Rajanaka Sammelana

Far Too Many Words

2012-01-25T17:10:00.004-05:00

Language is a partisan even when it’s not overtly political or preaching the unattainable. Words have histories, they encode feelings and positions implied or gathered by speakers and listeners; they belong to culture and society and so language is never private; words lean, however we proclaim an agenda of clarity or simplicity or resort to our other senses like vision or taste, words evoke, induce, and challenge our humanity because they stir and churn. Words don’t just get to us, they get into us; and that is a part, a critical part of being human.

Words can make promises, assert claims, and demand compliance without being anything more than the words themselves. Spiritual traditions usually step right into that meaning swamp without the slightest trepidation: declaring finalities, making promises that are little more than repeatable words, as if saying it made it so. That’s because saying it does make it so and there’s the irony: not everything said is more than what is said. Sometimes that’s a good thing, like the way mantras can work upon subtle processes of awareness; and sometimes, well, not so good, for reasons we can talk about.

We can go down the familiar path of the inexplicable, the transcendent, or the ineffable as if these claims resolve into “higher” or “deeper” meaning but as I see it, they are more often strategies to provide cover for being inarticulate or not having a shared language. We may not always love the challenge that words create and we may take recourse to other strategies of sharing meaning, but what we are as beings of language is human. We are human not despite language but because we live in it. (That language and voice lives within a larger circle of sound itself (nada), ah, that is another matter to which we will attend later.)

Each winter when we take the pilgrim’s path to the great temples of south India, I am reminded how much more we understand when we empower language rather than reduce it. Because Tamil is so challenging to the non-Tamil speaker, we all try to convey meaning without words in order to find our way through eddies of communication. What I find is that even a few words in Tamil changes everything for the better. Vanakam up and it’s a whole new game. Speak more than a few words and this perplexing world opens up in ways no amount of sympathetic understanding can provide. We have the pictures to prove it. We might even have recordings. But the nuance, the power of Tamil as a language crystallizes because it is, at least for me even after some thirty-odd years, still so rich, so difficult, so much more like ten million butterflies at play than a language at all. So why do yogins so gleefully abandon or dismiss the empowerment of words? (Too much nirodha in the diet? I jest.) Why not enter into the greater pantheon of communication? Words too are the gods and that formless, transcendent, and ineffable divine, what is sometimes in Sanskrit called anirvacaniya, is not much like the gods I experience among the Tamils. People are always singing, shouting, gossiping, and otherwise trading in words. The gods all have names; they aren’t just “god” generically transcendent and these same gods aren’t beyond; they are right in front of you. Tamil gods present themselves as murtis, in images and forms, not only in nature as rivers and hillocks, and they are only invisible if you want to include that in some greater vision and voice. The gods are not without their names; they are their names, no matter what more they are. The intention (samkalpa) of every ritual is implied, gestured, and placed within the feelings of the body and heart, and it is also stated and can be seen.

Silence is not something nature loves as much as sound. Sound and light may be features of each other at deeper levels---levels where darkness too is a form of energy--- but such distinctions are no less informative nor are they inseparable for the purposes of better understanding. When sound (or light) expresses consciousness, that is voice, and everything that has the ability to give voice does so as far as it is able. Silence is but another form of voice, at least for human beings and the gods. In India, the most important sounds---like the images of the gods--- are remembered and they are listened for, drawn from memory and into memory, not merely read or recorded; their existence is power.

Decoding words into thoughts and feelings, overtly expressed or merely suggested is the business of understanding. Understanding may not always incur “meaning.” Sometimes the “meaning” is the act, the mere pronouncement, like when mantra creates an instrument for the churning of unaccounted deep memory or serves as the expression of life-force, prana, without having to be interpreted further. Mantra may be understood even when it doesn’t have any meaning the way words do. Mantra sometimes cuts to the chase directly and the drama of meaning is of little significance to the act itself. Understanding a mantra is not the same as gathering its meaning or, to put it differently, the meaning of the mantra includes understanding how it exists without meaning-as-language. This is hardly an original thought but it’s not a popular one either.

How mantras do their business is a topic we should consider on (many) another occasion, suffice it to say I think of them less as language than within language. In critical ways, mantras aren’t language at all if language’s purpose is to convey meanings other or more than what is said. As Mozart put it, “Be silent, if you choose…and speak in such a way that people will remember it.” Mantras are remembered perhaps because they are the truest form of a memory that we do not remember and in them are contained expressions of power that further encrypt experience. Deciphering a mantra is not the same as knowing its meaning: mantras provide applications of consciousness, they exist within consciousness’s subtle matrix of expression and occur within the spectrum of sound, even language, but as power foremost, understanding only secondarily.

What I have in mind here however isn’t more about mantra but rather language, that is, what is being said is by definition more than what is said. In Tantric yoga traditions the valence of language, the power of words is understood to be innate, part of the way the universe expresses itself as power. The universe has voice and it acts as mantra, and I mean to distinguish between these particularly different expressions of power. The uncompromising Vedic ritualist maintains that mantra’s perfect execution alone suffices to ignite the powers of the universe and bring them to our advantage. The Tantric broadens this appeal to include the power created through voice and in language: language possessing meaning needs also to strike the unstruck sound as does mantra, albeit not in the same ways.

The usual appeal to wordlessness for those looking to express what they deem inexpressible goes one step further when experiences are moralized by meanings. Anger or greed is “bad,” serenity or generosity is “good” and the outcome too often more repression and denial. Having such feelings or thoughts is regarded as unhealthy or worse, unyogic. I should love, not hate. I should be compassionate, not cruel. Why am I unconvinced by such normative ethical imperatives so plainly stated? It’s more than a visceral suspicion of authority or the coercion of social directives; it’s because there are things I don’t love and, more than that, things that may be worth loathing like, say, injustice.

For words to arrive at deeper meanings they must have value, weight, they must carry something worth the burden of their meaning. We must learn to bear those burdens rather than merely relieve them. We must learn to occupy words and reside in their meanings. Are we supposed to talk ourselves into feeling better with all the right words, leaving aside the wrong ones and so the feelings that go with them? I have no grievance with those who want to feel better much less with the recognition that language can be empowering or debilitating. Rather I have the distinct sense that when we confine words to meet these expectations we make our world smaller. More to the point, it is better first to authenticate than to restrict our experiences.

My teacher called this process radical affirmation and if complex, irresolvable situations and unfinished, inconclusive results aren’t something you love as much as you don’t, you’ll prefer some other yoga. There isn’t an experience worth having that won’t cause you some kinda’ trouble. What sort of life purports to raise the stakes and then tells you it’s all going to be just fine? And especially fine if you realize some ultimate state in which there is no conflict? Meh. Is there any kind of love you’ve ever experienced that makes the conditional world less fraught with peril? Is there any kind of intimacy without prospects of conflict? Do you really want to transcend these conditions? A life without such peril purports to be perfect, without adversaries, when it seems rather to be without much character. Think about how much you love and then consider if there is ever a moment when not worrying about the ones you love isn’t yet another expression of love. We need not fear to have adversaries, even enemies, if by that we mean to acknowledge forces that are deliberately contrary to our welfare. It’s that kind of nature that evolved us to this experience of human consciousness, not only ponies and rainbows. I rather revel in some limitations and (im)perfectly dislike others.

Intimacy demands conditions, no matter how deeply we will experience love unconditionally. There’s no human life without unconditional love---because we came with it, we don’t achieve it--- but life may not be worth living that doesn’t include as real a commitment to its conditions, maybes, and challenges, the ones that can’t be fulfilled, only faced and engaged more deeply. There’s nothing fair or balanced about such a world, no promise that it’ll all work out to our benefit or that there exists some sort of transcendental fulfillment; nature take sides, so will we, and we going to run surpluses and deficits both. Alignment isn’t getting things all tidy; it’s learning to live creatively in the maelstrom of possibilities, in a world in which the greatest certainty is only the most certain possibility. Taking sides won’t only solve or produce problems: that’s going to be incumbent no matter how we evolve the meanings we create.

Inside our maelstrom of possibilities are words and meanings. Yoga invites us to the experience the possibility that making more meaning is better than resolving to comfortable platitudes or moral imperatives. But such a yoga will require raising the stakes. The best we can do is to continue to own our case, argue for and with and against, make our biases transparent, our opinions hard won, and invite our own dissuasion. Subvert me or persuade me but don’t expect me to agree just because I’m listening charitably and honoring your choices. I don’t know what I will do if we don’t align but I will need to understand more from your words even as I take seriously what you do. We can demand (but shouldn’t expect) reason in the face of the irrational truth that love like hate trumps all reasons but we mustn’t give up on the power of words to make a difference. Rather than moralizing the superiority of authorized feelings, we can live more fully in an empowered language of radical affirmation. Come by your opinions from the authentic place of your experience and if that differs from mine, maybe we can share it, hopefully in as few or as many words as we need. There’s nothing better than a good conversation.

Join some good conversation in the study of yoga and the history of Indian spiritualities, go to srividyalaya.com to find out more.

DuckRabbit Cumulus

2011-09-24T11:34:00.005-04:00

With the advent of our Srividyalaya teaching initiative (www.srividyalaya.com) I’ve spent a great deal of time in the last year reading and learning, contemplating and even talking about the histories of yoga. There’s no history of thethingsthatreallyhappened but there is something like evidence, stories. People aren’t factual truths so much as what they can create as their narrative: people are the stories they tell about themselves and about others. Human beings don’t get outside their own narratives much less to ultimate truths about ~~maythegodsforbid~~ Ultimacy. Yoga’s practitioners tell their story. Scholars tell us these narrative truths reveal matters to be treated as facts. [Insert irony] Truth is, it’s all more round ‘bout than this. The facts are narratives that reveal more narratives. I’m not telling you that there aren’t facts, only that there’s never a fact without a story, another narrative and another one about it.

I spend a lot of time with difficult primary sources in Tamil and Sanskrit as well as modern scholarship, much of it serious, learned, and, as we might also expect, heartless. I don’t mean that scholarship is without passion but I am pretty convinced it tries to be heartless. Even when rigor appears to use principle as an antidote to feeling anything at all it is more often in the service of professional honesty than it is a tool meant to diminish the experiences of advocates. Those experiences of the advocates, say in our case, the yogins of the past, you, me, the data base etc. are, after all, the subject. But scholarship in order to be genuine needs to be indifferent to the feelings of those it might offend, even in the arena of subjects like yoga where personal experiences are irrefragable by definition. No one can tell people what they feel or experience much less deny it. Taking people to heart isn’t the same as sharing their beliefs, agreeing or disagreeing. It’s listening. Explaining is harder than recording the evidence because, well, we never get ourselves out of the story.

When I began the study of Tantra both personally and professionally, I knew there was no pleasing everyone. Sometimes I think there’s no pleasing anyone but I’m okay with that too. Being displeased is conducive to productive scholarship and, as I see it, it’s an even better way to become a more interesting and empowered yogin. Nothing strikes me as more stultifying, more frightening, or more boring than certainty or those who believe they’ve attained it. Yogas that talk about achieving certainty, final, lasting, unchanging Truth are about making assertions of experience. I couldn’t know if what was said was True because I can’t fathom that Truth is a fact. Truth is a plural narrative, a listening job that involves other story-tellers. I can’t tell the Truth Ultimacy Oh Yeah We Know Spiritual Experiencer Sorts that they are wrong but the only thing I am sure is right is that they tell me so.

When I began my involvement in Yoga Tantra with my Appa I was also on the path to professional scholarship. To stand as “outside” as I needed to portray myself as a scholar I could never have found out what was “inside.” In Tantric traditions practitioners will reveal only to other initiates, insiders only need apply. Sir John Woodroffe, who never claimed to be a professional scholar (he was a British judge in Bengal in the early 20^th century), opened up worlds of Tantra. It’s fair to say too that he not only mixed but also mixed up the worlds of scholar and practitioner. Fair enough, I suppose. Scholars today ignore him, criticize his non-scholarly authority, treat his work as a quaint well-meaning colonial amateur: but the point is that he isn’t taken seriously. There is serious work, non-serious (this means not approved) work ~~like this blog~~, and data (this means books, history, people, evidence) to be studied b~~ut only what’s deemed serious enough~~. That about covers the scholarly categories. Non-serious need not apply. So there’s a clear line between worlds, supposedly different narrative voices. But Woodroffe had something right: he knew, perhaps instinctively, that there was no outside, no inside, only a narrative. He had the temerity to live his life in multiple worlds and to tell his story. That was big stuff in his era. Nowdays not so much. But that photo offset of Sir John standing in a dhoti before the Sun temple at Konarak inspired me as an eighteen year old to enter the Tantric’s narrative for myself.

In the 1970s I knew had to enter the world of shamans in order to study them. I leapt only after I met my teacher because in him I found a person I could respect and trust. With him, I could participate in a narrative that I knew would change my life in every way for the better. But unlike Carlos Castaneda who found it impossible to ford the worlds of practice and scholarship--- leaving us with books that read more like fantasies than the diaries they purport to be --- my own Don Juan understood in himself the same dilemma I faced as a public scholar and private practitioner. My Appa was Professor of Sanskrit at Madurai-Kamaraj University in south India and his own solution was to confine his scholarly writings to subjects that didn’t involve himself or the traditions of Shrividya, Auspicious Wisdom. When he agreed to study living Shrividya in any public way we knew we had crossed the line.

Scholarship has long submitted to its own versions of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, a policy it believes spares readers from the tyrannies of personal advocacy by sacrificing at the altar of Joe Friday, the Detective Deity, the One who Sticks to Just the Facts, Ma’am. Historians of the yoga traditions as humanities scholars mean to make themselves invisible to the work, to uncover the case without judgments of value or worth, not to feel or experience what is being advocated but to restate what’s been said, where and when, as if they were forensic archeologists of language, observers uncovering history’s bones, and making models of flesh. The problem, as I see it, is that too often these flesh-like models are all too plastic, reconstructions that claim too much resemblance to the real thing without living among the living. When the usual levels of disclaimer are set in motion about how little we know and how much more there is, we have arrived at the obligatory, scholarship’s nitya-karma --- I have never read a scholarly article that claims it is comprehensive enough, long enough, boring enough (were you still reading?), or that whatever the subject is won’t take forever to be even ever so slightly better imperfectly understood as in never yo. These CYAisms take on the familiar odor of the prana-free environment of a “conference” or published lucubration. Yawn. Yes, we are inadequate; yes, we are happy to diminish one another in the name of honest disagreements about this and that. Nothing personal. Never. It’s about the truth. Sure. Careers rise and fall, cresting on these waves of professional approval or criticism. Few are the least bit affected but those inside insular professional worlds and that means that scholarship in my field largely changes nothing about lives outside the academy. ~~It didn’t feel good to write that sentence but it’s the story.~~ Nothing personal, mind you. If you are lucky enough to have academic tenure it means you can write about it like this.

Prol’lem is there’s nothing not personal about studying yoga or even studying about yoga history or texts: if you bring yourself outside enough, to the scholarly island of objective sanctity there is the peril that, well, you can only report the facts and they have little to do with people. Far more interesting to watch a few seasons of Lost. But really: how did the human beings, the yogins compiling their ritual liturgies practice a given ritual? A trip to any church on Sunday will tell you that the liturgy even within traditions of The ~~Any~~ Book (be it Bible or, say, the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer) isn’t really what people do, much less do such texts offer understandings or interpretations that are somehow self-evident. What people say, what they say they do, and what they do is never quite the same, much less the story. There’s a new law in New Jersey about this. Eye-witness testimony and the like. More revelations from The Promised Land.

For a great deal of yoga there’s also no way to get inside enough, at least not at this point in history. Much of “Kashmir Shaivism” and its legacy, for example, are no longer living with more than written sources and when if then yeah sure okay you know some living traditionalists what they can represent is their experience and their interpretations. These reports are, of course, True but there’s no getting back to Then much less to The. When people say this or that is what Abhinavagupta meant or what he did, they are talking about themselves, they are representing words. I’m not claiming such a thing is the least bit disingenuous, be it from the voice of the scholar or the practitioner. What I’m saying instead is that the heart of the matter is that you can’t learn all that much without the hearts involved. Scholars can’t re-create what they can’t experience and what they study are experiences conveyed as stories. Modern yogins, the other side of the experience coin, can claim experience tells them so but that’s all they got. Who’s credible? Now that’s a word about having heart. Credo, credential, shraddha in Sanskrit, all cognate words, words about the heart, like courage of course. What counts as creds? We always need to ask.

Indian tradition has been so deeply committed to aurality, to listening and learning in personal transmission, and to the creativity of learning through memory, voice, and explications of experience that books are the least reliable sources for our understanding what yogins have thought, felt, or done. Our culture makes us believe that if it isn’t written it isn’t real but ancient India took the other view. Writing something down grants the least amount of credibility, be it Veda or Tantra. Hindus call their “scriptures” shruti, which means hearing or revealed by listening and smrti, which means remembered. None of the other important terms like agama, yamala, and tantra, as well as bhashya and other words for commentaries mean to prioritize the power of writing, none are etymologized involving the Sanskrit verb “to write.” Sure, there was plenty of composition; works that could only have been written and studied as books but the book is not the source. Never. As the Heart of the Yogini Tantra puts it, matters are learned “from ear to ear,” which suggests that it is what we hear and remember that is truth shared and transmitted. The very concept of “orthodoxy” in the literal sense of “correct words” means that: something that has been assimilated into an experience from an experience through words but never as words, at least not written ones. I’m notnotnot saying that truth is beyond words or that there is a/some/any/whatever Truth beyond words. But rather that truth is experiences conveyed, sometimes in words and with words and as for written ones, meh.

So “orthodoxy” when we study Yoga-Tantra is a practice--- some one’s practice--- not the book even when words were written. It’s fair I think to assume that all written accounts are by definition partial records of experiences and that there’s something about experiences that remain inaccessible except to the person having them. What counts more than the orthodoxy, the correct words is the heart, these collections of human memories, hearts experiencing with each other.

Every generation of yogins has reinvented truth as experiences even when it asserts the sameness of some or another realization. We no more have each other’s experiences than books can convey them. Historical scholarship conceals its heart from itself not to be disingenuous to its task but to maintain its professional edifice, even its substance. Practitioners can add their voices, their words, even their books to the creativity of tradition but no one of them can be more right than another, much less wrong save in the ways they talk to each other contesting indisputable personal experiences. If we try to be scholars or practitioners or both, tradition reveals we too will be no different. We are not only the story we tell, we become stories because we tell them.

Come and join us in deepening your study of life and of yoga: the courses are always open and everyone is welcome, at every level of experience. Write to us: svcourses@gmail.com.

This is not a dog.

2010-08-23T12:07:00.005-04:00

We never learn to generalize by learning things in general. And generalization is one of the great goals of all learning. I mean, what’s better than a truism that applies to “all” cases? Indian logic values this kind of knowledge as much as western tradition: it’s a human thing to want truth to be “pervasive” (vyapti is the Sanskrit term), and so attain universality beyond mere instances or personal idiosyncrasies. But how do we reach such levels of applicability? Do we have to begin with the idea that there are such truths? Ones that are true in all cases at all times?

Between what we learn from the proofs of quantum and the concept of lila we may have to live in a world in which truth is more like a paradox than a problem to be solved. To whit, we pursue universals, truths that are true, because these will endeavor to make us more human even as we admit that anything can happen at anytime for no discernable reason. We’ll return to this issue soon enough in another piece but for now let’s think about generalization in more practical terms, say, as it applies to our understandings of “yoga” and “Tantra.” More than ever folks identify themselves or what they are doing as “yoga” and, especially in the past ten years, more identify their yoga as “Tantra.” What’s that mean?

The more we learn about the traditions of yoga and Tantra the less clear we become about matters in general. The reason for this is simple enough: as the diversity and complexity of the sources become more apparent, it is increasingly difficult to reach consensus. To define yoga we might take a narrow view and reduce the meaning to, say, Patanjali’s famous yogascittavrtti nirodhah but what makes this normative --- the “ought” “should” definition other than familiarity, predisposition, or bias? The Bhagavadgita uses the word “yoga” in more than one hundred fifty variants on the verbal root and when we reach the historically later works of the Tantra even more definitions abound. What exactly is yoga? Who gets to decide and why do we give more authority to one source than to another? For practical purposes nothing serves us better than the clarity we get from a definition since that’s the first step to generalization. But if we start, for example, with Patanjali’s view we’d have to exclude a great deal of Tantra and, frankly, that makes no sense. In a comparable way, the more we find out about Tantra the more difficult it is to generalize in ways that withstand much scrutiny and it’s not like we talking about angels, dancing, and pins here, we dive into exceptions-to-the-rule so vast and cavernous that it’s impossible to ignore them. There is simply too much diversity and plurality in Tantra to produce generalizations that apply to people practicing their yoga even in the narrow confines of their own historical recollections. It’s not that we lack historical examples to provide definitions; it’s that we have so many that they become incommensurate for all of their genuine diversity. There’re no objectified criteria; no way to reach a standard, no buoy(s) in the ocean of comparison that can guide our understanding to homeport. We might say a yogin is anyone who practices yoga (and what does that mean?) but we can no longer say that yogins are persons who refer to the traditions or sources of yoga---- not with the inventions that apply to “yoga” as it is practiced today in the West (and as it is migrating back to India).

What is generally called “yoga” today in North America not only bears little resemblance to the histories and sources of Asian traditions, it is this emphasis on asana practice, the veritable stretching-in-Sanskrit, that is re-defining yoga even in India. (You can see signs for yoga studios all over India these days and it’s the contemporary practice of asana that is being sold.) There’s nothing “wrong” with such innovation and creativity, and certainly nothing wrong with asana practice being “yoga”; I’m not remonstrating contemporary “hatha yoga” but rather only pointing out that historical usage, practical observation, and the process of creating meaning and identity are far more complex than meets the eye. And I can assure you that the majority of what is said about yoga in historical sources from India has still yet to be brought into public conversation. What we don’t know or haven’t considered from the historical sources outweighs what we have already before us ten-million-fold. But this may not matter as much as the simple fact that “yoga” and “Tantra” are terms whose meanings are being re-created by their current usages. I’m not arguing for or about who is “real” or what is “authentic,” only that we are in an age when ideas and behaviors with complex historical meanings are becoming both more and less clear. Popular culture ---and not just in the West--- is increasingly identifying yoga with asana practice, with or without any other associated discourse, while the more we learn about yoga (much less Tantra!) the more we gather that it’s about more than we reckoned. There’s always more.

A long time ago I took up some of these issues in a formal academic way, talking about the application of a family resemblance theory that doesn’t rely on any single characteristic. In this way we can look for sets of features and use resemblance, a judgment call about close enough, much like the way we might look at someone to notice family resemblance but without, say, the precision of analyzing their DNA (which can be quantified). When’s one thing enough like another to say that’s one too? When is one lineage or school of Tantra close enough in notable features to say, “that’s Tantra” or “that’s Tantra too?”

One the important issues that comes up when we generalize about yoga or Tantra is that in order to reach resemblance much less universality we have to generalize without enough attention to the people who are yogins or Tantrikas. We stand to lose the real anthropology of the traditions, that is, the peeps who identify themselves as such and are instead left with abstractions, like “yoga is equanimity” (Bhagavadgita, 2.48) or “yoga is stanching the movements of the psycho-physical consciousness” (Yogasutra, 1.2). People are compelled to conform to the concept when the matter at hand is to create an understanding that is common to (true for, applies to all) those who call themselves “yogins” or “Tantrikas.” And if we turn exclusively to what people say about themselves we don’t necessarily reach any better understanding. For example, someone might well say, “I am not a Tantric yogin” because they don’t fancy the associations made with the words as they understand them or for the nuances of social or historical identity. But if this same person is quoting Tantric sources as important or even definitive to their practical identity then what do we make of their disclaimer? What people say about themselves is always true but not necessarily for the reasons that they give. That’s worth thinking about.

What we must do of course is create a construct, invent a model that empowers us to see what neither “objectification” nor the limits of anthropology can surmise. We can neither point to nature for a standard (the way we can when we look at the elements and think about creating a periodic table) nor the claims of authoritative persons (because they will invariably conflict). I’m not suggesting here a solution though the method proposed some twenty years back involving polythetic classification still seems a wise place to start for achieving a bit more clarity (see The Secret of the Three Cities: An Introduction to Sakta Tantrism, UChicgoPress, 1990). Instead what I suggest by revisiting the idea of generalization that has plagued my consciousness since I began thinking about “yoga,” “Tantra,” “Hinduism,” etc., is that we not abandon the responsibility to engage the issue or reduce it by the demeaning notion it is a “mere” construct, as if constructs were false, unhelpful, or more than heuristic.

Everything we humans know, we know because we construct it. You can say all you like about “direct” experience or some other (quasi-) mystical state but in order to convey and to share experience we must construct a bridge, a way to communicate it, to offer it beyond the irrefragable confines of our own private cognitions. In short, we each have our own direct experiences but we can only share them by constructing modalities of communication, constructs that empower us to relay and recognize what we share in an experience that extends to more than one time or one place. Unique experiences are the least valuable ones we have if we mean to share our possibilities. After all, you may have some fantastic, wonderful experience but if it’s all and only yours, so what? What about that really helps me? Somewhere in Abhinavagupta’s Tantraloka he argues that it’s better to have a teacher who can teach you than it is to try to learn from a great siddha who has no such interest in communicating her or his state beyond personal example. We aren’t merely examples to each other, we are teachers, and we must become more adept communicators; and as for reducing experience to the narrowest sense of yours is true because it’s yours, perhaps we might remember that expanding into greater circles of understanding is the goal of inclusion. Check out the dog.

Dust into Gold

2010-03-11T07:33:00.011-05:00

Today is Appa’s birthday, his solar birthday. My teacher, Gopala Aiyar Sundaramoorthy was born on March 11^th, 1936, we think. I say, “think,” because there was no name or date on his birth certificate, just “baby boy” and the names of his parents. Appa wasn’t sure about the precise day and Brahmins of his era took the traditional stance, waiting the prescribed ten days before naming a child--- time enough for the traumas of birth to pass and for the appropriate gathering of friends and family. The namakarana or “naming ceremony” is largely a deshacara, that is, a matter of custom because the orthodox texts (called Grhyasutra) actually don’t specify the ritual. (There’s a fine, short piece about namakarana here, if you are curious: http://www.subhakariam.com/samskara/namakarana.htm). Appa was born under the Pushyam nakshatra, said to be the most auspicious of the lunar mansions and it is the nakshatra that determines the date for one’s traditional birthday celebration among orthodox Hindus.

Each of the twenty-seven nakshatra divide the sun’s eliptic. Simply put, the sun appears to trace an eastward path spherically around the earth as the year passes and with the orbit of the moon taking 27.3 days, it takes about one day for the moon to pass through each nakshatra or “lunar mansion.” (There’s more about the elipitic here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecliptic.) Where the moon is in the celestial sphere at the moment of one’s birth decides one’s nakshatra and defines the auspicious moment of birth, a determination so complex to calculate that Appa used to say jokingly that it was yet another way for the Brahmins to keep themselves employed. Nowadays there are nakshatra calculators on the Internet and any number of explanations of their astrological significance. I’m not in the business of contending others’ amusements but as far as I can tell almost any endeavor of learning will surpass what might be gained from pursuing these astrological matters, except perhaps as a way of understanding better Indian culture and history.

While he would not have made much mention of his opinions publicly, Appa never much cared for jyotisha, astrology, nor did he invest much importance in its claims. But he also would not have liked to offend others’ interests and in his culture astrology, like the Iron Chef’s cuisine, reigns supreme. (I’m constantly reminded in my everyday life that Appa was a better person than I am. Growing up in Jersey as a boy we were perfectly willing to offend a sensibility if it was in the service of something more sensible. You talkin’ to me? You gotta’ be kiddin’ me.) Appa maintained that astrological determinations played upon our human desire to know without offering enough information of real value in return; he much preferred our ability to cultivate the mind, speak authentically from the heart, and allow the cosmos do what it does with a greater reliance upon more proximate and important sources of influence upon our human experience. But he was also deeply respectful of his culture and there’s no underestimating the degree to which astrological calculation plays its role in the organization of Hindu social and religious identity. When performing even ordinary rites in a Hindu temple, the priest will invariably ask for your nakshatra as part of the process by which the god recognizes who, where, and when you appeared within the greater divine matrix. Don’t leave home without it.

Darwin once wrote, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” Appa would have loved this observation. Not (or is it not merely) because it subverts the claim for a God who is minding the store and therefore must also somehow be held accountable for all the evil, mischief, and natural disaster we experience but because it insists that we, as part of this “pitiless indifference” are truly free, not created for a purpose but rather free to create. We are not here for a reason much less a purpose; we aren’t in a moral universe at all but rather a powerful one, a Shakti universe as the Tantra puts it, and so we are compelled to adapt, innovate, and re-create ourselves in order to be successful, not only good. Appa loved goodness, being good, and he admired those who are, but he didn’t think that we are born good, born to be good, or that we are somehow conforming to our nature when we are. Rather he thought that the power that is the universe affirms and that as far as humans are concerned, well, being good is doing good. Instead of a commandment or a compulsion of nature, with requisite rewards and punishments (be they divinely dispensed or attributed to karma) goodness is a choice that affirms a human possibility to contribute something of value to the very world to which we owe our existence. With goodness we are better at being human, not because God or karma rewards the good (or punishes the bad) but because we can be.

In the past few years, the teachings of Rajanaka have moved forward in ways that I know would have delighted Appa. I say that because continued research and some very good luck have produced findings that even he didn’t know about. Appa loved to say he didn’t know and by possessing a rare combination of genius and determination, he was capable of learning, correcting his mistakes, and taking the Tantra to new levels of continued growth; he wanted to evolve our understanding of things that not only have come before but also bring Tantric yoga into the future with all we have gained since. Rajanaka has never been captive of the golden age sentimentality of spirituality, the kind that implies that everything we ever wanted to know about ourselves has already been discovered and that the best we can do, in fact the only thing we really want to do is re-cover and un-cover what has long since or always been known. Rajanaka, he insisted, was progressive and evolving, meant to address an unfinished reality and the evolving conditions of human consciousness and understanding. Truth is, we know much more now than we ever have: about the physical universe and the powers of technology, about the origins of life and our human nature, about so many things from the developments of science to the history of human migration. Appa always looked for examples and ways to make the ancient yoga relevant or to revise it when necessary. As he was fond of saying, “This isn’t the 11^th century anymore. Tell me something about these teachings that matters now.” So failing to consider our contemporary findings as part of how we engage ourselves and the world is to set yoga apart, it is to reduce yoga to a religion of corroboration with dogmas, yet another way to conform to some claim about how we wish the world were rather than invite the process of our discovering how much more it is.

It should be perfectly clear by now that I have no idea when Appa’s nakshatra day occurs this year but it’s almost certainly not his solar birthday. It rarely is---- lunar calculations are far too fickle to make that happen. But I’m happy to celebrate March 11^th on the Christmas Principle (I just made that up. I mean, who knows when Jesus of Nazareth was born and the 25^th of December has nothing to do with that), the Neighborhood Play (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neighborhood_play), or close enough for rock n’ roll, an old saw about how a band needs only to tune close enough to play well enough, and so this day will serve about as well any and I can’t seem to make the precise day matter more than that to me. Appa would not have liked any fuss if it were over him. He might not even have liked me talking about him half as much as I do: he always said that the teachings of Rajanaka were never about him or anyone who might teach them but rather about the ways others’ receive their value and make them their own. I’m sure he’s right about that. A great teaching of yoga will change lives because it goes far past the person who teaches it, even if it has come through that person. Truths are never tied to individuals; everyone knows that or needs to. But nothing that I have ever learned from yoga will ever matter as much to me as Appa did. Things that matter are also like that. And I don’t think I’m contradicting my teacher or his teachings here. Loving him doesn’t create a conflict in me. Instead it compels the embrace of another paradox. I know that the most valuable things I have ever learned are not only about him, even if it’s also true that those things have entered my life because of him. And still there’s something far more than that going on.

It’s hard not to think of Appa’s passing so young even on this day I celebrate his birth--- he was only about fifty-seven when he succumbed to cancer. What I really wanted to say about him here has already been said countless times before, far better than I can hope to express. Here’s one, a verse by another guy from Jersey who has a way of saying things. It captures everything I’d like you who’ve read this far to know about how I feel this day about my teacher, my Appa, Gopala Aiyar Sundaramoorthy.

"Now the world is filled with many wonders under the passing sun.And sometimes something comes along and you know it's for sure the only one. The Mona Lisa, the David, the Sistine Chapel, Jesus, Mary, and Joe. And when they built you, brother, they broke the mold.    When they built you, brother, they turned dust into gold . When they built you, brother, they broke the mold  . They say you can't take it with you, but I think that they're wrong.  'Cause all I know is I woke up this morning, and something big was gone … But love is a power greater than death, just like the songs and stories told  And when she built you, brother, she broke the mold." ---Bruce Springsteen, Terry’s Song.

Sitting with tradition

2009-11-13T11:17:00.004-05:00

When you sat in study with my teacher you felt as if you were there, with the teachers, the commentators, the authors of the great philosophical and ritual sources of yoga. Sometimes, of course, you were, in a literal sense.

I recall once a manuscript arrived at our home from the famous Sarasvati Mahal Library in Thanjavur. Appa was Professor of Sanskrit at Madurai Kamaraj University and we were often privileged and indeed blessed to have access to some of the most remarkable, often unstudied works of the yoga traditions. On this day a work of the Auspicious Wisdom, the Shrividya tradition of the goddess-centered Tantra arrived in a carefully packed parcel. It was the Saubhagyaratnakara, an immense, complex, and largely unstudied exposition of visionary Tantra written in the form of evocative ritual. We think this work was composed in the fifteenth century and here we sat, holding this treasure in our hands, and hoping to make the most of the time it was on loan to us.

In the later Shakta traditions there are relatively few of those compelling prose works of philosophical theology that rouse your heart by the sheer magnitude of wondrous and inspiring contemplation. You know, like those quoted translations from Abhinavagupta that grace pages with elegant notions of Consciousness abiding in the hearts of all beings. The Kashmir Shaivites possessed a particular genius for this kind of expression and such voluminous and visionary philosophy provides a lifetime’s worth of study and reflection. In contrast the south Indian Shrividya treats us to a very different kind of experience, one of evocative thought-feeling projects that oblige us to imagine their performance as rites and practices; these Goddess-centered Tantrikas bid us to think ritually rather than in discourse, to see (as if we were performing a play or standing before a work of art) and act out the process directly through the practices of mantra, yantra, mudra, and the other arts of contemplative ritual. Ritual is, among the many things we might say, a way of bringing consciousness into acts of reflective consciousness. But ritual does not demand we comprehend, interpret, or even consider these acts past their performance; only that we do them with the consideration that something will happen. Thinking ritually means first that we act knowing that there can be meaning in actions, expressions, symbols, and forms, but that these are concealed in the revelation of the action itself. In the Shrividya we get much less speculative, argumentative, or didactic teaching, almost no explanation or interpretation but instead description, prescription (do this now, then do that), and an open opportunity to create meaning rather than garner and imbibe it.

So there we sat in the quiet foyer of Appa’s house with this magnificent work, months and months as we worked through the prosaic details of this ritual of the great goddess, the Mahadevi who is Embodied Prosperity (saubhagya). We imagined Her, then invoked, awakened, summoned Her presence through this peculiar mixture of description and offering that make up the essentials of the ritual, the engagement, yes, the yoga of She who is the ritual. These are not mere descriptions of acts that create the desired experiences of the yogin, they are themselves the forms of the goddess who is being charged to appear as these forms of mantra and ritual action. I will return to this subject again; I digress (and if you know me, I bet you find that unusual. I’ve never been much of a linear thinker.)

Near the end of our time with the Saubhagyaratnakara we turned to a series of verses scholars call the colophon. These verses provide a certain amount of information about the transmission, production, the patronage of the text, sometimes telling us who, where, and even when the work was copied ---- for there are no truly ancient manuscripts in India, we will never have a Qumran, no Dead Sea scrolls-like find in the sub-continent, weather, materials used for production, a host of factors make that impossible. Instead we rely upon copies of copies, all of different quality and value; it may sound romantic to sit with manuscripts pouring over material unedited and as close as we will ever come to the “original” but it is, in truth, tedious, painstaking, and difficult work, the sort of thing you only learn to do by doing it, a ritual, a performative yoga that confers its grace only after you’ve had, say, years and years of classroom Sanskrit, Tamil, pick-your-language, learn-the-next-script-it’s-written-in training.

As we are reading along Appa raised his eyes from the page and smiled. This manuscript had been commissioned by the famous king Seforji II, an early 19^th century ruler of Taml country originally from Maharastra in western India. He patronized all sorts of scholarship, from zoology to yoga shastra, and to hold in our hands just such a work was an amazing feeling. I could feel the “happy hair” (lomaharsana) bristling and was enjoying the sweet expression on my Appa’s face when he said, “Well, you know, the Brahmin from whom the king received this text was my relative; I recognize the name.” And so it was to sit in the heart of the living tradition, to live with a man for whom these great works were no mere enterprise of the intellect or remote spiritual resource made part of lineage by six or eight or whoknowshowmany degrees of separation. Studying with Appa meant sitting inside tradition.

But for all of his innate sense of familiarity and personal connection, for all the many years of practice and experience that informed his teaching, Appa was always an astute and gifted scholar with a keen, critical eye. He was ill disposed to treat the texts, any texts, as if they were somehow transcendental in content, as if they came from some mystical place above our comprehension, beyond our examination, or exempt from our critique. I think it was the deeply human connection he made to them that so affected me. I have always been in awe of the genius and stirred deeply by the spiritual power of these sources, and yet for Appa our work as scholars and as keepers of the tradition were never separate enterprises and he was more than disinclined to place these “scriptures” on some pedestal above us. Rather it was his way to treat them as profound thought-experiments. In this way, we could bring them into our own world, test them in the laboratory of our own experience, and not have to bother with the idea of conforming, believing, or somehow getting what they got.

Appa treated yoga and its great works as projects of human enterprise deeply grounded in serious efforts of intellectual expression and artistic offering. When he said things like “the great Abhinavagupta” he had no illusions that these siddhas should somehow stand above us, that their work or lives were somehow not like our own (however seriously he took the project of understanding them as historical beings living their historical contexts), despite the claims of tradition or even their own conceptions of privileged spiritual birth (e.g., like Abhinavagupta’s testimony of being “born of a yogini” in the opening sections of his Tantrasara, where he explains his conception in his parents Tantric ritual and how this has predetermined his state, his ability to cultivate and realize the goals of his yoga.)

Whatever yo. I’m not buying it (though I am keen to study it) and neither did Appa. It’s just not our tradition: for the Rajanaka Shrividya these beings are great, truly amazing for their contributions but they are not our spiritual superiors, not exempt or beyond error, and, most importantly, their work is not more than a process of deep engagement born of their own experiences. What they offer, as far as the Rajanaka are concerned, are projects from which we can evolve further the teachings and practices of yoga. They are our predecessors, gifted and insightful in ways I know I will likely never achieve, but nonetheless contributors to the conversation of which we are a part. And for all the love and admiration I hold for my own teacher, he would never have permitted more than the deep respect, deference, and affection that I felt and made clear as my offering to him.

The tendency to treat great souls and great works in the yoga traditions, especially works regarded as “heard” (shruti), the Veda and even Tantra, as revelatory in the sense of being immaculate containers of Truth is common, even prescribed. But as soon as we endow them with such impeccability we can no longer consider ourselves their peers but rather only their subordinate interpreters. Our project is to replicate, to re-achieve their achievements. We are not then being called upon to contribute but only to get it: you know, Harry met Sally meets enlightenment, I’ll have what she’s having. But not in Rajanaka Shrividya. I am not suggesting that these are not works of genius much less that I am fully capable of comprehending their depth and power. But for Appa it was always a conversation with greatness that he sought, not some submission to those scriptures or enlightened ones who possessed or achieved what was not yet ours.

Appa was the least presumptuous man I have ever known, a fact all the more remarkable for his genius, not merely as a erudite proponent of tradition or as a scholar but as a human being.

What Rajanaka seeks are partners in a conversation, not adherents of a tradition whose sources stand above us. Rather, as Appa made so clear in his own life, as conversant players engaged, offering each our own yoga, experimenting with truth rather than claiming it, living a tradition that invites or perhaps even insists that we bring it, with ourselves, to its next level rather than merely its next iteration.

one is the loneliest number

2009-08-14T14:05:00.005-04:00

Three Dog Night. Remember them?

Yoga, like most spiritualities and religions, makes roots in revelation. (Until recently we’d have to say that yoga has always passed the duck test of being religious--- scriptures, concepts like revelation and ultimacy, moral imperatives, experts who look like clergy or shamanists or experts of a kind, mysticism, pilgrimage, duck, bill, feathers, waddles, it’s a duck.) A revelation is usually a claim that there is something more that we can access that somehow comes to us rather than from us. The source of the revelation is sometimes God or the gods and the medium is sometimes prophets or sages, and we ourselves might also be both source and medium, but still: the revelation isn’t like ordinary experimental or experiential understanding nor does it usually come about by any intellectually cultivated means. Revelation is the outlier category; it’s there to tell us that there is a there and that we need to know it. It’s a principle of revelation that something is missing without it, that it provides the most important something we need. As we’ll see, it’s a bit different in Rajanaka and certain other traditions because revelation’s purpose is to reveal what we can and, in a certain way must learn scientifically, that is, experimentally. But it’s fair to say that this is not the more common conceptualization.

How do we know things? How do we convey and create the means by which we attest to our certainties and uncertainties? We can always say that we know that we know, that experience verifies itself. But the yoga traditions ask more of us than that ---or do they? Well, it will depend on whom we ask. But it’s fair to say that all the yoga traditionalists want us to consider how we can be sure and how we can share, extend, and offer to each other the depth of our human potential and possibilities. We’re not in this alone, after all. Never. We can’t make our way through the world without each other anymore than we can claim that our individual experience is unique. Whatever else might be said about revelation, in the Indian tradition such insights are mutually attainable: what revealed sources or sages get we are supposed to get too. This is interesting too because in most prophetic traditions, we don’t share the prophets powers of insight or receive comparable revelation (or even the same insight). Instead we listen and receive, the prophet is a medium unlike ourselves because he or she provides the revelation we need. So it goes.

Unique means one of a kind and though we sometimes use it to mean “special” or “extraordinary,” it’s better I think to be more precise. Something that is truly one of a kind can’t be compared in any way since it is, after all, not like anything else! So being “very unique” is even sillier than unique since if something were one of a kind than we could not even experience it. How could we? What would be our basis for comparison? This important idea of the sui generis in the absolute sense is critical to certain traditions of theism because it insures that God is like nothing else in His-Its-Her nature no matter how it is then explained that God made the world, cares for it, is invested in it. Uniqueness preserves otherness so that nothing more can be said, known, or doubted. Uniqueness is a strategy to have faith in the ineffable. That works great for some folks and you’ll never hear me pronounce on what others feel makes them happy. Alas, I’m not mystical enough to want a yoga of the ineffable. For me yoga has to be instruction about the world I’m living in, not a mystical otherness. We can assert uniqueness but we can’t argue about it (‘cause argument requires comparison). We might have faith in such a uniqueness, be that a God or some sort of state that cannot be compared in any way to others (what sort of state would that be?) and we can even claim that we will know (insert whatever word you want here) “God” when we get it. But curiously that’s all we can do. And it may be what we really want to do. There’s nothing left for us to say about a unique God other than that these words refer only to themselves and somehow to our feelings about them. For some this is life’s mystery and a comfort. For me, another way.

Patanjali’s “experience” of Purusha (Spirit) or Atman (self) is just such a “state” or possibility since the Yogasutra is perfectly clear that all changeable and comparative experience is nothing like the unchangeable and so incomparable eternality of the Spirit. Yoga, for Patanjali, is a kind of preparation for that possibility of transcendence-beyond-comparison and must be rooted in the idea that we’ll somehow know it when we get it. Don’t confuse this state with Patanjali’s last anga of samadhi (equanimity will do for now as a translation) because to reach, attain, achieve, or in anyway obtain to samadhi would suggest a transformation from and any change violates Patanjali’s principle that Spirit is exempt from change.

Comparably speaking, the great non-dualist philosopher Shankara, the principal of Advaita Vedanta, says in no uncertain terms that knowledge (jnana) is categorically unlike action (karma), that no actions can cause or in anyway bring about knowledge, and so such knowledge can only be acquired through an equally inviolate, utterly unique source, the Veda (and only the so-called knowledge sections of the Veda or jnana-khanda), which is indisputable revelation, pure, unadulterated Truth come through sages. We begin with what we might call a pure assertion ---Veda is by definition revealed truth--- and our job as yogins is somehow to “get it.” Shankara doesn’t tell us we need to have faith in knowledge or have faith that knowledge will somehow appear. Rather he tells us there is a process for acquiring knowledge that has somehow always been present as such. Our own yoga is in this sense a revelation based on revelation. (The Shankara to which I refer is the author of the commentary on the Brahmasutra and about a dozen other works, perhaps. Legend attributes hundreds of works to Shankara but that is another discussion. There’s nothing like consistency in a philosopher who prizes it above all other intellectual values!)

There’s much to be said about revelation and the uniqueness claims in the works of Tantric philosophers since their views are more complex in the sense that most are going to opt for a both-and strategy. What I mean is, the majority of classic Kashmir Shaivites will say that the revelation that is the Tantra creates access to an otherwise inaccessible level of truth/experience, that Oneness Consciousness is not comparable to all other by definition limited states, and yet we must cultivate, experiment, and evolve to this transcendence that is unlike our usual conditions. We are born not only from this Oneness but as it and it is the sense of our separation from our eternally singular source that causes in us a failure to access that level or kind of experience. Then there’s the discussion the three malas and thirty-six tattvas and suddenly we’re headed down a very long passage of explanation. This version of non-dualism means that our usual states of this-and-that (dualism) and the one transcendent realization of the One are not different in essence but that this awaits our achievement of the unique accomplishment. Enlightenment is not only of the One but must be the same one for everyone (how could we each have different enlightenments of the One?) though these philosophers also go to some length to explain that we each achieve this state for ourselves. We’re still left to wonder how something ---the state of Oneness recognition ---is by definition nothing like what we are having now and yet is nothing but what we are having now. Did you take your blue pill this morning?

So what’s the big deal about a revelation that posits a one-of-a-kind attainment? First, it isolates because, well, you either have it or you don’t and there is no way anyone who doesn’t have it can even imagine what you are feeling, thinking, being. Patanjali is wise enough to call his transcendence kaivalya, which means isolation in the sense of oneness. Shankara is content to say that the state he purports to be ultimately without any qualification (nirguna) is self-verified by the Veda but not by one’s Consciousness. For Shankara argues that if Consciousness knew itself then this would require yet another Consciousness to know that one, a regressive problem, and a fault he attributes to those pesky Consciousness-Only Buddhists, the so-called Vijnanavadins. However, Shankara says that since others have already reached the Oneness realization their revelation of this as Veda proves that knowledge is a category of being without duality. Since there is nothing in the realm of our ephemeral experiences that can in any way be compared to this supreme knowledge, Shankara says we must have the Veda’s revelation to know what is unlike all that we call knowledge in the realm of subject-object experience. Veda is shruti, it is literally “heard” as the universe and yet only certain portions of the Veda provide the ultimate source of Knowledge (another capital letter to indicate Really Big Important Ultimate It). To whit, when we get it, we got it and with it there is no before or after, or even you and me. Just One. Darn mystical, if you ask me, which is why not only I use a capital “O” when discussing Oneness. For Advaitins Oneness is Really Really Important. And for some that mysticism works as an inspiration as well as an aspiration; it can create a clear sense of the goal of human existence even if that attainment always seems beyond one’s experiential horizon of the ordinary ---since surely this supreme is nothing like this mundane, suffering ebb and flow of desire. There is surprisingly little about what happens to the jnani, the Knower, after this pinnacle of awareness without subject or object is realized. Shankara is interested in getting us there and he’s got almost no re-entry strategy. For what advaita or non-dualism of this sort (N.B., can non-dualism have more than one sort? Why, yes. Now that’s interesting, no?) would look like in the world we’d have to ask a modern practitioner since Shankara himself gives us few clues.

The classic Kashmir Shaivite vision is, in a sense, even more mystical since it purports to create in us a state of awareness, the attainment of Shiva Consciousness that the realized yogin carries back into the world without the slightest alteration. Kashmir Shaivites to the last maintain that the state never relents, subsides, or varies even for the “better” since there is “none higher” (anuttara) and while it would seem one can re-enter the everyday world without the slightest difficulty, one is permanently exempt from the never winsome features of change, desire, life, and, of course, death. Better yet, no re-death ‘cause this Oneness attainment means no rebirth. In their view the realized yogin who is “beyond the pairs of opposites” is perfect and in the most important ways exempt from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. The great Abhinavagupta even explains that when such yogins grow old and seemingly dotty that their inner state remains immaculate and perfectly perfect. (I will not explain this further but refer you to Abhinava’s comments on the Bhagavadgita or to my explanation in Poised for Grace, Anusara Books, 2009. Did I just plug the book? You’ll forgive me?)

But we can say this for certain about Abhinavagupta, which puts him in league with both the classical yoga of Patanjali and Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta: all of them claim an attainment ---call it “enlightenment” even if such a state would suggest at least three entirely different concepts of enlightenment--- that is precisely commensurate and consistent with their respective views of revelation. Abhinavagupta says his enlightenment is not only consistent with scripture’s revelation but is verified by experience and taught by the guru, so for him the experience of explaining Oneness from inside the dual isn’t the same problem as it is for Patanjali or Shankara for whom the experience can’t be an experience (since those change and Oneness doesn’t). Abhinava brilliantly tell us that duality is also Oneness in it’s own way, that is, when we get the One. This means that the power of the revelation, which conveys or invites an opening to truth that is unlike any other, is in some sense identical with the attainment of that truth, the enlightenment. To whit again, revelation equals enlightenment at least insofar as this means that the source in the sense of the font or locus of truth is unique and so is the goal. Has this been at all interesting?

In yoga traditions you can be an ontological dualist (there are two real features of existence, matter and spirit) like Patanjali or a non-dualist who claims the quality-less (nirguna) of the One is superior (Shankara) or merely renders the qualified world, well, qualified (Abhinavagupta) but in every case the source of this ultimacy is a revelation that provides what no other kind of resource can provide. For Patanjali it is the reality of Purusha itself rather than the Veda; for Shankara, clearly, only the knowledge portions (jnana-khanda) of the Veda; and for Abhinavagupta, the later, post-Vedic shruti sources, the Tantra-Agama, which are then seen as not different from the experience itself of the yogin. You aren’t getting there --- that is, to any of these theres of the One--- without revelation. Nosirreebob.

As Appa explained the Rajanaka Tantra he made clear that one-of-a-kind revelation raised a host of issues that are only solved if you are willing to begin with a kind of faith that there is a mystical experience at the end of the process and that whatever-is-defined-as “enlightenment” confers special powers on the person who achieves it, meaning that it’s self-verifying. You have to be able to say, “The sages got it” and then “I got it” and that’s that. What happens after this enlightenment depends on who you ask but suffice it to say there are as many ideas about that as there are versions of enlightenment. We’ve already labored a bit with those and unless you have a real taste for scholasticism (oo…ooo…me…I do, I do…), you’ll be spared further (or at least until I write about this again).

Abhinavagupta and other Kashmir Shaivites give us a kind of fluent-in-the-world but utterly impervious, even aloof from its concerns sort of siddha who moves graciously in any and every context. One might say that Abhinavagupta’s siddha is the human being with the ultimate hall pass; he (and I don’t think he thinks the siddha can be a she, really, but that’s another story), ‘cause the siddha is simply exempt, impervious, without concern but not oblivious to the working of the world, including its laws of karma. Reaching the unconditional confers all sorts of do-as-you-want in the conditional world, even Patanjali would agree (that is, if we think the third pada of the Yogasutra is really connected to the first two). Getting it makes you powerful, all seem to agree. Even miraculous by non-superhero standards. But the key point can never be less than until-you-achieve-this-realization you aren’t really siddha-fluent in the world. Siddhas got powers dammit and one might be more inclined to see those as the point than the enlightenment, that is, if you really read the texts carefully and think about how much yoga tradition cares about being powerful in the world we experience.

So what about these issues? Well, let’s begin with this: in every usual case in which we say something happened only once, we mean that such things are false. Oneness may be One but it’s not an unrepeatable experiment, at least as far as its proponents are concerned. As Appa put it, if something can’t happen twice then we know it didn’t happen once. But those who claim the uniqueness of revelation/enlightenment all insist such one-of-a-kind things do happen more than once and, in fact, that our potential enlightenment though it is nothing like our ordinary experience must be nothing other than the same enlightenment as the sages of yore. This too must be self-verifying since the-rest-of-us-not-enlightens don’t yet know that either. But in the way we usually think we know things, we want to be able to verify together rather than in our lonesome. No one likes a solipsist. Not even the solipsist. How would we know we’re not just deluded or suffering from too beautiful a mind?

The real culprit in claims about revelation being a qualitatively different source of knowledge from our usual empirical resources, flawed as they may be, is that their purpose in yoga traditions is to claim that there is an enlightenment. Just one. Not the other guys. Ours. One can wish away the differences among the claimants as a feature of our unenlightened state, that is, say that there could only be a dispute about what constitutes “real” enlightenment before we are enlightened; simply put, enlightenment makes all differences evaporate into so much duality. But this isn’t really what happens in the texts or traditions that talk about this subject seriously. Nobody in the traditions thinks that your enlightenment is just as good as mine if they are not in perfect agreement. There we find the yoga philosophers arguing for their own versions of enlightenment and not the least bit inhibited to explain that others’ versions are, well, wrong or incomplete or somehow flawed. Again, the nettle in this patch of ideas is the uniqueness of attainment, which ironically is only self-validated; it’s like you have to join the Real Enlightenment Club to know what it is you really get.

In Rajanaka there is no final enlightenment, not only because these Tantrics see the expanding universe as always creating more but also because the idea of a singular or unique state of awareness really does nothing more than hand us back a duality that isn’t the one we really want. In other words, we have to say not-enlightened/enlightened as if these were before and after or that the enlightened state somehow solves all conflicts, challenges, inconsistencies, or problems. Ahh, the magic bullet and the Sourcerer’s Stone all in one! Oneness seems to wish away the world that we don’t want but somehow leave us with the one we do. Were it so. Ahh.

But if there is, as the Rajanaka say, no goal, no finality, no end then what is there for us as yogins? Well, there is always more. Perhaps what we seek isn’t oneness at all but rather the paradoxical possibility that the One that is the universe is never without it’s own duality and so an invitation to comparison. Perhaps non-dualism, Oneness means that difference is real but that we are never ever no how separate ever, that we are always entangled. Funny thing, this being human. We’d like to believe we are the measure of the world but are constantly reminded that we were made by the world we are measuring. How such a notion might involve a concept of revelation placed in the context of experimentation and experience, we’ll take that up again in a few days. For now, let’s just enjoy the ride. It’s nearing the end of August and I’m looking back nostalgically to those summers when my daughters were still little and we rode the teacups in the amusement park till we were all sick. (It took me only once.) Thinking about non-duality is a lot like those tea-cups, doncha’ think?

making the rakshabandha

2009-08-06T07:39:00.006-04:00

Today is the full moon of the month of Shravana, the August full moon, which belongs to the goddess Sarasvati who is wisdom and learning, art and the gifts of the heart come to form in the embodied grace of recognition. It’s also Rakhi Day, especially important in north India as the celebration of sisters for their brothers, the bond of affection and of hope appearing in the rakhi, a bracelet tied to the wrist. There’s a sweetness and simplicity to Rakhi Day and, truth to tell, it fosters no great body of reflection in the sources of the yoga tantra. But an occasion to savor the grace of protection is always welcome. In Sanskrit, it is raksha-bandha, the bond of protection. And I will spare you here the long etymology I am so fond of explaining that I do it again and again, the one that takes you from the Sanskrit verbal root raksh- all the way to bagels and lox. Everything is connected. Sometimes the route bends in ways that can make us smile all the way down to the bottom of our being.

Of course, in the customary sense in India the connection of sisters to brothers reflects not only the bonds of immediate sibling affection but of a girl’s hope that when she leaves the natal home her brother will continue to be her advocate with her new family, he securing that privilege by being the helpful and always near maternal uncle. In youth particularly the rakhi is a sign that hope always brings with it vulnerability but that hope invites us to welcome rather than dread the unknown that lies over the horizon of our present recognition. We turn to those we can count on and remind ourselves what in life really counts. Rakhis tell a story of relationship in time, mark a place, and offer another way to find our identity. With the rakhi we say, “I have been there for you and I will be there again. I am with you here, now. And we are bound to one another, like this.” Could anything be more human?

The relationship that emerges in maternal uncles, that person who we call in Tamil “maamaa”, extends far beyond the boundaries of kinship ---for any close family friend or even helpful acquaintance might be called “uncle.” And the same is true of “aunties”--- one has so many “maamee-s”, thank goodness. That some are very dear and others less is clear only in the relationship itself but the notion is rooted in the same hope: we protect one another when we can create a boundary and know how to reach across it. What counts too is the acknowledgement ---so the bracelet---and the effort to make that connection mutually with a sign of affection, and in this month tied to the wrist.

We hear a great deal in yoga about non-attachment, about loosening the bonds to the mortal, limited, and conditioned experience of our humanity so that we might taste the immortal, unlimited, and unconditioned. But I think in Rakhi Day we have a chance to hold closer to the mid-line that joins the two and brings us closer to the gift of embodiment, to that place where these feelings and concerns can come together, where they co-mingle. For what better experience is there in our embodied, temporal lives than those occasions, conditioned as they are, when we are given the chance to remember, to reflect, and to recognize the presence of the unconditional? And how important it is that we bring those unconditional feelings of affection into the life we are really living with others, in bonds of relationship that mean to protect one another? Look out for each other. It’s not a complex message but like most of the important ones, it’s not always as easy as it appears. I’ve always loved that there was a day just for this, where we can celebrate an innocence of heart that reminds us we are bound to each other by the choices we make to do just that: look out for each other, be present for each other, and remember that everyone longs for that connection to be real, the one that goes straight to the heart. Happy Rakhi Day!

because anything can happen

2009-07-19T14:37:00.005-04:00

The first images I saw of the yogin were of Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha who became etched in my heart: the awakened one had transcended suffering, embodied compassion, and achieved the epitome of human possibilities, including perfect morality. I loved the immaculate simplicity of the Buddha’s peaceful visage, a being whose wisdom and probity were exemplary and beyond all conventional categories. We westerners prefer our sages and saints to be moral examples of (near) perfection; we connect to the aspiration for ethical ascendency because, as we know, mortals have a way of being all too mortal.

As much as the western saint may exemplify moral transcendence, he or she is also a reminder of the concept of the Fall, the notion that perfection is (now) beyond our reach and that sin is our common lot. In the Buddha, as it is for certain other yogins, moral perfection is attainable, as fully realized as other claims to empowerment, and all within boundaries of mortal existence. Few in the later history of yoga dispute the concept of moral perfection but some question its ultimate importance or, to put it more wryly, its ultimacy; we witness not only implacable power but, as I soon came to learn, a paradigm for human viability in a universe more complex than we might have first considered. There’s no doubt that this evolution of thought happens but we might want to ask why and what does it tell us about our prospects for yoga.

My experience of my teacher revealed a person so gentle, compassionate, and so essentially decent that I cannot help but be reminded of that early concept of the Buddha or, say, of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. There is always something compelling about such authenticity. But Appa didn’t teach moral purity nor did he claim transcendent probity as a feature of the accomplished yogin aligning with a moral universe. He once said that as soon as we assent to absolute morality we create a situation that can never be sustained and place ourselves in submission to a paradigm that would insist on conformity. As willing as Appa was to apply himself capably to convention and as consistently as I witnessed his seemingly effortless goodness, he was not interested in moral perfection either as a goal or an indication of the accomplished yogin.

For Rajanaka Sundaramoorthy, our human nature is no less divine because we fail to be morally perfect but, more importantly, he argued that moral absolutes, like all absolutes, are intrusions upon a prior claim the universe is making upon us: that we are free and that the universe itself is in its nature free from all constraints, commands, and imperatives. We live in a universe in which anything can happen for no reason, without any purpose, at any time--- this is an important, albeit simple definition of a lila. That such a playful or lila universe operates as well by the machinations of karma, which makes order out of possibility and causality, creates a certain paradox: the world makes “sense” (karma) though it is always possible that every certainty opens to an utterly random, uncontrollable, perfectly free offering (lila). Perhaps it is because the universe does not have an inherent moral imperative, much less a transcendent nature that stands beyond the more subtle reality we experience, that makes doing good that much more important and indeed powerful.

If we are without an imperative to be good, how much more remarkable it is that there are human beings who choose to be good? And if the universe invites us to participate in its nature, then lila means we are unbound by the bondage of all imperatives. What’s left is our choice to live with the openness of lila, which by definition thwarts any absolutism, and within the boundaries of karma because, well, actions and intentions have their own sorts of consequences.

I’m not at all suggesting that yogins are or need to be somehow “less” moral because they are free but rather that the certain Tantrikas, like the Rajanaka, are telling us about a universe that is quite unlike the one imagined by those for whom the saint provides an unambiguous moral standard of certitude. No doubt we can find examples of the yogic sage acting as moral exemplar but there’s another no less ethical possibility that we can be yogins free to be moral.

Of course, there’s much to be said for human empowerments attributed to compassion (karuna) and non-injury (ahimsa) and the simple but direct ethical injunctive (yama/niyama) that provides a prerequisite for deeper development. People are moved, and rightly so, by acts of kindness, generosity, and the extraordinary capacity of human beings to do good things, things that seem to transcend mere personal interest. There is something deeply charismatic and endearing to us all about an incorruptible conscience and a decision-making process that moves from principles to pragmatism but doesn’t lose its way. But we might ask from the Tantric standpoint: Does sagely goodness arise from a goodness inherent in the universe or is it that human beings are free to act in a universe that creates situations of power in relationships? Certainly humans routinely extend beyond narrow definitions of self-interest but does that mean that interest is itself some form of moral compromise? That the only true morality is beyond all self-interest? We might just as well begin by asking what sort of universe are we living in that somehow creates, permits, or more correctly seems indifferent to human goodness or evil?

Tantric Yoga is about engaging a universe that is powerful, not about the division between good and evil or the ethical injunctions of a creator to which we must submit. The universe is Shakti, Power, because it is dynamic, complex, and creates more of itself through the entropic process of self-expression. In other words, the world is energy that is becoming more diverse and more complex in its variables, and it’s creating itself by unraveling, by moving from greater to lesser levels of order. The Shakti is also free (svatantrya), which means it presents itself for no reason, purpose, goal, or point to prove: the universe of power simply is the way it is. As the Rajanaka see it, we human beings aren’t here to get anything, prove anything, or become anything in particular or that is somehow final because, well, neither is the universe doing any of those things. The question of being “good” isn’t a feature of what the universe wants; it might just be something we want because it suits our interests, because it empowers us.

However a given lineage may connect its goals to its ethics, the heart of the issue of human empowerment rests in the possibility of real choice rather than true morality, and of the importance of exigency, circumstances, and context. In a Tantric vision, the lila concept ---randomness, indeterminacy, and purpose-free reality--- mitigates the weave of karma, which always stands for ultimate accountability. We can find in certain Tantric yoga traditions measures for human behavior and intentionality that simply do not assume that life is about moral ascendency or the attainment of ethical certainty. It’s easy to make an accusation of moral relativism when there is no absolute standard of goodness as such but, in practical terms, it seems plain enough that yogins are no more or less ethical than other folks even when they suggest paradigms that presume the goals of human development don’t conclude with goodness but rather only begin there. Goodness (whatever we mean by that) may indeed be a worthy yogic goal but it need not be absolute or intrinsic in order to matter to us.

To use the term “Dharma” as if it were principally about ethical standards and moral injunctions is, I think, more modern convention, an easier rendering because we in the Western world--- sustained for centuries on monotheisms in which the Creator presents ethical commands and implies consequences--- find it more natural to think about an ethical universe. And with some yoga traditions, like early Buddhism and certain Vedantic interpretations of the Bhagavadgita, for example, karma’s problematic is resolved at least in part by attaining the finality of moral perfection. But what if the universe is not only moving by karma? What if it has no ethics as such, what if it is of another order of being altogether? What if the universe left the creation of ethics to us rather than invest creation with ethics?

What if the universe were not about the conflict of good and evil at all but rather about expressions of interest in matrices of power? In such a vision, Dharma has more to do with the observation and subsequent invention of methods that address the structures and roles that define a universe expressing itself as power. Dharma doesn’t so much define the world as good as it provides a way of structuring, interpreting, and creating parameters, including those for goodness.

Dharma usually begins with the notion that this powerful universe is organized, sorted, and essentially rooted in karma ---the complex causes and effects working through the matrix of time and place that bring things into identity and a world of relationships that are fundamentally inequitable and hierarchical. Now those are words that can make modern yogins cringe since we, especially in North America, would prefer to think about creating a world of equality. But hierarchy is not a zero sum game even when there are measureable inequities. Just because something is given priority or choice creates a de facto hierarchy of “first,” such an action (or intention, both being karma) doesn’t necessarily consign other valuable things to an inferior status. Hierarchy is not the same as inferiority: that would be a principle of Dharma since it allows us to structure relationships out of different forms and expressions of power. Dharma implicitly endorses hierarchy, as it must in the process of making choices. Karma in turn neither dispenses nor supports equity; instead karma describes relationships of causality and probability and enables us to understand interests, advantages, and outcomes. In this process we observe ---because it’s perfectly clear that it’s important to understand--- tacit hierarchies and the implication of choices with consequences, some advantageous, others less so. What karma makes clear is that power doesn’t confer advantage but rather that advantages are made of power. Some advantages take the form of goodness, that is, of affirming ethical choices but this powerful universe is, I repeat, powerful, not ethical by nature. If we really thought about this I think we would discover that it is perfectly possible to be good in a universe that isn’t itself about goodness.

Lila, in a certain way, levels the playing field of karma but, we might add ironically, because that couldn’t’ be its purpose. Lila simply means that the universe need not have any purpose, reason, or goals to unfold perfectly (as it is) and that the universe is free from and free to be without any direction or need or imperative. But that doesn’t mean that the Shakti’s lila ---the universe as power--- doesn’t express its own interest since, well, it is this way and not some other. Lila includes the notion that purposelessness is its own expression of interest and that this is as plausible a way of understanding ourselves as is karma.

Everything in the universe has an interest and whether those interests are congenial or adversarial, to one’s advantage, neutral, or disadvantageous, karma is how yoga means to assess where we are within this grand structure, this Dharma of relationships in which both hierarchy and inequity play important roles. Again, let’s try not to assume that hierarchy or inequity are somehow inherently evil, or good, or moral at all. Let’s just assume that power expresses itself in such structures and that power is also simultaneously expressing itself in ways that do not involve, support, or include any purpose, that is, by lila as well. Dharma could be understood to be this far greater architecture of karma and lila, the blueprint, a road map and a plan but one without a destination, purpose, or point; Dharma may be called santana or “eternal” meaning that it is always present, in some sense resilient, even immutable as such, but if it includes lila as the part of very structure of the universe, this also means that moral codes may have karmic consequences but no ultimate resolution.

As a social and moral paradigm Dharma suggests that it is in one’s interest, one’s self interest to serve that which is greater than oneself, to whit, society, the harmony of nature, etc. It’s not to be moral for its own sake, as if fulfilling a commandment to be “good” is it’s own reward, but rather that interests must serve because we are made from something, from power that is far greater than ourselves. Our participation in the structures of power is what’s at stake, not compliance with an inherent code of conduct that is somehow part of the nature of the universe.

Why am I so about this? I’ve been reading Darwin for the last few years and this year in particular of celebration of his 200^th year (Darwin shares a birthday with Lincoln, a perfectly random and at once wonderfully karmic fact, no?). I think no one in our modern age understood better the implications of declaring the universe an expression of power rather than a design with moral injunction inherent to its purpose. Darwin chose not to publish his evolutionary theories for some twenty years after their formulation precisely because he knew just how upsetting they would be to those especially religious persons for whom this creation must necessarily be a design with divine purpose and moral certainty. But there is, as I see it, a real consonance between Darwin’s views and those of the Tantric yogin committed to the concept of a truly free and powerful universe.

Darwin once wrote, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” I confess, I find the strident clarity of this observation not only intellectually compelling but deeply moving. And rather than feel at an existential loss for meaning because the universe has none, I am reminded of the day my teacher so casually, in that calm, gentle voice that could disarm the most adamant in argument, said to me, “Your life has no purpose, no meaning, and no goal. And that is all very, very good news. The rest is up to you.” I was puzzled until I began to think that it might mean that I am truly free because the universe is so free that there is nothing compelling it even to be, much less have in mind a plan or purpose.

on this day

2009-04-16T00:41:00.007-04:00

His life was gentle; and the elements

So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up

And say to all the world, This was a man.

Today I celebrate the life of my teacher who passed some fifteen years ago on this day. I remember so vividly sitting with him while he was ill, dying of metastasized cancer, both of us knowing that his time was approaching. It was January. We were in Bangalore where he was receiving treatments that we knew were mere gestures towards fighting the good fight. When all had gone to bed that night, I asked him when, when would that time be and how might I prepare.

At the very same time Appa's mother, who I called by the Tamil "Pati" for grandmother, was herself preparing to make her passage. Pati was well into her nineties ---we were never exactly sure how old she was--- dying of perfectly natural causes. "First I shall see Pati through. I am her only son and it is our custom that a son should say the rites. As for me, you will know the day." I was puzzled by Appa's remark about this day I was supposed to know beforehand but I didn't pursue the matter. Instead I asked him where he was going and how I might follow.

"Where do you think I am going?" he asked.

"Honestly, I don't know."

"What do you think eternity is like?"

"I think it is silent and I will have to live here with that silence. I will miss our conversations."

"Then to be with me," Appa said, "you will have to go to that silence inside yourself. You will have to go more deeply into your own heart. And there you'll find me too, in that place where our conversations will continue."

I can remember still sitting there beside him, crying as quietly as I could. I couldn't yet imagine how I might bear this silence when it seemed only to be loss.

When the phone rang that morning in April with the news, it was exactly sixteen years from the very day that Appa had given me the essential practices, the mantras of Auspicious Wisdom. He chose to leave his life on the day I had always considered the luckiest of my life, my divya-diksha, the day of divine initiations. On this day those many years earlier he had opened the doors of perception to show me how I might see the more there is in this gift of embodied life. It was as if he were saying that I couldn't make this day merely one of grief or only for this remembrance; that it had to be as much my day as his, so that I could never forsake hope or fail to appreciate the presence of grace in this life. He was a wily one, that Appa. He never liked to see anyone in pain and he had a way of making those around him remember that there is always more and always a chance to become a better human being.

Gopala Aiyar Sundaramoorthy. Never fancied himself guru, much less enlightened being. Had no desire for the limelight or even those attentions and honors received that were so richly his due. But I should like to remember him today in these few words, for his was a life truly made of compassion and learning, of generosity and genius. His life has made so many lives the richer. He would never have presumed himself flawless and neither shall I. What I can say is that he was a man and Nature, the Auspicious One Herself, gave him to us as a gift, a life so precious in value, so ferocious in goodness, and so gentle in light that I believe he will never be forgotten but rather always heard clearly, in hearts, in the silence.

peradventure

2009-03-29T12:13:00.020-04:00

Response to the last sammelana has been spirited, thoughtful, and curious, curious because I made a point of leaving the Rajanaka view of revelation unfinished. Cheeky, eh? I hope the irony came through: the Rajanaka say the world as we are experiencing it, our own lives are nothing less than the revelation we seek and that revelation is the wave (urmi), the undulation (vilasa), the churning stick (manthana) of our experience of Consciousness, unfinished and unresolved, an adventure into peradventure. ---I love that word "peradventure" 'cause it's so fantastically archaic and unfamiliar. If by chance you're uncertain about the meaning, you're onto it.

To consider that our mortal embodiment is not only yoga's goal but also the very revelation we seek means we needn't quest for an extrinsic source, wait for the guru's grace or receive it from prophet or prophecy, the burning bush or last word that will provide the missing piece, the essential understanding. We can venture into worlds of awareness and experimentation, inside and out, without having to reach transcendence or finality, a perfectly imperfect sojourn. What we seek is right before us and as the famous Ganesha story suggests, there's no race that doesn't end where we might just as well have begun.

It's a simple story and while I'm always sorely tempted to go on and on about the characters, the symbolism, the yada yada, we'll return again, 'cause everything goes and comes around, as we know. Goes like this: in a moment of sibling rivalry the two brothers Ganesha and Subrahmanian accept the challenge from their wily pops to race around the world...err...the universe, the proverbial block. Subrahmanian has a speedy carbon fiber peacock, the calves of a Tour de France racer, and plenty of attitude. Off he goes, back in a flash to find that ol'Ganapati has merely taken a few steps around mom and pop, Shakti and Shiva who are, of course, the whole shootin' match. Ganapati circumambulates the entire universe by merely circling his parents. Leaving aside as well the more interesting contrasts among these provocateurs of divine self-awareness, the point is that we are always seeking what seems out there when it's really right here, can't be lost. It also can't be found. It can only be engaged.

But the yogas unlike Rajanaka that teach an ultimate enlightenment surely make a compelling promise and one that seems clear enough even if it's not anything much like what we are now, in our limited ways, experiencing. There's an extra, a more we are missing to life that is right here even if it takes going there ---to enlightenment via the revelation express---to realize it. We re-cognize and all's different after that. Most will tell you that when you get it, the world's not going to be like it was before and that important things like suffering, calamity, injustice, and even evil will either be solved or made far, far more intelligible. Enlightenment, we are promised, makes things different because the way things are sure could use an upgrade of the final, lasting sort. In transcendental consciousness we will find what we are looking for, what revelation alone reveals and can alone provide, re-entrance into the mundane in some continuous state of that better state? Your call.

We'll consider more about what Rajanaka has to say about the deeper states of meditation in a future sammelana (yeah, yeah, promises, promises). For now let's return to the ordinary world and think about what sort of consciousness, awareness we are bringing to it. In the traditions of final enlightenment we hear that this awareness changes the world since it's rightly pointed out that when we change our awareness, we change the world. (We change the world even when we don't change our awareness. ---ed. note) Most enlighteners tell us that we will see the world as we truly see ourselves, in an unconditioned state freed from the transient and free to experience our innate joy. We'll be the ecstatic that we are, the immortal we always have (also?) been, certainly extinguishing banality. Hmm. That's quite the promise, however you feel about it: it's a someday-this-won't-be-like-this-anymore.

Rajanaka takes ---you're not surprised, are you?--- a different stance. That someday will be just like the world you're in, replete with its sufferings, calamities, injustices, and indeed still with lots we must call evil. Change the name or our attitude or wishing for utopia won't make our sufferings go away or bring an end to human evil. Where's it gonna go? It's not as if we can't or don't make the world a far better place by the way we enlist our presence, intentions, visions, hopes, and actions; it's not that we don't make a difference by how we view it or what we do. Rather, it is that viewing the world with its realities of sorrow is no more a problem that we must finally solve than it is reality to claim we solve all our sorrows ---most, well at least many, will come simply with being human. Living in a world without sorrows isn't living enough for me. Sorrow comes with human embodiment and I'm not all that eager to transcend the gift I was given. But not to be glum, the Rajanaka aren't much for complaining or wallowing even though the hurt is real. It's those two Bhagavadgita teachings I like so much: Pay attention. Stop complaining. Grief is for healing but perhaps too it is not to be transcended anymore than sorrow itself.

Certain yoga traditions, especially in Japanese Buddhism, have a keen sense of the poignancy and importance of the mortal, the unfinished, the imperfect perfection or wabi-sabi conveyed in things and in our appreciations. There is in mono no aware a sense of how the world brings just what it does. This expression is more evocative than perhaps any translation can easily convey since it means something like "oh...things." Say it to yourself breathing in and out a few times. See what happens. Mono means "things" as in, well, anything-- a feeling object thought. Aware suggests a sense of both surprise and recognition, an oh-I-got-it but without having been startled or shaken to insight, without too much ah-ha. What we are being invited to is the sweet, bitter, inspiring, deflated, poignant and ordinary nature of things, ourselves wholly included. The whole of things that doesn't exclude ourselves, treating our spirit as if it were not part of that reality. There's a beautiful even comparable expression in Latin, it comes in the Aeneid when Virgil has Aeneas remark, "sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt." These are tears for things, our mortality touches the heart.

I think that is the Rajanaka's point: it is our mortality that touches the heart. The feelings Aeneas speaks to remind us that human vulnerability isn't failure but authenticity and that nature's affirmation is made whether or not we are willing or ready to receive the offering. In Rajanaka Tantra there are many ways we talk about cultivating a deeper appreciation for life but one important term is samaya. This Sanskrit word often means an agreement or convention; a custom, a law, or compact. In the Auspicious Wisdom traditions of goddess Tantra where Rajanaka originates, samaya usually names the more austere, less defiant approach to certain Tantric teachings that create controversy for the orthodox and contrast with the more provocative views of the Kaula. But in Rajanaka, samaya means quite a bit more than these familiar references.

We can look to the Japanese mono no aware and to Virgil's sunt lacrimae to gain a better sense of samaya. As Rajanaka Sundaramoorthy explained it, samaya in the simplest sense means coming to our mutual understandings ---with nature and culture, with finite expectations and infinite hopes, with death and love and all the possibilities accomplishment and disappointment, with each other, with ourselves, with things. We make our covenants and treaties, we engage seriously and playfully, happy or otherwise, we stipulate, forbear, agree, tolerate, endure, lavish and arrange, and sometimes we settle even though we know there is no resolution. We come to terms though these terms may change too, adding or subtracting in meaning, in time, and with circumstances and conditions.

To create a life of "speaking to the samaya" (samayavada) we will need to find better ways to live not because everything is somehow going to work out, much less be ultimately resolved, but because there are ways to live better with, entirely, in the midst of ---all ways of understanding samaya, our coming to terms. Samayavada can mean keeping one's word, not merely in the sense of a promise or contract but also in the ways we keep words and feelings, thoughts and experiences: where we keep them, how we keep them, and in what ways keeping them makes us more. In the deepening of our samaya we make a commitment to the greater possibilities of our human birth, to our intuition and intelligence, to the ways we can experiment and explore the revelation that is our experience of Consciousness. Perhaps there is more peradventure than clarity or assurance in samaya but there is engagement that touches the heart and where there is engagement, there are the revelations of yoga.

life's run-on sentence

2009-03-10T10:38:00.008-04:00

The great Indian philosopher Bhartrhari, author of the complex and difficult Vakyapadiya, thought of the universe as a run-on sentence. Reality unfolds and enfolds, pulsates and rambles forward and back, making itself known but always extending further into the unknown. But this is another story and many more run-on sentences ahead of where we are now. My teacher held a comparable view, preferring contentment with the unfinished, the sort that brings perfect imperfection, a joy that might include every possible feeling and thought and never bothers with what we don't experience. This way, he said, we could enjoy the gift of embodied life for what it is offering more than any final goal that would somehow provide an end. Why would anyone be interested in an end that always seems like it has just begun? I know I started the sammelana with this idea but there's plenty to it. It's going to take a few entries but, with luck, we'll have plenty of time. So. Here. We. Go.

Yoga traditions are deeply rooted in experimental and experiential truths. There's a distinction between experiments and experiences that invites our attention. We'll need to get to that distinction but there's a third category too, which we'll also explore more carefully: revelation. Revelation is usually a claim about there being something more that we can access which somehow comes to us rather than from us. The source of revelation, at least in the western monotheisms, is God or in other traditions the gods (you pick) or it can even be in the nature of the universe itself--- as we might say so for the Veda. The Veda is "without human origin" (apaurusheya), which just as well means that it is without any beginning at all and so eternally present. The medium for revelation is sometimes prophets or sages and even we ourselves might provide both source and medium but still: revelation isn't like ordinary understanding nor does it come by any usual means. We don't think it up; it thinks us. In this way, revelation is an outlier category; it's there to tell us that there is a there and that we need to know it so that what's most important can be known at all. Part of the principle of revelation is that something is missing and that revelation provides this crucial missing link.

How do we know things? How do we convey and create the means by which we attest to our certainties and admit uncertainties? In Rajanaka Tantra, as in Kashmir Shaivism, we can always say we know that we know, that experience verifies itself (as well as the revelation, as far as the Shaivites are concerned). There is a subject who as an agent that can act and know. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. We know when to stop and we do the stopping. The action is recursive rather than a vicious cycle: it ends with our choosing. It's not like we are still in the shower wondering what to do next.

But the yoga traditions ask more of us than that ---or do they? Well, it will depend upon whom we ask. But it's fair to say that all the yoga traditionalists want us to consider how we can be sure and how we can share, extend, and offer to each other the depth of our human potential and possibilities. What we can all experience is what we all want; how we need to go about achieving that which we share most deeply and commonly is up for discussion. But importantly, we as individuals are not alone in this world nor in this shared project. Never. We can't make our way through the world without each other anymore than we can claim that our individual experience is unique. There is no such thing as a one-of-a-kind experience, at least in the sense that such an experience is incomparable. After all, experience by definition compares.

Unique means one-of-a-kind and though we sometimes use it to mean special or extraordinary, it's better to be more precise. Something that is one-of-a-kind can't be compared in any way since it is, after all, not like anything else! So being "very unique" is an even sillier thing to say than just unique since if something were one-of-a-kind than we could not even experience it. How could we? What would be our basis for comparison? The most we could claim or assert is that there exists a something-not-an-experience-that-is-ineffable, beyond-experience.

This important idea of sui generis in the absolute or ultimate sense (and the Indian philosophers just love the idea of "ultimate") is critical, especially to certain traditions of theism because it insures that God is like nothing else, no matter how it is then explained that God made the world, cares for it, is invested in it. Same thing for "enlightenment." It's gotta be there if there is something for us to get. Uniqueness preserves otherness so that nothing more can be said, known, or doubted. Ineffability, anirvacaniya is the idea that nothing more can be said. We can assert uniqueness but we can't argue with it ('cause argument require comparison). We can have faith in such a uniqueness, be that a God or some sort of state that cannot be compared in any way to others (what sort of state would that be?) and we can even claim that we will know (insert whatever word you want here) "It" when we get it. But curiously that's all we can do.

Patanjali's Purusha (spirit, person, et.al.) or Atman (self) is just such a state or potency since it cannot be an experience. If Purusha were an experience it could be achieved, reached from a non-enlightened position, we would not have it and then have it, and so the eternal would be a result of causality. Na, nah, nah, naaah. Can't do that. Such a process compromises ultimacy's ultimacy. The Yogasutra is perfectly clear that all changeable and comparative experience is nothing like the unchangeable and so incomparable eternality of the Spirit. Yoga, for Patanjali, is a kind of preparation for that possibility of transcendence-beyond-comparison and must be rooted in the idea that we'll somehow know it when we get it. Don't confuse this Purusha or

Atman state with Patanjali's last anga of samadhi (equanimity will do for now as a translation) because to reach, attain, achieve or even sustain or in anyway obtain to samadhi would suggest a transformation from and any change violates Patanjali's principle that Spirit/Self is exempt from change by definition. The Yogasutra is written, at least in part, to tell us that there is such a state as Atman and that we don't know it and that we can. But we will start out by having to take Patanjali at his word. And let's not forget too that he's telling us this because he wants us to know that the Buddhist claim that there is no such Self is, well, wrong. Ol'Patanjali's been there, done that Self and he wants us to know it's nothin', not one thing like any of those mortal, conditional, and so changeable states we call experience.

Comparably speaking, the great non-dualist philosopher Shankara, the principal of Advaita Vedanta, says in no uncertain terms that knowledge (jnana) is categorically unlike action (karma), that no actions can cause or in any way bring about knowledge, and so such knowledge can only be acquired through an equally inviolate, utterly unique source, the revelation, the shabda of the Veda and, for that matter, only through the the so-called knowledge sections (jnana-khanda), which is indisputable revelation, pure unadulterated Truth come through sages. (How's dem'apples for run-on sentences? Add Good Will Hunting inflection.) At some point the guru utters the great statement (mahavakya) into the receptive student's ear and voila, the big kaboom, in a single stroke: revelation confers knowledge. You got it. We begin here with what we might call a pure assertion because it can't be refuted, only somehow verified--- Veda is by definition revealed truth of the ultimate and unique variety-- and our job is to rise to the occasion of getting it. Shankara doesn't tell us we need to have faith, belief, or gather up our intention for knowledge because none of these things can make knowledge appear to us. Rather he tells us that there is a process for our acquiring this point of departure for knowledge that has somehow always been present and comes only from Vedic revelation. Enlightenment is a revelation based on revelation. (I refer here only to the Shankara who authors the Brahmasutrabhasya and less than a dozen other works. Legend attributes hundreds of works to Shankara but that is another discussion, much well worn in the annals of scholarship. Suffice it to say that there is nothing like consistency in a philosopher who prizes it above all other intellectual values.)

There's much to be said about revelation, enlightenment, and the uniqueness claim in the works of Tantric philosophers since their views are more complex. At least this is so because the Tantras claim to be yet another revelation, one that somehow sublates even the Veda, perhaps because it is a more secret or a more technologically advanced claim. Ideas differ about this but the point is that it's revelation and so unlike other kinds of insight gleaned from or through or somehow in the company of experience. Tantrics prefer a both-and-strategy, meaning that the majority of the classic Kashmir Shaivites will say that revelation creates access to an otherwise inaccessible level of truth experience (verified from other, lesser levels and within the realms of experience as such), that Oneness Consciousness is not comparable to others inasmuch as it's without limitations or conditions, and yet we must cultivate, experiment, and evolve to this transcendent level that is unlike our usual conditions. Somehow the unconditional category exists within and in a relationship to conditional experiences: we can get there from here because there and here are the same reality.

In other words, the oneness that revelation proclaims, asserts to be our true and ultimate state is accessed at least initially from our less-than-complete state because perfection is concealed, contained, somehow fully present for the recognizing even from within this apparently incomplete condition of awareness ---so long as we have revelation. The Kashmir Shaivite's non-dualism means that they will insist that our usual states and the one transcendent realization are not different in essence but only once we achieve this unique accomplishment. And, importantly, revelation is a crucial piece of that process: we receive what we seek but not without the revelation that must find us. We're still left to wonder how something like the state of oneness recognition is by definition nothing like what we can access without it and yet is nothing but what we are currently experiencing, albeit without knowing we do. Neo, did you take your red pill this morning?

So what's the big deal about a revelation that posits a one-of-a-kind attainment? First, it isolates because, well, you either have it or you don't and there is no way anyone who doesn't have it can even imagine what such a person is feeling, thinking, being. Patanjali is wise to call his transcendence kaivalya, which means isolation in the sense of uniqueness. His Purusha is not like anything else. Shankara is content to say that the state (which he says is not a state at all) he purports to be ultimate is verified by the Veda, which also is the source of its revelation, since others have already reached it. Unity is self-verifying because it is self-validating; nothing in the realm of our ephemeral experiences can be compared to this supreme knowledge. Darn mystical, if you ask me. And not much help with understanding what we would do next. I mean, get it and then? For some this sort of mysticism works as an inspiration as well as an aspiration that tells us reality is more than we could ever account for ---even as it must somehow enter our accounts. The mystical goal can create a powerful incentive to live even if the attainment is by definition not to be confused with such incentive, always beyond the horizon. Surely this supreme is nothing like this mundane, suffering ebb and flow of desires. That's the gist of the yogins who posit the unique enlightenment.

The classic Kashmir Shaivite vision is, in a sense, even more mystical since it purports to create in us a state of awareness, the attainment of Shiva Consciousness that the realized yogin carries back into the world without the slightest alteration. Abhinvava and his followers are relentless in their assertion that the enlightened being is in a state that never subsides, alters, grows, or changes even for the better because there is "none higher" (anuttara) or, it seems, without the slightest difficulty with respect to re-entering the ordinary world of change, desire, life, and death. Immune, invulnerable, and exempt, such a siddha carries on in the world but to what end? In their view the realized yogin who is "beyond the pairs of opposites" is perfect and in the most important ways no longer part of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Abhinavagupta even explains that when such yogins grow old and dotty their inner state remains immaculate, perfectly perfect. (I won't stop to make that citation but refer you to Poised for Grace, Anusara Books, 2009).

We can say this for sure about Abhinavagupta that puts him in league with both the classical yoga of Patanajali and Shankara Advaita Vedanta: all of them claim an attainment, call it "enlightenment" even if such a state would suggest at least three entire different concepts of enlightenment--- that is precisely commensurate and consistent with their respective views of revelation. This means that the power of the revelation, which conveys or invites an opening to truth that is unlike any other, is in some sense identical with the attainment of that truth, the enlightenment. To wit, revelation equals enlightenment at least insofar as this means that the source in the sense of the font or the locus of truth is unique and so is the goal. You can't have two unique things; that's even more untenable than just one.

As Appa explained the Rajanaka Tantra he made clear that one-of-a-kind-revelation raised a host of issues that are only solved if you are willing to begin with a kind of faith that there is a mystical experience at the end of the process and that whatever-is-defined-as "enlightenment" confers special powers on the person who achieves it, meaning that it's self-verifying. You have to be able to say, "The sages got it" and then "I got it" and that's that. What happens after this depends on who you ask but suffice it to say there are as many ideas about that as there are versions of enlightenment. Abhinavagupta and the other Kashmir Shaivites give us a kind of fluent-in-the-world but utterly impervious, even aloof from its concerns sorta' siddha who moves graciously, even compassionately in any and every context. But the key point can never be less than until-you-achieve-realization you aren't really siddha-fluent in the world.

So what about these issues? Well, let's begin with this: in every usual case in which we say something happened only once or that there is something unique, we mean that such things are false. As Appa put it, if something can't happen twice then we know it didn't happen once. But those who claim the uniqueness that is revelation and enlightenment (ironic that's two things, no?) insist such one-of-a-kind thing(s) do happen more than once (sages of yore got it, we can get it) and, in fact, that our potential enlightenment though it's nothing like our ordinary experience must be nothing other than the enlightenment all other sages attained. This too must be self-verifying since the rest-of-us-non-enlightens don't yet know it yet. But in the way we usually think we know things, we want to be able to verify together rather than in our isolation. How would we know (experience, realize, you pick) we're not just deluded or suffering from too beautiful a mind?

The real culprit in claims about revelation being a qualitatively different source of knowledge from our usual empirical sources, flawed as they may be, is that their purpose in yoga traditions is to lay claim to the idea of an enlightenment. One can wish away the difference among the claimants as a feature of our unenlightened state, that is, say that there could only be a dispute about what constitutes "real" enlightenment before we are enlightened; simply put, enlightenment makes all differences evaporate into so much duality. But this isn't really what happens in the texts. There we find the yoga philosophers arguing for their own versions of enlightenment and not the least bit inhibited to explain that others' versions are, well, wrong or incomplete or preliminary or somehow flawed in yet another way. Again, the culprit is the uniqueness of attainment, which can only be self-verified in one's isolation with all those other folks who are similarly isolated: it's like you have to join the Real Enlightenment Club to know what it is you really got.

In Rajanaka there is no final enlightenment because there is no uniqueness. The Rajanaka see the expanding universe as always creating more but also understand that the idea of a singular state, a uniqueness really does nothing more than hand us back duality...uhh, of the unenlightened sort. In other words, we have to say not-enlightened/enlightened as if these were before and after or that the enlightened state somehow solves all conflicts, challenges, inconsistencies, whatever. Ahh, the magic bullet and the Sourcer's Stone all in one!

But if there is no goal, no finality, no end, as the Rajanaka say, then what is there for us yogins? Well, there is always more: that is the definition of Shri. Perhaps what we seek isn't oneness at all but rather the paradoxical possibility that the One that is the universe is never without it's own duality (advaya) and so an invitation to comparison. How such a notion might involve a concept of revelation placed in the context of experimentation and experience, we'll take that up again in a few days. For now, let's just enjoy the ride. And another run-on or is that incomplete sentence?

a rare phasmid

2009-02-01T16:56:00.003-05:00

My teacher possessed a rare, inveterate curiosity as natural as it was nurtured in his commitment to the Yoga Tantra. Appa saw this whole universe the subject and object of yoga; we gain insight and empowerment when we open to every side, every course of the arts and sciences, and apply ourselves entirely to body, mind, and heart. He often said there was never enough time to learn everything--- life's designed that way, a perfect ploy to remind us that playfulness is not the same as idleness--- but that every moment spent is made worthwhile when we give ourselves to it. Application is opening to grace, the capacity to receive and savor, nothing passive but rather a receptive power characteristic of nature herself and brought to imperfect perfection in the seeker.

From the outset I knew that every moment living in his house was valuable. I mean, it was obvious in the company of one so inspiring but still he encouraged me "to read more than Sanskrit and our studies" and knew he needn't admonish me to discipline. I liked the work, in truth more than anything, maybe too much. Liking something too much is, of course, a definition of addiction (or at least a part) and Appa knew the difference between addictions and commitments. I was occasionally commanded, inasmuch as he ever commanded me to anything, to take a break so that I might sustain a more healthy commitment. This was a curious counsel given Appa's own tireless efforts, always thirsty to learn and eager to consider "how She is revealing Herself, always making more of Herself, always inviting us to greater depths of appreciation and understanding."

"She" is the Shakti: the indomitable Power that is the universe, the pervasive and recursive energy of the Auspicious making Herself known by concealing Her nature in processes of human experience. The world is Power infinitely layering reality into forms we interpret through the prism of that Power becoming our own consciousness. We participate in that circle of Power as awareness, not a vicious circle from which we must escape but rather a recursive one that invites us to act within its cycles of revelation and concealment and to become the agent, the one who feels and knows and chooses the power of desire. Every subject then is our subject when every object is too nothing but the Shakti.

One morning I found Appa buried in a book I'd bought in the market in Madurai for a rare diversion. It was a companion volume to a series of naturalist films by Sir David Attenborough. At least that's my recollection: a book with fantastic photography and descriptions featuring wonders of nature as benign and beautiful as hummingbirds and as dangerous and horrific as parasitic worms that bore through our eyes. Appa saw something important in all of these expressions of the Shakti's power. "Each somehow knows what it wants. Each seeks its interests so brilliantly, so creatively."

But the creature Appa most admired was a rare phasmid, a kind of walking stick sometimes called the ghost insect. The phasmid hides itself in plain sight--- it looks more like a stick than most sticks and can wave gently back and form, perhaps for crypsis, that's its power to avoid observation, and perhaps because it just does. The phasmid is itself the crypsis-- it doesn't adopt a camouflage, it is its camouflage--- and uses this advantage both actively as a predator and receptively to avoid its predators. "Something like the Tantrika," Appa quipped. Since I didn't understand he took the opportunity to explain.

It's not uncommon that Tantrics create their own crypsis, sometimes to mask secrets, at other times to procure some other advantage. Every creature seeks its own advantage. Why should yogins be different? But the Tantrika needn't adopt a camouflage or put on a cloak to conceal what is underneath. Rather, we can wear our true nature and that provides the crypsis. We hide only as ourselves in plain sight but go unnoticed because the world isn't looking for phasmids anymore than it cares for sticks. So it is, Appa said, for all yogins and seekers truly, not just for Tantrikas. The powers of awareness continue to reveal our search on the inside even as our outer form creates its natural crypsis. So we go unnoticed. Well, with any luck. Like the phasmid.

But hasn't the ghost insect become the stick to deceive its prey and to avoid becoming prey? Of course, but this too is its natural interest. How does this apply to the Tantric yogin, I asked.

You will notice, Appa said, that the phasmid follows its nature and pursues its interests without enmity, without anger, without pride. Yet it flourishes because it has adapted and its success speaks clearly for itself. So too the Tantric seeker as one envisioning life, as a philosopher makes a case to express values and preferences, crafts arguments to hone insights, and never eschews the company of those who possess contrary views. You must become, as it were, natural in all company. Without enmity there is no adversary, without anger there is no place for pride to take root, and then no need to persuade, to prove, or offer reproof. What is left? Desires and hopes, interests, curiosities, and aspirations, and what is gone as much invites awareness as it re-creates the circle of possibilities. Krishna reminds the seeker in the Bhagavadgita [2/29], "it is by rare chance that one sees this, a rarity too if proclaimed; a rare chance that someone hears this and even if hearing this that one knows."

in the forest of the tillai trees

2009-01-06T15:17:00.010-05:00

We first met a long time ago when I was just twenty. Somewhere I have photos of us both together in Madurai where he came to bless the marriage of my teacher's daughter and also, of course, in Cidambaram. Ananda Kunchitapada Dikshitar is a hereditary priest of the Sabaranaya Nataraja Temple, the great Shiva temple of Cidambaram in south India, the temple as it is said in Tamil, the place devoted principally to the Dancer, the Lord of the Universe who brought with Him the three thousand of the Tillai forest, the clan called Dikshitars, the ones who still serve Him in this ancient place. My south Indian family calls Ananda Kunchitapada "Dikshitar Mama," that's Uncle Dikshitar in Tamil, and while he is not much older than myself, perhaps only ten years, time has taken its toll on uncle's health. Some years back he suffered a stroke leaving the right side of his body virtually paralyzed and forever changing his relationship to his beloved temple. He can no longer manage the short walk across the road or perform the charges of a temple priest and so he stays at home, performing his rites in private and studying the lore of Cidambaram and the teachings of Rajanaka Sammelana. Still he carries in the wrap of his dhoti that small familiar container of vibhuti, the holy ashes, the most precious blessing a priest can offer to those who come to see the Dancing Lord. He will offer you some whenever you come to visit.

As my cousin Mani so aptly puts it, "It is very simple. If you love Nataraja then the Dikshitars surely love you." This has always been my experience and how much more keenly I felt it in my heart this time in the company of my dear, old friend. Kunchitapada is a gifted scholar, one of my own teacher's teachers, and it was his uncle Raja Ratna Dikshitar who enabled and empowered our further understanding of Rajanaka Sammelana, the Shrividya, and the very peculiar, distinctive teachings of the great Nataraja temple. How many times did Ananda Kunchitapada care for me and my beloved Appa as we stood before Nataraja, receiving the blessings of darshan, and guiding our passage through the temple's labyrinth shrines? I remember vividly Kunchitapada's lithe and supple form, seeing him slip invisibly into the inner sanctum of the golden shelter to recite the mantras of offering, pull aside the curtain to reveal the invisible god, the Secret called Cidambaram Rahasyam, and return from the lamp lit chamber with gifts of prasad and always more holy ashes, gifts that can only come from one born Dikshitar and gifts freely given to those who come to offer love to the Dancer.

When we stopped again this morning, December 26th, to see Dikshitar Mama at his home on the East Car Street not far from the temple's gate, all was much as it was during my last visit two years ago. Many Dikshitar houses begin as virtually unseen doorways at the street, opening into long hallways to a warren of rooms where extended families share the close-knit traditions and customs that define the clan's unique claims of service to Nataraja's temple. But ours was to be only the briefest of visits. I had brought with me two dear friends, students of mine I should say, and while I would have liked to have brought all twenty-eight who had come on his pilgrimage to Cidambaram, I didn't want to overwhelm uncle Dikshitar. Really I had come merely to pay my respects and to let him know that the teachings he had so graciously shared with me over these years continued to evolve in the hearts and minds of some born half a world away.

But no sooner had we sat for a moment together than he began to teach again. I had mentioned to him that the previous day we'd been blessed with the performance of an elaborate Rudra Homa in the courtyard, the Cit Sabha of the great temple, performed by more than a dozen of his colleagues and other Brahmins, where I had been honored as the yajamana, the ritual protagonist representing our group. He smiled, pleased that we'd made our offering and explained that at the very time we were in the temple, he was performing his own private rites, according to the very secret sources meant to complement and parallel those done in public. He sorted out matters of canon, asked me if I understood his meaning, and if my two friends too were students of mantra, mudra, and yantra. My eyes teared as I watched Uncle try to twist his paralyzed hand into the seal of the guru. And then with a wide smile said in Tamil, "I should tell you? You know all this!" "Hardly so," I replied, "and so much of what I learned I gathered from you, Uncle." "Ah yes. But it was Sundaramoorthy, your Appa. He was the one. He knew like so few have ever known." And so ended our interview. I promised we would return. My friends and I asked to peform our pranams, and made our prostrations before the great man. And I felt again as I did those many years ago, privileged to know such a fine and gifted yogin, such a beautiful, profound soul, treated as his family and honored by him because, like so many thousands before me for generations and centuries, I had come to offer my love and respects to his Lord, the Dancer, the One clothed in the Sky of Infinite Consciousness, here in the forest of the tillai trees, in the ancient city of Cidambaram.

savoring the unfinished

2008-12-11T02:44:00.013-05:00

Yoga traditions have traditionally placed a premium on notions of accomplishment and attainment, evolving a rich, complex vocabulary to describe feats of completion, fulfillment, and ultimacy. Beginning with verbal roots like /ap, /sidh or /sadh, /labh, and /kram, we find myriad Sanskrit terms ---such as prapta, siddhi, labha, krama, etc.--- derived to mean or imply ideas of gaining, obtaining, procuring, progressing, accomplishing, and, finally and most significantly, perfecting. However seriously invested they may be in method or process, most yogas are committed to final goals definitively, if not always clearly defined.

An account of what we are supposed to get, receive, or obtain, what is normative to the process and, at the very least, a collection of key words describing the finality, these things are critically important. Though ultimacy may be deemed ineffable there is rarely a shortage of nominal descriptions for whatever defines such transcendence of the mundane. While it may be that ultimacy is beyond the range of ordinary description or that it is necessarily mysterious (paroksha), it is nonetheless established (nishta) and "ever-perfect" (nityasiddha) and fully "cooked" (pakva).

Yoga has always been about experimentation, efficacy, and outcomes we can measure, take stock of, and presumably re-create. I know of no yoga tradition that believes otherwise: we are here to cultivate the prospects that come with the gifts of human embodiment. After all, why would we do anything that promises results without some reasonable expectation of the difference betweeen before and after, here and there, this and that? Ultimacy looks to have ultimate value: that is, it must be the most important thing we can achieve because it is, by definition, the last (apavarga, apunarbhava meaning "not occurring again"). If a goal is final then it must also be somehow the same each time it is reached and universal to our experience--- so that all of us reach that very it.

Ultimacy must be true in the sense that it remains so and its attainment, being once and for all (sampanna), can't permit change. Whether we are talking about moksha, nirvana, buddhahood, or the state of the siddha, it's fair to say that the vast majority of yoga traditions mean to distinguish such feats from all others that can be altered or even further advanced; what is final doesn't co-mingle nor should it be confused with any other sort of success that much be deemed inferior for its mutability.

Even the Kashmir Shaivites, smitten with the visionary Tantra that commits affirmatively to the reality of the everyday world spinning with (vivarta) apparent differences and reflecting (abhasa) the source of illuminative power (praskasha), insist that it is only when we reach the singularity of consciousness, when we re-cognize ourselves as unified and so none other than Shiva Himself that we can re-join diversity without suffering from the unfortunate taints on awareness that will otherwise consign us to rebirth. In short, they say we gotta' get it or suffer the consequences of not getting it, and so our life's goal is to experience our ultimate freedom, to become enlightened, taste our liberation, albeit not necessarily from the world but surely from within and yet unbound (abaddha, udbandha, unnahana) by worldliness.

So it's fair to ask: do all yoga traditions maintain an enlightenment principle that asserts a version of finality, a finishing off of samsara, lasting liberation (atimukti, carama)?

Let's leave aside for a moment (well, maybe forever) the question how there could be more than one such finality if the goal is truly last and singular. I mean, since there isn't one answer that suits all schools, are they in disagreement over the true finality or somehow all saying the "same" thing? The latter poses no plausible solution, only another nominal assertion. But so long as there is finality, there is truth that does not change ---that too is purely definitional to the claim. I do think that all the yoga traditions I've ever encountered have some notion that our awareness invites cultivation, degrees and so different kinds of attainment. And what would happen if truth were ultimately not final or if we just began with that possibility?

In the view of the Rajanaka, albeit perhaps a minority of one among yogas in this respect, we find no claim made for a final, conclusive, singular, or ultimate attainment. There is instead an evolving (ayana, gatu, prasara), ascending (abhyarodha), growing (anuvrdha, bhuyobhava) state of appreciation, a deepening capacity to savor (asvada) the flavors that hasten near (abhipada, abhitas), that approach our elemental nature but remain asymptotic to the goal, the proximate essential (rasa, svadu, vipaka) we experience as living and moving, as Consciousnss becoming more expressive of itself. We have been given the opportunity in human embodiment to participate in this process of relentless energy taking infinite form but can no more reduce or reach it than we can contain or prevent it from being itself. We are that, we can accept such a reality as more than ourselves, receive its nature, and learn to live as it but we cannot make it do something ---like stop or start--- that it does not seem itself to do. It is the nature of the universe to become and it is Consciousness that never ceases to conceal more in order to reveal itself as the universe we experience.

Ultimacy in the Rajanaka view is encoded with the primacy of the feminine divine: the Shakti isn't a power beyond reach or a transcendent unapproachable but rather the universe itself dynamic, trembling ever so slightly (alola), bending (abhugna), even crooked (krukta, vikrokti) or curled about itself in a round twist (kutila, kundalini). Such a conceptual loom weaves the form of a dancer and of course Her counterpart Shiva Nataraja whose masculinity is similarly twisted in the profound embrace of the feminine, not as mere complement but as fully (un)contained paradox. The only oneness as such to attain is fractal recursively expansive, and ceaselessly unrestricted by any boundary of beginning or end. We don't achieve these gods but we can do what they do.

As my teacher once explained: if oneness were an attainment we would need to presume either an original state to which we could somehow return or a finality within a universe whose boundaries are naturally expanding. What beginning is ever first? What conclusion has no afterward? We can move with the current (anusara, dhara) that tremble or sway (pracalana), and naturally resist containment; we can align, float, or even sustain a presence that joins in this augmentation, escalation, and continuing process of becoming but we don't achieve or acquire what the Rajanaka tells us is always inviting more, an opening (or a pulsation to narrow), an effulgence of power that is complete in incompleteness. It is truly a dance, not a goal; a serpentine pulsation without resolution, without point or purpose other than itself, a perfectly imperfect offering.

There is nothing to prove nor destination to reach and so perhaps we aren't born to get it but instead merely to revel with its unfinishedness, an incomplete dance, without a reason other than its own innately ecstatic play. We aren't here because we failed last time to find the solution to bondage, resolve redeath, or overcome rebirth but rather to become the point the universe has been making all along. We are here as play and, if we choose, to play with the freedom that binds us only to itself. Savor the unfinished.

the greatest certainty is only the most certain possibility

2008-11-26T12:57:00.000-05:00

In Sanskrit the word "sammelana" means meeting, mingling, collection ---a coming together. It might nowadays even be translated "blogspot" but for the ways in which privacy, sometimes secrecy, has played a part in traditional learning and communication. So it's not without some trepidation that I embark on this effort to collect and comment before any willing eyes. Even the most reticent of the gifted Tantric yogins called Rajanaka have over the centuries accepted the invitation to offer experiences in words, their most cherished expression of the matrka-sakti, the divine powers of speech. And were it not for their shameless passion for language and the admonitions of their audience, what would we know of the great teachings and practices of Tantric yoga and the visionary power of Indian spirituality, art, and science?

I can make no comparison between these ruminations forthcoming and the work of such heroic spiritual ancestors but I've thought for a long while now that it would be worthwhile to offer something more about what I learned and experienced over the past thirty-odd years of study and practice, and also to answer a few queries from friends and make the off-hand comment that wanders, as I am want to do, across boundaries, topics, and curiosities.

The Rajanaka were polymaths and seekers of truth, as suspicious of certainty as they were eager to make ignorance an opportunity to learn, evolve, and cultivate something better. They spoke very little about themselves and like all great souls they were likely greater in legend than they were in person. My own teacher, I am convinced, invited me to live as a member of his family in his home in south India and with all that intimacy might afford not only to grant me my deepest wish ---to keep the company of greatness--- but to reveal to me his humanity, his foibles and moods, to show me what it is like to live fully in the gift of embodiment. What we have today of the ancient Rajanaka presence is now in their words and in the living possibilities of our sammelana, our connection and conversation.

When I last met with my teacher Rajanaka Sundaramoorthy shortly before his death in 1994 I asked him what he sought, what he had wanted for himself, and what he wanted from our relationship that had evolved over our sixteen years together.

"I wanted only someone to talk to. The gift of embodiment lies in the conversation. In the sammelana we are born to unfold the beauty of creating yet more sammelana. Born into freedom to experience our freedom: freedom is no more an attainment of yoga than liberation is from this body. So what more there is to life lies in our deepest intimacy, our willingness to share our hearts, our thoughts, our presence with honesty and candor, with authenticity and light, with a desire to listen and to offer our experiences. We are born to savor, for the ashvada, for deepening our experience of what we share as human beings. The immortal has chosen this mortal form not so that we might transcend it but rather revel in its possibilities. What we achieve in our collective, in our conversation, in our intimacies is incomparably greater than anything we do by ourselves in isolation. We exult in the achievements of the individual but how much greater are these offerings when we engage them with open minds and generous hearts? That is the hope and the power of sammelana."

Writing without a shard of vanity or pretension is like ambition disavowing its own worth ---there would be no merit from the outset if we didn't think there was something more we thought important or interesting to say. Humility doesn't mean inhibition, how much less false self-deprecations? What's worse than someone saying they can't when you know they can? How does that ever make things better? If we aren't willing to step into the fray, to become virya, just a bit heroic then the worst we must admit about our failings is that we didn't even try. The good news is, I think, that we needn't, indeed we mustn't go it alone. There's more in a conversation than we've ever imagined.

In the Tantric traditions we are often told that the written word mandates conversation. The Kaulavalinirnaya Tantra [1/20ff] offers a typical and bluntly unconciliatory reproach to our learning without appreciation for rapport: "A fool, as usual motivated by self-indulgence, acting after merely looking the matter up in a book and without engaging an experienced teacher, will not only fail but take others with him." Make no mistake: there's no disdain for book-learning here but rather an insistence upon our humanity, our engagement with the living, the present, the creativity of meaning through the power of dialectic. We're not being asked to submit to another but to know the value of deference and the necessity of bringing experiences into the mid-line, the madhya, that place in between that can only happen when we participate with each other's narrative and contribute to an enduring conversation. And as my teacher so often put it, "This could take some time."

If we want to discuss the spirituality of the contemplative Tantra, rooted in the histories of Kashmir Shaivism, south Indian Srividya, and especially the lineage my teacher called Rajanaka ---and that will be our staple as we evolve the discussion of these teachings--- we will need each other. For my part I will do my best to remember as the Kularnava Tantra (17/4) puts it, "the Tantra is enclosed in the heart of the yoginis." This means we will rely as much upon the cintamani, the "jewel" that is the oral tradition brought forth in dialogue, as we do upon the original sources, their interpretations, and our own experiences. There really is no other way for us to evolve; for what we might accomplish, embedding ourselves in the greater embrace of the conversation, holds no comparison to our singular involutions.

Beside the image of Shiva Nataraja in the sanctum of the temple at Cidambaram in south India is another image, the sammelana, also knows as the cidambaram-rahasya, the "secret clothed in Consciousness," or even "the mystery held in the sky of Consciousness." It is considered even more sacred than the Dancing Lord Himself, concealed by a curtain and obscured by a rain of golden bilva leaves, it is said to be everything and nothing at all, the answer we seek and the all of possibilities that never ceases to question, the source that chooses certainty and uncertainty woven by the loom of its own paradox manifesting reality. It is a darkness and a light, a mirror of the Self present in all beings and a prism that fractures awareness into more, an opening to forever and the past, a place to stand before the infinite so that we might gather the courage to imagine our mortal purpose. It was there, before the Collective that is Consciousness, the sammelana-cakra, that my teacher first invited me to pose the question that has since motivated my every pursuit: "Ask for your heart's desire. But let the sammelana decide."