Kavitha Chinnaiyan Interview

Summary

The discussion explores the direct path, witnessing, and the distinction between awareness and the body-mind. It also examines the Goddess path, the sidelining of feminine wisdom, and how fierce divine imagery can reveal the full nature of creation and spiritual transformation.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What is the difference between the direct path and progressive spiritual paths?
• How can witnessing and awareness develop without becoming mental effort or detachment?
• What is the relationship between the observer, the observed, and pure awareness?
• What do the ten Mahavidyas symbolize in spiritual practice and human psychology?
• How can fierce or violent divine imagery be reconciled with the principle of nonviolence?

Key takeaways

• The direct path begins with the recognition that awareness is already our true nature.
• Direct inquiry is systematic and still requires preparation, practice, and honest examination.
• Genuine witnessing develops naturally through sustained meditation and cannot be faked.
• Everything experienced, including thoughts and emotions, is an object appearing to awareness.
• The Mahavidyas include both light and shadow rather than rejecting difficult aspects of life.
• Fierce goddess imagery can symbolize the ruthless forces of time, change, and liberation.
• Feminine spiritual wisdom has often been marginalized despite its important role in yogic traditions.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I have done hundreds of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu.

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My guest today is Kavitha Chinnaiyan, MD. She is a cardiologist—an integrative cardiologist—because she is also a meditation teacher, an expert in Ayurveda, and a Tantrika. She became drawn to the direct path through the teachings of Greg Goode, who has been on BatGap, and Sri Atmananda Krishnamenon. She has studied yoga, Sri Vidya sadhana, Vedanta, and Tantra through the teachings of the Chinmaya Mission, Sri Premananda, Sally Kempton, who has been on BatGap, Paul Mueller-Ortega, who has been on BatGap, and Sri Chaitanya Ananda Natasaraswati, who hasn’t been on BatGap.

She blends her expertise in cardiology with her knowledge of Ayurveda, yoga, Vedanta, and the direct path in her approach to healing, enabling patients to discover bliss amid chronic illness. She is an associate professor of medicine at Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine in Rochester, Michigan.

She is the author of Shakti Rising, published last year by Non-Duality Press, and The Heart of Wellness, which I don’t have a copy of, so I can’t hold it up. It’s coming out—or actually just coming out this month, or just came out. Which is it?

Kavitha: It just came out.

Rick: It just came out, and it’s more of a health-oriented book. Shakti Rising is subtitled “Embracing Shadow and Light on the Goddess Path to Wholeness.” First of all, welcome, Kavitha. Glad to have you.

Kavitha: Thanks so much for having me here, Rick.

🛤️ The direct and progressive paths

Rick: This is an interesting book. When you first glance at it, you see all these photos of Indian goddesses with skulls around their necks, drinking blood, cutting off heads, and all that stuff. You might think, “Firstly, I’m not a Hindu, and secondly, that’s all mythology and ooga-booga, and it doesn’t interest me that much.”

But if you actually read the book, as I have almost in its entirety, you discover that these archetypes are symbolic or representative of a very sophisticated and subtle understanding of the mechanics of creation. In fact, I bet you that if a qualified quantum physicist were to read this book, he or she could draw correlations between a lot of the things that Kavitha explains in it and his or her understanding of physics at the cutting edge of that discipline.

So it’s a credit to Kavitha, I think, for ferreting out the implications of these archetypes, and it’s also a credit to the tradition from which they come for understanding so deeply the mechanics of creation and portraying them in a sort of artistic or archetypal form, which probably most scholars have dismissed as quaint mythology, but which is really profound and significant.

Anyway, that’s a bit of a mouthful, but what do you think? Is that a fair assessment of what you intended to convey in the book?

Kavitha: Absolutely. That’s absolutely right on target.

Rick: Good. Another thing that struck me fairly soon in reading the book, and was actually mentioned in the bio that I just read, is “direct path.” I actually moderated a panel discussion on the direct versus progressive paths at the Science and Non-Duality Conference last October. I felt like, in reading your book and hearing your explanation of the direct path, I gained a much better understanding of what that term actually means, even though I prepared for and moderated that panel.

Maybe just for starters—we could start in many places—but why don’t you define what is meant by the direct path as contrasted with the progressive path?

Kavitha: The progressive paths are the paths that most of us are familiar with: yoga and Tantra, and even Vedanta to a large extent, because they start with the assumption that who we are is this limited body-mind, and that we are going toward a goal of remembering or discovering the Self.

Direct-Path Inquiry into Awareness

The direct path actually starts with the premise that we are already That. What happens if you stand in your direct experience, devoid of conditioning or stories? If you were just to look at your direct experience alone, what would that look like?

The direct path actually starts with the premise that we are already That. What happens if you stand in your direct experience, devoid of conditioning or stories? If you were just to look at your direct experience alone, what would that look like?

For instance, if you were to look at an object without any of the labeling that occurs regarding the object, what would happen to that object if we took a stand as the Self or awareness? The stand from which we approach a path is what determines whether it’s progressive or the direct path.

Ultimately, even in the progressive paths, at no point are we ever separate from awareness. We’re always That. It’s just that we begin with the goal seemingly in the future that we are going to discover That, whereas here we start with that premise already.

Rick: Is there an overlap? Is the direct path progressive, and is the progressive path—or can it be, in some respects—direct?

Kavitha: The direct path is very interesting because Greg, who is really my teacher in the direct path, will say that even to have arrived at the direct path, most people have done years of practice in the progressive paths.

It’s such a subtle thing to tell somebody who is not familiar at all with this and say, “Now take a stand as awareness.” That’s a very subtle thing. It makes sense only after years of having studied in the progressive paths. Suddenly, it makes sense.

Rick: That was actually going to be my question, because people hear about this and think, “Hey, why not the direct path? Why goof around for a decade? I just assumed, you know, get right on to it.”

Then you have all these people who have read some Vedanta books and so on, proclaiming themselves already enlightened, and saying that everybody’s already enlightened, that you don’t have to do anything, and so on, going on and on in Internet chat groups. I must admit that I developed a bit of a resentment or bias against that sort of angle. But anyway, go ahead.

Kavitha: I think it’s really important to clarify that the direct path isn’t Neo-Vedanta, which is what you were just—

Rick: Yeah, the Neo-Advaita.

Kavitha: Right, the Neo-Advaita, which is “There’s nobody to do anything.” It never says that. The direct path in the tradition of Sri Atmananda Krishnamenon never talks about any of that.

It’s just saying, “What is really happening in your direct experience right now?” It goes through a very systematic process of looking at the world, looking at our bodies, looking at objects of the senses, and so on, purely in the direct experience.

It’s tempting to think that the direct path is somehow going to be shorter. It isn’t. Just because it’s direct doesn’t mean that somehow you’re going to be enlightened in this moment. There is still a lot of work to do because taking a stand as awareness isn’t something that comes naturally to most of us. Taking a stand there and doing the inquiry is a process. It is progressive in that way.

Rick: When you say “taking a stand as awareness,” what comes to my mind is that many people might try to do that and end up being manipulative of their experience. They might be driving the car, shopping, or having a dinner conversation, while part of their mind is trying to take a stand as awareness as they’re doing that, which, in my understanding, would divide the mind and divide the attention and not be helpful.

Kavitha: Absolutely. This is not something that Greg says in his teachings of the direct path, but something that I feel as a long-term meditator and a proponent of meditation for various reasons.

Taking a stand as awareness actually becomes more natural when we have cultivated the witnessing ability, which is something that happens with a long-term, deep meditation practice. In the context of inner silence, that makes more sense. Otherwise, exactly as you said, we’re manipulating experience to think that we are standing as awareness, whereas actually it’s all mental noise.

Rick: When you say witnessing ability, I think of witnessing more as a natural condition that develops eventually rather than a skill that one acquires.

Kavitha: Absolutely.

Taking a stand as awareness isn’t something that comes naturally to most of us.

Rick: If witnessing is genuine, it’s not some attitude that one adopts or some manipulation that one tries to continue throughout the day. It’s just a way of being where you could be involved in dynamic activity, and yet there’s this pure silence and a very distinct sense of uninvolvement, because pure silence is uninvolved in activity.

It should ultimately, ideally, eventually persist throughout sleep. So you couldn’t manipulate that.

Kavitha: Yes, absolutely, and that can’t be faked. It can’t be adopted, as you said, but it’s something that naturally unfolds over a long-term meditation practice. Wouldn’t you agree, as a long-term meditator?

Rick: It does. I was interviewing a guy one time, and we got onto this topic. He said, “Oh, I can witness any time,” and then he said, “Here, watch. I’ll show you.” He kind of went into this spacey, detached sort of state, as if he wasn’t all there. I thought, “That’s not witnessing as I understand it.”

Kavitha: No, that’s not how I understand it either. This is the thing: I’m sure we’ll get into this, but Tantra is this science of absolute intimacy with experience. However, to get there, we first need to create that space between the subject and the object, which is what witnessing does.

We need that space in order to be able to look at our own processes. We need that space to stand back, and that’s really what witnessing provides over time.

Rick: Would you say that you, or one, does something to cultivate that space between subject and object, or would you say that that’s something one eventually notices after sufficient practice?

Kavitha: I think it just happens over time with a dedicated meditation practice. I say meditation practice because that’s what worked for me and works for the people I know and for the people I teach meditation to. There may be other things that work for other people, but this is something that I know works very effectively.

Rick: Just to clarify it a little more, when we say “subject” and “object,” what do you mean by subject? We know what we mean by objects—trees and dogs and everything—but what do you mean by subject, between which there is going to be a space between that and objects?

Kavitha: When we think about objects, traditionally we think of physical objects, like the table, the chair, the tree, and so on. But actually, everything that is experienced is an object.

Rick: Sure—a thought or—

Kavitha: A thought, emotion, any perception, any sensation—all of those things are really objects. But who are all these things occurring to? What is that? That is the subject. There is the sole subject, and everything appears to that subject. They’re all objects.

Rick: Yes, okay, so we could say that the mechanics of perception are such that there’s an observer, there’s the observed, and then there’s the process of observation. Right?

Kavitha: Yes, absolutely. The classic triad.

Rick: Right, and the process would involve the mind, the nervous system, the senses, and all that. So, what is that observer? It’s pretty easy to put your finger on the object or even the mechanics of perception. But how about the perceiver or the observer? What is that?

Kavitha: Yeah, so that basically sums up the spiritual path for me: What is that observer? Because ordinarily we think the observer is this person that resides in this body. Most of us don’t think of the body as ourselves. We think that whatever is inside the body, being the puppeteer of the body, is who we are, right? The subtle body.

So we take that to be the subject, but then what the spiritual path shows us is that that, too, is an object. And so the subject then is pure awareness, which is not localized to the body and the mind. It is more global, where even this person occurs in that global awareness.

So that process from the subject, with a small “s,” moving on to the Subject, with a capital “S,” would be the journey, basically.

Rick: Okay, good. I think most people listening to this will be familiar with that kind of notion. And so, just to put a lid on it, the subject which we hope to discover through the spiritual path is not going to be discovered in the way that we discover Antarctica or something under a microscope. It’s not something that can be observed through the senses, any more than the classic example of the eyeball being able to perceive itself. It’s that which perceives.

Kavitha: Yes, exactly. And I think we’ll get more into that as we go into the path of the Goddess. But that kind of knowledge is actually one of the subtle veils that are very, very difficult to pierce through.

🛤️ The feminine power and the path of the Goddess

Rick: Well, let’s get into the path of the Goddess. You talk about how the feminine power became sidelined. I think that would be interesting to start with. Historically, what happened?

Kavitha: Well, a lot of the reports, for instance, of yoga—if you look at the origin of yoga—present many different theories and historical perspectives on how yoga began. But one perspective is that because women have a cyclical nature—they have these cycles of menstruation, birth, menopause, and so on—it is much easier for women to actually observe their own physiological processes.

That includes not just the reproductive system, but how it affects everything else because of these cyclical natures and the nature of the woman. And so one theory in terms of the origin of yoga states that it was actually something that was discovered by women in pre-Vedic times.

They began to observe their physiology and to ask, “Could we control this? Could we influence this by breath practices, through certain postures, or by changing the way that we think or feel?” They began to actually experience changes in their cycles as a result of changing the prana in the body and so on.

And then they taught it to the men. Ultimately, it’s about progeny and the quality of the progeny, so if we can teach it to the men and have them also purify this prana, we can have the highest-quality progeny as a result of that.

And so they taught it to the men, and eventually, in Vedic times and moving forward after that, somehow women were just excluded from all of it. The very processes that actually helped create that—menstruation and so on—especially in the Hindu tradition, became taboo.

Because women are going through these cyclical processes, they were considered impure, or people said they should not be taught this. And while there is some wisdom in women not doing certain practices because it affects their physiology, it was taken as meaning that they were impure or inferior, and that was passed on through centuries of that kind of wrong thinking, which is still widely prevalent right now.

Rick: Yeah, if you give credence to the notion of the yugas or any other model of ages and cycles throughout history, do you see the patriarchal dominance as being characteristic or symptomatic of the so-called Kali Yuga, or the dark age in which we seem to have found ourselves?

And do you see this Me Too movement and the whole awakening of the feminine, the divine feminine, and the emphasis on women’s role in spirituality and so on as a kind of harbinger of better times?

Kavitha: I certainly hope so. And yeah, I think it’s very interesting, this whole issue of the Kali Yuga. It seems like that is true not just in our political, cultural, and social upheaval—the upheaval that the whole world seems to be going through right now—but also in natural disasters and everything, for instance, that California is going through or other places are going through.

It’s an absolute upheaval. Change is the only way. Whatever is the dominant structure, whatever is crystallized into being the norm, is not going to work anymore.

And so, too, with the Me Too movement and the redefining of those roles—the gender roles—and saying, “Well, it’s time to question those crystallized ways of thinking and conditioning that somehow we, as the world, have just accepted to be the norm.”

Rick: Yeah, you and I were talking about Amma before we started here. She’s doing things—she’s been doing things all along in India. The very fact of what she does was totally shocking to a lot of male-dominated thinkers in India: touching people, hugging people, and so on.

But then she’s also tried to put women in roles that are ordinarily reserved for men in India—the various temple functions, yagyas, and things like that, which women weren’t supposed to be able to do.

Kavitha: Yeah, absolutely. She is an absolute trailblazer in this whole spiritual movement.

What really attracts me to this path of the divine feminine is that even though the traditional spiritual paths have been patriarchal, there have been some traditions where that has not been the case, where women are still given their equal place on the path and are the actual keepers of that tradition.

So you won’t even find these teachers. You won’t even find these women. They are not going to be announcing themselves as teachers. So it’s really a stroke of luck if you can find someone like that to work with. But there is that unbroken tradition still.

Rick: Yeah. Well, here at BatGap, we have a policy these days—at least for the last year or two—of interviewing an equal number of men and women. Irene says, “Okay, we’re looking at March. Here’s two men; now we need two women.” And so we really try to stick to that.

Kavitha: Oh, thank you. Thank you for doing that.

The Mahavidyas and the forces of creation

Rick: Okay, so, Shakti and the Maha-Vidyas. So, the Maha-Vidyas, as I understand it—well, you go ahead and define them.

Kavitha: Sure. “Maha” means great, and “Vidya” means knowledge or wisdom. So these are the goddesses of great wisdom, great goddesses of cosmic wisdom—many different ways of defining them—but that’s really the essence of the definition of the word Maha-Vidya.

There are traditionally ten Maha-Vidyas, or ten goddesses of great wisdom. The most famous of them is Kali. What makes them great, and what makes the sequence of this group of goddesses so unique, is that each of these goddesses represents a force of creation. Kali represents time, Bhuvaneshwari represents space, and so on. That is one thing they all have in common.

The other thing they all have in common is that they are all fierce. You don’t see any of the demureness in them, and you don’t see the patriarchal definition of femininity in them, because they defy all such norms of what the feminine is supposed to be.

And they defy those norms because Shakti is everything. She is all of creation.

Rick: In fact, many of the images of their fierceness depict them taking it out on men—standing on them, lopping their heads off, smashing them, pulling their tongues out, and stuff like that.

Kavitha: Well, typically, the poor man in all of these imageries is Shiva. But there is, of course, as you know, a very deep symbolism behind that.

It’s not like these goddesses are propagating what I call misinformed feminism. That’s not what these goddesses are about. But whether I’m a man or a woman, the Mahavidyas are going to be extremely important, because the third thing they all have in common is that they all represent aspects of our own psyche and the kinds of things that keep us bound to thinking that the self is this body-mind, which is what I call the shadow aspect.

And then they also have the opposing quality of the light, which leads us to liberation from that. They are not—how deities always represent the highest in any particular tradition, and they are pure goodness or pure light—the Mahavidyas are not like that because they don’t exclude the darkness.

They include all of the darkness and all of the so-called negative aspects to show that Shakti does not prefer one thing over the other. She is everything.

Shakti does not prefer one thing over the other. She is everything.

Rick: Well, if we look at the actual universe, it’s a pretty wild place. There are planets getting smashed by asteroids and getting melted by expanding suns, and all kinds of things. It’s a violent place, full of beauty, full of violence and death and life. The whole spectrum of possibilities is on full display.

So, if these goddesses represent the impulses of intelligence governing the universe, then it’s completely in keeping with the iconography that they have these fierce aspects, I would say, as well as compassionate aspects. Their whole point is not just to wreak havoc, but to destroy ignorance and liberate people and so on.

Kavitha: Yes, absolutely. And so this is why they really force us to smash our own stereotypes of what we think we are.

For instance, we talk about ahimsa, nonviolence, as the fundamental ethic of yoga, or of any spiritual path. But then you look at Kali or any of these goddesses. Their imagery is very violent, right? Especially Kali, for instance. If you look at Kali, you wouldn’t be thinking, “Well, she’s representing nonviolence.” That’s not what comes to mind. It’s extremely gory and violent.

But as time—as the force of time—she is the perfect representation, if you ask me. Because time is violent. It’s ruthless. It doesn’t wait for anybody. It doesn’t care about our precious memories and so on. It just doesn’t wait for anybody. It doesn’t care about anybody. It’s always going, right?

And so she is showing that. And when we think about life itself, ask a woman who’s given birth if that was a nonviolent process. Everything, by taking birth—just taking birth itself—is a violent process.

So if we don’t accept that, then we are living in delusion that there is going to be a place of absolute nonviolence all the time. There is never going to be such a thing.

Rick: So how do you reconcile the prescription of ahimsa in Patanjali’s Yoga with the reality of the universe and with the depiction of these Mahavidyas?

Kavitha: So, I think that can be a path in itself over a lifetime, this real discovery of ahimsa within ourselves and the actual practice of it. Because we think that nonviolence is about not killing and not doing these kinds of bad things to other people, which is, of course, part of that. But it’s much more subtle than that, especially as spiritual practitioners and spiritual seekers.

We can be extremely violent in the way we judge other people who are perhaps not on the path, and in how we judge ourselves and how we judge everything and think that this is not how it should be. So any resistance to what is, is violence. And just to come to that acceptance, I think, is the path of Kali.

Rick: It’s true. I mean, Kali herself is not resisting what is. One thing that comes to my mind is James Bond. He had a license to kill, right? But ordinarily people don’t have that license. And so perhaps we could say that it behooves, or is incumbent upon, a spiritual seeker to practice ahimsa, to be nonviolent.

But if you happen to have risen to the level of one of the fundamental impulses of intelligence governing the universe, then some sort of violence is within your job description.

Kavitha: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have to be violent sometimes in very subtle ways within ourselves, right? If you have these recurring, self-defeating thoughts, for instance, then we can invoke Kali to behead all of them. Cut them off right at the source. But see how violence is required sometimes.

And if you’re a parent, you’ll understand that sometimes you need to be able to communicate with your children in a way that seems violent, but actually it isn’t, right? In the grand scheme of things.

Rick: Yeah, it seems violent to the child, like, “Stop scrubbing behind my ear,” or “You’re depriving me of this candy.”

Kavitha: Yeah, yeah, yeah. “Let me be on my phone 24 hours a day.”

Rick: Yeah, I’m sure you’re not advocating any kind of actual violence against children. But things from the child’s perspective seem so mean and unfair.

Kavitha: Yes, exactly. And I say that as a mother of two teenagers, trying to direct them always into things that are more wholesome, as in, “Don’t be on your phone—”

Rick: “It rots your brain.”

Kavitha: Exactly.

Rick: Yeah, well, it’s interesting, actually, because this points to a deeper point. Maybe you’ve already kind of said it, but if we regard the universe as being one giant evolution machine, as having an evolutionary agenda or trajectory, then all the stuff that happens, however violent it may seem, is ultimately in our best interest.

If it’s true that the universe has this evolutionary tendency or direction, which it seems to have if you look at its violent birth as the Big Bang and then its evolution over 13.7 billion years to where we’ve gotten, it all involves exploding stars and all kinds of wild things happening in order to make life possible.

Kavitha: Yeah, absolutely. And even, you know, we were talking about the yugas earlier, and if you look at every yuga, each has had its share of violence and its share of the bad guys, so to speak.

So it seems like somehow we are in this current era of really bad things happening. But at no point in creation has there been a time when that has not been the case, because that is really part of the whole.

Kali sadhana, or the sadhana of this particular Mahavidya, actually shows us that we need to get beyond ourselves in the way we think. Creation itself moves as a whole. It isn’t restricted, and there isn’t a preference for one thing over another. Kali doesn’t prefer one thing over another; everything is part of it.

Rick: Yeah, and the balance keeps shifting between sattva, rajas, and tamas, and whatever other triads you want to define. There’s a cyclical nature to everything.

Kavitha: Yeah, absolutely.

Rick: Turn, turn, turn. Okay, now here’s a question. We’ve alluded to the notion of the universe being intelligent and everything, with nothing being arbitrary or accidental or capricious. There’s this sort of infinite intelligence in every iota of creation and in every vast phenomenon as well—galaxies and their interactions, and so on.

So, when I think of these goddesses, I wonder whether it would actually be possible to get down to some level where you would actually see one of them as depicted in these sorts of photos, this kind of thing: “Oops, there it is.” Or whether those are just artistic representations of streams of intelligence or impulses of intelligence that perform various functions.

But when I say that, I don’t mean to depersonalize them, because I think that any impulse of intelligence, by definition, gross or subtle, is a conscious being. We are an impulse of intelligence. There are angels and celestial beings who are impulses of intelligence and who are conscious beings in their own right.

And I suspect that these Mahavidyas, if they really exist, are conscious beings who have a universal frame of reference or universal territory of influence. They are kind of on the upper echelons of the hierarchy of creation and have a function that encompasses the entire universe, or universes, as the case may be. What do you think about that?

Kavitha: Yeah, and that’s exactly how I feel. To back up a little bit, to really define these Mahavidyas—what are they? We have to talk a little bit about this dichotomy between Shiva and Shakti, and then we can understand that, which is in the Tantric tradition.

There is this potential before anything. All of creation rests as a potential, a latent potential, undifferentiated. And the first movement within that potential is self-recognition, or this self-awareness.

There is this potential before anything. All of creation rests as a potential, a latent potential, undifferentiated. And the first movement within that potential is self-recognition, or this self-awareness.

And so it is said that Shakti and Shiva separate in that self-recognition. She is his self-recognition. It’s like that undifferentiated potential looking in the mirror and finding that the one here is Shiva and there is Shakti. But they are actually one and the same.

With that differentiation, the whole creation process begins after that. That is the moment of the Big Bang, so to speak—that self-awareness.

But in order to understand what creates space and time, this expansion of the universe, and the creation of separate beings and so on, we have to understand that Shakti is Shiva’s creative power.

It is said that Shiva is pure awareness, and pure awareness is attributeless. There are no attributes. Shiva cannot create because his creative power is Shakti.

And so, if we have to create something, we need several different skills, right? Those skills of creation are these Mahavidyas: time, space, intention or will, knowledge, action, and so on.

Shakti, taking different forms, is these Mahavidyas. She is actually only one, but she takes all these different forms to go ahead with the process of creation. But they are all powers of Shiva, so they are always one and the same.

They are universal in that way, but each of these Mahavidyas also forms a focal point of our sadhana, our devotion, and our practice. Anytime a deity becomes the focal point of a practice, we see them as such in our mind’s eye.

Shiva and Shakti are always one.

Rick: I mentioned earlier that I thought that if a qualified quantum physicist were to read this book, he would be able to correlate a lot of the things in it with the understanding that physics has come up with. Physics, by definition, is trying to understand the subtlest mechanics of creation, from whence the whole creation arises, and how it diversifies, differentiates, manifests, and so on.

There is one guy—there are a number of them—Menas Kafatos and others who speak at the Science and Nonduality Conference. I’ve interviewed Menas. There is John Hagelin, whom I’ve interviewed, who wrote a paper called “Is Consciousness a Unified Field?” He goes into a really interesting explanation of what I think he calls “sequential spontaneous symmetry breaking” that happens as oneness diversifies into multiplicity.

Anyway, that’s just a reference for people who want to look into that side of it more. Okay, so before we proceed, is there anything that has come to your mind that you’d like to say?

Kavitha: No.

Rick: Okay, good. So let’s start going through some of these Mahavidyas and explaining the role and significance of each one. The first in your book, and the first one you’ve primarily mentioned so far, is Kali, who represents time and is also related to death, where letting go and moving on brings new life. So what shall we say about her?

Kavitha: We could talk about Kali for hours because there’s so much to say about her. Among the Mahavidyas, she represents time, so she is the primordial force. That’s why she’s also called Adi Shakti, the primordial, the first Shakti.

Regarding Kali, I think there are so many different aspects of her. She is also the goddess of transformation, because time is transformation.

One thing that I think is really important for me to say, and to just put out there, is that there is a lot of correlation these days between Kali and what I was saying earlier about misinformed feminism, as if she is the goddess of vengeance, or as if we somehow tend to justify our rage by portraying Kali, Durga, or any of these goddesses as though we are saying, “Look, I can embody that.”

But what I want to say is, “No, we can’t embody that,” because she is Adi Shakti, and it’s going to take a lot more than rage to embody her. That requires transcendence of time and the limitations of linear time, which is really her biggest trap, or the way she entraps us in this illusion of being limited, time-bound kinds of people with our stories and so on.

So I think there is a lot of misunderstanding around Kali.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, as the story goes, her rage was a benign thing. She came into being to get rid of some real bad guys who were making a lot of trouble in the universe. Ordinary human rage isn’t necessarily so benign and constructive. It can be damaging, violent, and harmful.

So, as you say, we shouldn’t necessarily use Kali as an alibi for venting our anger.

Kavitha: Yeah, and you bring up a really good point. That story you were relating comes from the Devi Mahatmyam, where Kali actually leaps onto this battlefield from Durga’s face, and it is exactly to vanquish these asuras, or these bad forces of the universe.

However, the Devi actually says in the Devi Mahatmyam, “There is nobody to kill because they’re all me.” Her rage and her destruction are all a show because the good and the bad—she declares that they’re also her children, they’re also her.

That non-differentiation between me and other is the fundamental principle, right? And we can’t embody Kali’s rage unless that is also our state of being, that nonseparation.

Rick: Yeah, and the Gita says stuff like that too. Weapons cannot cleave him, fire cannot burn him, water cannot wet him, wind cannot dry him, and so on—that sort of indestructibility of the Self, which is obviously not true of the body.

So we have to know ourself as being that which is uncleavable, and so on, or else we’re just misapplying levels.

Kavitha: Yes, exactly. And in the 11th chapter of the Gita, when Lord Krishna shows his universal form, the Vishwaroopa, to Arjuna, Arjuna is actually shocked to see that even the Kauravas are part of Krishna.

Rick: Who are the bad guys in that story, right?

Kavitha: Yes, yes, everybody is swirling around in Krishna’s form. He is everywhere; he is encompassing everything.

Rick: Yeah. Well, if we think of Krishna as God, and if we define God as the sort of universal intelligence which, even scientifically, we can see is functional in every single particle of creation, we can’t find a place where we don’t see all those laws of nature functioning in one way or another. Then obviously it has to be a totality which contains all the parts. There could be nothing outside of it.

Kavitha: Exactly. And so it is also in the Bhagavad Gita. We call that intelligence Krishna, and in the Devi traditions we call that intelligence Devi or Shakti.

Rick: I was just commenting with someone the other day about one of the meanings for Krishna being “black,” and it’s interesting that the color black absorbs all colors of the spectrum. It doesn’t reflect any. That also reminds me of that saying that Brahman is the eater of everything. So somehow the totality absorbs, eats, consumes, or subsumes all the diversity.

Kavitha: And so it is with Kali. She is absolutely black, so that’s how we differentiate her from Tara, for instance, who has a little bit of color. But Kali is absolutely black. She is the black goddess for the exact same reason. And I don’t know if you knew this, but Kali is supposed to be Krishna’s Shakti.

Rick: I didn’t know that. I did not know that.

Kavitha: Yeah, so she is considered his Shakti.

Rick: Interesting. Now, a lot of these goddesses, Kali included, are always wearing garlands of skulls, and as I understand it, that’s supposed to be symbolic of the destruction of egos in a good sense, kind of like the destruction of ignorance in a person. And so, in your book, you refer a lot to the I-self, and I have some questions about the I-self.

Kavitha: Sure.

Rick: Does everyone have one? Can we function without one? There is a quote from your book: “The sense of separation is reinforced through comparison and judgment, and the I-self grows stronger.” Can one be utterly without an I-self and still function as a human being, or does the I-self get transformed into something more pure, while there’s still some sort of recognition of a person here in order to live in the world?

Kavitha: Yeah, so that is a great question. The first question: does everybody have one? Yes, unless we have worked through it and so on. But yes, everybody has one because we are culturally and socially, universally conditioned to develop one. And that happens at a very early age with the formation of the self, with giving a child a name, and suddenly there is a separation between me and the mother, and me and everybody else.

That sense of me is what I’m calling the I-self, which is the story of the me that revolves around the body and the mind, and it’s called the ego in every tradition. I specifically didn’t want to use the word ego because sometimes it means an inflated sense of self. But you may not have an inflated sense of self; you have a sense of self that is limited, and that’s why I use the term I-self.

So, is it possible to live without an I-self? Well, there are accounts of people who have lived through that whole no-self kind of experience. Now I forget who it was. I’m sure you know.

Rick: Anandamayi Ma or somebody?

Kavitha: No, the Christian mystic.

Rick: Oh, Bernadette Roberts.

Kavitha: Yes, Bernadette Roberts. We read her book, The Experience of No-Self.

Rick: I’ve got it on the shelf here. I’ve dabbled in it.

Kavitha: Yeah, so she describes this whole process of how she lives through, or lived through, that phase of the complete falling away of the no-self.

Rick: Did she pass through that phase and eventually discover some kind of self there?

Kavitha: I think so. Then she talks about coming back to the marketplace after having been a nun for many, many years, and that sense of self coming back in a very different way.

Rick: Yeah, different.

Kavitha: Where it is more of a functional thing, where it is for living day to day, but there isn’t that self-referential thing going on. Gary Weber and others talk about the two neural pathways. One is the one that is constantly self-referential; this is the blah-blah network. And then the other is the task-positive network, in which there isn’t the self-referential thing going on all the time.

So, if we lose that, the task-positive network is still there. These sages call that “the state where the mind is your slave” rather than “you are the slave of the mind,” where the mind is used functionally, for doing practical things, but then it doesn’t exist otherwise.

Rick: Yeah, but there still is one. So if you say, “Hey, Nisargadatta, would you like a cigarette or something?” he knows who you’re talking to.

Kavitha: Especially with the cigarette.

Rick: And then obvious examples would be like somebody says they have no I-self, but then you stick a fork in their leg or something. They know that that’s happening. There’s some kind of localized identification with that experience. It’s not the same as sticking a fork in the table or something like that.

Kavitha: Yeah, absolutely. I think this is where there are subtle differences between the Tantric path and the other paths. For instance, in my studies of Advaita Vedanta, the teaching, or the general consensus, was that you need to lose the ego. Losing the ego is the beginning of enlightenment, or the beginning of awakening.

But that isn’t really the issue in Tantra. It is actually refinement, where you understand that you’re not that, but then that sense of self is continuously refined, where the understanding, or the self-knowledge, actually pours through into the body-mind, and our functioning becomes more and more and more refined.

So it is actually a two-way journey. You’re going up and losing the sense of self. Of course, that’s a self-referential kind of thing, but the body-mind obviously doesn’t go away. You’re still alive, and you’re still functioning. You’re still living. So that light of the self can be allowed to actually refine those conditioned pathways. What that means is, it’s very easy to be awake and still be a jerk.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. Which brings into question the whole issue of what it really means to be awake, or what an awakening really means. So many people say, “I’ve had an awakening,” but I always think, “Yeah, fine.” There are so many possibilities for levels of awakening, degrees of awakening, and one awakening does not a saint make.

Yes, exactly. Tantra is very beautiful in that. It’s not like, “Don’t limit yourself to ascendance.” It’s actually immanence also, which is the refinement of the body-mind to levels of functioning where we are actually rewiring our neurohormonal pathways and rewiring the whole physiology, basically, where we can live that light more and more.

Kavitha: Yes, exactly. Tantra is very beautiful in that. It’s not like, “Don’t limit yourself to ascendance.” It’s actually immanence also, which is the refinement of the body-mind to levels of functioning where we are actually rewiring our neurohormonal pathways and rewiring the whole physiology, basically, where we can live that light more and more.

Rick: Yeah, and as a physician, I’m sure you know that the whole physiology doesn’t get rewired overnight. It’s neuroplasticity, and all that can take a lifetime.

Kavitha: Yes, absolutely, and that’s what my other book is about, by the way.

Rick: Good, I’ll have to read that. Just one little comment. I made up this metaphor the other day. It’s a variation on an old metaphor, but I was having a discussion with a friend about this no-self thing.

Streams and rivers are completely distinct from one another. This stream says, “I am this stream, and I’m totally different from that stream.” But once they reach the ocean, they all kind of merge, and then they might say, “Oh, I’m just the ocean.” But let’s say, for the sake of the metaphor, that the streams don’t completely cease to exist. They become currents within the ocean.

So our individuality doesn’t completely get obliterated, but it becomes sort of a component within a much greater wholeness. Initially, the ocean might say, “I’m just the ocean. I don’t see any currents.” And conversely, the current might say, “All I see is the ocean. I’ve lost any sort of sense of individuality.”

But I think eventually, if you delve into and become sensitive to the fine fabric of what’s going on within consciousness, you discover all these currents and impulses of intelligence and dynamic things taking place within the oneness, within the wholeness. What do you think of that metaphor?

Kavitha: Yeah, I love it. I love it, and that’s absolutely beautiful. That’s really the crux of this path: there is the oneness, but there is also the uniqueness in which that oneness expresses itself.

Rick: Yeah, in which and through which.

Kavitha: Yes.

Kundalini and the process of purification

Rick: Yeah. Okay, so getting back to my notes here. This is still in the Kali chapter of your book: “As Kundalini touches each chakra, hidden issues surface so that they can be resolved.” I thought that was interesting, worth discussing a bit. I can elaborate on the question, but I think you know what I’m talking about. So go for it.

Kavitha: Yeah. When we think of Kundalini—and I think this is where we really must define what Kundalini is—we somehow think of Kundalini as some kind of huge energetic experience, and then you’re all blissed out thereafter and so on. But that’s not really it.

Kundalini is said to be active in the Tantric traditions when you develop what in Advaita Vedanta is known as mumukshutvam, the burning desire for awakening, where it becomes the primordial focus of your life. That’s when the Kundalini is said to be active.

You may not have all these energetic experiences. You may not have all this buzzing and vibration and stuff. Of course, a lot of people have that, but that isn’t really it.

Rick: I think the roughness and smoothness of it depends, to a certain extent, upon how impeded it is. If there’s a lot of blockage, then there can be a lot of intensity as those blockages are cleared, and other people hardly notice anything going on at all.

Kavitha: Absolutely. It all has to do with the nadis, because of where the obstructions may be in the subtle body. The chakras are really the confluence of these nadis at specific points, and there are hundreds of them throughout the subtle body. But we usually think of the chakras along the spine, and the activated Kundalini energy, which directs our desire for awakening, goes up the spine, so to speak.

Traditionally, in the Tantric traditions and even the yoga traditions, we talk about these chakras as hosting or having certain properties where certain issues are stored in the psyche. When that energy touches them, all of those issues come surfacing into our awareness.

For instance, if you have a long-term meditation practice, it becomes really easy to see how the kinds of thoughts and things that happen during meditation actually change from day to day. The focus of it changes over time. Sometimes it may have been about, “Oh my gosh, I’m not going to get this technique right. I don’t even know what it’s supposed to be doing, and so on. Why am I even doing this? I’m fine. I don’t need to do this. I have other things to do.” So it’s all in the lower chakras, so to speak.

But as we keep meditating and that inner silence becomes more and more deeply established, the issues become more and more subtle. We’re asking the more existential questions: “If I’m not this, what is my reality? What am I? Who am I?” And so on. That means that the energy is going up.

As the energy touches each of these chakras, we are forced to confront these issues. This is probably something you have noticed over your years of teaching meditation. Somehow, when we come to this path, we think everything is going to be solved. All our problems are going to be solved, and it’s all going to be one smooth thing. Then we discover, “My gosh, this isn’t what I thought it was going to be.” We go through intense periods of purification and intense periods of upheaval.

As the energy touches each of these chakras, we are forced to confront these issues. This is probably something you have noticed over your years of teaching meditation. Somehow, when we come to this path, we think everything is going to be solved. All our problems are going to be solved, and it’s all going to be one smooth thing. Then we discover, “My gosh, this isn’t what I thought it was going to be.” We go through intense periods of purification and intense periods of upheaval.

Rick: Yeah, that’s not part of the initial sales pitch.

Kavitha: Yeah, but that’s really what happens. Those periods of upheaval are where the Kundalini is touching those chakras and opening them, so those issues can be resolved.

Rick: Yeah, there was a phrase that I probably heard Maharishi repeat a thousand times, and that was, “Something good is happening.” When people were going through these really intense things, especially on long meditation courses—six-month courses and so on—he would always say over and over, “Something good is happening. Just stay with it.”

Kavitha: Yes, exactly. I call it the washing-machine effect with my students.

Something good is happening. Just stay with it.

Vedanta, Tantra, and Sri Vidya

Rick: You know what a Venn diagram is, right?

Kavitha: Yeah.

Rick: Where you have two circles and they overlap a little bit, but not entirely. If we take Vedanta and Tantra as two circles, to what extent do they overlap and diverge if you think of them as a Venn diagram?

Kavitha: They overlap to a large extent, a very large extent. But there are some fundamental differences between Vedanta and Tantra.

For instance, in Vedanta, even if you look at the Bhagavad Gita, Brahman doesn’t do anything. Brahman is not the doer; Brahman just is. It’s like saying awareness doesn’t do anything, which is really our experience as well. There are no creative powers attributed to Brahman.

In Vedanta, we differentiate Brahman from Ishvara. Ishvara is the creator, but Brahman is pure and untouched and cannot do anything. Whereas in Tantra, there is no such differentiation. Shiva and Shakti together are endowed with the creative potency. They have these five functions: creating, sustaining, destroying, concealing, and revealing. Those are inherent qualities of the divine.

That is one fundamental difference between the two, and there are other fundamental differences. A lot of people think that in Advaita Vedanta there remains a separation between Maya, which doesn’t exist, and all that exists, which is Brahman. I think that is only part of the story, because I think it is a misunderstanding of Advaita Vedanta.

Even Shankara doesn’t say that Maya doesn’t exist. He says Maya doesn’t exist as we think it does. The classic example is the rope and the snake: it doesn’t exist the way we think it does. But we can get stuck between that and seeing that Brahman is the only reality and Maya simply doesn’t exist. There is still a duality there.

Tantra resolves that right from the beginning. There is Maya. It’s not that it doesn’t exist; everything is real.

Rick: Yeah. Well, you remember what Shankara said: “The world is Maya, Brahman alone is real; Brahman is Maya, Brahman is the world.”

Kavitha: Yes, exactly.

Rick: Shankara, incidentally, wasn’t he a Kali worshiper, or was that Ramakrishna? He was devoted to some aspect of the Divine Mother. He was a devotee.

Kavitha: Oh, yeah. He was very much a Mother devotee, and he was a worshiper of the Sri Yantra. A lot of people attribute to him the Soundarya Lahiri, which is an absolutely magnificent, very lush text describing the Tantric worship and visualization of the Goddess. Some people say that’s not the same Shankara, but some people think it is the same Shankara.

Rick: Okay, but it’s worth mentioning in passing, simply because all these great nondual teachers whom we revere, both ancient and modern, were devotees of something or other.

Kavitha: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: Every single one—Papaji, Ramana, Nisargadatta, and Shankara going back even further. There wasn’t a complete dismissal of all vestiges of duality as unworthy of our attention. There was a sort of—Shankara said that the intellect imagines duality for the sake of devotion. So even if he acknowledges that duality exists, intellectually at least, he considers it to have a purpose.

Kavitha: Yes, absolutely. This is something I just discovered recently that I didn’t know. Shankara actually established all the Shankaracharya Maths in India, and I’ve been to a couple of them. But I didn’t know that he established the tradition of daily worship of the Sri Yantra in the Maths, which is very secret. It needs to go on four times a day, all the time. There is that worship aspect of it in an Advaitic center.

Rick: Is the Sri Yantra part of Sri Vidya? The reason I ask is that Maharishi’s teacher, Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, was a worshiper or practitioner of Sri Vidya. He ended up becoming Shankaracharya of Jyotirmath for the first time in ages. They hadn’t had a Shankaracharya for a couple hundred years or something, and they got him to do it.

Anyway, I found that interesting. I don’t know much about Sri Vidya. Would it be nice—I mean, would it be interesting—to tell people about that, or should we save our time for talking more about your book and the Mahavidyas and all?

Kavitha: I think it’s worth mentioning, at least in passing, because the Mahavidyas are also part of the Sri Vidya tradition. That’s how I was introduced to them in my Sri Vidya Upasaka role.

Sri means auspicious, and Vidya means knowledge. So Sri Vidya is auspicious knowledge, and it is the particular path to liberation where liberation manifests as the goddess Tripura Sundari. She is the third of the Mahavidyas in the book. She is the central goddess, and she is the creator, the sustainer, and the destroyer of everything.

It is the path to her, and the path involves mantra. It’s a Tantric path, so it also involves yantra and specific rituals and practices that lead us to the goddess Tripura Sundari.

Rick: I just want to say again, as we said in the beginning, that all this talk of worshiping goddesses and so on shouldn’t be trivialized or dismissed as some quaint, mythical indulgence or something like that. We’re really talking about a deeper mechanism here, which can be extremely potent, powerful, and transformational for those who engage in it properly.

Kavitha: Yes, absolutely. There’s something about the yantras I just want to say, because my Tantra teachers, in particular, don’t really recommend worshiping yantras. They think it’s not necessary, because the yantras begin to manifest in our own experience as our neural pathways change.

These yantras are actually external manifestations of the neural pathways within the brain. That happens automatically, and there is no real need to worship external yantras or perform external rituals. It’s an entirely internal process in which our physiology changes, and with that change, these yantras actually start manifesting.

Rick: Interesting. So when we see these pictures of yantras, they may have come from the actual cognitions of the people who originally painted or drew them. People saw this thing and then drew it out, right?

Kavitha: Yes, absolutely. All of them.

Rick: Interesting. I was going to say something, but now I forget what it was. Oh, yeah, I know what it was. A lot of mantras have what are called bija mantras in them, which, as I understand it, are somehow the names of a god or goddess, or some aspect of the Divine Mother. I’ve been using a mantra like that in one form or another for a long time, but I still don’t know a lot about its esoteric significance and mechanics. Is there anything you can say that would educate me and others on that?

Kavitha: Yeah, absolutely. Each bija mantra actually maps to a particular cosmic force, so to speak. Then, of course, the cosmic force is given the form of a deity. We think that it maps to that particular deity, but actually the quality of the sound is such that it opens us, because these bija mantras are derived from Sanskrit.

In certain traditions, like the Sri Vidya Sadhana or Kashmir Shaivism, there is this whole concept of Matrika Shakti, where each syllable in Sanskrit actually maps to a different point in consciousness, a different aspect of consciousness.

The bija mantras map to certain points of our consciousness and open us to the whole. When you take combinations of these bija mantras in specific sequences—which is really what Sri Vidya does—you open in certain ways to that consciousness, through different aspects of it. As a result, the neural pathways change, and the yantras start manifesting.

Rick: So when you say “open to different aspects,” could you think of it as there being a number of different bija mantras, with all roads leading to Rome? Could they be thought of as spokes on a wheel that all lead to the hub? You take the one that works for you or is appropriate for you, and then you follow it back to its source. It has an influence that is conducive to doing that.

Kavitha: Yes.

Rick: There’s a whole discussion of the vibratory influence of these sounds, as opposed to any meaning they may or may not have. Different sounds have different vibratory qualities. You scratch your fingernails down a blackboard, and that has one influence. A beautiful flute melody has another. These sounds are said to be conducive to settling the mind and body down to transcendence.

Kavitha: Yeah. That is really the cosmic force called Tara, who’s the second Mahavidya.

Rick: Oh, good. We should get another.

Kavitha: Yeah, so it’s a perfect segue into understanding mantras because she is the power behind all mantras. She represents the primordial vibration. In physics, if we want to loosely map it—and I just want to emphasize the word “loosely,” because the correlations may not really be so tight—there’s the background microwave. What do you call that?

Rick: Radiation.

Kavitha: Microwave.

Rick: Yeah, the original radiation of the Big Bang, which they discovered at Bell Labs, right?

Kavitha: Yes, exactly. That’s something I think of as what Tara is: the primordial vibration, which is the mother of all other vibrations that become forms. Yes, the Aum, or I am, is the primordial vibration. All bija mantras actually lead to that primordial vibration. They are all modifications of that primordial vibration. So Tara is the mother of mantras in the Mahavidya tradition.

Rick: Yeah. Have you ever heard the notion that using a mantra with Aum in it tends to make you more of a recluse? Have you ever heard that?

Kavitha: Yes.

Rick: Do you believe that?

Kavitha: I have heard that, and I have experienced that.

Rick: Have you?

Kavitha: Yes, yes, and it is really true and very profound.

Rick: So do you still use a mantra with Aum in it?

Kavitha: No, no. I was taught not to because I was using it for a while, and it really makes you dissociate from stuff and kind of not—yeah, but at different stages, I would say.

Rick: And maybe different stages because I had heard that and, for decades, used a mantra that didn’t have Aum in it. Then I got a mantra from Amma about 15 or 18 years ago that did have Aum in it. I’ve been using that ever since, and it hasn’t tended to make me more of a recluse. I wonder if that was total BS.

Kavitha: No, I think it just depends on the stage. I kind of did that early on. What Yogani says is that it’s more of an issue in the intermediate stages of meditation practice. As a beginner, it won’t affect you. As you’re more advanced, it won’t affect you. But in the intermediate stages, if you take that on too early, then it may not be the right thing for you.

Rick: I see. I think it also would depend on whether you’re just using Aum alone—“Aum, Aum, Aum”—or whether you’re using it in conjunction with the bija mantra and other aspects that mantras tend to have in them.

Kavitha: Yeah, exactly. Aum as an external chanting thing is not the problem. It’s using it to transcend the mind that becomes an issue.

Rick: Okay, good. Well, we’re on this topic, and this is an interesting discussion. It’s not your plain vanilla BatGap interview. We’re getting into all kinds of things that I haven’t really discussed much in other interviews, so I’m enjoying this.

In the Tara part of your book, you say, “Sound is the subtlest of the senses.” This is the principle behind mantra sadhana. If you think about that, I’ve heard it said that thoughts are a subtler aspect of the sense of hearing, and you don’t really get that so much with the other senses, although you might visualize dinner or get some taste of dinner in your mind’s eye. But we’re much more familiar with thoughts than we are with the subtler aspects of the other senses. Therefore, it would make sense that using the sense of hearing—namely, thought in the form of a mantra—would perhaps be an easier road to traverse than some of the other senses.

Kavitha: Yes, absolutely. So you’ve heard of the word tanmatra. Tanmatra is that subtle sense relating to a particular element.

Rick: I think indriyas comes in there someplace too, doesn’t it? The indriyas?

Kavitha: Indriyas, yes, exactly. The indriyas are the external senses, and the tanmatras are the subtle senses, so to speak, mediated by a particular element. There are the five elements. Earth, for instance, carries the tanmatra of smell. It is the grossest of those tanmatras, whereas sound is carried through ether or space—akasha—which is the most subtle of the five elements. That’s why sound is the most subtle of the five senses, because it is carried through that akasha.

Rick: Okay, good. That’s interesting. Okay, so we’ve talked about Tara. Is there anything more you want to say about her? With each of these Mahavidyas, you mentioned a shadow and a light aspect of them. Her shadow is self-deception; her light is truth.

Kavitha: Yes, so self-deception is interesting because it’s something that we deal with in one form or another, whether we’re on the spiritual path or not. Ordinarily, of course, we can understand that self-deception. But even as we progress along the spiritual path, this self-deception can be so subtle that we miss it entirely.

It most commonly comes through the constant justification and validation of our actions, thoughts, and feelings. That still goes on with a self-referential loop: I do something, and I feel really validated—internally or externally—or justified in one way or another.

Tara’s Radical Truth

Tara actually cuts through that, and it’s a very shocking thing when you do this Tara sadhana. She just comes in and cuts through all of that. She stands for absolute, radical truth, which is always staying true to your own experience, without any of that self-deception. That’s how I correlated that with the yamas and niyamas, with truth being one of them.

She stands for absolute, radical truth, which is always staying true to your own experience.

Rick: That’s nice: always staying true to your own experience. I’ve been guilty of not doing that many times, even in a metaphysical or philosophical sense—just sort of pontificating about things that I haven’t actually experienced.

Kavitha: Yeah, I think we all do that. We do that, and I think now, especially in these days of the internet and easy access to information, it’s probably a little easier to deceive ourselves into thinking one way or the other in terms of where we are.

Rick: Yeah, and it’s interesting about self-deception, too. There’s that phrase, “the blinding darkness of ignorance.” It’s in the saying of Jesus: “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” Then there are so many marvelous stories in the Vedic literature about Maya. Who was it? Narayan asks his disciple to go off and get him a glass of water. The disciple goes off and goes through this whole thing where he meets a pretty woman at the well, marries her, has kids, and everything else. Then a big flood comes, and he cries out to Narayan. All of a sudden, the flood disappears, and Narayan says, “Well, where’s my water?”

Kavitha: That’s exactly the story I was thinking of when we were talking about self-deception. Amazing. That’s sage Narada.

Rick: Narada, right. Narada.

Kavitha: Yeah. There are stories, actually, of even Vishnu being self-deluded, or his own stories of self-deception, where he takes on the form of Mohini for a particular function. Then he looks at himself in the mirror and thinks, “Oh my gosh, I’m so beautiful.” Shiva needs to remind him, “Wait, you’re not even a woman. Forget Mohini.”

Rick: Yeah. On this note, there’s a fascinating thing in your book about how you say that, if it weren’t for self-deception, we wouldn’t really have a universe. It’s necessary. The creator, however you want to define the creator, hides himself from himself—or herself from herself—in order to have a creation, and it makes the whole thing more interesting than it would otherwise be.

Kavitha: Yes.

Rick: I’m not sure which of the Maha Shaktis—

Kavitha: That’s Chinnamasta.

Rick: Yeah, let’s talk about that a little bit. It’s a bit of a jump from where we’re skipping some, but I’ve often pondered that and didn’t think of it in terms of a Mahavidya. There has to be this hiding quality in order for there to be a creation, which I think is perhaps a quality of tamas or perhaps a quality of chhandas. Chhandas means hiding.

Kavitha: Yeah. Earlier we were talking about the five functions of the divine, which are creating, sustaining, destroying, concealing, and revealing. Those are the five functions of the divine in the Tantric traditions.

Chinnamasta represents both the concealing and the revealing power of the divine. She’s the fiercest of the Mahavidyas, more fierce than Kali, because she’s the one who cuts her own head off, and her own head is feeding from the blood in her severed neck.

That beheading—that self-beheading—makes it very clear how the divine basically cuts itself off from its creation so that there is a sense of separation and the whole drama goes on. It’s like this very common metaphor we use on the spiritual path: that of a play and actors in a play. You’ve heard of actors who actually live in character because that’s when their acting is so beautiful.

Rick: They say that Leonardo DiCaprio stays in character between takes because he doesn’t want to have to move in and out of it.

Kavitha: Yes. Who is the actor who played Lincoln, one of my favorites?

Rick: Daniel Day-Lewis?

Kavitha: Yes, yes. He’s magnificent. Apparently, he does that too, where he stays in character the entire time because he becomes the character, and that’s what makes his acting so powerful.

He forgets his identity, and he is the character. That’s exactly the analogy we could use for the divine: if it forgets its identity, the play can be beautiful and engaging. That is the concealing power of Chinnamasta. Then, of course, on the spiritual path, she is also the great revealer.

When the Kundalini goes up, it’s like a second beheading: the beheading of the I-self, the identity, or the tight identification with the I-self. That’s the second beheading, where you remember, “Oh, wait, I’m not Daniel Day-Lewis. I’m so-and-so,” or “I’m Lincoln; I’m Daniel Day-Lewis,” or “I’m not this character.”

I just love Chinnamasta. It’s such a beautiful, beautiful metaphor for this whole process.

Rick: Yeah, it’s fascinating, and it’s humbling. Nobody is above it, as we were just saying. Even Vishnu got deluded and so on. If you think that you’re incapable of being deluded, overshadowed, or getting lost, you might have a lesson to learn that won’t necessarily be enjoyable.

Kavitha: Yeah, and this is why I love the Puranas so much. Teachers are very humbling. There are stories where Shiva himself gets deluded, or Devi, for instance. Kali goes on this rampage in one story where nobody can stop her—absolutely nobody can stop her. So Shiva comes and lies down under her. That’s the first time she wakes up. She’s like, “Oh, this is my beloved,” and wakes up.

Then there’s another story where nobody can stop her again, and she goes on this rampage. Shiva takes the form of a baby, and suddenly she loses that rage and becomes this compassionate mother to this child. So it’s exactly as you say: none of us is above that.

Rick: Yeah. Several other stories come to mind right now about Shankara getting deluded and then snapping out of it, but I don’t want to take the time to tell them.

Kavitha: Yes, with the Chandala.

Rick: Yeah, there was that one, and there was the one where he occupied the body of a king who had died in order to have the kind of experiences that only a king could have. He got so caught up in the role that he forgot he was Shankara. His disciples went running there and started chanting one of his poems or something to remind him of who he was. Yeah, interesting.

Here’s something in the Chinnamasta section of your book that jumped out at me. It’s a little bit of an abrupt segue, but it’s related: “Dharma keeps us on the path of appropriate cultivation of sexual energy, virtue, and wisdom. If we confuse our attachments and aversions for our Dharma, our creative and procreative energies are used up and we remain attached to the I-self.” So I like that.

Kavitha: Yeah. One thing that is foreign to a lot of people who are not very familiar with these paths is this issue of finding your bliss. “Find your bliss” is a cliché. People think “find your bliss” means “do what you want.”

Rick: Which is not what Joseph Campbell meant when he said that.

Kavitha: Exactly. But we confuse our likes and dislikes with what we must be doing, with what our dharma is. We get so caught up in that, and this energy—the Kundalini energy that we were talking about, which is this burning desire for waking up—is activated. That doesn’t simply happen because the prana is getting diffused into all these other channels of our likes and dislikes, and our senses are constantly roaming around. That energy is used up.

It so happens that this Kundalini energy is a primordial sexual energy as well. We can’t cultivate that energy to go up in terms of achieving that beheading, the second beheading that Chinnamasta represents.

The two attendants who stand by her are like the two others. In the traditional yoga or Tantric traditions, there is the Sushumna, the central nadi that goes along the spine. Then there are the Ida and Pingala, which are the two side channels where the energy goes. They loop around like the symbol of medicine.

When we are not aligned with dharma and are following bliss in our misinformed way—thinking that it is associated with our likes and dislikes, chasing our senses—the energy gets diffused and is directed more through the Ida and Pingala rather than the Sushumna.

The Ida and Pingala are opposites. One is the hot channel, and one is the cold channel. One corresponds to the sympathetic system, and one to the parasympathetic. Like our likes and dislikes, they are the channels of duality. They continue to switch between joy and pain and all the dualities that affect us.

That very powerful sexual energy, which is part of this Kundalini energy, gets diffused in that. The ashrama system of ancient times was actually developed for the appropriate cultivation of this energy so that it could be directed more into the central channel, so that we could be liberated in our lifetime.

In the ashrama system, the dharma is actually very easy to follow. If we follow the ashrama system, as a child your duty is to study. As long as you’re a student, your primary dharma is to focus on whatever learning is taking place. Only then are you capable of going into this householder life.

As a householder, the energy is explored in appropriate ways. Then, with retirement, if that energy has been explored and used appropriately, the thinking is that it would have subsided by then and could be used. By then, the energy has gone up to the higher chakras, where the thinking has changed and our worries are more in the metaphysical realm.

Then comes sannyasa, where the energy goes up even further and we are in that mode of self-knowledge and self-realization.

Rick: What about those who become monks and don’t go through these four stages? How do they deal with it?

Kavitha: In the old ashrama system, very few people were actually encouraged to become monks, and only if they had the samskara of being a monk—if they showed signs of already having worked through all that stuff.

If being a monk is something that we develop, like Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, where he says in the first chapter, “I don’t want this war. I just want to be a monk,” Krishna says, “No, nothing doing. That’s not your dharma.”

If we are trying to be a renunciate because we are trying to escape life, that doesn’t really work, because the energy is still there and it can’t be faked. If there is nowhere for it to go, you see that in a lot of institutions where celibacy is forced and it’s expressed in an adharmic way.

Rick: The Catholic Church. I mean, what a mess.

Kavitha: Yeah. Anything that’s forced like that has to be expressed.

Rick: Interesting. The Gita says that one can perform one’s own dharma—even if it is lesser in merit—and it is better than the dharma of another.

Kavitha: Yes, swadharma.

Rick: Better is death than one’s own dharma.

Kavitha: Yes, swadharma is it. Along this line of dharma is the issue of our gunas. What is my dharma as opposed to yours is really determined by our combination of gunas.

In the Bhagavad Gita, for instance, Krishna talks about these four categorizations of society, of occupation or vocation.

Rick: Which is a nasty subject, because you’re touching upon the caste system here, which is, you know…

Kavitha: Oh, yeah. The caste system is a complete distortion of what it’s really supposed to be, because our gunas change, and so our vocations may change with that.

Rick: So you can go from being a street sweeper to a doctor, theoretically.

Kavitha: Or you can still be a street sweeper, but your gunas have changed, so you are no longer performing that job for whatever the original intention was. As our gunas change, we actually change and become more evolved as we progress along the path.

Most Hindus will tell you that the caste system is a complete distortion and not at all what it was supposed to be.

Rick: I’m sure that’s true of many things—pretty much every religious tradition in the world, which is probably a far cry from what its founder had intended.

Kavitha: Yes, exactly.

Rick: Okay, so we’re skipping over some of these. We’ve touched upon Tara. I think we’ve touched a little bit on Tripura Sundari. There’s Bhuvaneshwari and Tripura Bhairavi. We won’t have time to spend a lot of time on all of them.

Then there’s this whole section toward the end of your book where you talk about elements of the path of the Mahavidyas: devotion, single-pointedness, austerity, surrender, experience, language, and bliss. That was a thirty-second overview of the stuff we haven’t talked about in your book.

Then there’s a beautiful thing about opening further through ethics and virtues, yamas and niyamas, and self-realization. We could go on for another two hours talking about all that stuff. But everything I just rambled out, what catches your attention that you’d like us to discuss in our remaining time?

Kavitha: Perhaps the issue of ethics. I know you did this whole panel at SAND last year.

Rick: It was my own talk. Next year, I think we’re going to have a panel.

Kavitha: Yeah. I think that’s a very important subject, because there is a lot of misunderstanding that somehow becoming awakened will instill you with all the ethics, and that it’s just going to happen magically and spontaneously, even if you haven’t really cultivated that.

Some of it happens spontaneously because you come from a sense of wholeness, but a lot of it doesn’t. I think that’s a good thing to discuss.

Rick: Yeah, let’s do it. I think it’s important. It was very much in the air last year at SAND. After I gave my talk, a bunch of other teachers came to me and said, “You know, we were touching on that in our talks. Let’s all sit down and discuss this. There needs to be some kind of higher standard in the spiritual community, because there’s just been too much misbehavior and people are sick of it.”

Kavitha: Yeah.

Rick: Oh, but Irene says people are getting sick of me harping on it too. But let’s talk, because I’m always griping about teachers behaving badly.

Kavitha: Okay, now we don’t have to talk.

Rick: Heck with them. We’re still going to talk about it a little bit.

Kavitha: Yeah. I really love Greg’s book After Awareness, because he touches a lot on that.

Rick: Yeah, I read that chapter. He sent it to me in preparation for my talk, and we were chatting back and forth a little bit about it.

Kavitha: Yeah, and I think it is, as touchy as it may be, a very important thing to really talk about, especially in the context of Tantra.

Tantra is misunderstood, as you know, as this path that is about licentiousness: everything goes.

Rick: Yeah, you can drink, you can do whatever, carry on.

Kavitha: Yeah, but that is not actually the case. I go into that in a little detail in the last Mahavidya, in the chapter on Kamalatmika, discussing who is really qualified to explore some of the forbidden practices, who isn’t, and why not.

In the name of Tantra, there are five substances or forbidden practices that people quote or talk about: consumption of alcohol, meat, fish, parched grain, and sexual practices.

You can see how, if a text tells you that you can practice with those things, our ordinary way of thinking is, “Wait, wait. All the other paths are saying, ‘Don’t do that,’ and this is telling you, ‘Do it. I’m just going to go all out and do that.’”

But the text, like the Mahanirvana Tantra, for instance, goes into detail about who is a qualified seeker who can do that: one who is already established in awareness and is working on what you might call the post-enlightenment sadhana, where you are working to remain stable in that awareness while exploring those substances.

In the name of Tantra, though, there is a lot of letting go of ethics, where teachers may be behaving inappropriately with students and teaching them that it is okay to do that.

Rick: Using it as an alibi.

Kavitha: Using it as a kind of crutch to fulfill their own needs, or wherever they feel they need to feel fulfilled. So, I think that, particularly in the Tantric paths, this cultivation of ethics is really, really important, as is developing that discrimination, which is the foundation of Advaita Vedanta. The two wings of jnana are discrimination and non-attachment, viveka and vairagya. Both are necessary in order to explore further with any of those substances, but it is also very important for the teacher to develop those ethics.

Rick: Yeah, some people say that awakening and ethical behavior have nothing to do with one another. You can be an enlightened scoundrel, and you can’t judge a person’s level of consciousness by their external behavior. Other people hold the model that higher levels of consciousness or enlightenment really involve the cultivation not only of an inner awareness of pure consciousness but a complete housecleaning of all of one’s human tendencies, so that they become pure—one’s vasanas—so that you really do become saintly.

You hear people saying, “Saintliness has nothing to do with enlightenment, and you shouldn’t judge it by outer behavior.” So, what’s your perspective on that conundrum?

Kavitha: Well, I think there are two aspects to this. One is that anything that is forced externally, including ethics, becomes a problem, right? I think that’s where a lot of the rebellion comes from. It’s like, “Don’t tell me what to do,” because it’s forced upon us.

But what I’m suggesting in this book and in my own sadhana is that the cultivation of ethics, particularly the yamas and niyamas, when we look at them from a more non-dual aspect and from subtler and subtler perspectives, actually changes. It’s like moving from the shadow to the light, moving from those tendencies into a place where we can live those ethics without really talking about them, without them really being enforced. They just happen.

But if we pay attention to those particular shadows, as I was saying earlier, that is actually the difference between Tantra and other paths, where refinement of the body-mind to be in accordance with our highest understanding is really part of the path.

It’s very easy to be awake and still be a jerk.

Rick: Yeah. I’ve come to the conclusion, just from my own life experience over the past 50 years and from my BatGap experience over the past eight years, that everybody is a work in progress.

Kavitha: Yes.

Rick: That’s such a comfortable conclusion to reach. Because if you look at this or that teacher and think, “Well, this guy really knows where it’s at. He’s really got it all figured out,” and then he or she does something that seems wrong, you can get into trouble.

Firstly, you can become disillusioned. Or you might think, “Well, who am I, ignorant schmo, to judge this enlightened person? Therefore, I must excuse and allow this kind of wrong behavior,” that kind of thing.

But if you have the attitude that everybody is a work in progress, you think, “All right, well, this guy has some work to do in this particular area. He may have great gifts and radiate wonderful Shakti, and so on and so forth.” But that doesn’t mean that, on all counts, there has been complete development to the highest degree possible.

Kavitha: Yeah, I love that, and that’s how I feel too: We’re all works in progress. I think that touches upon this issue of the guru—the role of the guru—because we get disillusioned when we are attached to the teacher rather than the teaching.

The more we get attached to the finger pointing to the moon, the more chances there are of forming opinions one way or the other about that person. Whereas, if our sights are always on the moon, then we realize that everything else is really not that important—what somebody does or what somebody doesn’t do—as long as our sight is on the highest, always.

Rick: Yeah. It’s like if one goes to study chemistry, for instance, in college. One’s orientation is, “Oh, my chemistry teacher is so wonderful. I’m interested in chemistry, and this guy knows about it and he’s teaching me, and I appreciate and respect him for doing that.” But the focus is on the chemistry.

In spirituality, part of the complication is that surrender to the guru has often been required or advocated as essential to really learning what the guru has to teach, in a way that you wouldn’t expect from a chemistry teacher. He wouldn’t say, “Surrender to me and I will give you all my knowledge,” although you do have to cooperate, do the tests, and pay attention in the lectures.

So, in a way, that almost sets up the possibility of difficulty if it’s in the wrong hands. In the right hands, I imagine it can be a beautiful thing. In the wrong hands, it can be abused.

Kavitha: Yeah, absolutely. My friend and I were talking about this just yesterday, with this whole issue of the inner guru. I wrote about that in the book. We are always taught in Vedanta, for instance, that your guru is always going to be a manifestation of where you are at any given stage. Your outer guru is always a reflection of what your heart’s desire really is, right?

On the spiritual path, I’m really not the kind who subscribes to this whole “surrender to the guru at all costs” kind of thing. But I understand the teaching: surrender to the teaching. That may not necessarily mean the teacher.

My gurus and my teachers have always been ones who have kept themselves out of it and have always pointed to the moon and said, “Focus on that, not me.” So, that’s worked out well for me.

Rick: It also depends on how we define surrender. If it’s some kind of slavish, mindless, will-less kind of subservience where you put aside your own good judgment—I mean, there’s that great quote from the Buddha. He says, “Don’t believe anything anybody says, and even if I say it, if it doesn’t jibe with your own understanding and common sense and so on.” So, we have to define surrender before making these kinds of comments.

Kavitha: Yeah, absolutely. This is the thing: Whether it is with Vedanta or with Tantra, the fundamental thing that is emphasized is that you have to cultivate your own sense of discernment.

Rick: Discernment.

Kavitha: And that is the most important thing because that is your guiding light. The surrender should be to that. Even Shankara says in the Viveka Chudamani what devotion really is and who the devotion should be to, and it should be to the highest, which is the Self with a capital S.

That is the highest kind of devotion. The guru is just the external person driving you to that, but your sights are always on the Self. So, discernment and discrimination—viveka—is the most important.

Rick: Yeah. So, maybe a concluding point on this one is that any teacher worth his salt is going to do everything he can to help you cultivate discernment and discrimination. He is not going to violate your tendency to be discerning or discriminating and say, “Do as I say, not as I do,” or any kind of nonsense like that.

He is going to help you. He is going to allow questioning and not set himself up as infallible or beyond reproach or anything like that, but rather be humble and open.

Kavitha: Yeah, absolutely. It’s like I tell my children—and this is something that, as a mother of two daughters, I tell them—you need to trust yourself first.

I also teach them, for instance, “You don’t have any responsibility for making me happy,” or, “That’s not your job. Making me happy is my job.” However, that doesn’t mean that you can do whatever you want, because you still need to live in harmony, right? You still need to learn to live in harmony.

So, it is with awakening and living in the world. If you’re awakened on a mountaintop, who cares? You can behave as you want. But if you’re living in society, then we still need to be able to live in harmony. I think that’s where these ethical issues come in.

Rick: Yeah. When we were talking earlier about dharma and the good versus the pleasant and so on, I just wanted to throw in the story of Nachiketas, which I’m sure you’re familiar with. It seems the conclusion of that story was that he refused all these things that were merely pleasurable because he wanted the truth, which is not to say that we should all abstain from any form of pleasure. But it’s a matter of priorities, it seems to me.

Kavitha: Yes.

Rick: And if we hold adherence to truth and dharma as our highest priority, then everything else kind of falls into place and gets properly ordered.

Kavitha: Yeah, and that is really the whole essence of Chinnamasta. It’s saying, “Stick to that first, and then the other things will fall into place.”

Rick: Yeah. “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, and all shall be added unto thee.”

Kavitha: Yes.

The Divine Feminine and the living world

Rick: A question came in from Mark Peters in Santa Clara. Mark is a regular viewer of the live interviews and almost always asks a question. He said, “Can you speak about the Divine Feminine’s role in establishing a sustainable relationship with the planet? Are global warming, deforestation, rampant consumerism, etc., largely symptomatic of the disconnected ‘hypermentation’ that characterizes the masculine?”

Kavitha: Yeah. So that’s a great question, and thank you for bringing that up, because I just want to talk a little bit about that. It’s very important. When we make this dichotomous division between the masculine and the feminine, we somehow forget that the division, too, is in our minds.

Because the Divine has no gender. The Divine isn’t dichotomous, and Shiva and Shakti are always one. If we talk about Shiva as a masculine force and say Shiva is attributeless and everything in creation is Shakti, then the negative and destructive aspects are also Shakti. But that’s her shadow side.

And so the role of the Divine Feminine is not that it’s a masculine side that needs to be addressed. It is the shadow side of Shakti that needs to be addressed, because all of that is also Shakti. It doesn’t matter whether we are men or women. All these shadow aspects are still Shakti, whether we are male or female.

The role of the Divine Feminine in cultivating a better world is one of cultivating the light of Shakti, which is all the different collaborative kinds of qualities. The beauty of the Divine Feminine, or the beauty of the feminine in general, is that it’s not about the individual.

For instance, when I first came to the U.S., I would hear people say, “Think about number one. You have to think about number one.” It didn’t really make sense to me. I’m like, “What is number one?” I didn’t even know what that was. But it’s a very highly individual kind of thing. Everybody is looking out for themselves, and we think that’s the masculine side.

That left-brained, hyper-dominant, go-getting, efforting kind of thing—we assign that to be a masculine quality. But in reality, it’s the shadow of Shakti. What we need to develop is the light of Shakti, and then the individual is part of the whole, as Kali shows us in her iconography, where everything is interconnected.

The more we align with that, the more we understand that there is nothing that a person in Nairobi is doing that is not going to affect me. Them taking a sip of coffee is going to affect me in imperceptible ways. We are all connected in this web—not just the Earth, but the whole of creation.

The more we step into her light, the more we step away from that aggressiveness and the violent aspect, which, as we talked about, is the shadow of Kali.

Rick: Yeah, that’s good. It seems like the more unified we become, the more we appreciate the oneness or the wholeness of life, the less we could stand to defile the environment or harm other people in any way whatsoever, because we’re really defiling ourselves. The Amazon is our lungs, and the rivers are our blood. We’re spoiling our own nest by…

Kavitha: Yeah, yeah. In the Sri Vidya tradition, we think of the Goddess as creation being her body, exactly as you said. The Amazon is our lungs. That’s exactly how we visualize the Devi, which is hard to visualize. All of this is her body.

That’s why this devotion is so important. When you’re devoted to something, you are less likely to defile it. I’m so devoted as a mother to my children that their highest good is always my goal.

Rick: And you don’t have to think about that. It’s instinctual. What we were just saying becomes instinctual, too—the appreciation of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, I think it’s said: the world is my family. It’s not just a nice little concept. It becomes your intuitive way of functioning.

Kavitha: Yes, exactly. That is the real essence of the path of the Goddess: developing that softness. That’s more of that parasympathetic activity, surrender, and being okay.

We’re conditioned to work through effort. It’s like, “Go, go, go. Get what I want at the cost of everything else.” Surrendering all of that in softness and sweetness is her light.

Rick: Yeah. When you think about it, maybe if we equate the Goddess with nature itself, nature is a huge, powerful, invincible force which is conducting—the whole of nature, in the biggest sense—the whole universe in its minute detail without effort.

You use the word surrender. If we can surrender to, align ourselves with, or tune ourselves to that intelligence of nature, which I believe is embodied by all these Mahavidyas, then Brahman becomes a charioteer. They become the driving force of our life, and we can just relax in the chariot and enjoy the ride.

Kavitha: Yeah. The ironic thing is that it’s already always the case, right? They are driving it anyway. It’s just that we think we have control.

Rick: Right. So we keep interfering with their attempts to drive.

Kavitha: Exactly.

🩺 Health, wellness, and continuing the work

Rick: Yeah, good. Okay, well, I think we’re about done, although we could be never done. As I was reading your book, I was thinking, “This is one of those books where I wish we could take a month and read each paragraph and then discuss it, read another one and then discuss it.” But that’s not really quite the purpose of an interview.

So it is sort of a taste or a sampling. I’ve really enjoyed talking with you, and I’m sure we’ll be connecting again. Are you going to SAND in the fall?

Kavitha: I hope so.

Rick: Good, I’ll be there. You mentioned you might even come to Fairfield at some point. That’ll be lovely if you come to Fairfield.

Kavitha: Yes, I’d love to. I’d love to come.

Rick: I encourage people to check out this book. I really learned a lot from it and really enjoyed it. I’ll have a link to it on Kavitha’s page on batgap.com. Your new book is more about health, you said.

Kavitha: Well, actually, it’s called The Heart of Wellness, and the heart here refers to awareness—the heart, the great heart.

Rick: That being the most important component in wellness?

Kavitha: Of wellness, yes. How do you bring medicine and spirituality together? What happens to our relationship with health and with disease when you enter the heart? That’s really what that book is about.

Rick: Yeah. I would say even if you end up getting a disease, like Ramana, for instance, people would say, “Oh, Ramana, you’re suffering.” And he would say, “I’m not suffering. This isn’t touching me.”

Kavitha: Yes, exactly. That’s really the crux of it: suffering is optional. In traditional medicine, we equate disease with suffering. We look at academic papers where they say, “We have decreased disease and suffering,” and I would beg to differ and say we’ve decreased disease, but not necessarily suffering.

Those are two different things. That’s really delving more into how we enter the heart of wellness through the principles of Ayurveda, yoga, and Vedanta. So that’s what that is.

Rick: Good. All right, well, thank you so much. I really enjoyed speaking with you, and we will do it again sometime.

Kavitha: Thank you.

Rick: So, just to make some general concluding remarks, I’ve been speaking with Kavitha Chinnaiyan, MD. I’ll be linking to her website from her page on batgap.com, and you can go there to see what she’s up to and probably get in touch.

You do some kinds of—do you do anything remotely with people aside from your local practice as a physician? Do you do spiritual satsangs or consultations over Skype, or do you offer retreats or any of that kind of stuff?

Kavitha: Yeah, I do, actually. I have a course coming up on Shakti Rising, where we will be exploring all the Mahavidyas. It’s a 12-week course, all online, and it’s coming up and starts at the end of February.

Later this year, I’ll be doing a course on The Heart of Wellness. I also have some mini-courses just before Navratri, including a whole Navratri course, as well as retreats, intensives, and workshops.

Later this year, I’m planning a Shakti Yatra—actually going to India to specific Shakti Peethams and really practicing with the deities at those places.

Rick: Yeah. It’s funny. This image just came to me because you do all these things. Here you are, this medical doctor, and then you’re doing all these courses, and you have your own spiritual practice, and this and that. I pictured you as one of these deities with four or six arms, doing all this stuff at once. I don’t know how you manage all that. You’ve got teenage daughters and you’re writing books all the time.

Kavitha: Yeah, it’s Shakti doing that. It’s your creative flow.

Rick: All righty. Well, thanks. To those listening or watching, you’ve probably watched my interviews before, but if you haven’t, go to batgap.com.

If you want to sign up to be notified of new ones, just click on the little email notification link. Sign up for the audio podcast if you like to listen to things while you’re commuting and so forth. You could also subscribe to the YouTube channel; that’s always helpful. The more subscribers I have, the more seriously YouTube takes me and helps me.

So do that if you haven’t, and we’ll see you next week. Thanks, Kavitha.

Kavitha: Thank you.

Rick: All right, thanks.

Kavitha: Thank you.

Rick: All right, thanks.