For instance, from a mechanical View, you might say that the cause of hearing a sound is your ear. But from the View of Trika, the experience of physical ears has arisen in direct responsivity to the primordial capacity for sounding. The appearance of a physical ear is actually a response to the call of sound. The ear is meeting sound. The nose appears to meet smells with smelling. The eyes appear to meet sights with seeing. If you cook a beautiful meal for friends, tongues are meeting tastes with their capacity for tasting.
Furthermore, these arisings to meet are devotional. The total responsivity of the Supreme is an expression of primordial devotion, a devotional feeling that permeates all of reality. Whatever you do or don’t do is being met just as the devotee runs to meet the beloved.
Call and response is built into many spiritual practices. Kirtan is a living symbol of the call-and-response nature of dualistic life. When we play kirtan, we get to practice being more spontaneous and devotional listeners and responders. The Tantras are also written in a call-and-response format with either Shiva or Shakti asking questions and the other responding. Satsang, an ancient form of gathering with a teacher, is a call-and-response practice. Puja is also call and response. You make offerings and are responded to with the return of your offerings as prasad, or a gift from the divine. These practices give us the opportunity to let go and participate in dualistic experience as ritual and the expression of primordial devotion.
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Rest in your real nature
The essence of direct realization practice is to relax into uncontrived naturalness and spontaneity.
A teacher once said to me that the whole of the practice can be summarized in five words: rest in your real nature. We relax our self-concepts and karmas. We learn many kinds of sadhana to help us to do this. These practices require effort and discipline. But eventually we realize that the greatest austerity is to stop all struggle, to give up all objections and complaints, and yield to life just as it is.
Yielding is definitely not a condition of passivity; it is a condition of total receptivity and utterly spontaneous responsivity. We work with life’s ever-changing circumstances in a graceful, skillful, practical, and positive way. We meet them just as we would a good friend. A good friend may be happy or sad, easy or difficult, but we care for our friend with the same tenderness and quality of attention nonetheless. Just so, we play with and adapt to circumstances as they are rather than willfully struggling to have our way and falling into anger and despair when life serves us difficulties.
Naturalness is the best word for what we discover and embody when we self-realize. Primordial naturalness, sahaja, is totally uncontrived and unconditioned by history, circumstance, linear time, conceptual space, or form. There is nothing missing. There is contentment with everything exactly as it is. The natural state is complete and replete.
Immersion in living presence introduces us to the eternal. We can begin to identify with permanence while still enjoying impermanence. Our sense of time radically changes, and the feeling of panicked urgency about our lives in samsara begins to recede. The fear of loss and death loses its grip on us. Many times people have the experience of a homecoming. It’s a home and a heaven coming at the same time.
When you are resting naturally and at ease, there is simply no more urgency or mission or compulsion. You recognize everything, including your limitations, as an ornament of the natural state. You can be light and playful even in the face of your own “failings” or illness or loss. All sense of worry dissipates even as you have tremendous power to act.
Struggle is replaced by receptivity, practicality, devotion, and humor. You are going along with life in partnership, in friendliness, and with a laugh. You are a player in a cosmic play with no rehearsal and no script. You enjoy the full palette of emotions, yet nothing sticks or bogs down. It is all improvisation.
In the natural condition, the space beyond limitations and partiality, Whatever presents itself, I enjoy as an ornament.
So I don’t make any effort to obtain or reject anything.
— Chögyal Namkhai Norbu18
Even though we are generally not experiencing sahaja until we are more awake, we are also not unnatural even in our relative condition of limitation. Limitation is an experience created by the unlimited for its own enjoyment. So we are not trying to fix ourselves. The attitude that we are damaged, or evil, or trying to fix ourselves is diametrically opposed to this tradition. There is nothing here that is not a perfect expression of the essence nature, so there never is anything wrong. By engaging in sadhana, you are simply God playing at letting go of some natural Self-imposed experiences of limitation.
At the same time, “letting go of limitation” requires effort. It takes intelligence and creativity and effort to stop struggling. If we want to re-integrate our body, energy, and mind with living awareness, we will have to work hard for some time.
Luckily for us, sadhana is also a natural Self-imposed expression. There is beauty to it, but no ultimate significance. We are accomplishing our nature by making the effort to do sadhana. That’s all. It is very simple.
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Ananda is aesthetic appreciation
Lord Shiva eternally contemplates his own nature in a state of wonder and amazement at the Self.
The Sanskrit word used to describe the state of natural contemplation is ananda. Ananda means something like “bliss-clarity.” There is no accurate English equivalent. The ananda of the Lord is not some kind of gross experience of a tingly, happy body. It is fathomless aesthetic appreciation: utter delight in experiencing and contemplating the creative nature of the Self.
We participate in the natural state of self-contemplation in our own, more limited way. The feeling you have when you finish making a work of art, writing a poem, or a piece of music, or cooking a beautiful dish, is an echo of ananda. You have a feeling of contentment and appreciation. You feel wonder at the simple fact that you made something. It is almost a surprise. You can’t get over it. You want to keep contemplating and enjoying your own nature through what you have created.
You have externalized a self-expression and enjoy the recognition of what you have made out of yourself, but there is also an aspect of discovery. It’s like unexpectedly coming across a sparkling gem and yet knowing it to be your self. In Vajrayana traditions this feeling is called “vajra pride.” Vajra pride indicates the indestructible confidence that you begin to feel because you have experienced your real nature. It is not small-self prideful. In fact, vajra pride is the most innocent, and I would even say humble expression, because you are in a state of continual surprise at your own nature.
Ananda also includes a kind of clarity that is hard to imagine if we have not experienced it for ourselves. Entering the primordial state of contemplation is accompanied by the advent of blazing clarity in one’s vision, mind, and other senses. If a person zoomed in an instant from the ordinary sensing they are experiencing right now to a condition of experiencing the clarity of ananda, they might find it very difficult to tolerate. The clarity of insight into the condition of beings and circumstances, along with the saturation of colors, sharpness of shapes, and the quality of light would be too piercing and intense. As our awareness and senses become more integrated with the natural state, this clarity can extend to other times and places, and even past lives. Luckily, as we do sadhana, our body, energy, and mind recalibrate over time and prepare us for this opening into clarity. Ananda, this cosmic bliss, is more like wonder or amazement at the freshness, beauty, diversity, and intelligence of everything.
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Everything is equality
Everything is made by and of wisdom. The only difference between one circumstance or being and another is the degree to which enlightened essence nature stands revealed or concealed.
Eka means “one.” Rasa means “taste” or “flavor.” Eka rasa is also sometimes referred to as samarasa – “same taste.” Our real situation is that there are infinitely diverse phen
omena enjoying absolute equality. All are equally composed of wisdom virtue. All are self-expressions of one continuous enlightened subjectivity. When someone is established in this recognition and embodies it in their attitudes and behaviors, they are said to be in a condition of eka rasa.
Rasa also means “nectar” and carries the connotation of something that is nourishing and sweet. A person who is rasika possesses an appreciation for art and aesthetics. When one is established in the recognition that everything is equality, a deep aesthetic appreciation for manifest life and the perception of the sweetness and goodness of the creation naturally arise. Realizing the equality of all phenomena is one way of defining self-realization.
We encounter many different circumstances in our lives. We have strong feelings and convictions about whether circumstances are good or bad, just or unjust, traumatic or pleasurable, or desirable or undesirable. For instance, a person may hold a strong conviction that eating meat is sinful and harmful. If they see animals being killed for food, or if they should somehow be forced to eat meat, they will suffer. They may even be traumatized. Another person holds the conviction that eating meat is healthy, normal, and necessary. If they should be prevented from eating meat for some time, they may feel upset and suffer from that. These responses are conditioned.
Even our responses to the most extreme circumstances are conditioned. Nearly everyone on earth would agree that being thrown into a prison camp, starved, and tortured is bad. Yet some Tibetan monks and Lamas report that they were grateful for that circumstance because it helped them to deepen their realization. Every reaction that we have based on good or bad, just or unjust, traumatic or pleasurable, or desirable or undesirable is conditioned by karmic vision. No one particular reaction to a circumstance is necessary or the same for all people.
If you are in an art museum or gallery, you will see many paintings. When you see a painting of a war with people being hurt, you may feel emotions looking at the painting. The emotions you feel, or thoughts that arise, while looking at works of art are an aspect of self-contemplation. You are contemplating the human condition, your own condition, or the process of art-making. You know paintings are made of paint. You can be moved by a painting, but you do not have the same reactivity to them as you would if you saw the depicted situation in real life.
In terms of the View, a painting of a war and an actual war are both aspects of creative, alive wisdom: the Self expressing itself. On one level, they are unique and different expressions, but on another level, they are all “painted” by and within the natural state.
Neither a painting of a war or an actual war enjoys substantiality in the way we normally assume. Neither circumstance involves an objectively existing object (a painting) or beings (people). Both the painting and the actual war are real experiences, but as in a dream, both are being projected from and within a single subjectivity. The experience of externality, of objectivity, and of others is the creative life process of one continuous awareness and its energy.
When you can feel and see this for yourself, your level of reactivity and suffering goes down. You begin to have a deep appreciation for the wisdom and goodness and beauty and fecundity of the manifest world. You become more of a rasika. As Anandamayi Ma put it: “Even in the midst of this Lila [the play of the manifest], Oneness remains unimpaired. What is enjoyed in Lila is rasa, which is unique.”19
Someone who is in the condition of eka rasa does not stop feeling compassion and other emotions. This is a mistake people often make when talking about eka rasa. They think it means that you wander around with a neutral affect, feeling nothing because everything is “equal.” How boring! No one would do years and lifetimes of spiritual practice if this were the ultimate result! No one would follow a teacher who displayed no compassion or other emotions.
Human emotions are colors on God’s palette, or flavors on God’s tongue. They are meant to be savored. When we recognize eka rasa, that all is the Lord, we experience emotions in a more enlightened way. We instantly recognize the wisdom inherent in our emotions and all circumstances. With that recognition, we simultaneously embody and express wisdoms such as compassion more fully, not less. Our expressions of wisdom virtues are just less conditioned and more universalized. They leap toward others gladly and spontaneously like clear rainbow light continually flashing forth from the source.
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Ethics are already built in
The natural state is goodness itself with no opposite. “Bad” is a play of that.
Generally, ethics is defined as a system that identifies right and wrong and gives us rules for acting according to what is deemed right. Punishment for wrongs may also be included.
Some systems of ethics lean more toward holding right and wrong as absolute values given either by nature, birthright, or God. Other systems of ethics tend to be more or less contextual, taking into account times, cultures, and actors. One thing that all systems of ethics have in common is the View that human beings have ethical shortcomings.
The fundamental understanding of Trika Shaivism is that there is only goodness, there is only beneficence. When we reintegrate with the natural state, we rediscover primordial goodness, and we understand directly that what we considered to be “bad” or “limited” or “flawed” is a self-expression or play of wisdom.
These two cycles, bondage and liberation, are the play of Lord Śiva and nothing else. They are not separate from Lord Śiva because differentiated states have not risen at all. In reality, nothing has happened to Lord Śiva.
— Abhinavagupta20
The absolute View of all direct realization traditions is “everything is fine.” This insight into the nature of reality has been expressed in many, many ways by different teachers. The 16th Karmapa, former leader of the Kagyu tradition of Tibet, reportedly made this reassuring statement on his deathbed in an attempt to provide solace to a grieving student: “Nothing happens.”21
Reality is and remains fine despite the insane variety of manifest life and the relative experience of suffering. Nothing happens other than that diverse projections of a continuous awareness and its energy arise and subside. When you realize that everything is happening within and is made of one continuous Self, you understand there is no question of ethics; there is no right and wrong because there is, in absolute terms, no other. There is no one to be harmed or benefitted. There are no objects, worlds, or beings in the ordinary sense. Right and wrong are relative experiences. They are real experiences, but at the base one discovers only goodness and its play.
And yet we are individuated styles of Shiva nature subject to the relative experience of separateness. We are subject to limited experiences of space and time. These real experiences, and the paradigms we concoct to navigate dualistic karmic vision, are also part of the play. God is immanent in the experience of limitation and the unlimited natural state.
Direct realization traditions are not transcendental. We are not ignoring manifest life or using absolute View to escape dealing with our real feelings and experiences of diversity. Where is there to escape from or to?
If we are not going to escape, and we are not going to be fully realized any time soon, what should we do? What should we not do? These are questions with which we need help!
Our traditions generally offer us precepts to live by. Precepts are a kind of ethical system, but instead of being grounded in “right” and “wrong,” they are grounded in a View of how to functionally manage our bodies, energy, and minds in order to create the best circumstances for self–realization.
For instance, “Be actually honest” is a precept for my students. If you are thinking in a more ordinary way, you might say that honesty is good or right. But from the perspective of View, honesty supports the immune system and contributes greatly to one’s ability to persevere and roll with life’s ups and downs. Honesty also keeps one out of a lot of unnecessary karmic entanglement and demonstrates basic respect for others which simplifies life and helps to conserve
everyone’s vital energy. Honesty is an important aspect of ahimsa, nonviolence.
From a functional perspective, what we should do is what helps us to conserve energy; unwind karma; and relax our body, energy, and mind. What we should not do is anything that gets us more entangled in limitation and tension. The precepts of direct realization traditions are resources students can use to specifically enact this functional View until they are more realized and can naturally and spontaneously feel for themselves how to move toward waking up while living in a messy world.
An aspect of modern spiritual ethics that needs to be considered is the common instruction to cultivate compassion or cultivate kindness or generosity. In direct realization traditions, if we are being true to the View, we are not thinking or practicing in this way.
Compassion, kindness, and generosity are already built into the fabric of reality. These wisdom virtues are present in full measure everywhere even though it may not seem so from our limited perspectives. The sun of natural virtue is shining fully in all times and circumstances. It would not make sense to say “I am cultivating sunlight.” The remedy is not to try to generate or cultivate anything, but to destroy the clouds of ignorance that obscure wisdom virtues from manifesting fully through us.
The most ethical thing we can do is practice and realize. We can try to be resting in natural presence as much as possible. The least ethical thing we can do is to stop trying to do that. To whatever extent we have reintegrated with primordial presence, that is the extent to which natural wisdom virtues will appear in us in their more expansive expressions.
The Reality Sutras Page 8