Ethics is already “built in.” So if you want to do good, do your practice and discover your indestructible goodness. Until then, you can act skillfully by following precepts and functionally managing your energy and interactions with others.
35
The heart is the gateway to unconditioned wisdom
Immersing yourself in the cave of the heart, you discover all guidance, all understanding, all virtue, all space, and the supreme moment.
Trika sadhana strongly focuses on the heart chakra or the heart space, hridayakasha. Accompanying this emphasis is the primacy of devotion in the teachings and writings of the tradition. In the Trika, these are front and center from the start.
What is the heart?
The heart is the seat of wisdom. Immersion in the heart space through meditation and mantra is a royal road to the encounter with unconditioned wisdom virtue.
Abhinavagupta writes:
When by virtue of the store of the gems of supreme wisdom, which are collected in the treasure house of the mystic heart, the state of Mahesvara (the Great Lord) is reached, one realises “I am all; what misfortune can befall, and to whom?”22
The heart is also the subtle form of Kashi, the City of Light. The geographical Kashi (Varanasi, Benares) is one of the oldest, continuously inhabited cities in the world. It is the earthly mytho-poetic home of Lord Shiva in his householder form. The city also is Lord Shiva. Our heart space is Shiva’s home in us. Here he resides in the “courtyard of duality,”23 content and at rest in the midst of life as jivanmukta, one who is liberated in life.
Shiva as the renunciate yogi lives in the Himalayas. In the human subtle body, Shiva’s Himalayan home is the seat atop the crown, just above sahasrara chakra. After the ascent to the Himalayas, there is always a return to the heart, to Kashi.
The heart is also the mahasandhi, the great juncture or portal between the manifest and the unmanifest, between linear time and Great Time. We explore our individualized sandhi of the heart, but in truth, the heart is at the center of reality, filling all space. The creation emerges continuously from this heart.
Finally, the heart is ‘A’, the first letter of the Sanskrit alphabet. This sound form, when used in sadhana, evokes the unconditioned, anuttara, the Lord. ‘A’ is the all-pervading, spontaneous freedom, svatantrya, that sits behind and is the summation of all sound forms including the unstruck sounds of the heart chakra. It is propelled by ‘HA’, Shakti. With her breath, with the power of the word, she excites the emission of the creation. ‘A’ is immanent in the destination ‘MA’: the last sound form in the Sanskrit alphabet and a living symbol of the manifest world. These three together, unconditioned awareness, the force, and their unity in the manifest world continuously sound the mantra AHAM, the “I am” of the totality.
36
Devotion is wisdom’s crucible
Devotion arises simultaneously with the dawning of self-knowledge and hosts every action of awakened devotees.
It doesn’t matter where you begin in spiritual life. You may be a skeptic. You may be a rationalist. You may be a bhakta (devotional worshipper). Wherever you begin, if you travel all the way back to discover your real nature, you will end in devotion. Contacting wisdom is contacting devotion. Knowledge of the Self is the getting of devotion. Just as with the famous heat and light of a flame, wisdom and devotion may be talked about separately, but they always arrive together.
Alive, aware presence appears as the physical world. It also appears as energy: the fundamental vitality and clarity of everything. When we travel to the center, it reveals itself to be wisdom, but not wisdom in the ordinary sense of knowing. The wisdom revealed, what composes all and of which all is composed, is wisdom virtue: goodness without an opposite, compassion, generosity, a profound intelligence beyond imagining, playfulness, gladness, clarity, and delight.
When we are immersed in the fullness of our own self, the Self, we overflow with these virtues naturally. We are good because of goodness. We are compassionate because of compassion. We are intelligent because of intelligence. There is no external circumstance that selectively calls forth these virtues; they continually pour out without restraint or reason.
A crucible is an alchemical vessel for making offerings and receiving blessings of wisdom. Devotion gathers and concentrates all wisdom virtues into itself and ignites them in a cosmic puja, a cosmic play of the ritual offering of self-to-self.
Dreams of mastery and the spiritual mountaintop are karmic fantasies of the less-than-realized. This mad devotion of Self to Self, born of wonder and amazement at its Self, makes the awake ones eternal servants of the Lord. To be a disciple is to be still on the path. To become like Shiva, a devotee of all, is the destination of all disciples.
I am only a servant and there is no master to be seen. This is a wonder to me.
— Utpaladeva24
37
The View expires
The ultimate instruction, beyond which there is no need for instruction, is hold no View.
In the key Trika text, the Vijñana Bhairava Tantra, Shakti asks Shiva for clarification of a variety of complex View teachings. At the end of her extensive list of questions, Lord Shiva replies:
All this is nothing but a phantom for frightening children, or a sweet given by the mother (to attract the child). These descriptions are only meant for the spiritual advancement of the unenlightened.25
Since nearly all of us are unenlightened, Lord Shiva goes on to address Shakti Devi’s questions and to offer 117 practical methods for “children.” But the message is clear: the View teachings that are for so long our ground must eventually become the cliff that we jump from.
The Trika tradition is so far from dogmatism that it builds in its own obsolescence. Knowing this is wonderful for students. You can use the View. You should even become attached to View. But if you follow the practice through to its conclusion, you will not get stuck with anything other than the intimacy and immediacy of immersion in primordial livingness, your own Self.
We have many tools and words to get us there. We have our teachers. But once we have remembered, once we have relaxed the boundaries of body, energy, and mind, we don’t need the View anymore. The View becomes the direct experience we are always living in, and whatever that is cannot be held by the View.
Swami Lakshmanjoo describes the letting go of the intricacies of View and, in essence, all of the accoutrements of spiritual tradition, as a bitter medicine.26 But it is only bitter when we are attached to limited knowing and the security of believing that we have “gotten it” and that “it” is of supreme importance.
Nature unfolds and refolds itself with both utter simplicity and dazzling variety. Our destiny is to relax, immersed in presence while enjoying our reclaimed ability to play freely in the field of infinite arisings. Eventually, we can happily reconcile ourselves to the fact that all View teachings, even absolute teachings, come with an expiration date.
Keep on continuing
During a trip to India, I met a young Bengali man who worked at the Anandamayi Ma ashram on the banks of the Ganga in Varanasi. His parents were devotees of Ma, and he had grown up in her presence.
During the course of the visit, he told me about a cassette tape he had recorded of Ma giving satsang. He promised to translate it for me. Some months later, I received this. These words have inscribed themselves in my mind and heart and guide me always.
You have come for Darshan, but you still remember your home and family members. You have come for Darshan, you have come to the place where the Lord lives (vaikunt), where there is no knot (kunt). Here, you should try to have satsang. You should try to have Satbhava, Satvachan, and the stories told here should be about Reality without limitation.
You do Masters Degrees. You do research and write books. But THIS knowledge is not in books. . . it is in you. That is the real knowledge, the real wisdom. On the path of sadhana, of satsang, you gain Atma Shakti, Atma Prakasha. You gain introduction to your r
eal self. You tread on the path to Self-realization. The effort should not be stopped. Keep continuing. Become a pilgrim to openness, to awakening. Keep on continuing. It will happen. Let there be coming and going. The Thing will be done.
— Anandamayi Ma
Endnotes
1. Constantina Rhodes Bailly, Shaiva Devotional Songs of Kashmir: A Translation and Study of Utpaladeva’s Shivastotravali (State University of New York Press, 1987), 84.
2. Quoted in Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies (Kindle Locations 1890-1893). Allworth Press. Kindle Edition.
3. Quoted in Ksemaraja, Pratyabhijñahrdayam: The Secret of Self-Recognition, trans. Jaideva Singh (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1982), 33.
4. Abhinavagupta, Gitartha Samgraha, Abhinavagupta’s Commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, trans. Boris Marjanovic (Varanasi: Indica Books, 2002), 27.
5. Wikipedia contributors, “Hakuin Ekaku,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hakuin_Ekaku&oldid=825382096 (accessed April 24, 2018).
6. B. P. Bahirat, The Amritanubhava of Jnanadeva (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1963), 85.
7. Quoted in John Hughes, Self Realization in Kashmir Shaivism: The Oral Teachings of Swami Lakshmanjoo (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 21.
8. Anandamayi Ma, “Ma in Her Words,” privately circulated PDF, multiple translators and sources, 149.
9. Anandamayi Ma, “Mataji’s Amara Vani,” Ananda Varta, Shree Shree Anandamayee Sangha, Varanasi, Vol. VI:2, 1958: 130.
10. Jyotish Chandra Roy, “Reduce Yourself to Zero,” Amrit Varta, Shree Shree Anandamayee Sangha, Varanasi, Vol. IV:4, Oct. 2000: 22.
11. Swami Lakshmanjoo, Shiva Sutras: The Supreme Awakening, (Culver City: Universal Shaiva Fellowship, 2007), 156.
12. Swami Lakshmanjoo, Light on Tantra in Kashmir Shaivism: Chapter One of Abhinavagupta’s Tantraloka (Kindle Locations 6944-6945). Universal Shaiva Fellowship. Kindle Edition.
13. These texts are Somananda’s Shivadrishti, Utpaladeva’s Ishvarapatyabhijñakarika, Abhinavagupta’s Isvara-Pratyabhijña-Vimarsini, and Kshemaraja’s Pratyabhijñahrdayam.
14. Raffaele Torella, The Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā of Utpaladeva with the Author’s Vrtti, (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2013), 86.
15. Torella, 87. The word in Sanskrit that Utpaladeva uses for “certainty” is abhijñana: remembrance or recognition.
16. Anandamayi Ma, “Matri Vani,” Ananda Varta 27, no. 2 (1980): 87-88.
17. Coleman Barks. The Essential Rumi: New Expanded Edition (Kindle Location 1938). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
18. Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, The Little Song of Do as You Please, trans. Enrico Dell’Angelo (Arcidosso, Italy: Shang Shung Publications, 2017), 23.
19. Anandamayi Ma, Words of Sri Anandamayi Ma, trans. Atmananda (Haridwar: Shree Shree Anandamayee Sangha Kankhal, 2008), 145-146.
20. Hughes, 32.
21. The Lion’s Roar, directed by Mark Elliot (1985; Colorado, Crestone Films) DVD.
22. Abhinavagupta, Paramārthasāra of Abhinavagupta: Essence of the Supreme Truth, trans. Deba Brata SenSharma (New Delhi: Mukatbodha Indological Research Institute, 2007), 122.
23. Jñanadeva, 85.
24. Swami Lakshmanjoo, Hymns to Shiva: Songs of Devotion in Kashmir Shaivism; Utpaladeva’s Shivastotravali (Lakshmanjoo Academy Book Series) (p. 251). Universal Shaiva Fellowship. Kindle Edition.
25. Swami Lakshmanjoo, Vijnana Bhairava Tantra: The Practice of Centring Awareness, trans. Bettina Bäumer (Varanasi: Indica, 2002), 12.
26. Ibid., 12.
Acknowledgments
Unending gratitude to all those teachers and other beings who have taught me the View and who continue to push and prod me so I don’t get stuck. Many thanks to my students Matridarshana Lamb and Ambika Beber for shouldering the load of running Jaya Kula Press and helping to share the teachings. Special thanks to my designer, Saskia Nicol, for somehow getting it and translating the View into color and form. Thanks to all of my students who continue to show up on the cushion and everywhere else. You make the impossible possible.
About Jaya Kula Press
Jaya Kula Press is a project of Jaya Kula, a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization headquartered in Portland, Maine.
Jaya Kula Press supports dharma practitioners by presenting spiritual teachings that are precise, practical, faithful to their origins, and yet accessible to a wide range of people. We currently publish the teachings of Shambhavi Sarasvati, the spiritual director of Jaya Kula.
About Jaya Kula
Jaya Kula is a vibrant, nonprofit householder community offering opportunities to learn and practice in the direct realization traditions of Trika Shaivism and Dzogchen. Visit jayakula.org for more information and Shambhavi’s teaching schedule.
Table of Contents
Two Handfuls of Rice
1. Reality is knowable
2. Everything is God
3. Your senses are for directly discovering your real nature
4. God is wisdom virtue
5. Desire is required
6. Freedom is the unlimited capacity for self-expression
7. Shakti is the power of self-reflection
8. All self-reflections are enjoyed by the Lord
9. Diversity is a real experience
10. Know yourself and know God
11. There are no individuals
12. Worlds are experiences
13. Belief, faith, and trust are obstacles to self-realization
14. I am here, I am everywhere
15. Unmind the mind
16. There is no emptiness
17. Impermanence is the glamour of God
18. The whole of life is the means of realizing the Self
19. God is both the limited and the unlimited
20. Ignorance of your real nature is the cause of suffering
21. There is no suffering
22. Manifest life is a cascade of becoming and unbecoming
23. Maya makes diversity for the Lord
24. All is perfection
25. Recognize, gain confidence, and immerse yourself in presence
26. Guru is the View, the method, and the fruit
27. Lose the watcher
28. The mind is the organ of curiosity
29. The relative purpose of life is self-realization
30. Duality is for the enjoyment of reciprocity
31. Rest in your real nature
32. Ananda is aesthetic appreciation
33. Everything is equality
34. Ethics are already built in
35. The heart is the gateway to unconditioned wisdom
36. Devotion is wisdom’s crucible
37. The View expires
Keep on Continuing
The Reality Sutras Page 9