorious.
Any committed student of a direct realization tradition understands that the response of recognition is provoked in the heart and is drawn out of the heart. We receive transmission and teachings. We hear about our real nature. At some point, perhaps right away, perhaps not, there is a deep, spontaneous response of recognition. This can happen in the midst of doubt, seeming lack of interest, or even skepticism. It is as if the teacher and the teachings are the forever friends of the Supreme, and that calls out with wild gladness from within to meet them.
Once recognition sounds in the heart, the path truly begins. Without recognition, you don’t know where you are going or how to proceed. Recognition relates to the direct realization strategy of beginning with the end, or taking the fruit for the path. With recognition, you have a beacon. You can find your way.
Recognition is often not steady or strong at first; it can come and go. We remember and forget, remember and forget again. Our recognition is not firm. The coming and going leaves room for doubt. Now we must use our sadhana and our teacher to become confident in the
recognition of our real nature, the nature of all. We must, as Utpaladeva writes, acquire “unswerving certainty.”15
I have often compared this process to wading into deeper and deeper water. At first we are in the shallow end. We only recognize what is happening at the surface. We are only half-way in. We walk into deeper waters as we continue to practice.
For instance, being with our teacher, we may feel a sweetness and lightness and sense of relaxation mixed with the poignancy of homecoming after having been lost. We may have different kinds of energetic and emotional experiences that call into question the nature of our bodies and minds and help us to feel less separate. These are all “shallow-end” experiences, but they are important aspects of recognition.
More dramatic experiences of deepening our recognition, and therefore our certainty, will occur. But despite talk of sudden enlightenment, for most people, immersion is not something accomplished like diving from dry ground into deep ocean. It appears to approach us slowly. This is because our senses are not open enough at first to recognize wisdom on such a grand scale. As our senses subtilize, remembrance of our real nature becomes deeper and more experientially continuous.
At some point we also recognize that there is no inside and no outside. Our real nature is unbroken and infinite. This is when our entrance into the experience of samavesha, or immersion truly begins. After some years or lifetimes, the vastness and fountain-like quality of the wisdom heart reveals itself everywhere.
That eternal, infinite Self is your real nature. Because it is what you are, you can and will inevitably come to experientially know it and reintegrate your individualized experience with that. The open-hearted, overflowing virtue and skillful action that arise as a result of reintegrating with the natural state are the ultimate fruits of practice.
The Reality Sutras Page 6