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[Music]

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Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump, in

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case you haven't watched one of these before, is an ongoing series of conversations with

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spiritually awakening people. And we've done over 700 of them now. If this is new to you

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and you'd like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under

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the interviews menu where you'll see them organized in several different ways. We'll

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be updating the website in the next couple of months, so forgive the bland appearance

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of it. It's been that way for many years, but we're going to update it.

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One feature that I like to mention these days is that we have something called the BatGap

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Bot, which is an AI chat bot. You can find it under the menu of that name, and it produces

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much better results to spiritual and philosophical questions than you're likely to get on ChatGPT

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one of the commercial bots. So if you're into that sort of thing, try it out. It continues to develop

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as AI continues to develop at light speed. One final little business type point is that this

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whole program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you

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appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the

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the website and there is a page explaining alternatives to PayPal.

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Okay, my guest today is a very interesting fellow named Nishanth Selvalingam, nicknamed

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Nish the Fish, and rather than just read his bio, I'm going to do this conversationally

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and just start asking him questions and let him bring out the points.

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So Nish, no one has seen you yet, so you'll have to do your little namaste one more time

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once you begin to speak because then the camera will switch over to you.

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Jai Ma, Jai Ma, Namaste Eric ji.

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Thank you so much for having me and Pranam to the Bag Tap audience.

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Jai Ma.

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Thank you Nish.

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So I'll tell you a funny story.

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I was walking in the woods a month or two ago as I do most days and I ran into a friend

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that I've met there in the woods and I asked her what she'd been up to and she said, "Well,

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I just met this guy named Fish."

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And I said, "You mean Nish the Fish?"

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She said, "Yeah, Nish the Fish."

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I said, "He's in Fairfield?"

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And she said, "Yeah!"

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So you were in Fairfield?

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I was in Fairfield?

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Where's Fairfield?

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Iowa.

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Interesting.

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As far as I recall, I haven't been to Iowa yet.

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Oh, so it must be an imposter.

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Maybe an evil twin running around.

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I don't know.

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Doppelganger.

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All right, Nish hasn't been to Fairfield, so we've cleared that up.

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But out of curiosity, how'd you get that nickname?

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You know, there's a yogi that I very much look up to.

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His name is Matsyendra Natha, the Lord of the Fishes, and he's credited as being the founder

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of the Nath Sampradaya, one of the great tantric masters of yore.

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I used to debate internationally with the Malaysian team at international debating tournaments,

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and there was difficulty in pronouncing my name.

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Nishant, you actually nailed it.

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That was a beautiful pronunciation.

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I was very impressed.

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But people would struggle to pronounce the name, and so I was wondering, Nish, Nish,

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Nish, you know, something simpler.

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So they said Nish, but then when I would say Nish, they would say Nish.

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So I felt there was a need to give some kind of device to make sure that it was pronounced.

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I said Nish the fish.

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Alliteration.

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Yeah.

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Alliteration.

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So over time, somehow the name just stuck.

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Cool.

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And there was an avatar of Vishnu that was a fish, wasn't there?

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Yes.

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Matsya, the first of Vishnu's ten forms.

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Yeah, there you go.

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Maybe you're him in a degenerated state by comparison with the avatar.

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In truth, all of us are just that.

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Right.

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Yeah.

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You mentioned Malaysia just now, I believe.

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Were you born in Asia?

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Yes, I was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

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In Malaysia, there's a very big Indian community, South Indian mostly, Tamil community.

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So, my great-grandfather came over with the British colony and came to Malaysia prior to its independence.

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So, I grew up there and my grandfather grew up there.

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He spent a lot of time in Sri Lanka, though, my grandfather.

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But my father and I both lived almost our entire lives in Malaysia.

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But you speak perfect English. Was English your first language or what?

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or what? You know, Malaysia, we do our instruction in Malay. Bahasa Malaysia is the national language,

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and so that's what we learned at school. But there was a strong push in school to learn English, and

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my grandfather was a headmaster at an English school. So at home he made it a point, he spoke

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to me in Tamil, but mainly in English. He spoke to me mainly in English, I think. In a sense,

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it's my first language. Okay, good. Four years ago you graduated from UCLA with a BA in philosophy.

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Indian philosophy? What philosophy? No, just philosophy in general. At UCLA we have a strong

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logicians headquarters, you know, like some of the Vienna circle were there. We have a lot of good,

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like, you know, Bertrand Russell type stuff. So I learned logic. I was mostly interested in theology

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though, and most of the theology is like Christian theology. So scholastics, Aquinas, Anselm, etc.

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Kant took many classes on Kant, who I think is a very Indian mind.

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And then I understand that you have a strong background in Kashmir Shaivism, right?

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Yes. My grandfather was a practitioner of Shaiva Siddhanta, the Tamil stream of Shaiva Siddhanta.

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And so that's just very much in the air. It's just part of the Shaiva heritage. And so as I

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started to study more philosophy and started to develop my own practice, and as I came to

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Paramahansa Sri Ramakrishna, which is the lineage I belong to now, I found that my real inclination

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is towards non-duality. And of course, already having grown up in the Shaiva Siddhanta world,

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Advaita Shaiva philosophy, otherwise known as Kashmir Shaivism these days, that just came naturally.

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Okay, good. And you are quite prolific. I don't know if you realize this, but you have about 20

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days worth of videos on your YouTube channel. I know that because I downloaded them all and

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turned them into audio files and popped them into iTunes and it said, you know, almost 20 days.

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A non-stop continuous 20 days of talking.

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Yeah, if you wanted to listen 24/7, it would take you 20 days to listen to them all.

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Oh my god. Of course you'd be asleep for much of it, but um, anyway, but it's good stuff, right? I

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listened to many of them and I feel I have a lot that I can learn from you and I did learn a lot

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listening to a bunch. One thing I've done to prepare for this lecture, since I didn't have

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time to listen to them all obviously, was I just scanned down the list of names of your videos and

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I copied and pasted some of the names that jumped out at me, some of the titles into a document,

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And so, if we run out of things to talk about, which I don't think we will, I'll say, "Hey,

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what about this one and that one?" And we'll just riff on it for a while. Yeah.

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>> Okay, so you're eclectic. You've studied Christianity deeply and Western philosophy

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and Kashmir Shaivism, and now you're into Sri Ramakrishna's teachings and lineage.

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Do you have any difficulty reconciling all these or integrating them?

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Yes, the beauty of the tantric heritage because Kashmir Shaivism is of course an exegetical

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movement that emerged within Kashmir like around the 9th, 10th century it flourished.

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What does exegetical mean?

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Post-scriptural or like a commentary on the scriptures and the scriptures in question

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here are known as the tantras or the Agamas and the Agamas are of course philosophically

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speaking the revelation of Lord Shiva, mythologically speaking the revelation of Lord Shiva.

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And so the Kashmir Shaiva movement is an attempt to make sense of this vast and very complex

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world known as Tantra.

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So many of the authors like Abhinava Gupta, their project was to reconcile and to harmonize

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and to systematize seemingly different streams of thought.

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And Swami Vivekananda, very much like Abhinava Gupta, has also attempted to systematize everything

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into a nice coherent whole.

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So there's a meta-narrative that holds everything together.

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And so having studied Shaiva Siddhanta, especially Kashmir Shaivism for a while, when I was initiated

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into the Paramahansa Ramakrishna lineage, I felt like that was pretty much a one-to-one

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match with this eclectic harmonization of different streams.

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So Sri Ramakrishna, for instance, as you know, was very eclectic himself in that he would

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practice all the different forms of "Hinduism" that was available to him at the time.

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He was primarily a Tantrika and his first mode of spiritual practice was devotion to

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the Divine Mother Kali.

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He did many tantric practices, but he later practiced Vaishnavism and then Advaita Vedanta

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and then all sorts of different movements within Hinduism. After that he practiced Islam and then

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Christianity and he found a way to reconcile all of it. So in the light of Shri Ramakrishna, it

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becomes quite easy actually to find that which is great in all the different traditions and find a

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common center to hold it all together. Yeah, that's good. I want to ask you about that, but

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as you're speaking I thought of a couple other little biographical tidbits that I just want to

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make sure we cover. One is that you are a fairly accomplished guitar player. I was watching

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Yesterday I was watching a YouTube of your band playing. I don't know if you're still in a band.

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Are you? Yes, I wouldn't say accomplished. I'm learning to play. Well, yeah, you're not

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John McLaughlin, but yeah, you're good. Thank you. And you had a good drummer. I used to be a drummer.

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What did you hear? What's on YouTube? I don't remember the name of it. It was in some club

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or something or other. I left my band to become a meditation teacher actually, and when I was 20.

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And also, you said that you teach in a middle school.

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>> Ah, yes.

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>> You still do that?

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>> Yes, I'm a middle school debate teacher.

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>> Cool, you got like your fingers in many pies.

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>> Yes, it's actually all the same pie, it just has various aspects.

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>> Yeah, no, I like that, I like that, your diverse interests.

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And that's reflected in your spirituality too, as you were just saying.

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So let's get back to that.

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It's been a while, but in the past when I've been confronted by

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like a fundamentalist Christian, I'll start talking astronomy to them and I'll say, "Do you realize

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even if there's one intelligent life form in each galaxy, that there are anywhere between two and

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ten trillion intelligent civilizations and they all have their religions and their gurus and their

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inspirational leaders?" And if Jesus is the only way, is he on tour, you know, to these ten trillion?

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You know, I just say that by way of taking a God's eye view of the whole thing, which

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is that there are just infinite streams of wisdom and spirituality and people gravitate

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toward what's available and what resonates with them and what their karma would dictate

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and so on.

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Yes, precisely.

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And this is Shri Ramakrishna's most famous teaching, that the divine is infinitely capacious

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And as such, there must be necessarily infinite ways to reach the Divine, but also infinite

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aspects to reach, and infinite ways to enjoy the Divine.

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And speaking from the God's eye view, as you so beautifully put it, if Divinity is

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infinite, then it expresses itself in infinite numbers of ways too.

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Now that raises a question that I've discussed with friends at times.

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Do you think that different paths and practices result in different types of realization, or

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Or do you think that people gravitate toward a particular path according to their karma

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and tendencies?

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But if enlightenment is supposed to be realization of the reality, the ultimate truth of things,

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could there actually be different flavors or colors of enlightenment?

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Or would it fundamentally all have to be the same thing and perhaps just being expressed

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in different languages or different cultural forms?

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It's a wonderful question.

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I think the tantric position, especially Shri Ramakrishna's position, would be the former.

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That there are actually different flavors.

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So it's true.

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realization is the realization of the one divine reality, but that one divine reality is the

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kind of reality that can be enjoyed in infinite numbers of ways.

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So it's not just that people's karmas predispose them to certain paths, but those certain paths

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have their unique revelations also.

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And they're all revelations of the same reality.

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So for instance, someone practicing in a dualistic tradition, their highest conception of realization

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might be to enjoy an eternally loving relationship with the divine in some like heavenly realm.

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In Indian spirituality, that's called a loka.

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So they might go to Vishnu Loka, Vaikuntha Loka it's called, and then become Vishnu's

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door guard or something, or Vishnu's eternal devotee, or say, you know, those who follow

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Gaudiya Vaishnavism, their ideal realm is the Goloka, where they will whirl about in ecstatic

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intoxicated circle with Krishna and the Gopis.

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And that, according to Kashmir Shaivism, would be a legitimate realization as well.

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In the text, Pratyabhigya Hridaya Sutra, one of the famous texts of the tradition, it is

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said, "Tad bhoomika sarva dharsana sthithayaha."

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All the various schools of philosophy in the world, all the various spiritual positions

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and paths are all valid expressions of the one divine reality.

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So they are distinct and different ways of enjoying the same thing.

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Okay, so I get how they're all valid expressions and how it's natural for people to be on different

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paths, but if we're all climbing a great big mountain on different paths, ultimately there's

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a mountaintop, there's a peak.

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And one would think that, okay, it's got to be the same peak, it's not like they're separate

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mountains in this analogy, the paths may be very different, but the peak itself is just the one

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peak. Once you get there, everybody would see the same thing. What do you think about that?

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It's a wonderful metaphor, but it breaks down with regards to the nature of the peak.

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Because you're right, in suppose we're talking about geography and geology, the peak is just

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the peak. You know, five different people taking five different hiking trails will arrive at the

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same peak and they'll all look at each other like, "Hey, it's you! Hey, it's you! We're all here!"

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how vociferously we argued about the path down at base camp but now look you made it too i never

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thought you would make it you know that's i think our idea of what enlightenment will be like we

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just all end up in heaven or like oh or we all have this non-dual realization where it's just the one

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undifferentiated consciousness and then we all realize oh i thought it was vishnu i thought it

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was jesus but the whole time those were just metaphors or symbols for the one advaitic brahma

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realization so we all have that i think view but shramakrishna was very interesting his claim is

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that this one non-dual reality which everyone arrives at, unlike a mountain peak, is infinitely

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diverse. So it's like he gives the example of the elephant and many different people are touching

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the elephant at the same time. They're all blind. I'm sure you've heard this example before and

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they're all giving a report of what they're touching. But notice, they're all of them

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actually touching the elephant. So one is touching a real part of the elephant and he's calling it

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like a wall and the other is touching a real part of the elephant. It's calling it like spiky and

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hard. But I guess you could say the more capacious view would be to say, well the elephant does have

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all of these aspects. It's got a bushy tail and a wall-like leg and it has a spiky tusk and all of

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that is one way of... each and every one of them is an interesting way of enjoying the same elephant.

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But if you have a partial view of the elephant or a partial understanding of the elephant based

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upon what you happen to be feeling, does that really deserve the term "enlightenment"? Or does

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the word "enlightenment" necessarily imply a view of the entire elephant, to mix our metaphor with

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what we're actually talking about here.

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For Ramakrishna, no, it's enough to touch just the trunk and have a partial view and not touch anything else.

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He describes it in terms more of bhava than tattva. Bhava means experience, whereas tattva means reality.

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And perhaps reality is not an experience, it's something beyond the experience, the bhava.

00:15:34.620 --> 00:15:41.500
But Ramakrishna would say if you go to a bar, a tavern, you only need to drink one cup, perhaps, depending.

00:15:41.500 --> 00:15:44.300
And you'll be drunk. You don't have to drink the whole tavern dry.

00:15:44.300 --> 00:15:47.900
If you want, of course, you can drink various different cups, but one cup is usually enough

00:15:47.900 --> 00:15:52.540
to get me quite a bit drunk. And that's what he would call enlightenment. Just fulfillment.

00:15:52.540 --> 00:15:56.940
Just atyantika dukkha nivrtti, the permanent cessation of all suffering, and paramananda

00:15:56.940 --> 00:16:00.620
prapti, the attainment of the highest fulfillment in life, which you can get from just touching the

00:16:00.620 --> 00:16:04.140
trunk. You don't have to touch the whole elephant. You don't have to realize the whole elephant in

00:16:04.140 --> 00:16:08.940
order to be able to say you are realized. And in a sense, realization is not like a stopping point.

00:16:08.940 --> 00:16:12.700
I know in many spiritual traditions, there's like this cap, tattva jnana, either you know it or you

00:16:12.700 --> 00:16:16.060
don't. You're realized or you're not. You're saved or you're not. But I think in the tantric world

00:16:16.060 --> 00:16:20.460
there's this idea that there's no end to realization. That you can touch the trunk and be fulfilled or

00:16:20.460 --> 00:16:25.100
if you want you can continue your journey and then also touch the elephant's rear and then later touch

00:16:25.100 --> 00:16:29.660
the elephant's bushy tail and the elephant etc etc. But you see it's all part of the infinite

00:16:29.660 --> 00:16:35.260
self-exploration of the one divine reality, namely Kali or Shiva or something. So in a sense you're

00:16:35.260 --> 00:16:40.140
already realized when you start out. You know the very beginning of the quest is an expression of

00:16:40.140 --> 00:16:44.780
realization, not an attempt to become realized, but an expression of how to enjoy the realization

00:16:44.780 --> 00:16:50.220
that you already are. Well, I'm kind of a broken record on the notion that there's no end to growth,

00:16:50.220 --> 00:16:53.740
so I'm with you on that one. But I'm just trying to wrap my head around,

00:16:53.740 --> 00:16:59.740
you said bhava versus tatva, I think you just said, right? I've sometimes understood bhava to

00:16:59.740 --> 00:17:05.180
mean like a mood. So, very difficult to translate that word. Bhava could mean being absorbed in a

00:17:05.180 --> 00:17:08.940
particular aspect of God. Let's say someone thinks about the Christ and becomes inspired,

00:17:08.940 --> 00:17:13.660
they're in bhava. They're in a mood, you know. Or bhava could be a technical term to describe a

00:17:13.660 --> 00:17:17.660
kind of samadhi where you forget about the world, you forget about your body, you forget about

00:17:17.660 --> 00:17:22.780
yourself and all you can think about is God and you're enthralled by God's beauty. So bhava samadhi.

00:17:22.780 --> 00:17:27.020
Bhava could also mean state, just regularly. So like if somebody's eating chocolate,

00:17:27.020 --> 00:17:31.660
they're experiencing chocolate bhava or someone's depressed, their bhava is depressed bhava.

00:17:31.660 --> 00:17:38.700
Yeah, Amma, the hugging saint, used to do Devi bhava and earlier she used to do Krishna bhava

00:17:38.700 --> 00:17:44.860
and so on. But what I'm getting at is, if enlightenment, let me try to phrase this,

00:17:44.860 --> 00:17:52.380
so would Ramakrishna, or to your understanding, say that it's possible for a human being to attain

00:17:52.380 --> 00:17:59.820
a state in which they become the ultimate reality so thoroughly, so profoundly, so deeply, so

00:17:59.820 --> 00:18:05.340
comprehensively, that they've got the whole elephant, and they could perhaps comfortably

00:18:05.340 --> 00:18:10.780
incorporate or agree with all kinds of different philosophical perspectives as Ramakrishna did,

00:18:10.780 --> 00:18:16.220
because they are all just facets of this vast reality that they know themselves to be.

00:18:16.220 --> 00:18:20.540
Yes, I'll take one step back from that and first start with the non-dual claim. So,

00:18:20.540 --> 00:18:25.980
there's only one reality. It's called Brahman from the Advaitic point of view, and that Brahman,

00:18:25.980 --> 00:18:30.700
Tantra calls Shiva, not to be conflated with Shiva as one of the forms of the various Puranic gods,

00:18:30.700 --> 00:18:36.060
but Shiva meaning ultimate reality and that Shiva is of two aspects. One is called Prakasha,

00:18:36.060 --> 00:18:41.260
it illumines, pure non-dual consciousness shines, but it also has Vimarsha. Vimarsha means it's

00:18:41.260 --> 00:18:46.300
self-reflexively aware. So Shiva is aware and he's aware that he's aware and I'm using the word he

00:18:46.300 --> 00:18:51.100
here very specifically because the tantric world, this is a being. Shiva is a being by virtue of his

00:18:51.100 --> 00:18:55.420
self-awareness, not because he has a form or because he has any attributes, he's just self-aware.

00:18:56.060 --> 00:19:00.780
Now this self-aware being according to the tantric worldview, the non-dual tantric worldview, is

00:19:00.780 --> 00:19:06.380
playful by nature. Freedom is his very innate quality, sva-tantriya. He's non-dual, there's

00:19:06.380 --> 00:19:11.340
nothing that exists outside of him to limit him. So he's free and once he becomes aware of his

00:19:11.340 --> 00:19:15.980
ever-free nature, he becomes expressive and playful. So the entire universe then is Lord

00:19:15.980 --> 00:19:20.380
Shiva's creative self-expression and creative self-exploration. So your question about can

00:19:20.380 --> 00:19:25.260
someone become the whole elephant, we have to take one step back and say no, we are all of us already

00:19:25.260 --> 00:19:30.380
the whole elephant exploring its own infinitude. So we're God to begin with. Lord Shiva manifests

00:19:30.380 --> 00:19:34.460
the world and then enters into the world and becomes everything as it were. So Shiva, Eva,

00:19:34.460 --> 00:19:40.220
Ghritva, Pashubhavaha. Lord Shiva alone, the highest reality alone, manifests all this. So you're

00:19:40.220 --> 00:19:45.180
already the elephant to begin with, the whole elephant. Except your specific incarnation,

00:19:45.180 --> 00:19:50.140
your specific expression will be drawn to maybe the tusk and you might manifest the tusk aspect

00:19:50.140 --> 00:19:54.860
more than maybe the leg aspect and someone else might manifest the leg aspect. But each of these

00:19:54.860 --> 00:19:58.860
are like shinings in the same jewel. Turn the jewel this way you get a red glint,

00:19:58.860 --> 00:20:03.340
Kali. Turn the jewel this way a blue glint maybe like that but it's the same jewel.

00:20:03.340 --> 00:20:06.140
So one doesn't become God, one is God to begin with.

00:20:06.140 --> 00:20:12.060
Right and of course the neo-advaita people say things like you're already enlightened and

00:20:12.060 --> 00:20:14.540
you don't need to do anything because you're already enlightened.

00:20:14.540 --> 00:20:18.620
I wouldn't go so far, I wouldn't go so far. I think enlightenment is the recognition that you are God

00:20:18.620 --> 00:20:24.220
so God also conceals her own nature from herself. This is called Maya. So Shiva's Maya is the

00:20:24.220 --> 00:20:29.020
swatantriya, Shiva's freedom, to do swatmavaranam, which means to hide himself from himself.

00:20:29.020 --> 00:20:32.780
So I guess enlightenment would be removing that covering. It's not, I think, a given that

00:20:32.780 --> 00:20:37.020
everyone has done that. No, and so it doesn't do you a lot of good just to have the thought,

00:20:37.020 --> 00:20:40.460
I'm already enlightened, or everybody is already enlightened. I mean, look at the world.

00:20:40.460 --> 00:20:44.380
So let me push this a little further because I'm having fun with this.

00:20:44.380 --> 00:20:49.340
Let's say you used your gem analogy where, you know, the light is shining through different

00:20:49.340 --> 00:20:52.220
gems and so it comes out as different colors. Okay.

00:20:52.220 --> 00:20:53.580
- Yes, the same gems.

00:20:53.580 --> 00:20:59.500
- Same gem. So, from the perspective of an observer, let's modify the analogy slightly,

00:20:59.500 --> 00:21:03.900
let's say different colors of glass and the sun is shining through them all like a stained glass

00:21:03.900 --> 00:21:09.420
window in a church. So, from the perspective of the observer, there's blue here and pink there

00:21:09.420 --> 00:21:16.940
and red there and so on, but from the perspective of the sun, it's the same light. And so, what we're

00:21:16.940 --> 00:21:22.300
getting at here, I think, is we are the sun in this analogy, and then through this personality,

00:21:22.300 --> 00:21:27.180
the sun looks blue, and through this personality, the sun looks green, and so on.

00:21:27.180 --> 00:21:30.540
>> Beautiful, beautiful. >> Yeah, so most people,

00:21:30.540 --> 00:21:35.500
they're not aware of their status as sun. They're just sort of aware of, I'm a boy, I'm a girl,

00:21:35.500 --> 00:21:40.380
I'm gay, I'm straight, I'm this, I'm that. These are my attributes, this is my job, this is my

00:21:40.380 --> 00:21:45.260
family. They're just aware of the sort of the surface manifestation qualities of their life.

00:21:45.260 --> 00:21:50.540
But what I think we're getting at with this whole spiritual thing is to realize our essential nature,

00:21:50.540 --> 00:21:56.780
which is one and the same for all of us. Yes, precisely. You and I and the dog and the mosquito

00:21:56.780 --> 00:22:01.900
and everybody else has the same essential nature. Precisely. And Ramakrishna would say the Divine

00:22:01.900 --> 00:22:07.020
Mother Herself becomes the 24 tattvas. The 24 tattvas of course the Sankhya model of reality.

00:22:07.020 --> 00:22:11.500
So he's essentially saying the sunlight, God, the ultimate reality, appears as all of this.

00:22:11.500 --> 00:22:14.540
And you're right, within this are all sorts of different colors. So what a beautiful

00:22:14.540 --> 00:22:19.740
metaphor you've given. I don't think I made it up. And so, you know, in terms of the Gita saying,

00:22:19.740 --> 00:22:25.580
"You see all beings in the self and the self in all beings," my conception of enlightenment is

00:22:25.580 --> 00:22:32.860
that subjectively, on some level, it would be the same for all enlightened people, even though the

00:22:32.860 --> 00:22:38.300
phrase "enlightened people" is an oxymoron. But it would be ultimately the same, and yet then it

00:22:38.300 --> 00:22:42.380
would be expressed differently through different personalities. Precisely, precisely. In fact,

00:22:42.380 --> 00:22:47.180
I think Ramakrishna almost positions himself in that elephant metaphor as the one who can see

00:22:47.180 --> 00:22:52.140
the whole elephant. Yeah. Because he's able to say, "Yes, that's true. Yes, that's true. Yes,

00:22:52.140 --> 00:22:57.020
that's true" by referring to some underlying reality which he has accessed and embodied.

00:22:57.020 --> 00:23:03.580
And I presume he would say that that's not the sole province of avatars as he was,

00:23:03.580 --> 00:23:07.260
but others can have that same perspective or realization.

00:23:07.260 --> 00:23:11.900
Yes, it's actually a very interesting question because in the theology of Ramakrishna,

00:23:11.900 --> 00:23:16.380
Ramakrishna is an avatar and there are other beings that are considered to be partial manifestations

00:23:16.380 --> 00:23:21.980
of the avatar, the avatar as and he calls these Ishwara Kothis and he does say in certain places

00:23:21.980 --> 00:23:28.620
that this realization of the fullness of God is the purview of only the avatars and the Ishwara

00:23:28.620 --> 00:23:33.580
Kothis. He would say at most one can realize one or two aspects of God and here he would famously

00:23:33.580 --> 00:23:39.100
give the example of an ant going to get sugar from a sugar mountain. Of course the mountain is vast,

00:23:39.100 --> 00:23:40.940
unfathomably vast for the ant.

00:23:40.940 --> 00:23:43.100
And the ant goes and picks up one grain of sugar.

00:23:43.100 --> 00:23:45.980
I think sugar is important because it's sweet and delightful

00:23:45.980 --> 00:23:49.420
and any aspect of reality, if we can touch even a bit of it,

00:23:49.420 --> 00:23:50.860
unfortunately we have to speak quantitatively,

00:23:50.860 --> 00:23:52.860
that's the limits of the metaphor,

00:23:52.860 --> 00:23:54.780
but you'd be happy, you'd be filled with joy.

00:23:54.780 --> 00:23:57.260
And so you take a grain of sugar and the ant is on its way

00:23:57.260 --> 00:23:59.660
back home to give the sugar to all of its friends or whatever.

00:23:59.660 --> 00:24:01.580
It looks over its shoulder and it thinks to itself

00:24:01.580 --> 00:24:02.540
with much hubris,

00:24:02.540 --> 00:24:05.100
"Tomorrow I'll come back and take the whole mountain."

00:24:05.100 --> 00:24:07.980
And Sri Ramakrishna seems to think that Jiva Kothi's regular souls

00:24:07.980 --> 00:24:10.300
We'll be satisfied with one grain of sugar.

00:24:10.300 --> 00:24:12.620
One drink of wine will knock us straight out.

00:24:12.620 --> 00:24:16.460
We don't actually have the capacity, most of us, to hold the whole mountain.

00:24:16.460 --> 00:24:19.740
And there are some great souls throughout history like Shukadeva, etc.

00:24:19.740 --> 00:24:21.220
Great Illumine masters in India.

00:24:21.220 --> 00:24:25.140
And he says they best can hold one or two grains, but never the whole mountain.

00:24:25.140 --> 00:24:28.660
So what Sri Ramakrishna seems to be implying is that there are perhaps aspects of the mountain

00:24:28.660 --> 00:24:29.940
that maybe he doesn't even know.

00:24:29.940 --> 00:24:32.540
He says God is all this and many more things besides.

00:24:32.540 --> 00:24:35.860
And like you said, so long as we live, so long as we learn, Sri Ramakrishna was very

00:24:35.860 --> 00:24:37.220
fond of that statement too.

00:24:37.220 --> 00:24:41.140
So I think you're right, there is sunlight, there is one basic reality, and it inheres

00:24:41.140 --> 00:24:45.620
in all things as all things, like you referenced in the Gita, Sarvabhutanam Chatmanam, the

00:24:45.620 --> 00:24:51.500
self in all beings expressing as all beings, but at the same time, that reality, that light,

00:24:51.500 --> 00:24:57.220
is so infinite that maybe it isn't really in our cards to realize all of it.

00:24:57.220 --> 00:24:59.540
Even that's even possible, I don't think anybody could realize all of it, given its

00:24:59.540 --> 00:25:00.980
infinite nature.

00:25:00.980 --> 00:25:01.980
Interesting.

00:25:01.980 --> 00:25:08.380
Speaking of sugar, of course Ramakrishna was fond of the "would you rather be sugar or taste sugar"

00:25:08.380 --> 00:25:14.460
and referring to "would you rather be one with God as God or maintain some separation and have

00:25:14.460 --> 00:25:19.580
a devotional relationship with God." Can I respond to that real quick? Because I think that comes from

00:25:19.580 --> 00:25:24.620
Ram Prasad. There's a song by a famous Bengali mystic saint, a devotee of Kali, and he said,

00:25:24.620 --> 00:25:27.820
"I don't want to be sugar." And speaking from a devotional point of view, why would I want to

00:25:27.820 --> 00:25:31.500
merge into the non-dual Brahman and just be in this like nihilistic void state.

00:25:31.500 --> 00:25:35.180
I want to be the devotee of God and I want to sing and dance and make merry.

00:25:35.180 --> 00:25:36.180
I want to eat sugar.

00:25:36.180 --> 00:25:40.420
That's a Ram Prasad quote and Sri Ramakrishna was very fond of it because that was his bhava

00:25:40.420 --> 00:25:41.420
as well.

00:25:41.420 --> 00:25:43.780
He would say, "Oh mother, please don't take my mind into samadhi.

00:25:43.780 --> 00:25:45.820
You know, here we are praying for samadhi.

00:25:45.820 --> 00:25:46.820
He's praying, no, no, please.

00:25:46.820 --> 00:25:48.620
I want to sing and dance and make merry.

00:25:48.620 --> 00:25:50.580
I want to enjoy the company with devotees."

00:25:50.580 --> 00:25:53.140
So Sri Ramakrishna is saying it's better to taste sugar than to be sugar.

00:25:53.140 --> 00:25:56.300
He will of course say that, quoting Ram Prasad when he's in a devotional mood.

00:25:56.300 --> 00:25:59.860
So from the Kashmir Shaiva point of view, to say that this is a dichotomy, either you have

00:25:59.860 --> 00:26:05.060
to become sugar, merging in non-dual oneness, or you can taste sugar by maintaining distinguishing

00:26:05.060 --> 00:26:07.360
between you the taster and the thing tasted.

00:26:07.360 --> 00:26:11.380
From the Kashmir Shaiva point of view, that's like a false dichotomy, because it misunderstands

00:26:11.380 --> 00:26:13.240
the fundamental nature of sugar.

00:26:13.240 --> 00:26:15.740
Sugar in this case is the kind of thing that can taste itself.

00:26:15.740 --> 00:26:19.040
So by becoming sugar, you don't lose the ability to taste sugar.

00:26:19.040 --> 00:26:20.040
It's self-referral consciousness.

00:26:20.040 --> 00:26:21.040
It's self-referral.

00:26:21.040 --> 00:26:22.040
It's a Vimarsha quality.

00:26:22.040 --> 00:26:27.800
quality. Yes, Shiva, even when he is Shiva, can enjoy his own Shiva-dwar, his Shiva-ness.

00:26:27.800 --> 00:26:32.840
Interesting. I'm reminded of an idea from mathematics, which is that you can take infinity,

00:26:32.840 --> 00:26:38.200
okay, infinity is infinity, you got it, infinity, but then you can square it or cube it, or add one

00:26:38.200 --> 00:26:43.800
to it or add a million to it, and so you have some somehow a bigger infinity. So that's a good

00:26:43.800 --> 00:26:49.720
analogy, I think, for this idea of getting the full value of the mountain of sugar even by taking one

00:26:49.720 --> 00:26:55.880
grain, but that grain could be multiplied manyfold and if you had the capacity you could take the

00:26:55.880 --> 00:27:00.520
whole mountain. But maybe what you're getting at or what Ramakrishna was getting at is that human

00:27:00.520 --> 00:27:06.600
nervous systems are not adequate to take the whole mountain. Yes, and I think I love how you said

00:27:06.600 --> 00:27:10.680
nervous system because it's true when we talk about spiritual realization, contrary to the

00:27:10.680 --> 00:27:16.280
neo-advaitin point of view, it is a physical thing that happens. In the tantric world, it's an actual

00:27:16.280 --> 00:27:19.880
change that happens in the level of our chemistry and our biology and the nerves.

00:27:19.880 --> 00:27:23.760
Of course, the physical nerves are a reflex of a much subtler set of nerves called nadis

00:27:23.760 --> 00:27:28.000
in the subtle body and realization of God, which is not just an intellectual recognition

00:27:28.000 --> 00:27:30.120
of oneness like, "Oh, I am not the mind.

00:27:30.120 --> 00:27:31.120
I'm not the body."

00:27:31.120 --> 00:27:34.880
No, but the experience of that on the level of the mind and body is like a shock to both

00:27:34.880 --> 00:27:36.720
the psychic and physical nervous systems.

00:27:36.720 --> 00:27:38.040
I think that's a really good point.

00:27:38.040 --> 00:27:43.040
We might just not be able to anatomically, subtly and physically handle the surge of God

00:27:43.040 --> 00:27:44.040
realization.

00:27:44.040 --> 00:27:45.040
Our brain will be on fire.

00:27:45.040 --> 00:27:51.120
would be smashed asunder from such a thing. I was with a spiritual teacher, some people asked him,

00:27:51.120 --> 00:27:55.600
"Well, can't you just enlighten us just like that? Why do we have to go through all this trouble?"

00:27:55.600 --> 00:28:00.400
And I don't know if he could really do that, but he said, "I could, but it would take 10 strong

00:28:00.400 --> 00:28:04.800
men to hold you down." Right. My guru says the same thing. He met a great sadhu and he asked

00:28:04.800 --> 00:28:09.200
the sadhu, "Please give me a touch, you know, give me something." And the sadhu said, strikingly,

00:28:09.200 --> 00:28:12.080
I can give, but can you hold? Yeah. And that silence.

00:28:12.080 --> 00:28:16.800
I've been talking with Daniel Ingram. I don't know if you know who he is, but he's

00:28:16.800 --> 00:28:22.480
yeah, he was an emergency room physician and Buddhist practitioner and he's starting an

00:28:22.480 --> 00:28:28.480
organization now or has started it in collaboration with a lot of other doctors around the world.

00:28:28.480 --> 00:28:34.720
And what they're attempting to do is get the DSM educated to understand spiritual emergencies and

00:28:34.720 --> 00:28:39.280
spiritual realizations, you know, because somebody could start having a Kundalini awakening and be

00:28:39.280 --> 00:28:43.680
put on medications for the rest of their life or something because the doctor wouldn't understand

00:28:43.680 --> 00:28:50.480
it. So, we've been having some conversations about that, but I think one thing perhaps you and I have

00:28:50.480 --> 00:28:57.040
both observed is that you definitely have to take your spiritual advancement in measured doses.

00:28:57.040 --> 00:29:03.280
Yes, because too much too quick can be dangerous. Yes, and we advocate grounding through practices

00:29:03.280 --> 00:29:08.240
like Hatha Yoga and Pranayama to make the kind of body that can withstand these spiritual experiences.

00:29:08.240 --> 00:29:12.800
And so a lot of conditioning is necessary. Even the ritual world, I mean Tantra essentially is

00:29:12.800 --> 00:29:18.400
a ritual modality oriented around deity yoga. The ritual world is an attempt to beef up one

00:29:18.400 --> 00:29:23.040
psychic immunity if you will, to be able to handle these states of realization. So Sri Ramakrishna

00:29:23.040 --> 00:29:28.080
was a special case. He's a spiritual savant in that he had this capacity. He was such a capacious being

00:29:28.080 --> 00:29:33.200
that he was able to hold within his being, within his small frame. He was able to hold so many

00:29:33.200 --> 00:29:37.200
different streams and traditions and realizations all at once.

00:29:37.200 --> 00:29:40.760
And the uniqueness of that is he's able to then, from that point of view, say they're

00:29:40.760 --> 00:29:42.840
all legit, they're all valid.

00:29:42.840 --> 00:29:46.680
And so all religions are all valid expressions of the one reality.

00:29:46.680 --> 00:29:50.840
In a sense, they're all true because they're all valid parts to that one reality, but in

00:29:50.840 --> 00:29:54.520
another sense, they're also all true because they're all valid expressions of that one

00:29:54.520 --> 00:29:55.520
reality.

00:29:55.520 --> 00:30:00.360
Yeah, and I think Krishna says in the Gita that, you know, whoever, wherever, if they

00:30:00.360 --> 00:30:06.000
express any sort of devotion toward whatever they consider God to be or some higher value

00:30:06.000 --> 00:30:10.960
or something, I get it, I receive it, I acknowledge it, it bears fruit.

00:30:10.960 --> 00:30:15.140
Yes, so the metaphor of the mother, if a mother has five children, Shri Ramakrishna was fond

00:30:15.140 --> 00:30:18.980
of mother metaphors because of course he saw God as the Divine Mother Kali as we do.

00:30:18.980 --> 00:30:22.460
So say the mother has five children or three children, the eldest child is able to say

00:30:22.460 --> 00:30:27.980
"Mother" in a very polished way and the second eldest child maybe says "Ma, Ma, Ma" and the

00:30:27.980 --> 00:30:32.620
youngest child is just a baby you can only go, "Eh?" You just can't even articulate anything

00:30:32.620 --> 00:30:37.180
beyond that. The mother knows that she alone is being referred to by all three and in fact

00:30:37.180 --> 00:30:41.340
she might even have a special fondness for the baby who can barely even pronounce her name.

00:30:41.340 --> 00:30:47.420
Yeah, okay. I'll just make one more point about the infinite of God because you brought up a

00:30:47.420 --> 00:30:52.940
beautiful mathematical metaphor that the infinity can actually be augmented in a sense. So the idea

00:30:52.940 --> 00:30:57.660
is that Lord Shiva, speaking from the point of view of absolute reality, he himself doesn't know

00:30:57.660 --> 00:31:01.420
what's going to happen next. So this kind of confounds the notion of God's omniscience. God

00:31:01.420 --> 00:31:05.340
is omniscient in the sense that everything that exists exists within awareness. So of course there's

00:31:05.340 --> 00:31:09.020
a small sample set of things that I know and there's a much bigger set of things that I don't

00:31:09.020 --> 00:31:14.380
know. So both what I know and both what I don't know are both of them within awareness. In that

00:31:14.380 --> 00:31:20.220
sense I'm omniscient, right? But from Shiva's point of view his omniscience, his sarvajna-tva,

00:31:20.220 --> 00:31:24.780
his omniscience is actually being awareness that doesn't take away from the possibility of being

00:31:24.780 --> 00:31:30.620
surprised. So because Shakti, his power of self-expression, can infinitely express herself,

00:31:30.620 --> 00:31:35.260
he's always confronted with a new aspect of himself. So the state of realization in Kashmir

00:31:35.260 --> 00:31:39.420
Shaivism or in Tantra in general would be this. You become a Bhairava or a Bhairavi,

00:31:39.420 --> 00:31:44.060
a fully realized being, a surprise. In each and every moment you're in wide-eyed wonder because

00:31:44.060 --> 00:31:49.900
every scene is a new revelation to you of your own nature. It's called a Chamatkara, poetic rapture.

00:31:49.900 --> 00:31:53.660
So you wonder about the world, wordless and ecstatic, surprised and everything.

00:31:53.660 --> 00:31:57.420
"I'm this! Here's me in a new form!" And you even don't know what could happen.

00:31:57.420 --> 00:32:03.980
Kurt Vonnegut said that the church he belongs to is called "Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment."

00:32:03.980 --> 00:32:08.860
Beautiful. That's exactly it. My Kali is Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment. Ah,

00:32:08.860 --> 00:32:10.220
could not have put it better ourselves.

00:32:10.220 --> 00:32:14.140
There's another quote from Saint Teresa of Avila. She said,

00:32:14.140 --> 00:32:16.460
"It appears that God himself is on the journey."

00:32:17.660 --> 00:32:23.020
that would I think meet the Kashmir Shaiva ethos perfectly. You're already realized to begin with,

00:32:23.020 --> 00:32:28.380
but what it is to be realized is to be on the journey. See how it confounds our notions of

00:32:28.380 --> 00:32:33.180
progress? Like in most spiritual traditions, we're on the way to becoming realized, but this is the

00:32:33.180 --> 00:32:37.180
total opposite use of the latter. No, we are realized, therefore we are on the way.

00:32:37.180 --> 00:32:43.100
Yeah, okay, I want to get into direct versus progressive paths, but before I do that,

00:32:43.100 --> 00:32:47.980
since you were just talking about omniscience, I was talking to my friend Steve from Santa Monica,

00:32:47.980 --> 00:32:52.780
whom I'm hoping you're going to meet, talking to him today, and we were talking about omniscience,

00:32:52.780 --> 00:32:57.100
and I said, "Okay, well, I'm walking in the woods and here's a pebble that I just picked up,

00:32:57.100 --> 00:33:01.900
and in this pebble there are trillions of molecules, and each little molecule is this

00:33:01.900 --> 00:33:06.780
perfect little mechanism that abides by certain laws of nature that we hardly understand.

00:33:06.780 --> 00:33:11.180
We understand some of them. Does omniscience mean that God, in some way,

00:33:11.980 --> 00:33:16.780
who is said to be nothing, the universe is nothing but God, you know, in this tradition,

00:33:16.780 --> 00:33:23.660
does that mean that God is somehow cognizant or aware of the workings of this one little

00:33:23.660 --> 00:33:29.900
molecule and the one next to it and the one next to it, or does he somehow set up laws by which all

00:33:29.900 --> 00:33:35.260
these things function and then just go and take a nap and it all works on its own or what? I mean,

00:33:35.260 --> 00:33:39.820
I don't presume that you really know any definitive answer to this question, but you're so well-versed

00:33:39.820 --> 00:33:43.180
in the tradition, what would those traditions say about that and that question?

00:33:43.180 --> 00:33:47.260
It's a wonderful question. First, we have to ground our understanding of God.

00:33:47.260 --> 00:33:52.540
So God is a being, insofar as we speak of God as an other, as like this over soul or something,

00:33:52.540 --> 00:33:57.100
we're always going to run into speculations. So what Abhinava Gupta suggests is we take this

00:33:57.100 --> 00:34:03.420
formula, very beautiful formula, Atma Prakasha Vapuresha Shiva Svatantraha. This very self

00:34:04.140 --> 00:34:10.780
is God embodied in all of his splendor and freedom? So when we say God, I think the better word is me

00:34:10.780 --> 00:34:16.540
or you. God here in this tradition is Chaitanyam Atma, the consciousness which is none other than

00:34:16.540 --> 00:34:21.180
my very own self. So when we talk about omniscience, we have to ask about epistemology from my point of

00:34:21.180 --> 00:34:26.540
view. Right now I'm experiencing the world. In what sense am I consciousness, God, omniscient?

00:34:26.540 --> 00:34:31.020
That's the, I think, a way to approach the question from this non-dual Shaiva point of view.

00:34:31.020 --> 00:34:34.620
And then we can make a few observations here. We can say there's a distinction to be made

00:34:34.620 --> 00:34:42.780
between knowledge and knowing. You know, knowledge are the cognized events that occur to me. So I

00:34:42.780 --> 00:34:48.300
know a rock but I might not know all the trillions of particles and what they're doing in the rock.

00:34:48.300 --> 00:34:52.220
I know what's happening in this room but I might not know what's going on on the other side of this

00:34:52.220 --> 00:34:56.620
wall. I can take a few guesses but I don't know. So when we speak of knowledge in that sense,

00:34:56.620 --> 00:35:02.860
We're talking about information or cognitive data. If we can make a distinction between items of

00:35:02.860 --> 00:35:06.940
information or pockets information and knowing itself, then we can have a very different

00:35:06.940 --> 00:35:11.500
understanding of omniscience. Omniscience is not just knowing everything or being aware of all the

00:35:11.500 --> 00:35:17.020
details. Omniscience is just to be aware because everything that is, whether known or unknown,

00:35:17.020 --> 00:35:22.140
appears in awareness. And if I am awareness, knowing itself, in precisely that sense am I

00:35:22.140 --> 00:35:23.140
my own mission.

00:35:23.140 --> 00:35:25.780
Pete: Yeah, but I'm sure there's more to it.

00:35:25.780 --> 00:35:30.260
Like, I know that I have a liver, but I've never seen my liver, and it has trillions

00:35:30.260 --> 00:35:36.140
of cells probably, or billions or whatever, and each little cell is a marvel of intelligence.

00:35:36.140 --> 00:35:39.780
And this is one of my favorite themes also, that God is hiding in plain sight, because

00:35:39.780 --> 00:35:43.740
you look at anything and you contemplate what you're actually looking at and it just blows

00:35:43.740 --> 00:35:44.740
your mind.

00:35:44.740 --> 00:35:49.960
So, that intelligence that you see on display, what is the nature of it?

00:35:49.960 --> 00:35:57.400
Is it omnipresently cognizant of everything in the universe from macroscopic to microscopic?

00:35:57.400 --> 00:36:04.320
Is there some omnipresent knowingness that is consciously knowing each cell in my liver?

00:36:04.320 --> 00:36:08.840
Or is somehow things set up automatically and they just run?

00:36:08.840 --> 00:36:12.680
We could take a more maybe solipsistic view here, like we could take a more ekajiva vada

00:36:12.680 --> 00:36:17.680
view of like the only thing I can be sure of is that which is appearing to me now.

00:36:17.680 --> 00:36:21.440
And that would be a valid approach too, but you're right. I think there are maybe more theistic,

00:36:21.440 --> 00:36:25.600
more realist views of the tradition that would say this, that right now I am a jiva or a pashu,

00:36:25.600 --> 00:36:31.280
an embodied soul, and so I'm Shiva plus some self-limitation, some sankocha. So right now

00:36:31.280 --> 00:36:35.440
I'm only aware of very little and so it appears to me that there's an entire universe beyond my

00:36:35.440 --> 00:36:40.960
knowledge. And then through spiritual practice in this tradition, the idea is that I expand my knowing.

00:36:40.960 --> 00:36:45.440
So I become aware now not just of this body but maybe also of the liver. You know, before we take

00:36:45.440 --> 00:36:49.680
a hatha yoga class for instance, we're not even aware that we have hamstrings. And then after

00:36:49.680 --> 00:36:54.160
the practice we're like, "Ow! I didn't even know I had muscles in those places!" What is this

00:36:54.160 --> 00:36:58.640
inner growth? It's like our world has widened. We become aware of more of our embodiment.

00:36:58.640 --> 00:37:02.320
And in the Shiva Sutra, there's a beautiful line there, "Dhrishyam Shariram."

00:37:02.320 --> 00:37:07.120
Whatever you can see is your body. Or to put it another way, this whole universe is God's body,

00:37:07.120 --> 00:37:11.360
and you are God. So technically it's true. The realization in this tradition would be knowing

00:37:11.360 --> 00:37:15.280
that and feeling that. You should feel embodied as the whole world. So you wouldn't just feel

00:37:15.280 --> 00:37:19.760
your own liver. You would feel every liver everywhere. I'm reminded of Swami Vekananda.

00:37:19.760 --> 00:37:24.080
There's a scene where he's pacing back and forth on the balcony in his room in Belumat and he's

00:37:24.080 --> 00:37:28.000
obviously very distressed and someone asks him about why he's so distressed, why he can't sleep.

00:37:28.000 --> 00:37:31.840
It's like in the middle of the night and he claims that there's a volcano that just exploded somewhere

00:37:31.840 --> 00:37:36.720
in Fiji and you know the news hadn't reached him yet but he could feel the suffering of the people

00:37:36.720 --> 00:37:42.080
on that end of the planet. He just was embodied as them in a sense or there's another story where

00:37:42.080 --> 00:37:47.240
where Ramakrishna is looking at a boatman in the distance on the Ganga and the boatman's

00:37:47.240 --> 00:37:52.640
assistant slaps him on the back and Sri Ramakrishna feels that, he goes "Ow!" and later it's

00:37:52.640 --> 00:37:56.680
verified that his back becomes red or he would feel when people stepped on grass, he would

00:37:56.680 --> 00:37:58.800
feel like they were stepping on his own body.

00:37:58.800 --> 00:38:03.040
So there are mystical experiences, we call it Purnahangta, the experience of oneself

00:38:03.040 --> 00:38:04.240
as the Oversoul.

00:38:04.240 --> 00:38:08.120
In truth we are that, but maybe mercifully, for better or for worse, I don't know that

00:38:08.120 --> 00:38:10.860
and I don't feel that because I don't have the capacity to handle that.

00:38:10.860 --> 00:38:15.540
But through sadhana, through spiritual practice, one's capacity for embodiment increases and

00:38:15.540 --> 00:38:17.940
so one's experience of embodiment increases.

00:38:17.940 --> 00:38:22.580
And I think you're right, at a certain point, one does know about the trillions of atoms

00:38:22.580 --> 00:38:25.620
in one little rock and is aware of all the laws.

00:38:25.620 --> 00:38:30.600
And maybe when you say one does know, it may not be human beings know, because it might

00:38:30.600 --> 00:38:33.780
be beyond the capacity of a gross human nervous system.

00:38:33.780 --> 00:38:36.740
You might need a celestial nervous system to have that kind of knowledge.

00:38:36.740 --> 00:38:37.740
Precisely.

00:38:37.740 --> 00:38:40.100
They call them siddhas and they have a different kind of embodiment actually.

00:38:40.100 --> 00:38:47.260
They're not limited by the hardware of being a human, although they can at any time and any in any place appear in an anthropomorphic

00:38:47.260 --> 00:38:52.080
Form like Matsyendra Natha or Goraksha Natha. These are great Siddhas even Vivekananda

00:38:52.080 --> 00:38:57.740
You know once he kicked the body he kicked the mortal coil and before news of it got to his brother disciple Sashi Maharaj in

00:38:57.740 --> 00:39:01.160
South India he himself appeared kind of like Ben Kenobi in Star Wars

00:39:01.160 --> 00:39:05.440
You know he appeared as a force apparition and he said Sashi Sashi I spat out the body

00:39:05.520 --> 00:39:09.520
So Vivekananda now, he's exultant, you know, I spat out the body.

00:39:09.520 --> 00:39:14.080
Now he's gotten out of Ram Dass' tight shoe, he's gotten out of the hardware, and now he

00:39:14.080 --> 00:39:19.200
has a greater capacity to work, arguably, a greater capacity to feel and to act.

00:39:19.200 --> 00:39:20.800
Which is something Obi-Wan Kenobi said.

00:39:20.800 --> 00:39:25.080
He said, "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."

00:39:25.080 --> 00:39:26.080
Precisely that.

00:39:26.080 --> 00:39:30.320
And you know George Lucas, he's friends with Joseph Campbell, who was a disciple of Holy

00:39:30.320 --> 00:39:31.320
Mother.

00:39:31.320 --> 00:39:32.320
Oh, I didn't know that.

00:39:32.320 --> 00:39:35.280
I knew he was tight with Campbell, but I didn't know Campbell was a disciple.

00:39:35.280 --> 00:39:38.800
Oh, sorry, Campbell was a disciple of Nikilananda, sorry, who was a disciple of the Holy Mother.

00:39:38.800 --> 00:39:42.560
So, Holy Mother's disciple, Swami Nikilananda, who translated the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna,

00:39:42.560 --> 00:39:46.240
his disciple was Joseph Campbell, which actually explains a lot of things. The way that Joseph

00:39:46.240 --> 00:39:51.360
Campbell thinks synchronically about all the world's myths and stories, that's a very Ramakrishnan

00:39:51.360 --> 00:39:58.480
approach, I think. Yeah. Since we've talked about growth being a never-ending process,

00:39:58.480 --> 00:40:03.040
spiritual development, let's talk a little bit about the so-called direct versus progressive

00:40:03.040 --> 00:40:09.200
paths because you've expressed notions that actually align with both of them, and my attitude is that

00:40:09.200 --> 00:40:15.280
both simultaneously can function but neither exclusively. Yes. I think the way that you

00:40:15.280 --> 00:40:20.480
started this interview was so apt and so wonderful, which is on the theme of reconciliation and

00:40:20.480 --> 00:40:26.080
harmonization. Because things that seem dichotomous, it's like the trademark of our tradition to somehow

00:40:26.080 --> 00:40:29.840
reconcile them. We want our cake, we want to eat it too. So often when people are talking about

00:40:29.840 --> 00:40:34.480
the world and the ontological status of the world, you'll see that in non-dual tantra,

00:40:34.480 --> 00:40:39.440
it's like we both get the benefits of Shankara's vivarta, you know Advaita Vedanta says the world

00:40:39.440 --> 00:40:44.160
is an illusory appearance in Brahman. The advantage there is that God doesn't change or God doesn't

00:40:44.160 --> 00:40:49.120
themselves undergo any process. The drawback is the world is no longer real, the body and mind are

00:40:49.120 --> 00:40:53.520
no longer real and then you can easily run into all sorts of ethical problems, chief of which is

00:40:53.520 --> 00:40:57.360
non-digested spirituality. You just make claims that you're enlightened but because you see the

00:40:57.360 --> 00:41:01.200
the body and mind is real, you can spiritually bypass, you can opt out of actually integrating

00:41:01.200 --> 00:41:04.800
that reality into each and every moment of your life.

00:41:04.800 --> 00:41:08.640
On the other end of the spectrum though, ontologically speaking, if the world is real, then in what

00:41:08.640 --> 00:41:10.560
sense does God stand in relation to the world?

00:41:10.560 --> 00:41:13.400
Like you pointed out earlier, does God just create the world and then go to sleep and

00:41:13.400 --> 00:41:15.200
allow the world to run mechanistically?

00:41:15.200 --> 00:41:19.920
Or is God involved with every step of the process like some helicopter parent or something?

00:41:19.920 --> 00:41:21.920
And if so, what horrible mismanagement?

00:41:21.920 --> 00:41:24.160
Then all the sorts of problems of evil arise and everything.

00:41:24.160 --> 00:41:27.640
So if the world is real, that's a real problem for God, it seems like.

00:41:27.640 --> 00:41:30.920
And then God might have changed or transformed or the whole thing.

00:41:30.920 --> 00:41:33.760
This is Ramanuja's Parinama Vada, God transforms.

00:41:33.760 --> 00:41:35.700
Our position is a bit of both.

00:41:35.700 --> 00:41:40.840
It's an appearance in God without any real change in God's being, but it's a real appearance,

00:41:40.840 --> 00:41:42.640
a real manifestation of God.

00:41:42.640 --> 00:41:44.040
So that's ontologically speaking.

00:41:44.040 --> 00:41:48.080
To take this down to the level of the individual in spiritual practice, that allows for both

00:41:48.080 --> 00:41:52.760
views, the direct path view, that I'm already Shiva as I am, pure non-dual consciousness,

00:41:52.760 --> 00:41:57.320
in me arises the experience of the body and mind, but because the body and mind are real

00:41:57.320 --> 00:42:01.800
manifestations of my non-dual nature as pure consciousness, it's therefore still productive

00:42:01.800 --> 00:42:06.360
to try to integrate my Shiva-dva, my Shiva nature, into my embodiment, which is where all the

00:42:06.360 --> 00:42:12.520
progressive practices become emphasized. Yeah, so let's say that, you know, you see on the news that

00:42:12.520 --> 00:42:18.280
a certain number won the lottery and you happen to have that number. Okay, so you're a multi-millionaire,

00:42:18.280 --> 00:42:23.800
but you haven't taken the steps necessary yet to cash in the ticket, to get an attorney and an

00:42:23.800 --> 00:42:27.960
accountant and all the stuff you have to do before you can actually begin spending the money.

00:42:27.960 --> 00:42:32.760
Yes, that's my favorite metaphor. It's like direct path gyana, tattva jnana is like knowing you have

00:42:32.760 --> 00:42:37.480
the money in the bank and that itself is wonderful. It gives you great peace but the practice of tantra

00:42:37.480 --> 00:42:41.640
is in a sense yes going to the bank and withdrawing the money and then actually enjoying it, spending

00:42:41.640 --> 00:42:47.480
it, having fun. Yeah, so you have to do some stuff to make it. Yeah, but importantly not to get the

00:42:47.480 --> 00:42:50.880
the money. I think that's where we really benefit from the direct path. Because in the progressive

00:42:50.880 --> 00:42:55.040
path, there's sometimes this "I'm born in original sin" vibe that you get, like "I'm

00:42:55.040 --> 00:42:59.240
broken in need of fixing, I'm deficient in need of growing." And so in that sense, the

00:42:59.240 --> 00:43:03.640
direct path criticism is valid, I think. As long as spirituality is in the future, it's

00:43:03.640 --> 00:43:07.980
a self-fulfilling prophecy. You'll never recognize the truth, which is always here and now, inhearing

00:43:07.980 --> 00:43:11.940
in my experience, if I'm always wishfully thinking that it's going to come later, after

00:43:11.940 --> 00:43:15.640
the next experience, or once I make it to the Himalayas, or once I find a bearded Indian

00:43:15.640 --> 00:43:19.160
guide to take me on as his disciple. You know, there's always some kind of fetishization of the

00:43:19.160 --> 00:43:22.680
future and so the direct path people, they're quite right to point out that this is a problem

00:43:22.680 --> 00:43:27.720
in the progressive path. But we say, importantly, that I already have the money. I'm already

00:43:27.720 --> 00:43:33.480
innately divine. You know, I'm already free. But I have to do something to manifest that freedom

00:43:33.480 --> 00:43:37.560
and enjoy that freedom, arguably. It doesn't change that I'm free. It's just the difference

00:43:37.560 --> 00:43:41.800
is that, you know, who wants a grumpy jnani? Like there are a lot of direct paths, they're free,

00:43:41.800 --> 00:43:45.320
but you know, they're not enjoying their freedom. They're just as miserable as the rest of us.

00:43:45.320 --> 00:43:48.920
with a little bit more peace and assurance maybe, but not that much more I don't think.

00:43:48.920 --> 00:43:54.360
Yeah, I'm not even so sure they're free. It could just be an intellectual. There's a Tibetan saying

00:43:54.360 --> 00:43:59.560
"don't mistake understanding for realization." Precisely, precisely, yes. Yeah, I mean you can

00:43:59.560 --> 00:44:03.960
kind of hypnotize yourself if you think about something or read about something or hear

00:44:03.960 --> 00:44:09.560
something enough times you end up believing it, but is it real? Precisely. Is it real in

00:44:09.560 --> 00:44:16.440
your experience. That's exactly. Okay, good. How long have you been doing your YouTube videos?

00:44:16.440 --> 00:44:20.920
I think we started in 2020, so it's about five years now. About four or five years.

00:44:20.920 --> 00:44:24.600
Do you sometimes look back at some things you were saying four or five years ago and think,

00:44:24.600 --> 00:44:29.640
not so much? All the time. I said that about, I feel that about things I said 20 minutes ago.

00:44:29.640 --> 00:44:33.000
That's good.

00:44:38.280 --> 00:44:42.680
You know, I've become much more realist over the years. Like I think when I first started out,

00:44:42.680 --> 00:44:46.840
I was maybe a bit more in the Advaita Vedanta camp. I mean, it's true, I grew up within Shraiva

00:44:46.840 --> 00:44:51.880
Siddhanta. Mine is a ritual world, the world of Tantra, where it's all about puja and deity yoga

00:44:51.880 --> 00:44:56.200
and all of that. That has been the case with me. But when I was lecturing, I tended to favor the

00:44:56.200 --> 00:45:01.160
more Mayavadic language, you know, the world is an illusory appearance and like that. But I think

00:45:01.160 --> 00:45:05.960
over the years, these past five years, I've moved a bit more towards realism, where I'm starting to

00:45:05.960 --> 00:45:10.760
feel into this, I think, tantric realism where it's like everything is real but real as God.

00:45:10.760 --> 00:45:12.600
Real as what? God?

00:45:12.600 --> 00:45:17.480
Real as God, yes. Everything is real, but not as matter or energy, not as a world,

00:45:17.480 --> 00:45:21.800
but as God, as a real appearance and a real manifestation of God. Therefore, everything has

00:45:21.800 --> 00:45:28.040
value. I'm kind of the same way. I've made a similar shift over the years. I like Advaita

00:45:28.040 --> 00:45:32.840
Vedanta and I love listening to Swami Sarvapriyananda. I take his classes and everything,

00:45:32.840 --> 00:45:38.280
but there's something about Kashmir Shaivism, although I only have a really kindergarten

00:45:38.280 --> 00:45:43.000
understanding of it, but there's something about the life-affirming nature of it, insofar as I've

00:45:43.000 --> 00:45:47.880
understood it, which resonates more with my experience or proclivities or something.

00:45:47.880 --> 00:45:53.240
Yes, right, right. Swami Sarvapriyanandaji is a very important mentor of mine. I actually mentioned

00:45:53.240 --> 00:45:57.320
this interview at the dinner table with Swami Mehtanandaji and Swami Sarvapriyanandaji,

00:45:57.320 --> 00:46:00.520
and they both were very excited. They said, "Oh yes, we know Rikji, and it was really fun,"

00:46:00.520 --> 00:46:05.960
and etc. Yeah, I've interviewed them both. I like them all. That whole gang of the Vedanta Society,

00:46:05.960 --> 00:46:09.880
I have a real good feeling about it. Yeah, yeah, because notice even though Swami Saruprananda

00:46:09.880 --> 00:46:15.640
ji represents Advaita Vedanta on the world stage as his predecessor Swami Vivekananda did to an

00:46:15.640 --> 00:46:20.680
extent, it's a different kind of Advaita. I mean, Swami Saruprananda ji, he speaks based on Shankara's

00:46:20.680 --> 00:46:25.960
commentaries and he's of course an acharya, a great teacher and expounder of Advaita Vedanta,

00:46:25.960 --> 00:46:31.560
but he differs I think in many significant ways from the standard traditional Advaita Vedanta

00:46:31.560 --> 00:46:36.680
teacher because of his grounding in the Ramakrishna lineage. So he's obviously got a much more

00:46:36.680 --> 00:46:43.160
devotional flavor to his presentation of Advaita Vedanta, a much less I think orthodox and dogmatic

00:46:43.160 --> 00:46:47.720
approach you'll find in him. So yeah, his Advaita Vedanta, I mean we've had so many conversations

00:46:47.720 --> 00:46:51.400
between us about like Kashmir Shaivism, Advaita Vedanta and the main difference is the self

00:46:51.400 --> 00:46:55.560
reflexivity. I remember once at the dinner table he said it this way, he said Kashmir Shaivism falls

00:46:55.560 --> 00:46:59.560
apart from the very beginning and he said it's because of that self-reflexivity.

00:46:59.560 --> 00:47:05.400
In Advaita Vedanta there's this concept Swat Prakasha like awareness Brahman is self-illumining

00:47:05.400 --> 00:47:10.040
you know so therefore it's not void it's not nihilistically presented it's real and it's real

00:47:10.040 --> 00:47:13.800
consciousness but it's not a person it's a principle it's a self-illumining principle

00:47:13.800 --> 00:47:18.520
whereas Advaita Vedanta there's more theistic flavor where this principle is self-reflexively

00:47:18.520 --> 00:47:23.160
aware that's the big difference between the two but i mean when he pointed out there are texts like

00:47:23.160 --> 00:47:27.240
Sureshwaracharya's commentary on Shankara's Dakshinamurti Sutram,

00:47:27.240 --> 00:47:31.000
you know that's attributed to Shankara and there we speak about the world shining non-differently

00:47:31.000 --> 00:47:36.120
in the mirror of awareness and the very name of Sureshwaracharya's commentary, Sureshwaracharya

00:47:36.120 --> 00:47:42.520
mind you, is Shankara's disciple. The name is Manasolasa which is such a tantric name and his

00:47:42.520 --> 00:47:48.040
commentary is so incredibly tantric and even medieval authors like Vidyarana Swami, they wax

00:47:48.040 --> 00:47:51.080
very tantric in their expositions of Advaita Vedanta.

00:47:51.080 --> 00:47:54.680
You know, Sri Ramana Maharshi himself would say things like, "The world is Brahman."

00:47:54.680 --> 00:47:59.560
You know, so I think the distinction between Advaita Vedanta and tantric non-duality is

00:47:59.560 --> 00:48:01.400
often quite blurred in practice.

00:48:01.400 --> 00:48:06.840
What did Swami Sarvabhayananda mean when he said, "Kashmir Shaivism falls apart"?

00:48:06.840 --> 00:48:12.600
Because its fundamental axiom, its primary stance is that awareness is self-aware.

00:48:12.600 --> 00:48:15.400
Shiva, Prakasha is in doubt, Vimarsha.

00:48:15.400 --> 00:48:19.160
And so when I speak to Swami Sarupendraji, the two of us are almost always discussing the difference

00:48:19.160 --> 00:48:23.240
between Svatprakasha and Vimarsha. So I keep pressing him on this point. I'm like, in what

00:48:23.240 --> 00:48:28.360
sense is Svatprakasha different from Vimarsha? And of course, Swami Sarupendraji rightly points

00:48:28.360 --> 00:48:33.560
out Chitsuki and he points out the 11 definitions of Chitsuki. I think you better define some of

00:48:33.560 --> 00:48:38.200
these terms. The terms are flying pretty fast here. Once you mentioned Swami Sarupendraji,

00:48:38.200 --> 00:48:42.280
now we've gone into a very technical world of Indian philosophy where it's Advaita Vedanta

00:48:42.280 --> 00:48:46.360
versus the finer points of Swadmantriya Mata. I start using a lot of Sanskrit phrases really

00:48:46.360 --> 00:48:50.520
quickly because I start nerding out very quickly. So yes, thank you, thank you. Let me ground myself

00:48:50.520 --> 00:48:55.960
a bit. But yes, because Swami Saraswati Pradhan Ji, his main claim is that awareness cannot be

00:48:55.960 --> 00:49:01.880
reflexively self-aware. Why not? That's a good question. And it has to do with the philosophical

00:49:01.880 --> 00:49:07.240
principle of non-self reflexivity. It's like a doorknob cannot turn itself. Or for instance,

00:49:07.240 --> 00:49:12.440
the eyeballs. The eyeball can look at everything in the room including like a reflection of

00:49:12.440 --> 00:49:17.960
themselves but they cannot literally see themselves. The eyeballs can't ogle themselves. It's impossible

00:49:17.960 --> 00:49:23.000
for the eyeball to be self-reflexively aware. I have to have the mind and the mind is then

00:49:23.000 --> 00:49:27.400
aware of the eyeballs. So the eyeballs are an other to the mind and awareness is something

00:49:27.400 --> 00:49:32.600
other than the mind. So I as awareness am aware of the mind as an object and I as a mind am aware

00:49:32.600 --> 00:49:38.360
of the eyeballs as an object and I as the eyeballs am aware of the room as an object and a subject

00:49:38.360 --> 00:49:43.560
can never be an object to itself. So if awareness could be aware of itself in that sense, if it

00:49:43.560 --> 00:49:48.360
could be its own object, then you end up with what in Sanskrit is called Anavastha Dosha, which means

00:49:48.360 --> 00:49:53.080
the paradox of infinite regress. If there is a subject for this subject, there can potentially

00:49:53.080 --> 00:49:57.160
be a subject for that subject and a subject for that subject and a subject for that subject and

00:49:57.160 --> 00:50:01.160
then you wouldn't have an ultimate subject and if there's no ultimate subject, no objective

00:50:01.160 --> 00:50:05.400
experience is possible. You know, so that's one problem. And then of course we say, no,

00:50:05.400 --> 00:50:09.480
no, it's not in that sense that awareness is self-aware. Awareness does not become an object

00:50:09.480 --> 00:50:14.840
to itself. It's just awareness is self-aware in the same way that a light is self-illumining.

00:50:14.840 --> 00:50:20.920
You know, the light shines, it reveals all the objects in the room, but in so doing it also

00:50:20.920 --> 00:50:26.520
self-illumines. It's radiant and you become aware of the light. Similarly, awareness objectifies

00:50:26.520 --> 00:50:31.960
everything but it itself in so doing is self-aware. So we have these kind of very nuanced discussions

00:50:31.960 --> 00:50:37.000
between Satprakasha and Vimarsha but I think the main difference is this in agency. In Advaita

00:50:37.000 --> 00:50:42.440
Vedanta, Brahman is Nishkriya and Nishkama. It has no desire, that's important, and it doesn't do

00:50:42.440 --> 00:50:47.320
anything. Brahman is totally inert. In fact the word that Kashmir Shaivas use for Advaita Vedanta

00:50:47.320 --> 00:50:54.200
is Shanta Brahmavada, the doctrine of the peaceful and quiescent Brahman. Whereas in Advaita Shaiva,

00:50:54.200 --> 00:50:58.680
non-dual Shaiva philosophy, Brahman is endowed with infinite creative power,

00:50:58.680 --> 00:51:04.760
kartritva, a doership. So, Brahman actually acts and has will and has knowledge and has

00:51:04.760 --> 00:51:09.320
activity and that's the main difference I think between Swami's Sava Puranas, Advaita Vedanta

00:51:09.320 --> 00:51:13.240
position and this Kashmir Shaiva position. But he's very friendly of course towards the Kashmir

00:51:13.240 --> 00:51:18.520
Shaiva school because he's not that dogmatic about the Advaita Vedanta stuff. Let me just interject

00:51:18.520 --> 00:51:23.960
for the audience's sake that you teach regular classes apparently several a week and if people

00:51:23.960 --> 00:51:29.240
would like to get involved in these, I will provide some kind of link on your page on BatGap so that

00:51:29.240 --> 00:51:34.280
they can find out how to do so. Okay, let me run something by you on this point that you're

00:51:34.280 --> 00:51:40.360
discussing and see what you think. Lakshman Juh and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi spent a lot of time

00:51:40.360 --> 00:51:45.400
talking together and a lot of Lakshman Juh's teachings were kind of bequeathed to Maharishi

00:51:45.400 --> 00:51:51.800
through the, what's that couple's name, his archivist. John and Denise Hughes. That's it,

00:51:51.800 --> 00:51:56.920
that's who I'm trying to think of. He spent years talking about what he called the self-referral

00:51:56.920 --> 00:52:01.080
nature of consciousness and what he meant by that was this, and I think this might have

00:52:01.080 --> 00:52:06.760
derived from Kashmir Shaivism, but let me just lay it out real briefly. So, you know, at the

00:52:06.760 --> 00:52:10.520
most fundamental level you have consciousness, right, and there's nothing else down there.

00:52:10.520 --> 00:52:14.600
So, its nature is to be conscious. So, what's it going to be conscious of if that's all there is,

00:52:14.600 --> 00:52:19.960
is consciousness. Okay, it becomes conscious of itself, but in so doing it immediately sets up a

00:52:19.960 --> 00:52:26.360
trifle nature of observer-observed and object of observation. So, all of a sudden, you have one

00:52:26.360 --> 00:52:31.480
becoming three, but how can one become three? It's one, and yet it's three, and yet it's one,

00:52:31.480 --> 00:52:37.560
and yet it's three. And so, there's this sort of infinite frequency of alternation between one and

00:52:37.560 --> 00:52:42.520
three which creates the infinite dynamism at the foundation of creation which gives rise to the

00:52:42.520 --> 00:52:48.600
whole explosion of creativity that we see. And of course, three then further bifurcates and

00:52:48.600 --> 00:52:53.880
trifurcates and so on to become all the great diversity and physicists have actually matched

00:52:53.880 --> 00:52:59.880
this up with the unified field and fundamental emergence or enlivenance of that field.

00:52:59.880 --> 00:53:05.560
Is that a Kailash Mishraism thing? Oh my god, one to one, you know, I mean there's a beautiful

00:53:05.560 --> 00:53:10.520
phrase. Basically what you described is called the spanda. Spanda means the creative throb or

00:53:10.520 --> 00:53:15.240
pulsation of the one being aware of itself and there's a beautiful shloka that Abhinavagupta

00:53:15.240 --> 00:53:16.040
gives us. He goes,

00:53:16.040 --> 00:53:27.320
It explains the one in three.

00:53:27.320 --> 00:53:29.560
So he argues that there is awareness, Chit,

00:53:29.560 --> 00:53:33.960
and that awareness has as its inseparable consort,

00:53:33.960 --> 00:53:37.840
this Devi called Paradevi or sometimes called Pratibha,

00:53:37.840 --> 00:53:41.720
as the verse calls it. Pratibha has the connotation of intuition.

00:53:42.000 --> 00:53:45.600
So awareness intuits its own being, it's self-aware.

00:53:45.600 --> 00:53:48.880
And this self-intuition is also sometimes called

00:53:48.880 --> 00:53:51.440
Svatantra Shakti, Ananda Shakti or Spanda.

00:53:51.440 --> 00:53:54.400
And Spanda means throb or pulsation.

00:53:54.400 --> 00:53:57.600
And then this Ananda Shakti or this throb

00:53:57.600 --> 00:54:01.280
then manifests in a tripartite way as knower,

00:54:01.280 --> 00:54:02.560
knowing and known.

00:54:02.560 --> 00:54:05.280
Pramatar, Prameyam and Pramanam.

00:54:05.280 --> 00:54:06.960
Matar, Mana, Prameyam, Sha.

00:54:06.960 --> 00:54:09.840
So these three are called the three spokes of the trident.

00:54:10.400 --> 00:54:14.960
So the three spokes of this trident, you know, are the transcendent, the imminent,

00:54:14.960 --> 00:54:19.680
the transcendent imminent, or the knower, the known, and the act of knowing. And these three

00:54:19.680 --> 00:54:25.600
are united in one, the actual staff of the trident. So three in one is of course a very important model

00:54:25.600 --> 00:54:30.640
in Kashmir Shaivism. In fact, Abhinava Gupta uses this three in one model throughout his entire

00:54:30.640 --> 00:54:37.200
liturgical work to kind of reconcile various traditions. And the idea of, Rob, of course,

00:54:37.200 --> 00:54:40.880
like you pointed out so beautifully, the quantum mechanics people really love it.

00:54:40.880 --> 00:54:43.520
And that's why I think outside CERN they have a dancing Shiva.

00:54:43.520 --> 00:54:46.320
There's a book, the Tao of Physics.

00:54:46.320 --> 00:54:50.560
Fritjof Capra had breakfast with him at one of the S.A.N.D. conferences.

00:54:50.560 --> 00:54:54.880
Beautiful, beautiful. He made this point. He was on a beach. And I think, I don't know if this is

00:54:54.880 --> 00:54:59.120
in the book, but I remember him saying like he was on a beach and then he saw for the first time

00:54:59.120 --> 00:55:02.640
what he'd been studying for so long, he experienced it in a kind of mystical vision.

00:55:02.640 --> 00:55:05.760
He said, I finally understand what the Hindu means by the dancing Shiva.

00:55:05.760 --> 00:55:11.360
So of course the dancing shiva is meant to express the dynamic, creative, playful nature of consciousness,

00:55:11.360 --> 00:55:18.240
which manifests as one in three. Nice. Okay, a question came in. Irene says it's a good one.

00:55:18.240 --> 00:55:27.120
This is Laura Gibson from the UK. "I know spiritual experiences are not the goal. However, I had more

00:55:27.120 --> 00:55:33.280
experiences before consciously being a seeker, such as vast emptiness and my vision turning golden.

00:55:33.280 --> 00:55:38.880
Why has this stopped? Am I doing something wrong? Was I closer to awakening before deliberately

00:55:38.880 --> 00:55:46.160
seeking? Yes, perhaps. Perhaps. I mean, one thing to note is that what a mystery spiritual life is,

00:55:46.160 --> 00:55:51.360
you know, and I think for Lord Gibson, none but your guru can probably answer this question. So

00:55:51.360 --> 00:55:55.840
I would recommend that you seek out a lineage and a spiritual teacher because I'm sure there

00:55:55.840 --> 00:56:00.560
are a lot of factors in your life that you're not able to express through the question. So who can

00:56:00.560 --> 00:56:05.280
say who can give a definitive answer here? It would be glib I think for me to say yes it's because

00:56:05.280 --> 00:56:08.400
you've fetishized this idea of finding and therefore you become a seeker that you've

00:56:08.400 --> 00:56:11.920
closed yourself off to the immediacy of each and every moment but it could also be that you've

00:56:11.920 --> 00:56:16.400
become more refined. You know I know a very wonderful story there's a lady a beautiful lady

00:56:16.400 --> 00:56:21.120
and powerful teacher who started the Kali Mandir in Laguna Beach her name is Usha Harding and her

00:56:21.120 --> 00:56:26.240
book the Black Goddess of Dakshineshwar is perhaps the definitive book on Kali for anybody wanting to

00:56:26.240 --> 00:56:28.120
to learn about Kali for the first time.

00:56:28.120 --> 00:56:32.360
So she talks about how she would go to the temple and speak to Shri Ramakrishna directly.

00:56:32.360 --> 00:56:36.680
She would sit in the Hollywood ashrama and look at the picture of Shri Ramakrishna and

00:56:36.680 --> 00:56:39.140
the two of them would actually talk.

00:56:39.140 --> 00:56:42.960
And then it just stopped happening in that tangible and direct way.

00:56:42.960 --> 00:56:45.920
So Shri Ramakrishna would often say also, he would make a joke about this, he would say

00:56:45.920 --> 00:56:49.560
when two lovers are just getting to know each other, they have to see each other a lot all

00:56:49.560 --> 00:56:50.840
the time.

00:56:50.840 --> 00:56:54.720
But then once they have an actually intimate relationship, it becomes much more relaxed.

00:56:54.720 --> 00:56:58.680
It's a bit like this, say you're courting somebody, when they come over to your house, you prepare

00:56:58.680 --> 00:56:59.680
everything really nicely.

00:56:59.680 --> 00:57:02.440
You know, you have a nice cup of tea and you clean up the whole house.

00:57:02.440 --> 00:57:05.960
But once you've been dating for four years, you just sit on the couch, thumbing through

00:57:05.960 --> 00:57:08.000
the channels on TV and you ask them to bring you the coffee.

00:57:08.000 --> 00:57:09.400
You're like, "Hey, you go over there."

00:57:09.400 --> 00:57:10.400
It's like that.

00:57:10.400 --> 00:57:14.080
So Lord Gibson, your relationship to the divine might just be deeper.

00:57:14.080 --> 00:57:18.120
It's deeper so you don't need all of these experiences here and there.

00:57:18.120 --> 00:57:19.120
You're already in.

00:57:19.120 --> 00:57:23.120
So I think God needs to give you less pieces of candy or something like that.

00:57:23.120 --> 00:57:24.760
So I don't think seeking is the problem.

00:57:24.760 --> 00:57:25.920
I think seeking is wonderful.

00:57:25.920 --> 00:57:27.200
One should seek.

00:57:27.200 --> 00:57:31.320
But maybe the fetishization of experiences as a marker for one's spirituality, maybe

00:57:31.320 --> 00:57:32.320
that has to go away.

00:57:32.320 --> 00:57:36.580
Spirituality, as Lord Gibson himself pointed out, has a lot more to do with character than

00:57:36.580 --> 00:57:37.580
it does to do with experiences.

00:57:37.580 --> 00:57:39.520
Experiences are of course not the point.

00:57:39.520 --> 00:57:44.800
They could be valuable or they could just be happening on a much deeper, much more refined

00:57:44.800 --> 00:57:46.800
level now than they were before.

00:57:46.800 --> 00:57:49.200
Yeah, that's a lot in that.

00:57:49.200 --> 00:57:52.960
I think perhaps even some of the Christian mystics say this, that initially they had

00:57:52.960 --> 00:57:57.680
flashy experiences that really lit their fire and got them going and on the path,

00:57:57.680 --> 00:58:01.600
but eventually they went into a dark night of the soul where they weren't experiencing very much,

00:58:01.600 --> 00:58:05.760
it seemed dry, but it's not like they weren't making progress. It's just that

00:58:05.760 --> 00:58:09.200
maybe they didn't need the enticing candy incentive.

00:58:09.200 --> 00:58:13.600
The lovers have become more intimate, you know, now they can shout at each other. But also another

00:58:13.600 --> 00:58:18.400
thing is that our concept of a spiritual experience, I think, changes as we continue on the path. So in

00:58:18.400 --> 00:58:22.360
the beginning it's like flashy lights. I saw an apparition, I saw some lights, or I had

00:58:22.360 --> 00:58:27.040
this feeling of vastness, or suddenly all the walls melted, etc, etc. Then all of that

00:58:27.040 --> 00:58:32.880
stuff stops and instead something very different happens. A glass of water on the table becomes

00:58:32.880 --> 00:58:38.140
a divine rapture. It's like the mundane world becomes more mystical and the mystical world

00:58:38.140 --> 00:58:44.720
becomes more mundane. That shock of seeing an apparition diminishes a lot. But the shock

00:58:44.720 --> 00:58:49.520
of seeing, I don't know, the sun setting becomes increasingly magnified a thousand fold.

00:58:49.520 --> 00:58:54.800
Another thought that comes to mind, Laura, is what are you actually doing in your spiritual

00:58:54.800 --> 00:58:58.400
practice? Because some spiritual practices might be counterproductive.

00:58:58.400 --> 00:58:59.600
Could be.

00:58:59.600 --> 00:59:01.120
I don't know what she's doing.

00:59:01.120 --> 00:59:04.720
That's such a specific predicament that's specific to you, Laura, that that's why the

00:59:04.720 --> 00:59:09.200
first and foremost suggestion would be to find a genuine spiritual teacher. Of course,

00:59:09.200 --> 00:59:13.680
make sure that teacher is genuine, belong to a tradition, and then that person will be able to

00:59:13.680 --> 00:59:18.160
guide you more closely and more appropriately, you know, than just people on the internet.

00:59:18.160 --> 00:59:26.560
That's a sticky wicket, finding a genuine spiritual teacher. You know, here's some titles

00:59:26.560 --> 00:59:31.760
from some of your YouTube videos, "Role of the Guru", "Problem of Unethical Gurus", "The Genuine

00:59:31.760 --> 00:59:37.200
Guru" and "How to Avoid a Fake", "Rogue Gurus" and "Fallen Yogis", "How to Practice Pure Yoga".

00:59:37.200 --> 00:59:42.560
It's a minefield out there. Oh my god, Rikji, have we run out of things to talk about that

00:59:42.560 --> 00:59:47.520
you're now looking through your document for the titles? No, no, this is something I wanted to

00:59:47.520 --> 00:59:52.320
talk to you about because I've helped to establish this organization called the Association for

00:59:52.320 --> 00:59:58.800
Spiritual Integrity and we have like nearly 700 members and 40 member organizations and so on.

00:59:58.800 --> 01:00:06.480
But boy, the stories you hear, both in my position in Batgap and in that of spiritual teachers

01:00:06.480 --> 01:00:12.640
behaving reprehensibly. It's tragic considering how sacred and precious the spiritual path is.

01:00:12.640 --> 01:00:19.120
Yes, because you can't really talk about tantra without mentioning the role of the guru. Like

01:00:19.120 --> 01:00:23.840
guru yoga and guru parampara is at the heart arguably of the tantric tradition. It's a very

01:00:23.840 --> 01:00:28.960
lineage-based transmission. So gurus become very important. But you're right, over the past few

01:00:28.960 --> 01:00:34.160
decades I think many unscrupulous individuals have used that and I think positioned themselves

01:00:34.160 --> 01:00:39.440
in positions of power as like important cult figures and then abused. What might actually be in most

01:00:39.440 --> 01:00:44.560
cases genuine spiritual power, they maybe misuse that power for unethical ends. And so you're right,

01:00:44.560 --> 01:00:48.880
it's a very big issue and it's something we talk about a lot in our community as well because in

01:00:48.880 --> 01:00:54.080
the Ramakrishna lineage of course ethics is very strongly stressed. In the Indian spiritual world

01:00:54.080 --> 01:00:59.360
in general, you know like the opening of almost any Advaita Vedanta text is going to be a list

01:00:59.360 --> 01:01:04.000
of prerequisite qualities that not the teacher but the student needs to have in order to even take

01:01:04.000 --> 01:01:06.720
up the study of Advaita Vedanta.

01:01:06.720 --> 01:01:10.200
So in yoga for instance the yamas and the niyamas, these are very important.

01:01:10.200 --> 01:01:12.680
Ethics are very important for any spiritual practice.

01:01:12.680 --> 01:01:18.520
But I think after a while, maybe masters or self-proclaimed masters or genuinely spiritually

01:01:18.520 --> 01:01:22.480
advanced beings might also become a little destabilized by the lack of understanding

01:01:22.480 --> 01:01:24.120
of guru yoga here in the West.

01:01:24.120 --> 01:01:26.040
They might have done fine in the East actually.

01:01:26.040 --> 01:01:29.520
Maybe in the East people could understand the guru-student relationship in a maybe more

01:01:29.520 --> 01:01:32.600
mature way than they can do here, seeing as it's kind of new here.

01:01:32.600 --> 01:01:36.040
And so people come here and they set up their communities and then it very quickly becomes

01:01:36.040 --> 01:01:40.240
like this cult of personality, hey commune thing and it loses its grounding.

01:01:40.240 --> 01:01:43.000
So selecting a guru is a very tenuous process.

01:01:43.000 --> 01:01:45.640
Swami Vivekananda speaks about this a lot.

01:01:45.640 --> 01:01:47.800
He says that the student must have three qualities.

01:01:47.800 --> 01:01:51.040
One, the student must genuinely want spirituality.

01:01:51.040 --> 01:01:55.900
There must be this real hunger, this real yearning and pining for actual spirituality.

01:01:55.900 --> 01:01:57.520
And that's something that awakens in the student.

01:01:57.520 --> 01:02:00.000
Secondly, the student must have infinite patience.

01:02:00.000 --> 01:02:02.580
And thirdly, the student must have infinite perseverance.

01:02:02.580 --> 01:02:05.960
So the student must not go in for short-term goals.

01:02:05.960 --> 01:02:10.020
The kind of student who is impatient is perhaps the kind of student that can be easily swayed

01:02:10.020 --> 01:02:15.000
by a guru liberally giving Shakti Pathas because they get caught up in the glamour of everything.

01:02:15.000 --> 01:02:17.100
So patience and perseverance is very important.

01:02:17.100 --> 01:02:18.100
That's the mature student.

01:02:18.100 --> 01:02:22.320
Then, the student must test the teacher like a money lender tests coins.

01:02:22.320 --> 01:02:24.280
That really makes sure the teacher has integrity.

01:02:24.280 --> 01:02:26.520
The first thing is that the teacher should have a teacher.

01:02:26.520 --> 01:02:30.040
The big problem today is people don't hold teachers to that standard.

01:02:30.040 --> 01:02:32.380
They think that teachers can just spring out of the earth.

01:02:32.380 --> 01:02:35.760
But teachers should have a teacher and their teachers should have a teacher and their teachers

01:02:35.760 --> 01:02:36.760
should have a teacher.

01:02:36.760 --> 01:02:37.760
So a lineage is very important.

01:02:37.760 --> 01:02:39.880
But secondly, scripture is very important too.

01:02:39.880 --> 01:02:43.480
In the tantric world we say, "Sad Agama, Sad Guru."

01:02:43.480 --> 01:02:45.600
So there must be a true scripture as well.

01:02:45.600 --> 01:02:49.080
So the teacher must be able to cite their sources and the teacher must empower you to

01:02:49.080 --> 01:02:50.080
do the same.

01:02:50.080 --> 01:02:53.220
Ultimately, scriptures are there just to keep teachers accountable.

01:02:53.220 --> 01:02:57.300
So they don't just like make up their own idiosyncrasies and create their own religion, but that they're

01:02:57.300 --> 01:03:00.880
actually representing an authentic, peer-reviewed, corroborated tradition.

01:03:00.880 --> 01:03:02.900
And of course, thirdly, reason is very important.

01:03:02.900 --> 01:03:06.860
A person must always use their reasoning faculties to test what the teacher is saying.

01:03:06.860 --> 01:03:10.580
And finally, most importantly, I think the teacher must be doing it for the right reasons.

01:03:10.580 --> 01:03:13.340
The teacher must be ethically grounded and pure.

01:03:13.340 --> 01:03:15.380
Swamiji calls this Akamahata.

01:03:15.380 --> 01:03:19.020
Actually no, he's quoting from Shankara's text, Vivekachudamani, and there the word is

01:03:19.020 --> 01:03:25.980
Akama Hatha, which literally means undestroyed or undegenerated by desire. So the teacher must not

01:03:25.980 --> 01:03:30.700
be teaching for money or for some sexual advantage or for some name and fame. The teacher must be

01:03:30.700 --> 01:03:34.700
teaching as an act of love. From freedom unto freedom only this gift can be given.

01:03:34.700 --> 01:03:41.740
That's a really good checklist that you just gave us there. Unfortunately, a lot of times

01:03:41.740 --> 01:03:48.780
teachers aren't that transparent, so they can be presenting themselves as in accordance with

01:03:48.780 --> 01:03:52.940
all the things you just said and there could be some funny stuff going on behind the scenes that

01:03:52.940 --> 01:03:57.740
only gets discovered later on. The internet has greatly exacerbated this problem because we can

01:03:57.740 --> 01:04:01.740
be whoever we want to be on the Instagram and I think that's the danger. If we judge a teacher

01:04:01.740 --> 01:04:06.220
based on their Instagram wall or based on their YouTube videos, see a charismatic individual who

01:04:06.220 --> 01:04:11.500
can speak eloquently about a subject is not a guru, not necessarily. It takes a lot more than

01:04:11.500 --> 01:04:15.980
just being a powerful person to be a guru. In fact, I think one of the best ways we can test

01:04:15.980 --> 01:04:17.940
the teachers by testing their students.

01:04:17.940 --> 01:04:20.540
The guru's job is not to be cool and flashy and eloquent.

01:04:20.540 --> 01:04:21.860
The guru's job is to teach.

01:04:21.860 --> 01:04:25.540
So the quality of that guru's student, I think, tells you a lot about the teacher.

01:04:25.540 --> 01:04:29.140
But you're right, until we're actually in person with a guru, these days at least, I

01:04:29.140 --> 01:04:32.220
think we should be very careful about making judgments based on the internet as to the

01:04:32.220 --> 01:04:33.220
quality of the teacher.

01:04:33.220 --> 01:04:36.500
But then you're right, even in person, you're right, it's quite easy, I think, to present

01:04:36.500 --> 01:04:37.500
a facade.

01:04:37.500 --> 01:04:40.540
And especially if you have this inner circle, you can really create the sense that you're

01:04:40.540 --> 01:04:42.660
like morally pure and like you're ethical.

01:04:42.660 --> 01:04:45.740
I think this happened, a lot of people in some spiritual communities were shocked when they

01:04:45.740 --> 01:04:50.740
found out about their teachers engaging in maybe sexually unethical practices or taking

01:04:50.740 --> 01:04:55.140
money or drinking or something, they were shocked because the teacher in their lectures presented

01:04:55.140 --> 01:04:57.180
ethics as being the centerpiece of yoga.

01:04:57.180 --> 01:05:00.700
They would talk about the yamas and niyamas and then behind closed doors they would violate

01:05:00.700 --> 01:05:04.340
all the very rules that they set out as ideals for the community.

01:05:04.340 --> 01:05:06.860
It's true, it's true.

01:05:06.860 --> 01:05:09.100
You wonder how they sleep at night.

01:05:09.100 --> 01:05:14.300
You know, in their quiet moments you'd think they'd be saying, "What am I doing?"

01:05:14.300 --> 01:05:17.020
I have a lot of compassion also for people like that because it's very

01:05:17.020 --> 01:05:21.420
disequilibrating, you know, when people put you on a pedestal and everyone's looking at you as like

01:05:21.420 --> 01:05:24.700
the guru or as God or something, if you're not careful you can start to believe it.

01:05:24.700 --> 01:05:29.740
Like, oh maybe I am God. You're right, maybe I am the king of my self-proclaimed nation.

01:05:29.740 --> 01:05:34.460
After all, this little hermitage that we have, it's an independent nation. And I'm,

01:05:34.460 --> 01:05:39.340
and all those like baser animal qualities that we all carry with us, these animal samskaras that

01:05:39.340 --> 01:05:44.220
are embedded in our biology, they just become greatly exacerbated. It's a very

01:05:44.220 --> 01:05:48.300
disequilibrating thing. I think it happens to the best of us. People start with very good intentions,

01:05:48.300 --> 01:05:51.900
they're true teachers from a true lineage, but then I think, you know, usually when they come

01:05:51.900 --> 01:05:55.900
to America and they start their commune, usually that's when things become a little iffy after

01:05:55.900 --> 01:05:59.900
about 10 or 20 years, you know. So I have great compassion for individuals like that.

01:05:59.900 --> 01:06:05.980
It's a difficult thing to teach spirituality. And you can still derive tremendous benefit from

01:06:05.980 --> 01:06:10.540
association with such a teacher? I knew someone, I asked her about it. She was involved in one of

01:06:10.540 --> 01:06:13.660
these communities. Of course, I won't take names, I don't mean to judge anyone. Right, me neither.

01:06:13.660 --> 01:06:17.660
She was there in such a community, which I became very problematic very quickly. And she was there

01:06:17.660 --> 01:06:21.980
during the heyday of its communities problems, you know, and I was speaking to her about it.

01:06:21.980 --> 01:06:25.420
And we were talking about crazy wisdom and that kind of thing. And she said to me, she's like,

01:06:25.420 --> 01:06:29.900
yes, there were a lot of problems, but it was real. She was in her 70s. She, you know,

01:06:29.900 --> 01:06:34.220
very grounded individual. She said, no, it was a real transmission. There was real power.

01:06:34.220 --> 01:06:38.860
I really benefited from the presence of that teacher and from the Asanga, but I also will

01:06:38.860 --> 01:06:42.780
not deny that all that horrible stuff happened. So her conclusion was that real teacher,

01:06:42.780 --> 01:06:49.100
really powerful, complicated person. Yeah, well you don't have that problem. I heard you say in one

01:06:49.100 --> 01:06:52.620
lecture that you wet your bed one night after being kicked out of your rock band.

01:06:52.620 --> 01:06:58.140
That did happen. You're down to earth. Yes, that did happen. I did wet my bed.

01:07:01.180 --> 01:07:04.460
Don't mean to embarrass you. No, it's true though, it happened.

01:07:04.460 --> 01:07:14.060
Yes. So here you mentioned one of your things was the dark side of tantra. First of all,

01:07:14.060 --> 01:07:18.940
better define tantra because I think the common understanding might not be

01:07:18.940 --> 01:07:23.580
adequate compared to what it really is and what its history is and so on.

01:07:24.380 --> 01:07:31.500
Tantra is of course at its core a form of deity yoga with the central modality being ritual worship.

01:07:31.500 --> 01:07:37.500
So tantra, it's argued that tantra predates the Vedic period. We find seals from Mohenjo-Daro

01:07:37.500 --> 01:07:43.260
Harappan civilization from the Indus Saraswati valley which radiocarbon dating says is 3,800 BCE

01:07:43.260 --> 01:07:48.780
thereabouts of gods like Shiva and Durga, very prominent tantric figures. So you could argue

01:07:48.780 --> 01:07:53.100
tantra predated the Vedas. Some scholars argue tantra is a Dravidian movement that interceded

01:07:53.100 --> 01:07:57.820
into northern Vedic tradition. But I think many scholars understand Tantra to be a movement that

01:07:57.820 --> 01:08:04.380
emerged in the Indian subcontinent from within the religion of Shaivism around the 6th or 7th century

01:08:04.380 --> 01:08:09.340
AD. So it's pretty recent. It's a pretty recent movement in Indian spirituality. It most certainly

01:08:09.340 --> 01:08:13.260
emerged from within Shaivism but very quickly entered into Buddhism from there and then of

01:08:13.260 --> 01:08:17.820
course entered into Vaishnavism. So Tantra is not itself a religion, it's a way of doing

01:08:17.820 --> 01:08:22.460
spirituality that influences many of the religions in the Indian subcontinent. Would it be part of

01:08:22.460 --> 01:08:26.780
of what is commonly known as Hinduism or some kind of offshoot or separate stream?

01:08:26.780 --> 01:08:32.340
I mean it definitely emerged within Shaivism which is one of the branches of broader Hinduism.

01:08:32.340 --> 01:08:36.660
But Hinduism is a very complicated term because that term was only used much later after the

01:08:36.660 --> 01:08:37.660
British colonization.

01:08:37.660 --> 01:08:42.220
And it was first used, the first Indian to use that word Hindu was Raja Ranmohan Roy

01:08:42.220 --> 01:08:44.420
who belonged to the Brahmo Samaj, you know.

01:08:44.420 --> 01:08:48.820
And that was a movement in Bengal and Kolkata that was very much an apologetics.

01:08:48.820 --> 01:08:52.260
You know they were trying to scrub quote unquote Hinduism of all its Hindu elements.

01:08:52.260 --> 01:08:55.140
And so what you ended up with is a kind of Upanishadic Christianity.

01:08:55.140 --> 01:08:58.340
And so the word Hinduism, I'm kind of uncomfortable with it.

01:08:58.340 --> 01:09:00.860
It conglomerates a lot of different spiritual traditions.

01:09:00.860 --> 01:09:03.860
There's almost like Shaivism is its own religion.

01:09:03.860 --> 01:09:06.380
And Vaishnavism is also its own religion.

01:09:06.380 --> 01:09:10.100
But in India, of course, these are all seen as various aspects of the Sanatana Dharma,

01:09:10.100 --> 01:09:11.660
the overarching religion.

01:09:11.660 --> 01:09:14.180
So yes, Tantra is a part of Sanatana Dharma.

01:09:14.180 --> 01:09:18.260
But I think Sanatana Dharma is inclusive enough to the extent that I can even say there's tantric

01:09:18.260 --> 01:09:19.260
forms of Islam.

01:09:19.260 --> 01:09:23.020
I would argue that a lot of Sufism in India is tantric in nature.

01:09:23.020 --> 01:09:26.620
Take for instance Hazrat Inayat Khan, a very important teacher who came from America and

01:09:26.620 --> 01:09:28.540
taught Sufism here.

01:09:28.540 --> 01:09:30.660
His Sufism is of course Indian Tantra.

01:09:30.660 --> 01:09:32.620
So what makes something tantric?

01:09:32.620 --> 01:09:34.060
Yes, it's a good question.

01:09:34.060 --> 01:09:35.060
So I think it's this.

01:09:35.060 --> 01:09:40.380
Primarily, primarily the central feature of Tantra is ritualism and so the foundation

01:09:40.380 --> 01:09:45.600
of Tantra is dualistic worship of a particular deity through ritual practices.

01:09:45.600 --> 01:09:49.520
And those ritual practices are very nuanced and very complicated, but they're an embodied

01:09:49.520 --> 01:09:50.760
way of doing spiritual practice.

01:09:50.760 --> 01:09:53.960
So there are for instance ritual gestures that one might do with the hands.

01:09:53.960 --> 01:09:56.640
There's ritual gestures that one might do with the body.

01:09:56.640 --> 01:09:59.500
And there's of course ritual gestures that one might do with the mouth.

01:09:59.500 --> 01:10:02.460
It's a speech act that ultimately defines ritual.

01:10:02.460 --> 01:10:07.000
So tantra is also sometimes styled mantra marga, the path of mantras.

01:10:07.000 --> 01:10:08.840
Mantras become very important in tantra.

01:10:08.840 --> 01:10:13.360
So any embodied form of spiritual practice that sees the body as a means and not as an

01:10:13.360 --> 01:10:18.640
obstacle to spirituality that primarily uses mantra as a way to get closer to divinity.

01:10:18.640 --> 01:10:23.360
I think and properly speaking we call tantric. A few key features though in tantra is the emphasis

01:10:23.360 --> 01:10:28.240
on the direct transmission from a guru. Guru parampara is one of the main features of tantra.

01:10:28.240 --> 01:10:33.600
Secondly, the profileration of deities. Another thing I like very much about tantra is it

01:10:33.600 --> 01:10:38.480
emphasizes the need for experience. It's very much a progressive path orientation. It's like

01:10:38.480 --> 01:10:43.200
The purpose of spiritual life is to have a direct, tangible experience of Deity.

01:10:43.200 --> 01:10:48.480
Deity, capital D. But, since everyone is different, Tantra has to diversify its means.

01:10:48.480 --> 01:10:52.640
And therefore, it comes up with this model known as the Ishta Devi or the Ishta Devata,

01:10:52.640 --> 01:10:57.680
one's chosen ideal. So, the role of the Guru is to assess you as to what kind of predisposition

01:10:57.680 --> 01:11:03.040
you have and then to assign to you a form of the Deity that best meets you where you're at.

01:11:03.040 --> 01:11:07.520
You know, so some people will worship Kali, others might worship Krishna, others might worship Shiva.

01:11:07.520 --> 01:11:12.720
But in tantra, these are all diversification. See, within Kali even, in tantra, Kali is diversified

01:11:12.720 --> 01:11:18.480
into 10 aspects. Kali, Tara, Shodashi, Bhuvaneshwari, Bhairavi, these are all forms of the same goddess,

01:11:18.480 --> 01:11:22.080
but there are many different forms to meet different aspirants at different parts of

01:11:22.080 --> 01:11:27.600
their journey. So therefore tantra is deity yoga, but also a diversification or profileration of

01:11:27.600 --> 01:11:32.720
deities in order to accommodate various spiritual predispositions. Incidentally, the word is

01:11:32.720 --> 01:11:37.200
proliferation. Oh thank you, thank you. Proliferation, thank you. I heard that on your

01:11:37.200 --> 01:11:41.440
YouTube videos, sorry. I'm glad because a lot of my English is from reading, not from speaking,

01:11:41.440 --> 01:11:46.480
so sometimes I misread something, it just stays with me. So proliferation. That's right, similar

01:11:46.480 --> 01:11:51.680
to the word prolific. If a person produces a lot of stuff, they're prolific. Oh good, good, yes,

01:11:51.680 --> 01:11:55.920
that's it. Proliferation of deities. So many deities appear. Yeah. And you know, I think one

01:11:55.920 --> 01:12:02.680
One very important feature in Tantra also is we have ritual, we have Guru, we have proliferation

01:12:02.680 --> 01:12:05.940
of deities, but we also have an emphasis on the divine feminine.

01:12:05.940 --> 01:12:10.720
So I think above all, Tantra, especially in its more non-dual form, like the Kaula and

01:12:10.720 --> 01:12:17.400
Kalikula, it's a revisiting of deity as goddess, which I think might have existed prior to the

01:12:17.400 --> 01:12:18.400
Vedic civilization.

01:12:18.400 --> 01:12:22.320
It makes somewhat of an appearance in Vedic civilization, but I think it's not until Tantra

01:12:22.320 --> 01:12:25.220
that the goddess becomes front and center in spiritual life.

01:12:25.220 --> 01:12:30.260
So I would say the cult of the Divine Mother, the worship of God as Mother or as the Divine

01:12:30.260 --> 01:12:34.060
Feminine as Shakti, that I think is the central feature of Tantra.

01:12:34.060 --> 01:12:35.060
But not all Tantra is like this.

01:12:35.060 --> 01:12:39.460
A lot of Tantra is still worshipping God as the patriarchal figure, sure, but I think

01:12:39.460 --> 01:12:43.380
that's one of the maybe trademarks of Tantra, Goddess worship.

01:12:43.380 --> 01:12:47.980
I don't know what percentage of our audience this would apply to, but I imagine a fairly

01:12:47.980 --> 01:12:54.140
significant percentage, culturally, can't relate to the idea of deities and gods and

01:12:54.140 --> 01:12:59.980
goddesses and they look at the pictures from Indian iconography and they think, "Well, that's

01:12:59.980 --> 01:13:05.820
very colorful and a little weird sometimes." But, you know, do these... Is this just the product of

01:13:05.820 --> 01:13:11.980
some vivid imaginations or is there some actual reality that these images represent?

01:13:11.980 --> 01:13:19.420
Yes, yes. It's a great question. Yes and no, because these deities appear to rishis or seers

01:13:19.420 --> 01:13:25.900
in their meditation. So arguably a deity, any deity, will have four aspects. Its grossest aspect is its

01:13:25.900 --> 01:13:31.500
anthropomorphic or zooanthropomorphic form. So we look at the art and by the way we should also

01:13:31.500 --> 01:13:35.980
mention this that tantra is not just a spiritual movement, it's primarily that, but it's also a

01:13:35.980 --> 01:13:40.380
social movement, a political movement, and I think it's also above all an artistic and aesthetic

01:13:40.380 --> 01:13:45.900
movement because it's not just that the deities proliferate, it's that art proliferates, right?

01:13:45.900 --> 01:13:49.740
There's like all sorts of artwork that emerges in the Tantric period.

01:13:49.740 --> 01:13:52.820
And you're right to point out that the main form of this artwork is paintings of gods

01:13:52.820 --> 01:13:53.820
and goddesses.

01:13:53.820 --> 01:13:59.180
So you might see Kali with the sword and the severed head or with tongue sticking out,

01:13:59.180 --> 01:14:02.500
standing on the chest of her husband Mahakala in the cremation ground.

01:14:02.500 --> 01:14:08.360
So these actually, their forms are described by a series of verses known as Dhyana Shlokas.

01:14:08.360 --> 01:14:12.820
So for instance, a sage might be meditating and the sage has an experience of a particular

01:14:12.820 --> 01:14:14.100
aspect of Godhead.

01:14:14.100 --> 01:14:20.340
say Kali, the sage sees Kali in the inner shrine of her meditation and then she spontaneously

01:14:20.340 --> 01:14:23.220
presents us with this hymn. For instance, the Kali hymn.

01:14:23.220 --> 01:14:30.420
She has wild hair, she has four arms.

01:14:30.420 --> 01:14:38.420
She is garlanded in heads. That is the southward facing goddess Dakshinakali. She is Kali. And then

01:14:38.420 --> 01:14:43.460
the poet, having expressed this, gives an inspiration to the artist to paint it. So all

01:14:43.460 --> 01:14:47.500
All the paintings you see of anthropomorphic forms like gods and goddesses, both in Tibetan

01:14:47.500 --> 01:14:52.700
tantric tradition, the Vajrayana or Tibetan tradition, and also in the Hindu Indic tradition,

01:14:52.700 --> 01:14:57.600
what you see is an artist's rendition of these Dhyana Shlokas, these verses that describe

01:14:57.600 --> 01:14:58.900
the form of the deity.

01:14:58.900 --> 01:15:02.980
But that's considered in Tantra to be the most exterior form of the goddess.

01:15:02.980 --> 01:15:07.780
The goddess is externally presenting herself as a form out of her grace, because we're human,

01:15:07.780 --> 01:15:10.420
we're anthropomorphic in nature.

01:15:10.420 --> 01:15:13.740
Therefore, our concept of divinity must also be anthropomorphic.

01:15:13.740 --> 01:15:17.940
So in a sense, the deity's projection as a human form is to meet us where we are.

01:15:17.940 --> 01:15:22.620
But when we go deeper, we find that what the deity actually is, arguably, behind her form,

01:15:22.620 --> 01:15:25.700
is a sacred geometrical pattern called a yantra.

01:15:25.700 --> 01:15:27.660
So for instance, this is the Kali yantra.

01:15:27.660 --> 01:15:32.480
This yantra would be the geometric pattern in consciousness that corresponds to Kali.

01:15:32.480 --> 01:15:34.540
So it's a slightly subtler aspect of Kali.

01:15:34.540 --> 01:15:36.660
I see you two have a yantra behind you.

01:15:36.660 --> 01:15:38.460
Is that the Shri Chakra or?

01:15:38.460 --> 01:15:39.460
I'm not sure what yantra.

01:15:39.460 --> 01:15:43.140
I don't really know my yantras, but this is something we picked up somewhere along the way.

01:15:43.140 --> 01:15:44.900
It looks like a Buddhist yantra.

01:15:44.900 --> 01:15:45.620
What is it, Irene?

01:15:45.620 --> 01:15:48.660
We got it from Amma's organization.

01:15:48.660 --> 01:15:53.140
So it must be a shri-chakra. I can't quite make it out, but it's like if it has many triangles,

01:15:53.140 --> 01:15:54.100
it's a shri-chakra.

01:15:54.100 --> 01:15:56.100
It protects the home.

01:15:56.100 --> 01:15:58.020
It's supposed to protect the home, whatever this is.

01:15:58.020 --> 01:16:01.060
Oh, is that Irene? Hi, Irene. Nice to hear your voice.

01:16:01.060 --> 01:16:05.540
Yeah, so that's the yantras, you know, they describe a form of the deity,

01:16:05.540 --> 01:16:10.900
and it's its subtle form, it's yantric form, but even subtler than that, Rick, arguably the true

01:16:10.900 --> 01:16:16.820
form of the deity is its mantra. So, subtler than even the sacred geometry of a yantra is that pattern

01:16:16.820 --> 01:16:21.540
in consciousness called mantra. And mantra, of course, can be spoken aloud on the speech level,

01:16:21.540 --> 01:16:26.340
that's called bhikkhari. It can be chanted internally in a mental way, that's called

01:16:26.340 --> 01:16:31.700
madhyama. It can be experienced in a spiritual way, that's called paschanti. But ultimately,

01:16:31.700 --> 01:16:36.660
that mantra, whether it's being repeated aloud or silently, mentally repeated within, that

01:16:36.660 --> 01:16:39.180
mantra is indistinguishable from the deity.

01:16:39.180 --> 01:16:40.900
Nama Nami Abhed.

01:16:40.900 --> 01:16:45.320
The name and that to which the name refers are one in the same reality.

01:16:45.320 --> 01:16:48.700
And then arguably even deeper than that is the deity as pure consciousness.

01:16:48.700 --> 01:16:54.820
So notice it's an emanationist model from pure non-dual consciousness emanates a sound,

01:16:54.820 --> 01:16:55.860
a vibration.

01:16:55.860 --> 01:16:59.540
In the beginning was the word, the word was with God and the word was God.

01:16:59.540 --> 01:17:05.860
logos, that word is called "Om" but emanating from "Om" are these various mantras, if you will,

01:17:05.860 --> 01:17:10.660
and those mantras then further emanate as yantras, geometric designs in consciousness,

01:17:10.660 --> 01:17:15.460
and those when interpreted by the gross physical mind appear to be this or that god or goddess.

01:17:15.460 --> 01:17:23.380
Would it be fair to say that a deity is most primordially an impulse of the ocean of intelligence,

01:17:23.380 --> 01:17:27.700
like a wave on the ocean of intelligence arising, and obviously there are different waves,

01:17:27.700 --> 01:17:32.580
different deities performing different functions in creation. I think that's a beautiful way of

01:17:32.580 --> 01:17:36.100
putting it because you brought up quantum mechanics. We could say it's a repeating

01:17:36.100 --> 01:17:40.900
pattern of consciousness. So it's a wave, but it's a static wave. It's a wave, it's a standing wave.

01:17:40.900 --> 01:17:45.460
It's maybe I'm using that phrase, but it's not just mechanistic. It's an impulse of intelligence.

01:17:45.460 --> 01:17:49.780
Yes, awareness itself projects these deities. So they are real archetypical expressions of

01:17:49.780 --> 01:17:55.060
awareness that you're right. It is a wave whose water is the same. So every deity is a unique

01:17:55.060 --> 01:17:59.540
way, with a unique shape and with a unique form. Like I as a worshipper of Kali, we love the color

01:17:59.540 --> 01:18:04.660
red and we have a certain disposition. The way we do ritual, the way that we approach spiritual life

01:18:04.660 --> 01:18:08.260
is going to be different from our Vaishnava brothers and sisters. Like they're going to

01:18:08.260 --> 01:18:11.620
worship Krishna in a slightly different way. They have different colors that they like,

01:18:11.620 --> 01:18:15.780
different ways of doing ritual worship. But both Krishna and Kali, I mean Krishna and Kali maybe

01:18:15.780 --> 01:18:19.700
aren't good examples because they're very close to one another, especially in a place like Bengal.

01:18:19.700 --> 01:18:24.740
I think all the tantric deities are so closely related that tantra cannot be confined to anyone

01:18:24.740 --> 01:18:30.340
tradition. Everyone recognizes that their unique deity though is an expression of the same deity

01:18:30.340 --> 01:18:34.180
and that's the water of the ocean. So while the waves might all appear different to suit

01:18:34.180 --> 01:18:39.620
my temperament, the water is the same and that water has this innate desire to arise as waves.

01:18:39.620 --> 01:18:45.460
Light that is one though the lamps be many. Yes. To quote the incredible string band there before

01:18:45.460 --> 01:18:50.580
your time. Here's a question for you. You know how some people say, I guess perhaps referencing

01:18:50.580 --> 01:18:55.940
quantum mechanics that a thing doesn't actually come into existence until someone perceives it.

01:18:55.940 --> 01:19:00.980
But if you think about that, all right, it was a few billion years at the very least before the

01:19:00.980 --> 01:19:06.420
universe was habitable enough for there to be living beings that could perceive anything. So,

01:19:06.420 --> 01:19:11.300
it seems like a kind of dog chasing its own tail thing. How did the universe come into existence

01:19:11.300 --> 01:19:16.820
if there was no one to perceive it? But if we think of these deities as intrinsic to the

01:19:16.820 --> 01:19:23.140
fundamental nature of creation and as impulses of that field, then they were there from the

01:19:23.140 --> 01:19:29.860
very beginning to perceive and thereby to facilitate the manifestation of everything that came about.

01:19:29.860 --> 01:19:34.260
Yes, it's true. There's a beautiful Komalakanta song where he says, "Oh mother,

01:19:34.260 --> 01:19:38.020
where didst thou get thy garland of skulls before the universe was made?"

01:19:38.020 --> 01:19:44.100
What a beautiful song. And he's implying that yes, Ma was there. She's Adhyashakti, primordial

01:19:44.100 --> 01:19:47.860
creatrix and she was there prior to the existence of the universe. What was she doing? Well,

01:19:47.860 --> 01:19:50.820
she was dancing in the cremation ground, howling madly with joy.

01:19:50.820 --> 01:19:54.020
Leftover skulls from the previous creation, maybe.

01:19:54.020 --> 01:19:58.660
Exactly, yes, probably. Sri Ramakrishna would use exactly that metaphor. He would say something,

01:19:58.660 --> 01:20:02.660
at the end of this creation, mother gathers all of this up and puts it in a little bag.

01:20:02.660 --> 01:20:06.420
And then from that bag, she takes it out again and creates this entire universe.

01:20:06.420 --> 01:20:09.940
But yes, I think tantra, very simply put, is this, it's deity yoga.

01:20:09.940 --> 01:20:13.700
What a deity is, will of course differ from tradition to tradition. So this is a very deep

01:20:13.700 --> 01:20:17.940
and profound conversation of course. But I think different people have a different idea as to what

01:20:17.940 --> 01:20:23.300
deity really means. But I think deity yoga is common to all tantric traditions. So you get a deity,

01:20:23.300 --> 01:20:28.020
typically you choose one and then you approach a teacher who can give you that deity's mantra,

01:20:28.020 --> 01:20:33.860
or you approach a teacher who then assesses you and then prescribes a deity for you. So the role

01:20:33.860 --> 01:20:39.140
of the teacher above all in the tantric world is to give you mantra deeksha. Deeksha means

01:20:39.140 --> 01:20:43.060
initiation. That's another thing I should have mentioned actually. As long as we have guru yoga,

01:20:43.060 --> 01:20:47.060
then the emphasis is not only on the Guru but on this procedure called initiation.

01:20:47.060 --> 01:20:50.820
So the Guru gives you Diksha and the main form of that Diksha is the imparting of a mantra.

01:20:50.820 --> 01:20:54.020
Of course there are many kinds of Diksha. There's, you know, you can be enlightened through a glance

01:20:54.020 --> 01:20:57.940
from the teacher. It's called Chakshu Diksha or a teacher could smack you on the shoulder and you

01:20:57.940 --> 01:21:02.260
could have an experience. That's called Sparsha Diksha. But basically Diksha, Kriyavati Diksha,

01:21:02.260 --> 01:21:06.820
means you sit down with the teacher, they do a ceremony, they invoke the presence of that deity

01:21:06.820 --> 01:21:10.660
and then they whisper into your left ear and you're familiar with this being part of the TM tradition.

01:21:10.660 --> 01:21:12.820
they whisper into your ear a particular mantra.

01:21:12.820 --> 01:21:15.620
But that mantra will not only have a bead mantra,

01:21:15.620 --> 01:21:18.180
you know, but it will probably also have the deity's name.

01:21:18.180 --> 01:21:21.620
So now you have this mantra and your job now from this point on

01:21:21.620 --> 01:21:25.780
is to establish a close personal relationship with that deity.

01:21:25.780 --> 01:21:27.700
Maybe you think of that deity as your mother.

01:21:27.700 --> 01:21:29.780
As in my case, I think of Kali as my mother.

01:21:29.780 --> 01:21:32.980
Or you think of that deity as your guru or your sister or as your friend.

01:21:32.980 --> 01:21:36.340
That's another, I think, very unique thing in Hinduism, if we may call it that.

01:21:36.340 --> 01:21:38.660
Approaching God through all these different bhavas.

01:21:38.660 --> 01:21:41.540
God is my mother, God is my friend or God is my lover.

01:21:41.540 --> 01:21:45.620
As in the case of Krishna Radha, a very difficult Baba to practice, but one of the various Babas.

01:21:45.620 --> 01:21:49.380
Then you do puja. The Guru will teach you how to worship that deity every day.

01:21:49.380 --> 01:21:50.820
So you have a daily ritual practice.

01:21:50.820 --> 01:21:53.140
You offer flowers and incense and fire.

01:21:53.140 --> 01:21:55.540
Depending on the tradition, this could look differently.

01:21:55.540 --> 01:21:58.900
And then after you do puja, the next thing you have to do is called japa.

01:21:58.900 --> 01:22:01.460
So you sit there and you repeat the mantra of that deity.

01:22:01.460 --> 01:22:05.780
And then of course dhyana, you visualize the name and the form of that deity in your heart.

01:22:05.780 --> 01:22:08.500
And ultimately you become one with the deity.

01:22:08.500 --> 01:22:11.220
So this is of course, Tibetan yoga really stresses this.

01:22:11.220 --> 01:22:15.940
Deity yoga is all about identifying with the deity and losing yourself to the deity.

01:22:15.940 --> 01:22:19.860
So at the end of the day, you forget that this is your body, it becomes deity's body.

01:22:19.860 --> 01:22:21.220
It's like a moth going into flame.

01:22:21.220 --> 01:22:23.700
It's not that you're appropriating the deity into your personality.

01:22:23.700 --> 01:22:24.820
A lot of people do that these days.

01:22:24.820 --> 01:22:26.020
It's like, I'm Kali.

01:22:26.020 --> 01:22:29.460
I'm like, "Hey, what do you mean you're Kali?

01:22:29.460 --> 01:22:32.820
You can't even digest dairy and you're claiming like you're the god."

01:22:32.820 --> 01:22:33.860
It's not quite like that.

01:22:33.860 --> 01:22:36.180
It's not like you're bringing the deity down to your level.

01:22:36.180 --> 01:22:37.300
It's more the opposite.

01:22:37.300 --> 01:22:39.940
You're eating food that was offered to the deity.

01:22:39.940 --> 01:22:41.860
Thereby, when you eat, you think of the deity.

01:22:41.860 --> 01:22:44.980
Before you go to sleep, you say your mantra and you dream of the deity.

01:22:44.980 --> 01:22:46.980
All day long, you're repeating the deity's name.

01:22:46.980 --> 01:22:50.180
And when you say the deity's name, you naturally think of the deity's form.

01:22:50.180 --> 01:22:52.180
And it's like, before you know it, you're obsessed.

01:22:52.180 --> 01:22:54.740
Your whole life is nothing but Kali, Kali, Kali, Kali.

01:22:54.740 --> 01:22:58.100
And in that fervor, in that madness, you forget all about yourself.

01:22:58.100 --> 01:23:00.900
Renunciation comes spontaneously to one who is in love.

01:23:00.900 --> 01:23:03.940
The body is forgotten, the mind is forgotten, the world is forgotten.

01:23:03.940 --> 01:23:05.700
All that's left is Kali.

01:23:05.700 --> 01:23:10.340
I sometimes think of Frodo Baggins in Lord of the Rings saying that all you can see is the great eye

01:23:10.340 --> 01:23:16.180
like that all you can see is that ring of fire Kali Kali Kali so you lose yourself in Kali and

01:23:16.180 --> 01:23:21.140
then you become one with Kali that's the way deity yoga works by repeating the deity's name you become

01:23:21.140 --> 01:23:25.860
one with the deity and then arguably from there you go even further from the deity which is the

01:23:25.860 --> 01:23:30.820
personal aspect of God you enter into the impersonal aspect of God you know which you cannot get to

01:23:30.820 --> 01:23:38.180
directly. Good. A few questions came in. The first is from my friend Vaidehi Nathan who lives up in

01:23:38.180 --> 01:23:42.980
San Jose. If you're ever up that way you should meet him. I'll connect you. The question is

01:23:42.980 --> 01:23:49.300
comparing Shiva Siddhanta and Kashmiri Shaivism. Shiva Siddhanta has been there for thousands of

01:23:49.300 --> 01:23:58.660
years from through Mular and other Siddhas who are from BC. I'm not sure what BC is but Abhinavagupta,

01:23:58.660 --> 01:24:04.180
founder of Kashmir Shaivism is recent and only... Oh I see, BC meaning before Christ.

01:24:04.180 --> 01:24:10.820
Abhyananda Gupta is recent and only AD, but they are similar. Do you think Kashmir Shaivism is

01:24:10.820 --> 01:24:16.420
derived from or took roots from Shiva Siddhanta and what are the differences between them?

01:24:16.420 --> 01:24:20.900
Yes, without a doubt. I think once, see Swami Sarvapriyanidhi is one of the most important

01:24:20.900 --> 01:24:24.660
mentors in my life, of course, next to my guru. Another very important mentor in my life is

01:24:24.660 --> 01:24:29.380
is Tanishwar Timalsinna and I would sit with him in his living room and I would ask questions

01:24:29.380 --> 01:24:33.620
like this about Shaivism in the North, Shaivism in the South, Shaivism of the present, Shaivism

01:24:33.620 --> 01:24:34.620
of the past.

01:24:34.620 --> 01:24:39.300
And it seems like Shaivism as a whole is quite cohesive and quite unified.

01:24:39.300 --> 01:24:43.860
So like Northern Shaivas, like the Shaivas in Kashmir and Southern Shaivas, like the

01:24:43.860 --> 01:24:48.180
Shaivas in Tamil Nadu, the kind of Shaivism I grew up in, there's a lot of coherence.

01:24:48.180 --> 01:24:51.240
In fact, there's an author, his name is Madhu Raja.

01:24:51.240 --> 01:24:55.440
He composed a beautiful hymn to Abhinava Gupta describing Abhinava Gupta.

01:24:55.440 --> 01:24:57.920
Some claim Madhuraja never met Abhinava Gupta.

01:24:57.920 --> 01:25:00.880
Madhuraja of course lived in a temple in Madhure Minachi.

01:25:00.880 --> 01:25:02.320
He lived in southern India.

01:25:02.320 --> 01:25:06.960
Some claim he walked up north to Kashmir and he met Abhinava Gupta and then composed this

01:25:06.960 --> 01:25:07.960
wonderful hymn.

01:25:07.960 --> 01:25:12.680
In any case, Madhuraja is a very unique figure because he represents the reconciling of north

01:25:12.680 --> 01:25:14.000
and south.

01:25:14.000 --> 01:25:16.960
Northern Kashmir Shaivism with southern Tamil Shaivism.

01:25:16.960 --> 01:25:18.600
There's figures like that, Madhuraja.

01:25:18.600 --> 01:25:21.040
There was also a very important figure in Maheshwarananda.

01:25:21.040 --> 01:25:25.240
He was a priest in the temple at Chidambaram, a famous temple to Lord Shiva, the temple

01:25:25.240 --> 01:25:26.240
of the dancing Shiva.

01:25:26.240 --> 01:25:27.600
And there's a beautiful story.

01:25:27.600 --> 01:25:32.240
One day he was dozing off after performing a puja and suddenly he had the vision of the

01:25:32.240 --> 01:25:33.800
divine goddess Kali.

01:25:33.800 --> 01:25:37.480
And the goddess held up seven fingers and he received this powerful transmission.

01:25:37.480 --> 01:25:43.680
When he woke up, he then composed a text in 77 verses called the Mahartha Manjari.

01:25:43.680 --> 01:25:47.080
And that's one of the most important texts about Kali ever written.

01:25:47.080 --> 01:25:50.700
It's a philosophical, exegetical work, of course, but it's about Kali worship.

01:25:50.700 --> 01:25:55.340
So a lot of the texts like the Kali worship text, we call them Mahavata or Mahanaya texts,

01:25:55.340 --> 01:25:57.140
many of them are to be found in the South.

01:25:57.140 --> 01:26:01.100
Kerala is another center of goddess worship and you'll see that there's geographically

01:26:01.100 --> 01:26:04.400
in India, there's a lot of similarities between North and South.

01:26:04.400 --> 01:26:10.220
So Abhinava Gupta, yes, he existed later on in the classical tantric period, late 10th

01:26:10.220 --> 01:26:12.180
century, early 12th century.

01:26:12.180 --> 01:26:15.700
And of course Tirumala and a lot of the Tamil Shaivas are ancient.

01:26:15.700 --> 01:26:17.340
They existed a long time ago.

01:26:17.340 --> 01:26:19.980
But you'll notice that Shaivism is not temporal.

01:26:19.980 --> 01:26:24.720
The teachings of Lord Shiva are eternal and the five heads of Lord Shiva are always issuing

01:26:24.720 --> 01:26:27.540
forth the Shaiva Agamas in each and every moment.

01:26:27.540 --> 01:26:33.420
Om Namah Shivaya Satatam Pancha Kritya Vidhaya Nenaya Chid Ananda Asvatma Paramatmanam.

01:26:33.420 --> 01:26:37.960
You see, Lord Shiva, Satatam, always in each and every moment is revealing the Shaiva Agama.

01:26:37.960 --> 01:26:42.460
So I think when we talk about Shaivism, we can put all temporality and geography aside.

01:26:42.460 --> 01:26:47.180
The Shaiva Agamas, the tradition is one tradition and it's cohesive all throughout.

01:26:47.180 --> 01:26:49.180
Okay, good.

01:26:49.180 --> 01:26:53.660
question. You remember Laura who asked a question a little while ago? She said she's practicing

01:26:53.660 --> 01:26:58.140
Kriya Yoga. Oh beautiful, beautiful. Yes and maybe you have a Kriya Yoga guru but you know

01:26:58.140 --> 01:27:05.660
Mahabhatar Babaji, he's very much in Shaivism we call him a Siddha, a being who just materializes.

01:27:05.660 --> 01:27:10.860
So Matsyendranath, Gorakshanath, these are Siddhas and it's true Kriya Yoga is in the wider umbrella

01:27:10.860 --> 01:27:15.260
of Raja Yoga or the Yoga world which is very much closely related to Shaivism.

01:27:15.900 --> 01:27:19.660
And one thing you might note is that Kriya Yoga is much broader than just Self-Realization

01:27:19.660 --> 01:27:24.140
Fellowship. That's of course one movement within the Kriya Yoga tradition. But there's like lots

01:27:24.140 --> 01:27:28.700
of different traditions. You know, Sri Yukteswarji had different disciples besides Swami Yogananda

01:27:28.700 --> 01:27:33.100
Giri, Paramahansa Dev. There are many other disciples too and Yukteswar Giri was a friend

01:27:33.100 --> 01:27:38.940
of Swami Brahmananda and Sri Yoganandaji met actually M, the recorder of the Sri Sri Ram

01:27:38.940 --> 01:27:43.180
Krishna Kathamrita. So it's kind of interesting that those worlds actually do combine. But yes,

01:27:43.180 --> 01:27:47.900
wonderful. It's a wonderful tradition. It's a yogic tradition, a mystical tradition,

01:27:47.900 --> 01:27:50.540
and therefore it does put emphasis on mystical experience.

01:27:50.540 --> 01:27:57.820
Laura, check out my interview with Philip Weber about a month ago. He was primarily in the

01:27:57.820 --> 01:28:02.700
Yogananda tradition, but he's a little bit eclectic. But he's had some really lovely

01:28:02.700 --> 01:28:08.620
experiences and awakenings, and he'd probably be happy to have a phone or YouTube chat.

01:28:08.620 --> 01:28:10.060
WhatsApp, that's what I'm trying to think of.

01:28:11.340 --> 01:28:16.300
I'm reminded though the reason I brought up Sthaneshwar Timhalsanatji is because once he gave a course on foundational Shaivism

01:28:16.300 --> 01:28:20.940
and the choice of text I thought was stunning. He chose Shiva Jnana Bhoda which is actually a text

01:28:20.940 --> 01:28:26.140
in Tamil which has a Sanskrit form of course and he chose the Shiva Sutra. So he took a Vasu Gupta's

01:28:26.140 --> 01:28:31.820
text which is from Kashmir and he took Shiva Jnana Bhoda which is from southern India and he taught

01:28:31.820 --> 01:28:37.500
a course on Shaivism using those two texts to show that Shaivism goes beyond all temporality and beyond

01:28:37.500 --> 01:28:40.220
all geography. Yes, I just wanted to point that out. That's why I brought him up.

01:28:40.220 --> 01:28:48.860
Next question is from my friend Chitra Polanski in Sacramento. There's a presumption in this

01:28:48.860 --> 01:28:53.420
question that you might not cop to. She said, "When you realized the self, did the world vanish?"

01:28:53.420 --> 01:28:59.820
That's an interesting question. In my tradition, in the Ramakrishna Vivekananda lineage,

01:28:59.820 --> 01:29:07.180
the realization of the self is in a sense equated with Nirvikalpa Samadhi. So yes, in a sense,

01:29:07.180 --> 01:29:13.580
When you realize the self, it's in the context of that Samadhi in which one forgets about the body

01:29:13.580 --> 01:29:17.420
and in which one forgets about the mind. See, the world is nothing but an experience of embodiment.

01:29:17.420 --> 01:29:21.100
If I don't feel my body, if I'm not seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting or touching,

01:29:21.100 --> 01:29:24.540
what to say of the world? I won't feel anything. I won't know what room I'm in.

01:29:24.540 --> 01:29:28.460
The world will vanish. But of course, there's also a mental world. And the mental world is

01:29:28.460 --> 01:29:31.820
where we experience the forms of gods and goddesses. We have all sorts of exciting

01:29:31.820 --> 01:29:36.220
spiritual experiences in this like dreamlike dimension. But even that disappears in Nirvikalpa

01:29:36.220 --> 01:29:42.220
The mind is extinguished and in that moment, in that Nirvikalpa Samadhi, the Yoga Sutra says,

01:29:42.220 --> 01:29:44.220
"Tada drashtu svarupe avasthanam"

01:29:44.220 --> 01:29:53.220
In that "Tada" and then "drashtu" the drashta, the seer abides, "avastha" in her true nature, svarupa.

01:29:53.220 --> 01:29:58.220
So with response to your question, when one realizes the self, it's often in Nirvikalpa Samadhi.

01:29:58.220 --> 01:30:02.220
Of course, I know most of the Advaita Vedantins, you know, those who are in the Neo-Advaita camp,

01:30:02.220 --> 01:30:04.860
camp will certainly disagree with this.

01:30:04.860 --> 01:30:08.700
They think you can realize Brahman like now itself without needing to go to Nirvikalpa

01:30:08.700 --> 01:30:09.700
Samadhi.

01:30:09.700 --> 01:30:11.940
But I think in our lineage, it's a very yogic Vedantic lineage.

01:30:11.940 --> 01:30:15.860
We do say yes, when you realize the self, it's probably because of Nirvikalpa Samadhi.

01:30:15.860 --> 01:30:17.800
It's probably in a time when the world vanishes.

01:30:17.800 --> 01:30:18.800
But you know what?

01:30:18.800 --> 01:30:19.800
You come out of Nirvikalpa Samadhi.

01:30:19.800 --> 01:30:23.040
And when you come out of Nirvikalpa Samadhi and you experience the world, it's with new

01:30:23.040 --> 01:30:27.780
eyes and then you're constantly communing with the self now appearing as a table, now appearing

01:30:27.780 --> 01:30:28.820
as a chair.

01:30:28.820 --> 01:30:31.940
And just very briefly, there's a good example that might help you out with this.

01:30:31.940 --> 01:30:36.700
Let's say a child has never before seen a movie screen and so his father takes him to the theater

01:30:36.700 --> 01:30:38.040
and they're watching the movie.

01:30:38.040 --> 01:30:42.500
Now they arrive late and so the movie is well underway by the time the boy gets there and

01:30:42.500 --> 01:30:45.520
then the boy asks the father, "Dad, where's the movie screen?"

01:30:45.520 --> 01:30:47.620
And the father points and he says, "Over there!"

01:30:47.620 --> 01:30:50.740
Now let's say it's a World War II film and the boy looks to where the dad's pointing and

01:30:50.740 --> 01:30:53.340
he thinks, "The soldier is the movie screen?"

01:30:53.340 --> 01:30:56.620
And the dad says, "No, no, no, behind the soldier is the movie screen."

01:30:56.620 --> 01:30:59.820
And the boy looks and he says, "The tank is the movie screen?

01:30:59.820 --> 01:31:01.900
Behind that, the mountain is the movie screen?"

01:31:01.900 --> 01:31:05.980
No, behind that, oh the sky is the movie screen.

01:31:05.980 --> 01:31:07.520
Now the father is at a loss.

01:31:07.520 --> 01:31:11.020
Everything that he points at is some object in the movie.

01:31:11.020 --> 01:31:12.460
So he says no, the whole thing.

01:31:12.460 --> 01:31:15.380
So the boy thinks, oh everything together is the movie screen.

01:31:15.380 --> 01:31:16.380
Not quite.

01:31:16.380 --> 01:31:17.580
So there is no movie screen.

01:31:17.580 --> 01:31:18.580
Not quite.

01:31:18.580 --> 01:31:21.620
You see, in the dad's predicament, there's nothing the dad can do to show the boy the

01:31:21.620 --> 01:31:22.620
movie screen.

01:31:22.620 --> 01:31:25.380
The boy has never seen a movie screen except to turn off the movie.

01:31:25.380 --> 01:31:29.340
If they had come before the movie or if they stuck around after the movie, it's only then

01:31:29.340 --> 01:31:31.380
that the boy will see the movie screen.

01:31:31.380 --> 01:31:36.100
possible for the boy to intuit the existence of the movie screen while the movie is running,

01:31:36.100 --> 01:31:39.860
but it's probably better for the boy to just see the screen without the movie. That's called

01:31:39.860 --> 01:31:44.420
Nirvikalpa Samadhi. That's the realization of the self. Yeah, I have a question related to this.

01:31:44.420 --> 01:31:50.660
Swami Sarvabhipayananda often seems to say that according to Patanjali, maintaining samadhi

01:31:50.660 --> 01:31:57.060
requires keeping the senses withdrawn, eyes closed. And I always counter, I usually send him an email

01:31:57.060 --> 01:32:02.580
after I hear him say this, that that's just an initial condition, but through regular exposure

01:32:02.580 --> 01:32:07.620
to that, it gets stabilized and integrated so that it will be maintained even in the midst of

01:32:07.620 --> 01:32:12.820
activities. Like dyeing a cloth yellow by dipping it in dye and then bleaching it in the sun and

01:32:12.820 --> 01:32:16.980
dipping it and bleaching it back and forth until it's colorfast no matter whether it's in the sun

01:32:16.980 --> 01:32:22.660
or the dye. That's my take on it. There's a verse in Pratyabhigya Hridaya Sutra where

01:32:22.660 --> 01:32:25.860
where Shrema Raja says, it's like when you're in Nirvikalpa Samadhi,

01:32:25.860 --> 01:32:30.060
you dhyutane bhuyas bhuyas, you slowly emerge from Nirvikalpa Samadhi

01:32:30.060 --> 01:32:32.560
and you maintain that fragrance.

01:32:32.560 --> 01:32:36.360
He calls it chid-aityo marshan, the sense of the oneness of all things.

01:32:36.360 --> 01:32:39.860
And then with your eyes open, you never quite forget that fragrance.

01:32:39.860 --> 01:32:41.960
And so you're right. It's a matter of constant immersion.

01:32:41.960 --> 01:32:44.760
That's why I like your dyeing the cloth metaphor a lot.

01:32:44.760 --> 01:32:46.160
Sri Ramakrishna would joke, he would say,

01:32:46.160 --> 01:32:49.860
what you put God in the prison of Samadhi and then threw away the key.

01:32:49.860 --> 01:32:52.360
And then in Tripura Rahasya, man goes into Samadhi

01:32:52.360 --> 01:32:53.880
and his wife says, "Wait, wait, wait!"

01:32:53.880 --> 01:32:55.320
First he experiences Nirvikalpa Samadhi,

01:32:55.320 --> 01:32:56.200
then he opens his eyes,

01:32:56.200 --> 01:32:57.000
he looks around,

01:32:57.000 --> 01:32:58.840
and then he hurriedly closes them again.

01:32:58.840 --> 01:33:00.760
Because it's true, in Patanjali he does say,

01:33:00.760 --> 01:33:02.520
"Yogas chitta vritti nirodhah"

01:33:02.520 --> 01:33:03.880
It's the cessation of the mind.

01:33:03.880 --> 01:33:05.080
So all senses are shut down,

01:33:05.080 --> 01:33:06.120
the mind is turned off,

01:33:06.120 --> 01:33:07.080
you're in Samadhi.

01:33:07.080 --> 01:33:08.840
And in texts like Jeevan Mukti Viveka,

01:33:08.840 --> 01:33:09.480
it's true.

01:33:09.480 --> 01:33:11.880
It seems like the longer you can stay in Samadhi,

01:33:11.880 --> 01:33:12.680
the better.

01:33:12.680 --> 01:33:13.880
So anyway, in this text,

01:33:13.880 --> 01:33:14.920
the man looks around,

01:33:14.920 --> 01:33:15.880
and he closes his eyes again,

01:33:15.880 --> 01:33:17.320
and his wife says, "Wait, wait, wait!"

01:33:17.320 --> 01:33:18.840
"Please tell me, my husband,

01:33:18.840 --> 01:33:21.080
What have you gained by closing your eyes?

01:33:21.080 --> 01:33:22.520
What have you lost by opening them?

01:33:22.520 --> 01:33:24.760
It's a very remarkable statement.

01:33:24.760 --> 01:33:29.160
And then she goes on to say that you can have this eyes open samadhi, sahaja samadhi.

01:33:29.160 --> 01:33:31.560
And so, Sri Ramakrishna, he would go into samadhi a lot.

01:33:31.560 --> 01:33:35.880
The slightest mention of God would cause his mind to soar and he would enter into samadhi

01:33:35.880 --> 01:33:37.320
and he would be lost in samadhi, you know.

01:33:37.320 --> 01:33:41.400
And then he would come out and he would stutter a little bit like a drunk person.

01:33:41.400 --> 01:33:43.640
And then he would usually have to manufacture some desire.

01:33:43.640 --> 01:33:47.400
He would say, "prepare for me a smoke" or "give me a glass of water" or something.

01:33:47.400 --> 01:33:49.400
he would need something to bring his mind down.

01:33:49.400 --> 01:33:51.960
He wouldn't actually have to drink the water or smoke the Hubble bubble.

01:33:51.960 --> 01:33:54.760
It was enough to simply just manufacture a desire.

01:33:54.760 --> 01:33:58.040
And with that desire, the mind would come down and then he would speak.

01:33:58.040 --> 01:34:02.120
And when he would speak, his voice would be charged with the power of Samadhi.

01:34:02.120 --> 01:34:05.160
So he was somebody who would frequently go into Samadhi, frequently come out,

01:34:05.160 --> 01:34:06.920
frequently go into Samadhi, frequently come out.

01:34:06.920 --> 01:34:11.000
Whereas Holy Mother, she was someone who was never seen to go into Samadhi.

01:34:11.000 --> 01:34:14.280
Rarely would anybody catch her in like a spiritually abstracted state.

01:34:14.280 --> 01:34:20.120
So arguably she maintained the constant experience of samadhi like an undercurrent even as she went

01:34:20.120 --> 01:34:24.360
about doing the various duties that she had. So I think you're right, it is perfectly possible

01:34:24.360 --> 01:34:29.480
post samadhi to maintain that fragrance. It's called maybe sahaja samadhi or some eyes open

01:34:29.480 --> 01:34:34.760
type of samadhi to constantly be interfacing with God even with your eyes open. One would hope

01:34:34.760 --> 01:34:40.760
otherwise it seems very tenuous, very intermittent. You can bet that when Ramakrishna had his eyes

01:34:40.760 --> 01:34:45.800
open and was talking to people, he wasn't in ordinary humdrum state of consciousness.

01:34:45.800 --> 01:34:50.080
We would be quite blown away if we could step into his body and experience things as he

01:34:50.080 --> 01:34:52.000
was experiencing them at that time.

01:34:52.000 --> 01:34:53.000
Yes, it's true.

01:34:53.000 --> 01:34:58.400
And in India, they break these bricks and using the brick dust with lime, they make steps

01:34:58.400 --> 01:34:59.960
and then they also make roofs.

01:34:59.960 --> 01:35:03.760
So Sri Raghunath would say, when you climb the steps and you get to the roof, you then

01:35:03.760 --> 01:35:09.920
realize that the material of the roof, brick and lime dust is the same material as the steps.

01:35:09.920 --> 01:35:14.400
So having gone beyond the world, you realize God, you come back to see that the world is

01:35:14.400 --> 01:35:15.800
nothing but God.

01:35:15.800 --> 01:35:18.840
So Sri Ramakrishna would say it's all rushed, soaked in consciousness.

01:35:18.840 --> 01:35:23.440
So this, what you're describing is a post-Samadhi experience of maintaining Samadhi even with

01:35:23.440 --> 01:35:24.440
the eyes open.

01:35:24.440 --> 01:35:28.000
Sri Ramakrishna might call something like that Vijnana, something greater than just

01:35:28.000 --> 01:35:29.000
Jnana.

01:35:29.000 --> 01:35:32.600
Jnana you get in Samadhi, but Vijnana you get with your eyes open, interfacing.

01:35:32.600 --> 01:35:34.640
So I think it is possible and desirable.

01:35:34.640 --> 01:35:36.560
And I think it's a goal actually.

01:35:36.560 --> 01:35:40.420
I think this actually pertains to our previous discussion also about direct and progressive

01:35:40.420 --> 01:35:46.360
paths because you can directly go into samadhi on day one of your spiritual practice, but

01:35:46.360 --> 01:35:50.560
it's going to then integrate and stabilize over years and decades.

01:35:50.560 --> 01:35:52.920
Yes, true, true.

01:35:52.920 --> 01:35:53.920
Repeated exposure.

01:35:53.920 --> 01:35:54.920
Yes, repeated exposure.

01:35:54.920 --> 01:35:56.780
I think repeated immersion.

01:35:56.780 --> 01:35:59.840
Is repeated exposure therapy with samadhi.

01:35:59.840 --> 01:36:01.520
Beautiful question.

01:36:01.520 --> 01:36:04.040
Some more questions coming in here.

01:36:04.040 --> 01:36:09.320
This is from Tree Wise Blood who was my previous interviewee just before you.

01:36:09.320 --> 01:36:10.320
She's in Australia.

01:36:10.320 --> 01:36:14.240
She says, "I have many of the deities dancing in my body.

01:36:14.240 --> 01:36:15.240
What is happening here?

01:36:15.240 --> 01:36:17.440
What are they doing?"

01:36:17.440 --> 01:36:21.480
You know in the Shiva Sutra there are words like "Khechari" and "Ghuchari".

01:36:21.480 --> 01:36:24.880
One thing about Tantra is everything in the body is deified.

01:36:24.880 --> 01:36:27.480
So for instance Kali has 15 attendants.

01:36:27.480 --> 01:36:28.920
They're called the Nitya Kalis.

01:36:28.920 --> 01:36:32.800
And each of these goddesses are correspondent to some aspect of embodiment.

01:36:32.800 --> 01:36:37.280
For instance, the five organs of action, the legs, the hands, the organ of evacuation,

01:36:37.280 --> 01:36:40.080
the organ of reproduction, and the organ of speech.

01:36:40.080 --> 01:36:43.200
Each of these are seen to be in and of themselves goddesses.

01:36:43.200 --> 01:36:49.360
The organ of smelling, of tasting, of seeing, of touching, of hearing, these are all goddesses.

01:36:49.360 --> 01:36:54.080
And the five pranas that flow through the body, the downward moving prana, the outward

01:36:54.080 --> 01:36:58.960
moving prana, prana vayu, so inhaling and exhaling are movements of the goddess.

01:36:58.960 --> 01:37:03.360
Samadha Vayu, the breath retention or even Kundalini Shakti, of course, the goddess Kundalini

01:37:03.360 --> 01:37:08.000
racing up the Shushubhna Nadi is a goddess. And then of course, Vyana Vayu, the goddess that's

01:37:08.000 --> 01:37:12.960
you know, what you're describing as eyes open Samadhi is this pervasion, Vyana, the pervasion

01:37:12.960 --> 01:37:17.600
of divinity and all things. These are all goddesses. So the five organs of action, the five organs of

01:37:17.600 --> 01:37:23.440
perception and the five pranas, they make up 15. And how many attendants does Kali have? 15.

01:37:23.440 --> 01:37:28.160
Isn't that so beautiful? Yeah, there are eight petals in the Yantra. The eight petals sometimes

01:37:28.160 --> 01:37:35.360
referred to the eight aesthetic flavors like anger or like disgust or like fear or like arousal or

01:37:35.360 --> 01:37:41.200
laughter. In tantra the goal is to divinize the body to see every process that happens in the

01:37:41.200 --> 01:37:45.440
body as a stirring of consciousness. What's happening is that you're getting a better

01:37:45.440 --> 01:37:50.560
grasp of reality that everything that happens in the body is sacred and divine. Goddesses dancing.

01:37:51.200 --> 01:37:57.520
I like that. And again, if we think of goddesses and gods as impulses of intelligence, the human

01:37:57.520 --> 01:38:01.760
body is just like this miraculous display of intelligence on every level.

01:38:01.760 --> 01:38:06.320
I love that phrase, Rikji. Impulses of intelligence. Beautiful. What is the body

01:38:06.320 --> 01:38:10.880
but a series of impulses of intelligence? And what is a goddess but that? In the West,

01:38:10.880 --> 01:38:16.560
when you say tantra, or more commonly tantra, what people are thinking about is sex. Tantra in the

01:38:16.560 --> 01:38:19.600
the West is usually a fixation on sexuality.

01:38:19.600 --> 01:38:20.600
And that's not wrong.

01:38:20.600 --> 01:38:24.240
I mean, I think there are a lot of things that call themselves Tantra, maybe Neo Tantra, just

01:38:24.240 --> 01:38:25.720
like there's Neo Vedanta, there's Neo Tantra.

01:38:25.720 --> 01:38:27.520
There's one who just says Tantra.

01:38:27.520 --> 01:38:31.440
To distinguish Tantra from the California brand of it, she calls one Tantra and the

01:38:31.440 --> 01:38:32.440
other Tantra.

01:38:32.440 --> 01:38:35.360
So, this Tantra, I'm not saying it's without its value.

01:38:35.360 --> 01:38:38.600
I'm sure it's helping many couples find greater intimacy and whatnot.

01:38:38.600 --> 01:38:41.760
I'm sure that's, as a standalone tradition, very valuable.

01:38:41.760 --> 01:38:46.800
It's just tantra is itself not really interested in sex as an end.

01:38:46.800 --> 01:38:52.720
There are forms of tantra certainly like vamachara tantra where sexuality and sex is divinized

01:38:52.720 --> 01:38:53.920
and ritualized.

01:38:53.920 --> 01:38:59.540
So for instance in chapter 29 of Abhinava Gupta's magnum opus tantra loka, he describes the

01:38:59.540 --> 01:39:05.240
Adi Yaga or the Kaula ritual in which one enters into the ritual space with usually

01:39:05.240 --> 01:39:09.920
one's wife almost always is it's one's wife or one's husband and the two of them enter

01:39:09.920 --> 01:39:13.840
into a meditative state in which one partner identifies as Shiva and the other partner

01:39:13.840 --> 01:39:19.880
identifies as Shakti and they do actually participate in a ritualized sex act that happens.

01:39:19.880 --> 01:39:25.000
That's definitely part of the tantric world and that's supposed to create a sudden explosion

01:39:25.000 --> 01:39:26.000
of Kundalini Shakti.

01:39:26.000 --> 01:39:30.800
So the purpose of that ritual, very importantly I have to stress this, is not pleasure.

01:39:30.800 --> 01:39:37.080
The purpose of that ritual is to use the primordial forces of arousal and sexuality and harness

01:39:37.080 --> 01:39:39.960
that and redirect that for a spiritual outcome.

01:39:39.960 --> 01:39:44.360
So sex is not so much villainized in Tantra as it is in other traditions.

01:39:44.360 --> 01:39:49.720
Tantra is a much more body positive, Siddhi positive, sex positive tradition, but always

01:39:49.720 --> 01:39:51.740
with a spiritual view in end.

01:39:51.740 --> 01:39:56.060
So in the West, any tradition aimed at maximizing pleasure or increasing the number of orgasms

01:39:56.060 --> 01:39:58.160
you're having or something like that, that's fine.

01:39:58.160 --> 01:39:59.520
It's just not Tantra.

01:39:59.520 --> 01:40:02.680
Tantra is about going beyond the body and going beyond the mind.

01:40:02.680 --> 01:40:06.800
Albeit it allows the body and mind to be seen as vehicles.

01:40:06.800 --> 01:40:08.800
So sexuality then can be harnessed.

01:40:08.800 --> 01:40:12.480
Sri Ramakrishna would say, "Why would you want to overcome your sexuality?

01:40:12.480 --> 01:40:14.240
Redirect it towards God."

01:40:14.240 --> 01:40:15.240
That's the idea.

01:40:15.240 --> 01:40:18.640
If you're angry, if you're aroused, whatever, that's free energy.

01:40:18.640 --> 01:40:21.920
Tantra is about capitalizing on that energy and getting beyond it ultimately.

01:40:21.920 --> 01:40:22.920
That's one thing.

01:40:22.920 --> 01:40:24.320
In the East, it's black magic.

01:40:24.320 --> 01:40:26.840
So the West, when they hear tantra, they think sex.

01:40:26.840 --> 01:40:29.440
In the East, when they hear tantra, they think black magic.

01:40:29.440 --> 01:40:31.520
And that's certainly part of the tradition too.

01:40:31.520 --> 01:40:35.080
There are people who go to the cremation ground and then tie a string around a crow and then

01:40:35.080 --> 01:40:40.120
sacrifice that crow into the funeral pyre in order to like hex their enemy. This is called Abhichara.

01:40:40.120 --> 01:40:45.160
Abhichara means to stun your enemy, to kill your enemy, to have someone fall in love with you.

01:40:45.160 --> 01:40:49.720
That's also part of the tantric world and worshipping goddesses like Bhagalabhuki,

01:40:49.720 --> 01:40:54.760
like the Dasha Mahavidya tradition, there's a reputation in these traditions for doing Abhichara,

01:40:54.760 --> 01:41:01.160
for doing "black magic". So I think it's good to be as inclusive as possible. It's good to say that

01:41:01.160 --> 01:41:06.280
that Tantra has high and low, pure and impure, and ultimately all can be seen as part of

01:41:06.280 --> 01:41:07.520
the same tradition.

01:41:07.520 --> 01:41:08.840
I think Abhichara is fine.

01:41:08.840 --> 01:41:14.000
I think the crazy sex stuff is fine too, because it's helping someone somewhere.

01:41:14.000 --> 01:41:16.360
I'll just close it with Vivekananda's famous statement.

01:41:16.360 --> 01:41:20.680
He said in America when he first gave lectures here in Chicago, he said, "In Hinduism,"

01:41:20.680 --> 01:41:27.560
I'm going to paraphrase a bit, "the lowest fetishism and the highest absolutism are seen

01:41:27.560 --> 01:41:30.760
as valid attempts to grasp the ineffable.

01:41:30.760 --> 01:41:34.200
So I think yes, there is a dark side and by dark side I mean a ritualistic

01:41:34.200 --> 01:41:38.120
black magic, like indulging the censor's side to tantra.

01:41:38.120 --> 01:41:41.480
And I don't think we as a tradition ought to reject that as not tantra. It's

01:41:41.480 --> 01:41:44.600
certainly part of tantra, but it's a great tragedy, I think, to

01:41:44.600 --> 01:41:48.040
think that tantra is just that. Tantra is so much more.

01:41:48.040 --> 01:41:51.240
Right, it's just a small percentage, I imagine. Have you really understood the

01:41:51.240 --> 01:41:54.680
whole of tantra? Yeah, yeah. Most tantrikas would not be

01:41:54.680 --> 01:42:00.440
engaging in wine drinking or ritual sex acts or black magic or things of that nature. Most

01:42:00.440 --> 01:42:08.200
Tantricas wouldn't be even remotely interested in that. Yeah, okay. This one is from Prem

01:42:08.200 --> 01:42:15.640
Vishwanathan in Boston. How is Tantra different from Bhakti Yoga? If Tantra is ritualistic worship

01:42:15.640 --> 01:42:21.240
of a deity, can that be categorized as a form of Bhakti? It's a very, very beautiful question. In

01:42:21.240 --> 01:42:24.240
In fact, a lot of Bhakti Yoga is tantricized.

01:42:24.240 --> 01:42:28.440
Tantra does not actually presuppose Bhakti, but it is a form of deity yoga, like I mentioned

01:42:28.440 --> 01:42:29.440
earlier.

01:42:29.440 --> 01:42:30.880
So it's a ritual form, right?

01:42:30.880 --> 01:42:35.760
So you get puja from your guru, you learn how to do ritual for the deity, but it doesn't

01:42:35.760 --> 01:42:38.280
presuppose that you love the deity.

01:42:38.280 --> 01:42:40.000
It's enough for you to do the rituals.

01:42:40.000 --> 01:42:45.240
So tantra, many people have argued, has more to do with yoga and with jnana than with bhakti.

01:42:45.240 --> 01:42:50.000
It's not really about loving the deity as much as it is in performing rituals and doing the

01:42:50.000 --> 01:42:53.520
practices, which of course ultimately culminate in genuine love for the deity.

01:42:53.520 --> 01:42:57.400
Whereas Bhakti traditions sometimes are anti-ritual.

01:42:57.400 --> 01:43:01.200
There are many Bhakti traditions, you know like Chaitanya Mahaprabhu famously would say,

01:43:01.200 --> 01:43:06.000
"No times are set, no rites are needed for the chanting of thy name, so vast is thy mercy."

01:43:06.000 --> 01:43:10.160
So there are a lot of like Bhakti teachers that are trying to go beyond ritual, that

01:43:10.160 --> 01:43:13.880
are speaking out against ritual, and in doing so are distinguishing themselves from the Tantric

01:43:13.880 --> 01:43:16.680
tradition, which for the most part is very ritualistic.

01:43:16.680 --> 01:43:19.800
Vaidehi Deva asked earlier about Shaiva Siddhanta.

01:43:19.800 --> 01:43:22.600
Shaiva Siddhanta is the foundations of all Tantra.

01:43:22.600 --> 01:43:27.040
And of course, Kashmir Shaivism would not exist without the foundations of Shaiva Siddhanta.

01:43:27.040 --> 01:43:31.120
Everything we know about Shaivism rests upon this Shaiva Siddhanta ritual technology and

01:43:31.120 --> 01:43:32.120
ritual world.

01:43:32.120 --> 01:43:37.120
So in a sense, Bhakti can be seen as a standalone tradition for that reason, because it rejects

01:43:37.120 --> 01:43:39.200
ritualism in some of its forms.

01:43:39.200 --> 01:43:45.320
But over time, the use of puja, the use of japa, the use of mantra became inalienable

01:43:45.320 --> 01:43:49.800
aspects of bhakti such that nowadays tantra and bhakti are almost indistinguishable.

01:43:49.800 --> 01:43:54.520
So I think it's fair to say that tantra is the means for bhakti yoga.

01:43:54.520 --> 01:43:58.360
Where you know in bhakti yoga you get a deity from your guru and then you use the practices

01:43:58.360 --> 01:44:00.500
that emerge from the tantric world.

01:44:00.500 --> 01:44:04.740
Practices like puja, japa, even kirtan in a sense is a kind of mantra yoga.

01:44:04.740 --> 01:44:08.660
Those practices are tantric in nature, they evolve out of the tantric worldview.

01:44:08.660 --> 01:44:12.460
But the goal, the end goal in bhakti is devotion to God.

01:44:12.460 --> 01:44:15.040
Bhakti is special in that way because that's the end goal.

01:44:15.040 --> 01:44:18.240
In Tantra, I think its end goal is not necessarily just to love God.

01:44:18.240 --> 01:44:21.760
Its end goal might be to become God, which I think many Bhakti traditions would not be

01:44:21.760 --> 01:44:22.760
comfortable with.

01:44:22.760 --> 01:44:25.360
Yeah, they want to keep tasting the sugar.

01:44:25.360 --> 01:44:26.360
Yes.

01:44:26.360 --> 01:44:31.240
I will say, Sri Ramakrishna often stressed, he would say, "Bhakti is the one essential

01:44:31.240 --> 01:44:32.240
thing."

01:44:32.240 --> 01:44:34.000
And he is a master Tantric, right?

01:44:34.000 --> 01:44:36.480
He mastered the 64 Bhairava Agamas.

01:44:36.480 --> 01:44:38.840
He was a worshipper of the divine goddess Kali.

01:44:38.840 --> 01:44:40.680
He was very well versed in puja.

01:44:40.680 --> 01:44:44.680
But his main form of sadhana was just crying out to God with a yearning heart.

01:44:44.680 --> 01:44:50.440
Vyakulata, Padma Vyakulata, intense yearning for God. That's a bhakti approach. So in bhakti,

01:44:50.440 --> 01:44:57.240
if you have strong yearning, just deep love for God, that alone is sufficient. You can think of

01:44:57.240 --> 01:45:02.520
bhakti as a kind of super tantra maybe. Tantra is the way to get bhakti. One of the titles of one of

01:45:02.520 --> 01:45:07.720
your videos was the danger of non-duality, Ashtavakra Gita. Now I know Ashtavakra and

01:45:07.720 --> 01:45:12.360
Madhukya Upanishad are very world negating, you know, nothing ever happened and nothing ever

01:45:12.360 --> 01:45:18.760
existed and all that stuff. Are you implying that by your title that that would perhaps be a dangerous

01:45:18.760 --> 01:45:23.800
attitude to culture for most people, especially householders?

01:45:23.800 --> 01:45:28.920
Yes, you know, I don't think it's so much that. I love Ajatavada and I think householders can also

01:45:28.920 --> 01:45:33.160
benefit from it because if they knew the world was nothing but a dream, nothing but an appearance

01:45:33.160 --> 01:45:37.160
with no basis in reality, I think that would help a lot of householders actually.

01:45:37.160 --> 01:45:40.280
I think that would help them be better householders. They would take everything

01:45:40.280 --> 01:45:45.480
less seriously. Like Janaka, Ashtavaka's student in that text is himself a householder and not

01:45:45.480 --> 01:45:49.480
just any householder, he's a king. He has all these responsibilities and he doesn't give them up.

01:45:49.480 --> 01:45:54.520
He continues to be a king even in light of his realization which came from Ashtavaka in that

01:45:54.520 --> 01:45:59.000
Gita. So anyway, I think it's not so much that seeing the world as a dream is dangerous. I think

01:45:59.000 --> 01:46:04.920
in that lecture I was specifically pointing out the risk of spiritual bypassing. There's this hasty

01:46:04.920 --> 01:46:08.600
conclusion that people make after they read the Mandukya Upanishad and they study Gaudapada's

01:46:08.600 --> 01:46:13.640
commentary after they study Ashtavakra Gita, they usually become like so condescending towards

01:46:13.640 --> 01:46:17.480
deity yoga. They're like, "Oh, I don't need to do puja. I don't need to do japa. Why should I have

01:46:17.480 --> 01:46:21.560
love for any form of the divine? The world is not real. I don't have to do any spiritual practices."

01:46:21.560 --> 01:46:26.200
So I think it's the danger that I was pointing out there is the danger of undigested jnana or

01:46:26.200 --> 01:46:31.560
direct path without any supportive progressive path disciplines. Typically, I see a lot of people

01:46:31.560 --> 01:46:36.360
reading Ashtavakra Gita who have no foundations in spirituality whatsoever. They get turned on

01:46:36.360 --> 01:46:40.520
on to the text and they're intellectually stimulated by the text but they're not doing daily meditation

01:46:40.520 --> 01:46:43.960
or doing puja or anything like that. So I think that's the danger I pointed out. Ashravaka is a

01:46:43.960 --> 01:46:49.720
high level text. Even Dzogchen or Mahamudra, that's something that's only revealed after a lot of

01:46:49.720 --> 01:46:54.680
ethical and meditative training within Buddhism. And most of the people practicing Dzogchen are

01:46:54.680 --> 01:46:59.560
monks and have been monks since they were children. You know, there's a big danger in starting from the

01:46:59.560 --> 01:47:03.560
top at the very beginning without the foundations. That's I think what I was pointing out.

01:47:04.280 --> 01:47:07.800
Good point. Yeah, and I mean some of these new Advaita teachers actually

01:47:07.800 --> 01:47:13.320
follow this logic. They say, "Okay, the world is an illusion. You don't exist. Therefore,

01:47:13.320 --> 01:47:17.720
don't bother doing spiritual practices because those are only going to reinforce the notion of

01:47:17.720 --> 01:47:22.600
a practicer." So, you're already enlightened. You're done. Basically, I know, come next week

01:47:22.600 --> 01:47:26.440
and I'll tell you that again. And you know what? In some cases that might be true. There are some

01:47:26.440 --> 01:47:30.360
people, it's called Anubayan, Abhinav says there are some people who just hear it once and they're

01:47:30.360 --> 01:47:36.280
free. It's very rare. Yeah, it's such a minority. And so I do really, I love that direct path

01:47:36.280 --> 01:47:41.560
teachers are trying their luck. Maybe someone in that big hall will be an Anubhaya qualifier.

01:47:41.560 --> 01:47:45.320
And they hear that, and it's true, it's actually true for them. They do experience the benefits of

01:47:45.320 --> 01:47:49.400
their realization and they for the rest of their life, they're free. And as Ashutavaka says so

01:47:49.400 --> 01:47:54.920
provocatively, Sukhamchara, Sukhamchara, they just wander about the world happily. But you're right,

01:47:54.920 --> 01:47:57.960
for the vast majority of people, they'll hear that and they'll need to hear it next week.

01:47:57.960 --> 01:48:02.520
and they'll need to hear it next week and the high will only last until they get to the parking lot

01:48:02.520 --> 01:48:05.320
and when they're pulling out of the little conference center and someone cuts them off

01:48:05.320 --> 01:48:10.200
in traffic all the ajatama goes away. So the realization is not the problem, the realization

01:48:10.200 --> 01:48:14.440
is wonderful. The problem is that because of that realization and because of, you're right, a lot of

01:48:14.440 --> 01:48:19.160
direct path teachers discouraging practice, the danger is this kind of spiritual bypassing where

01:48:19.160 --> 01:48:22.600
we don't actually do the work and therefore we don't actually benefit from the realization.

01:48:22.600 --> 01:48:25.880
And you know, I mean direct path teachers, a lot of them who are speaking out against practice,

01:48:26.840 --> 01:48:31.640
It's true, practice will reify the idea of the practicing subject. But they themselves have

01:48:31.640 --> 01:48:34.680
done a lot of practice. That's one thing they don't often tell their students.

01:48:34.680 --> 01:48:39.560
True. A couple of years ago, I interviewed a woman named Jessica Eve. People can find her

01:48:39.560 --> 01:48:45.320
if they look on Batcap. And she's become a kind of a clearinghouse for neo-Advaita brainwrecks.

01:48:45.320 --> 01:48:49.720
People who just got really into the whole thing and began to lose interest in their families and

01:48:49.720 --> 01:48:54.840
their jobs and to become nihilistic and to become depressed, even suicidal. There's several other

01:48:54.840 --> 01:48:58.880
All the people who are doing this now, too, there's a woman in Germany who's, I've seen

01:48:58.880 --> 01:49:01.840
her having conversations with Tim Freak.

01:49:01.840 --> 01:49:09.400
I think that overemphasis on jnana yoga is, or primary focus on jnana yoga, is probably

01:49:09.400 --> 01:49:12.480
most suitable for recluses.

01:49:12.480 --> 01:49:16.520
And if householders do it, and especially if they're focusing on knowledge that says, "You

01:49:16.520 --> 01:49:20.760
don't exist, the world isn't real," and so on and so forth, I think it can make one kind

01:49:20.760 --> 01:49:21.760
of nihilistic.

01:49:21.760 --> 01:49:25.680
you know, your child gets cancer and what do you say? Oh well, the world is an illusion. I mean,

01:49:25.680 --> 01:49:30.720
yeah, you know, Swami Vivekananda says it best. He says it's not good to be one-sided.

01:49:30.720 --> 01:49:35.440
And this model of the four yogas is very helpful because you're right. If we're very, very developed

01:49:35.440 --> 01:49:41.200
in one yoga and we forget about the other three, often we can become unbalanced. There's a Swami

01:49:41.200 --> 01:49:46.240
in Providence, Swami Yogatmananda Ji, he makes a joke. He says, if you do too much jnana, you become

01:49:46.240 --> 01:49:52.640
stony, cold and dry and holistic. If you do too much bhakti yoga, you become shaky, overly sentimental.

01:49:52.640 --> 01:49:56.480
If you do too much raja yoga, you become spooky because you're so ungrounded because of all these

01:49:56.480 --> 01:50:00.560
mystical experiences. And if you do too much karma yoga, you become shady because you're always asking

01:50:00.560 --> 01:50:05.840
for donations for your new school or something. If you practice karma, you become stony, shaky,

01:50:05.840 --> 01:50:13.680
spooky and shady. Yeah, my friend Steve in Santa Monica that I've referenced, he called me today

01:50:13.680 --> 01:50:19.360
and the first thing he said was, "Do you think that on the whole, worldwide, is spirituality

01:50:19.360 --> 01:50:23.440
doing more harm than good?" And we got into an hour and a half conversation about it.

01:50:23.440 --> 01:50:31.120
My conclusion is that if it is approached in a holistic way, where all the different

01:50:31.120 --> 01:50:38.480
aspects of life are cultured, you get exercise, you have proper relationships, you eat properly,

01:50:38.480 --> 01:50:44.960
you engage in meditation, study, you know all the different things, then you can have a balanced

01:50:44.960 --> 01:50:50.000
development that is very good for you and your contribution to the world will be good. But if,

01:50:50.000 --> 01:50:56.560
as you were saying with the Swami in Providence, you focus in an imbalanced way on one or another

01:50:56.560 --> 01:51:01.760
aspect, it can throw your whole life out of whack and then perhaps it's not good for you or the

01:51:01.760 --> 01:51:08.080
world. Yes, it's true. To be balanced and to be integrated, I think, is the Ramakrishna mission,

01:51:08.080 --> 01:51:12.000
the goal is really the four yogas ought to be developed alongside one another because they're

01:51:12.000 --> 01:51:16.400
mutually enforcing and out of the understanding that we as human beings are not just cognitive

01:51:16.400 --> 01:51:21.920
beings which i think has been the hyper emphasized aspect of our personality since the dawning of the

01:51:21.920 --> 01:51:27.360
internet age because so much of our life is in the head you know we're just on reddit or we're on

01:51:27.360 --> 01:51:31.360
discord like talking to people and getting disconnected from the rest of us and so we're

01:51:31.360 --> 01:51:36.960
not just cognitive beings we're also affective beings we have a heart and we have a desire to

01:51:36.960 --> 01:51:41.360
act, we're active beings and we're co-native beings. So the four yogas meet us where we are.

01:51:41.360 --> 01:51:45.600
Jnana yoga for the cognitive aspect and of course Bhakti yoga for the affective aspect,

01:51:45.600 --> 01:51:50.000
Karma yoga for the active aspect and Raja yoga, one of my personal favorites of course,

01:51:50.000 --> 01:51:54.080
for the co-native aspect. What's that word? Co-native? Co-native, like to will.

01:51:54.080 --> 01:52:00.800
Cognitive? Not cognitive. C-o-n-a-t-i-v-e, co-native. Co-native, I hadn't heard that word.

01:52:00.800 --> 01:52:05.760
Willing, willing aspect. Because yoga is really an act of concentration, keeping the mind fixed on

01:52:05.760 --> 01:52:10.000
let's say the breath or like whatever else you're meditating on. That's the kind of muscle unto

01:52:10.000 --> 01:52:15.760
itself. It's like a specific part of the mind arguably willing. A lot of jnanis, they read a

01:52:15.760 --> 01:52:20.480
lot of Ashtavagraha Gita but their willpower is very weak. So they'll continue to indulge in

01:52:20.480 --> 01:52:24.720
activities even after they realize that it's not real. They'll still plunge headfirst into that

01:52:24.720 --> 01:52:29.440
indulgence. Why? Because they cannot will themselves away from it. They don't have that vairagya. Why

01:52:29.440 --> 01:52:33.840
don't they have the vairagya? Because they don't have the willpower and and Raja Yoga will develop

01:52:33.840 --> 01:52:39.200
that willpower, that psychic strength. And some people are jnanis but they're so sad and so

01:52:39.200 --> 01:52:44.240
sorrowful and that's because their life is not filled with song and devotion and the ecstasy of

01:52:44.240 --> 01:52:48.960
bhakti yoga. And a lot of them can be very ungrounded and very reclusive because they're not

01:52:48.960 --> 01:52:53.440
plunging into the realm of activity and serving others. Because if it's true that only Brahman

01:52:53.440 --> 01:52:58.640
exists, then Brahman is appearing as all of this. And if I'm going to eat, if I'm feeding this

01:52:58.640 --> 01:53:03.520
illusory body, shouldn't I also feed every other illusory body that appears around me? I should

01:53:03.520 --> 01:53:08.800
go out and feed and volunteer and help people. So it's only when we have all the four yogas

01:53:08.800 --> 01:53:14.160
cooking at the same time that the meal is really tasty. Swamiji said, "I give you dry hard reason,

01:53:14.160 --> 01:53:20.880
jnana yoga, softened in the syrup of bhakti, made spicy through karma and cooked in the

01:53:20.880 --> 01:53:27.040
kitchen of yoga." Very good. Okay, so that's a really good takeaway point. If you're a spiritual

01:53:27.040 --> 01:53:33.760
aspirant, try to cover all the bases. And in fact, that's fun, right? It's just more exciting to do

01:53:33.760 --> 01:53:40.160
that. Yeah, and that's not to say that you will become a dilettante, a superficial dabbler,

01:53:40.160 --> 01:53:44.960
but there's that old saying, you know, you dig one deep well rather than 10 shallow wells.

01:53:44.960 --> 01:53:49.120
But another way of looking at it is use maybe 10 different tools to dig the one deep well.

01:53:49.120 --> 01:53:54.080
You need a pickaxe, you need a shovel, you need a jackhammer, you need all kinds of different things.

01:53:54.640 --> 01:53:58.720
you're raising a really important point here. The four yogas will only really work, I think,

01:53:58.720 --> 01:54:02.960
if you have this understanding that it's the same whole and these are distinct tools for digging the

01:54:02.960 --> 01:54:08.320
same hole. Because if you think the god of bhakti and the god of jnana are different gods,

01:54:08.320 --> 01:54:11.760
then you will feel a kind of tension. Because you'll study ashtavakra and you think,

01:54:11.760 --> 01:54:16.480
god is impersonal, god is absolute. In fact, I won't even say god anymore, I'll say self.

01:54:16.480 --> 01:54:20.240
Then you come to bhakti and it's all Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare. You might get

01:54:20.240 --> 01:54:25.680
the sense that like okay well that personal god, that god with attributes that I'm praying to,

01:54:25.680 --> 01:54:30.960
is different from the self that the Upanishads talk about. And if you have that sense, then the

01:54:30.960 --> 01:54:35.760
four yogas you're right will be like digging four shallow holes. But if you know and if you understand

01:54:35.760 --> 01:54:41.360
that the formless is the form, that the absolute impersonal is now appearing as Kali, if you know

01:54:41.360 --> 01:54:45.600
that the person that you're serving is none other than Kali embodied, and if you know that in

01:54:45.600 --> 01:54:51.600
meditation your goal is to reconcile all of this, then the four yogas will feel like different tools

01:54:51.600 --> 01:54:55.840
digging the same hole. You'll feel like each of them is giving you the same joy and each of them

01:54:55.840 --> 01:55:01.280
is mutually enforcing one another in the path of spiritual progress. Yeah and another thing you said

01:55:01.280 --> 01:55:05.920
a minute ago which I really liked is we have different faculties. We have an intellect, we have

01:55:05.920 --> 01:55:12.240
a heart, we have organs of action, we have organs of perception and so why just develop one to the

01:55:12.240 --> 01:55:17.440
exclusion of the others. Yes, that's the tantric idea too. The body is real, the mind is real,

01:55:17.440 --> 01:55:22.240
the human personality is real. So tantra seeks not to overcome the human personality but to

01:55:22.240 --> 01:55:27.520
transform it. And so there must be practices for the body, for the mind, for the prana and for the

01:55:27.520 --> 01:55:33.440
ego. In fact, Kundalini as Swami Vimalananda, not Swami, Vimalanandaji, the Agora trilogy is about

01:55:33.440 --> 01:55:38.800
this very powerful Aghori named Vimalananda and Robert Swoboda. I think someone who, if you

01:55:38.800 --> 01:55:41.120
If you haven't interviewed him yet, you have to.

01:55:41.120 --> 01:55:42.120
I have.

01:55:42.120 --> 01:55:43.120
You have?

01:55:43.120 --> 01:55:44.120
I'm a big fan.

01:55:44.120 --> 01:55:46.480
I think he's such a great voice in this world of Tantra.

01:55:46.480 --> 01:55:51.640
Because the Tantra that he learned from Vimalananda Ji is that Aghora Tantra, that Vamachara Tantra

01:55:51.640 --> 01:55:54.800
that is often so misunderstood and misrepresented.

01:55:54.800 --> 01:55:57.080
So he's pivotal, I think, in clearing up our tradition.

01:55:57.080 --> 01:55:59.440
Vimalananda was deeply devoted to Ramakrishna.

01:55:59.440 --> 01:56:03.200
A lot of the things that Vimalananda says are very aligned with what Ramakrishna says.

01:56:03.200 --> 01:56:05.560
He saw Ramakrishna as the perfect ideal.

01:56:05.560 --> 01:56:09.560
And so Vimaranda, I keep saying Swami Vimaranda because he has a Swami name, but he's a householder.

01:56:09.560 --> 01:56:13.240
Vimaranda Ji, he teaches about the Kundalini in a very unique way.

01:56:13.240 --> 01:56:16.320
He says it's Ahamkara actually, ego.

01:56:16.320 --> 01:56:21.080
Kundalini, that power within us, which is the heart of Tantra arguably, Kauliki Visarga

01:56:21.080 --> 01:56:26.280
Shakti, the goddess that runs the body, which Abhinava Gupta describes as a streak of lightning,

01:56:26.280 --> 01:56:29.160
Vidhuleka Vilasanim, playful and beautiful.

01:56:29.160 --> 01:56:33.160
That goddess who abides in the body of the dancing Shiva, that Kundalini is nothing but

01:56:33.160 --> 01:56:34.420
personality.

01:56:34.420 --> 01:56:38.460
So when we come into the world of Tantra, it's a practice of personality transformation.

01:56:38.460 --> 01:56:40.340
Right now I think I'm this little mind and body.

01:56:40.340 --> 01:56:42.020
So Kundalini is dormant.

01:56:42.020 --> 01:56:45.140
It's sleeping because it's identified with this limited Jiva.

01:56:45.140 --> 01:56:49.220
And Tantra is the journey from Jiva to Shiva, the journey from the Muladhara Chakra to this

01:56:49.220 --> 01:56:51.060
Hasradha Chakra and then back.

01:56:51.060 --> 01:56:52.240
It's a hero's journey.

01:56:52.240 --> 01:56:56.060
So that transformation of personality is actually very important.

01:56:56.060 --> 01:57:00.420
So Advaita Vedanta sometimes when it's taught in a neo-Advaitic way can reject the person.

01:57:00.420 --> 01:57:01.420
I'm not a person.

01:57:01.420 --> 01:57:03.340
I mean, after all, reality is impersonal.

01:57:03.340 --> 01:57:04.340
So I'm not a person.

01:57:04.340 --> 01:57:07.620
I have no body, I have no mind, and that's kind of bypass-y.

01:57:07.620 --> 01:57:09.580
But in Tantra, we acknowledge the person.

01:57:09.580 --> 01:57:11.420
I am a person, I am this jiva called Nish.

01:57:11.420 --> 01:57:14.300
And the journey now is to transform that jiva into Shiva,

01:57:14.300 --> 01:57:15.500
to become a God person.

01:57:15.500 --> 01:57:18.300
Actually, Tantra is all about getting the Divya Deha,

01:57:18.300 --> 01:57:20.740
or the Vajra Deha, the lightning body or the divine body.

01:57:20.740 --> 01:57:23.140
The body should be full of prana and full of power

01:57:23.140 --> 01:57:25.660
and refining the mind so it's clear and lucid,

01:57:25.660 --> 01:57:27.940
and most of all, transforming the personality

01:57:27.940 --> 01:57:31.140
so that it becomes divine, veritably God on Earth.

01:57:31.140 --> 01:57:31.980
- That's great.

01:57:31.980 --> 01:57:32.900
I'll let you have the last word.

01:57:32.900 --> 01:57:34.340
- That's a really good closing point.

01:57:34.340 --> 01:57:36.260
(laughing)

01:57:36.260 --> 01:57:38.500
'Cause we could go on for the next 20 days.

01:57:38.500 --> 01:57:39.980
(laughing)

01:57:39.980 --> 01:57:40.820
- Nicely done.

01:57:40.820 --> 01:57:43.100
- Where do you do these classes?

01:57:43.100 --> 01:57:45.100
Are they on Patreon or on YouTube?

01:57:45.100 --> 01:57:46.500
- Most of them are on Zoom.

01:57:46.500 --> 01:57:47.460
Anybody can come.

01:57:47.460 --> 01:57:49.780
The big satsang, the one that most people attend,

01:57:49.780 --> 01:57:53.120
is Monday nights at 7 p.m. Pacific.

01:57:53.120 --> 01:57:54.140
And it's just a Zoom link.

01:57:54.140 --> 01:57:54.980
It's totally free.

01:57:54.980 --> 01:57:56.100
Anybody can come.

01:57:56.100 --> 01:57:59.740
And then we meet again at 10 a.m. Pacific on Friday morning,

01:57:59.740 --> 01:58:02.260
just to be inclusive to our EU and Indian satsang,

01:58:02.260 --> 01:58:04.500
because of course they can't make the evening times.

01:58:04.500 --> 01:58:07.220
And then we do it again Friday at 6 p.m. Pacific.

01:58:07.220 --> 01:58:08.540
So these are just our satsangs.

01:58:08.540 --> 01:58:10.060
They're free and open to the public.

01:58:10.060 --> 01:58:12.020
But yes, of course, the videos from there,

01:58:12.020 --> 01:58:13.420
many of them we put on YouTube,

01:58:13.420 --> 01:58:15.220
some we put in podcast form.

01:58:15.220 --> 01:58:16.820
And if anybody wanted to come live,

01:58:16.820 --> 01:58:18.620
we could of course be part of the Discord

01:58:18.620 --> 01:58:20.500
and they could of course join us on Patreon.

01:58:20.500 --> 01:58:21.340
And of course, you know,

01:58:21.340 --> 01:58:22.540
thank you for all your contributions,

01:58:22.540 --> 01:58:24.540
but really it's just freely open to the public

01:58:24.540 --> 01:58:26.640
and anyone and everyone is welcome.

01:58:26.640 --> 01:58:27.540
- That's great.

01:58:27.540 --> 01:58:29.900
I'll make sure that I have proper links to all that

01:58:29.900 --> 01:58:32.640
on your BatGap page and links to your website,

01:58:32.640 --> 01:58:35.120
which I imagine gives people a window

01:58:35.120 --> 01:58:37.600
into all those different things.

01:58:37.600 --> 01:58:40.280
Good, so it's great getting to know you, Nish,

01:58:40.280 --> 01:58:42.160
and I hope we stay in touch.

01:58:42.160 --> 01:58:43.920
- Yeah, Rick G, that was so much fun.

01:58:43.920 --> 01:58:45.080
Thank you so much for having me.

01:58:45.080 --> 01:58:46.840
I greatly enjoyed our conversation.

01:58:46.840 --> 01:58:48.840
And you're right, we could just go on and on and on.

01:58:48.840 --> 01:58:50.600
(Rick laughs)

01:58:50.600 --> 01:58:52.520
- Okay, so thank you very much,

01:58:52.520 --> 01:58:54.920
and thanks to those who've been listening or watching.

01:58:54.920 --> 01:58:57.000
My next interview is with another young guy.

01:58:57.000 --> 01:58:59.080
How old are you now, 25 or so?

01:58:59.080 --> 01:59:04.920
Yeah, the next one is another young guy in Denmark that Irene discovered.

01:59:04.920 --> 01:59:11.520
I mostly interview older people, you know, but old white dudes.

01:59:11.520 --> 01:59:17.000
But it's really good to tune into someone like yourself who is the hope of the future, really.

01:59:17.000 --> 01:59:18.840
You and others like you.

01:59:18.840 --> 01:59:23.760
It's encouraging, it's inspiring, and it's reassuring to know that there are young people

01:59:23.760 --> 01:59:31.120
who are so ardent in their spiritual development and so advanced in their understanding already

01:59:31.120 --> 01:59:35.680
at your young age. That's impressive. I remember I was 28. I didn't think I was that young anymore,

01:59:35.680 --> 01:59:40.080
but it seems young to me now. Well, thank you so much for the chance, Rick G. Thank you for

01:59:40.080 --> 01:59:47.200
giving me the space to share these views and my deep pranam to Irene G. Just convey my pranams

01:59:47.200 --> 01:59:52.640
to her and of course to the rest of your household. May Divine Mother Kali bless all with health and

01:59:52.640 --> 01:59:56.560
and prosperity and with light and love and renunciation.

01:59:56.560 --> 01:59:57.560
Thank you.

01:59:57.560 --> 01:59:59.360
And thanks to those who've been listening or watching.

01:59:59.360 --> 02:00:00.360
We'll see you for the next one.

02:00:00.360 --> 02:00:01.360
Aarhar Mahadev.

02:00:01.360 --> 02:00:26.320
Thank you.

02:00:26.320 --> 02:00:29.360
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