So slippery and cunning are basic ignorance and the ego that they are surrounded and protected by deep irrational emotions. It is the yoga of love, or bhakti, that directly addresses emotions. Deep inside the core of the body lie our very deepest feelings and emotions, and until this depth of our being is addressed, those emotions will act subversively to distract us from genuine practice and from life itself. Left unattended, at some point these deep feelings will sabotage even our most noble endeavors. Bhakti acknowledges all of these profound emotions, and it resolves them through ecstatic love, the nature of which is that you become most happy when the beloved is happy. The real beloved—the actual other being—is outside of the circle of your ego and outside of the categories of your knowledge. When practicing bhakti yoga your own happiness is not the focus of your attention because right at the center of your own being is another being: the beloved. Likewise, at the very, very center of the heart of the beloved is not the beloved, but rather there is another. In the metaphor of the Bhagavad Gītā, deep in the very heart of Kṛṣṇa lies everybody else, and Kṛṣṇa becomes ecstatic through making others happy. At the same time, deep in the heart of the devotee is Kṛṣṇa, so the devotee becomes joyous merely by experiencing the delight of Kṛṣṇa. In a sense both are selfless because they have identified with the other at their own core. In bhakti yoga what you find is something like a selfless, perpetual motion machine in which two bright mirrors face each other. As one sees the happiness of the other expanding, one’s own happiness blossoms; and when the other apprehends that expansion of happiness in the heart of the other, the other too become ecstatic. The result is an unlimited expansion of consciousness in the form of pure unadulterated joy. This is called ānanda. The word da means “to give.” So, it is actually by giving to the beloved that happiness comes.
We might question what this pathless path of bhakti or love actually is. The mind, seeing that there is something of great value in bhakti, wants to hold it, to package it, maybe to even sell it. Doing what the mind does best, it reduces the beloved to an image of the beloved. This is exactly what Arjuna wanted: to reduce the universal form of Kṛṣṇa to one single form, when in fact Kṛṣṇa was an unending generation of divine forms. In reducing the beloved to a single form, we become idolaters. In the process of doing so, the most central, liquid current of pure love is extinguished, and we fall back into the mere reflections of what love or bhakti is. Bhakti can very easily degenerate into idolatry and a type of exclusive religious fundamentalism that produces a kind of suppressed disdain and sustained hatred for everybody else except for the beloved—or more accurately, the image of the beloved. Kṛṣṇa is not just a big ego who won the ego game that all beings play. Kṛṣṇa is without “self” at the center of his heart. This lack of self in the supreme Self is ironic, but it is what opens all of the connections of the great network of all beings.
The final teaching that Kṛṣṇa gives to Arjuna is to “abandon in all ways all dharmas and just come to Me as refuge. I will liberate you from all wrongs; do not worry.” In other words, let all dharmas be. As we know, dharma has many meanings. In one light it is considered to be religious obligation, duties, and formulations. But dharmas are not just the correct path; they are also the mental factors, the background principles and the elements that create and structure your immediate experience. Give them up, let them go; none of them are absolute. Again, this reflects back and can be understood clearly in light of the Sāṁkhya system’s notion that all of the layers of prakṛti are context dependent and empty of a separate self. Earth, water, fire, air, and space are not what are really important. Nor is the buddhi all that important and special. So if you want to really do yoga, to give up the patterning of your mind as well as your immediate sense perceptions and feelings, the key is not a technique. The key is merely to accept and trust the essence of love, the essence of your own direct relationship with the beloved. Imagine that Kṛṣṇa was serving Arjuna tea in a cup. The tea is the love, it is the juice, the real message. The cup, of course, is the container. You need the cup in order to serve the scalding hot tea; having it without a cup just does not work. It could be a paper cup or a fancy porcelain cup, whatever serves as the vehicle for delivering the tea will do. Arjuna is fascinated by the container, thinking that the cup is what is important, but Kṛṣṇa tells him, “Taste the tea, Arjuna! Don’t worry about the cup.” The direct experience of whatever is being presented (in this case the tea) is what is of import. This too is prakṛti, which forms the language, the paper, and the ink for the message. The specific language, the techniques, the forms and images all depend on something else—the context. They will all change, as will the body and the factors that caused prakṛti and the world itself to arise.
“Simply come to me” assumes that one’s heart is open and that, therefore, the beloved is very accessible. The teaching of the Bhagavad Gītā is not really a formula or a technique, but is instead the teaching that love allows the refinement of a multiplicity of techniques and practices that, like the maṇḍala of prakṛti, fold into each other and transform into the indescribable, ineffable experience of the present moment. It is the teaching of who we really are. The Bhagavad Gītā is a fantastic tool—not to be kept on the shelf as an idol but to be read, to be wrestled with, to be reread, consumed, digested, and released.
7
Tantra and the Radiant Earth
Crying sounds of cuckoos, mating on mango shoots
Shaken as bees seek honey scents of opening buds,
Raise fever in the ears of lonely travelers—
Somehow they survive these days
By tasting the mood of lovers’ union
In climaxing moments of meditation.
—Gītā Govinda of Jayadeva, I. 36
When we understand that the essence of yoga is that of pure love, pure bhakti, it is natural to think that this is exactly what we want to do; to give up everything else and discover pure love. But then we find ourselves wondering how to actually go about doing so using our body and mind. Even though the senses and the mind may have given us a flash of insight into the teaching of bhakti, we are confounded by the task of deciding exactly what action to take in order to act in a way that reflects pure love. So the mind does what it does best: it begins to categorize, theorize, attach itself to ideas, and as it does this we encounter the danger of feeding our own ego as we imagine we are following the path of yoga. Using the mind, the senses, and the ego to realize yoga is like asking a bull to fix the porcelain it just knocked off the shelf; there is a very real danger that the bull will make an even greater mess. In our practice of yoga, however, we have no choice but to use ourselves as we search for insight.
The true practice of yoga cannot occur until all aspects of experience throughout the day and night are attended to with singular intention and devotion. All of the things that you do, everything that constitutes real life can be yoga. Otherwise our actions and the events of our life become distractions and pockets in which the ego can hide. For example, cooking and eating can become part of the practice or a great escape from it. Imbalanced eating, from gorging with junk food to punishing the body with a salad diet, is a common and effective way for the ego to sabotage yoga. Alternatively, food can be selected, handled, and prepared as if it were a way of benefiting or communicating with the beloved, a means of connecting sensually with pure awareness directly through your taste buds. The practice becomes one in which while tasting food you might think, “The beloved within me is tasting this offering through me, and the food itself is the supreme deity.” The same concentration and awareness can be brought to walking, running, working, thinking, and even to pleasures like love and relaxation. This same depth of devotion can be carried out with every breath, every thought, and in every situation when practicing yoga. When we find that our need to practice yoga and meditation has come to every aspect of the inner and outer worlds, the time is here to dip into the vast ocean of what is called ta
ntra—the experiential unveiling of reality.
Tantra is one of those exciting buzzwords that catches the ear and invokes images of the sensual, exotic, and the mysterious. Complex occult rituals, magic spells, and touching the dark side of things are associated with tantra. Yet a broad look at the many schools, practices, and philosophies of tantra show a bright and beautiful side, essential for a yoga student to know. Tantra means extending a thread or a weaving of threads; it also implies the stretching out on a loom of connections in order to form an interpenetrating network or a matrix. Tantra forms a vast complex of specific practices and rituals done in endless detail to sanctify every particular of our experience. Within the matrix of tantric practices the worship of feminine deities is dominant, since in Vedic culture the main deities were male deities. Tantra not only rhymes with, but its meaning overlaps with that of the words mantra and yantra. Mantras are vibrant chants that bring us into heightened awareness and concentration; yantras are geometric forms, which are drawn or visualized to aid concentration. Within the various schools of tantra we do not find any unique philosophical point of view, nor do we find any idea that is not already expounded upon in other more orthodox schools. Hence it is difficult to explain the history of tantra. In a sense it can be said that tantra is a composite of all of those practices and views that are on the borderline between various yoga philosophies. It has become the language of exchange between different schools of practice.
Thousands of years ago in the age of the early Upaniṣads and of the Buddha, there were many people practicing yoga, experimenting with different techniques and various approaches in order to understand the meaning of reality. Gradually these methods evolved into schools of philosophical understanding as practitioners discussed their practices, their philosophies, and experiences—perhaps in the marketplace or over a meal. It was in that world, where the schools actually met each other—in the alleys between the various ashrams—that tantra flowed. Tantra is like a lingua franca, the currency of exchange between schools. It is where practice and experience count, where the concern is not so much to establish a historical school, a cult, or a religion that dominates others. Instead tantra is the basket from which various schools of philosophy and practice arise, just as it is the ocean into which all of this variety of practice and thought eventually returns. There is a natural evolution that occurs within the process of all philosophical thinking: as the streams of thought deepen and the ideas ripen, different schools appear to accommodate the innovative insights at hand. Sometimes, because the ideas are so complex and rich, even perhaps controversial, new systems evolve into secret, occult, diverse schools of practice in the same way tantric practices and thought have evolved within the yoga tradition. As is true with most of these offshoot schools, including tantra, to an outsider some of the practices and streams of thought may seem extreme or outlandish. However, tantric ideas are not designed for their eccentricity; rather they are constructed to be fully absorbing as a means of bringing every ounce of practitioners’ attention into the essence, the juice, of whatever is arising before them. If you meet someone who is a truly devout tantric, you will discover a practitioner uniquely themselves, fully enmeshed in the world, fully focused with a dedication to just doing the practices as a method of tapping into the deep beauty and joy of liberation for themselves and for others. This form of awakening is the nectar, the juice, of real tantric practice.
Within Indian philosophy the term rasa is used when describing nectar of the aesthetic experience. Rasa, which literally means “juice” or “essence,” refers to relationships between people and things and to the different moods and types of beauty and joy that are formed. The different rasas serve to absorb the mind into deep meditation. A very tangible and literal experience of rasa flows out of the different sacrifices and pūjās performed for the pleasure of the deities in temples. In these rituals the priests chant, offer incense, and bathe statues of the deities in mixtures of milk, honey, water, yogurt, and other liquids. Having flowed over the deity, the liquids are then a sacred drink. This rasa, which sometimes is channeled to flow in a spout out of the temple, is collected so that the devotees may drink it as part of their practice. Tantra is often considered equivalent to this ritualistic rasa, because in its higher forms it focuses on the direct aesthetic experience and the metaphorical juice of ecstatic concentrated emotions generated from successful practices and meditations. The nature of all liquid, of course, is that it will take on the shape of whatever container in which it is held, but the liquid itself is not actually the shape of the container. So tantric philosophies and practices are simply containers for the delivery of the rasa, in essence the love, which is the nectar of liberation that flows forth through an authentic practice. This elixir—enlightenment—is actually what tantra is concerned with.
Nectar from the Moon (6)
One of the meanings of the word rasa is “relationship,” referring to the aesthetic pleasure coming from interfacing with another. The different rasas, or flavors, of love correspond to a strong feeling of luminous, intense, pleasurable joy, which seems to come from what is called the root of the palate. The root of the palate is located approximately at the pituitary gland, and is felt by releasing the soft palate as if subtly smiling. The quintessence of all of the rasas is called amṛta, or nectar. Its primary quality is compassion. The nectar drips down through the petals of the sahasrāra, the thousand-petaled lotus, to the reservoir just above the root of the palate called the moon. When mūla bandha, or yoni mudrā, is done well it causes nectar to drip from this moon and that nectar fills all of the nāḍīs, transforming one’s body and every sensation into the experience of consciousness and joy.
Taking a somewhat broader view we find that the teachings of haṭha yoga are actually tantric. In fact, it is said in the Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā that the kuṇḍalinī, the awakening of the power of the internal breath into the central channel of the body, is the foundation of all tantra. Since the underlying focus of tantra is this visceral experience of the present moment, tantric practices always remain something of a secret because the truth that lives in the central channel is subtle, elusive, and ultimately something each of us can experience only for ourselves. If we concur that the secret of tantra is to pay attention to what is actually arising in the present moment, then the mind says, “Oh! That sounds very simple” until we attempt to pay attention to what is actually occurring. Immediately we find that the conceptualizing mind, which is always externalizing experience by making theories, is unable to actually watch what is arising. The deep process that tantra taps into is an absorption of mind to the point that it can simply observe, without interfering, that which is unfolding. Tantra works, therefore, by ritualizing ordinary day-to-day sensual and mental experiences (sometimes in excruciatingly precise detail and degree) in order to stimulate and focus the mind, free of theory, on the immediate arising of feelings, thoughts, and sensations within any experience. By learning to tap small currents of rasa, derived from the skillful joining of opposites, there is a releasing of things and objects of the senses into their background. The practice is ultimately the same as in yoga and Sāṁkhya, but a tantric metaphor for practice would revolve around pleasurable juice extraction as opposed to merely mindful observation.
For example, through the use of mudrā, or the joining together of the fingers or hands into precise patterns (which is a classic tantric ritual), you can visualize and experience fully the divine goddess. You can imagine your thumbs as being different aspects of the body of the deity and through mantras and meditations on the sensations of your two thumbs touching, a connection to whatever is arising within your consciousness spontaneously occurs. The meditation can then be deepened through concentrating on the tips of the forefingers, middle, ring, and little fingers. The focus might then spread to the centers of the palms and deep into the nervous system, as through the practice you begin to ritualize various points of contact and the sensations throughout the entire bo
dy. All of these are simply techniques to help you wake up to the foremost secret that is right in front of your eyes all the time: that the world as it is being presented to us right here, right now is utterly sacred and mysterious. Our body and the world are the divine body and mind of the goddess. Through tantra and other forms of yoga we learn that paying close attention to whatever is arising reveals its inscrutable depths and leaves us in a state of awe with insight into the nature of mind and reality.
A popular metaphor in tantra is that of the play and interpenetration of the god Śiva and his consort Śakti. Their coming together is the basis of all experience and indeed of the whole of creation. Unlike the formal dualism in Sāṁkhya, a variety of different schools of nondualism allow Śiva and Śakti, Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā, and even puruṣa and prakṛti, to be two aspects of one pure consciousness. Then from being pure, free, contentless consciousness, Śiva penetrates and shines through Śakti. They appear as layered between each other, reacting to and inspiring one another. Each is selfless and is always finding his or her self in the other. They form mirrors of each other, and their relationship is the purest bhakti. They can be felt tangibly in our bodies as the interplay of prāṇa and apāna, the spin and counterspin that prāṇa and apāna produce in our limbs and our āsana practice. Prāṇāyama and āsana are both perfected when we let prāṇa and apāna squeeze together and interpenetrate in this kind of affectionate union.
The Mirror of Yoga Page 16
