26
Guru is the View, the method, and the fruit
Without Guru and transmission, there is no way out of ignorance.
Guru is not merely a person. In Trika Shaivism, we have the possibility to directly experience that the Guru tattva, or Guru element, is present everywhere. Individual Gurus are instances of that pervasive and unerring clarity, wisdom, and force of desire that moves beings toward awakening.
Our longing for self-understanding is Guru. The actions we take to seek knowledge of reality are Guru. Guru fuels spiritual paths and lineages, and Guru is the creator of those. Guru is embodied in every true teacher. Guru is the call of our own hearts leading us step-by-step toward wisdom. Guru is the signs and instructions we begin to notice everywhere as our perceptions open. Guru is a function, a power, a process, and many people. There is no path without Guru, and Guru is the path.
The central practice of direct realization Tantra is working with a human being who has direct knowledge of the natural state and who can convey that to you via a process called “transmission.” Transmission means that through the alchemy of your relationship to the teacher, you can have a real experience of your essence nature. Transmission does not mean that the teacher is giving you energy, or something you lack. You already have the same enlightened essence nature as the teacher. And actually, that is the transmission.
Without transmission, you likely will not have a clear experience of what it is you are trying to realize. Transmission is a beacon you can follow. Doing sadhana is how you follow that beacon and enlarge your capacity to recognize and remain in the natural state. So the teacher is responsible for re-introducing you to living presence, and you are responsible for doing practice and making immersion in that your new normal.
The teacher also imparts the View and knows some methods you can use to come to embody the View. These are methods that the teacher has already practiced and realized. The best teachers embody the View to such an extent that their very way of being in the world is a powerful teaching. Finally, the teacher acts as a mirror, showing you where you are stuck, and helping you to get unstuck. Because we have many attachments, we are unlikely to do this for ourselves. We need help!
Guru is a natural technology for waking up. What sparks your curiosity about spiritual paths? What causes you to look for some kind of practice to do? It is that wisdom that is coming to you through the heart chakra. Through that gateway, Guru is calling out, waiting patiently for you to listen.
Guru awakens the longing for a teacher and makes that longing grow stronger and stronger until you find one. And that same wisdom allows you to follow the instructions of the teacher and experience some sort of confidence in what’s going on even if it is outside of your frame of reference.
Anandamayi Ma said:
The Guru resides in your own heart, but most people are unable to rely firmly on their own self, so they have to take refuge in an external Guru. But in actual fact, the Guru resides within one’s own heart.16
We have a sense of inner knowing that is more durable and insistent than any convention, emotional need, fixation, intellect, or circumstance. Those people who are ripe will be able to hear and listen to that inner knowing in spite of criticism or doubts. When we have that capacity and follow the promptings of our wisdom heart, that’s when we encounter Guru.
People reject Gurus for various reasons, or they say they are following inner Guru even when they have little experience of essence nature. The first stage is not bypassing Guru. The first stage is to set out on a path that eventually leads you to recognize that having help is good. The fact is, when you are a little awake, you really want help!
In order to realize continuity, you first need to understand the value of being in alliance with others in our world. Much of the time, we value a gross kind of independence, a crass kind of freedom. But there is really not very much independence or freedom to be found in following your fixations without resistance!
The Guru will try to help you to surrender your attachments, your rigidity, your contrivances, your emotional patterns, your fixed ideas about life, and your self concepts. In effect, you are surrendering your brand. The result is that you will eventually live totally immersed in living presence, experiencing clarity, spontaneity, and freshness in your body, energy, and mind. Despite this great result, you will fight the entire way to hang onto limitation. Guru, in whatever form it takes, is here to make sure that freedom is victorious.
Sometimes you read or hear that you have to see Guru as God. People really take this the wrong way. Even some “Gurus” capitalize on the misunderstanding of this teaching. People assume it means you must put Guru on a pedestal above the merely human. This is dead wrong.
Realization means you have to see God in everything, without exception, not just the bits of life you consider to be “spiritual” or “holy.” Guru is your training for that. If you put Guru on a pedestal, just be sure you know that the pedestal is also God. Whether your teacher is spouting profundities, or picking their nose, God is present.
First you have to reconcile yourself to both the ordinary and the extraordinary in your teacher, and then in everyone. Ultimately, you have to experience that creative intelligence in all manifestations of life. The binary of ordinary and extraordinary, or mundane and spiritual, is a booby prize. There is magic everywhere.
If you want to experience God in everyone and everything, you have to actually experience God. And if you want to experience God, you have to do a lot of sadhana. You have to wear away the tyranny of your ordinary perceptions, the tyranny of your ordinary senses that only see and hear the most gross things. You have to subtilize yourself. You can’t just wander around inanely repeating that everyone is God. Self-realization is not an idea or a proclamation.
In the Guru Stotram it says: Salutations to that glorious Guru, who, when I was blinded by ignorance, applied medicine and opened my eyes.
We work with human teachers because we are trying to fully explore and realize the full potential of being human. Only human teachers can help us to do that. They are the medicine that helps us to see perfection in all of the messiness of life without exception.
27
Lose the watcher
God is not a watcher; God is a contemplator and an enjoyer.
Imagine yourself in a pleasing landscape. It might be a mountain meadow, a forest glade, a lake shore, or quiet inlet cove. You are enjoying the smells, the sights, the sounds, and the feeling of the air moving around you. You are immersed in the scene. You are not standing back, analyzing it from the position of a pair of abstract, intellectual eyes. Your natural intelligence and your senses drink deeply of the total circumstance, going out to meet it, and being met in return. You experience immediacy. You feel relaxed, alive, and integrated with Nature.
In some spiritual traditions, students are advised to take up the stance of a watcher with respect to their thoughts and emotions, or even life in general. God in some systems is defined as a watcher. These traditions are dualistic. Dualism is performed by the repeatedly marking three poles of perception: the seer, the act of seeing, and the seen.
By internally adopting the position of the watcher, dualistic experience is made even stronger. Whether you are watching your thoughts or everything, you must split yourself into the watcher and the watched. The watcher takes up a disembodied, bird’s eye view.
Unfortunately, Western psychology only makes matters worse. The psychological View of a person teaches us that our thoughts, and particularly our emotions, are of utmost importance and deeply problematic. The result has been that generations of people not only experience thoughts and emotions, but also pathologize a good portion of their experience. They syphon lots of energy into thinking about thoughts, feeling about feelings, and feeling badly about how they think and feel. This relentless enterprise of self-concern and self-repair proceeds in deadly earnest.
In direct realization Tantra, the goal is to lose the watcher. T
he watcher is understood to be a contrivance that propagates dualistic experience and requires undue effort to maintain. For this reason, practices in direct realization traditions do not emphasize activities such as watching the breath or the thoughts. We are not so interested in examining the mind. We are simply resting in the natural state as much as we can. This dissolves karmic habit patterns of thoughts and emotions much more quickly and thoroughly than distanced, analytic, restrained, or combative stances toward ourselves.
Limited emotions and thoughts are patterns of consciousness and energy. We don’t need to attack or fight our emotions or our mind. When we identify and integrate with the natural state, we can recognize the real nature of thoughts and feelings. As we begin to experience their real nature, they lose their ability to distract or rule us. As thoughts and emotions come and go, we remain, contemplating and enjoying our own nature everywhere.
28
The mind is the organ of curiosity
From within every cell of our bodies and every subtle channel, the mind excites the exploration of all.
Our relationship to mind—our minds and the mind—radically transforms over the course of engaging in practices such as meditation and mantra. We may bring to our practice received, strong associations of the mind with analytic thinking, theorizing, and information processing. We also may relate to our minds as the seat of psychology. Minds in this paradigm are a storehouse of thoughts, memories, and emotional patterns. Many of us are taught to believe that mind is produced by and is located in the brain.
Over the course of sadhana, we eventually come to experience mind as a sense organ and as immanent to all of our senses. We discover mind in every cell in our bodies and in the channels of our subtle energy body. We will develop the capacity to directly experience mind impelling all of the senses to reach into life and to learn to converse with life’s diverse circumstances from the most gross to the most subtle.
When we contact living presence using our real intelligence, we are entering into the experience of a dialog that ultimately teaches us about the nature of reality. It is this mind, along with all of our other senses, that relaxes its boundaries in order to be receptive to the reintegration with all of life. In the best circumstance, mind is always being in a condition of freshness and awakeness. Just as when we are conversing with someone, we want them to be listening in an open and undistracted way, so our minds are ideally listening undistractedly to whatever is arriving.
Natural intelligence is without any defensiveness or aggression. It receives impressions and reaches out to meet what is coming toward it as you would listen to a beautiful, subtle piece of music. You are not making anything of it in an aggressive way; you are letting the music reveal itself to you. At the same time, you are not passive. You are actively engaged with the music, as if you and the music were dance partners.
In the direct realization traditions, we are trying to be integrated with presence. We have the View that karmically patterned thoughts and emotions will unwind more quickly by integrating with presence than they will by doing other effortful things to try to control ordinary mind. Just continue your sadhana, trying to recognize and integrate with essence nature. You can begin to experience your real intelligence, set free to listen, feel, and explore reality. In our overly psychologized cultures, sometimes it is best to begin with listening. Listening moves the awareness out of the hothouses of our emotional lives. But eventually, you only need to be in a condition of receptivity and active, open-ended curiosity.
29
The relative purpose of life is self-realization
There is nothing to accomplish. Everything is already awake and totally free from the beginning.
You might think that self-realization is a serious, lofty goal. You might have the idea that as a practitioner you are doing something very important. You have practiced hard, and you now you have more clarity. You feel more compassion for people. You are able to help people more skillfully. You feel your life has meaning because you are waking up. This is wonderful. It is a marvelous experience, thrilling even. But self-realization is the play of essence nature expressing itself. While the play of Lord Shiva is thrilling, you are not actually accomplishing anything. In fact, there is nothing to accomplish.
The whole journey, from the first inkling that there might be more to life, all the way through to enlightenment, is built into nature, into the life process of Shiva-Shakti. Shiva-Shakti creates many experiences of limited forms of life. All of them are playing a huge game. The purpose of the game is to walk backward from ignorance to once again experience the delight of who you really are.
Your life is like a long TV series. You have the little episodic stories that change each week, but then you have the arc story. Self-realization is the arc story. But nothing has really happened. The Lord is not journeying toward wisdom; the Lord is wisdom. The play of a journey is enacted purely for the sake of enjoyment. The actors have just played their parts.
Earnestness is one of the major spiritual diseases that afflicts practitioners and teachers alike. The news that the entire journey from the experience of relative ignorance to self-realization is God’s play should not dismay you. Nor should you think, “Well, if that’s the case, I refuse to participate!”
The game of waking up is the best story arc around, full of chills, thrills, spills, infinite surprise turns, and a blockbuster ending. It’s the greatest romance, mystery, space opera, and indie mind bender of all times all rolled into one. Bottom line: There is no form of life that will ask more of your intelligence, your creativity, your sensitivity, and your heart. Nor will any other form of life give you such wealth in return. Well, except here’s a spoiler: what really happens is that you find out that you already possessed that wealth all along. Like I said, blockbuster ending.
But the real kicker is: you can’t help yourself. It doesn’t matter what arguments your mind makes or resistance your karma lobs at your aspirations to realize. You will seek greater continuity. You’re already doing it in every aspect of your activity, including reading this book. You will try to learn more about who you really are and what’s going on here. And you will find out.
Despite my Guru’s profound understanding of the absolute nature of reality, she spent her entire life teaching and exhorting people to do sadhana. She talked over and over again about the importance of a daily practice and of keeping one’s mind focused on the divine every minute of the day. Why? Because this is what is happening here. This is what we do. And if we are going to play this game, we may as well play it with gusto.
The purpose, or really the process, of realizing is already built into impermanent, relative existence. You already had a job and a job description from the moment you got here. That is good news, actually. Because you can stop worrying about the purpose of your life.
If anyone wants to know why you are a practitioner, or why you are a teacher, the only real answer is because this is what God does. There is nothing to develop pride around. If we do develop pride about our spiritual life, that is also just a flavor of the game. Knowing this, we can work with our relative condition and be as earnest as we like. But we can and should always maintain a small secret smile about it all, and occasionally, actually as often as possible, laugh really hard at our absurd and wonderful predicament.
30
Duality is for the enjoyment of reciprocity
We live in a devotional, call-and-response world.
Right now, I am writing to you. I am having a kind of conversation with you. It is enjoyable. All manifest life is engaged in what the Sufi poet Rumi described as a “constant conversation.”17 The hallmark of dualistic experience is that we are having the constant experience of being in contact with that which appears to be separate from us. Being in conversation with others, with nature, and with circumstances can be the source of suffering, but it is also our greatest pleasure. The degree to which social networks magnetize our attention testifies to this.
D
ualistic experience is a total theater in which everything is meeting and responding to everything else. We can see this responsivity everywhere. In an ordinary sense, plants respond to water and sunlight. Bodies respond to the quality of food offered to them. Circumstances in our lives respond to our degree of skill in navigating them. Some of us can respond to the communications we receive from our subtle bodies and subtle energy.
Responsivity is the natural state of manifest life. When we are being driven by karmic habit patterns, responsivity turns into reactivity. Reactivity is when we act out of compulsion or habit in a less than fully aware way. When we do sadhana, we rediscover more reciprocity and responsivity. Responsivity is both awake and playful. You clearly see and sense your circumstance and you respond to it appropriately and skillfully. Reactivity is always clumsy, out of step, out of tune, and ill-timed.
Despite our experience of suffering, more awake beings and reality as a whole are enjoying dualistic experience. When our senses and inner eyes open, we can directly sense the gladness in the experience of meeting that is inherent in more subtle manifestations of reality, such as the primordial lights of the five elements. The five elements—earth, water, fire, air, and space—comprise all appearings in the manifest world. But they have more subtle forms as colored lights that can be seen by people whose senses are more open. An exquisite responsiveness and exuberant gladness in meeting is apparent at this level. When we perceive it, we instantly feel that same joy.
Philosophers and spiritual traditions have long talked about cause and effect. But cause and effect is a very gross and mechanical description of the living process that is our actual circumstance in duality. The responsivity of the supreme subjectivity to itself as it plays in duality can more properly be understood as a pervasive phenomenon of call and response. As we wake up, we become increasingly sensitive to the call-and-response nature of manifest life.
The Reality Sutras Page 7