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.

on this day

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

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

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?