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?

a rare phasmid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

in the forest of the tillai trees

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

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

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

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

savoring the unfinished

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the greatest certainty is only the most certain possibility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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