This is not a dog.

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

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

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

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

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

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.